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Home Depot buying supplier to professional contractors in a deal valued at about $18.25B

Home Depot will buy SRS Distribution, a materials provider for professionals, in a deal valued at approximately $18.25 billion.

It is Home Depot’s largest acquisition in its history and with it, it steps more aggressively into the fast growing professional builder and contactor business.

SRS provides materials for professionals like roofers, landscapers and pool contractors.

Home Depot is making a big bet on a housing market that is suffering a severe lack of new homes, which has driven prices sky high. The median sales price for new homes in the U.S. has climbed 29.4% over the past five years. In the fourth quarter, the median sales prices totaled $417,700, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The U.S. housing market is coming off a deep, 2-year sales slump triggered by one-two punch of so few homes and sharp rise in mortgage rates. The overall decline in rates since their peak last fall has opened a tiny window for some, though a home remains out of reach for millions of Americans.

Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes rose in February from the previous month to the strongest pace in a year with homebuyers encouraged by that modest pullback in mortgage rates.

With mortgage rates still high, millions of people are spending money on upkeep for the homes that they own, another financial driver for the Home Depot, SRS deal.

Home Depot said that when taking the deal into account, it now believes its total addressable market is approximately $1 trillion, an increase of approximately $50 billion.

“SRS has built a robust and successful platform that will accelerate our growth with the residential professional customer while presenting future opportunities with the specialty trade pro,” Home Depot CEO Ted Decker said in a statement.

SRS’s has a sales team of more than 2,500 and more than 760 branches across 47 states. It also has 4,000-plus truck fleet and jobsite delivery capabilities.

“We are looking forward to combining our differentiated assets and capabilities, including our extensive branch network, experienced sales team, robust trade credit offering, and order management system, geared at serving the complex project purchase occasion, with The Home Depot’s competitive advantages,” SRS CEO Dan Tinker said. “We believe this will enable us to better serve pros and continue growing in our large and highly fragmented market.”

Tinker and his senior management team will continue to lead SRS, which is based in McKinney, Texas.

The deal is expected to close by the end of fiscal 2024.


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EnCap Investments seeks sale of Utah oil producer XCL Resources, sources say

By Shariq Khan and David French

(Reuters) – EnCap Investments is seeking to sell XCL Resources, four people familiar with the matter said, two years after the private equity firm’s plan to combine the oil and gas producer with a local rival was thwarted by U.S. antitrust regulators.

XCL, one of the largest energy producers in the Uinta shale formation of Utah, could be worth at least $2.8 billion including debt, and could achieve a higher valuation when accounting for its undeveloped assets, the sources said.

Investment bankers at Jefferies Financial Group are running the sale process for XCL, which kicked off earlier this month, the sources added, requesting anonymity because the matter is confidential.

An EnCap spokesperson declined comment, as did a Jefferies spokesperson. XCL and Rice Investment Group, which owns a minority position in XCL, did not respond to requests for comment.

EnCap first invested in XCL in 2018 with a $400 million capital commitment. XCL has around 45,000 net acres in the Uinta, according to its website.

The company produces around 55,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, the sources said. XCL also owns assets used for transporting water using in energy production. A sand mine the company is developing to source the material used in the fracking process to break open rock will be online later this year.

The type of oil extracted in the Uinta is unlike any other crude grade found in the United States, with a waxy consistency and a high paraffin content, according to Utah’s Department of Environmental Quality.

EnCap agreed in August 2021 to buy EP Energy, which had assets in the Uinta and South Texas, for $1.5 billion, with the aim of merging EP’s Uinta assets with XCL.

However, the Federal Trade Commission threatened to sue and block the deal over fears it would reduce competition and lead to higher prices for Utah consumers. Crescent Energy acquired EP’s Uinta assets in 2022 instead.

A new suitor for XCL may not face the same antitrust hurdles. The FTC said earlier this month the Uinta Basin’s competitive landscape had “changed significantly” since the aborted EP deal, as more oil production and an increased number of operators reduced the risk of producers raising prices unilaterally.

U.S. oil and gas producers went on a $192 billion buying spree in 2023, taking advantage of acquirers’ high stock prices to secure lower-cost reserves. The FTC is now scrutinizing many of these deals.

(Reporting by Shariq Khan and David French in New York; Editing by Jamie Freed)


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Ship insurer Britannia says it’s helping Baltimore bridge collapse probe

LONDON (Reuters) – Britannia, the insurer of container ship the Dali, is working with the vessel’s owner and U.S. authorities on the investigation into the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, Britannia said on Thursday.

The bridge collapsed on Tuesday after the Dali suffered a power outage and struck a pylon, causing huge disruption in the port.

“We are working closely with the vessel’s owner and manager and the relevant U.S. authorities as part of the investigation into the casualty,” Britannia said in a statement.

(Reporting by Jonathan Saul and Carolyn Cohn; editing by Mark Heinrich)


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Why did more than 1,000 people die after police subdued them with force that isn’t meant to kill?

Carl Grant, a Vietnam veteran with dementia, wandered out of a hospital room to charge a cellphone he imagined he had. When he wouldn’t sit still, the police officer escorting Grant body-slammed him, ricocheting the patient’s head off the floor.

Taylor Ware, a former Marine and aspiring college student, walked the grassy grounds of an interstate rest stop trying to shake the voices in his head. After Ware ran from an officer, he was attacked by a police dog, jolted by a stun gun, pinned on the ground and injected with a sedative.

