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He Donated His Kidney and Received a $13,064 Bill in Return

2 years 2 months ago

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The email arrived in Elliot Malin’s inbox from his cousin’s mom.

“Scott needs a kidney,” the subject line read.

The message matter-of-factly described Scott’s situation: At 28 years old, Scott Kline was in end-stage renal failure. He wasn’t on dialysis yet. But he probably should have been.

His mom was reaching out to as many people as she could, asking them to be screened as a potential donation match.

“Thank you for considering it, but please don’t feel any pressure to do it,” she wrote. “Sorry I have to share this burden, but the best potential match is family.”

Malin didn’t need to be pressured. For him, the decision was easy.

“There was no other thought besides trying to help Scott,” Malin later said.

He clicked on a link in the email to begin the screening process.

If he turned out to be a match, Malin knew the surgery could put his health at risk. The recovery would be physically painful. What he didn’t anticipate was that it would put his finances in jeopardy. That just as he would have to trust the skilled hands of the surgeon to make sure the operation went well, he’d have to trust in the expertise of billing coders and financial coordinators to navigate the increasingly complex system that covers the costs of transplant surgeries.

Living organ donors are never supposed to receive a bill for care related to a transplant surgery. The recipient’s insurance covers all of those costs. This rule is key to a system built on encouraging such a selfless act. And for most uninsured patients in end-stage kidney failure, Medicare would pick up the tab. But in Malin’s case, he would end up facing a $13,000 billing mistake and the threat of having his bill sent to collections.

A bill from NorthStar Anesthesia to Malin for $13,064 (Andri Tambunan, special to ProPublica)

Donors like Malin play a critical role in the nation’s transplant system. According to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing, in the last three years more than 30% of kidney donations came from living donors. Neither UNOS nor other national advocacy organizations track how often billing problems like those encountered by Malin occur. But advocates say they do happen and can deter donors from coming forward.

“Living donors should not be receiving any bills at all whatsoever regarding any part of the living donation process,” said Morgan Reid, director of transplant policy and strategy for the National Kidney Foundation.

Malin and Kline describe themselves as cousins, but their blood relationship is distant. Their great-grandfathers were brothers, making them third cousins. Still, they’re the same age and grew up as friends, sometimes traveling and spending holidays together. Kline attended Malin’s wedding in 2019.

Exactly what went wrong with Kline’s kidneys is a mystery. In the summer of 2020 he had just moved to Fort Worth, Texas, for work. He went in for routine blood work to monitor a medication he was taking. When the results came in, the doctor called to ask if he was on dialysis.

“You’re in end-stage renal failure,” the doctor told him.

“Oh, no I’m not,” Kline responded.

The bloodwork wasn’t wrong. He had just 17% kidney function. Thus began his search for a new organ. Kline was told his wait for a kidney could be three to five years if a friend or family member didn’t step forward. In February 2021, Kline and his family began reaching out to everyone they knew. Volunteers signed up for medical screening, but insurance would only pay to test one at a time. Waiting for one potential donor to be ruled out before testing another drew out an already lengthy process.

Four months after Malin signed up to be screened, he got final confirmation he was a match.

By June, the two cousins were deep in the byzantine organ transplant bureaucracy: screeners, financial counselors, doctors, specialists, laboratories and, the most difficult, insurance companies.

“The amount of hoops you have to jump through to do this is pretty extraordinary,” Malin said, describing rounds of medical tests, mountains of paperwork and preauthorizations for procedures. A multidisciplinary team of professionals assembled to assist the two patients through the process.

“The hospital was amazing on trying to make everything as easy as possible,” he said of the team.

Malin said they gave him one assurance: He wouldn’t have to contend with any bills or be responsible for a dime of the surgery’s estimated $160,000 cost. The team had received preauthorization from Kline’s insurance plan, which would pick up all of Malin’s medical costs.

That assurance, however well-intentioned, fell flat.

Malin, right, and his cousin Scott Kline in the hospital for the transplant surgery (Courtesy of Elliot Malin)

In July, Malin traveled from his home in Reno, Nevada, to Fort Worth, where the cousins underwent the transplant surgery at Baylor Scott & White All Saints Medical Center. The surgery was successful.

Malin spent three days in the hospital recovering, Kline a day or two longer — a painful experience made bearable by their companionship.

“We would do our little walks around the hospital floor,” Kline said. “We would be suffering together. It was really nice to have that. Usually you’re there alone, especially during COVID.”

By early August, Malin was back in Reno to finish recuperating. The next week, he started law school. Life was getting back to normal.

When the first bill arrived, it was more annoying than stressful. It totaled just $19.15 for blood work done before the surgery. The hospital said it would take care of it, Malin said. Then he got a notice that an old insurance plan he was no longer a member of had been billed $934 for lab work. Again, he notified the hospital.

In late September, Malin got a bill for a stomach-dropping amount: $13,064. While he was startled by the cost, it didn’t worry him too much. He knew Kline’s insurance was responsible for paying it. He notified the hospital and forgot about it.

A month later, a second notice arrived. Then, on Dec. 6, Malin received a document that scared him.

“Final Notice! Your account is now considered delinquent,” the notice read. If he didn’t take action, the billing company warned, it would attempt “further collection activity.”

The bill was from NorthStar Anesthesia, a firm that provides anesthesia services to hospitals across the country, including Baylor Scott & White All Saints.

NorthStar Anesthesia warns Malin that his bill could be sent to collections. (Courtesy of Malin, highlight added by ProPublica)

Now, Malin wasn’t only irritated that the bills just kept coming, he was worried about his credit.

“I did call them and kind of chewed them out a little bit,” Malin said. “I walked through what this was for, that it was a kidney donation and I’m not the responsible party.”

Malin complained on Twitter about the aggressive billing practice, eliciting an array of responses, from jokes about asking for his kidney back to outrage that he’d be in this position after such a gift.

After he called the billing company and the hospital, there was nothing else he could do.

“I’m just waiting to see if I go to collections or not,” Malin told ProPublica two weeks later.

He did his best to leave Kline out of it entirely.

“He’s had a lot on his plate,” Malin said of his cousin. “His recovery has been harder than mine. He’s the one accepting the organ, so he’ll be on immunosuppressants the rest of his life. Because of COVID, he’s largely stuck indoors. I don’t tell him a lot of it. I don’t want to stress him out.”

Still, it troubled Kline that Malin was facing such problems.

“At the end of the day, I want everything to go as smoothly as possible for Elliot,” Kline said. “He was doing me an unbelievable kindness. I owe my life to him.”

A stack of bills for Malin's transplant surgery (Andri Tambunan, special to ProPublica)

Malin heard nothing until Jan. 19, one day after ProPublica reached out to NorthStar for comment.

“The CFO of NorthStar just called me and told me she’s taken care of the bill,” Malin texted a reporter.

The next day, the company emailed Malin, confirming he would not be responsible for the bill, that he was never sent to collections and that his credit wouldn’t be affected.

“On behalf of NorthStar, I apologize for causing any confusion or concern for you regarding this matter and assure you that it has been resolved,” wrote Kate Stets, the company’s chief financial officer.

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She said that after his call on Dec. 7, the bill had been rerouted to “the correct parties,” but that the company had failed to communicate that to him. The letter explained that NorthStar had received incorrect insurance information at the time of the surgery. (A spokesperson later said NorthStar received no insurance information at the time of the surgery.) In such cases, bills are automatically sent to the patient.

The company has since adjusted its policy to prevent that from happening in future transplant cases, Stets wrote.

“To be clear, it is not NorthStar’s policy to bill transplant donors for bills related to their donation surgeries,” Stets wrote. “We recognize the well-established public policy standard and practice that transplant donors should not be billed for such services — that we and the nation’s health care system have a responsibility to foster and encourage such acts of selflessness and generosity.”

In a statement, a NorthStar spokesperson said no other organ donors owe “out of pocket payments.”

“NorthStar did not hear from Baylor on this matter previously and was first notified of the billing error on December 7, 2021 after insurance information was not provided to NorthStar by the transplant center at the point of care,” a spokesperson said. “NorthStar resolved the error immediately and closed the account that same day, prior to any inquiry from ProPublica.”

Both Malin and Kline commended the team at Baylor Scott & White All Saints that guided them through the process. The hospital, however, declined to grant an interview to ProPublica about what went wrong with the billing.

A spokesperson provided a short statement: “We are pleased this has been resolved for our patient by NorthStar. Although billing can be complicated, these occurrences are rare. We have also been in touch with the patient and we don’t have anything further to report.”

Financing such surgeries is so complex that transplant centers employ coordinators to help both patients with the process.

“I tell donors, I can’t guarantee you won’t get a bill, but if you do, call me,” said Deidra Simano, president of the Transplant Financial Coordinators Association.

In one case, after trying everything to get a provider to bill the proper insurance, Simano resorted to paying a patient’s $200 bill with the transplant center’s credit card.

“That’s what we had to do to make it go away,” she said.

Malin said he feels fortunate to be equipped to fight the billing issues. He worries about others with fewer means facing a similar situation, recognizing it could be a barrier to those selfless enough to donate an organ.

“It sucks but I wouldn’t have changed any of it,” he said. “I like my cousin. I want him to be healthy.”

Malin with a kidney-shaped pillow given to him at the hospital for his recovery (Andri Tambunan, special to ProPublica)

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by Anjeanette Damon

Colorado Homeowners: Do You Have Experience Dealing With an HOA? Help Us Investigate.

2 years 2 months ago

ProPublica and Rocky Mountain PBS would like to talk to Coloradans who have lived in a community with a homeowners association. We know there are a lot of you: As of 2020, an estimated 74 million residents belonged to one of America’s 355,000 HOAs. There are more than 10,000 of these groups in Colorado alone, and they’re estimated to be home to nearly 2.4 million residents. These resident-governed organizations collect dues and fees from members to provide for improvements to and upkeep of shared areas, and to pay for some insurance coverage. HOAs can also set standards for public-facing aspects of members’ homes, including lawn maintenance, exterior paint colors and the use of lights and other decor.

HOA members who fall behind on dues or run afoul of rules set by the board can face additional fees, including legal fees charged by the HOA board’s attorney. If the dispute is left unresolved, the HOA could place liens on the homeowner’s property and attempt to foreclose on the home.

Because these processes often occur outside of the public eye, it is difficult to know just how common they are. If you have firsthand experience with an HOA, please fill out the brief questionnaire below.

by Brittany Freeman, Rocky Mountain PBS, and Chris Morran and Mariam Elba, ProPublica

What ProPublica Is Doing About Diversity in 2022

2 years 2 months ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

ProPublica is committed to increasing the diversity of our workplace as well as of the journalism community more broadly, and each year we publish a report of what we’re doing about it. This is the report for 2022; here are all our past reports.

Our Commitment

We believe that it is crucial to fill our newsroom with people from a broad range of backgrounds, ages and perspectives. We are committed to recruiting and retaining people from communities that have long been underrepresented, not only in journalism but particularly in investigative journalism. That includes African Americans, Latinos, other people of color, women, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities.

ProPublica has continued to expand, growing from 137 full-time employees at the start of 2021 to 160 in 2022, largely due to the launch of regional units in the South and Southwest and the expansion of our Midwest office. In addition to our talent recruitment efforts, mentorship opportunities and financial stipends, many of ProPublica’s diversity efforts this year continued to be internal, focused on onboarding and staff development.

The Diversity Committee comprises more than 50 ProPublicans who volunteer their time to work on initiatives that are pitched and run by the staff. The current co-chairs are Caroline Chen, Vianna Davila, Melissa Sanchez and Liz Sharp.

Breakdown of Our Staff

As with last year, we tracked candidates through the application and interview process. Out of 50 positions filled in 2021, 55% of the candidates we interviewed identified as women, and 47% identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white. Of those we hired, 45% identified as women and 44% as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white.

The percentage of all ProPublica staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white was 59%, the same as last year. In editorial positions, staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white also stayed the same as last year, at 58%.

For the fourth year in a row, more women than men work at ProPublica. In editorial positions, women represented 51% of the staff.

As we’ve said since 2015, part of our commitment to diversity means being transparent about our own numbers. Here are the breakdowns:

Race and Ethnicity: All of ProPublica Race and Ethnicity: Editorial Race and Ethnicity: Managers Gender: All of ProPublica Gender: Editorial Gender: Managers

Note: The data is based on employees’ self-reported information. Recognizing that some people may identify as more than one race but not identify as a person of color, from this year onward we are stating these numbers in terms of people who “solely identify as non-Hispanic white.” We hope this will provide more specificity and accuracy. In previous years, we have sometimes given statistics with the term “people of color.” To better compare current data to previous years, ProPublica used employee information as of Jan. 1, which was not the date used in the 2021 annual report; as a result, figures for 2021 differ from what was previously reported. Managers are defined as staff members who supervise other people and do not include all editors. Percentages may not add up to 100 because of rounding.

Our Ongoing Efforts

We think about our efforts in the following ways: building the pipeline (for us and for all of investigative journalism), recruiting talent and improving our hiring process, and inclusion and retention. As the pandemic continued to disrupt our ability to carry out many in-person diversity initiatives, ProPublica has continued to offer virtual training and development opportunities:

  • The conference subcommittee, led by Maya Miller and Irena Hwang, partnered with Journalism Mentors in the lead-up to the summer conference season. Twenty ProPublica staff members provided affinity conference attendees with general advice or portfolio reviews. The partnership was so successful that we decided to keep it active outside of the traditional conference season. (Interested in signing up for a session? You can do so here.)

  • In June 2021, Ellis Simani, Irena Hwang and former ProPublica staffer Beena Raghavendran continued a career-building webinar for “alumni,” current members and selected finalists of ProPublica programs (Conference Stipends, Data Institute and Emerging Reporters) to hear from our staff about topics including journalism ethics, burnout and side-hustles. ProPublica is working on a similar virtual gathering for 2022.

  • Diversity Committee Office Hours: We have continued to offer a casual hangout on Zoom twice a month where ProPublicans can chat with the Diversity Committee co-chairs to brainstorm about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, ask questions about ProPublica’s ongoing DEI programs or chat about diversity-related concerns in a more intimate setting outside of the monthly committee meetings.

Building the Pipeline

  • Conference Stipends: ProPublica offers funding to help student journalists attend conferences. This effort is coordinated by Mollie Simon, Ash Ngu and Adriana Gallardo. In the sixth year of the program, we teamed up with The Pudding to award 25 stipends of $750 each. Because of the pandemic, we also gave students the option to use the money for journalism-related expenses in addition to online conference expenses. Apply for this year’s stipend here.

  • Emerging Reporters Program: This program provides stipends and mentorship to six students who have demonstrated financial need and encourages applications from people with diverse backgrounds. The program includes a $9,000 stipend and admission to a journalism conference. This is the program’s seventh year, and it is coordinated by Talia Buford. Check out our most recent class and find out more about the program.

  • ONA (Online News Association) Diversity Breakfast: An annual breakfast at the ONA conference, facilitated by Ruth Baron, Karim Doumar and former ProPublica staffer Beena Raghavendran, pairs managing editors, executive editors and other leading professionals in the industry with journalists from historically underrepresented communities. For the past two years, we have hosted a virtual breakfast at the conference and plan to keep doing so, whether in person or virtually, this year.

  • Chicago External Mentorships: Quarterly mentorship sessions with The Real Chi, a Chicago-based learning newsroom powered by young reporters and editors ages 18 to 25 that cover the city’s West and South sides. Led by Duaa Eldeib and Tony Briscoe, workshops include sessions about public records, fact checking and investigative reporting.

  • Outreach Trips: A team coordinates visits, in person or by Zoom, by ProPublica journalists to schools across the country, especially historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions with journalism programs. Contact Topher Sanders if you’d like us to visit your school virtually or in person, once we’re able to do so safely.

Recruiting and Hiring

  • Rooney Rule: We require that hiring managers interview at least one person who does not self-identify as solely non-Hispanic white. In addition, we have made it explicit that every application must be read by at least two people.

  • Application Process Data Analysis: We gather and analyze data about our job, fellowship and Local Reporting Network candidates to better understand who’s making it to the interview stage and look at the makeup of our overall applicant pool.

  • Affinity Conferences: Our conference subcommittee coordinates and encourages ProPublica presence, participation and events at affinity conferences such as NAHJ, NABJ and AAJA. The subcommittee spent the year reassessing its budget and relationships with affinity groups, and its members are excited to be entering 2022 with more opportunities to engage in conferences as a result.

Inclusion and Retention
  • Unconscious Bias Training: In 2021, ProPublica hired Paradigm Reach to conduct ongoing diversity, equity and inclusion training with staff, including mandatory training for all managers.

  • ProPublica Peer Partnership Program: This is an internal program organized by Jodi Cohen and Lisa Song that matches ProPublicans with a mentor or peer partner to meet each other, develop new skills and have someone to turn to for help navigating workplace or career questions.

  • Welcoming New Hires and Focusing on Internal Culture: Following a year of expansion and rapid hiring at ProPublica, two new subcommittees, led by Michael Grabell and Ariana Tobin, were formed to think about how to improve the news organization’s onboarding process and how to be more inclusive and equitable in our newsroom.

  • Rethinking Language Around Identity: An ad hoc subcommittee led by Melissa Sanchez was created to discuss best practices for language in job application forms and other ProPublica internal documents to allow people to identify themselves most accurately.

Interested in Working Here?

Here is our jobs page, where we post new full-time positions, and here’s our fellowships page. At the bottom of either page, you can sign up to be automatically notified when we have a job or fellowship available.

by Caroline Chen, Vianna Davila, Melissa Sanchez and Liz Sharp, graphics by Haru Coryne

Students! ProPublica and The Pudding Want to Send You to a Conference in 2022.

2 years 2 months ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

We are proud to announce our seventh annual conference stipend program (formerly the Diversity Scholarship), aimed at providing students with an opportunity to learn from professionals in the field. This year we are once again teaming up with The Pudding, a longform data journalism publication.

ProPublica, with additional support from The Pudding, will be sponsoring need-based stipends for 25 students to attend journalism conferences in 2022. Anyone who is U.S. resident for tax purposes is eligible. All are welcome to apply. We especially encourage students from underrepresented groups in journalism — including people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities — with interests in investigative and data journalism to apply. Check out last year’s scholarship recipients.

The $750 stipends will go to students who would otherwise be unable to attend conferences. If a student intends to go to a conference that ends up going virtual, they will have the opportunity to use any leftover portion of the stipend toward journalism-related expenses such as subscriptions to news publications, software, FOIA fees or equipment (think cameras, recorders, etc.).

Journalism conferences offer great opportunities for networking and professional development, especially for those just starting out in their careers.

The deadline is March 7 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time. Students have the option to select a conference as part of their application. We understand that dates and formats may change, but we would still like to know which you are interested in attending. Please note that the list below is not exhaustive.

  • AAJA, Asian American Journalists Association. Los Angeles, California, July 27-30.
  • AHCJ, Association of Health Care Journalists. Austin, Texas, April 28-May 1.
  • IRE, Investigative Reporters and Editors. Denver, Colorado, and virtual, June 23-26.
  • JAWS, Journalism and Women Symposium. Austin, Texas, Sept. 8-11.
  • NABJ, National Association of Black Journalists. Las Vegas, Nevada, Aug. 3-7.
  • NAHJ, National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Las Vegas, Nevada, Aug. 3-7.
  • NAJA, Native American Journalists Association. Phoenix, Aug. 25-27.
  • NLGJA, Association of LGBTQ Journalists. Chicago, Illinois, Sept. 8-11.
  • NPPA, National Press Photographers Association (Northern Short Course). Virtual, March 31-April 2.
  • ONA, Online News Association. Los Angeles, California, Sept. 21-24.
  • RNA, Religion News Association. Bethesda, Maryland, March 24-26.
  • SND, Society for News Design. Location and dates TBD.
  • SRCCON, organized by OpenNews. Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 22-23.
  • MVJ, Military Veterans in Journalism. Washington, D.C., October, exact dates TBD.
  • LSM, Latino Media Summit. New York City and virtual, June 3-4.

