Reeling from losses to land and livestock, many farmers are holding out for help. If it doesn’t come soon, spring may yield a bitter harvest.

Promised lands: Western NC farmers wait for Helene aid to come. And wait. is a story from Carolina Public Press, an award-winning independent newsroom. Our breakthrough journalism shines a light on the critical overlooked and under-reported issues facing North Carolina’s 10.4 million residents. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

On his final day in office, President Joe Biden commuted Leonard Peltier, an 80-year-old Turtle Mountain Chippewa man convicted of killing two FBI agents. Many Indigenous communities around the state and nation are celebrating the decision.

Wyoming has for decades incarcerated juvenile offenders at the highest rates in the nation. 

The state’s multi-year efforts to reduce those numbers have been hampered, in part, by an unclear picture of why kids enter the justice system and whether incarceration seems to help. A bill to strengthen data and information sharing about state-supervised youth, including those in the juvenile justice system, died without debate in the House Judiciary Committee last week. 

The five no votes came from freshman lawmakers aligned with the Wyoming Freedom Caucus. Rep. Lloyd Larsen, R-Lander, a 12-year veteran of the House, led the effort to craft the measure. He took the bill’s failure as evidence more could have been done to communicate the backstory behind the need for more data.

“We didn’t just come up with this on a Saturday night while we were eating popcorn,” Larsen said of the Joint Judiciary Interim Committee-sponsored legislation. “We’ve gone through two interims of looking at this.” 

Why it matters 

While many of Wyoming’s neighboring states have decreased their use of juvenile incarceration, the Equality State once again posted the highest rate in the nation, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2021, Wyoming courts removed adjudicated delinquents — juvenile justice-specific terminology for young people convicted of crimes — from their homes and placed them in public and private facilities at over three times the national average. The majority of the offenses were non-violent, and 13% were technical violations — in other words, kids failing to comply with the terms of their probation, be it missing a drug test or poor academic performance. 

Research has found juvenile incarceration does not significantly deter delinquent behavior or improve public safety while leading to poor outcomes for young people — from lower academic performance to higher suicide rates. Instead, studies show that community-based programs, which address the root causes of delinquent behavior while keeping kids close to home, lead to better outcomes and do so with a smaller price tag for the state. 

Five years after South Dakota implemented juvenile justice reform — investing $6.1 million in expanded community-based programs in 2015 — the state cut the number of incarcerated youth in half and reduced its juvenile corrections budget.

The fiscal implications of Wyoming’s high juvenile incarceration rate have not been lost on lawmakers here. In 2021, the Joint Judiciary Committee agreed to study Wyoming’s juvenile justice system during the legislative off-season, acknowledging that “youth confinement is one of the largest expenditures for the Department of Family Services.” 

House Bill 48, “Department of family services-confidentiality amendments,” which died in the House Judiciary Committee last week, was seen as an important step in a multi-year effort to understand what’s driving Wyoming’s heavy, and expensive, reliance on juvenile incarceration. 

How we got here

Back in 2021, when the Joint Judiciary Committee set out to study juvenile justice, the panel’s members quickly realized the first problem they would need to tackle was a lack of consistent data.

That’s in part because Wyoming doesn’t have a statewide juvenile justice system. Instead of sending all juvenile cases to juvenile court, county attorneys have discretion — a policy known as single point of entry — and each county takes a different approach. Some will funnel juvenile cases to municipal and circuit courts, some rely on juvenile courts and others routinely use all three. There are also counties with diversion programs designed to keep juvenile offenders out of court altogether and others that rely heavily on juvenile probation programs. 

But no matter what a county decides to do, once a court orders a young person into custody, the state pays the bill. And for decades the state had no way of assessing what was happening at the county level to drive up, or drive down, juvenile incarceration rates, or whether money spent to confine kids was having the desired effect. 

Wyoming didn’t know high school graduation rates or recidivism rates for juvenile offenders, or how often they reoffend as adults. 

