Latest news with #UniversityofMichigan
USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh added to federal lawsuit against former Michigan assistant
Los Angeles Chargers head coach Jim Harbaugh was added as a defendant in a federal lawsuit against the University of Michigan and former assistant football coach Matthew Weiss, who authorities say hacked into computers at more than 100 universities and stole the identity of more than 3,000 students. Weiss is charged with 14 counts of unauthorized access to computers and 10 counts of aggravated identity theft, and faces a maximum of five years imprisonment on each count of unauthorized access to computers and two years on each count of aggravated identity theft. In a lawsuit filed in the Eastern District of Michigan and obtained by USA TODAY Sports, the amended version is part of a lawsuit originally filed in March, in which 11 women filed a class action lawsuit saying Weiss downloaded personal, intimate digital photographs and videos of them. Former University of Michigan president Santa Ono, athletic director Warde Manuel, and 47 others have been named in the amended lawsuit as defendants. The lawsuit claims that Harbaugh, who at the time was Michigan's coach, and others knew that Weiss had viewed private information on a computer, but still let him coach as a co-offensive coordinator in a national semifinal playoff game in the Fiesta Bowl against TCU on Dec. 31, 2022. "Had Harbaugh implemented basic oversight of his staff, plaintiffs and the class would have been protected against predators such as Weiss," the lawsuit states. "Instead, Weiss was a highly compensated asset that was promoted by and within the football program, from which position he was able to, and did, target female student athletes." Weiss was fired in January 2023 after an investigation by campus police looked into his computer use. More than a dozen civil lawsuits have been filed against Weiss, who worked for the Baltimore Ravens before becoming Michigan's quarterbacks coach and co-offensive coordinator.
Mint
6 hours ago
- Business
- Mint
US economy shrugs off trade war and soldiers on
President Trump is still issuing tariff threats, consumer spending is weakening, and the Mideast is in turmoil. So why did the S&P 500 hit a record high Friday? Investors may not think the economy is taking off, but they are probably relieved that the worst-case scenarios feared in recent months haven't come to pass. Trump's tariffs, deportations, and cuts to the federal bureaucracy have bent the economy but haven't broken it. The S&P 500 plummeted 19% from its previous high in February to its 2025 low on April 8. Behind the drop: fears that Trump's threatened tariffs of as high as 145% on China and 50% on other major trading partners would send inflation and interest rates up, sap business and consumer confidence, and spark a recession. Instead, Trump has significantly dialed back the tariffs from what he first proposed. Although tariffs did come into effect starting in February on China, Canada and Mexico, as well as on autos, steel and aluminum, the effect on inflation to date has been milder than feared. Oil prices leapt when Israel attacked Iran and the U.S. joined in, but have since fallen back. Even after President Trump's rollbacks, the average tariff in the U.S. is 18.8%, the highest since the 1930s. Economists at JPMorgan Chase put the probability of recession starting in the next four quarters at about one-third, down from 60% in early April. In recent months, business confidence fell amid tariff threats. Yet that sentiment never fully translated into behavior: businesses kept investing in equipment, factories and technology. They kept adding jobs, albeit at a slower pace than last year. 'The macro economy is doing decently," said Jason Furman, a Harvard economics professor who was an adviser to President Barack Obama. Especially when it comes to tariffs, the market is now more confident 'that Trump will back off if necessary," he added. 'In April I think the fear was he would just plow ahead no matter what. Now there is a sense that there are realities he won't try to blow past." Consumer confidence has also recovered a bit. The University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index rose 16% in June from May, though it remains 18% lower than in December. Wall Street analysts expect earnings at retailers and other S&P 500 consumer discretionary companies to fall in the second quarter from a year earlier. Earlier this year, 'consumers were really on a downward trend, they really were worried that the high levels of tariffs threatened and policy volatility could lead to very dire consequences," said Joanne Hsu, director of consumer surveys for the University of Michigan. Now, 'consumers don't think we're out of the woods, but they're less worried about the worst-case scenario.' Still, while consumer spending never collapsed, new data shows that it has weakened significantly. The labor market also appears to be softening. Annualized growth in gross domestic product is likely to average 0.8% over the first two quarters of 2025, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, down sharply from 2.5% in 2024. The stock market isn't the economy, but it does capture in real time how investors feel about growth, profits, interest rates, and risk. While companies were cautious about the outlook a few months ago, their recent profit guidance has tended to be better than analysts expected, according to FactSet. The policy landscape has also become less unpredictable, easing investors' fears. Republicans' massive tax and spending bill remains up in the air, but that sort of risk is more familiar than the tariffs and steep cuts to the federal bureaucracy by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency that regularly emanated from the White House in previous months. 'If you look at the beginning of the year, the main action economically was tariffs and DOGE, and both of those were very dramatic, very fast and of debated lawfulness," Furman said. 