Every year, we share what ProPublica is doing to increase the diversity of our newsroom and of journalism as a whole. These stipends are a small but important step to help student journalists from underrepresented communities take advantage of everything these conferences offer.

High school, college and graduate students are welcome to apply. You must be a student at the time of application, but it’s OK if you’re graduating this spring. Students currently in a gap year are not eligible.

Questions about the application process? Want to contribute to our stipend fund to send more students to these conferences? Get in touch at student.conference@propublica.org.

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by Mollie Simon, Ash Ngu and Adriana Gallardo

Internal Investigation Confirms Border Patrol Failures Leading Up to a 16-Year-Old’s Death on the Floor of His Cell

2 years 2 months ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story was co-published with El Paso Matters.

A government investigation into the 2019 death of a Guatemalan teenager in Border Patrol custody has found serious problems with the agency’s handling of sick detainees.

The report, obtained by ProPublica through a public records request, concludes that Border Patrol agents did not check on 16-year-old Carlos Hernandez Vasquez, who died of the flu after writhing on the floor of his cell in Weslaco, Texas. The report also found that the case reflected broader problems with care in a detainee system that at the time was overwhelmed with migrants, many of whom were ill.

Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez (Via Facebook)

The findings echo the conclusions of a ProPublica investigation from two years ago that revealed how the government failed in taking care of Hernandez.

Hernandez had been detained by Border Patrol agents in May 2019. After being in custody for a few days at an overcrowded processing facility, the Guatemalan migrant had been diagnosed with the flu and was running a 103-degree fever. A nurse practitioner who treated Hernandez wrote that he should be checked again in two hours and taken to the emergency room if his condition worsened.

Agents noted in log books that they regularly checked on the boy after he was moved to another Border Patrol station that housed sick migrants. But video surveillance of his cell showed no sign of it, the report said.

(Excerpt from Office of Inspector General report obtained by ProPublica)

The government report said that agents never went inside Hernandez’s cell that night as he lay ill. It wasn’t until the morning, when Hernandez’s cellmate woke up and found him unresponsive, that agents finally entered the cell.

Falsifying federal records to impede administration of an agency’s function is a crime. But the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas declined to prosecute anyone in Hernandez’s death, the report said. The U.S. attorney declined ProPublica’s request for comment on the decision.

The report is by the Office of Inspector General, which is the internal watchdog for the Department of Homeland Security. The government issued a press release in September about the general findings, but the report itself was not released. Most of the report was provided to ProPublica in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

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The report still leaves many questions unanswered, including whether anybody involved in the case has been disciplined.

The government also did not provide the full report to ProPublica. The inspector general’s office said it was releasing 164 pages of documents, but it has provided only 104. The agency hasn’t responded to numerous inquiries about the discrepancy.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, declined to comment on whether any agents have faced discipline stemming from Hernandez’s death or whether any changes had been made as a result of the inspector general report.

The agency said it is continuing an internal investigation, 32 months after Hernandez died and four months after receiving the inspector general report.

The Texas Civil Rights Project, which represents Hernandez’s family, also declined to comment on the report.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the report identified several failings. It “confirms a concerning lapse in care for the health and well-being of Carlos, as well as the importance of appropriate training and resources for personnel caring for children in custody. CBP must do better,” the Mississippi Democrat said.

The report found that only one health care worker was on duty when Hernandez died the night of May 19, even though more than 200 sick migrants were housed in a makeshift ward.

A pediatrician who reviewed the case for investigators wrote that agents should have noticed that Hernandez was in trouble. The doctor noted that videos showed Hernandez using the bathroom an “extraordinary” number of times. The doctor said it was “especially worrisome” that agents’ logs of Hernandez’s last hours noted no problems even as the boy, the doctor wrote, “was lying motionless on the bathroom floor.”

The doctor, whose name is redacted from the report, stated that Hernandez probably would have died even if he had been watched more closely. In addition to the flu, Hernandez had sepsis and a severe immune disorder, according to an autopsy report.

(Excerpt from Office of Inspector General report obtained by ProPublica)

But Dr. Alia Sunderji, a pediatric emergency medicine physician who has researched the deaths of migrant children in Border Patrol custody, said the inspector general report hadn’t properly framed its question about Herndandez’s illness.

“I would say that the question shouldn’t be, or isn’t, ‘Might he have died anyway?’ The question is, ‘Might he have lived?’” said Sunderji, who has reviewed autopsy reports and Border Patrol medical records of Hernandez’s care at our request. “That answer is yes, there is a possibility that with prompt treatment he could have lived.”

Dr. Judy Melinek, a San Francisco-based pathologist who has reviewed Hernandez’s autopsy report and Border Patrol medical records, said she believes his immune disorder was caused by his untreated illness.

“It can occur in overwhelming untreated sepsis,” said Melinek.

Hernandez was the fifth child to die either in Border Patrol custody or shortly after release between December 2018 and May 2019. Three of them died of the flu.

Hernandez and his 18-year-old sister were among almost 133,000 migrants taken into custody at the southern border that May, the highest total in 13 years.

His sister was allowed to travel to New Jersey to be with another brother while immigration courts decided her status. Hernandez was held by the Border Patrol because he was a minor and was supposed to be turned over within three days to the agency responsible for finding placements for unaccompanied children.

But the large numbers of children crossing the border had created delays. Hernandez was still in Border Patrol custody in McAllen, Texas, six days later when he got sick.

He was moved that afternoon, May 19, to another Border Patrol facility in the nearby town of Weslaco, which was serving as a makeshift isolation ward for sick migrants.

Hernandez was seen by a nurse practitioner that evening, his last contact with a health professional.

Health care workers and Border Patrol agents told investigators that it was common to have only one or two medical staffers on duty at the Weslaco station. The report said the workers, employed by a contractor called Loyal Source Government Services, repeatedly raised concerns about low staffing levels. (Company officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

(Excerpt from Office of Inspector General report obtained by ProPublica)

The inspector general said Loyal Source’s policies didn’t set a ratio for medical staff to detainees. The report said the Border Patrol rushed to provide medical staffing at detention centers after two children died in custody in December 2018 but “did not ensure adequate oversight procedures were in place.”

The inspector general report also found a breakdown in required welfare checks of detained migrants. The lead Border Patrol agent at Weslaco on the midnight shift the night of Hernandez’s death told investigators he had been instructed to check on each person hourly but had never received training on how to do the checks.

The lead agent told investigators that he made hourly checks of Hernandez’s cell but didn’t remember seeing anything that raised concerns.

(Excerpt from Office of Inspector General report obtained by ProPublica)

He also told investigators that it was common practice for lead agents to “check the ‘select all’ tab in the [logging] system and press enter, reporting all detainees received an hourly welfare check.”

(Excerpt from Office of Inspector General report obtained by ProPublica)

The agent’s name is redacted in the inspector general report released to ProPublica. But Border Patrol log records previously obtained by ProPublica from the Weslaco Police Department showed that Agent Oscar Garza logged welfare checks at 2:02 a.m., 4:09 a.m. and 5:05 a.m.

Closed-circuit video showed that Hernandez’s last movement was at 1:41 a.m., as he lay beside the toilet in his cell. A pool of blood was visible on the floor near his concrete bed.

Garza told investigators he hadn’t noticed any problems. He did not respond to requests for comment.

by Robert Moore, El Paso Matters

School District Where Toxic Chemicals Lingered for Years Offers $34 Million Settlement to Families

2 years 2 months ago

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This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Seattle Times. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A school district in Washington state has offered an extraordinary $34 million settlement to students and parents exposed to toxic chemicals that lingered for at least eight years on a public school campus.

The Monroe School District, northeast of Seattle, proposed the striking settlement in November under court seal, preventing the public from seeing the offer. However, the $34 million figure appears in a separate court document obtained last week by The Seattle Times.

In publicly available court documents, the school district did not accept responsibility for hazardous conditions on the Sky Valley Education Center campus, detailed in a recent Times investigation. Instead, the district defended its cleanup efforts on campus, saying it acted appropriately to remove toxic chemicals and inform parents.

Records show the school district was slow to clear out toxic material from the Monroe campus, even as pressure from parents and staff escalated and dozens reported illnesses. As early as 2014, Monroe School District officials found a mixture of harmful conditions at the school, including poor air ventilation and the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a banned, synthetic chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency has linked to some cancers and other illnesses.

Children and staff claimed they became severely ill, reporting hormonal problems, skin conditions, cancers and brain damage. More than 200 parents, teachers and students filed lawsuits against Monsanto, the manufacturer of the PCBs, for exposure to the toxicant at Sky Valley. Monsanto, which is now owned by Bayer, has gone to trial in two of the lawsuits, with juries awarding 11 plaintiffs a collective $247 million. Several other suits are awaiting trial.

Monsanto originally produced the PCBs, a chemical preservative used in light fixtures and caulking in Sky Valley’s 1950s- and 1960s-era buildings. The light fixtures at Sky Valley started failing in 2014, leaking oily, yellow PCB liquids into classrooms.

The school district has been slow to remove the PCB-laden light fixtures from the campus, even after the EPA stepped in to guide officials and encourage a swift cleanup. At one point, school officials certified in writing — and assured parents — that they had removed all PCB-containing material from Sky Valley, but an EPA inspection later revealed that wasn’t the case, The Times reported last month.

At least 15 of the King County Superior Court lawsuits, totaling 195 plaintiffs, also took aim at the Monroe School District, which opted to negotiate a settlement separately from Monsanto. The proposed settlement excludes Sky Valley staff who sued Monsanto, because Washington state law bars employees from suing their employers for negligence in most cases.

The $34 million offer is the maximum allowed under the Monroe School District’s insurance policy “in order to protect MSD’s finances and its ability to continue operating,” according to a statement the district provided to The Times last week.

The district called the settlement a “prudent action under the circumstances.”

It isn’t clear if the $34 million is the highest settlement payout for a school district in the state, but the sum is about half the total that the district’s insurance service, Washington Schools Risk Management Pool, paid out all of last year on claims, according to risk management records. Washington state schools enroll about 1 million students.

The Monroe School District, which serves about 6,000 children, has an annual budget of $93 million.

The $34 million settlement figure first appeared in a report by a special master, an outside judge tasked with deciding how the sum should be split among the 195 claimants.

The report suggests that those who were exposed to PCBs as children, some of whom are now adults, should collect the bulk of the payout. Adults who were exposed would get the next highest payouts. And family members of those exposed would collect the least.

About a third of the settlement would go toward attorneys’ fees and costs. After subtracting the fees, each child exposed would collect roughly $171,000; each adult exposed would collect about $58,000; and each family member of someone exposed would collect about $2,300, according to estimates in the report.

Many plaintiffs experienced “significant, profound damages which they will have to live with for the remainder of their lives and for which they deserve to be compensated,” wrote the special master, King County Superior Court Judge Richard McDermott.

Though McDermott is only overseeing the school district cases, he offered his opinion on the ongoing lawsuits against Monsanto, writing that the chemical giant “is going to have to get serious about a global settlement that is large enough that the plaintiffs will have to pay attention.”

Earlier this week, Monsanto filed a motion to strike elements from McDermott's report or seal the report entirely and bar any parties from publicly releasing it. Monsanto, which claimed the report commented on topics that were still being litigated in trials, wasn’t involved in the Monroe School District settlement discussions.

“The anti-Monsanto statements in the report were not supported by any judicial fact-finding, not adopted by the court, and are damaging to a fair and impartial jury selection and trial process,” read a statement provided to The Times by Bayer, which in 2018 acquired Monsanto, explaining the request to revise or seal the reports.

King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North, overseeing the Sky Valley cases, hasn’t ruled on Monsanto’s request.

The cases have apparently pitted Monsanto and the school district against one another, with each party arguing that the other is to blame for the health crisis at Sky Valley.

McDermott wrote in his report that Monroe School District is “far less culpable than the product manufacturer.”

Monsanto, on the other hand, argued in court that the school district was repeatedly warned about PCBs but failed to take aggressive action.

To this day, the EPA is still working with the district on a cleanup, and Sky Valley, with about 700 students and teachers, remains open. In response to the Times story, Monroe School District said it prioritizes the health and safety of students and continues to work on remediation efforts. The latest PCB testing on campus, carried out in August by a district contractor, showed negligible levels of the chemical, according to school district records.

Experts say hazardous PCBs are likely lingering in aging campuses across the state and country, but Washington does not require testing school buildings for PCBs.

And though health districts are required to inspect campuses for environmental hazards, state law does not require enforcing recommendations or removing certain hazards — a gap that afforded school and health officials a defense against allegations of negligence at Sky Valley. State law also does not require school districts to disclose testing results to parents, students or teachers.

Those omissions have lingered despite the Washington State Department of Ecology flagging PCBs in schools as a priority in 2015, calling the hazard posed by the chemicals “especially concerning.” The department requested legislative dollars to survey schools and target potential hotbeds of PCB exposure, but because lawmakers delayed funding the request, Ecology only started surveying school districts last summer, starting with Eastern Washington districts.

Without a survey, there’s no way to know how many campuses across the state may be exposing students and staff to toxic conditions.

In response to the Times reporting on Sky Valley, state lawmakers and advocates plan to push for PCB testing and prioritize renovating or replacing older buildings. Legislators also proposed creating mandatory timelines for school cleanups and a working group to tackle environmental hazards in schools.

by Lulu Ramadan, The Seattle Times

New Journalists Join ProPublica’s Crowdsourcing and Engagement Reporting Team

2 years 2 months ago

ProPublica has expanded its engagement team with the hiring of two new reporters — Byard Duncan and Asia Fields. In addition, Jessica Priest is joining as an engagement reporter for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune’s investigative unit, a first-of-its-kind collaboration focused on Texas. All three will use crowdsourcing and community outreach to engage diverse audiences for investigative projects.

“We are thrilled to add these extraordinarily talented journalists to our team,” ProPublica Crowdsourcing and Engagement Editor Ariana Tobin said. “Their proven ability to tell impactful, community-driven stories makes them a perfect fit for our newsroom.”

Byard Duncan joins ProPublica from Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. There, he created and managed Reveal’s Reporting Networks, which provide more than 1,100 local journalists across the U.S. with resources and training to continue Reveal investigations in their communities. Duncan also led engagement reporting initiatives around Reveal’s major investigations and reported on threats to U.S. democracy. He was part of Reveal’s “Behind the Smiles” project team, which exposed the true toll of Amazon’s relentless drive for speed on its workers by using public injury records from the company’s warehouses and deep sourcing from current and former Amazon workers. The project was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2019. Duncan is the recipient of two Gerald Loeb Awards, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, a National Headliner Award, an Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award and two first-place awards for feature storytelling from the Society of Professional Journalists and Best of the West. In addition to Reveal, Duncan’s work has appeared in GQ, Esquire, The California Sunday Magazine and Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets.

Asia Fields joins ProPublica from the investigative team at the The Seattle Times, where she helped lead coverage of the coronavirus’ devastating toll in long-term care facilities, including the site of the nation’s first-known outbreak. She and her colleagues exposed early missteps that allowed the virus to spread in facilities and worked with the families of residents to track outbreaks at a time when officials weren’t able to provide data. This work was selected as a finalist for the Scripps Howard Award and IRE Award for breaking news. For a series on Title IX, Fields connected with dozens of survivors who felt their universities failed them and, in some cases, put other students in danger. Her work has also exposed gaps in colleges' sexual misconduct policies and led to a law in Washington state requiring schools to share information about employee misconduct as part of the hiring process.

Jessica Priest joins the ProPublica and The Texas Tribune investigative unit from the Fort Worth Report. As one of its founding reporters, she exposed corruption by the head of a large public port, prompting a grand jury investigation. At the Victoria Advocate, her call-out driven series about gaps in mental health care in rural Texas won the Star Investigative Report of the Year award from the Texas Associated Press Managers. Later that year, she drove to every apartment complex in Victoria to map damage from Hurricane Harvey, giving visibility to renters all but forgotten in the recovery process. The story and map were part of a series that received a Sigma Delta Chi Award for public service journalism. Most recently, at USA Today and the Austin American-Statesman, Priest detailed a Midland prosecutor’s serious conflict of interest. After this reporting, Texas’ highest criminal court overturned a death row inmate’s conviction. The State Bar of Texas has also recognized Priest’s reporting for fostering public understanding of the legal system and highlighting needs for reform. Her work has also appeared in the Houston Chronicle, the Temple Daily Telegram and the Texas Observer.

by ProPublica

Senators Ask JPMorgan Chase to Explain Its Lawsuit Blitz Against Credit Card Customers

2 years 2 months ago

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This story was co-published with The Capitol Forum.

Saying they were “deeply troubled by recent reports” that JPMorgan Chase has “renewed its predatory practice of robo-signing,” six Senate Democrats on Monday asked Jamie Dimon, the company’s CEO, to provide “detailed information regarding the bank’s credit card debt collection practices.”

The letter, signed by five members of the Senate Banking Committee and its chairman, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, cited an article by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum that revealed how Chase had launched an ongoing lawsuit blitz against indebted credit card customers when the pandemic began battering the economy in early 2020.

Chase had stopped pursuing credit card lawsuits nearly a decade ago when regulators found that the bank’s legal paperwork was often faulty. Back then, Chase lawsuits did not include extensive billing records; they typically contained a two-page affidavit signed by a Chase employee who swore that the bank records were reliable.

Chase employees signed affidavits “without personal knowledge of the signer, a practice commonly referred to as ‘robo-signing,’” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau concluded in a consent order with Chase in 2015. Nearly 10% of lawsuits Chase won were for inflated totals and “contained erroneous amounts,” the CFPB found. Chase neither admitted nor denied the CFPB’s findings at the time, but agreed to provide “relevant information and documentation” in future suits.

When key terms of the CFPB settlement expired on New Year’s Day in 2020, Chase returned to suing credit card borrowers much as it did before, according to consumer lawyers and legal records.

“Chase should not utilize robo-signing in pursuing these debt collection suits, or any other debt,” according to the lawmakers’ letter. The letter asked Dimon to lay out the steps the company takes to verify the accuracy of its lawsuit claims. “How does Chase quality check the affidavits?” the lawmakers asked. “Do these employees have personal knowledge of the case?”

The letter also requested that Dimon provide details about the company’s credit card suits and their outcomes, and it inquired about Chase’s past promises to grant hardship exemptions to customers during the pandemic. Finally, the letter noted the “extensive evidence about racial disparities in debt collection” and asked what measures Chase has in place to make sure its debt collection practices don’t create these gaps.

Chase did not immediately reply to a request for comment. But in a statement for the earlier article by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum, Chase said its current system for processing credit card lawsuits is sound and reliable. “We quality-check 100% of our affidavits today,” the bank said. And, Chase said, “we continue to meet the requirements of the consent order.”

Before the CFPB settlement, roughly half a dozen Chase employees, working from a single San Antonio office, signed hundreds of thousands affidavits. Today, Chase has about a dozen employees mass-producing affidavits from the same office using some of the same methods as in the past, according to Chase employees and outside lawyers who have represented the company.

