Login
Enlarge / A Wendy's old-fashion burger. Romaine lettuce on Wendy's burgers is thought to be the cause of the outbreak. (credit: Getty | Francis Dean)
We will never know for certain what caused a large, multistate outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 infections linked to Wendy's restaurants late last year, according to a new study led by investigators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study, highlighting weaknesses in our ability to respond to foodborne outbreaks, lands amid a separate report published by the CDC finding that, in general, we're also failing to prevent outbreaks. In fact, cases from some common foodborne pathogens have increased relative to pre-pandemic levels.
In the outbreak last year, which spanned from July to August, at least 109 people in six states fell ill, with 52 needing to be hospitalized. Eating at Wendy's was a clear link. But it wasn't enough to crack the case.
Enlarge (credit: Roberto Machado Noa / Contributor | LightRocket)
Last month, the FBI created a national online database to finally start coordinating law enforcement reports about "swatting" attacks nationwide, NBC News reported yesterday.
Swatting is a form of domestic terrorism that is sometimes deadly and has become more widespread in the US, according to a March report from Hal Berghel, a computer science professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Berghel's report defined swatting as:
A malicious act that involves making fraudulent 911 calls to cause emergency response teams, such as law enforcement special weapons and tactics teams, or SWAT teams (that’s where the gerund’s root comes from), to react forcefully to a nonexistent public threat.
Scott Schubert, of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services, told NBC News that the database will help combat the growing swatting problem by facilitating "information sharing between hundreds of police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country pertaining to swatting incidents."
In a decrepit house in São Paulo lives a woman who many people call a bruxa (the witch). As a blockbuster Brazilian podcast recently revealed, Margarida Maria Vicente de Azevedo Bonetti is wanted by U.S. authorities for her treatment of a maid named Hilda Rosa dos Santos, whom Margarida and her husband more or less enslaved in the Washington, D.C. area:
In early 1998—19 years after moving to the United States—dos Santos left the Bonettis, aided by a neighbor she’d befriended, Vicki Schneider. Schneider and others helped arrange for dos Santos to stay in a secret location, according to testimony Schneider later gave in court. (Schneider declined to be interviewed for this story.) The FBI and the Montgomery County adult services agency began a months-long investigation.
When social worker Annette Kerr arrived at the Bonetti home in April 1998—shortly after dos Santos had moved—she was stunned. She’d handled tough cases before, but this was different. Dos Santos lived in a chilly basement with a large hole in the floor covered by plywood. There was no toilet, Kerr, now retired, said in a recent interview, pausing often to regain her composure, tears welling in her eyes. (Renê Bonetti later acknowledged in court testimony that dos Santos lived in the basement, as well as confirmed that it had no toilet or shower and had a hole in the floor covered with plywood. He told jurors that dos Santos could have used an upstairs shower but chose not to do so.)
Dos Santos bathed using a metal tub that she would fill with water she hauled downstairs in a bucket from an upper floor, Kerr said, flipping through personal notes that she has kept all these years. Dos Santos slept on a cot with a thin mattress she supplemented with a discarded mat she’d scavenged in the woods. An upstairs refrigerator was locked so she could not open it.
“I couldn’t believe that would take place in the United States,” Kerr said.
During Kerr’s investigation, dos Santos recounted regular beatings she’d received from Margarida Bonetti, including being punched and slapped and having clumps of her hair pulled out and fingernails dug into her skin. She talked about hot soup being thrown in her face. Kerr learned that dos Santos had suffered a cut on her leg while cleaning up broken glass that was left untreated so long it festered and emitted a putrid smell.
She’d also lived for years with a tumor so large that doctors would later describe it variously as the size of a cantaloupe or a basketball. It turned out to be noncancerous.
She’d had “no voice” her whole life, Kerr concluded, “no rights.” Traumatized by her circumstances, dos Santos was “extremely passive” and “fearful,” Kerr said. Kerr had no doubt she was telling the truth. She was too timid to lie.
