Sandra E. Garcia

Most of the recalled poultry is bulk chicken products that are shipped to “industrial business customers,” according to Donny Epp, a company spokesman.

“These products should be thrown away or returned to the place of purchase,” the USDA said in a statement Wednesday, adding that there had been no confirmed reports of adverse reactions related to consumption of the recalled poultry.

The products, which were produced from Oct. 21 to Nov. 4, were shipped to locations in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, according to the USDA. Simmons declined to say what metal was found in the chicken.

“We are working closely with regulatory authorities and affected customers to expedite this product recall,” Simmons said in a statement Wednesday. The company has already contacted its customers, according to Epp.

Two million pounds is a large amount of chicken to recall, according to Pamela Koch, a professor of nutrition ecology at Columbia University, who said the ever speedier distribution of mass produced food would make large recalls more and more likely.

In January, Tyson Foods, one of the United States’ largest meat producers, recalled more than 36,000 pounds of chicken nuggets. The company found pieces of rubber in the food.

Then, in March, Tyson recalled 69,093 pounds of frozen chicken strips after two people said they found pieces of metal in the chicken.

A year ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Americans to not eat romaine lettuce, days before Thanksgiving. The CDC said at the time that it was taking the precaution after 32 people across 11 states got sick with E. coli.

So are recalls becoming more common, or is recall information more accessible?

Both, according to Koch. Food recalls are happening “all the time,” she said, and because the volumes of food that are produced at once are getting larger, the recalls are getting larger as well.

Americans spend the lowest percentage of their income on food compared with people in similarly large countries, Koch said, creating the need to make more food faster.

“To do that, food gets mixed together in larger batches,” she said. “It is very easy to spread contamination to a lot of food, and that food is getting distributed very quickly to multiple states.”

“If we want to eat well for our health, the environment, to decrease climate change and to minimize food safety changes,” people have to consume smaller, more locally distributed food, Koch said.

“The only way that could be accomplished is if food becomes more expensive and it takes more to accomplish that.”

This article originally appeared in

Chicken Recall Affects Over 2 Million Pounds of Simmons Products

Simmons Prepared Foods has recalled over 2 million pounds of poultry products after it found last month that the chicken may have been contaminated with metal, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

President Donald Trump on Twitter accused news outlets of trying to pressure the justice into taking more liberal positions and suggested, without elaborating, that the “Justice Department should come to his rescue.”

On Saturday, The Times published an essay in its Opinion section adapted from a forthcoming book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” by two Times reporters, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, who helped cover his confirmation hearings.

The reporters wrote that they spent 10 months investigating the allegations of sexual misconduct and assault at the center of the hearings, including one by a former Yale classmate, Deborah Ramirez. She recalled being at a dorm party where participants were drinking heavily, and Kavanaugh thrust his penis in her face, prompting her to swat it away and inadvertently touch it.

While Senate investigators concluded at the time that Ramirez’s account lacked corroboration, the authors said at least seven people “heard about the Yale incident long before Kavanaugh was a federal judge,” including Ramirez’s mother and two classmates who learned of it just days after the party.

The book also reports that Ramirez’s lawyers gave the FBI a list of at least 25 people who may have had corroborating evidence, but that the bureau interviewed none of them. The two agents who interviewed Ramirez told her they found her “credible,” the excerpt said.

The authors also said they uncovered a second, previously unreported incident involving similar behavior by Kavanaugh at a different party in his freshman year.

The excerpt said a classmate, Max Stier, who now runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the FBI about what he had witnessed but that the bureau did not investigate.

The excerpt cites two unnamed officials who have communicated with Stier, who has declined to discuss the episode publicly. Kavanaugh has declined to answer questions about it, according to the excerpt.

At the center of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing was the testimony of sexual misconduct allegations by Christine Blasey Ford, a California university professor who had attended a Washington-area high school near his.

She testified that when they were teenagers, he pinned her to a bed, groped her and tried to remove her clothes while covering her mouth. He has denied the allegations from both women.

“These newest revelations are disturbing,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wrote on Twitter about The Times essay. “Like the man who appointed him, Kavanaugh should be impeached.”

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., a member of the Senate committee that presided over his confirmation hearings, on Twitter echoed the call for impeachment.

