The relationship between pianist Justin Kauflin and trumpeter Clark Terry is at the heart of the documentary, "Keep On Keepin' On."; Credit: COURTESY OF RADiUS-TWC

Trumpeter Clark Terry played in Count Basie's and Duke Ellington's bands. He was the first African American hired for The Tonight Show band. He mentored the teenage prodigies Miles Davis and Quincy Jones. But Terry isn't as well known as you might think he'd be. 

Thanks to the new documentary, "Keep On Keepin' On," you can see Clark Terry — or C.T., as everyone calls him — in action. The film tells the story of Terry's early love of the trumpet, his quick rise through the jazz ranks, and how he's devoted much of his life to inspiring other musicians — all with a sparkle in his eye.

The movie is directed by first time filmmaker Alan Hicks and made on a shoestring budget. Hicks is himself a drummer and had been one of Terry's students. Originally it was going to be a short film about Terry and Hicks' relationship, funded by the Australian Broadcasting Company. (Hicks is from Australia.) When that financing fell through, Hicks improvised. Determined to tell the world about Terry, he and a childhood buddy, Adam Hart, decided to do it themselves — despite having no filmmaking experience. They bought a camera and plane tickets to the U.S. and began following Terry.

For many years their schedule was to shoot until they ran out of funds, usually about three months, work for a few months to save more money, then go back to shooting. To demonstrate how Terry mentors his students, they followed one young man in particular. Justin Kauflin is a blind jazz pianist with stage fright who would spend days and nights practicing at Terry's bedside. Over the course of the film, as we learn about Terry's past, we see the aging trumpeter in the present (he's now 93) — struggling with advanced diabetes, but always composing riffs from his bed late into the night.  

In one moving scene, Kauflin is riddled with anxiety as he prepares to compete in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz competition. Terry sends him an audio letter and some lucky socks for inspiration.

Years into the project, when Quincy Jones came to visit Terry, he met Kauflin and the filmmakers. Eventually Jones signed on as an executive producer of "Keep On Keepin' On" — as is only fitting given that, at age 13, he'd been Terry's first student.

Jones, Hicks and Kauflin spoke with The Frame about Terry and his unparalleled talent as a musician and as a mentor.

Source: Streetwise Reports 11/07/2024

Jericho Energy Ventures Inc. (JEV:TSX.V; JROOF:OTC; JLM:FRA) has announced a strategic move to spin off its hydrogen solutions platform into a separate entity. The new entity, to be named Hydrogen Technologies Corp. (HTC), was approved by the company's board of directors. The intention is to create two specialized companies focusing on hydrogen technology and traditional energy assets, respectively. Each Jericho Energy shareholder will retain their Jericho shares while receiving shares of the new HTC entity on a pro-rata basis in consideration of the transfer of Jericho's hydrogen assets.

The planned transaction, still subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals, aims to allow both companies to focus on their distinct markets and strategies. Jericho Energy expects this restructuring to enable each company to operate with tailored capital structures and investment plans, positioning them for growth within their specific sectors. The final terms of the spinout will be detailed in a management information circular to be shared with shareholders before they vote on the proposal.

Approval processes for the spinout include a review by the TSX Venture Exchange, shareholder consent, and possibly court approval in British Columbia if the plan proceeds via a formal arrangement. Jericho's CEO, Brian Williamson, noted in the news release, "By separating our hydrogen platform, we can create two agile, focused companies . . . positioning them for long-term growth and success."

Jericho Energy, which will continue trading on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol JEV, will retain its traditional oil and gas assets following the separation. The company's annual general meeting on January 15, 2025, may serve as a venue for shareholder approval, or a separate meeting may be scheduled.

Hydrogen Energy and Clean Tech

Energy Storage, in its November 5 report, underscored the growth potential for green hydrogen in the U.S. Supported by the government's US$7 billion Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs program, this program aimed to boost clean hydrogen production and reduce costs. The report noted that the Mid-Atlantic Hydrogen Hub (MACH2) anticipated large-scale green hydrogen projects, generating over 20,000 jobs and incorporating hydrogen applications across sectors like steel, aviation, and maritime.

On November 6, Reuters reported that despite political shifts, U.S. clean energy momentum continues to be driven by federal tax credits and technology advancements. Renewable energy sources, including hydrogen, were identified as the fastest-growing segments on the power grid, benefiting from initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and state mandates. Carl Fleming, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery, highlighted that "the jobs and the economic benefits have been so heavy in red states, it's hard to see an administration come in that says we don't like this." Although political challenges might impact renewable sectors like offshore wind, the trajectory of clean energy, including hydrogen, remained strong due to market demand and state-level support.

The International Energy Agency's (IEA) 2024 Global Hydrogen Review reported that global hydrogen demand reached 97 Mt (metric tons) in 2023. This demand was projected to approach 100 Mt in 2024. The IEA highlighted a rising focus on low-emissions hydrogen, particularly for refining and heavy industries. Although new applications in transport and energy storage accounted for less than 1% of global demand, industry interest grew, with chemical, refining, and shipping sectors making strides in contracting low-emissions hydrogen. The IEA also noted substantial investments in electrolyzer projects worldwide, with installed capacity expected to grow significantly.

Jericho's Catalysts

According to Jericho Energy's April 2024 investor presentation, the spinout of Hydrogen Technologies Corp. aligns with a broader strategy to drive advancements in hydrogen technology. Currently, an area experiencing significant momentum due to global energy transition efforts, the investor presentation highlights key growth drivers, including Jericho’s patented hydrogen-based boiler technology and emerging partnerships with institutions and companies across the hydrogen sector. [OWNERSHIP_CHART-7025]

The decision to separate hydrogen assets positions HTC to capture opportunities within the rapidly expanding hydrogen ecosystem, benefiting from policy support and rising market demand for green energy solutions. As part of its strategy, Jericho intends to leverage its expertise in traditional energy systems while directing resources to support innovation in hydrogen applications.

Ownership and Share Structure

Around 35% of Jericho's shares are held by management, insiders, and insider institutional investors, the company said. They include CEO Brian Williamson, who owns 1.19% or about 3.1 million shares; founder Allen Wilson, who owns 0.76% or about 1.97 million shares; and board member Nicholas Baxter, who owns 0.44%, or about 1.14 million shares, according to Refinitiv' latest research.

Around 10% of shares are held by non-insider institutions, and approximately 55% are in retail, the company said.

On March 6, 2023, JEV completed an insider-led private placement financing, above the current share price, for gross proceeds of CA$2.23 million.

JEV's market cap is CA$25.19 million, and it trades in a 52-week range of CA$0.07 and CA$0.18. It has 259.75 million shares outstanding, approx.. 189.99 million floating.

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Important Disclosures:

1. As of the date of this article, officers and/or employees of Streetwise Reports LLC (including members of their household) own securities of Jericho Energy Ventures Inc.
2. James Guttman wrote this article for Streetwise Reports LLC and provides services to Streetwise Reports as an employee.
3. This article does not constitute investment advice and is not a solicitation for any investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her personal financial adviser and perform their own comprehensive investment research. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company.

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( Companies Mentioned: JEV:TSX.V; JROOF:OTC; JLM:FRA, )

Former LA Times food writer Russ Parsons offers John Rabe a piece of pie, in John's Mercedes; Credit: John Rabe/KPCC

Semi-retired, former LA Times food writer Russ Parsons appeared often on Off-Ramp over the years, helping to explain the city’s communities through their food, as well as giving solid cooking advice. For the final edition of Off-Ramp, John picked up Russ at Jongewaard's Bake-N-Broil, a Long Beach institution.

Parsons brought John an olallieberry pie (a cross of 'Black Logan' blackberries and youngberries), whilst the inimitable Parsons -- author of "How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table" and "How to Read a French Fry: And Other Stories of Intriguing Kitchen Science" -- opted for the coconut cream.

Listen to the audio for John and Russ' observations on how food brings the disparate cultures of Los Angeles together, and to hear about which part of hosting Off-Ramp is as humbling for John as it is for Parsons when readers tell him they cook his food at Thanksgiving.

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

Full Text:

Many wild southern sea otters in California are infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, yet the infection is fatal for only a fraction of sea otters, which has long puzzled the scientific community. A National Science Foundation-funded study identifies the parasite's specific strains that are killing southern sea otters, tracing them back to a bobcat and feral domestic cats from nearby watersheds. The study marks the first time a genetic link has been clearly established between the Toxoplasma strains in felid hosts and parasites causing fatal disease in marine wildlife. The study's results highlight how infectious agents like Toxoplasma can spread from cat feces on land to the sea, leading to detrimental impacts on marine wildlife.

Image credit: Trina Wood/UC Davis

Pix by Proximity has been introduced by the Central bank of Brazil,...

; Credit: /Rose Wong for NPR/KHN

Claire Lang-Ree was in a lab coat taking a college chemistry class remotely in the kitchen of her Colorado Springs, Colo., home, when a profound pain twisted into her lower abdomen. She called her mom, Jen Lang-Ree, a nurse practitioner who worried it was appendicitis and found a nearby hospital in the family's health insurance network.

After a long wait in the emergency room of Penrose Hospital, Claire received morphine and an anti-nausea medication delivered through an IV. She also underwent a CT scan of her abdomen and a series of tests.

