Latest news with #Bakke
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Ramsey County to pay $3.6M to family of hemophiliac who died after arrest, jail
Ramsey County has agreed to pay $3.6 million to settle a family's lawsuit after a 37-year-old man with hemophilia died following his 2022 arrest in St. Paul. The lawsuit alleged that the county and four correctional officers violated Dillon Dean Bakke's right to adequate medical treatment under the Fourteenth Amendment. The lawsuit was brought by the law firm Meshbesher and Student P.A. on behalf of Bakke's mother, Teresa Marie Schnell of St. Paul. According to court documents, Bakke, a graphic designer, caregiver at a long-term care facility and severe hemophiliac, was arrested by St. Paul police officers on suspicion of drug possession and taken to Ramsey County jail on Aug. 7, 2022. When he was booked, he had a laceration on his forehead and extensive bruising on his body. Court documents allege that jail staff was aware Bakke suffered from hemophilia and needed prescription clotting medication at any signs of bodily injuries. Despite this, attorneys alleged, he did not receive the medication or any medical treatment. 'The lawsuit alleges that during Dillon's three-day detainment at the jail, he suffered a medical emergency, specifically a brain bleed with corresponding serious and obvious neurological symptoms,' the law firm said in announcing the settlement. Bakke's condition was ignored and he was denied medical treatment for 30 hours, the firm said. 'On the morning he was to be released from custody, jail staff found him unresponsive on the floor of his cell. Dillon was transported to Regions Hospital where, despite the heroic efforts of his doctors and nurses, he never regained consciousness and tragically passed away on August 27,' the attorneys said. Bakke began displaying neurological signs and symptoms on Aug. 7 and 'began vocally and continually complaining about severe pain,' the lawsuit says. His condition deteriorated overnight and into the early morning hours of Aug. 8, 'at which point he was unable to stand or walk, and was yelling out in pain and yelling for his mother.' According to the lawsuit, correctional officers Xue Yang, Alex Grundhofer, Scott Brommerich and Antonio Rulli went to Bakke's jail cell, handcuffed him and carried him to a cell in the segregation unit, where they laid him down and left without reporting his condition to medical personnel or requesting medical treatment. In response to the settlement, a spokesman for Ramsey County said that the correctional staff notified medical personnel about Bakke's condition on 'multiple occasions' during this time in custody. The county's public health staff oversees all medical care in the jail, Ramsey County Sheriff's spokesman Steve Linders said. 'Public Health staff working in the Adult Detention Center are not supervised by the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office. Their training, supervision and medical decisions are the responsibility of Public Health leadership,' he said. 'During Dillion Bakke's time in custody, correctional staff promptly notified medical personnel on multiple occasions.' Linders said that each time medical personnel were notified, Bakke's condition was assessed by public health staff. 'Our sympathies are with Mr. Bakke's family,' he said. 'Everyone deserves competent medical care in jail.' The settlement is one of the largest of its kind in Minnesota, according to Meshbesher and Student. The lawsuit in Bakke's death followed a $3 million settlement in June 2023 involving another alleged case of inmate mistreatment and medical neglect at the Ramsey County jail. In that case, a woman said correctional officers tackled her to the ground when she was handcuffed with her arms behind her back. Her tibia was fractured and an artery was severed, but she wasn't taken for medical treatment for 17 hours, according to her lawsuit. Noah Feldman: Here is Harvard's best argument against funding cuts Farmington man repeatedly stabbed his wife amid cheating accusations, charges say Fairview Health Services sues UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Inver Grove Heights mom spared jail after 3-year-old son shot brother with her gun St. Paul man gets 24 years in federal prison for paying Philippines woman to produce child sexual abuse material
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Grand Forks Public Schools will shift principals at three schools, seek new principal to lead Winship
