The EcoComplex is a system that recovers all useable products and by-products from a group of private and public partners located in a close-knit defined area. This group of partners works together to use each other�s waste products either as a source of energy (electricity, steam, or heat) or as a raw material for the production of their own product (pallets, lumber, compost, brick shapes/art). The EcoComplex is also focused on making and using �green� energy and on economic development.

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

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

Catawba County Assistant County Manager Dewey Harris has earned the International City/County Management Association's (ICMA) Credentialed Manager designation. Established in 2002, the ICMA Credentialed Manager program recognizes professional government managers whom the ICMA certifies as having a "commitment to continuous learning and professional development".

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

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

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

Catawba County Public Health has earned reaccreditation from the North Carolina Local Health Department Accreditation Board.

Charter Communications' Government Channel for Catawba County will move from Channel 3 to Channel 192 effective January 28, 2014.

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

A hazing-related student death at Bowling Green State University has renewed conversations about hazing on college campuses.; Credit: Adam Lacy/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

There were zero reported deaths from college hazing incidents in 2020, but as campuses reopen to students, there have already been two hazing-related deaths this year. Eight men face a range of charges, including involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, evidence tampering and failure to comply with underage alcohol laws, after Stone Foltz, a sophomore at Bowling Green State University, died on March 7 of alcohol poisoning.

At a news conference on April 29, Wood County Prosecutor Paul Dobson described the fraternity event in which initiates were told to drink 750 milliliters of hard alcohol — or about 40 shots, according to Hank Nuwer, author of Hazing: Destroying Young Lives. Dobson said Foltz's death was "the result of a fatal level of alcohol intoxication during a hazing incident."

Experts like Nuwer are concerned that as students return to in-person learning and are eager to take part in "the college experience," more hazing-related deaths may be on the way.

"There seems to be a disconnect — not seeing that alcohol-related hazing can kill," he says.

Nuwer is a professor emeritus of journalism at Franklin College and the author of five books on hazing. He spoke with NPR's All Things Considered about how the Stone Foltz case could reshape hazing prosecution, how college campuses create a "perfect storm" for hazing and how to put an end to the practice, once and for all.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights

On the legal history of prosecuting hazing

There've been charges all along, but often they get dropped or they're unsuccessful. I would consider this to be a landmark case because of the possibility of at least five years of imprisonment, if the prosecutor is successful.

We have 44 state laws out there on hazing, but some are very, very weak. And Ohio's is weak now, but they're trying to strengthen it after a death at Ohio University [in 2018] and now Bowling Green.

On what the return to college campuses means for hazing

What I'm seeing is, in effect, we have two freshmen classes in that the sophomores have been taking online classes. Now they're going to be out there, and they haven't had any hazing or alcohol education programs. They're coming out there with a gusto because now they're the people of status, who have power over these pledges. And then the regular freshman class is coming in, all excited as usual, and we've seen so many times where a death occurs within the first couple of days of the students on campus, sometimes before they've taken a single class.

On the challenges to end fraternity hazing

In my opinion, campuses are the perfect storm for something like this because we're all about status and power. All of these obstacles have led to today, when alcohol has been added to the mix. There wasn't a single alcohol death before 1940. Now, it's one of the most major [causes of hazing-related deaths]. There were 62 deaths from 2009 to 2021; 39 were alcohol related.

On whether this is a chance for colleges to reset this part of campus culture

I want a hard approach. You have to go after the alumni who are encouraging this. You have to punish all of the hazing — not temporarily. This tradition has to stop, and it can't be looked at as tradition. As Mr. [Paul] Dobson, the prosecutor, is doing in the Stone Foltz case: You have to prosecute to the fullest extent [of the law].

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

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, pictured in 2019, is hoping to change how the justice system handles cases involving 16- and 17-year-olds who are charged as adults.; Credit: Claire Harbage/NPR

A new proposal from D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine could overhaul the way juveniles are charged as adults and offer greater opportunities for rehabilitation than a federal prison.

If passed, the proposal would impact people like Charlie Curtis, who was charged with armed robbery and sent to adult court at the age of 16 — a decision that he said left him confused and adrift.

Curtis said he had problems reading and writing back then, let alone asking the court to appoint him a lawyer. After his conviction, he spent years in a federal prison in New Jersey.

"It's a little bit of everything," Curtis said. "A little scary, a little nervous, you got to grow up real fast. You're not in the high school gym no more."

