07 August 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
A group of doctors and medical workers join protesters gathering in May in front of the State House in Boston to rally for abortion rights. (photo: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images)
Recruiters say OB/GYNs are turning down offers, a warning for conservative-dominated states already experiencing shortages
The trouble for Texas: Because of the state’s strict antiabortion laws, Bardhi’s not sure he will remain there.
Although he doesn’t provide abortion care right now, laws limiting the procedure have created confusion and uncertainty over what treatments are legal for miscarriage and keep him from even advising pregnant patients on the option of abortion, he said. Aiding and abetting an abortion in Texas also exposes doctors to civil lawsuits and criminal prosecution.
“It definitely does bother me,” Bardhi said. “If a patient comes in, and you can’t provide them the care that you are supposed to for their well-being, maybe I shouldn’t practice here. The thought has crossed my mind.”
He is balancing his concern with his sense that he can do more good by staying, including counseling patients on obtaining contraception.
Bardhi’s uncertainty reflects a broader hesitancy among some doctors and medical students who are reconsidering career prospects in red states where laws governing abortion have changed rapidly since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, according to interviews with health-care professionals and reproductive health advocates.
One large medical recruiting firm said it recently had 20 obstetrician-gynecologists turn down positions in red states because of abortion laws. The reluctance extends beyond those interested in providing abortion care, as laws meant to protect a fetus could open doctors up to new liabilities or limit their ability to practice.
It remains unclear how thoroughly career decisions being made amid the upheaval and confusion since the Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will translate to a lasting geographic shift. But amid a national shortage of reproductive health practitioners, the early evidence indicates that red states have, at minimum, put themselves at a disadvantage in the competition for crucial front-line providers, experts said.
One large health-care staffing firm, AMN Healthcare, said clients in states with abortion bans are having greater trouble filling vacancies because some prospective OB/GYN candidates won’t even consider opportunities in states with new or pending abortion bans.
Tom Florence, president of Merritt Hawkins, an AMN Healthcare company, cited 20 instances since the Supreme Court ruling where prospects specifically refused to relocate to states where reproductive rights are being targeted by lawmakers.
“To talk to approximately 20 candidates that state they would decline to practice in those restrictive states, that is certainly a trend we are seeing,” Florence said. “It is certainly going to impact things moving forward.”
Three candidates turned down one of the firm’s recruiters, who was working to fill a single job in maternal fetal medicine in Texas, he said: “All three expressed fear they could be fined or lose their license for doing their jobs.”
In another example, a physician contacted by phone by an AMN Healthcare recruiter trying to fill a post in an antiabortion state “simply said, ‘Roe versus Wade,’ and hung up,” Florence said.
Florence said the shift has especially serious implications for small, rural hospitals, which can afford just a small number of maternal specialists or, in some cases, only one.
“They can deliver hundreds of babies each year and see several thousand patients,” he said. “The potential absence of one OB/GYN that might be in their community, if not for the Supreme Court decision, is highly significant. The burden will be borne by the patients.”
Tellingly, Florence added, none of the recruiters had encountered a single physician seeking to practice in a state because it had banned abortion.
In a 2021 Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 75 percent of OB/GYNs said their practices do not provide abortions for the purposes of terminating a pregnancy.
Yet broadly written abortion bans across the United States have cast a chill across the broader practice of reproductive health, say mainstream physician leaders who support abortion rights. In states without exceptions for the life and health of the woman, they say, routine standards of care are being scrapped.
They worry that limits on training for new doctors will undermine recruitment of young talent. They are concerned about restrictions on fertility treatment. They anticipate that conservative legislatures will seek to impose bans on certain types of contraception, including IUDs and Plan B medication. Most Republicans in the U.S. House voted last month against a measure protecting the right to contraception.
Additionally, many OB/GYN doctors, even if they don’t perform abortions themselves, believe strongly in patient autonomy and decision-making, said academic and clinical leaders.
“Even physicians in restrictive states have never had to deal with this kind of political interference and legislative oversight,” said Eve Espey, chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of New Mexico and a physician at the UNM Center for Reproductive Health. “It’s an incredible intrusion into a wide swath of reproductive health care.”
A third-year OB/GYN resident at U-N. M., Alana Carstens Yalom attended medical school at Tulane University, in New Orleans. She had entertained the idea of going back to Louisiana for her medical practice. Not anymore. She wants abortion care to be a part of her OB/GYN practice, and Louisiana has a ban.
“Now I don’t think that is even an option for me,” she said.
Physicians, medical residents and medical students said in interviews they are worried about the impact on the profession. How to navigate careers in the new landscape is a major topic of discussion among both doctors and trainees, they said.
