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Class canceled for poor facilities

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Crunching the numbers

  • President Donald Trump continues to find ways to profit from his office, charging the Secret Service as much as $650 a night to rent rooms at his properties while they’re protecting him. The Secret Service paid Trump’s companies at least $471,000 from 2017 to April 2018, according to a Washington Post analysis. So far, Trump has spent more than 342 days of his presidency at his clubs and hotels.
  • Around the same time that the Trump administration withheld $391 million in military aid to Ukraine, the United States delayed approval of arms and ammunition sales to the country. All of the sales, worth a combined $30 million, have been held up about a year or longer, BuzzFeed News reported last week.
  • Ancestry.com’s DNA database has about 16 million profiles – more than competitors 23andMe, GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA combined. According to a recent report from Ancestry, the company did not comply with a Pennsylvania court’s warrant to access to the database.

Eye on local news

  • From the Associated Press and Mississippi Today: Last week, six people were arrested in connection with a scheme to embezzle at least $4 million in federal funds intended to aid the poor in Mississippi. A day after news emerged of the largest public embezzlement case in state history, Mississippi’s Senate Finance Committee advanced a bill that would allow the state to use income tax returns to determine if applicants are eligible for public assistance, including Medicaid.
  • From The Baltimore Sun: During the last five years, Baltimore students missed about 1.5 million classroom hours due to issues with school facilities, including electrical problems, broken pipes and inadequate temperatures. Only 17 percent of Baltimore schools are rated as being in good or excellent condition by the state.
  • From The New Haven Independent: A charter school principal reported suspending just 30 students for the whole school year. But that number is false, because about 60 were suspended in a single day in October and attendance records for some students show their suspensions were recorded as absences.
  • From The Chicago Sun-Times: Two investigations in Illinois are examining whether the head of the state’s Property Tax Appeal Board pressured staff to grant Trump’s 2012 appeal for a $1 million refund.
  • From The Tulsa World: The Oklahoma House of Representatives approved a bill that would revoke the licenses of doctors who perform abortions, except in situations when a woman’s life is in danger.

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Send me feedback, questions and tips: bryant@bigiftrue.org and 405-990-0988.
 
– Mollie Bryant