Today in the recurring series “America is Broken” — meaning, the news — three reporters at Pro Publica reveal that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted lavish gifts from Harlan Crow, a billionaire Republican donor. Thomas has flown on Crow’s private jet many times, gone on vacations to Indonesia and New Zealand on Crow’s yacht, and spent time at Crow’s compound in the Adirondacks. In doing so, Thomas has violated norms pertaining to judges’ conduct and possibly broken federal law:
Soon after Crow met Thomas three decades ago, he began lavishing the justice with gifts, including a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass, which Thomas disclosed. Recently, Crow gave Thomas a portrait of the justice and his wife, according to Tarabay, who painted it. Crow’s foundation also gave $105,000 to Yale Law School, Thomas’ alma mater, for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund,” tax filings show.
Crow said that he and his wife have funded a number of projects that celebrate Thomas. “We believe it is important to make sure as many people as possible learn about him, remember him and understand the ideals for which he stands,” he said.
To trace Thomas’ trips around the world on Crow’s superyacht, ProPublica spoke to more than 15 former yacht workers and tour guides and obtained records documenting the ship’s travels.
On the Indonesia trip in the summer of 2019, Thomas flew to the country on Crow’s jet, according to another passenger on the plane. Clarence and Ginni Thomas were traveling with Crow and his wife, Kathy. Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, decked out with motorboats and a giant inflatable rubber duck, met the travelers at a fishing town on the island of Flores.
Every day, anti-trans rhetoric is spreading and becoming more virulent. Conservative forces in statehouses across America are pushing bills that would strip trans people of rights, including access to vital medical care. In some places, these laws have already passed. This is all part of a concerted, coordinated effort, as Madison Pauly’s reporting shows. Pauly gained access to a trove of emails exchanged by a group of anti-trans advocates who workshop legislative bills, public messaging, and other aspects of their crusade:
They brainstormed responses to the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide — an assertion that is backed up by research. Peer-reviewed studies have repeatedly found that trans and nonbinary youth with access to gender-affirming care are significantly less like to seriously consider suicide than those who did not receive such care. A larger analysis, using online survey data from over 11,000 trans and nonbinary youth, found using gender-affirming hormonal therapy was associated with lower rates of both depression and suicidality. Yet one team member called the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide “abusive”; another argued it was a way for doctors to coerce parents to consent to gender-affirming care for their child.
Van Mol, the doctor, suggested Deutsch reply to the suicide prevention argument with a rebuttal published on a defunct anti-trans blog: “Why weren’t the 1950s a total blood bath for suicides if non-affirmation of everything is the fast train to offing one’s self?” Van Mol asked, paraphrasing the blog post.
Another doctor in the working group, California endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, had gained attention for his writing against gender-affirming care after parents at a charter school in his region raised complaints that they hadn’t been notified before kindergarteners were read a children’s book, I Am Jazz, about trans teenager Jazz Jennings. Last fall, when the state of Florida called on Laidlaw as an expert witness in a lawsuit over its anti-trans Medicaid policy, a federal judge concluded that he was “far off from the accepted view” on how to treat gender dysphoria, in part because Laidlaw had said he would refuse to use patients’ preferred pronouns. In his South Dakota testimony, Laidlaw compared gender-affirming care to Nazi experimentation and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In emails to Deutsch and the group, he railed against doctors who prescribe puberty blockers — which are used to delay unwanted physical changes in gender-diverse kids and give them more time to explore whether or how to transition — accusing them of “willfully harming” children, even if kids and their parents consent to treatment. “The physician is the criminal in these scenarios and must be prosecuted by the law,” he argued.
Enlarge / Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) (credit: Bill Clark / Contributor | CQ-Roll Call, Inc.)
Last month, a declassified FBI report revealed that the bureau had used Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to conduct multiple unlawful searches of a sitting Congress member’s personal communications. Wired was the first to report the abuse, but for weeks, no one knew exactly which lawmaker was targeted by the FBI. That changed this week when Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) revealed during an annual House Intelligence Committee hearing on world threats that the FBI’s abuse of 702 was “in fact” aimed at him.
“This careless abuse by the FBI is unfortunate,” LaHood said at the hearing, suggesting that the searches of his name not only “degrades trust in FISA” but was a “threat to separation of powers” in the United States. Calling the FBI’s past abuses of Section 702 “egregious,” the congressman—who is leading the House Intelligence Committee's working group pushing to reauthorize Section 702 amid a steeply divided Congress—said that “ironically,” being targeted by the FBI gives him a “unique perspective” on “what’s wrong with the FBI.”
