Hasta La Gadget!

Prosecutors charged a Florida police officer on Wednesday in the shooting last July of an unarmed black man who was seen on cellphone video lying in a street with his hands in the air at the time he was shot in the leg.

North Miami Police Department officer Jonathan Aledda was charged with attempted manslaughter, a felony, and culpable negligence, a misdemeanor, according to the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office.

The shooting of behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey, who was with and caring for a severely autistic man when he was shot, was one in a series of police shootings of black men across the United States to raise questions about police use of force and civil rights.

Aledda defended his actions last July, saying “I did what I had to do in a split second.” The Miami-Dade Police Benevolent Association, which is representing Aledda, was not immediately available for comment.

The officer was responding to reports of a man with a gun and apparently was aiming at the autisic man when he shot Kinsey, according to an affidavit supporting the arrest warrant filed with the state court for Miami-Dade County.

Kinsey had followed police commands and was lying on the ground at the time he was shot. He had been trying to get the autistic man back to a nearby group home from which he had wandered. Hilton Napoleon, a lawyer for Kinsey, was not immediately available for comment.

Initial calls to 911 emergency dispatchers reported a man, possibly suicidal, with a gun in his hand, which led to the arrival of 16 police officers, including Aledda. What a caller thought was a gun turned out to be a toy tanker truck held by the autistic man, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit said the autistic man, who is now 27 and has an IQ of 40, needed around-the-clock supervision.

In a video widely shared on social media, Kinsey can be heard yelling, “All he has is a toy truck in his hands.”

The affidavit said Aledda fired three shots using his personally owned Colt M4 Carbine rifle from about 150 feet (45 meters) where Kinsey lay.

“No other officer on the scene observed (the autistic man) exhibit any behavior that compelled them to shoot,” the affidavit says.

(Reporting by Bernie Woodall; Editing by Daniel Trotta and Andrew Hay)

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In South Sudan, people are sheltering from conflict wherever they can, including a network of islands in the swamps of Unity State. On one island, where 2,300 displaced people live without access to clean water or toilets, cholera has become rife.

GANYIEL, SOUTH SUDAN – Kneeling over a pot of water drawn from the nearby swamp, Veronica feigns a smile as her eyes dart toward the floor of her small hut. “I know it’s dirty but I have no other choice,” says the 35-year-old South Sudanese mother of four.

A few years earlier, Veronica lost her 3-year-old daughter to cholera. Several months ago, another of her children contracted the disease and Veronica herself spent 10 days in hospital receiving treatment. On South Sudan’s tiny island of Tayar, in Unity State, there’s no escaping this debilitating epidemic.

Once a commercial trading island with only 200 inhabitants, Tayar is now home to 2,300 internally displaced people who have sought refuge from South Sudan’s three-year civil war. They live with no toilets or running water, openly defecating in the island’s surrounding swamplands. This same filthy water is then used for cooking, bathing and drinking. Thus, cholera has become rife in this makeshift community.

The deadly waterborne disease, which causes crippling diarrhea and kills through dehydration, is flourishing amid the young nation’s war.

Every time fighting erupts in villages, people flee their homes seeking safety wherever they can, often in isolated pockets of safety where they have few resources and little access to aid. The war has displaced 1.9million people inside the country, while 1.6 million have fled its borders.

Many, like Veronica travel for days through swamps, with no food or water until they find sanctuary. Roughly 5,800 people reside on seven remote islands in Panyijiar county, including Tayar.

These shifting populations mean that a growing number of people are crammed into small, unsanitary spaces, spawning a cholera outbreak that is unprecedented for this time of year.

“It would be the worst problem if this doesn’t get under control before the rainy season,” says Stephen Gatliah, health director for Panyijiar county. Gatliah has seen cholera in this area before, but he says it has never been this bad in the dry season, which usually runs from December to May. After that, the onset of months of heavy rains will make tackling the epidemic even more challenging, as flooding increases the risk of contamination and further restricts humanitarian access.

A U.N. study found that more than 4,000 cholera cases were reported between June 2016 and January 2017 in 10 counties in South Sudan, of which 83 were fatal, although the true figures are likely much higher due to unreported deaths. The disease has spread to more locations and lasted longer than the previous two years. On Tayar Island 10 people have died from the disease since October and 37 have died in surrounding areas, according to community leaders.

A Breeding Ground for Cholera

Since the latest bout of conflict broke out last July, 800 people have shown up on Tayar’s muddy shores, a two- to three-hour journey by canoe from the mainland.

The population has swelled so much that those who came before July now call themselves the “host community,” even though they themselves were displaced. They live in tents and sleep on dirt floors, eating water lilies or fish pulled from the nearby swamp. The conditions have created an ideal breeding ground for the cholera epidemic.

Most people sheltering on Tayar know little about the disease or the hygiene measures that could save their lives, says Oxfam’s Kiden Loice, who is working to eradicate the outbreak on the island and the surrounding region of Greater Ganyiel.

Oxfam was the first NGO to set foot on the island in 2017. Since the end of January, Loice has been doing what she can to get the situation under control. Not only was it difficult for her to reach Tayar, now she lacks the necessary supplies. Without water treatment pills, clean buckets and hygiene kits, she must make do by delivering information sessions to the communities about sanitation.

