CDC revokes U.S. authority to expel migrant children
A federal court last week had ruled that the administration could not exempt unaccompanied children from a Trump-era border restriction.
The children were sexually abused and neglected while at The Refuge, a facility located in Bastrop contracted by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, according to a report from a current employee.
The Child Protective Services office at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services in Austin on Nov. 14, 2019. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
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If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can receive confidential help by calling the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network’s 24/7 toll-free support line at 800-656-4673 or visiting its online hotline.
Employees of a Texas-contracted facility meant to care for female foster children who are victims of sex trafficking were discovered to be trafficking the same children, according to a federal judge.
Seven children, ages 11 to 17, were victimized by nine alleged perpetrators, according to discussions held during an emergency court hearing called by U.S. District Judge Janis Jack on Thursday. The children remained in the facility for over a month after the abuse was first reported before they were removed.
The children were sexually and physically abused and suffered from neglectful supervision and medical neglect while at The Refuge, a facility located in Bastrop contracted by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, a current Refuge employee reported to state authorities on Jan. 24. The court and the court monitors — watchdogs of the foster care system appointed by the judge — were not notified until Thursday.
That employee said a former staff member sold nude photos of two children in the facility’s care, using the proceeds to purchase illegal drugs and alcohol that were then supplied to the children, according to a letter from DFPS filed on Thursday notifying the court about the incident. Local law enforcement and the Texas Department of Public Safety were immediately notified, according to the letter.
“Has the governor seen it?” Jack asked, referring to the letter. No one answered.
In a statement Thursday evening, Gov. Greg Abbott said the Texas Rangers will investigate, arrest and pursue charges against any suspects related to the Refuge allegations.
“The reports of child sex trafficking at The Refuge in Bastrop are abhorrent,” Abbott said. “Child abuse of any kind won’t be tolerated in the state of Texas, and we are committed to ensuring these despicable perpetrators are brought to justice and punished to the fullest extent of the law.”
The identities of the suspects have not yet been made public.
Rich Richman, DFPS associate commissioner for child protective investigation, told the court the children weren’t immediately removed from the facility because investigators thought the person responsible had been fired.
However, several staff members were found to be allegedly responsible for the abuse of the children, some of whom were not immediately removed. A suspect has been arrested by law enforcement, and DFPS anticipates further arrests will be made.
Between the first report on Jan. 24 and March 4, DFPS received several additional reports about the staff member who was removed from the facility. However, during the investigation, DFPS “discovered several additional staff members still employed at the operation appeared to be involved, and that many of them were related to one another by blood or marriage and/or were cohabiting,” according to the letter. The operation’s residential care director is now believed to have known about the sexual abuse.
DFPS did not remove all of the children until Wednesday, five weeks after the first documented report of sexual abuse. The department sent Child Protective Services staff and off-duty law enforcement to the facility to “ensure the youth’s safety” a day prior. Eight of the nine children who were in The Refuge at the time have been placed with other facilities that specialize in serving victims of commercial sex trafficking, according to the letter. The remaining child refused to be placed in another facility and DFPS is searching for another placement.
“This is just shocking and shameful. Children are being subjected to terrible abuse in state care, and the agencies say nothing,” Paul Yetter, an attorney who represents foster care children in the federal lawsuit, said in a statement Thursday. “Texas is failing its most basic duty: keep these innocent children safe. And we all know who pays the price. Without the vigilance of the court monitors, and the Judge’s jumping into immediate action, who knows what kind of further abuse would be happening.”
Jack, who is overseeing a decade-old lawsuit against Texas over its foster care system, expressed horror over the discovery during Thursday’s hearing.
The judge blasted DFPS for not immediately removing the children when the allegations of abuse were first reported, calling it yet another failure of the system. Numerousbombshellreports have been released by the court-appointed monitors detailing abuse within the system, neglect and even the deaths of children.
Dozens of facilities contracted by Texas have recently closed down or had their license revoked after racking up numerous offenses and subjecting children to dangerous and damaging environments. Child advocates and the judge have repeatedly criticized Texas officials for failing to ensure facilities are safe for kids in the state’s care. From summer 2019 to May 2021, the court monitors discovered that at least 23 children died in Texas’ long-term foster care system in shelters and facilities licensed by the state.
DFPS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The judge instructed the state to provide the court with the identities of the alleged abusers and victims by noon on Friday. She also asked for details on the care the children have received since they were removed.
