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UK's Sunak considered resigning over tax criticism - Sunday Times


British Chancellor of the Exchequer Sunak presents Spring Statement in London

Sat, April 9, 2022

LONDON (Reuters) - British finance minister Rishi Sunak considered whether he should resign this week after a storm of criticism over his wealthy wife's tax status, the Sunday Times newspaper reported.

"He was considering whether he could withstand his family taking this any more," the newspaper quoted an unidentified source as saying.

A source familiar with the situation told Reuters that Sunak did not consider resigning.

Sunak this week came under the most sustained pressure since he became finance minister in 2020 after his wife, Akshata Murty, confirmed that she had non-domiciled tax status, meaning she did not pay tax on earnings from outside the United Kingdom.

While the status was legal, critics said the arrangement was incompatible with Sunak's decision to raise taxes on workers and employers from April 6 at a time when high inflation is causing a cost-of-living squeeze for many households.

Murty is the daughter one of the founders of Indian IT giant Infosys and owns about 0.9% of the company -- entitling her to a dividend payment worth 11.6 million pounds ($15.12 million) last year.

Sunak said on Friday that questions over his wife's tax arrangements were politically motivated attempts to damage him.

A few hours later, Murty said she would start paying British tax on her foreign income.

The Sunday Times said some people close to Sunak - once considered a potential future prime minister - still thought he might walk away from politics.

Newspapers said Sunak's family had moved out of a government flat in Downing Street, which could add to the speculation about his future, although the reports also said the move had previously been planned to cut the distance to the school of one of his daughters.

The opposition Labour Party on Saturday called on Sunak to respond to claims in another newspaper report that he was listed as a beneficiary of offshore trusts linked to his wife's family business interests.

A spokesperson for Sunak said no one in the families of Murty or Sunak was aware of the alleged trusts.

On Friday, Sunak confirmed media reports that he only gave up a "green card" for the United States -- an immigration status intended for permanent U.S. residents -- after he became Britain's finance minister in 2020.

A spokesperson for Sunak said he had paid his taxes in full and not broken any laws or regulations.

(Writing by William Schomberg; Editing by Frances Kerry and Mike Harrison)

Jared Kushner's firm got $2 billion from Saudi wealth fund run by crown prince, despite board's objections


Peter Weber, Senior editor
Mon, April 11, 2022,

Jared Kushner with Donald Trump and Saudi crown prince 

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images

The main Saudi sovereign wealth fund, controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner's new private equity firm six months after Kushner left the White House, where he was a key defender of bin Salman, even though the Saudi fund's investment screening committee expressed serious misgivings, The New York Times reported Sunday night, citing internal documents. Kushner was a senior White House adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald Trump.

The screening committee's four members — current or former heads of Saudi Aramco, Dow Chemical, the Saudi Central Bank, and Saudi Industrial Development Fund — voted unanimously against investing in Kushner's fledging Affinity Fund, citing the "inexperience" of its management, an asset management fee that "seems excessive," and the fact that due diligence found the firm's operations "unsatisfactory in all aspects," the Times reports. "But days later the full board of the $620 billion Public Investment Fund" overruled the screening panel.

At the same time, the screening committee endorsed the fund's $1 billion investment with former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin's new Liberty Strategic Capital, the Times reports. Mnuchin's fund is "focused on cybersecurity, financial technology, and entertainment — all sectors that fit Saudi priorities" — while Kushner's "has not publicly disclosed a theme or focus." Kushner's fund reported $2.5 billion under management, most of which "appears to be the $2 billion from Saudi Arabia," the Times reports, while Liberty Strategic Capital reports raising $2.7 billion from a total of 33 investors.

The Saudi investment with Kushner, who "has little experience or track record in private equity," is also "on more generous terms" than the smaller investment with Mnuchin, a successful investor before joining the Trump administration, the Times notes.

"Ethics experts say that such a deal creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner's actions in the White House — or of a bid for future favor if Mr. Trump seeks and wins another presidential term in 2024," the Times reports. Among other things, "Kushner played a leading role inside the Trump administration defending Crown Prince Mohammed after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that he had approved the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist for The Washington Post and resident of Virginia who had criticized the kingdom's rulers."

Florida visitor from UK wanted to catch a shark. Instead he caught something amazing


Ed Killer, Florida Today
Sun, April 10, 2022, 

When Ian Atherton traveled across the pond from his home in Fleetwood, England to Florida's Space Coast for an April vacation, one of the things he had on his bucket list was to catch a shark. He had always envisioned what it would be like to tangle man-to-fish with one of the ocean's most fearsome apex predators.

How's that saying go about best laid plans?

Atherton was able to catch and release a giant seagoing fish, only it wasn't a shark, but a distant cousin and something much rarer — and some might say cooler — than a shark.

A 13-foot long sawfish was caught and released Aug. 4, 2021 by anglers fishing with Fin and Fly Charters out of Port Canaveral.

What in the world?

Atherton joined Capt. Jon Cangianella of Fin & Fly charters in Cocoa Beach April 9 for a morning half-day to begin with shark fishing, then to try to catch some of the other popular fishing targets in the nearshore waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

Cangianella steered Atherton out from Port Canaveral to a spot in about 35 feet of water a few miles from the inlet. He deployed a chunk of bluefish, an oily fish which draws in sharks from a large distance once the scent of the fish gets into the ocean's currents.

Soon, there was a bite. Right away, line began peeling off the reel — not fast, but steady and strong. Atherton reeled tight to set the hook and began his battle on rod and reel. The tug of war went on for about an hour. As the fish drew close to the boat, Cangianella knew what Atherton had might not be a shark after all.

