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Porsche Edition: Florida Man strikes again!

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Oh Florida, land of alligators and crazy criminal plots. The latest scheme involved Casey William Kelley allegedly making a false banknote to fraudulently purchase a $140,000 Porsche 911 Turbo from a dealership. The 42-year-old man has been charged with grand theft of a motor vehicle and uttering a false banknote, says the Walton County Sheriff’s Office.

According to authorities, Kelley used his home computer and printer to copy and print a convincing-looking cashier’s check. While he’s sitting in jail at the moment and will likely be behind bars for some time, Kelley could have a future in graphic design once he gets out, if he’s looking to live an honest life that is.

Photo credit: Facebook

The dealership, which is located in Destin, Florida had no idea the cashier’s check Kelley provided wasn’t from a bank. With the car keys and title in hand, Kelley happily drove off, likely thinking he would get away with the alleged fraud.

Of course, once the dealership learned the cashier’s check was no good it contacted the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office. Police were on the hunt for their suspect, who surfaced not too long afterward.

With confidence from passing the bad cashier’s check at the car dealership, authorities say Kelley went to a jeweler in Miramar Beach where he presented another one for $61,521 for three Rolex watches. Perhaps having been burned in the past, the jeweler held onto the watches until the check cleared, which it didn’t. Police were then able to track Kelley down and retrieve the Porsche 911 Turbo as well as take him into custody.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen quite a few alleged fraud cases this year, as well as more traditional car thefts. Anyone selling a vehicle, whether a private party or dealer should take steps to protect themselves against the different possible schemes used by would-be criminals.

Source: Fox Business

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Saturday Night Live instantly started receiving backlash after Nikki Haley made a surprise appearance during the Feb. 3 show.

During a town hall sketch for the cold open, the Republican presidential candidate made a cameo to ask James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump some questions of her own.

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Haley started out by asking, “Why won’t you debate Nikki Haley?” in reference to the former president refusing to participate in presidential debates ahead of the 2024 election.

Johnson’s Trump responded, “Oh my God. It’s her, the woman who was in charge of security on Jan. 6. It’s Nancy Pelosi.”

“Are you doing OK, Donald? Haley proceeded to ask. “You might need a mental competency test.”

“You know what, I did,” Johnson’s Trump said. “I took the test and I aced it, OK. Perfect score. They said I’m 100 percent mental and, you know, I’m confident because I’m a man. That’s why a woman should never run our economy. Women are terrible with money.”

Ayo Edebiri later popped up at the end of the sketch and directed a question at Haley: “I was just curious, what would you say was the main cause of the Civil War? And do you think it starts with an S and ends with a lavery?”

The former South Carolina governor said in response, “Yep, I probably should have said that the first time.”

Edebiri’s question was in reference to a December 2023 town hall in New Hampshire, where a voter asked Haley what caused the war. She responded at the time, “I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

People quickly began to criticize Haley on social media for not mentioning slavery in her response. She ended up walking back her comments during a radio interview on Good Morning New Hampshire, saying, “Of course, the Civil War was about slavery.”

She continued, “What it means to us today is about freedom — that’s what that was all about. It was about individual freedom,” she said. “It was about economic freedom. It was about individual rights.”

Following Haley’s appearance on SNL, some people took to social media to criticize the NBC sketch comedy show for giving her screen time but not other candidates.

One person wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “Nikki Haley will only ever diss trump on a comedy show, and WTF is slavery denier doing on SNL anyway? Disgraceful, @nbcsnl,” while another one added, “Nikki Haley just appeared in the cold open for SNL. Saturday Night Live sure does have a long track record of comedy-washing hateful conservatives.” Trump previously hosted the show in 2015 while running for president for the 2016 election.

NBC declined to comment, but sources told The Hollywood Reporter that NBC will comply with any equal time obligations for other presidential candidates across both parties.

Edebiri made her hosting debut on Saturday Night Live with musical guest Jennifer Lopez.

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Hundreds of communities across the U.S. have for several decades tried to reduce crime, fight gangs and tackle noise and other neighborhood problems through the use of “crime-free” or “public nuisance” laws encouraging and allowing landlords to evict renters when police or emergency crews are repeatedly called to the same addresses.

Long the subject of criticism that such policies are ineffective and enforced more harshly in poor neighborhoods and against people of color, the ordinances are now under scrutiny as sources of mental health discrimination.

Last November, the U.S. Department of Justice issued what it called a first-of-its-kind finding, telling a Minneapolis suburb that its enforcement of a crime-free law illegally discriminated against people with mental health disabilities.

Other cities and jurisdictions are joining a growing movement to rethink, rewrite or repeal such laws as criticism and lawsuits escalate.

WHAT ARE LOCAL ‘CRIME-FREE’ OR ‘NUISANCE’ ORDINANCES?

Anti-crime and nuisance ordinances have been around for years and are widespread in their usage. More than 2,000 cities nationwide have enacted such policies since the 1990s, according to the Chicago-based Shriver Center on Poverty Law. The International Crime Free Association says at least 3,000 international cities also use them.