'Now the main thing going on is this fiscal bill, which I think is problematic. But it's sort of normal…things have moved more into the legislative arena, which is weirdly more predictable." In a recently released report, the White House Council of Economic Advisers predicted the Senate draft of Trump's 'one big beautiful bill" will significantly boost investment, wages and employment in the next four years relative to a scenario in which the 2017 tax cuts expire this year, as scheduled. This past week, Fed chairman Jerome Powell acknowledged there has been little evidence of tariffs pushing up inflation broadly thus far, and some Fed officials have said a rate cut should be on the table as soon as next month. That has caused some bond yields to drop, which is also good for the stock market. Still, tariffs' full effect could still lie ahead. A 90-day pause on Trump's steepest tariffs is to end July 9. Officials have said that deadline could slip as the U.S. and some partners close in on deals. But Friday, Trump said he had broken off talks with Canada and would issue new tariffs soon, and the administration is also carrying out probes that could yield new tariffs on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. Trump's tariff threats spurred car sales earlier this year. Even after Trump's rollbacks, the average tariff in the U.S. is 18.8%, the highest since the 1930s, versus 2.4% in 2024, according to Preston Caldwell, chief U.S. economist at Morningstar. He thinks that will push inflation based on the index of personal-consumption expenditures to 3.2% in early 2026, versus 2.3% now. The biggest risk to the outlook appears to be the consumer. This past week, the Commerce Department sharply revised down consumption growth. That softness has persisted in the second quarter, with inflation-adjusted consumption slipping 0.3% in May from April, leaving the level of spending below December's. Particularly notable was softness in discretionary categories including air travel and hotels, which are especially sensitive to moods about the economy. Wall Street analysts now expect earnings at S&P 500 consumer discretionary companies, which includes retailers, restaurant chains and carmakers, to slip by 5.1% in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to FactSet, down from a 2.2% gain at the end of March. Write to Jeanne Whalen at Justin Lahart at and Te-Ping Chen at
USA Today
7 hours ago
- Politics
- USA Today
Congress, stop neglecting the farm bill. Only luck has shielded us from disaster.
From foreign actors smuggling in crop diseases to outbreaks like the bird flu, America has come dangerously close to disaster. Our luck cannot continue. There is nothing more American than agriculture. Yet, it's often an afterthought in national security ‒ and it shouldn't be. FBI agents have recently arrested three Chinese scientists accused of smuggling biological materials into the United States. In the first case, the boyfriend of a University of Michigan researcher is accused of concealing baggies containing a potentially devastating plant fungus in a wad of tissues in his backpack; in the second, a Chinese scientist was arrested entering the United States on suspicion of mailing biological material related to roundworms to a laboratory at the same university. Whether the roundworm material or the version of Fusarium graminearum in the baggies could cause billions of dollars in damage to our farmers and food supply remains unclear ‒ but the fact that these biological materials entered the country through the mail and Detroit's airport should serve as a wake-up call. Risks keep growing in food and agriculture industry From foreign actors smuggling in crop diseases to outbreaks like the latest avian flu, the United States has come dangerously close to disaster ‒ and we've avoided it not because we were prepared, but because we have been lucky. America is among the most food-secure nations in the world, but it's time to treat food and agriculture as critical components of our national security. The cost of not doing so is simply far too high. Today, food and agriculture contribute $1.537 trillion to U.S. gross domestic product, and the sector employs more than 22 million people. Farming is a defining feature of our identity. But while politicians pose in front of barns, tractors and fields for campaign ads, meaningful agricultural security policy sits on the back burner as the risks keep growing. Opinion: Many American farmers agree with spending cuts. But those policies hurt farms most. In 2020, more than 30,000 unsolicited packages of seeds were sent from China to random American households. While the government eventually determined that these shipments were not a deliberate act of biological warfare, the next time they may be. Pathogens, pests and invasive weeds could have easily hidden in these packages, potentially yielding devastating damage to our crops, causing billions of dollars in economic damage. You've heard of bird flu, but what about African Swine Fever? Before avian flu caused egg prices to go up and cows to get sick, African Swine Fever was making a home right outside of our borders. This virus is now on the island of Hispaniola, comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic, fewer than 700 miles from the United States. With millions of U.S. tourists visiting the island each year and hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants fleeing due to criminal activity and insecurity, we have been lucky the virus has not found its way to the United States on the sole of someone's shoe. African Swine Fever spreading in the United States could create losses of up to $50 billion to the U.S. pork industry. There's also plenty of evidence of 'agroterrorism' out there. In China, for example, criminal gangs have been known to spread the virus between farms for economic gain. Opinion: Amid bird flu, farmers culled millions of chickens ‒ but USDA fired workers helping to deal with outbreak The