Based on a report from the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, more Minnesota nonprofits are facing financial crisis than any year since 2020. Eighty percent of nonprofit leaders noted concern about the viability of their budgets for the next 12 months. On Give to the Max Day, Minnesotans showed up to support our sector — in droves. More than $37 million was raised on our state’s giving holiday.
Still, the truth remains that nonprofits are citing a decline in giving and volunteerism, and an increase in demand for services. A less visible but significant issue was not named in recent research. Many nonprofit organizations must front the cost to deliver services, for reimbursement payment that may come five to six months later.
Our state’s nonprofits are the backbone of our social safety net, delivering essential health, social and community services that improve the quality of life for people across our state. Many of these critical services are linked to cash reimbursement systems by counties, state and federal pass-through agencies.
When payment comes many months after the service delivery expense is incurred, it creates immense financial strain for nonprofits that are already lean and challenged to find adequate cash flow. This is an unfair burden we would never place on for-profit businesses.
Armando Camacho
The viability of our nonprofit sector is a crisis that should concern all Minnesotans. Nonprofits make up a significant portion of our state’s economy and employment base — around one in seven jobs in Minnesota are in the nonprofit sector. Our state depends on mission-driven nonprofits.
Minnesota is one of the most philanthropic states and boasts high volunteerism. This looming crisis is a wake-up call for all of us to increase our charitable giving and dedicate more time to the causes that are important to us. Critically though, we must address the payment model that expects nonprofits to shoulder the financial risks of delivering services our communities need.
The state of Minnesota is one of the top funders of the nonprofit sector, and this partnership is crucial.
Dr. Eric Jolly
But we have an opportunity to manage it more strategically, with an understanding of the unique challenges nonprofits face. We need our state leaders to convene with nonprofit executives, foundations and other stakeholders to find solutions that avert this looming crisis of fiscal stability.
The well-being of Minnesota’s nonprofits is inextricably linked to the well-being of our state as a whole.
When these organizations struggle, it is our communities that suffer. Now is the time for bold action to shore up this vital sector and ensure it can continue serving the people of Minnesota for years to come.
Eric J. Jolly, Ph.D., is the president and CEO of the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation. Armando Camacho is the president and CEO of the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation.
The post Minnesotans showed up on Give to the Max Day — now it’s the state’s turn to bolster support for nonprofits appeared first on MinnPost.
When Heather Hoff took a job at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, she was skeptical of nuclear energy — so much so that she resolved to report anything questionable to the anti-nuclear group Mothers for Peace.
Instead, after working at the plant for over a decade and asking every question she could think of about operations and safety, she co-founded her own group, Mothers for Nuclear, in 2016 to keep the plant alive.
“I was pretty nervous,” said Hoff, 45. “It felt very lonely — no one else was doing that. We looked around for allies — other pro-nuclear groups. … There just weren’t very many.”
Today, however, public support for nuclear power is the highest its been in more than a decade as government and private industry struggle to reduce reliance on planet-warming fossil fuels.
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Although a string of nuclear disasters decades ago had caused the majority of older Americans to distrust the technology, this hasn’t been the case for younger generations.
Old-school environmentalists “grew up in the generation of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. … The Gen Zers today did not,” said David Weisman, 63, who has been involved in the movement to get Diablo Canyon shut down since the ’90s and works as the legislative director of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility.
“They don’t remember how paralyzed with fright the nation was the week after Three Mile Island. … They don’t recall the shock of Chernobyl less than seven years later.”
Public support for nuclear power is the highest its been in more than a decade. Here, the domed reactors of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant rise along the California coast.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
Many of these younger nuclear advocates — outwardly vocal on social media sites such as X and Instagram — hope the renewed interest will fuel a second renaissance in nuclear power, one that helps California, the U.S. and the globe meet ambitious climate goals.
“I think we are the generation that’s ready to make this change, and accept facts over feelings, and ready to transition to a cleaner, more reliable and safer energy source,” said Veronica Annala, 23, a college student at Texas A&M and president of the school’s new Nuclear Advocacy Resource Organization.
In the past few months alone, Microsoft announced plans to fund the reopening of Three Mile Island’s shuttered unit to power a data center. Amazon and Google have also invested in new, cutting-edge nuclear technology to meet clean energy goals.