And Donald Ivy Jr., a former three-sport athlete, left an ATM alone one night when officers sized him up as suspicious and tried to detain him. Ivy took off, and police tackled and shocked him with a stun gun, belted him with batons and held him facedown.

Each man was unarmed. Each was not a threat to public safety. And despite that, each died after police used a kind of force that is not supposed to be deadly — and can be much easier to hide than the blast of an officer’s gun.

Every day, police rely on common tactics that, unlike guns, are meant to stop people without killing them, such as physical holds, Tasers and body blows. But when misused, these tactics can still end in death — as happened with George Floyd in 2020, sparking a national reckoning over policing. And while that encounter was caught on video, capturing Floyd’s last words of “I can’t breathe,” many others throughout the United States have escaped notice.

Over a decade, more than 1,000 people died after police subdued them through means not intended to be lethal, an investigation led by The Associated Press found. In hundreds of cases, officers weren’t taught or didn’t follow best safety practices for physical force and weapons, creating a recipe for death.

These sorts of deadly encounters happened just about everywhere, according to an analysis of a database AP created. Big cities, suburbs and rural America. Red states and blue states. Restaurants, assisted-living centers and, most commonly, in or near the homes of those who died. The deceased came from all walks of life — a poet, a nurse, a saxophone player in a mariachi band, a truck driver, a sales director, a rodeo clown and even a few off-duty law enforcement officers.

The toll, however, disproportionately fell on Black Americans like Grant and Ivy. Black people made up a third of those who died despite representing only 12% of the U.S. population. Others feeling the brunt were impaired by a medical, mental health or drug emergency, a group particularly susceptible to force even when lightly applied.

“We were robbed,” said Carl Grant’s sister, Kathy Jenkins, whose anger has not subsided four years later. “It’s like somebody went in your house and just took something, and you were violated.”

AP’s three-year investigation was done in collaboration with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs at the University of Maryland and Arizona State University, and FRONTLINE (PBS). The AP and its partners focused on local police, sheriff’s deputies and other officers patrolling the streets or responding to dispatch calls. Reporters filed nearly 7,000 requests for government documents and body-camera footage, receiving more than 700 autopsy reports or death certificates, and uncovering video in at least four dozen cases that has never been published or widely distributed.

Medical officials cited law enforcement as causing or contributing to about half of the deaths. In many others, significant police force went unmentioned and drugs or preexisting health conditions were blamed instead.

Video in a few dozen cases showed some officers mocked people as they died, laughing or making comments such as “sweaty little hog,” “screaming like a little girl” and “lazy f—.” In other cases, officers expressed clear concern for the people they were subduing.

The federal government has struggled for years to count deaths following what police call “less-lethal force,” and the little information it collects is often kept from the public and highly incomplete at best. No more than a third of the cases the AP identified are listed in federal mortality data as involving law enforcement at all.

When force came, it could be sudden and extreme, the AP investigation found. Other times, the force was minimal, and yet the people nevertheless died, sometimes from a drug overdose or a combination of factors.

In about 30% of the cases, police were intervening to stop people who were injuring others or who posed a threat of danger. But roughly 25% of those who died were not harming anyone or, at most, were committing low-level infractions or causing minor disturbances, AP’s review of cases shows. The rest involved other nonviolent situations with people who, police said, were trying to resist arrest or flee.

A Texas man loitering outside a convenience store who resisted going to jail was shocked up to 11 times with a Taser and restrained facedown for nearly 22 minutes — more than twice as long as George Floyd, previously unreported video shows. After a California man turned silent during questioning, he was grabbed, dogpiled by seven officers, shocked five times with a Taser, wrapped in a restraint contraption and injected with a sedative by a medic despite complaining “I can’t breathe.” And a Michigan teen was speeding an all-terrain vehicle down a city street when a state trooper sent volts of excruciating electricity from a Taser through him, and he crashed.

In hundreds of cases, officers repeated errors that experts and trainers have spent years trying to eliminate — perhaps none more prevalent than how they held someone facedown in what is known as prone restraint.

Many policing experts agree that someone can stop breathing if pinned on their chest for too long or with too much weight, and the Department of Justice has issued warnings to that effect since 1995. But with no standard national rules, what police are taught is often left to the states and individual departments. In dozens of cases, officers disregarded people who told them they were struggling for air or even about to die, often uttering the words, “I can’t breathe.”

What followed deadly encounters revealed how the broader justice system frequently works to shield police from scrutiny, often leaving families to grieve without knowing what really happened.

Officers were usually cleared by their departments in internal investigations. Some had a history of violence and a few were involved in multiple restraint deaths. Local and state authorities that investigate deaths also withheld information and in some cases omitted potentially damaging details from reports.

One of the last hopes for accountability from inside the system — what are known as death opinions — also often exonerated officers. The medical examiners and coroners who decide on these did not link hundreds of the deaths to force, but instead to accidents, drug use or preexisting health problems, sometimes relying on debunked science or incomplete studies from sources tied to law enforcement.

Even when these deaths receive the homicide label that fatal police shootings often get, prosecutors rarely pursue officers. Charging police is politically sensitive and can be legally fraught, and the AP investigation identified just 28 deaths that led to such charges. Finding accountability through civil courts was also tough for families, but at least 168 cases ended in settlements or jury verdicts totaling about $374 million.

