Senior Women Web

Author: SeniorWomenWeb

  • US Justice Department Highlights National Stalking Awareness Month; One in Three Women and One in Six Men Experience Stalking in Their Lifetimes

    January is National Stalking Awareness MonthThe Justice Department joins survivors, victim services providers, justice professionals and others in recognizing the month of January as National Stalking Awareness Month  (NSAM). According to the CDC, an estimated one in three women and one in six men experience stalking in their lifetimes. This NSAM, the department reaffirms its commitment to survivors by honoring and providing resources to those leading efforts in supporting survivors and preventing stalking crimes.

    Today the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW), which provides grants to communities, and the Stalking Prevention Awareness and Resource Center (SPARC), held a virtual Strategies Showcase highlighting OVW grantees’ promising approaches to stalking investigations, services for survivors and training for law enforcement and prosecutors.

    “The Justice Department is committed to using all its tools to address stalking,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. “Survivors need justice and safety, and communities require resources to respond and prevent this crime. OVW’s grantees play a critical role, providing essential services and justice solutions in their communities.”

    With the prolific misuse of the Internet and other forms of technology as weapons against stalking victims, today’s Strategies Showcase further emphasizes the White House’s priority to eradicate technology-facilitated violence. Last June, President Biden established the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse, an interagency effort to increase prevention, response and protection measures for survivors.

    OVW will release new grant solicitations in the coming months to further address stalking, domestic violence, sexual assault and dating violence. Funds will support states, communities, institutions of higher education, tribes and victim service providers. OVW encourages applicants to visit the website for anticipated release dates and prepare their grants early. Additional resources for applicants and how to apply for OVW funding can be found on OVW’s website.

    “OVW’s grant programs fund innovative and successful strategies to end stalking and other forms of gender-based violence,” said OVW Acting Director Allison Randall. “By encouraging a coordinated community response, these grant programs forge meaningful partnerships of on-the-ground service providers, culturally specific organizations and everyone who works daily to keep survivors safe.”

    Created in 1995, OVW provides leadership in developing the nation’s capacity to reduce violence through the implementation of VAWA and subsequent legislation. OVW administers financial and technical assistance to communities across the country that are developing programs, policies, and practices aimed at ending domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking. In addition to overseeing federal grant programs, OVW undertakes initiatives in response to special needs identified by communities facing acute challenges. Learn more at www.justice.gov/ovw.

    The OVW-funded Stalking Prevention, Awareness & Resource Center (SPARC) offers training to service providers and justice professionals on keeping stalking survivors safe and holding offenders accountable. 

    Topic(s): 
    Violent Crime
    Civil Rights
    Component(s): 
    Office of the Associate Attorney General
    Office on Violence Against Women

  • Kaiser Health News: Will Your Smartphone Be the Next Doctor’s Office?

     Kaiser Health News

    Hannah Norman, Kaiser Health News
     January 17, 2023

    The same devices used to take selfies and type out tweets are being repurposed and commercialized for quick access to information needed for monitoring a patient’s health. A fingertip pressed against a phone’s camera lens can measure a heart rate. The microphone, kept by the bedside, can screen for sleep apnea. Even the speaker is being tapped, to monitor breathing using sonar technology.

    In the best of this new world, the data is conveyed remotely to a medical professional for the convenience and comfort of the patient or, in some cases, to support a clinician without the need for costly hardware.

    But using smartphones as diagnostic tools is a work in progress, experts say. Although doctors and their patients have found some real-world success in deploying the phone as a medical device, the overall potential remains unfulfilled and uncertain.

    Smartphones come packed with sensors capable of monitoring a patient’s vital signs. They can help assess people for concussions, watch for atrial fibrillation, and conduct mental health wellness checks, to name the uses of a few nascent applications.

    Companies and researchers eager to find medical applications for smartphone technology are tapping into modern phones’ built-in cameras and light sensors; microphones; accelerometers, which detect body movements; gyroscopes; and even speakers. The apps then use artificial intelligence software to analyze the collected sights and sounds to create an easy connection between patients and physicians. Earning potential and marketability are evidenced by the more than 350,000 digital health products available in app stores, according to a Grand View Research report.

