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Missing Lake Oswego foster children believed to be in danger KGW.com
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) – West Virginia’s largest education union has expressed a loss of confidence in the state’s school re-entry metrics map, saying it’s putting people’s lives in danger.
The American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia (AFT-WV) made that announcement Wednesday, adding that it’s considering its next steps.
The union said Gov. Jim Justice has been inconsistent in his COVID-19 response.
“The Governor continues to cherry-pick the portions of AFT’s public health guidance document to suit his own agenda,” AFT-WV said in a statement. “Quite frankly, this shouldn’t surprise us given his habit of changing the rules midstream. In less than a month, he has altered the color-coded map to the point where it is no longer trusted by the public, school employees or nationally recognized public health experts.”
Wednesday’s announcement follows a similar announcement Tuesday by the West Virginia Education Association, which said it will file a legal injunction against Justice and other state officials.
WSAZ reached out to the governor Tuesday evening, who responded he had no comment at that time.
“The public no longer trusts the Governor’s map. In grading the Governor’s performance on this critical test, he receives an F. He is failing to keep West Virginians safe,” stated AFT-WV President Fred Albert.
Tap or click here to see the AFT-WV’s complete statement.
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Apparently, many Americans spared themselves the torture of watching Tuesday night’s first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
According to early numbers from Nielsen, the debate, which was aptly described by CNN’s Jake Tapper as “a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck,” is on track to draw a far smaller audience than the record-setting first face-off between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Fast national ratings for the broadcast networks show the Trump-Biden showdown amassing about 29 million total viewers across ABC (which drew the largest broadcast crowd, with 11 million), NBC (8 million), CBS (5.3 million) and Fox (4.5 million) — a decline of 36 percent from 2016.
Four years ago, the broadcast networks combined for 45.3 million total viewers in the preliminary ratings, according to The Hollywood Reporter. That figure rose to 49.33 million after time-zone adjustments for the broadcast. When other outlets, including the cable networks, were factored in, the Trump-Clinton debate wound up at 84.4 million viewers, besting the previous record set by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan’s Oct. 28, 1980 debate (81 million).
The ratings for Tuesday’s Trump-Biden debate will adjust upward once more numbers from cable and other outlets are added, but still are unlikely to approach the numbers from four years ago.
Tuesday’s debate, moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox News, was widely derided by viewers and critics who described it as “chaotic,” “combative” and a “travesty.”
Speaking on MSNBC, longtime political pundit James Carville said an unruly Trump “just chased the audience away. It was unwatchable … “tough television.”
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has led Turkey for more than 17 years, is known for being pragmatic as well as pugnacious.
Thus, amid escalating tensions in the eastern Mediterranean over territorial boundaries and maritime gas deposits, Turkey has withdrawn an exploration vessel and agreed to reopen talks with Greece, its fellow Nato member and old Aegean rival. All this just before this week’s EU summit, which a top adviser to Mr Erdogan says is the chance for a Turkish reset with Europe.
Yet he appears simultaneously to be leaping into another conflict — a lethal flare-up of the simmering dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the separatist enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. That could bring him into yet another stand-off with his sometime friend and fellow strongman, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
To recap: Turkey and Russia are on opposing sides in the civil wars in Syria and Libya and yet they try to collaborate in their attempts to manage these conflicts to their mutual advantage.
Mr Erdogan strongly supported the mainly Sunni rebellion against Bashar al-Assad in Syria from 2011. Back then, he was a more overtly neo-Islamist figure, expecting forces allied to the Muslim Brotherhood to sweep all before them in a series of Arab upheavals. Mr Putin salvaged the Assad regime, committing Russia’s air force to Syria in 2015, alongside Iranian revolutionary guards and their proxy militia on the ground.
When, in the summer of 2016, Mr Erdogan put down an attempted coup d’état at home — in which he felt the US and some EU states had been complicit — Mr Putin moved with speed and agility to heal the rift with Ankara. Realising that Mr Erdogan’s main concern was to push back from his frontier Syrian Kurdish militia, who were allied with Kurdish insurgents inside Turkey but backed by the US in the fight against Isis, Mr Putin allowed three successive Turkish incursions into northern Syria, in 2016, 2018 and 2019. But as Russia bounced back as a regional superpower it collided with Turkey’s desire for strategic depth. This February the two countries came to the brink of war in Syria.
