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A New Accuser Is Alleging That Donald Trump Assaulted Her

Mother Jones

Yet another woman has alleged that she was sexually assaulted by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Kristin Anderson told the Washington Post‘s Karen Tumulty that, at a nightclub in the early 1990s, Trump reached under her skirt to grope her genitals. Anderson, whose story was corroborated by friends, decided to come forward with her story after a 2005 video surfaced last week in which Trump brags that his fame allows him to cavalierly grope women. “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,” he said in the clip.

“It wasn’t a sexual come-on,” Anderson told the Post of her encounter with Trump. “I don’t know why he did it. It was like just to prove that he could do it, and nothing would happen. There was zero conversation. We didn’t even really look at each other. It was very random, very nonchalant on his part.”

This is just the latest revelation of Trump forcing himself on women. On Wednesday, the New York Times published accounts from two women who told the paper that Trump had groped them. The Guardian, CBS, and BuzzFeed have also reported numerous tales from contestants at Trump’s pageants who say Trump had burst into their dressing rooms while the contestants were undressed. And this week a People reporter detailed a 2005 encounter with Trump when he allegedly cornered her in an empty room, pushed her against the wall, and began kissing her.

Trump has denied allegations that he has touched women inappropriately. On Thursday, he angrily lashed out at his accusers at a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida. “These events never happened—and the people who brought them—you take a look at these people, you study these people, and you’ll understand that also,” he said.

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A New Accuser Is Alleging That Donald Trump Assaulted Her

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Spraying Pesticides May Not Kill Zika Mosquitos

Mother Jones

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In Miami Beach, daily crowds have been gathering outside city hall to protest a program to spray a potent pesticide called naled, in an effort to combat mosquitos carrying the Zika virus. After delays, officials began periodic naled sprayings Friday morning at 5 a.m.

People are concerned about the spraying because like other organophosphates, naled is a neurotoxin, or a poison that works by attacking the nervous system. Even at tiny doses, naled kills adult Aedes mosquitos—which, in parts of Miami, including Miami Beach, are known to carry the Zika virus. In South Carolina last week, aerial spraying of naled inadvertently killed millions of bees.

The EPA reports that naled is regularly sprayed on 16 million acres of land in the mainland United States “as part of routine mosquito control,” including in “highly populated major metropolitan areas.” That’s a lot of land—California, for comparison, occupies 100 million acres.

Here’s what we know about naled, its toxicity to people and ecosystems, and its potential as a tool to limit the spread of Zika.

• Is naled spraying toxic to humans? The European Union banned naled in 2012, citing “potential and unacceptable risk showed for human health.” But the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency disagree. The chemical is used at such a low rate as a mosquito spray—about two tablespoons for each area the size of a football field—that it “does not pose a health risk to people or pets in the area that is sprayed,” the CDC says. Also, “Naled starts to degrade (break down) immediately on surfaces, in water, and in sunlight,” the CDC adds, meaning it doesn’t linger after spraying.

I asked Dana Barr, a research professor at Emory who has done extensive research on the ill effects of organophosphate exposure on kids’ neural development, whether people should worry about health effects from spraying. “Likely the small amount sprayed won’t pose significant risk,” she said. Barr added, though, that people who live in sprayed areas “need to consider their exposures from other sources as well,” like through garden insecticides and residues on food. A 2015 study by University of Washington, Harvard, and University of Texas researchers found that people who eat organic food have significantly lower levels of organophosphate traces in their urine than people who don’t.

Barr added that infants and pregnant women are the most vulnerable to harm from organophosphate exposure, and should “take precautions to stay inside during spraying”—which won’t be too hard, since the spraying are scheduled for early mornings (5 a.m.).

• Is spraying naled effective at slowing the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses like Zika? This one is surprisingly hard to answer. The CDC stresses it’s just one part of an “integrated mosquito control program” that includes “eliminating mosquito habitats, such as discarded containers and rain gutters” and other actions. But the agency insists that spraying is the “one method that can rapidly reduce the number of mosquitoes spreading Zika in a large area,” like Miami beach.