I am struggling. I read this earlier and got triggered. I have been fighting flash backs since. I tried to lay down to get control but that made it worse. I am getting worse right now, starting to tear up. So while I have a lot of news tabs open and the email machine is full of posts I want to read, I am shutting down both computers. No more videos, no more news, no more stories of Republicans using kids lives and their sexual identities as props to rile up their base and win elections. I am going to take some medications to calm me and make me sleepy, then I am going to turn on my Xbox and play the new Halo. In there I am a powerful here winning the war against the bad guys. Night
Russia’s baseless claims about secret American biological warfare labs in Ukraine are taking root in the U.S. too, uniting COVID-19 conspiracy theorists, QAnon adherents and some supporters of ex-President Donald Trump.
Despite rebuttals from independent scientists, Ukrainian leaders and officials at the White House and Pentagon, the online popularity of the claims suggests some Americans are willing to trust Kremlin propaganda over the U.S. media and government.
Like any effective conspiracy theory, the Russian claim relies on some truths: Ukraine does maintain a network of biological labs dedicated to research into pathogens, and those labs have received funding and research support from the U.S.
But the labs are owned and operated by Ukraine, and the work is not secret. It’s part of an initiative called the Biological Threat Reduction Program that aims to reduce the likelihood of deadly outbreaks, whether natural or manmade. The U.S. efforts date back to work in the 1990s to dismantle the former Soviet Union’s program for weapons of mass destruction.
“The labs are not secret,” said Filippa Lentzos, a senior lecturer in science and international security at King’s College London, in an email to the Associated Press. “They are not being used in relation to bioweapons. This is all disinformation.”
That hasn’t stopped the claim from being embraced by some on the far-right, by Fox News hosts, and by groups that push debunked claims that COVID-19 is a bioweapon created by the U.S.
The day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an early version appeared on Twitter — in a thread espousing the idea that Russia’s offensive was targeting “US biolabs in Ukraine” — and was soon amplified by the conspiracy theory website Infowars. It has spread across mainstream and lower-profile social platforms, including Telegram and Gab, that are popular with far-right Americans, COVID-19 conspiracy theorists and adherents of QAnon, the baseless hoax that Satan-worshipping pedophiles secretly shape world events.
Many of the accounts posting the claim are citing Russian propaganda outlets as sources. When Kremlin officials repeated the conspiracy theory on Thursday, saying the U.S. was developing bioweapons that target specific ethnicities, it took a few minutes for their quotes to show up on American social media.
Several Telegram users who cited the comments said they trusted Russian propaganda over independent American journalists, or their own democratically elected officials.
“Can’t believe anything our government says!” one poster wrote.
Others cited the claim while parroting Russia’s talking points about the invasion.
“It’s not a “war,” it’s a much needed cleansing,” wrote a member of a Telegram group called “Patriot Voices” that is popular with supporters of Trump. “Ukraine has a ton of US govt funded BioWeapons Labs that created deathly pathogens and viruses.”
Television pundits and high-profile political figures have helped spread the claim even further. Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted segments on his shows on Wednesday and Thursday to promoting the conspiracy theory. On Wednesday, Donald Trump Jr. said conspiracy theories around the labs were proven to be a “fact” in a tweet to his 7.3 million followers.
Both Carlson and Trump misrepresented congressional testimony from a State Department official saying the U.S. was working with Ukraine to secure material in the biological labs, suggesting that indicated the labs were being used for illegitimate purposes.
It’s not surprising that a biological research center would contain potentially hazardous material, however. The World Health Organization said Thursday that it has asked Ukraine to destroy any samples that could pose a threat if released, either intentionally or accidentally.
While the disinformation poses a threat on its own, the White House warned this week that the Kremlin’s latest conspiracy theory could be a prelude to a chemical or biological attack that Russia would blame on the U.S. or Ukraine.
“Frankly, this influence campaign is completely consistent with longstanding Russian efforts to accuse the United States of sponsoring bioweapons work in the former Soviet Union,” U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said Thursday during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. “So this is a classic move by the Russians.”
The conspiracy theory has also been picked up by Chinese state media, and was further amplified this week by China’s Foreign Ministry, which repeated Russia’s claim and called for an investigation.
Milton Leitenberg, an arms control expert and senior research associate at the Center for International & Security Studies at the University of Maryland, noted that Russia has a long history of such disinformation. In the 1980s, Russian intelligence spread the conspiracy theory that the U.S. created HIV in a lab.