“He was put on the Court through a sham process and his place on the Court is an insult to the pursuit of truth and justice,” she wrote.

Julián Castro, who was housing secretary under President Barack Obama, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont also called for his impeachment.

Trump, who nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, defended him on Twitter on Sunday.

“He is an innocent man who has been treated HORRIBLY,” he wrote. “Such lies about him. They want to scare him into turning Liberal!”

In another tweet, the president suggested that Kavanaugh should “start suing people for libel, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue.”

The Senate Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said on Twitter, that the “far left’s willingness to seize on completely uncorroborated and unsubstantiated allegations during last year’s confirmation process was a dark and embarrassing chapter for the Senate.”

Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, wrote on Twitter that “The New York Times should be ashamed of this smear on Justice Kavanaugh.”

James Dao, deputy editorial page editor for The Times, said in a statement that the essay was “a well-reported and newsworthy account that sheds new light on a matter that provoked significant national debate.”

The Times was roundly criticized for a tweet — which was later deleted — made on its Opinion account on Saturday about the essay that read: “Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun. But when Brett Kavanaugh did it to her, Deborah Ramirez says, it confirmed that she didn’t belong at Yale in the first place.”

Dao said the tweet “was clearly offensive and never should have gone out and we sincerely apologize.”

Calls for Kavanaugh's Impeachment Come Amid New Misconduct Allegations

Several Democratic presidential candidates called for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on Sunday after The New York Times published new information about allegations of sexual misconduct against him, while Republican leaders condemned the reporting as irresponsible and defended him.

Kids II, which manufactures baby products for brands such as Baby Einstein, Ingenuity, Bright Starts and Disney Baby, is offering consumers a refund for their recalled baby rockers, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said in a statement Friday announcing the recall.

Approximately 694,000 Kids II rocking sleepers were sold nationwide at Walmart, Target, Toys “R” Us and online from March 2012 to this month, according to the safety agency. The sleepers usually cost $40 to $80.

The recall comes weeks after Fisher Price recalled 4.7 million of its Rock ’n Play sleepers after it was reported that at least 10 infants had died of suffocation since 2015 after rolling over from their backs to their stomachs while in the seat. After first issuing a safety warning for the sleeper, Fisher Price eventually recalled the product.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends “that infants are put to sleep on their back on a flat, firm surface, and these are on an incline,” said Dr. David Fagan, vice chairman of pediatrics at the Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park, New York. “We would never recommend any of these products.”

According to Fagan, research from the 1990s proved that putting babies to sleep on their backs on a flat, firm surface caused incidents of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, to drop significantly.

“Every nap and every night,” Fagan said.

The allure of the sleepers or rockers is the promise of rocking babies to sleep, giving parents a free moment. But the idea that babies can be rocked to sleep is more myth than fact.

“The perception that rocking soothes the infant and puts him to sleep has not been proven,” Fagan said. “It is not fact.”

To request a refund, consumers can call the Kids II recall hotline at 866-869-7954 or fill out a form online.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/us/kids-2-rocking-sleeper-recall.html" id="70f2f329-c04e-3867-a599-f52d4fc34459">The New York Times</a>.

700,000 Rocking Baby Sleepers Are Recalled After 5 Infant Deaths

The children’s product company Kids II has recalled 700,000 rocking baby sleepers after the deaths of five infants who had used the rocker while unrestrained.

Kids II, which manufactures baby product for brands such as Baby Einstein, Ingenuity, Bright Starts and Disney Baby, is offering consumers a refund for their recalled baby rockers, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said in a statement Friday announcing the recall.

Many winners decide to remain anonymous — or at least try to — but that can be difficult when many states demand that the winners of large jackpots show their faces at news conferences.

At his own news conference in Madison, Wisconsin, Manuel Franco, 24, who in a Powerball drawing last month won $768 million, the third-largest jackpot in United States lottery history, seemed to be trying not to divulge too much information about himself, perhaps to keep random family members from coming out of the woodwork. Speaking with reporters Tuesday, he declined to say where he grew up, where he lived, what kind of car he drove or where he used to work. (He quit two days after winning.)

Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Texas, North Dakota and Ohio allow lottery winners to conceal their identities if the winnings exceed a certain dollar amount, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Other states, like New York, make it easy for winners to collect their prizes under the cover of an LLC or an entity. But states like Wisconsin want winners to come forward to claim their prizes, although Wisconsin does not require them to appear at a news conference as Franco did.