The known fatalities still averaged just two a week — a tiny fraction of the total contacts police have with the population. Police leaders, officers and experts say law enforcement shouldn’t bear all the blame. As the social safety net frays, people under mental distress or who use stimulant drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine are increasingly on the streets. Officers sent to handle these emergencies are often poorly trained by their departments.

If incidents turn chaotic and officers make split-second decisions to use force, “people do die,” said Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former Baltimore police officer.

“The only way to get down to zero is to get rid of policing,” Moskos said, “and that’s not going to save lives either.”

But because the United States has no clear idea how many people die like this and why, holding police accountable and making meaningful reforms will remain difficult, said Dr. Roger Mitchell Jr., a leader in the push to improve tracking and one of the nation’s few Black chief medical examiners when he held the office in Washington, D.C., from 2014 to 2021.

“Any time anyone dies before their day in court, or dies in an environment where the federal government or the local government’s job is to take care of you,” he said, “it needs transparency. It cannot be in the dark of night.”

“This,” he added, “is an American problem we need to solve.”

Carl Grant didn’t care much for football. So on Super Bowl Sunday in 2020, family members said, he eased into his black Kia Optima, intending to shop for groceries near his suburban Atlanta home. The 68-year-old wound up 2½ hours away, where he came face to face with police in an encounter that underscores several findings central to AP’s investigation: He was Black, he was not threatening physical harm, and a seemingly routine matter rapidly escalated.

The former Marine and trucking business owner had dementia and qualified as a disabled veteran. As he drove that evening, he became disoriented and took an interstate west to Birmingham, Alabama. There, Grant twice tried to go inside houses he thought were his.

Both times, residents phoned 911. And both times, responding officers opted to use force.

At the first house, Grant was taken to the ground and cuffed after an officer said he’d stepped toward a partner. Even though one officer sensed he was impaired, police released Grant without asking medics to examine him — a decision a superior later faulted.

At a second house about a half-mile away, police found him sitting in a porch chair. When he didn’t follow an order to get off the porch, a different officer pushed him down the stairs, according to previously unreleased body-camera video. Grant gashed his forehead in the fall.

Officer Vincent Larry, who pushed Grant, went with him to the hospital. When Grant wouldn’t return to his exam room, Larry used an unapproved “hip toss” to lift and slam him, hospital surveillance video showed. The back of Grant’s head bounced four inches off the floor, a nurse estimated, wrecking his spinal cord in his neck.

After Grant awoke from emergency surgery, he thought his paralysis was a combat injury from the Vietnam War. “I’m so sorry this happened,” he told family, his sister recalled. He died almost six months later from the injury.

An internal investigation concluded Larry’s force at the hospital was excessive, and in a departure from many other cases AP found, his department acted: he received a 15-day suspension. He is no longer a city employee, a Birmingham spokesperson told AP. Neither Larry nor the department would comment. A judge recently cited a procedural error in dismissing a lawsuit filed by Grant’s estate, which is appealing the ruling.

“He’s almost 70 and confused,” Grant’s partner, Ronda Hernandez, said. “That’s what I don’t get. You just don’t do that to old people.”

Grant was one of 1,036 deaths from 2012 through 2021 that AP logged. That is certainly an undercount, because many departments blocked access to information. Files that others released were blacked out and video blurred, while officers routinely used vague language in their reports that glossed over force.

All but 3% of the dead were men. They tended to be in their 30s and 40s, when police might consider them more of a physical threat. The youngest was just 15, the oldest 95.

In sheer numbers, white people of non-Hispanic descent were the largest group, making up more than 40% of cases. Hispanics were just under 20% of those killed. But Black Americans were hit especially hard.

The disproportionate representation of Black people tracks research findings that they face higher rates and severity of force, and even deaths. The Department of Justice has found after multiple investigations that Black people accounted for more unjustified stops for minor offenses, illegal searches that produced no contraband, unnecessary force, or arrests without probable cause.

Researchers caution that proving — or disproving — discrimination can be hard because of a lack of information. But in some cases AP identified, officers were accused of profiling and stopping Black people based on suspicions, as happened to Donald “Dontay” Ivy Jr.

Ivy was a 39-year-old resident of Albany, New York, who excelled in basketball during high school, served in the U.S. Navy and graduated college with a business degree. On a freezing night in 2015, he went to an ATM to check whether a delayed disability deposit had posted. Officers thought he seemed suspicious because he was walking with a lean and only one hand in the pocket of his “puffer” coat — indications, they thought, he might have a gun or drugs.

Ivy was cooperative when they stopped him, but, they said, he wouldn’t answer how much money he had withdrawn and denied a prior arrest. Police interpreted Ivy’s behavior as deceptive without grasping that Ivy suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. A witness recounted that Ivy seemed “slow” when he spoke.

When an officer touched Ivy to detain him — a known trigger for some with severe mental illness — police say Ivy began to resist. An officer fired a Taser, then Ivy fled. Officers caught up and beat him with batons, shocked him several more times with a Taser, put him facedown and got on top of him. By the time they rolled Ivy over, he’d stopped breathing.

