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City leaders want to know what the Philadelphia Police Department is doing to crack down on officers who abuse a disability benefit that’s meant for those who suffer injuries in the line of duty.
During a four-hour hearing, held remotely by several joint City Council committees on Monday, a string of Council members demanded accountability and the results of investigations into potential scammers — and they want it soon.
The problem, documented in an Inquirer investigation last month, has long been a source of frustration for police commanders: officers who stay at home for months, or even years, with exaggerated injuries, while pocketing what amounts to a 20% raise through the Pennsylvania Heart and Lung Act, a state law that exempts police and firefighter disability payments from state and federal taxes.
The investigation found that some officers who are considered too hurt to work have managed to hold down physically strenuous second jobs, while others started businesses, in violation of a police directive.
Boston Globe: Omicron subvariant now accounts for over half of all COVID-19 cases in New England, CDC says by Martin Finucane, Daigo Fujiwara, and Ryan Huddle
A new Omicron subvariant, which is believed to be one of the drivers of a COVID-19 resurgence in Europe, now accounts for more than half the new cases in New England, according to estimates from the CDC.
The subvariant, known as BA.2, accounted for 55.4 percent of cases in New England as of Saturday, continuing to elbow out other varieties of Omicron.
Nationally, BA.2 has grown to account for 34.9 percent of cases, up from 1 percent as recently as early February, according to the CDC estimates.
The increases come as the region — and the nation — have seen steep declines from the Omicron surge early this year to much lower cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
But is this the calm before the storm? Experts and officials are eyeing increases in cases and hospitalizations in Europe warily, wondering if what is happening in Europe could happen here.
Detroit Free Press: Defense presses key informant on texts with FBI in Whitmer kidnapping trial by Arpan Lobo
The informant known as "Big Dan" took the witness stand for the third straight day Tuesday in the trial of four men alleged to have conspired to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.
Attorney Julia Kelly continued her cross-examination of Dan, a truck driver for the postal service who became a vital informant for the FBI during its months-long investigation. Kelly is representing defendant Daniel Harris in the trial.
She focused on conversations Dan had with his FBI handler agents in the months between his initial contact with the FBI in March 2020 and the October 2020 arrest of the alleged conspirators.
Dan had initially joined the Wolverine Watchmen, a militia group, in March 2020. He joined the group for its Second Amendment rights enthusiasm, which he shared. But Dan reached out to police after hearing of potential threats against law enforcement. A week later, the FBI contacted him.
NOLA.com: Watch: Videos show a large tornado hitting New Orleans and surrounding areas Tuesday night by Patrick Magee
The city of New Orleans was struck by a tornado Tuesday evening and live footage of the storm was shown on local television while other images were shared on social media by the city's residents.
A tornado warning was issued for Northwestern St. Bernard and Orleans Parishes when at 7:32 p.m. the National Weather Service in Slidell reported a confirmed "large and extremely dangerous tornado" over Arabi, near Chalmette, moving at 45 mph.
WDSU-TV showed live footage of the tornado on the ground moving toward New Orleans East. The video showed transformers blowing in the Lower Ninth Ward as the twister stayed on the ground for an extended period of time.
Seattle Times: Workers at a Seattle Starbucks vote to unionize, hoping to send a signal of change to the food-service industry by Heidi Groover
A mile away from the flagship location where Starbucks launched in Seattle 50 years ago, a small group of local Starbucks employees huddled around an iPad under the bright lights of a hotel conference room and watched as they became the only unionized company-owned store in town.
“Unanimous!” they shouted, hands clasped in the air.
The vote, which the National Labor Relations Board announced Tuesday, is an especially symbolic win in the coffee giant’s hometown as Howard Schultz returns as interim chief executive officer and workers at more than 100 stores say they want to unionize.
The store at Broadway and East Denny Way in the Capitol Hill neighborhood will become the seventh in the country where employees have voted in favor of unionizing with Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union.
Employees at five stores in Buffalo, New York, and one in Mesa, Arizona, have voted yes. One store in Buffalo voted against unionization. Employees at six other Seattle locations have said they plan to unionize.
New York Times: Pledging to ‘Stay in My Lane,’ Jackson Defends Her Record by Carl Hulse and Katie Rogers
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on Tuesday pushed back on Republican attacks on her record, defending her work representing terror detainees and sentencing child sex abusers as she presented herself as a firm believer in judicial restraint fit to be confirmed to a seat on the Supreme Court.