In a recent editorial in the medical journal JAMA, CDC Director Tom Frieden wrote that a spraying program in New Orleans, similar to the current one in Miami Beach, had reduced both indoor and outdoor adult mosquito populations by 90 percent.

However, the New Orleans figure cited by Friedan comes from an informal study that never underwent peer review, and some experts are skeptical of it. The Aedes mosquito, the variety that hosts Zika and other nasty pathogens, tends to live indoors, making it a tough target for spraying. “I know of no published reports that support Friedan’s figure,” Yale University professor emeritus of microbial diseases Durland Fish told Kaiser Health News. He added: “This is a domestic mosquito, meaning they live inside the house—in closets, under the bed, in the sink. Spraying outside won’t be very effective.”

A recent news report by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Disease Research and Policy also casts doubt of the efficacy of spraying, echoing concerns raised by Fish.

Will the spraying kill other bugs? While Aedes mosquitos live mainly indoors, protected from pesticide droplets falling from the sky, other critters aren’t so lucky. The South Carolina incident demonstrated how vulnerable honeybees are to an ill-timed naled spraying.

And a Florida International University team has published three papers since 2011—in the journals Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Science of the Total Environment, Chemosphere—finding that butterflies are even more susceptible to naled than bees. South Florida’s butterfly populations have declined dramatically in recent years. The Florida International University research, funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, prompted South Florida officials to scale back routine naled spraying last year. Butterflies are a key part of the food chain, serving as prey for birds and bats; they’re also important pollinators.

When naled degrades, it turns into another potent organophosphate called dichlorvos, which in turn can linger in water, a 2014 study by University of California at Davis researchers found. Once there, it’s highly toxic to aquatic species at the “low end of the food chain,” including insects and frog larvae, one of the study’s authors, Bryn Phillips, recently told CNN.

So while people probably don’t have much to fear from naled spraying, bees and butterflies do. As for Zika-carrying mosquitos, the jury is still out.

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Spraying Pesticides May Not Kill Zika Mosquitos

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Please resist the urge to take a selfie with this cute seal

SEALFIE TIME

Please resist the urge to take a selfie with this cute seal

By on May 29, 2016Share

Seals, like the Sirens of Greek myth who perched on rocky shores to lead passerby astray, are trying to lure you — and you must not give in. Their weapon: those photogenic little faces.

Let Atlas Obscura set the scene:

Imagine: it’s the tail end of Memorial Day Weekend. All your friends have been posting pictures of themselves laughing it up in various attractive early summer situations. You, on the other hand, have found yourself at a relatively average New England beach — gritty sand, cloudy sky, some water. There is no Instagram filter that can enhance this. How to set yourself apart?

Look! There, down the beach — a lone seal pup, wriggling in the sand. Do you approach the seal? Do you click that little button that switches to the front-facing camera? Do you put your head near the pup’s head, as though you are pals, and smile?

No. Do not do it, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association said in a recent press release. Do not take a selfie with the seal.

If Mommy Seal, who is probably nearby hunting for food, sees you with Baby Seal, she might abandon her young pup forever. (So much for maternal instincts.) Trust me: You don’t want that kind of guilt on your hands, and you sure don’t want any photos around to verify your disgraceful affront to sealkind.

If that’s not enough to keep you away, NOAA also wants you to know this: “Seals have powerful jaws, and can leave a lasting impression.”

So next time you encounter a cute, squirmy wild animal, keep your cellphone-wielding flippers to yourself and recall the immortal words of NOAA: “There is no selfie stick long enough!”

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Please resist the urge to take a selfie with this cute seal

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Supreme Court Urges Nevada to Stop Hating on California

Mother Jones

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Excellent news. The Supreme Court has confirmed that Nevada does indeed hate California and needs to knock it off:

Nevada has not applied the principles of Nevada law ordinarily applicable to suits against Nevada’s own agencies. Rather, it has applied a special rule of law applicable only in lawsuits against its sister States, such as California.