After Franco’s $768 million win, “it seems a little ridiculous that there isn’t privacy when it comes to that,” Gary Tauchen, a Wisconsin state representative, said. “Certainly you have a lot of fourth and fifth cousins and it is just a situation when you’re under high stress.”

While Franco was answering questions about his lottery winnings as concisely as possible, Tauchen was introducing a bill seeking to ensure the privacy of lottery winners in Wisconsin.

“I know that it is one of those life-changing experiences when you need some time to adjust,” Tauchen said. “You don’t need the stress of other people putting pressure on you.”

And for jackpot winners like Franco, the pressure comes nearly immediately.

“For the next two weeks, people are going to be outside of his house,” Jason M. Kurland, a lawyer who has represented several winners of large lottery jackpots, said Wednesday.

“I get those letters every week,” Kurland said, referring to the mail he receives intended for his clients. “They range from congratulatory letters to individuals having a tough time asking for handouts, to organizations looking for donations, to business men and women asking for investors.”

Kurland, who calls himself the Lottery Lawyer and represented the person in South Carolina who won the $1.54 billion Mega Millions jackpot last year, advises his clients to delete all their social media accounts before they claim their winnings. He also tells them to try to remove their address from public view as much as they can and to get new phone numbers. If there are children involved, he will hire security for the first couple of days.

Kurland tries to help his clients retain some privacy after they win, but if privacy is hard to achieve in 2019, anonymity is nearly impossible.

“It is very hard to participate in civil life and be anonymous,” Albert Gidari, the privacy director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, said Wednesday. “You can’t buy a car in cash and avoid disclosing who you are because now car dealers are financial institutions,” Gidari said, adding that it was nearly impossible to transfer money in and out of the United States without disclosing who you are to the government.

“He can get a lot of lawyers and accountants and figure out how to move and hide a lot of that money at great risk to himself for not complying with government reporting,” Gidari said. “You can’t get very far, but you can get far enough to get some degree of obscurity, even if you can’t get anonymity.”

Last year the winner of a $560 million Powerball jackpot in New Hampshire took the state to court to retain her anonymity while claiming her prize. The woman’s lawyers argued that she would be accosted with requests for money, and the state argued that lottery winners must be disclosed to make sure that winners are not related to lottery employees and that winnings are distributed fairly. The court decided disclosing the winner’s name would be an invasion of privacy and allowed the woman to anonymously claim her winnings.

“You want to be able to enjoy this crazy amount of money you luckily won, but at the same time, you want to keep your privacy, so it’s a balance,” Kurland said.

But going off the grid, setting up shop on the beach and enjoying the fruits of your ticket are not necessarily possible without informing the government.

“If you leave the country, it’s worse,” Gidari said, adding that leaving the country and failing to report assets in the United States and abroad could lead to losing those assets.

“Because the IRS will know all of this doesn’t mean that the public will know all of this,” Gidari said. “We still haven’t seen Donald Trump’s taxes.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/lottery-winners-anonymous.html" id="7d224019-b230-3ee2-acdc-4a30560707f9">The New York Times</a>.

Everyone dreams of it: having a small piece of paper with the right numbers printed on it and winning the life-changing $200 million, $700 million or $1 billion jackpot. But what happens after you win?

Thinking of Going Off the Grid After Winning the Lottery? Not So Fast

The state senator, Maureen Walsh, a Republican, made the remarks on the Senate floor on April 16 while denouncing a bill that would allow nurses to get mandatory, uninterrupted meal and rest breaks. She said she opposed the legislation because it “does not apply” to districts like hers with many critical access hospitals, which have fewer than 25 beds.

“I understand helping with employees and making sure we have rest breaks,” said Walsh, who voted against the bill, House Bill 1155. “We need to care for patients first and foremost.”

Walsh’s comments were met with backlash by nurses around the country. A nurse in Chicago, Juliana Bindas, 27, started a petition on Change.org asking Walsh to spend a day shadowing a nurse so she could gain a deeper understanding of what a nurse’s basic shift is like. The senator has since indicated that she will accept the invitation.