    “It’s very hard to put devices into the patient home or in the hospital, but everybody is just walking around with a cellphone that has a network connection,” said Dr. Andrew Gostine, CEO of the sensor network company Artisight. Most Americans own a smartphone, including more than 60% of people 65 and over, an increase from just 13% a decade ago, according the Pew Research Center. The covid-19 pandemic has also pushed people to become more comfortable with virtual care.

    Some of these products have sought FDA clearance to be marketed as a medical device. That way, if patients must pay to use the software, health insurers are more likely to cover at least part of the cost. Other products are designated as exempt from this regulatory process, placed in the same clinical classification as a Band-Aid. But how the agency handles AI and machine learning-based medical devices is still being adjusted to reflect software’s adaptive nature.

    Ensuring accuracy and clinical validation is crucial to securing buy-in from health care providers. And many tools still need fine-tuning, said Dr. Eugene Yang, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington. Currently, Yang is testing contactless measurement of blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen saturation gleaned remotely via Zoom camera footage of a patient’s face.

    Judging these new technologies is difficult because they rely on algorithms built by machine learning and artificial intelligence to collect data, rather than the physical tools typically used in hospitals. So researchers cannot “compare apples to apples” with medical industry standards, Yang said. Failure to build in such assurances undermines the technology’s ultimate goals of easing costs and access because a doctor still must verify results.

  • From the Frick Madison Museum Archive: Giovanni Battista Moroni’s Portrait of a Woman

    Moroni's Portrait of a Young Woman

    New York City’s Frick Madison Museum adds to its collection Giovanni Battista Moroni’s Portrait of a Woman, the most significant Italian Renaissance painting the museum has acquired in more than half a century.

    Complementing exceptional portraits by Bronzino, Titian, and others purchased a century ago by the institution’s founder, Henry Clay Frick, this gift from the trust of Assadour O. Tavitian is also the first female portrait to enter the Frick’s holdings of Renaissance painting.

    It will be on view at Frick Madison beginning January 12. Comments Ian Wardropper, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Director, “We had the pleasure of getting to know this compelling portrait very well in 2019, when it was one of the highlights of Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture, the special exhibition that introduced this artist to American audiences. At that time, the portrait was considered one of the finest by Moroni in private hands. We are thrilled to now include it in our permanent collection, thanks to Aso’s great generosity.”

    Adds Curator Aimee Ng, who co-organized the acclaimed 2019 exhibition, “Portrait of a Woman was a star of our Moroni show, holding pride of place at the center of the Frick’s Oval Room. The canvas is a triumph painted at the height of the artist’s career, and its superb quality and condition are perfectly at home among the treasures of the Frick.”

    Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/24–1579/80) spent his career painting in and around his native Bergamo, in Lombardy, then part of the Venetian Republic. His portraits are celebrated for the psychological presence and lifelikeness of the sitters, as well as his extreme attention to detail, particularly to his subjects’ clothing and accessories — sumptuous fineries that signal wealth, status, and fashion.

    The identity of the woman and the reason Moroni painted her are unknown. Her strong, somewhat confrontational gaze is unconventional in Renaissance portraits of women, which tend to promote a more modest demeanor. Whatever the purpose of the portrait, which probably was painted about 1575, Moroni demonstrates his exceptional skill in depicting the woman’s pink dress brocaded in silver-gilt and silver-wound thread, white neck ruff, and fine jewelry, which also ornaments her hair. Of the roughly one hundred twenty-five portraits by Moroni that are known today, only about fifteen are independent portraits of women, and this is the finest example.