While some advocates wish nuclear revitalization wasn’t being driven by energy-hungry AI technology, the excitement around nuclear power is more palpable than it has been in a generation, they say.
“There’s so many things happening at the same time. … This is the actual nuclear renaissance,” said Gabriel Ivory, 22, a student at Texas A&M and vice president of NARO. “When you look at Three Mile Island restarting — that was something nobody would have ever even thought of.”
This enthusiasm has also been accompanied by a surprising political shift.
During the Cold War nuclear energy frenzy of the 1970s and ’80s, nuclear supporters — often Republicans — touted the jobs the plants would create, and argued that the United States needed to remain a commanding leader of nuclear technology and weaponry on the global stage.
Meanwhile, environmental groups, often aligned with the Democratic Party, opposed nuclear power based on the potential negative impact on surrounding ecosystems, the thorny problem of storing spent fuel and the small but real risk of a nuclear meltdown.
“In America … it has been highly politicized,” said Jenifer Avellaneda Diaz, 29, who works in the industry and runs the advocacy account Nuclear Hazelnut. “That is a little bit shameful, because we have great experts here — a lot of doctors, a lot of scientists, a lot of engineers, mathematicians, physicists.”
Today, younger Republicans are 11% less likely to support new nuclear plants in the U.S. than their older counterparts. Meanwhile the opposite is true for the left: Younger Democrats are 9% more likely to support new nuclear than older Democrats, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.
As a result, while Republicans older than 65 are 27% more likely to support nuclear energy than their Democratic peers, Republicans age 18 to 29 are only 7% more likely to support it than their Democratic counterparts.
“Young Democrats and young Republicans may be looking at numbers — but two separate sets of numbers,” said Weisman. “The young Republicans may be looking at the cost per megawatt hour, and the young Democrats are looking at a different number: parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.”
Brendan Pittman, 33 — who founded the Berkeley Amend movement, aiming to get his city to drop its “nuclear-free zone” status — said he’s noticed that younger people have become more open to learning about nuclear energy.
“Now — as we’re getting into energy crises and we’re talking more about, ‘How do we solve this?’ — younger people are taking a more rational and nuanced review of all energy. And they’re coming to the same conclusion: Yeah, nuclear checks all the boxes,” Pittman said.
“I remember getting signatures on the streets of Berkeley, and I would say most young people — when I said we’re looking to support nuclear energy — they would just stop me and say, ‘Where do I sign?’” he said. “I didn’t even have to sell it.”
This newfound enthusiasm has also affected the nuclear industry, where two dominant age groups have emerged: baby boomers who mostly took nuclear jobs for consistent work, and millennials and Gen Zers who made a motivated choice to enter a stigmatized field, advocates in the industry say.
“You get all sorts of different backgrounds, and that really just blooms into all sorts of fresh new ideas, and I think that’s part of what’s making the industry exciting right now,” said Matt Wargon, 33, past chair of the Young Members Group of the American Nuclear Society.
Like the workers themselves, the industry has formed two bubbles: the traditional plants that have been operating for decades and a slew of new technologies — from small reactors that could power or heat single factories to a potentially safer class of large-scale reactors that use molten salt in their cores instead of pressurized water.
At existing plants, younger folks have injected innovation into longstanding operation norms, improving safety and efficiency. At the startups, those who’ve worked in the industry for decades provide “invaluable” knowledge that simply isn’t in textbooks, industry workers say.
Steam rises from the cooling towers of the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, in Waynesboro, Ga.
(Mike Stewart / Associated Press)
The infusion of new talent and ideas is a significant change from when Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 devastated the industry. Regulations became stricter, and development on new reactors and new technology slowed to a halt.
False narratives around the technology ricocheted through society. Both Hoff and Avellaneda Diaz recall their parents worrying about radiation affecting their ability to have children. (The average worker at Diablo receives significantly less radiation in a week than a passenger does on a single East Coast to West Coast airplane flight.)
“Radiation is invisible — you can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t hear it,” said Wargon. “And people tend to fear the unknown. … So if you tell them, ‘Oh this power plant has a lot of radiation coming out of it,’ it’s hard to dispel [the misinformation and fear].”
