to spread brightness in as much space around us as we can, especially if we’re in an area endangered by the Trump enforcement brigades we’re seeing. But even if we’re not, we can extend these actions locally to build community so we’ll be safer when it is our turn.
“We, at Wrecktangle, at all locations for the rest of the weekend, are going to donate one pizza for every single pizza sold, to families and friends that are affected by the increased ICE presence in Minneapolis,” one representative said.
In the caption, they noted that they are “set on volunteers” who would deliver pizza and other goods to people unable to leave home, but added: “We could really use some help raising funds to keep the momentum and keep people safe inside during these disturbing and uncertain times.”
Wrecktangle leaders said they started with $2,000 in donations from family and friends, and figured if they posted their Venmo information, they might be able to double that.
The support exceeded their expectations.
In addition to the collection of non-perishable foods and home essentials, two days later, they announced that they had received over $83,000 in donations.
Along with the donations, the local chain sold 2,291 pizzas between Thursday and Sunday.
During this time, they distributed 600 pizzas, non-perishables, and toiletries to vulnerable families, adding that “we have been working only with volunteers we personally know and trust to ensure the safety of our community.”
But thousands more meals are being made and prepared for free delivery as quickly as possible.
Wrecktangle co-owner Breana Evans told Bring Me The News that nearly every local restaurant in their area has been negatively impacted by the presence of ICE.
“We have staff, coworkers who are directly affected and scared to come to work,” Evans said. “It’s not fair for our friends to be scared to provide for their families and make a living. We know how to make food. So, we said, let’s just start making food.”
The company began donating their 13-inch frozen pizzas privately by connecting with their network of neighboring businesses and organizations. But then they realized the community could expand their efforts even wider.
Trusted volunteers were sent off to deliver free pizzas and meal kits, and others came to the shop to help assemble the goods.
“I think that’s a testament to our community and that there’s more good in the world than this horrible bad that they’re making us go through,” Evans said.
After meeting an immediate need to distribute food, Wrecktangle owners are working to figure out how to best use the funds they raised to help the community.
A screenshot of an Instagram story from Wrecktangle, sharing a weekend total of donated pizzas. Photo courtesy of Wrecktangle/Instagram
“We are working hard with nonprofit organizations to make sure these funds do the most good. We have not yet touched a cent,” they shared on social media. “As soon as we have updates as to specifically where your kindness is going, outside of purchasing food and home products, we will keep you thoroughly updated.”
And on Sunday, to finish out the campaign, Wrecktangle encouraged supporters to spend their money with other local restaurants. For one day only, they accepted emails containing a photo of a receipt from any Minnesota restaurant, and an additional meal was donated on their behalf.
“A lot of our community wants to come back to work, and we need to make sure these restaurants can help support their staff,” Evans said in a social media video. “We need you to be there.”
s of Monday morning, Wrecktangle shared on an Instagram story that they received 176 emailed receipts, which translates to 176 more meals for vulnerable community members.
“This week has spread so much love and friendship,” the company added in an Instagram story. “And we couldn’t be more grateful.”
The Majority report team talk about this kid who mouthed off to ICE guys and gets beaten, kidnaped, beaten again, then dumped over a mile way in a Walmart parking lot. This is not police behavior these are gang thugs terrorizing people. They are no different than any other criminal gang. Hugs
ICE white supremacist gang thugs getting even more agressive attacking people. They no longer care about skin color. The gang has reverted to gang tactics of intimidation. They think might makes them right. The ones with the guns are in charge is what they have been taught. And the administration is OK with this as it helps their cause to have a frightened public unwilling to stand up to them. They are covering their faces because they understand they are breaking the laws and that if a police officer tried this they would be in prison. They know that Stephen Miller will not always be there to protect them. And tRump can not pardon people found guilty of state crimes. In this clip a woman rushes into another woman’s home. The police dispatch incorrectly tells her she must hand the woman over and she almost does, but then gains courage as ICE thugs draw closer on her property. Her neighbors come out and give her strength and support. Hugs
The government take over of thoughts and what material people can read is happening with the assistance of the tech community. The limiting what people can see or read started with the idea of restricting any media that positively presented the LGBTQ+ community so to protect the children they claimed. See how quickly it has progressed in less than a year to simply the government telling / demanding the right to tell people what they can read or view so that the government is never disfavored or contradicted. Totally as China and Russia work. How do you like living in such a society. Remember the people who had these books on their device had paid for them and Amazon did not return their money, they just reached in and deleted the material they did not want you to read. Once the precedent is set it will be used by any new government who wish to control the population and how they feel about the society they live in. Hugs
A commuter using an Amazon Kindle while riding the subway in New York.Credit…Lucas Jackson/Reuters
In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”
On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole by Amazon.com.