Mayrose Porter, an Austin native who is a student at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said she will apply to residencies in her home state but that the rest of the choices on her list will only be in states where abortion is legal. In the long term, Porter, a member of Medical Students for Choice, does not expect to practice medicine in Texas.
“The idea that myself and other future doctors are just not going to be here is sad for me personally and sad for the community,” she said, emphasizing she was speaking for herself only, not Baylor. “There’s some guilt that I’m abandoning the community I grew up in.”
In Nebraska, Methodist Health System in Omaha has just two specialists with expertise in high-risk pregnancies who also can perform dilation and evacuation procedures to remove a fetus. The hospital permits abortions only in situations that threaten the health and life of the woman. A group of OB/GYNs from Nebraska, including Methodist maternal fetal specialist Emily Patel, have formed a local political action committee to urge the legislature not to pass an abortion ban.
They are warning about “downstream effects” of an abortion ban on reproductive health more broadly.
A common example is for a woman whose water has broken around 18 or 19 weeks. The risks of continuing that pregnancy to the health of the woman and the fetus include developmental problems for the fetus and the risk of infection for the woman.
But under the proposed abortion ban in Nebraska, Patel said, it is not clear whether even explaining termination options in such a circumstance would be legal.
“Imagine we are in a state with a ban, and that fetus has a heart rate, and the patient sitting in front of me is not ill. This is going to be a tough situation for a physician to be in,” Patel said. “A physician is not going to want to be in a position where they are going to be criminally prosecuted for providing routine care and counseling.”
It’s the sort of legal uncertainty and danger that top doctors will seek to avoid, she added: “These states where bans are going into effect are going to have trouble recruiting for the next generation of OB/GYNs.”
Opponents of abortion said worries about legal jeopardy and restrictions beyond elective abortions are overblown.
“There’s a lot of mythology and misconception about what this means for reproductive health,” said Sandy Christiansen, an OB/GYN who is medical director of a Maryland Care Net pregnancy center, which encourages women to continue pregnancies. “There shouldn’t be any problems” treating a miscarriage with medication or surgical intervention, she said.
“They shouldn’t have to worry about their licenses if they are practicing a standard of care,” said Christiansen, who is a member of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
She did acknowledge some confusion: “Hopefully, the laws that will come along will clarify some of these things.”
Another member of the antiabortion physicians’ group, associate professor Susan Bane, at Barton College, a small Christian-affiliated institution in North Carolina, said she believes reluctance to move to states with abortion bans will be limited to the small percentage of OB/GYN doctors who want to perform elective abortions.
“If you’re going to be in medical school and you want to be an obstetrician and want to do abortions, you will choose a state where it’s legal,” she said.
Hospital systems in states with abortion restrictions, including Utah, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Ohio, did not respond to requests for comment or declined to respond to questions about how they are approaching potential retention and recruiting challenges.
A large health system based in Utah, Intermountain Healthcare, lists 10 OB/GYN physician vacancies on its website, the most of any specialty for which it is recruiting. A spokeswoman at Intermountain, apparently inadvertently, included a Post reporter on an email to the public relations team after The Post asked about challenges filling those vacancies in light of Utah’s abortion law: “We need to strategize a response to politely decline so that we can stay away from this issue.”
Doctors said they are grappling with the fallout from broadly worded legislation written by politicians without detailed medical knowledge. The environment creates a high degree of legal and professional risk for specialists, said David Turok, an associate professor of OB/GYN at the University of Utah who is also a board member of Physicians for Reproductive Health, which supports abortion rights.
“What we have is laws that are not representative of medical practice, that are not framed in ways that we think or speak as medical professionals,” Turok said, “and that makes it confusing.”
Officials in some states are working to clarify how abortion bans are going to be applied. The Louisiana Department of Health on Monday issued a list of 25 fetal conditions that can justify termination.
The legal uncertainty adds to the burdens on OB/GYNs. They must respond to deliver babies 24 hours a day, emergencies are emotionally stressful, and practitioners face some of the highest rates of malpractice lawsuits and accompanying insurance costs.
The federal government has said the United States needs 9,000 more OB/GYNs and that the shortage will reach 22,000 by 2050.
In Michigan, an old, pre-Roe abortion ban was renewed after the Supreme Court ruling. The looming ban has prompted Tim Johnson, a veteran of high-risk pregnancy care at Michigan Health, to consider moving out of the state. Although he is 73 and no longer provides elective abortions, he still treats patients and is not ready to retire. If Michigan’s abortion ban sticks, he may move to Maryland to practice, he said.
“I always said if (Roe were overturned) quickly like this, it would be terribly disruptive,” he said, “We are starting to understand how truly disruptive it is.”
Republican controlled states that rushed to ban abortions already had poor public health records, performing poorly in response to COVID, with high maternal & infant deaths rates.
This does not bode well for public health care in those states.
