thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-08--‘Dukes Of Hazzard’ Stars Dismiss Controversy Over Confederate Imagery

The former stars of “ The Dukes of Hazzard , ” which depicted the adventures of two “ good ol ’ boys ” defying corrupt cops in a fictionalized Georgia county , have offered their take on the show ’ s prominent usage of the Confederate flag .
John Schneider and Tom Wopat , who played Bo and Luke Duke , respectively , from 1979 to 1985 , told The Hollywood Reporter that the show ’ s famous car — a customized 1969 Dodge Charger that was called “ General Lee ” and had a Confederate flag on its roof @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I have never had an African American come up to me and have any problem with it whatsoever , ” said John Schneider , 60 , adding that the “ politically correct generation has gotten way out of hand.
” “ ‘ Dukes of Hazzard ’ was a unifying force , ” Schneider said .
“ Mom , Grandma , everyone wanted to watch it together .
But who benefits from division ?
‘ The Dukes of Hazzard ’ has been shot down , I believe unfairly .
We haven ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ may miss this next one.
” Wopat , 68 , offered a more nuanced response to the controversy , acknowledging that “ the situation in the country has obviously changed in the last 40 years.
” “ I feel fortunate to be living in a time when we can address some of the injustices of the past , ” Wopat said .
“ But the car is innocent.
” Tom Wopat ( left ) and John Schneider in a promotional portrait for `` The Dukes of Hazzard . ''
On the show , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was called “ General Lee ” and had a Confederate flag on its roof .
Gy Waldron , the 87-year-old creator of “ The Dukes of Hazzard , ” argued that he “ had relatives fight on both sides of the Civil War and [ they ] honored both the American and Confederate flags.
” “ No one even connected the Confederate flag with slavery , ” Waldron told The Hollywood Reporter .
“ It was simply a part of our Southern culture.
” Historians have spoken out against separating the Confederate flag @ @ @ @ @ @ @ slave trade , pointing out that seceding states specifically mentioned a desire to break from a president “ whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.
” The prominent usage of the Confederate flag on “ The “ Dukes of Hazzard ” was also criticized in 2015 .
Reruns stopped airing and Warner Bros. announced it would no longer license images of “ General Lee ” after white supremacist Dylann Roof — who had posed in photos alongside Confederate imagery — killed nine Black church members in South Carolina .
The show has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Video and IMDb TV streaming services , but its future on the platforms is reportedly under review .
Other TV shows and movies referencing the Confederacy have received similar scrutiny in the wake of protests against racial injustice and police brutality .
“ Gone With The Wind , ” for instance , was temporarily pulled from HBO Max and later returned to the service with a disclaimer .

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The former stars of “The Dukes of Hazzard,” which depicted the adventures of two “good ol’ boys” defying corrupt cops in a fictionalized Georgia county, have offered their take on the show’s prominent usage of the Confederate flag.
John Schneider and Tom Wopat, who played Bo and Luke Duke, respectively, from 1979 to 1985, told The Hollywood Reporter that the show’s famous car — a customized 1969 Dodge Charger that was called “General Lee” and had a Confederate flag on its roof — was not necessarily an issue.
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“I have never had an African American come up to me and have any problem with it whatsoever,” said John Schneider, 60, adding that the “politically correct generation has gotten way out of hand.”
“‘Dukes of Hazzard’ was a unifying force,” Schneider said. “Mom, Grandma, everyone wanted to watch it together. But who benefits from division? ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ has been shot down, I believe unfairly. We haven’t missed a generation yet, but we may miss this next one.”
Wopat, 68, offered a more nuanced response to the controversy, acknowledging that “the situation in the country has obviously changed in the last 40 years.”
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“I feel fortunate to be living in a time when we can address some of the injustices of the past,” Wopat said. “But the car is innocent.”
Tom Wopat (left) and John Schneider in a promotional portrait for "The Dukes of Hazzard." On the show, they drove a customized Dodge Charger that was called “General Lee” and had a Confederate flag on its roof. Silver Screen Collection via Getty Images
Gy Waldron, the 87-year-old creator of “The Dukes of Hazzard,” argued that he “had relatives fight on both sides of the Civil War and [they] honored both the American and Confederate flags.”
“No one even connected the Confederate flag with slavery,” Waldron told The Hollywood Reporter. “It was simply a part of our Southern culture.”
Historians have spoken out against separating the Confederate flag and the government it represented from the slave trade, pointing out that seceding states specifically mentioned a desire to break from a president “whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”
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The prominent usage of the Confederate flag on “The “Dukes of Hazzard” was also criticized in 2015. Reruns stopped airing and Warner Bros. announced it would no longer license images of “General Lee” after white supremacist Dylann Roof — who had posed in photos alongside Confederate imagery — killed nine Black church members in South Carolina.
The show has since reemerged on Amazon’s Prime Video and IMDb TV streaming services, but its future on the platforms is reportedly under review.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-08--Thomas Lane, Officer Charged In George Floyd Death, Seeks Case Dismissal

MINNEAPOLIS ( AP ) — One of four Minneapolis police officers charged in George Floyd ’ s death is asking to have his case dismissed .
An attorney for Thomas Lane said in court papers made public Wednesday that the case against his client should be dismissed for lack of probable cause .
As part of his court filing , attorney Earl Gray filed transcripts from body camera footage recorded by Lane ’ s camera and the camera of his partner , J. Kueng .
Floyd , a Black handcuffed man , died on May 25 after Derek Chauvin , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into Floyd ’ s neck for nearly 8 minutes and held it there even after Floyd said he couldn ’ t breathe and stopped moving .
Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder , third-degree murder and manslaughter .
Lane , Kueng and Tou Thao are charged with aiding and abetting both second-degree murder and manslaughter .
Lane was holding Floyd ’ s legs at the time , Kueng was holding Floyd ’ s back and Thao was managing nearby bystanders .
All four officers were fired .
Gray said in his court filing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ should turn Floyd on his side , and Chauvin said no .

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MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — One of four Minneapolis police officers charged in George Floyd’s death is asking to have his case dismissed.
An attorney for Thomas Lane said in court papers made public Wednesday that the case against his client should be dismissed for lack of probable cause. As part of his court filing, attorney Earl Gray filed transcripts from body camera footage recorded by Lane’s camera and the camera of his partner, J. Kueng.
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Gray also filed a transcript of Lane’s interview with state investigators.
Floyd, a Black handcuffed man, died on May 25 after Derek Chauvin, a white officer, pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly 8 minutes and held it there even after Floyd said he couldn’t breathe and stopped moving.
Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter. Lane, Kueng and Tou Thao are charged with aiding and abetting both second-degree murder and manslaughter.
Lane was holding Floyd’s legs at the time, Kueng was holding Floyd’s back and Thao was managing nearby bystanders. All four officers were fired.
Gray said in his court filing that Lane asked twice if the officers should turn Floyd on his side, and Chauvin said no.
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thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-08--Unemployed And Alone: US H4 Visa Restrictions Are A Blow To Women Stranded In India

Dubey said that several women have been asking if they are eligible for the National Waiver Exception , but most of them aren ’ t .
According to the statute , a person ’ s visa can be approved if they can show that they ” ... are critical to the defense , law enforcement , diplomacy , or national security of the United States ; are involved with the provision of medical care to individuals who have contracted COVID-19 and are currently hospitalized ; are involved with the provision of medical research at United States facilities to help the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ necessary to facilitate the immediate and continued economic recovery of the United States.
” “ I go through mood swings , fears , strange physical pains and what not .
I have to manage medical appointments , scanning all by myself .
And doing it in conjunction with Covid is all together is a separate challenge .
We were settled and have taken on commitments based on my husband ’ s job in the US , so I can not ask him to leave everything and come back .
I can not even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s all alone there and would make him panic more .
So I ’ m keeping all these things within me and it ’ s killing me inside , ” Sakshi said .