The rostrum, or saw, came out of the water. It resembles a hedge trimmer and on a large sawfish it can measure up to 4 or 5 feet in length. The fish uses it in the wild by swinging it back and forth through a school of small baitfish. A whack from the saw will stun a small fish allowing the sawfish to pick it up from the bottom since it mouth is located on the underside of the large fish. They also eat crustaceans and other bottom dwelling organisms.

The sawfish is actually very closely related to stingrays, not so much sharks, but is sometimes caught using the same methods. They inhabit Florida waters, but their population numbers in the wild are a mere fraction of what their numbers were before pioneer families 120 years ago began fishing coastal waters with nets.

A 13-foot long sawfish was caught & released April 9, 2022 by a UK angler fishing with Fin & Fly charters in Cocoa Beach.

Let it go

Cangianella freed the sawfish from its hook without removing it from the water, and the sawfish swam off healthy and strong. After the unique encounter, they set out for another spot with different bait where Atherton landed a few king mackerel.

Unfortunately, his dream of catching a shark wasn't completed. However, he could have never imagined he would catch something so rare and mysterious as a sawfish.

Another skipper with Fin & Fly charters, Capt. Parker Miley steered a Wisconsin family to a sawfish catch in the same area in August 2021. Another angler in 2021 encountered a healthy sawfish in the Indian River Lagoon in Brevard County.

A 13-foot long sawfish was caught & released April 9, 2022 by a UK angler fishing with Fin & Fly charters in Cocoa Beach.

Call it a come back

Smalltooth sawfish can grow to about 16 feet long. They are one of five sawfish species worldwide and the only sawfish species found in Florida waters. Historically, the species was found along the U.S. East Coast and throughout the Gulf of Mexico, including the waters of the Indian River Lagoon, Charlotte Harbor and the Everglades.

But sawfish become easily entangled in fishing nets used by commercial fishers seeking other targeted species. Since the early 1900s, sawfish populations have declined dramatically. Sadly, they became the first marine fish species listed as endangered in 2003 under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

For more information about ongoing sawfish research and recovery efforts in Florida, visit FWC Sawfish and the Sawfish Recovery webpage at sawfishrecovery.org.

To report sawfish sightings, call the Sawfish Hotline: 1-844-4SAWFISH, fill out an online report form at floridamuseum.ufl.edu/sawfish/report-encounter or email sawfish@myfwc.com.

What to do if you catch a sawfish

All sawfish caught in U.S. waters must be released unharmed immediately, or face federal charges.

Keep sawfish in the water at all times.

If it can be done safely, untangle the line if it is wrapped around the saw and remove as much of the line as possible.

Cut the line as close to the hook as possible.

Do not handle the animal or attempt to remove any hooks on the saw unless you have a long-handled de-hooker.

Do not remove the rostrum, or saw.

Florida sawfish encounters 1782-2017


Total: 11,523


Monroe: 5,939


Lee: 2,726


Charlotte: 1,020


Collier: 974


Martin: 177


Palm Beach: 135


Broward: 122


St. Lucie: 71


Miami-Dade: 53


Pinellas: 41


Brevard: 40


Sarasota: 32


Manatee: 27


Indian River: 26


Hillsborough: 25


Volusia: 16


Source: International Sawfish Encounter Database

Ed Killer is florida today's outdoors writer. Friend Ed on Facebook at Ed Killer, follow him on Twitter @tcpalmekiller or email him at ed.killer@tcpalm.com.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Shark fishing trip for UK angler yields surprising rare catch

A Stunning Surprise In The Michigan Kidnapping Case Calls The Government’s Domestic Terror Strategy Into Question

In one of the nation’s most important domestic terrorism trials, the government’s single-minded pursuit of a conviction speaks volumes — about way more than just this one case.


Ken Bensinger
BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on April 8, 2022

BuzzFeed News / Kent County Sheriff via AP Photo
From left: Brandon Caserta, Adam Fox, Barry Croft, and Daniel Harris

Despite the government’s extraordinary efforts to muzzle the defense, a jury in Grand Rapids federal court on Friday acquitted two men on charges including conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the other two who had been charged.

As a result, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta are now free men, while the federal judge overseeing the case called a mistrial on the counts against Adam Fox and Barry Croft. In a written statement after the verdict, Andrew Birge, the US Attorney for the Western District of Michigan, said that Fox and Croft “now await re-trial” although he did not say when that would be


The outcome of the trial is a stunning rebuke to the prosecution, which at times appeared to view the case — one of the most prominent domestic terror investigations in a generation — as a slam dunk. The split verdict calls into question the Justice Department’s strategy, and beyond that, its entire approach to combating domestic extremism. Defense attorneys in the case, along with observers from across the political spectrum, have argued the FBI’s efforts to make the case, which involved at least a dozen confidential informants, went beyond legitimate law enforcement and into outright entrapment.

It may also leave the two defendants who chose to plead guilty and testify for the government in hopes of leniency, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, wondering whether they made the right choice. Last summer, Garbin was sentenced to 75 months in prison, while Franks, who changed his plea in February, is still awaiting sentencing.

Also up in the air is the fate of eight men charged by Michigan’s Attorney General for providing material support to terrorism for their role in the alleged plot. Three of them face trial in September, but it may be challenging to convince a jury that they aided a plot the very existence of which has not been proven.

“The jury clearly saw what the FBI was doing to create this case,” said Caserta’s attorney, Mike Hills, in an interview after the verdict was announced. “They saw it, and they didn’t like it.”