Only as the memories faded and new generations entered the workforce did the reputation of nuclear power slowly recover.
Advocates also say that college campuses have become a leading space for nuclear advocacy, with Nuclear is Clean Energy (NiCE) clubs popping up at multiple California schools in the past few years.
In August, Ivory held up a big “I [heart] nuclear energy,” sign behind an ESPN college football broadcast. It quickly spread on social media and even caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Nuclear advocates say the internet and easy access to accurate information has also helped their cause.
“That was certainly a revolution because right now, it’s super easy to Google it,” Avellaneda Diaz said. “Back then you needed to go to the library, get the book — it was not that easy to get the information or be informed.”
A poll conducted by Ann Bisconti, a scientist and nuclear public opinion expert, found that 74% of people who said they felt very well informed strongly favored the use of nuclear energy in the U.S., whereas only 6% who felt not at all informed supported it.
As such, public outreach and education has become a core tenant of the new nuclear advocacy movement.
“Let’s be real,” Annala said, “our generation has the whole internet at our fingertips … so, just starting the conversations is really the big thing.”
Advocates speculate that the ability to rapidly disseminate information on nuclear energy to combat misconceptions might have helped prevent nuclear energy from becoming politically and culturally toxic after the Fukushima accident, unlike with Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
While the Texas A&M students were quite young when the disaster unfolded, both Wargon and Pittman were in college in 2011 when an earthquake and tsunami in Japan crippled the power systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, triggering a meltdown. Avellaneda Diaz was in high school.
Hoff was working at Diablo Canyon when Fukushima happened. The public scare, in part pushed by the media, almost led her to quit her job.
Instead, after taking the time to analyze the causes of the meltdown and the errors made, she decided to embrace nuclear.
For her, Fukushima was a reminder that nuclear power comes with risk — however small — but that even in a worst-case scenario, operators are skilled at preventing a disaster. (PG&E says a Fukushima flooding episode would be impossible at Diablo Canyon.)
Environmental activists in Seoul march during a rally marking the 12th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
(Ahn Young-joon / Associated Press)
Today, Hoff writes the emergency protocols for Diablo Canyon and hopes the industry will learn again how to engage with the public.
She said that’s what happened with her when she first — somewhat reluctantly — took a job at Diablo.
“I was a little obnoxious for the first few years,” Hoff said of her constant questioning and search for a critical flaw.
Instead of pushing back against her, the plant welcomed it.
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Schools have generally been working hard to meet the special educational needs of an array of students — those with learning disabilities, those learning English, those with behavioral issues and those whose households struggle with poverty. But they have widely neglected one major group of students with special needs: the academically gifted.
Many school districts around the country have dropped programs for students who catch on quickly. The trend toward eliminating or scaling back such programs started about 15 years ago. But it picked up steam in 2021, when the Black Lives Matter movement made schools reckon with the discomfiting fact that they were far less likely to identify Black and Latino as gifted than they were white and Asian students.
Part of the problem was that the original purpose of gifted programs had been lost in parental competition for prestige and advantage. Unlike other special-education categories, the gifted label was coveted by parents. Classes and sometimes entire schools for gifted students often had richer curricula and more resources. They became classrooms for high achievers rather than for students properly defined as gifted.
These programs were originally meant to meet the needs of students with intense, often irregular learning patterns. They used to be seen as not needing special attention because they often excelled. As standardized testing required schools to aim for student proficiency, all the focus went to those who hadn’t met that mark. Those who exceeded it were deemed to be just fine.
But they’re not just fine. Gifted children, more than others, tend to shine in certain ways and struggle in others, a phenomenon known as asynchronous development. A third-grader’s reading skills might be at 11th-grade level while her social skills are more like a kindergartner’s. They often find it hard to connect with other children. They also are in danger of being turned off by school because the lessons move slowly.
I don’t know whether I would have been identified as gifted when I was a kid, but I certainly was bored out of my mind in elementary school. It felt as though everything was repeated to the point that paying attention in class was worthless. I started acting up simply to keep myself occupied.
My third-grade teacher tried a few strategies, including sending me on errands invented just to get me out of the classroom. Nothing worked. So they sent me on to fourth grade even though school policy prohibited it.