In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.
An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.
Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned.
Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices and apparently to make them vanish.
An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.”
People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. “Of all the books to recall,” said Charles Slater, an executive with a sheet-music retailer in Philadelphia, who bought the digital edition of “1984” for 99 cents last month. “I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased.”
Antoine Bruguier, an engineer in Silicon Valley, said he had noticed that his digital copy of “1984” appeared to be a scan of a paper edition of the book. “If this Kindle breaks, I won’t buy a new one, that’s for sure,” he said.
Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues.
Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”
Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.
“It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from Amazon,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. “As a Kindle owner, I’m frustrated. I can’t lend people books and I can’t sell books that I’ve already read, and now it turns out that I can’t even count on still having my books tomorrow.”
Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.
On the Internet, of course, there is no such thing as a memory hole. While the copyright on “1984” will not expire until 2044 in the United States, it has already expired in other countries, including Canada, Australia and Russia. Web sites in those countries offer digital copies of the book free to all comers.
Again we see the institutionalized casual racism in the US. This was the basis of the CRT higher education classes were about. All the media latched on to and went into great detail over a white woman’s shooting by ICE but only report vaguely and sporadically on the shooting of the black / brown people shot by ICE. But when you read the report below think on how racist ICE gang thugs are, the fact that they have broken other laws and assaulted other people with impunity as they are defended by the power of the US government. One last thing to think on. The ICE thug was clearly angry and he had his gun out, ready, and pointed in front of him allowing him to shoot the man without raising his gun. The reported statements from the government never mention him drawing his gun nor raising it, just that he fired his weapon defensively. If he felt threatened why openly approach the man with the long gun? Why no call for back up? Depending on the time was the ICE thug wakened up by the noise of gun fire? Hugs
Friends and family of the 43-year-old man who was fatally shot by a Department of Homeland Security agent in Northridge on New Year’s Eve gathered on Sunday to demand accountability and hold a candlelight vigil for their lost loved one.
They identified the victim as Keith Porter, who they say was a well-known and well-liked person in the community.
“If I could say anything to the ICE agent, it’s that you’re a murderer,” said Jasané Tyler, Porter’s cousin. “You stole my cousin from me. You stole their father from them. You stole Francine’s son from her.”
Porter’s loved ones are demanding justice after the father of two died on New Year’s Eve. He was shot by an off-duty U.S. Immigration and Customs agent at the apartments where they both lived.
Keith Porter, the 43-year-old man fatally shot by a DHS agent in Northridge on New Year’s Eve. Porter Family
His family contends that he was shooting a gun in the air to mark the new year. A statement from DHS on the incident contends that it was an “active shooter situation.”
“On December 31st, an off-duty ICE Officer bravely responded to an active shooter situation at his apartment complex,” the statement said. “In order to protect his life and that of others, he was forced to defensively use his weapon and exchanged gunfire with the shooter.”
Another statement from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin provided further details. She said that the agent was “in his apartment, when he heard what he suspected were multiple gunshots. The suspected gunfire grew progressively louder, indicating to the officer that whoever was firing a gun was approaching his apartment. The officer took his ICE-authorized firearm and left his apartment to investigate. He moved to the ground level and went outside, where he believed the suspected gunfire was coming from.”
McLaughlin’s statement says that the officer rounded the corner of the building, where he encountered Porter, who they said was allegedly armed with a long rifle.
“The ICE officer identified himself as law enforcement. In response, the individual pointed his weapon at the ICE officer. The officer ordered the subject to put the weapon down, McLaughlin said. “When the subject refused to comply, the officer fired defensively with his service weapon at the subject to disarm him. The subject fired at least three rounds at the officer.”