  • National Institutes of Health Launches Home Test to Treat, a Pilot COVID-19 Telehealth Program; Berks County, PA, Is First Community to Join Partnership With Local Public Health Departments.

    home to test program image

    Berks County, Pennsylvania, is first community to join partnership with local public health departments.  RADx is supporting the Home Test to Treat program. This telehealth model will incorporate rapid COVID-19 home tests, a virtual consultant, and prescription antiviral medication if eligible. The program aims to enroll roughly 100K participants around the country and will be targeted towards at-risk populations. NIBIB/eMed of Health, in collaboration with the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has launched the Home Test to Treat program, an entirely virtual community health intervention that will provide free COVID-19 health services — at-home rapid tests, telehealth sessions and at-home treatments — in selected communities. The program, first announced by the White House(link is external) in September 2022, will make antiviral treatment available for eligible individuals who receive a positive test result, which could prevent severe illness, hospitalization or death.

    “At-home testing for COVID-19 is now widely available in the United States, as are antiviral treatments, and this program combines easy home access to both,” said Bruce Tromberg, Ph.D., director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) at the National Institutes of Health and leader of the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx®) Tech program. “The Home Test to Treat program allows those who are sick an alternative to venturing out for testing or treatment, potentially reducing the spread of COVID-19 in the community.”

    Later this month, local and state officials in Berks County, Pennsylvania, will be the first to pilot the Home Test to Treat program. Up to 8,000 eligible residents are anticipated to participate in the program.

    Program organizers will gather information from participants to identify best practices and make improvements to the Home Test to Treat model that can be used to implement the program on a larger scale. Additional communities across the country will be selected to participate based on level of community need, access to healthcare treatment, expected COVID-19 infection rates and socio-economic factors. Through collaborations with local health departments, Home Test to Treat aims to offer services to approximately 100,000 people across the United States in the coming year.

    Telehealth services provider eMed will implement the Home Test to Treat program. Their services are provided under a contract award by NIBIB contractor, VentureWell. Having administered millions of verified at-home telehealth sessions during the pandemic, eMed will host the user-friendly Home Test to Treat website, where participants can sign up for the program, report symptoms, receive telehealth and antiviral treatment delivery, and coordinate telehealth enabled test kits.

    NIBIB also has issued a contract with UMass Chan Medical School, whose researchers, in collaboration with eMed, will analyze data collected from each participating community, including the impacts of a home-based process for testing and treatment, individual attitudes about the Home Test to Treat program, and clinical outcomes from treatments.

    HHS, through ASPR, has led a national COVID-19 Test to Treat initiative since March 2022, that includes thousands of treatment access points nationwide. These include CDC’s Increasing Community Access to Testing (ICATT) program, composed of federally funded health centers, long-term care facilities and community-based sites. Participants in the Home Test to Treat program can be tested at local ICATT centers. The Test to Treat initiative has evolved to include more mobile and telehealth-based models that reduce barriers to access for the highest-risk individuals. NIH’s Home Test to treat program will provide an important additional pathway to rapidly access lifesaving treatments for COVID-19 in vulnerable communities.

  • From the US House of Representatives: Who Was Jeannette Rankin? Party Divisions of the House of Representatives, 1789 to Present

    Jeannette Rankin

    Political parties have been central to the organization and operations of the U.S. House of Representatives. As this chart demonstrates, the efforts of the founding generation to create a national government free of political parties proved unworkable. Parties demonstrated their worth in the House very quickly in organizing its work and in bridging the separation of powers. Within a decade House parties absorbed the various state and local factions.

    Right, in 1916, Jeannette Rankin, a member of the Republican Party, became the first woman in US history elected to the House of Representatives. 

    The chart below emphasizes the traditional two-party structure of the United States, with third-party affiliations in the Other column. Additionally, the numbers of Delegates and Resident Commissioners are reflected in the “Del./Res.” Column for reference. This chart does not address the party affiliation of these Members as they do not hold voting privileges on the House Floor.

    The figures presented are the House party divisions as of the initial election results for a particular Congress. This means that subsequent changes in House membership due to deaths, resignations, contested or special elections, or changes in a Member’s party affiliation are not included.

    The determination of party membership relies upon a number of authoritative sources that include The Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress, the House Clerk’s Election Statistics, Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections, Michael Dubin’s United States Congressional Elections, and Kenneth Martis’s Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress.