Curtis returned home when he was 22. It would be a while before he stabilized, got a good job driving a truck and started a family that grew to include three children. He now volunteers to help other young people leaving jail and prison — trying to offer the support he got too late.

What the legislation would change

NPR has learned Racine will introduce legislation in the D.C. Council Wednesday to ensure that 16- and 17-year-olds accused of certain crimes start in the family court system.

"Children should be treated like children, including 16- and 17-year-olds, notwithstanding the seriousness of their alleged offense," Racine said.

The proposed legislation would apply to teens charged with murder, first-degree sexual abuse, and armed robbery, among other crimes. Currently, the lead federal prosecutor in D.C. can file those kinds of cases directly in adult court — without any say from a judge — even if those defendants ultimately plead guilty to lesser charges.

D.C. has no federal prisons of its own, so young people convicted as adults can spend years in other states, at great distances from their families. The D.C. attorney general said the majority of underaged defendants charged as adults return home to the District before they are 21, but without the benefit of access to educational programs, vocational training and mentoring they could have received if their cases had been handled in the family courts.

"The adult system doesn't work that way," Racine said. "Federal Bureau of Prisons people will tell you the adult system is not made for kids."

Eduardo Ferrer, the policy director at the Georgetown Juvenile Justice Initiative, said research demonstrates charging young people in the adult system decreases public safety by making it more likely they'll break the law in the future. Most charging decisions in these cases in D.C. are made within a half a day, without the benefit of a longer review of the facts of the case and the background of the teenager, he said.

"The process in D.C. right now, because the U.S. Attorney's Office does not exercise discretion often in terms of keeping kids down in juvenile court, is more of a sledgehammer," Ferrer said. "What we really need is a scalpel."

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington and the Metropolitan Police Department did not return calls for comment about the proposal. But its supporters expect some resistance when it's ultimately considered by the City Council.

Ferrer pointed out that the legislation still leaves room for a judge to transfer a young person in D.C. into adult court if the judge has concerns about the ability for rehabilitation and worries about public safety. "The reality is that a young person still can be transferred to adult court," he said. "The difference is we're taking the time to get it right."

The potential impact

The vast majority — 93% — of the 16- and 17-year-olds who are charged as adults in D.C. are Black. One of them is the son of Keela Hailes. In 2008, he was charged with armed robbery. Hailes said she wasn't consulted about decisions about what was best for her son.

"It's like my son went from a 16-year-old to a 30-year-old overnight," Hailes said.

Her son was convicted and sent to federal prison in North Dakota, too far for her to visit regularly as she had done in the D.C. area. Her son, now 30 years old, is incarcerated again. Hailes said she wishes he would have had more options years ago — a chance for an education, and time spent in a juvenile facility instead of around adults in prison.

She said science suggests young people have less judgment and maturity because their brains are still developing. She thinks the new proposal will make a "huge difference" for juveniles in the legal system in the District.

The proposal is the latest in a series of steps Racine has taken to overhaul juvenile justice in D.C. He pushed the courts to stop shackling young defendants; started a restorative justice program for juveniles to meet with and make amends to victims; and worked to limit the ability of police to put handcuffs on most people under age 12.

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

Many public school students receive little or no exposure to the theory of evolution, the most important concept in understanding biology, says a new guidebook from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Incineration is widely used in the United States to reduce the volume of waste. Hundreds of incinerators -- including industrial kilns, boilers, and furnaces -- combust municipal and hazardous waste, while many more are used to burn medical waste.

No justification currently exists for completely abandoning chemical pesticides, says a new report from the National Academies 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.

No single approach -- technical, legal, economic, or educational -- will be sufficient to protect children from online pornography.

As the recent spread of West Nile virus and the anthrax scare of 2001 dramatically illustrate, America faces a variety of new health challenges in the 21st century, along with a number of persistent problems, such as racial disparities in health status and care delivery.

The environmental effects of oil and gas exploration and production on Alaska s North Slope have been accumulating for more than three decades, says a new report from the National Academies National Research Council.

Police officers are perhaps the most visible faces of the law, and one of the few groups authorized to use force when dealing with the public. But despite the pivotal role that officers play in preventing and controlling crime, and in promoting justice, the science base is often inadequate regarding the value, fairness, and legitimacy of police practices and policies.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys standard for the maximum amount of fluoride allowed in drinking water -- 4 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water -- does not protect against adverse health effects.

Each year, tens of millions of Americans, young and old, choose to learn about science in informal ways -- by visiting museums and aquariums, attending after-school programs, pursuing personal hobbies, and watching TV documentaries, for example.

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.