LaHood has said that having his own Fourth Amendment rights violated in ways others consider “frightening” positions him well to oversee the working group charged with implementing bipartisan reforms and safeguards that would prevent any such abuses in the future.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hickman’s had a problem. The massive egg farm in Arizona relied on the wildly undercompensated labor of incarcerated people. How would it operate during the looming lockdown? The solution, engineered by Hickman’s and the Arizona penal system, was a prison labor camp:
Hickman’s remained the only private company in Arizona allowed to use incarcerated workers on its own turf. Two national experts in prison labor who spoke with Cosmopolitan — Corene Kendrick and Jennifer Turner, both with the American Civil Liberties Union — could cite no other instance of a state corrections department detaining people on-site at a U.S. corporation for the corporation’s express use.
Within days of the plan’s approval, a roughly 6,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse on the Hickman’s lot at 6515 S Jackrabbit Trail in Buckeye, Arizona, had been repurposed from an apparent vehicle hangar into a bare-bones “dormitory.” It sat in plain sight, about 200 feet back from the road, near the Hickman’s corporate headquarters and retail store, where an electric signboard and giant 3D chicken beckon customers in for “local & fresh” eggs. Over the next 14 and a half months, some 300 women total would cycle through this prison outpost, their waking lives largely devoted to maintaining the farm’s operations while the pandemic raged.
Eleven of these women — all incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, which one could argue is beside the point — shared their firsthand accounts with Cosmopolitan. Our nearly yearlong investigation also turned up thousands of pages of internal ADCRR emails, incident reports, and other documents exposing a hastily launched labor experiment for which women were explicitly chosen. Housed in conditions described by many as hideous, the women performed dangerous work at base hourly wages as low as $4.25, working on skeleton crews decimated in part by COVID. At least one suffered an injury that left her permanently disfigured. These are their stories.
Last September, a longtime Las Vegas journalist named Jeff German was shot and killed. The person charged in his death is a public official German investigated. There were other investigations German hadn’t completed when he was murdered, including one about a Ponzi scheme. Reporter Lizzie Johnson picked up where he left off, reporting a story about a scam that, as scams so often do, enriched a few at the expense of many:
Jager had told Mabeus about the opportunity to make money in August 2019, during a couples trip to Mexico, she said. She felt flattered to be included.
“We were a little nervous, but we trusted him,” Mabeus said. “Because we were friends and belonged to the same church, the red flags were heart-shaped. I was like, ‘Wow. We are really lucky to be involved in this investment.’”
The next month, she and her husband wired over $140,000. Ninety days later, the first interest payment of $18,000 arrived, right on time. The couple continued adding money, until they reached a total of $680,000, she said.
“There was never a hiccup,” Mabeus said. “My bishop was involved and invested, and so were my closest friends. A lot of people were told to keep it quiet.”
When she and her husband, a former Major League Baseball pitcher who worked for a medical device company, divorced in June 2021, Mabeus agreed to take the investment as alimony. She planned to rely on the dividends, along with child support payments, to remain at home with her daughter and three sons. A former elementary school teacher, she hadn’t worked for 13 years.
Now, Mabeus hung up the phone, horrified.
She tried to call Jager. No answer.
“Word is spreading like wildfire,” Mabeus remembered. “People are texting left and right. No one is getting responses.”
Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding, she thought. She told herself that she’d know for sure the next day, when the quarterly interest payment was scheduled to hit her bank account.
But when Friday arrived, the money didn’t. All her savings, Mabeus realized, were gone.
Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, argues that the Justice Department has victimized and attempted to silence conservative parents.
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Tesla | Airplane!)
Tesla filed its annual 10-K report with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday night, and the document confirms that, among the many open federal investigations into the company, the US Department of Justice is looking into the automaker's controversial driver assistance features.
In the section detailing "Certain Investigations and Other Matters," the 10-K briefly describes Tesla being subpoenaed by the SEC following CEO Elon Musk's tweets about taking the company private in 2018. That investigation led to a consent decree with the regulator but did not mark the end of the company's SEC headache; in February 2022, we reported that the SEC was investigating both Musk and his brother for potential insider trading.
"Separately, the company has received requests from the DOJ for documents related to Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD features," Tesla wrote.
FreshRSS 