Hospital staffers ruled out appendicitis and surmised Claire was suffering from a ruptured ovarian cyst, which can be a harmless part of the menstrual cycle but can also be problematic and painful. After a few days — and a chemistry exam taken through gritted teeth — the pain went away.

Then the bill came.

Patient: Claire Lang-Ree, a 21-year-old Stanford University student who was living in Colorado for a few months while taking classes remotely. She's insured by Anthem Blue Cross through her mom's work as a pediatric nurse practitioner in Northern California.

Total Bill: $18,735.93, including two $722.50 fees for a nurse to "push" drugs into her IV, a process that takes seconds. Anthem's negotiated charges were $6,999 for the total treatment. Anthem paid $5,578.30, and the Lang-Rees owed $1,270.45 to the hospital, plus additional bills for radiologists and other care. (Claire also anted up a $150 copay at the ER.)

Service Provider: Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, part of the regional health care network Centura Health.

What Gives: As hospitals disaggregate charges for services once included in an ER visit, a hospitalization or a surgical procedure, there has been a proliferation of newfangled fees to increase billing. In the health field, this is called "unbundling." It's analogous to the airlines now charging extra for each checked bag or for an exit row seat. Over time, in the medical industry, this has led to separate fees for ever-smaller components of care. A charge to put medicine into a patient's IV line — a "push fee" — is one of them.

Though the biggest charge on Claire's bill, $9,885.73, was for a CT scan, in many ways Claire and her mom found the push fees most galling. (Note to readers: Scans are frequently many times more expensive when ordered in an ER than in other settings.)

"That was so ridiculous," says Claire, who adds she had previously taken the anti-nausea drug they gave her; it's available in tablet form for the price of a cup of coffee, no IV necessary. "It works really well. Why wasn't that an option?"

In Colorado, the average charge for the code corresponding to Claire's first IV push has nearly tripled since 2014, and the dollars hospitals actually get for the procedure has doubled. In Colorado Springs specifically, the cost for IV pushes rose even more sharply than it did statewide.

A typical nurse in Colorado Springs makes about $35 an hour. At that rate, it would take nearly 21 hours to earn the amount of money Penrose charged for a push of plunger that likely took seconds or at most minutes.

The hospital's charge for just one "IV push" was more than Claire's portion of the monthly rent in the home she shared with roommates. In the end, Anthem did not pay the push fees in its negotiated payment. But claims data shows that in 2020 Penrose typically received upward of $1,000 for the first IV push. And patients who didn't have an insurer to dismiss such charges would be stuck with them. Colorado hospitals on average received $723 for the same code, according to the claims database.

"It's insane the variation that we see in prices, and there's no rhyme or reason," says Cari Frank with the Center for Improving Value in Health Care, a Colorado nonprofit that runs a statewide health care claims database. "It's just that they've been able to negotiate those prices with the insurance company and the insurance company has decided to pay it."

To put the total cost in context, Penrose initially charged more money for Claire's visit than the typical Colorado hospital would have charged for helping someone give birth, according to data published by the Colorado Division of Insurance.

Even with the negotiated rate, "it was only $1,000 less than an average payment for having a baby," Frank says.

In an email statement, Centura said it "conducted a thorough review and determined all charges were accurate" and went on to explain that "an Emergency Room (ER) must be prepared for anything and everything that comes through the doors," requiring highly trained staff, plus equipment and supplies. "All of this adds up to large operating costs and can translate into patient responsibility."

As researchers have found, little stands in the way of hospitals charging through the roof, especially in a place like an emergency room, where a patient has few choices. A report from National Nurses United found that hospital markups have more than doubled since 1999, according to data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. In an email, Anthem called the trend of increasing hospital prices "alarming" and "unsustainable."

But Ge Bai, an associate professor of accounting and health policy at Johns Hopkins University, says when patients see big bills it isn't only the hospital's doing — a lot depends on the insurer, too. For one, the negotiated price depends on the negotiating power of the payer, in this case, Anthem.

"Most insurance companies don't have comparable negotiating or bargaining power with the hospital," said Bai. Prices in a state like Michigan, where Bai said the UAW union covers a big proportion of Michigan patients, will look very different from those in Colorado.

Also, insurers are not the wallet defenders patients might assume them to be.

"In many cases, insurance companies don't negotiate as aggressively as they can, because they earn profit from the percentage of the claims," she says. The more expensive the actual payment is, the more money they get to extract.

Though Anthem negotiated away the push fees, it paid the hospital 30% more than the average Level IV emergency department visit in Colorado that year, and it paid quadruple what Medicare would allow for her CT scan.

Resolution: Claire and her mom decided to fight the bill, writing letters to the hospital and searching for information on what the procedures should have cost. The cost of the IV pushes and CT scan infuriated them — the hospital wanted more than double for a CT than what top-rated hospitals typically charged in 2019.

But the threat of collections wore them out and ultimately they paid their assigned share of the bill — $1,420.45, which was mostly coinsurance.

"Eventually it got to the point where I was like, 'I don't really want to go to collections, because this might ruin my credit score,'" says Claire, who didn't want to graduate from college with dinged credit.

Bai and Frank say the state of Maryland can provide a useful benchmark for medical bills, since it sets the prices that hospitals can charge for each procedure. Data provided by the Maryland Health Care Commission shows that Anthem and Claire paid seven times what she likely would have paid for the CT scan there, and nearly 10 times what they likely would have paid for the emergency department Level IV visit. In Maryland, intravenous pushes typically cost about $200 apiece in 2019. A typical Maryland hospital would have received only about $1,350 from a visit like Claire's, and the Lang-Rees would have been on the hook for about $270.

Claire's pain has come back a few times, but never as bad as that night in Colorado. She has avoided reentering an emergency room since then. After visiting multiple specialists back home in California, she learned she might have had a condition called ovarian torsion.

The Takeaway: Even at an in-network facility and with good insurance, patients can get hurt financially by visiting the ER. A few helpful documents can help guide the way to fighting such charges. The first is an itemized bill.

"I just think it's wrong in the U.S. to charge so much," says Jen Lang-Ree. "It's just a little side passion of mine to look at those and make sure I'm not being scammed."

Bai, of Johns Hopkins, suggests asking for an itemized explanation of benefits from the insurance company, too. That will show what the hospital actually received for each procedure.

Find out if the hospital massively overcharged. The Medicare price lookup tool can be useful for getting a benchmark. And publicly available data on health claims in Colorado and at least 17 other states can help, too.

Vincent Plymell with the Colorado Division of Insurance encourages patients to reach out if something on a bill looks sketchy. "Even if it's not a plan we regulate," he wrote in an email, departments such as his "can always arm the consumer with info."

Finally, make scrutinizing such charges fun. Claire and Jen made bill-fighting their mother-daughter hobby for the winter. They recommend pretzel chips and cocktails to boost the mood.

Bill of the Month is a crowdsourced investigation by KHN and NPR that dissects and explains medical bills. Do you have an interesting medical bill you want to share with us? Tell us about it!

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

Many hospitals around the country, including Medstar Washington Hospital in Washington DC., have started sharing their prices online in compliance with a recent federal rule.; Credit: DANIEL SLIM/AFP via Getty Images

A colonoscopy might cost you or your insurer a few hundred dollars — or several thousand, depending on which hospital or insurer you use.

Long hidden, such price variations are supposed to be available in stark black and white under a Trump administration price transparency rule that took effect at the start of this year. It requires hospitals to post a range of actual prices — everything from the rates they offer cash-paying customers to costs negotiated with insurers.

Many have complied.

But some hospitals bury the data deep on their websites or have not included all the categories of prices required, according to industry analysts. A sizable minority of hospitals have not disclosed the information at all.

While imperfect and potentially of limited use right now to the average consumer, the disclosures that are available illustrate the huge differences in prices — nationally, regionally and within the same hospital. But they're challenging for consumers and employers to use, giving a boost to a cottage industry that analyzes the data.

While it's still an unanswered question whether price transparency will lead to overall lower prices, KHN took a dive into the initial trove of data to see what it reveals. Here are five takeaways from the newly public data and tips for how you might be able to use it to your benefit

1) As expected, prices are all over the map

The idea behind the requirement to release prices is that the transparency may prompt consumers to shop around, weighing cost and quality. Perhaps they could save a few hundred dollars by getting their surgery or imaging test across town instead of at the nearby clinic or hospital.

Under the Trump-era rule, hospitals must post what they accept from all insurers for thousands of line items, including each drug, procedure or treatment they provide. In addition, hospitals must present this in a format easily readable by computers and include a consumer-friendly separate listing of 300 "shoppable" services, bundling the full price a hospital accepts for a given treatment, such as having a baby or getting a hip replacement.

The negotiated rates now being posted publicly often show an individual hospital accepting a wide range of prices for the same service, depending on the insurer, often based on how much negotiating power each has in a market.

In some cases, the cash-only price is less than what insurers pay. And prices may vary widely within the same city or region.

In Virginia, for example, the average price of a diagnostic colonoscopy is $2,763, but the range across the state is from $208 to $10,563, according to a database aggregated by San Diego-based Turquoise Health, one of the new firms looking to market the data to businesses, while offering some information free of charge to patients.

2) Patients can look up the information, but it's incomplete

Patients can try to find the price information themselves by searching hospital websites, but even locating the correct tab on a hospital's website is tricky.