Apr. 3—GRAND FORKS — Principals at three Grand Forks elementary schools will be reassigned to new schools next year and a new principal will be hired at Winship Elementary. The current principals of Winship, Lake Agassiz and Lewis and Clark elementary schools will be shifted to lead other elementary schools within the district, including to fill a vacancy at Viking Elementary that will open up when current Principal Jolyn Bergstrom retires at the end of the year. Winship Principal Travis Thorvilson will go to Lake Agassiz, Lake Agassiz Principal Angela Jonasson will go to Lewis and Clark, and Lewis and Clark Principal Loren Hoheisel will run Viking Elementary. Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Education Matt Bakke confirmed the forthcoming changes to school leadership in a Thursday phone call. "We've made some changes internally to feed to the strengths of the administrators," he said. An email went out to school district employees around 3:30 p.m., while families at the four affected schools were notified at 4 p.m. Bakke says administrators have been meeting to discuss the future of schools leadership since Bergstrom, who joined the district from Cavalier in 2015, submitted her resignation in January. Staff at Winship, Lake Agassiz and Lewis and Clark learned about the forthcoming changes from their principals on Wednesday. The district will begin accepting applications for the Winship vacancy on Friday. One former educator who remains involved with school activities said she does not recall a previous instance when three principals were shifted to new schools at the same time. "I've not seen it happen quite like this before," she said. Bakke said he could recall times when the district had shifted multiple administrators at once, though he could not speak to the number of administrators whose roles had changed at any one time. Bakke worked as a teacher and Title I program coordinator in the district from 2012 to 2018 before accepting his current position in 2023. The district's current employee manual for classified personnel states employees may be reassigned to another job within the same building or another building entirely. Reassignment decisions are made by the employee's supervisor in conjunction with the district human resources director. Bakke said Thorvilson, Hoheisel and Jonasson had not applied to their new roles but he'd held "many conversations" with them before their job changes were announced. "I trust the administrators and I believe the administrators trust me in in the fact that their strengths are going to align well with the buildings they're going to," he said. "I believe this is in the best interest of our educational community." Thorvilson and Hoheisel had not returned phone calls as of Thursday afternoon. Jonasson is on leave until Monday and could not be reached, according to Lake Agassiz's front office. Grand Forks Principals Association President Terry Bohan said he had no additional information to share besides what had been shared with employees earlier Thursday. In response to a request for comment, School Board President Dave Berger wrote in a text message it is "not the School Board's role or prerogative to have a say in or comment on district operations." He added he trusted Bakke to "make the best decisions possible for our district."
Chicago Tribune
09-03-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
Legal community ‘stunned' by Trump's attacks on DEI, professor says
President Donald Trump's executive actions to attack diversity, equity and inclusion don't have the force of law, University of South Carolina law professor Kevin Brown emphasized, so it's been shocking to see the speed at which universities, nonprofits and even the business community have moved to end DEI initiatives. Brown spoke to a packed room at the Urban League of Northwest Indiana's Diversity and Inclusion Symposium Thursday at Valparaiso University. 'We in the legal academy as well as the American Bar Association have really been stunned by the things that President Trump has done,' Brown said. 'He is not a king. We do not have a king; we have a president. And if you were doing something that was legal before Jan. 20, the president can't come and execute an executive order to make it illegal on Jan. 21. 'We've never really faced a president who has denied the rule of law to the extent that we've seen over the last six weeks,' he said. Courts are slowly adjusting to executive orders, striking them down, Brown said. 'Simply put, the president can't change the law. The president's job is to enforce the law. Congress, the legislature, is the one that changes the law,' he said. Brown offered a brief history of DEI initiatives and offered his opinion on major attacks as part of his threat assessment. In the Civil War, the contribution of Black troops is overlooked, he said. There were 205,000 Black troops in the Union Army and Navy. More than 10% of the Union war dead were Black troops, with a casualty rate 40% higher than that of white troops. About 75% of eligible Black men in the north fought for the Union, he added. After the war, Congress passed a series of measures, including the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, aimed at giving Blacks the same rights as whites. Those actions are now being used in litigation aimed at bolstering white people's claims that they deserve the same treatment as Blacks and other minorities and challenging Birthright citizenship. A pivotal moment in attacks against DEI was the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.'s opinion said race should be allowed among multiple factors in determining college admissions, but only to achieve the educational benefits from a diverse student body. In his opinion, Powell said, 'The clock of our liberties, however, cannot be turned back to 1868. It is far too late to argue that the guarantee of equal protection to all persons permits the recognition of special wards (Black people) entitled to a degree of protection greater than accorded others.' A key outcome of the Bakke case was the new purpose of the equal protection clause was to protect the rights of individuals, not groups, Brown said. 