In the first week of March, Sakshi Srivastava Sah travelled to India from Dallas to visit her mother. Two weeks later, she found out she was pregnant, just as India announced a complete lockdown, including cancelling international flights, to tackle the coronavirus outbreak. Her husband Deepak, a software engineer, was in the US on a H1B visa, working for a multinational company in Texas.
As the number of cases continued rising in both India and the US, the 32-year-old homemaker had no option but to wait for consulates and flights to open so that she could get her H4 dependent visa stamped and fly back to her husband. But she got a shock last week when US President Donald Trump suspended the issuing of H1B visas, and dependent H4 visas, leaving thousands of families in the lurch. The purported reason for the ban was to reduce unemployment in the US, which is reeling under the effects of the coronavirus-induced lockdown.
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Indians, who account for 75% of H-1B petitions and over 90% for the H4 visa, will be the worst affected by the new order.
As news of the order came in, a staggering number of women began posting anxious messages on social media groups of H1B and H4 visa holders, seeking legal counsel about the avenues available to them. It was clear from the messages that, apart from the people whose jobs were in danger because of the executive order, hundreds of women who had applied for dependent visas or extensions of it were also suddenly facing an indefinite period of uncertainty. Worse, it was likely that they would have to deal with it without the support of their spouses.
“As news of the order came in, a staggering number of women began posting anxious messages on social media groups of H1B and H4 visa holders, seeking legal counsel about the avenues available to them.”
Srivastava said that she had already been suffering from anxiety because of the lockdown and the executive order dealt a huge psychological blow.
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“Every day, I go through a different level of stress and I am afraid that it will affect my baby,” Srivastava, who is now five months pregnant, said. Srivastava’s only support system in India is her mother, who lives in Gorakhpur and works in sales in a garments shop.
“This is my first pregnancy. I wake up with unfamiliar pains on some days, but I mostly keep it to myself. I don’t feel like telling my mother, who is also alone and will worry. I also don’t always tell my husband because he has to work, and this will be an added stress,” Srivastava said.
She has also been managing everything from ultrasound appointments to doctor’s visits by herself in the midst of a pandemic. “Doctor visits are the most scary. There is no option, so I have to do it and mostly alone. I am constantly worried about catching something,” she said.
“She has also been managing everything from ultrasound appointments to doctor’s visits by herself in the midst of a pandemic.”
Apart from the anxiety around health and being away from loved ones, there is also the financial uncertainty to contend with. Many women told HuffPost India that they had quit their stable jobs ahead of moving to the US, and are now worried about how they will find another job in the weak economic climate.
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According to an article on Quartz, 90% of H4 visa holders are women and at least 70% of H1B visa holders in America are Indian. The new executive order, therefore, disproportionately affects a large percentage of Indian women, some of who are now stranded in India like Srivastava, without jobs, unsure if they can take up one at the moment or having to take care of children all by themselves in the midst of a pandemic.
US-based immigration attorney Prashant Dubey told HuffPost India that ‘there is a personal, professional, and economic impact of not being able to obtain a visa stamp to come back to the US if they are currently stranded in India’.
He has fielded at least 50 emails and dozens of calls since the executive order came in. In a series of Facebook Live sessions he has held, dozens of viewers have raised the issue of their spouses stranded in India without a stamped dependent visa. “If they are abroad, and currently do not have a valid H4 visa stamped, it is a tough situation. These individuals will likely have to wait until December 31, 2020 to be issued a dependent visa or will have to craft an argument to qualify under the National Interest Waiver exception,” Dubey said.
NEWLY-WED AND SEPARATED
27-year-old Steffi David quit her job as an operations manager in Bengaluru in January before her wedding in February, following which she was planning to move to the US with her husband. On March 18, she travelled to New Delhi for her visa interview, which got cancelled amid the lockdown. Since then, she has been living alone in New Delhi in a friend’s vacant apartment but is unsure whether to stay on in the hope that the consulate opens or to leave for her parents’ house in Tamil Nadu.
“I quit my job because I was all set to move to the US and had planned to start a family. Now, I don’t have a job and I am not sure how long it will take the visa restrictions to be lifted either,” David said.
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David’s post on a Facebook group, detailing how she stayed with her for barely 10 days before he had to fly back, drew dozens of comments from women who claimed to be in a similar situation — having resigned from jobs or dropped out of projects ahead of migrating to the US, and now stuck in India without their spouses and with no idea what comes next.
Various articles and studies have pointed out that many professionally trained and educated Indian women have been forced to lead somewhat humiliating and dependent lives in the US because they are on the H4 visas, which prevents them from having jobs. Over a dozen women told HuffPost India over the past few days that they now fear they will have to lead similar lives here in India, without even the reassurance of spousal support they’d have in the US.
29-year-old Sharmila Kavin’s experience is similar to that of David. She quit her job as a senior information technology consultant in Chennai in January this year, set to move to California where her husband, a tech consultant, had leased a new house ahead of Kavin’s arrival. She also wanted to take a break and spend some time with her partner, whom she had not met for nearly a year. In February, they got married and she applied for a H4 visa. Her husband left three weeks after the wedding, and she’s still here.
Apart from the money they wasted on visa procedures and other formalities during an economic downturn, Kavin said the executive order banning H4 visas has scuttled her life beyond measure.
“Apart from being away from him, I am so stressed that I have not been able to start looking for a job. Also, the IT industry has taken a huge hit, people are getting laid off, it is so difficult to find a job now,” Kavin said. Her husband is also paying higher rent to live alone after moving out from an apartment he shared with friends.
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“Apart from the money they wasted on visa procedures and other formalities during an economic downturn, Kavin said the executive order banning H4 visas has scuttled her life beyond measure.”
“I am not sure if I should start looking for projects or a job, or whether I should wait patiently till the end of the year and then try moving,” Kavin said, pointing out that it is unlikely she would find work for at least six months amid all these uncertainties. She has already been out of a job for over 6 months now.
N* found herself in a similar, frustrating situation after the executive order dashed her hopes of going to the US to be with her husband. The couple have also had to dip into their savings. The 31-year-old, who is from Assam, quit her stable job at an IT company ahead of her wedding in February this year. “I was hoping to live with my husband in the US and then consider what to do with my professional life. I was excited to begin a new life there,” she said.
Like Sharmila, N has found herself in a soup as their bills have doubled in the past few months, and is now worried about the state of their savings.
Dubey said that several women have been asking if they are eligible for the National Waiver Exception, but most of them aren’t. According to the statute, a person’s visa can be approved if they can show that they ”...are critical to the defense, law enforcement, diplomacy, or national security of the United States; are involved with the provision of medical care to individuals who have contracted COVID-19 and are currently hospitalized; are involved with the provision of medical research at United States facilities to help the United States combat COVID-19; or are necessary to facilitate the immediate and continued economic recovery of the United States.”
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Though there is no separate filing process, an applicant has to convince the US authorities that they qualify for an exception for reasons mentioned above. And that, is nearly impossible to prove in most of the cases.
“My husband took up a bigger, more expensive rented place thinking I will come. Now we are having to pay for rent and his own expenditures there and a similar set of expenditures here because of this order,” N said, pointing out that in a volatile job market and economy, such an arrangement is not only emotionally draining but also financially unstable.
“If I could keep my job, I would have had a salary and how I am looking at being without a job for a year. Since I had worked for very long and had been in a long-distance relationship for two years, I was really looking forward to a break and spending some time with my husband till his H1B lasted,” she said.
N is stuck in Bengaluru where she had been living in a rented apartment for the last few years and was scheduled to go to Chennai for a visa interview. The interview got cancelled. “I have personal responsibilities, I have a brother to look after he is still in college, and my mother who stays alone in Assam. Plus I have to keep paying rent here,” N said, adding the financial stress of her situation is tiring her.
“Financially, I am now dependent very much on my spouse. We are working on developing our career skills and getting prepared for next year,” N said.
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RESPONSIBILITIES, RESPONSIBILITIES
The pandemic and the visa ban have also affected couples who had thought hard before taking on financial obligations.
Anu Kamboj from Karnal, Haryana, travelled back to India to take care of a family emergency earlier this year, and is now stuck. The 28-year-old quit her job as an HR generalist in a well-paying company in 2019 to be with her husband, who is in the US on a H1B visa.
The couple have a car loan to pay for in the US, apart from the lease that her husband had taken when she travelled briefly to the country last year. Now, Kamboj is in India without a job and with little hope of seeing her husband this year, while they keep paying for separate living expenses in two cities.
“We have a car loan and apartment lease. Both were very well planned keeping in mind the period of approved petition/extension. But nobody would have thought of such a ban which is contributing to stress as we would need to pay for the loan and lease irrespective of the government rulings,” Anu said. She added that the new complication and resultant increase in expenses have stressed out her elderly in-laws and parents.
“They can’t stop worrying about us. And from what I have read, hypertension is dangerous for them during this COVID-19 pandemic,” Anu said.
Some of the affected women are also offering each other support and advice.
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As the executive order came in, H* suggested on a Facebook group that women like her who were stranded in India should form a group to discuss the avenues available for them. The group she formed on Telegram amassed 500 members overnight.
H, quit her well-paying tech job in an MNC to raise her children when she moved to the US with her husband. She and her two children, a six-and-a-half-year-old girl and two-and-a-half-year-old boy, travelled to India for a family emergency in January. With the new visa diktat and travel restrictions, H is now stuck in her mother’s house at Hyderabad for at least the next six months.
“We have a car loan and apartment lease. Both were very well planned keeping in mind the period of approved petition/extension. But nobody would have thought of such a ban which is contributing to stress”
“My daughter lashes out and then breaks down frequently because she can’t make sense of what is going on. We have not ventured out in days, she misses school and more importantly, she cannot fathom why she can’t meet her father for this long,” H said.
Apart from caring for the toddler, who needs to begin playschool soon, homeschooling her daughter, and dealing with the stress of a pandemic, H’s fortitude is running out fast. “Consoling her for 7 months has become difficult because I myself am not able to come to terms with the present ongoing pandemic, ban and consulate closure,” she said.
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They are also facing the financial strain of footing the bill for two households.
Nearly all 500 women in H’s Telegram group on Telegram are in similar situations.
“I wonder what difference 500 women who don’t have the right to work, and hence can’t affect employment opportunities of Americans, make to the American economy,” H said, adding that the women in the group discuss the mental health challenges of living apart, raising families by themselves and the pandemic.
“There are some mothers who have come to India for a family emergency, leaving their kids and husband at home. Now they haven’t met their kids in months. Some are pregnant women who couldn’t travel back because of the pandemic and don’t see themselves going back this year due to the visa situation. Their babies were born without their fathers being around and are also a few months old already. The emotional trauma of something like this for a new mother is huge!” H pointed out.
Sakshi has been spending sleepless nights worrying about a similar situation with her first baby, due in November. Even if her husband manages to travel back to be with her, it would just be for a short while. With the job market almost at a standstill, Sakshi is worried that her present routine of dealing with the challenges of pregnancy alone will continue even when the baby arrives.
“I go through mood swings, fears, strange physical pains and what not. I have to manage medical appointments, scanning all by myself. And doing it in conjunction with Covid is all together is a separate challenge. We were settled and have taken on commitments based on my husband’s job in the US, so I cannot ask him to leave everything and come back. I cannot even tell him all these problems because he’s all alone there and would make him panic more. So I’m keeping all these things within me and it’s killing me inside,” Sakshi said.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-08--Visitors From The United States Will Still Have To Quarantine, Says Grant Shapps