Chase declined to say how many suits it has filed in its blitz of the past two years, but civil dockets from across the country give a hint of the scale — and its accelerating pace. The company sued more than 800 credit card customers around Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last year after suing 70 in 2020 and none in 2019, according to a review of court records. In Houston, Chase filed more than 1,000 consumer debt lawsuits last year after filing only seven in 2020.

The lawmakers asked Dimon to respond to their letter by Feb. 21.

by Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum

When Private Equity Becomes Your Landlord

2 years 2 months ago

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Daniel Cooper could barely afford a tiny apartment at the 13-story Olume building in downtown San Francisco. But the expansive view from the roof deck captivated him.

Raised in a small city in Kentucky, Cooper was struck by the grandeur of the skyline before him, from the soaring heights of Salesforce tower, San Francisco’s largest skyscraper, to the gleaming gold cupolas atop St. Joseph’s Church, one of the city’s historic landmarks.

The sense of opportunity he felt when looking out on his new hometown helped convince the software engineer to become one of the glassy new building’s first tenants in 2016. He joined Mévis Mousbé, a driver for a ride-sharing service who had been the first to move in. She admired the high ceilings in her new junior studio on the sixth floor, which she shared with her Shih Tzu, Roxie-Jolie. A few months later, “Specs” Titus, an entrepreneur whose eyeglasses inspired her nickname, settled happily into a corner unit on the eighth floor with her daughter. She’d won it in a lottery for apartments with below-market rents.

But prospective tenants weren’t the only ones eyeing the new apartment building, with its 121 units, gym and rooftop fire pits.

In July 2017, Cooper received an email announcing that Greystar, the property management and real estate investment behemoth, was taking over the building. The private equity-backed firm was buying the Olume’s owner, Monogram Residential Trust, and its investments in four dozen properties scattered across 10 states. Cooper worried his new community was about to change.

As Greystar took charge, his alarm grew. Rents soared. Trash collected in the hallways and on the rooftop deck, Cooper said. The security guard showed up less often. One tenant said she was frightened when she encountered a large, seemingly drunk man she didn’t know dancing in a leotard and tutu in the parking garage. Another renter described having to heat her bathwater on the stove after she woke several times to find only cold water flowing from her tap.

“I understand that rent goes up, cost of living goes up, everything goes up,” Cooper said. “But with that, we would expect the quality of the building, and the quality of the management, would stay the same, and that was not what we saw.”

Greystar did not respond to questions about tenant complaints, except to say that resident satisfaction was “very important” to the company.

Cooper and his fellow tenants were experiencing firsthand the effects of a dramatic, though mostly unnoticed, shift in control of a vital portion of America’s housing stock, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by ProPublica.

During the past decade, private equity-backed firms such as Greystar have stormed into the multifamily apartment market, snapping up rentals by the thousands and becoming major landlords in American cities, according to ProPublica’s analysis of National Multifamily Housing Council data on the nation’s biggest owners of apartment buildings with five or more units.

Private Equity Firms Were Behind 85% of Freddie Mac’s Biggest Apartment Complex Deals !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r
by Heather Vogell

A Push to Remove LGBTQ Books in One County Could Signal Rising Partisanship on School Boards

2 years 2 months ago

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Nearly seven years ago, Melanie Graft’s 4-year-old daughter was in the children’s section of her local North Texas library when she picked up a book about an LGBTQ pride parade. Within the colorful pages of the book, “This Day in June,” children and adults celebrate with rainbow flags and signs promoting equality and love over hate. Adults embrace and kiss one another.

Alarmed, Graft launched a campaign against the book and another about a boy who likes to wear dresses, suggesting that their presence in the library foisted inappropriate themes on unsuspecting children. By June 2015, the Hood County Library Advisory Board had received more than 50 complaints asking that the two books be removed from the shelves of the children’s section. The board refused, saying the books did not promote homosexuality, as some complaints had suggested, and arguing that the library already required parents of young children to accompany them and check out materials. Librarian Courtney Kincaid called “This Day in June” a tool to teach respect and acceptance of the LGBTQ community, but she agreed to move it to the adult section. She kept “My Princess Boy” in the children’s section.

Opponents of the books then turned to the entirely Republican Hood County Commissioners Court, which appoints members to the library advisory board. After an emotional three-hour meeting that July, commissioners declined to remove the books on the advice of the county’s attorney, who concluded that such action could spur a lawsuit over unlawful censorship because of potential violations of state law and the U.S. Constitution.

Anger over that decision helped fuel a seven-year effort by far-right Christian conservatives in Hood County to seize control of elected offices and government boards from more traditional Republicans. They won spots on the commissioners court, grabbed seats on the library advisory board and, last year, launched a monthslong campaign to oust Michele Carew, the county’s independent elections administrator, accusing the Republican of harboring a secret liberal agenda.

In November, the group claimed a major victory after Graft won a seat on the school board in Granbury, the county seat. Also elected was Courtney Gore, the co-host of a local far-right internet talk show who has railed against masks and vaccines and promoted Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. On the campaign trail, the women promised to comb through educational materials for any signs of “indoctrination” in the form of books or lesson plans that they charged promote LGBTQ ideology or what they referred to as critical race theory, a university-level academic discipline based on the idea that racism is embedded in U.S. legal and other structures.

“When my daughter was 4 years old, my parental rights were taken away here at the public library in Hood County,” Graft, who said on the campaign trail that her school-age children did not attend Granbury public schools, told attendees at a GOP forum before the election. “I stood up for my daughter then, and I’ll stick up for our kids now.”

The yearslong journey in Hood County offers a window into the fiercely contentious debates over curriculum and library books that have cropped up across the state and country in recent months. Once-nonpartisan school board races are taking on a decidedly partisan tone, and administrators are now sounding like political operatives.

Peter Coyl, a librarian who testified on behalf of the American Library Association in 2015 against removing the books, recalls thinking at the time that Hood County was an outlier because of how extensively the fight consumed the community. In retrospect, Coyl said, Hood County foreshadowed the larger battle that is playing out in school board races and over library books across the country.

“It was obvious that there was a portion of the community that was not happy with the outcome,” said Coyl, who now leads a library in Sacramento, California. “But I think now we are in an era, a time where people aren’t willing to have discourse or conversations about things. They want their way and they want to impose their view on anyone and everyone, because they feel that they’re right.”

The Granbury Independent School District elections last fall served as a litmus test of loyalty to the GOP’s most conservative wing, which pushed candidates for nonpartisan posts to declare their party affiliation and to explain how they would actively push far-right initiatives.

Graft, left, and Courtney Gore are sworn in to the board of the Granbury Independent School District on Nov. 15, after winning their races. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

“This was the first election where candidates felt the need to put ‘conservative’ or ‘Republican’ on their campaign signs and in their literature that they sent out,” said Nancy Alana, a self-described conservative Republican who lost to Gore in November after serving on the school board since 2009. “And I have always shied away from that because I understood that the school board position was nonpolitical. And that was what I was trying to uphold.”

A career educator who spent 30 years as a teacher and principal, Alana shares views similar to those of Graft and Gore on books and curriculum, but was pegged by some far-right Republican activists as too passive for their vision of a more uncompromising “new Granbury.” Alana said she worried that the focus on culture-war battles over books and curriculum could distract leaders from important issues like overcrowding in the growing district.

Graft did not respond to requests for comment. Gore said in an email to ProPublica and The Texas Tribune that declaring party affiliation makes school board elections more transparent. She said that the board “​​more accurately reflects the population now.”

“Any entity that taxes or oversees school curriculum is inherently partisan, whether people want to admit it or not,” Gore said. “I proudly ran as a Conservative Republican and will never apologize for being one.”

Challenges to books about sexual orientation and racial identity in Texas are the latest in a wave of divisive national political issues driving local campaigns. In October, Matt Krause, a Republican state representative from Fort Worth who was then running for attorney general, sparked national attention when he released a list of 850 books that he said should be investigated and potentially banned from school libraries. The majority of the titles dealt with LGBTQ themes, and some were targeted for merely including LGBTQ characters, according to an analysis by BookRiot.

Gov. Greg Abbott, facing a Republican primary challenge from two opponents running to his right on education issues, later ordered the Texas Education Agency to investigate the availability of “pornography” in public schools, a term that some politicians and district leaders have interpreted as a catchall for books on sexuality and sexual orientation. He urged criminal prosecutions under the state penal code of educators who make such material available.

At a January school board meeting, Granbury Superintendent Jeremy Glenn, who is appointed by the board, referenced Krause and Abbott in defense of the district’s recent decision to remove more than 130 books that deal with race and sexual orientation from school libraries, pending a review.

The Granbury school board went a step further during its meeting Jan. 24. Led by Graft, the school board cleared the way for the district to strip any material deemed vulgar or unsuitable by administration and the board from its shelves without a committee review.

The next night, at Brazos Covenant Ministries church, Glenn assured attendees at a Republican Party gathering that school board members would act as gatekeepers against books and “woke” curriculum about sexual orientation and racial identity.

Speaking in partisan political language not common among school superintendents, Glenn pointed to decreasing margins of victory for Republican presidential candidates in the state, and warned local party leaders that “there are individuals out there that want to destroy what you believe.”

“They don’t believe in the same America that you and I grew up in, and that’s just the truth,” he said. “Our community has to decide whether or not we want to hold the line.”

Community members at the Granbury school board meeting in November 2021 watch the swearing-in of Graft and Gore. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) An Old Fight Resurfaces

A week after the November election, Emily Schigut, a fifth grade reading teacher and soccer coach, put her house on the market. She knew it was time to leave her job.

Schigut, who has family in Hood County, was teaching in Midland, Texas, five years ago when the principal of STEAM Academy at Mambrino in Granbury reached out to her about an opening at its campus.

She recalls her excitement at coming to the district, which she said was a model of innovation. Now she worries that politics have taken hold in a way that makes it difficult for teachers to do their jobs. And as someone who identifies as queer, she is concerned about the message the district is sending to educators and students.

“It’s absolutely terrifying,” Schigut said in an interview. “All anyone has to do is listen to the words they’ve said. They aren’t there for the kids. They are there for a political agenda. You watch all these things happening around the country, and in the blink of an eye, it was happening here.

“It’s very sad because I 100% believed in this district. But I do not feel safe here any longer.”

While the shift in tone at the school district felt sudden to Schigut, far-right Republicans had spent years working toward electing candidates to local political offices. Their efforts gained steam in the summer of 2015 amid outrage over two failed fights: one over the LGBTQ books and another when Hood County was required to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage. County Clerk Katie Lang initially refused to issue a marriage license to a gay couple.

Despite losing the debate over books, opponents claimed a major victory that year when Kincaid, Granbury’s librarian, resigned. She said she could no longer endure harassment and bullying by the group, which she recalled had posted someone at the library’s circulation desk every day to watch her.

“Even going out to lunch was a gamble because I didn’t know if my food would be tainted in any way by someone who disagreed with my decision to keep the books. Whenever I would leave the library, be it during my lunch time or running an errand for work, I was followed,” Kincaid told the American Library Association in 2017 after her resignation. Kincaid, who faced additional harassment following her departure from Hood County, declined an interview.

Graft became increasingly active in local politics, serving on the local library advisory board and as a Republican Party precinct chair. Her fight against the books made her popular in far-right circles, giving her a platform across the state.

Graft listens at the board meeting after winning her seat in November 2021. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

During an interview with Doc Greene, a self-described conservative activist radio show host, at the 2016 state Republican convention in Dallas, Graft described the moment her daughter encountered “This Day in June” by Gayle Pitman.

“She picked it up, turned to the page and showed it to me, and I was appalled,” Graft said. “There were political issues. Signs like love over hate, equal rights, things that a child certainly can’t understand. And this book on the back binding was recommended for children ages 4 to 8.”

She continued, “They have an agenda and an indoctrination for our children. It’s not enough to tolerate. They want us to participate. And they want our children.”

After Graft had finished, Greene said he was not a violent man, then added, “But something like this enrages me to such a degree that violence is not completely ruled out. Because when you go after the children, this is not the time to just stand by and talk about it.”

Graft responded that she was not a proponent of violence, but Greene continued pressing.

“If you’re not willing to kill for what you believe, you’ve already lost the war. Our children are worth saving,” said Greene, who did not respond to requests for comment.

“I can’t argue with that,” Graft said. “I agree.”

A month later, the Northeast Tarrant Tea Party near the library where Kincaid had relocated uploaded a video of Graft speaking at one of its meetings to YouTube.

“This is Courtney Kincaid. You need to know her name,” Graft told the group as a screen flashed behind her. “We have to stand in the gap between the liberal left and our children. It only takes one liberal library with an agenda to steal the innocence of your child.”

Two years later, one of Graft’s allies in the fight against the books, Dave Eagle, a former tea party leader, was elected to the Hood County Commissioners Court. Eagle, who lost a bid for the school board in 2016, had vowed in a letter to the Hood County News the previous August that the Hood County Tea Party would “continue to reap political dividends” from the fights over same-sex marriage and LGBTQ books, as he complained about the local news organization’s coverage.

Eagle, who claimed credit for Kincaid’s departure, frequently sparred with members of the library’s advisory board and worked to change the makeup of the panel. In 2019, the Hood County Republican Party issued a formal resolution calling for the board to be disbanded, claiming that it failed to represent the “moral character” of the community. County commissioners dissolved the board last year after political divisions had made it difficult for the board to get much accomplished.

“It has become a lightning rod,” David Wells, the former library advisory board chair, said after the board disbanded. “It’s lost its sense of purpose, of what it’s there for. It’s way beyond the purpose for which it is designed.”

Eagle, who did not respond to a request for comment, also helped lead an effort last year that sought to abolish the elections administrator position held by Carew and transfer her duties to Lang, the county clerk, who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud. Aside from saying she would abide by the constitution, Lang has declined to speak about the issue. Carew resigned in October. She is now running for office against Lang, an effort she said she undertook to prevent partisans from taking control of elections if commissioners decide to dissolve the independent election office.

Debates over national issues have left the ground fertile for takeovers in rural counties and small towns across Texas, provided local far-right activists can organize as they have in Hood County, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston.

“Local organizers can ride these national waves to power,” Rottinghaus said. “With the right spark, I think that’s a model they can replicate across the state.”

Pitman, the author of “This Day in June,” one of the children’s books targeted by Graft and tea party members in 2015, said the school board election in Hood County marks a worrisome escalation of rhetoric that previously seemed more isolated. “It just seems like there’s been a shift in the political climate,” Pitman said, adding that she never expected to see the massive wave of current book challenges.

“I think the most disturbing thing about this to me is that if you look historically at book challenges, for the most part, books were challenged because of the ideas that were in them,” Pitman said. “And that, to me, is really disturbing because it’s no longer about ideas or exchange of information or discourse, it’s about marginalizing an entire community.”

Emily Schigut, who identifies as queer, decided to leave her job as a fifth grade reading teacher in Granbury last year after Graft and Gore’s election. “You watch all these things happening around the country, and in the blink of an eye, it was happening here,” she said. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) Reviewing 130 Books

In January, administrators in the Granbury school district summoned its librarians to a meeting to review library offerings “based upon the Governor’s criteria,” according to emails obtained by a Granbury parent through the Texas Public Information Act and shared with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

District officials immediately removed from the library shelves five books unrelated to LGBTQ themes by Abbi Glines, an author known for including explicit sex scenes that push the boundaries of young adult fiction. They also pulled about 130 other titles from school libraries, pending a review by a district committee composed of teachers, librarians and parents.

“​​Let’s not misrepresent things. We’re not taking Shakespeare or Hemingway off the shelves,” Glenn said at a school board meeting last week in which he blasted opponents of the book removal effort. “And we’re not going and grabbing every socially, culturally or religiously diverse book and pulling them. That’s absurd. And the people that are saying that are gaslighters, and it’s designed to incite division.”

Glenn made no mention of the dozens of LGBTQ-themed books that had been pulled from the shelves for further review. Of the 130 books temporarily removed, about 94, or 73%, feature LGBTQ characters or themes, according to a ProPublica and Tribune analysis of the popular book review site Goodreads.

Coyl said he is concerned that political candidates are increasingly using the issue of book censorship to win public office. “People need to be very vigilant and aware of it,” he said. “It’s a slippery slope. If we allow the restriction of one thing, it’s very easy to slide into more suppression.”

Experts say waves of backlash against LGBTQ communities often follow moments of cultural transformation. Schools have long been the battleground, dating at least to the 1970s, when anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant led a national movement to save children from gay adults.

But fed by social media, the same message today is spreading farther and faster than during past waves, experts said.

Gore and Graft’s election was a major victory for campaigners who had spent years working toward electing far-right candidates to local political offices in Hood County. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Vox Jo Hsu, an assistant professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the effect of public rhetoric on racial, gender and sexual minorities, said movements to censor LGBTQ books can leave young people feeling alone.

“I can’t overstate the type of damage it does to create a culture of shame and silence around LGBTQ topics,” Hsu said. “You are teaching them, from a young age, these false narratives about who they are that they will have to unlearn and you’re depriving them of resources and communities they will need to do so.” Leaving a school district is not an option for all LGBTQ students or families, and children who are left behind when others depart will only become more isolated, Hsu said.

Last month, students in the Granbury district launched an online petition opposing the book removal effort. Within days, the petition had gathered more than 600 signatures. Students also spoke against the removal at last week’s school board meeting.

“I don’t think that little children should be shocked or disgusted by our identities,” a queer senior at Granbury High School said at the meeting, warning that removing the books would send a dangerous message. “It’s disgusting that, even in 2022, we still have to have these discussions about censorship.”

Glenn saluted the students for speaking out, but then took aim at those who questioned the removal of the books.

“During my tenure, I have witnessed radicals come into our boardroom and go onto social media platforms to distort the truth, exaggerate issues and bad-mouth our trustees,” Glenn said. “To those individuals, please know, like the little boys who cried wolf, you have lost all credibility to the majority in this community. We will not back down from you.”

In an email, Gore applauded the book removals and said the district is not taking aim at LGBTQ students or community members. “All students at GISD are loved and cared for by the amazing staff and administration,” she said. “With that, public schools are not the place for young people to express themselves sexually.”

Near the end of the discussion, Graft made a motion to amend the district’s policy on book removals, eliminating the requirement for campus-level committees that have determined whether concerns are merited.

The revised policy, which passed unanimously, will allow the district to remove books the administration and board deem “pervasively vulgar” or educationally unsuitable without going through the district’s existing process. Before the change, books had to stay on shelves until a review was completed.

“This is going to align the policy so that in the event that we do have a book that is in our library that is vulgar and overtly sexual, it can be removed without review,” said Tammy Clark, an assistant superintendent in the district.

Despite the policy change, district spokesperson Jeff Meador said a committee will review the books, and most of them “will likely be returned to the library shelves.”

Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education at nonprofit PEN America, which promotes literary culture and defends freedom of speech, said the Supreme Court has not settled the constitutionality of removing school library books without a review. Still, he said it’s “highly concerning” that Hood County school board members “appear to have changed the policy just in order to appease the state lawmakers’ list of books.”

Friedman said that while there hasn’t been a recent legal challenge related to the spate of book removals, districts could find themselves in legal jeopardy if it becomes clear that their motive was based on “hostility towards the views in those books.”

Efforts to censor material usually fail, but the process can still be divisive and counterproductive, said Whitney Strub, a history professor at Rutgers University.