Anna Vorosheva was detained at a checkpoint in March while trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Mariupol. (photo: Abdulmonam Eassa/The Observer)
Entrepreneur Anna Vorosheva accuses Moscow of murder after spending 100 days in the Olenivka detention centre
This, according to a prisoner who was there, is what conditions are like inside Olenivka, the notorious detention centre outside Donetsk where dozens of Ukrainian soldiers burned to death in a horrific episode late last month while in Russian captivity.
Anna Vorosheva – a 45-year-old Ukrainian entrepreneur – gave a harrowing account to the Observer of her time inside the jail. She spent 100 days in Olenivka after being detained in mid-March at a checkpoint run by the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) in eastern Ukraine.
She had been trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Mariupol, her home city, which the Russian army had besieged. The separatists arrested her and drove her in a packed police van to the prison, where she was held until early July on charges of “terrorism”.
Now recovering in France, Vorosheva said she had no doubt Russia “cynically and deliberately” murdered Ukrainian prisoners of war. “We are talking about absolute evil,” she said.
The fighters were blown up on 29 July in a mysterious and devastating explosion. Moscow claims Ukraine killed them with a US-made precision-guided Himars rocket. Satellite images and independent analysis, however, suggest they were obliterated by a powerful bomb detonated from inside the building.
Russia says 53 prisoners were killed and 75 injured. Ukraine has been unable to confirm these figures and has called for an investigation. The victims were members of the Azov battalion. Until their surrender in May, they had defended Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant, holding out underground.
A day before the blast, they were transferred to a separate area in the camp’s industrial zone, some distance from the grimy two-storey concrete block where Vorosheva shared a cell with other women prisoners. Video shown on Russian state TV revealed charred bodies and twisted metal bunk beds.
“Russia didn’t want them to stay alive. I’m sure some of those ‘killed’ in the explosion were already corpses. It was a convenient way of accounting for the fact they had been tortured to death,” she said.
Male prisoners were regularly removed from their cells, beaten, then locked up again. “We heard their cries,” she said. “They played loud music to cover the screams. Torture happened all the time. Investigators would joke about it and ask inmates, ‘What happened to your face?’ The soldier would reply, ‘I fell over’, and they would laugh.
“It was a demonstration of power. The prisoners understood that anything could happen to them, that they might easily be killed. A small number of the Azov guys were captured before the mass surrender in May.”
Vorosheva said there was constant traffic around Olenivka, known as correctional colony No 120. A former Soviet technical school, it was converted in the 1980s into a prison, and later abandoned. The DNR began using it earlier this year to house enemy civilians.
Captives arrived and departed every day at the camp, 20km south-west of occupied Donetsk, Vorosheva told the Observer. Around 2,500 people were held there, with the figure sometimes rising to 3,500-4,000, she estimated. There was no running water or electricity.
The atmosphere changed when around 2,000 Azov fighters were bussed in on the morning of 17 May, she said. Russian flags were raised and the DNR colours taken down. Guards were initially wary of the new prisoners. Later they talked openly about how they were going to brutalise and humiliate them, she said.
“We were frequently called Nazis and terrorists. One of the women in my cell was an Azovstal medic. She was pregnant. I asked if I could give her my food ration. I was told, ‘No, she’s a killer’. The only question they ever asked me was, ‘Do you know any Azov soldiers?’”
Conditions for the female inmates were grim. She said they were not tortured but received barely any food – 50g of bread for dinner and sometimes porridge. “It was fit for pigs,” she said. She suspected the prison governor siphoned off money allocated for meals. The toilets overflowed and the women were given no sanitary products. The cells were so overcrowded they slept in shifts. “It was tough. People were crying, worried about their kids and families.” Asked if the guards ever showed sympathy, she said an anonymous person once left them a bottle of shampoo.
According to Vorosheva, the camp’s staff were brainwashed by Russian propaganda and considered Ukrainians to be Nazis. Some were local villagers. “They blamed us for the fact that their lives were terrible. It was like an alcoholic who says he drinks vodka because his wife is no good.
“The philosophy is: ‘Everything is horrible for us, so everything should be horrible for you’. It’s all very communist.”
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has called the explosion “a deliberate Russian war crime and a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war”. Last week, his office and Ukraine’s defence ministry gave details of clues which they say point to the Kremlin’s guilt.
Citing satellite images and phone intercepts and intelligence, they said Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group carried out the killings in collaboration with Vladimir Putin’s FSB spy agency. They point to the fact a row of graves was dug in the colony a few days before the blast.
The operation was approved at the “highest level” in Moscow, they allege. “Russia is not a democracy. The dictator is personally responsible for everything, whether it’s MH17, Bucha or Olenivka,” one intelligence source said. “The question is: when will Putin acknowledge his atrocities.”
