After being designated a dementia-friendly city—one of only two in Mississippi—Petal is now moving forward with new programs to support residents living with dementia.
The post Petal Becomes Second Dementia-Friendly City in Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Free Press.
Lea este artículo en español aquí.
After an attempted fraud that appeared to have cost nearly $700,000, San Benito County has recovered the funds courtesy of Wells Fargo Bank.
According to county Supervisor Kollin Kosmicki, the money was officially back in the county’s account by the morning of Nov. 12.
Kosmicki thanked Wells Fargo for helping recover the funds, noting that losing them would have significantly impacted the county’s already tight finances.
The recovery was the result of weeks of email exchanges and constant communication between Wells Fargo and the county, County Treasurer Melinda Casillas said.
The fraud was first reported on Oct. 16 after the County Administrative Office announced an investigation into a $696,602 payment approved by the Auditor-Controller’s Office. Casillas raised the alarm the day before when she was alerted to a suspicious transaction.
Officials said the payment request came from someone posing as a contractor in a phishing scam, designed to trick victims into revealing sensitive information. That same day, Auditor-Controller Joe Paul Gonzalez released a statement saying the funds had been recovered.
But at a special meeting on Oct. 21, Casillas told the Board of Supervisors that Wells Fargo had reversed the reimbursement because the account that received the funds had been closed. She and Gonzalez told BenitoLink they are unclear about the bank’s process for returning the funds.
What Casillas said they did know was that on the morning of Nov. 10 a pending transaction appeared in the county’s account for the amount that was fraudulently taken; the next day the funds were posted; and the following day the bank verified the payment and closed the claim.
“I’d like to know myself,” Gonzalez said. “But the bank has its own internal processes.”
He added that Wells Fargo had said the investigation could take up to 90 days, but resolved the issue in less than a month.
During the Oct. 21 meeting, the board wrote a letter to the California State Controller’s Office asking for assistance.
Following a $360,000 county library embezzlement case which led to the sentencing of two former library employees last summer, the county requested proposals for an external audit to review internal financial controls and recommend reforms. The results of that process are expected to be announced at the board’s Nov. 18 meeting.
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The Trump Administration’s warp-speed restructuring of the federal government, mass integration of government data and vast tracking of immigrants would likely not be possible without a key technological partner: Palantir. The software company provides the digital architecture powering what former employees describe as an authoritarian agenda. Yet the company’s staggering commercial sector growth — up by 121 percent over the past 12 months — has attracted far less scrutiny. America’s largest meat company, Tyson Foods, became an early commercial adopter of the software in 2020, establishing a blueprint for how large food corporations can leverage Palantir’s surveillance technology.
Palantir advertises its partnership with Tyson as a flagship example of how its software is “transforming food and beverage businesses for the AI era.” Tyson uses Palantir’s Foundry platform, which has been described by a former employee as a “super-charged filing cabinet” for its unique capacity to digest endless amounts of data. It’s easy to see how this data-mining technology could be incredibly useful in managing complex food supply chains with many variables — and indeed, Palantir claims that it saved Tyson $200 million over the course of two years.
Yet Tyson’s deployment of Palantir also showcases the limits of the technology in protecting a vulnerable workforce. The company used Palantir to forecast Covid-19 infections among its meatpacking workers, according to Scott Spradley, Tyson’s former Chief of Technology. This data was then used to prepare for supply chain disruptions as workers fell predictably sick, while Tyson extensively lobbied against mandated worker protections.
Tyson Foods did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
The U.S. food industry’s workforce is particularly vulnerable to surveillance technologies. An estimated 2.1 million immigrants work across the entire U.S. food supply chain, from farmworkers to food processing workers to grocery store workers — a workforce that has long been subject to heightened surveillance to further immigrant control and raids, which have significantly expanded under the Trump Administration. And this heightened risk of deportation makes food chain workers — fearful of speaking out because of their immigration status — more vulnerable to corporate abuse.
While there is no indication that Palantir is currently being used by food companies to monitor employees, food corporations have been investing in other AI technologies to this end and Palantir has facilitated the internal surveillance of employees in other industries.
For instance, Tyson and JBS, the world’s two largest meat companies, have invested in smart watches used to monitor workers’ movements. In a press release, a JBS spokesperson describes this technology as a “wearables and analytics platform” that will “provide us insight into how each employee responds to ergonomic and process changes by digitizing individual worker motion.” This raw data is fed to an AI algorithm, which converts it to metrics displayed on a dashboard for supervisors to monitor.
Palantir is not part of these smart watch projects, and it has repeatedly stated that it does not harvest any raw data. Instead, Palantir is able to quickly integrate existing data already stored by the company without making any changes to the underlying datasets. Yet as Tyson’s venture capitalist arm invests in smart watches and other forms of AI, it’s easy to see how the mass integration of data across varying data fields could lead to privacy concerns. Experts have warned about the compounding risks to privacy “that arise when huge datasets are merged and analyzed, which is the premise behind Palantir’s business model.”
Tyson first contracted with Palantir in 2020, as meatpacking plants emerged as the epicenter of the pandemic, to predict infections among its poultry plant workers down to nearly an exact figure. “In a very short amount of time we started working on figuring out how bad the spread is going to be, which plants are going to be affected, how quick are they going to be affected,” said Tyson’s Scott Spradley in a keynote speech at a Palantir-sponsored conference.