Typically, consumers don't comparison-shop, preferring to choose convenience or the provider their doctor recommends. A recent Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker brief, for instance, found that 85% of adults said they had not researched online the price of a hospital treatment.

And hospitals say the transparency push alone won't help consumers much, because each patient's situation is different and may vary from the average— and individual deductibles and insurance plans complicate matters.

But if you do want to try, here's one tip: "You can Google the hospital name and the words 'price transparency' and see where that takes you," says Caitlin Sheetz, director and head of analytics at the consulting firm ADVI Health in the Washington, D.C., metro area.

Typing in "MedStar Health hospital transparency," for example, likely points to the MedStar Washington Hospital Center's "price transparency disclosure" page, with a link to its full list of prices, as well as its separate list of 300 shoppable services.

By clicking on the list of shoppable services, consumers can download an Excel file. Searching it for "colonoscopy" pulls up several variations of the procedure, along with prices for different insurers, such as Aetna and Cigna, but a "not available" designation for the cash-only price. The file explains that MedStar does not have a standard cash price but makes determinations case by case.

Performing the same Google search for the nearby Inova health system results in less useful information.

Inova's website links to a long list of thousands of charges, which are not the discounts negotiated by insurers, and the list is not easily searchable. The website advises those who are not Inova patients or who would like to create their own estimate to log into the hospitals' "My Chart" system, but a search on that for "colonoscopy" failed to produce any data.

3) Third-party firms are trying to make searching prices simpler – and cash in

Because of the difficulty of navigating these websites — or locating the negotiated prices once there — some consumers may turn to sites like Turquoise. Another such firm is Health Cost Labs, which will have pricing information for 2,300 hospitals in its database when it goes live July 1.

Doing a similar search for "colonoscopy" on Turquoise shows the prices at MedStar by insurer, but the process is still complicated. First, a consumer must select the "health system" button from the website's menu of options, click on "surgical procedures," then click again on "digestive" to get to it.

There is no similar information for Inova because the hospital has not yet made its data accessible in a computer-friendly format, said Chris Severn, CEO of Turquoise.

Inova spokesperson Tracy Connell said in a written statement that the health system will create personalized estimates for patients and is "currently working to post information on negotiated prices and discounts on services."

Firms like Turquoise and Health Cost Labs aim to sell the data gathered from hospitals nationally to insurers, employers and others. In turn, those groups may use it in negotiations with hospitals over future prices. While that may drive down prices in areas with a lot of competition, it might do the opposite where there are few hospitals to choose from, or in situations where a hospital raises its prices to match competitors.

4) Consumers could use this data to negotiate, especially if they're paying cash

For consumers who go the distance and can find price data from their hospitals, it may prove helpful in certain situations:

• Patients who are paying cash or who have unmet deductibles may want to compare prices among hospitals to see if driving farther could save them money.
• Uninsured patients could ask the hospital for the cash price or attempt to negotiate for the lowest amount the facility accepts from insurers.
• Insured patients who get a bill for out-of-network care may find the information helpful because it could empower them to negotiate a discount off the hospitals' gross charges for that care.

While there's no guarantee of success, "if you are uninsured or out of network, you could point to some of those prices and say, 'That's what I want,'" says Barak Richman, a contract law expert and professor of law at Duke University School of Law.

But the data may not help insured patients who notice their prices are higher than those negotiated by other insurers.

In those cases, legal experts say the insured patients are unlikely to get a bill changed because they have a contract with that insurer, which has negotiated the price with their contracted hospitals.

"Legally, a contract is a contract," says Mark Hall, a health law professor at Wake Forest University.

Richman agrees.

"You can't say, 'Well, you charged that person less,'" he notes, but neither can they say they'll charge you more.

Getting the data, however, relies on the hospital having posted it.

5) Hospitals still aren't really on board

When it comes to compliance, "we're seeing the range of the spectrum," says Jeffrey Leibach, a partner at the consulting firm Guidehouse, which found earlier this year that about 60% of 1,000 hospitals surveyed had posted at least some data, but 30% had reported nothing at all.

Many in the hospital industry have long fought transparency efforts, even filing a lawsuit seeking to block the new rule. The suit was dismissed by a federal judge last year.

They argue the rule is unclear and overly burdensome. Additionally, hospitals haven't wanted their prices exposed, knowing that competitors might then adjust theirs, or health plans could demand lower rates. Conversely, lower-cost hospitals might decide to raise prices to match competitors.

The rule stems from requirements in the Affordable Care Act. The Obama administration required hospitals to post their chargemaster rates, which are less useful because they are generally inflated, hospital-set amounts that are almost never what is actually paid.

Insurers and hospitals are also bracing for next year when even more data is set to come online. Insurers will be required to post negotiated prices for medical care across a broader range of facilities, including clinics and doctors' offices.

In May, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services sent letters to some of the hospitals that have not complied, giving them 90 days to do so or potentially face penalties, including a $300-a-day fine.

"A lot of members say until hospitals are fully compliant, our ability to use the data is limited," says Shawn Gremminger, director of health policy at the Purchaser Business Group on Health, a coalition of large employers.

His group and others have called for increasing the penalty for noncomplying hospitals from $300 a day to $300 a bed per day, so "the fine would be bigger as the hospital gets bigger," Gremminger says. "That's the kind of thing they take seriously."

Already, though, employers or insurers are eyeing the hospital data as leverage in negotiations, says Severn, Turquoise's CEO. Conversely, some employers may use it to fire their insurers if the rates they're paying are substantially more than those agreed to by other carriers.

"It will piss off anyone who is overpaying for health care, which happens for various reasons," he says.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation).

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

The Solar System is full of its own tricks and treats, so discover some of our favorites below.

Geologic mapping has been one of the most fundamental mandates of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) since its establishment in 1879. Congress created the USGS to "classify the public lands and examine the geological structure, mineral resources, and products within and outside the national domain."

Progressive activists are watching the end of the Supreme Court session for a possible retirement announcement from Stephen Breyer, the court's oldest current justice. Breyer will turn 83 in August.; Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP/Pool

For Erwin Chemerinsky, this is a familiar feeling: Seven years ago, the dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law publicly called for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire from the Supreme Court because he reasoned too much was at stake in the 2016 elections.

Ginsburg didn't listen then, but he's hoping Justice Stephen Breyer will listen now — but Breyer has given no indication whether he plans to stay or go.

"If he wants someone with his values and views to take his place, now is the time to step down," Chemerinsky told NPR.

Progressive activists are hoping that Breyer, who will turn 83 in August, will announce he is retiring Thursday, the same day the Supreme Court delivers its final two opinions of the term. But a justice can decide to retire at any time — though both Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor announced their respective retirements at the end of the court's session.

Chemerinsky is part of a growing rank of progressives who are breaking with the polite, political norms of the past when it comes to questioning service on the Supreme Court. Ginsburg's death last year and the subsequent appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to deliver a conservative supermajority on the court had a lot to do with that.

"I think a lot of people who thought that silence was the best approach in 2013 came to regret that in the aftermath of [Ginsburg's] untimely passing last year," said Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice. "I think it would be foolish of us to repeat this same mistake and to greet the current situation passively and not do everything we can to signal to Justice Breyer, that now is the time for him to step down"

Since Democrats took control of the Senate in January, Demand Justice has organized public demonstrations, billboard and ad campaigns, and assembled a list of scholars and activists to join their public pressure campaign for Breyer to retire.

The risk, as Fallon sees it, is twofold. The first is the perils of a 50-50 Senate.

"The Democrats are one heartbeat away from having control switch in the Senate," he said. "There's a lot of octogenarian senators, many of whom have Republican governors that might get to appoint a successor to them if the worst happened."

The second is the 2022 midterms when control of the Senate will be in play.

"If [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell reassumes the Senate majority leader post, at worst, he might block any Biden pick, and at best, Biden is going to have to calibrate who he selects in order to get them through a Republican-held Senate."

Both Chemerinsky and Fallon concede the public campaign is not without some risk.

"I've certainly heard from some that this might make him less likely to retire, perhaps to dig in his heels," Chemerinsky said.

The campaign has also not caught fire on Capitol Hill, where only a small handful of progressive senators have — tactfully — suggested they'd like to see Breyer retire of his own accord.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., told CNN this month he did not support any Senate-led pressure campaigns on the court, but he added: "My secret heart is that some members, particularly the 82-year-old Stephen Breyer, will maybe have that thought on his own, that he should not let his seat be subject to a potential theft."

Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., also distanced himself from the public retirement push, telling NPR: "I'm not on that campaign to put pressure on Justice Breyer. He's done an exceptional job. He alone can make the decision about his future. And I trust him to make the right one."

Absent any change in the status quo, Democrats will control the Senate at least until 2023. If the court's session ends without a retirement announcement, Fallon said he expects the calls for Breyer's retirement will grow louder. It's all part of what he said is a new, more aggressive position on the Supreme Court from the left.

"In some way, we are trying to make a point that progressives for too long, have taken a hands-off approach to the court," he said. "And they've been sort of foolish for doing so because the other side doesn't operate that way."