One version of events being examined by Kyiv is that the blast may have been the result of intra-service rivalries between Russia’s FSB and GRU military intelligence wings. The GRU negotiated Azovstal’s surrender with its Ukrainian army counterpart, sources suggest – a deal the FSB may have been keen to wreck.
The soldiers should have been protected by guarantees given by Russia to the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross that the Azov detainees would be properly treated. Since the blast, the Russians have refused to give international representatives any access to the site.
Vorosheva said the Red Cross were allowed into the camp in May. She said the Russians took the visitors to a specially renovated room and did not allow them to talk independently to the prisoners. “It was a show,” she said. “We were asked to give our clothes’ size and told the Red Cross would hand out something. Nothing reached us.”
Other detainees confirmed Vorosheva’s version of events and said the Azov soldiers were treated worse than civilians. Dmitry Bodrov, a 32-year-old volunteer worker, told the Wall Street Journal the guards took anyone they suspected of misbehaviour to a special disciplinary section of the camp for beatings.
They emerged limping and moaning, he said. Some captives were forced to crawl back to their cells. Another prisoner, Stanislav Hlushkov, said an inmate who was regularly beaten was found dead in solitary confinement. Orderlies put a sheet over his head, loaded him into a mortuary van and told fellow inmates he had “committed suicide”.
Vorosheva was freed on 4 July. It was, she said, a “miracle”. “The guards read out the names of those who were going to be freed. Everyone listened in silence. My heart leaped when I heard my name. I packed my things but didn’t celebrate. There were cases where people were on the list, got out, then came back.”
She added: “The people who run the camp represent the worst aspects of the Soviet Union. They could only behave well if they thought nobody was looking.”
President Biden's Build Back Better agenda called for a number of reforms that did not make it into Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
The legislation is being passed through the budget reconciliation process, which means all 50 Democrats and one tie-breaker vote from Vice President Harris are needed, since none of the 50 Republican senators will vote for the bill. It also restricts the measures in the bill to those that directly change federal spending and revenue.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Saturday that despite a few cuts from the Senate parliamentarian, the bill overall is still a legislative win for Democrats.
Democrats have argued it will tackle voters' main economic concern, naming it the Inflation Reducation Act. Republicans argue the new spending will aggravate inflation. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says, though, the bill has a "negligible" effect on inflation in 2022 and into 2023.
Overall, the bill is a very scaled-down solution to what many Democrats, including President Biden, had asked for originally.
"This bill is far from perfect. It's a compromise. But it's often how progress is made," Biden said at the White House last month. "My message to Congress is this: This is the strongest bill you can pass."
After passage in the Senate, the House plans to take up the bill at the end of the week and then send it to President Biden for his signature.
Here's a look at some of what did get included in the Democrats' bill, and what didn't.
You can see the entire 755-page bill here.
Tackling climate change
More than $300 billion would be invested in energy and climate reform, the largest federal clean energy investment in U.S. history.
The bill has support from many environmental and climate activists but is short of the $555 billion that Democrats had originally called for.
This portion of the bill takes on transportation and electricity generation, and it includes $60 billion for growing renewable energy infrastructure in manufacturing like solar panels and wind turbines.
It also includes several tax credits for individuals on things like electric vehicles and making homes more energy efficient.
The bill would, according to Democrats, lower greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, based on 2005 levels, by the end of the decade, which is short of the 50% Biden had originally aimed for.
"It puts us within a close enough distance that further executive action, state and local government efforts and private sector leadership could plausibly get us across the finish line by 2030," said Jesse Jenkins from Princeton University, who leads the REPEAT Project analyzing the impact of government climate actions.
Lowering the cost of prescription drugs
On health reforms, the bill takes on making prescription drugs more affordable — but there are some limits.
The bill includes a historic measure that allows the federal health secretary to negotiate the prices of certain expensive drugs each year for Medicare.
But this won't impact every prescription drug or every patient, and it won't take effect quickly. The negotiations will take effect for 10 drugs covered by Medicare in 2026, increasing to 20 drugs in 2029.
The portion of the bill that tried to cap at $35 per month the price of insulin — a drug that is incredibly expensive in the U.S. compared to other countries — was ruled out of order by the Senate parliamentarian, putting it out of reach for now because it would need 60 votes to pass as regular legislation.
The parliamentarian also ruled that a measure that was in the bill to force drug companies to offer rebates if prescription prices outpaced inflation was not totally in line with the rules for budget reconciliation; she said that it could apply to Medicare patients but not those with private insurers.
The bill puts a cap of $2,000 on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for people on Medicare, effective in 2025.
There's also a three-year extension on healthcare subsidies in the Affordable Care Act originally passed in a pandemic relief bill last year, estimated by the government to have kept premiums at $10 per month or lower for the vast majority of people covered through the federal health insurance exchange.