“Nurses don’t really have time to even take a bathroom break, let alone play a deck of cards,” Bindas said on Tuesday. “It is completely false. We are busy taking care of your family members; we are making sure our patients are comfortable.”

Walsh apologized on Monday “to those I offended with my comments.”

“I really don’t believe nurses at our critical access hospitals spend their days playing cards, but I did say it, and I wish I could reel it back,” she said in a statement. The senator could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Walsh — who mentioned in her apology that her mother was a registered nurse — said she was trying to point out that the staffing needs of smaller, rural hospitals were different from those of the larger hospitals with “hundreds of patients.”

The executive director of the Washington state Nurses Association, Sally Watkins, said she did not think that a hospital’s size, location or number of beds ought to make a difference.

“It should not matter where a nurse works: All nurses should have a break,” Watkins said. “It is my understanding that those hospitals should be exempted for cost reasons, but in many ways hospitals are already spending that money.”

According to a 2018 Gallup poll about Americans’ perceptions of various professions, nurses received the highest rating for honesty and ethics for the 17th consecutive year, with 84 percent of Americans indicating high or very high levels of trust in them. But to take the job means to be prepared to be worn out.

“Nurses get frustrated and oftentimes leave the profession because they can’t work without breaks,” Watkins said. “It becomes a fatigue issue.”

In Washington state, nurses can take breaks, but those breaks can be interrupted.

“Nurses can be called back to their unit,” Watkins said. “Some hospitals call a bathroom visit a break.”

Bindas spoke about the need for personal time. “If there was a way we could have an uninterrupted lunch break it would be important not only for the physical but mental and emotional as well,” she said. “So you can also take care of yourself.”

Walsh offered an amendment to the bill on April 16 limiting nurses to eight-hour shifts. But in her statement she said she was abandoning the amendment after hearing from nurses in her district that they prefer to work 12-hour shifts to spend more time with their families.

“In recognition of that, I support the removal of the amendment and am confident it will be stripped off,” Walsh said.

But 12-hour shifts are rarely just 12 hours. In Bindas’ experience, a 12-hour shift can easily run more than two hours over because nurses usually stay to hand off to other nurses, check on their patients and write reports.

“Nurses go into this career because it’s a selfless career,” Bindas said. “At the end of the day every nurse deserves respect and to be appreciated.”

In her statement, Walsh left the door open for a learning experience.

“I understand from news accounts that a petition is being circulated urging me to spend a day shadowing a nurse at a local hospital for 12 hours, and walk a mile in her shoes,” she said. “I look forward to receiving it and am happy to accept.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/us/nurses-maureen-walsh.html" id="d405c826-1fcd-3199-ab47-3bf804549be6">The New York Times</a>.

A state senator in Washington who last week suggested that nurses “probably play cards for a considerable amount of the day” has now said she would shadow a nurse for 12 hours.

A State Senator Who Said Nurses 'Play Cards' While on the Job May Shadow One

The man, Brandon Cory Lecroy, 26, of Greenwood, was arrested in 2018 after a confidential source tipped off authorities that Lecroy had reached out to an unidentified white supremacist organization seeking help in the murder.

An FBI agent posing as a hit man contacted Lecroy, who told the agent over the phone, “$500 and he’s a ghost,” according to an arrest warrant affidavit. After giving the agent an initial payment of $100, he was taken into custody.

Lecroy received the maximum 10-year sentence and three years of court-ordered supervision Friday after pleading guilty to a murder-for-hire charge, the U.S. attorney’s office in South Carolina said in a statement.

The attempted killing came as hate crimes are on the rise. In 2018, the FBI said that reports of such crimes had increased 17% from 2016-17. That was the third straight year they had risen as issues of race increasingly dominated the political climate.

The primary motivators in hate crimes are race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation, the FBI said in its 2018 report. Reporting hate crimes to the FBI is still voluntary for law enforcement agencies, and in 2017, only 12.6% of federal agencies reported that a hate crime had occurred in their jurisdiction.

In Lecroy’s case, officials said they were tipped off in March 2018 that he had contacted the white supremacist group for help with the killing.

Lecroy went as far as texting the agent photos of two targets, including the neighbor, whom officials have not identified. He also provided times when it would have been best to carry out the killing.