To make their case, federal prosecutors presented a mountain of evidence: hundreds of audio clips, videos, and text messages, many of which show the men describing violence they would personally like to inflict on the governor, plus the testimony of a confidential informant, two undercover FBI agents, and two defendants who had pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the investigation.

But the most striking thing about the closely watched 15-day trial might be what the jury never got to see.

Both before and during the trial, prosecutors went to extraordinary lengths to exclude evidence and witnesses that might undermine their arguments, while winning the right to bring in almost anything favorable to their own side. As a result, defense attorneys were largely reduced to nibbling at the edges of the government’s case in hopes of instilling doubt in the jurors’ minds, and to making claims about official misconduct with vanishingly few pieces of evidence to support them.

Over and over during the course of the trial, the prosecution objected to any attempts by defendants to provide context for the often shocking soundbites and text messages shown in court — objections sustained by a judge who agreed that such material risked confusing the jury.

The result was, at least from the defense’s point of view, a stunningly one-sided presentation that left the preponderance of evidence out of court and gave jurors precious little to balance against the Justice Department’s claims.

“The government controls the evidence,” Fox’s attorney, Chris Gibbons, said in his closing statement last Friday, “and they can play whatever they want.”

Back on Oct. 8, 2020, when the government announced that the FBI had broken up a violent plot against a sitting governor, the case seemed like a sure thing. In addition to the men accused of kidnapping conspiracy in federal court, Michigan’s attorney general had charged eight additional individuals for providing material assistance to terrorism for their role in aiding the scheme. Months later, the Justice Department tacked on weapons of mass destruction charges, elevating it to a terrorism case as well.

But over the next 17 months, a different and more nuanced version of events began to emerge.

Defense attorneys in both the state and federal cases contended, in a series of court filings and pretrial hearings, that their clients may have been loudmouths, or even anti-government cranks, but they never actually intended to hurt anyone — and couldn’t have pulled off a kidnapping to save their own lives. Fox, the lawyers noted, was so hapless he lived in the basement of a vacuum cleaner store and was forced to go to the Mexican restaurant next door when he needed to use the bathroom. Croft, for his part, ranted about shooting down airships, cutting down every tree on the border between Ohio and Michigan, and setting off electromagnetic pulse weapons that his lawyer, Joshua Blanchard, characterized at trial as “movie stuff.”

Their statements, however nasty they might sound, were just talk, the defense said, and therefore protected by the First Amendment. To the degree that there was any actual plan to kidnap Whitmer, they added, it was the FBI that had cooked it up, while the government’s minions — as many as a dozen confidential informants — lured the defendants into half-heartedly playing along.

They said it was a case of entrapment and that they had hundreds of recordings, text messages, and Facebook posts that would shine a very different light on the government’s narrative. They included exhibits showing informants smoking cannabis with the defendants, plying them with offers of cash, and working them up into a lather with anti-government talk of their own. There was evidence of informants and FBI agents discussing ways to lure more suspects into the case, and extensive audio of defendants discussing absurd schemes involving stolen Blackhawk helicopters, 300-strong armies, and newly minted silver currencies that the defense believed showed the men were simply fantasizing.

But on Feb. 2, Judge Robert J. Jonker ruled that most of the evidence the defense hoped to present could not even be mentioned in court, let alone shown to the jury. Though the exhibits were direct audio recordings or transcriptions, just like much of the prosecution’s evidence, the judge dismissed the material as irrelevant hearsay.

He also ruled that defendants could not inquire about the past conduct of several FBI agents, though the government would be allowed to question the defendants about episodes in their own past.

Five days before trial, Jonker handed the defense a rare victory by ruling that if two undercover FBI agents appeared as witnesses, they had to use their real names. After all the preceding decisions, it was hard to overlook the irony.

“It is time for all guise and pretense to end and for the prosecution to present the evidence in an open forum,” the judge wrote. “Making it crystal clear to the jury and the public that inside the Courtroom, nothing is undercover and everything is out in the open will best ensure fairness during trial and eventual acceptance and respect for whatever the jury ultimately decides.”

On the 13th day of the trial, a stream of potential witnesses arrived in the courtroom. They had all been subpoenaed by the defense. But addressing them one by one, the government warned them to think very carefully before testifying.

One of the prosecutors asked a woman named Taya Plummer pointed questions about her boyfriend, who plays no role whatsoever in the kidnapping case but is a member of an armed militant group in another state. The prosecutor, Jonathan Roth, noted that he wasn’t aware that Plummer herself was in any trouble with the law, but he left the unavoidable impression that could change if she made the wrong decision. As for how things would play out, “I’d leave that to her,” Roth added ominously.

If it was meant as a threat, it worked. Plummer said she would invoke her constitutional right against self-incrimination. Judge Jonker released her subpoena and excused her.

Under similar pressure from the government, six other potential defense witnesses — including Stephen Robeson, a controversial FBI informant at the heart of the investigation — announced that they, too, would prefer to remain silent. And defense attorneys told Judge Jonker that several additional witnesses intended to do the same, so they decided against even calling them to court. At least one of those individuals, a retiree from Virginia named Frank Butler, had been sent a letter by the Justice Department telling him he was the target of an investigation.

The prosecutors’ tactics were so heavy-handed that they could easily have backfired, causing the jury to wonder why it was so important to shut people up.

But the jury never saw any of it. They had been removed from the courtroom before these thinly veiled threats were made. All the jury saw was the result: a piteously threadbare defense.

There were only three witnesses — who collectively testified for scarcely 30 minutes — to bolster the case, compared to the relentless stream of undercover agents, cooperators, informants, experts, associates, and even Barry Croft’s weeping girlfriend that the government was allowed to parade before the jury.