“I remember telling our CEO, “Hey, this plant in seven weeks is going to have 880 people infected and we’re going to shut that plant down,” said Spradley. “So that day hit. 883 people were infected because we were driving prediction with Palantir.”
Though Tyson had the technology to forecast infections, the company didn’t use this data to heighten protections among workers in advance of projected outbreaks at its meatpacking plants, at least none that were made public. Instead, this software was largely used to protect Tyson, ensuring that infections among workers didn’t disrupt the company’s intricate supply chain. By forecasting worker infections, Tyson could plan in advance for irregular inventories from plant closures and labor shortages, as Spradley explained: “This plant’s going to go down, so we need to start shifting product to this place.”
In Spradley’s speech, the only protective measure for workers mentioned was Tyson’s vaccine mandate, which relied on Palantir to verify vaccination records.
It was later revealed, in a 2022 House investigative report, that Tyson and other meat producers lobbied the first Trump Administration to shield the industry from liability for worker deaths and illnesses and exempt the industry from the stay-at-home mandate. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis determined that Tyson and other major meatpacking companies failed to take adequate coronavirus precautions, “despite awareness of the high risks of coronavirus spread in their plants.” Tyson possessed especially detailed awareness of the risk that Covid-19 posed to its workers, raising ethical questions about the responsibility that companies have to act on the data availed by Palantir.
Tyson is part of a growing wave of major food corporations — including General Mills, Wendy’s, Beyond Meat and Aramark — to embed Palantir in their operations. The U.N. World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian food aid program, is another adopter of Palantir. As the software giant appears poised for further growth in the food sector, supported by energy-intensive data centers being rapidly built across the country, it’s worth asking, sooner rather than later: what are the risks of a food system that runs on Palantir?
Like many emerging forms of AI-driven technology, Palantir is malleable and responsive, designed to reflect the motives of its users, whether that is generating more profits or improving efficiencies or protecting its workers. Named after the ‘seeing stones’ in Lord of the Rings, Palantir can give companies and governments an unusual level of insight, but this doesn’t guarantee this information will be harnessed for good.
And in the wrong hands, like the seeing stones, the integration of vast pools of data has the risk of being weaponized for unethical or even illegal ends.
These risks are something that Palantir’s employees acknowledge, to an extent, even before being officially hired. In the final step of the hiring process, prospective employees typically undergo what is known as the “founder interview,” meeting with one of the company’s four founders, according to a former Palantir employee, who asked for anonymity due to a lifelong non-disparagement agreement he signed with the company.
In this final interview stage, “they would ask you a disarming question to catch you off guard, then try to read your soul to see if you were going to put the mission at risk or not,” the former employee told Sentient over Signal. “An example of a question a lot of people got (mine was similar to this) was: ‘How would you feel if software you wrote resulted in people dying due to a bug?’ Follow up: ‘What if this wasn’t a bug, but the software’s actual purpose?”’
“They made no excuses that Palantir’s software was powerful and would be used to ‘get the bad guys’ and ‘protect Western democracy,’ whatever that meant,” adds the former employee.
By now, it has become clear that these questions were not just far-flung hypotheticals. Palantir’s contracts with military and law enforcement agencies have demonstrated that the company is a willing partner to institutions that, whether by design or accident, kill people. Its 2024 contract with the Israeli military has especially provoked outrage, prompting accusations of enabling Israel to commit a genocide. Palantir also recently inked a $10 billion contract with the U.S. Army, building a “comprehensive framework” for the military’s data. And Palantir is behind a new $30 million mass surveillance system, deployed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to track and deport unauthorized immigrants.
There are mechanisms built into Palantir’s design to limit the company’s clients from accessing sensitive data, according to the former employee. For example, there are safety controls to prevent employees in intelligence agencies from accessing information that they don’t have clearance to see, with an option to flag someone who does have the permission to view this data in order to share it. There are also audit logs, owned by Palantir’s clients, that can monitor what information individual employees access in the system.
“The problem is all the safeguards in the world don’t mean anything if nobody uses this feature,” adds the former employee, who never anticipated this system would be abused when he was initially hired. “You still have to trust that your government will follow their own laws, another modern-day situation that back then seemed unimaginable.”
And these built-in measures have repeatedly proven insufficient. In July, Palantir was questioned by members of Congress about likely violating multiple federal laws by merging across federal agencies to create a searchable “database” of Americans, raising concerns about how this software is enabling the mass surveillance of both unauthorized immigrants and U.S. residents. The U.S. government relies on Palantir’s Foundry platform to compile this potentially illegal database — the same platform that Tyson deploys.
As it stands now, it’s not clear how most food companies are utilizing Palantir beyond the often vague, public-facing statements. But as Palantir further expands into the commercial sector, so do concerns about using the software to compile sensitive data.
While it may be common for defense technology to be wrapped in opacity, arguably for the sake of protecting national security, Palantir maintains a similar level of secrecy even in non-military contexts, Ilia Siatitsa, a program director and senior legal official at London-based nonprofit Privacy International, tells Sentient. She sees this as a problem.
“We have to just rely on promises from a company, but how is that good enough? How is that sufficient? Companies have never lied before? That’s what I find, from a public policy perspective, problematic,” says Siatitsa.
“Once [Palantir] moves the same product to the food industry, for instance, or the health sector, or all these other public sectors, then I think the citizens have a right to know a bit more about what exactly the product is doing, how it’s used and what exactly they aggregate and for what purpose,” says Siatitsa.