That helps millions of Americans avoid spikes in their health care costs.
Tax reform
The legislation creates a 15% minimum tax for corporations making $1 billion or more in income, bringing in more than $300 billion in revenue.
A portion that got cut, though, is one that narrowed the carried interest tax loophole. Arizona Kyrsten Sinema agreed to sign onto the bill if this measure, which would have changed the way private equity income is taxed, was cut. Democrats said it would have brought in $14 billion in revenue.
Instead, a 1% excise tax on stock buybacks was introduced, and it could bring in roughly five times as much revenue as the carried interest measure. However, it wouldn't take effect until next year, raising predictions of a rush of buybacks by some companies before 2023 rolls around.
A major portion of the bill that isn't included, due to opposition from West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, is extended the Child Tax Credit. Manchin expressed last year that the cost to extend the credit was too high, but progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have continued to push for its inclusion in the bill.
Sanders planned to add it as an amendment to the legislation during the all-night voting process, even without the support he needs to pass it.
COMMENTS:
For some reason, NPR (aka Nuclear Powered Radio) neglected to mention that the IRA bill includes a "production tax credit" for economically failing nuclear power plants, amounting to an estimated $53 BILLION bailout for this increasingly dangerous, unsustainable (and not even "zero carbon") industry. It's right there, starting on page 312 of the bill. That's almost as much as the total financial benefit ($60 billion) to real renewable energy sources. You can go to www.nirs.org for more info on this bailout and who to complain to about it.
Yes - this bill must pass, for a host of other reasons, but it's sad that at this late date (climate-wise) we have to take 2 steps back for every 3 steps forward. And you can guess who we have to blame for that.
The Nuclear Industry, as you know, has spent a great deal lobbying and has gotten its money worth in liability exemptions and subsidies.
Thanks for the link.
Even after Pilgrim was decommissioned, monitoring was significant because HOLTEC planned to dump radioactive waste water into Cape Cod Bay.
This highlights the involvement of informed citizens and their congressional delegation.
A photo of Breonna Taylor at the Defend Black Women March in Black Lives Matter Plaza on July 30, 2022, in Washington, DC. (photo: Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Frontline Action Hub)
It’s been more than two years since police shot the 26-year-old in her home.
In an unexpected announcement on Thursday, the department charged four current and former Louisville Metro Police Department officers with federal crimes in connection with the police shooting of Breonna Taylor.
Police officers shot and killed the 26-year-old Black woman in her home on March 13, 2020, in Louisville, Kentucky, while executing a search warrant connected to a drug investigation. Taylor was asleep when the officers barged into her apartment that night with a “no-knock warrant” and fired 32 shots.
The police killing incited national protests that have continued for more than two years. Kentucky prosecutors did not charge any of the police officers with Taylor’s death. One officer was indicted for wanton endangerment for firing into a neighboring apartment, but in March a jury found him not guilty. The city settled a $12 million lawsuit with Taylor’s family in 2020, and in 2021, the Justice Department launched an investigation into allegations of systemic misconduct on the part of the Louisville Police Department.
Now the Justice Department alleges that members of the Louisville Metro Police Department Place-Based Investigations Unit, which police say was formed to reduce violence in a high-crime area but has faced scrutiny for being an alleged “rogue police unit,” falsified the affidavit that was used to obtain the search warrant of Taylor’s home. To get the search warrant, the officers made false statements, omitted facts, and relied on stale information, the department argues. Then, prosecutors say, after Taylor was killed, they conspired to cover up their actions.
At a press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that this act violated federal civil rights laws. “Breonna Taylor should be alive today,” Garland said.
The first indictment charges former detective Joshua Jaynes and current sergeant Kyle Meany with federal civil rights and obstruction offenses for preparing and approving a false search warrant affidavit.
The second indictment charges former detective Brett Hankison with civil rights offenses for firing his service weapon into Taylor’s home through a covered window and covered glass door. The department is also charging current detective Kelly Goodlett with conspiring with Jaynes to falsify the search warrant and cover up their actions afterward.
Social justice activists called the announcement a victory, though many acknowledged the criminal charges would never be able to undo the harm done. Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, wrote, “They said it couldn’t and wouldn’t be done but they didn’t know I could and would stand for 874 days,” noting the number of days that have passed since Taylor’s death.
Since police are rarely prosecuted for shooting civilians while on the job, the Justice Department’s decision to charge the officers is uncommon. Here’s what the decision could mean for the fight for justice for Breonna Taylor, and for the four current and former officers.
What the charges mean
On March 13, Louisville police had a warrant to enter and search Taylor’s home because they believed a suspect in their drug investigation was receiving packages at Taylor’s home. However, the man they were searching for, Jamarcus Glover — a man Taylor dated years ago but did not maintain a friendship with — did not reside in Taylor’s apartment and was detained elsewhere.