Under such ordinances, landlords can be fined or lose their rental licenses if they don’t evict tenants whose actions are considered a public nuisance, including those selling drugs or suspected of other crimes. They also can be required to screen potential tenants and limit the number of people living in a home or apartment.

But every ordinance is different: unique in what it targets, how it is enforced and what kind of consequences are levied for violating it. Many also are vague about who and what is considered a public nuisance.

In Anoka, Minnesota, the Minneapolis suburb scrutinized by the DOJ, the “Crime Free Housing” ordinance covers excessive noise, “unfounded calls to police” and allowing a “physically offensive condition.” While the ordinance says a nuisance call involves “disorderly conduct,” such as criminal activity and acts jeopardizing others, it doesn’t define unfounded calls or physically offensive conditions.

Critics, and courts, say those subjective ambiguities have allowed discrimination against certain groups of people.

WHAT PROBLEMS CAN THESE LAWS POSE?

Federal fair housing laws bar landlords from asking whether someone has a disability, including a mental health disability, or refusing to rent to them on that basis. But many crime-free laws direct landlords to screen rental applicants, sometimes by the same officials who decide whether emergency calls for help or about an individual’s demeanor will count against a tenant or the landlord themself.

Some jurisdictions also share detailed information about those calls with landlords, which housing activists say is often further shared among landlords when discussing why they don’t view a past tenant as a good rental prospect.

One such law in Hesperia, California, spawned a federal lawsuit after a resident was forced to leave her home and move into a motel after calling for assistance when her boyfriend had a mental health crisis. The town’s ordinance required landlords to have potential tenants’ applications screened by the local sheriff’s office. The agency, according to the lawsuit, then shared with landlords a list of people it flagged as potentially troublesome renters.

Advocates say reluctance to rent to people previously hospitalized for mental health issues, as well as city policies that discourage renting to people who have been arrested, exacerbates the situation.

People face being homeless or “forced to cycle from an institution to a homeless shelter,” said Corey Bernstein, executive director of the National Disability Rights Network.

A lack of community services often means jails serve as “de facto psychiatric centers” for people with mental illnesses, said Devon Orland, litigation director at the disability rights Georgia Advocacy Office.

“We’ve seen people on street corners yelling or getting upset,” Orland said. “That locality doesn’t want them around and then they reappear or they don’t leave immediately and they get arrested for criminal trespass.”

WHERE ARE THE LAWS MOST OFTEN ENFORCED?

Critical studies and lawsuits indicate enforcement of nuisance laws frequently occur in poorer neighborhoods and communities of color.

An August 2018 report from the American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union said data from Rochester and Troy, New York, showed the most vigorous enforcement of “no crime” and “public nuisance” laws occurred in poor and heavily minority areas.

A 2017 federal lawsuit against Peoria, Illinois, similarly plotted three years’ worth of data on a map of the city and found almost all nuisance citations were issued in neighborhoods with larger percentages of residents of color.

Other studies and lawsuits indicate such ordinances are typically in response to an influx of residents of color, often from larger communities such as Cleveland or Los Angeles.

When the DOJ sued Hesperia, a city of about 101,000 residents about 60 miles (97 kilometers) northeast of Los Angeles, in 2019, the agency said officials there had made it clear their ordinance was a reaction to an increasing number of residents of color.

The lawsuit quoted one council member saying “those kind of people” coming from the Los Angeles area were of “no value” and “I want their butt kicked out of this community as fast as I can possibly humanly get it done.”

Other lawsuits have concluded crime-free policies hurt domestic abuse victims for repeatedly calling for help from police.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development filed a complaint in 2013 against the Philadelphia community of Norristown, Pennsylvania, over an ordinance it said allowed the town to sanction landlords over “domestic disturbances that do not require that a mandatory arrest be made.”

A Black resident had filed a federal lawsuit over a series of 2012 incidents involving an abusive boyfriend. She was told by police that she faced eviction over the emergency calls and later did not call police after her boyfriend stabbed her in the neck. A neighbor called police and the woman was airlifted to a hospital for emergency care, the lawsuit said.

WHERE ARE THESE LAWS BEING CHALLENGED?

At least a few states are trying to limit the reach of such ordinances.

Maryland last year prohibited cities and counties from penalizing landlords and now prevents landlords from evicting tenants over the number of police or emergency calls to their addresses. At the start of this year, California greatly limited cities’ use of crime-free policies. Advocates expect a similar push for such legislation in Illinois.

Housing advocates and civil liberties groups also have challenged ordinances in multiple states, including California, Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania, forcing cities to rewrite or repeal their ordinances in legal settlements.

Some communities have backed off on their own.

In the Minneapolis area, the communities of Golden Valley, St. Louis Park and Bloomington repealed most or all of their ordinances starting in 2020.