“I think history shows that these movements don’t actually succeed, but they do a lot of damage and inflict a lot of destruction and harm along the way,” Strub said. “And I absolutely think that’s likely to be the case at the local level.”

Two empty frames, soon to be filled by Graft and Gore, hang in the district’s administration building alongside portraits of other members of the Granbury school board. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) Seeking Safety

The escalation of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric worries one Granbury mother of a 4-year-old, who asked that her name not be used as she fears retaliation because she is gay.

She recalled feeling reassured after county commissioners denied efforts to ban LGBTQ books from the local library in 2015 when she lived in a neighboring county. Although she didn’t have a child at the time, she believed that the books provided an opportunity to teach children that having gay parents is normal.

On election night in 2021, she was shocked when Graft, who had led the fight against the books, won. It was then that she and her wife decided to send their son, who is entering kindergarten, to another district. “It makes me worried that someone like her would tell kids that it’s not OK to be like that,” she said.

The woman can tick off the incidents of hate she has experienced since moving to the county four years ago: the stranger at the grocery store who called her a “faggot,” the senior citizen who threw his arms in the air in disgust and stormed off when he saw her kiss her fiancee goodbye.

She wanted school to be a safe space for her son, one that didn’t vilify him for having two moms.

“I wouldn’t put it past someone to physically harm me because I gave my fiancee a kiss,” she said. “Seeing stuff like the school board election definitely opens my eyes. Even though this is a small town, and I know most of the people, and I grew up next door, when it comes to sexuality nobody’s safe.”

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by Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

Flood Insurance Premiums in Louisiana Are Rising. Help Us Investigate.

2 years 2 months ago

Sweeping changes are coming to the National Flood Insurance Program, which will result in premium increases for many Louisiana policyholders starting April 1, 2022.

ProPublica and The Times-Picayune | The Advocate could use your help in understanding how these changes affect homeowners, other property owners and the real estate market in Louisiana. If you’ve explored purchasing flood insurance in Louisiana in recent months, if you plan to, or if you are in the real estate, mortgage or insurance fields, we may have some questions as our reporting continues. If you’re willing to help, please sign up here by answering a few questions below.

OUR COMMITMENT TO YOUR PRIVACY: We appreciate you sharing this information, and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering this for the purposes of our reporting, and we will not publish your name or information without your consent.

Maya Miller contributed reporting.

Email Mike Smith at msmith@theadvocate.com

by Mike Smith and Richard A. Webster, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate

Suicide Bomber Who Killed U.S. Troops and Afghans “Likely” Used Unguarded Route to Kabul Airport Gate

2 years 2 months ago

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This article was co-published with Alive in Afghanistan, a news agency launched in the days after the fall of Kabul, aimed at bringing the perspective of the most marginalized Afghans to the world.

Days before the final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, thousands of desperate Americans and Afghan allies seeking to flee the country were using unguarded routes across open fields and through narrow alleys to reach one of the only gates providing access to the Kabul airfield.

Despite intelligence warning of terrorist attacks, U.S. military commanders encouraged use of the routes. Some U.S. officials even provided maps to evacuees trying to bypass Taliban fighters stationed at a checkpoint outside the airport.

It was a decision born of necessity, senior military officials told Alive in Afghanistan and ProPublica. The U.S. had publicly committed to helping the tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked on its behalf to safety. The choice was stark. The government’s hold on Afghanistan was collapsing far sooner than intelligence agencies had expected, and the U.S. was forced to improvise a way to evacuate more than 120,000 people in a chaotic environment barely controlled by its remaining forces.

The Taliban controlled the outer checkpoints and were preventing Americans and Afghan civilians from getting to the airport entrance known as Abbey Gate, according to military officials. Commanders on the ground had to weigh the safety of American forces posted at the gate against concerns about leaving behind U.S. citizens and Afghan allies.

On Aug. 26, U.S. intelligence issued warnings of an imminent threat at the airport. That evening, a man loaded with explosives “likely” used one of the unguarded routes to gain access to Abbey Gate, according to a military investigation reviewed by the news organizations. He detonated his suicide device, killing 13 American servicemembers and an estimated more than 160 Afghan civilians.

“This was not the original way it was intended to work,” a senior military official familiar with the investigation told the news organizations, suggesting the compressed timeframe of the evacuation led to the decision to leave the routes unimpeded.

This satellite image of Abbey Gate was taken at 2:54 p.m. on Aug. 26, several hours before the bombing. The positions are approximate. (Image: Planet Labs PBC. Map: Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

Alive in Afghanistan and ProPublica recently interviewed several Kabul-based doctors who believed they saw gunshot wounds in civilians coming from Abbey Gate. In response to questions, senior military officials provided a preview of their inquiry into the attack, which found there was no evidence civilians had been shot. The officials allowed the news organizations to interview officers familiar with the investigation and view previously unreleased video and drone footage.

At a press briefing Friday, Pentagon officials said that three commanders huddled near the gate roughly 30 minutes before the bombing. The commanders discussed the deteriorating situation on the ground and the possibility of closing the gate. Brig. Gen. Lance Curtis, who led the investigation, declined to elaborate on what decisions, if any, were made.

Taken together, the new information provides the most detailed look yet at the Pentagon’s evolving story of what happened at Abbey Gate that day. Young Marines and Afghan families were exposed to extraordinary danger as a result of a hastily executed evacuation that left ground commanders with hard decisions and limited options.

Ultimately, investigators determined that the attack was “not preventable” without undermining the evacuation mission.

The investigation also provides insight into how the military made a striking reversal of its assessment of the damage done by gunfire that followed the blast. Initially, top officials told the public that Islamic State fighters opened fire on the Marines. Now, the Pentagon has concluded that there was no enemy gunfire. American and British troops fired their weapons, but they didn’t hit any of the thousands of Afghans crushed against the gate seeking refuge, officials said.

The investigation and its conclusions are likely to raise new questions about the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan as the Taliban rapidly retook the country. The suicide bombing at the gates of the airport was one of the deadliest attacks on American forces in the 20-year history of the war. In addition to those who lost their lives, 45 U.S. service members and an estimated 200 or more Afghans were wounded.

With the date of the final withdrawal approaching, tens of thousands of Americans, green card holders and other Afghans flooded toward the Kabul airport, which was surrounded by high walls with entrances at locations around the perimeter.

The crowd pressed against the gates, some attempting to jump the fences while others passed children over the walls to Marines and members of NATO forces inside the airfield. As the situation grew ever more desperate, commanders leading the evacuation decided to shut down all of the main airport entrances on Aug. 25 except Abbey Gate.

Each gate had to close due to its own unique vulnerability, the officials explained. At the northern entrance, three roads converged to provide “high-speed approaches” susceptible to a car bomb. The eastern gate sometimes required an entire squad to evacuate a single civilian because the Marines decided they could only safely bring in one person at a time.

“The reality is that Abbey Gate was the least risky of all the gates,” one official said.

Alongside dozens of U.S. Marines positioned at the gate, U.S. Army soldiers looked on from a tower inside the airport walls. British troops staffed checkpoints and watchtowers to the southwest. And, in an uneasy alliance, Taliban militants worked with allied troops, guarding the perimeter and controlling the access of civilians into the airport.

The Marines positioned a cluster of shipping containers at the end of an entry road to the gate to form what became a Taliban-controlled checkpoint. Past the checkpoint, the area around the gate had natural advantages. The long, narrow path to it was divided in the middle by a sewage ditch, which provided some measure of crowd control. Several surrounding towers offered key vantage points for American and British troops.

But the protections only held up for so long. As the numbers of people grew, more Marines were needed to form a human barrier to hold back the crowd. They were forced into a tight clump, increasing their vulnerability to attack. At the same time, they had to act as de facto immigration officers, examining documents to determine who to allow to pass through the gate into the airport. Soon, the sewage ditch was filled with desperate Afghans, holding up paperwork and pleading with the junior Marines who lined the canal wall.

A video obtained by the military showed the moment of the attack: At 5:36 p.m., a figure dressed in black took a single step out of the crowd and disappeared in a plume of smoke. A Marine in the frame was staggered by the blast wave, which traveled as far as about 50 meters, the senior military officials said.

In the moments after, investigators determined, American and British troops then fired from four positions surrounding Abbey Gate.

Two British troops fired roughly 30 warning shots into the air, the investigation found. One Marine fired four warning shots over the head of what investigators called a “suspicious individual” and said he saw him run away unharmed. Another Marine fired fewer than 30 rounds at an adult male allegedly holding an AK-47, who was positioned on a rooftop to the east.

“What they don’t see is a hostile act,” said a senior official familiar with the investigation. “They don’t see him firing.” Investigators were unable to determine who the man was or what happened to him. The investigation said it was unlikely he shot at Marines, and that if he did, he was most likely a “rogue Taliban member.”

After the gunfire ceased, Marines began to rush casualties — injured and dying Marines and civilians — into the airport for treatment. In the hurried operations that followed, military doctors assessed that many of the injured and dead had been shot. The doctors treated U.S. service members and dozens of Afghan civilians.

After consulting military medical examiners, the investigators determined the doctors were mistaken in their assessment of what they thought were gunshot wounds. None of the doctors recovered bullets from any patients. What the doctors thought were bullet holes were actually caused by ball bearings exploding from the suicide bomber’s device, the investigation concluded. Blast experts interviewed by ProPublica and Alive in Afghanistan said that these metal balls can produce wounds that look extremely similar to those caused by bullets.

ProPublica and Alive in Afghanistan spoke to six doctors from three different Kabul hospitals about their experience treating civilians in the aftermath of the attack. The doctors remained convinced that they saw wounds from bullets, not only ball bearings. All said they had the experience necessary to make the distinction, having responded to numerous terrorist attacks and firefights in their medical careers.

Their accounts suggest a potential gap in the Pentagon’s inquiry. The investigation concluded there was no evidence that civilians had been shot by anyone. But the investigators never spoke to any of the local, Kabul-based physicians who treated the majority of civilians.

Doctors with Emergency Surgical Centre, a well-regarded, Italian-run facility in Kabul that specializes in the treatment of war victims, said they received 10 people with fatal injuries from gunfire.

Eight were shot in the head or neck, they said. The others were shot in the chest. The doctors said they also treated patients with gunshot wounds.

“It was really a disaster situation,” said Dr. Mir Abdul Azim, a senior surgeon on duty that night who has worked at Emergency for 15 years. Azim did not find any bullets in his patients or the dead. But he said he could tell that the wounds were caused by bullets and not ball bearings from the shape and size of the entry and exit wounds, along with other factors such as the tissue damage he saw.

Dr. Hares Aref, a senior surgeon at Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, one of Kabul’s largest public hospitals, said he personally operated on three patients with bullet wounds in their legs. “We had patients with bullet injury in this attack, it’s clear,” he said. Aref said that the distinction between ball bearing and bullet wounds is clear to him after witnessing multiple similar mass casualty events in Kabul. “My proof is my experience.”

Dr. Rafi Amiri, a surgeon in charge of the same hospital’s emergency department that night, described a visual inspection of dozens of dead Afghans at the hospital morgue. For many of them, he wrapped their heads in cloth, following an Afghan tradition of preparing bodies for burial. A number of them had what appeared to be gunshot wounds. “Their bodies were intact,” he said. “They only had a bullet wound to the head or the chest.”

Dr. Rafi Amiri in the emergency room at Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, where he treated patients after the Kabul airport bombing in August. (Oriane Zerah for ProPublica)

In the interview, Amiri repeatedly cautioned that he did not conduct a forensic examination and said he was not interested at the time in determining a cause of death.

Pentagon officials dismissed doctors’ external assessments of wounds as scientifically inconclusive. Only an autopsy “could produce definitive results,” said Capt. Bill Urban, a spokesperson for U.S. Central Command.

Urban also said the ball bearings used in the bombing were almost the same size as bullets used by American troops, adding to the potential for confusion.

Dr. David King, a trauma and combat surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Trauma Center, treated victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, in which terrorists used improvised explosive devices loaded with ball bearings and nails. In an interview, he told Alive in Afghanistan and ProPublica that it was very difficult to distinguish wounds from gunshots versus ball bearings.

“As a generalization, I would say that with a high degree of confidence, looking at the hole alone, you largely, generally cannot tell the difference,” he said.

Michael Cardash, a former deputy head of the Israeli National Police Bomb Disposal Division, has examined bomb attacks for more than 30 years. In an interview, he said that some experienced war zone doctors can distinguish such wounds on sight.

“If he’s a doctor in Kabul, he has probably seen gunshot wounds before,” he said. “I would say, if he is an experienced doctor, he probably knows what he is talking about.”

The military has collected additional evidence that it says disproves allegations of a mass shooting.

The Pentagon investigators conducted interviews with 139 American and British personnel about the incident, according to Urban. “Not a single individual described wanton or reckless shooting post attack,” he said.

While there were “a small number of inconsistencies in the sworn testimony of some of the witnesses interviewed,” Urban said, investigators attributed them to the inexperience of some Marines and the effects of the blast, which left nearby troops disoriented or concussed.

Military officials showed drone footage of the blast site to ProPublica and Alive in Afghanistan reporters. Asked why there was no overhead video of the gate at the time of the blast, the officials said it was because drones were monitoring the airstrip and other “classified threats.” They declined to elaborate. The footage starts three minutes later. The camera bounces between Abbey Gate and other locations around the airport. When it focuses on the gate, no gunfire is clearly visible.

“While this video is not definitive proof that no one was shot during periods of time when the scene was not observed by overhead cameras, they did conclusively demonstrate that the scene of the explosion was not the site of a mass shooting,” Urban said. “Such an incident would have caused panicked fleeing that continued long after the shooting ended and the likes of which were never observed by any video.”

The investigators’ findings are substantially different from the Pentagon’s initial version of events. The day of the bombing, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the leader of Central Command, said that Islamic State gunmen fired at Marines and the crowd. Three weeks later, Maj. Ben Sutphen, operations officer for the battalion at the gate, appeared on CBS News with his own firsthand account.

“He’s blown off his feet,” Sutphen said of a corporal under his command who was knocked over by the blast. “Shot through the shoulder, immediately recovers his weapon and puts the opposing gunman down.”

Urban said Sutphen’s account was “based upon the events as they were shared with him as opposed to his recollection of the events” and that he later told investigators “he may not have been remembering the event correctly.” Urban also said that people close to a bombing can suffer concussions that impair their recall, and thus can “unconsciously” use secondhand information “to fill in the gaps of their memory.”

Update, Feb. 4, 2022: This story has been updated to include information released in a Pentagon press briefing on Friday.

Alex Mierjeski and Doris Burke of ProPublica contributed research.

by Brian J. Conley, Mohammad J. Alizada, Samira Nuhzat, Abdul Ahad Poya and Mirzahussain Sadid, Alive in Afghanistan, Joshua Kaplan and Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica, and Lynzy Billing for ProPublica

Inside ProPublica’s Article Layout Framework

2 years 2 months ago

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Editorial design is a many-splendored thing. Cliché as it may be to say a picture is worth a thousand words, there’s no denying that even the most skillful and vivid deployment of the written word can benefit from a thoughtful visual presentation. Photography, illustration and video can humanize a story’s characters. Charts, graphs and other data visualizations clarify complicated concepts. Typography and color set an emotional tone. And bringing cohesive form to it all is perhaps the most invisible and least understood aspect of editorial design: layout.

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A good layout works its magic by modulating visual rhythm and contrast to determine what elements of the article are emphasized and how much. If a cast of characters is introduced one by one, a small inset portrait of each at the start of every paragraph can reinforce the pace of the writing. If the story’s focus shifts to a new location, a large establishing photo of that landscape can signal a change in the story’s focus. Choosing instead to make that image small, off-center and surrounded by generous white space offers a different kind of contrast and tells a different story.

The size and position of images and text can be just as communicative as their content, and the possibilities are virtually limitless.

Watch video ➜

When we overhauled ProPublica’s article design system last year, sophisticated layout capabilities like these were a top priority. Building our article layout framework was a balancing act of providing a range of options that’s wide but not overwhelming.

How It Works

Our articles are built on an underlying grid structure, which varies depending on the size of the reader’s device or browser window. On most mobile phones, the layout is based on a narrow four-column grid. On a tablet, it might be six or eight columns. And in a large desktop browser window, there’s enough room for 14 columns, the largest version of the grid.

Our layout’s grid structure is responsive and varies by screen size.

The main article text occupies the eight-column span in the middle of the 14-column grid, which keeps lines from getting too long for comfortable reading. On smaller screens, the text fills six columns of the eight-column version of the grid, four columns of the six-column version and all four columns of the smallest version.

All other layout elements, such as photos and illustrations, use combinations of several attributes to specify how they behave on the grid. Let’s take a look at them.

Size and Position

With the 14-column version of the grid as a basis, a layout element can be one of 15 sizes. Size 1 is one column wide, Size 2 spans two columns and so on, all the way up to Size 14. The 15th and largest size expands into the margins to take up the full width of the browser. On smaller screens, each size automatically scales down in rough proportion to the size of the grid; for example, Size 5 spans five columns of the 14-column grid, four columns of the eight-column grid and three columns of the six- and four-column grids.

From top to bottom: Size 3, Size 5 and Size 8.

Layout elements are anchored to the inside of the main article text area by default. They can be positioned to align to its center or its left or right edges. If they have a positional basis of left or right, they can be pushed into the text area or pulled into the outer columns, up to three columns in either direction. As with the sizing, the spacing automatically scales down in rough proportion to the size of the grid on smaller screens.

An image indented one column from the left. Since the indent scales proportionally on smaller screens, it disappears on the smallest screen. Text Wrap

Layout elements have the option to completely interrupt the article text or have the text wrap around them. In situations where there isn’t enough space for the text to wrap comfortably, the layout automatically ignores the text-wrap preference.

Layout elements can interrupt the article text or have it wrap around them. The mobile screen ignores the text-wrap preference in this case, because our article layout framework knows there isn’t enough space for the text to wrap comfortably. Responsiveness

The automatic proportionate scaling of elements across different screen sizes can be very handy, but it can also be a liability. An image that looks great at a small size on a large screen might become tiny and illegible when scaled down on a small screen. To solve this, we included the option to force an element to take up the full width of the text area on smaller screens, regardless of its size on larger screens.

This small image works well on large screens but gets too small when it scales down, so we have the option to force it to be full width and/or give it an alternate crop on smaller screens.

Also included is the option to use two different versions of an image for small screens and large screens. This might be used for two different crops of the same photograph (a wide crop for large and a close crop for small) or for two different orientations of a bar chart (horizontal/large and vertical/small).

Diptychs, Triptychs and More

A set of any number of elements can be placed side by side on the grid, which is useful for making something like a row of portraits. The same responsive options mentioned above can change the row of elements into a stack on smaller screens to keep them from becoming prohibitively small.

A diptych on large screens optionally becomes a stack on smaller screens. To Code or Not to Code

We’ve built all of these layout options into our content management system so they don’t require our producers to have any coding skills to use them. But for code-savvy power users who want to extend the system, it’s built with Column Setter, the open-source tool we developed for grid-based editorial design. We recently updated it with a variety of new features.

Watch video ➜

The many possible ways of combining our layout framework’s streamlined set of variables — size, position, responsiveness and text wrap — make it a simple but powerful system. Offering a total of 616 unique ways to present a layout element, its visual vocabulary is expansive! Used in conjunction with photography, illustration, video, data visualization and our systems for typography and color, the framework gives our editorial teams tremendous flexibility to be visually expressive in whatever way best suits the story they’re telling.