Siatitsa points to Palantir’s partnership with the U.N. World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian organization. When this partnership was announced in 2019, Privacy International and other nonprofits wrote an open letter to David Beasley, the executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, warning that “the partnership has the potential to seriously undermine the rights of 90 million people the WFP serves.”
“Nothing has been transparently shared about the procurement process that WFP set up to engage Palantir,” states that 2019 letter. “Given the gravity of these concerns, building in transparent checks and balances — such as third-party audits, open procurement and contract or agreement transparency — seems essential.” But this letter didn’t result in any greater levels of disclosure. Even today, “we have no information how this collaboration is going,” says Siatitsa.
As for Tyson, it remains unclear how the company is currently utilizing Palantir. In his 2022 remarks, Scott Spradley appeared to be brimming with excitement about all the ways Palantir can be further integrated into Tyson’s operations. “And we’re just continuing to find more and more, once you get all your data into Palantir, into Foundry, your kind of use case exploitation is unlimited,” said Spradley. “There’s nothing that you really can’t…we haven’t found a zero sum game there yet.” Of course, there are legal limits to how companies and governments can deploy Palantir, but that is increasingly appearing irrelevant.
The caravan of executions started with a U.S. Army veteran in March.
It continued in May with a former Army Ranger who served in the Gulf War, then an Air Force veteran in July, a former National Guard member in August, and a Navy veteran in October.
On Thursday, a former Marine, and next week, yet another Army veteran are scheduled to die in what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has called the “most veteran-friendly state in the nation.”
He’s the one who signed all seven of their death warrants. The governor wielding the executioner’s pen is a Navy veteran himself.
“They are coming so hard and so fast that it’s hard to keep track,” said William Kissinger, a Vietnam veteran who spent over four decades behind bars in Louisiana and now advocates on behalf of veterans on death row. “It’s heartbreaking.”
It’s also historic. Florida is on pace to more than double its record of eight executions in a year since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty nearly a half century ago. The number of military veterans on the list is startling.
While veterans represent an estimated 12% of Florida’s 256 death row inmates, they account for nearly 40% of the 18 death warrants that the governor has signed this year.
MORE COVERAGE: A List of the Veterans Florida Executed in 2025
DeSantis, a former JAG officer who served as a legal adviser to SEAL Team One in Iraq, has ignored the pleas of some veteran advocates and refused to address the disproportionate ratio of former service members he is sending to the Florida State Prison’s execution chamber.
“I don’t think he [DeSantis] is targeting vets specifically,” said Art Cody, a retired Navy captain and director of the Center for Veteran Criminal Advocacy. “He is just not taking [their military backgrounds] into consideration.”
But should he?
While death penalty opponents and tough-on-crime hard-liners clash over the moral arguments and political motivations of DeSantis’ historic urgency, another debate is suddenly raging: Should an inmate’s military service matter when a judge, jury, or governor decides who deserves the ultimate punishment for society’s most heinous crimes?
The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on that question 16 years ago in a case out of—none other than—Florida. The justices overturned the death sentence of Gregory Porter, a decorated Korean War veteran convicted of killing his former girlfriend and her boyfriend, because his attorney had presented no evidence about the combat that left him “a traumatized, changed man.”
“Our Nation has a long tradition of according leniency to veterans in recognition of their service, especially for those who fought on the front lines,” the court stated in a 2009 opinion. “Moreover, the relevance of Porter’s extensive combat experience is not only that he served honorably under extreme hardship and gruesome conditions, but also that the jury might find mitigating the intense stress and mental and emotional toll that combat took on Porter.”
What makes the recent surge in veteran executions stand out, veterans advocates say, is how they contrast with the historic declines in death sentences nationally and the rising understanding of the traumatic impact of military service.
A new report released this week by the Death Penalty Information Center tallied more than 800 veterans sentenced to death in the U.S. since 1972.
About one-fifth of those veterans served in a major conflict, with the largest group—106 veterans—from the Vietnam War. About 40% of those Vietnam veterans had a known diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and many had been exposed to Agent Orange, the report found.
Veterans and capital punishment opponents congregate outside the Florida State Prison to protest each execution, including this gathering on May 1, when Jeffrey Hutchinson was put to death. (Photo courtesy of Maria DeLiberato of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty)
Jeffrey Hutchinson, the Gulf War veteran executed in Florida this May, traveled what the report called the “battlefield-to-prison” pipeline. The former Army Ranger’s appeals for mercy included his diagnoses for PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and neurotoxin exposure.
“In many cases in Florida, the juries that sentenced these veterans to death never understood how seriously they were harmed by their experience in the military and what effect those injuries had on their ability to conform their behavior to the law,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research center that focuses on how the death penalty is implemented. “Gov. DeSantis is in a position to recognize that and do something about it. But he, instead, has been scheduling them for execution and letting them be executed at his sole discretion.”
Yet, victims’ advocates argue that Hutchinson’s horrific crimes speak for themselves: He was convicted for the murder of his girlfriend and her three children, after busting down the front door of their north Florida home on Sept. 11, 1998, and finding them in the master bedroom. He shot mom Renee Flaherty and her kids, seven-year-old Amanda and four-year-old Logan, all in the head. Then he turned the gun on nine-year-old Geoffrey.
“The terror suffered in that moment is incomprehensible to this court,” the trial judge said.