It was so thin, it was almost no defense at all. The prosecution had closed off so many of the defense’s options that last Thursday, Daniel Harris, a 24-year-old ex-Marine with a boyish face and a goofy sense of humor, decided to testify in his own defense, a risky move that, surprisingly, seems to have paid off.

“Daniel told me from day one that he was innocent,” said Julia Kelly, Harris’s attorney, on Friday afternoon. “The jury believed him.”

According to Kelly, both she and Harris broke into tears as the verdict was read. Friday happened to be Caserta’s birthday, and he exclaimed that the jury’s decision was the best birthday present he’d ever gotten.

After almost a year and a half in detention, both men were immediately released and headed home. Fox and Croft, meanwhile, returned to jail pending a potential retrial. Their attorneys could not be reached for comment.

In the government’s telling, the most critical moment in the alleged plot took place late on Sept. 12, 2020, when Fox, Croft, and others piled into three trucks and headed out to conduct nighttime surveillance of Whitmer’s lakeside cottage.

It was not a great success. For one thing, their companions that night included two confidential informants and two undercover agents. Some 10 additional FBI agents followed them en route, and stationary cameras mounted at strategic spots tracked their progress. For another, despite all the careful planning, the men failed to find Whitmer’s house because they had been given the wrong address, and heavy rains made it impossible for them to spot one another from across the lake as they had hoped to do.

Nonetheless, the government seized on the narrative value of that outing, and several times throughout the trial showed the jury a pair of videos reenacting it. Except it looked a little different on the projector screen.

In one of the videos, a confidential informant and two agents sit in a truck parked in Whitmer’s driveway — which none of the defendants ever found. A second video, viewed from across the lake, shows a glowing infrared illuminator held by an FBI agent standing on Whitmer’s boat dock — a vantage point not one of the defendants ever had.

“That’s just dishonest,” Blanchard said in court on Friday. But it certainly made for good viewing.

In the end — and in ways that may be unsatisfying to many of the parties — the case that was tried in Grand Rapids will inevitably reach far beyond the evidence shown in court or even the partial verdict delivered on Friday afternoon.

In a Jan. 26 order, Judge Jonker wrote that one of the challenges of the trial would be ensuring the jurors ignore “extraneous” information about the FBI and its tactics, and focus only on the specific facts of the case. The reality, however, is that other than the prosecutions flowing out of the ongoing Capitol riot probe, the Michigan case stands as the most ambitious and closely watched investigation of domestic extremism in a generation.

Whether they crossed the sharply defined line into entrapment is a matter of legal definitions. But the tactics employed by the FBI to develop its case against the defendants — despite the Justice Department’s best efforts to keep those tactics secret — conform to a growing popular conception of government overreach.

Manipulating people into committing crimes is “unacceptable in America,” Blanchard said in closing arguments carefully calibrated to press that hot button. “That’s not how it works. We don’t make terrorists so we can arrest them.”

Blanchard was mistaken. Using swarms of informants to push suspected radicals toward violence is in fact exactly how it works: The FBI has been doing it for at least half a century, from the Black Panthers in the 1970s to Muslim groups in the wake of 9/11. But because the targets in this case were conservative white men, those tactics touched a nerve with a swath of the population that had never seriously considered the issue before.

The message that law enforcement wanted to send when it announced the sensational arrests back in October 2020 was, as the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan put it in a press conference, that “our state and federal governments are working together to keep us all safe.”

Friday’s verdict, though not conclusive, suggests that the takeaway for many people has a distinctly different tone, one that could reverberate throughout federal law enforcement for years to come. As much as Fox, Croft, Harris, and Caserta were on trial, so were the FBI and the Department of Justice. On the eve of trial, even Judge Jonker conceded as much.

“This case is not about the role of government generally,” he wrote in an order on the Friday before jury selection. But, he added, it will “undoubtedly touch on how the defendants felt about the function of government and about the decisions of government actors.”



Ken Bensinger is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Los Angeles. He is the author of "Red Card," on the FIFA scandal. His DMs are open.
Contact Ken Bensinger at ken.bensinger@buzzfeed.com.

Distraught over orders to investigate trans kids, Texas child welfare workers are resigning

By Eleanor Klibanoff, The Texas Tribune

Morgan Davis (L) and Randa Mulanax decided to leave the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services after Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the agency to investigate families who have provided gender-affirming care to their children as possible child abuse.

 Photo by Lauren Witte/The Texas Tribune

LONG READ

April 11 (UPI) -- Morgan Davis, a transgender man, joined Texas' child welfare agency as an investigator to be the advocate he never had growing up.

Less than a year later, one of the first cases under Gov. Greg Abbott's order to investigate parents of transgender children landed on his desk.

His supervisors in the Travis County office of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services offered to reassign the case, but maybe, he thought, he was the right person for the job.

"If somebody was going to do it, I'm glad it was me," Davis said.

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He hoped it would be reassuring to the family to see a transgender man at the helm of the investigation. But the family's lawyer didn't see it that way.

"She said, 'I know your intentions are good. But by walking in that door, as a representative for the state, you are saying in a sense that you condone this, that you agree with it,'" Davis said.

"It hit me like a thunderbolt. It's true," he said. "By me being there, for even a split second, a child could think they've done something wrong."

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Davis resigned shortly after. Since the directive went into effect, each member of his four-person unit has put in their notice as well.

While the attorney general's office has gone to great lengths to defend the governor's directive in court, The agency responsible for carrying out investigations into families of transgender children in Texas has been roiled by resistance and resignations as employees struggle with ethical questions.

More than half a dozen child abuse investigators told The Texas Tribune that they either have resigned or are actively job hunting as a result of the directive.

