We’re paying out-of-state residential facilities hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more," to house children in state custody

Explanation: Rep. DaSilva says R.I. pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for out-of-state care for children in state custody

Rhode Island, Children, Families, State Budget, Roberto DaSilva,

State Rep. Roberto DaSilva recently introduced legislation intended to make it much more difficult for the state Department of Children, Youth and Families to send children in its care to out-of-state residential treatment facilities. He said he was moved by the story of Nicholas Alahverdian, who was the subject of a column by The Providence Journal’s Bob Kerr. Alahverdian says he endured years of abuse and neglect in two out-of-state residential facilities where he was sent by DCYF. He has formed his own nonprofit organization to advocate for children in DCYF care. He has also filed state and federal lawsuits stemming from his alleged mistreatment. DaSilva said in a General Assembly news release that Rhode Island has the resources to provide children with the treatment they need within the state. DaSilva said he is concerned about the well-being of children in state care and also about keeping taxpayer dollars in the state. "We’re paying out-of-state residential facilities hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, to house our own state residents," DaSilva said. "It just doesn’t make sense, especially in these dire economic times." Among the children the DCYF takes into its custody are those who are victims of abuse or neglect caused by their primary caretakers, those who are in the juvenile justice system and ordered by courts to have access to rehabilitative care, and those with emotional, behavioral or developmental challenges who need out-of-home care and treatment and whose parents give DCYF temporary custody, according to DCYF interim Director Kevin J. Aucoin. The DCYF has said it is working to reduce its dependence on residential treatment programs, both in Rhode Island and in other states. So we wondered whether the agency is still spending as much as DaSilva says on such placements. We asked DaSilva where he got his information and he referred us to a website called the Rhode Island DCYF Transparency Portal. It shows the agency’s expenditures in various categories such as personnel and foster care. The top expenditure is residential services. For fiscal year 2010, for instance, the portal shows the state spent $117 million for residential care for youth in DCYF custody, which also includes costs for foster home placements and varous community services   Much of that money was spent on local services such as Child and Family Services of Newport County or Ocean Tides, a residential treatment program in Narragansett for male juvenile offenders. The DCYF also budgets an additional $22.4 million this year for youths sent to the Rhode Island Training School. But the website shows that millions of dollars go to out-of-state programs. For example, Mass Mentor Inc., which provides services at several Massachusetts locations to children with developmental disabilities was paid $376,829 in the first quarter. During the same quarter, the Bennington School in Vermont was paid $77,769 and the Glen Mills School in Pennsylvania got $59,246. We asked Kevin J. Aucoin, interim director of DCYF, for more data. He said that this fiscal year, the DCYF expects to spend $65.5 million on residential services for 718 children, with $9.5 million going to out-of-state facilities, most of them in nearby states. Aucoin says the spending on residential programs has been declining. In fiscal year 2007, for example, the state spent $85.4 million for 1,102 children. In that year, it spent $18.4 million to send 154 children out of state. All residential placements are expected to be reduced as the agency adopts a new model of care that focuses on keeping families together. Aucoin said the DCYF sends children out of state for specialized treatments not offered by in-state providers. Those include multiple psychiatric diagnoses and severe and profound developmental disabilities. The majority, he said, have severe aggressive behaviors. Some may be youth with significant "sexual offending behaviors." Aucoin said children are placed out of state only with approval of the Family Court and only after the agency demonstrates there is no adequate program in-state. So it appears the only fault with DaSilva’s claim is it is too conservative. Instead of spending the "hundreds of thousands," DaSilva claims, the state actually expects to spend nearly $10 million on out-of-state programs. We find his claim to be .


Joaquin Castro Says the director of an anti-abortion group receiving a Texas grant to provide women’s health services "believes HIV can be spread through the sewer system.

Health Care, Public Health, Texas, Joaquin Castro,

After word surfaced that a conservative nonprofit won a $1.6 million state grant to deliver women’s health services, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro questioned the decision while making a "sewer" claim about the group’s director. Castro, D-San Antonio, said in an August 2016 tweet: "The group's director believes HIV can be spread through the sewer system. Is it really most qualified for the grant?" Human Immunodeficiency Virus, which causes AIDS, is mainly spread through sexual contact or from sharing needles, syringes, rinse water or other equipment with someone who has the virus, according to a federal website focused on AIDS. Less commonly, per the site, the virus may be spread from mother to child during pregnancy, by being stuck with an HIV-contaminated needle and, in rare cases, via blood transfusions and eating food pre-chewed by an HIV-infected person. We spotted no mention of the virus getting conveyed from anything in a sewer pipe. "HIV does not survive long outside the human body (such as on surfaces) and it cannot reproduce outside a human host," the site says. The virus also isn’t spread by air or water, the site says. Seeking Castro’s factual backup, we heard from his House spokeswoman, Erin Hatch, who emailed us web links to summer 2016 news stories--including an Austin American-Statesman story posted earlier the day of Castro’s tweet about Carol Everett, chief executive of the Round Rock-based Heidi Group, which once ran no-charge crisis pregnancy centers in Dallas advising women with unplanned pregnancies about giving birth. Everett, the story said, "recently came under scrutiny for suggesting during a fetal tissue disposal hearing that sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, could be transmitted through the sewer system." Everett told the paper, though, that her highlighted comments had been misunderstood. Everett also told reporter Julie Chang that her remarks about HIV amounted to "a stupid mistake." Chang shared with us her notes from her interview with Everett, who said: "I very much regret what I said. I shouldn’t have even tried… because they misunderstood it. I didn’t talk about transmitting STDs that way. I was trying to talk about the fact that babies are ground up and put into these garbage disposals which goes into our sewers. I didn’t make that point very clearly." Existing regulations allow fetal remains, as with other medical tissue, to be ground and discharged into a sewer system, incinerated or disinfected followed by disposal in a landfill, or "an approved alternate treatment process, provided that the process renders the item as unrecognizable, followed by deposition in a sanitary landfill." Two instances For our part, we confirmed from a TV news report noted by Hatch and Chang’s recording of Everett’s comments before a state agency that she indeed made mention of HIV and sewers while advocating for state officials to adopt a rule requiring fetal remains to be buried or cremated rather than disposed other ways. The rule was proposed in June 2016 by the executive commissioner of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission on behalf of the Department of State Health Services; it wasn’t finalized as of Aug. 17, 2016. Chang’s recording of Everett’s comments at an Aug. 4, 2016 state hearing on the proposed rule show Everett expressed criticism of current disposal methods, further saying: "What does this really do to the public? There are other people to consider. "What if one of those sewer treatment programs breaks down one day? You know, the abortion industry doesn’t have time; they only see a woman one time; they do not do an AIDS test, they don’t do, they don’t know if she’s HIV-positive. They don’t know if she has a sexually transmitted disease. And what if one day, just one day, something horrible escaped into the sewer system?" (Laughter.) "It may sound funny but it’s something we could think about because I can tell you today, the public is thinking about it. "So I appreciate very much addressing this. I encourage you to uphold it. Let’s take care of those who cannot take care of themselves -- and I am talking about the women." Earlier, as pointed out by Hatch, Everett said in an interview with Austin’s Fox 7 aired July 7, 2016, that existing protocols for disposing fetal remains pose "several health concerns. What if the woman had HIV? What if she had a sexually transmitted disease? What if those germs went through and got into our water supply?" Everett said. When we reached Everett about Castro's claim, she said by phone she hadn’t explicitly said HIV is spread through sewer pipes--and doesn’t believe as much. "People with HIV and AIDS go to the bathroom every day," Everett said. At the state hearing, she said, she was trying to stress that fetal material gets into the sewer system. Everett called her comment to Austin’s Fox 7 about HIV/STD "germs" getting into "our" water supply "really far out. I shouldn’t have said that." Our ruling Castro said Everett "believes HIV can be spread through the sewer system." Everett didn’t explicitly say as much and told us she doesn’t believe it. However, on two occasions, she raised the "what-if" spectre of a woman somehow passing along the virus or an STD through fetal material flushed down a drain.


Midwest women join climate change group in Antarctica.

Explanation: “Chicago is the coldest place I’ve ever been,” said Jing Hu, who came from southern China to do her postdoctoral work in materials science at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago.

