U.S. News

Emily Gedeon, a spokesperson for Denver's climate office, said there's no foul play at work here — just enormous demand. About 17,000 people tried to get a voucher on Tuesday, she told us, more than 77 times the amount available [220 vouchers]

The shooter who opened fire inside Apalachee High school is believed to be a 14-year-old boy, a law enforcement source tells CNN.

The source said it is not yet known whether the teen attended that school.

We cannot continue to accept this as normal,” the president said in a statement.

At least four people are believed to have been killed and approximately 30 more were injured in the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, although it’s unclear how many of the injuries are from gunshot wounds, according to law enforcement sources.

Apalachee High School is located in the city of Winder, Georgia, which is a community about an hour outside of Atlanta.

Archived version

A retired Aurora police sergeant faces criminal charges for raping his daughter and continually sexually assaulting her and his two adopted daughters, but he remains free from custody while his ex-wife is in jail for objecting to court-ordered reunification therapy meant to repair his relationship with two of his sons.

The mother, Rachel Pickrel-Hawkins, said the reunification therapy by Christine Bassett, a licensed marriage and family therapist, has been harmful, abusive and counterproductive. For now, the mother has custody of the couple’s minor children, and they are living in a domestic violence shelter. She said that she has arranged for family members to care for her children when she goes to jail.

The mother said Bassett has supported the efforts by her ex-husband, Michael Hawkins, to gain sole custody of their two youngest sons, now 10 and 13, and has psychologically tortured the children along the way.

“The very last visit with her, I told her, ‘This man now has formal criminal charges for sex assault on children and child abuse, and you need to know this,’” Pickrel-Hawkins said of one encounter with Bassett before a reunification session with the children that the father attended. “She went into the room, and the very first thing that my boy said that she told them was, ‘We need to make progress, and today you need to tell your father that you forgive him.’”

The Klamath River is free of four huge dams for the first time in generations. But for the Yurok tribe, the river's restoration is only just beginning – starting with 18 billion seeds.

Brook Thompson has been fishing on the Klamath River ever since she could stand up in a boat. To Thompson and her family, who are part of the Karuk and Yurok tribes from northern California, fishing is second nature. "The river was our grocery store," the 28-year-old explains. That was until a catastrophic fish die off happened in 2002.

[...]

The dams have long been a point of contention for the tribe, who have been campaigning for their removal since the 1990s. The river is the lifeblood for the Yuroks, and the salmon are family. "The death of salmon means the death of our entire way," Thompson says. "Everyone is connected. Taking these dams down is a life-or-death situation for us."

Finally, at the end of August 2024, after years of negotiating, and decades of activism, the last dam fell, reopening more than 400 miles (644km) of river, in what is the largest dam removal project in US history.

[...]

Removing the dams is one thing, restoring the land is quite another," says Thompson, a civil engineer and part of the crew working on the restoration project – which is being managed by Resource Environmental Solutions, an ecological restoration company.

[...]

Between 2018 and 2021 seed collection crews – many of whom are tribal elders – were hired to harvest native seeds, by hand, in preparation for the dam removal. They collected 98 species and around 2,000lbs (900kg) of seeds. The seeds were then dispatched to specialised nurseries, which propagated them en masse, and sent the seedlings to storage facilities where they were kept until the time came for them to be planted.

A total of 18 billion native seeds were propagated – more than 66,000lbs (30,000kg) worth – each species selected for a purpose: to retain sediment, to prepare the soil for other plants, for cultural uses, or to be a food source. Wheatgrass, yarrow, lupine and oak trees – an important cultural species for the Yuroks and a keystone species – to name a few.

[...]

Seeds from trees and shrubs were also collected, which was a challenge during 2021 and 2022, particularly hot and dry years that exacerbated widespread wildfires.

[...]

But Thompson isn't hoping to return to the past – she's looking firmly to the future.