Coronavirus has changed everything .
Make sense of it all with the Waugh Zone , our evening politics briefing .
Sign up now .
The United States will be on the “ red list ” of countries from which visitors to the UK will still have to have quarantine for 14-days when they arrive , Grant Shapps has confirmed .
The two-week self-isolation policy for people returning to or visiting England from destinations such as Spain , France , Italy and Germany is being lifted from July 10 .
A full list of around 60 countries deemed to pose “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of UK citizens ” will be published later on Friday .
But speaking to BBC Radio 4′s Today programme , Shapps was asked if the United States would be on a “ red list ” of countries not included .
Shapps also told BBC Breakfast that passengers who are currently isolating for 14 days will be able to break the restrictions legally from next Friday .
He said while “ nothing could happen ” before July 10 , “ from that point onward you will be legal not to quarantine yourself ” .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ all the included nations , meaning some may require English holidaymakers to go into quarantine at the beginning of their trip .
They were also unable to convince the devolved administrations to sign off on the overall plan , with the DfT stating that Scotland , Wales and Northern Ireland will “ set out their own approach ” .
The requirement for everyone arriving into the UK – bar a handful of exemptions – to self-isolate for 14 days was introduced on June 8 .
It was met with fierce criticism over the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , tourism and hospitality industries .

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Coronavirus has changed everything. Make sense of it all with the Waugh Zone, our evening politics briefing. Sign up now.
The United States will be on the “red list” of countries from which visitors to the UK will still have to have quarantine for 14-days when they arrive, Grant Shapps has confirmed.
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The two-week self-isolation policy for people returning to or visiting England from destinations such as Spain, France, Italy and Germany is being lifted from July 10.
A full list of around 60 countries deemed to pose “a reduced risk to the public health of UK citizens” will be published later on Friday.
But speaking to BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, Shapps was asked if the United States would be on a “red list” of countries not included.
“I’m afraid it will be,” the transport secretary said.
July 1 saw 52,000 new infections reported across the United States, a record-breaking number.
Shapps also told BBC Breakfast that passengers who are currently isolating for 14 days will be able to break the restrictions legally from next Friday.
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He said while “nothing could happen” before July 10, “from that point onward you will be legal not to quarantine yourself”.
Ministers failed to guarantee reciprocal arrangements with all the included nations, meaning some may require English holidaymakers to go into quarantine at the beginning of their trip.
They were also unable to convince the devolved administrations to sign off on the overall plan, with the DfT stating that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will “set out their own approach”.
The requirement for everyone arriving into the UK – bar a handful of exemptions – to self-isolate for 14 days was introduced on June 8.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-08--Video Shows Michigan Youth Facility Staff Restraining Black Teen Who Died

At least seven men forcibly restrained a teenager who had a heart attack and died two days later .
The staffers at a youth facility in Michigan held down the boy ’ s arms and legs and sat on him as he screamed that he couldn ’ t breathe , an attorney representing the boy ’ s estate said Tuesday .
Surveillance video footage from the Lakeside Academy in Kalamazoo shows 16-year-old Cornelius Fredericks being pushed to the floor and held down by staff members because he threw a sandwich in the cafeteria .
About a dozen teenagers can be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time .
The video was released Tuesday by Detroit-area attorney Geoffrey Fieger , who represents Fredericks ’ estate .
A civil lawsuit filed by the estate in June says the boy screamed “ I can ’ t breathe ” as he was restrained for about 8 minutes on April 29 .
The video shown to reporters had no sound .
On the video , several of the men appear to pull on and hold down Fredericks ’ arms and legs while others sit or lay atop his chest and abdomen .
Toward the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appears limp and falls back to the floor when staffers try to sit him up .
Others then move in and start CPR .
The teenager went into cardiac arrest , was hospitalized and died two days later , authorities said .
The death was ruled a homicide and the doctor who performed the autopsy said Fredericks died of asphyxia .
Two male staffers and a female nurse — Michael Mosley of Battle Creek , Zachary Solis of Lansing and Heather McLogan of Kalamazoo — were fired and have been charged with involuntary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ death .
“ As you can see in the video , far more than two people are involved in suffocating him , ” Fieger said .
“ I would urge them to reconsider the other people ... who are clearly involved in the killing of Cornelius.
” Fieger said his office had a forensic examiner review the footage and that portions of the videotape are missing .
He didn ’ t specifically say that he believed the video had been edited or explain what had happened , or why .
“ It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ longer in the scene that were there one second before , ” he said .
“ It is a horrific videotape and it demonstrates what other employees have told us is a culture of fear and abuse at the Lakeside facility , ” Fieger said .
“ One employee told us that in order to work there all you needed was to be breathing and accept $ 13 per hour.
” The staff members ’ actions shown in the video don ’ t “ adhere to the Sequel and Lakeside Academy policies and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ safety interventions , ” Sequel Youth and Family Services said in a statement Tuesday .
It also said Lakeside employees are trained in deescalation techniques and that its policy is to only use restraints as emergency safety interventions when “ a student exhibits imminent danger to themselves and ... when a student exhibits imminent danger to others , and in those cases to use the minimal level of intervention possible.
” “ Otherwise , a restraint is not an appropriate first response , and restraints are never to be used as a means @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or retaliation by staff , ” the company said .
Lakeside had a contract with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to care for youths in the state ’ s foster care and juvenile justice systems .
The state said last month that it had terminated that contract with Lakeside Academy and removed all 125 youth being housed there .

At least seven men forcibly restrained a teenager who had a heart attack and died two days later. The staffers at a youth facility in Michigan held down the boy’s arms and legs and sat on him as he screamed that he couldn’t breathe, an attorney representing the boy’s estate said Tuesday.
Surveillance video footage from the Lakeside Academy in Kalamazoo shows 16-year-old Cornelius Fredericks being pushed to the floor and held down by staff members because he threw a sandwich in the cafeteria. About a dozen teenagers can be seen sitting in the cafeteria at the time.
The video was released Tuesday by Detroit-area attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who represents Fredericks’ estate. A civil lawsuit filed by the estate in June says the boy screamed “I can’t breathe” as he was restrained for about 8 minutes on April 29. The video shown to reporters had no sound.
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On the video, several of the men appear to pull on and hold down Fredericks’ arms and legs while others sit or lay atop his chest and abdomen. Toward the end of the video, the teen appears limp and falls back to the floor when staffers try to sit him up. Others then move in and start CPR.
“He’s not fighting at all ... his shoes and his feet are just lying there,” Fieger said, referring to the videotape.
The teenager went into cardiac arrest, was hospitalized and died two days later, authorities said. The death was ruled a homicide and the doctor who performed the autopsy said Fredericks died of asphyxia.
Two male staffers and a female nurse — Michael Mosley of Battle Creek, Zachary Solis of Lansing and Heather McLogan of Kalamazoo — were fired and have been charged with involuntary manslaughter and second-degree child abuse in Fredericks’ death.
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Fieger said he is urging authorities to recommend charging others.
“As you can see in the video, far more than two people are involved in suffocating him,” Fieger said. “I would urge them to reconsider the other people ... who are clearly involved in the killing of Cornelius.”
Fredericks had been a ward of the state for several years, following his mother’s death when his father was incarcerated.
Fieger said his office had a forensic examiner review the footage and that portions of the videotape are missing. He didn’t specifically say that he believed the video had been edited or explain what had happened, or why.
“It jumps and there suddenly people are no longer in the scene that were there one second before,” he said.
In its investigation, the state of Michigan disclosed that staff members at Lakeside had also suffocated Fredericks as a form of discipline, according to Fieger.
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“It is a horrific videotape and it demonstrates what other employees have told us is a culture of fear and abuse at the Lakeside facility,” Fieger said. “One employee told us that in order to work there all you needed was to be breathing and accept $13 per hour.”
“The mechanism for dealing with children in this facility was abuse and fear,” he added. “In fact, suffocation was regularly practiced upon children. They called it ‘fearing.’”
Lakeside Academy and its operator, Sequel Youth and Family Services, are named in the civil lawsuit.
The staff members’ actions shown in the video don’t “adhere to the Sequel and Lakeside Academy policies and procedures related to the use of emergency safety interventions,” Sequel Youth and Family Services said in a statement Tuesday.
It also said Lakeside employees are trained in deescalation techniques and that its policy is to only use restraints as emergency safety interventions when “a student exhibits imminent danger to themselves and ... when a student exhibits imminent danger to others, and in those cases to use the minimal level of intervention possible.”
“Otherwise, a restraint is not an appropriate first response, and restraints are never to be used as a means of coercion, discipline, convenience, or retaliation by staff,” the company said.
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Lakeside had a contract with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to care for youths in the state’s foster care and juvenile justice systems. The state said last month that it had terminated that contract with Lakeside Academy and removed all 125 youth being housed there.
JooYeun Chang, who oversees Michigan’s child welfare system, said the state needs to “totally overhaul” its oversight of residential facilities for youth.
“What’s important is we look at the totality of what’s happening, how these institutions are being used and how we monitor and provide oversight and training,” Chang told WOOD-TV.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-08--Trump’s Latest Coronavirus Boast

Trump’s Latest Coronavirus Boast

President Donald Trump bragged that the United States was in “ a good place ” with regard to the coronavirus @ @

Trump’s Latest Coronavirus Boast
President Donald Trump bragged that the United States was in “a good place” with regard to the coronavirus pandemic.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-08--Neil Young Taunts Donald Trump With New Song Suggestion For Next Rally

Neil Young doesn ’ t usually like President Donald Trump playing his music at campaign rallies .
The rock icon has called Trump out over the issue on multiple previous occasions , most recently on Friday when three of Young ’ s songs were used during the president ’ s Independence Day celebration at Mount Rushmore .
But Young revealed in an open letter published on his website Monday that he does have one song that Trump can use .
It ’ s an updated version of his 2006 song “ Lookin ’ For A Leader ” that now takes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden .
Young performed the song for his online concert series , filmed by his wife , “ Kill Bill ” star Daryl Hannah .
“ I believe it would be an interesting addition to your next rally , ” Young wrote of the song .
He sarcastically added that he won ’ t sue Trump over the unauthorized use of the tracks so Trump can focus on tackling the coronavirus pandemic .
Check out Young ’ s original version of the song below and his updated version from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his website here .