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

Incoming President Biden and Vice President Harris stand with their respective spouses Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff after delivering remarks in Wilmington, Del., on Nov. 7, the day the Democrats were declared the winners in the 2020 election.; Credit: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

We know that President Biden won the 2020 election (regardless of what former President Donald Trump and his allies say). We just haven't had a great picture of how Biden won.

That is until Wednesday, when we got the clearest data yet on how different groups voted, and crucially, how those votes shifted from 2016. The Pew Research Center just released its validated voters' report, considered a more accurate measure of the electorate than exit polls, which have the potential for significant inaccuracies.

The new Pew data shows that shifts among suburban voters, white men and independents helped Biden win in November, even while white women and Hispanics swung toward Trump from 2016 to 2020.

To compile the data, Pew matches up survey respondents with state voter records. Those voter files do not say how a person voted, but they do allow researchers to be sure that a person voted, period. That helps with accuracy, eliminating the possibility of survey respondents overreporting their voting activity. In addition, the Pew study uses large samples of Americans — more than 11,000 people in 2020.

It's a numbers-packed report, but there are some big takeaways about what happened in 2020 (and what it might tell us about 2022 and beyond):

Suburban voters (especially white suburban voters) swung toward Biden

Suburban voters appear to have been a major factor helping Biden win. While Pew found Trump winning the suburbs by 2 points in 2016, Biden won them by 11 points in 2020, a 13-point overall swing. Considering that the suburbs accounted for just over half of all voters, it was a big demographic win for Biden.

That said, Trump gained in both rural and urban areas. He won 65% of rural voters, a 6-point jump from 2016. And while cities were still majority-Democratic, his support there jumped by 9 points, to 33%.

Men (especially white men) swung toward Biden

In 2020, men were nearly evenly split, with 48% choosing Biden to Trump's 50%. That gap shrank considerably from 2016, when Trump won men by 11 points. In addition, this group that swung away from Trump grew as a share of the electorate from 2016 — signaling that in a year with high turnout, men's turnout grew more.

White men were a big part of the swing toward Biden. In 2016, Trump won white men by 30 points. In 2020, he won them again, but by a substantially slimmer 17 points.

In addition, Biden made significant gains among married men and college-educated men. All of these groups overlap, but they help paint a more detailed portrait of the type of men who might have shifted or newly participated in 2020.

However, we can't know from this data what exactly was behind these shifts among men — for example, exactly what share of men might have sat on the sidelines in 2016, as opposed to 2020.

Women (especially white women) swung toward Trump

The idea that a majority of white women voted for Trump quickly became one of the 2016 election's most-cited statistics, as many Hillary Clinton supporters — particularly women — were outraged to see other women support Trump.

While that statistic was repeated over and over, Pew's data ultimately said this wasn't true — they found that in 2016, white women were split 47% to 45%, slightly in Trump's favor but not a majority.

This year, however, it appears that Trump did win a majority of white women. Pew found that 53% of white women chose Trump this year, up by 6 points from 2016.

This support contributed to an overall shift in women's numbers — while Clinton won women of all races by 15 points in 2016, Biden won them by 11 points in 2020. Combined with men's shifts described above, it shrank 2016's historic gender gap.

Notably, the swing in white women's margin (5 points altogether) was significantly smaller than white men's swing toward Biden (13 points altogether).

Hispanic voters swung toward Trump

Trump won 38% of Hispanic voters in 2020, according to Pew, up from 28% in 2016.

That 38% would put Trump near George W. Bush's 40% from 2004 — a recent high-water mark for Republicans with Hispanic voters. That share fell off substantially after 2004, leading some Republican pollsters and strategists to wonder how the party could regain that ground. Trump in 2016 intensified those fears, with his nativist rhetoric and hard-line immigration policies.

There are some important nuances to these Hispanic numbers. Perhaps most notably, there is a sizable education gap. Biden won college-educated Hispanic voters by 39 points, but the Democrat won those with some college education or less by 14 points.

That gap mirrors the education gap regularly seen in the broader voting population.

Unfortunately, Pew's sample sizes from 2016 weren't big enough to break down Hispanic voters by gender that year, so it's impossible to see if this group's gender gap widened.

Nonwhite voters leaned heavily toward Biden

Unlike white and Hispanic voters, Black voters didn't shift significantly from 2016. They remained Democratic stalwarts, with 92% choosing Biden — barely changed from four years earlier.

Nearly three-quarters of Asian voters also voted for Biden, along with 6 in 10 Hispanic voters and 56% of voters who chose "other" as their race. (Those groups' sample sizes also weren't big enough in 2016 to draw a comparison over time.)

2018 trends stuck around ... but diminished

In many of these cases where there were substantial shifts in how different groups voted, they weren't surprising, given how voters in the last midterms voted. For example, white men voted more for Democrats in 2018 than they did in 2016, as did suburban voters.

What it means for 2022

The data signals that Democrats' strength with Hispanic voters has eroded, but that the party succeeded in making further inroads in the suburbs, including among suburban whites.

It suggests that these groups, already major focuses for both parties, will continue to be so in 2022, with Republicans trying to cement their gains among Hispanics (and regain suburban voters), while Democrats do Hispanic outreach and try to hold onto the suburbs.

However, it's hard to project much into the future about what voters will do based on the past two elections because of their unique turnout numbers.

"It's hard to interpret here, because 2018 was such a high turnout midterm election, and then our last data point, 2014, was a historically low turnout midterm election," said Ruth Igielnik, senior researcher at Pew Research Center.

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

Shot from the film "The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It"; Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

Larry Mantle and KPCC film critics Amy Nicholson, Wade Major and Charles Solomon review this weekend’s new movie releases on streaming and on demand platforms.

• "The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It," in wide release & HBO Max

• "Spirit Untamed," in wide release

• "Edge Of The World," on VOD (including Google Play & FandangoNow)

• "All Light, Everywhere," at The Landmark Theater; Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 (Pasadena) on June 11

• "City of Ali," Laemmle’s Virtual Cinema; Laemmle’s NoHo 7 on June 17

• "Gully," In Select Theaters including Cinemark 18 and XD (Los Angeles), Cinemark 22 and IMAX (Lancaster); VOD (Youtube & Vudu) June 8

• "On The Trail Of Bigfoot: The Journey," VOD (including iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Vudu & FandangoNOW) June 8

• "Undine," Laemmle Theaters (Playhouse 7, Newhall, Town Center 5, Royal, Claremont 5); VOD (including iTunes, Vudu, Google Play)

• "Grace And Grit," in select theaters & VOD (including FandangoNow, iTunes, Spectrum on Demand)

• "Super Frenchie," In select theaters & VOD (including Google Play, iTunes & FandangoNow)

• "Bad Tales," In select theaters; Laemmle Virtual Cinema & Monica Film Center; VOD

• "Flashback," VOD (including Vudu, FandangoNow & Spectrum on Demand)

Our FilmWeek critics have been curating personal lists of their favorite TV shows and movies to binge-watch during self-quarantine. You can see recommendations from each of the critics and where you can watch them here.

Guests:

Amy Nicholson, film critic for KPCC, film writer for The New York Times and host of the podcast ‘Unspooled’ and the podcast miniseries “Zoom”; she tweets @TheAmyNicholson

Wade Major, film critic for KPCC and CineGods.com

Charles Solomon, film critic for KPCC, Animation Scoop and Animation Magazine

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

Source: Streetwise Reports 11/08/2024

Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. (VRTX:NASDAQ) has reported a robust financial performance for the third quarter of 2024. The report has demonstrated the company's continued revenue growth and the strengthening of its innovative pipeline. For Q3 2024, Vertex's product revenue reached US$2.77 billion, a 12% increase from the previous year. This was primarily driven by strong demand for its TRIKAFTA®/KAFTRIO® therapies. Based on this momentum, Vertex raised its full-year product revenue guidance to a range of US$10.8 billion to US$10.9 billion, citing a solid trajectory in its cystic fibrosis (CF) portfolio and expected future launches.

In Q3, the company made notable advancements in its pipeline. Three programs have begun moving into Phase 3 clinical development: suzetrigine in diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN), povetacicept in IgA nephropathy (IgAN), and VX-880 in type 1 diabetes (T1D). Vertex is also preparing for the launch of two potential treatments in early 2025, with PDUFA dates set for January 2 for the vanzacaftor triple therapy for CF and January 30 for suzetrigine, the latter being a pain medication in a new therapeutic class aimed at reducing reliance on opioids.

GAAP and Non-GAAP net income both reached US$1.0 billion, largely driven by increased product revenue, which offset rising R&D and SG&A expense. This was s due to investments in global commercialization and late-stage clinical development. For Q3, Vertex's combined R&D and SG&A expenses were US$1.2 billion and US$1.1 billion, respectively, an increase from last year attributed to new global program advancements and upcoming launch support.

Vertex's cash position remained strong, with US$11.2 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities as of September 30. The decline from US$13.7 billion at the end of 2023 primarily reflects the acquisition of Alpine Immune Sciences and share repurchases under the company's buyback program.

A Look At Biotechnology and Pharma

The U.S. Pharmaceuticals Report for 2024 by Nova One Advisor detailed the size and growth trajectory of the U.S. pharmaceutical market. Valued at US$602.19 billion in 2023, the sector is projected to exceed US$1 trillion by 2033. The report pointed to a "high healthcare expenditure provided by government bodies" as a primary growth driver, further bolstered by the aging population's demand for advanced treatments.

