'Don't kiss or snuggle backyard poultry,' CDC warns in salmonella alert

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning backyard poultry farmers that their chickens may be linked to a growing salmonella outbreak.

The notice of investigation, posted Thursday, said 163 people are confirmed to have been sickened across 43 states.

While none have died, a third of those sickened were children under 5 years of age, the agency said.

The CDC warns that there are likely many more cases as few people are tested for salmonella, a bacterial infection that in most people resolves on its own in a week or less after causing diarrhea, fever and stomach cramps.

People younger than 5 or older than 65 are likelier to experience more severe illness and are at increased risk of hospitalization, the CDC says.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/don-t-kiss-or-snuggle-backyard-poultry-cdc-warns-salmonella-n1268083

Dear Chris,

I have big news to share with you.

I’m entering the race for Franklin County Commissioner to continue doing the work that I believe matters most — fighting on behalf of Ohio’s working families.

But I need your help. Can you add your name to show that I have the support of the people of Franklin County?

In my career, I’ve approached every crossroads with the same question: How can I give back to my community?

In answering that question now, I know that county-level leadership will help me build upon my focus for the last six years on City Council — advocating for families first. As County Commissioner, there is a unique opportunity to serve an even larger number of residents who deserve representation: families, children, and older adults.

From my first job teaching middle school, to leading the Ohio Women’s Public Policy Network, and to serving on Columbus City Council, it has always been clear to me what’s at stake when we don’t put families at the forefront of public policymaking: neighborhoods burdened by addiction, a growing childcare crisis that stacks the deck against working parents and children not born into privilege, a looming elder care crisis that forces families to make impossible choices to care for loved ones, and far too many women and families — especially Black women and families — facing eviction.

I’ve also seen what’s possible when we do put working families at the forefront of policymaking:

The emergency financial assistance I passed through Columbus City Council to help families recover from COVID-19
Paid family leave that I passed for our city employees, which includes caregiver leave to care for a sick or aging loved one
Our scholarship program to train early childhood educators
The incentive I added to Columbus City Code to encourage the hiring of restored citizens
Our groundbreaking Columbus Families Together Fund to represent families who face deportation
My ordinance to demilitarize the Columbus Division of Police, because I believe we can all agree that the presence of peace officers in our neighborhoods should never look and feel to residents as if we are at war
The bottom line: what drives every minute of my work to this day is that we can only build strong, resilient communities if we first build strong, resilient families.

That’s why, when this opportunity arose just days ago, I knew I had to enter the race for Franklin County Commissioner.

Crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen has ambitions to deploy private security workers to the scene of disturbances at the request of app users, according to leaked internal Citizen documents and Citizen sources.

The plans mark a dramatic expansion of Citizen's purview. It is currently an app where users report "incidents" in their neighborhoods and, based on those reports and police scanner transcriptions, the app sends "real-time safety alerts" to users about crime and other incidents happening near where a user is located. It is essentially a mapping app that allows users to both report and learn about crime (or what users of the app perceive to be crime) in their neighborhood. The introduction of in-person, private security forces drastically alters the service, and potential impact, that Citizen may offer in the future, and provides more context as to why a Citizen-branded vehicle has been spotted driving around Los Angeles. The news comes after Citizen offered a $30,000 bounty against a person it falsely accused of starting a wildfire.

"The broad master plan was to create a privatized secondary emergency response network," one former Citizen employee told Motherboard. Motherboard granted multiple sources anonymity to protect them from retaliation from the company.

"It's been something discussed for a while but I personally never expected it to make it this far," another Citizen source told Motherboard.[/fiv]

Read more: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7evbx/citizen-app-private-security-leaked-emails

Tomorrow, a 65-foot, steel-hulled ship will sail into Brooklyn with a cargo hold packed full of goods direct from the Hudson Valley. The Schooner Apollonia––designed in 1946 by a naval architect, and named after the Greek god Apollo (patron and protector of sailors)––is the only sailing merchant vessel on the Hudson River in the last century. But hopefully it won’t be the last, as its captain, Sam Merrett, is set on re-establishing water-based, emission-free shipping throughout the region.

For local producers who pride themselves on sustainability, sail freight offers a carbon-friendly mode of delivering their goods, and the Hudson River was once the superhighway of this area, with 1,200 working ships moving goods up and down it. “It’s important to me that people start realizing the impacts of transportation, and it’s not just how you get from point A to B, but how your stuff gets from point A to B,” says Merrett, who previously had a business converting diesel engines to run on alternative fuel. He’s also the co-founder of the Hudson Sloop Club, dedicated to reconnecting the community with the Hudson River. “We’re not saying the Apollonia will solve all problems––but green energy is not about just one thing.”