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A representative of DFPS declined to comment on the resignations or answer specific questions, citing pending litigation.

The employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs, said they feel conflicted -- unwilling to undertake what they see as discriminatory investigations and critical of the agency's internal response to requests for guidance, but haunted by what a mass exodus of experienced child abuse investigators would mean for the state's most vulnerable children.

"Things are already slipping through the cracks. ... We will see investigations that get closed where intervention could have occurred," one supervisor said. "And children will die in Texas."

'Heartbreaking' investigation

From the moment he got the case, Davis felt the conflict acutely. He joined DFPS to help children facing abuse and neglect, not children receiving medical care under the direction of a doctor -- medical care that made such a difference in his own life.

Gender-affirming care is endorsed by all the major medical associations as the proper treatment for gender dysphoria, the distress someone can feel when their assigned sex doesn't align with their gender identity. While many young people focus on social transition -- dressing differently or using different pronouns -- some are prescribed puberty blockers, which are reversible, or hormone therapy.

Davis felt the directive was an unnecessary overreach -- he knew firsthand the care and caution that doctors take when prescribing treatments for gender dysphoria.

Even the person who made the child abuse report didn't seem to agree with the directive: Davis said they were sobbing on the phone, distraught that they were reporting the family, but the person was mandated by law to report child abuse and feared the consequences of not making a report.

"[They] said to me, 'Just promise me you'll be kind,'" Davis remembered.

When he visited the family, the house was clean, the pantry was well stocked and the kids were healthy, happy and well loved. He tried to be as reassuring as possible, reiterating again and again what a good job the parents were doing raising their children in a safe and loving way.

But the family was clearly terrified, he said.

"It was just heartbreaking to me, to everyone, to see what we were doing, to see what we had become," Davis said.

After that, Davis said he couldn't keep working for an agency that would target families this way. Last week, he put in his notice; he is going to keep working until mid-May to wrap up as many of his open cases as he can to help minimize the burden on his colleagues.

But even though Davis told his supervisor there was no evidence of abuse, the investigation into that child's family will remain open, likely long after he's left, while the state continues to fight in court for the right to investigate parents just like those.

Inside the agency

Employees at the Travis County DFPS office say they found out about Abbott's directive the same way most people did -- on the news. They were shocked and devastated to see their agency become politicized, several said.

When they got an invitation to an emergency staff meeting the next day, many of them hoped they'd be told the agency wouldn't be following the governor's directive.

Instead, they received confirmation that they would be required to open investigations into reports of parents who provide gender-affirming care to their children. They were instructed to treat these cases very differently than others.

According to a meeting agenda reviewed by the Tribune, supervisors were told that they needed to notify their chain of command when they received one of these cases ("as we know these can be difficult," the agenda read) and that the agency's general counsel would be working on guidelines to determine how to rule on these cases.

Several employees say they were told to mark all the cases under Abbott's directive as sensitive, a rare designation usually reserved for cases in which DFPS employees are personally involved.

They were also instructed not to communicate about these cases in writing, a directive that struck the employees as unusual, unethical and risky.

"We document ... as relentlessly as we do because it's a way to make sure there's individual responsibility for actions that are taken that can be tracked back to who made the decision," said one Travis County child protective investigations supervisor. "I could be held responsible for a decision made in my case that I didn't make, but I have no way to defend myself."

Investigators and supervisors said they don't typically investigate cases if the only allegation is that a parent is giving their child medication prescribed by a doctor. Instead, those cases are ruled out without a formal investigation and designated "priority none."

In fact, they said, the agency usually gets involved in cases with the opposite problem: parents who won't or don't give their child prescribed medications.

But supervisors at the emergency staff meeting say they were told cases in which parents were providing medically prescribed gender-affirming care to their children could not be marked priority none and had to be investigated.

"This is literally a direct contradiction of the policy ... because we are telling parents we understand that a doctor ... is telling you to do this, but we don't like it," said one senior-level supervisor.

When people on the call pointed out that these cases would not meet the standards for physical abuse or medical neglect as laid out in the Texas Family Code, they were told that policy would be generated to match the directives, according to several employees who were in the meeting.

One senior-level supervisor said the response seemed to be, "basically, do it now and policy will catch up later, and everything will be fine."

For a lot of employees, the special requirements on these cases have put them in an untenable situation.

"We already have such a high level of responsibility that our ethics can't be called into question," said another senior-level supervisor who is still employed by the agency. "We have the ability to remove people's children. We have to be able to pass muster at every level. [This] has dramatically affected the trust that I have in this department as a whole."

Many DFPS employees say they feel caught in a tug of war between their ethics and their obligations. They say they don't want to be foot soldiers following Attorney General Ken Paxton and Abbott into this latest culture war, but they need their jobs and they worry about what will happen to vulnerable children if they leave.

Many of those who have stayed have been engaging in small acts of resistance to the directive. Last week, DFPS workers from several offices signed on to an amicus brief condemning the order. Several Travis County staff members wore T-shirts one day proclaiming their support for trans kids; others have added subtle rainbows to their office decor.

Resignations and resistance

A week after the directive came out, the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit on behalf of a DFPS employee, identified only as Jane Doe, who was under investigation for child abuse for providing gender-affirming care to her 16-year-old daughter.

At the hearing, a lawyer for the state said DFPS was not going to investigate "every trans youth or every young person undergoing these kinds of treatments and procedures."

The directive was intended to convey "not that gender-affirming treatments are necessarily or per se abusive, but that these treatments, like virtually any other implement, could be used by somebody to harm a child," said assistant attorney general Ryan Kercher.