Under intense questioning from senators in a daylong hearing on her nomination, Judge Jackson said repeatedly that she understood the narrow role that judges played in American government and refused to be drawn into political fights such as whether seats should be added to the Supreme Court.
“I am acutely aware that as a judge in our system, I have limited power, and I am trying in every case to stay in my lane,” she said, a formulation she repeated several times during hours of interrogation in what Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called a “trial by ordeal.”
“I don’t think anyone can look at my record and say it is pointing in one direction or another, that it is supporting one viewpoint or another,” she told senators.
NBC News: Fewer medical students trained for abortion procedures by Sarah Varney
A barrage of abortion restrictions rippling across the country, from Florida to Texas to Idaho, is shrinking the already limited training options for U.S. medical students and residents who want to learn how to perform abortion procedures.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends standardized training on abortion care during medical residency, the training period after medical school that provides future physicians on-the-job experience in a particular specialty. But the number of residency programs located in states where hospital employees are prohibited from performing or teaching about abortion — or at Catholic-owned hospitals with similar bans — has skyrocketed in recent years, an overlooked byproduct of anti-abortion legislation taking root in the American South, Midwest, and Mountain states.
Danna Ghafir, a born and bred Texan and third-year medical student in her home state, will leave Texas when the time comes for residency training.
“How does legislation inform my approach to preparing for residency applications? It informs every decision I’ve made in the last year,” said Ghafir, who asked that her school not be identified. “What if I match at a program in a state that is hostile to abortion and has a trigger law that would automatically ban abortion?”
Vox: Congress’s epic pandemic funding failure by Dylan Matthews
As I write this, the White House is warning that it will soon run out of funding to address the Covid-19 pandemic.
Without additional money, uninsured Americans will stop being able to get free tests and treatments for Covid-19 after March 22, and won’t be able to get free vaccinations through the federal Uninsured Program after April 5. The White House says it won’t be able to buy additional antiviral pills or new monoclonal antibody treatments for people with Covid, or to fund surveillance that could catch future waves of the virus.
The administration wants $22 billion; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tried to pass $15 billion only to face a rebellion from both Republicans and Democrats angry that the money would come out of the Biden stimulus plan’s funds for state governments. If this stalemate holds, the federal effort to halt the virus could effectively be over, even though the pandemic itself clearly isn’t.
That would be a disaster. Equally disastrous, though, is that Congress is simultaneously refusing to invest heavily in preventing the next pandemic.
Washington Post: Schools nationwide are quietly removing books from their libraries by Hannah Natanson
LANCASTER, Pa. — Samantha Hull was on vacation when she got the call about the missing books.
Eight titles had melted away seemingly overnight, a panicked school aide told Hull, from the shelves of an elementary school in one of the 22 districts Hull oversees as co-chair of a group representing school librarians in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster and Lebanon counties. The books included titles such as “In My Mosque,” which instructs children about Islam; “A Place Inside of Me,” which explores a Black student’s reckoning with a police shooting; and “When Aidan Became a Brother,” whose main character is a transgender boy.
Hull, 33, couldn’t understand it: None of those books had been formally challenged by parents, even though she knew that activists across the country were targeting books featuring discussions of race, gender and LGBTQ identities for removal. The growing national furor had already arrived in Hull’s corner of Pennsylvania: Parents at a high school in Lancaster County, she said, had requested the elimination of “Gender Queer,” a memoir about being nonbinary, and “Lawn Boy,” a young-adult novel that includes a description of a sexual encounter between two boys.
Slowly — over months of meetings, investigations and secret conversations with fearful librarians across her counties — she came to understand the disturbing reality. Administrators, afraid of attracting controversy, were quietly removing books from library shelves before they could be challenged.
Guardian: Russian shelling has reduced Mariupol to ‘ashes of a dead land’, Ukraine says by Daniel Boffey
Russian artillery has unleashed a continuous bombardment on the port of Mariupol, reducing the besieged city to “ashes of a dead land”, Ukrainian officials said, as survivors described their escape past bodies piled up in the streets.
The Donetsk governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, accused Vladimir Putin’s forces of indiscriminate fire on civilian areas, as local officials said two “super-powerful bombs” had struck amid efforts to rescue the remaining 100,000-200,000 civilians hiding in basements and shelters.