Other area cities have rewritten their ordinances, including Faribault in 2022 as it agreed to pay $685,000 to settle a federal lawsuit over the law.

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Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas.

DELTONA, Fla. – A Deltona man is behind bars after deputies say he beat his dog with a chain and fought bystanders who tried to stop him, and it was all caught on camera.

Raymon Prush was at Circle K on Elkcam Boulevard and Lake Helen Osteen Road on Thursday afternoon when he says he witnessed the man hitting the dog in the face.

“I don’t understand why somebody could do that. It’s just heartbreaking,” he said.

He decided to step in and stop the man, identified by the Volusia Sheriff’s Office as 31-year-old Jose Rivera, from hurting the dog any further.

Video taken by witnesses shows Prush confronting Rivera as he continues to whip the dog with the chain.

“I could never see myself ever doing that to my best friend, who’s there to protect me and my family,” Prush said.

That’s when he says, and the video proves, other bystanders are trying to shield the dog from Rivera. But the mayhem didn’t stop there.

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“I wasn’t going to let anybody get hurt, so I put myself in between. He hit me in the face on this side, I guess, to try to knock me down. That’s when I yoked him up to get him to stop being violent,” Prush said.

According to VSO, a total of nine bystanders tried to get Rivera under control before deputies arrived. At least four of them, including Prush, were hurt.

Court records show Rivera has a history of violence, including several convictions for battery and domestic violence.

Prush is still trying to comprehend how someone could hurt their own pet.

“We treat them as children. They live with us. They eat with us. They sleep with us. They’re amazing things, and nobody deserves, nor any animal deserves, to get hit like that in the face, especially with a metal chain,” he said. “I just don’t understand how somebody could do that to something that’s so special.”

Rivera is facing multiple charges. A judge set Rivera’s bond at $51,000.

As for the dog’s condition, deputies say it suffered cuts and other injuries and is now in the care of someone else.

GARDNER, Kansas − Donna Knoche made her way up to the podium at the Johnson County Commission hearing on June 6, 2022, her new yellow shirt crisp and her voice steady. It wasn’t something she’d ever thought she’d have to do in her 93 years in the place her grandfather first homesteaded in the 1860s.

Calmly setting aside her walker, she looked at the county commissioners arrayed to her left and began to speak.

“I never in all my life thought I would stand up here to protect our property rights by being able to use our land legally for the best benefit of our family,” she said.

Scores of people were in line behind her. Many of them had other ideas.

Some implored the commissioners to vote to allow the so-called West Gardner plan, a utility-size array of solar panels, saying the county needed to commit to clean energy for their children’s future.

But others were just as passionately opposed. Many wore matching T-shirts that implored the council to “Stop INDUSTRIAL SOLAR,” testifying for more than three hours against the plan for Knoche’s farm and others across the county.

To them, the solar plant  would “threaten health and well-being” and did not fit “the character of the land.” It would create “a landscape of black glass and towering windmills,” that would put lives at risk and cause “a mass exodus out of the area.”

The fight played out in front of one small county commission in one 613,000-person county. But at its heart, this fight – and hundreds of others like it across the country – was over the future of the whole nation’s energy supply and, perhaps, the future of the planet.

As the country races to shift to carbon-free energy to forestall climate change, opposition movements have popped up nationwide to fight new solar and wind farms, hampering America’s chances of meeting its climate pledges.

A USA TODAY analysis of local rules and policies nationwide found that, as of December, 15% of counties in the United States had banned or otherwise blocked new utility-scale wind farms, solar installations or both.

In the past decade, 183 U.S. counties had their first wind projects start producing power, while nearly 375 blocked new wind turbines. In 2023, almost as many counties blocked new solar projects as added them.

The reasons for local opposition are varied and the motives behind them can be murky but often boil down to one essential idea: Renewables are fine, but we don’t want them here.

That’s a problem, said Grace Wu, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies energy systems and land use change. “If nowhere seems to be the right place, increasingly we’ll have a harder and harder time to site them.”

The land owned by the Knoche family is just one spot in a statewide fight in Kansas, which has both the nation’s fourth best wind resources and, as solar power technology has become more efficient, strong solar as well: the same sunlight that drives photosynthesis in large-scale crops like corn can generate energy in solar panels.

Today, the state gets 47.13% of its electricity from wind and 0.33% from solar.

Yet now, 14 of the 105 counties in Kansas block wind turbines and 12 block solar farms. These include outright bans, height restrictions, unworkable setbacks for turbines, size limitations for solar farms, caps on the amount of agricultural land that can be used and, in McPherson County, an “indefinite moratorium” on solar applications.

These efforts mirror those in hundreds of counties and townships across the nation, where the merest hint of a potential project quickly brings forth a Facebook group, yard signs, organized protests and – increasingly – zoning rules and laws that make new renewable energy impossible to build.

Seen as just one flare-up in a nationwide trend to oppose local green-energy projects, the fight in Johnson County shouldn’t be surprising.