Lecroy said he planned to take over his neighbor’s property, according to an affidavit in U.S. District Court in South Carolina. He also asked the agent for a “ghost gun,” or an untraceable 9 mm gun that had not been stolen, according to court documents. What Lecroy planned to do with the “ghost gun” was not disclosed.

After initially pleading not guilty, Lecroy withdrew his plea and pleaded guilty to one count of murder for hire.

Victims of hate crimes often do not believe that reporting their crime will help their situation, and that contributes to why many hate crimes remain unreported.

In 2018, the FBI said it planned to train its agents to be better at identifying and reporting hate crimes. The Justice Department has also set up a website that focuses on education and prevention of hate crimes and providing resources for victims, citizens and officials.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/us/hit-man-lynching.html" id="d6300b74-40a0-30e3-afb4-96e83a1e2a1f">The New York Times</a>.

A white man in South Carolina has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to trying to hire a hit man to kill his black neighbor, hang him from a tree and leave a burning cross in his yard, prosecutors said.

White Man Gets 10 Years in Prison for Trying to Hire Hit Man to Lynch Black Neighbor

Lecroy said he planned to take over his neighbor’s property, according to the U.S. district attorney’s office in South Carolina. He also asked the agent for a “ghost gun,” or an untraceable 9 mm gun that had not been stolen, according to court documents. What Lecroy planned to do with the “ghost gun” was not disclosed.

The strike, by United Food and Commercial Workers International Union members working at more than 240 Stop &amp; Shops in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, forced some stores to close. Union and supermarket officials could not say precisely how many.

The supermarket activated a contingency plan that included sending support-office staff members and temporary replacement workers to select locations, according to a Stop &amp; Shop spokeswoman, Jennifer Brogan. Pharmacies and banks remained open, regardless of a store’s status, she said.

Among the workers on strike were cashiers, stockers, bakers, deli clerks and butchers. A previous three-year contract expired Feb. 23.

Last year, while employees were seeking better wages, Stop &amp; Shop’s parent company, Ahold Delhaize, reported profits of more than $2 billion to its shareholders, according to Erikka Knuti, a union spokeswoman.

Most full-time employees, including unionized department managers, earn an average of $21.30 an hour, Brogan said.

Stop &amp; Shop said its latest proposed contract included, among other things, pay increases for all associates, no changes to employees’ deductibles, an increase of $2 to $4 on health insurance premiums and an increase to the company’s pension fund contributions.

The proposed pay increase — an additional 50 cents an hour for workers, according to Knuti — would not offset the higher costs of health care, the union spokeswoman said, and “makes it not really a pay increase.”

“A full-timer would pay $900 on a weekly premium for three years,” Knuti said Saturday. “The average part-timer would pay an additional $600 over three years.”

The president of Stop &amp; Shop, Mark McGowan, said in a statement Saturday that the contract the union had proposed was “unsustainable” and could lead to higher prices for consumers.

Thomas Kochan, a director of the MIT Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research, which focuses on addressing the needs of a modernizing workforce, said Stop &amp; Shop didn’t have to raise prices to provide higher wages.

“It is not automatic that it has to go into price increases,” he said. “They have to find ways to have better customer service to attract more customers.”

The way the strike was unfolding was par for the course, he said.

“They are unionized and an older company that doesn’t have as strong a reputation for great customer service,” he said, adding that the supermarket chain has to remain competitive to provide higher wages.

At a Stop &amp; Shop on Main Street in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Lisa Juliano, a florist manager who has worked at the store for two years, said she was particularly worried about the loss of premium pay for working on Sundays.

Though she said the company wasn’t directly proposing a reduction in the Sunday pay for current employees, it does want to eliminate the premium for new hires. Many employees expect those new employees would then be asked to work most Sundays, resulting in a de facto pay cut for the more tenured workers.

“The extra Sunday pay makes up what I live on day to day,” Juliano said. “If not for the extra I get on Sundays, I wouldn’t have gas to come to work the rest of the week.”

She said it was important for current workers to fight for the benefits of future ones. Her father was hired by Stop &amp; Shop more than 30 years ago, to push shopping carts, and he is now a grocery manager, she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/business/stop-shop-strike.html" id="18b8ef30-52c3-3d2d-addd-08301f764d54">The New York Times</a>.