The Justice Department alleges that the search warrant was invalid. Jaynes and Meany willfully deprived Taylor of her constitutional rights when they drafted and approved a false affidavit to obtain a search warrant for Taylor’s home, according to the department.
The indictment alleges that both men knew the affidavit “contained false and misleading statements, omitted material facts, relied on stale information and was not supported by probable cause,” according to the DOJ’s statement. It also alleges that because Jaynes and Meany knew the search warrant would be carried out by armed officers, they also knew that it could create a deadly situation for the officers and anyone inside Taylor’s home.
On March 12, 2020, officers from the Place-Based Investigations Unit sought five search warrants that they claimed were related to suspected drug trafficking in the West End area of Louisville. Four of the search warrants were for that neighborhood, but the fifth was for Taylor’s home, located 10 miles away from the West End, according to the Justice Department.
The indictment goes on to allege that the affidavit falsely claimed the officers had verified their target in the alleged drug trafficking operation, Glover, had received a package at Taylor’s apartment.
The first indictment also charges Jaynes with conspiracy to cover up the false warrant affidavit after Taylor’s death and making false statements to investigators. Jaynes allegedly worked with Goodlett to do so, whom the Justice Department has also charged with conspiracy. The department alleges that the two officers met in a garage in May 2020 and agreed to tell investigators a false story.
And when the warrant was served, the situation turned deadly.
The officers who conducted the search were unaware of the false and misleading statements used to obtain the warrant, according to the Justice Department. When they arrived at Taylor’s apartment that night, they broke down the door. Taylor was at home with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who owned a handgun. Believing an intruder was entering the apartment, he fired one shot and struck the first officer at the door. Two officers — Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove — then immediately fired a total of 22 shots into the apartments, one of which struck Taylor in the chest and killed her.
The Justice Department has brought charges against just one of the officers — Hankison — who fired that night. The two civil rights charges against Hankison contained in the second indictment allege that he used “unconstitutionally excessive force” when he fired his weapon into Taylor’s apartment.
He fired 10 more shots after Taylor had already been shot. His bullets traveled through Taylor’s apartment and through the wall to her neighbor’s apartment. Hankison’s actions “involved an attempt to kill,” the department alleges.
Why all of the officers previously walked free
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, the special prosecutor who led the state’s investigation of the police shooting, only recommended charges of wanton endangerment to the grand jury for Hankison, one of three officers who fired shots into Taylor’s apartment.
As I wrote in 2020, “that single charge was the only one jurors were allowed to consider” and it was about endangering the neighbors, not Taylor or her boyfriend. Jurors weren’t asked to consider whether any of the officers committed murder or manslaughter in regard to Taylor. While the grand jury indicted Hankison on the wanton endangerment charges in September 2020, a jury found him not guilty of all three counts.
The Justice Department’s new charges against Hankison alleged excessive use of force with respect to Taylor and her boyfriend, which was not included in Kentucky’s case. The Justice Department has already been leading a civil investigation into the Louisville Metro Government and the Louisville Metro Police Department, which Garland announced in April 2021, to examine allegations of systemic police misconduct.
Taylor’s name became, and remains, a rallying cry for racial justice efforts across the world. The killing also renewed focus on the #SayHerName movement, which seeks to draw attention to the many Black women who are killed at the hands of police but are typically ignored in the fight for justice.
The $12 million settlement between Louisville and Taylor’s family included a set of policing reforms, such as sending social workers to assist police and incentivizing police officers to live in the communities that they patrol. In the wake of the killing, the Louisville Metro Council also unanimously voted to pass “Breonna’s Law,” which bans the use of no-knock warrants.
The civil rights charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison if the violation involves an attempt to kill or results in death. The obstruction counts carry a maximum sentence of 20 years, and the conspiracy counts and false-statements charge carry a maximum sentence of five years.
Relatives of Muhammad Hassouna, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike mourn before his funeral outside a hospital in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, Sunday, Aug. 7, 2022. (photo: Fatima Shbair/AP)
The Iran-backed militant group has fired hundreds of rockets at Israel in response, and the risk of the cross-border fighting turning into a full-fledged war remained high.
Gaza's ruling Hamas group, which fought an 11-day war with Israel in May 2021, appeared to stay on the sidelines for now, possibly because it fears Israeli reprisals and undoing economic understandings with Israel, including Israeli work permits for thousands of Gaza residents, that bolster its control.
The Islamic Jihad commander, Khaled Mansour, was killed in an airstrike on an apartment building in the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza late Saturday.