Watching the hearing, Travis County investigators were confused. In the emergency meeting after Abbott announced the directive, they say regional leadership told them the exact opposite -- they had to investigate these cases, even if there was no evidence that these medications were being forced on a child or otherwise used as a form of abuse.

A judge granted a temporary restraining order, halting the investigation into that family, and scheduled a hearing to consider a statewide pause to the governor's directive.

Soon after, DFPS supervisor Randa Mulanax put in her resignation at the Travis County office. She'd reached out to the ACLU to see how she could help block this directive from being implemented and agreed to testify at the next hearing.

On the stand, she told the judge that the cases being investigated under Abbott's directive are treated differently than others, and that the ethical conundrum those cases had sparked left her no choice but to resign. The judge granted a temporary statewide injunction that day, blocking these investigations from continuing until a full trial in July.

Paxton has asked the Texas Supreme Court to intervene and allow the investigations to continue while the case proceeds through the courts. After several days of confusion, supervisors said they were told the cases are "on pause" -- they remain open, but investigative activities are suspended.

The injunction also stops DFPS from investigating new reports of child abuse based solely on allegations that a parent provided gender-affirming care to a child.

When Mulanax returned to the office after testifying, she said her office door was covered in thank-you notes and her email inbox was overflowing with gratitude from families, lawyers and fellow DFPS employees.

Mulanax said she felt proud that she'd contributed to blocking the directive but was wracked with guilt over what her resignation would mean for an overburdened department.

"I understood that things were going to get worse with me leaving," she said. "I'm leaving cases behind that have been reassigned two or three times and bounced around from supervisor to supervisor. But do I trade in my ethics and my morality?"

The state's child welfare agency has long struggled to recruit and retain qualified staff. It's a grueling job, made more difficult in recent years as the agency scrambles to try to comply with the terms of a decadelong federal lawsuit.

The state is still dealing with a crisis of foster children without permanent placement who sleep in state offices, often for weeks at a time. DFPS employees take shifts supervising these kids; supervisors, who are salaried, do not get paid overtime for that work.

And that's in addition to their existing, often overwhelming job duties investigating some of the most heartbreaking, challenging cases of abuse and neglect.

Several employees said investigators at the Travis County office are often getting assigned five to seven new cases a week -- more than double what they say is recommended as best practice -- on top of an already teetering pile of open cases.

"It's a very scary time here right now," one senior-level supervisor said. "You never know what you're going to come into the next day, if someone else is going to leave and you're going to have another 20 cases to reassign, or you're going to have to cover another unit because their supervisor left."

And employees say they know better than anyone the potential consequences of overloaded investigators.

"They're letting so many years of experience walk out that door," said a senior-level supervisor. "And the ones who will leave are the ones who stand their ground and do the right thing. Once all those good staff leave, who will be left?"

Few answers available

On a Tuesday in mid-March, a few days after Mulanax testified, hundreds of child welfare investigative supervisors and managers from across the state logged in to a video conference call, eager to get some answers from the department's leadership.

Several managers said they were surprised to see that DFPS Commissioner Jaime Masters wasn't in attendance.

Instead, Associate Commissioner Rich Richman took the lead. He started by saying the meeting was not going to be "an ass-chewing," according to several people who attended, and then launched into a criticism of the handling of a separate scandal the agency was facing in connection to allegations of sex trafficking at a state-licensed foster facility in Bastrop.

Abbott's directive was not the focus of the call, as they'd been hoping, employees who were on the call said.

"We had a whole statewide meeting on something that has literally nothing to do with us instead of the thing that is directly affecting our everyday life," one supervisor said.

Richman did not address Mulanax's testimony or the injunction in the gender-affirming care cases. Instead, several people on the call said, he briefly reminded staff that they were to be "neutral fact-finders" in these and all investigations.

When Richman opened up the floor to questions and comments, the staff unloaded, according to chat logs reviewed by the Tribune. They demanded answers on when they were going to be getting more guidance on how to handle cases of gender-affirming care and issued dire warnings about the flood of resignations on the horizon.

"You are losing so many tenured staff and wisdom because this job is just not manageable anymore," one supervisor wrote.

Another said DFPS leaders "are so out of touch with what your agency does."

They also aired long-standing gripes about salaries, overtime pay and working conditions.

"As supervisors, we are out here working 60 to 80 hours a week to be supportive of our staff and to keep their heads above water and feel supported," one supervisor wrote. "We are worn but pushing through, because we love what we do, but not getting overtime or compensation becomes exhausting and discouraging."

Most of the questions, including those about gender-affirming care cases, went unanswered.

Richman did respond to the money question: According to several people on the call, he encouraged employees to remember they were there for the children, not the money.

"It was also very upsetting because we've looked at the salaries of all those higher-ups," said Mulanax. "It's pretty, pretty easy to say it's not about the money when you're sitting high and tight on over $100,000 a year and you're not working all this overtime."

Richman, who was hired in September, earns $150,000 a year.

Evoking children's welfare felt particularly disingenuous, several people said, when they'd been loudly challenging whether the governor's directive was really in children's best interest, to no response.

The meeting was scheduled for 90 minutes, but just before the hour mark, Richman brought it to an end. He said he'd print out the questions in the chat and follow up with employees directly via email. No one who spoke to the Tribune has received a response.

Later that day, the department hosted a similar meeting for lower-level investigators. But this time, the chat function was turned off.

For LGBTQ mental health support, call the Trevor Project's 24/7 toll-free support line at 866-488-7386. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by calling 800-273-8255 or texting 741741.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune. Read the original here.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

HEALTHCARE PRIORITIES USA
Serious illness spurs some patients to get cosmetic surgery

By HealthDay News


Patients with serious illnesses who sought cosmetic surgery said the did so for mental well-being, social acceptance, counteracting aging, work benefits, and suggestions from friends, family and doctors. 