Acknowledging it’s hard to manage what you can’t measure, the Wyoming Legislature passed a Joint Judiciary Committee-sponsored bill in 2022 mandating the Department of Family Services set up the Juvenile Justice Information System. 

While DFS oversees out-of-home placements and juvenile incarceration, the agency quickly realized that pre-existing privacy laws would make it hard to fulfill the Legislature’s mandate for a comprehensive system tracking how kids enter the system or what happens after. That’s because DFS, the Wyoming Department of Health, the Wyoming Department of Education, the Wyoming Department of Corrections and the court system, which all hold pieces of the puzzle, are limited in what information they can exchange.

Solving that problem was a top priority of the Legislature’s Mental Health and Vulnerable Adult Task Force, which convened over the last two years. House Bill 48 was the fruit of that labor. 

Larsen, the Lander representative who co-chaired the task force, said enhanced data sharing is about helping state agencies better serve constituents and operate more effectively and cost-efficiently. 

“I think data really helps us identify what programs are needed and what programs aren’t,” Larsen told WyoFile.

Balancing the state’s desire to evaluate programs with privacy and confidentiality was a focus of the task force, Larsen said, given the vulnerability of the families DFS serves. 

“We should always be nervous about privacy,” Larsen said, which is why so much time went into “House Bill 48 which really addresses a very delicate, sensitive issue.”  

Those concerns were also on DFS Director Korin Schmidt’s mind when she testified to the House Judiciary Committee about the need for HB 48. 

“We take seriously the confidentiality of the information that we gather,” Schmidt said. “However, the confidentiality statutes, in large part … were created in the ‘70s, and they didn’t contemplate a time where maybe we could help these families a little bit earlier, a little bit more effectively, while also being good stewards of the dollar, while also ensuring efficiencies across our systems, both internally and externally.”  

State agencies are simply unable to answer many fundamental questions about juvenile justice, Schmidt told the committee. 

“We have frequently been asked the question: How many kids that you serve in your juvenile justice system go into the Department of Corrections system? We can’t answer that question,” Schmidt said. “And one of the reasons we can’t answer that question is because of our confidentiality statutes.”

House Bill 48 would give the DFS director authority to initiate changes in how data is shared between state agencies through a rules-changing process requiring public and legislative input. 

That ensures “the general public also knows what it is that we are doing in a very transparent way,” Schmidt said.  

Those guardrails did not persuade the majority of the House Judiciary Committee — the bill died on a 5-4 vote. Reps. Laurie Bratten from Sheridan and Marlene Brady from Rock Springs, briefly mentioned privacy concerns before casting no votes, along with Republican Reps. Tom Kelly from Sheridan, Jayme Lien from Casper and Joe Webb from Lyman.

What now? 

Juvenile justice data sharing was just one piece of HB 48. The bill would also have enhanced DFS’ ability to evaluate its other programs — helping abuse and neglect victims, for example — and opened up opportunities for cross-agency referrals between DFS case workers, public health nurses and mental health providers. 

While HB 48 died in committee, Larsen said, that doesn’t mean solutions are off the table this session. He suggested individual lawmakers may bring their own versions of the bill. 

Lawmakers have until Jan. 29 to introduce bills in the Senate and Feb. 3 in the House. 

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Learn more: Listen to Juvenile (in)justice from Reveal.

The post Wyoming locks up kids at the highest rates in the nation. Bill to help understand why died without debate. appeared first on WyoFile .

RENOVO — Tracy Bruno had just ordered breakfast at Socky’s Restaurant when she suddenly felt dizzy.

The next thing she knew, her husband Gene Bruno, the mayor of Renovo Borough, was calling 911. But rather than wait for first responders, the couple decided to drive five minutes to Bucktail Medical Center, rural Clinton County’s only inpatient hospital.

Bruno, who had felt sick all weekend and planned to see a doctor on Monday, was treated for hypoglycemia. Without Bucktail Medical Center, her options for care would’ve been 35 minutes away in Lock Haven at an outpatient center or an hour away in a Lycoming County hospital.