Educational and business leaders want todays students both to master school subjects and to excel in areas such as problem solving, critical thinking, and communication

Recipients of the 10th annual Communication Awards were announced today by the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine.

As immigrants and their descendants become integrated into U.S. society, many aspects of their lives improve, including measurable outcomes such as educational attainment, occupational distribution, income, and language ability, but their well-being declines in the areas of health, crime, and family patterns, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Scientific advances in molecular biology over the past 50 years have produced remarkable progress in medicine. Some of these advances have also raised important ethical and societal issues – for example, about the use of recombinant DNA technologies or embryonic stem cells.

As researchers’ and teachers’ understanding of how best to learn and teach science evolves and curricula are redesigned, many teachers are left without the experience needed to enhance the science and engineering courses they teach, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Although there is widespread perception among the public and medical professionals that food allergy prevalence is on the rise, no study in the U.S. has been conducted with sufficient sample size and in various populations to determine the true prevalence of food allergies, and most studies likely overestimate the proportion of the population with this condition, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

In response to alarming evidence of high rates of depression and suicide among U.S. health care workers, the National Academy of Medicine is launching a wide-ranging “action collaborative” of multiple organizations to promote clinician well-being and resilience.

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.

Despite their potential, many English learners (ELs) -- who account for more than 9 percent of K-12 enrollment in the U.S. -- lag behind their English-speaking monolingual peers in educational achievement, in part because schools do not provide adequate instruction and social-emotional support to acquire English proficiency or access to academic subjects at the appropriate grade level, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Policymakers, employers, and educational institutions should take steps to strengthen the nation’s skilled technical workforce, 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 examines policies and practices governing dual-use research in the life sciences – research that could potentially be misused to cause harm – and its findings identify multiple shortcomings.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers detailed recommendations to guide federal statistical agencies in creating a new entity that would enable them to combine data from multiple sources in order to provide more relevant, timely, and detailed statistics – for example, on the unemployment rate or the rate of violent crime.

With the sharp and largely unexpected increase in the long-distance movement of domestically produced crude oil, ethanol, and natural gas since 2005, a number of concerns have arisen about the safe transport of these hazardous materials, particularly in relation to railroad track defects, rural communities’ emergency response preparedness, and the older tank car designs that will continue to be used in multi-car unit trains, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

An op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal questions the conclusions of a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine analysis, issued earlier this year, of a draft of the federal government’s U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Climate Science Special Report (CSSR).

Consumer access to effective and affordable medicines is an imperative for public health, social equity, and economic development, but this need is not being served adequately by the biopharmaceutical sector, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Although NASA has made progress toward the overall space exploration science priorities recommended in a 2011 decadal survey by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the space agency should raise the priority of scientific research that addresses the risks and unknowns of human space exploration.

An international, multidisciplinary organizing committee has been appointed to plan the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, which will take place Nov. 27-29 in Hong Kong.

The National Academy of Medicine today announced Kenneth Wells is the recipient of the 2018 Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health, for his work developing quality and outcomes approaches to psychiatry and mental health, fostering a generation of clinical investigators and mental health system leaders, and championing partnered, participatory research to advance equity for under-resourced populations.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine highlights the dynamic process of learning throughout the life span and identifies frontiers in which more research is needed to pursue an even deeper understanding of human learning.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine outlines a research agenda for improving the commercial viability of technologies that turn greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels into useful products such as fuels, construction materials, and chemicals.

A shift is needed in how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects are taught to students in grades K-12 who are learning English, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) at its annual meeting announced its inaugural International Health Policy Fellow, Roger Chung, Ph.D., M.H.S., assistant professor in the School of Public Health and Primary Care at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

Scientific research that involves nonscientists contributing to research processes – also known as ‘citizen science’ – supports participants’ learning, engages the public in science, contributes to community scientific literacy, and can serve as a valuable tool to facilitate larger scale research, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Centering science instruction around investigation and design can improve learning in middle and high schools and help students make sense of phenomena in the world around them.

In December 2015, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and U.S. National Academy of Medicine, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences hosted an international summit in Washington, D.C., to discuss scientific, ethical, and governance issues associated with human genome editing.

We thank the organizing committee of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, held this week in Hong Kong, for planning an important and timely conference on a rapidly advancing area of science and medicine.

Most of the alternative technologies to open burning and open detonation (OB/OD) of conventional munitions designated for disposal are mature, including contained burn and contained detonation chambers with pollution control equipment, and many are permitted to replace OB/OD of waste munitions, says a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.