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Neil Young doesn’t usually like President Donald Trump playing his music at campaign rallies.
The rock icon has called Trump out over the issue on multiple previous occasions, most recently on Friday when three of Young’s songs were used during the president’s Independence Day celebration at Mount Rushmore.
But Young revealed in an open letter published on his website Monday that he does have one song that Trump can use.
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It’s an updated version of his 2006 song “Lookin’ For A Leader” that now takes swipes at the current president and endorses presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Young performed the song for his online concert series, filmed by his wife, “Kill Bill” star Daryl Hannah.
“I believe it would be an interesting addition to your next rally,” Young wrote of the song. He sarcastically added that he won’t sue Trump over the unauthorized use of the tracks so Trump can focus on tackling the coronavirus pandemic.
Check out Young’s original version of the song below and his updated version from the 17:18 mark in the video on his website here.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-08--Harvard, MIT Sue To Block ICE Rule On International Students

BOSTON ( AP ) — Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday challenging the Trump administration ’ s decision to bar international students from staying in the U.S. if they take classes entirely online this fall .
The lawsuit , filed in Boston ’ s federal court , seeks to prevent federal immigration authorities from enforcing the rule .
The universities contend that the directive violates the Administrative Procedures Act because officials failed to offer a reasonable basis justifying the policy and because the public was not given notice to comment on it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Monday that international students will be forced to leave the U.S. or transfer to another college if their schools operate entirely online this fall .
New visas will not be issued to students at those schools , and others at universities offering a mix of online and in-person classes will be barred from taking all of their classes online .
The guidance says international students won ’ t be exempt even if an outbreak forces their schools online during the fall term .
The guidance was released the same day Harvard announced it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fall .
Harvard says the directive would prevent many of Harvard ’ s 5,000 international students from remaining the U.S. Harvard President Lawrence Bacow said the order came without notice and that its “ cruelty ” was surpassed only by its “ recklessness.
” “ It appears that it was designed purposefully to place pressure on colleges and universities to open their on-campus classrooms for in-person instruction this fall , without regard to concerns for the health and safety of students , instructors , and other , ” Bacow said in a statement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time when the United States has been setting daily records for the number of new infections , with more than 300,000 new cases reported since July 1.
” The guidelines have provoked backlash from universities across the U.S. who say international students have an important place in their communities .
Many schools have also come to depend on tuition revenue from international students , who typically pay higher tuition rates .
It creates an urgent dilemma for thousands of international students who became stranded in the U.S. last spring after the coronavirus forced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attending schools that are staying online must “ depart the country or take other measures , such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction , ” according to the guidance .
Dozens of colleges have said they plan to offer at least some classes in person this fall , but some say it ’ s too risky .
The University of Southern California last week reversed course on a plan to bring students to campus , saying classes will be hosted primarily or exclusively online .

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BOSTON (AP) — Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday challenging the Trump administration’s decision to bar international students from staying in the U.S. if they take classes entirely online this fall.
The lawsuit, filed in Boston’s federal court, seeks to prevent federal immigration authorities from enforcing the rule. The universities contend that the directive violates the Administrative Procedures Act because officials failed to offer a reasonable basis justifying the policy and because the public was not given notice to comment on it.
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The Trump administration did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement notified colleges Monday that international students will be forced to leave the U.S. or transfer to another college if their schools operate entirely online this fall. New visas will not be issued to students at those schools, and others at universities offering a mix of online and in-person classes will be barred from taking all of their classes online.
The guidance says international students won’t be exempt even if an outbreak forces their schools online during the fall term.
The guidance was released the same day Harvard announced it would be keeping its classes online this fall. Harvard says the directive would prevent many of Harvard’s 5,000 international students from remaining the U.S.
Harvard President Lawrence Bacow said the order came without notice and that its “cruelty” was surpassed only by its “recklessness.”
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“It appears that it was designed purposefully to place pressure on colleges and universities to open their on-campus classrooms for in-person instruction this fall, without regard to concerns for the health and safety of students, instructors, and other,” Bacow said in a statement Wednesday. “This comes at a time when the United States has been setting daily records for the number of new infections, with more than 300,000 new cases reported since July 1.”
The guidelines have provoked backlash from universities across the U.S. who say international students have an important place in their communities. Many schools have also come to depend on tuition revenue from international students, who typically pay higher tuition rates.
It creates an urgent dilemma for thousands of international students who became stranded in the U.S. last spring after the coronavirus forced their schools to move online. Those attending schools that are staying online must “depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction,” according to the guidance.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-08--Robert Redford Makes Crystal Clear What He Thinks Of Donald Trump Ahead Of Election

Robert Redford is leaving no doubt about his choice in the 2020 presidential election .
Back in 2016 , then-candidate Donald Trump twisted the movie legend ’ s comments to make it seem as if Redford had endorsed him .
But in a column for CNN published on Wednesday , the famed actor and director made it crystal clear that he ’ s all in for Joe Biden in this November ’ s election .
In the op-ed , Redford lamented the “ moral vacuum ” in the Oval Office and called out Trump ’ s inflammatory rhetoric .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our country beyond repair , ” Redford warned .
The United States has “ lost its place as a world leader , ” during Trump ’ s presidency , he continued .
And at home , the president has “ found every fault line in America and wrenched them wide open.
” Biden , wrote Redford , would bring unity , empathy , experience and intelligence back to the White House .
The former vice president was “ made for this moment , ” he said .
“ Biden leads with his heart @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a soft and sentimental way , ” Redford added .
“ I ’ m talking about a fierce compassion ― the kind that fuels him , that drives him to fight against racial and economic injustice , that won ’ t let him rest while people are struggling.
” Redford has been a harsh critic of Trump ’ s disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic .

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Robert Redford is leaving no doubt about his choice in the 2020 presidential election.
Back in 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump twisted the movie legend’s comments to make it seem as if Redford had endorsed him. But in a column for CNN published on Wednesday, the famed actor and director made it crystal clear that he’s all in for Joe Biden in this November’s election.
In the op-ed, Redford lamented the “moral vacuum” in the Oval Office and called out Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric.
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“Another four years of this would degrade our country beyond repair,” Redford warned.
The United States has “lost its place as a world leader,” during Trump’s presidency, he continued. And at home, the president has “found every fault line in America and wrenched them wide open.”
Biden, wrote Redford, would bring unity, empathy, experience and intelligence back to the White House. The former vice president was “made for this moment,” he said.
“Biden leads with his heart. I don’t mean that in a soft and sentimental way,” Redford added. “I’m talking about a fierce compassion ― the kind that fuels him, that drives him to fight against racial and economic injustice, that won’t let him rest while people are struggling.”
Redford has been a harsh critic of Trump’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-09--12 Therapist-Backed Tips For Overcoming Exercise Anxiety

Take time to discover the right workout routine for you .
Don ’ t compare yourself to others .
Put your imagination to good use .
Remind yourself that avoidance often makes things worse .
Reward yourself along the way .
For example , if you exercise for 30 minutes a day , three days a week , then give yourself permission to buy yourself something that you ’ ve always wanted or to go somewhere you dreamed of going , she said .
Humans respond well to rewards , so there ’ s nothing wrong with attaching them to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doing it in a healthy way .
“ It ’ s easy to fall into the all-or-nothing mindset when it comes to fitness , but the truth is that the benefits you reap from moving your body are cumulative , ” said Logan Jones , a Manhattan-based psychologist and founder of NYC THERAPY + WELLNESS and Clarity Therapy Online .
“ The work you do will have a positive impact on your health and level of fitness over time , regardless of how short each session may seem.
” “ Commit to working @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a friend ― virtually , or in the park , whatever works , ” said Elena Touroni , a psychologist based in the United Kingdom and founder of My Online Therapy .
“ Exercising with other people is a great way of building momentum and you can both encourage each other on the days when negative or anxious thoughts are creeping in , ” she said .
Add in something you love .
“ My No .
1 tip for my patients is to pair something they love with something they don ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said Sean Paul , a Florida-based psychiatrist with Now Psych .
“ When you pair something you love with exercise , it becomes less anxiety-provoking and you may even look forward to doing it.
” This story is part of Don ’ t Sweat It , a HuffPost Life series on improving your relationship with fitness .
We ’ re giving you a guide on the latest thinking on exercise and why we ’ ve been conditioned to hate it in the past .
Mental health and body-positive fitness experts will offer guidance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ routine that works for you .
Find all of our coverage here .