More than 30,000 Stop &amp; Shop supermarket workers across three states remained on strike for a third day Saturday, protesting what they said were unfair wages and high health insurance premiums.

Stop & Shop Workers Are on Strike at Over 240 Stores in New England

In a joint statement Friday, the agency, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the company recommended that parents stop using the seat when a child reaches 3 months old “or as soon as an infant exhibits rollover capabilities.”

The deaths occurred after infants rolled from their back to their stomach or side when they were unrestrained in the seat. All the infants who died were under 3 months old, the statement said.

The Rock ’n Play sleeper features a fabric cradle on a metal stand that rocks babies so they can be soothed to sleep. Fisher-Price said parents should always use the sleeper’s harness to secure infants.

“Always use the provided restraints, always place infants on their backs to sleep, and make sure that no pillows, blankets or extra padding are placed in the Rock ’n Play sleeper,” Fisher-Price said in a separate statement released by Mattel, its parent company.

The statements did not specifically explain how the infants died, and representatives from the companies and agency were unavailable Saturday.

Parenting blogs have praised the baby sleeper for years. In a blog post in February, writers at CynicalParent.com called it “magic” but suggested that parents see their child’s pediatrician before making a purchase.

In a 2013 blog post, Dr. Roy Benaroch, a pediatrician in Atlanta, wrote his first recommendation against using it. He cited sleep guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics as reason enough not to use the Rock ’n Play.

“The guidelines went over several important ways that parents can ensure that their children were sleeping safely,” Benaroch said Saturday. “Among them was that babies should be placed to sleep on a firm, flat surface, and on their back. The Rock ’n Play is neither firm nor flat.”

For children under 3 months, Benaroch suggested following the academy guidelines, which say that parents should “avoid use of soft bedding, including crib bumpers, blankets, pillows and soft toys” and that the crib should be bare.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/business/fisher-price-rock-n-play-recall.html" id="98b28d20-fee9-3873-a1a6-26feb829fb58">The New York Times</a>.

A federal consumer agency and Fisher-Price are warning parents about the Rock ’n Play sleeper following reports that 10 infants since 2015 have died after rolling over while in the seat.

Warning About Rock 'n Play Sleeper Issued After Infant Deaths

The new findings, published last week in the journal Slavery &amp; Abolition, are likely to be subject to scholarly debate, because there are few records documenting the lives of the last Africans to be captured and brought to the United States on slave ships.

Regardless of Redoshi’s precise historical status, the researcher, Hannah Durkin, has pieced together accounts from different sources and census records to carve out the remarkable life of a woman who survived the treacherous Middle Passage voyage at age 12, was sold as a child bride, and lived through the Civil War and the Great Depression. According to Durkin, Redoshi died in 1937; Lewis died in 1935.

“It was thought that this woman was lost to history,” Durkin, a lecturer at Newcastle University, said in an interview.

But Redoshi was not lost. She is believed to have been taken from a West African village before being brought to the United States in 1860 on the Clotilda, the last recorded slave ship to arrive in the country after more than 240 years of slavery.

The rest of her life provides a stark example of the physical and psychological trauma left on those who survived the trans-Atlantic slave trade, scars that continue to inflame tensions in the United States today.

Author Zora Neale Hurston discovered Redoshi, who became known as Sally Smith after being enslaved, while doing research for her literary works in the South.

Durkin wove together bits and pieces of Redoshi’s life that were found in Hurston’s unpublished writings and an interview she gave to The Montgomery Advertiser as well as in “Bridge Across Jordan,” a memoir by civil rights leader Amelia Boynton Robinson. Redoshi was also filmed for an instructional film released in 1938 by the Department of Agriculture called “The Negro Farmer: Extension Work for Better Farming and Better Living,” possibly making her the only female Clotilda survivor who appeared on film.

The film, which was meant to showcase issues facing formerly enslaved people as they tried to become farmers, shows Redoshi as an old woman on the porch of her small home, made out of wooden planks on a plantation in Alabama. As a narrator speaks, she can be seen talking to someone as she sits in a chair, wrapped by a quilt. Her white hair looks fuzzy, marked by stray braids poking out of it, and her skin is dark and thick but still vibrant. She has a gaptoothed smile, and cheekbones rising up to her eyes.

