A 35 year veteran of the Register of Deeds Office, Beaver was praised by all her co-workers in that office for excellent customer service, for being a patient instructor on the laws involved in her work, and for preserving the County�s history.

More than 120 people recently attended the seventh annual Foothills Regional Conference for Early Childhood Educators in Statesville. This year�s conference theme, "You Make a Powerful Difference", explored the difference that early childhood educators make in the lives of young children.

Catawba County Library System has hired a librarian to serve both the Conover and Claremont branches. Siobhan Loendorf will add preschool Ready to Learn sessions, computer classes and adult programming for Conover and Claremont branch libraries.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation has released recommendations on widening of Highway 16 South in Catawba County (within the minutes of public meetings). Link to project maps: http://www.ncdot.org/doh/preconstruct/highway/roadway/hearingmaps_by_county/county/Catawba.html

Internal Systems Analyst Scott Klinger was recognized, in part, for integrating a new billing program that resulted in improved efficiencies across the organization.

Catawba County has won the Government Innovation Grant Award (GIGA), from the UNC School of Government, the Local Government Federal Credit Union, and the North Carolina Local Government Information Systems Association, for its innovative use of Quick Response (QR) Codes on building permits issued in the county. The County was recognized for implementation of a Building Permit QR Codes system, which provides building contractors and inspectors with up-to-the-minute job site and inspection information, at their fingertips, in the field.

Catawba County Government renewed an annual tradition on March 22nd, honoring employees with 25 or more years of service at the twenty-seventh annual Quarter Century Club lunch. Catawba County formed the Quarter Century Club in 1986. A highlight of this year�s program was the recognition of twelve new Quarter Century Club members.

Enhancements include an auto-fill feature, the ability to search on a business or landmark name, and links to both Google and Bing maps.

County programs which developed QR (Quick Response) codes for building permits; reach families affected by economic distress, and serve as an ongoing, immediate source of food for students during weekends and extended breaks from school; and promote healthy, sustainable policies that improve physical activity and nutrition in schools were honored.

A team of students from Hickory High School's Student Council won the Grand Prize. The team included Will McCarrick, Anne Orgain, Taylor Panzer and Lexie Reeves. Their video, "Do You Drive Distracted?", was judged the best by a panel of judges.

A Catawba County Social Services program that serves as an ongoing, immediate source of food for students who often go hungry, during weekends and extended breaks from school, and a Green Vendor Exhibition designed to shine a spotlight on existing and potential vendors that specialize in providing recycled and environmentally-friendly products and services, have been named winners of 2012 National Association of Counties (NACo) Achievement Awards.

Rodney Miller has been named Outstanding N.C. Finance Officer of the Year for 2011-12 by the North Carolina Government Finance Officers Association. The award traditionally and annually recognizes and honors the local government finance officer who has demonstrated state leadership in local government finance issues by serving as the organization's president.

Catawba County Attorney Debra Bechtel has been named County Attorney of the Year by the North Carolina County Association of County Attorneys. Bechtel was recognized for her service to Catawba County and for her service to the association and local governments across the state.

New State food rules recently put in place are expected to enforce safe food handling and reduce transmission of food-borne illness.

The Institute for Conservation Leadership has chosen to honor the Catawba-Wateree Relicensing Coalition for their exemplary collaboration to accomplish outstanding environmental protection. The Coalition is being recognized for collaborative work that is creative, visionary, and highly effective and that their respective coalition members could not have achieved by acting alone

2012 Catawba County Employee Of The Year, Ona Scruggs, recognized for patience, understanding, listening in stressful arena.

A new agreement extends borrowing privileges at Lenoir-Rhyne University Library to registered users of Hickory Public and Catawba County Libraries.

The information was developed and compiled by the Children's Agenda Planning Committee, appointed by the Catawba County Board of Commissioners. The committee's vision is to ensure a safe community where all children are engaged, enriched and equipped to reach their full potential.

Catawba County has launched a performance dashboard, a program that will be the gateway for hundreds of pieces of data on dozens of topics related to the County government, demographics and quality of life. Catawba County Facts and Figures, offers users a choice of exploring data grouped into eight broad categories.

Architectural plans have been finalized for the new Sherrills Ford branch of Catawba County Library. The 10,000 square foot facility, to be erected on 2.5 acres near the intersection of Highway 150 and Sherrills Ford Road, is expected to be completed in 2014.

Chinese maker of products for the textile industry has located its first US manufacturing facility in Conover, creating 78 new jobs.

Catawba County Director of Utilities and Engineering Barry Edwards has been named one of the winners of the 2013 Energy Leadership Awards by the Business Journal of Charlotte.

The Catawba County Board of Commissioners took action at its meeting on February 4, 2013, to dedicate the entrance area of the Catawba County Justice Center in honor of retired Sheriff L. David Huffman and his 32 years of services to the county, including four as a county commissioner and 28 as Sheriff.