"There's almost a bit of a fallacy in thinking like it will be returned to what it used to be," Thompson says. "But I think with traditional ecological knowledge, tribal-led initiatives and current academic understanding of the landscape so you can almost make it better."

Archived version

A former deputy chief of staff to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was charged Tuesday with acting as an undisclosed agent of the Chinese government, federal prosecutors revealed in a sprawling indictment.

Linda Sun, who held numerous posts in New York state government before rising to the rank of deputy chief of staff for Hochul, was arrested Tuesday morning along with her husband, Chris Hu, at their $3.5 million home on Long Island.

Sun and Hu, are expected to make an initial court appearance Tuesday afternoon, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn said.

Prosecutors said Sun, at the request of Chinese officials, blocked representatives of the Taiwanese government from having access to high-level officials in New York state, altered state governmental messaging on issues related to the Chinese government and attempted to facilitate a trip to China for a high-level politician in New York, among other things. Hu is charged with money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and misuse of means of identification.

Here is the Court ruling (pdf)

In a major decision, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.”

The court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of “general, exploratory rummaging” that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment intended to outlaw.

"The Electronc Frontier Foundation (EFF) applauds this decision because it is essential that every person feels like they can simply take their cell phone out into the world without the fear that they might end up a criminal suspect because their location data was swept up in open-ended digital dragnet," the EFF says.

The new Fifth Circuit case, United States v. Smith, involved an armed robbery and assault of a US Postal Service worker at a post office in Mississippi in 2018. After several months of investigation, police had no identifiable suspects, so they obtained a geofence warrant covering a large geographic area around the post office for the hour surrounding the crime. Google responded to the warrant with information on several devices, ultimately leading police to the two defendants.

The purveyors of claims that COVID’s danger was overstated and could be met by exposing the maximum number of people to the deadly virus in quest of “herd immunity” have been offered a platform to air their widely debunked and refuted views at a forum sponsored by Stanford University.

The event is a symposium on the topic “Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past,” scheduled to take place on campus Oct. 4.

[...]

Most of its participants have been associated with discredited approaches to the COVID pandemic, including minimizing its severity and calling for widespread infection to achieve herd immunity. Some have been sources of rank misinformation or disinformation. Advocates of scientifically validated policies are all but absent.

The event is shaping up as a major embarrassment for an institution that prides itself on its academic standards. It comes with Stanford’s official imprimatur; the opening remarks will be delivered by its freshly appointed president, Jonathan Levin, an economist who took office Aug. 1.

Interestingly, also the only thing consultants won't try.

Kroger Co. hiked prices on milk and eggs more than needed to account for inflation, the company's top pricing executive testified during a court hearing on the US government's bid to block the grocery chain's purchase of rival Albertsons Cos.

In a March email to his bosses, Andy Groff, Kroger's senior director for pricing, acknowledged that the company had raised its prices more than required to adjust for higher costs.

"On milk and eggs, retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation," Groff wrote.

Archived version

Lidia Martinez, a retired educator who lives in San Antonio, was shocked last week when officers came to her house at 6 a.m. and informed her that they were searching her residence because she had filed a complaint about residents in her area getting their mail-in ballots.

Martinez says she's spent decades volunteering with the League of United Latin American Citizens to help seniors in the Latino community register themselves to vote.

The officers at her house asked to see the voter registration cards that she had collected. After informing them that she didn't have them at her house, they proceeded to search the property and left with her laptop, her phone and some documents.

Texas Attorney General defended the raid as part of an election integrity investigation.

Reporting on court proceedings is not politics. Please restrict comments to the news aspects of this story in this community; we're all aware he's primarily running to stay out of prison, but that is not this story. /soapbox

archive.is link

[...]last spring, pro-Palestinian activists, running under the Shut It Down party, won control over the student government. They immediately moved to withhold funding for all activities, until the university committed to divest from companies that profit from Israel’s war in Gaza.