The footage is the only known video of a woman who survived slavery in the United States, Durkin said.

Durkin said she learned about Redoshi as she researched Hurston’s “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo,’” a nonfiction work centered on interviews with Cudjo Lewis. Durkin noticed a woman named Sally Smith in the appendix to a posthumously published manuscript by Hurston called “Every Tongue Got to Confess.”

Durkin says Redoshi was taken from her village in West Africa, where she described her life as “peaceful” before her father was killed by men who kidnapped her.

The interview Redoshi gave to The Montgomery Advertiser in 1932 indicated that she was from an area of West Africa that is now part of Benin, Durkin said. “I guess she is Yoruba.”

When she arrived in the United States, she was given the name Sally Smith after she was sold to a man named Washington Smith in Alabama, where she was made a child bride to an enslaved man.

“I was 12 years old, and he was a man from another tribe who had a family in Africa,” Redoshi is quoted as saying to Boynton Robinson. “I couldn’t understand his talk, and he couldn’t understand me. They put us on block together and sold us for man and wife.”

This began Redoshi’s life as a slave on a plantation in Bogue Chitto, Alabama. Five years after she arrived in the United States, she became a free woman with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.

According to an article published in The Montgomery Advertiser, after Redoshi was freed she remained on the plantation with the Smiths, which was common for emancipated people.

“We stay on Smith place, where we know folks be good to us,’” she said in the 1932 interview. When Washington Smith died, she said, “we stay with Mistress Smith,” adding, “We love her and no want to leave.”

Durkin deduced from the memoir by Boynton Robinson, who died in 2015, that while Redoshi stayed on the plantation for the remainder of her life, she later owned land in Bogue Chitto. According to Boynton Robinson, around 6,000 acres in Bogue Chitto was owned and operated by black people. The land was inherited from formerly enslaved people who acquired it soon after slavery was abolished.

Redoshi’s life can provide a deeper understanding of the challenges and the narrow but previously unthinkable opportunities facing people as they emerged from slavery in the United States.

“We may still discover people who passed away after Redoshi,” said Sylviane A. Diouf, a visiting professor at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. “She may very well not be the last, which is of no importance whatsoever. What is crucial is the people’s stories.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/us/transatlantic-slave-trade-last-survivor.html" id="679cf84c-ea1b-3bf0-a95c-604d0165612f">The New York Times</a>.

She Survived a Slave Ship, the Civil War and the Depression. Her Name Was Redoshi.

It has long been believed that a man named Cudjo Lewis was the last living survivor of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the United States. Now a researcher at Newcastle University in Britain says she has discovered testimony from someone who may have lived even longer — a woman named Redoshi.

The prosecutor, Kim Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney, wrote in The Chicago Tribune on Friday that she welcomed an “outside, nonpolitical review of how we handled this matter.”

The case involved Smollett, a star of the television show “Empire,” who claimed he was a victim of a hate crime in Chicago. Smollett, who is black and gay, told authorities he was attacked in January by two men who yelled homophobic and racial slurs at him, tied a rope around his neck and poured a chemical substance on him.

Nearly a month later, he was arrested by police, who maintained he had staged the assault and falsely reported it. Initially there was an outpouring of support for Smollett, but as the story turned, so did public sentiment. Smollett, who denied the allegations, was charged with 16 counts of disorderly conduct, but on Tuesday, the charges were dropped.

“Yes, falsely reporting a hate crime makes me angry, and anyone who does that deserves the community’s outrage,” Foxx wrote. “But, as I’ve said since before I was elected, we must separate the people at whom we are angry from the people of whom we are afraid.”

Foxx wrote that there were “specific aspects of the evidence and testimony presented” that made securing a conviction uncertain. She did not elaborate.

She also said Smollett was charged with a class 4 felony, which was on par with pulling a fire alarm at a school or “draft card mutilation.” Those kinds of charges are “routinely resolved, particularly in cases involving suspects with no prior criminal record, long before a case ever nears a courtroom and often without either jail time or monetary penalties,” she wrote.

The decision to drop the charges drew a sharp rebuke from the police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, and the mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who called the decision a “whitewash of justice.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/kim-foxx-chicago-smollett.html" id="99c62791-b504-3155-a2a7-2568e7efd8b8">The New York Times</a>.