U.S. government needs to pay as much attention to securing food and agriculture as to other national and economic security threats. The U.S. Department of Agriculture works diligently to protect and promote the nation's agriculture from natural and accidental threats, but it operates as a trade agency, not a national security agency. Vital USDA programs for identifying agricultural threats are historically underfunded compared with their public health counterparts. The Farm Bill, which authorizes and prioritizes policies and programs for agriculture, has not been updated since 2018. This means that programs like the National Veterinary Stockpile, which protects the nation's food supply, will continue to operate on a shoestring budget that is less than 1% of its public health counterpart. Congress needs to modernize and approve a Farm Bill designed to protect national and economic security. As a first step, the bill should establish a senior USDA position for national and homeland security. Appointed by the president, this official can be responsible for threats to agricultural security. Further, Congress needs to appropriately fund programs that secure U.S. agriculture. The cost of inaction far outweighs any expenditure. Our government's response to the current avian flu has already cost $1.4 billion alone ‒ response always costs more than prevention. The USDA works tirelessly to protect our food, health, national and economic security, but today it's fighting a wildfire with a watering can. We have managed to evade an economic catastrophe, but our luck cannot continue. Congress must prioritize and invest in agricultural security by updating and passing a Farm Bill. It is in everyone's interest. David Stiefel serves as a director for the Global Biological Policy and Programs team at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Before joining NTI, Stiefel held several senior roles on the National Security Council at the White House and directed the government's biopreparedness review, resulting in the 2022 National Biodefense Strategy. He also led efforts to shape U.S. government plans to strengthen the security and resilience of U.S. food and agriculture.
Yahoo
15 hours ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Toxic algae blooms are lasting longer in Lake Erie − why that's a worry for people and pets
Lake Erie algal blooms, August 2011, along the southeast Lake Erie shore of Pelee Island, Ontario, Canada, 5 miles north of the international line. | Michigan Sea Grant Gregory J. Dick, University of Michigan Federal scientists released their annual forecast for Lake Erie's harmful algal blooms on June 26, 2025, and they expect a mild to moderate season. However, anyone who comes in contact with the blooms can face health risks, and it's worth remembering that 2014, when toxins from algae blooms contaminated the water supply in Toledo, Ohio, was considered a moderate year, too. The Conversation asked Gregory J. Dick, who leads the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, a federally funded center at the University of Michigan that studies harmful algal blooms among other Great Lakes issues, why they're such a concern. bulletin_current 1. What causes harmful algal blooms? Harmful algal blooms are dense patches of excessive algae growth that can occur in any type of water body, including ponds, reservoirs, rivers, lakes and oceans. When you see them in freshwater, you're typically seeing cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae. These photosynthetic bacteria have inhabited our planet for billions of years. In fact, they were responsible for oxygenating Earth's atmosphere, which enabled plant and animal life as we know it. Algae are natural components of ecosystems, but they cause trouble when they proliferate to high densities, creating what we call blooms. Harmful algal blooms form scums at the water surface and produce toxins that can harm ecosystems, water quality and human health. They have been reported in all 50 U.S. states, all five Great Lakes and nearly every country around the world. Blue-green algae blooms are becoming more common in inland waters. The main sources of harmful algal blooms are excess nutrients in the water, typically phosphorus and nitrogen. Historically, these excess nutrients mainly came from sewage and phosphorus-based detergents used in laundry machines and dishwashers that ended up in waterways. U.S. environmental laws in the early 1970s addressed this by requiring sewage treatment and banning phosphorus detergents, with spectacular success. Today, agriculture is the main source of excess nutrients from chemical fertilizer or manure applied to farm fields to grow crops. Rainstorms wash these nutrients into streams and rivers that deliver them to lakes and coastal areas, where they fertilize algal blooms. In the U.S., most of these nutrients come from industrial-scale corn production, which is largely used as animal feed or to produce ethanol for gasoline. Climate change also exacerbates the problem in two ways. First, cyanobacteria grow faster at higher temperatures. Second, climate-driven increases in precipitation, especially large storms, cause more nutrient runoff that has led to record-setting blooms. 2. What does your team's DNA testing tell us about Lake Erie's harmful algal blooms? Harmful algal blooms contain a mixture of cyanobacterial species that can produce an array of different toxins, many of which are still being discovered. When my colleagues and I recently sequenced DNA from Lake Erie water, we found new types of microcystins, the notorious toxins that were responsible for contaminating Toledo's drinking water supply in 2014. These novel molecules cannot be detected with traditional methods and show some signs of causing toxicity, though further studies are needed to confirm their human health effects. We also found organisms responsible for producing saxitoxin, a potent neurotoxin that is well known for causing paralytic shellfish poisoning on the Pacific Coast of North America and elsewhere. Saxitoxins have been detected at low concentrations in the Great Lakes for some time, but the recent discovery of hot spots of genes that make the toxin makes them an emerging concern. Our research suggests warmer water temperatures could boost its production, which raises concerns that saxitoxin will become more prevalent with climate change. However, the controls on toxin production are complex, and more research is needed to test this hypothesis. Federal monitoring programs are essential for tracking and understanding emerging threats. 