….The Nevada Supreme Court explained its departure from those general principles by describing California’s system of controlling its own agencies as failing to provide “adequate” recourse to Nevada’s citizens….Such an explanation, which amounts to little more than a conclusory statement disparaging California’s own legislative, judicial, and administrative controls, cannot justify the application of a special and discriminatory rule. Rather, viewed through a full faith and credit lens, a State that disregards its own ordinary legal principles on this ground is hostile to another State.

….We can safely conclude that, in devising a special—and hostile—rule for California, Nevada has not “sensitively applied principles of comity with a healthy regard for California’s sovereign status.”

The case itself doesn’t matter much. An inventor moved to Nevada and then sued California when it harassed him for back taxes. Nevada normally limits these judgments to $50,000 even if you win, but as long as you’re suing California, it turns out the sky’s the limit. The Supreme Court was not amused. Nevada can’t do that just because they think poorly of California’s laws.

But all is forgiven now. Come to the beach and relax, Nevadans! Don’t let the dark side consume you.

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Supreme Court Urges Nevada to Stop Hating on California

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No, Californians, Venomous El Niño Snakes Are Not Going to Kill You

Mother Jones

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Here is some video, they are dangerous and venomous, don’t get close to them. Rescued this sea snake today on the beach here at Silverstrand in Oxnard. Prior to this there was only a report of them being seen as far north as Orange County. El Niño has definitely brought a lot of strange and unusual aquatic fish and animals up. Caution these snakes are venomous and should be avoided and not handled. And yes it is alive.

Posted by

Robert Forbes on Friday, October 16, 2015

On Friday, Southern Californians began freaking out after a surfer discovered a venomous sea snake on a beach north of Los Angeles. The species, the yellow-bellied sea snake, normally keeps to tropical waters and has not been reported on the Golden State’s shores for more than 30 years, and never as far north as Ventura County. The snake died shortly after it was found, but not before adding to El Niño apocalypse anxiety. Local wildlife experts have hypothesized that the snake traveled this far north because of unusually warm waters off of the California coast due to El Niño.

If you suffer from ophidiophobia, these reports probably gave you a scare. But we have some good news: While venomous snakes are a significant danger in other parts of the world, the United States is almost certainly not going to see a wave of deadly snake attacks, even with a strong El Niño. Yes, sea snakes might be feeding further north this winter, but that does not mean they are going to be out for human prey; likely the only reason this snake came ashore is because it was injured or sick.

Furthermore, according to David Steen, a snake expert and researcher at Auburn University’s Museum of Natural History, there are no known human deaths attributed to the yellow-bellied sea snake, and only about five people per year are killed by venomous snakes of any kind in the United States. By contrast, there were 42 reports of dog-bite fatalities in the United States last year.

“Venomous snakes deserve our respect but in many cases the danger they represent is exaggerated,” Steen wrote me in an email, adding that a sea snake would have no reason to attack a human unless it was picked up or harassed. “If you don’t already know that it is a bad idea to pick up snakes that you do not recognize then you probably have bigger problems.”

This story has been revised.

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No, Californians, Venomous El Niño Snakes Are Not Going to Kill You

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Another Fatal Police Shooting Caught on Video—and More Questions About a Dispatcher’s Role

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, a federal court ordered the release of video showing a June 2013 police shooting in Gardena, California (a city in southern Los Angeles County) in which an unarmed man, Ricardo Diaz-Zeferino, was killed and another unarmed man wounded. Previously, an internal review by the Gardena Police Department had concluded that the shooting was justified, and prosecutors in Gardena decided not to pursue criminal charges against the officers involved. In May, the City of Gardena agreed to pay $4.7 million to settle a federal lawsuit filed by the family of Diaz-Zeferino. But the newly released police dash cam footage, first posted by the Los Angeles Times, has raised questions about the events leading up to the fatal encounter—including the potential mishandling of a 911 call, an issue that has come up with other officer-involved killings.