The prosecutor who dropped disorderly conduct charges against actor Jussie Smollett defended the decision, saying her office was uncertain it had enough evidence to gain a conviction and wanted to focus on bigger crime in Chicago, she wrote in an op-ed.

Jussie Smollett Charges Were Dropped Because Conviction Was Uncertain, Prosecutor Says

The prosecutor, Kim Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney, wrote in an op-ed in The Chicago Tribune on Friday that she welcomed an “outside, nonpolitical review of how we handled this matter.”

Nearly a month later, he was arrested by police, who maintained he had staged the assault and falsely reported it. Initially there was an outpouring of support for Smollett, but as the story turned, so did public sentiment. Smollett, who denied the allegations, was charged with 16 counts of disorderly conduct, but on Tuesday, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office dropped all of the charges.

“You cannot have, because of a person’s position, one set of rules apply to them and one set of rules apply to everybody else,” Emanuel said. The mayor also wanted Smollett to pay more than $130,000 to cover the costs of the investigation.

The mayor’s office on Saturday could not immediately be reached to comment on Foxx’s op-ed, and the superintendent’s office declined to comment.

Foxx, who took office in 2016, wrote that she was elected on “a promise to rethink the justice system, to keep people out of prison who do not pose a danger to the community.” She said she had pledged “to spend my office’s finite resources on the most serious crimes in order to create communities that are both safer and fairer.”

Joe Magats, the first assistant state’s attorney, defended the decision this week. He said the prosecutor’s office made violent crime a priority, adding, “I don’t see Jussie Smollett as a threat to public safety.”

Foxx said she believed Smollett had been punished enough in the public eye.

“Smollett’s alleged unstable actions have probably caused him more harm than any court-ordered penance could,” she wrote, adding that whatever harm was done to his image did not change the facts. “Falsely reporting a hate crime is a dangerous and unlawful act, and Smollett was not exonerated of that in this case.”

The officer, John Rivera, 23, was shot in a parked car early Saturday along with a friend, who was hospitalized and is now in stable condition, according to Melissa Staples, the Chicago Police Department’s chief of detectives.

Surveillance camera video showed that one of the two men who have been charged in the attack, Menelik Jackson, 24, encountered the Latino men on a party bus in front of a McDonald’s in the River North neighborhood, Staples said at a news conference Monday. Jackson, who is black, was punched in the face by one of the men and ran away, the chief said.

Shortly after, Jackson returned, but the party bus had left the area, Staples said. Jackson then got in his white Ford pickup truck and searched the area for the bus but did not find it, she said.

Staples said that an hour after the confrontation in front of the McDonald’s, Jackson approached a car with two friends: Jovan Battle, 32, and another man police are still searching for. She said Jackson then shot at the car with a .40-caliber handgun, killing Rivera and wounding his friend.

“It appears that he was just looking for a Hispanic person,” Eddie Johnson, the Chicago police superintendent, said at the news conference. “He was searching around for the party bus, the party bus had left the area, so I guess he settled for the first Hispanic he saw,” Johnson said, adding that Jackson had confessed.

Jackson and Battle have each been charged with one count of first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder. They are being held without bail.

Johnson also said that authorities “have been pursuing possible hate crime charges since the beginning.”

Chris Anderson, a public defender who is representing Battle, said that his client did not “share the intent of the shooter based on what the state proffered.” He added that Battle “suffers from bipolar disorder and depression, receives SSI and disability, was denied phone calls, and has a severe, untreated, old and deep cut to his finger that needs medical attention.”

Battle has been ordered to the jail hospital for treatment, Anderson said.

A lawyer for Jackson did not immediately respond to calls and emails.

Rivera’s second anniversary with Chicago police had been approaching in May, the department said.

“He was the kind of officer that we want in Chicago,” Johnson said, adding that Rivera was a “hard worker, he loved going out on patrol and solving problems.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/us/chicago-cop-killed-john-rivera.html" id="1d202f3f-ffe2-37b7-a877-93f78a2a352d">The New York Times</a>.

A suspect in the deadly shooting of an off-duty police officer in Chicago over the weekend was targeting the “first Hispanic man he saw” after a dispute with a group of Latino men, the city’s police superintendent said.

Sandra E. Garcia

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