Leitenberg said numerous Russian scientists had visited a similar public health lab in the republic of Georgia, but that Russia continued to spread false claims about that facility.
“There’s nothing they don’t know about what’s taking place there, and they know that nothing of what they claim is true,” Leitenberg said. “The important thing is that they know that, unquestionably.”
While gaining traction in the U.S., the claims about bioweapons are likely intended for a domestic Russian audience, as a way to increase support for the invasion, according to Andy Carvin, senior fellow and managing editor at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which is tracking Russian disinformation.
Carvin noted the Kremlin has also spread hoaxes about Ukrainian efforts to obtain nuclear weaponry.
“It’s a rinse-and-repeat cycle to hammer home these narratives, particularly to domestic audiences,” Carvin said.
In an effort to argue that Ukraine is making biological weapons, Tucker Carlson cited an interview with a Pentagon official.
But that Pentagon official said the exact opposite of what Tucker Carlson told his audience he said.https://t.co/3agpT4Wbsd
Modelling suggests that by the end of 2021, some 18 million people had died because of the pandemic.
People who died of COVID-19 are buried near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Credit: Fabio Teixeira/Anadolu Agency via Getty
The number of people who have died because of the COVID-19 pandemic could be roughly three times higher than official figures suggest, according to a new analysis1.
The study, published on 10 March in TheLancet, says that the true number of lives lost to the pandemic by 31 December 2021 was close to 18 million. That far outstrips the 5.9 million deaths that the study says were reported to various official sources for the same period. The difference is down to significant undercounts in official statistics, owing to delayed and incomplete reporting and a lack of data in dozens of countries.
The loss of life “is much higher than simply assessed by reported COVID-19 deaths in most countries”, says study co-author Haidong Wang, a demographer and population-health expert at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, Washington. “Understanding the true death toll from the pandemic is vital for effective public health decision-making.”
Grim statistics
To estimate COVID-19 deaths, the IHME study uses a measure called excess mortality, which is a convenient tool to overcome variation in the ways that countries identify and record deaths from the virus. Researchers estimate excess deaths by comparing the total deaths reported in a region or country, from all causes, with how many deaths would be expected given trends in recent years.
Excess deaths are a good indicator of COVID-19 deaths, Wang says, citing studies from Sweden and the Netherlands suggesting that COVID-19 was the direct cause of most excess deaths during the pandemic. But he stresses that such estimates also include deaths from other causes. More research is needed, he says, to separate deaths caused directly by COVID-19 from those that are the indirect results of the pandemic, such as those of people who did not have COVID-19 and died because of inadequate medical care in overwhelmed hospitals.
The IHME team collected data on deaths from all causes in 74 countries and territories. For countries that do not produce such data, the authors used a statistical model to produce mortality estimates. The team’s analysis indicates that although reported deaths from COVID-19 totalled 5.9 million between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021, global excess deaths due to the pandemic for that period might have totalled 18.2 million.
Sources: Our World in Data/The Economist/IHME
The highest estimated excess death rates were in Andean Latin America (512 excess deaths per 100,000 population), eastern Europe (345 per 100,000), central Europe (316 per 100,000), southern sub-Saharan Africa (309 per 100,000) and central Latin America (274 per 100,000). Wang says his group’s results are useful because they allow researchers to compare countries and regions that responded to the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in different ways.
The IHME’s results are the first estimate of global excess deaths to appear in a peer-reviewed journal. A rival analysis being prepared by the World Health Organization (WHO) has run into delays but is scheduled to be published later this month.
The IHME’s central estimate is similar to that of TheEconomist magazine in London, which arrived at some 18 million excess deaths by the end of 2021. But the error bars on the IHME’s analysis are notably narrower:The Economist has a 95% uncertainty interval of 12.6 million to 21.0 million; the IHME’s is just 17.1 million to 19.6 million.
Disputed death counts
Other researchers in the field have previously criticized COVID-19 death estimates produced by the IHME, including those that appear on its website.
Ariel Karlinsky, an economist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel who has worked on excess deaths estimates, says the new study’s central estimate of 18 million is reasonable, but that some of the IHME’s numbers for excess deaths in individual countries are significantly out-of-step with other estimates.
“They still have their ludicrous estimate for Japan at over 100,000 excess deaths, which is over six times the reported deaths. I really don’t know how they are getting that,” he says.