Climate, Climate change, Chicago, Technology, Antarctica, Engineering, China, Science, Education

So she is “excited and terrified” about spending three weeks in Antarctica, among almost 100 women in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, math and medicine) fields who were recently announced as fellows in the Homeward Bound program to raise awareness of climate change and promote the role of female scientists, engineers and other experts in addressing it. The program was started in 2015 by an Australian activist and an Antarctic marine scientist. The participants raise much of the funding for the trip themselves. Over the next 11 months they will collaborate and strategize on leadership development and science education before going to Antarctica in November 2019. --- The nonprofit news outlet Energy News Network provided this article to The Associated Press through a collaboration with Institute for Nonprofit News. --- They come from a wide range of disciplines, including agricultural science, molecular biology, epidemiology and geochemistry. The only other representative of the Midwest is Krissa Skogen, a conservation scientist and botanist at the Chicago Botanic Garden whose specialty is studying the effects of climate change on evening primroses in the Southwest. The idea is that in Antarctica, the women will not only do their own research but, perhaps more importantly, network and strategize with each other around how to make people care about climate change and how to bring more women and girls into STEMM fields where they can work to mitigate and curb climate change and develop clean energy. In Antarctica, Hu hopes to test out solar technology that she was involved with developing at Oxford University: a “third-generation quantum dot solar cell” that can absorb types of light other than UV and — hopefully — tolerate a harsh environment like Antarctica. “A lot of the (research) stations in Antarctica are actually powered by diesel generators and things like that — it’s not very clean at the moment,” but solar could ideally power zero-emissions stations, said Hu, whose work at Argonne involves using a highly specialized microscope to study materials in extremely hot environments, like inside nuclear reactors or in outer space. “And on expeditions people get lost; they have no walls to plug in. By using these solar panels you could charge things (like satellite phones or GPS devices) that could save your life.” Hu was inspired to go into materials science by her parents, who worked in banks in China and encouraged her not to take that route. She was aware of energy issues from a young age, given the air pollution problems in China, and her family had a solar thermal installation on their roof. During her doctoral work at Oxford, where she was studying materials involved in nuclear reactors, Hu became especially concerned about climate change. She organized the Oxford Climate Forum in 2015 and campaigned during the Paris Climate Conference that year, while also working on the solar technology that she and her colleagues hope could efficiently provide power in Antarctica. Hu said she hopes the trip helps her “step outside my comfort zone” and “find out where my future lies. How does my personal science fit into the bigger picture?” Skogen will not have much chance to do her primary research on the trip. “I’m a pollination biologist, and there aren’t any insects in Antarctica,” she said. But she sees it as a way to view the impacts of climate change firsthand in one of the earth’s most delicate ecosystems, just as she observes how evening primroses are suffering from reduced soil moisture in the Southwest. Skogen had a minor in women’s studies in college, and she was active on women’s rights and “edited a zine, as you do in the ’90s.” Some friends were surprised when she chose a career in science, since it seemed out of step with her advocacy work. But with science education and pushing for more diversity in science, she melds her various interests. “I’m very committed to increasing diversity and opportunities for folks left out of the scientific process historically,” Skogen said. She finds herself mentoring younger women in science — just as she sought mentors in her career — to help them deal with issues that her male colleagues “never even have to think about.” Things like avoiding “up-speak” that means women are perceived as less competent, and figuring out how to pursue career opportunities while also living in the same place as a husband or partner. She noted that exploring such issues with women scientists can be done in settings other than Antarctica. “But having Antarctica as a backdrop provides the opportunity for connecting with folks in a fundamentally different way. Antarctica is a fantastic place to go to highlight the importance of climate change in people’s daily lives, and it’s a good metaphor for how important it is for women to have a voice and feel represented and confident.” Inspiring women and especially women of color to go into science is a major goal for Melissa Marquez, a marine biologist of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage joining Hu and Skogen on the trip. Marquez is based in Australia and studies (among other things) the impacts of climate change on sharks, skates and their relatives. This summer she appeared on the Discovery Channel during its popular Shark Week event. During filming in Cuba she was bitten and dragged — “ironically,” as she has said — by a crocodile. After the show, she said, “I got a lot of messages saying (things like), ’Thank you so much for being on the show. I had my little girl watch, and she said, ’Oh my gosh Papi there’s a brown girl with a shark.” Representation really matters in the media. Growing up, I never saw women marine biologists, no less Latina marine biologists.” Marquez was born in Puerto Rico and visited the island after Hurricane Maria, seeing how it affected her family and an ecosystem expected to be buffeted with increasing storms because of climate change. She sees Antarctica as a key place to study a climate change impact that affects ecosystems around the globe: the migration of species into new habitats because of changing climate. “Currently there are no rays or sharks in Antarctica, though there are several endemic species of skates that can live in cold waters,” Marquez said. “Some researchers have found increases in water temperature of even a few degrees Celsius could make those very frigid waters habitable for sharks. Antarctic waters are dominated by soft-bodied invertebrates — so animals with jaws would find easy pickings and decimate the Antarctic benthic community as we currently know it.” The Homeward Bound program is sponsored in part by several companies; a lead sponsor is the Spanish company Acciona, which develops renewable energy installations and infrastructure around the world. Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and member of Acciona’s board, will join the scientists in Antarctica. In order to complete the trip, the women who were chosen still need to raise more than $17,000 each. Hu recently launched a crowdfunding site, the first time she has ever used the medium. Skogen said that while the fundraising is a major challenge, it adds to the mission of the program. “I’m thinking about the fundraising angle really as a different way to tackle science outreach — it’s requiring me to be creative, to make connections with people I know in different industries that maybe I wouldn’t have talked about these particular topics with,” she said. “I see it as an opportunity for me to spread the word about the work I do, the importance of battling climate change and the importance of ensuring women are at the table at all levels — to collect the data and write about it as a scientist or to be at the table when policy decisions are being made.”


5 Minnesotans sickened by E. coli linked to salad kits.

Explanation: Five Minnesotans have gotten sick from eating salad kits linked to an outbreak of E. coli, state health officials said Tuesday.

Health, St. Paul, General News, Minnesota

The state Department of Health says the Minnesotans became ill between Nov. 8 and Nov. 16. Two people were hospitalized. The ill Minnesotans ranged in age from 21 to 91. Four were from the Minneapolis-St. Paul are and one from Greater Minneota. Officials say nine people from three states have gotten sick. The infections are linked to Fresh Express Sunflower Crisp Chopped Salad Kits. Health officials are warning consumers not to eat the salad mix, or to throw it out if they have it in their refrigerators. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a safety alert about the salad kits.


Italy suffers setback to hopes its coronavirus epidemic might be in retreat.

Explanation: Hopes that Italy’s coronavirus epidemic might be in retreat suffered a setback on Thursday when data showed that both the number of new cases and deaths had ticked higher, underscoring how hard it is to halt the disease.

Officials said 712 people died of the illness in the last 24 hours, pushing the total tally to 8,215, well over double that seen in anywhere else in the world, while new infections rose by 6,153 to 80,539. The number of cases is nudging close to the more than 81,000 infections recorded in China where the pandemic began. The relentless rise in Italy is despite stringent lockdown measures introduced progressively since Feb. 23 to try to stop the spread, which authorities had hoped would be having more of an effect by now. There had been slight declines in both new cases and deaths earlier this week, but the northern region of Lombardy, the epicentre of the outbreak, saw its numbers climb on Thursday. “I do not know if we have hit the peak or if we have missed something ... all I can say is that I am worried,” Lombardy governor Attilio Fontana told reporters, adding that the situation would soon become clearer. “I think that in two or three days we will understand if the measures we have taken are working,” he said. However, he warned that when new cases finally receded, the government would not necessarily be able to relax the lockdown, which is due to be lifted on April 3. “Even if the number of cases declines, I think we will have to carry on with (the restrictions) until we are quite certain that this contagion has been stopped.”  The situation appeared particularly worrying in Lombardy’s capital Milan, which is also Italy’s financial hub, where new infections jumped by more than 800 to almost 7,000. Only the neighbouring provinces of Bergamo and Brescia have a higher number of cases. Highlighting the scale of the drama, Bergamo said that over the last 10 years it had recorded on average 45 deaths a week. This ticked up to 64 at the end of February and then soared, hitting a peak of 313 deaths between March 15-21. The disease has also taken a heavy toll amongst medical workers, with the national federation of doctors and surgeons saying on Thursday that 40 doctors had so far died, many of them general practitioners in northern towns and cities. Italy’s less developed south is growing increasingly anxious as it sees its own numbers push up, with several regions reporting growth rates in new cases that are above the national average. In an open letter to Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, the head of the Campania region, which is centred on Naples, warned of impending disaster. “At this point there is the real prospect that Lombardy’s tragedy is about to become the south’s tragedy,” Vincenzo De Luca wrote. “We are on the cusp of a major expansion of infections that we might not be able to manage.”


Rick Scott "was forced to resign as the head of a company that pled guilty to massive amounts of systematic fraud, including 14 felonies, leading to a historic $1.7 billion fine.