But to Donna Knoche, 93, and her husband Robert “Doc” Knoche, 95, it’s bewildering – and annoying.

For them, leasing acres to a solar farm would simplify their land’s care, keep it available for farming when the lease runs out and allow it to continue to be passed on through the generations.

“We figured it was just one of those sorts of things that you could do – like buying a house or leasing a car. You could just do it on your own and not have to deal with all this complexity,” Donna said.

Instead, it has become a five-year battle.

“I had no idea it would drag on this long,” said Doc.

Deep roots in Kansas

Both Donna and Doc have deep roots in this land.

Donna’s grandfather William Brecheisen came to the United States in 1850 as a 7-year-old. His German-speaking family was from Alsace–Lorraine, at that time part of France.

“They got the Kansas Fever,” she said. “They came out in a prairie schooner wagon,” she said.

William served in the Union Army during the Civil War and then came home to Kansas, where he homesteaded 160 acres of the flat, productive plains.

“We have the patent from 1868,” Donna said proudly from her well-worn chair next to her husband’s matching one in the living room of their simple rambler in Gardner, Kansas. They’ve lived here since 1959. It’s where they raised their six children.

Robert is universally known as Doc after working more than 60 years as a large animal veterinarian in the area – he still has his license. He grew up in the town of Paola. After the death of his mother he was raised on his uncle and aunt’s farm. At the time, they worked the land not with machines but with half a dozen horses – “and two mules,” he said.

Too young to serve in World War II, he had to wait several years to start veterinary school because all the slots were reserved for veterans.

He graduated in 1952 and settled in Gardner, a town of 650 at the time.

He roomed with a local woman who took in boarders, and went on dates with a few girls in town. “I never asked for a second date,” he says. Then his landlady’s daughter had a baby at the new hospital in Gardner and Robert met a nurse who had just been hired there – Donna.

Their first date was on July 12, 1952, “to a picture show in Ottawa” about 25 miles away. They drove in Doc’s 1951 Ford.

Today when they tell this story, the couple look at each other – their matching chairs side by side – and smile.

“We’ve been married for 70 years,” Donna said.

“So that’s how it all worked out,” Doc said.

Those 160 acres that Donna’s grandfather had farmed grew as the family bought up additional land.

Today that legacy is about 1,190 acres of farmland that straddles Johnson and Douglas counties. For many years, the Knoches rented out most of the ground to Donna’s uncle Lucky Brecheisen, who grew corn, soybeans and hay. After he died in 1997 they took over, eventually running a 200-head cow-calf operation in addition to the veterinary practice.

“We bought some land south of Gardner and we had mostly Angus cattle of our own,” Doc said. “I built the fences and mowed the hay. Mom would answer the phone when people called for emergencies.”

“It wasn’t easy, it was long hours,” Doc says of the 10-year stint. Shoulder surgery around 2010 forced him to give up his herd. Since then, they’ve rented the land to other farmers and ranchers.

Doc doesn’t call himself a farmer, but he knows the soil is not as fertile as it is elsewhere. “Lucky always said, ‘We’ve got all bottom land – because the top land is all washed away.’ So it’s not the good prime ground you think of,” Doc said.

Keeping the land healthy and productive is important to the family. “We’ve worked to conserve the soil and make it better through the years,” said Donna.

In time, they realized they would never farm the whole property, and no one person in their family was likely to, either. That led to a conundrum.

The Knoches have six children, 11 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. As they approached their 90s, they’d wrestled with how to divide the 1,190 acres among all those heirs.

They had a plan for sharing, but then a better one came up. In 2018, they came home to a message on their answering machine.

The caller was from a solar developer looking to lease land in the area for a solar farm.

“Well, I called him back and we talked about it,” Doc said, “and it sounded better than farming.”  It didn’t hurt that one of their sons-in-law, Steve Clark, was an engineer and solar consultant, so they had an expert to talk with.

The Knoches ended up signing a four-year lease on their land with NextEra Energy, as did other landowners and farmers nearby.

The deal gave the company an option to build on the land. The Knoches got a little bit of money for the agreement, and for a while, nothing else happened. “We didn’t make a big show of it,” Donna said.

They figured it would take a long time for an energy plant to be developed, if ever.

They’d heard stories about windmills in other places, and how people fought them. This seemed different. A solar farm would keep the rural land from being built up as something else – a subdivision, or a warehouse. The panels lasted a long time, up to 30 years, but after that, they could be removed and the land could be farmed again, if people wanted.

They didn’t think about it much for the next few years.

“I really hadn’t heard much about people fighting solar,” Doc said. Then he looked over at his wife, something between a smile and a grimace on his face.

“So we found out about it,” he said.

The opposition to solar

The planned solar farm – the West Gardner Solar Project – was originally proposed to include as much as 3,000 acres spread over Douglas and Johnson counties that would generate up to 320 megawatts of electricity. The project would also include 129 megawatts of battery storage, to make the solar energy available when the sun isn’t shining.