More than 26 years later, Florida carried out Hutchinson’s execution.
Until this month, DeSantis said little about why he has so dramatically accelerated the pace of executions in the Sunshine State. Before this year, Florida had executed nine people—including two veterans—since the Republican became governor in 2019. Six of those were in 2023, critics note, as DeSantis launched an unsuccessful campaign for the White House.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (right) and National Guard officers inspect the troops during a change of command ceremony at Camp Blanding Joint Training Center on April 6, 2019. (Photo by U.S. Air National Guard Master Sgt. William Buchanan)
The governor said during an appearance in Jacksonville earlier this month that he’s trying to do his part for victims’ families who deserve to see justice served.
“We have lengthy reviews and appeals that I think should be shorter,” DeSantis said, according to WUSF. “I still have a responsibility to look at these cases and to be sure that the person’s guilty. And if I honestly thought somebody wasn’t, I would not pull the trigger on it.”
But the governor has failed to address why so many of those inmates this year are veterans.
“By the time I’m writing about one, he has already signed another death warrant,” said Kissinger, a former airman first class and Vietnam War veteran who has led appeals to the governor on behalf of Florida’s veterans on death row. Three years after returning from the war, Kissinger killed a man during a drug robbery and was locked up in Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he eventually became an inmate counselor on death row.
Kissinger was among 161 veterans who signed a letter calling on DeSantis to stop signing death warrants for veterans, including former National Guard member Kayle Bates, convicted for the 1982 murder of an office manager in Lynn Haven near Panama City.
A week before Bates’ execution in August, many of those petitioners gathered in Tallahassee, urging DeSantis to reconsider, arguing that executing veterans affected by war and denied mental health care was “not justice.”
They called the executions a “final abandonment.”
When asked for last words, Bates, who had been deployed during the deadly 1980 Miami race riots, said nothing. He had maintained his innocence for more than 43 years.
He was the fourth veteran executed in Florida this year. But his lethal injection became a tipping point for scores of veterans and death penalty opponents who say serious questions remained about his case.
When The War Horse reached out to DeSantis’ office with questions about Bates and whether the governor takes into account an inmate’s military service, a spokesperson replied with the same two sentences shared with other media: “Kayle Bates was executed after receiving the death penalty for murder, sexual battery, kidnapping, and robbery. His sentence had nothing to do with his status as a veteran.”
In 1982, Bates was an active member of the National Guard when he was charged in the brutal murder of Janet Renee White. Prosecutors say he abducted White from her office, stole her diamond ring, attempted to rape her, and stabbed her to death.
The trial of Bates, who was Black, opened with a prayer from the victim’s minister, who asked for the judge and the all-white jury to have “wisdom.” With no mention of Bates’ military background, he was sentenced to death within an hour of deliberations.
But the Florida Supreme Court threw out his original death penalty and ordered the trial court to reconsider his sentence. This time, attorney Tom Dunn, an Army veteran, represented Bates with one aim: to persuade the jury that Bates was not the “worst of the worst,” and that life in prison, not death, was appropriate.
Kayle Bates after graduating basic training in the National Guard. (Photo courtesy of Tom Dunn)
Dunn presented Bates’ military service and lack of criminal history, and put forth 18 character witnesses, including fellow National Guard members.
They testified about how Bates’ deployment to the Miami riots, two years before his arrest, had affected him. Bates was among thousands of National Guard members sent into Miami after an all-white jury acquitted four white police officers in the beating of Arthur McDuffie, a Black Marine Corps veteran, left in a coma after a traffic stop in December 1979. For three days, Black neighborhoods in and around Miami burned. Vehicles were set on fire, people were dragged and beaten, and businesses were looted. At least 18 people were killed and hundreds injured.
One fellow Guard member described how Bates was afraid and nervous during patrols, according to court records, and another testified about the gruesome violence, especially against Black residents. No one came out of that experience unaffected, the Guard member testified.
Bates’ wife described him as distant and plagued by nightmares, and she said he often woke up screaming and not recognizing where he was. A forensic neuropsychologist testified that the trauma Bates endured could have influenced his later behavior.
But Bates’ attorney Dunn also focused on another argument: As an alternative to a death sentence, he said, the jury should be able to recommend life in prison without the possibility of parole, a new option under Florida law. At Bates’ original trial, the only alternative to death was 25 years to life. By 1995, Bates had already served nearly 13 years on death row, so Dunn worried jurors would feel forced to impose the death penalty so Bates couldn’t be eligible for parole in another 12 years.
When the jury asked the court after nearly three hours of deliberation if it could sentence Bates to life in prison without parole, the judge said no.
Ultimately, the jury voted nine to three to sentence Bates to death again. In a U.S. federal court, the lack of a unanimous decision would lead to a hung jury and no death sentence. That is not the case in Florida.
A dissenting Florida Supreme Court judge later criticized the ruling, calling the court’s refusal to accept Bates’ waiver “unnecessarily harsh” and inconsistent with past rulings.
In 2024, almost three decades after his resentencing and a year before his execution, Bates’ legal team uncovered information suggesting a potentially fundamental problem with his original conviction: The jury may have included a relative of the victim. They asked the Florida Supreme Court to allow them to interview the juror.
If true, such a discovery could have led to a retrial. Florida law, like that of most other states as well as the federal system, explicitly bars jurors related to a victim by blood or marriage. The court, however, rejected the request as being too late, records show.