Getty Images/HuffPost “Exercise anxiety is many times created by negative thoughts related to fear of failure, embarrassment and fear of pain or injury,” according to one expert.
Does the thought of starting a fitness routine or hopping back into an abandoned one incite doom, stress or apprehension? Exercise anxiety is a very real thing.
Raffi Bilek, a licensed therapist and director of the Baltimore Therapy Center, said a common reason that people get nervous about heading to the gym is because of social pressure to look a certain way.
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“It’s often an impossible ideal to attain, or at least it certainly seems that way. And that fear of failure can contribute to anxiety over even getting started,” he explained.
Grace Dowd, a licensed clinical social worker in Austin, Texas, added that exercise anxiety can stem from people worrying that others will judge them while they work out, from feeling overwhelmed by the multitude of fitness options, from setting unobtainable goals, and from body image issues.
According to Dowd, exercise anxiety can manifest in a variety of ways ― physical symptoms such as a fast heartbeat, sweaty palms, nausea or lack of appetite, as well as mental symptoms like excessive worry, rumination and imagining the worst-case scenario.
And the condition is common. “From my experience, I can say that anxiety is the main reason that keeps people from going to the gym or starting a new exercise routine,” Dowd explained. “The irony is that exercise is one of the most effective ways to reduce stress and anxiety.”
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So how do you fight the stress and worry associated with embarking on a new fitness routine? Try one of these expert-backed strategies.
Take time to discover the right workout routine for you.
“Exercise anxiety is many times created by negative thoughts related to fear of failure, embarrassment and fear of pain or injury,” explained Cindy Radovic, the clinical director of emergency and inpatient mental health services at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Maryland.
There are unlimited opportunities to overcome these feelings, but Radovic noted that you have to first be kind to yourself and do what feels right to you.
“Whether that be personal training, small group workouts or training programs, it’s truly all about finding the right fit, in the right time, and creating a routine that is enjoyable to you,” she said.
RichLegg via Getty Images The less you focus on what others are achieving, the easier it will be to focus on what you’re achieving.
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Plan ahead.
Between the vast array of equipment and options, fitness can be daunting. To help curb anxiety in this department, Mark Mayfield, a licensed professional counselor and CEO of Mayfield Counseling Centers, said to approach your workout with a plan so you know what to expect.
“Sometimes exercising can be difficult because there is an unknown component like ‘how long should I work out,’ ‘what type of cardio should I do,’ etc. If you are able to plan it out, then you can develop a set of realistic expectations,” he explained.
Start small.
Kasia Ciszewski, a licensed professional counselor in South Carolina, said to keep workouts short when you’re starting out.
“For example, tell yourself that you only have to do 10 minutes on the treadmill. Next time, maybe try 12 minutes, the following week maybe work up to 15 minutes,” she said, suggesting a “slow and steady wins the race” mentality.
Doing 10 minutes on the treadmill sounds a lot more manageable than an hour, and eventually, it will become easier to go beyond that point.
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“Anxiety is the main reason that keeps people from going to the gym or starting a new exercise routine. The irony is that exercise is one of the most effective ways to reduce stress and anxiety.” - Grace Dowd, clinical social worker
Don’t compare yourself to others.
It’s very easy to get caught up in social media and play the comparison game, especially if your feed is filled with #FitnessInspo accounts that feature all sorts of ripped and modelesque influencers.
But Jacob Kountz, a clinical therapist in Bakersfield, California, said, “this will likely cause you to get stuck while trying to obtain how others are getting their own results.”
He added that the less you focus on what others are achieving, the easier it will be to focus on what you’re achieving.
Put your imagination to good use.
Linda Weiskoff, a licensed clinical social worker with Atlanta’s Heartwork Counseling Center, said letting yourself daydream about your activity can make fitness feel more exciting. For example, picture yourself in a sneaker ad as you’re moving down the sidewalk.
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“Enjoy the fantasy of being an athlete in a commercial. [Using] your imagination in this way adds some entertainment to your walk,” she explained.
Weiskoff used her own advice throughout the years: “On past morning walks, with every uphill climb, I’d guide myself with ‘Just do it,’ then imagine myself among the other athletes in Nike ads. It added some fun to the experience.”
Remind yourself that avoidance often makes things worse.
Alicia Henry, a psychotherapist and wellness coach in New York, said “anxiety and avoidance go hand in hand.” It’s one thing to not work out because your body and mind just aren’t feeling it; it’s another to avoid exercise altogether because you’re afraid.
Henry noted that the best way to overcome uncomfortable feelings is to work through them. “Remind yourself that while avoidance may offer temporary relief, it will ultimately land back where you started; feeling frustrated and powerless,” she explained.
PeopleImages via Getty Images “It’s easy to fall into the all-or-nothing mindset when it comes to fitness, but the truth is that the benefits you reap from moving your body are cumulative,” says psychologist Logan Jones.
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Reward yourself along the way.
Rewards may reduce your exercise anxiety, “as long as you clearly define them upfront,” said Abby Lev, a California-based psychotherapist and founder of CBT Online.
For example, if you exercise for 30 minutes a day, three days a week, then give yourself permission to buy yourself something that you’ve always wanted or to go somewhere you dreamed of going, she said. Humans respond well to rewards, so there’s nothing wrong with attaching them to exercise as long as you’re doing it in a healthy way.
Label your exercise anxiety.
Thomas McDonagh, a San Francisco-based clinical psychologist and founder of Good Therapy SF, advised verbally placing a name or label on the emotions you are experiencing.
“Continue to name the emotion until the intensity begins to fade,” he said. An example: “I am experiencing pre-workout stress right now.”
McDonagh said you should repeat this like a mantra until the stress begins to fade. “Research shows that verbally labeling an emotion decreases activity of the amygdala and other brain areas associated with emotions,” he said.
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Adopt the 1% mindset.
Look at exercise as a fraction of your time. Fifteen minutes is only about 1% of your day. Whether you choose yoga, swimming, HIIT, or just a simple walk around the neighborhood, try dedicating just those few minutes to a new workout.
“It’s easy to fall into the all-or-nothing mindset when it comes to fitness, but the truth is that the benefits you reap from moving your body are cumulative,” said Logan Jones, a Manhattan-based psychologist and founder of NYC THERAPY + WELLNESS and Clarity Therapy Online. “The work you do will have a positive impact on your health and level of fitness over time, regardless of how short each session may seem.”
Get a friend involved.
“Commit to working out at certain times each week with a friend ― virtually, or in the park, whatever works,” said Elena Touroni, a psychologist based in the United Kingdom and founder of My Online Therapy. “Exercising with other people is a great way of building momentum and you can both encourage each other on the days when negative or anxious thoughts are creeping in,” she said.
Touroni added that, alternatively, there are lots of apps and online training programs that have a community aspect that enable you to share stories and log your achievements that day.
Use affirmations to stay grounded.
There’s power in what you tell your mind. Jones suggested the following anxiety-reducing affirmations:
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My body is improving.
I’m focusing on my health every day.
My fitness is increasing each moment.
My health is important to me at this moment.
I have the right to develop a healthy body or any type of body that I wish.
I’m taking care of my body.
I’m a work in progress.
I love my body.
I trust my body.
My body works with me and not against me.
Add in something you love.
“My No. 1 tip for my patients is to pair something they love with something they don’t love but should do,” said Sean Paul, a Florida-based psychiatrist with Now Psych. “When you pair something you love with exercise, it becomes less anxiety-provoking and you may even look forward to doing it.”
This could be listening to your favorite podcast while walking, calling a friend to chat when on the elliptical, or listening to your favorite music as you lift weights, Paul said.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-09--Inside The Prison Where 8 In 10 Of The Incarcerated Have Gotten Coronavirus