In an October 24 article, The Investing News Network reported on a dynamic landscape within the biotechnology sector. The report highlighted advancements in AI-powered drug discovery. Despite a cautious investment climate, interest remained strong in AI's potential to reshape healthcare, with venture capital investment reaching US$6.59 billion. At the HealthTech Ignite conference, Susie Roberts from Relay Therapeutics expressed confidence, noting, "We will definitely see AI design drugs in the next 10 years."

On November 4, Yahoo! Finance shared insights from MIT professors Andrew Lo and Dennis Whyte. They emphasized that biotechnology's rapid advancement over the past five decades offers valuable lessons for future innovation. In their research paper, Lo and Whyte proposed initiatives to accelerate biotechnology's growth, underscoring the importance of "reducing risk and uncertainty" to foster a robust investment ecosystem that supports groundbreaking discoveries.

Catalysts Driving Vertex Pharma

According to Vertex's November 2024 investor presentation, the company sees multiple growth catalysts over the next few years. Vertex aims to meet its goal of achieving "five launches in five years," focusing on expanding the treatable patient base in CF with vanzacaftor triple, addressing critical needs in sickle cell disease (SCD) and beta thalassemia (TDT) with CASGEVY, and launching suzetrigine for acute pain management.

Additionally, Vertex expects its expansive R&D pipeline to support long-term growth. This includes pivotal clinical trials for VX-880 in T1D, povetacicept in IgAN, and NaV1.8 pain inhibitors like suzetrigine, indicating a commitment to treating a range of chronic and life-threatening conditions with limited therapeutic options.

By driving advancements in CF therapies, diversifying its portfolio with novel pain treatments, and pursuing accelerated approvals for renal and blood-related disorders, Vertex is strategically positioning itself to sustain growth and achieve several near-term milestones.

What Are Experts Saying About Vertex?

In a November 5, 2024, H.C. Wainwright & Co. update, the analysts highlighted promising data from Vertex's recent Phase 2 trial for suzetrigine, which showed encouraging reductions in pain intensity. [OWNERSHIP_CHART-4085]

The analysts noted that suzetrigine's peripheral nervous system-specific mechanism could potentially address "a significant, unmet medical need worldwide" in non-opioid pain management. They set a price target of US$600.00, projecting Vertex's continued growth from its strong cystic fibrosis franchise and pipeline expansion.

From the November 7 Kingswood Capital Partners report, analysts noted Vertex Pharmaceuticals' "sustained execution" in advancing product development programs and achieving robust operating margins, enabling "continued, significant investments" in both its pipeline and commercial capabilities. The firm maintained a "Buy" rating with a 12-month target price of US$550.00, attributing this outlook to Vertex's deep cash resources and historical successes in clinical trials.

Ownership and Share Structure

According to Refinitiv, 95.44% of Vertex Pharmaceuticals is held by Institutions. The top among them are Capital World Investors at 10.37%, The Vanguard Group at 8.88%, BlackRock Institutional Trust with 5.49%, State Street Global Advisors (US) with 4.55%, and Fidelity Management and Research with 4.11%. Strategic Investors hold .12%. The rest is retail.

The company's market cap is US$129,395.59 million with 257.07 million free float shares. The 52 week range is US$341.90–$510.64.

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Important Disclosures:

1) James Guttman wrote this article for Streetwise Reports LLC and provides services to Streetwise Reports as an employee.

2) This article does not constitute investment advice and is not a solicitation for any investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her personal financial adviser and perform their own comprehensive investment research. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company.

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( Companies Mentioned: VRTX:NASDAQ, )

On-Demand Webinar > Watch Now! SPONSORED BY: TripwireWatch this FREE on-demand webinar to learn how to overcome the top 5 compliance challenges keeping IT directors awake at night! Watch Now! Overc...

Jericho Energy Ventures Inc. (JEV:TSX.V; JROOF:OTC; JLM:FRA) has announced a strategic move to spin off its hydrogen solutions platform into a separate entity. Read more on how this transition aims to unlock growth in both hydrogen and traditional energy sectors.

Rescuers search for bodies from the site where a Philippine military C-130 plane crashed in Patikul town, Sulu province, southern Philippines on Sunday, July 4, 2021.; Credit: /Joint Task Force-Sulu via AP

MANILA, Philippines — A Philippine air force C-130 aircraft carrying combat troops crashed in a southern province while landing Sunday, killing at least 29 army soldiers on board and two civilians on the ground, while at least 50 were rescued from the burning wreckage, officials said.

Some soldiers were seen jumping off the aircraft before it crashed and exploded around noon in the periphery of the Jolo airport in Sulu province, military officials said. Two of six villagers who were hit on the ground have died.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said rescue and recovery efforts were ongoing. The aircraft had 96 people on board, including three pilots and five crew and the rest were army personnel, the military said, adding 17 soldiers remained unaccounted for by nightfall. The pilots survived but were seriously injured, officials said.

The Lockheed C-130 Hercules was one of two ex-U.S. Air Force aircraft handed over to the Philippines as part of military assistance this year. It crashed while landing shortly before noon Sunday in Bangkal village in the mountainous town of Patikul, military chief of staff Gen. Cirilito Sobejana said.

Military officials said at least 50 people on board were brought to a hospital in Sulu or flown to nearby Zamboanga city and troops were trying to search for the rest. "Per eyewitnesses, a number of soldiers were seen jumping out of the aircraft before it hit the ground, sparing them from the explosion caused by the crash," a military statement said.

Initial pictures released by the military showed the tail section of the cargo plane relatively intact. The other parts of the plane were burned or scattered in pieces in a clearing surrounded by coconut trees. Soldiers and other rescuers with stretchers were seen dashing to and from the smoke-shrouded crash site.

The plane was transporting troops, many of them new soldiers who had just undergone basic training, from the southern Cagayan de Oro city for deployment in Sulu, officials said.

"They were supposed to join us in our fight against terrorism," Sulu military commander Maj. Gen. William Gonzales said. Government forces have been battling Abu Sayyaf militants in the predominantly Muslim province of Sulu for decades.

It was not immediately clear what caused the crash. Regional military commander Lt. Gen. Corleto Vinluan said it was unlikely that the aircraft took hostile fire, and cited witnesses as saying that it appeared to have overshot the runway then crashed in the periphery of the airport.

"It's very unfortunate," Sobejana told reporters. "The plane missed the runway and it was trying to regain power but failed and crashed."

An air force official told The Associated Press that the Jolo runway is shorter than most others in the country, making it more difficult for pilots to adjust if an aircraft misses the landing spot. The official, who has flown military aircraft to and from Jolo several times, spoke on condition of anonymity because of a lack of authority to speak publicly.

Initial pictures showed that the weather was apparently fine in Sulu although other parts of the Philippines were experiencing rains due to an approaching tropical depression. The airport in Sulu's main town of Jolo is located a few kilometers (miles) from a mountainous area where troops have battled Abu Sayyaf militants. Some militants have aligned themselves with the Islamic State group.

The U.S. and the Philippines have separately blacklisted Abu Sayyaf as a terrorist organization for bombings, ransom kidnappings and beheadings. It has been considerably weakened by years of government offensives but remains a threat.

President Rodrigo Duterte expanded the military presence in Sulu into a full division in late 2018, deploying hundreds of additional troops, air force aircraft and other combat equipment after vowing to wipe out the Abu Sayyaf and allied foreign and local gunmen.

Government forces at the time were running after Muslim armed groups a year after quelling the five-month siege of southern Marawi city by hundreds of militants linked to the Islamic State group. More than 1,000 people, mostly militants and long-elusive Abu Sayyaf commanders, were killed in months of intense air and ground assaults.

Sunday's crash comes as the limited number of military aircraft has been further strained, as the air force helped transport medical supplies, vaccines and protective equipment to far-flung island provinces amid spikes in COVID-19 infections.

The Philippine government has struggled for years to modernize its military, one of Asia's least equipped, as it dealt with decades-long Muslim and communist insurgencies and territorial rifts with China and other claimant countries in the South China Sea.

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

A tropical storm with 65-mile-an-hour winds is drenching Cuba, and is expected to reach Key West and the west coast of Florida within the next 48 hours.

The National Hurricane Center expects Tropical Storm Elsa to drop between 5 and 10 inches of rain on central and western Cuba, leading to significant flooding and mudslides. The storm probably will weaken somewhat as it crosses the island, but could strengthen again as it approaches Florida.

According to the Associated Press, Cuban officials evacuated 180,000 people as a precaution against the possibility of heavy flooding.

Most of those evacuated stayed at relatives' homes, others went to government shelters, and hundreds living in mountainous areas took refuge in caves prepared for emergencies. The storm had killed at least three people on other Caribbean islands before it reached Cuba

The National Weather Service says that the western coast of Florida, including Tampa Bay, can expect a storm surge that would lift water levels between two and four feet. Much of Florida could see heavy rainfall that could reach six inches in some places. The storm will then bring heavy rains to Georgia and the Carolinas later in the week.

Florida officials were worried that the storm could destabilize what was left of the condominium building that partially collapsed over a week ago. In order to avoid an uncontrolled collapse, they approved the demolition of the remaining portion of the building, which took place on Sunday night.