Two other militants and five civilians were also killed in the attack, bringing the Palestinian death toll to 31 since the start of the Israeli offensive on Friday. Among the dead were six children and four women. The Palestinian Health Ministry said more than 250 people were wounded since Friday.
Israel says some of the deaths were caused by errant rocket fire, including one incident in the Jebaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza in which six Palestinians were killed Saturday. On Sunday, a projectile hit a home in the same area of Jebaliya, killing two men. Palestinians held Israel responsible, while Israel said it was investigating whether the area was hit by an errant rocket.
Mansour, the Islamic Jihad commander for southern Gaza, was in the apartment of a member of the group when the missile struck, flattening the three-story building and badly damaging nearby houses.
"Suddenly, without warning, the house next to us was bombed and everything became black and dusty with smoke in the blink of an eye," said Wissam Jouda, who lives next to the targeted building.
Ahmed al-Qaissi, another neighbor, said his wife and son were among the wounded, suffering shrapnel injuries. To make way for rescue workers, al-Qaissi agreed to have part of his house demolished.
As a funeral for Mansour began in the Gaza Strip on Sunday afternoon, the Israeli military said it was striking suspected "Islamic Jihad rocket launch posts." Smoke could be seen from the strikes as thumps from the strikes' explosions rattled Gaza.
The Rafah strike was the deadliest so far in the current round of fighting, which was initiated by Israel on Friday with the targeted killing of Islamic Jihad's commander for northern Gaza.
Israel has said it took action against the militant group because of concrete threats of an imminent attack, but has not provided details. Caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who is an experienced diplomat but untested in overseeing a war, unleashed the offensive less than three months before a general election in which he is campaigning to keep the job.
In a statement Sunday, Lapid said the military would continue to strike targets in Gaza "in a pinpoint and responsible way in order to reduce to a minimum the harm to noncombatants." Lapid said the strike that killed Mansour was "an extraordinary achievement."
"The operation will continue as long as necessary," Lapid said.
Israel estimates its airstrikes have killed about 15 militants.
Islamic Jihad has fewer fighters and supporters than Hamas, and little is known about its weapons arsenal. Both groups call for Israel's destruction, but have different priorities, with Hamas constrained by the demands of governing.
The Israeli army said militants in Gaza fired some 580 rockets toward Israel. The army said its air defenses had intercepted many of them, with two of those shot down being fired toward Jerusalem. Islamic Jihad has fewer fighters and supporters than Hamas.
Air raid sirens sounded in the Jerusalem area for the first time Sunday since last year's Israel-Hamas war.
Jerusalem is typically a flash point during periods of cross-border fighting between Israel and Gaza. On Sunday, hundreds of Jews, including firebrand ultra-nationalist lawmaker Itamar Ben Gvir, visited a sensitive holy site in Jerusalem, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. The visit, under heavy police protection, ended without incident, police said.
Such demonstrative visits by Israeli hard-liners seeking to underscore Israeli claims of sovereignty over contested Jerusalem have sparked violence in the past. The holy site sits on the fault line of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is central to rival narratives of Palestinians and Israeli Jews.
In Palestinian cities and towns in the West Bank, Israeli security forces said they detained 19 people on suspicion of belonging to the Islamic Jihad during overnight raids.
The fighting began with Israel's killing of a senior Islamic Jihad commander in a wave of strikes Friday that Israel said were meant to prevent an imminent attack.
By Sunday, Hamas still appeared to stay out of the battle. The group has a strong incentive to avoid another war. Last year's Israel-Hamas war, one of four major conflicts and several smaller battles over the last 15 years, exacted a staggering toll on the impoverished territory's 2.3 million Palestinian residents.
Since the last war, Israel and Hamas have reached tacit understandings based on trading calm for work permits and a slight easing of the border blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt when Hamas overran the territory 15 years ago. Israel has issued 12,000 work permits to Gaza laborers, and has held out the prospect of granting another 2,000 permits.
The lone power plant in Gaza ground to a halt at noon Saturday due to a lack of fuel. Israel has kept its crossing points into Gaza closed since Tuesday. With the new disruption, Gazans can use only four hours of electricity a day, increasing their reliance on private generators and deepening the territory's chronic power crisis amid peak summer heat.
Volunteers help remove flood debris from Messenger Florist and Gifts in Whitesburg, Ky., on Friday. Hundreds of families have moved into government-run shelters, according to Gov. Andy Beshear's office. (photo: Jeff Dean/NPR)
Since then, they have been staying with relatives while they deal with insurance adjusters, following the historic flooding in eastern Kentucky that so far has claimed 37 lives.
Lucas considers himself lucky. Still, the only home his children — ages 10 and 15 — have ever known is a total loss.
Standing in the mud on what was his front yard, he told NPR, "I have no intentions of leaving eastern Kentucky. I don't care how high the water gets. But do I want to live here? Probably not."