Lori A. Mathes was appointed by the Catawba County Board of Commissioners as the County�s new Tax Collector, based upon staff�s recommendation, at the Board�s meeting on February 18, 2013. Mathes served as Chief Financial Officer for Mental Health Partners of Hickory for eight years, responsible for overseeing the agency�s expenditures and revenues, its accounting policies and procedures.

A new State law will soon shift collection of motor vehicle taxes from counties to the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles.

The Western Piedmont Council of Governments has won a national honor for the Western North Carolina Annual Air Quality Conference held at Lenoir-Rhyne University.

Catawba County Home Health is empowering older adults to lower their risk of falling through a new service called Smart Moves.

"Catawba County Facts and Figures" web page, the gateway for hundreds of pieces of data on dozens of topics related to the County government, demographics and quality of life, has been named winner of a 2013 National Association of Counties (NACo) Achievement Award.

Catawba County offers electronics and paint recycling, year round, at Blackburn Landfill during regular landfill operating hours, as of July 1.

Budget Office wins national award, for producing budget document judged easy to read and understand, for 25th straight year

Randy Cress, currently the Systems and Network Manager for Rowan County, North Carolina, is named Catawba County's new Chief Information Officer.

Synopsis of Catawba County Board of Commissioners meeting of December 16, 2013.

Social Services program honored as one of only 15 programs in U.S. making critical difference in lives of youth in foster care.

Dental care was recently provided for hundreds of children by Catawba County Public Health.

Catawba County Board of Commissioners adopts resolution supporting citizen participation in government through elections in Catawba County.

Catawba County Board of Elections appoints Amanda Duncan as new Director of Elections to succeed retiring Larry Brewer.

Students carry sack lunches at Elk Ridge Elementary School in Buckley, Wash. On Monday, USDA unveiled a new program that would feed millions of children over the summer, when many schools are closed.; Credit: Ted S. Warren/AP

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a new effort Monday to feed millions of children this summer, when free school meals traditionally reach just a small minority of the kids who rely on them the rest of the year. The move expands what's known as the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer, or P-EBT, program into the summer months, and USDA estimates it will reach more than 30 million children.

"If children and children's learning and children's health is a priority for us in this country, then we need to fund our priorities," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a Monday interview with NPR's All Things Considered. "I think it's an important day."

P-EBT takes the value of the meals kids aren't getting at school, about $6.82 per child per weekday, according to USDA, and puts it onto a debit card that families can use at the grocery store. Households already enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (once known as food stamps) can have the value placed directly onto their SNAP debit card.

Children are eligible for the new P-EBT summer expansion if they are eligible to receive free or low-cost meals during the school year. Children younger than 6 can also qualify if they live in a household that currently receives SNAP benefits. According to USDA, eligible families can expect to receive roughly $375 per child to help them through this summer.

"Families are still in crisis as a result of the pandemic and providing Pandemic EBT benefits this summer will help reduce childhood hunger and support good nutrition," said Crystal FitzSimons at the Food Research & Action Center, or FRAC.

P-EBT began in March 2020 as an emergency move to reach children whose schools had closed in response to the pandemic; it was extended as part of the American Rescue Plan, the massive COVID-19 relief package that President Biden signed this past March.

The summer months have traditionally been hard on children who depend on free or low-cost school meals. According to FRAC, in July 2019, just 1 in 7 children who ate at little or no cost during the school year was getting a subsidized school lunch at the height of summer.

Currently, at least 37 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have been approved by USDA to provide P-EBT since the program's inception. On Monday, Secretary Tom Vilsack told All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly that he's been on the phone with governors working to expand adoption.

"When I took this job, I think only 12 states were currently enrolled ... and we're continuing to get states in every day," Vilsack said. As for why some states hadn't yet signed on, he said, "I think the guidance that we were providing to states was a little bit murky ... There's no confusion about the simple plan here for the summer. Mom and Dad get a card. They are able to go to the grocery store. They now have more resources to be able to feed their family."

Monday's announcement is just the latest move by USDA to fight child hunger. The agency recently issued waivers that will allow school districts to offer free school meals to all children in the 2021-2022 school year. Schools will also be allowed to pack meals in bulk and deliver them to students still learning at home. The Biden administration also recently pushed a $1.1 billion monthly increase in SNAP benefits through September 2021.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey, which has offered regular snapshots of families' wellbeing during the pandemic, food insecurity in the U.S. has been declining in recent months. As of the period from March 17-29, nearly 23% of households with children reported experiencing some food insecurity, down from a pandemic high of 31.4% in December 2020.