"The hurricane was coming, the potential for that building to fall on the pile with the victims in it was a tragic thought," Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told NPR on Monday.

It's early in the hurricane season. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted a busier-than-average Atlantic hurricane season, but it would be hard to top last year's, which set an all-time record with 30 named storms.

Tropical storms are fueled by warm water in the upper layers of the ocean, and ocean temperatures have been rising as heat is trapped by greenhouse gases.

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

Crews searching the building collapse site in Surfside, Fla., have discovered four more victims since Monday, bringing the death toll to 32. Authorities have identified 26 of the bodies.

Another 113 people were unaccounted for, though local officials said they had only been able to confirm that about 70 of those people were in the building at the time of the collapse nearly two weeks ago.

Detectives are continuing to follow up on reports submitted about possible victims in the partial collapse, but in some cases they have been unable to reach those who submitted the tips in the first place.

"People call anonymously. People call and don't leave return phone numbers. People call with partial information, not enough to really secure whether that person may or may not have been in the building," Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told reporters on Tuesday.

Some of the reports of possible victims are also incomplete, she said, including a name but no apartment number or no date of birth.

Levine Cava urged people who are missing loved ones to communicate with local authorities. She said there may also be victims of the collapse who have not been reported missing.

The rescue effort stopped briefly overnight due to lightning from a passing storm. Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said high winds were hampering the cranes moving heavy debris from the collapse site.

Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez said Florida has declared a state of emergency ahead of Tropical Storm Elsa, which is expected to reach hurricane strength before making landfall Wednesday morning on the state's west coast.

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

With the advent of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and data analytics, banks across the world are embracing a new era of innovation to enhance their services and improve customer experiences. These innovations are empowering banks to provide personalized, efficient, reliable, and secure financial solutions to their customers.

Two members of the Catawba County Board of Commissioners, Vice-Chair Lynn Lail and Commissioner Barbara Beatty joined UNC Charlotte officials and leaders from business and power industries to celebrate the start of construction on the University�s Energy Production and Infrastructure Center (EPIC). EPIC is a planned research endeavor between the University and private partners with the goal of expanding energy engineering and research within the region based on industry needs. The Catawba County EcoComplex will play an important role in EPIC through research partnership between Catawba County and UNC-Charlotte

At the spring North Carolina City & County Communicators Conference, held March 30-April 1, in Fayetteville, NC, Dave Hardin, Public Information Officer for Catawba County, received the prestigious Chris Coulson Memorial Award. The award is presented to a person whose character, career and service represents the highest standards and who excels in the practice of local government communications.

A Catawba County Department of Social Services program that helped teenagers enrolled in a poverty reduction and teen pregnancy program better understand the myths of government support programs has been named a winner of a 2011 National Association of Counties (NACo) Achievement Award.

The Catawba County Sheriff�s Office, in conjunction with The Cognitive Connection and The Foothills Coalition, is sponsoring an Operation Pill Stoppers program that now provides fixed locations for citizens to properly dispose of their unused and unwanted medications.

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

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.

Robin Heilweil, 6, wears a mask while swinging around with her kindergarten class this month at Kenter Canyon School in Los Angeles.; Credit: Sarah Reingewirtz/Los Angeles Daily News/Southern California News Group via Getty Images

New research released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reinforces an old message: COVID-19 spreads less in schools where teachers and staff wear masks. Yet the study arrives as states and school districts across the country have begun scaling back or simply dropping their masking requirements for staff and students alike.

With the majority of school-age children still too young to qualify for vaccination, Friday's research is the latest salvo in a simmering fight between public health officials and politicians — with parents lining up on both sides.

The new study comes from Georgia and compares COVID-19 infection rates across 169 K-5 schools. Some schools required teachers, staff and sometimes students to wear masks; some did not.

Between Nov. 16 and Dec. 11, researchers found that infection rates were 37% lower in schools where teachers and staff members were required to wear masks. The difference between schools that did and did not require students to wear masks was not statistically significant.

This is one more study showing that masking, among other mitigation efforts, "can reduce infections and ultimately save lives," said Dr. Sean O'Leary, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado and vice chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

O'Leary points to a previous CDC study, of schools in Florida, that also found "a strong association with student mask requirements and lower rates of infections in students."

Like any study, Friday's release comes with caveats. Only 12% of schools invited to share their data did so. And it's always worth remembering: Correlation is not causation. Still, the results offer an important warning to states and school districts that are now lifting their school-based mask requirements, especially for adults: It's safer if you don't.

The latest, and perhaps broadest effort to change schools' masking policies comes from Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Tuesday banning all mask mandates in the state's public schools. After June 4, the order says, "no student, teacher, parent or other staff member or visitor may be required to wear a face covering."

For Abbott, and many opponents of mask mandates, the move is about restoring a balance between safety and freedom. "We can continue to mitigate COVID-19 while defending Texans' liberty to choose whether or not they mask up," he said in announcing the order.

Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, called the move "unconscionable" in a statement. "The governor's new verdict takes a blanket approach to addressing what is still extremely dangerous for some Texans — a return to school unmasked."

And Texas isn't alone. On Thursday, Iowa's Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, also signed a law banning schools from requiring masks. The justification is similar: "I am proud to be a governor of a state that values personal responsibility and individual liberties," Reynolds said in a statement.

"Whether a child wears a mask in school is a decision that should be left only to a student's parents," South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said last week as he issued an executive order allowing parents to opt their children out of school-based mask requirements.

Public health experts have been quick to sound the alarm.

"All along in this pandemic, we have seen the tragic consequences when politics start to play a role in public health decisions. And to me, this kind of maneuver smells like politics — to ban the requirements that are ultimately there to save lives," O'Leary said. "The body of evidence shows us that masks work."

And Dr. Aaron Milstone, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins, likens the banning of mask mandates to having a variable speed limit.

"Unfortunately, with contagious diseases the decisions I make impact someone else," Milstone said. "It would be like saying: You can drive 55 mph if you think that's safe for you, but if someone else thinks they can safely drive 90 mph, their choice may wind up risking your life."

While the CDC recently scaled back its masking guidance for people who are fully vaccinated, the agency also reiterated that schools should continue to require universal masking, at least through the end of the current school year. Though one vaccine has been approved for use for 12- to 15-year-olds, those kids won't be considered fully vaccinated for another month.

Milstone said it's simply too early to talk about schools without masking. "Until vaccines are eligible for all children, it's hard to abandon the practices that we know work the best to prevent the spread of COVID."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House, told CNBC this week that it is conceivable the CDC could recommend that middle and high schools be mask-free in the fall — if, that is, enough students 12 years of age and older get vaccinated.

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

; Credit: LA Johnson/NPR

Writing a graduation speech is a tricky task. Should you be funny, or sincere? Tell a story — or offer advice? For Yusef Pierce, a graduating senior in California, the job of putting together his public address was a bit more challenging.

"Being inside, I can't really refer to other graduation speeches," Pierce says. He's speaking by phone from inside the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium-security prison in Norco. "I was just trying to come up with what sounded like a graduation speech."

He is the first person to graduate with a bachelor's degree from the Inside-Out program at Pitzer College, a liberal arts school outside Los Angeles. In a normal year, the school would bring traditional students by bus to the prison to take classes alongside the students who are in prison.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, those classes are happening online. Pierce shared his Zoom square with 10 other guys, all wearing the CRC's blue uniforms and seated at those classic classroom desks, where the chair and the table are attached. This spring, his classes included topics like feminism for men, microeconomics and mass incarceration.

In one of those classes on a recent evening this spring, professor Nigel Boyle goes around asking each student what they're looking forward to doing that week. Pierce replies: "I'm looking forward to doing a lot of homework!"

"Every professor wants a Yusef in your class," says Boyle, who leads the Inside-Out program and teaches Pierce's Wednesday night class about mass incarceration. "You want that student who's bright, does the work, but is also helping to bring along the others."

It was only natural then that Pierce would be one of the college's graduation speakers.

"We don't label the student speaker as a valedictorian," explains Boyle. "But it happens that Yusef has a 4.0, and he's got a really interesting story to tell."

Pierce is in his early 30s and is a bit of a nerd and a class leader. He also writes poetry and paints. "It is true that oppression often requires that individuals make themselves extraordinary in order to simply survive," reads his artist's statement in an online exhibit of his work. "My paintings are entire conversations on canvas."

Eventually, he says, he wants to be a college professor, working with formerly incarcerated students.

"So he wants my job," says Boyle, laughing, "and he'd be much better at it than I am."

Boyle serves as the academic adviser to all of the incarcerated students, and he has become a mentor to Pierce, navigating him through the graduation process. In one of the last classes of the semester, Boyle hosts an impromptu fashion show, wearing his own blue cap and gown, backing away from the camera to give the onlooking students a full view of his outfit.

The guys inside cheer and whistle. "Do a spin," one guy shouts. "Beautiful! Beautiful!" another yells.

As the cheering dies down, Boyle looks for Pierce on the screen. "He doesn't know this, so it may be a slight surprise," he tells the class, "but, Yusef, you will also be receiving these cords." He drapes dark orange cords around his shoulders. "These cords are for students who graduate with honors in their degrees. Congratulations, Yusef, you are going to graduate with honors."

