Tag Archives : Build House

Raskin launches bid to lead House Oversight panel

The race for the top Democratic seat on the powerful House Oversight and Reform Committee got more crowded on Friday when Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) entered the contest to replace the outgoing chairwoman, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.).

Maloney lost her primary race on Tuesday to Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), ending a 30-year career on Capitol Hill and opening up the top panel seat in the next Congress.

Raskin’s decision to seek the spot pits him against two other, more veteran Oversight Democrats — Reps. Stephen Lynch (Mass.) and Gerry Connolly (Va.), who launched their candidacies on Wednesday.

Democrats have traditionally favored seniority when choosing top committee spots, which would seem to place Raskin at a disadvantage in the race.

Still, the three-term congressman has built a sturdy national profile in his short time on Capitol Hill, leading the House’s second impeachment of former President Trump after last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol, and now playing a high-profile role in the investigation of the attacks.

A former professor of constitutional law, Raskin is now making the case that his legal background makes him the best candidate to lead the Democrats on the Oversight panel.

“We are still in the fight of our lives to defend American constitutional democracy and—by extension—political freedom and human rights all over the world,” Raskin wrote Friday to his fellow Democrats in a letter obtained by The Hill.

Source: TEST FEED1

14 Maryland police officers indicted, accused of private security double-dipping

A grand jury indicted 14 Maryland police officers on Thursday after prosecutors alleged that they secretly double-dipped shifts, simultaneously working as both private security and at the police department. 

Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy announced the indictments against 13 current and one retired officer on charges of misconduct in office and felony and misdemeanor theft scheme. 

The investigation originally stemmed from a separate but related case involving a former county police officer who pleaded guilty earlier this year, according to a release from the state’s attorney’s office. That case showed evidence that the 14 officers hid their secondary shifts from the police department between January 2019 and March 2021. 

Seven of the officers are charged with misconduct for submitting falsified information to a secondary employer. 

Thirteen are charged with theft scheme of at least $1,500 to under $25,000, and one is charged with theft scheme of at least $100 to under $1,500. 

The officers could face up to five years in prison if convicted of felony theft. Misconduct in office does not have a maximum sentence. 

“Police officers are sworn to protect and serve the public, and they take an oath to uphold the law. These indictments demonstrate our commitment to pursuing justice regardless of a suspect’s race, gender, religion, or occupation,” Braveboy said in the release. 

The Washington Post reported that a Prince George’s County program allows officers to earn extra income through working as private security, but they need to receive approval from the department and work while they are off duty.

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DOJ seeking more than 17 year sentence for ex-NYPD officer in Jan. 6 case

Federal prosecutors will seek a seventeen-and-a-half-year sentence for a former Marine and New York Police Department officer convicted on six counts related to his participation in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a sentencing memorandum on Thursday recommending the 210-month sentence for Thomas Webster for violently assaulting a Washington police officer, “spearheading” the breach of a police line outside the Capitol and “disgracing a democracy that he once fought honorably to protect and serve.”

The sentence would be nearly double the longest prison sentence handed down by a court in a Jan. 6 case so far, CBS News reported. 

Webster’s sentencing is scheduled for next Friday.

A jury in May found Webster guilty on five felonies and one misdemeanor, including assaulting, resisting or impeding an officer using a deadly or dangerous weapon, engaging in an act of physical violence on Capitol grounds and entering or remaining in a restricted building with a deadly or dangerous weapon.

DOJ had released footage of Webster carrying a metal flagpole with a red U.S. Marine Corps flag, berating D.C. Metropolitan Police Department cfficer Noah Rathburn.

“You f—ing piece of s—. You f—ing Commie motherf—ers, man … Come on, take your s— off. Take your s— off,” Webster yelled at the officer.

Webster then swung the flagpole at the officer, which he wrested from Webster. Webster then broke through a metal barricade, tackling Rathburn to the ground and choking him by the chinstrap of his gas mask, making it difficult for the officer to breathe, prosecutors said.

DOJ also asked the court to make Webster pay $2,060 in restitution, a mandatory $100 fine for each of the five felonies and a mandatory $10 fine for the misdemeanor.

Webster’s attorneys, meanwhile, asked the court to honor his 127 days in custody that immediately followed his arrest and only further sentence him to supervised release. 