That was a disaster. I was cut off from my friends and anxious about constant grilling from adults and children asking why I was in the higher grade. It didn’t work academically, either. I enjoyed the challenge of catching up, but once that happened, school was boring again. The problem wasn’t third-grade material; it was the pace of learning.
When I started covering education in the late 1970s, it was a pleasant surprise to see this need being addressed — though it was a little off-putting to hear a 10-year-old describe herself as a “mentally gifted minor” at a school board meeting. “MGM” was the name given to the programs, later rebranded “GATE,” for Gifted and Talented Education.
It was never clear exactly what gifted education was, though. In some districts, it amounted to highly sought-after schools devoted to high achievers. Sometimes it was enrichment for certain students. Teachers were supposed to have special training, as any special-ed teacher would, but it seemed hit-or-miss. In the schools my kids attended, the gifted program basically meant extra homework.
When giftedness became a matter of prestige rather than a particular learning style and need, all bets were off. Maybe the problem was calling it “gifted” instead of “asynchronous development”; no one’s going to fight to get their kid into an asynchronous development program unless they need it.
There’s little doubt that racism played a role in identifying children as gifted even though the label was based on supposedly objective criteria. But the solution to that problem is to eliminate biases, not the programs themselves.
To its credit, the Los Angeles Unified School District has retained gifted education, with programs catering to different academic and creative skills. One is for highly gifted students, who may be well into college material in some areas while still high school sophomores. But proportional underenrollment of students of color led the district to relax its requirements for entry before it recently reversed course. The criteria should be fairly simple: whether a student needs to and can advance extremely quickly through academic material.
California doesn’t require schools to offer gifted programs and stopped funding them in 2013, so schools have little incentive to keep them. The answer certainly isn’t eliminating the programs entirely. It doesn’t seem to have helped to open them to all children either; that led some to slow down the pace, defeating their purpose.
Differentiated instruction — in which a teacher tailors lessons to varying student needs — sounds good but is difficult to carry off in a large class.
My eldest child had the good fortune to be in a small program within her public school, open to all until the spaces were filled, that solved much of the differentiation problem. It involved few tests and many individual projects. Students chose their own books to read and report on. Their projects could be written reports or, if their talents lay elsewhere, movies, plays, songs or board games — as long as they showed they had learned the lesson at hand. It gave students free rein to work at their own level, avoid boredom and show off their talents.
But that program was run by two extremely gifted teachers who knew how to bring out the best in each student. It’s much easier to grade a test than to evaluate a project, and I don’t know how widely the program could be replicated. In any case, it no longer exists.
Go to your kitchen, grab your black spatula and throw it in the trash. Immediately.
That’s the alarming message from a new study published in the journal Chemosphere. Cooking with any plastic utensil has long been seen as worrisome because heat can cause chemicals in the plastic to migrate into the food you’re about to eat. But researchers are now saying products made from recycled black plastic contain even more toxic components.
The authors of the Chemosphere study found that everyday household items that are made of black recycled plastic, including kitchen utensils, take-out containers, toys and hair accessories, have a high chance of containing dangerous levels of flame retardants and other toxic chemicals.
Flame retardants are getting into our most commonly used items because these black-colored products are being made from recycled electronic waste, such as discarded television sets and computers, that frequently contain the additives.
As with any other plastic cooking utensil, when you use a black plastic spatula while flipping your pancakes, the heat can encourage any flame retardant present to leach out of the flipper and into your flapjacks.
“That’s because flame retardants aren’t actually bound to the plastic polymers that they’re added to, it’s an additive. And heat can ease migration of chemicals out of products,” said Megan Liu, co-author of the study and science and policy manager for Toxic-Free Future.
The toxic chemicals are not in every black-colored item — for example, you won’t find them in a black spatula made of silicone. Nor are they in every black plastic item. The problem is, you can’t tell which plastic ones are risky and which aren’t.
Why get rid of them now?
If you’re looking at your black plastic products and thinking, “I’ve used it for this long and I’m OK,” Liu said these products play the long game.
Cooking daily with a black plastic product can lead to increased exposure to toxic chemicals over time.
Toys with black plastic can be even more harmful to young children, whose bodies are still developing.
Liu said studies have shown that toxic chemicals can leach out of children’s toys and into their saliva if they put the products in their mouth.