Above: Jonathan White with his family. Illustration: HuffPost; Photos: Family Handout/Getty Images
Jonathan White, a 45-year-old man incarcerated at a state prison in Ohio, gazed out at the group of people who had come to collect their lunch from the chow hall. As part of the effort to contain the spread of COVID-19, people were sent one dorm at a time to pick up their food. These individuals were from the dorm that houses many of the people who are elderly or have health conditions.
“My heart just ached cause I asked myself who am I seeing now that I won’t see again due to death from this virus,” White wrote in early April, just as the pandemic was building toward its first peak in the U.S.
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“This prison is just too crowded, there is no way everyone will make it that I’m seeing unscathed,” White wrote. “Thanks to years of flopping people simply because they have the power to, never truly looking into who people are today,” he continued, referring to those he knew who had been denied parole. “This has resulted in their apparent overall objective which is to see to it that as many people as possible die in prison.”
Since White made that dire prediction, at least 13 people incarcerated at Marion Correctional Institution (MCI) have died, in addition to at least one prison staff member. More than 2,000 prisoners — about 80% of the population — have tested positive for the coronavirus, including White. The prison is the second-largest COVID-19 cluster in the country, according to the New York Times tracker, just ahead of Pickaway Correctional Institution, another Ohio state prison about an hour away. Nationwide, 9 of the top 10 coronavirus clusters are in prisons or jails.
There are signs this particular prison outbreak spread into the surrounding community: The relatively small county of Marion has one of the highest rates of infection in the state, even with the Marion prisoner cases removed from the count.
HuffPost spoke with eight people incarcerated at Marion for more than two months about what it was like living through the pandemic, knowing it was almost impossible to avoid the potentially fatal disease behind bars. They described how their prison sentence stripped them of the ability to make decisions that would increase their chances of survival. They did everything within their power to protect themselves from COVID-19: They followed the news closely. They requested masks but were denied until it was too late. They pleaded with prison staff. They filed internal complaints, knowing they would go nowhere. They filed lawsuits, sometimes without help from a lawyer or access to the internet.
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And when they turned on the TV, they watched the governor and the head of the state’s Department of Rehabilitation and Correction — officials with immense control over their fate — mislead the public about the protections available to people in the state’s prisons.
The coronavirus outbreak at the prison in Marion is proof of what criminal justice reform advocates and incarcerated people have been warning since the beginning of the pandemic: It is nearly impossible to keep the coronavirus out of prisons and jails, and once it’s in, it endangers everyone who lives and works in and around the facility. It is a risk that disproportionately impacts Black people, who are more likely to be incarcerated and also more likely to die of COVID-19. In April, the prison at Marion was dubbed the “number-one coronavirus hotspot” in the country — but because of a lack of mass testing in most American prisons, it’s impossible to know if Marion is truly an anomaly or if it’s indicative of how the highly contagious disease is traveling through similar detention facilities.
A young girl stands behind a Marion Correctional Institution sign during a May 2 protest to increase public awareness of the conditions inside the Ohio prison. MEGAN JELINGER via Getty Images
As the scale of the epidemic revealed itself in March, many Americans began frantically preparing: stockpiling groceries and cleaning supplies; making improvised masks and learning to avoid getting too close to strangers. Every interaction was freighted with intentionality, as people made careful judgments about who was safe and who was a possible risk.
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Inside Marion, however, a shambolic and ultimately futile version of this pandemic preparedness was taking place. Prison officials tried to replicate some of the medical guidance. They sent frequent messages through JPay, a corrections messaging service, urging people to wash their hands and practice social distancing. But even the simplest suggestions seemed absurd.
A grim alternate reality took shape. People incarcerated at Marion knew some of them would die from the coronavirus. They closely followed media reports about the emerging pandemic, and what was happening inside the prison did not match the urgent warnings they saw on TV in early March.
“There are three feet in between my bunk bed and the bunk bed on my left side and the bunk bed on my right side,” Steven D’Augustino, a 50-year-old man with asthma who is incarcerated at MCI and has tested positive for COVID-19, said in a May interview. “So I have a living quarters, if you don’t count the bed itself, of about 18 to 21 square feet — two people actually, myself and my bunkie have about 21 square feet.”
When people pointed out the physical impossibility of social distancing, given their living conditions in a prison operating at more than 150% capacity, they were instructed to sleep “head-to-toe,” D’Augustino said.
The prison started conducting temperature checks on employees coming to work on March 11 — but in the early days of the pandemic, the virus was being spread by people who did not yet run a fever or exhibit other symptoms.
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Like other front-line workers, prison employees who wanted to wear masks had a hard time getting them. “We do not have the masks to issue to every staff member,” a corrections department official wrote in an email obtained by HuffPost, referencing the shortage of N95 masks. After weeks of unsuccessful negotiations, the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association — the union that represents the state’s corrections officers — used $200,000 in member dues to buy its own supply of KN95 masks to distribute to workers.
On March 25, the first corrections officer reported feeling sick. The officer had worked in the prison the previous day. It became clear the temperature-check firewall for employees had failed when the officer tested positive for the virus on March 29 — and when others began testing positive in the following days.
Several corrections officers who tested positive returned to work before they had recovered. Public health officials have urged Americans who contract the coronavirus to stay home until they’ve gone three days without a fever, have no respiratory-related symptoms, and have gone 10 days since symptoms first appeared. But that timeline wasn’t realistic for Ohio corrections officers, who received only 40 hours of paid leave for COVID-19.
Even if every officer was meticulous about stopping the spread of the virus, they were in an almost impossible situation. But some corrections officers didn’t seem to take the threat seriously, several people incarcerated at MCI said in interviews. Prisoners overheard guards inaccurately claim that the coronavirus was less deadly than the flu, a common talking point in right-wing media and one often repeated by President Donald Trump in the early weeks of the pandemic. Several prisoners who tried to cover their faces with makeshift masks were told to remove the coverings or risk getting written up for “contraband,” two incarcerated individuals said in interviews.
JoEllen Smith, a spokeswoman for the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, confirmed to HuffPost that “wearing masks would have been a serious violation” of prison rules “prior to COVID.” The DRC did not adjust the guidance to allow masks until March 27 — and did not require them until April 7. Even then, incarcerated individuals were initially given only one mask, meaning they would have to go barefaced while they were washing it by hand and letting it dry.
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So some 2,500 people sat inside the overcrowded prison, waiting for the virus to reach them. There was no hope that Ohio officials would thin out the prison population, which would have allowed freed individuals to protect themselves and created more space for those who remained behind bars. Although Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine was one of the few Republican governors willing to break with Trump and acknowledge the severity of the situation in the early days of the pandemic, he refused to meaningfully reduce the state’s prison population.
Asked during a March 29 press conference if he was considering letting anyone out of jail or prison, DeWine suggested that those incarcerated were safer in crowded detention facilities than out on their own. “What makes us think that they’re going to be in any better position outside than inside?” said DeWine.
A person incarcerated at Marion tested positive later that week.
People walk in the yard at Marion Correctional Institution on April 22, just after the prison completed mass testing for the coronavirus. Dane Rhys/Reuters
The prison, which had already suspended visits from family and lawyers, went into lockdown. The things that make prison more bearable — educational classes, access to the library — were shut down indefinitely. Confined to their living areas for nearly the entire day, people had almost nothing to distract them.
“That’s OK if they’re really protecting us. The problem is they obviously didn’t protect us,” D’Augustino said.
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The first COVID-19 death directly tied to the prison came on April 8. John Dawson, a 55-year-old corrections officer, had worked in the control center giving out equipment to prison staff. He had been with the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction for 24 years.
Keeping the virus out of the prison appeared to be a lost cause. Dennis Salerno, a 50-year-old man incarcerated at Marion who describes himself as a “health nut,” often prepared a drink that includes cayenne pepper for himself and a friend. He realized they were sick when neither of them could taste the cayenne. “Cayenne is hot!” he said in an interview. After adding a third of a jar of the pepper, Salerno decided he should stop adding more — “and that certainly we had Corona.”
Officials’ focus shifted to mitigating the damage. Meals were reduced to twice a day to limit movement within the prison and allow time to clean the cafeteria between groups coming to pick up their food.
People inside had little confidence these measures were sufficient. White, who has high blood pressure and hypertension, started worrying that his job in the chow hall’s recycling unit was putting him at an even higher risk of getting the virus. But if he refused to show up, he risked punishment and a disciplinary report that could jeopardize his chances of being granted parole in the future.
Dennis Salerno first suspected he had COVID-19 when he couldn't taste the cayenne pepper in a drink he makes to boost his immunity. Illustration: HuffPost; Photo: Courtesy of Dennis Salerno
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After talking with his family, White decided to stay in his dorm and do his best to self-quarantine. When he didn’t show up for work, corrections officers threatened to extract him from his cell and place him in solitary confinement, he said. He eventually received permission to pause his work at the chow hall after his family intervened. (Smith, the DRC spokeswoman, told HuffPost that the department had “nothing on record to verify this occurred” but did not deny White’s account.)
White’s precautions weren’t enough. He lost his sense of taste first — and then his ability to catch his breath. “My breathing had gotten so bad I had to turn my TV off and just focus and breathe. It was like trying to catch a feather,” he said. He self-treated the problem by holding his head over a crockpot and inhaling the steam. “It helps your skin,” he joked.
D’Augustino soon found himself literally surrounded by people who were sick. “Two people to my right had lost their sense of taste, the person that sleeps on the bottom bunk to my left was coughing, I was coughing, people around me were coughing ― I mean there was just all kinds of symptoms all over the place,” D’Augustino said.
“Guys was just falling out left and right,” said Shannon Kidd, a 42-year-old man imprisoned at Marion. The prison staff “was so overwhelmed with it, I don’t think they had the right staffing in place to handle it,” he said.
Members of the Ohio National Guard were dispatched to the prison as more staff members called in sick. Prisoners with high fevers were removed from the dorms. The people they lived with never found out where the sick were taken — although they feared it was to solitary confinement.
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Solitary confinement is a form of torture and nobody inside wanted to end up there. Smith told HuffPost that people who are quarantined due to illness in areas typically used for punishment are not subject to the rules typically associated with solitary confinement — but those incarcerated at Marion didn’t know that. The fear of solitary drove some people to drink ice water and put cold towels on their heads before temperature checks in hopes of masking a fever.
Then, prisoners started to die. Jesse Zeigler, 74, told his family on April 6 that he was having trouble breathing, body aches and a headache. Christine Bevington, Zeigler’s stepdaughter, said a nurse at the prison told Zeigler that he didn’t have a high fever but that he should let her know if his symptoms worsened. Bevington worried that her stepfather was struggling to speak over the phone and called the prison’s medical staff. She found out days later that he was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with COVID-19.
While Zeigler was in the hospital, Ohio’s corrections department began mass testing every person at three of the state’s facilities with the largest COVID-19 outbreaks, including Marion. “It seemed like it was a little too late,” said Andre Stores, a 43-year-old man at Marion with hypertension and pre-diabetes who tested positive for the virus. “Everyone was sick at the time.
When the results came back a few days later, some of the people imprisoned at Marion learned about the severity of the outbreak on the news: 78% of the prison population tested positive in that first round. In less than three weeks, MCI went from one confirmed COVID-19 case on staff to 154 staffers and 2,011 incarcerated people infected with the virus.
Meanwhile, Zeigler’s health was deteriorating — but his family remained largely in the dark. His wife received a call from someone offering information about a support group. “She told them she didn’t need it,” Bevington said in an email. “She didn’t know her husband was dying.”
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On April 19, Zeigler’s wife received another call, telling her that he had been on dialysis and a ventilator and probably wouldn’t make it through the night. The hospital arranged a Zoom video call for the family to say goodbye. He “was not responsive but we talked to him and told him we love him,” Bevington recalled. Before hanging up, Bevington asked the nurse if someone would call to let the family know when Zeigler passed away, and the nurse agreed.
Zeigler’s wife found out he was dead the next morning around 10:45 when she received a call from Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center asking if she wanted an autopsy. He had died the night before, she learned, less than an hour after the Zoom call ended.
Christine Bevington holds a photo of her stepfather, Jesse Zeigler, taken as his family said goodbye on a video call before he died from COVID-19. MEGAN JELINGER via Getty Images
Marion Correctional Institution had become the nation’s worst documented COVID-19 hot spot. (It has since been replaced by Los Angeles County’s jail system.) The New York Times editorial board referenced its surging case numbers in a piece urging states to free prisoners to prevent more people from dying in custody. MSNBC broadcast videos sent from people incarcerated at Marion describing unsanitary conditions inside the prison.
But is Marion’s outbreak actually exceptional? Very few correctional institutions do facility-wide testing, as was undertaken there in April, and so there is little information about how many people have contracted the virus in other prisons and jails. This lack of data leaves open the alarming possibility that other prisons have infection rates similar to — or worse than — Marion’s.
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In places that are doing limited or no COVID-19 testing, “their case rates look really low — but it’s really artificial because if you don’t have testing in the door, there’s no way to know what true prevalence is,” said Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, a co-founder of the COVID Prison Project, a group of public health scientists who track the coronavirus in correctional facilities.
Several states with high rates of testing — including Michigan, Tennessee and New Jersey — uncovered high rates of infection, researchers at the COVID Prison Project have found. Although no other prison has reported numbers as stunning as those at Marion, mass testing consistently shows that COVID-19 cases are more widespread behind bars than previously acknowledged.
The vast majority of prisons only test very visibly ill individuals and are almost certainly undercounting people who don’t show symptoms or who don’t report symptoms out of fear of being sent into solitary confinement. In Ohio, the corrections department had initially planned to do mass testing in every prison where limited testing revealed positive cases, Christopher Mabe, president of the corrections officers union, said in an interview in May. But after mass testing at Marion revealed catastrophic rates of infection, the corrections department shifted to supposedly more targeted strategic testing.
“They have walked away from the testing, basically burying their head in the sand on the actual problem that still exists,” Mabe said.
Corrections departments have incentives to avoid mass testing. It’s expensive, there are logistical complications to administering the tests, and the results could reflect poorly on the department. Most corrections departments are either unable or unwilling to acquire enough materials to commit to ongoing testing.
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And because corrections authorities and politicians have mostly refused to significantly depopulate prisons, there isn’t room in most facilities to segregate COVID-19 carriers from everyone else. So without a plan in place to meaningfully protect incarcerated people from the coronavirus, mass testing does little more than document the system’s failures.
With mass testing, “the risk is that you find a lot of people and it makes you look bad,” Brinkley-Rubinstein said.
Other states are selectively testing prisons, too. At Washington state’s Monroe Correctional Complex, one of the first prisons nationwide to confirm a COVID-19 case, conditions are similar to those at Marion: Prisoners live in crowded dormitories as opposed to single cells. Washington and Ohio’s corrections departments have both responded to the pandemic by suspending visitation and programming, isolating symptomatic prisoners, implementing temperature checks for staff, restricting movement within the prison, and encouraging social distancing. But Washington has not conducted mass testing at Monroe — and claims that only 20 people incarcerated there have tested positive for COVID-19.
On June 17, the Washington State Department of Corrections announced plans for widespread testing at a different prison, Coyote Ridge Corrections Center, after confirming more than 100 COVID-19 cases among prison staff and incarcerated people. The state tested those people incarcerated in the medium-security complex and employees throughout the prison, and the number of confirmed cases more than doubled. The corrections department did not respond to an email asking why they were not conducting mass testing in every prison with confirmed cases of the coronavirus.
The corrections department is moving some of the people who tested negative out of Coyote Ridge, but the effort comes too late to save some lives. Victor Bueno, a 63-year-old man incarcerated there, died from COVID-19 the day after the testing plan was announced. Bueno was set to be released in three months. A second man, 72-year-old William Bryant, died four days later.
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Geoffrey Banks experienced COVID-19 symptoms through late May, more than a month after he had tested positive for the virus. Illustration: HuffPost; Photo: Courtesy of Geoffrey Banks
Some of those incarcerated at MCI didn’t learn their own diagnosis until after seeing on the news that most people in the prison had tested positive for COVID-19. They received their results on a stapled-shut piece of paper. For some, it was almost a relief to receive confirmation of a diagnosis they had already suspected.
The test results triggered a haphazard effort by prison officials to separate the people who tested positive from the people who tested negative. It did not go well.
“They have no clue how to separate,” said Geoffrey Banks, 37, who is incarcerated at Marion and tested positive for the coronavirus. “At first, it was we’re going to separate all the positives. We’re going to make the gym and these couple dorms all positive,” Banks said. “Then they realized, ‘Wow, you know, there’s a lot more positives than we thought.’”
So the gymnasium and other areas used to quarantine the COVID-19-positive group flipped to become the areas to hold the people who tested negative. Smith, the DRC spokeswoman, said that if the positive and negative groups switched places, those areas would have been “thoroughly cleaned and disinfected,” but people inside don’t think it was enough. “They cross-contaminated that — they just screwed the pooch on that one, for lack of a better term,” Banks said.
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By moving people with COVID-19 symptoms around in an attempt to create isolation areas, MCI staffers may have “inadvertently spread it a little bit,” Traci Kinsler, Marion County’s public health commissioner, said in an interview.
Even after it became clear that most of the prison was infected with COVID-19, people who were sick had a hard time getting medical attention. “The only way medical was taking guys was guys that were falling out,” White said
Banks, who experienced severe stomach pains, chills, headaches, fatigue and a slight fever, said that “unless you are not breathing, they’re just gonna give you Tylenol or stomach pills and send you on your way.” Some of Banks’ symptoms continued through late May, more than a month after he tested positive for COVID-19. “I am having labored breathing and can’t lay on my back without feeling like I have a bowling ball on my chest as well as a heavy cough,” he told HuffPost in a May 15 message on JPay. He waited several days for a response to a health services request and eventually received a cough expectorant, which he worried would just make him cough more. (Smith contends that people held at Marion had “adequate access to medical care” and could request emergency help.)
Testing doesn’t always deliver clear results, and some prisoners at Marion received inconclusive results and had to get retested the following week. In the meantime, they were left in the same living area as the people who tested positive.
Willis Williams, a 64-year-old with a liver disorder and hypertension, was one of the people who had to get retested. His second test results came back negative at the end of April, but he was never moved away from the COVID-19-positive population. Prison staffers told him the people who tested positive had probably recovered. Williams thought that was unlikely. And even if it was true, some of the people he got retested with received positive results the second time around, including individuals who lived in his dorm, he said.
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“They left me in a positive area knowing that I was negative. They started off trying to separate positive from negative and then they take forever to get my results and then when I do test negative, they say, ‘Oh well, stay where you’re at,’” Williams said in an interview. “That’s kind of difficult to swallow. There’s not a lot I can do.”
Asked if he ever suspected he’d caught the coronavirus from someone in his dorm, Williams said it was hard to tell. “When you’re worried, your mind plays tricks on you. You cough too many times and wonder if you have it,” he said. “It was kind of traumatic to go through this every day not knowing.”
Ohio’s corrections department has attempted to downplay the severity of the situation by emphasizing that many of the people who tested positive were asymptomatic individuals who wouldn’t have received a COVID-19 test at most other prisons. Annette Chambers-Smith, the department’s director, claimed in a May 18 press conference that 96% of the incarcerated people who tested positive were asymptomatic. Several individuals held at Marion told HuffPost they believed they were incorrectly classified as asymptomatic if they didn’t have a fever or shortness of breath, even if they reported other symptoms.
Chambers-Smith eventually acknowledged that more than 4% of the incarcerated people who tested positive experienced symptoms of the disease. “As the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] recognized additional symptoms of COVID, those things were added to our verbal screening process,” Smith, the DRC spokeswoman, wrote in an email.
Undercounting the number of symptomatic people could be a way to deflect criticism over the department’s handling of the coronavirus, Meghan Novisky, a Cleveland State University professor who focuses on the health consequences of incarceration, told the Ohio Capital Journal. “If there are no symptoms, you can make the claim that people aren’t suffering.”
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Willis Williams, who tested negative for COVID-19, was never separated from people who tested positive. Illustration: HuffPost; Photo: Courtesy of Willis Williams
There is an obvious moral imperative for the state to provide basic protections to the people it imprisons. As many incarcerated people at Marion said in interviews, their prison sentence should not become a death sentence simply because they have no way to shield themselves from the coronavirus. But protecting the general well-being of people who live near a prison or jail is another reason to keep COVID-19 from tearing through the country’s detention facilities.
“We’ve been saying for decades, correctional health is public health,” said Dr. Brie Williams, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco who specializes in correctional health.
“Hundreds of thousands of correctional officers and correctional health care workers enter and exit these facilities every day. They return to their families, they return to their communities at the ends of their shift. They shop in the grocery stores, they seek medical care in the same health care facilities, they walk in the same parks, they send their kids on bike rides in the same areas as the rest of the community, and they bring back and forth, into and out of the jails and prisons where they work, any exposures that they’ve had during their time in the community or in the system,” Williams said.
That concern is particularly relevant in the Marion area. “We are a relatively impoverished community and a lot of people in our community work at the prisons,” said Todd Schneider, president of the Marion City Council. During one town council meeting, a member of the community compared people who work in prisons or nursing homes and wear their uniforms when they go to the grocery store to “Typhoid Mary,” said Schneider.
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Health care facilities in prisons are typically designed to treat chronic conditions, like high blood pressure or diabetes, and minor injuries that require stitches. They are not generally equipped with ventilators or breathing machines to provide lifesaving respiratory support, professor Williams said. When incarcerated people become seriously ill, the plan is for them to get triaged at the on-site medical center and then transferred to a hospital in the community.
But prisons are often located in rural areas and rural areas often have smaller hospitals. “So you can just imagine the impact of an outbreak at a 2,000-person prison on a small community hospital,” Williams said.
As of July 1, 69 people incarcerated at Marion have been admitted to Wexner Medical Center, according to Smith. The highest number of prisoners in that hospital at any one time was 26, during the week of April 12. Generally, hospitals in the area do not appear to have been overwhelmed by the outbreak — but there is evidence of community spread from the prison into the surrounding community.
Even removing the more than 2,000 confirmed cases of people incarcerated at MCI from the count, Marion County has more coronavirus cases per capita than almost anywhere in the state, including the much more densely populated Cuyahoga and Franklin counties.
“What happens in our institutions is kind of reflective of what’s happening in the community,” Mabe said.
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The corrections department says the prisoners at Marion are better now; the state claims that 2,042 incarcerated people who tested positive for COVID-19 have “recovered” from the virus. But most of the people who tested positive have not been retested to confirm they are now negative. Instead, people are placed in the “recovered” category based on their symptoms, even though many of those who tested positive never experienced symptoms in the first place.
“How they came to this conclusion without testing everyone again I don’t know,” White wrote in a JPay message. When White told medical staff at the prison in late May that he still had a bad cough, he was told it probably wasn’t related to the coronavirus. “They jus trying to sweep this whole thing along wit me under the rug,” he wrote.
According to Smith, people in Ohio’s prisons are considered to be recovered once they are 14 days past the onset of symptoms and free of symptoms for 72 hours. When these criteria are met, she said, the individual is referred to a physician or a nurse practitioner “who completes the recovery assessment considering the totality of the patient’s health status.” Individuals may receive a second test or antibody testing “in some instances,” but that’s a decision made on a “case-by-case basis,” Smith continued.
Relying on symptom-based assessments about COVID-19 has already proven to be a deadly mistake at a federal prison in California. Adrian Solarzano, a 54-year-old who was incarcerated at Terminal Island, died on May 24, after the Federal Bureau of Prisons had proclaimed him “recovered” from the coronavirus based on his lack of visible symptoms.
D’Augustino, Stores and Willis Williams are in the process of suing Ohio’s governor and top corrections officials on the grounds that the response to the pandemic at Marion violated Eighth Amendment prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. They will need to prove that the state acted with “deliberate indifference” to their medical needs. Without access to the internet, they sometimes would ask me to send copies of news reports and legal documents or to transcribe part of a press conference they had seen on TV so they could reference it in their complaint.
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D’Augustino wrote the 50-page complaint by hand, without help from a lawyer. Williams proofread, keeping an eye out not only for typos but also for penmanship — you have to dot i’s hard for it to show up on a copy machine, he explained. It took weeks to get the document mailed from the prison to the federal court.
“It’s a very tedious process, and it’s pretty much set up for laymen to fail,” Williams wrote in a JPay message. “But we can’t be discouraged by that.”
Steven D'Augustino Complaint on Scribd
The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s response to COVID-19 at its prison in Marion was, objectively, a failure. An overwhelming majority of the people under their care got sick, more than a dozen died, and there doesn’t appear to be an adequate plan in place to prevent another outbreak in the future.
That’s been true of the American prison system as a whole during this pandemic. State and federal prisons across the country have failed to prevent a total of more than 600 deaths since March.
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Due to decades of draconian sentencing laws and a broken parole system that often fails to account for overly harsh sentences or individuals’ reform, Ohio imprisons thousands more people than its prisons were designed to hold.
“I don’t think, by and large, that the problem lies at the feet of Annette Chambers-Smith,” said David Singleton, executive director of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center. “She and her staff have tried to do as good a job as possible getting out in front and planning.”
The real problem, Singleton said, is Gov. DeWine’s failure to sign off on a large-scale reduction of the prison population. “You could do all the planning in the world and I don’t see how you prevent what’s happening at a place like Marion — and also at Pickaway — if you don’t actually substantially reduce the prison population,” Singleton said.
The numbers problem is clear to the people imprisoned inside Marion Correctional Institution, too. “The story isn’t that more than 2,000 guys came up with positive COVID-19,” White said in an interview. “My thing is: why was there more than 2,000 guys in a prison that was designed for 1,500?”
“I’m not begging to go home,” said Banks, who noted that he didn’t expect to be released even if the governor moved to depopulate the state’s prisons. “I’m begging to be safe.”
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thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-09--Joe Biden Hammers Betsy DeVos With A Promise That Has His Supporters Fired Up