The department quickly ruled that the officers acted appropriately and blamed a “medical crisis” for his death, even though it was classified a homicide. A grand jury declined to indict. However, the local prosecutor urged police to review policies for Tasers, batons and dealing with people with mental illness.

The local chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union continued to question the stop, saying there was “strong reason to suspect” Ivy was racially profiled. After years in court, the city paid $625,000 to settle with Ivy’s estate. His cousin and close friend Chamberlain Guthrie said the way Ivy’s life ended was one of the most painful things his family had endured.

“It’d be one thing if Dontay was out here being a ruffian and he was a thug,” Guthrie said. “But he was none of that.”

When people died after police subdued them, it was often because officers went too fast, too hard or for too long — many times, all of the above.

The United States has no national rules for how exactly to apply force. Instead, Supreme Court decisions set broad guard rails that weigh force as either “objectively reasonable” or “excessive,” based in part on the severity of the situation, any immediate safety threat and active resistance.

That frequently leaves states and local law enforcement to sort out the particulars in training and policies. Best practices from the government and private law enforcement organizations have tried to fill gaps, but aren’t mandatory and sometimes go ignored, as happened in hundreds of cases reviewed by AP and its partners.

In 2019, the mother of Taylor Ware, the former Marine with college plans, called 911 when he wouldn’t get back in their SUV during a manic episode caused by bipolar disorder. She told the dispatcher Ware would need space and urged police to wait for backup because he was a former wrestler and might be a handful — advice that tracked best practices, yet wasn’t followed.

The first officer to encounter Ware at a highway rest stop in Indiana saw the 24-year-old extending him a hand in greeting. Ware then calmly walked through a grassy field and sat down with folded legs.

The officer, an unpaid reserve marshal, assured Ware’s mother he’d had calls like this before. As she and a family friend watched, he stopped about 10 feet in front of Ware, according to video filmed by the friend and obtained by AP. His police dog barked and lunged several times — a provocation officers are told to avoid with the emotionally distressed. Ware remained seated.

After a few minutes, Ware walked toward the parking lot. There, the officer said, Ware pushed him away, a split-second act disputed by the friend. Her video shows Ware running and the officer commanding the dog to attack, setting off a cascade of force that ended with Ware in a coma. He died three days later.

A police news release said Ware had a “medical event,” an explanation that echoes how police first described George Floyd’s death. The prosecutor in Indiana declined to bring charges and praised officers for “incredible patience and restraint.” His office’s letter brushed past or left out key details: multiple dog bites, multiple stun-gun shocks, prone restraint and an injection of the powerful sedative ketamine.

In dozens of other cases identified by AP, people who died were given sedatives without consent, sometimes after officers urged paramedics to use them — a recommendation law enforcement is unqualified to make.

A coroner ruled Ware’s death was due to natural causes, specifically “excited delirium” — a term for a condition that police say causes potentially life-threatening agitation, rapid heart rate and other symptoms. Major medical groups oppose it as a diagnosis, however, and say it is frequently an attempt to justify excessive force.

“It was like that was his body’s own fault, that it wasn’t the police’s fault,” Ware’s sister, Briana Garton, said of the autopsy ruling.

Two experts who reviewed the case for the AP said police actions — such as the order for the dog to attack, the use of a Taser in the sternum and restraint facedown with handcuffs and back pressure — contributed to Ware’s death.

“This was not proper service,” said police practices expert Stan Kephart, himself a former chief. “This person should be alive today.”

As with Ware, officers resorted to force in roughly 25% of the cases even though the circumstances weren’t imminently dangerous. Many began as routine calls that other officers have, time and again, resolved safely. Those included medical emergencies phoned in by families, friends or the person who died.

By launching prematurely into force, police introduced violence and volatility, and in turn needed to use more weapons, holds or restraints to regain control — a phenomenon known as “officer-created jeopardy.” Sometimes it starts when police misread as defiance someone’s confusion, intoxication or inability to communicate due to a medical issue.

What led up to the force was sometimes unclear. In more than 100 cases, police either withheld key details or witnesses disputed the officer’s account — and body-camera footage didn’t exist to add clarity. But in about 45% of cases, officers became physical after they said someone tried to evade them or resist arrest for nonviolent circumstances. Some sprinted away with drugs, for example, or simply flailed their arms to resist handcuffs or wiggled around while held down.

Many times the way officers subdued people broke policing best practices, especially when using the go-to tools of restraining people facedown and shocking them with Tasers.

When done properly, placing someone on their stomach or shocking them is not inherently life-threatening. But there are risks: Prone restraint can compress the lungs and put stress on the heart, and Taser’s maker has issued warnings against repeated shocks or targeting the body near the heart. These risks intensify when safety protocols aren’t followed or when people with mental illness, the elderly or those on stimulant drugs are involved.

Some officers involved in fatalities testified they had been assured that prone position was never deadly, AP found, while many others were trained to roll people onto their sides to aid breathing and simply failed to do so.

“If you’re talking, you’re breathing, bro,” an officer, repeating a common myth about prone restraint, told a Florida man following 12 shocks from stun guns.

“Stomach is (an) ideal place for them to be. It’s harder for them to punch me,” testified an officer in the death of a Minnesota man found sleeping at a grocery store and restrained for more than 30 minutes.

In dozens of police or witness videos, those who died began to fade on screen, their breathing becoming shallow, as happened in suburban San Diego to 56-year-old Oral Nunis.