The execution chamber at Florida State Prison in Raiford, pictured here around 2012. (Courtesy of Florida Department of Corrections)
So on July 18, 2025, almost 42 years after Bates’ conviction, Gov. DeSantis signed a letter addressed to the warden of the Florida State Prison in Raiford about 140 miles away.
The death warrant was brief, outlining Bates’ court rulings, and concluded with a note saying that the governor’s office did not find executive clemency “appropriate” for him. It did not provide any further explanation for the decision.
Janet White’s husband, Randy, had been waiting for this resolution for four decades. He said he attended every hearing and every trial to “let Renee know that justice has finally been served for her,” he told USA Today. He attended the execution, but not out of revenge, he said. He had actually made peace and forgiven Bates years ago as a way to move forward.
“You’ve got to find a shorter route than 43 years,” he told the USA Today. “There’s got to be a better system that will see all these appeals through quicker.”
On D-Day, just over two months before Bates was executed, DeSantis signed three separate bills “strengthening Florida’s support systems for veterans and their families,” according to a news release.
One was toward long-term care access for veterans and their spouses; another aimed to expand the state’s suicide prevention program specifically for veterans; and the last one proposed a crackdown on those trying to exploit veterans seeking their benefits.
“On D-Day and every day, Florida honors those who served our country in uniform,” the governor said in his announcement. “Florida remains the most veteran-friendly state in the nation.”
It is also one of the seven states in the U.S. where a dedicated clemency board listens to pleas to commute sentences and is required to make recommendations to the governor. But unlike in the other states, Florida’s four-member board is headed by the governor himself. The state has not granted clemency to a death row prisoner since 1983.
That appears to also be the case in the two executions scheduled for this month—both of whom are veterans: Bryan Jennings, a Marine Corps veteran, has been on death row for more than four decades for the rape and murder of a six-year-old girl in 1979; Richard Randolph, an Army veteran, was convicted of the 1988 rape and murder of his former manager.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Jennings’ final legal appeal, clearing the way for Thursday’s execution.
“Florida’s practice transforms clemency from a constitutional safeguard into a secret administrative ritual,” Jennings’ lawyers wrote.
For Kissinger, who has become a vocal advocate for criminal justice reform in Florida, the quest to be heard has become an endless battle. As the dizzying pace of executions keeps growing, he has repeatedly requested a meeting with the governor to discuss veterans on death row.
He knows it’s a long shot.
“I keep waiting on emails,” he said. “I keep waiting on some sort of acknowledgement.”
This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
The post Florida’s Governor Is a Veteran. So Are Seven Inmates He’ll Send to the Execution Chamber This Year</br> <span class=’secondary-title’>Veterans represent nearly 40% of the record number of death warrants Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed in 2025. Should their military service matter?</span> appeared first on The War Horse.
Since 2022, four Wyoming hospitals have closed labor and delivery wards, leaving 16 birthing hospitals for a state spanning 97,000 square miles. Medical workforce shortages, onerous on-call doctor schedules and mounting affordability challenges have only exacerbated the state’s growing maternity care gaps.
The problem is not unique to Wyoming, but the state lags behind others in embracing and implementing solutions, according to a new Wyoming Women’s Action Network white paper.
Wyoming, for example, is the only state not to participate in the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, an initiative to support best practices that make births safer and improve maternal health outcomes.
“There are tools that are available to us that really haven’t been a focus of discussion, and could maybe start to make a significant difference,” said Jen Simon of the Wyoming Women’s Action Network. Like so many complicated issues, Simon said, “there’s no silver bullet. It’s going to take [multiple] efforts to really address it. And so, let’s start to identify what low-hanging fruit might be.”
That was one goal of the white paper, titled “The Equality State’s Growing Crisis: What maternity deserts mean for Wyoming and how we can turn the tide for moms and babies.”
By collecting baseline data and policy directions, Simon said, the hope is to underscore an array of steps — even small ones — that can lead to more robust maternity care.
“We do in fact have options,” she said.
Along with joining the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Care, “low-hanging-fruit” strategies range from distributing low-cost alert bracelets to new mothers to convening an annual summit for sharing best practices.
A dearth of maternal health care has made pregnancy and childbirth increasingly tricky in widening swaths of Wyoming, a 2023 WyoFile investigation found.
This is evident in Fremont County, where moms are opting to temporarily relocate to places like Denver and even the East Coast to deliver babies. It is evident in Rawlins, where families have to travel Interstate 80, a notorious stretch of highway that closes frequently in the winter, to deliver in Laramie. And it is evident in Teton County, where overflow patients from elsewhere in the state are straining OB-GYN providers.
Lawmakers made maternity care a top issue of study for the 2024 legislative off-season and began to identify a complicated mix of challenges for providing such care in rural places, though they didn’t pass any policies.
Meanwhile, births continue to fall in many Wyoming hospitals, and a fifth facility, Platte County Hospital in Wheatland, temporarily shut down its delivery services in October.
For the Legislature’s Joint Labor, Health and Social Services Committee, maternity care was the No. 1 priority again during the 2025 off-season, or interim.
Committee members discussed the issue in depth in October and acknowledged the problem’s scope is daunting. Proposed measures, such as one they advanced to authorize freestanding birth centers to get Medicaid coverage for midwife births, are merely “band-aids” that could perhaps keep maternity care limping along in its current state, lawmakers said.