Photo by skeeze/Pixabay

Some patients with serious illnesses get cosmetic surgery to look healthier and be more comfortable in social situations or at work, a small study finds.

Researchers interviewed 12 patients who had cosmetic surgery at the start or during treatment for conditions such as stroke, advanced melanoma, prostate cancer, advanced cervical or thyroid cancer and Hodgkin's lymphoma.

"Patients dealing with serious illnesses have visible signs of their health problems, which make them feel unhappy about themselves," said senior author Dr. Murad Alam, vice chair of dermatology and chief of cutaneous and aesthetic surgery at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

"Cosmetic procedures that improve appearance make these patients feel better and more confident during a time when they are already going through so much," he said in a school news release.

RELATED Unflattering selfies may lead to spike in requests for plastic surgery

The cosmetic procedures patients had ranged from noninvasive treatments such as neurotoxin and filler injections, lasers, chemical peels, radiofrequency devices, dermabrasion and microneedling, to invasive procedures such as face-lifts, liposuction and eyelid lifts.

Most said they sought cosmetic surgery directly because of their major medical illness (75%) or treatment (66%).

Their reasons included mental well-being, social acceptance, counteracting aging, work benefits, and suggestions from friends, family and doctors.

"Post-treatment, you look in the mirror negative-wise," a 34-year-old woman with breast cancer told researchers. "You have no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, nothing. My immune system was severely low, so I looked really pale and anemic. It's like you don't even recognize yourself anymore."

Many of the study participants said the safety of noninvasive cosmetic procedures made them more appealing, according to findings recently published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

Alam said the findings "may help improve conversations between physicians and patients who are interested in getting cosmetic procedures, so that they have information on procedures that are most safe and helpful for them."

More information

There's more on cosmetic surgery at the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Copyright © 2022 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

US Gallup Poll: Big majorities back range of climate change policies


Solid majorities of Americans backed providing tax credits for the installation of solar power and other types of clean energy systems in homes.

 File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo

April 11 (UPI) -- Americans decisively support a series of six policy proposals to fight climate change backed by the Biden administration, according to a Gallup Poll released Monday.

The poll results showed that by varying degrees, solid majorities of U.S. residents back such climate proposals as providing tax credits for installing home clean energy systems to spending federal money on constructing electric vehicle charging stations.

At the high end of the scale, 89% of respondents favored the clean energy tax credit idea, while the least favorable response was the 59% who backed federal spending on charging stations, Gallup reported.

In between, the pollsters found that 75% backed providing tax incentives to businesses to promote their use of wind, solar and nuclear power and 71% supported setting higher fuel efficiency standards for cars, trucks and buses

Also, 62% favored establishing strict limits on the release of methane in the production of natural gas, while 61% backed providing tax credits to individuals who purchase electric vehicles.

All six of the proposals were included in President Joe Biden's $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act introduced last year, which stalled in the Senate when two key Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kristin Sinema of Arizona, withheld their support for the measure in December, Manchin said he would not vote for the bill, citing factors including inflation worries, the COVID-19 pandemic and "geopolitical unrest."

RELATED Gallup poll: 1 in 3 Americans have recently experienced extreme weather

Some policies to boost the use of clean energy and electric vehicles were included in a bipartisan, $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passed last year.

On a broader topic relating to climate change, the new Gallup Poll found that a smaller 53% majority said they are more concerned about the risk to the environment of not passing such proposals than they are about potential harm to the economy.

Some 43%, meanwhile. indicated they are more concerned about the potential harm to the economy and deficit if the such measures are passed.

RELATED Gallup poll: 44% of Americans worry a 'great deal' about environment

On a partisan level, solid majorities of Republicans favored some of the climate change measures, including 78% who backed tax credits for installing home-based clean energy systems and 62% who agreed with providing tax incentives to businesses to promote their use of wind, solar and nuclear power.

Only 36% of Republicans, however, supported tax credits to individuals who purchase electric vehicles.

17-year Neptune study reveals surprising temperature changes

The study's astronomers have been fixated on the summertime season that's occurred in the planet's southern hemisphere since 2005.


The image of the planet Neptune on the left was obtained during the testing of the Narrow-Field adaptive optics mode of the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The image on the right is a comparable image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Note that the two images were not taken at the same time so do not show identical surface features. 

Photo by ESO/P. Weilbacher (AIP)/NASA, ESA, and M.H. Wong and J. Tollefson/UC Berkeley

April 11 (UPI) -- The heating-and-cooling changes of Neptune's atmospheric and global temperatures have caught the attention of the astronomers who have monitored them over 17 years, a study released Monday shows.

The expert international team spent nearly two decades keeping a close watch on the gaseous planet's temperatures using ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

What they found reveals an "unexpected" drop in Neptune's global temperatures followed by its south pole dramatically warming up, according to the study published in the Planetary Science Journal.

"Since we have been observing Neptune during its early southern summer, we expected temperatures to be slowly growing warmer, not colder," the study's lead author, Michael Roman, a postdoctoral research associate at the United Kingdom's University of Leicester, said in a news release.

While Neptune is like Earth in that its seasons change based on its orbit of the sun, Neptune's seasons last about 40 years, according to the European Southern Observatory.

A single year on Neptune, which is the most distant giant planet from the sun, equals 165 Earth years.

It's about 2.8 billion miles away from Earth.