Nunis was having a mental break at his daughter’s apartment in 2020. He had calmed down, but then the first arriving officer grabbed his arm, a mere four seconds after making eye contact. Nunis begged to go without being handcuffed. The officer persisted. Nunis became agitated and ran outside.

At 5 feet, 5 inches tall and 146 pounds, Nunis quickly found himself pinned by several officers — each at least 80 pounds heavier than him. Although his body turned still, they kept pressing, wrapped him in a full-body restraint device and put a spit mask on him. From just 10 feet away, his daughter tried to console him in his final minutes: “Daddy, just breathe.”

The district attorney’s office later cleared the police, calling their force reasonable because Nunis had posed “unnaturally strong resistance” for his size.

As part of the family’s lawsuit, two pathologists concluded that the restraint officers used led to his death. One officer was asked under oath if pressure on someone’s back could impair breathing. “I have had several bodies on top of me during different training scenarios,” the 6-foot, 265-pound officer said, “and I never had difficulty breathing.”

The use of Tasers can be similarly misinformed. An officer shocked Stanley Downen, 77, a former ironworker with Alzheimer’s disease who served during the Korean War, as he wandered the grounds of his veterans’ home in Columbia Falls, Montana. The electricity locked up his body and made him fall without control of his limbs. He hit his head on the pavement and later died.

The officer said under oath that he hadn’t read any warnings, including those from Taser manufacturer Axon Enterprise Inc., about the risks of shocking the elderly or people who could be injured if they fell. He testified that Downen was “armed with rocks,” but a witness told police Downen never raised his hands to throw them. The police chief cleared the officer, though a police expert hired by the family found he failed to follow accepted practices.

In about 30% of deaths that AP logged, civilians and officers faced potential or clear danger, extenuating circumstances that meant police didn’t always follow best practices. In about 170 of those cases, officers said a person charged, swung or lunged at them, or police arrived to find people holding someone down after a fight. In the other roughly 110 cases, police were trying to stop violent attacks against others, including officers.

There was a Kansas man who used his elderly mother as a shield when deputies arrived. And there was a 41-year-old concrete mason in Minnesota who choked and punched his adult daughter before grabbing an officer by the throat and pushing her into a window.

In one of the most violent encounters, three officers in Cohasset, Massachusetts, confronted Erich Stelzer, a 6-foot-6-inch bodybuilder who was stabbing his date so viciously that the walls were red with her blood.

Rather than fire their pistols that night in 2018, two of the officers used their Tasers and managed to handcuff Stelzer, 25, as he thrashed on the floor. Stelzer stopped breathing, and the officers could not revive him. The local prosecutor determined they had handled the situation appropriately and would have been justified in shooting Stelzer because he presented a lethal threat.

While the officers were relieved to have saved the woman’s life, they also wrestled with killing a man despite doing their best to avoid it.

“As the time went by after the incident, you know, it wasn’t lost on me that he was someone’s son, someone’s brother,” Detective Lt. Gregory Lennon said. “And I’m sorry that he died. You know, it wasn’t our intention.”

Understanding how and why people die after force can be difficult. Information is often scarce or government at all levels won’t share what it has.

In 2000, Congress started trying to get the Justice Department to track deaths involving law enforcement. The department has acknowledged its data is incomplete, blames spotty reporting from police departments, and does not make whatever information exists publicly available.

Mortality data maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also has gaps. The AP found that when a death certificate does not list words like “police” and “law enforcement,” the CDC’s language-reading software doesn’t label the death as involving “legal intervention.” This means the death data flagged police involvement in, at most, 34% of the more than 1,000 deaths the investigation identified.

Among the mislabeled deaths is that of Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Black man. He died in 2020 while restrained and covered with a spit hood in Rochester, New York. The high-profile incident was caught on video, but while his death certificate noted “physical restraint,” it made no direct mention of police.

The CDC recognizes the data undercounts police-involved deaths, but says it wasn’t primarily intended to flag them. Staff lack the time or resources to corroborate death certificate details, officials said.

In 2017, leading pathologists recommended adding a checkbox to the U.S. standard death certificate to identify deaths involving law enforcement — as is already done with tobacco use and pregnancy. They argued better data could help inform better practices and prevent deaths. However, the proposal hasn’t gained traction.

“This is a long-standing, not-very-secret secret about the problem here: We know very little,” said Georgetown University law professor Christy Lopez, who until 2017 led the Justice Department office that investigates law enforcement agencies over excessive force.

Meanwhile, laws in states like Pennsylvania, Alabama and Delaware block the release of most, if not all, information. And in other places, such as Iowa, departments can choose what they wish to release, even to family members like Sandra Jones.

Jones’ husband, Brian Hays, 56, had battled an addiction to painkillers since injuring his shoulder at a factory job. She last saw him alive one September night in 2015 after he called 911 because his mental health and methamphetamine use was making him delusional. Officers who arrived at their home in Muscatine, Iowa, ordered her to leave.

The next morning, a hospital contacted Jones to say Hays was there. As Hays was on life support, doctors told her that he had several Taser marks on his body and scrapes on his face and knees, she recalled. Neighbors also said they had seen Hays run out of the house, clad only in boxer shorts, and make it around the corner before officers caught him.