Then things got contentious.

People heard about the leases and began to organize against the proposed solar farm. A Facebook group opposing the project appeared, several groups were formed and a website was created.

Soon there were hearings scheduled before the Johnson County commissioners, who were considering various proposals amending the zoning regulations for solar facilities and battery storage.

There were work sessions. Planning commission meetings. Subcommittee meetings. The work stretched for more than a year.

Crowds of opponents flocked to public meetings to demand the plans for a solar farm be shut down.

The family estimates between the two counties they’ve attended more than a dozen meetings, not including the ones they’ve watched online.

Finally, June 2022 arrived. The goal on this warm summer night was to vote on exactly what the county would allow. How large could the solar installations be? How far must they be from towns? What about stormwater runoff? How much of a buffer should there be from the land of other neighbors who weren’t part of the project? How many years would permits be valid?

Even if county commissioners allowed solar projects, there would still be other hurdles.

Opponents decried what they call industrial wind and solar and said the installations have no place in an idyllic landscape of corn, wheat, soybeans and cattle.

They said solar panels would drip toxic chemicals from their glass into the ground, contaminating wells. The land under them would heat up and kill all surrounding vegetation. The solar cells and batteries planned to accompany them would be at risk for catastrophic fires that country firefighters would be unable to contain. Property values would fall and so much of the land would be consumed that the country would risk starving.

Those Johnson County meetings aired many of the same concerns that emerged nationwide, in more than a dozen different local zoning meetings reviewed online or in person by USA TODAY.

The problem with these concerns is that almost none of them are true.

“They had these meetings and they were very negative,” said Karlene Thomson, one of the Knoches’ daughters. “A lot of misinformation got put out.”

The meeting on June 6, 2022, lasted more than three hours.

It began with a solemn recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Then speaker after speaker came forward. There were many in favor of the project, but most were adamantly – though politely – opposed.

To them the solar farm was an intrusion of industrial energy production that would destroy the rural community that they loved.

Not that the area hadn’t long been home to more than farms. The 9,000 acre Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant was built there in 1942, employing more than 15,000 people at the height of World War II. In 2013, BNSF Railway opened an intermodal shipping hub in the southern part of the county. The 330-acre I-35 Logistics Park opened the same year. Panasonic broke ground on a new battery plant on the old ammunition plant in 2022.

And people from nearby Olathe, Overland Park and even Kansas City kept moving deeper into the county, buying small 5- and 10-acre plots to build their dream homes on.

But thousands of acres of solar panels was something no one had ever experienced, and they didn’t like it.

“This is so far off from being right, I don’t even have words. You will be affecting over 200 homeowners and 1,200 souls with one project,” said Lisa Huppe of nearby Edgerton, Kansas.

“We are not against solar energy. However, when it comes to utility scale facilities in the agricultural communities of rural Johnson County, it’s the wrong choice,” she said. “If you allow this to happen, commissioners, you will devalue the property and destroy the lives that we have spent years building here and threaten our health and well-being.”

Many opponents sported T-shirts that read “County Commissioners: Protect our Quality of Life. Let us help you draft regulations that stop INDUSTRIAL SOLAR.”

“We stand to lose the character of our communities, with a transition from agricultural to industrial use,” said Pam Ferguson of Eudora. “Developers want you to think that we need to turn our state into a landscape of black glass and towering windmills. And if you do so, the planet will be ruined.”

Solar and wind power need to be sited responsibly, away from places like Johnson County which have lots of people in them, said Carrie Brandon, chairperson for Douglas County/Johnson County Kansans for Responsible Solar.

“We realize that renewable energy is needed to offset oil and coal,” she said. “But we have brilliant people on our planet who are constantly coming up with new energy inventions. Haste makes for waste – we can be smart about it and not just go all in on blanketing rural areas and taking agricultural land out of our inventory.”

Brandon says her work to fight the project has taken a toll on her health and her business. “I’ve spent at least half a million dollars at my hourly rate, it’s been an enormous effort over the last three years,” she said.

For the Knoches, the desire to farm the sun on their land is a simple matter of property rights.  They and other landowners want to maximize the profit they make from their fields without having to sell it off or break it up. It’s their land. They should use it as they see fit.

“This opposition doesn’t seem to be concerned about property rights for anybody but themselves,” said Donna.

Of course, zoning restrictions are nothing new. The Knoches think the solar panels – not very tall, silent, no smoke or other emissions – make for a better fit in farm country than almost anything else that might get built.

But the family also can’t help but see it as a matter of seniority. After all, this has been their land for the better part of two centuries.

Doc does allow that things started to change even in the 1950s. People moved out of the city to small farms for the ambiance.

Back in those days they were called agriculturalists.

“There was a story about the difference between a farmer and an agriculturalist,” he said. “A farmer makes money on the farm and spends it in town. An agriculturalist makes money in town and comes out and buys a farm and spends it on his farm,” Doc said.