WASHINGTON — Shortly before leaving office, President Joe Biden commuted Leonard Peltier’s life sentence to indefinite house arrest following decades of community activists fighting for his release. “It’s finally over — I’m going home,” Peltier said in a press release from NDN Collective. “I want to show the world I’m a good person with a […]

The post Departing Biden commutes Leonard Peltier sentence appeared first on NonDoc.

News by Derek Firenze

Flyers and zines proliferate around Jefferson County with a warning of “Dollar Store Danger.” Quimper Resiliency Network (QRN), an activist organization publishing the materials, was founded in response to construction on the future Dollar Tree located in Port Hadlock. 

Construction on the Dollar Tree is slated to be completed sometime in the middle of February, according to Josh Gass, the general contractor working on the project.

“That is not the solution for what any community really needs,” Hannah Welch, one of QRN’s founding members, said. “There was a dollar store in town when I was a kid and it didn’t last, so I’m hopeful maybe this one won’t last. But in the current state, it doesn’t feel like enough just to have hope.”

The zine published by QRN takes aim at various issues surrounding dollar stores including lead poisoning, resource extraction, low wages, and more. Much of its facts and statistics come from a report from 2022 by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) entitled “The Dollar Store Invasion”.

“These stores aren’t merely a byproduct of economic distress; they are a cause of it,” the report argues. “Dollar stores drive grocery stores and other retailers out of business, leave more people without access to fresh food, extract wealth from local economies, sow crime and violence, and further erode the prospects of the communities they target.”

One of the core arguments against dollar stores is the extraction of resources from local communities. 

“A dollar store contributes only half to a third of the economic contributions of a local business,” QRN writes. They cite how studies consistently show that for every dollar spent at a local business, 45 to 60 cents remains in the community, while chain stores contribute only 14 to 30 cents.

“Dollar stores have made their name by offering cheap food, and that’s what they do: provide low-quality goods at the expense of our community,” QRN writes in their zine. They also point to illegal levels of lead and cadmium in children’s products found in 2018, 2019, and 2021.

While the myriad of other economic factors involved are complex and take up the bulk of the 30-page ILSR report, issues like lead poisoning are much less difficult to parse. Scroll to the bottom of Dollar Tree’s website and you’ll find a page listing recent recalls which includes a 2023 recall of an apple cinnamon puree targeted towards infants and young children. This toxic product was recalled after four children were found with elevated blood lead levels, indicating potential acute lead toxicity. The only physical storefront where the contaminated product could be found was Dollar Tree, though it was also sold through Amazon and other online discount sites.

Still, everyone agrees on the desperate demand for more local affordable goods.

“There is a specific need in this place to have access to affordable products,” Welch said. “Letting these corporate powers that have no accountability to the community be the ones to provide that is not the way to move forward.” 

Instead, QRN wants to encourage more creative solutions like a pop-up free store and an online community resource inventory to educate people on the abundance that’s already available locally.

“This place that I love and care about so deeply is on the precipice of change, and it’s either going to become a little more radical and start creating systems that are of the people, for the people, or it’s going to be subsumed into these structures that are failing,” Welch said.

The Quimper Peninsula has a long history of creative solutions outside of traditional capitalist enterprises. For years, the North Olympic Exchange, a chapter of Bellingham-based Fourth Corner Exchange, has offered a barter and trade system utilizing the concept of “life dollars.” Life dollars can be thought of as a kind of “community currency,” a facilitated barter system that serves to complement the federal monetary system. The goal of the exchange is to connect unused resources with unmet needs, helping to build a stronger and more sustainable community.

The Jefferson Community Foundation’s Nonprofit Directory is another kind of online resource inventory that provides a comprehensive list of the nonprofit organizations in Jefferson County.

If you’d like to voice your own concerns about the incoming Dollar Tree, QRN has created a survey to hear from the community. You can also contact them through QuimperResiliencyNetwork@gmail.com.

For more information on the North Olympic Exchange, email Gary@fourthcornerexchange.org for a personal orientation session.