Explanation: Rick Scott, former healthcare CEO, faces questions about past

Candidate Biography, Health Care, Florida, Alex Sink,

With Republican Rick Scott pouring millions of dollars into his unconventional bid for governor, the front-runners from both major parties are beginning to take his candidacy seriously.Translation: They're attacking him.Republican Attorney General Bill McCollum and Democratic Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink are launching new criticisms against Scott and his former hospital company, Columbia/HCA. "If Scott proposes the same accountability measures for Florida government that he used at Columbia/HCA, we'll have to back up the paddy wagon to the front door of the Capitol," Sink spokeswoman Kyra Jennings said in a May 18, 2010, press release. "Florida simply can't trust someone who was forced to resign as the head of a company that pled guilty to massive amounts of systematic fraud, including 14 felonies, leading to a historic $1.7 billion fine. "Hours later McCollum campaign manager Matt Williams offered a second stinging critique. "The fact that Rick Scott is running for governor as a 'reformer' would be funny if it wasn't so outrageous," Williams said. "This is a man who barely escaped imprisonment, whose failure in business has been portrayed on national news and around the world. He is an embarrassment. "We're going to be checking statements from both campaigns. We'll start with Sink's claim that Scott "was forced to resign as the head of a company that pled guilty to massive amounts of systematic fraud, including 14 felonies, leading to a historic $1.7 billion fine. "On his campaign website, Scott admits HCA has paid $1.7 billion in fines as part of a federal settlement concerning fraudulent health care billing, so there's not much point in checking that.But we hadn't heard the claim that HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies.Scott started what was first Columbia in the spring of 1987, purchasing two El Paso, Texas, hospitals. In 1994, Scott's Columbia purchased HCA and its 100 hospitals, and merged the companies to form Columbia/HCA. When Scott resigned as CEO in 1997, Columbia/HCA had grown to more than 340 hospitals, 135 surgery centers and 550 home health locations in 37 states and two foreign countries, Scott's campaign says. The company employed more than 285,000 people.Now, about why Scott left Columbia/HCA in 1997.That year, federal agents went public with an investigation into the company, first seizing records from four El Paso-area hospitals and then expanding across the country. The scope of the investigation at first was unclear; even Scott said he didn't know what the U.S. Justice Department was looking for.But it later became apparent that the investigation focused on whether Columbia bilked Medicare and Medicaid.Scott resigned as CEO in July 1997, less than four months after the inquiry became public and before the level of fraud became known. Company executives said had Scott remained CEO, the entire chain could have been in jeopardy.Was he forced out as Sink claims? It's hard to tell. We don't know what happened in Columbia's board of directors meeting back in July 1997. So we have to go on news accounts from that time.USA Today put it this way: "Under pressure from his board of directors, Columbia CEO Richard Scott quit Friday. "The St. Petersburg Times: "The top two executives at Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. resigned Friday under pressure from an increasingly hostile board." Other articles used the words "amid pressure," or "ousted" to describe Scott's departure. Scott campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Baker said Scott left Columbia/HCA over a disagreement on how to handle the fraud investigation. "There was a disagreement on how to move forward in light of the investigation and he and the company parted ways," Baker said. "The board wanted to settle the fines and Rick took the position that the courts ultimately did, which was that there could be honest disagreement over how the regulations were interpreted." In December 2000, the U.S. Justice Department announced what it called the largest government fraud settlement in U.S. history when Columbia/HCA agreed to pay $840 million in criminal fines and civil damages and penalties.Among the revelations from the 2000 settlement: The government settled a second series of claims with Columbia/HCA in 2002 for an additional $881 million. The claims were largely related to additional allegations of fraud. The combination of the two settlements is how Sink, Scott and others reach the $1.7 billion figure.But none of that speaks directly to the fact cited in the Sink statement, that HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies in connection with the fraud case.The Sink campaign referred us to a December 2002 New York Times article. Indeed, the article said that in 2000 the hospital chain agreed to plead guilty to 14 separate felonies. But that's an article talking about a 2000 event. There were no stories from 2000 that referenced Columbia/HCA and 14 felonies.So we went to the Department of Justice looking for help.There we unearthed the original press release. Dated Dec. 14, 2000, the release highlights the record $840 million settlement agreed to between HCA and the Department of Justice. "Health care fraud impacts every American citizen. When a company defrauds our nation's health care programs, it takes money out of the pockets of the American taxpayers. It is wrong," then-Attorney General Janet Reno said in the release. "This investigation has been the largest multi-agency investigation of a health care provider ever undertaken by the U.S. and reflects our commitment to vigorously pursuing all types of health care fraud schemes. "The release spells out the settlement, including specific payouts. It also details deals in the settlement of pending criminal cases. From the release:Southern District of Florida (Miami) -- Columbia Homecare Group Inc., a subsidiary of Columbia, will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and to violate the Medicare Anti-kickback Statute involving its fraudulent business in the purchase and operation of home health agencies and fraudulent billing of Medicare for management and personnel costs. The criminal fine is $3.36 million;Northern District of Georgia (Atlanta) -- Columbia Homecare Inc. will plead guilty to one count of violating the Medicare Anti-kickback Statute related to purchase of home health agencies. The criminal fine is $3.36 million;Department of Justice Criminal Fraud Section -- Another subsidiary, Columbia Management Companies Inc., will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and to make and use false writings and documents in connection with its fraudulent "upcoding" of bills to Medicare for patients diagnosed with certain types of pneumonia. The criminal fine is $27.5 million. This investigation was based in Nashville, Tennessee;Middle District of Florida (Tampa) -- Columbia Homecare Group will plead guilty to one count of conspiring to defraud the U.S. and one count of conspiracy to violate the Medicare Anti-kickback Statute in connection with the purchase and operation of home health agencies. The criminal fine is $8.4 million. Also, Columbia Management Companies will plead guilty to eight counts of making false statements to the U.S. in connection with the submission of false cost reports to Medicare. The fine amount is $22.6 million; and,Western District of Texas (El Paso) -- Columbia Homecare Group will plead to a conspiracy to pay kickbacks and other monetary benefits to doctors in violation of the Medicare Anti-kickback Statute. The criminal fine is $30.1 million.A couple of important notes. The actual plea deals were arranged with HCA subsidiaries and not the hospital chain itself. That was done so HCA could continue to participate in the Medicare program. Also, all of the charges deal with corporate criminal liability. Scott wasn't charged individually, and the plea deal was struck after Scott already had left the company.Secondly, we noticed how the discussion regarding the El Paso charge was different than in the other four jurisdictions. But based on the size of the fine, $30.1 million, we feel safe assuming there was at least one count agreed to as part of the settlement.Adding that in with the others indeed adds up to 14. In interviews, Scott accepts responsibility for the problems at Columbia/HCA, but denies direct knowledge of the fraud. "There's no question that mistakes were made and as CEO, I have to accept responsibility for those mistakes. I was focused on lowering costs and making the hospitals more efficient,'' Scott told the St. Petersburg Times this month. "I could have had more internal and external controls. I learned hard lessons, and I've taken that lesson and it's helped me become a better business person and a better leader." In its claim, the Sink campaign says Scott "was forced to resign as the head of a company that pled guilty to massive amounts of systematic fraud, including 14 felonies, leading to a historic $1.7 billion fine." Scott's former company, Columbia/HCA, did plead guilty to 14 felony charges stemming from a massive federal fraud investigation, and Scott himself admits the company wound up paying $1.7 billion in fines. Whether Scott was forced to resign or not is something of an HR employment trick, but  media accounts certainly suggest the company's board of directors was under pressure from shareholders to shake things up. That's enough to rate Sink's claim .


Insulin can be purchased at Walmart for $25 a vial.

Explanation: What's true: Novo Nordisk-manufactured human insulin can be purchased at Walmart stores without a prescription for $24.88 a vial (except in Indiana). What's false: The most commonly prescribed form of insulin is insulin analogs, which require a prescription and are currently the subject of a controversy over soaring prices.

