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Tuesday, June 11, 2024
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Monday, June 10, 2024
An Idaho couple was accused of kidnapping neighbor’s son. Here is their plea deal
#1:An Idaho couple was accused of kidnapping neighbor’s son. Here is their plea deal
Initially accused of abducting their neighbor’s son, an Idaho couple have been placed on unsupervised probation after they struck a deal because prosecutors were concerned that a jury wouldn’t convict on kidnapping charges.
Alisha and Matthew Rettkowski, of Middleton, were each charged with a single count of felony second-degree kidnapping in September after the Canyon County Sheriff’s Office alleged that they “coordinated a plan” to abduct a teenage boy from his biological mother in Arizona, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
The boy’s stepmother told authorities that she thought Matthew Rettkowski had taken the teen. This was because the boy had temporarily stayed with the Middleton couple — who lived across the street from the teen’s biological father and stepmother — when issues arose in the home, according to a probable cause affidavit filed by the Wilder Police Department.
After learning that the Rettkowskis were giving the teen drugs and alcohol, they didn’t allow him to stay there, the affidavit said.
“Following that choice, things became volatile between the families because the Rettkowskis were unhappy (the boy) could no longer live with them,” the stepmother told police, according to the affidavit. The boy’s father then sent him to live with his mother in Arizona.
The prosecution agreed to the plea deal over concerns of jury nullification, because the boy was about two months away from turning 16 when the incident occurred, according to the Canyon County Prosecutor’s Office. At that age, prosecutors would’ve charged the Rettkowskis with harboring a runaway — a much lesser charge that is punishable by up to a year in jail, compared to a maximum of 25 years in prison for kidnapping.
“The victim willingly went with the defendants and asked them to come to get him,” a prosecutor said in court. “That’s why the state is agreeing to the (plea deal).”
Both pleaded guilty in April to the lesser charge of custodial interference and were placed on unsupervised probation for two years by 3rd District Magistrate Judge Ryan Dowell, court records showed. Neither will face any additional jail time — unless they violate probation — as Dowell gave them credit for time served and suspended the remainder of a 90-day sentence.
“I mean, obviously if this happens again, it’s not going to be the same situation,” Dowell said in court. “If there’s an attempt to do this again, it’s not going to be custodial interference.”
Father said the Rettkowskis ‘brainwashed’ his son
Dowell also quashed a no-contact order in the case, despite concerns raised by the boy’s father in court that if the order was lifted, his son’s life could be in jeopardy. The teen’s guardian — currently his grandmother — can limit any communication between the boy and the Rettkowskis, Dowell said.
The father said his son is temporarily living with the grandmother, who doesn’t want guardianship of the teen and would be OK with the Rettkowskis taking custody of him. He added that the Rettkowskis had been in contact with his son despite the no-contact order.
“I know if the contact order is lifted the Rettkowskis will try again to take guardianship of my son and he will be back at their residence,” the man said in court.
Court records showed the boy’s mother filed a petition for guardianship in September, and that case is ongoing.
Alisha Rettkowski’s attorney, John Charles DeFranco, said the boy lived with the Rettkowskis for 16 months before they were charged with kidnapping. The teen’s father said the Rettkowskis “brainwashed” his son, allowing him to drink alcohol and smoke marijuana — “almost costing (him) his life.”
“When (my son) disappeared from his mother’s in Arizona, it was mine and hers worst nightmare,” the father said. “We did not know if my son was going to be alive or dead or if we’d see him again.”
The Rettkowskis also made “false claims” to the state Department of Health and Welfare about the teen’s treatment, the father said, and he indicated that both he and his former wife were cleared of any wrongdoing. This was echoed by the prosecution, which said that Health and Welfare wasn’t able to corroborate any allegations of abuse by the parents.
In September, Matthew Rettkowski admitted to police during an interview that he had picked up the teen in Phoenix and brought him back to Idaho, according to the affidavit. He said he knew that he had no “legal standing” to do so but felt he had a “moral obligation.”
“The original act was motivated out of love,” DeFranco said in court. “After this experience, I don’t think they would ever do anything that would jeopardize their standing and what they’ve achieved in their personal lives with their career, their family and their home.”
Sunday, June 9, 2024
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Saturday, June 8, 2024
Ex-Staffers Detail Nancy Mace’s Poisonous Behavior Behind Closed Doors
#1:Ex-Staffers Detail Nancy Mace’s Poisonous Behavior Behind Closed Doors
They told The Daily Beast that Mace has misconstrued a series of events, and that staffers regularly kept track of her calendars in ways that are entirely normal for congressional offices that move at a rapid pace on a daily basis.