Back then, the spreads people bought were maybe 160 acres, he said. People actually farmed. Today the lot sizes of those seeking a rural lifestyle are a lot smaller, often as little as five acres, said their daughter Jane Knoche.

“Their big statement is they came out to the rural peace and quiet of the rural area,” she said.

The issue has been divisive enough that it’s made the county a less neighborly place. On a drive to visit the land where the solar farm would be built, Jane pointed out sign after sign on fenceposts and in storefronts reading “No Industrial Solar” and “Protect our Quality of Life.”

“Not so fun to see,” Jane said.

Doc, who loves airplanes and aviation, likes to hang out at the tiny Gardner Municipal Airport with his buddies. Until the day someone tracked him down there to confront him about the plan.

“He came in there and said ‘I guess you’re real proud of the fact that you’ve lowered everybody’s property values,’” he said.

Facing the future of green energy

Renewable energy plants do get built in Kansas.

Two hours northwest of the Knoches’ home is the Amerugi Farm. It’s 400 acres of corn, soybeans, barley, oats, rye and alfalfa, woodlands and pasture. It’s also home to one wind turbine that’s part of the Soldier Creek Wind Energy Center.

The wind project, which includes 120 turbines dotted across the fields of 200 participating landowners, went into operation in 2020 and today produces up to 300 megawatts of electricity, about enough for about 64,000 homes.

Mary Fund and her husband Ed Reznicek have farmed there since 1978 on land Fund’s family has owned since the 1870s. The one wind turbine on their land gives them a small lease payment.

“It’s a nice little addition to our retirement income but it’s not going to make us rich,” said Fund, 70.

She views that turbine in much the same way her mother and aunt saw the oil leases on the farm in the early 1980s.

“They struck oil, so we have a couple of oil wells on our land. They helped my mother in her old age,” she said.

Indeed, across the farm country where green energy is now controversial, pump jacks and gas wells have long extracted from the ground below to create a far less green kind of energy. Nemaha County is home to 22 oil wells and in 2022 produced 33,788 barrels of oil, enough to make as much as 675,000 gallons of gasoline.

The state as a whole has more than 48,000 oil wells and 19,000 natural gas wells in production in 2023.

It’s a kind of karma, Fund said. “You don’t let them extract oil from your land and then not let them put up a turbine.”

They signed a lease in July 2018 that gave a three-year option for NextEra to explore use of their land as a site for a potential turbine, but only after several months of communications with the wind farm representative, visiting other windfarms to see what it felt like to be near turbines and a lot of research.

“I really have to confess I didn’t think anybody would oppose it,” she said. “I mean, why would you?”

She was wrong. Things quickly got testy, much of it organized through Facebook. Speakers railed against wind and stacks of a misinformation-filled book appeared on the counters of local businesses and local libraries all winter long.

“It was never clear who brought these into the county, but the website of South Dakotans for Safe & Responsible Renewable Energy offers a case of 30 for $1,000 donations,” she said.

The furor over the plan made the couple enemies in the place they’d lived together for 45 years, the place where Fund grew up.

“There are people who don’t talk to each other anymore, and people who grudgingly moved on and talk about everything but the wind farm,” she said. “I’ve got a neighbor who won’t talk to me, but her husband will.”

In the end, county commissioners voted to approve the wind farm in 2019. It was built in 2020 and now brings about $900,000 in taxes to the county each year.

That’s on top of the lease payments made directly to landowners including Mary and Ed.

The Soldier Creek turbines dot a spare, wind-swept landscape of farms, grazing land, creeks and woodlots.

Living near the turbines hasn’t bothered the couple. On quiet nights they can hear both the turbine and the oil wells.

But theirs seems likely to be the last wind power that will be built in Nemaha County. After the first conditional use permits were approved in early 2019, the county commission passed a moratorium on new projects in May of 2019.

In October of 2023 they passed a resolution extending the moratorium for another year. A new County Comprehensive Plan documents opposition to further wind energy and effectively warns off developers.

When the Knoches first began considering the possibility of a solar project on their land, they were both in their 80s. Doc was still enjoying his hobby of going up in a gas-powered hang glider. Three of their children were still in their 50s and they only had 11 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

In December 2023, everyone was older. Doc had stopped flying and suffered a fall. Donna had to be more careful when she walked.

And they weren’t much closer to having a deal.

Both Douglas and Johnson counties have passed new zoning regulations surrounding solar. In Douglas as of 2022, projects are limited to no more than 1,000 acres and must be at least 500 feet from existing residences. In Johnson, there’s a cap of 2,000 acres per project and a one-and-a-half mile setback from neighboring cities.

Another solar project, which had nothing to do with their land, is now also going through the process in Douglas County. It ended the year with a packed planning meeting that went past 2:00 am on Dec. 19, which is now headed to yet another vote by the county commission.

The Knoches continue to live in their modest rambler, full of photos, mementos. They visit children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They offer donuts to guests and pull out scrapbooks with clippings about the project along with books on the family’s history in the area.