More MoJo coverage on policing:


How Cleveland Police May Have Botched a 911 Call Just Before Killing Tamir Rice


Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate


Here Are 13 Killings by Police Captured on Video in the Past Year


The Walter Scott Shooting Video Shows Why Police Accounts Are Hard to Trust


Itâ&#128;&#153;s Been 6 Months Since Tamir Rice Died, and the Cop Who Killed Him Still Hasn’t Been Questioned


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won’t Pay a Dime


A Mentally Ill Woman’s “Sudden Death” at the Hands of Cleveland Police

According to the Los Angeles Times, there may have been a miscommunication by the police dispatcher:

The shooting occurred about 2:30 a.m. on June 2, 2013, after a bicycle was stolen from outside a CVS Pharmacy on Western Avenue. A police dispatcher mistakenly told officers that the crime was a robbery, which usually involves a theft using weapons or force, and officers headed to the area in search of two suspects.

Gardena police Sgt. Christopher Cuff saw two men riding bicycles east on Redondo Beach Boulevard. The men were friends of the bike theft victim and were searching for the missing bicycle. Mistaking them for the thieves, Cuff ordered the men to stop and put their hands up, according to a district attorney’s memo written by a prosecutor who reviewed the police videos.

The Gardena killing is the latest in a string of high-profile police shootings captured on video, which have brought scrutiny on police tactics and procedures. With the Tamir Rice shooting in Cleveland, evidence emerged that the dispatcher who relayed the 911 call did not include potentially key details about the suspect, as Mother Jones previously reported. And according to a recent Washington Post data investigation of police shootings of mentally ill suspects, “officers are routinely dispatched with information that is incomplete or wrong.”

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Another Fatal Police Shooting Caught on Video—and More Questions About a Dispatcher’s Role

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How smart meters are helping California save water

How smart meters are helping California save water

By on 15 Jun 2015commentsShare

“The sprinklers were running so hard at a McDonalds in Long Beach, California, recently that water was pooling up and running into the streets,” noted tattletale Wired reported earlier today. It’s not clear what running “so hard” means in the context of sprinklers — perhaps just that they were on for a long time when they didn’t need to be? Regardless, McDonalds: Relax. No one’s going there for the grass.

As #DroughtShaming has made clear, overwatering is a cardinal sin in California these days, which is why McDonalds’ own employees reported the burger pusher to the city of Long Beach (a tip of the visor to you, brave insurgents). But as Wired reports, so-called smart meters that track real time water use could help cities catch irresponsible users in the act without having to rely on third party informants:

After employees reported McDonalds for water usage violations, the Water Department installed a meter at the restaurant that reports water usage over the web every five minutes. Not only did this provide the city with the proof it needed to fine the restaurant, it also provided McDonald’s with data it could use to clean up its act.

McD’s isn’t the only one in Long Beach getting an upgrade. Since April, the city has installed about 225 smart meters at both residential and commercial locations, Rachel Davis, an operations analyst at the Long Beach Water Department, said over the phone. The meters record data every five minutes and send a report of the day’s readings out once every night, Davis said. The hope is that this constant stream of data will help people conserve water and spot leaks better than they could using old analog meters. Here’s more from Wired:

Traditional water meters essentially provide a running tally of how much water a customer has used. Your bill is based on your current total, minus last month’s total. The utility has no idea how much water you actually use on a day-to-day basis, let alone what time of day you use the most water. But to enforce water restrictions, utilities need to know exactly that. The Long Beach Water Department is one of a small but growing number of utilities turning to electronic “smart” meters to solve the problem.