“A comparison of Mr. Webster’s relevant conduct and life history to the conduct and history of the other defendants who have been sentenced in connection to the Capitol riot would not justify the disparity and sentences that either the guidelines or the government’s recommendation would create,” his attorneys wrote.

Webster’s attorneys argued he was “swept up” in the crowd and admitted his role in the riot upon learning he was under investigation. Webster now believes he was “duped and used as a pawn” by elected officials.

“Defendant is no longer under any illusion that the 2020 election was stolen or that he was fighting for a just cause,” they wrote. “Mr. Webster certainly acknowledges in retrospect that his actions seriously injured this country.”

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These states were the best at protecting their residents during the pandemic

As the nation continues to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new WalletHub analysis assessed which states best protected its residents during the crisis. 

To do so, researchers compiled data on community transmission levels, rates of positive testing, hospitalizations, deaths, and share of eligible populations that are vaccinated as of August 2022. Data were then converted into a score out of 100, with 100 points representing the safest conditions. Weighted averages were used to determine each state’s overall score. 

In recent weeks, new cases of COVID-19 have slowly begun to decrease, and around 67 percent of the nation’s population has been vaccinated against COVID-19. 

However, on the state level WalletHub found Vermont ranked the best out of the country for keeping its residents safe, with a score of 75.95. North Carolina, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine, and Hawaii followed, respectively. 

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The bottom 10 slots were occupied by Louisiana, being the worst with a score of 14.31, followed by West Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana and Mississippi. 

Results are similar to findings of another recent study that tracked the most and least healthy states in the country. In that analysis, researchers found Vermont was the third healthiest state, while New Hampshire and Connecticut were in the top 10. 

Conversely, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Mississippi ranked as some of the least healthy states. 

According to the WalletHub analysis these states all had high COVID-19 death rates and low vaccination rates. 

However, several states surveyed, like Alabama, reported low COVID-19 death rates along with low vaccination rates. 

Tied for first place, North Carolina, Washington D.C., Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania had the highest rates of vaccinated residents. Wyoming came in last, outranked by Mississippi and Louisiana, respectively.

In addition, Vermont had the lowest positive testing rate recorded, while Missouri and Tennessee had the highest rates of positive tests. 

Similar to trends documented throughout the pandemic, states who voted for a Democrat in the 2020 election tended to be safer than those that went Republican. 

Source: TEST FEED1

Privacy is being ignored as lines blur between health care and social care

Imagine signing one consent form to receive help from a shelter, food pantry, substance abuse center, or other social service — but with that one action, you’ve opened the floodgates for staff and volunteers at hundreds of other organizations to see your private financial, medical, behavioral, and social data in its entirety. And you didn’t have a choice in the matter.

This is more than hypothetical; it’s happening in communities today.

We’re in this situation because privacy assurances within the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) introduced 20 years ago this month have not kept up with healthcare organizations that are now taking an earnest and more modern approach to whole person care. This has left the door open for bad actors to take advantage of loopholes and diminish privacy for deeply personal information. 

To maintain high standards for the privacy and protection of personal information that citizens across the U.S. have come to expect, legislators need to act before it’s too late.

It’s important to understand how the blurring lines between health care and social care have unintentionally created an environment that some organizations are exploiting.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. has made significant strides in recognizing the outsized impact that socioeconomic factors have on health outcomes and cost. In fact, it’s widely accepted that 80 percent of health outcomes are determined by these social determinants of health (SDOH) – including food insecurity, transportation barriers, housing instability and other factors. In other words, the medications you take or the decisions you make with your doctor, while important, only influence a fraction of your overall health.

This is why healthcare organizations have become more involved in social care. They realize how important it is for keeping people healthy, so as they continue to focus on what they do best — medicine and clinical care — they’re partnering with other organizations in their communities that provide social care. Nonprofits and community-based organizations (CBOs) that provide assistance for things like food, housing, transportation, utilities, substance abuse treatment and so much more are the bedrock of our social safety net. And when these organizations are connected to and working with our healthcare systems, it lifts the wellbeing of our communities and the people in them.

Organizing CBOs, nonprofits and other social services into a network to help people find the right resources at the right time amplifies the reach these organizations have, and the good they can do. But if a social care network is not thoughtfully designed with the right legal and moral boundaries for protecting personal information, privacy starts to erode.

Healthcare organizations are held to a higher standard for protecting personal information, thanks to HIPAA and other industry regulations — but the social care organizations they work with are not held to those same standards. This must change.