***

The story of how Yusef Pierce wound up in these college classes, wound up inside prison at all, starts with trauma. When he was a teen, his older brother was shot and killed. "He was murdered in the front yard of our home, right in front of my face," he explains, "and so I had to call my mom and let her know what had happened." All these years later, it's still something he doesn't like to talk about. He considered putting it in his graduation speech, but took it out, worried it might be too much for his mom to hear.

"It had a traumatic effect on all of us," Drochelle Pierce tells me over the phone, from her house in Victorville, Calif. She remembers a change in Yusef around that time.

"It was just kind of one thing after another. He got into a little bit of trouble. He allowed people that he associated with to kind of influence him in a direction that really wasn't him." Yusef finished high school, but in his early 20s he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery. Drochelle Pierce says she was beside herself when she learned his sentence would be nearly 20 years. "I tell you, honestly, I never envisioned that Yusef would ever go to prison. Never, never. Never."

A few months into Yusef's prison sentence, she wrote him a letter. "What's done is done," she wrote. "You, now more than ever, must diligently seek and obtain higher education."

It wasn't a new message. Education had always been at the center of her relationship with Yusef. When he was young, he remembers riding in the car with his mom, a sociology textbook open on his lap. "She wouldn't let me turn on the radio," he says. "She would make me read to her."

"Oh, I made [my kids] read everything," Drochelle Pierce says. "If they read it out loud, I knew they were reading it. That's the only way I would know that they were actually reading anything."

Today, the two talk on the phone nearly every day. "He was always a deep thinker," says Pierce. She knows she sounds like a typical proud mother, but she can't help it: "Yusef is very smart."

In California, college classes can shorten a prison sentence. So when the opportunity first arose for Yusef Pierce to take courses in prison, it felt like simply a means to an end. "I just want to get home sooner," he remembers joking with a friend at the time. "If they gave us time off for going to college, I would walk out of here with a Ph.D.!"

But by the time Pitzer College started offering classes for a bachelor's degree, Pierce found to his surprise that he really liked college.

"I loved it because it gave me validation," he says. "To know that somebody was reading my stuff and that somebody felt like the things that I was thinking about and writing were worth something. I got really addicted to that validation, and it just really turned me into an overachiever. And I just took class after class after class."

That drive paid off.

After writing and rewriting a number of drafts, on May 15 Pierce delivered his final graduation speech to hundreds of Pitzer graduates and their family members and friends. The content he landed on? That letter his mom sent him all those years ago.

"I realize now that I've saved this letter because it was meant for me way back then to share it with you all today," he says, dressed in his white cap and gown, draped in a kente stole, with the prison classroom where he has spent so much time in the background. "It reads, 'Dear son, I was so glad to see you Monday ...' "

As he reads the letter aloud, he gets to the part where his mother, a big poetry fan, included the lines from Invictus, a poem by William Ernest Henley. Pierce looks directly into the camera as he reads; he knows this part by heart.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Drochelle Pierce watched the speech on her laptop at home, with family gathered around. "We were all crying. We were just boohooing. It was just so sweet," she says.

The final line of the poem:

It matters not how strait the gate, / How charged with punishments the scroll, / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.

"I love that so much," she says. "I sent that to my son because I wanted him to think in terms of 'OK, here you are now. What happens to you from this point going forward, it really depends on you.' "

She is proud of her son and inspired by him too. "Look what he did. He turned a bad situation into something very, very positive. Here he is, graduating with his degree."

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

Some institutions have scrapped Columbus Day or switched to celebrating Indigenous Peoples' Day. One New Jersey school district came up with a new solution: eliminate all holiday names.; Credit: Olesya Semenov/EyeEm via Getty Images

Memorial Day. Thanksgiving. Labor Day.

You may be used to seeing your calendar punctuated by the various holidays that occur throughout the year.

But on one New Jersey school district's calendar, each one of these days will be listed, simply, as "day off."

It all started when the school board in Randolph Township voted to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples' Day. Some residents were outraged, so the board said that instead it would wipe holiday names from the school calendar altogether while still observing the days off.

"The overwhelming majority of the township population feels that they've [Randolph Township school board members] grossly overstepped their bounds, that they're completely pushing their own personal, political ideologies," Randolph resident Tom Tatem told Fox News. He started a petition calling on school officials to resign.

Institutions across the country are wrestling with the question of what to do with Columbus Day.

Critics have derided the idea of celebrating the Italian explorer, who perpetrated violence on Native Americans when he arrived in the United States. Boosters say it is critical to recognize the contributions of Christopher Columbus, and that Italian-Americans have historically faced discrimination.

Some places have switched to marking Indigenous Peoples' Day in recognition of the Native Americans who occupied the United States long before European explorers like Columbus arrived.

Randolph Township arrived at a novel solution to this problem: eliminate every holiday name to avoid taking a side.

The goal appears to have been to sidestep the debate over Columbus Day, but the Randolph Township school system instead found itself squarely in it, and opponents of the move have called on school officials to resign.

The Randolph Board of Education is now scheduled to convene Monday for a special meeting to reconsider its plan to remove holiday names from the school calendar.

What's happening in New Jersey

In May, the Randolph school board voted unanimously to replace Christopher Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day.

Some parents grew angry with the decision, but instead of reverting back to the old calendar, the board moved in early June to scrap all holiday names from the school calendar, not giving preference to either one of the October celebrations.

"If we don't have anything on this calendar, then we don't have to have anyone [with] hurt feelings," Randolph school board member Dorene Roche said during a June 10 public meeting, according to NJ.com.

The backlash has only grown.

A petition calling on Randolph Township Schools superintendent Jennifer Fano and members of the board of education to resign has topped 4,000 signatures. "They represent everything that is wrong in education today and are completely incompetent in every aspect of their role," the petition says.

For its part, the school board acknowledged the public outcry but said its decision was misconstrued by some people.

A press release issued by the Randolph board of education on Sunday clarified that the holidays will still be observed as days off and that their decision was not meant to dishonor "the great veterans and the heroes" after which several of those holidays are named.

"These State, Federal and other holidays have not been cancelled or taken away by this Board of Education as some are falsely claiming," the board said. "Everyone is still encouraged to celebrate them in whatever way they deem appropriate."

Matthew Pfouts, director of communications and digital media for the Randolph Township Schools, told NPR the board has no further comment.

Changing views on holidays

On the national level, Columbus Day remains a federal holiday.

But a number of states, including Alaska and Virginia, as well as some cities either observe Indigenous Peoples' Day as a holiday or celebrate it in some way.

The movement away from Columbus Day has not come without controversy.

The New York City Department of Education tried to rename Columbus Day over objections and eventually settled on marking a holiday called "Italian Heritage Day/Indigenous People's Day," which drew its own set of critiques. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said it was wrong to make the two groups share one holiday.

There are also other efforts to recognize the role people of color played in American history.

This week, the Senate unanimously passed a bill to make Juneteenth — the day marking the end of slavery in the U.S. — a public holiday.

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

; Credit: shuoshu/Getty Images

New rules kick in today that will help aspiring teachers pay for college and complete a years-long overhaul of the federal TEACH Grant program — from a bureaucratic bear trap that hobbled thousands of teachers with unfair student loan debts to a program that may actually make good on its foundational promise: to help K-12 educators pay for their own education in exchange for teaching a high-need subject, like math, for four years in a low-income community.

"The changes announced today deliver much-needed improvements to the TEACH Grant," said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. "Respecting and honoring teachers who serve students with the greatest needs also requires that we ensure these educators receive the support to which they are entitled from this important federal program without having to jump through unnecessary hoops."

In Dec. 2018, the Department of Education under Secretary Betsy DeVos committed to overhauling the program and, last summer, posted its more flexible revisions. Among those changes that go into effect today, teachers will no longer have their grants automatically converted to loans if they fail to submit annual certification paperwork. Instead, with eight years to make good on a four-year teaching requirement, teachers won't have their grants converted to loans until completion of the required service is no longer feasible.

The rule changes to the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grant Program were outlined by the U.S. Department of Education nearly a year ago but only go into effect today. And they are the culmination of a story that began several years ago, when the Government Accountability Office, followed by an NPR investigation, revealed that the program's strict paperwork requirements — what Cardona calls "unnecessary hoops" — were tripping up teachers who were keeping their end of the deal.

In accordance with the program's old rules, if a teacher did not submit annual paperwork on time documenting their teaching service in a qualified school, their TEACH Grants were automatically converted into loans that must be paid back with interest. Teachers who tried to appeal this conversion were given little recourse and told the process was not reversible.

Kaitlyn McCollum was teaching high school in Tennessee when her federal TEACH Grants were turned into more than $20,000 in loans simply because she had narrowly missed a paperwork deadline. In the spring of 2019, her debts were erased as part of the department's overhaul.

"We won," she told NPR. "We raised our voices and they finally heard us. Disbelief followed by a relief like I have not felt before."

While the program's flaws date back to its beginning, in 2008, it was the Trump administration that agreed to a remedy and apologized to teachers.

"We've put teachers who didn't deserve this stress, this pressure, this financial burden in a position that is frightening and confusing," the Education Department's then-acting undersecretary and acting assistant secretary, Diane Auer Jones, told NPR in 2019. "It seems like a small thing to do to say, 'I'm sorry,' but I'm very sorry. And we want to work to fix it and correct it."