Photos in the layout examples above by Celeste Sloman, for ProPublica, and originally appeared in “The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers.”

by Rob Weychert

How the Sugar Industry Makes Political Friends and Influences Elections

2 years 2 months ago

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Palm Beach Post. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Last year, the Florida Legislature was in the midst of an extraordinary push to protect the state’s farming industry from lawsuits over air pollution.

Supporters argued that the legislation was critical to protecting Florida’s agricultural businesses from “frivolous lawsuits.” But some lawmakers were skeptical, noting that residents of the state’s heartland who were bringing suit against sugar companies would feel their case anything but frivolous. At issue was the practice of cane burning, a harvesting method in which the sugar industry burns crops to rid the plants of their outer leaves. Florida produces more than half of America’s cane sugar and relies heavily on the technique, but residents in the largely Black and Hispanic communities nearby claim the resulting smoke and ash harms their health.

So, on a Wednesday morning in March, lawmakers heard testimony on the new bill. In a committee room in Tallahassee, Joaquin Almazan stepped to the microphone as a newly elected city commissioner in Belle Glade, the largest city in the sugar-rich Glades region, where the smoke drops “black snow” on residents throughout every burning season.

Almazan had won his seat just one week before the hearing. His victory was also a victory for the sugar industry, a political powerhouse that employs more than 12,000 workers in the area during harvest season. His rival, Steve Messam, opposed cane burning and sought to end the practice.

In a small town of 8,000 voters where political campaigns are generally sleepy, the contest emerged as the marquee race in an election for three seats on the city commission, contributing to record turnout and fueling big spending. In fact, each side raised more than $16,000, making the March election the most expensive in at least 15 years, according to an analysis of campaign finance records by The Palm Beach Post and ProPublica, which examined documents going back to 2006. That’s five times the amount of money typically raised by city commissioner candidates, after adjusting for inflation. While Messam relied on mostly small donations from more than 200 donors, Almazan tapped a much smaller pool of 40 contributors, with much of his campaign money coming from sugar and farming interests.

Those industry donors were among more than two dozen entities that gave identical amounts to candidates running for the two other city commission seats. Like Almazan, the two favored contenders in those races supported the sugar industry’s methods, saying that ending cane burning would lead to devastating job losses.

At the same time, political action committees aligned with the industry spent thousands of additional dollars to influence the election, with one group promoting business-friendly candidates and another attacking Messam.

The local campaign, which was underway while major legislation was pending before the state Legislature, provides a window onto how the industry cultivates political allies in the Glades who, in turn, help protect its interests in Tallahassee.

“A voice that is for or against the ag industry is 10 times more powerful coming from the Glades area than someone who is from outside the local area,” said Rick Asnani, a West Palm Beach-based political consultant, explaining the industry’s investment in local elections. “It is absolutely appropriate and logical that an industry is going to protect their industry, their reputation and their backyard.”

And indeed, once elected, Almazan emphasized his lifelong residence in the Glades when he asked lawmakers to support the bill.

“It’s sad, as we’ve seen too many times previously: Wealthy, out-of-town, so-called environment special interest groups are claiming to know what’s best for our community,” he told lawmakers. “In fact, they repeatedly argue against our city, our best interests, and repeatedly advocate for other solutions that will only bring us economic destruction, unemployment and food insecurity, and shutter local businesses.”

His testimony and that of other elected officials and residents in the Glades in support of the legislation would lead several Democrats to withdraw their objections, and the proposal sailed through the Legislature.

In response to questions for this story, Almazan said his run for office — and his testimony — were a natural extension of his advocacy as a member of the International Association of Machinists, a union representing sugar workers. “The union encourages its members to rise to challenges,” he said in a statement, “and I felt that by running for the City Commission I could do that.”

Asked about the donations from the agricultural industry, he said they’d been given because “I support similar interest, Community, workers and jobs.”

Now, nine months later, some Democratic lawmakers want to roll back last year’s key changes, which were aimed at barring so-called nuisance lawsuits against farmers. Under the state’s Right to Farm law, certain farming activities are protected from legal action, and the legislation added “particle emissions” to the list. The term is interchangeable with particulate matter, a known byproduct of cane burning and a type of pollution tied to heart and lung disease. Last month, state Rep. Anna Eskamani and state Sen. Gary Farmer introduced legislation to strike that language, hoping to bolster residents’ ability to sue.

It’s a reflection of the views of some Glades residents and environmental groups, who have battled the sugar industry for years over burning crops. They argue that the resulting smoke and ash harms their health — a claim that the sugar companies deny. Last year, The Post and ProPublica deployed their own air monitors to produce a first-of-its-kind investigation into cane burning. The readings showed repeated spikes in pollution on days when the state had authorized cane burning and smoke was projected to blow toward the sensors. These short-term spikes often reached four times the average pollution levels in the area. Experts said the results highlighted a need for more scrutiny from government agencies, which have access to better equipment and data.

The news organizations also found that in 2016, the state health department’s own researchers recommended deeper study of the potential health effects of cane burning on Glades residents, after finding that the burns release toxic air pollutants. Six years later, the department has yet to produce such a study and has not responded to questions about why.

In the Glades, the opposition to cane burning crystallized in 2015 into a “Stop the Burn” campaign, which was backed by the Sierra Club. The campaign involved rallies to press the industry to use an alternative method of cane harvesting that doesn’t involve fire. But the group’s events rarely amounted to more than a ripple in the state’s political landscape, where sugar companies are among the largest donors.

The “Stop the Burn” campaign’s claims drew attention when Messam, one of the group’s leaders, filed to run for an open seat on the Belle Glade city commission. He was born in the nearby town of Pahokee and grew up in the region, the son of Jamaican immigrants. His father worked in the sugar fields, cutting down cane by hand for 75 cents a row, he said.

When Messam left to attend Central Michigan University on a football scholarship, he said his teachers thought he had asthma because his breathing sounded difficult. His symptoms abated over time in Michigan. But when he returned home on Christmas break, during cane-burning season, “my allergies went haywire,” he later told supporters in a Facebook Live video on his campaign page. “At the time, I didn’t make the connection.”

In 2015, Messam and his family moved to Belle Glade from Greenacres, a city closer to the more populous part of Palm Beach County, east of the cane fields. He was working nearby as a senior vice president of his brother’s construction company, Messam Construction, and serving as a pastor at ​​First Church of God South Bay. Before long, his wife, LoMiekia, who also grew up in the region but had spent much of the prior decade living outside Florida, started to get respiratory tract infections and their young son, Noah, developed allergies and needed a nebulizer to help him breathe. Doctors advised them to move, LoMiekia said in the video.

Messam said he reached out to the Sierra Club to learn more about what activists call “green harvesting,” in which sugar cane is harvested without burning. Harvesters cut the cane with the leaves still attached and separate them from the sugar-rich stalks. Some of the world’s leading sugar-producing nations, including Brazil, India and Thailand, have embraced this method as they move to end or sharply limit cane burning. Florida’s sugar companies, however, maintain that burning is safe and heavily regulated, and that it cannot be changed without significant economic impact.

In running for city commissioner, Messam saw a different future for Belle Glade. Switching to green harvesting in Florida would “be a win-win for the environment and the economy,” Messam said. While he understood that local officials have little power to regulate farming — those decisions are made at the state level — he knew that local voices carry weight in Tallahassee.

Relying on mostly small contributions, Messam raised a total of more than $16,000 from more than 200 donors. The Sierra Club’s political action committee in Florida made a $500 donation, and some of the group’s local supporters and a plaintiff in the sugar cane burning lawsuit also pitched in. Educators made up much of the campaign haul. His brother’s company contributed $1,000, the maximum under state law.

By contrast, his opponent in the race, Almazan, opposed the “Stop the Burn” effort and tapped his connections in labor circles and the agricultural sector.

In addition to being a member of the machinists union, he’s also the community action director of the Sugar Industry Labor Management Committee, a political organization that advocates for the union and local sugar companies, according to the union website. “Of course jobs in the sugar industry are important to me,” he said in an email to The Post, highlighting his union membership. “My dad retired from the sugar industry after 35 years and was proud to have raised his family here. I’m proud to have spent more than 30 years in the industry. My son is also building his career here.”

The sugar and agriculture industries also backed two other city commissioner candidates running for separate seats: Bishop Andrew “Kenny” Berry of Grace Fellowship Worship Center and incumbent Vice Mayor Mary Ross Wilkerson, who was first elected in 1998.

In 2018, candidates for city commission had raised about $3,200 each on average. The three industry-backed candidates in the 2021 race, however, each raised more than $15,000. The vast majority of each campaign’s funds — $13,100 — came from the same 28 individuals, committees and businesses, according to a Post/ProPublica analysis. Agriculture interests represented the single largest pool of money, making up about 40% of these contributions. Among them were the Sugar Cane Growers Co-Op; the Palm Beach Farm PAC, run by farmer and state Rep. Rick Roth, a co-introducer of last year’s legislation; and Hundley Farms, a grower in the Glades that produces sugar cane.

Some locals, including an incumbent facing an industry-backed challenger, took note of the heightened political activity in Belle Glade.

“I’ve never seen the sugar industry involved in any of the political affairs, when it came to campaigns and elections, like this time around here. Period,” said then-City Commissioner Johnny Burroughs Jr., speaking to voters in a Facebook Live video the night before the election. His campaign was struggling as industry allies supported his rival.

Asked about the industry donations, Almazan said in a statement, “I’m very thankful for the endorsements I received from major unions including the Palm-Beach Treasure Coast AFL-CIO and the Firefighters as well as support from family, friends, neighbors, local businesses and farmers who together are the backbone of our community.”

Berry and Wilkerson, the other two candidates who received significant contributions from sugar and agriculture groups, did not respond to a request for comment on their campaign donations.

According to campaign finance records, neither U.S. Sugar nor Florida Crystals, the state’s largest sugar producers, played a direct role in the election. But their allies did.

As the campaign progressed, Glades Together, a local political action committee, distributed voter guides and fliers promoting Almazan, along with the two other industry-backed candidates. The literature did not mention cane burning, instead emphasizing the local economy. “Our jobs and our future,” one flier read. “Do your part to protect ag jobs.”

The organization was formed by Sherrie Dulany, a former Belle Glade City Commissioner and school teacher. “When it became clear that outside organizations such as the Sierra Club were getting involved in our local election, we organized an effort to promote unity and our local economy,” Dulany told The Post and ProPublica in an email.

The sole source of the group’s funding during the election was Liberate Florida, a statewide political action committee financed largely by other PACs, including Florida Prosperity Fund. Among the latter group’s top donors is U.S. Sugar, which gave $75,000 in February, just as the Belle Glade election was heating up.

Meanwhile, a group called Urban Action Fund launched mailers targeting Messam. Like Glades Together, the group received funding from a political action committee with ties to Florida Prosperity Fund. The mail pieces didn’t mention sugar or cane burning but used black-and-white photos of Messam at “Stop the Burn” events.

“Steve Messam is part of the Sierra Club!” said one mailer. “We don’t need Steve Messam and outsiders who want to see our jobs and us go!”

“The Sierra Club’s job killing plan will hurt Glades families,” another mailer warned, leaving unsaid what the plan was or how it would impact the local economy. “Unemployment will make crime worse and hurt social services.”

John T. Fox, who chaired Urban Action Fund until it closed on Oct. 12, did not respond to an inquiry from The Post and ProPublica. The news organizations also sought comment from Florida Prosperity Fund’s chair, Brewster Bevis, who also serves as the president and CEO of Associated Industries of Florida, a group representing business interests in the capital. A spokesperson said the organization “does not discuss political activity.”

The attacks grated on Messam. And on March 7, two nights before the election, he logged on to Facebook Live to address them. For an hour, he went point by point, rebutting what he called a “smear campaign.” More than 1,000 people watched.

Messam argued that green harvesting would create jobs and a new industry to convert sugar cane waste into new products. Sugar companies in the Glades do use leftover sugar cane fiber to make biodegradable paper plates and take-out containers, though industry allies argue there is no large-scale commercial use for the leaf material, the part of the plant that is burned. Producers in Brazil, however, have found ways to use this material as a source of renewable energy.

On election day, Almazan won, taking 60% of the vote. When asked about their role in the election, both U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals pointed to their efforts to encourage their employees to vote.

U.S. Sugar did not respond to questions about its donation to Florida Prosperity Fund, but company executive Judy Clayton Sanchez did offer a general statement on the election. “Glades residents elected three qualified candidates who have a track record of leadership in our community,” she said. “Elected candidates were full-time local residents with our communities’ best interest at heart and a history of protecting our rural way of life — not outsiders being influenced, directed and/or paid by out-of-town activists’ groups with anti-farming agendas.”

“While disappointing, it is not surprising that The Palm Beach Post would publish a story that challenges the validity of a fair and democratic election,” Florida Crystals said in a statement about this story. “The Palm Beach Post is not only attempting to undermine a free, fair and accessible election but also to harm the reputations of three highly regarded Glades leaders, the consequence of which will be a chilling effect on future leaders who will rethink entering public service.”

In the weeks after the election, agricultural and environmental groups pressed their cases in Tallahassee.

But, as the bill to protect farmers from lawsuits moved forward, former Pahokee Mayor Colin Walkes, who is on the leadership team of the Sierra Club’s “Stop The Burn” campaign, pushed back on assertions like Almazan’s — that outsiders were getting involved. He told lawmakers that locals were driving the anti-burn efforts.

“I want to dispel the myth that we, the locals who are opposed to the bill, are opposed to our industry,” Walkes said during a March 30 hearing. “We want to make sure that our industry thrives, but we want to ensure that we are taking care of the people that help the industry to thrive.”

On April 15, as lawmakers gave the legislation its last committee hearing, Almazan and his fellow elected officials from the Glades visited the state Capitol again. They were bused in by a group tied to the Belle Glade Chamber of Commerce. Belle Glade Mayor Steve Wilson led the charge.

Not passing the Right to Farm Act changes, Wilson claimed, would decimate the Glades.

Farming and the sugar industry are “key to the Glades community,” he said. “It’s our No. 1 economic engine. And if you stop that, trust me, you stop the community, a striving community.”

Wilson continued: “Do you think the people in the Glades are that naive, they will put themselves, their family members, their children at risk for the sake of industry or politicians?”

Almazan agreed.

“I’ve lived all around our sugar fields, and my son’s out there,” he told lawmakers. “I wouldn’t raise my kids to be in a bad environment if I thought it was unhealthy. I would have been moved out of there a long time ago.”

Rep. Ramon Alexander, a Democrat from Tallahassee, had already voted against the bill in an earlier committee meeting, but changed his second vote to a “yes.” He noted that the locals supported the changes.

“On one end, we’re talking about the environment, which is important. On the other hand, we’re talking about grits, eggs, bacon and collard greens,” Alexander said. “My point is they are in that community, and this is their way. If you don’t work, you don’t eat, and I’m not going to take grits, eggs, bacon and collard greens off of somebody else’s table.”

Two of his Democratic colleagues also withdrew their objections after listening to the testimony.

“I came in this morning with a ‘no’ vote,” said Rep. Dianne Hart, a Democrat from Tampa, who noted the opposition from environmentalists. “However, I cannot in good conscience tell you what’s best for your community.” She later told the news organizations that she felt it was important to defer to the opinions of people like Almazan who live in the community.

At the hearing, Rep. Mike Gottlieb, a Democrat from Davie, agreed.

“I’ve been sitting here on my phone looking at environmental studies and particulate matter and so on and so forth,” he said, “but when you hear the testimony of the people who are living there and working there for 40 years … they’re not telling us about horrible environmental hazards that are causing death or premature death or breathing issues.”

He then addressed the bill’s sponsor: “I was a ‘no’ as I walked in here today, but hearing you and hearing the people who testified on behalf of your bill, I’m up today.”

A week later, the bill went to a vote in the House, which joined the Senate in passing the measure. The overall tally: 147-8.

by Hannah Morse, The Palm Beach Post

Reno Seeks to Purchase Motels as Affordable Housing Instead of Letting Developers Demolish Them

2 years 2 months ago

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For more than five years, the mayor of Reno, Nevada, has supported the demolition of dozens of dilapidated motels that provided shelter for thousands of residents squeezed by the city’s housing crisis, rather than rehabilitate the buildings to provide affordable housing. Now she’s changing course.

Mayor Hillary Schieve is proposing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire and rehabilitate motels in downtown through the Reno Housing Authority. In fact, the agency has already moved quietly to buy two shuttered buildings. Last week, the agency submitted an offer to buy the Bonanza Inn, a closed 58-unit motel with a history of code violations that is now part of an estate sale. It also submitted a letter of intent to make an offer on a much larger property — the 19-story former Sundowner casino-hotel.

Details of the offers — the prices, contingencies and financing — are not public. The RHA’s board of commissioners discussed the offers last month in a series of closed-door meetings allowed under an exemption in the state’s open meeting law. An RHA spokesperson said the agency has enough funds to purchase the Bonanza Inn but would need to secure financing for the Sundowner purchase. An early estimate by the RHA indicated it would cost $22 million to buy both properties and up to $50 million to rehab the buildings.

The purchases would be the beginning of a broader effort to increase affordable housing in the region, Schieve said. She supports using part of the city’s share of federal stimulus money from the American Rescue Plan Act and would like to see the state, the county and the neighboring city of Sparks chip in money, as they do for other regional projects such as Reno’s homeless shelter. Schieve also wants to explore whether the housing authority can use its existing housing stock as collateral for bonds to help finance more affordable housing. She’d like to borrow at least $200 million. She didn’t provide details on her plans for the additional funding.

“We have a real opportunity when it comes to workforce and affordable housing,” Schieve said.

The city’s about-face follows a ProPublica investigation that found Reno did little to deter the demolition of similar motels that housed some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. Nor did the city provide any incentives for landowners to replace that housing. One developer, casino-owner Jeff Jacobs, has been responsible for most of the motel demolitions, razing nearly 600 housing units since 2017. Schieve and other council members posed for photos during some of those demolitions, celebrating the elimination of what they said were blighted properties to make way for a proposed entertainment district.

After widespread criticism of the demolitions, Jacobs recently announced he would be willing to donate up to $15 million in land for an affordable housing and public parking project. The donation would be contingent on the housing authority financing the project and the city acquiring additional land, he said.

Jacobs has been assembling more than 100 parcels in downtown Reno for what he describes as a $1.8 billion entertainment district that would include hotels, restaurants and an amphitheater. He said the motels he demolished were slums that couldn’t be remodeled and said he provided relocation assistance to most of the people who lived in them.

The property sought by the Reno Housing Authority sits within Jacobs’ proposed district, directly across from his signature casino, the Sands Regency. In fact, the agency’s letter of intent on the Sundowner includes a vacant parcel on a block primarily owned by Jacobs.

The Sundowner has been vacant since 2003. The Bonanza Inn, however, was only recently listed for sale following the death of its owner. Her son told the Reno Gazette Journal that the estate was forced to sell the motel, which had been vacant for more than a year, following aggressive code enforcement efforts by the city. His family couldn’t afford to make the required repairs, he told the newspaper. The property had been cited multiple times for code violations since 2012, according to public records.

In an interview with ProPublica, Schieve reiterated that she doesn’t think “slumlords should be landlords,” but also said she doesn’t favor wholesale demolition of the hotels.

“If you can rehab something, then that’s great, obviously, and if it makes sense to,” Schieve said. “I honestly believe in saving everything you can.”

She added, “I’m not like, ‘Let’s demolish everything.’ That’s not who I am.” Rather, she said, she doesn’t believe people should be forced to live in terrible conditions.

