Portfolio: Open for viewing!

Chrstn

I made a new page for my portfolio!

I was thinking the other day if I should make another site for my portfolio, but… I figured out it would be easy to manage if it’s in the same site so I made a new page for it and I’m so happy to share it with you guys! ❤

I’ve been posting new photos for a week now and I hope you can check it out HERE. ❤

Here’s some of my recent uploads! Hope you like it! ❤

“Bangka”
This was a photo I took when we went in Lakawon Island.


“Grandeur”
I took this one when we went to Sipalay. This one’s striking, I must say.


“Bandstand”
I took this one when I did a project with my friends.
Inscribed along the sides of it’s roof are the names of Westernclassical music composersBeethoven,Wagner,Haydn

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NATO condemns Novichok attack on Navalny — EUROPE DIPLOMATIC

The North Atlantic Council met on 4 September 2020 to address the assassination attempt on Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny. Germany briefed Allies on the toxicology findings of their specialist laboratory. “There is proof beyond doubt that Mr. Navalny was poisoned using a military-grade nerve agent from the Novichok group,” said NATO Secretary General Jens […]

NATO condemns Novichok attack on Navalny — EUROPE DIPLOMATIC

Butler County returns to Level 3 in state’s health advisory system due to spike in Oxford virus cases

The county has met four out of the seven COVID-19 indicators, including a spike in outpatient visits per day. Miami University students are a big reason for that spike.

As of Wednesday, the school reported 704 total cases, with 60.5 percent of those cases reported between Monday and Wednesday, according to the school. There were 249 new reported cases on Monday and 132 on Wednesday.

Off-campus parties are the primary reason for the spike of virus cases, said Miami University President Gregory Crawford, who appeared with DeWine during the governor’s statewide news conference on Thursday.

“The surge in cases really demonstrates the aggressive nature of this virus,” Crawford said.

Source: Butler County returns to Level 3 in state’s health advisory system due to spike in Oxford virus cases

Trump admin quietly pulls funding for disinfecting N.Y. subways, schools – New York Daily News

Transit systems, schools and other public facilities in New York could soon become a whole lot dirtier because of a policy change enacted by the Trump administration that’ll strip millions of dollars in critical coronavirus aid for the state, the Daily News has learned.

It’s a gut-punch no one saw coming, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) railed Thursday.

Source: Trump admin quietly pulls funding for disinfecting N.Y. subways, schools – New York Daily News

A Few Students Threw Parties. Now an Entire SUNY Campus Is Shut Down. – The New York Times

 

In late August, less than a week after classes started, the State University of New York at Oneonta suspended five students who, officials said, had organized parties in the upstate town that might have led to a coronavirus outbreak on campus.

But it was already too late.

Five days later, the outbreak was out of control, with nearly 400 virus cases among a campus student population that is usually around 6,000.

As a result, officials announced on Thursday that they were canceling in-person classes for the fall semester and sending students home, making Oneonta the first SUNY campus to shut down because of the virus after trying to reopen for classes.

“Despite the diligence of the vast majority of our SUNY Oneonta students, faculty and staff, the actions of a few individuals who didn’t comply resulted in the spread of Covid-19 over the past week,” Jim Malatras, SUNY’s chancellor, said in a statement.

After a teen’s death, Texas cuts ties with a rural foster care facility, then gets a tongue-lashing from a federal judge

Heart Galleries, portraits of adoptable children, on display at the Child Protective Services office at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services in Austin on Nov. 14, 2019.

Portraits of adoptable children on display at the Child Protective Services office at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services in Austin on Nov. 14, 2019.

Credit: Eddie Gaspar

Texas officials will no longer send foster children to live at a rural facility where a teen girl died this spring in what a federal judge described as an apparently “avoidable death.”

The decision by child welfare officials to cut ties with the Prairie Harbor residential treatment center in Wallis came to light Thursday during the first day of a two-day hearing in which state officials argued that they had made significant progress toward reforms ordered by U.S. District Judge Janis Jack in a nearly decade-old class-action lawsuit brought by foster children.

An obviously skeptical Jack, who at one point quipped that she took state officials’ testimony “with a grain of salt,” threatened several times during the hearing to hold the state in contempt of court for not adequately implementing new policy.

The hearing comes nearly five years after Jack first ruled that Texas had violated long-term foster children’s constitutional rights by leaving them in unsafe homes and three months after court-appointed monitors published a scathing report arguing that state officials remained out of compliance, permitting the foster care system system to pose “substantial threats to children’s safety.”

The hearing is scheduled to continue Friday, and Jack is expected to decide whether to hold Texas child welfare officials in contempt of court, for the second time in less than a year.

On a video call sometimes interrupted by the pings of computer alerts and a hiccuping internet connection, Jack lobbed fiery questions at her iPad screen, such as why state officials hadn’t asked lawmakers more quickly for emergency funding to address systemic failures.

“I’m not understanding the state’s reluctance, and actually refusal, to abide by these orders,” Jack said. State witnesses used “circular speak” to avoid answering her questions, she said. And at one point she scolded Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jaime Masters for turning off her video camera, saying she wanted to make sure the commissioner was present.

State officials described their efforts as a work in progress and resisted the sweeping terms Jack used to criticize the system they oversee. But given the opportunity, they declined to name any perceived inaccuracies in the court-appointed monitors’ June report detailing 11 recent child deaths. At one point, Masters told the judge, “Your Honor, I’m concerned by what I’m hearing as well.”