In his daily address, Zelenskiy said bus drivers and emergency service personnel on one convoy seeking to rescue people from Mariupol had been take prisoner on Tuesday. “We are doing everything we can to free out people and unblock the movement of humanitarian aid”, he said.
Zelenskiy described the scenes in the city as inhumane. “No food, no water, no medicine,” he said.
“Under constant shelling, under constant bombing.” Ukraine’s president said he had spoken to Pope Francis who he had invited to the country on a mercy mission that he believed was possible to organise.
BBC News: Russia Navalny: Putin critic given nine-year jail sentence in trial branded 'sham'
Russia's most prominent opposition figure Alexei Navalny has been given nine years in a "strict regime penal colony" in a fraud case rejected by supporters as fabricated.
Navalny was detained when he returned to Russia last year, after surviving a poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.
He is already serving three and a half years in jail for breaking bail conditions while in hospital.
A judge has now found him guilty of fraud and contempt of court.
Prosecutors accused him of stealing $4.7m (£3.5m) of donations given to his now banned organisations, including his anti-corruption foundation.
Delivering her verdict, Judge Margarita Kotova said Navalny had carried out "the theft of property by an organised group".
The new sentence replaces his earlier jail term, so the opposition leader will now have to serve some seven years in a maximum-security prison, with much stricter conditions and far more remote than the jail in Pokrov east of Moscow where he has spent more than a year.
Guardian: China Eastern Airlines crash: families await grim news as rescuers sift through wreckage by Helen Davidson
About an hour into its journey from Kunming to Gaungzhou, flight MU5735 fell out of the air. After cruising at an altitude of 29,100ft, it suddenly dropped to about 7,000ft where it briefly ascended before diving again and crashing into remote bamboo forest in the mountains near Wuzhou. The fall appears to have taken around two minutes, according to flight tracking data.
“The plane did not smoke during the fall,” a witness told the Beijing Youth Daily. “The fire started after it fell into the mountain, followed by a lot of smoke.”
Villagers reported the sound of explosions and a raging fire. Some locals raced to the scene ahead of hundreds of fire and rescue personnel – and reportedly local militia groups – travelling the final distance on foot via a dirt trail.
There has been no official announcement on the death toll, but state media has reported there were no signs of survivors.
Washington Post: Americans may be greatly underestimating the impact of 10 years of Putin’s propaganda by Steven Zeitchik
Few Americans have parsed Russian propaganda on its various platforms like Maxim Pozdorovkin.
The Russian-born, Harvard-educated filmmaker and thinker is behind several works on the subject, most notably “Our New President” from 2018, an award-winning documentary deconstruction of the Russian media’s portrayal of Donald Trump’s election that was, as he puts it, “a movie based entirely on actual footage without a single true statement in it.” He also examined the resistance to such media messaging in “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer,” a nonfiction film on the political collective.
Far from just an attempt to negate discontent over its Ukraine invasion, Russia’s current state-media approach is, in Pozdorovkin’s view, a continuation of a decade-long campaign to warp Russian citizens’ view of the West. He argues the country’s population has been long primed for this moment — seriously lowering the odds for any tech company or foreign outlet hoping to poke through the veil.
Openly: LGBTQ+ Ukrainians fight for their country, and their rights by Enrique Anarte
March 21 (Openly) - Before Russia invaded Ukraine three weeks ago, Oleg used to get up early every day to walk his dogs along the wide, French-inspired boulevards of the capital, Kyiv.
He had been planning a cycling trip to Odessa on the country's Black Sea coast.
But three days after Russian tanks rolled across the border, Oleg, a 22-year-old bisexual man and former beer sommelier, began a very different life - signing up to serve in the Ukrainian armed forces along with his father.
"My favourite places in Kyiv are now in ruins," said Oleg, whose mother and younger brother managed to flee to Germany, joining more than 3 million Ukrainians who have left the country since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.
"I try to call them every day and communicate. I miss them very much, but I'm glad they are safe, and they don't need to hide in basements and bomb shelters," Oleg, who declined to give his surname for security reasons, said from Kyiv.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy banned men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country when Russia invaded, asking them instead to fight for their country, and many LGBTQ+ people have responded to his request.