This is the city’s first attempt, however, at preserving such buildings. In addition to supporting Jacobs’ razing of mostly squalid motels, the city used its blight fund in 2016 to finance the demolition of two vacant motels despite pleas from the community to preserve them as housing.

Schieve said the city hasn’t had the financial resources to buy and rehab motels for housing. Federal stimulus money has now made it possible to pursue such acquisitions, she said.

“It’s tough to build it. It’s expensive,” she said. “With the ARPA funds, it really gives us a foot in the door.”

by Anjeanette Damon

A Police Car Hit a Kid on Halloween 2019. The NYPD Is Quashing a Move to Punish the Officer.

2 years 2 months ago

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It was a little more than two years ago that I really started learning about the reality of police oversight in America.

On Halloween night in 2019, my wife and our then-6-year-old daughter were walking home from trick-or-treating in our Brooklyn neighborhood when they saw a New York Police Department car go the wrong way down a street and smack into a teenager, who fell and then ran away.

When I contacted the NYPD afterward, they told me that what my family saw hadn’t happened. A police car hadn’t hit a teenager. The teenager had hit the car. Or, as an NYPD statement put it, he “ran across the hood of a stationary police car.”

I ended up diving into the case and wrote about it the next summer during the global racial justice protests spawned by George Floyd’s murder.

The police had been looking for a group of Black, male teenagers who reportedly had stolen a cellphone. After the teenager who’d been hit by the car ran away, my wife, Sara, watched as officers turned their attention to other Black boys.

The police lined the boys up against the wall of our local movie theater, then arrested three of them. The boys insisted they had just been trick-or-treating. The youngest was 12. He was crying, asking repeatedly, “What did I do?”

I didn’t hear anything more about the case for a long while. Then, a few weeks ago, the city agency charged with investigating civilians’ complaints of police abuse let me know it had finally finished its investigation.

The Civilian Complaint Review Board found that, contrary to the NYPD’s assertions, an officer did hit a kid with his car. It also found that officers, including the precinct commander, had arrested the boys without justification. An officer had even drawn his gun and pointed it at one of the boys.

One of the officers, the report noted, was wearing a sweatshirt with a logo of the Punisher, a Marvel character who kills lawbreakers, which is popular with cops and white nationalists. The sweatshirt also had a blue line over the American flag and the acronym DILLIGAF. (“Do I Look Like I Give a Fuck.”) The officer told investigators he hadn’t known the meaning of the logo or the acronym on his sweatshirt.

The police response that night started when some teenagers told officers they had been robbed at the local park. But the officers only had what investigators later described as “varying and inconsistent descriptions” of who they were looking for.

The officers stopped a group of boys a few blocks away. There was little about them that matched the description of the assailants other than that they were Black, young and walking together. Indeed, the CCRB’s report noted, one of the officers “stated that he was not certain whether they were involved.”

Some of the boys ran, including the one who was hit by the police car. (They told investigators that they ran because they were scared.)

The boys who were arrested — a 15-year-old, a 14-year-old and the 12-year-old — said that the officers never offered any explanation for why they were stopped. They were released without charges, after being held for hours. Their parents said they weren’t given any documentation on the arrests. The mother of one of the boys worked for the NYPD as a school safety officer, but even she couldn’t get any record of what happened.

It was as if the case was being pushed into a fog.

The CCRB began investigating after receiving a witness complaint. But the agency’s investigations are dependent on the NYPD cooperating. And as often happens, the NYPD has been slow to do so.

Take body-worn cameras, which are often critical in abuse investigations. The CCRB noted it faced “extremely substantial delays” in getting the Halloween night footage from the NYPD. While some cities have given civilian investigators direct access to body cam footage, the NYPD has rejected calls to do the same.

The agency also did not get to interview officers until more than a year after the incident. By the time officers did finally submit to interviews, they had serious trouble with their recollections. When the officer who drove the car was asked whether he had hit a kid, he “stated that he could not remember.”

In December, the CCRB told me it had just filed disciplinary charges against the officers: for wrongful arrests, for pulling a gun without justification, and for, as the bureaucratic lingo puts it, “Force, Vehicle.”

The next step would typically be disciplinary hearings, in which the CCRB acts as the prosecutor and the proceedings are overseen by an NYPD judge, who answers ultimately to the police commissioner. While the penalties after guilty verdicts are often wrist-slappy, like lost vacation days, it seemed like this case could be a rare, if modest, victory for police accountability.

Then, about a week after I heard about the outcome of the investigation, I learned of another twist.

The NYPD had informed the CCRB that it was invoking its authority to unilaterally end the cases against most of the officers the civilian agency had charged with misconduct. No disciplinary charges would be brought against them.

Instead of letting the CCRB’s disciplinary process play out, the NYPD said it would handle the cases internally. The NYPD wrote, as it has many times before, that allowing the CCRB case to continue “would be detrimental to the Police Department’s disciplinary process.”

When it came to the officer who had hit the kid with his car, the NYPD said it was an “alleged traffic accident” and that therefore the CCRB had no authority to investigate in the first place.

The NYPD did decide that the disciplinary charges against one officer could continue — for using offensive language and telling one of the teens to stop filming on his phone.

It was all remarkable, but also par for the course.

Like many police departments around the country, the NYPD has complete discretion to overrule the civilian agency that is supposed to help oversee it.

In New York City, the police commissioner can and often does choose to ignore the results of CCRB-brought disciplinary trials. The commissioner can ignore guilty pleas and can even decide there should be no trial at all, as appears to be happening in this case. Last year, the police commissioner followed through on the CCRB’s discipline recommendations in serious cases just 27% of the time.

I sent the NYPD a series of questions, asking both about its power to ignore the CCRB and about how that power has been wielded in this case. I got a one-sentence response: “The disciplinary process is ongoing.”

We do know something about what’s happened to the officers, and about their records. Thanks to legislation that New York state passed in the summer of 2020, police records are no longer secret. The CCRB’s report names the officers involved.

Officer Christopher Brower drove into the boy, according to the report. Officer Christopher Digioia wore the Punisher sweatshirt and is the one officer still facing a disciplinary trial, for allegedly swearing at the teens. A search of their respective CCRB files shows they were also disciplined for another case together. Investigators found that, in April 2019, about six months before the Halloween incident, the two had refused to provide their names or badge numbers to a civilian. The NYPD penalized them for that with “instructions.”

The precinct commander who the CCRB concluded oversaw the wrongful arrests is Inspector Megan O’Malley. She told investigators she believed the arrests were justified because the boys ran and one had dropped a kitchen knife. O’Malley has since been promoted and now heads a precinct in midtown Manhattan.

The officer who, the report said, first ordered the boys to be stopped and then pointed a gun at one of them is Lt. John Dasaro. He told investigators he had been worried that the boy was armed. Dasaro was moved to work at the internal affairs unit that investigates use of force against civilians.

None of the officers responded to my requests for comment.

I recently shared all the developments with one of the boys from that night. He was in ninth grade when officers ordered him up against the wall. His mom and 9-year-old sister watched from across the street, where they had been trick-or-treating.

“It’s just all getting blown over,” he said, sounding deflated. “So, it’s kind of like, what’s the point of doing all this?”

But the Halloween case isn’t fully over yet.

After the NYPD said it would be overriding the CCRB cases, the agency formally objected. The NYPD has yet to give its response.

Technically, the CCRB can move ahead if the NYPD doesn’t respond. But the reality of the current system is that any discipline or trial requires the police department to be on board.

The NYPD has a new commissioner hired by New York’s new mayor, Eric Adams, a former police officer who has often talked about his experience being beaten by officers as a teenager. Like many mayors and politicians around the country, Adams has taken something of a middle ground on policing, rejecting calls for “defunding” the force while also emphasizing that misconduct can’t be countenanced.

“Justice and public safety go together,” Adams said recently. “I don’t subscribe to the belief of some that we can only have justice and not public safety. We will have them both.”

I’ve asked Adams’ office about the Halloween case — whether the mayor thinks that there has been justice in this instance.

I have yet to hear back.

Has the NYPD Stopped a Teen You Know? Are You a Young Person With a Story to Share? We’d Like to Hear From You.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Eric Umansky

What Germany’s Effort to Leave Coal Behind Can Teach the U.S.

2 years 2 months ago

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This story was co-published with The New Yorker and is exempt from our Creative Commons license until April 1, 2022.

In late September, just before the German parliamentary elections, the Alternative für Deutschland held a large campaign rally in Görlitz, a picturesque city of about 56,000 people across the Neisse River from Poland. I was making my way down a narrow street toward the rally when I entered a square that had been dressed up as Berlin circa 1930, complete with wooden carts, street urchins and a large poster of Hitler.

Görlitz, which was barely damaged in the Second World War, often stands in for prewar Europe in movies and TV shows. (“Babylon Berlin,” “Inglourious Basterds” and other productions have filmed scenes there.) It was a startling sight nonetheless, especially since, a few hundred yards away, a crowd was gathering for the AfD, the far-right party whose incendiary rhetoric about foreign migrants invading Germany has raised alarms in a country vigilant about the resurgence of the radical right.

In fact, at the rally, the rhetoric about foreigners from the AfD’s top national candidate, Tino Chrupalla, was relatively mild. Germany’s general success with handling the wave of more than a million refugees and migrants who arrived in the country starting in 2015 has helped undermine the party’s central platform. Chrupalla moved on from migrants to other topics: the threat of coronavirus-vaccination mandates for schoolchildren, the plight of small businesses and the country’s desire to stop burning coal, which provides more than a quarter of its electricity, a greater share even than in the United States.

Coal has particular resonance in the area around Görlitz, one of the country’s two large remaining mining regions. Germany’s coal-exit plan, which was passed in 2020, includes billions of euros in compensation for the coal regions, to help transform their economies, but there are reports that some of the money has been allocated to frivolous-sounding projects far from the towns most dependent on mining. Chrupalla, who is from the area, listed some of these in a mocking tone and told the crowd that the region was being betrayed by the government, just as it had been after German reuni­fication, when millions in the former East Germany lost their jobs, leading many to abandon home for the West. “We are being deceived again, like after 1990,” he said.

Such language was eerily familiar. For years, I had been reporting on American coal country, where the industry’s decadeslong decline has spurred economic hardship and political resentment. In West Virginia, fewer than 15,000 people now work in coal mining, down from more than a 100,000 in the 1950s. The state is the only one that has fewer residents than it did 70 years ago, when the U.S. had a population less than half its current size — a statistic that is unlikely to surprise anyone who has visited half-abandoned towns such as Logan, Oceana and Pine­ville. Accompanying the decline has been a dramatic political shift: A longtime Democratic stronghold, West Virginia was one of only 10 states to vote for Michael Dukakis in 1988; in 2020, it provided Donald Trump with his second-­largest margin of victory, after Wyoming, which also happens to be the country’s largest coal producer, ahead of West Virginia.

The statistics are strikingly similar in Lusatia, the coal-mining region that stretches north of Görlitz along the Polish border, straddling the states of Brandenburg and Saxony, about 90 miles southeast of Berlin. Since 1990, employment at coal mines and power plants has plunged from 80,000 to less than 8,000, and the region’s population has fallen sharply, too. Hoyerswerda, in the heart of the area, has lost more than half of its 70,000 inhabitants, leaving a constellation of vacant Eastern Bloc high-rises; Cottbus, the region’s largest city, has dropped from roughly 130,000 people, just before the Berlin Wall fell, to less than 100,000. And the rightward shift visible in West Virginia has happened here, too: Along with the rest of eastern Saxony, Lusatia is the AfD’s stronghold, with the party capturing more than a third of the vote in some towns.

But there’s one crucial difference between the two places. As part of its “Energiewende,” or energy pivot, Germany has embarked on a formal effort to exit coal, with a national commission and subsequent legislation setting specific closure deadlines for mines and plants, and distributing billions of euros in compensation to coal companies, workers and the regions themselves. In the U.S., the coal exit has been haphazard. Federal attempts to move beyond coal went dormant under President Donald Trump, and under President Joe Biden they are now running up against the opposition of Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who holds both the crucial 50th vote in the Senate and a stake in a family coal business that earned him nearly $500,000 in 2020. To the extent that the country has reduced its coal usage, it has been driven mostly by the profusion of cheap natural gas. The effort to provide solutions to the social and economic fallout for coal regions has been limited to fledgling projects, such as a working group that Biden convened last year to identify communities in need and funding opportunities for them to pursue.

This contrast was what brought me to Lusatia. The German coal exit has assumed outsized symbolic importance in a world that desperately needs to reduce carbon emissions: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that we need to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050 in order to have any hope of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Burning coal for electricity represented nearly a third of all energy-related carbon emissions — the world’s single largest source — in 2018, and the International Energy Agency believes that global consumption of coal power reached record levels last year. In the absence of leadership from the U.S., Germany is seeking to show how a major manufacturing power can reduce its reliance on coal without causing too much economic damage or political backlash. A lot is riding on whether the country can pull it off.

A parking lot at the Boxberg coal-fired power plant, owned by a Czech-controlled company called LEAG, in eastern Germany. (Joakim Eskildsen/Institute for The New Yorker)

“God created Lusatia, and the Devil buried brown coal underneath it.” This saying is credited to the Sorbs, the ethnic Slavic people who have lived in the region — “die Lausitz” — since the sixth century. The land was swampy, and the area remained relatively impoverished, with the exception of the cities at its southern end, Görlitz and Bautzen, which flourished as market hubs on one of Central Europe’s primary east-west trade routes.

Everything changed after the discovery of the brown coal, in the late 18th century. Brown coal, or lignite, is sedimentary rock that is less compressed than typical bituminous coal. Lignite is softer, closer to peat in carbon’s geological arc. It’s also even dirtier to burn than bituminous coal and emits even more carbon.

Because lignite sits closer to the surface than bituminous coal, workers don’t need to dig deep shafts and tunnels. Instead, they use the open-cast method, excavating the clay and sand that lie above the lignite seam. This is safer than sending workers deep underground. But it requires removing everything that stands in the way, and in densely settled Central Europe that means demolishing villages — “Braunkohle” mining has led to the destruction of hundreds of communities in Germany. Once the mines are exhausted, they are either flooded to become lakes or leveled off with fill, which often leaves the land unusable for farming and in some cases even too unstable to walk on. “No entry” signs dot the local woods.

Open-cast mining started in Lusatia around 1900, and, in the decades that followed, the villages targeted for destruction tended to be Sorbian. The new industry brought a wave of workers to the area, mostly ethnic Germans, and a prosperity that it hadn’t known before. Lusatia produced coal briquettes that warmed homes and the fuel that lit the streets of Berlin and powered factories in Chemnitz and Dresden. The German word for miner has a noble connotation: “Bergmann” — literally, “mountain man.”

Brown coal is found in western Germany, too, near Cologne. But there it was long overshadowed by the much larger sprawl of bituminous mines in the Ruhr region, just to the north. These mines transformed the area into Germany’s great industrial powerhouse, a vast urban agglomeration home to Essen, Dortmund and other manufacturing cities. Germany’s coal riches were integral to the new nation’s rise in the late 19th century, to the war machine that sustained it through two horrific conflicts and to West Germany’s rebound in the 1950s, after which the region’s bituminous mining became less competitive with imported coal. In 2018, mining of bituminous coal in Germany was shut down for good.

In the coal regions of the former East Germany — Lusatia and a second region, near Leipzig, which has seen employment decline even more precipitously — the cultural and economic hold of coal persists. Braunkohle was the German Democratic Republic’s only major energy resource — it had almost no oil or bituminous coal — so the country opened several dozen open-cast mines in the postwar decades, destroying many more villages in the process. It built high-rise apartment towers in the larger towns to relocate people from the destroyed villages and to house mine workers. It gave these workers preferential pension payments and exalted them as paragons of the “workers’ and farmers’ state,” as the country’s leaders called the GDR. “Being a miner meant something,” a retired excavator operator, Monika Miertsch, told me. A former electrical engineer in Cottbus recalled that, when he was a child in the GDR, his teachers endlessly told students that their small nation produced more brown coal than any other country in the world. Christian Hoffmann, a naturalist who grew up in Weisswasser, in Lusatia, said that people would snap to attention whenever a band started playing the coal-miner anthem, “Steigerlied.”

The industry permeated local life. The soccer team in Cottbus is named Energie. Regional artists put Braunkohle mines on canvas — a museum in Cottbus recently held a retrospective of the work. One of East Germany’s best-known singer-songwriters, its Bob Dylan, was an excavator operator from Hoyerswerda named Gerhard Gundermann, who kept working in the giant pits even as his musical career blossomed.

After my first visits to Lusatia, which is now home to slightly more than a million people, the dominance of Braunkohle started to seem overwhelming. It was as if everyone was working for the industry or had lost his or her family’s village to it, or both — which helped explain why some residents weren’t too upset about the latter. It made for an especially stark manifestation of the trade-off between the coal-based development of the modern world and the environmental costs that came with it. “They knew that it gave work. They accepted it,” Hannelore Wodtke, a member of the town council in Welzow, said when we met. We were in Proschim, a village that she helped save from a planned expansion of the Welzow-Süd mine, two years ago. “Through coal, people did earn well. And that’s why it looks pretty good around here.”

The Schwarze Pumpe power plant, near the Welzow-Süd brown-coal mine in eastern Germany. (Joakim Eskildsen/Institute for The New Yorker)

One Saturday, I accompanied a group into the Welzow-Süd mine, on a tour offered by the owner of all the Lusatian mines, a Czech-controlled company called LEAG. We started at an outlook above the mine, a vast barren moonscape stretching to the horizon, 4 miles across, and then a bus took us down a long winding dirt road, pausing to let us admire giant excavators — more than 600 feet long, among the largest machines in the world — that would resume work on Monday morning.

At last, we arrived at a seam of brown coal, about 300 feet underground. A guide handed out plastic bags and encouraged us to pick up chunks as souvenirs. Some pieces were so soft or ragged that they resembled old wood or caked mud. It was hard to believe that this rudimentary stuff was still powering one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

I recalled a similar moment, years earlier, when I was far belowground, in a mine in southern Illinois, watching workers shear bituminous coal off a seam at the end of a 3.5-mile tunnel. It had seemed unbelievably archaic at the time — men tossed hunks of black rock onto a conveyor belt so that we could power our laptops and cellphones. The giant hole in Lusatia seemed even more unfathomable: machines had destroyed villages, and then larger machines had dug into the fossilized past for 300-million-year-old carbon with which to fuel yet other machines, our daily life.

“Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes different people inhabit,” George Orwell wrote in “The Road to Wigan Pier,” his 1937 account from the North of England. “Down there where coal is dug it is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably a majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above. ... Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.”

That quality of not wanting to hear about the mining of coal, the reluctance of those in far-removed cities to make the connection between their world and that other one, provoked much of the resentment in the produc­ing regions of the U.S. “This country benefited from having the cheapest electricity in the world,” Cecil Roberts, the president of the United Mine Workers of America, told me in New York in July, after a rally of current and retired miners on behalf of striking Warrior Met Coal workers in ­Alabama. “So what are we going to do with these communities?”

I heard a similar sentiment from miners in Germany. “If we really shut down now, then Berlin will have no more electricity,” Toralf Smith, a leading representative for power-plant workers in Lusatia, told me. “And I’d like to see how it goes at the universities in Berlin when the toilets don’t function and the cellphones don’t function and the internet doesn’t function. When their lives don’t function. It’s a lack of respect. If we have to switch things over for the sake of climate politics, we won’t stand against that, but it can’t be done on our backs. It has to be done with us.”