Turkey’s intervention in Libya was intended partly to secure its claim to eastern Mediterranean oil and gas riches. In June it turned the tide of the civil war against Khalifa Haftar, the warlord supported by Russia, France, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Russia reportedly sent warplanes to eastern Libya from north-west Syria in response. Egypt, backed by the UAE and its fighter jets, threatens to invade Libya to stop further Turkish advances. While Ankara appears not to take this sabre-rattling too seriously, there is room for miscalculation.
And so to Nagorno-Karabakh, where current clashes are the heaviest since a brief but violent spasm in 2016 that killed some 200 people, rekindling fears of a return to the war of the early 1990s.
The region, and its ethnic Armenian population, seceded from Turkic Azerbaijan after the collapse of the Soviet Union in a conflict that was overshadowed by the wars of the Yugoslav succession. Now, a major oil and gas pipeline runs from Azerbaijan into Turkey and on to Europe. Russia, which has a military base in, and defence pact with, Armenia also sells arms to Azerbaijan and is seeking to damp the conflict.
Armenian allegations that Turkey has sent Syrian proxies to the Azerbaijani front — reprising its Syrian militia deployment in Libya — remain unconfirmed and denied by Azerbaijan, though it held joint military exercises with Turkey this summer. There is room for miscalculation here too.
Turkey challenging Russia in north Africa or the Levant is not quite the same as a face-off in the Caucasus. While that may be former Ottoman territory, this is former Soviet turf. Under Mr Erdogan’s authoritarian rule, the conceptual boundary between domestic and foreign policy has been erased. Both are fired by a turbocharged nationalism as he tries to shore up his shrinking base. His recourse to hard power abroad, sidelining generations of seasoned diplomats, gives the impression that Turkey has gone rogue.
There are certainly takers for that view in the EU and the US. Should US President Donald Trump fail to win re-election in November, Mr Erdogan will lose the shield his administration has provided. All this comes at a time when Mr Erdogan is politically vulnerable; his adventurism could rebound on a weakened economy and currency.
Few modern leaders have so dominated their countries, winning more than a dozen elections and plebiscites over nearly two decades. Even fewer have done it while seemingly able constantly to expand their power. If Mr Erdogan now overreaches he may test this record to destruction.
Desteny Lara is 18, and she goes to California State University, East Bay. Like many college students in America, she recently had to leave campus and move back home — she’s from South Central Los Angeles. For her, moving back means living in a two-bedroom apartment with 10 family members and grappling with how to keep her focus.
“When it comes to concentrating and doing work, I normally do it at night, because everyone’s asleep. Everyone’s quiet, and it makes me focus more,” Lara says.
Still, it’s getting challenging. And she says she wonders how much longer she can do this for: “Sometimes I think to myself, is school really worth it?”
This is exactly what educators and experts are worried about. COVID-19 and the ensuing economic crisis is putting even more pressure on low-income and first-generation college students. It’s starting to show: So far, there’s been a decrease in students applying for financial aid — especially from low-income students. Around 100,000 fewer high school seniors completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, to attend college this year.
Michele Siqueiros, president of the California-based advocacy organization Campaign for College Opportunity, says the irony is, higher education “is absolutely the only path often for low-income students out of poverty.”
With the average student loan debt at around $30,000, the inaccessibility of a college education was a problem long before COVID-19. Black and Latino college education levels lag far behind whites, and many worry that the pandemic will make it worse.
Brian Troyer, dean of undergraduate admissions at Marquette University in Wisconsin, says he’s heard a lot of student concerns about financial instability since the spring. They include questions like “What happens if our family situation changes? Might I qualify for financial aid?”
In August, the U.S. Census Bureau found students from families with incomes under $75,000 were almost twice as likely to say they canceled plans to attend college than students from wealthier families. “That’s worrisome,” says Siqueiros. “Because we know that when students, especially when low-income students leave higher education, the probability of them returning is highly unlikely.”