Former Vice President Joe Biden , the presumed Democratic presidential nominee , has vowed to replace Education Secretary Betsy DeVos with someone who has the right experience for the job .
On Wednesday , President Donald Trump again insisted that schools reopen despite the growing coronavirus pandemic .
He and DeVos even threatened to cut federal funding to schools that don ’ t reopen .
“ They must fully open , ” she said .
“ And they must be fully operational.
” DeVos is not an educator and had no experience in public education before being elevated to run @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Biden ’ s vow about her replacement if he wins the election : Four years of Betsy DeVos is more than enough .
We need a Secretary of Education who is actually a public school educator .
— Joe Biden ( @ JoeBiden ) July 9 , 2020 DeVos was one of Trump ’ s most controversial picks , and after her Senate confirmation vote ended in a 50-50 tie , she became the first cabinet member to take office via the vice president casting a tie-breaking vote .
Biden also vowed last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ position if he defeated Trump .
“ First thing , as president of United States ― not a joke ― first thing I will do is make sure that the secretary of education is not Betsy DeVos , it is a teacher , ” he said .
And last week , Biden said educators should have more say in the new “ teacher-oriented ” Department of Education .
“ You should have more input on what you teach , how you teach it and when you teach it , ” he said in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Association last week , according to Education Week .
“ You are the ones in the classroom , you should have more input.
” Given that history , Biden ’ s supporters cheered the promise .
His tweet received more than 200,000 likes in a matter of hours .