University regents, though, have consistently said that divestment is off the table. And as students returned to school, the campus seemed to be at a virtual standstill.

When campaigning for student government, the Shut It Down party did not keep its intentions a secret. Its platform “ran with one single point: to halt the operations of the University of Michigan Central Student Government,” Alifa Chowdhury, the president of the party, wrote in a statement to The Times. Other members of the group declined to comment.

In the March election, in which less than 20 percent of students turned out to vote, Shut It Down won the presidency and vice presidency, and secured 22 of 45 seats in the assembly.

After the election, the new leaders of the student government passed a resolution, calling for the university’s regents to divest. In May, Ms. Chowdhury issued a statement condemning the university’s decision to call in police to break up the protest encampments.

see also this Detroit News article, which notes:

The new 2024-25 president of UM Central Student Government has since vetoed the summer budget, shutting down funding to student groups. She is expected to take the same action next month when a fall budget is considered. Students are expected to become more aware of this development as classes begin Monday on the Ann Arbor campus and most student organizations restart their activities.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18999354

GOP lawmakers have made the state hostile for trans youth. These teens and their parents vow to ‘assert themselves’

Some parents have stockpiled medications in hidden locations. Some have stopped socializing with neighbors. Some have made plans to flee the state.

In Missouri, transgender youth and their families are grappling with an onslaught of attacks on their rights. Last year, Republican lawmakers outlawed critical healthcare treatments for trans youth and banned many trans athletes from school sports. Local school districts worked to censor LGBTQ+ books and prohibit trans children from using bathroomsthat match their gender identity.

And the state’s attorney general has become a national leader in anti-trans policy, seeking to gain access to trans kids’ medical records, fighting to restrict trans adults’ healthcare and attacking trans adults who use public locker rooms.

archive.is link

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has claimed RealPage's software algorithm meant rival landlords were sharing what would otherwise be private information, allegedly allowing them to illegally co-ordinate and raise rents. "Everybody knows the rent is too damn high and we allege this is one of the reasons why," Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference announcing the lawsuit. RealPage did not immediately comment but it has previously called similar claims false and misleading. The Texas-based company, which is owned by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, has found itself in the spotlight in recent years, after an investigation from ProPublica drew attention to its practices. The company has already been the target of lawsuits filed by renters and prosecutors in Arizona and the District of Columbia earlier this year. With housing affordability a hot-button issue in the US, criticism of rent-setting algorithms has also become a staple of speeches from Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign. In the complaint, the DOJ and eight states claim RealPage had access to information about millions of apartments across the country. "RealPage allows landlords to manipulate, distort, and subvert market forces," the DOJ alleged in the complaint. It took aim at a RealPage offering that recommends rents to its property owner customers, suggesting that many agree to "auto accept" the proposals from RealPage. It claimed the firm dominated the market for commercial revenue management software, citing the firm's own estimates that it controlled about 80% of the market. RealPage in June said it served a much smaller fraction of the rental market than has been claimed and that landlords, not RealPage, set prices. The lawsuit marks a first for the federal government as it seeks to address the rising use of pricing algorithms across the economy. Officials said they were also looking at such practices in the meat industry and elsewhere. "Modern-day wrongdoers cannot hid behind software algorithms and artificial intelligence to violate the law," said assistant attorney general Jonathan Kanter, who leads up the department's anti-monopoly unit.

Yuanjun Tang, 67, a naturalized citizen of the United States and resident of Queens, New York, was charged by criminal complaint with acting and conspiring to act in the United States as an unregistered agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and making materially false statements to the FBI. Tang was arrested today in Flushing, Queens, and will be presented this afternoon.

[...]

Between at least in or about 2018 and in or about June 2023, Tang acted in the United States as an agent of the PRC by completing tasks at the direction of the PRC’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), which is the PRC’s principal civilian intelligence agency. The MSS is responsible for, among other things, the PRC’s foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, espionage and political security functions.

what in the world...?