Both wonder at the changes they’ve seen in their lives. Donna tells of growing up with kerosene lamps and remembers when they first got an Aladdin lamp, which burned kerosene but used a mantle instead of a wick.

“It was almost like night and day compared to that old kerosene lamp,” she said. “We didn’t get electricity out in the farm until, it was 1947 or 1948, when I was in high school.”

Doc ponders the shifts in a state where he first plowed with horses and mules. As he testified to the county commission, he’s not afraid solar power will turn the county’s farmland into an industrial wasteland.

He’s afraid of the constant push to turn farms into subdivisions.

“Out here,” he said, “I think in five, ten years you’ll be glad it’s there because you’re going to be crowded out by other people.”

This story was produced with support from the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Solar power in Kansas: How one couple’s land lease became a fight

D.C. Judge Tanya Chutkan indefinitely postpones the March 4th election interference trial as we await the D.C. Court’s decision about Donald Trump’s absolute immunity. Katie Phang talks with former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner about what happens next.

A 38-year-old Blaine woman was charged Friday with criminal sexual conduct after allegedly having sexual contact with juvenile boys in town last month for a hockey tournament.

The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office charged Allison Leigh Schardin with one count each of criminal sexual assault in the third and fourth degree. Both charges involve two 15-year-old boys.

According to the criminal complaint, the contact occurred when Schardin and her family were taking a “staycation” at a Roseville hotel in the 2500 block of Cleveland Avenue North. Team members from a boys hockey team were staying at the same hotel.

Schardin spoke with members of the team in the hotel’s pool area Jan. 14. She later messaged one of the boys on Snapchat and asked to go to his room, according to the charges.

At the room, Schardin asked the boys their ages and told them they were young enough to be her kids. She then had sexual contact with two of the boys, the charges state.

The two boys said they felt pressured and eventually told her she had to leave. She later showed up at one of their hockey games and texted the two boys after they returned home, according to the charges.

Schardin was arrested Thursday. She allegedly told investigators she kissed and had sexual contact with the boys, the charges say.

Her first court appearance is scheduled for Monday.

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Butch Cassidy’s legacy is a bit complex.

Cassidy, whose real name was Robert LeRoy Parker, is viewed by some as a ruthless criminal who robbed trains and banks throughout the West at the turn of the 20th century. Others see his actions in a more redeeming light, as he targeted large businesses that threatened the existence of smaller ones.

What isn’t up for debate is that he was from Utah and remains one of the state’s more memorable figures even a century after his reported death.

“Whether you think he’s a villain or a Robin Hood, he’s definitely a colorful character for our state,” says Rep. Steven Lund, R-Manti.

Now, an effort to turn the childhood home of Utah’s most notorious outlaw into the state’s newest monument has cleared its first hurdle. Members of the Utah House Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment Committee voted 11-0 Thursday to advance HCR8, a resolution to create Butch Cassidy State Monument near Circleville.

Who was Butch Cassidy?

The property, which is an attraction near the Garfield and Piute county line maintained by local officials, is where Parker grew up with his family after he was born in Beaver in 1866.

The nonprofit Utah Humanities, which compiled a short history of Butch Cassidy’s life, says family raised him there until his teenage years before they lost the farm. That’s when he met a cattle thief named Mike Cassidy and life turned.

Mike Cassidy influenced Parker to hit the road and become an outlaw, as noted by historian John Barton in Utah History Encyclopedia. It was on this journey he developed the persona for which he’s remembered.

“Parker rode the fringe between being an outlaw and a migrant cowboy,” Barton wrote. “He worked several ranches as well as one time in a butcher shop at Rock Springs, Wyoming, from which he took the name ‘Butch.’ And to not bring shame upon honest parents, he added the name Cassidy.”

Butch Cassidy went into American folklore from there, becoming a well-known bank and train robber across the West. He would go on to form the infamous outlaw gang known as the “Wild Bunch,” which carried out some of the largest robberies in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

But some say he committed these crimes for the little guy, targeting large cattle operations that pushed smaller ones out of business, Utah Humanities noted.

“The best way to hurt them is through their pocketbook. … I steal their money just to hear them holler. Then I pass it out among those who really need it,” it quoted him as once saying.

Whatever the case may be, it made him a wanted man. The impacted railroad companies hired a detective agency to track down members of the gang, some of whom fled to South America with Butch Cassidy.

In 1908, soldiers in Bolivia finally tracked down Butch Cassidy and Harry Longabaugh, known as “The Sundance Kid,” who were reportedly killed after a shootout. But as a part of their lore, some to this day believe the two never died in that fateful shootout and lived under new identities.

Butch Cassidy’s legacy went on to be cemented in literature and cinema, including the classic 1969 Western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

A new state monument

Butch Cassidy’s legacy has fueled interest in his childhood home, which was restored and is now a popular tourist destination. HCR8, sponsored by Rep. Carl Albrecht, R-Richfield, would make it a state monument operated by the Utah Division of State Parks.