This composite shows thermal images of Neptune taken between 2006 and 2020. The first three images (2006, 2009, 2018) were taken with the VISIR instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope while the 2020 image was captured by the COMICS instrument on the Subaru Telescope (VISIR wasn’t in operation in mid-late 2020 because of the pandemic). After the planet’s gradual cooling, the south pole appears to have become dramatically warmer in the past few years, as shown by a bright spot at the bottom of Neptune in the images from 2018 and 2020. 

Image by ESO/M. Roman, NAOJ/Subaru/COMICS

The study's astronomers have been fixated on the summertime season that's occurred in the planet's southern hemisphere since 2005, closely examining any temperature changes after the summer solstice.

They've pieced together nearly 100 thermal-infrared images of Neptune taken over 17 years to study those trends in deeper detail.

They recorded an average global temperature drop of 8 degrees Celsius, or 46.4 degrees Fahrenheit, between 2003 and 2018.

Yet another surprising finding came with the dramatic warming of the eighth planet's south pole during the last two years of observations.

Between 2018 and 2020, experts observed a rapid increase of 11 C, or 51.8 F. It's an unusual finding, as this level of rapid polar warming has never before been observed on Neptune, according to researchers.

"Our data cover less than half of a Neptune season, so no one was expecting to see large and rapid changes," said Glenn Orton, the study's co-author and senior research scientist at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The astronomers are not yet certain what caused Neptune's unexpected temperature variations.

They plan to continue observing the changes in the coming years.

SPIRIT ANIMAL

Albino deer caught on camera next to Missouri road

April 11 (UPI) -- A Missouri man captured video of his close encounter with an albino deer he spotted standing at the side of a road.

Dale Richardson posted a video to Facebook showing the all-white deer he spotted standing just a few feet from a road in Marshfield.

Richardson said he has seen the albino white-tailed deer wandering in the area on two previous occasions.

Francis Skalicky, of the Missouri Department of Conservation, said the albino deer, sometimes known as a "ghost deer," is known to officials.

"This particular one around Marshfield we've actually got several reports of," Skalicky told KOLR-TV. "She has been around there for at least a few months."

The department said about one in 30,000 deer is born albino, meaning their bodies lack all pigment.

"One in 30,000 sounds like a rare ratio, which it is. However, when you have over a million deer in Missouri, which we do, that means you will probably have a few albino deer a year," Skalicky said. "We get reports of them around the state."

Study: Psychedelic mushroom ingredient helps reduce depression


Psilocybin, the ingredient that gives psychedelic mushrooms their mind-altering effects, appears to have therapeutic benefits for people with depression, according to a new study.

 File photo by Shots Studio/Shutterstock.


April 11 (UPI) -- Psilocybin, the ingredient that gives so-called psychedelic mushrooms their mind-altering effects, helps reduce the symptoms of depression, a study published Monday by Nature Medicine found.

Based on brain scans of roughly 60 people receiving the compound as a treatment for depression, it appears to foster improved communication between different regions of the brain, even after its hallucinogenic effects have worn off, the researchers said.

This may be how psilocybin works as a treatment for depression and other mental health disorders, they said.

"These findings are important because for the first time, we find that psilocybin works differently from conventional antidepressants," study co-author David Nutt said in a press release.

RELATED Magic mushroom' therapy may interact with other medicines

It appears to work by "making the brain more flexible and fluid, and less entrenched in the negative thinking patterns associated with depression," said Nutt, head of the Imperial Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College in London.

Psilocybin is one of a number of psychedelics being explored as a potential therapy for mental health disorders.

Several studies have examined the use of a synthesized form of the drug to treat patients with depression and anxiety, with promising results.

RELATED 'Magic mushroom' drug psilocybin edges toward mainstream therapy

These findings, taken from two combined studies, reveal that people who responded to psilocybin had evidence of increased brain connectivity both during their treatment and up to three weeks later, the researchers said.

This enhanced connectivity was associated with self-reported improvements in their depression, according to the researchers.

Patterns of brain activity in depression can become rigid and restricted, leading to repetitive negative thinking, they said.

RELATED Study finds 'magic mushroom' hallucinogen as good as antidepressants

Similar changes in brain connectivity were not seen in those treated with a commonly used prescription antidepressant, which indicates the psychedelic may work differently in treating the condition, the researchers said.

For the two studies, the researchers analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, scans of the brains of nearly 60 participants, about half of whom received psilocybin, while the remainder were treated with the anti-depressant escitalopram.

All participants also attended talking therapy sessions with registered mental health professionals. Brain scans were taken before and then one day or three weeks after participants received drug therapy, the researchers said.

Both studies found that depression patients treated with psilocybin experienced improvement in their symptoms, based on responses to clinical questionnaires, the data showed.

Analysis of the brain scans revealed altered communication or connectivity between brain regions, particularly those that are thought to be more segregated in depressed patients, according to the researchers.

There was a correlation between this effect and symptom improvement in both studies, although the strength and duration of effect varied between participants, the researchers said.

However, the effect was strongest in participants who reported an improvement in their symptoms, they said.

Still, the researchers caution that though these findings are encouraging, they are based on studies conducted under controlled, clinical conditions, using a regulated dose of psilocybin formulated in a laboratory, with extensive psychological support from mental health professionals.

People with depression should not attempt to self-medicate with psilocybin, as taking magic mushrooms or psilocybin in the absence of these careful safeguards may not have a positive outcome, the researchers said.

"We don't yet know how long the changes in brain activity seen with psilocybin therapy last and we need to do more research to understand this," study co-author Robin Carhart-Harris said in a press release.

"We do know that some people relapse, and it may be that after a while their brains revert to the rigid patterns of activity we see in depression," said Carhart-Harris, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of California-San Francisco.