This spring, the State of New Hampshire passed a bill with overwhelming, bi-partisan support to provide important guard rails for privacy when accessing social services through a referral network. This simple but critical legislation for maintaining privacy can serve as a blueprint for federal action on the issue. In the meantime, states that care about the privacy of their residents (and which can act more nimbly than the federal government) should consider enacting similar legislation. 

There is no legitimate argument for leaving privacy behind when modernizing the social safety net. Some might say that requiring individual consent — versus blanket consent — to refer a person to a social service will hinder access to care. This is simply not true.

Organizations across the country are successfully working with referral networks that require individual consent, proving that it can be done efficiently and effectively. On the other hand, there are others who are taking the opposite approach. In these cases, people may not realize that they’re giving blanket consent for their personal information to become accessible far and wide by others in their community.

So many people are concerned about how social media networks may be ignoring privacy by tracking people and sharing data — it’s a legitimate issue that gets constant attention. Social care networks are capable of similar actions, but the information they have access to is far more personal. This issue deserves just as much — if not more — attention until we can assure each individual has full control of their personal information and transparency to know who has access to it.

New Hampshire was the first to recognize that this breach of privacy has been taking place. As a result, the state took swift steps to prevent it from happening. It’s time for others to follow suit.

Erine Gray is CEO and founder of findhelp.org, a public benefit corporation working to modernize America’s social safety net for anyone who needs help or helps others.

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Two dead, two others injured in Kentucky homeless shelter shooting

Two people were killed and two others wounded in a shooting at a homeless shelter in Kentucky on Thursday. 

Police responded to a report of multiple people being shot at the Harbor House men’s shelter in Henderson, a city located along the Ohio River near Indiana, around 7:40 p.m., according to a news release. Officers found four victims with gunshot wounds, one of whom was dead when they arrived and three of whom were transported to local hospitals with life-threatening injuries. 

A second victim died at the hospital.

Police identified the shooter as 37-year-old Kenneth Gibbs, a resident of the shelter and found his vehicle about two hours after they initially responded. 

Police said that soon after found Gibbs walking in the area of softball fields and arrested him without incident. He had a handgun on him at the time of his arrest, police said. 

He was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder, according to the release.

The release did not give additional details about the circumstances of the shooting.

Police identified the two deceased as 67-year-old Steven Wathen and 44-year-old Chad Holmes. The two injured were a 33-year-old male and a 41-year-old male. All victims were Harbor House residents. 

The Evansville Courier and Press reported that the two injured are in stable condition.

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Heavily redacted affidavit says 184 classified docs found at Trump residence

A redacted FBI affidavit used to convince a judge for a search warrant for former President Trump’s Florida home noted that authorities found 184 classified documents in their initial review of boxes recovered from the home in an effort that began just a few months after he left office. 

The 28-page affidavit contains numerous redactions but indicates authorities believed “evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed” would be found at Mar-a-Lago.

In a separate filing explaining the rationale behind its redactions, DOJ said it had to protect “a broad range of civilian witnesses,” warning they would likely face intimidation.  

The same federal magistrate judge who approved the search ordered DOJ to release the affidavit that convinced him to approve the warrant. Judge Bruce Reinhart concluded Thursday that proposed redactions from DOJ were narrow enough to allow for public disclosure while protecting their ongoing investigation.  

The release of the redact affidavit follows the disclosure of the warrant that allowed for the search of Trump’s home, indicating that storing documents there may have violated the Espionage Act, as well as two other statutes.

One bars concealing, removing and mutilating government documents, and the other prohibits similar actions when done “with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence [an] investigation.” 

An inventory released alongside the warrant indicated the FBI recovered 11 different sets of classified documents during the search, along with information about “the president of France” and Trump’s pardon of his ally Roger Stone. 

Trump had called for the release of both the warrant and the affidavit. He filed a separate case however seeking an injunction to stall the FBI’s investigation and asking a court to appoint a special master for the case. Doing so would let an outside party approved by the court first review the evidence taken during the search before the FBI can review it. 

DEVELOPING.

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Colorado Democrats urge Biden to protect public landscapes

Colorado Democrats urged President Biden in a letter on Friday to use his executive powers to preserve the historical legacy of key Rocky Mountain landscapes and ban new oil and gas leasing in certain spaces. 