'Justice Powell's opinion is really the cause of the attacks on DEI today, so to a certain extent I'm saying this was baked in as early as 1978,' he said. Brown singled out five major attacks on DEI, critical race theory, and affirmative action in the past two years. In the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University case, an affirmative action challenge, the Supreme Court said considering an applicant's race as a factor for admissions is unconstitutional, overturning 60 years of legal precedent. That ruling is relevant, Brown said, because the 1964 Civil Rights Act applied to not only governments but all recipients of federal funds. A Feb. 14 'Dear Colleague' letter by the Department of Education purported to be an interpretation of the Harvard affirmative action decision and claimed some programs may appear neutral on their face but are, in fact, motivated by racial considerations, thus violating the law. It was followed up by a second letter on Feb. 28 that retracted some of the claims of the original letter. 'If you actually took it that far, it would mean, of course, you couldn't have Black student unions. You couldn't have Black law student organizations. It would raise questions about Black studies programs. You would even have questions about historically Black colleges,' Brown said. 'Guess what else you couldn't have? Celebrations for St. Patrick's Day, because that's for the Irish. You certainly couldn't have Holocaust remembrance celebrations because that's for a specific racial group. I think once they begin to realize this, they were like 'OK, we don't really mean that, so forget all that',' he said, and that's why the second letter was sent. The Department of Education seemed to realize it's prohibited by law from dealing with the content in school curricula, he said. That would violate First Amendment rights to free speech. Anti-DEI executive orders issued Jan. 20 and Jan. 21 — Trump's first and second days in office — were aimed at recipients of federal funds. Trump wanted to discourage DEI efforts by corporations and others. 'You can't tell a private company what they can do with their own money so that was one of the reasons it was it was it was enjoined by the District Court,' Brown said. The other reason was that to ban DEI, it first has to be defined. Even DEI proponents have been struggling to define it, he said. The biggest threat to DEI, Brown believes, is the Fearless Fund case. 'This is the one that scares me the most,' Brown said. The Civil Rights Act of 1866, which is now 42 USC 1981, is a very important civil rights program, but the Fearless Fund case has reinterpreted it, he said. That law says all people shall have the same rights as white people in regard to legal proceedings. The Fearless Fund program offered $20,000 grants to black women entrepreneurs in information technology because they are so underrepresented. It was shut down in September in response to a legal challenge by the American Alliance for Equal Rights, which wanted to eliminate the restriction that recipients had to be Black women. Under that rationale, law firms that had diversity scholarships limited to underrepresented minorities wouldn't be allowed to restrict the qualifications to achieve the intended goal, Brown said. Rather than advancing equality, attacks on DEI attempt to freeze the status quo for whites. 'Let me just remind you about the disparities,' Brown said. 'Black family income is about 66% of nonwhite Hispanic income. Black poverty rates are about double that of white non-Hispanics.' The unemployment rate for Black people is typically twice that of white people. For at least the last 40 to 50 years, the rate of home ownership for Blacks has been about 44% compared to 72% for whites. Look at demographics for Americans 18 and under, and it's clear the nation is changing. Whites in 2024 were 48.8% of that population, with Latino 25.9%, Blacks 13.8%, Asians 5.7%, and two or more races 5%. Brown said the Supreme Court's recent decisions pulling back from expanding DEI programs will have an effect on society. He suggests Black students focus on entrepreneurship to be able to make more money than some of the fields they might study in college. 'We're going to see government significantly pulling back from DEI programs,' so more private organizations will need to fill in the gaps, he said.