In early February 2019, amid continued public outcry over the soaring cost of life-saving pharmaceuticals, readers shared a screen-captured image on social media of a local news station’s reporting on the story of a woman who said she bought inexpensive insulin without a prescription at Walmart:  Readers asked us whether this was true. It is true, although you should note Walmart sells human insulin, an older version of the glucose-moderating hormone, whereas most insulin-dependent diabetics are currently prescribed insulin analogs that have evolved to help prevent dangerous swings in blood-glucose levels. The screenshot above was taken from a 4 February 2019 news broadcast from Dallas–Fort Worth television station KDFW:  We confirmed with Walmart that the retail chain does indeed sell human insulin without a prescription (except in Indiana). That product is Novo Nordisk-manufactured Novolin, which Walmart has branded as ReliOn and sells for $24.88 per vial. Walmart spokeswoman Marilee McInnis confirmed to us that the company has “maintained, through negotiation, the same retail to patients since 2011.” To say that the insulin is sold “over-the-counter” isn’t quite accurate, however, as customers must ask a pharmacist for it. Although this revelation might be important, life-saving information for diabetics, an important caveat is that human insulin behaves differently than the newer analog insulin currently retailing for more than $300 a vial. Dr. Todd Hobbs, chief medical officer for Novo Nordisk, wrote that the different types of insulin have the same effect of lowering blood-glucose levels, but, “Training is required whenever someone is prescribed insulin, whether that be human insulin or the newer analog insulin products. Differences in the timing of all types of insulin must be considered for patients to effectively use them … The difference in the types of insulin is related to how slowly or rapidly they are absorbed once injected. Scientific advances over the years have made improvements on the speed and length of time this absorption occurs.” Diabetes Forecast, a health-oriented magazine associated with the American Diabetics Association, explained the history of the two types of insulin and the difference in health benefits this way: In the 1970s, researchers discovered how to program bacteria in the lab to manufacture human insulin, and in 1982, regular human insulin became the first “recombinant DNA” drug product. “It’s a very pure, clean product, and it’s exactly what we as humans make,” [Virginia Commonwealth University School of Pharmacy associate professor and a spokesman for the American Association of Diabetes Educators Evan] Sisson says. Human insulin is now available as short-acting “regular” (or “R”) insulin, which is used at mealtimes, and intermediate-acting NPH (or “N”) insulin, which is used as a basal insulin … While the development of human insulin was a major advancement, it wasn’t perfect. Regular insulin didn’t hit the bloodstream quick enough to cover the rapid absorption of carbohydrates after meals, and it stuck around too long after meals, causing hypoglycemia [low blood glucose, which can lead to unconsciousness and death if untreated]. In 1996, Eli Lilly introduced the first rapid-acting insulin analog to the market: insulin lispro (Humalog). Insulin aspart (Novo Nordisk’s Novolog) and insulin glulisine (Sanofi’s Apidra) quickly followed. With rapid-acting insulin analogs, onset occurs 10 to 20 minutes after injection, instead of the 30 to 60 minutes it takes for regular human insulin to take effect. This allows people to inject their insulin right before a meal, rather than having to dose 30 minutes or more before eating … Deliver a dose of NPH [human] insulin, and it’ll reach its peak about six to eight hours later. This means your insulin may peak while you’re sleeping, posing a serious danger if you don’t wake up to treat. Long-acting analogs, on the other hand, don’t peak, resulting in more-stable blood glucose levels and fewer unexpected highs or lows. In fact, one study showed that long-acting analog insulin glargine reduced overnight bouts of hypoglycemia by up to 48 percent compared with NPH. In another study, detemir reduced nighttime hypoglycemia by 34 percent. This is especially beneficial for people with type 1, who need to be much more precise about matching insulin dosages with their insulin needs to avoid nighttime lows, says Sisson. Note, there are two types of diabetes. Type 1 diabetics’ bodies cannot manufacture insulin, the hormone responsible for glucose absorption. Type 2 diabetics’ bodies, on the other hand, become resistant to insulin. In most cases, Type 1 diabetes starts in childhood, whereas Type 2 is sometimes referred to as “adult-onset” diabetes. Writing for Insulin Nation, Nicki Nichols explained why the older form of human insulin is difficult to control in children: When my child was first diagnosed, she was on NPH. It was incredibly difficult to limit a growing child’s diet to such a strict schedule. Here’s what it looked like: 8 a.m.- 45-carb meal 10:30 a.m. – 15-carb snack 12 p.m. – 45-carb meal 2 p.m. – 15-carb snack 5 p.m. – 45-carb meal 7:30 p.m. – 15-20 carb snack before bed to keep blood sugar up overnight. I cannot tell you how many times my child refused to eat the 45 carbs in her dinner. There is something wrong when you are fussing at your 5-year-old to stop eating her green beans and to eat her bread, or mashed potatoes, or pasta. The screen shot from the KDFW report no doubt went viral as a result of an ongoing controversy over the cost of analog insulin, which as of 7 February 2019 soared to a retail price of more than $300 per vial. Americans have been awash in medical horror stories such the death of Jesse Lutgen, a 32-year-old Type 1 diabetic who lost his job at a distribution center in Dubuque, Iowa, and with it, his health insurance. He was found dead in his home in February 2018, having run out of insulin. His last vials of the medication were given to him by a friend.


Barron Trump Rushed To The Hospital, Hospital Releases Statement On His Condition

Explanation: It's fake news that Barron Trump was hospitalized for pneumonia

A post on the website AmericanToday.us falsely claimed Barron Trump was hospitalized for pneumonia. "Horrible news are coming from the President’s house while President (Donald) Trump on Friday began a 17-day stint at his prized golf club in Bedminster, NJ. Barron Trump has been rushed to hospital with severe pneumonia while on holiday in Bedminster, NJ," the Aug. 6 post said. Trump’s youngest son is indeed on vacation with his family at their Bedminster resort, but we found no proof of his purported illness. The post claimed Trump had sent a Snapchat photo to his friends captioned, "Not the sort of bangles I usually choose on holiday." We traced the image attached to the article to an 841-day old photo on an Instagram search engine called Mulpix. It’s not Barron Trump’s hand. "He also tweeted his friends, saying that he was currently ‘in a wheelchair, connected up to tubes, in a hospital,’ " the post said. But we didn’t find any tweets mentioning a wheelchair or a hospital in the various unofficial Barron Trump Twitter pages. The post also cited a nonexistent Fox News report that he was receiving treatment at an unnamed hospital. In reality, the post is stealing some real-life events from surrounding a British television show host. The host of the show Grand Tour, Jeremy Clarkson, was admitted to a Spanish hospital for pneumonia on Aug. 6, the same day as this fake news story was posted. A spokesperson for the show said in a statement that Clarkson "was admitted to hospital on Friday morning during a family holiday in Spain." Clarkson posted a photo on Instagram of his arm which he captioned, "Not the sort of bangles I usually choose on holiday." He also said he was in "in a wheelchair, connected up to tubes, in a hospital" in a tweet. I could send you one but it's of me in a wheelchair, connected up to tubes, in a hospital. Better? That’s more than enough to seal the fate of the claim that Barron Trump was rushed to hospital with severe pneumonia. We rate this claim !


The Cancer Act of 1939 makes it illegal to cure cancer.

Explanation: If, in a bizarre turn of events, an individual did actually discover smoothie-based or telepathic cures for cancer, they would be free under the Cancer Act of 1939 to publish about their discoveries in scientific journals, discuss them privately or in academic contexts, or to continue researching the concept. They would not, however, be allowed to present that information to the general public in advertisements in the United Kingdom.

Myriad unfounded claims have been made of the UK’s Cancer Act of 1939, a law which some critics of the modern medical industry have suggested is part of a conspiracy to prevent a cure for cancer from being discovered so that “big pharma” can continue to profit from the disease unabated. In fact, the law prohibits any person from taking “any part in the publication of any advertisement … containing an offer to treat any person for cancer, or to prescribe any remedy therefor, or to give any advice in connection with the treatment thereof.” The act had other provisions when first passed, but the advertising portion is the only aspect of the act that remains on the books: Because it arrived nearly a decade before the founding of the NHS [National Health Service], the [Cancer] Act also contained details about how local councils should provide treatment and other services for cancer patients. And there was a whole section explaining how money should be allocated around the country to buy supplies of a radioactive element called radium — a forerunner of the far more sophisticated radiotherapy treatments we have today. All but one of these sections have now been repealed or subsumed into other pieces of legislation, and only one — section four — still stands. [Put simply, that section] is a blanket ban on advertising cancer treatments to the general public. One meme on the subject appearing online attempts to state as fact that the actually prevents anyone from curing cancer by criminalizing that activity:  First, since this law was passed by the British Parliament, no “medical practitioners” are being prosecuted “in America” under the law. More important, the act in no way prevents people from developing or researching cures for cancer. In fact, UK-based entities frequently fund research into cancer cures. The Act merely bars anyone (including UK drug manufacturers) from advertising they have a product that will “cure” cancer. The Act also does not, as claimed by Cannabis-culture website Herb, make it “illegal to promote, write about, or even speak about cancer therapies other than radiation.” That claim apparently stems from the way the act defines an advertisement: “In this section the expression ‘advertisement’ includes any notice, circular, label, wrapper or other document, and any announcement made orally or by any means of producing or transmitting sounds.” While the definition of what constitutes an advertisement is broad, the Act applies to the “publication” of an advertisement. The law was intended to protect patients from quacks and snake oil peddlers, a threat as real to cancer patients then as it is today. The few prosecutions that have taken place under the Act are in keeping with that spirit of the law. For example, a man named Jerry Sargeant, who calls himself “The Facilitator” and purports to have the ability to edit “people’s karmic blueprints through distance healing” (for the low price of £90 per quarter hour), claimed in several YouTube videos that his skills allowed him to rid people of cancer. He was found guilty of four violations under the Act and fined £4,700. In another example, a “life coach and naturopathic doctor” who calls himself Dr. Stephen Ferguson (who is not a medical doctor, but has a PhD in nutrition and hypnosis), claimed that multiple patients of his had been “cured” of cancer thanks to vitamin supplements and protein shakes sold on his website. He was fined £1,750 for violating the Act.


The Trump administration is building "tent cities" to house minor immigrants.

Explanation: What's true: Multiple news outlets have confirmed HHS's plans to build tent cities. What's false: They have not yet been constructed; the practice is not new.