When Jones set out to unravel what happened, she said, police wouldn’t hand over their reports. A detective later told her officers had shocked Hays and tied his feet before he went into cardiac arrest. She couldn’t glean why that much force was necessary.

In time, Jones managed to get the autopsy report from the medical examiner’s office, confirming the force and a struggle. But an attorney told her winning a lawsuit to pry out more information was unlikely. Hays’ death didn’t even make the local news.

“All I know is, something terrible happened that night,” she said. “I have pictured him laying on that cement road more times than I can tell you. I picture him there, struggling to breathe.”

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This story is part of an ongoing investigation led by The Associated Press in collaboration with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs and FRONTLINE (PBS). The investigation includes the Lethal Restraint interactive story, database and the documentary, “Documenting Police Use Of Force,” premiering April 30 on PBS.

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Contributing to this story were Thalia Beaty, Martha Bellisle, Jacques Billeaud, Michael Catalini, Brett Chambers, Mary Dalrymple, Trenton Daniel, Kristin M. Hall, Roxana Hegeman, Carla K. Johnson, Angeliki Kastanis, Denise Lavoie, Andy Lemberger, Brian McDonnell, Aaron Morrison, Sean Mussenden, Serginho Roosblad, Rhonda Shafner, Taylor Stevens, Mitch Weiss and Helen Wieffering.

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To view stories by journalists at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs, go here.

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The Associated Press receives support from the Public Welfare Foundation for reporting focused on criminal justice. This story also was supported by Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/


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The White House expects about 40,000 participants at its ‘egg-ucation’-themed annual Easter egg roll

Some 40,000 people are expected to participate in Monday’s “EGG-ucation”-themed White House Easter Egg Roll, about 10,000 more people than last year.

A teacher for more than 30 years, Jill Biden is transforming an annual tradition first held in 1878 into an “EGG-ucational” experience. Various stations on the South Lawn and Ellipse will help children learn about farming, healthier eating, exercise and more, the White House announced Thursday.

They’ll still get to coax hard-boiled eggs across the lawn to a finish line.

Guests include thousands of military and veteran families, their caregivers and survivors. Members of the general public claimed tickets through an online lottery. They will be admitted in nine waves, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Monday’s “egg-stravaganza” will be the third Easter egg roll hosted by President Joe Biden and the first lady. They did not host the event in 2021, Biden’s first year in office, because of COVID-19.

The White House Easter Egg Roll dates to 1878, when President Rutherford B. Hayes opened the White House lawn to children after they were kicked off the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.


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Lawsuits over Baltimore bridge collapse likely, though limited, lawyers say

By Diana Novak Jones

(Reuters) – The owner, operator and charterer of the container ship that struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge on Tuesday are likely to face lawsuits over its collapse and the people killed or injured, but legal experts say U.S. maritime law could limit the companies’ liability.

U.S. laws pertaining to open-water navigation and shipping, which are created through court decisions and by acts of Congress, could restrict the kinds of lawsuits filed against the registered owner of the Singapore-flagged ship, Grace Ocean Pte Ltd, its manager Synergy Marine Group and its charterer Maersk, and could limit the damages they would have to pay, three legal experts told Reuters.

Representatives for Synergy and Maersk declined to comment on the potential for litigation. Efforts to reach a spokesperson for Grace Ocean were not successful.

The economic damages suffered by the city of Baltimore from the closure of the port, the busiest port for car shipments in the U.S., or by businesses that rely on it and the now-collapsed bridge would not be recoverable through lawsuits, said Martin Davies, director of the Maritime Law Center at Tulane University School of Law.

That’s because U.S. courts have interpreted a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling to mean that any purely economic damages from maritime incidents can’t be recovered from the ship’s owners and operators, Davies and other experts said.

Instead, lawsuits would be limited to injuries, death and property damage or losses, such as claims from the people harmed by the collapse or claims over the damage to the bridge itself, likely brought by government entities.

The lawsuits are likely to be filed in federal court, the experts said. The plaintiffs may also ask a federal judge to “arrest” the ship, and prevent it from leaving the jurisdiction while the litigation plays out, they said.

Those with economic damages might be able to get compensation from insurance policies. Insurers could face billions of dollars in claims, analysts said, with one putting the cost at as much as $4 billion, which would make the tragedy a record shipping insurance loss.

Traffic was stopped on Tuesday before the ship, named the Dali, struck the pylon that led to the bridge’s collapse, likely saving lives. But eight people fell into the river, where water temperatures were 47 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius).

The remains of two of the six missing workers were recovered on Wednesday with the remaining four presumed dead. Two workers were rescued, one unharmed and one injured. The ship’s owner, its operator, charterer and even the ship itself could face claims for those injuries or deaths.

Under maritime law, a victim can sue the ship itself, in contrast to laws pertaining to car crashes, and have it sold to satisfy their judgment, said Robert Anderson, a professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law.

But an 1851 law limits the shipowners’ liability to the present value of the ship, which could be in tens of millions of dollars, said Anderson and Baltimore maritime plaintiffs’ attorney Charles Simmons Jr.

Davies and Simmons said they expect the shipowners to petition a federal court for that limitation of liability, and Anderson said the shipowners will likely rely on liability insurance to pay any damages. But if evidence shows that the shipowners were somehow at fault for the crash, they could lose the ability to limit their liability, the experts said.