“It’s really concerning when you think about flame retardants, because they’re known to bioaccumulate in our bodies,” she said.
Experts agree, there’s no safe level of exposure for these flame retardants.
The buildup can lead to a variety of health issues, including increased risks of cancer, hormone disruption, fertility effects and damage to the brain and nervous system.
How do you know a product is harmful?
It’s nearly impossible to know whether a black plastic product is contaminated. That’s because these products that include recycled e-waste don’t disclose a detailed list of all ingredients and contaminants in the product.
Liu said it’s also unclear how many types of flame retardants are in these black plastic products.
Some of the products that researchers tested in this recent study “had up to nine different harmful chemicals and harmful flame retardants in them,” she said.
What can you do about it?
Experts advise consumers not to purchase any black plastic cookware or other products if possible. If you have some products in your kitchen or home, they advise you to throw them away.
There are many restaurants that place their to-go orders in black plastic containers. If you receive food in one of them, do not use it to reheat the food or your leftovers — transfer the food to glass or ceramic containers.
“Sushi trays had one of the highest levels of [a] flame retardant called deca-BDE [Decabromodiphenyl ether], which is really concerning because it has actually been phased out of the U.S. and banned” for several years, Liu said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of deca-BDE in 2021 after the chemical was linked to cancer, endocrine and thyroid issues as well as a host of other ailments.
What are safer alternatives?
The safest nontoxic material options for kitchen utensil are wood and stainless steel.
The strongest atmospheric river to hit California in months is expected to dump rain and snow across the northern half of the state this week — also bringing high winds and possible flooding — before eventually making its way south, forecasters say.
“This is going to be the first major storm of the season,” said Dial Hoang, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Monterey. The low pressure system off the Pacific Northwest coast driving this storm will begin rapidly intensifying Tuesday — reaching the threshold of a bomb cyclone — which will drastically increase its moisture and strength.
Parts of northwest California will be under flood and high wind watches starting Tuesday, when persistent rain is expected to begin, dropping 4 to 8 inches over several days. Some ridgetops could see gusts up to 75 mph.
A powerful storm system will bring heavy mountain snowfall, rain, and high winds to the Pacific Northwest and Northern California through midweek. Numerous flash floods, hazardous travel, power outages, and tree damage can be expected as the storm reaches max intensity on Wed. pic.twitter.com/iFrmuUZfj7
“A powerful storm system will bring heavy mountain snowfall, rain and high winds to the Pacific Northwest and Northern California through midweek,” the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center warned. “Numerous flash floods, hazardous travel, power outages and tree damage can be expected as the storm reaches max intensity” on Wednesday.
But after its initial peak, the system is expected to linger into the weekend, with a second wave of rainfall extending farther south across most of the San Francisco Bay Area, down into the Central Coast and possibly reaching parts of Southern California.
The North Bay is forecast to see 3 to 7 inches of rain from Wednesday through Sunday, with some areas seeing up to 11 inches, according to the National Weather Service’s forecast discussion. Officials are hopeful the region will see only minor flooding, as few areas have seen any real rainfall this season, so soils should be able to absorb significant precipitation.
But, some areas of the North Bay “will likely become saturated very quickly,” Dalton Behringer, a National Weather Service meterologist, wrote in the daily forecast. “Even if we don’t see too many flooding impacts Wednesday, I wouldn’t be surprised if flooding gets worse Friday with the second wave, even though less rain is expected during that time.”
Some light rain could reach Southern California by the weekend, but it probably won’t be enough to eliminate any wildfire threat through the end of the year.
“It’s not going be what Northern California will be, but any bit helps,” said Bryan Lewis, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Oxnard. “It’s probably not enough to get us completely out of the clear yet [for fire concerns].”
A winter storm watch has been issued for the northern Sierra Nevada and other Northern California mountains above 3,500 feet, where 4 to 15 inches of snow is possible Tuesday and Wednesday.
This storm is kicking off what appears to be a stretch of wet weather across the entire state, with above-average precipitation expected through at least Thanksgiving, according to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center.
A Hawaii woman disappeared after sending a cryptic message to her family and then missing a connecting flight to New York at Los Angeles International Airport, according to her family and police.