Politics Immigration, border issues, family separation, jeff sessions

On 13 June 2018, the Facebook page “The Other 98%” shared the following meme:  The Twitter handle @krassenstein appeared at the lower left corner of the meme, and Twitter user Brian Krassenstein shared the text as a tweet a day earlier. Neither “The Other 98%” (whose caption simply stated “Unbelievable”) nor Krassenstein provided a citation for the meme’s text, which read: BREAKING: President Trump is planning to construct tent cities in Texas to house unaccompanied immigrant children. That’s right. We’re now going to build “camps” in order to “concentrate” the kids into a small area, as Trump attacks & marginalizes them. Sound Familiar? Both the tweet and meme appeared to reference a 12 June 2018 article from McClatchy entitled, “Trump looking to erect tent cities to house unaccompanied children.” That piece quoted an unnamed source from the Department of Health and Human Services as saying officials were considering building a tent city on military land: The Trump administration is looking to build tent cities at military posts around Texas to shelter the increasing number of unaccompanied migrant children being held in detention. The Department of Health and Human Services will visit Fort Bliss, a sprawling Army base near El Paso in the coming weeks to look at a parcel of land where the administration is considering building a tent city to hold between 1,000 and 5,000 children, according to U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the plans. HHS officials confirmed that they’re looking at the Fort Bliss site along with Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene and Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo for potential use as temporary shelters. At the time of publication, the HHS official said the agency had yet to determine whether “any of the three sites assessed are suitable.” The Texas Observer reported that notions of “locking up families in penal-like facilities, or even ‘tent cities’ for immigrants, including kids” is “both new and not new,” resulting from the enforcement of far harsher detention policies: On one level, these tent cities, as they’ve been branded on social media, have a practical purpose. They are provisional solutions to an artificial overcrowding problem. Jeff Beauregard Sessions … has decided to criminally prosecute anyone who crosses the border without authorization, including parents traveling with children. Since kids can’t (yet) go to prison with mom and dad, the federal government must — by its cruel logic — seize the children and turn them over to the temporary custody of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But HHS facilities are at 95 percent capacity. There’s no more room at the inn for Sessions’ growing collection of traumatized youngsters. The attorney general, however, is not a man easily deterred by human rights, laws protecting asylum-seekers, or the “optics” of stacking kids like cordwood near the 1st Armored Division. Thus, the brain trust has landed on tents. Like many Trump border/immigration proposals, this is both new and not new. What’s new is the extreme cruelty of prosecuting parents, many of them asylum-seekers fleeing unbearable violence in their home countries, for the misdemeanor offense of illegal entry. The law has been on the books for a long time, but previous administrations have exercised discretion in a way that excluded families. What’s new is the zealousness with which the administration has treated children, some reportedly as young as 18 months, as collateral damage from its increasingly draconian immigration policies. Let’s be clear: Sessions et. al have chosen to split apart families in the name of tamping down lawlessness. On 14 June 2018, The New York Times profiled a shelter for immigrant children in Brownsville, Texas. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) visited that center on 3 June 2018, putting up a video that later went viral on social media. That article reported that HHS had announced that temporary tent cities would be constructed near Tornillo, Texas: The teeming, 250,000-square-foot facility is a model of border life in Trump-era America, part of a growing industry of detention centers and shelters as federal authorities scramble to comply with the president’s order to end “catch and release” of migrants illegally entering the country. Now that children are often being separated from their parents, this facility has had to obtain a waiver from the state to expand its capacity. Cots are being added to sleeping areas. The staff is expanding. But even that is not enough. Federal authorities are considering establishing tent cities on Army and Air Force bases, and have already transferred hundreds of immigrant detainees to temporary housing at federal prisons. On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that temporary tent housing would be set up near the border station in Tornillo, Tex., to house up to 360 youths. NBC reiterated that the policy was not new: It will not be the first time the U.S. government has erected tent cities to house immigrants. U.S. Customs and Border Protection used tents to house an influx of immigrants in 2014 and at the end of the Obama administration. Multiple news organizations obtained HHS confirmation that tent cities were being constructed to accommodate a massive influx of child detainees, largely due to changes made to border policy in May and June 2018. Many noted that the primary difference in circumstance was that a change in how families were processed in detention led to an abrupt need for increased shelter capacity.


Stem cell test to help treat bowel cancer.

Explanation: Stem cell scientists have developed a  new and more accurate way of spotting aggressive forms of bowel  cancer, allowing for tailored treatment that should improve  patients’ chances of survival.

British researchers said on Wednesday those with the most  aggressive kind of cancer could be identified early by testing  for a stem cell marker protein called Lamin A. The team concluded that patients testing positive for Lamin  A should be given chemotherapy, in addition to surgery, to  increase their chances of survival. The discovery is the latest example of new tests being  developed that can help doctors decide how and when to treat  different manifestations of cancer. In the two earliest of the four key stages of bowel cancer,  patients normally have an operation to remove their tumor but  are rarely given chemotherapy, since the toxic treatment can  cause more harm than good. The new research, however, suggests that around one third  of these early-stage patients will have the Lamin A stem cell  marker, indicating a more serious form of disease, and they are  likely to benefit from chemotherapy. “Chemotherapy can be very useful but can have a number of  side effects, so we only want to use it where we think there’s  a good chance it will help. This test will help us determine  that,” said Robert Wilson, a bowel cancer specialist at The  James Cook University Hospital, Middlesbrough. The team from Durham University and the North East England  Stem Cell Institute now aims to develop a robust prognostic  tool that eventually can be used widely in hospitals. Their research was published in the Public Library of  Science journal PLOS One and is available online here


Blocking “rogue gene” may stop cancer spread: study

Explanation: It would set drug development speed records and defy all odds for a drug to enter clinical use within a decade after this sort of tentative laboratory experiment. Yet the story presents this single study that involved not even a single human subject as one that promises to “stop many types of the disease in their tracks” and to allow doctors to use chemotherapy and radiotherapy “with no risk of the disease taking hold elsewhere.” This is exactly the kind of story that leaves readers feeling whipsawed when clinical trials in actual patients may prove disappointing down the road. Scientists have every right to get excited when they find a new gene or make some advance that they believe holds promise for combating a particular disease. It is up to journalists to rein them in with careful analysis of the evidence and hard questions. This story offers neither. To the families who lose half a billion people every year to cancer in the United States alone, this is the kind of false hope that may cause more harm than good.

This is such an early stage finding it would be premature to throw out cost figures, and there are no comparable treatments that come to mind to serve as cost comparators. The story does not attempt to quantify the benefits. It says that “levels of the natural inhibitor protein were boosted and the cancer cells remained dormant.” Did this happen every time the scientists blocked the gene? How many times did they repeat this exercise? Did their actions ever make the cancer worse? There are no mentions of possible harms that might come from blocking a gene. The story calls the gene a “rogue” and a “culprit” but does little to explain what it does. It says it is both inside cancer cells and outside them, destroying “a naturally-occurring protein in the body which normally prevents cancer cells from spreading.” As anyone who has been through cancer treatment knows, knocking out cancer cells through radiation and chemotherapy can take a heavy toll on a person. People can die from infections and other complications. One question might have helped answer the harms question: “When you blocked this rogue gene, what happened to all of the normal cells around the cancer cells?” Anything that alters cell function in tumors could have powerful effects on normal tissue, too. The researchers noted in their article that they have yet to “establish normal and disease expression patterns of all three WWP2 isoforms”. If they don’t yet fully understand the normal form and function of WWP2, the potential for unanticipated effects is a serious concern that the story should have addressed. The story makes no attempt to evaluate the quality of the evidence. This story badly misrepresents the tentative and uncertain nature of the findings. Only in exceptional cases has a laboratory finding such as this progressed in a straight line to a clinically useful treatment. Indeed, while this report may well spur excitement among researchers, there is nothing that suggests this finding is any more likely to be useful to actual cancer patients than the many other laboratory findings about cancer metastases that have been announced over the past few decades. The story does not engage in disease-mongering. The story uses no independent sources. It quotes just two people: Surinder Soond and Andrew Chantry, the two authors of the paper published in Oncogene. (You need a subscription to view it.) The claims made in this story needed independent analysis. The story makes no comparisons with alternatives. It mentions chemotherapy and radiotherapy in passing. Reading the story carefully, one might believe that any treatment developed from this finding would work only in conjunction with these other treatments. But we can’t be sure. The story should have mentioned other proposed interventions intended to disrupt the spread of cancer cells, including some drugs that are already in clinical trials. The story says that “the findings mean drugs could be developed in the next 10 years that could be used to halt the aggressive spread of many forms of cancer, including breast cancer, brain, colon and skin cancer.” The story says nothing about all the hoops that remain for a finding to go from the lab to the drug store. Nor does it mention anything about the many cancer “breakthroughs” that have failed to fundamentally alter the rates of cancer incidence or mortality over many decades. The story says, “Surinder Soond, who worked on the study, said it was a “novel and exciting approach to treating cancer and the spread of tumors which holds great potential.”” Quoting the author, though, does not prove that the approach is novel. The study itself also says that the findings are novel: “Significantly, this is the first report of an interdependent biological role for distinct HECT E3 ubiquitin ligase isoforms, and highlights an entirely novel regulatory paradigm that selectively limits the level of inhibitory and activating Smads.” Of course, that would not make much sense to most readers. So the story should have found a way to explain to readers why the approach to cancer treatment identified was a true advance that opened a new world of possibilities or whether it was a small improvement. And having an independent source evaluate the novelty would have helped as well. The story does not appear to rely solely on a news release.


Said Democrats manufactured a death toll of 3,000 for Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to make him "look as bad as possible.

Explanation: In a pair of early morning tweets, President Donald Trump rejected Puerto Rico’s official estimate of 2,975 hurricane-related deaths after Hurricane Maria and, in the process, made some false and misleading claims.