Questions have arisen about the Dali’s condition when it hit the pylon and problems identified during previous inspections, which could come into play as a court evaluates whether to limit the damages, said Simmons.

“If there was any indication that the ship had pre-existing issues, these guys are not going to get out on a limitation of liability,” he said.

An unusual feature of these claims is that any lawsuits filed on behalf of people injured or killed in the collapse will not be subjected to a Maryland law that caps non-economic damages in wrongful death cases to about $1.4 million, because it isn’t recognized by maritime law, Simmons said.

(Reporting by Diana Jones; Editing by Leigh Jones and Lisa Shumaker)


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Biden’s campaign war chest exceeds Trump’s before major fundraising event

By Stephanie Kelly and Moira Warburton

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s campaign has pulled in more money ahead of November’s election than that of his Republican rival Donald Trump, which analysts attribute to Biden’s incumbent status and support from Democratic predecessors.

That support will be on full display Thursday at a fundraising event for Biden in New York City, where former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, both prominent Democrats, will be in attendance.

Biden’s campaign committee is outraising Trump in both money raised from large contributions and small individual donations under $200, according to OpenSecrets, a research group that tracks money and influence in U.S. politics.

Large contributions make up about 55% of the $128.7 million Biden’s campaign committee has raised so far in the election cycle, OpenSecrets data showed, compared with 45% from small contributions.

    For Trump, large contributions comprise 64% of the $96.1 million his campaign committee has raised, versus 36% from small contributions.

However, Trump has done better in raising money from outside groups like super PACs, which can receive donations of unlimited size but cannot coordinate with campaigns directly.

Outside groups that support Trump have raised $83.1 million, versus the $60.1 million from groups that support Biden.

In total, Biden’s candidacy has raised $188.8 million from his campaign committee and outside groups, versus Trump’s $179.2 million.

Democratic candidates have raised more moneyin support of their White House bids than their Republican counterparts in all election cycles after 2004, when Bush raked in more money than his Democratic opponent John Kerry, OpenSecrets data showed.

In the 2020 match-up between Biden and Trump, the Democrat raised over $1.6 billion from his campaign committee and outside groups, the most any candidate has raised in a presidential race. Trump, in comparison, raised $1.1 billion.

More money is not always an indication of success, however. Trump beat Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 after she raised $769.9 million, well over the $433.4 million he raised.

GRASSROOTS SUPPORT VS BIG MONEY

Small-dollar donors are important for signaling grassroots support, analysts said.

“If you get somebody to give you five bucks, they’re giving $5 as a gesture of saying, ‘I believe in you,'” said David Primo, a professor of political science and business administration at the University of Rochester.

Fundraisers like Biden’s event on Thursday are also important – helping a candidate build a campaign war chest, which funds advertisement campaigns and phone outreach.

While Biden has previous presidents like Obama and Clinton to lean on, Trump does not have the support of former President George W. Bush, his Republican predecessor, and failed to gain an endorsement from Mike Pence, who served as Trump’s vice president.

Still, Trump also has major fundraisers coming up. In early April, hedge fund billionaire John Paulson will host a fundraiser in Palm Beach, Florida, with big names including hedge-fund investor Robert Mercer and supermarket billionaire John Catsimatidis listed as co-chairs. Donations can range from $250,000 to $814,600 per person, according to an invitation to the event.

“If you can raise early money in a competitive election and have it spent intelligently you can move some real votes with it,” said Dmitri Mehlhorn, an adviser to Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a major donor to mostly Democratic candidates.

(Reporting by Stephanie Kelly and Moira Warburton, additional reporting by Alexandra Ulmer, editing by Deepa Babington)


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US requiring new AI safeguards for government use, transparency

By David Shepardson

(Reuters) – The White House said Thursday it is requiring federal agencies using artificial intelligence to adopt “concrete safeguards” by Dec. 1 to protect Americans’ rights and ensure safety as the government expands AI use in a wide range of applications.

The Office of Management and Budget issued a directive to federal agencies to monitor, assess and test AI’s impacts “on the public, mitigate the risks of algorithmic discrimination, and provide the public with transparency into how the government uses AI.” Agencies must also conduct risk assessments and set operational and governance metrics.

The White House said agencies “will be required to implement concrete safeguards when using AI in a way that could impact Americans’ rights or safety” including detailed public disclosures so the public knows how and when artificial intelligence is being used by the government.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order in October invoking the Defense Production Act to require developers of AI systems posing risks to U.S. national security, the economy, public health or safety to share the results of safety tests with the U.S. government before publicly released.

The White House on Thursday said new safeguards will ensure air travelers can opt out from Transportation Security Administration facial recognition use without delay in screening. When AI is used in federal healthcare to support diagnostics decisions a human must oversee “the process to verify the tools’ results.”

Generative AI – which can create text, photos and videos in response to open-ended prompts – has spurred excitement as well as fears it could lead to job losses, upend elections and potentially overpower humans and catastrophic effects.

The White House is requiring government agencies to release inventories of AI use cases, report metrics about AI use and release government-owned AI code, models, and data if it does not pose risks.

The Biden administration cited ongoing federal AI uses, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency employing AI to assess structural hurricane damage, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses AI to predict spread of disease and detect opioid use. The Federal Aviation Administration is using AI to help “deconflict air traffic in major metropolitan areas to improve travel time.”