Back in South Central LA, Desteny Lara just took on a new job at a fast food restaurant, to make ends meet. She’s worried about juggling school and work. But then she remembers that she’s the first one to make it to college. And that’s a really big deal in her family. “My whole family basically looks up to me. Like my siblings, my cousins. Like [they say] ‘if she can go to college, then you can go to college, too,'” she says.
What does the unemployment picture look like?
It depends on where you live. The national unemployment rate has fallen from nearly 15% in April down to 8.4% percent last month. That number, however, masks some big differences in how states are recovering from the huge job losses resulting from the pandemic. Nevada, Hawaii, California and New York have unemployment rates ranging from 11% to more than 13%. Unemployment rates in Idaho, Nebraska, South Dakota and Vermont have now fallen below 5%.
Will it work to fine people who refuse to wear a mask?
Travelers in the New York City transit system are subject to $50 fines for not wearing masks. It’s one of many jurisdictions imposing financial penalties: It’s $220 in Singapore, $130 in the United Kingdom and a whopping $400 in Glendale, California. And losses loom larger than gains, behavioral scientists say. So that principle suggests that for policymakers trying to nudge people’s public behavior, it may be better to take away than to give.
How are restaurants recovering?
Nearly 100,000 restaurants are closed either permanently or for the long term — nearly 1 in 6, according to a new survey by the National Restaurant Association. Almost 4.5 million jobs still haven’t come back. Some restaurants have been able to get by on innovation, focusing on delivery, selling meal or cocktail kits, dining outside — though that option that will disappear in northern states as temperatures fall. But however you slice it, one analyst said, the United States will end the year with fewer restaurants than it began with. And it’s the larger chains that are more likely to survive.
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BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s foreign minister says he hopes the U.S. will reconsider its decision to close its diplomatic mission in Baghdad. His press conference Wednesday came after a group of 25 international diplomatic envoys in Iraq issued a joint statement expressing willingness to help the country secure its seat of government. Frequent rocket and mortar attacks have targeted the Green Zone, the seat of Iraq’s government and home to many foreign embassies, including the U.S. Embassy. Iraq’s foreign minister called the U.S. threat to close its embassy “dangerous” because “there is a possibility that the American withdrawal from Baghdad will lead to other withdrawals” by other countries’ embassies.
TROY – Shots fired in the city in the first nine months of 2020 are more than twice what they were for all of 2019. The number of homicides have soared, residents wounded in shootings are up and the city faces an increasing feeling of danger, the seven City Council members heard Tuesday night.
“The most pressing topic at hand is the increase in violent crime,” Chief Brian Owens told the council Public Safety Committee, which all council members attended.
The police department is dealing with this along with demands for increased accountability and transparency as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement across the country and the local Troy 4 Black Lives group in the city.
The city is days away from approving contracts for upgraded street surveillance cameras and body cameras that police officers will wear. The surveillance cameras are expected to aid in the investigations of violent crimes and other offenses, while the body cameras are expected to provide real-time recordings of police officers at crime scenes and interacting with the public.
The city also will see the return of a reconstituted Police Objective Review Board in mid-October, the first time the oversight organization has functioned in more than five years, Mayor Patrick Madden said.
Installation of improved surveillance cameras to replace the malfunctioning camera system currently in place and the use of body cameras have been discussed for years. After years of delays, the city is preparing to approve contracts of $95,823 with Eclipse Network Solution to install 120 street cameras and of $119,717 with Axon Enterprises, Inc., for the body cameras.
The violent crimes and protests in the city have put attention on the police department. The last time the Public Safety Committee met was Feb. 12 when the discussion was about idling vehicles, according to the committee meeting minutes.
“There’s been 59 shots-fired incidents this year, more than double of last year,” Owens said.
The city’s toll also includes 13 homicides and 22 shooting in which 29 people were shot, Owens told the council members.
The police department is on pace to exceed its $1.15 million overtime budget, Owens said. The department has spent $998,000 in overtime - 86.7 percent of the annual overtime budget - investigating homicides and other crimes and providing security at demonstrations.
Council members pushed for dealing with the violence and transparency for police operations, including use-of-force policies and filing complaints with the department.