The IHME model contains some “bizarre features”, adds Jonathan Wakefield, a statistician at the University of Washington in Seattle who the WHO’s COVID-19 global death toll project. The IHME’s approach leads him to doubt the validity of its uncertainty intervals and other statistical features of the modelling.
Different models and techniques will produce different country results and uncertainty levels, Wang responds. For example, the IHME model uses 15 variables to estimate a country’s excess deaths, whereas TheEconomist’s model employs more than 100.
The U.S. Supreme Court left abortion providers only the narrowest avenue to challenge the ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy. Friday’s Texas Supreme Court ruling has effectively ended that federal legal challenge.
The Texas Supreme Court on Jan. 15, 2020 Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
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The Texas Supreme Court dealt a final blow to abortion providers’ federal challenge to the state’s latest abortion restrictions Friday.
The court ruled that state medical licensing officials do not have authority to enforce the law, which bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy. This was the last, narrowly cracked window that abortion providers had left to challenge the law after the U.S. Supreme Court decimated their case in a December ruling.
The law has a unique private-enforcement mechanism that empowers private citizens to sue anyone who, in the law’s language, “aids or abets” an abortion after fetal cardiac activity is detected, usually around six weeks of pregnancy.
The law is designed to evade judicial review, a goal at which it has been largely successful so far. Abortion providers have tried to argue that the law is actually enforced by state officials — the clerks who docket the lawsuits, the attorney general and medical licensing officials who could discipline doctors, nurses or pharmacists who violate the law — which would give them someone to bring a constitutional challenge against in court.
The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed with all of those arguments but one, allowing a challenge against the medical licensing officials to proceed. That case then went back to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which sent it to the Texas Supreme Court to weigh in on.
In a hearing last month, Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone argued that there was no “ordinary English interpretation that entertains any possibility of public enforcement.”
On Friday, the justices issued a ruling that seemed to agree with Stone’s “ordinary English interpretation” of the law.
“The Court concluded that Texas law does not authorize the state-agency executives to enforce the Act’s requirements, either directly or indirectly,” they wrote.
Abortion advocates, including those who brought this challenge, were unhappy with the ruling.
“We have been fighting this ban for six long months, but the courts have failed us,” Amy Hagstrom Miller, president and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health and Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, said in a statement. “The situation is becoming increasingly dire, and now neighboring states—where we have been sending patients—are about to pass similar bans. Where will Texans go then?”
Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, also issued a statement. “The courts have allowed Texas to nullify a constitutional right,” she said. “We will continue to do everything in our power to right this wrong.”
Meanwhile, anti-abortion groups cheered the court’s decision.
“The court recognized what we already knew: this law is constitutional,” said Chelsey Youman, state director and national legislative advisor with Human Coalition Action, in a statement. “It is the most successful piece of pro-life legislation in 50 years and should be replicated everywhere in states that are serious about rescuing pre-born lives.”
You cannot persuade some one of something their paycheck or position depends on them refusing to accept. Abbot is locked in a who can be the worst Republican contest with Florida’s DeathSantis. Both want to be president. Both need the same cult base voters. So the contest of racing to the bottom of the pit is on. Each needs the culture wars to distract from their horrid response to the pandemic and how many deaths were caused by their policies. They need to distract the voters from all the issues in the two states that are not getting addressed such as power grids failing and corporations taking all the profits with no regulations possible. The fact people cannot get healthcare. They need to distract from the poor roads and bridges failing. But they can stand firm on what they know their base cares most about, LGBTQ+ books and stories in libraries, them horrid brown people who need to be oppressed and learn to like it, and those women who think they have a right to control their sexual parts and control their own bodies, and where trans people pee. We really need to know and control where trans people pee to save the hospitals from failing when they are overwhelmed, and the state needs to ask the federal government for healthcare workers. Those Republican governors must have their priorities right?
Amber Briggle says her long fight over gender-affirming care wasn’t a choice but her duty. Her Texas family is under investigation after state Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a legal opinion this year saying gender-affirming treatments for transgender children constitutes child abuse. Later, Gov. Greg Abbott instructed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate any reported instances of such treatments.
The Briggles are now the target of such an investigation.
So… how did Paxton become aware of her family and her transkid?
Briggle’s son is transgender. Back in 2016, she told Texas Standard she invited Paxton over to dinner to “put a human face” to the struggle for transgender rights that Paxton was challenging at the time via opposition to public school bathroom guidelines outlined by the Obama…
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Scottie's Playtime 