Chicago Tribune
02-03-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
Clarence Page: Don't let ‘reverse discrimination' reverse our national progress
Marlean Ames of Akron, Ohio, is not gay or a member of a racial minority. But, please, she points out, don't hold that against her, as she alleges her employers have, as she takes her 'reverse discrimination' case all the way to the Supreme Court. I wish her well. As an African American male, I strongly oppose unfair discrimination against any race, gender or sexual orientation, although I also know the charge can be very difficult to prove. Or, at least, it has been. Ames' case aims to change that and, considering how much the high court and official Washington have shifted to the right of late, she could hardly have chosen a more opportune time to try. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in her case, Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, which has drawn a lot of attention since it could redefine how discrimination claims of all types are handled under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The core issue is whether so-called majority-group plaintiffs, legal language for white or heterosexual employees who allege discrimination, are so unusual that they must meet a higher standard of evidence than other plaintiffs in such cases. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund argued in a friend-of-the-court brief in the case that different standards were appropriate for majority and minority groups because minorities are historically the target of discrimination. Before Ames' suit went to trial, lower courts ruled against her, finding that she was unable to meet that standard. Ames' lawyers argue that the standard is unconstitutional. So does Donald Trump's administration and conservative legal groups. Joe Biden's administration also filed an amicus brief in support of Ames' position, as Jurist reported, 'with former Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar agreeing that the background circumstances requirement is not supported by the text of Title VII.' On the other side were conservative groups like America First Legal, founded by prominent Trump aide Stephen Miller, which has campaigned nationwide against DEI programs as vigorously as his better-known campaign to tighten border restrictions. 'It is highly suspect in this age of hiring based on 'diversity, equity and inclusion,'' he has said, that minority groups face more discrimination on the job than majority groups do. That faint praise is a backhanded tribute to the success of DEI campaigns, even as many Americans still scratch their heads in confusion over what DEI really is. Having covered civil rights debates off and on for about a half-century, I am reminded of perhaps the most famous reverse discrimination case: Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the 1978 landmark Supreme Court case that challenged the use of racial quotas in college admissions. The court ruled in favor of Bakke, striking down racial quotas while allowing race to be considered as one of many factors in admissions. When the high court ruled against specific racial quotas, many defenders of such policies mourned the beginning of the end for civil rights reforms. Instead, the effort to protect and defend civil rights continues despite periodic pushbacks, yet also with many refinements and improvements. As more people than ever seem to be quoting Martin Luther King Jr.'s immortal plea for 'all men' to 'not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,' I am reminded that he was not being descriptive about the present as much as hopeful for a better future. Our best way to get there as Americans is to help each other up, as we work together despite our many divisions, and not to waste too much energy trying to put each other down. In that spirit, I wish Marlean Ames well, and I hope the Supreme Court will be wise in its judgment. There's nothing simple about our racial, gender and other conflicts, but finding solutions together despite our petty differences has served us well in the past and it still can work again, if we can build faith in each other. Ames has taken on a complicated task, trying to work her way through our national tangle of history, group conflicts and tribal rivalries, looking for what most of us want: peace and justice. I only hope the Supreme Court comes up with a decision that, even if we don't love it, we can work with it.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Custom feed builder Graze is building a business on Bluesky, and investors are paying attention