Porter’s friends and family don’t buy it, especially with members of law enforcement in their own family.
“Every one of them says this is not standard, this is not protocol,” Tyler said.
Black Lives Matter leaders, who hosted the Sunday night vigil, are outraged by what happened.
“Were this anyone else, there would’ve been an arrest,” said Dr. Melina Abdullah, with BLM. “You don’t get to just murder people because you don’t like what they’re doing or how they’re celebrating.”
Los Angeles Police Department officers tell CBS LA that their investigation into the shooting is still ongoing. They also told the LA Times on Sunday that they haven’t yet spoken with the ICE agent due to protocol on how deadly force investigations are conducted when they involve federal law enforcement officers.
As the flu and covid are on the rise again vaccines are on the decline due to the tRump admin claiming that the best science we have is wrong based on feelings and in the case of the people like JFK Jr it is greed. People don’t realize he makes his money suing drug manufacturers that produce vaccines. Every time he thinks he has some wacked out idea he sues and nothing they can show him will matter to him, all he wants is money and to stop vaccines for other people, as his families kids are protected. Think on it, he is vaccinated, their family has the money to get the vaccines without medical insurance, all he is doing is making it harder and more costly for your kids to get them because you need the medical insurance to help pay for it. Hugs
Under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s guidance, the CDC no longer recommends routine vaccination to protect against meningococcal disease.
Jan. 11, 2026, 7:00 AM EST
By Kaitlin Sullivan
Deaths from a rare and dangerous bacterial infection could rise if fewer teens are vaccinated, doctors warn.
After the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that all adolescents get vaccinated against meningococcal disease in 2005, cases of the potentially deadly illness plummeted in the United States by 90%.
However, cases have sharply risen since 2021, likely due to a combination of mutating bacteria and declining rates of vaccination overall, especially among teens getting a booster dose for bacterial meningitis, doctors suggest.
Dr. Luis Ostrosky, an infectious disease doctor at UT Health in Houston, is concerned that as cases of bacterial meningitis climb in the United States, the CDC’s recent overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule could lead to more deaths.
Under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s guidance, the CDC is no longer recommending a meningitis vaccine for all adolescents. The vaccine and booster protect against the most common types of the infection in the U.S., serogroups A, C, Y, W.
“We see quite a few cases of meningitis per year,” Ostrosky said.
Under the new guidance, the vaccines will be recommended for “high-risk groups,” although parents can still ask doctors to vaccinate their children through a process called “shared clinical decision making.”
Teenagers and college-age adults, who often spend a lot of time in groups or communal living spaces such as dorms, and people with HIV are considered at highest risk for the infection, caused by a group of bacteria called Neisseria meningitidis.
Vaccination is important not because the disease is common — around 3,000 people are diagnosed with bacterial meningitis in the U.S. each year — but because the infection is both extremely serious and fast-moving.
Bacterial meningitis can progress quickly, causing the brain to swell and limbs to develop gangrene and sepsis, and can kill within 24 hours.
Symptoms such as headache, stiff neck, vomiting and fever come on suddenly, and may be mistaken for other minor illnesses. It can be treated with antibiotics, but even with rapid diagnosis, about 15% of patients die.
Fast-acting and life-threatening
Why some people are susceptible isn’t well understood. The infection develops when usually harmless bacteria travel through the respiratory tract and infiltrate the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord, causing severe inflammation. These bacteria, which commonly live in the back of the throat, can spread from person to person through close contact.
It can lead to a life-threatening infection in someone whose immune system is compromised — sometimes by a simple cold or flu virus — or who doesn’t have immunity to those bacteria. Viruses and fungi can also cause meningitis, but bacterial meningitis is the most serious.
Among patients who survive, as many as 20% have lifelong disability or complications, including amputated limbs, hearing impairment and neurological problems.
“You can die from a brain hernia, or from sepsis,” Messacar said. “And if you survive a brain hernia, you will most likely have severe complications.”