Restoring the schooner to seafaring condition took five years—it was on “the hard” in Boston for close to three decades prior. Last summer saw her inaugural voyage, followed by a handful of shipments between Hudson River towns, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, limited by (what else?) the pandemic. Over winter, Merrett got busy connecting family farms, breweries, distilleries and makers, building a network of trade routes to ship not just finished products, but also crops like malt and grain. Once word got out, like-minded clients stepped forward.

“There’s a real hunger in people to move from saying, in principle, they’re a huge supporter of sustainability and finding better ways to move goods to actually taking a tangible small step, and then seeing a result,” says Brad Vogel, another member of Apollonia’s team. “Even if it’s just one small subset of goods that’s been taken off the road, that’s a start.”

The Apollonia is not an experiment in climate-friendly trade solutions; it’s a for-profit business. Merrett was first inspired by the Vermont Sail Freight Project, which sailed down the Hudson River in 2013 and 2014, loaded with fresh Vermont farm goods, demonstrating the potential for river cargo. These efforts tie in with the growing international sail freight movement, committed to developing carbon neutral shipping. When the Dutch Fairtransport first launched in 2007, their brigantine was the only engineless cargo ship on the seas; now there are dozens of ventures sailing goods around the globe, with bigger ships currently in development, like the Ceiba in Costa Rica, which will have the capacity to stow 250 tonnes.

U.S. House candidate Anthony Bouchard had a relationship with and impregnated a 14-year-old girl when he was 18, he told the Star-Tribune late Thursday, hours after he disclosed the relationship in a Facebook Live video to his supporters.

Bouchard, who did not specify the girl's age in the video, said he went public with the information to get ahead of the story after learning that people were investigating it in opposition to his candidacy. A Wyoming state senator since 2017, Bouchard has risen in prominence since announcing he would challenge Rep. Liz Cheney following her vote to impeach then-President Donald Trump.

"So, bottom line, it's a story when I was young, two teenagers, girl gets pregnant," he said in the Facebook Live video. "You've heard those stories before. She was a little younger than me, so it's like the Romeo and Juliet story."

Bouchard told the Star-Tribune he married the girl when she was 15 and he was 19. At the time, they were both living in Florida.

As he did in his presidential candidacy, which had support from a broad spectrum of disaffected voters, Mr. Yang has been able to widen his appeal in New York, attracting a significant following from influential ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders.

There are at least 500,000 Orthodox Jews in the New York area, by some estimates, and the endorsement of ultra-Orthodox leaders is highly coveted because the community is seen as a formidable voting bloc, especially in a race that has so far not energized the electorate.

The key for Mr. Yang was his early declaration that he intended to take a laissez-faire attitude toward Hasidic yeshivas, the private schools to which almost all ultra-Orthodox families send their sons, as well as toward the schools where they educate their daughters.

The yeshiva system has faced intense criticism over the failure of some schools to provide a basic secular education. Some also operated secretly during the pandemic, in violation of public health rules.

Former President Trump slapped the “wayward” House Republicans who voted in support of a commission that will investigate the Capitol insurrection on January 6.

Said Trump: “See, 35 wayward Republicans—they just can’t help themselves. We have much better policy and are much better for the Country, but the Democrats stick together, the Republicans don’t.”

He added: “They don’t have the Romney’s, Little Ben Sasse’s, and Cheney’s of the world. Unfortunately, we do. Sometimes there are consequences to being ineffective and weak. The voters understand!”

Kirsten Gillibrand surveyed the whiteboard that leans against her office wall, ticking through the list of senators she hopes to win over for her landmark plan to wrest control of military sexual assault investigations from commanders.

“Sullivan, I’ve been working nonstop. I think he’s going to vote yes. And if he does vote yes, he might even co-sponsor,” Gillibrand said, updating her latest whip count with a marker. “We might get Rubio. I’ve been working him for eight straight years.”

In national politics, her name is often associated with the ouster of former Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), though Gillibrand was only the first — by minutes — of dozens of senators who pushed him to go amid multiple misconduct allegations. Then her presidential campaign sputtered after just five months.

But the New York Democrat is now on the cusp of a breakout year that has the potential to rewrite her legacy, putting 2020 and Franken well behind her.