That leads to Simon’s point that Wyoming doesn’t have to focus on large-scale state-level reforms for solutions.
“It’s such a significant challenge to move things through the legislature in every state, not just this state,” she said. The intent of the white paper is “to really be thinking about what would be accessible for hospitals and providers, and what are some best practices that are really simple and straightforward.”
The paper’s more accessible recommendations include instituting an annual, statewide maternal health summit — an effort already underway. There are also training approaches, such as the Obstetric Patient Safety Program, commonly known as OPS, which is designed to help medical providers prepare for obstetrical emergencies.
Postpartum birth alert bracelets, meanwhile, represent a simple and inexpensive tool that alerts health care providers to patients who have delivered within the previous six weeks. That can help ensure recognition and response to complications such as hemorrhage, hypertensive crises or infection — leading contributors to postpartum maternal mortality.
There are also local-level models, such as a community-wide prenatal access program developed in Teton County, as well as inclusion in national expertise pools.
“Participation in [Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health] would give Wyoming access to resources, technical assistance, and collaborative partners to better collect and report data, implement strategies to address identified issues, and ultimately improve maternal outcomes,” the white paper reads.
It also identifies more-involved strategies aimed at improving local capacity, affordability and workforce recruitment. These include initiatives like expanding physician access to remote support from maternal-fetal medicine specialists, administering matching-funds loan-repayment programs for health care professionals or boosting reimbursement for providing maternity services to Medicaid patients.
The Labor Committee in October voted down draft legislation that would provide for increased Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement for OB services and critical access hospitals.
Even though government can play a vital role in improving maternity care, Simon said, she hopes to convey that other meaningful avenues exist.
“Here’s some things that can be done, that hospitals can decide, that communities can decide, that individuals can decide,” she said.
The paper also highlights some positive steps and strategies that are rolling out in the maternal health realm.
This year, for example, Megan Baker of St. John’s Health in Jackson became the first Wyoming Section Chair for the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses, which connects her with resources for training and improved obstetric outcomes for Wyoming moms.
Baker, the manager of women’s services at St. John’s, has spearheaded initiatives to bolster the hospital’s maternal health offerings. St. John’s recently became Wyoming’s first hospital to gain a “maternal level of care” designation. She also helped obtain a statewide grant for OB safety courses and acquire alert bracelets for her facility.
Wyoming medical professionals and hospitals will need to work together to combine resources to create a stronger network, Baker said. She is also a proponent of small-cost, big-impact programs like the alert bracelets.
“I think we have to look at things differently,” she said. “Share resources, share people and figure out how others are doing it.”
If Wyoming’s trend continues, experts worry that mothers will put off or forgo prenatal care, travel long distances in difficult weather or give birth in emergency rooms with nurses who aren’t trained in labor and delivery, which could have dangerous or even deadly results.
The erosion in care also poses existential threats to communities, as adequate health care is crucial to attracting young families to rural towns, state leaders say.
“Being able to have a baby, safely, in Wyoming is a harbinger of our state’s present and future prospects,” Wyoming Women’s Action Network Board Member and Teton County Commissioner Natalia Macker said in a release. “The health of our moms, babies, and families is a clear indication of how healthy our hospitals, communities, and economy will be.”
The post Wyoming lags on solutions while maternal care crisis grows, report finds appeared first on WyoFile .
Centra Southside Community Hospital is set to close its labor and delivery unit and OB/GYN services in Farmville on Dec. 19 as part of a consolidation of women’s health care with their Lynchburg facilities.
The closure in Farmville fits a growing national pattern: rural maternity units are disappearing faster than communities can adapt.
As birth centers shut down, pregnant women in smaller towns are forced to travel farther for care. For residents in Farmville, the nearest full-service labor and delivery unit will now be an hour or more away.
Centra decided to close the unit for a variety of reasons. According to Centra’s statement, declining birth rates and recent reductions in federal healthcare funding played a role. President of Centra Southside Community Hospital Thomas Angelo added in a recent interview with The Farmville Herald, a local news outlet, that staffing the unit was also a challenge.
Centra said staff are reaching out to all affected patients, and there are a few options that remain in the area for prenatal care.
One is Central Virginia Health Services, a federally qualified health center in Farmville, which has midwives who see patients.
The other is Centra’s Emergency Department — the staff is trained to stabilize and care for patients before transfer. They can deliver babies, too, according to Angelo’s interview with The Herald.
Patients who choose to continue seeing Centra providers will be able to transfer their care to the system’s Lynchburg facilities or another site of their choice, the statement said.
What is happening in Farmville is part of a national trend. In 2025, 27 rural hospitals have shut down or have scheduled the closure of their labor and delivery units according to a report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, a national policy center focusing on promoting affordable, patient-centered health care. In 2024, 21 units were closed.
The reasons for the closures are similar to Centra’s — a national shortage of healthcare providers, declining birth rates, and low reimbursement rates from private insurance and Medicaid that pay hospitals less than what it costs to deliver babies, making maintaining birth units unprofitable, the report said.
State legislators have put forward some initiatives focused on maternal health outcomes, including money in the state budget to support OB-GYN residencies, Virginia Mercury reported.
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The post Centra Southside Community Hospital closing labor and delivery unit in December appeared first on Charlottesville Tomorrow.