"Food insecurity rates are finally starting to come down," said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. A host of federal programs to fight hunger and put money in the pockets of low-income Americans are "putting substantial downward pressure on food insecurity rates. It's a whole new world," Bauer said.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Police tape blocks access from a street leading to the building complex where the Capital Gazette is located on June 29, 2018, in Annapolis, Md. The suspect barricaded a back door in an effort to "kill as many people as he could kill," police said.; Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Jury selection in the trial of the gunman who fatally shot five employees at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Md., on June 28, 2018 gets underway on Wednesday.

Jarrod Ramos, 41, has pleaded guilty — but not criminally responsible for reason of insanity — in the killings of John McNamara, Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman, Wendi Winters and Rebecca Smith. The mass shooting was one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in modern U.S. history.

"There is a sense that you don't want this to be the thing that makes your life change," Phil Davis, the paper's former criminal justice reporter who now works at the Baltimore Sun, told NPR.

Davis was hiding under his desk while live tweeting the shooting that day. Later, he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that put out a paper the very next day.

"That's kind of what drove me to continue as a criminal justice reporter. Once I got the feeling of like, 'no we're going to get back to exactly what we do. We're going to tackle this how we would even if it wasn't us and try to go at it from the perspective of a local community newspaper,'" Davis said.

Bruce Shapiro, the executive director of the Columbia University's Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, said what made this shooting reverberate in newsrooms across the U.S. was "the idea of a newsroom full of colleagues being murdered just because they are journalists. It's an identity based attack."

Attacks on journalists in the U.S. haven't stopped there. During his time in office, President Donald Trump tweeted that the news media is the enemy of the people. Associated Press journalists were threatened and had their equipment damaged by supporters of Trump during the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. And last year, during the protests in Minneapolis over the murder of George Floyd by police, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker reported at least 160 threats to journalists across the country in one week--mostly by police.

Shapiro says the trial is a reminder to the public of the risks and costs local reporters take daily.

"The reality is that local newsrooms all over the country cover extraordinarily difficult events affecting their own families, neighbors, kids, schools whether that is wildfires, whether that is mass shooting, whether that is COVID-19," Shapiro said.

The Capital Gazette trial has been delayed several times due to COVID-19, turnover in the public defender and state's attorney's offices, and rounds of court hearings. Davis says he hopes the long-awaited trial brings some closure.

"Certainly for the families of the victims themselves, I look forward to being on the other end of this trial," he said. "And whatever the outcome is, being able to embrace them and support them just to bring them some sort of closure."

Today, less than a week before the third anniversary of the shooting, the judge has called a pool of 300 people to determine the 12 that will sit as jurors. They will then determine Ramos's mental sanity during the attack.

Steve Mercer, a former Maryland public defender, said the defense has the burden to prove Ramos's sanity. He said that in cases like these, the defense will look at motive and intent. One possible motive, Mercer says, is Ramos' "long-simmering feud with the paper."

Ramos sued the paper for defamation in 2012 after reporters wrote about his guilty plea on charges of criminal harassment and 90-day suspended jail sentence. But that motive might not hold up.

"I think there's a big gap between sort of being upset about a story that's published ... and then going in and committing a mass shooting," Mercer said.

Mercer adds what presents a challenge to both the defense and prosecution is Ramos's conduct after the shooting. He was found by police under a desk at the scene of the shooting with a pump-action shotgun which was purchased legally a few years before.

"The defense may point to it and say that it shows just a disconnect from reality and a lack of awareness of what was going on," Mercer said.

Circuit Court Judge Judge Michael Wachs will ultimately decide if he ends up in prison or a state psychiatric hospital.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

After issuing its final decisions of the term Thursday, the Supreme Court on Friday granted a religious liberty case for next term and turned away challenges to longstanding decisions on qualified immunity and defamation, prompting dissents from the court's conservatives.

Court agrees to hear one religious liberty case, but rejects another

The justices agreed to consider a constitutional challenge to a school funding program in Maine that excludes private schools that teach religion.

Only half the school districts in Maine run their own high schools. The rest pay for students to attend public schools in other districts or to attend private schools. The state, however, will not fund students who attend any school that offers religious teaching.

Parents who wanted to send their children to a private Christian school challenged the law, alleging it violated their right to exercise their religion freely. The First Circuit disagreed, but now the high court will hear their case.

The justices, however, declined to hear another case about religious liberty – this one brought by a Washington state florist who refused to provide flowers for a same-sex wedding. She alleged that the state's antidiscrimination law violated her First Amendment rights, and in 2017, Washington's supreme court ruled against her.

Though the justices on Friday declined to hear her appeal, three of the court's conservatives—Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch—would have taken it for next term.

Thomas calls to do away with qualified immunity

Also on Friday, Justice Thomas once again called for the court to do away with qualified immunity, the legal shield for police officers that has come under intense scrutiny in the last year of racial justice protests.