  • National Institutes of Health: New Approach Successfully Traces Genomic Variants Back to Genetic Disorders

    Doctors researching DNA and geneticsDoctors researching DNA and genetics. Julia Fekecs, NHGRI

    National Institutes of Health researchers have published an assessment of 13 studies that took a genotype-first approach to patient care. This approach contrasts with the typical phenotype-first approach to clinical research, which starts with clinical findings. A genotype-first approach to patient care involves selecting patients with specific genomic variants and then studying their traits and symptoms; this finding uncovered new relationships between genes and clinical conditions, broadened the traits and symptoms associated with known disorders, and offered insights into newly described disorders. The study(link is external) was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

    “We demonstrated that genotype-first research can work, especially for identifying people with rare disorders who otherwise might not have been brought to clinical attention,” says Caralynn Wilczewski, Ph.D., a genetic counselor at the National Human Genome Research Institute’s (NHGRI) Reverse Phenotyping Core and first author of the paper.

    Typically, to treat genetic conditions, researchers first identify patients who are experiencing symptoms, then they look for variants in the patients’ genomes that might explain those findings. However, this can lead to bias because the researchers are studying clinical findings based on their understanding of the disorder. The phenotype-first approach limits researchers from understanding the full spectrum of symptoms of the disorders and the associated genomic variants.

    “Genomics has the potential to change reactive medicine into preventative medicine,” said Leslie Biesecker, M.D., NIH distinguished investigator, director of NHGRI’s Center for Precision Health Research and a senior author of the article. “Studying how taking a genotype-first approach to research can help us learn how to model predictive and precision medicine in the future.”

    The study documents three types of discoveries from a genotype-first approach.

    First, the researchers found that this approach helped discover new relationships between genomic variants and specific clinical traits. For example, one NIH study found that having more than two copies of the TPSAB1 gene was associated with symptoms related to the gastrointestinal tract, connective tissues, and the nervous system.

    Second, this approach helped researchers find novel symptoms related to a disorder that clinicians previously missed because the patient did not have the typical symptoms. NHGRI researchers identified a person with a genomic variant associated with a known metabolic disorder. Further testing found that the individual had high levels of certain chemicals in their body associated with the disorder, despite having only minor symptoms.

    Third, this approach allowed researchers to determine the function of specific genomic variants, which has the potential to help clinicians understand newly described disorders. For example, in one study, NHGRI researchers and their collaborators found(link is external) that a genomic variant was associated with immune dysfunction at the molecular level in blood cells.

    The 13 studies that implemented a genotype-first approach used genomic data from NHGRI’s Reverse Phenotyping Core in the Center for Precision Health Research. The core aggregates genomic data from programs such as ClinSeq(R) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Centralized Sequencing Protocol, which together allowed analyses to be performed on more than 16,000 research participants who have undergone genome or exome sequencing.

    Exome and genome sequencing data from participants who consented to broad genomic data sharing and recontact for future research studies are currently available to NIH intramural researchers through the Reverse Phenotyping Core Genomic Data Browser to identify genomic variants of interest for their own research.

    “Importantly, we provide a framework for other institutions to build research programs that allow for genotype-first studies. With more programs taking this approach, we can better study the predictive potential of genomic medicine,” said Clesson Turner, M.D., director of NHGRI’s Reverse Phenotyping Core and a senior author of the article.

    The framework includes broad genomic data sharing with the ability to recontact participants explicitly stated during the informed consent process. NHGRI researchers recommend institutions aiming to establish genotype-first centers create strategic plans, especially for deciding what genomic findings will be returned, which may involve genetic counseling services. Importantly, according to the study, researchers must actively communicate with study participants to build informed and trusting long-term relationships.

    “In the future, as more researchers adopt this approach, we hope to identify more people who may be helped by the availability of their genome sequence, especially as more diverse populations join genome-sequencing studies,” says Dr. Wilczewski.