In a pair of early morning tweets, President Donald Trump rejected Puerto Rico’s official estimate of 2,975 hurricane-related deaths after Hurricane Maria and, in the process, made some false and misleading claims:With parts of the East Coast bracing for Hurricane Florence, the president in recent days has praised his administration’s handling of past hurricanes.At the White House on Sept. 11, Trump said his administration deserves “A-plusses” for its response last year in Texas during Hurricane Harvey and in Florida for Hurricane Irma.He also said the administration’s handling of Puerto Rico during and after Hurricane Maria was “incredibly successful,” although the Federal Emergency Management Agency in a July report acknowledged that it was caught short-handed when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. Emergency supplies — including water, cots and tarps — were in short supply because weeks earlier they had been diverted from Puerto Rico to help victims of Hurricane Irma.“In response to Hurricane Irma impacts, FEMA distributed more than 80 percent of its inventory for selected commodities from the Caribbean Distribution Center warehouse [in San Juan, Puerto Rico],” FEMA’s report said. “Hurricane Maria struck before supplies were replenished.”But Trump’s praise for his administration’s response to Hurricane Maria largely drew criticism from some because of the high number of estimated deaths attributed to the storm.On Aug. 28, the Milken Institute School of Public Health released a report estimating that there were 2,975 “excess deaths in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria” over about a six-month period, from September 2017 through the end of February 2018.“The President keeps adding insult to injury and I think his words are despicable,” San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz told CNN. “He says he has done a good job when 3,000 people have died.”On Sept. 13, Trump rejected Puerto Rico’s official estimate in two early morning tweets.3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000…— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018…..This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018Let’s get some of the easy stuff out of the way, beginning with the president’s criticism of the Democrats and the report’s methodology.It’s not true that the higher death estimate “was done by the Democrats in order to make [Trump] look as bad as possible.” It was an independent study commissioned by Puerto Rico and undertaken by researchers at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.In February, Puerto Rico announced that the Milken Institute School of Public Health would lead a study of “deaths associated with Hurricane Maria after its passage through the Island.”At the time, Puerto Rico had estimated that there were 64 deaths caused by Hurricane Maria, but the estimate was considered low because of the lingering effects that the hurricane had on the island. For example, nearly half of Puerto Rico’s residents were still without power at the end of the year — more than three months after the devastating storm had passed.“The methodology will seek to analyze all data available related to mortality, including death certificates, to determine how many more deaths than usual could be related to the hurricane,” Puerto Rico said in announcing the study.Trump also misrepresented the study’s methodology, claiming it counted deaths “for any reason, like old age.”The researchers did an “excess mortality study,” which takes into account the usual number of deaths that could be expected from September 2017 through February 2018. The 2,975 figure is the estimated number of “excess” deaths that researchers say occurred during that time.Table 1 of the report shows the number of “observed,” “predicted” and “excess” number of deaths during the post-hurricane period. There were 16,608 “observed” deaths and 13,633 “predicted” deaths — meaning that 2,975 “excess deaths” were “related to Hurricane Maria.”The “predicted” number of deaths was based on “past mortality patterns,” including deaths and population, from 2010 to 2017. People dying of “old age,” as Trump put it, would be part of the “predicted” number, not the “excess” number.The 2,975 figure is not an exact count of hurricane-related deaths. But the researchers said they are 95 percent confident that the number of direct and indirect deaths falls between 2,658 and 3,290.In his tweet, the president ignored the number of indirect hurricane-related deaths that occurred after the storm, as opposed to those directly caused by the storm.Trump recalled that when he visited Puerto Rico after the hurricane there were “anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths” caused by the storm. That’s not wrong. Hurricane Maria made landfall on the island on Sept. 19, 2017, and Trump visited Puerto Rico on Oct. 3, 2017. At the time, he was told that the death toll stood at 16. He said to those in attendance that they should be “very proud” of the number of deaths compared with those caused by Hurricane Katrina.“If you look at the — every death is a horror,” he said. “But if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering — nobody has ever seen anything like this.”After all this time, however, we now know that the death toll was much higher than 18. As we said, the official death toll as of February was 64 deaths — but even then the number was considered too low.In an April report, the National Hurricane Center said the death toll in Puerto Rico was “highly uncertain” and there could be hundreds of direct and indirect hurricane-related deaths.“In Puerto Rico, the death toll is highly uncertain and the official number stands at 65, which includes an unknown number of indirect deaths,” the report said. “It should be noted that hundreds of additional indirect deaths in Puerto Rico may eventually be attributed to Maria’s aftermath pending the results of an official government review.”Katrina is a good example of the uncertainty associated with documenting deaths from hurricanes.For example, the National Hurricane Center in December 2005 — several months after the storm — issued a report on Katrina that put the death toll at 1,833 (about 1,500 directly related to Katrina and several hundred indirectly) in five states. That estimate was based on “reports to date from state and local officials in five states.” (That figure has since been revised down to 1,100. )Other research has produced different numbers.Louisiana State Epidemiologist Raoult Ratard co-authored a study with researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and concluded, in a paper published in August 2008, that there were 971 Katrina-related deaths in Louisiana and 15 deaths among Katrina evacuees in other states. (A follow-up study also co-authored by Ratard revised the number to 1,170.) Both studies analyzed death certificates and autopsy reports as well as the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team’s confirmed victims database for the two months immediately after the storm. Drowning was the most common cause of death (40 percent), followed by injury and trauma (25 percent) and heart conditions (11 percent).But in a phone interview, Ratard told us that methodology might not be the best to use to gauge storm-related deaths in Puerto Rico.The storms in Louisiana and Puerto Rico are “two different situations,” Ratard told us, and so comparing the methods used to track deaths doesn’t make sense. In Louisiana, many people evacuated shortly after the storm, making it difficult for researchers to track long-term effects of the storm. And so, he said, they stuck to documenting what happened during the flood and the immediate aftermath.In Puerto Rico, the situation was different, Ratard said. No one could evacuate. So it’s entirely appropriate, he said, to look at the mortality rates in the months after the storm and compare them to similar periods in past years.“I can see why they used the methods they used,” he said. “In Puerto Rico, it was easier to document the long-term impact.”“My impression is that they have a valid point in estimating the long-term effects” in Puerto Rico, he said. From what he knows about the research, he said, “it sounds reasonable to me.”Although Trump ignores the indirect deaths attributed to Hurricane Maria, the National Hurricane Center is interested in indirect deaths and makes an attempt to count them.In August 2016, Edward N. Rappaport, the deputy director of the NHC, and B. Wayne Blanchard, then with FEMA, wrote about indirect deaths in the journal of the American Meteorological Society. They wrote that “direct deaths do not tell the whole story. They do not include the important class of indirect fatalities–casualties that, while not directly attributable to one of the physical forces of a tropical cyclone, would not be expected in the absence of the storm. These losses can occur in significant numbers.”John Mutter, professor of earth and environmental sciences and of international and public affairs at Columbia University, has studied the impact of natural disasters and the death toll of Hurricane Katrina. Mutter told us that it’s difficult to measure the death toll from hurricanes for several reasons, including deciding when to start counting and when to stop, and whether various deaths should be considered hurricane-related. “A lot of people die from the exacerbation of preexisting conditions,” particularly the elderly, he said.People also go missing, and a lot of people can die in the aftermath. But how long should the “aftermath” be?“There are no rules about this,” Mutter said, “no uniform standard on when you start or when you stop.”But both of the experts we interviewed said the methodology used by the researchers at the Milken Institute School of Public Health was reasonable — contrary to the president’s tweet questioning the high death toll estimate, the methodology used by the researchers and the motivation of the Puerto Rico government in seeking the best estimate.Mutter said the study was using “tried and true methodologies” to get an estimate, which will have some admitted uncertainty. Such statistical models are often used in estimates of civilian casualties in conflicts, he said.In a statement, the Milken Institute School of Public Health stood by its “state-of-the-art mathematical model” and the findings that it produced. Hurricane Maria was “a very deadly storm” and “the number – 2,975 – is the most accurate and unbiased estimate of excess mortality to date,” it said.It’s not clear what Trump meant when he wrote, “I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico.” We didn’t receive a response to emails we sent to the White House for clarification.The federal government certainly has appropriated billions of dollars in disaster relief for Puerto Rico. In June, the Puerto Rico newspaper El Nuevo Día reported that “promised federal allocations” for the U.S. territory “total about $31.6 billion,” according to its analysis. The majority of that — about $20 billion— was awarded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development through its Community Development Block Grant — Disaster Recovery Program.At the time, El Nuevo Día noted that the amount appropriated by the government was about one-third of the $94.4 billion that Puerto Rico estimated in November it would need to rebuild. Then, in August, the island increased its request to Congress to $139 billion.In addition to those federal funds, Trump’s inauguration committee announced late last September that it was donating $3 million to three different charities involved in the hurricane relief efforts. That was not long after the Associated Press reported that the committee, which had raised $107 million for Trump’s inauguration ceremonies, had not donated any of its leftover money to charity, as it had pledged to do.


George Soros owns the WuXi PHARMA LAB located in Wuhan, China where COVID-19 was developed and conveniently Broke Out.