Hours after Trump’s inauguration, his administration canceled appointments allowing migrants to enter the U.S. to request asylum, leaving many of them stranded on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Este programa buscaba gestionar la migración de manera ordenada y abordar las necesidades humanitarias en respuesta a las crisis en los países beneficiados.

La entrada Trump elimina el Parole para migrantes venezolanos, cubanos, haitianos y nicaragüenses se publicó primero en Enlace Latino NC.

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Trump elimina el Parole para migrantes venezolanos, cubanos, haitianos y nicaragüenses was first posted on enero 21, 2025 at 7:37 pm.
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(RNS) — In his second inauguration address on Monday (Jan. 20), President Donald Trump repeated his customary campaign speech promises to improve the United States’ credibility around the world, but after one such vow the president surprised some by announcing America’s resurgence would entail new names for some familiar geographical features.

“A short time from now we are going to be changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” Trump said, “and we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs.” A few hours later he signed an executive order doing just that.

Alaska Native leaders, as well as state politicians, object that the order undoes years of work with the federal government to establish Denali as the rightful name.

“Located on the traditional homelands of the Dene peoples, it reflects a profound spiritual and cultural relationship with the land,” said Emily Edenshaw, president and CEO of the Alaska Native Heritage Center. “Keeping this name honors that connection and recognizes the enduring contributions of Alaska Native peoples.”

In a statement on X, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski wrote, “I strongly disagree with the President’s decision on Denali. Our nation’s tallest mountain, which has been called Denali for thousands of years, must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial.” 

Denali, which means “the High One” in Koyukon Athabascan, is indeed the traditional name for the 20,310-foot peak in Denali National Park and Preserve, covered by snow and glaciers year-round and visible from hundreds of miles away. But the park has only been known officially as Denali since 1980, according to a National Park Service website. Despite the advocacy of the park’s first superintendent, Harry Karstens, for “Denali,” as early as 1913, it had been popularly known as Mount McKinley since at least 1901, after President William McKinley was assassinated, and the area became Mount McKinley National Park on Feb. 26, 1917. 

In the 1970s, the Tanana Chiefs Conference, a consortium of Athabascan tribes in interior Alaska, started working to change the name of the mountain but was blocked by the congressional delegation with McKinley’s home state of Ohio. In 2015, President Barack Obama’s secretary of the interior, Sally Jewell, changed the mountain’s name to Denali just in time for its namesake park to celebrate 100 years. 

Murkowski was part of that fight, she said in a statement on her website on Monday. “For years, I advocated in Congress to restore the rightful name for this majestic mountain to respect Alaska’s first people who have lived on these lands for thousands of years.” She added, “This is an issue that should not be relitigated.”

The Tanana Chiefs Conference did not respond to requests for comment on Trump’s executive order. Other Alaska Native groups say it’s too early to know how they’ll respond.

Trump’s wish to see it renamed for McKinley, the 25th president, a Republican who was assassinated early in his second term, appears to be motivated by Trump’s plans to broaden tariffs on imports. Monday’s executive order celebrates McKinley as a champion of “tariffs to protect U.S. manufacturing, boost domestic production, and drive the U.S. industrialization and global reach to new heights.” 

But Edenshaw argued that Indigenous values should take precedence. “These names carry the wisdom, identity and stories of the original stewards of this land. Restoring and honoring them acknowledges the deep, millennia-old connections that Indigenous peoples maintain with these lands and is a step toward respect and reconciliation,” she said.

Edenshaw’s organization advocates for Indigenous place names for a variety of reasons. “As we move forward in times of change, we hope to foster collaboration rooted in shared values of respect and understanding,” she said. “Together, we can celebrate the resilience of our shared heritage while building a foundation for reconciliation and unity across our great state and nation.”

Former university leaders are raising concern about the lack of women in top leadership positions at North Dakota’s 11 public higher education institutions. Currently only one has a woman president or CEO. 

This comes at a time when the State Board of Higher Education is beginning the process of filling president vacancies at campuses in Bismarck, Dickinson and Devils Lake. In addition, North Dakota University System Chancellor Mark Hagerott will leave his position toward the end of the year. 