The politicians — Rep. Joe Neguse, Sen. Michael Bennet, Sen. John Hickenlooper and Gov. Jared Polis — asked the president to protect the public spaces included in the Colorado Outdoor Recreation & Economy (CORE) Act, the progress of which has stalled in Congress, despite strong local support. 

Chief among their requests is the designation of Colorado’s Camp Hale and the Tenmile Range as the “Camp Hale – Continental Divide National Monument,” by means of the Antiquities Act. 

This area, they explained, was instrumental “in preparing the 10th Mountain Division for some of the most difficult moments of World War II,” while many veterans returned to establish Colorado’s outdoor recreation economy. 

The politicians also urged the president to protect Colorado’s Thompson Divide through a Federal Lands Policy and Management Act mineral withdrawal, which would ban new oil and gas leasing, as well as mining, in the region. 

Farmers, ranchers and other community members have all come together in support of this conservation measure, the politicians noted. 

The letter comes after Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s recent visit to the region to meet with Colorado stakeholders, who called for urgent administrative actions to protect landscapes included in the CORE Act. 

During that visit, Vilsack met with conservationists, sportsmen, ranchers, business leaders and veterans, who demonstrated “overwhelming support” for such protections, according to the letter. 

“It is clear that Coloradans across the state support the conservation and preservation of these landscapes for future generations,” the letter stated. 

In January 2021, Neguse, Bennet and Hickenlooper reintroduced the CORE Act, which has now passed the House of Representatives five times. 

“Despite strong public support, the CORE Act has been held up in the Senate by lawmakers who are dead set against passing any conservation legislation,” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities environmental group, said in a statement.  

“It’s time for President Biden to step in to deliver for the people of Colorado,” Rokala added.

The proposed legislation would designate Camp Hale as a National Historic Landscape, while prohibiting new oil and gas drilling in areas important to sportsmen and ranchers near the Thompson Divide. 

Combining four previously introduced Colorado public land bills, the CORE Act also sought to protect 73,000 acres of land as new wilderness and nearly 80,000 acres as new recreation and conservation management areas that maintain existing outdoor uses, such as hiking and biking. 

In their letter to the president, Neguse, Hickenlooper, Bennet and Polis likewise called for new protections to the areas proposed for wilderness designation, mineral withdrawal and special management. 

Such measures — specifically for Colorado’s Grand Mesa Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests — would come with the support of seven Colorado county commissioners, the politicians noted.

In an appeal sent to Bennet last month, the commissioners asked that the senator urge Biden to “safeguard these cherished landscapes as soon as possible.”

The Colorado congressman, senators and governor suggested that the president use administrative tools at his disposal, such as forthcoming revisions to the U.S. Forest Service plan, to accomplish this goal. 

“By taking these steps, you will be making sure that even more of Colorado’s open spaces will be preserved for future generations,” the Colorado politicians wrote to Biden.  

“We will continue our fight to pass the CORE Act to deliver permanent conservation for the areas featured in the legislation but ask for your help in the interim to offer administrative protections modeled after the CORE Act,” they added.

The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment. 

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World's top password manager LastPass says it was hacked

The CEO of password-manager company LastPass said Thursday that it was was recently hacked, but the company sees no evidence the incident exposed any customer data or passwords.

“We have determined that an unauthorized party gained access to portions of the LastPass development environment through a single compromised developer account and took portions of source code and some proprietary LastPass technical information,” CEO Karim Toubba wrote in a letter to customers.

The software allows users to store their passwords for various accounts and websites in a “vault” that can be unlocked with a singular master password, also providing customers with auto-generated passwords designed to be hard to snatch.

Toubba said the company became aware of the hack after observing unusual activity two weeks ago.

LastPass said its software is designed so that the company can never know or gain access to customers’ master passwords.

“Our investigation has shown no evidence of any unauthorized access to encrypted vault data,” the company wrote on a frequently asked questions page. “Our zero knowledge model ensures that only the customer has access to decrypt vault data.”  

The company said its products are operating normally and LastPass is working with a cybersecurity and forensics firm following the incident. 

“Based on what we have learned and implemented, we are evaluating further mitigation techniques to strengthen our environment,” Toubba told customers. 

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Watch live: White House monkeypox response team holds briefing

The White House monkeypox response team will hold a briefing with public health officials on Friday afternoon.

The event is scheduled for 2 p.m. ET.

Watch the live video above.

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