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UPDATE: Woman charged with homicide of Mika Westwolf  Judd Legum

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In the early morning of March 31, 2023, Mika Westwolf, a 22-year-old Indigenous woman, was walking on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 93, which passes through the Flathead reservation in Montana. Westwolf was struck by a Cadillac Escalade and declared dead at the scene.

Authorities said that 28-year-old Sunny White was behind the wheel of the Escalade with her two young children in the back seat and fled the scene. White is allegedly a white nationalist; she named her children “Aryan” and “Nation.” Some speculated that Westwolf’s death was a hate crime. 

White was initially charged in April with two counts of criminal child endangerment. But Lake County District Attorney James Lapotka dropped the charges, saying more time was needed for the Montana Highway Patrol to investigate. 

In May and June, Popular Information revealed that the investigation into Westwolf’s death was under-resourced, haphazard, and focused on pinning blame on the victim. Trooper Wayne Bieber of the Montana Highway Patrol was the lead investigator. In a visit to Westwolf’s family three weeks after her death, Bieber appeared unfamiliar with basic facts, confused about Montana law, and dismissive of White’s potential connections to white nationalists.

“Once they found out that she was a young Indian woman, and it was late at night, early in the morning, they started investigating whether or not she was drinking or doing drugs,” Erica Shelby, a legal advocate for the Westwolf family, told Popular Information. “Then they started investigating if she was suicidal.”

At that point, Westwolf’s death had been the subject of two articles in the Missoulian and a handful of other reports from Montana outlets. The dearth of coverage is typical in cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women. But Popular Information’s report was picked up by major national media outlets, including Democracy Now, Huffington Post, The Daily Mail, and New York Magazine. Shortly thereafter, the Montana Highway Patrol told Popular Information that the FBI had begun assisting with the investigation. 

Over the weekend, White was arrested and charged with five felonies, including vehicular homicide while under the influence, criminal child endangerment, and criminal possession of dangerous drugs. According to documents filed on October 19 by Lapotka, White initially told an officer that she “had hit a deer and not stopped.” A search of White’s car yielded “a small makeup tube with methamphetamine inside, five syringes, and two unopened packages of Narcan.” A blood sample taken from White allegedly “came back positive for fentanyl and methamphetamine.”

Westwolf’s mother, Carissa Heavy Runner, engaged in a lengthy campaign to raise awareness of her daughter’s case and other missing and murdered Indigenous women. “I was glad to hear [the news], you know, but I’m still kind of in shock because it really seemed like this day was unreachable,” she told the Missoulian.

If convicted, White could face decades in prison. 

 

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Nellie Bowles: The Triumph of the Plastic Straw Nellie Bowles

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The biggest environmentalist craze of my generation started in 2011 with Vermont 9-year-old Milo Cress cooking up an arbitrary number for how many plastic straws Americans used daily. This 9-year-old figured it was so many. He says he called up straw manufacturers and calculated 500 million a day. Boom, big number, good number. The mainstream media was off to the races. That 500 million a day number was cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Suddenly the most important thing we could do for the environment—for our children!—was ban plastic straws.

States and cities passed laws against them. California banned them from restaurants outright in 2018. New York, in 2021, changed the law so the only straws on display were paper (you were allowed to ask for plastic). Official fact sheets from Ron DeSantis’s state of Florida instruct Floridians to “Skip the Straw,” citing the 500 million figure. Did anyone question the basis of this?


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It Pays to Be a Friend of Donald Trump Joe Nocera

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Two dodgy Democrats had a great day on Monday—thanks to our new Republican president, Donald J. Trump.

The first, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, was granted a full pardon. Back in 2009, after he’d been charged with corruption, Blagojevich got himself booked on Trump’s show, Celebrity Apprentice. (You can see his appearance in these YouTube clips. He was fired, of course.) I don’t know if Blagojevich had a premonition that Trump might someday be in a position to help him, but it sure has turned out that way. Transforming himself from a high-profile Democratic governor to a big-time Trump supporter was the single best move he could have made.


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Stop Making Cents? Charles Lane

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On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that he has ordered his administration to cease production of the penny. The argument for the move seems straightforward enough. It costs more than a penny to make a penny (3.7 cents, according to the U.S. Mint). Given inflation and the move to digital payments, ditching the coin is just common cents, right?

Not necessarily. Life’s about more than just making the numbers add up, and amid all the government waste, doesn’t the humble penny deserve a carve out for sentimental reasons?

Today, we debate the penny’s fate. Good riddance or gone too soon? Deputy Editor Charles Lane supports Trump’s move. Consulting Editor Jonathan Rosen opposes it. Have at it, gentleman.

Charles Lane: President Trump’s decision to end production of the penny has my total support. This mite of a coin betrayed me, quite directly and personally, over the course of 13 years.

“Save your pennies, Chuck,” a supervisor at work told me in 2002, responding to some angst I expressed about future college tuition costs. This was her way of not getting the hint that I needed a raise.

Attitudinally positive as always, I took her advice. I told my 5-year-old son that we would henceforth be keeping every one-cent coin we received as change, found on the street, or won playing dreidel until the moment he left for college.

What a father-son project! So rich in lessons about thrift, consistency, and long-term thinking! And so we collected and collected, filling first one large glass jug and then another, until July 2015, when it was time for the big reveal: We had accumulated 10,142 pennies, about 2.19 per day.

They were worth $101.42, not even enough to cover a month’s fraternity dues.

Wrapping the little suckers in paper rolls to enable deposit at a bank took me several days. Valued at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the time wasted offset any wealth embodied in our hoard—with change left over.

So I did not need the DOGE to tell me the government lost over $179 million in fiscal year 2023 minting more than 4.5 billion one-cent pieces at a cost of three-plus cents each. I already knew that a penny is much more trouble than it’s worth.


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