Albrecht pointed out both Garfield and Piute counties approved resolutions to preserve and maintain the facility in a land lease agreement with the land’s private owner. He added the state also has a memorandum of understanding with the landowner in place, providing utilities and upkeep for the 1-acre site.

“It’ll provide more recreational, cultural, historic, scenic and economic value,” he said. “Monument status would give the area more recognition, more signage on maps, more (identification), resulting in more visitors to the area. … It would just be a great economic driver, I think, for Garfield and Piute counties.”

The motion garnered support from local leaders who attended the meeting, as well as the division. There wasn’t any pushback from committee members before they passed the measure to a full House of Representatives vote.

“This is a great use and a way to care for and be wise stewards of the history and the treasures we have here in the state,” said Rep. Kevin Stratton, R-Orem, before casting his vote in favor.

The bill must be approved by the House and Senate by March 1 before it can be signed into law.

BEIJING (Reuters) – Many Chinese are venting their frustration at the slowing economy and the weak stock market in an unconventional place: the social media account of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

A post on Friday on protecting wild giraffes by the U.S. embassy on Weibo, a Chinese platform similar to X, has attracted 130,000 comments and 15,000 reposts as of Sunday, many of them unrelated to wildlife conservation.

“Could you spare us some missiles to bomb away the Shanghai Stock Exchange?” one user wrote in an repost of the article.

The Weibo account of the U.S. embassy in China “has become the Wailing Wall of Chinese retail equity investors”, another user wrote.

The U.S. embassy did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

While Weibo users can publish individual posts about the market and the economy, Chinese authorities regularly block what they view as “negative” online comments when they gain traction.

The comments function on posts related to the economy or the markets on social media platforms can also be turned off, or only show selected comments, restricting channels in which people can express their opinions.

China’s blue-chip CSI300 Index tumbled 6.3% last month, plumbing five-year lows, after a raft of government support measures failed to prop up confidence dented by multiple economic headwinds, including a multi-year property slump, tepid domestic consumption and deflationary pressures.

In late January, state media reported that China will take more “forceful” measures to support market confidence after a cabinet meeting chaired by Premier Li Qiang.

Chinese authorities have since ramped up efforts to calm investors, sending out positive messages that sometimes produce the opposite effect.

On Friday, the official People’s Daily published an article with the headline: “The entire country is filled with optimism”.

The headline was soon mocked on Chinese social media.

A Weibo user, in an repost of the U.S. embassy’s giraffe protection article, wrote: “The entire giraffe community is filled with optimism.”

(Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; editing by Miral Fahmy)

• Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, capturing over 96% of the vote.

• But primary challenger Dean Phillips on Sunday said that warning signs remain for Biden.

• “He should have passed the torch,” Phillips said of Biden’s 2024 reelection bid.

President Joe Biden on Saturday swept the South Carolina Democratic primary, winning over 96% of the vote and dominating intraparty rivals Marianne Williamson and Rep. Dean Phillips.

But despite Biden’s huge win, Phillips during a Sunday appearance on MSNBC’s “The Weekend” continued to insist that Biden is not the best choice for Democrats and said the president should have “passed the torch” to a new generation of leaders.

“Americans are really suffering right now. 60% living paycheck to paycheck, 40% don’t have $400 in the bank,” Phillips said. “And here we have the president in our party saying GDP growth is up, job growth is great. People are frustrated and they are fearful and they’re seeing wars around the world.”

“I respect Joe Biden. He should have passed the torch,” the Minnesota congressman continued. “This was not a mission for me. But someone had to do this.”

Phillips then said that despite Biden’s overwhelming victory in South Carolina, the president remained vulnerable against former President Donald Trump, pointing to the slew of competitive national polls — and swing state polls — that show the former president leading in key battlegrounds that could decide the race for the White House in November.

“Jimmy Carter was at 58% in January of 1980,” Phillips said as he referenced the former Democratic president’s standing before he eventually lost reelection later that year. “Joe Biden’s at 38%. I’m just trying to wake up our party.”

“We are the Progressive Party. We should be moving forward. I see the writing on the wall,” he added.

Phillips announced his long shot candidacy last October but has so far been unable to gain traction in the contest despite Biden’s polling struggles over the last year. The congressman has also taken heat from fellow Democrats like Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who in December derided his presidential campaign as “a dream for Trump.”

On Saturday, Phillips won less than 2% of the vote in the South Carolina Democratic primary, coming in third place behind Williamson.

Many of Phillips’ House Democratic colleagues remain puzzled by his candidacy and have become openly critical of the primary challenge against Biden, who is likely to be locked in a highly competitive rematch against Trump this fall.

“I think it’s more of a joke at this point,” Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost recently told Business Insider’s Bryan Metzger of Phillips’ candidacy. “He doesn’t have the resources to be super competitive.”

Read the original article on Business Insider