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Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, has vowed to replace Education Secretary Betsy DeVos with someone who has the right experience for the job.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump again insisted that schools reopen despite the growing coronavirus pandemic. He and DeVos even threatened to cut federal funding to schools that don’t reopen.
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DeVos blamed “fear-mongering” and “making excuses” for school closures due to the pandemic.
“They must fully open,” she said. “And they must be fully operational.”
DeVos is not an educator and had no experience in public education before being elevated to run the Department of Education. That inspired Biden’s vow about her replacement if he wins the election:
Four years of Betsy DeVos is more than enough. We need a Secretary of Education who is actually a public school educator. — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 9, 2020
DeVos was one of Trump’s most controversial picks, and after her Senate confirmation vote ended in a 50-50 tie, she became the first cabinet member to take office via the vice president casting a tie-breaking vote.
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Biden also vowed last year to nominate a teacher to the position if he defeated Trump.
“First thing, as president of United States ― not a joke ― first thing I will do is make sure that the secretary of education is not Betsy DeVos, it is a teacher,” he said.
And last week, Biden said educators should have more say in the new “teacher-oriented” Department of Education.
“You should have more input on what you teach, how you teach it and when you teach it,” he said in a webcam address to the National Education Association last week, according to Education Week. “You are the ones in the classroom, you should have more input.”
Given that history, Biden’s supporters cheered the promise. His tweet received more than 200,000 likes in a matter of hours.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-07-09--Kellyanne Conway’s ‘Creepy’ Comments Get Turned Against Trump In Biting New Ad

Kellyanne Conway ’ s recent attack on Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden just received a makeover that turns it back on President Donald Trump .
Conway , who is counselor to the president , said Biden had made “ a lot of really creepy statements ” and some of those statements “ make me very uncomfortable.
” A new video from the progressive PAC MeidasTouch combined her comments with footage of some of Trump ’ s creepier moments : “ Donald Trump is a disgusting and creepy individual whose predatory behavior is well-documented , ” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the video .
“ Trump and his crumbling regime of scoundrels and liars seek [ to ] use the label on others , but there is no one creepier than Donald Trump.
” The group called Trump “ the creepiest and most disgusting man alive ” and posted the video with the # CreepyTrump hashtag .
MeidasTouch was founded by Ben Meiselas and his two brothers .
Meiselas is the attorney who represented former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in his settlement with the NFL .
Important conversations are happening now .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ !

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Kellyanne Conway’s recent attack on Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden just received a makeover that turns it back on President Donald Trump.
Conway, who is counselor to the president, said Biden had made “a lot of really creepy statements” and some of those statements “make me very uncomfortable.”
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A new video from the progressive PAC MeidasTouch combined her comments with footage of some of Trump’s creepier moments:
“Donald Trump is a disgusting and creepy individual whose predatory behavior is well-documented,” the organization said in a statement released with the video. “Trump and his crumbling regime of scoundrels and liars seek [to] use the label on others, but there is no one creepier than Donald Trump.”
The group called Trump “the creepiest and most disgusting man alive” and posted the video with the #CreepyTrump hashtag.
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