In 2019, the sociologist Klaus Dörre, of the University of Jena, and a team of researchers interviewed dozens of coal workers in Lusatia about the region’s transition away from the industry. They found that workers keenly felt the loss of “Anerkennung” — recognition or esteem — that they and their forebears had enjoyed in East ­Germany. The workers cited opprobrium like that from a Green Party state legislator in western Germany who tweeted a protest poster that read “Whether Nazis or coal, brown is always shit.” One worker told the researchers: “In [East German] times, we were the heroes of the nation — that’s what they always said. And now we’re the fools or evildoers of the nation, because we have to let ourselves be scolded as Nazis or murderers or polluters and I don’t know what else. And that hurts.”

When I visited Dörre in his office in Jena, he said that the overriding theme from the interviews was the lingering trauma of the economic dislocation after the collapse of the Wall, a period known as “die Wende.” “The story that was told to us was: ‘We’re the survivors, from 80,000 down to 8,000. Now you’re all coming and want to give us a second Wende.’”

But his team also found that the workers were not necessarily all gravitating to the AfD as a result of their anger and anxiety. Organized labor still has a strong hold on the German coal industry, unlike in the U.S.; the national coal workers’ union is allied with the center-left Social Democratic Party and has managed to keep many members from straying right. Union leaders, as Dörre wrote in a report summarizing his research, hope that the region as a whole can also be kept from straying too much further right: “If you can manage to show that positive development is possible for the region, despite the coal exit, that would cut the ground out from under the AfD.”

In 2020, China built more than three times more new capacity for generating power from coal than the rest of the world combined. Last year, despite recurring pledges to start corralling carbon emissions, the country produced a record 4 billion tons of coal, up nearly 5% from the year before. Defenders of coal in Germany like to point to figures like this, along with the fact that Germany’s greenhouse-gas emissions constitute a mere 2% of the global total. Why should Germany be putting its economy at risk for such relatively slight gains?

Such arguments have stood little chance against Germany’s vigorous climate-activism movement. Activists and energy analysts told me that the country bears a special responsibility to reduce emissions. As a major industrial power, it produced a significant share of historical emissions; as manufac­turing has shifted to Asia, the nation’s consumers are relying on goods produced elsewhere, making them partly responsible for emissions there, too; and, as a wealthy nation, Germany has the resources to demonstrate a better path. “It makes a huge difference if well-off, industrialized Germany manages to transition away to a different system that sustains its prosperity without causing massive emissions,” Benjamin Wehrmann, a Berlin-based correspondent for Clean Energy Wire, said. “Most people in the industry agree that its signaling effect is much larger than the actual effect.”

This exceptionalism has, however, complicated the effort to leave coal. Germany has long been home to a strong anti-nuclear movement, partly as a result of its fears of being caught in the middle of a Soviet-U.S. nuclear war. In 2000, the governing coalition of the Social Democrats and the Green Party, whose roots lay in anti-nuclear activism, agreed to phase out nuclear power. Chancellor Angela Merkel reversed this stance in 2009, after her center-right Christian Democratic Union regained power, but in 2011, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, she announced that the country would close all 17 of its nuclear power plants within 11 years. To replace the lost energy — nearly a quarter of the country’s load at the time — Germany would ramp up renewable energy. Thus the Energiewende accelerated.

Since then, the country has greatly expanded its wind and solar capacity. The dramatic shift toward renewables in a country of 83 million people helped drive down prices worldwide for wind and solar equipment, fulfilling the country’s self-conception as a market leader. (This plunge in prices came at a cost, though, as cheap Chinese solar panels put many German panelmakers out of business.)

But the expansion has slowed in recent years, owing to a combination of state-level restrictions on siting wind turbines, resistance to turbines and transmission lines among conservationists and local residents, and a reduction in subsidies for wind-power developers. In the first half of 2021, coal was back to providing more of the country’s electricity than wind. Most experts estimate that, to meet its renewable-­­energy goals, Germany needs to quadruple its wind production, to the point where turbines cover 2% of the country’s landscape. And Germany is already contending with some of the highest electricity prices in the world, a source of consternation for domestic manufacturers seeking to remain globally competitive.

This was the daunting context in which the government convened its commission for the coal exit — “Kohleausstieg” — in June 2018. Germany’s per-capita carbon emissions were still significantly higher than the EU average. Activists were demanding a fast response — hundreds of them had, since 2012, occupied Hambach Forest, a patch of woods in western Germany that was threatened by the expansion of a brown-coal mine. But the country needed to time the exit so that it could be assured of having enough power not only to replace both coal and nuclear energy but to add capacity, in order to handle the coming transition to electric-powered vehicles. (Tesla recently built a manufacturing plant outside Berlin.)

The 31-member Commission on Growth, Structural Change and Employment consisted of environmentalists and scientists, industry representatives and trade unionists, and residents and elected officials from the coal regions. It met regularly in Berlin and visited some coal towns. In January 2019, after its final meeting, which ran until almost 5 a.m., it voted nearly unanimously in favor of a plan to exit coal by 2038. In July 2020, the Bundestag passed a law with closure dates for various mines and power plants, and specific sums for compensation: 4.4 billion euros for the power companies, 5 billion euros for older workers to retire a few years early (separate funds would cover younger workers while they looked for new jobs) and, most important, 40 billion euros for the mining regions to help them with their economic transformation, a process known as the “Strukturwandel.”

It was a remarkable achievement, an example of postwar Germany’s consensus politics. “At a fundamental level, that all these different branches of society were able to come together around a coal exit is very significant,” Ingrid Nestle, a Green member of the Bun­destag, told me. Climate-change experts in the U.S. looked on with admiration. “They got the environmental community, labor community and business community together to hash it out,” Jeremy Richardson, an energy analyst and a West Virginia native formerly with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me. “You have to get people together, and you have to ­invest.”

But it did not take long for the good feelings to fade. Environmental groups and Green Party leaders began arguing that the country needed to move up the exit date if it wanted to meet the European Union’s new, more ambitious goal of cutting emissions by 55% from 1990 levels by 2030. In April 2021, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the country’s existing climate efforts did not go far enough to stave off disaster. And, in July, heavy rains caused devastating flooding in western Germany, near Belgium. The floods killed at least 180 people and destroyed entire towns, drawing greater attention to the possible effects of climate change.

As the election to replace Merkel got underway during the summer, climate change was central. Having sat through countless American presidential TV debates where the subject was barely mentioned — and where politicians couldn’t even agree on whether climate change is real — I was astonished to see it take up 20 minutes in each of the three German debates that I watched, and to see the candidates toss around “Klimaneutralität” and Kohleausstieg as if they were household terms. The Social Democrats’ candidate for chancellor, Olaf Scholz, agreed with his Green rival, Annalena Baerbock, on the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions. On Election Day, Sept. 26, the Social Democrats won more votes than Merkel’s center-­right Christian Democrats, putting them in a position to form a government with the Greens and the pro-­business Free Democrats.

The AfD saw its nationwide numbers sag, but, in the coal towns of Lusatia and the nearby regions of eastern Saxony, the party did even better than it had four years earlier.

I encountered an AfD voter at a wind-­turbine factory in Lauchhammer, on the western edge of Lusatia. The Danish company Vestas had opened the plant in 2002, and it seemed to embody the ideals of the Energiewende: a century earlier, Lauchhammer had been home to one of the first brown-coal mines in the region, and now it was making the machinery of renewable power. But, a week before the election, Vestas announced that it was shutting down the factory, a decision widely attributed to the slowing growth of wind power in Germany. It will lay off the plant’s 460 employees early this year.

I arrived at the factory one weekday evening at dusk and waited in a light rain in a parking lot. After a while, a young man emerged, headed for his car. Cornell Köllner, a genial 31-year-old, had worked at the plant for five years as a mechanic, advancing to a supervisory role. He enjoyed the work and did not know what he would do next. The only other major employer in this part of Lusatia was BASF, the chemical company, which had a plant in nearby Schwarzheide that would soon be expanding into battery production. He could look for work outside the region, but he had recently bought a house, and he did not want to leave his family. “I’ve got to look for work here in the area,” he said.

The confounding nature of it all — shuttering a wind-turbine factory at a time when the country was supposedly ramping up renewable energy, and doing so in the region that was supposed to be targeted for extra assistance in managing the transition — had only confirmed for Köllner his preference for the AfD. “Not because of ‘Nazi,’ God forbid,” he said. “But because AfD is proposing something completely different.” I pressed him on what, exactly, that was, what the party would do to help Lusatia or people like him, but he stuck to generalities. “They would change things,” he said. “They would really change things.”

Reluctance to leave in search of work elsewhere was widespread in Germany. “We work where we live,” Klaus Emmerich, the chief worker representative at the Garzweiler mine, in the western region, told me. “Where we live, that is our ‘Heimat’” — the German word that expresses something stronger than just “home” or “home town.”

Again, the echo was strong from U.S. coal regions, where residents, especially younger ones, constantly wrestle with the question of whether to stay or go. “It’s just home,” John Arnett, a Marine veteran who worked for a closing coal-fired plant in southern Ohio, told me in 2018. “I’ve been a bunch of different places, different countries. I’ve been across the equator. And now this is where I want to be, or I’d have stayed somewhere else. It’s the most beautiful place in the world, these hills.”

The people who remained often took offense at the economist’s or the pundit’s counsel that the only thing to do for regions that had lost their former economic rationale was to give people a bus or plane ticket out. In the U.S., the rate of people moving across state lines has in fact dropped by half since the early ’90s, a trend attributed to, among other things, the cost of living in higher-opportunity cities and the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family, which leaves people dependent on extended family for child care or elder care.

The stay-or-go question is particularly sensitive in eastern Germany, because of the flight of younger people that occurred in the years after reuni­fication. Die Zeit estimates that 3.7 million people, a quarter of the population of the former GDR, eventually left. One night, at a tavern in Hoyerswerda, I talked with Jörg Müller, a 56-year-old man who worked at the BASF plant, making paint for German car companies, and who had in his youth done cleaning jobs at the mine where his father worked as an engineer. Müller, who had brought up his children alone after his wife died young, of cancer, was worried about the impact that higher energy prices could have on BASF’s prospects. But his main preoccupation was his grown children, who had left the area — one to study in Dresden, one to work in Kassel, in the former West Germany. I asked him how often he saw them. “Once or twice a year,” he said.

A structure in Mühlrose bears a sign that reads, in part, “Save Our Beautiful Mühlrose” and “We Want to Stay.” The town is among the last in Lusatia that will be lost to coal mines. (Joakim Eskildsen/Institute for The New Yorker)

To coal’s opponents in Germany, such laments about hometown decline are undermined by the fact that the industry has been demolishing home towns for decades. The extent of the destruction is all the more striking in a culture that generally idealizes the village. Even amid all the devastation wrought by the coal industry in Appalachia — the mountaintop-removal mining, the coal-slurry spills — coal companies have not had to wipe entire towns off the map, as happens in Germany.

The week after the election, I traveled to the western brown-coal region, known as the Rhenish district, which has become the primary front for climate activists seeking to halt mining via direct action. They had succeeded in sparing Hambach Forest, and many had now moved to a new encampment, in a tiny hamlet called Lützerath that was on the verge of being claimed by the Garzweiler mine. Part of the hamlet had already been demolished by RWE, the German energy company that owns all the western region’s mines and power plants, which employ about 9,000 people. The only villager still living in Lützerath was a 56-year-old farmer who was fighting the company in court and had welcomed more than a hundred activists to set up camp on his property. An RWE spokesperson told me that the company “will continue to try to find an amicable solution with the landowner.” The spokesperson added that RWE works closely with those affected by its plans and stands by its promises.

On Oct. 1, the day that the company was allowed to resume removing trees there, I cycled from the town of Erkelenz through fields of harvested sugar beets to reach Lützerath, where several dozen advocates had joined the occupiers to launch the defense. It made for a jarring juxtaposition: there were the remaining trees around the hamlet, festooned with treehouses and anti-coal banners; a narrow strip where the advocates were arrayed to speak; and, behind them, a vast pit, with excavators ­churning away at the edge of it. “If Lützerath falls, then the 1.5-degree limit falls,” Pauline Brünger, an activist with the youth movement Fridays for Future, said. “It lies in our hands — 1.5 degrees is nonnegotiable. Lützerath must stand.”

I wandered into the encampment, where activists were breaking down pallets to build huts and more treehouses while others held an orientation session for new arrivals. Many wore balaclavas to try to hide their identities; others wore COVID masks that served the same function. When I took pictures, a young woman came over to stop me.

Suddenly, a cry went up from the entrance to the encampment: Two large excavators were approaching the hamlet. A couple of dozen activists marched down the road to block them. One of the drivers climbed out, saying that he and his colleague were only doing land-­reclamation work on the older portion of the mine and were coming to park their equipment for the weekend. The ­activists refused to let him through. “Hey, have a lot of fun sitting!” he called out angrily as he reversed back down the road.

Soon afterward, two large pickups approached from the other direction, loaded with concrete blocks and metal fencing, and rolled into the main assemblage of protesters; they were bringing the materials for an added security perimeter and had taken a wrong turn, right into the enemy camp. The activists fell upon them and unloaded the blocks and fencing to build their own security perimeter, preventing access to one of the hamlet’s roads. The drivers sat helplessly in their cabs, watching the expropriation. Finally, a handful of police officers arrived and, after some cajoling, arranged for the materials to be returned and for the trucks to be allowed back out.

Nearby, five larger villages were also threatened with destruction by RWE. Most families had already sold their homes to the company and moved out, many of them to new developments on the outskirts of Erkelenz that had been built to house relocated families and had even been named for the marked villages — Kuckum-Neu, Keyenberg-Neu and so on. Tina Dresen, 21, and her family were still holding out in Kuckum, and she told me how strange it had been to grow up in the shadow of Garz­weiler and to see other villages falling to the bulldozers, one by one. “On the right side of my home was the hole, and life ended there,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone who lived there, and the bus stopped driving there, and the ­villages were destroyed there. I lived only to the left.”

She told me that some of the vacant homes in Kuckum were being used to house families who had lost their homes to the recent flooding. The irony was overpowering: people rendered homeless by a disaster likely exacerbated by climate change were now living in homes made available by the looming displacement of the coal mining that was contributing to climate change.

That evening, I rode my bike to Kuckum and found one of the displaced families. Anja Kassenpecher had been relocated to the village with her son, four cats and two dogs after the flooding destroyed her beloved half-timber house in the town of Ahrweiler. “What happened in the flood catastrophe, that was nature, and one couldn’t do anything against that,” she said. “But the dismantling of the coal here, one could do something about that.”

In 1945, the victorious Russians removed a 30-kilometer stretch of rail between Cottbus and the town of Lübbenau to take back to the Soviet Union, one of many such claims made throughout eastern Germany. The rails were never replaced, and the single track in that stretch has meant that trains run between Cottbus and Berlin only once an hour — less than ideal by German standards. Part of the Strukturwandel’s 40 billion euros will be used to replace the missing track.

But, toward the end of 2021, reports kept appearing in the local and national media of the questionable ways other portions of the fund were being put to use by federal agencies and by the obscure provincial councils that were overseeing much of the spending: a techno festival, a zoo, new streetcars in Görlitz. Coal defenders and opponents alike told me how wrong they thought it was to spend 310 million euros on a new branch of Germany’s public-health agency in an exurb of Berlin 60 miles from Cottbus, or millions more on the renovation of a cultural center in a town 30 miles from Dresden, far from the coal towns. In November, 11 mayors met to express their frustration with the spending decisions and to demand that communities closest to the coal mines get more of a say. “If it goes on like this, the pot will be empty,” Tristan Mühl, the mayor of the village of Krausch­witz, told me afterward. “The ­perspective of the community is ­missing.”

Part of the challenge for the appropriators was structural: Under European Union rules, they were forbidden to use the money to subsidize new or existing businesses in the region. Instead, the discussion was of funding research ­institutes for renewable energy, including innovations in hydrogen power, that might eventually lead to job creation. René ­Schuster, a Cottbus-based representative of the environmental group Grüne Liga, told me that it was doubtful whether such ventures would ever come close to replac­ing the jobs that would vanish in the coal exit. “I doubt you’re going to get a boom in new jobs that will replace what you’re losing from coal,” he said. “That you’re going to get 7,000 jobs, that’s not going to happen.” But it was still wrong to think of the coal jobs as somehow sacrosanct, he added. “It’s often discussed as if coal workers have a fundamental right to their job. There’s no right to an income. You have a fundamental right to your ­property. Whoever gets relocated, their property rights are being encroached on. But whoever wants to live off that relocation, well, they have no fundamental right to that.”

After the election, Olaf Scholz and his counterparts in the Greens and the Free Democrats began negotiating the coal-exit terms for their coalition pact, including whether to move the 2038 date to 2030. Adding pressure was the concurrent climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, where a major focus was whether to mandate a global end to burning coal. The talk of an earlier exit prompted more consternation in Lusatia, where many viewed it as a breach of the commission’s compromise. “By 2030, little of this will have got started,” Christine Herntier, the mayor of Spremberg, said of the Strukturwandel.

Every day or two, I checked an app called Electricity Map, which shows the sources from which countries are drawing their electricity. Invariably, coal was Germany’s largest source, with wind a distant second or third. The plan was to use natural gas as a bridge to the expansion of renewables, but that would require building more gas power plants, fast, and would also mean making Germany even more dependent on Russia, one of its biggest gas suppliers. Recently, Russia built a controversial new pipeline to Germany through the Baltic Sea, called Nord Stream 2. As a last resort, Germany could buy nuclear-based electricity from France, which has remained staunchly ­committed to nuclear power, or coal-fired ­electricity from Poland, but not without hypocrisy, given its own disavowal of both sources.

On Nov. 24, the coalition released its governing agreement, which called for “ideally” moving up the coal exit to 2030. The rhetorical wiggle room satisfied neither side and reflected the bind in which the country has found itself. Germany had set out to be an example of how to relinquish the dirty-­energy source that had enabled modernity. It had developed a clear timetable, and it had agreed on significant compen­sation, recognizing that there was a societal obligation to people whose liveli­hood was being shut down as a ­matter of policy. The process was undoubtedly superior to what was playing out at the same time in the U.S., where the Biden administration’s plan to spend $555 billion on incentives to reduce greenhouse-­gas emissions, as part of the sweeping Build Back Better package, was foundering, shy of majority support in the Senate.

But Germany was also at risk of being an unintended example, one that could be cited by opponents of the imposition of emissions reductions. (A recent Wall Street Journal editorial was titled “Germany’s Energy Surrender: Rarely has a country worked so hard to make itself vulnerable.”) The exit from nuclear power was leaving the country much less space to maneuver as it tried to move away from coal. And the lack of transparency and forethought with the regional spending undermined the purpose of the compensation: to convey that, this time around, the rest of the country really did care what happened to its left-behind places.

On my final visit to Lusatia, in November, I met Lars Katzmarek, an employee at LEAG, the coal company, at a coffee shop in Cottbus. Katzmarek, who is 29, oversees telecommunications at the mines, a job he loves and hopes to keep until things shut down. He was not drifting to the AfD: He is a loyal Social Democrat, he believes in climate change and he even met with some Fridays for Future activists in 2019.

