Three U.S. lawmakers, including two from Ohio, are requesting a federal investigation into 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant's time in foster care before she was shot and killed April 20 by a Columbus police officer.
Bryant was in a foster home and under the custody of Franklin County Children's Services when Columbus police officer Nicholas Reardon shot and killed the teenage girl as she swung a knife at another young woman. Reardon was among officers responding to a report of an attempted stabbing on Legion Lane on the city's Southeast Side.
Now, Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, D-Columbus, and U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, are urging the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families to assist Franklin County Children's Services as it reviews the details of Bryant's case.
In a letter addressed to Acting Assistant Secretary JooYeun Chang of the Administration for Children and Families and Acting Director Robinsue Frohboese in the Office for Civil Rights — both divisions of HHS — Brown, Beatty and Wyden are also requesting that the Office for Civil Rights launch an independent investigation into events leading to Bryant's death.
Miami Herald: Nikki Fried, Florida’s lone statewide elected Democrat, is running for governor by Samantha J. Gross
Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried is Florida’s only Democrat in statewide office and effectively, the head of the state’s Democratic Party.
But even still, many Floridians don’t know who the agriculture commissioner is or what they do.
Now, three years after pulling off a historic win, Fried is making another run at reintroducing herself.
Fried announced in a video message Tuesday that she will seek the Democratic nomination to run for governor against incumbent Ron DeSantis, whom she’s publicly lambasted since the day she took office.
Fried has been a thorn in the side of the governor since she was sworn in, but as of late has raised her profile largely on her criticism of the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She appears often on cable news and fund-raises off responses to the signing of right-wing legislation. Her most recent filing period, which ended April 30, was her political committee’s most lucrative to date.
San Diego Union-Tribune: Scripps begins notifying more than 147,000 people of ransomware records breach by Paul Sisson
Scripps Health announced Tuesday that it has begun notifying nearly 150,000 individuals that their personal information was stolen by hackers during the ransomware attack that hit the local health care giant on May 1.
In a statement, Scripps says that it is “beginning to mail notifications letters to approximately 147,267 individuals so they can take steps to protect their information.” About 2.5 percent of those — nearly 3,700 — are said to have had their Social Security and/or driver’s license numbers taken. For those, the company said, it will provide “complementary credit monitoring and identity protection support services.”
“At this point, we have no indication that any of this data has been used to commit fraud,” the Scripps statement said.
Fallout from the incursion took nearly a full month to resolve, forcing medical professionals at all levels of care, from medical offices to hospitals, to document their work on paper charts. Access to important information, such as previous test results, was unavailable for weeks, and Scripps facilities did not begin regaining the ability to create new digital records until late last week when the organization’s MyScripps patient portal also returned to service.
NBC News: Christian college's 1st out, queer student body president sparks a reckoning by Jillian Eugenios
Claire Murashima did not go to college expecting to change her institution, a Christian university founded 145 years ago. She also did not intend to come out, and she certainly didn’t plan to make history with her election as student body president.
But she did.
Calvin University is a private Christian college in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with about 3,800 students. It’s associated with the Christian Reformed Church, a Protestant denomination. The church’s position on homosexuality is that while gay members are to be given love and support from their communities, the practice of homosexuality “is incompatible with obedience to the will of God as revealed in scripture.” One of the university’s most well-known alumni is Betsy DeVos, who served as education secretary in the Trump administration.
Murashima, 22, said she went to Calvin because she wanted something different from her large, liberal, public high school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She described herself as someone who “moves towards people I disagree with” and said that while her high school education was the foundation of her political and social beliefs, “I wanted to expose myself to something new, and I knew my beliefs would be critically examined.”
There was something more, too: She said she thought going to a religious institution might make her more holy.
Washington Post: Biden administration suspends oil and gas leases in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by Juliet Eilperin and Joshua Partlow
The Biden administration on Tuesday suspended oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, targeting one of President Donald Trump’s most significant environmental acts during his last days in office.