“It’s been weeks and we haven’t received our materials,” says Loice.

South Sudan’s war has made it extremely challenging for humanitarian groups to get staff and resources to places where people are in need. They must negotiate access with armed factions on the ground amid often-hazy chains of command. In recent weeks, there has been a series of deadly attacks on aid workers in the country.

They must also contend with South Sudan’s shoddy infrastructure. Many parts of the country are inaccessible by road, requiring planes or helicopters to reach them.

Stemming the Tide

The cholera outbreak is spreading from the islands onto the mainland and into Ganyiel, the closest town to Tayar island.

A tiny, dusty oasis, Ganyiel has for the most part managed to stay out of South Sudan’s civil war. It has become a haven in the region for thousands of people escaping the fighting.

In the past seven months, the town has begun to buckle under the influx. Since July, 23,000 people have joined the existing 99,000 inhabitants, according to local officials. Community leaders worry that pressure on the town’s meager infrastructure will perpetuate the cholera outbreak.

In the central part of the town, 15,000 residents rely on four boreholes, or wells, to access clean water. There is often not enough water to go around and jerry cans sit empty by the pumps. Women can spend three to four hours waiting in line to draw water. Many get fed up and instead fill their buckets from the cholera-infected swamps in order to cook for their families.

“Too many people are dying,” said a local administrator for Greater Ganyiel who gave his name as John.

Oxfam is planning two more boreholes in Ganyiel as well as a pit latrine toilet on Tayar island so people don’t have to defecate in the water. Their hope is that once their supplies come through they’ll be able to provide sanitation and clean water to 3,000 households before the rains set in.

All of this, however, depends on how quickly their materials arrive and if they’re able to keep up with the constant flow of displaced people .

In the meantime, Veronica and her children have started boiling the swamp water on Tayar island, doing what little they can in order to keep the disease at bay.

For the remaining few months of the dry season, eradicating the outbreak will be a race against time.

The reporter’s transportation to cover this story was funded by Oxfam.

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Times sure have changed since 1953, the year that Peeps were first “hatched.”

Back then, it took 27 hours for each Peep to be molded, decorated and set in its final form.

These days, the technology has improved so much that a single Peep only needs six minutes to “hatch.”

In fact, Just Born, the candy company behind the venerable Easter favorites, knocks out 509 Peeps every eight seconds at its factory in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania ― about 2 billion a year.

Although the candy is associated with the spring, Peeps have branched out into other holidays like Christmas and Halloween in recent years.

The video above is a sweet depiction of how Peeps are “hatched.” But they’re not just for eating, as the gallery of Peep sculptures below demonstrates.  

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WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump signed a resolution on Thursday that will allow states to withhold Title X family planning funds from Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. 

The resolution overturns a Health and Human Services rule enacted by the Obama administration last year that prevents states from defunding Planned Parenthood or other health providers for any reason other than the provider’s lack of “ability to deliver services to program beneficiaries in an effective manner.”

Now, states can withhold federal family planning grants from providers because they offer abortion, even though the longstanding Hyde Amendment prevents any federal money from being used to pay for abortion.

The Senate narrowly passed the resolution at the end of March after Vice President Mike Pence was summoned to break a tie vote. Two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), broke with their party and opposed the measure. 

“If you’re serious about trying to reduce the number of abortions,” Collins said after the vote, “the best way to do that is to make family planning more widely available.”

The Title X federal family planning program, established by President Richard Nixon in 1970, subsidizes contraception, Pap smears and other preventative health care services for 4 million low-income Americans, roughly half of whom are uninsured. Planned Parenthood uses the $70 million it receives in Title X grants a year to serve 1.5 million patients ― about one-third of the patients in the program.

No Title X money can be used for abortion ― women who seek the procedure at Planned Parenthood must pay out of pocket ― but most Republicans are still opposed to granting public dollars to the organization.

“Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize the abortion industry in this country,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.), the sponsors of the House and Senate resolutions, wrote in a joint op-ed for the Washington Examiner. “Nor should they be forced to foot the bill for an organization like Planned Parenthood that has displayed such blatant disregard for human life.”

Trump’s attitude toward Planned Parenthood is a bit more complicated. His daughter, Ivanka, reportedly supports the organization, and he expressed conflicting views about it during his presidential campaign. “I would defund it because I’m pro-life,” Trump said during a CNN debate in February 2016, “but millions of women are helped by Planned Parenthood.” 

More recently, the president offered Planned Parenthood a deal: The organization could keep the $550 million a year it receives in federal funding if it stops doing abortions. The nation’s largest family planning provider, of course, declined the offer. “We would never abandon the women who count on us in exchange for cash,” Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, told The New York Times in an interview.

While Republicans in Congress did not manage to pass the health care bill that would have fully defunded Planned Parenthood, overturning the Title X rule will dent the provider’s ability to serve patients living below the poverty line. The move is not likely to sit well with voters, 3 in 4 of whom support public funding to Planned Parenthood. 

“There’s a reason they could barely get enough votes to get this bill through a procedural step,” said Dawn Laguens, executive vice president at Planned Parenthood. “People are sick and tired of politicians making it even harder for them to access health care, and they will not stand for it.” 

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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