A startup called Graze, which lets you build your own feeds for the Bluesky social network, has caught investors' attention. In addition to offering tools to easily build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds, Graze will soon allow feed creators to monetize their efforts with advertising, sponsored posts, and subscriptions. In other words, Graze has stumbled upon a potentially viable business model for Bluesky before the social network itself has. Investors are taking notice, too: Graze is poised to announce the close of an oversubscribed pre-seed round of funding. "I've been doing tech startups for 30 years and this is actually the craziest early-stage growth curve I've ever seen," says Graze co-founder and CEO Peat Bakke, speaking to the tool's adoption. "We went from zero — literally no traffic — to serving hundreds of thousands of unique people every day, tens of millions of content impressions. It's nuts. It's totally nuts. And it's all word of mouth." Bakke is joined by co-founder Devin Gaffney, whose background is in social media and network analysis. The two began working together around 12 years ago on Little Bird, a social data analysis startup that relied on parsing Twitter's full feed, also known as the "Firehose," to extract insights that could be useful to businesses. Now, they're working with the new generation's firehose: the "Jetstream" offered by the open and decentralized social network Bluesky, which includes all the public posts from its now over 30.3 million users as well as future apps building on the underlying AT Protocol (or atproto, for short). "We've always been interested in social networks, especially the nascent, growing social networks, to see what's happening next," Bakke says. Following the events that drove millions to leave X to join Bluesky over the past year (and in even larger numbers after the U.S. presidential elections), the two founders seized the opportunity to start working in this space again. In November, they began building Graze, a tool that gives Bluesky users the ability to "create their own algorithm," so to speak, in the form of custom feeds built with complex logic, multiple filters, and rules. And its tools have rapidly taken off. Graze's growth is being helped by Bluesky's increasing popularity; the network added 23 million users over the past year. Though Bluesky looks and feels much like X (formerly Twitter), with its text-first nature, timeline, and DMs, it's offering a more democratized experience than traditional social networks. Instead of being centrally managed by a billionaire owner like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, anyone can run their own Bluesky Personal Data Server and set their own moderation controls. They can also build their own custom feeds to filter the network's content in a variety of ways, instead of only relying on Bluesky's algorithm. Graze operates on Bluesky's Jetstream and works with atproto allowing people to build not just feeds, but also their own websites and experiences based on their filtered versions of the Jetstream. For instance, one Graze customer is building a social media platform focused on professional cycling. With Graze's toolset, the customer can create different algorithms that identify and track specific teams and people, and also moderate the feed so it's "safe for work." It's also the tool that built top Bluesky feeds like News and BookSky. Several of the apps building their own "TikTok for Bluesky"-type video experiences are working with Graze's toolset, too. What's potentially more interesting is that Graze is one of the only platforms working to monetize these custom Bluesky feeds, and it's doing it with the Bluesky team's blessing. The startup has already quietly tested sponsored posts via its platform, which loads ads into custom feeds. (Because Bluesky doesn't have a way of differentiating ads in its product, these posts use a hashtag to flag themselves as ads.) "Temu can't just come in and buy like $100,000 of advertising on [someone's] news feed," Bakke says. Instead, an advertiser offers a sponsored post and the number of impressions they're aiming for. "The feed operator has to consent to it. They maintain 100% editorial control over what goes into their feed." Plus, he says, if someone overruns their feed with ads, the users will likely abandon it. "So, there's a natural ecosystem balancing process," he says. The ads can be set at whatever price point the feed's creator chooses. Initially, Graze's guidance is a $1 to $3 CPM rate. That's a quarter of what it costs to advertise on other social networks, but so far, the click-through rates and engagement are comparable, he says. Graze also respects Bluesky's existing privacy guidelines — meaning the ads are not targeted by collecting users' personal data and or demographic info, but rather by which feeds the advertiser wants to reach. (Presumably, a cat food brand would do well advertising in a feed focused on cats, for example.) Other Graze tools will soon allow for private feeds, including those that require a subscription payment to access. With both ads and subscriptions, Graze is eyeing a 30/70 revenue split, similar to the App Store, with creators taking the larger share. It will also work with brands and businesses to match them to feeds that would best serve their interests via a creator marketplace, launching next week. Portland-based Graze is currently a team of three, including front-end developer Andrew Lazowski, based in San Jose. Sign in to access your portfolio