The immediate challenges of disaster relief in this part of Appalachia involve getting food, water and medicine to remote communities. The floods have also interrupted efforts to build a post-coal economy in eastern Kentucky, and displaced residents in a region where affordable houses are already hard to come by and flat land suitable for building new ones is scarce.
The inland floods, a type of disaster made worse by climate change, stretched across more than a dozen counties. Hundreds of families have moved into government-run shelters, according to Gov. Andy Beshear's office.
Lucas and his family have been staying with his in-laws, just across the street from his waterlogged house in Isom, Ky., and a few miles from where he grew up.
"Family is a big thing here. You have families that live close to each other and have lived close to each other their whole lives," he said.
Piecing together a sense of normalcy following tragedy
Health care and education have emerged as the largest employers in parts of eastern Kentucky as coal production waned in the region.
Lucas' family is intimately aware of these economic shifts. His father was a coal truck driver who Lucas said kept getting laid off, so he went back to school to become a nurse at Appalachian Regional Healthcare — one of the single largest employers in the region. Lucas now manages medical equipment there.
Dozens of ARH employees have lost their homes. The organization has provided housing to some, as well as sending supplies to communities up in the mountains, according to Tim Hatfield, an executive who oversees six of the ARH's hospitals. The organization also lent Lucas a truck to drive after the flood destroyed his vehicles.
Another thing that defines this area, Lucas said, is that people take care of each other and take pride in fending for themselves — even in the face of tragedy. That's one reason why, with everything else going on, he visited his local barber after the flood.
"That's a small business. If you're not spending money at that small business who got hit by the flood, too, guess what? They don't exist anymore," he said.
Several organizations, such as the Mountain Association, had been trying to revitalize and diversify the local economy and create jobs in the region before the floods.
"This is not a place that corporate America is going to invest in," Betsy Whaley, chief strategy officer with the Association, told NPR.
After the disaster, they plan to provide small loans to stabilize small businesses but will need more resources to help dig businesses out of the hole the floods put them in, she said.
Local businesses and organizations brace for economic hardship
The decline of coal mining led to mass layoffs in the area, and many have pulled up stakes and moved away. Now, Whaley worries that climate change, which makes inland flooding like this worse, is creating another challenge for the region. And that could mean more residents will leave.
Painstaking efforts to build up small businesses have been literally washed away overnight. Whaley shared the example of Gwen Christon, who owns an IGA grocery store in Isom.
Christon poured money into upgrades, such as a new HVAC system, coolers and solar panels before the flooding began, Whaley said.
Getting the store ready to open again would be prohibitively expensive, Christon told The Herald-Leader, but if it closes for good, the community loses a vital business.
"Where her store is, is a food desert," Whaley said.
Another major institution, the schools, have also suffered. During a recent meeting convened by the Kentucky Department of Education, Letcher County school superintendent Denise Yonts broke down when describing their losses: two staff members dead, six schools damaged.
"Our community as a whole is devastated," she told attendees.
Districts across the region are pushing back their start dates as administrators scramble to find enough undamaged space for students.
One challenge is just how rural the area is. Going to a different school might mean an extended commute along winding mountain roads.
Poverty is another persistent challenge that about a quarter of the people of the flooded counties face, according to U.S. Census data.
"The unfortunate part is some of the communities hit were some of the most impoverished," said Perry County superintendent Jonathan Jett.
He worries this disaster could be the final straw for many who have lived here for generations.
"I think people if they leave here, they're never coming back," Jett said.
The rebuilding process begins
Getting clean water, finding new homes, and removing mud and mold from flood-damaged buildings are among the immediate concerns plaguing most of eastern Kentucky.
In Hindman, Ky., where the downtown flooded, Doug Naselroad stood Thursday in the storefront that houses his stringed instrument-building school, the Appalachian School of Luthiery.
Naselroad also runs the Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Company, named for the brook that runs through town. It's the same creek that deposited the fine brown mud throughout the school and factory, ruining guitars and expensive equipment.
"I love the people of Hindman. I love my guys. I hate that creek," Naselroad said.
The school also has a social mission, training people referred from drug court and local recovery centers to craft high-quality instruments. Some get so skilled, they are hired to work in the factory, Naselroad said.
"I have some people who are having extreme psychological distress, and for people in recovery, this is not a good thing," he said.
Even though the first order of business is mucking out the building and using lots of Lysol, Naselroad said he is already thinking about ways to spin what happened into a new opportunity.
He plans to keep payroll going for his staff. Maybe they'll make a special run of dulcimers from wood that survived the flood, he said.
"I am thinking rebuilding a factory would be good. We're going to take care of them, come hell or high water," he said, laughing. "But that's the truth, hell or high water."
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.