If you’ve ever done a double take at your bird feeder, wondering, what on earth is that patchy bird, you’re not alone. It happened to me on a crisp October morning when I spotted a bird that looked like a faded watercolor version of a Purple Finch. I blinked. I checked my bird app. Was this a new species? Some exotic visitor blown off course? Nope, it was just one of my usual backyard guests, caught in the middle of a messy, magnificent transformation. Molting season had arrived.
Meet the Purple Finch—or what’s left of it. The Purple Finch is usually a stunner. Males, in particular, flaunt a vibrant raspberry wash over their head, chest and back, blending into streaky browns and whites below. They’re like the red wine of songbirds—bold, rich and unmistakable. But during molting, that confident color gets interrupted. Feathers fall out. Patterns become jumbled. Bald spots may appear. The once-glorious plumage turns into a confusing patchwork that makes even seasoned birders pause and say, ‘Wait… what bird is that?’
The photo above is a perfect example. This Purple Finch is deep in the throes of a molt. You can still see flashes of its true colors—literally—but the rest of it looks like it went through a bird-sized spin cycle. Pink feathers peek through faded patches. Dark spots sit where fresh feathers are just starting to emerge. The overall effect? A creature in flux, a feathered Frankenstein’s monster piecing itself back together.
Why do birds molt anyway? Molting is nature’s way of giving birds a wardrobe refresh. Feathers wear out from sun, wind and day-to-day life. They’re not alive like hair or fur; once grown, a feather can’t repair itself. So instead of mending old ones, birds replace them entirely—usually once or twice a year, depending on the species. For Purple Finches, molting typically happens after the breeding season, around late summer into fall. It’s a gradual process, replacing feathers in a specific sequence so they can still fly, forage and escape predators. But the trade-off? Their looks take a temporary nosedive. Imagine trying to impress someone while wearing only half a suit. Or going to a party with your haircut stuck halfway between shaggy and buzzed. That’s the molting experience.
Bird lovers know this phase is just part of the finch’s story. Molting isn’t a mistake—it’s a natural, vital process. But the way it transforms these birds is pretty mind-blowing. During the height of molt, a male Purple Finch can look like a hybrid: part house finch, part juvenile, part who-knows-what. I’ve seen people mistake them for entirely different species, and honestly, it’s easy to understand why. That broken-up coloration and irregular feather coverage throws off all the typical field markers we rely on. But then—almost like magic—it all comes back together. New feathers grow in. Colors deepen. That unmistakable rose-red plumage returns. And just like that, the bird is whole again, like nothing ever happened.
Nature doesn’t need Photoshop. It builds the drama right into the design. It’s tempting to think of molting birds as less attractive versions of their usual selves. But if you’re a true bird enthusiast, this is one of the coolest times to observe them. You’re witnessing a live transition. A biological reboot. It’s like seeing the caterpillar become the butterfly—except here, it’s finches ditching last season’s feathers for a new, sleeker model. I’ve grown to love this ragged phase. There’s something raw and real about a bird in the middle of change. They’re not picture-perfect, but they’re alive, adapting and in motion. Watching a Purple Finch go from patchy and awkward to polished and brilliant again reminds me how resilient nature is. Let’s be honest—it’s kind of fun to play “guess that bird” when a half-molted finch shows up looking like it belongs in a bird-themed mystery novel.
If you’re a backyard birder like me, fall is the perfect time to keep an eye out for molting Purple Finches. Look for: patchy plumage, irregular color patterns, especially around the head and back. Feather spikes or “pins,” new feathers still encased in their sheath. They look like tiny quills and will eventually unfurl. Awkward behavior; some birds might scratch more or preen excessively as new feathers grow in. That’s normal. And don’t worry—molting isn’t painful for birds. It can be a bit uncomfortable and energy-intensive, but it’s completely natural. If anything, it’s a sign the bird is healthy and going through a normal life stage.
There’s something deeply reassuring about the rhythm of molt. It’s a reminder that change doesn’t always look pretty in the middle—but it’s necessary. Even the most radiant creatures need to fall apart a little before they come back stronger. Seeing this ragtag Purple Finch on my feeder, looking like a bird-shaped jigsaw puzzle, reminded me that beauty isn’t always about polish. Sometimes, it’s about process. About watching something wild and wonderful slowly become itself again. So, the next time you spot a weird-looking bird that seems like it’s been through a storm—pause. Take a closer look. It might just be a Purple Finch, reinventing itself one feather at a time.
For fellow birders: snap a photo, take notes, and enjoy the transformation. There’s nothing quite like witnessing nature’s makeover in real time. That messy little bird? It’s not lost. It’s in progress. Just like the rest of us.
As Montanans pause this Veterans Day to honor those who served, it’s worth noting just how many of our neighbors have served in the U.S. Armed Forces. Montana ranks among the top states in the nation for veterans per capita.
According to 2023 data from the Veterans Administration, Montana ranks third per capita, behind only Alaska and Virginia, for the number of veterans who call the state home. According to those stats, roughly 1 in 13 Montanans has served in the military. That’s 88,543 residents overall.
Located across the Bering Strait from Russia, Alaska’s ranking stems from its strategic location and several major military installations. Virginia’s is explainable by its dense network of bases, government and defense employers adjacent to Washington, D.C.
Montana, with its single active Air Force base, Malmstrom in Great Falls, has a less-visible presence in terms of active-duty military personnel, with 3,432 active service men and women stationed in Montana as of June 2025 as opposed to 20,671 in Alaska and 122,254 in Virginia. Recruiting figures also show Montana is middle-of-the-pack in terms of the fraction of residents who sign up for active-duty service.