    The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is one of the 27 institutes and centers at the NIH, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services. The NHGRI Division of Intramural Research develops and implements technology to understand, diagnose and treat genomic and genetic diseases. Additional information about NHGRI can be found at: www.genome.gov.

    About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.

    NIH…Turning Discovery Into Health®

  • Jo Freeman’s Review of Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI

    Review of

    by Judy Gumbo
    New York: Three Rooms Press, 2022, 
    333 pages with a ten page photographic insert
     
     
    This is a sexy book – multiple meanings intended.  It should appeal to women who want to know more about feminism, to men who like to read about sex, and to anyone curious about the Sixties counter-culture.
     
    It’s also an inside story of someone who was present for several eye-catching events.  YIP stands for Youth International Party – with Party meaning party party and not political party.  Officially founded on December 31, 1967 by a few friends in a New York City apartment, Yippies used street theater and satire to oppose the war in Viet Nam, promote cannabis and generally raise hell.  In those days, the war was hot and the counter culture was blooming.
     
    Judy’s name wasn’t Gumbo in 1967, when she walked into her Toronto bedroom and found her first husband in bed with another woman.  With an ABD (All But Dissertation) in Sociology, Judy soon flew to California and for all practical purposes never went back to Canada.  Berkeley became home base, though for the next fifty years she lived all over the country and protested all over the world.
     
    The child of Canadian members of the Communist Party, she soon found herself in the middle of Yippiedom.  Early in 1968 she walked up to two handsome young men on the UC Berkeley campus and introduced herself.  One of them (a hunk with blond curls) became her life partner  despite several side trips into the arms of other men.
     
    Moving from authoritarian Communism to semi-anarchistic yippiedom, Judy was still a woman in a man’s world.  She discovered that “Yippie men talked; Yippie women listened.” (p. 66)  As was true in the larger society, it didn’t matter how brilliant your ideas or how creative your actions, a woman’s status depended on the man she was related to.  Her Stew Albert was the best friend of Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, as well as Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.  He made her an automatic insider.
     
    Indeed, it was Cleaver who gave her the name Gumbo.  She finally blew up when he called her “Mrs. Stew” one too many times.  After a long pause, Cleaver said “then, I’ll call you Gumbo.” (p. 44)  Gumbo is okra stew.
     
    Thanks to these connections Judy found herself on the inside of Yippie actions, often doing the clerical and support work but always observing closely. She displays a fine eye for detail as she describes what they wore and what they ate, as well as what they said and did.

  • Retiring: Congresswoman Jackie Speier Named One of “Politico’s 50” Most Influential People in American Politics for Bringing the Me Too Movement to Congress

    Jackie Speier 

    Congresswoman Jackie Speier (pronounced SPEAR) is a fearless fighter for women’s equality, LGBTQ rights and the disenfranchised who has dedicated her life to eliminating government corruption while working to strengthen America’s national and economic security. She was named to Newsweek’s list of 150 “Fearless Women” in the world and one of “Politico’s 50” most influential people in American politics for bringing the Me Too reckoning to Congress.

    She proudly represents California’s 14th Congressional District, stretching from the southern portion of San Francisco through San Mateo County to East Palo Alto. Speier serves on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), where she is the Chair of the Military Personnel Subcommittee, and on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where also she serves as Chair of the Strategic Technologies and Advanced Research (STAR) Subcommittee and serves on the Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation (C3) Subcommittee. Additionally, she serves on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, where she serves on the Subcommittees on National Security and Economic and Consumer Policy. Speier is also Co-Chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus (DWC), the Congressional Armenian Caucus, the Bipartisan Task Force To End Sexual Violence, and the Gunviolence Prevention Task Force.