The move by the Interior Department, which could spark a major legal battle, dims the prospect of oil drilling in a pristine and politically charged expanse of Alaskan wilderness that Republicans and Democrats have fought over for four decades. The Trump administration auctioned off the right to drill in the refuge’s coastal plain — home to hundreds of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl as well as
the southern Beaufort Sea’s remaining polar bears — just two weeks before President Biden was inaugurated.
Now the Biden administration is taking steps to block those leases, citing problems with the environmental review process. In Tuesday’s Interior Department order, Secretary Deb Haaland said that a review of the Trump administration’s leasing program in the wildlife refuge found “multiple legal deficiencies” including “insufficient analysis” required by environmental laws and a failure to assess other alternatives. Haaland’s order calls for a temporary moratorium on all activities related to those leases in order to conduct “a new, comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the oil and gas program.”
CNN: What the JBS cyberattack means for your meat supply by Danielle Wiener-Bronner
New York (CNN Business) Shoppers may want to brace themselves for yet another possible supply crunch — this time with meat.
JBS USA, the country's top beef producer and its second largest producer of pork,
suffered a cyberattack this weekend, prompting reported shutdowns at company plants in the United States and
globally.
On Tuesday evening, an official from the United Food and Commercial Workers union said all US JBS beef plants are shut down.
JBS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, the company
released a statement Tuesday night indicating most of its food plants will be open Wednesday.
"Given the progress our IT professionals and plant teams have made in the last 24 hours, the vast majority of our beef, pork, poultry and prepared foods plants will be operational tomorrow," said Andre Nogueira, CEO of JBS USA.
The company also said "JBS USA and Pilgrim's were able to ship product from nearly all of its facilities to supply customers."
Guardian: ‘No political story allowed’: Hong Kong broadcaster falls silent on sensitive subjects by Helen Davidson
Normally at this time of year Hong Kong media are bustling to prepare coverage of Friday’s anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre which, before Covid restrictions hit, usually included a huge vigil in Victoria Park. The event is illegal in China but had been proudly held in Hong Kong for decades.
But this year journalists at the respected public broadcaster RTHK say they’ve been told to stand down.
“We were informed that no political story is allowed,” says Emily*, an RTHK employee who, along with others interviewed for this article, asked for anonymity to speak freely. “We think it’s kind of funny because what isn’t a political story now?”
After mass pro-democracy protests in 2019, the Hong Kong government’s worsening crackdown on dissent over the past two years has also targeted press freedom. Once ranked 18th in the world press freedom index, Hong Kong now sits at 80th.
DW: Kremlin clampdown on Open Russia and opposition continues by Roman Goncharenko and Elena Barysheva
The scene that unfolded at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Airport on Monday was strongly reminiscent of the recent detention of Belarusian blogger Roman Pratasevich. This time, the Russian opposition politician Andrei Pivovarov was the man who was led away. In Pivovarov's case, the aircraft was stopped just before takeoff rather than forced to make an emergency landing under a clearly fabricated pretext. Pivovarov was arrested just minutes before the plane was to lift off for Poland. "He was already seated in the aircraft," fellow activist Tatiana Usmanova told DW. "Then suddenly the plane was suddenly ordered to stop, and he saw a lot of police through the window."
Prosecutors accuse the 39-year-old opposition politician of working together with Open Russia, an organization linked to the former oil tycoon and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Pivovarov faces two to six years in prison.
Open Russia was originally set up by Khodorkovsky in 2001. After his arrest, it functioned as a movement and a loose association of regional NGOs, which worked in the areas of education, media and civil society. There are organizations registered under the same name in the UK where Khodorkovsky has lived since his release. In 2017, Moscow listed the UK-based group as "undesirable." The Russian umbrella organization tried to continue as a separate entity. Pivovarov was its director and he also led the regional St. Petersburg branch. Just a few days ago, he announced that he was dissolving the entire organization to avoid arrests. But he was clearly too late.