“The hacking and stalking charges are ridiculous on their face to most anyone who has worked in a congressional office but especially wild coming from Mace,” one former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Daily Beast. “It’s true that she set up all those calendars herself and entered all the medical information herself.”
Nancy Mace Accuses Ex-Staffers of ‘Sabotaging’ Her Office
One former staffer recounted to the Daily Mail that instances where Mace would give staffers access to her calendars, then revoke it so they couldn’t do their jobs.
“I’m not at all surprised she’s blaming others for her troubles,” another former staffer, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Daily Beast. “She has always found it impossible to take responsibility for her own mistakes or accept the consequences of her toxic behavior.”
The accusations against her staff come as Mace has been shedding staffers due to what former employees described to The Daily Beast as toxic behavior. She lost nine staffers from her Washington, D.C. office in as many months. Her former chief of staff Dan Hanlon has even filed to run against her in South Carolina. But instead of fessing up to what staffers say is narcissistic, bizarre behavior, Mace has opted to turn on them.
In addition to accusing them of hacking her phone, she has also accused employees of spying on her children’s calendars, deleting files as part of a coverup, throwing her devices in water to break them, and mismanaging $1 million.
“We’re finding thousands of dollars in bills they didn’t pay,” she said in an interview with the Daily Mail. “That money could have also gone toward salaries, bonuses.”
One former staffer took issue with her claim that staffers mismanaged her money.
“Her saying that millions were mismanaged and could have gone to salaries is especially galling,” they told The Daily Beast. “She wanted everyone around her to be paid the bare minimum and frequently fought [us] on raises and bonuses. Only able to give some raises when the House mandated them/raised the minimum strategy and even then she fought it.”
Staffers described Mace as hostile to her employees, and even interested in getting rid of them.
“If she could replace her entire staff with AI and solely send out mailers with her face on them, she would,” one former staffer told The Daily Beast.
A Major Sign of Trouble in Nancy Mace’s Office: Total Staff Turnover
An internal Mace strategy memo The Daily Beast previously obtained revealed just how fixated she is on herself and gaining public attention.
The former employee indicated they thought the congresswoman might need help addressing possible mental health issues that could be contributing to her poisonous behavior and apparent paranoia.
One former staffer told the Daily Mail that her accusations reveal she is unwell and that they hope she gets the help she needs.
“This seems to be stemming from paranoia and trust issues,” the former staffer said. “She’s clearly unwell and I hope she gets help.”
Friday, June 7, 2024
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Thursday, June 6, 2024
Woman found living in Michigan grocery store sign, complete with computer and Keurig, for months
#1:Woman found living in Michigan grocery store sign, complete with computer and Keurig, for months
Police in Midland were notified about the woman living in the small space that hosts the supermarket’s sign on April 23 after contractors working on the roof found her there.
The woman had flooring, a computer, a desk, a printer, a Keurig and a pantry of food in the space, which was 10 to 15 feet long, five feet wide and approximately 8 feet tall at its highest point, according to the Midland Police Department.
"We made contact with her and she was advised she was not allowed to live there," said Brennon Warren, a spokesperson for the Midland Police Department. "She was formally trespassed from the store and was provided with information on services within our area, however, she did not wish for any of those."
The woman, who police are not identifying, left without incident. Police found that she'd been living in the space for approximately one year, but it's not clear how she was getting up onto the roof.
She was not formally charged for living in the space, police said.
This article was originally published on
Wednesday, June 5, 2024
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Tuesday, June 4, 2024
Montana man, 68, begs for moratorium on property taxes after bill reaches $8K just ‘to live in our own house’
#1:Montana man, 68, begs for moratorium on property taxes after bill reaches $8K just ‘to live in our own house
’
“I’m on Social Security, I’m 68-years-old and working just to pay my taxes,” says Kurt, in a clip shared on TikTok by Ryan Busse, who is running to be the next governor of Montana.
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Kurt claims that over the last couple of years, his annual property taxes have soared from $895 to almost $8,000 — an increase of around 790% — which he says is like paying almost “$700 a month rent to the state to live in our own house.” The state has an Elderly Homeowner/Renter Tax Credit, and the maximum credit is $1,150.
“There needs to be a moratorium on what we have to pay,” he says, adding that he’s had to continue working into what should be his retirement golden years to cover his mounting property costs. “I’m stubborn enough [that] I don’t want to dig into my bank account to pay them.”
Kurt is one of thousands of Montana homeowners suffering sticker shock over recent property tax hikes. He says: “We just can’t take this anymore. This was a great place and it still is, but the people that made it great can’t afford to live here anymore.”