In 2024, the CDC issued an alert about a rise in cases of a type of invasive meningococcal disease. More than 500 cases were reported, the highest since 2013. Most of the infections were due to a specific strain of the Y serogroup of bacteria, which is included in the previously recommended vaccine. The cases were more common in adults ages 30 to 60, in Black people and in people with HIV.
“It’s even more important now that we get meningococcal vaccines out to people given that we are seeing a spike in this Y strain,” Messacar said.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved three types of meningitis vaccines. In 2005, the CDC began recommending that 11- and 12-year-olds get vaccinated against the most common meningococcal serotypes, A, C, Y and W. Because of waning immunity, the CDC in 2011 added a booster recommendation for 16-year-olds to protect them through young adulthood. A vaccine for meningitis B and a combined shot are available for children or babies who are considered at high risk.
In a statement Monday, Kennedy said that the CDC’s new childhood vaccine schedule was “aligning the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule with international consensus.”
Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease doctor at the UCSF School of Medicine in San Francisco, said the new approach to meningitis vaccination in the U.S., which is based on Denmark’s, is flawed.
“You can’t just look at another country’s vaccine approach and photocopy it. You really have to look at what is happening in your own country,” Chin-Hong said. Given the safety of meningitis vaccines, “it makes sense to vaccinate.”
Alicia Stillman, who serves on a World Health Organization task force for eliminating meningitis, worries that by moving the vaccine into shared decision making, the CDC is creating hurdles for parents who want to protect their children.
Stillman’s daughter, Emily, died from meningitis B in 2013. Emily had been vaccinated against meningitis A, C, W and Y, but the FDA didn’t approve a vaccine for meningitis B until 2014.
Emily Stillman, pictured with her mother, Alicia, was 19 when she died from meningitis B. Courtesy Alicia Stillman
Because many types of bacteria can cause bacterial meningitis, different vaccines are needed. The meningitis B vaccine hasn’t been recommended for all children but is available for people at high risk through the shared decision making process.
“I have watched medical professionals not bring [meningitis B vaccination] up,” said Stillman, who is the co-executive director of the American Society for Meningitis Prevention. “I have watched parents who are maybe a little less educated and not know how to ask about it, or they go to a public clinic instead of a private clinic where they have less time with a provider.”
She believes that could happen more broadly with the changed guidance.
What the research says
A CDC statement said the changes to the recommendation reflect the need for more data on certain vaccines, “including placebo-controlled randomized trials and long-term observational studies to better characterize vaccine benefits, risks, and outcomes.”
While there haven’t been placebo-controlled trials for meningitis vaccines — which would test how well a vaccine works either by deliberately infecting people with bacteria or by seeing how well they fare if they are infected in the real world — there have been many randomized clinical trials and other studies that use decades of data collected from both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in the real world.
Chin-Hong said placebo-controlled trials aren’t realistic or ethical for every drug, especially for life-threatening and rare diseases.
“A well-designed observational study, especially using decades of experience, can be just as informative as a randomized controlled trial,” Chin-Hong said.
A 2020 CDC report analyzed 20 clinical trials on meningococcal disease vaccines, including data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VS). The most common reported side effects were “mild to moderate,” and included swelling, fever and headache.
In 2005, Katie Thompson, now 39, was infected with an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacterial meningitis when she was a college freshman, the same month the FDA approved the first MenACWY vaccine.
“I don’t know how to describe it besides it’s pure hell,” she said.
After five weeks in the hospital and nearly dying, she went home, but not without lifelong complications. Thompson, who lives outside of Charleston, South Carolina, still struggles with migraines and vestibular disorders that cause vertigo and nausea. The infection was hard on her organs and she uses a bladder stimulator that helps regulate both her bladder and nerves in the base of her spine.
“It’s just not a disease that you want to take a risk on,” she said. “It’s not one that you want to gamble with your child’s life.”
Two vaccines that remain universally recommended by the CDC — the Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, vaccine and the pneumococcal vaccine — protect against some causes of bacterial meningitis. However, these vaccines don’t protect against meningitis A, C, W, Y or B.
Kaitlin Sullivan
Kaitlin Sullivan is a contributor for NBCNews.com who has worked with NBC News Investigations. She reports on health, science and the environment and is a graduate of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York.
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