    Fighting for Women’s Rights

    In October 2017, Congresswoman Speier brought the Me Too movement to Congress by sharing her own experience of misconduct when she was a Congressional aide. Her legislation, the ME TOO Congress Act, became the basis of the bipartisan Congressional Accountability Act (CAA) Reform Act that was signed into law in December 2018. When Speier first started working on Congressional sexual harassment in 2014, she was told by a fellow colleague that even anti-harassment training would never see the light of day. Today, thanks to the CAA Reform Act and a related resolution, anti-harassment training is mandatory; survivors are no longer forced to undergo mandatory counselling, mediation, and cooling-off periods; and workers can’t be silenced with forced non-disclosure agreements. Moreover, interns and fellows have the same protections as permanent staff; employees can be heard in anonymous and regular climate surveys; and Members must personally cover the costs for their harassing behavior, not taxpayers. As a result of these efforts, employees also now have legal representation and counseling through the Office of Employee Advocacy, so that the U.S. House of Representatives is no longer exclusively providing counsel to Member offices accused of misconduct.

    The CAA Reform Act went into effect in June 2019 and has already made tremendous progress in people’s lives. However, Congresswoman Speier’s work is not finished. She will be introducing additional legislation with her colleague Congressman Bradley Byrne to further bolster protections for staff and hold Members accountable for their discriminatory behavior.

    She also continues to advocate for fundamental reforms to end the epidemic of sexual assault in the military and on college campuses, and she is leading the fight against sexism in the fields of science and technology and academia overall. And she is at the forefront of efforts to increase constitutional protections against sex discrimination through ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and to end gender-based discrimination in the pricing of goods and services through the passage of the Pink Tax Repeal Act.

    During her 18 years in both chambers of the California Legislature, Congresswoman Speier had more than 300 bills signed into law by both Republican and Democratic governors. Speier secured justice for women and children with a series of bills that led to the collection of more than $2 billion in delinquent court-ordered child support payments. She authored a measure that gave the state the nation’s strongest financial privacy law and was integral to the passage of California’s Gender Tax Repeal Act in 1996.

  • US Department of Justice: First of Two Convicted at Trial in Michigan Governor Kidnapping Plot Sentenced to 16 Years in Prison

    Department of Justice, Office of Public AffairsGov. Whitmer

     

    Governor Gretchen Whitmer, right

    A Michigan man was sentenced today to 16 years in prison followed by five years of supervised release for conspiracy to kidnap the Governor of Michigan and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction against persons or property. 

    Adam Fox, 39, of Wyoming, Michigan, and co-conspirator Barry Croft Jr., 47, of Bear, Delaware, were convicted by a federal jury in August 2022 during an 11-day retrial. According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Fox and Croft intended to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer from her vacation cottage near Elk Rapids, Michigan, and use the destructive devices to facilitate their plot by harming and hindering the governor’s security detail and any responding law enforcement officers. They specifically explored placing a bomb under an interstate overpass near a pedestrian boardwalk. Croft was also convicted of possessing an improvised explosive device, which was a commercial firework refashioned with shrapnel to serve as a hand-grenade. A jury in an earlier trial was unable to reach a verdict.

    “Mr. Fox, and his confederate Mr. Croft, were convicted by a jury of masterminding a plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan and to use weapons of mass destruction against responding law enforcement,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “Today’s sentence reflects the Department of Justice’s unwavering commitment to protecting our elected officials, law enforcement officers, and dedicated public servants from criminal threats and violence — and to holding the perpetrators of such acts fully accountable under the law.”

    “Today, Mr. Fox learned his fate. For his role in the plot to kidnap the Governor and trigger further violence, he will serve a long term in prison,” said Former U.S. Attorney Andrew Birge for the Western District of Michigan, appointed to oversee the trial. “Responding to domestic terrorism has been a priority for the Department of Justice since its founding. Rest assured: we will spare no effort to disrupt plots like these and hold those responsible accountable to the law.”

    Fox is the third to be sentenced of four conspirators convicted in the plot. Croft is scheduled to be sentenced tomorrow.

    Co-defendant Ty Garbin, 27, of Hartland, Michigan, pleaded guilty in January 2021 and initially received a sentence of 75 months, or over six years, in prison. The district court later reduced to a term of 30 months, or two and a half years in prison, after fully considering his cooperation at both trials. Kaleb Franks, 28, of Waterford, Michigan, received a term of four years in prison after pleading guilty and testifying at both trials. Co-defendants Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta were acquitted at the first trial in April 2022.