These smart meters seem like a no-brainer for utilities that might otherwise send workers around to check meters manually, but the required infrastructure can make the shift intimidating. Long Beach found a way around that problem:

For its pilot program, Long Beach turned to a smart meter company called T2. The company’s meters are powered by batteries the company claims can last at least ten years, saving utilities from having to run electricity to the meters. They communicate wirelessly over Verizon’s cellular data network, which means utilities don’t have to install network infrastructure. And the company provides a web-based analytics service to both utilities and customers that allows them to visualize their water usage. The City of Long Beach didn’t need to write code, or even buy servers, since the whole thing is hosted on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.

Still, transitioning to a smart meter system is expensive. The actual meters stay the same, Davis said, but replacing the analog “meter register” on top of the meter to a digital one that can connect to the wireless network costs about 300 dollars.

It’s too early to report any overall changes in water use since installing the meters, Davis said, but anecdotal evidence suggests that they can help people conserve water. One woman, for example, cut her water bill by more than 80 percent after uncovering a massive leak beneath the foundation of her house, Davis said.

Not to rain on Long Beach’s parade (although I’m sure they’d appreciate the water), but California golden child San Francisco is already way ahead of the curve on this one. When San Fran’s water meters were due for an upgrade six years ago, the water department decided to go all in on smart meters. According to Greentech Media, the new system cost about twice as much as the old system, but the city can now collect water use data every few hours, and if an abnormality shows up for more than three days, the city will call and send a postcard to the source, warning of a possible leak (they hope to eventually make this alert system automatic and digital).

So far, only about 6 percent of customers in San Francisco actually use the web portal that allows them to track real-time consumption. “Even so,” Greentech Media reports, “the water agency credits the portal with being one of the tools that helped San Francisco achieve an additional 8 percent water savings last summer, on top of about 20 percent in the past decade.”

According to Wired, severe blackouts in the early 2000s led to the widespread use of smart electric meters throughout California, so maybe this drought will do the same for smart water meters.

That said, a note to all the underpaid and miserable employees of California: If you get a chance to rat out your employers for wasting water, do it now before smart meters ruin everything!

Source:
Smart Meters Snitch on Water Wasters in a Drought


, Wired.

Smart Water Meters Gain Traction in Drought-Ridden California

, Greentech Media.

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How smart meters are helping California save water

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Look At These Crazy Wave Clouds!

Mother Jones

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Look! In the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a cloud that looks like neither a bird or a plane! A wave! It looks like a wave!

High above South Carolina yesterday “wave clouds” rippled through the sky. They are bonkers!

Look at this video:

Now look at this one:

Weather.com has a whole gallery of crazy shots.

What is a wave cloud? WIRED explains:

These crazy clouds that look like a row of crashing waves are known as Kelvin-Helmholz waves. They form when two layers of air or liquid of different densities move past each other at different speeds, creating shearing at the boundary.

“It could be like oil and vinegar,” Chuang said. “In the ocean, the top is warm and the bottom is really cold. It’s like a thin layer of oil on a big puddle of water.”

When these two layers move past each other, a Kelvin-Helmholz instability is formed that is sort of like a wave. Parts of the boundary move up and parts move down. Because one layer is moving faster than the other, the shear causes the tops of the waves to move horizontally, forming what looks like an ocean wave crashing on the beach.

“It really is like breaking waves,” Chuang said. “A wave breaks when the water on top moves so much faster than the water below that it kind of piles up on itself.”

The world is a weird and beautiful place.

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Look At These Crazy Wave Clouds!

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Los Angeles kids finally get a breath of fresh air

Los Angeles kids finally get a breath of fresh air

By on 5 Mar 2015commentsShare

Good news about air pollution! No, really: According to a new study published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, kids in Los Angeles are breathing easier than they used to, thanks to a decline in local air pollution.

The story started in 1994, when a group of researchers at the University of Southern California began tracking the lung function and development of little Los Angelinos as they went from pubescent 11-year-olds to borderline cool-but-not-really 15-year-olds — a crucial period for lung development in both girls and boys. Then the researchers started over with new groups of kids in 1997 and 2007 to see if anything changed as L.A. began the dirty work of cleaning up its pollution problem. Between 1994 and 2011, when the study ended, the city reduced its levels of both nitrogen dioxide and certain tiny airborne particles, by about 40 percent.