In Aug. 2020, NPR reported that, since the program's overhaul began, more than 6,500 educators had successfully petitioned to have nearly $44 million in loans turned back into TEACH Grants. For teachers who could prove they had already completed their required service, their debts were simply discharged. For teachers still serving, the conversion meant they could resume the deal they made with the department and work to keep their grant money.

The new regulations also give teachers more options for pausing their service obligation, create a formal reconsideration process for any teacher who believes they've had their grants converted unfairly, and expand the scope of the program to include not only low-income communities but also high-need, rural areas where recruiting and retaining teachers can be difficult.

The Biden Administration says it wants to expand the TEACH Grant, making it more generous. If passed by Congress, the American Families Plan would increase the grant for college juniors, seniors and graduate students from $4,000 a year to $8,000 and would also make it available to many early childhood educators. In a release, the Education Department said it expects these changes would increase the number of TEACH recipients by more than 50 percent, to nearly 40,000 in 2022 — welcome news to school leaders in remote and high-need communities that sometimes struggle to entice new talent to the classroom.

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.

Federal prosecutors secured their first guilty plea Wednesday in the Justice Department's sprawling conspiracy case involving the Oath Keepers extremist group in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

At a hearing in federal court in Washington, D.C., Graydon Young pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and one count of obstruction of an official proceeding. The 55-year-old Florida resident agreed to cooperate with investigators, which could prove critical as the government pursues the remaining defendants in the high-profile case.

Young is one of 16 people associated with the Oath Keepers to be charged with conspiracy, obstruction and other offenses over the Capitol riot. Prosecutors say the defendants coordinated their efforts and actions to try to disrupt Congress' certification of the Electoral College count on Jan. 6.

More than 500 people have been charged so far in connection with the Capitol breach, but the Oath Keepers conspiracy case is one of the most closely watched because of the allegations and the link to an extremist organization.

Young is the second defendant linked to the Oath Keepers to plead guilty. Jon Schaffer pleaded guilty to obstructing an official proceeding and entering restricted grounds with a dangerous weapon in April.

According to Young's statement of offense, he coordinated with his co-conspirators ahead of Jan. 6 and used encrypted messaging apps to maintain "operational security."

On the day itself, the document says, Young and some of his co-conspirators pushed through U.S. Capitol Police lines guarding the Capitol and into the building.

"Mr. Young believed that he and the co-conspirators were trying to obstruct, influence, and impede an official proceeding, that is, a proceeding before Congress, specifically, Congress's certification of the Electoral College vote," the document says.

At Wednesday's hearing, Judge Amit Mehta read that passage to Young to ensure that it was accurate.

"Yes, sir," Young replied, "that is correct."

According to the plea deal, Young has agreed to cooperate fully with prosecutors, including sitting for interviews with investigators and testifying before the grand jury and at trial.

The government, meanwhile, has agreed to dismiss the remaining charges against him. Even so, Mehta said Young is facing a possible prison sentence of 5 to 6 1/2 years under the sentencing guidelines.

Wednesday brought another significant development in the Capitol investigation.

Anna Morgan-Lloyd, a 49-year-old from Indiana who described Jan. 6 as the "best day ever," became the first Capitol riot defendant to be sentenced.

Morgan-Lloyd was not accused of taking part in any of the violence at the Capitol. She pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count of "parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building."

Judge Royce Lamberth sentenced her to three years of probation and no jail time.

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

Pro-Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol following a rally with then-President Donald Trump on Jan. 6.; Credit: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

An alleged member of the Oath Keepers has pleaded guilty to charges connected to the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol and agreed to cooperate with the government in its conspiracy case against the extremist group.

Mark Grods entered a plea of guilty to one count of conspiracy and one count of obstruction of an official proceeding. According to the statement of offense, the conspiracy's aim was to stop Congress' certification of the Electoral College count.

The plea marks another step forward for prosecutors pursuing a broader conspiracy case against 16 alleged members or associates of the Oath Keepers, a far-right, anti-government group. Last week, one of the defendants in that case pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction, and agreed to cooperate with investigators.

Grods, who was charged separately but admitted to having coordinated with members of the Oath Keepers, has also agreed to cooperate with the government, including testifying before a grand jury or at trial.

In a court filing, prosecutors said Grods' case "is part of an ongoing grand jury investigation and plea negotiation related to United States v. Thomas Caldwell, et al.," which is the government's Oath Keepers conspiracy case.

At a court hearing Wednesday in Washington, D.C., just blocks from the Capitol, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta went over the charges and the terms of Grods' plea deal, and told him his estimated sentencing guidelines range was 51 to 63 months.

"How do you plead on count one, the charge of conspiracy, sir?" Mehta asked.

"Guilty," Grods said.

"Count two, obstruction of an official proceeding, how do you plead, sir?" Mehta asked.

"Guilty," Grods replied again.

In his statement of offense, Grods admits to bringing firearms to Washington, D.C., and then stashing them across the Potomac River at a Virginia hotel — a detail the government says buttresses its argument that the Oath Keepers prepared for violence on Jan. 6.

The government alleges the group planned to store weapons in Virginia and ferry them into Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 if the situation in the city got messy.

Grods' statement of offense says on Jan. 6, he rode in a golf cart with others through the city before parking a few blocks away from the Capitol and walking the rest of the way. He then linked up with other alleged Oath Keepers, who forged their way through the crowd, up the steps of the Capitol in a military-style "stack" formation and into the building itself.

Other members of the "stack" have been charged in the Oath Keepers conspiracy case.

Four minutes after entering the Capitol, the statement of offense says, Grods left the building as police shot pepper balls at a wall near him.

Two days after the assault on the Capitol, an unnamed individual told Grods to "make sure that all signal comms about the op has been deleted and burned," according to the statement of offense, which Grods confirmed he had done.

It is unclear how much additional information Grods will be able to provide investigators, but his plea agreement — the second in the span of a week — may prompt other defendants in the case to cut deals with prosecutors as well.

Overall, charges have now been brought against more than 500 individuals related to the riot at the Capitol.

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

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.

Increased research is the key to developing more widely applicable detection systems to find pipe bombs before they explode and to help catch the perpetrators when a bomb has gone off, says a new report from a committee of the National Research Council.

American students progress toward proficiency in mathematics requires major changes in instruction, curricula, and assessment in the nations schools, says a new report from the National Research Council of the National Academies.

Scientific evidence links mold and other factors related to damp conditions in homes and buildings to asthma symptoms in some people with the chronic disorder, as well as to coughing, wheezing, and upper respiratory tract symptoms in otherwise healthy people, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

Use of protective face coverings will be one of many strategies used to slow or prevent transmission of the flu virus in the event of a pandemic, even though scientific evidence about the effectiveness of inexpensive, disposable medical masks and respirators against influenza is limited.

Ten questions driving the geological and planetary sciences were identified today in a new report by the National Research Council.

The numerous technical and operational breakdowns that contributed to the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and spill from the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico suggest the lack of a suitable approach for managing the inherent risks.

Insufficient data on service members exposures to emissions from open-air burn pits for trash on military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan is one of the reasons why it is not possible to say whether these emissions could cause long-term health effects, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine.

The Institute of Medicine today presented the 2012 Gustav O. Lienhard Award to Donald M. Berwick, a physician whose work has catalyzed a national movement to improve health care quality and safety.

Cardiac arrest strikes almost 600,000 people each year, killing the vast majority of those individuals, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. Every year in the U.S., approximately 395,000 cases of cardiac arrest occur outside of a hospital setting, in which less than 6 percent survive.

Potentially useful biomarker tests for molecularly targeted therapies are not being adopted appropriately into clinical practice because of a lack of common evidentiary standards necessary for regulatory, reimbursement, and treatment decisions, says a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

To make the world safer against future infectious disease threats, national health systems should be strengthened, the World Health Organization’s emergency and outbreak response activities should be consolidated and bolstered, and research and development should be enhanced, says a new Policy Forum article that appears in the May 19 edition of PLOS Medicine.

Inherent features of registries that rely on voluntary participation and self-reported information make them fundamentally unsuitable for determining whether emissions from military burn pits in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locations in Southwest Asia caused health problems in service members who were exposed to them, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Mobilization of a rapid and robust clinical research program that explores whether investigational therapeutics and vaccines are safe and effective to combat the next infectious disease epidemic will depend on strengthening capacity in low-income countries for response and research, engaging people living in affected communities, and conducting safety trials before an epidemic hits, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Years of sustained and coordinated efforts will be required to contain and reverse the harmful societal effects of the prescription and illicit opioid epidemics, which are intertwined and getting worse, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine outlines how to examine whether specific levels of nutrients or other food substances (NOFSs) can ameliorate the risk of chronic disease and recommends ways to develop dietary reference intakes (DRI) based on chronic disease outcomes.

Halting the opioid epidemic requires aggressive action across multiple dimensions, including informed, active, and determined front-line leadership from health clinicians working in every setting throughout the nation, says a new National Academy of Medicine (NAM) special publication developed at the request of the National Governors Association to assist the nation’s governors as they work with clinicians to counter the opioid crisis.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers a framework to guide federal, tribal, state and local agencies, community groups, and other interested and affected parties in making decisions about the Spirit Lake and Toutle River system, near Mount St. Helens in southwest Washington state.