But he understood the feeling of betrayal in the region. His parents both worked in Braunkohle. His mother lost her job in the ’90s and never found steady work again. Cottbus has experienced the third-highest rate of departures to western Germany of any city in the former GDR, and nearly all of Katzmarek’s high school friends have left town. It was hard now to watch a new wave of people leaving the company and the region because they didn’t believe the promises of the Strukturwandel. “The sorrow is gigantic,” he said.

Katzmarek composed rap music on the side, and he had recently produced a single about Lusatia’s plight, which included clips of him singing atop one of the turbines at the Vestas plant — before the news came of its closure. “For politics to win back the trust of the people, it has to finally be the case that things are carried out the way they said they would,” he said. “This is the big chance to win back trust.”

What you couldn’t have was a coal exit that led to a decline in German industry because of higher electricity costs. “You can’t have deindustrialization in Germany,” he said. “Industry means prosperity. A loss of prosperity would be absurd. If other countries look to see how Germany has fared, and they see deindustrialization and a loss of prosperity and the people growing discontent and populism gaining a new foothold, who would follow our example?”

His nuanced tone made me wish that we had more time to talk. But he had to catch the hourly train to Berlin to visit one of his many friends who had left Lusatia.

Alec MacGillis conducted the reporting for this article while holding the Fall 2021 Holtzbrinck Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.

by Alec MacGillis

EPA Rejects Texas’ More Lenient Standard for Highly Toxic Air Pollutant

2 years 3 months ago

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As part of a sweeping announcement detailing strategies to crack down on toxic industrial air pollution, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced this week it was moving to formally reject Texas’ less protective standard for the potent carcinogen ethylene oxide and stick with its own scientific conclusions, a move that clears the way for significant reductions in emissions nationwide.

EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan announced the decision after an investigation by ProPublica, in collaboration with the Texas Tribune, revealed that ethylene oxide, a low-odor, ubiquitous gas that is used to make everyday household items like dish soap, is contributing to the majority of the excess industrial cancer risk in the United States.

In 2016, nearly two decades after it began assessing ethylene oxide’s link to cancer, the EPA concluded that the chemical was 30 times more carcinogenic to people who continuously inhale it as adults and 50 times more carcinogenic to those who are exposed since birth than the agency previously thought.

Industry groups fought the EPA throughout the assessment process, arguing that ethylene oxide was far less harmful than agency scientists determined.

The companies found an unwavering ally in Texas. A year after the EPA published its conclusions, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality launched its own assessment of ethylene oxide that scientists have criticized for excluding studies linking the chemical to breast cancer and drawing on cherry-picked analyses of the data that the federal agency had examined. The state standard that resulted is 2,000 times more lenient than the EPA’s. (Excess cancer risk for a chemical is calculated as the number of additional cancer cases that are expected to result from a lifetime of exposure.)

Last year, after the EPA finalized changes to one of its six major regulations governing ethylene oxide, industry groups petitioned the federal agency to consider reassessing its decision and relying on the standard set by TCEQ instead of its own.

The decision announced Wednesday dealt a blow to their hope that the EPA would rely on Texas’ less protective standard.

“Today we reinforce and advance EPA’s commitment to protect overburdened communities by following the best available science and data,” Regan said in a statement. “People living near chemical plants are increasingly concerned about exposure to ethylene oxide, and the science shows it is a potent air toxic posing serious health risks.”

Neil Carman, clean air director for the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, said the announcement is a “game changer” that clears the way for significant, and more expedient, reductions in ethylene oxide emissions in Texas and across the country. He added that the decision sends a strong signal to industry that the EPA will defend its own science as the agency continues to update rules for ethylene oxide emissions.

“This really punches TCEQ in the gut, in essence, on ethylene oxide,” he said. “Once they finalize this new proposal, it’s got big effects for Texas.”

The EPA’s announcement “shows science and facts matter, and sends ripples of hope out to people breathing ethylene oxide every day, who are also seeking far more urgent and concrete action from EPA,“ said Emma Cheuse, an attorney with Earthjustice, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that represents communities and environmental groups in legal proceedings.

The public will have 45 days to comment on the agency’s decision before it is finalized and five days to request a virtual hearing after the agency officially publishes its notice. But experts said the strong language the EPA used in its announcement suggests it’s not going to reverse course.

The process for incorporating the federal government’s standard into a set of rules governing ethylene oxide emissions is expected to take until at least the end of 2024. That doesn’t account for the time it will take to settle any legal challenges from industry groups.

If fully incorporated into the half-dozen federal rules that dictate how much toxic air pollution industrial facilities can emit, the EPA’s ethylene oxide standard could require more than 160 industrial plants across the country to slash emissions of the chemical.

Legal experts said that once the federal government finalizes its approach, it will be difficult for future administrations to reverse the standard as the EPA did with previous regulations under former President Donald Trump.

“That is because a court will demand reasons from EPA for changes,” said Wendy Wagner, an environmental law professor at the University of Texas. “The more good reasons EPA gives for the current approach, the harder it will be in the future for EPA to move in a different direction.”

The American Chemistry Council, the powerful lobbying group representing the chemical industry that had requested the EPA consider using Texas’ ethylene oxide standard, said in a statement that it needed to review EPA’s explanation. But the group argued that such public policy decisions should be more “inclusive,” and noted that companies that make or use ethylene oxide have invested in technologies and research to reduce emissions of the chemical.

“As a result of these actions, industrial ethylene oxide emissions have already fallen dramatically nationwide over the past two decades,” the statement said.

Still, EPA data that relies on the agency’s new ethylene oxide standard, and on emissions reports from the companies themselves, shows facilities are releasing enough of the chemical to increase cancer risk for nearby residents.

Todd Cloud, a Georgia-based air quality consultant who worked in the petrochemical industry for 20 years, said he thinks it will be difficult for many facilities to meet the EPA’s stricter standard without relocating to “the middle of nowhere” where their emissions won’t waft into populated areas.

“If that standard is accurate then there is no safe level of emissions of EtO, and the only alternative is to remove it from the stream of commerce,” he said. “That’s why you’re seeing some of the pushback here.”

Midwest Sterilization Corporation’s plant in Laredo emits thousands of pounds of ethylene oxide every year. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

The risk from ethylene oxide is particularly acute in Texas, the nation’s top ethylene oxide polluter and home to at least 26 facilities that emit the chemical. That includes a plant in Laredo, featured in the ProPublica and Tribune investigation, where employees of the Midwest Sterilization Corporation every year use millions of pounds of ethylene oxide to sterilize medical equipment manufactured just across the border in Mexico before shipping the equipment to hospitals across the U.S.

Four years ago, after the EPA incorporated its new ethylene oxide standard into a national assessment of cancer risk posed by toxic air pollution, the agency identified the Laredo plant as one of more than two dozen “high-priority” facilities whose emissions of the chemical appeared to be elevating cancer risk to levels the agency considers unacceptable.

The Laredo plant reported releasing thousands of pounds per year of ethylene oxide between 2014 and 2018, according to the most recent EPA data available. That is far more than any other facility of its kind in the country, according to an analysis by ProPublica and the Tribune.

In a statement to ProPublica and the Tribune, Midwest Sterilization Corporation said it “currently is in compliance with all federal and state regulatory standards” and has exceeded them “where possible.” These standards do not yet account for the cancer risk identified by the EPA, which would require the plant to reduce emissions.

“Since 2019, we have voluntarily reduced overall EtO emissions by approximately 90% after researching, purchasing, implementing, and testing the best available emissions control technology,” the statement said. The company declined to say whether that percentage is applicable to both its Laredo facility and another it owns in Jackson, Missouri. Midwest installed equipment to reduce ethylene oxide emissions at the Jackson location in 2019 after EPA conducted public meetings there to inform the community about ethylene oxide’s link to cancer and a wide array of other health impacts, including miscarriages.

The EPA has yet to hold such a meeting in Laredo. Many in the community did not even know the Midwest plant existed until ProPublica and the Tribune began asking residents whether they were aware it was emitting significant amounts of a cancer-causing chemical.

Since the publication of the ProPublica and Tribune investigation, Midwest has taken out full-page ads in the local newspaper that stress the importance of ethylene oxide to the health care industry and emphasize that a small portion of the chemical is used to sterilize medical devices. The EPA is set to propose an updated regulation this summer governing air pollution from commercial sterilizers like Midwest and aims to finalize it in the fall.

Laredo officials and activists applauded the EPA’s announcement this week but said conflicting messages from the federal regulatory agency and TCEQ so far have spurred confusion that has hamstrung meaningful action to protect Laredo residents.

Vanessa Perez, a member of the Laredo City Council whose district is home to the Midwest plant, worries that the regulatory process will take years, unnecessarily exposing Laredo residents to excess cancer risk. In the meantime, she and other officials have been trying to beat back claims from TCEQ leaders that EPA’s ethylene oxide assessment is incorrect.

“The work to clarify what’s going on has fallen on us, and we’re not supposed to be here to do EPA’s job,” said Perez.

The Clean Air Laredo Coalition, an organization formed by Perez and local environmental activist Tricia Cortez after they learned from ProPublica and the Tribune about the dangers posed by the Midwest plant, began scoping out a potential partnership to conduct a pilot blood testing program among 3,000 residents after a packed and emotional town hall meeting in December. The group has also been looking into applying for a community air monitoring grant from the EPA, but Perez said the application requires technical expertise that has been hard to access.

While the EPA works to update environmental regulations, Texas’ more lenient rule will remain in effect.

“We want the TCEQ to reverse its current industry-friendly approach to ethylene oxide and go in the opposite direction, which is to do even more than what the EPA is going to ask for,” Cortez said.

The TCEQ has repeatedly defended its standard, saying the federal government is exaggerating the cancer risk posed by ethylene oxide. Officials with the state agency this week said the TCEQ would respond to the decision “in the appropriate time as part of the normal agency processes, following sound science and the law.”

“We will have to wait and see, but TCEQ has been put on notice that there is oversight and that communities want state agencies to do what they need them to do,” said Robert Bullard, a sociologist at Texas Southern University who has spent decades documenting the disproportionate effects of pollution on communities of color across the country.

Laredo residents who live in areas where the estimated cancer risk exceeds federal safety thresholds said protecting communities should be the most critical factor in making such a determination. One such resident is Robin Hunter Casiano, whose daughter attends first grade at an elementary school less than two miles from the Midwest facility.

“It makes me sick every time I drop my daughter off at school in the morning just to think where they’re at in relation to that factory that can be harming their health,” she said.

As part of its announcement this week, the EPA said it would be partnering with Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services to improve communication on environmental risk and enforcement “in response to the call for improved accessibility to language and interpretation services.”

The agency also said it is “looking at a range of approaches besides regulations for achieving emissions reductions while regulations are in development, and ensuring communities are informed and engaged as we work to address EtO.” It didn’t offer specific details about what those approaches may entail.

State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, a Democrat who represents Laredo, said she understands that reversing course might be difficult for the TCEQ, but “they should consider new information and the community’s perspective.” Zaffirini said she has met with “exceedingly concerned” residents in Laredo and has a meeting scheduled with Midwest representatives to hear the company’s perspective.

“I am extremely concerned about the impact of this carcinogen in our air, and particularly so for our school children and most vulnerable community members,” she said in an email. “While I certainly recognize the importance of Midwest’s work to sterilize medical equipment and will listen to its representatives, I cannot imagine that they would disagree with our need to prioritize ensuring the health and safety of those who live and work near the facility.”

Ava Kofman contributed reporting.

Clarification, Feb. 1, 2022: This story was updated to clarify a response from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality about a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decision.

Correction

Feb. 3, 2022: This story originally mischaracterized full-page ads taken out in a local newspaper by the Midwest Sterilization Corporation. They stress the importance of ethylene oxide to the health care industry and emphasize that a small portion of the chemical is used to sterilize medical equipment. They do not say that the EPA is wrong about the dangers of ethylene oxide.

by Kiah Collier, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Maya Miller, ProPublica

Baker College Threatens Legal Action Against Former Teacher Who Talked to Reporters

2 years 3 months ago

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Baker College, one of the largest private schools in Michigan, is threatening legal action against a former faculty member who spoke to ProPublica and the Detroit Free Press for an investigation published this month.

Jacqueline Tessmer, who taught digital media for 14 years at Baker’s campus in Auburn Hills, told the news organizations that students often came to the nonprofit college unprepared to succeed and exited without degrees or good jobs but with heavy debt from loans. “Baker College has ruined a lot of people’s lives,” she said in the story.

A Jan. 19 letter to Tessmer — sent by the law firm Plunkett Cooney on behalf of Baker — demanded she retract her statements, which it described as “false and defamatory.” It did not specify what, if anything, was false. Arguing that Tessmer was in violation of a nondisparagement clause in a settlement she reached with Baker in an employment dispute, attorney Courtney L. Nichols also demanded that she “agree voluntarily to remit payment to Baker College for the damages it has suffered as a result of your violation(s), including attorney fees.” The letter did not include a dollar amount.

Since publication, Baker has not contacted either news organization to contest the validity of her statements. Before publication, the Free Press and ProPublica informed Baker that Tessmer would be quoted and shared her comments. Baker did not specifically address those quotes or Tessmer’s time at the college.

Baker’s letter to her after publication gave her seven days to respond. Tessmer said in an interview this week she stands by her comments and will not meet the college’s demands.

She said she didn’t see how it would be possible to make a retraction even if she wanted to, given that she expressed her opinion “based on what I did in service to the college” and her comments were only “a couple of sentences in a giant article.”

“I could be quiet, but is it really going to matter at this point?” she added.

The story on Baker examined the college’s low graduation rates, its aggressive marketing and the oversight of a Board of Trustees that has included former presidents of the school.

In addition to the letter to Tessmer, Baker responded to the article by emailing students, writing a letter to the editor in the Free Press, and placing a statement on its website that disparaged the story and touted the school’s achievements. Officials have defended the 111-year-old college as an affordable open enrollment school whose practices are reviewed by regulators and accreditors.

Neither Baker nor its lawyer has responded to a request for comment on the legal threat.

Tessmer’s relationship with Baker ended in a lawsuit she filed for breach of contract and retaliation. The school disputed her claims in a countersuit, and the case ended in a settlement in 2014. The letter from Baker’s lawyer also suggested that if Tessmer had spoken about the settlement, she would be in violation of it.

“This is what they do,” said Tessmer, now self-employed. “They scare. They huff and they puff, and it works a lot of the time. I mean, it’s worked on me.”

The letter to Tessmer said that if she did not comply, “Baker College will consider its available recourse.”

As of Thursday evening, Tessmer had not heard again from the law firm.

by Anna Clark, ProPublica, and David Jesse, Detroit Free Press

A Former Hacker’s Guide to Boosting Your Online Security

2 years 3 months ago

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Ngô Minh Hiếu was once a fearsome hacker who spent 7 1/2 years incarcerated in the U.S. for running an online store that sold the personal information of about 200 million Americans. Since leaving prison, Hiếu has become a so-called white hat hacker, attempting to protect the world from the sorts of cybercriminals he once was.

These days, Hiếu said, it doesn’t take much hacking to access sensitive details about Americans. Companies and governments routinely leave databases exposed online with little or no protection, as we’ve reported, giving cybercriminals an easy way to harvest names, emails, passwords and other info. While in prison, Hiếu wrote an online security guide for the average internet user. As he and others have pointed out, it’s impossible to create an impenetrable shield. But here are some of his tips for how you can mitigate your risks, along with some other practical online security advice.

1. Stop reusing passwords

Make 2022 the year you finally stop reusing passwords. Once a password is exposed in a data breach, as routinely occurs, cybercriminals may use it on other websites to see if it grants them access and lets them take over an account or service. To help you generate lengthy, difficult-to-guess passwords without having to commit them to memory, use an encrypted password manager such as 1Password or LastPass. These services, which typically charge $3 to $4 per month, also monitor databases of breached passwords, like Have I Been Pwned, which can identify some passwords that have already been made public.

2. Delete unused accounts

Another benefit of using a password manager is that every time you create a new account at a website, you can log it in your password app. The app will track when you created a password and when you last modified it. If you notice that you haven’t used a website in a few years, and you don’t think you’re likely to use it again, delete your account from that website. It will mean one less place where your data resides.

3. Add an additional layer of security

Use multifactor authentication — which requires a second, temporary code in addition to your password to log in to a site or service — whenever possible. Some services send a six-digit code via text message or email. But the most secure method is to use an app that generates a numerical code on your phone that’s in sync with an algorithm running on the site. To make the process easier, you can download an app like Authy that, like a password keeper, helps you generate and manage all your multifactor authentications in one spot.

4. Manage your apps’ privacy settings

A lot of the data about us that gets leaked consists of information we don’t even realize apps and services collect. To limit that risk, check the privacy settings for any new app that you install on your computer, smartphone or other device. Deselect any services you don’t want the app to have access to, such as your contacts, location, camera or microphone. Here are some guides on how to manage your apps’ privacy settings for iPhone and Android devices.

5. Think before you click

Clicking on a link from a text message, an email or a search result without first thinking about whether it’s secure can expose you to phishing attacks and malware. In general, never click on any links that you didn’t seek out and avoid unsolicited emails asking you to open attachments. When in doubt, hover your cursor over a hyperlink and scrutinize the URL. Avoid it if it would lead you to somewhere you don’t expect or if it contains spelling errors like a missing or extra letter in a company’s name. And for safer online browsing, consider paying for an antivirus tool like Malwarebytes that helps you avoid suspicious URLs online (or sign up for a free browser guard extension).

6. Keep your software up to date

Whether it’s your web browser or the operating system on your computer or smartphone, it’s always a good idea to download and install the latest software update as soon as it’s available. Doing so fixes bugs and helps keep your systems patched against the latest security threats. To make sure you don’t forget, turn on notifications for new updates or enable autoupdate settings if they’re available.

7. Limit what you’re sharing online

Some of the large collections of personally identifiable information that have been floating around online weren’t hacked or stolen: They were simply scraped from social media websites like LinkedIn or Facebook. If you don’t want a particular piece of info about you out there, don’t put it on your social media profile. Scrub anything you don’t want exposed in your profiles, and check the platforms’ privacy settings to see who can access whatever is left. You can also pay for a service like DeleteMe, which helps centralize and pursue requests to delete your personal information from various data brokers.

8. Secure your SIM

One technique that has become increasingly common in recent years is SIM swapping: A cybercriminal tries to dupe your mobile carrier into switching your number from a SIM (the memory card that tells your phone it’s yours) that you control to a SIM that they control. The goal is to commandeer your phone so they can get around multifactor authentication settings that protect your financial accounts. To guard against SIM swaps, contact your carrier to establish an account PIN, or follow these directions if you’re with Verizon, AT&T or T-Mobile. And if you switch carriers, change your PIN.

9. Freeze your credit reports

If you’re afraid that a scammer might use your identity to open a fraudulent credit line in your name, consider placing a freeze on your report. A freeze will restrict access to your credit report, meaning that no one (not even you) will be able to open a new credit line while it’s in place. If you decide to apply for a loan or a new credit card, you can always unfreeze your credit later on. Freezing and unfreezing your credit is free, but you have to contact each of the three major credit bureaus separately to do it. Here’s a guide on how to get started.

10. Back up your data

Don’t assume that you’ll always have access to all your files and folders. Backing up your data can help you guard against virus infections as well as hard drive failure and theft or loss of your computer. You could use well-known cloud storage providers such as Dropbox or Google Drive to save copies of your data or buy a subscription to an online cloud backup service that automatically saves your files and lets you restore them if anything happens. All such services offer encryption, but if you’re afraid of storing your data in the cloud, keep an encrypted copy on a separate hard drive.

by Cezary Podkul