Hannah Kobayashi, 31, was last seen at LAX on Nov. 8 and last contacted her family by phone on Nov. 9, according to a Los Angeles Police Department news release. She is described as being 5 feet 10 and weighing 140 pounds with brown hair and hazel eyes. She has a “knife” tattoo on her forearm and freckles on her face.
An LAPD spokesperson confirmed that a missing person report was filed on Friday but no other information or updates were available. Anyone with more information has been asked to contact the LAPD at (877) 527-3247.
Kobayashi boarded a flight in Maui on Nov. 8 headed to New York City with a stop at LAX but never made it to New York, her family told USA Today.
She landed at LAX but missed her next flight, appearing instead to visit the Grove shopping center, where she went to a Nike event on Nov. 10, her family told USA Today. On Nov. 11, Kobayashi apparently went back to LAX but didn’t board a flight. Later that day, she sent her family what it called “strange” text messages.
“Hannah’s last message to us was alarming — she mentioned feeling scared, and that someone might be trying to steal her money and identity,” her family said. “She hasn’t been heard from since, and we are gravely concerned for her safety.”
Kobayashi also texted a friend that someone might be trying to steal her identity and money, her father, Ryan, told KABC-TV. Her phone’s last location was at LAX but it is now either dead or turned off.
“She felt like she was in danger,” he said. “She felt like somebody was trying to get her identity or her phone.”
Kobayashi’s aunt, Larie Pidgeon, told KABC that her niece was planning to attend an event in New York.
“She’s very responsible. She was looking forward to this event so much,” she said. “She had a hotel room booked that was a couple of thousand dollars, the ticket for the event was a couple of hundred dollars.”
One Los Angeles County senior has died amid a national recall on carrots found to be contaminated with E. coli.
Two additional local cases are under investigation, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. Across the U.S., at least 39 people were sickened, and 18 people were hospitalized in 15 states as of Sunday.
The affected products — whole bagged carrots and baby carrots grown in Bakersfield and sold by Grimmway Farms in a wide variety of grocery stores — are no longer on shelves, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement.
However, the carrots were on shelves from mid-August through late October, so consumers should check their refrigerators and throw out or return any carrots which could be contaminated.
The brands of carrots suspected of being contaminated are 365, Bunny Luv, Cal-Organic, Compliments, Full Circle, Good & Gather, GreenWise, Grimmway Farms, Marketside, Nature’s Promise, O-Organic, President’s Choice, Raley’s, Simple Truth, Sprouts, Trader Joe’s, Wegmans and Wholesome Pantry, according to the CDC.
There have been several E. coli outbreaks in recent months. In October, more than 100 McDonald’s customers were sickened by an E. coli outbreak in the U.S. linked to slivered onions. In the United Kingdom, one person died in June in an outbreak linked to lettuce that sickened at least 275 people. Organic walnuts sickened consumers in 19 states in April.
E. coli bacteria cause infections that are especially dangerous in young children, the elderly and those with weakened immune systems. Symptoms typically appear three to four days after exposure and include “severe stomach cramps, diarrhea, fever, nausea, and/or vomiting,” according to the Food and Drug Administration.
Move over, Chris Hansen — 20 Southern California juveniles just executed a sting operation that netted a suspected child predator.
Riverside County sheriff’s deputies responded to a tip Friday that an adult was meeting a minor for sex at Nicolas Road Park in Temecula, according to a release. When they got there at around 4:25 p.m., a crowd of 20 minors was filming suspect William Vandenbush, 46, of Homeland.
Authorities did not say how old the minors were, how exactly they organized the sting or how they previously encountered Vandenbush.
Still, an investigation by law enforcement confirmed that Vandenbush had sent nude photos and agreed to meet a minor at the park for sexual purposes, and he was arrested on several felony charges.
It’s not clear if the junior detectives were inspired by Hansen’s NBC television series, “To Catch a Predator,” in which suspected sexual predators are caught on hidden cameras arriving at a sting house to have sex with a minor.
The department cautioned against vigilante efforts to meet with or investigate potential suspects. The department said in a release that it is not only unsafe but can complicate an investigation if evidence is handled poorly.
“This action unnecessarily jeopardized the safety of everyone in the vicinity of the park,” the release said.