Those raising the profile of the issue point out that nationally and within the state, women account for between 50-60% of enrollment and graduation rates in higher education. 

They believe leadership at those institutions should better reflect those figures. 

“The SBHE’s record for hiring women in CEO positions for the last 25 years shows a pattern and practice of discrimination on the basis of gender,” said Ellen Chaffee, who served 15 years as president at Valley City State University (1993-2008) and nine of those concurrently as president of Mayville State University through 2001. 

Chaffee notes that five institutions had female presidents during the 1990s. That dropped to zero after 2008, until Valley City had two between 2014-2018, and Dakota College at Bottineau hired a woman leader in 2020. 

Nationally, rates of women in president or CEO positions at colleges and universities rose by 10% from 2006 to 2022 and currently women comprise around 33% of those top leadership spots across the country. 

“When it comes right down to it, in my opinion, there needs to be a concerted effort to hire more diversity,” said Debora Dragseth, Baker Boy Professor of Leadership at Dickinson State University who served as vice-president there from 2020-2022. 

“It’s the right thing to do,” Dragseth said. “It’s ethical. But also the fact that the majority of college students are female. Who’s representing them? Who’s walked in their shoes?” 

Dragseth calculated that women have served as the top leaders at higher education institutions throughout the state just under 6% of the time over the course of their history. 

Five of North Dakota’s higher education institutions have never had a formal woman leader, including the University of North Dakota, Minot State University, Dickinson State University, Williston State College, and North Dakota State University (NDSU). NDSU did have an interim woman president for a brief period in 1969. 

With Bismarck State College, Dickinson State University and Lake Region State College all in the process of searching for presidents, SBHE chair Tim Mihalick said there’s an opportunity to add female leaders at one or more of those schools. 

“From my perspective, and I think of the board in general, I agree, we need more female representation,” Mihalick said. “When we get the qualifications that match the institution’s needs, I would absolutely see us hiring a female leader.”

A big aspect of finding the best candidates is being intentional during the search process, said Kim Lee, director of community strategy and engagement at the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C. 

ACE has been active for two decades in promoting an initiative to try to reach parity in hiring top leadership in higher ed called Moving the Needle: Advancing Women in Higher Education Leadership. 

“We still have more work to do if we want to look at gender parity,” Lee said. 

She said it would be beneficial for search committees to tap into leadership development programs ACE has developed, and to consider using search firms that strongly consider diversity in their processes. 

The process of filling a vacancy starts with the chancellor appointing a search committee. A presidential search typically takes 4 to 6 months, according to NDUS staff, with the SBHE providing direction on the use of a search consultant. 

Procedural rules require the committee to submit at least three candidates for consideration by the SBHE. 

“It’s probably not out of the reach of the discussion around this to ask the search firms to look for strong female candidates,” Mihalick said. 

Chaffee said that the best pools of candidates include the best men and best women and are diverse in other key dimensions as well.

“You can’t be sure you’re selecting the best if you discount or fail to attract women applicants,” Chaffee said. 

She also believes the SBHE and the chancellor’s cabinet at the NDUS both need more female representation, and that this could attract more qualified female candidates to president positions. The SBHE currently has just one female voting member. 

On Jan. 14, State School Superintendent Kirsten Baesler announced six finalists – five men and one woman – for two open seats for the SBHE. Those names have now been forwarded to Gov. Kelly Armstrong for his first SBHE appointments of his new governorship, with terms beginning July 1.

“College students need to see and interact with diverse people as part of preparing for success after graduation,” Chaffee said. “If the SBHE does not seek, recruit and hire women, there is virtually no chance they will have strong women applicants and have the best possible new presidents.” 

Carmen Simone, campus dean and Dakota College at Bottineau, said that while she appreciates the sentiment regarding the need to hire more women leaders, her own experience has been “extremely positive” and she is “grateful for the support we receive as leaders.” 

Of the SBHE, she said: “I have full confidence that they will carefully consider the qualifications of each candidate and ultimately, they will choose the leaders who they believe will best serve our respective institutions.”

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