One theory is that Montana is an attractive destination for veterans as they retire from active military service.
Dr. Elizabeth Barrs, a retired Army officer and the director of the University of Montana’s Defense Critical Language & Culture Program, said in an interview that, while she isn’t aware of any hard data on the subject, anecdotally she hears that the state’s recreational options are a draw.
“I think a lot of service members are drawn to outdoor activities,” she said. “The military is an adrenaline-filled career and I think people are looking to fill that.”
Barrs also cited housing that has historically been less expensive than other states, veterans’ resources like Fort Harrison and a number of new VA clinics across the state as well as an active Special Forces Association chapter.
As she commemorates Veterans Day this year, Barrs said she’s thinking about the military as an example of engaged citizenship.
“I hope that Americans focus on what joins us together. In our military, millions of young people from every walk of life come together to serve one common ideal — the Constitution,” she said. “I wish Americans would look to that as an example.”
The post One theory on why Montana has a disproportionate number of veterans appeared first on Montana Free Press.
Several small NC towns are experimenting with Utah-based TextMyGov service, which allows texting to and from residents. Reactions are mixed.
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I sit at the lunch table knowing my food is getting cold, too busy writing to eat. My two table mates are eager to tell me their stories. They are both veterans, attending an Armed to Farm training for beginning farmers. One went out of her way to welcome me, fetching a chair from a nearby table.
Mary Martinez Rigo, 64, is older than most of the other attendees. She and her husband rehabilitated a former pine forest in Virginia into pasture for alpacas by literally drilling nutrients into the compacted clay. Her husband’s health is declining and she is at Armed to Farm with an eye to the future.
“I don’t want to give it up, and am looking to age gracefully in place as a farmer and a veteran,” she said. “I am looking to pivot from production to offering workshops.”
This November event was the 54th Armed to Farm, a program of the nonprofit National Center for Appropriate Technology. NCAT was founded during the energy crisis of the 1970s to develop energy saving strategies for underserved communities. In 1987, NCAT expanded its mission to include sustainable agriculture.
The week-long training events combine classroom instruction with in-depth farm tours. Experts, some of them veterans themselves, present on beekeeping, marketing, soil health, and agricultural law in the mornings. Afternoon tours provide for a close inspection of thriving small-scale agriculture operations and the chance to ask practitioners specific questions.
Participants begin by discerning goals for their farm. During the week they explore enterprises that could meet those goals. Some are aiming for profitability while others are seeking to be self-sufficient, grow a community garden in order to donate food, or operate a farm that trains other veterans.
The farm visits at the November event, held in Berea, Kentucky, exposed the group to aquaponics, horticulture, beekeeping, fruit and nut production, goat tending, retail operations, and seed saving. The Berea College Forest hosted a session on horse logging that drew a lot of interest.
Towanda Farrington got involved in farming through an equine program for veterans. She found that being outdoors and caring for animals helped her PTSD. She plans to operate her Mississippi-based vegetable and herb enterprises the old-fashioned way.
“I want to use a plow horse on my farm,” she said. “I got my horse from the Humane Society and like nurturing him as he nurtures me.”
Piloted in 2013 and launched in 2015, the Armed to Farm program has welcomed participants from 46 states. It has also proven highly successful; 83% of its thousands of graduates remain involved in farming. Some have gone on to leadership in community food system work.
Participants in this program gain much more than knowledge. Veterans face unique challenges, and being in a group with their former military peers creates an instant community. Participants feel safe to share their military experience in this nurturing environment, and program leaders are intent on accommodating their special needs.
Sean Judge was in a pivotal place in June 2019 when he attended his first Armed to Farm. With a PTSD diagnosis and recent surgeries to remove a tumor from his spinal cord, his physical restrictions dictated that he walk slowly and carry nothing over five pounds. Regardless, he felt like a full participant in the event.
“They asked about accommodations on the application and found a way for me to attend,” he said. “They never let go of me, even though they knew it would take a little bit for me to get there.”
Some attendees don’t know any other veterans interested in agriculture before Armed to Farm. They meet the teaching staff of NCAT, five of whom are veterans, who act as mentors and guides, and emerge connected to a supportive network they can call on in the months and years to come.
“Veterans having their own program is one of the biggest factors in [Armed to Farm’s] long-term success,” said Mike Lewis, a veteran and NCAT staff member. “I get at least four texts a week from graduates reaching out or asking technical farming questions.”
Veterans continue to benefit from NCAT resources after their Armed to Farm experience. Each receives a stack of books and pamphlets to take home, and can take advantage of networking and virtual learning opportunities. The advanced Armed to Farm 2.0 events provide a deeper dive into the business aspects of farming and scaling up production.
NCAT developed and operates Armed to Farm through a cooperative agreement with USDA-Rural Development. Each event relies on organizational partners for expertise and funding. Nonprofit Ranchin’ Vets offers a transportation stipend to participants. The Berea event was in partnership with Kentucky State University under one of their grant programs.
Looking to the future, Armed to Farm leaders hope to expand its reach. They are working on offering more enterprise-specific trainings, and hosting a tribal-focused Armed to Farm event.
The post ‘Armed to Farm’ Program Prepares Veterans for Success in Agriculture appeared first on The Daily Yonder.