Explanation: WuXi AppTec Group is a pharmaceutical and biotechnology company with a location in Wuhan, China. The company primarily manufactures medical devices. George Soros has invested in WuXi in the past, but he does not own it. Research shows the genetic makeup of COVID-19 precludes it from being man-made.

Facebook Fact-checks, Coronavirus, Facebook posts,

George Soros has been accused of many outrageous things. Now, misinformation on Facebook is blaming the billionaire philanthropist for the 2019 coronavirus pandemic. "George Soros owns the WuXi PHARMA LAB located in Wuhan, China where COVID-19 was developed and conveniently Broke Out," reads a March 15 text post. The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat  news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) It had more than 3,700 shares as of March 18. (Screenshot from Facebook) More than 191,000 people worldwide had been infected with COVID-19 as of March 18. Like other conspiracy theories about Soros, this Facebook post is bogus. In January, the conspiracy theory was shared in a Reddit thread that cited a now-defunct fake news website. The WuXi AppTec Group is a pharmaceutical and biotechnology company based in China. It works primarily on manufacturing and developing medical devices. The seed of the Facebook conspiracy is the fact that the company has a location in Wuhan, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak. And documents from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission show that Soros was a WuXi shareholder in May 2011. (Subsequent SEC filings do not list the company among Soros’ investments, perhaps because he changed the legal status of his hedge fund that summer to avoid more government regulation.) But none of that amounts to what the Facebook posts claims: that Soros "owns" the company and its Wuhan location. WuXi’s CEO and chairman is Ge Li, according to its website. And scientists have found that COVID-19’s origin is likely natural — not man-made, as the Facebook post and several other conspiracy theories allege. "If genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used," the analysis reads. "However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone." The Facebook post is inaccurate. We rate it .


20 percent of the time (smart guns) won't work.

Technology, PunditFact, Guns, Larry Pratt,

The debate over "smart guns" doesn’t always turn up accurate talking points. Exhibit A: Sarah Palin telling the National Rifle Association crowd about a (nonexistent) federal plan to make gun owners wear "special bracelets that would identify you as a gun owner." Exhibit B: MSNBC host Chris Hayes’ recent on-air shouting match with Larry Pratt, executive director of the lobbying group Gun Owners of America. Smart guns -- also known as "child-proof guns" and "personalized guns" -- are designed to work solely for authorized users through features like fingerprint recognition or electronic sensors. The hope is they will reduce deaths by suicide, accidental shootings or someone stealing a law enforcement officer’s weapon. They are not sold in the United States, though two dealers tried before backing down amid intense pressure from activists. Hayes supports the technology, but Pratt and other gun-rights advocates are skeptical. Pratt questions the guns’ reliability, saying smart guns are "only 80 percent effective." When Hayes pressed Pratt for the source of his statistic, Pratt cited the New Jersey Institute of Technology. "Twenty percent of the time it won’t work," Pratt said. "And you’re asking people to put their lives in the hands of a product like that?" Later, Pratt used the figure again. "Is it okay to put on the market a car that 20 percent of the time explodes on you and causes you harm or death?" Since Pratt tripled down on his statistic, PunditFact wanted to check it out. Tracing the source of the claim Pratt pointed to a 2003 column in Popular Mechanics magazine headlined "‘Smart’ Guns: Dumb Idea!" The column was inspired by a 2002 New Jersey law that requires all guns sold in the state to have "smart" technology within three years of the attorney general verifying the first smart gun was sold in the United States. Fear among gun rights activists that more government mandates may come when this happens drive their opposition to smart guns. In his column 11 years ago, writer Cliff Gromer said law enforcement officers are exempt from the law, which proves the technology isn’t solid enough for the mainstream gun market. "According to the New Jersey Institute of Technology, which used government grants to study personalized handgun technology, fingerprint recognition systems work only 80 percent of the time," Gromer wrote. "But the New Jersey law goes into effect regardless of whether the guns are 100 percent -- or 80 percent -- reliable." Article is not the smoking gun You may have read over it, but the 80 percent figure Gromer cited talks about fingerprint recognition systems. Not whether a smart gun will work. That’s important because while some smart guns use fingerprint recognition systems (which work like the new unlocking method for iPhones), not all do. The German-made Armatix iP1 .22 caliber pistol was expected to be the first smart gun sold in the United States this year until a California gun store owner scrapped plans to sell it after facing aggressive backlash. It happened again with a Maryland dealer. The Armatix does not have a fingerprint recognition system. Instead, the gun works with a black stopwatch and PIN code that emits radio signals to the gun to make it active. The signal is akin to what’s emitted from those bulky tags on mall merchandise that aren’t triggered until taken out of the store. Other models work with similar chips implanted in everyday accessories, such as bracelets, pins and rings, and some are implanted in the body. If the badge is too far away from the microchip in the gun, it will stop working. But that means the technology works, not that it failed. And, more critically, the Armatix radio signal has nothing to do with the study Pratt cited, which focused on fingerprint recognition systems, New Jersey Institute of Technology researchers told us. Other smart guns also avoid fingerprint technology. Michael Recce, an associate professor in the information systems department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, invented "dynamic grip recognition" and applied it to a gun, so that it fires only after it recognizes the user’s grip thanks to sensors on the side of the gun that detect pressure and the contours of the user's hand. The gun starts to detect if the user is authorized as someone starts pulling the gun, he said. Recce said the owner detection rate for his dynamic grip "is within the mechanical failure rate," i.e. the rate at which a standard gun fails. However, two or three people out of 100 adults could also fire the gun in trials because their hand is similar to the owner’s -- a tradeoff with the technology so it is sure to fire for the rightful owner, he said. Other types of smart guns in varying stages of development are outlined in a year-old National Institute of Justice report commissioned as part of President Barack Obama’s gun reforms after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. This research is dated In this case, the New Jersey Institute of Technology research is being misapplied, and it’s old. Researchers told us their work on fingerprint scanners should not be applied to newer guns. Their research, which was not published, was done in the early 2000s on four types of guns using fingerprint readers. None of those guns were as reliable as mechanical firearms, they found, though the guns were a "fragile technology" then, said Donald Sebastian, New Jersey Institute of Technology senior vice president for research and development. "Fingerprint readers may have progressed in the past 10 years," Recce said. "At that time even the readers on laptops would often require you to swipe your finger more than once before they worked. Our opinion was that swiping your finger over the reader multiple times would be a challenge when using a gun." Skeptics of these guns point to many concerns about the reliability of the weapons in a high-pressure situation, like who has time to enter a PIN code, and what if the sensors in the gun die? Michael Bazinet, a National Shooting Sports Foundation spokesman, said the "strongest statement on their reliability" will be when law enforcement officers use them en masse. But other potential weaknesses don’t change the fact that what Pratt cited is old news. "To make a universal blanket statement based on a 15-year-old analysis of fingerprint detectors just doesn’t pass muster," Sebastian said. "It’s like talking about the reliability of a Model T and comparing it to a race car. Apples and oranges." If not 80 percent reliable, then what? Finding a reliability rate for smart guns is an "almost unanswerable question," said Stephen Teret, a pro-smart gun Johns Hopkins professor and director of the university’s Center for Law and the Public’s Health. "Because there’s a wide range of quality in existing guns, some are better, some are worse. So when you are trying to compute a rate of reliability, are you using one gun or various categories?" Robert Spitzer, a SUNY Cortland political science professor and author of The Politics of Gun Control (whom Hayes brought in after Pratt to talk about the issue), said in order for the Armatix iP1 gun to be sold in California, it had to pass a reliability test. "The standard was a 99 percent successful fire rate, which it met (fire 600 times with 6 or fewer failed discharges)," Spitzer said. Others stressed that all guns are prone to failure at some point. The mechanical failure rate is often given as 1 in 1,000, and a military weapon’s failure rate is closer to 1 in 10,000, Sebastian said. "Misfire is embedded in our language," he said. Our ruling Pratt said "20 percent of the time (smart guns) won't work," which he got from a 2003 magazine story referencing unpublished research from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The scientists who conducted that research say Pratt’s citation is misapplied. Researchers only looked at smart guns that rely on fingerprint sensors, yet Pratt applied the statistic to all smart guns, including the Armatix pistol that works with a black stopwatch, PIN code and small electronic chips. Even more, their research is more than a decade old, and they say fingerprint matching technology has changed since then. Pratt’s statement is not based on solid evidence. We rate his statement .


Congo’s conflict makes fighting Ebola, sexual violence risky.

Explanation: The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a Congolese surgeon brings rare global attention to a region surging for decades with rebel conflict that now threatens efforts to contain a deadly Ebola outbreak.