    The FBI’s Detroit Field Office investigated the case with valuable assistance provided by the FBI’s Baltimore Field Office and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, including Michigan State Police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

    The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan charged the case and conducted the trials, with valuable assistance provided by the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section.

  • Roberta McReynolds Writes: My Rainbow Has 64 Colors

    Alaskan rainbow

    Full featured double rainbow in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska. Source, English Wikipedia; Eric Rolph

    By Roberta McReynolds

    Childhood joys are often simple things. One of my favorites was crayons. There were few things that elicited a more delightful response from me that receiving a brand-new box of crayons. The Crayola brand was my favorite, by far; the waxy sticks of crayons produced the best coverage when scribbling between the lines of a coloring book page.

    Boxes of crayons typically came in several standard sizes. The minimum pack of 8 colors covered only the very basics: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, and black. The boxes of 16, 32, and 48 included hues in increasing varieties. Oh, but it was the box of 64 crayons that I coveted; the delightful collection of every color available when I was young.

    Not a Christmas went by without the hope of discovering a brand-new box of 64 crayons to unwrap. Opening the lid released that unforgettable whiff of waxy pigments, and revealed the first glimpse of rows of those perfect tips on display that had never yet touched paper.

    The body of each stick was double wrapped in paper to lessen the chance of breakage. Those little paper shrouds bore the official name of each color. It was necessary to peel back the paper as the crayons wore down with usage. As I picked at the edge of the stiff paper it would inevitably slip under my short fingernails and stab the tender quick. Tearing back the paper in uneven strips ruined the perfect appearance in my eyes. One time I removed the entire paper from every single crayon to make them all uniform, and soon discovered how difficult it was to discern the differences in the darker colors. I regretted the disaster I’d created and immediately began longing for my next new box of crayons.

    The marvelous box of 64 was introduced in 1958 and came with a new feature; a sharpener was built into the box. Now children could restore the points to their crayons after they became blunt from hours of coloring. The results weren’t nearly as pristine as the original tip, but it was a welcomed device for youngsters. Parents saw the gimmicky sharpener in a totally different light. My mother was very vocal about how Crayola had diabolically invented a way to hasten the need to replace crayons that had been quickly, and needlessly, reduced by overzealous sharpening. Whenever she caught me sticking a crayon into sharpener, she scolded that I was wasting the crayon away until nothing would be left. For the record, I don’t believe I ever managed to cause a single crayon to disappear through the act of repeated twisting in the patented Crayola sharpener.

    I didn’t get a new box of crayons every year, but they were tucked under the Christmas tree more often than not. There were times when Mom just flat out refused, rightly making her case by pointing out all the partially used boxes I still possessed. I couldn’t bear to throw out any of my beloved crayons; hence I learned to hide the extra boxes so there wouldn’t be any evidence that could be used against me in the parental courtroom where my mother was the judge, prosecutor, and jury.

    Occasionally my mother gave me a box for my birthday, which caught me by surprise. While I was delighted to have them, I was a bit disappointed to already know I wouldn’t get any for Christmas. Maybe I’d get some new coloring books instead ….

    I don’t remember how the conversation got started, but my husband and I were reminiscing about past Christmases and birthdays during one of our early morning walks early in the summer of 2022. We were both describing the gifts we remembered; the best and worst our parents picked out over the years. As we traveled our route through the neighborhood, I shared my nostalgic memories of yearning for a new box of 64-crayons every year.

    I explained to Mike that before the sun set on Christmas day, I would dump all the new crayons out of the box and begin arranging them in sequence before putting them back into the box in what I considered the proper arrangement, instead of the random way they came from the factory. As a child, I thought of this as ‘rainbow order’. Fundamentally, it was taking a traditional color wheel and making it linear. I can recall carrying out this obsessive arranging as young as the age of five. Throughout my life, most of my art supplies have been subjected to this treatment.