The White House plans to hire 100 AI professionals to promote the safe use of AI and is requiring federal agencies to designate chief AI officers within 60 days.

In January, the Biden administration proposed requiring U.S. cloud companies to determine whether foreign entities are accessing U.S. data centers to train AI models through “know your customer” rules.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Michael Perry)


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Biden administration cracks down on so-called junk insurance

By Jarrett Renshaw

(Reuters) – The Biden administration on Thursday will finalize a rule aimed at cracking down on short-term health insurance plans and surprise medical bills, the latest steps in its effort to lower consumer costs across a broad range of industries.

The rule, first introduced last July, places tighter restrictions on short-term insurance products that are supposed to serve as a lifeline for more than 1 million Americans who rely on stop-gap insurance, such as when switching jobs.

The Biden administration says companies exploited changes made under former President Donald Trump that allowed watered-down insurance plans to be offered for a much longer period, up to three years, often resulting in surprise medical bills,

Short-term insurance plans misled consumers into thinking they were buying comprehensive health insurance, but included things like low caps on benefits and no coverage for pre-existing conditions, said Neera Tanden, who serves as the domestic policy adviser to President Joe Biden.

“That’s not really insurance. That’s a scam and the president really believes that the American people do not want to be taken for suckers,” Tanden said.

The administration of Barack Obama in 2016 limited short-term insurance plans to three months to try to get more people on year-round plans, but regulations adopted by the Trump administration in 2018 allowed people to stay on such plans for 12 months and renew them for three years.

The final rule finalized on Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services would restrict plans to three months, with only a short extension, Tanden said. It would also require companies to explicitly and more clearly disclose what’s covered and what’s not, she added.

U.S. inflation has fallen, job growth and spending continue to be strong and overall the U.S. economy is performing better than expected. But the high cost of consumer items from groceries to housing is contributing to American voters’ concerns about Biden’s economic policies.

Biden has successfully pressured companies such as Airbnb and Live Nation to limit junk fees, or extra charges, that customers pay when booking concert tickets, hotels and airfares. The administration has also forced credit card customers to slash late fees, from an average of $31 down to $8.

The White House Council of Economic advisers estimates that the administration’s actions will eliminate more than $20 billion in junk fees annually.

(Reporting By Jarrett Renshaw; Editing by Bill Berkrot)


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Republican committee to select Buck’s likely replacement, adding a challenge to Boebert’s campaign

DENVER (AP) — A panel of Colorado Republicans will select a candidate Thursday who will likely serve out the final months of U.S. Rep. Ken Buck ’s term — and could pose a challenge to Rep. Lauren Boebert’s bid for another term in Congress.

It’s an unusual and confusing twist in a closely watched primary race for a district the far-right Republican Boebert has not represented previously. Whoever the committee chooses is expected to prevail in the special election against the Democratic nominee, finish Buck’s term and reinforce Republicans’ slim majority in the U.S. House.

But the decision could have farther-reaching consequences. The committee is expected to pick one of the current Republican primary candidates competing for the same seat. Boebert opted to finish her current term in her old district, and the committee will likely select one of her rivals.

Whoever is picked would be running in two separate races for the same seat until the June election, giving them greater notoriety, media coverage and expanded fundraising opportunities — a boon for most of the candidates who fall far short of Boebert’s national name brand and campaign chest.

“Ken Buck really threw a wrench into the whole thing,” said Seth Masket, director at the Center on American Politics in Denver, who noted that it’s unclear what Buck’s intentions are. “It was already a fairly topsy-turvy race, but I think this does make it a little bit harder for her.”

Boebert said in a recent statement that the move was interference: “The establishment concocted a swampy backroom deal to try to rig an election.”

The congresswoman has built a far-right name with a ferocious political style, in step with the accusation of election rigging, and remains a known, if divisive, quantity among conservatives nationwide.

While Boebert has made headlines with scandals, including a tape of her groping and vaping with a date in a Denver theater, she’s also garnered endorsements from former President Donald Trump and current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

Those votes of confidence will likely go far for Boebert in the new district, where voters overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2020 and where her opponents are lesser known, local Republicans.

While it would be hard for the other candidates to match Boebert’s national conservative clout, the special election shakeup could give one of them an opportunity to make up some ground.

“Whoever it is, they are going to be much more well known come June,” said Conor Dowling, a professor of political science at the University of Buffalo.

Boebert nearly lost her old, Republican-leaning district to a Democratic candidate in 2022.

The slim margin raised questions of whether her Trumpian style still had purchase among GOP voters. After the Democrat who nearly beat her went on to far outraise her for an expected 2024 rematch, the congresswoman switched districts.

The move incited grumblings about political maneuvering, with some of Boebert’s homegrown primary opponents accusing her of “carpetbagging.”

She defended the move by saying her voice is still needed in Congress, and that her exodus from the old district makes it easier for Republicans to retain the seat, and therefore their majority in the U.S. House.

The option to district hop was opened to Boebert after Buck announced he wouldn’t run for reelection last year, citing his party’s handling of Trump.

Then, earlier this month, Buck abruptly resigned, pointing to the “bickering and nonsense” he said now pervades the U.S. Capitol. Buck left Congress on March 22.

___

Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.


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