“Law enforcement professionals investigating these types of egregious crimes have specialized training and follow specific protocols to ensure a proper investigation, evidence preservation, and public safety,” the release said. “By following these specific protocols, the investigation is not compromised and ensures a thorough investigation is presented to their local district attorney’s office for prosecution.”
Local sting operations have seen some success in getting their suspects prosecuted in recent years, but others have failed to meet prosecutors’ high criteria, KTLA reported.
Vandenbush was booked into the Cois M. Byrd Detention Center for sending harmful material to a minor, contacting a minor for sexual purposes and arranging to meet a minor for sexual purposes. He has not posted a $25,000 bail as of Monday afternoon and is awaiting a court hearing Wednesday at the Murrieta Southwest Justice Center, according to jail records.
Evidence found in Sean “Diddy” Combs’ jail cell suggests he has influenced a witness in his New York sex trafficking and racketeering case and is trying to blackmail others, prosecutors allege. They say that he has sought to avoid federal detection by using three-way calls and other inmates’ phone access codes.
In a motion filed Friday, federal prosecutors say Combs was using secretive methods to contact outsiders from jail, and evidence gathered shows “the clear inference that the defendant’s goal is to blackmail victims and witnesses either into silence or [to] provide testimony helpful to his defense. An allegation that is more often seen in mob trials or Mexican Mafia-style cases.”
But in a motion filed Monday, the music mogul’s lawyers contend that what investigators actually seized from his Metropolitan Detention Center cell in Brooklyn was “attorney-client privileged material,” including handwritten notes by Combs.
“This search and seizure are in violation of Mr. Combs’ Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights,” his attorneys wrote. “The targeted seizure of a pre-trial detainee’s work product and privileged materials — created in preparation for trial — is outrageous government conduct amounting to a substantive due process violation.”
The attorneys learned that notes were seized from Combs’ cell only when prosecutors filed a motion 30 minutes before midnight Friday citing them as evidence opposing his release, his attorneys wrote.
In a new filing Monday, prosecutors said they had not seen anything from a legal file in his cell and turned over photographs agents took of items in the cell to a “filter team” to determine if there was anything privileged that should remain private. That team redacted anything that appeared to be privileged and then gave the information to prosecutors.
The battling motions come as a federal judge is slated again this week to decide whether Combs, who has been behind bars since his September arrest, should be granted $50-million bail and released to house detention.
Combs has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution. Combs and his associates are accused of luring female victims, often under the pretense of a romantic relationship, and allegedly using force, threats of force, coercion and drugs to get them to engage in sex acts with male prostitutes in what Combs referred to as “freak-offs.”
Federal prosecutors reiterated their opposition to Combs being granted bail to the judge on Friday, alleging Combs attempted to tamper with witnesses and influence potential jurors from his prison cell using his family members, and said they feared that his behavior would worsen out of custody.
According to prosecutors, Combs’ notes were recovered from the “defendant’s cell during a pre-planned nationwide sweep of BOP facilities.”
Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, said there’s a reason prosecutors believe Combs is obstructing justice from prison, similar to an argument they made during a previous bail hearing, and there is a good chance the judge doesn’t toss out evidence seized.
“Inmates don’t have a Fourth Amendment expectation of privacy in prison. Guards can search his cell without probable cause or a warrant,” she said, adding that there is a process to handle potentially privileged materials found during a search.
“The feds usually use a ‘taint’ or ‘dirty’ team of agents that aren’t working on the case to conduct these searches. That way, if they see privileged materials, the ‘clean’ team won’t be disqualified from the case.”
In their partially redacted filing on Friday, prosecutors allege the evidence seized shows a pattern of influence from Combs while in custody and that he’s made “relentless efforts to contact potential witnesses, including victims of his abuse who could provide powerful testimony against him.”
They accuse Combs of using phone access codes, known as PAC numbers, of eight other inmates to contact several people — including his sons — and making “three-way calls to contact other individuals.” Prosecutors also allege that Combs has used a third-party communication service called ContactMeASAP to reach unauthorized individuals.
They referred to a call with “Witness-2” and said his communications with the individual as well as his personal notes revealed “a strong inference” that “the defendant paid Witness-2 after she posted her statement.”
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to execute mass deportations of immigrants in the U.S. illegally will involve the military and a national emergency declaration, he confirmed Monday.