Here’s what the scientists found: Kids in the last group showed 10 percent more lung growth than those in the first group, and only 3.6 percent of the last group had abnormally low lung function at the end of the four years compared to 7.9 percent of the first group. These results account for differences in gender, race, ethnicity, tobacco use, secondhand smoke exposure, parental education, and other potentially important factors — meaning the changes in air quality are the best explanation for the improvements in lung function.

Here’s a nice little rundown of the study from its lead researcher W. James Gauderman:

Now, don’t get cocky, L.A. This doesn’t mean you’re off the hook, as Gauderman emphasized in this press release from USC:

“We can’t get complacent, because not surprisingly the number of vehicles on our roads is continually increasing. Also, the activities at the ports of L.A. and Long Beach, which are our biggest polluting sources, are projected to increase. That means more trucks on the road, more trains carrying cargo.”

Okay. So maybe this is more like “good news about air pollution, with some caveats.” And speaking of caveats, here are a few more: Pollution is still a huge problem all around the country, and it’s doing more than just hindering lung development. A recent study published in PLOS Medicine shows how pollution can hurt cognitive development in children. That, in turn, could lead to problems later in life. Oh, and we also know that air pollution can mess with our genes and mental health.

But remember that thing about the kids in L.A.? That’s still a win.

Source:
L.A. Story: Cleaner Air, Healthier Kids

, University of Southern California.

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Los Angeles kids finally get a breath of fresh air

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David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity is Fighting a Tax Perk He Once Exploited

Mother Jones

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Americans for Prosperity, the free-market advocacy group established by the Koch brothers, mounts battles around the country on issues big and small via its nationwide network of chapters. Right now in North Carolina, AFP is vigorously opposing the revival of a state tax credit for renovating historic properties. The credit, which can be claimed by a company or a person, expired at the end of 2014, and the state’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, is pushing to renew it. AFP is working hard to thwart him. But the group’s lobbying on this issue might be a tad awkward for one of its main benefactors: David Koch, who cofounded AFP organization and currently serves as chairman of the AFP Foundation. He used a near-identical tax credit when he renovated his historic Palm Beach villa—and saved money at local taxpayers’ expense.

Donald Bryson, the director of AFP-North Carolina, recently told the Fayetteville Observer that the restoration perk was “another one of those tax credits that complicates the tax code.” Bryson went on, “We’re all for historic preservation, we have no problems with that. But if people are going to do it, they need to do it within the private market. I don’t know why that requires a state tax credit.”

What Bryson probably didn’t know was that David Koch relied on the same type of tax credit when he spruced up Villa el Sarmiento, his 25,000-square-foot historic oceanfront mansion on Palm Beach’s swanky South Ocean Boulevard, a decade ago.

In January 2002, the Palm Beach Post reported that Koch’s waterfront mansion received one of six tax breaks approved by the town council under Florida’s historic restoration tax credit. At the time, Koch was planning a $12 million remodeling of Villa el Sarmiento, a Mediterranean revival-style structure built in 1923 and designed by famed architect Addison Mizner. Koch’s tax break was expected to cost the city $48,000.

Asked about David Koch’s 2002 tax deal and his group’s opposition to North Carolina’s housing restoration credit, Bryson said the current debate is “a different matter altogether.” He added: “The historic tax credit in North Carolina was scheduled to sunset under an agreement made by the Governor and General Assembly in 2013. AFP has consistently advocated for simplifying the tax code, including allowing this credit to sunset. However, as long as these tax credits exist, we don’t begrudge taxpayers making use of them.”

A spokesman for Americans for Prosperity’s national office pointed me to Bryson. A spokeswoman for Koch Industries, where David Koch is an executive vice president and board member, did not respond to a request for comment.

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David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity is Fighting a Tax Perk He Once Exploited

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