Teacher deaths raise alarms as new school year begins
O’FALLON, Mo. — Teachers in at least three states have died after bouts with the coronavirus since the dawn of the new school year, and a teachers’ union leader worries that the return to in-person classes will have a deadly impact across the U.S. if proper precautions aren’t taken.
AshLee DeMarinis was just 34 when she died Sunday after three weeks in the hospital. She taught social skills and special education at John Evans Middle School in Potosi, Missouri, about 70 miles (115 kilometers) southwest of St. Louis.
A third-grade teacher died Monday in South Carolina, and two other educators died recently in Mississippi. It’s unclear how many teachers in the U.S. have become ill with COVID-19 since the new school year began, but Mississippi alone has reported 604 cases among school teachers and staff.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said schools need guidelines such as mandatory face coverings and strict social distancing rules to reopen safely.
“If community spread is too high as it is in Missouri and Mississippi, if you don’t have the infrastructure of testing, and if you don’t have the safeguards that prevent the spread of viruses in the school, we believe that you cannot reopen in person,” Weingarten said.
Official claims pressure to alter Homeland Security intel
WASHINGTON — A Department of Homeland Security official said in a whistleblower complaint released Wednesday that he was pressured by more senior officials to suppress facts in intelligence reports that President Donald Trump might find objectionable, including information about Russian interference in the election and the rising threat posed by white supremacists.
The official, Brian Murphy, alleged that senior DHS officials also pressed him to alter reports so they would reflect administration policy goals and that he was demoted for refusing to go along with the changes and for filing confidential internal complaints about the conduct.
Murphy, a former FBI agent and Marine Corps veteran, was demoted in August from his post as principal deputy under secretary in the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. He is seeking to be reinstated in a complaint filed with the DHS Office of Inspector General.
Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, released the complaint, which he said contained “grave and disturbing” allegations. He said Murphy has been asked to give a deposition to Congress as part of an investigation into intelligence collection by DHS related to its response to protests in Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere.
“We will get to the bottom of this, expose any and all misconduct or corruption to the American people, and put a stop to the politicization of intelligence,” the California Democrat said.
‘Unprecedented’ Pacific Northwest fires burn 100s of homes
ESTACADA, Ore. — Windblown wildfires raging across the Pacific Northwest destroyed hundreds of homes in Oregon, the governor said Wednesday, warning: “This could be the greatest loss of human life and property due to wildfire in our state’s history.”
Firefighters struggled to contain and douse the blazes fanned by 50 mph (80 kph) wind gusts and officials in some western Oregon communities gave residents “go now” orders to evacuate, meaning they had minutes to flee their homes.
The destructive blazes were burning in a large swath of Washington state and Oregon that rarely experiences such intense fire activity because of the Pacific Northwest’s cool and wet climate.
The fires trapped firefighters and civilians behind fire lines in Oregon and leveled an entire small town in eastern Washington. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown warned that the devastation could be overwhelming from the fires that exploded Monday during a late-summer wind storm.
“Everyone must be on high alert,” Brown said. “The next several days are going to be extremely difficult.”
Boy’s shooting raises questions about police crisis training
SALT LAKE CITY — A police shooting that wounded a 13-year-old autistic boy in Salt Lake City is revealing shortfalls in the way officers respond to a mental health crisis, an advocacy group said Wednesday, a part of policing that’s facing renewed scrutiny during nationwide protests over brutality by law enforcement.
Similar questions are being raised in Rochester, New York, following the death of a Black man whose brother called police about his unusual behavior shortly after a mental health evaluation. It comes as demonstrators have urged cities to “defund the police” and shift money to social services instead.
In Utah, the boy survived with serious injuries. He appears to be white based on a photo posted online by his mother, Golda Barton, although police have not provided his race. Barton says she called 911 on Friday night because he was having a breakdown and she needed help from a crisis-intervention officer.
The Salt Lake City officers who came were not specialists in crisis intervention but had some mental health training, and they ended up shooting the boy as he ran away because they believed he made threats involving a weapon, authorities said. There was no indications he had a weapon.
An officer trained in crisis response would have handled the situation differently, focusing on deescalation and avoiding shouting or using sirens, which can be disorienting, said Sherri Wittwer, board president of CIT Utah, a nonprofit that provides crisis intervention training for law enforcement.
Justice Dept. push into Trump case could prompt dismissal
WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday defended the Justice Department’s move to intervene in a defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump, even as experts were deeply skeptical of the federal government’s effort to protect the president in a seemingly private dispute.
The Justice Department’s action is “a normal application of the law. The law is clear. It is done frequently,” Barr said at an unrelated news conference in Chicago.
He added, “The little tempest that is going on is largely because of the bizarre political environment in which we live.”
But experts said it’s far from clear that the conduct at issue — whether Trump defamed E. Jean Carroll, a writer who accused him of raping her at a New York luxury department store in the 1990s — has anything to do with his White House duties. The department’s move is likely to have an ancillary benefit for Trump in delaying the case, but administration lawyers have a tough task at hand trying to argue that the president was acting in his official capacity when he denied Carroll’s allegations last year, experts say.
“I wouldn’t make such an argument, and if a president approached me, I would say, ‘Don’t,’” said Stuart Gerson, who led the Justice Department’s Civil Division in President George H.W. Bush’s administration when Barr was attorney general for the first time.