Here’s what’s going on in the Treasure State.
Soaring property values
There are many reasons why property taxes may increase over time. First and foremost, property tax is typically based on a percentage of a home’s assessed value — so if your value goes up, it’s likely that your tax bill will too.
In Kurt’s case, he claims to have bought his property in 1995. In the 29 years since then, the family home (he does not share where in Montana the property is located) has undoubtedly increased in value.
According to FRED Economic Data’s house price index for Billings, MT (the state’s most populous city), the average house price at the end of 1995 was around $103,860 and by the end of 2023 it had soared around 272% to more than $387,000.
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Looking at the data since 1985, the steepest jump in value in Billings and elsewhere in the state occurred between 2021 and 2023 — during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a surge of migration to the state and housing demand quickly outpaced supply. This corresponds with Kurt’s complaint that his property taxes have soared “over the last couple of years,” which likely occurred because his property value increased.
Monday, June 3, 2024
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Sunday, June 2, 2024
Tuna Crabs, Neither Tuna Nor Crabs, Are Swarming Near San Diego
#1:Tuna Crabs, Neither Tuna Nor Crabs, Are Swarming Near San Diego
SAN DIEGO — When Anna Sagatov, an underwater cinematographer, goes on her usual night dives off La Jolla Shores in San Diego, she’s used to spotting the “occasional octopus, nudibranch and horn shark.” But what she witnessed on a late April plunge was shocking: a seafloor turned red by what she described as an “overlapping carpet of crabs.” Swirling and shifting in the current, the creatures stretched “as far as my dive lights could illuminate,” she said.
The swarming red crustaceans she and other observers have been spotting on San Diego’s coast are called tuna crabs, but they are actually squat lobsters. And the shallows around Southern California are not their usual home.
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The animals typically live on the high seas, around Baja California in Mexico. But this is their second appearance in six years in the area. Some experts say they may have been pushed to San Diego’s near-shore canyons by nutrient-dense currents set off by El Nino, when warmer oceans release additional heat into the atmosphere, creating variable currents and air pressure fluctuations over the equatorial Pacific.
The event could signal shifts in the region’s climate. At the same time, the aggregation of tuna crabs offers scientists and divers like Sagatov a close-up of a sea creature that usually turns up inside a tuna’s stomach.
Some of the observations took twisted turns, like when she began to notice what she called “mass cannibalism” among the red crawlers. While tuna crabs are equipped to eat plankton, they are also opportunistic predators in the benthic stage of their life cycle, which can cause them to feed on their own species.
Tuna crabs are also known as red crabs, lobster krill and langostilla. They are more closely related to hermit crabs than to “true” crabs, even though they have evolved similar features. Their common name derives from their role as a favored food source for large species like tuna during the time in their life cycle when they live in the open ocean.
In the final phase of their life cycle, the crabs descend from the open ocean and live just above the continental crust as bottom-dwellers. In this stage, they will take vertical journeys through the water column in search of plankton, making them susceptible to winds, tides and currents, which may have pushed many of the animals to the north.
On the floor of Scripps Canyon, these crabs form writhing piles, thousands of individuals thick. For local predators, this is a welcome bounty. While many bottom-dwelling tuna crabs are consumed, hundreds of thousands of individuals remain uneaten when the novelty of this new food source wanes.
This aggregation and the one that preceded it in 2018 are mysteries to science, said Megan Cimino, an assistant researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. When tuna crabs last appeared, her team found that their movement in California was “related to unusually strong ocean currents originating from Baja,” sometimes but not always coinciding with El Nino.
She said the new event “signals something different is happening in the ocean.”
While the link between tuna crab aggregations and El Nino isn’t exactly clear cut, “when we think about climate change, the first thing to come to mind might be warming temperatures, but climate change can result in more variable ocean conditions” as well, Cimino said. She called tuna crabs an “indicator species” able to suggest evidence of large-scale changes in ocean currents and composition that may have positive and negative effects on animals in the area’s waters.
Because of cold water in Scripps Canyon, these crabs won’t last long after settling in San Diego. This mass dying creates stranding events in which tuna crabs wash onto the beaches in droves, turning the sand and the surrounding waters red. Alternately, the same currents that brought the swarm to San Diego could kick them back out to sea.
The end of this invasion could help scientists to one day create a forecasting system for future tuna crab aggregations. It can’t yet be said exactly how long the tuna crabs will stay, or when they’ll return to California’s shores. But in a warming ocean, it may be sooner than anyone expects.
Saturday, June 1, 2024
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