Denis Mukwege, International News, Africa, Health, Nobel Prizes, United Nations

As Dr. Denis Mukwege describes to the world how he stays in his hospital, protected by United Nations peacekeepers, to avoid further attempts on his life, teams of health workers not far away in eastern Congo feel an uncomfortable kinship as they combat Ebola amid the daily ring of gunfire. War in the vast region once had the aim of trying to unseat a president, or hunt down those suspected of genocide in neighboring Rwanda, or simply claim a piece of Congo’s trillions of dollars in mineral wealth. Now the conflict has splintered, with dozens of rebel groups traumatizing a population that sometimes has little idea who is behind a deadly attack. That chaos has brought a steady, horrific flow of women, girls and even babies into Mukwege’s hospital as he operates day by day on survivors of the harshest kinds of sexual violence. Women and girls are raped with the barrels of guns. Their genitals are shot or burned. The new documentary “City of Joy” focuses on the survivors and on Mukwege’s work. Trauma can beget trauma, and the emergence in August of the Ebola virus in the jittery region for the first time has posed the kind of challenge many health workers have never seen before. So far 140 Ebola cases have been confirmed including 76 deaths. Fears and rumors about the virus have spread as quickly as outreach teams can refute them. Some health workers, confronted by angry families or communities, have been attacked as they try to carry out vaccinations or promote safe burials. The virus is spread via the bodily fluids of those infected, including the dead. Some suspected of having contact with Ebola victims have fled. The World Health Organization worries openly about the virus spreading into “red zones” where the rebel threat is so high that carrying out health work is almost impossible. “It’s a totally unprecedented situation ... potentially explosive,” said Anne Rimoin, an associate professor of epidemiology at UCLA who directs teams of researchers in the Ebola outbreak zone. One team member was lightly injured by people throwing stones, she said. The threat of attack means Ebola efforts are limited to daylight hours as teams and their armed escorts, usually U.N. peacekeepers but also Congolese security forces, hurry to get off the roads before dark. “That is very unlike other outbreaks,” Rimoin told The Associated Press. With communities “already traumatized by decades of conflict,” the presence of armed escorts can bring further anxiety. Meanwhile, local authorities who have had contact with rebel groups in previous efforts such as routine vaccination campaigns are negotiating with the fighters for urgent access, as any Ebola victim left untracked could cause a new round of cases. Alarm about the insecurity has grown. Last week after Red Cross workers were attacked and badly hurt, the U.N. Security Council called for an end to hostilities as it prepared to visit Congo and discuss, among other things, the fighting that has displaced about 1 million people in the Ebola-affected North Kivu province alone. “An extremely challenging and dangerous environment,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the council, describing the attacks since the outbreak began: a “full-scale” assault on a Congolese military base, ambushes of U.N. peacekeepers, a rocket explosion and an attack on the town at the center of Ebola efforts that killed at least 18 people and shut down health work for days. Friday’s announcement of the Nobel prize, the first in Congo’s history, brought a burst of jubilation and tears in Panzi hospital as Mukwege was finishing his second operation of the day. “Hallelujah,” people said, as medical workers in scrubs danced and women wiped their eyes. The award brought a new round of global calls to end the sprawling conflict and let health workers across the region care for others without fear of violence. “A durable peace,” the U.N. secretary-general’s special envoy to Congo called it while congratulating Mukwege on his win. But it won’t be easy. Even as Congo’s government claimed partial credit for the efforts of the Nobel winner, who has been an outspoken critic, the outgoing President Joseph Kabila wants the U.N. peacekeepers, one of the region’s few stabilizing forces, to prepare for withdrawal. Both Congolese and health workers also are bracing for December’s long-delayed presidential election, which could bring fresh unrest. All hope the Ebola outbreak can be ended before then. The vote, Mercy Corps’ deputy country director Whitney Elmer said on Friday, “may lead to more violence and make an already unstable situation worse.” ___ Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa


Claimed his administration recently provided “historic levels of funding to improve school safety” through the STOP School Violence Act.

government spending, school shooting, school violence,

At an event for law enforcement officials, President Donald Trump boasted that his administration recently provided “historic levels of funding to improve school safety” and “hire more officers” through the newly created STOP School Violence Act. But the new law does not fund school safety at “historic levels.”An omnibus spending bill the president signed in March included the STOP School Violence Act, and shifted $75 million from an existing school safety program to STOP School Violence programs. But a single program created in the late 1990s and since disbanded, called COPS in Schools, provided as much as $180 million in fiscal year 2000, according to a 2017 government report. That’s $260 million in 2018 dollars.The president spoke about the STOP School Violence grants in his remarks to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Orlando, Florida.Trump, Oct. 8: Last week, my administration also provided historic levels of funding to improve school safety. Through STOP School Violence grants, we are giving local schools and police departments the resources they need to hire more officers, and train more teachers, and better detect and address early warning signs of mental illness before it’s too late.The White House said the president was referring to the STOP School Violence Act and the programs it funds.On Oct. 2, the Department of Justice announced that it had awarded more than $70 million for school safety through the STOP School Violence Act. A week earlier, Attorney General Jeff Sessions had announced $200,000 in funding to the National Association of School Resource Officers “to expand and update their curriculum to better support training programs,” the announcement said.The STOP School Violence Act was created by the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, an omnibus bill that the president signed in March. The omnibus spending bill provided $75 million to the STOP School Violence Act to address school violence. The Bureau of Justice Assistance, or BJA, received $50 million, and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS Office, received $25 million in grant money.“BJA received $50 million to provide grants to states, units of local government, and Indian tribes. These grants are used for the training of teachers and the education of students to prevent student violence, and to support threat assessments, crisis intervention teams, and the use of technology for anonymous reporting,” Alan R. Hanson, a principal deputy assistant attorney general, explained to Congress in written testimony to a House subcommittee in July. “The balance ($25 million) was provided to the COPS Office to provide grants for law enforcement training and coordination to prevent school violence and for a variety of school safety equipment (e.g., metal detectors, locks, lighting) and alerting technologies.”When the president signed the spending bill, Education Week noted that it “shifts funds from an existing, wide-ranging school safety grant program toward the new STOP School Violence Act.”Education Week, March 23: The final budget takes $75 million appropriated for the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative — an existing program in the Department of Justice that funds research and implementation of a wide range of evidence-based safety programs that range from bullying prevention to innovative approaches to school policing — and redirects that funding toward programs authorized under the STOP School Violence Act.On its website, the National Criminal Justice Reference Service notified potential grantees that the “NIJ has canceled the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative.”“With the enactment of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, the funding planned for these solicitations is no longer available for research and evaluation,” the cancellation notice said. “Instead, it will be used for other purposes under the Stop School Violence Act of 2018.”The National Institute of Justice website says the program, before it was cancelled, provided $246 million from fiscal years 2014 through 2017. That’s an annual average of $61.5 million, with a high in funding of $69 million in fiscal 2015. With inflation, the $69 million in fiscal 2015 is a few million less than the $75 million provided this year for STOP School Violence grants.So, it’s true that the $75 million for the STOP School Violence Act is more than what Congress had appropriated for the program it replaced, the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative. That program received a low of $42 million in fiscal 2017, the last year of funding.However, the COPS in Schools program in the late 1990s and early 2000s provided much more funding for school safety than the grants awarded under the STOP School Violence Act.A 2017 government report detailed the history of federal funding for school safety programs from 1990 to 2016. The report said that then-President Bill Clinton in 1998 held “the first White House Conference on School Safety,” which resulted in the formation of two major school safety grant programs.“During his keynote address, Clinton announced two new large-scale school safety discretionary grant programs: the COPS in Schools program to fund the hiring and training of school resource officers, and the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative to fund interagency, community-based violence prevention and behavioral health programs for school-age children and youth,” the report said.The COPS in Schools program was administered by the DOJ’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS Office — the same office that received $25 million under the STOP School Violence Act. The federal report on school safety programs called COPS in Schools “the largest sustained federal effort to support SROs.”Between 1999 and 2005, the COPS in Schools, or CIS, program awarded $823.7 million in grants to law enforcement agencies to support the hiring of more than 7,000 school resource officers. At its peak, the COPS in Schools program issued grants totaling $180 million in fiscal year 2000 — which is the equivalent of about $260 million in 2018 dollars. (See Table 11 in the report for COPS in Schools funds.) That’s nearly four times the STOP School Violence grants.“Annual appropriations for the CIS program total $167.5 million in FY1999, $180.0 million in FY2000, $179.6 million in FY2001, $180.0 million in FY2002, $39.7 million in FY2003, $59.4 million in FY2004, and $4.9 million in FY2005,” the report said.The Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative — a more broadly designed program that dealt with issues that included drug use, bullying and dropout prevention — provided “more than $2 billion in funding and other resources to 365 communities in 49 states” from fiscal years 1999 through 2012, the report said.The report noted that the peak in federal funding for school safety occurred in the “early to mid-2000s.”“After peaking in the early to mid-2000s — a period during which several national-level school safety initiatives were active and receiving substantial appropriations — federal funding for school safety declined in the following decade,” the report said.A February report on school safety by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said that Congress might want to consider restarting the dormant COPS in Schools program.CRS, Feb. 23, 2018: In late 1990s and 2000s, Congress appropriated funding for two programs that provided funding for physical school security measures, the Matching Grant Program for School Security and the COPS in Schools program. However, neither program has been funded for several years. Policymakers might consider whether to revive these programs to help support school security efforts, especially if Congress is looking for an avenue to provide funding to schools for installation of physical security measures.Instead, Congress passed the STOP School Violence Act, which provided grants at a level well below the COPS in Schools grants — despite Trump’s claim that the new law provided “historic levels of funding.”