Jack and attorney Paul Yetter, a partner with Yetter Coleman in Houston who represents more than 10,000 children in the class-action lawsuit brought against Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas’ health and human services leadership, paid particular attention to the death earlier this year of a 14-year-old girl, referred to as K.C.

On Feb. 8, K.C. woke shortly after 10:30 p.m. to use the restroom, according to the monitors’ summary of Prairie Harbor staff testimony. A staff member supervising the girl noticed that she limped but assumed it was because her leg was asleep.

The staff member heard the girl fall and found her collapsed on the bathroom floor, lying on her back. Over 10 minutes, the girl’s condition reportedly deteriorated and she lost consciousness, though she continued to breathe and had a pulse, according to the summary of staff testimony.

Staff waited to call 911 until 11:08 p.m., more than 30 minutes after K.C. had collapsed, the monitors wrote. K.C. was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at the hospital, and a forensic review found the cause was a pulmonary embolism associated with a deep blood clot in her right calf.

The court-appointed monitors described K.C. in their report as obese. She was approximately 5’3” and weighed just under 300 pounds, with medical records indicating she had high blood pressure and blood glucose levels. And they noted that daily progress notes signed by Prairie Harbor staff in the previous month documented the girl’s complaints of leg pain, but her last doctor’s appointment was in October 2019.

State officials said an investigation into K.C.’s death was ongoing. And they revealed during the hearing that they were terminating their contract with Prairie Harbor and would no longer place foster children in the residential treatment center, which caters to traumatized children with complex behavioral needs. State officials cited the facility more than 60 times for minimum standards violations between February 2017 and December 2019, according to the monitors’ report.

Jack said it was “unbelievable” that state officials had continued to place foster children at Prairie Harbor for up to seven months after K.C.’s death. And after officials testified that they had this week ceased placements there, Jack said that she discovered in a simple internet search that the home’s owner and executive director have a new facility in Corpus Christi that is poised to take new foster placements.

Prairie Harbor officials could not be reached for immediate comment on Thursday.

It is “stunning,” Jack said, that the Texas Health and Human Services Commission does not have “any stipulations that the owners of these facilities are not allowed to open under another name. That to me is also a problem that needs to be addressed.”

Children enter the foster care system after they are found to have suffered abuse or neglect at home. But Jack’s 2015 ruling, which state attorneys fought back against for years until it was ultimately weakened by an appeals court, found that foster children regularly become victims of sexual abuse and “often age out of care more damaged than when they entered.”

In November 2019, Jack held the state in contempt of court after a similarly fiery hearing for failing to comply with her orders. At the time, she made clear that based on initial information from the monitors, she no longer found the state’s child welfare agency “to be credible in any way.” She fined the state $150,000 at the time.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, which oversees Child Protective Services investigators as well as the privately run foster care system for children who are removed from their homes, also has been the subject of much recent legislative scrutiny.

During the 2017 legislative session, lawmakers poured an additional $500 million into the agency, boosting pay for case workers and hiring more.

But the Texas Legislature has not held any hearings during the coronavirus pandemic, which meant Jack’s hearing was the first in months to feature public testimony about oversight of the oft-maligned agency.

After her original ruling, Jack appointed the two monitors to serve as her eyes and ears, helping her to supervise the system for “an indefinite period of time.” Kevin Ryan, a former New Jersey commissioner of the Department of Children and Families, and Deborah Fowler, executive director of the nonprofit Texas Appleseed, have served in that capacity, drawing criticism from state attorneys who say they have charged “exorbitant” fees for their work.

In a recent legal filing, lawyers from the Texas Attorney General’s Office, which is defending child welfare officials in the case, wrote that they had “taken tremendous strides” to comply with Jack’s order. The arguments made by the children’s attorneys, they wrote, paint “an incomplete picture” of the state’s efforts.

The hearing is scheduled to continue Friday morning.

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Gov. Greg Abbott considering putting Austin police under state control after budget cut

‘No more democracy for you, if I disagree with you’ says Texas GOP governor. GOP in Texas in favor of State dictatorship over cities and counties?
Austin police officers gathered on Interstate 35 to remove protesters from the highway. May 31, 2020.

Austin police officers gathered on Interstate 35 to remove protesters demonstrating against police brutality from the highway in May. Gov. Greg Abbott and other state leaders have criticized Austin officials’ decision to cut police department funding.

Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune

Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

Gov. Greg Abbott is considering a legislative proposal that, if passed, would put the control of the Austin Police Department under state authority.

Texas’ governor tweeted Thursday that he was looking at a strategy that would stop major city officials’ efforts to shift resources away from police departments and into other social services. Austin became the first Texas city to approve cutting its police budget last month as calls rise to “defund police” during a revived movement against police brutality and racial injustice.

“This proposal for the state to takeover the Austin Police Department is one strategy I’m looking at,” Abbott tweeted. “We can’t let Austin’s defunding & disrespect for law enforcement to endanger the public & invite chaos like in Portland and Seattle.”

The potential legislation, sent to Abbott by former Texas House Representatives Terry Keel and Ron Wilson after Austin’s decision, would allow for a city with a population over 1 million and less than two police officers per 1,000 residents — a bucket Austin falls into — to have its police force consolidated with the Texas Department of Public Safety. The state’s law enforcement branch would take over the local police department and form a new entity if the governor decided there were “insufficient municipal resources being appropriated for public safety needs,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Texas Tribune.

The director of DPS would control operations of the new department, and the state’s Public Safety Commission, a five-member board that oversees DPS and is appointed by the governor, would decide its budget, said Keel, who is also a former Travis County sheriff. The money would then be taken from state sales revenue taxes usually sent to the city.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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