Thomas was dissenting from the court's refusal to hear the case of a college student promoting Turning Point USA, a right-wing organization known for publishing lists of university professors it deems hostile to conservatives. The student alleged campus police at Arkansas State University violated her First Amendment rights when they stopped her from advertising the organization near the student union. But the campus officers escaped liability in the lower court because of qualified immunity, a doctrine created by the Supreme Court in 1967 that has evolved into a near-impenetrable bulwark for the police.

"Why should university officers," wrote Thomas, "receive the same protection as a police officer who makes a split-second decision to use force in a dangerous setting?" Going further, Thomas questioned whether the judicially-created doctrine should exist at all, an opinion that has garnered more and more bipartisan consensus in the wake of George Floyd's murder.

Thomas and Gorsuch call to overturn landmark Free Speech precedent

The court declined to hear a defamation case brought by a Miami-born international arms dealer—portrayed in the 2016 movie War Dogs—against the author of a book about his life.

The lower court dismissed the suit. It pointed to a landmark 1964 First Amendment decision, in which the high court said that publishers are immune from libel suits brought by public figures, so long as the publishers either didn't know, or had no reason to know, that the information they published was false.

Both Thomas and Gorsuch dissented, arguing the court should overturn the nearly 50-year-old precedent. In the era of disinformation, "lies impose real harm," wrote Thomas. "Instead of continuing to insulate those who perpetrate lies," said Thomas, the court should narrow First Amendment protections.

In a separate dissent, Gorsuch agreed. In 1964, publishers needed protection against libel for unpopular opinions to survive. Indeed, the court's 1964 decision was first used to protect civil rights leaders who had published a New York Times ad criticizing the Montgomery, Alabama police for repeatedly arresting Martin Luther King Jr.

But, said Gorsuch, in 2021, "it's less obvious what force [libel protections have] in a world in which everyone carries a soapbox in their hands," referring to smartphones. Now, Gorsuch wrote, "the deck seems stacked against those with traditional (and expensive) journalistic standards—and in favor of those who can disseminate the most sensational information as efficiently as possible without any particular concern for truth."

Another execution

On top of its decisions about cases next term, the justices gave Alabama the green light to execute Matthew Reeves, whose death sentence was recently overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

This is the second time the justices have ruled against Reeves, who in 1998 was convicted for murder in Alabama. In 2002, Reeves first challenged his sentence in state court. He argued that because of his low IQ, his lawyer should have hired an expert to evaluate him for an intellectual disability. After 15 years of appeals, the Supreme Court denied his claim in 2017. So Reeves appealed his claim through the federal system.

But on Friday, the high court again rejected his challenge, thus allowing Alabama to move forward with his execution. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Kagan, dissented, criticizing the state court for its brusque dismissal of Reeves's claim.

Sotomayor drew attention to "a troubling trend in which this court strains to reverse summarily any grants of relief to those facing execution." The court, wrote Sotomayor, "turns deference" to state courts "into a rule that...relief is never available to those facing execution."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Evidence exists linking three cancers and two other health problems with chemicals used in herbicides in the Vietnam War, a committee of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has concluded.

A scientifically accurate and valid epidemiologic study of reproductive problems among the families of veterans exposed to radiation from atomic bombings and nuclear weapons tests is not feasible, concluded an Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee in a new report.

Cancer-causing chemicals that occur naturally in foods are far more numerous in the human diet than synthetic carcinogens, yet both types are consumed at levels so low that they currently appear to pose little threat to human health, a committee of the National Research Council said in a report released today.

While confirming that the science behind DNA forensics is valid, a new report from a committee of the National Research Council recommends new ways of interpreting DNA evidence to help answer a key question for jurors -- how likely it is that two matching samples came from different people.

A bold national initiative is needed to reduce the enormous health burden of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the United States, according to a new report from a committee of the Institute of Medicine.

Women who might become pregnant need 400 micrograms of folic acid per day to reduce their risk of having a child with neural tube defects, according to the latest report on Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs) from the Institute of Medicine.

The Council of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is concerned about the confusion caused by a petition being circulated via a letter from a former president of this Academy.

Although there is evidence of harmful health and ecological effects associated with exposure to high doses of chemicals known as hormonally active agents – or endocrine disrupters – little is understood about the harm posed by exposure to the substances at low concentrations, such as those that typically exist in the environment, says a new report from a National Research Council committee.

The federal government should not increase the maximum level of copper allowed in drinking water, because higher levels could lead to liver poisoning in infants and children with certain genetic disorders.

Darkly colored, carotene-rich fruits and vegetables -- such as carrots, sweet potatoes, and broccoli -- provide the body with half as much vitamin A as previously thought.

Representatives from academies and research organizations around the world sent messages of condolence and support to members, officials and staff of the U.S. National Academies in the wake of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The following are excerpts from some of these messages.