In a Nov. 8 post on Trump’s social media platform Truth Social, Tom Fitton, who leads the conservative legal group Judicial Watch, wrote: “GOOD NEWS: Reports are the incoming @RealDonaldTrump administration prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”
Trump responded early Monday: “TRUE!!!”
Asked for more details of the plan, Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that “President Trump will marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history.”
Advocates for immigrants, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have said they are prepared to respond with legal action.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the left-leaning American Immigration Council, cautioned that there is no national emergency authority permitting the U.S. to carry out deportations.
During his first term, Trump bypassed Congress to divert Pentagon funds to expand the border wall by declaring a national emergency. President Biden terminated the emergency order just after he took office in 2021.
Reichlin-Melnick said he doesn’t take Trump’s response to Fitton’s post as confirmation that U.S. military troops will be deployed to carry out deportations. Troops have previously been used to provide logistical support at the border, but they haven’t been directly involved in rounding up migrants.
“This is my recollection of the last four years of the Trump administration — they say a lot of things and when the actual policy rolls out, it often looks quite different,” he said.
More broadly, Trump and his allies have conflated discussion of recently arrived migrants with the broader population of longtime undocumented immigrants, said Reichlin-Melnick.
One potential wrench in Trump’s mass deportation plan: Anyone who was released by border authorities into the U.S. during the last four years is already facing removal proceedings and cannot be removed until that often years-long process concludes. As of last month, immigration courts have a record 1.5 million pending asylum cases.
Deportations would also target immigrants who entered the country long before Biden took office.
“They tend to suggest that really all they’re talking about is criminals and recent arrivals when really that’s just a small portion of the undocumented population,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
Mass deportations were one of Trump’s top campaign promises — he said he would go after at least 15 million people who are in the U.S. illegally, though the total number of undocumented immigrants is probably lower. During his last presidency, Trump deported about 1.5 million immigrants, according to a Migration Policy Institute analysis of federal figures, which the Biden administration is on pace to match.
Finding, detaining and deporting that many people would be costly and logistically challenging. On the campaign trail, Trump said his strategy would rely on military troops, friendly state and local law enforcement and wartime powers.
The ACLU Foundation of Southern California on Monday filed a lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seeking records that would reveal how the agency’s Air Operations — its network of for-profit, commercial and privately chartered deportation flights — could be expanded to carry out a mass deportation program. The lawsuit says the secrecy surrounding the agency’s air operations has “masked responsibility for serious abuses and danger” on flights.
Trump chose Tom Homan, previously the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to oversee deportations as his “border czar.” Homan promised to resume workplace immigration raids and prioritize immigrants who pose threats to public safety and national security for deportation.
Trump also appointed South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who has little experience with the Department of Homeland Security, to lead the agency. Trump’s longtime advisor Stephen Miller, who was behind much of his first term’s immigration agenda, will continue to play a role as deputy chief of policy.
Homan has said the administration will deport people who have been handed final removal orders by immigration judges. In fiscal year 2023, immigration agents removed 142,580 of the nearly 1.3 million people subject to those orders, according to federal figures.
CNN’s Jake Tapper asked House Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday whether Americans are prepared for the economic disruption that deporting millions of people would cause, as well as the resulting images of families being ripped apart. Experts have predicted that mass deportations would cause labor shocks across key industries, including construction and agriculture, drive up grocery prices, and cause economic hardship for U.S. citizen children and others who lose a breadwinner.
“I’m not sure that’s what’s going to happen, Jake,” Johnson replied. “I think what the president’s talking about is beginning with the dangerous persons that we know are here. … So you start with that number, you’ve got by some counts as many as 3 or 4 million people that fit that category.”
There were 662,566 people with pending criminal charges or convictions on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s national docket as of July 21, according to a letter to Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) from Patrick Lechleitner, the agency’s acting director. Some have been listed for decades because their country of citizenship won’t let the U.S. deport them back. Others are still serving jail or prison sentences for their crimes.
Tapper said Trump’s promise wasn’t just to get rid of criminals — it was to get rid of all undocumented immigrants.
“I’m not sure what the specific promise is,” Johnson replied. “I know the president said that he wanted to engage in the largest deportation effort probably in history, because that is what is called for.”