3. Should people worry about these blooms? Harmful algal blooms are unsightly and smelly, making them a concern for recreation, property values and businesses. They can disrupt food webs and harm aquatic life, though a recent study suggested that their effects on the Lake Erie food web so far are not substantial. But the biggest impact is from the toxins these algae produce that are harmful to humans and lethal to pets. The toxins can cause acute health problems such as gastrointestinal symptoms, headache, fever and skin irritation. Dogs can die from ingesting lake water with harmful algal blooms. Emerging science suggests that long-term exposure to harmful algal blooms, for example over months or years, can cause or exacerbate chronic respiratory, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal problems and may be linked to liver cancers, kidney disease and neurological issues. In addition to exposure through direct ingestion or skin contact, recent research also indicates that inhaling toxins that get into the air may harm health, raising concerns for coastal residents and boaters, but more research is needed to understand the risks. The Toledo drinking water crisis of 2014 illustrated the vast potential for algal blooms to cause harm in the Great Lakes. Toxins infiltrated the drinking water system and were detected in processed municipal water, resulting in a three-day 'do not drink' advisory. The episode affected residents, hospitals and businesses, and it ultimately cost the city an estimated US$65 million. 4. Blooms seem to be starting earlier in the year and lasting longer – why is that happening? Warmer waters are extending the duration of the blooms. In 2025, NOAA detected these toxins in Lake Erie on April 28, earlier than ever before. The 2022 bloom in Lake Erie persisted into November, which is rare if not unprecedented. Scientific studies of western Lake Erie show that the potential cyanobacterial growth rate has increased by up to 30% and the length of the bloom season has expanded by up to a month from 1995 to 2022, especially in warmer, shallow waters. These results are consistent with our understanding of cyanobacterial physiology: Blooms like it hot – cyanobacteria grow faster at higher temperatures. 5. What can be done to reduce the likelihood of algal blooms in the future? The best and perhaps only hope of reducing the size and occurrence of harmful algal blooms is to reduce the amount of nutrients reaching the Great Lakes. In Lake Erie, where nutrients come primarily from agriculture, that means improving agricultural practices and restoring wetlands to reduce the amount of nutrients flowing off of farm fields and into the lake. Early indications suggest that Ohio's H2Ohio program, which works with farmers to reduce runoff, is making some gains in this regard, but future funding for H2Ohio is uncertain. In places like Lake Superior, where harmful algal blooms appear to be driven by climate change, the solution likely requires halting and reversing the rapid human-driven increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Gregory J. Dick, Professor of Biology, University of Michigan This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The Star
20 hours ago
- Business
- The Star
UM consumer sentiment index rises for first time in 6 months
CHICAGO, June 27 (Xinhua) -- The Consumer Sentiment Index released Friday by the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers rose to 60.7 in the June 2025 survey, up from 52.2 in May and below last June's 68.2. The UM consumer sentiment has improved for the first time in six months. The Current Index rose to 64.8 in June, up from 58.9 in May and below last June's 65.9; the Expectations Index rose to 58.1, up from 47.9 in May and below last June's 69.6. Labor market expectations improved in June but remain considerably worse than at the beginning of the year. About 57 percent of consumers expect unemployment to rise in the year ahead, down from 66 percent in March but still much higher than the 40 percent seen in December 2024. Expectations for consumers' own income growth improved modestly in June, but June readings were worse than six months ago. Expectations for personal finances soared 17 percent from near historic lows in May but were 17 percent below December 2024. Beliefs about the anticipated effects of tariffs have shaped consumers' views of the economy this year. In June, about 59 percent of consumers provided unsolicited comments about tariffs, down from 66 percent in May but marking three consecutive months a majority of consumers did so. The share of consumers expecting business conditions to worsen in the year ahead fell from 64 percent in May but stood high at 55 percent, compared with just 29 percent in November 2024. "Consumers feel they have some breathing room given that the historically high tariffs announced earlier this year have not been sustained, and the worst-case scenarios for the economy have not come to fruition," said economist Joanne Hsu, director of the University of Michigan's Survey of Consumers. "However, consumers still worry that higher inflation and an economic slowdown are on the horizon, and they remain very cautious." The Surveys of Consumers is a rotating panel survey based on a nationally representative sample that gives each household in the coterminous United States an equal probability of being selected. Interviews are conducted throughout the month by telephone.
