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Mike Pence Caught in Power Struggle Wall Street Journal (subscription) Mike Pence showed his clout inside the White House with the Monday firing of Mike Flynn, who allowed the vice president to espouse false information about the national security adviser's conversations with Russian officials. But Mr. Pence also learned ... Pence's sphere of influence questioned in wake of Flynn falloutCNN Trump: I fired Flynn because of what he told PenceCNBC Mike Pence's delayed knowledge of Flynn's fibs hint he is outside Trump's inner circleChicago Tribune NBCNews.com -BuzzFeed News -Business Insider -New York Times all 8,332 news articles »

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Mike Pence Caught in Power Struggle - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

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(CNN) - Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled to attend the Super Bowl on Sunday in Houston, two administration officials and a third source familiar with Pence's travel told CNN on Friday.

Pence will be the fourth sitting vice president to attend a Super Bowl. Vice Presidents Spiro Agnew, George H.W. Bush and Al Gore each attended the NFL championship game while in office.

Security was already slated to be tight at Sunday's event. The Department of Homeland Security had designated the Super Bowl as a top-tier national security event and federal officials have for months been involved in security planning and will help secure Houston's NRG Stadium.

Pence press secretary Marc Lotter declined to confirm Pence's attendance, but said the vice president's schedule would be released later Friday.

It's unclear whether Pence, the former Indiana governor, has a favorite as the Atlanta Falcons and New England Patriots face off Sunday, but that may not be the case for President Donald Trump.

Trump repeatedly touted his friendship with Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, coach Bill Belichick and owner Robert Kraft on the campaign trail and even secured the political support of Brady and Belichick, which Trump announced at a campaign rally on the eve of the November election at his final New Hampshire campaign event.

Meanwhile, Falcons' owner Arthur Blank criticized Trump earlier this week for his executive order suspending the US refugee program and banning citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from the US as well as for the White House's statement on the Holocaust, which made no mention of Jews.

"I'm troubled by anything directionally in our country that separates people," Blank told Newsday. "America started without any of us, other than Native American Indians. This country was built on inclusion and diversity, on celebration of those differences, supporting those differences, and everybody being the very best they can be in their own way. I'm opposed to anything that takes away from that."

Bush, the second sitting vice president to ever attend a Super Bowl, will also do the coin toss Sunday.

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Vice President Mike Pence to attend Super Bowl - Kern Golden Empire

Dalia Mohamed says she doesn't go out much since President Donald Trump's inauguration because of harassment she says her friends have experienced. Annie Ropeik/Indiana Public Broadcasting hide caption

Dalia Mohamed says she doesn't go out much since President Donald Trump's inauguration because of harassment she says her friends have experienced.

In Indiana, Vice President Pence's hometown has one of the top concentrations of skilled immigrant workers in the country. In Columbus, Ind., manufacturers and residents depend on open borders to move both products and people, but continued uncertainty over the Trump administration's immigration policies is leading to some anxiety there.

The first thing to know about Columbus, about 45 miles south of Indianapolis, is that it's a company town the headquarters of Cummins, a big global engine-maker. Its local staff represents a fifth of the Bartholomew County's entire labor force.

The second thing to know is that this town has the lowest unemployment rate in Indiana. Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce president Cindy Frey that says when jobs do come open, there are only three options:

"You can develop talent, you can import workers, or you can export jobs," Frey says. "And we're not ready to export jobs."

Developing talent takes time, so for now, Frey says this city is competing for job applicants worldwide. That means Columbus is trying its best to be welcoming for thousands of skilled foreign workers and their families, like Dalia Mohamed's.

The Sudanese-American citizens who live in a big, airy house a short drive from the Cummins plant, where husband, Khalidd Eleawad, is an engineer. About 1,400 of the company's 9,500 local workers, or 15 percent, were hired on H1-B visas.

Right now, Mohamed says her family is in limbo. They usually visit Sudan in the winter,then fly their Sudanese relatives to Indiana in the summer but with so much uncertainty around President Donald Trump's now on-hold immigration order, which targets Sudan an six other countries, they don't want to risk it.

Mohamed is Muslim and wears a hijab. She says the changes she's noticed in town since Trump's inauguration are palpable.

"I don't go out that much after Jan. 20, because my friends, they have been through so many harassments, so so that's why I just kind of stay home," she says.

Her husband Eleawad says this isn't good for his employer. He notes that Cummins relies on global diversity to help sell its engines around the world.

"If you depend on just I would say, 'true American' people to do everything, you wouldn't be able to go to European market, or Middle East market or China or India, because you have no idea about their culture, no idea about how to sell the product," Eleawad says.

Without those sales, Cummins and this city likely would struggle the local economy is that dependent on exports. That could be a big problem if President Trump or Congress follow through on proposals to tighten up trade, immigration or visa requirements.

"We'd have to offset that somehow," says Dave Glass, CEO of LHP, a Columbus company that, among other things, designs control systems for self-driving cars. "I think growing would be more difficult."

Glass says that he prioritizes hiring Americans it's required before trying for a visa but that there just aren't enough unemployed American engineers to fill his jobs.

"Each year, we're doing that process hundreds of times and in my understanding, in the last few years, we've had, like, three people apply," Glass says. "So it's not an option."

So while LHP and other companies have no choice but to hire and depend on immigrants, skilled immigrants like Egyptian engineer Omar Elmarazhi do have a choice.

"I'm highly educated, I have graduate degrees," the Cummins employee says. "I know that I'm positively contributing to the economy, and I know that whatever community I'm in, I can positively contribute."

As a highly skilled engineer, Elmarazhi chose to come to the U.S. and he says he can also choose to take his skills elsewhere if Columbus, Ind., becomes an uncomfortable place for him to work and live.

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Immigration Executive Order Causes Anxiety In VP Mike Pence's Hometown - NPR

Last December, East Chicago Mayor Anthony Copeland wrote a letter pleading with then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence to grant his city, which is facing a lead contamination crisis, an emergency declaration to allow it to address the problem.

Pence said no, suggesting the $200,000 in assistance the state had already offered to help the city relocate affected families and administer free lead testing would suffice.

Pences successor, fellow Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, disagreed. Last week, in one of his first executive orders in office, he issued a declaration of disaster emergency that paved the way for additional state and potentially federal assistance for the struggling city and tasked Copeland with providing a written assessment of what resources the city will need to help its residents by March 5.

Deborah Chizewer, a law fellow at Northwestern Universitys Environmental Advocacy Clinic who has been assisting East Chicago residents affected by the toxic, lead-contaminated soil, said Holcombs action was a welcome change from Pences response to the crisis.

I was obviously very disappointed that Pence didnt give this situation the requisite level of attention, Chizewer told The Huffington Post. I dont think the state has done enough, but I was very pleased to see that Holcomb recognized the urgency in East Chicago that remains.

The situation in East Chicago dates back at leastto 1972, when the West Calumet housing complex was built on the site of a former lead refinery.

Concerns about lead in the soil in the area began around 1991, when the state first began testingEast Chicago children for lead exposure. It wasnt until 2009 that a 322-acre area, including the complex, was declareda Superfund site. Testing of the areas soil first confirmed to residentslast year that it was contaminated with both lead and arsenic.

Cleanup of lead-contaminated homes in the predominantly low-income, minority-populated city began last summer.Section 8 housing vouchers for residents affected by the citys plan to demolish the complex were distributed shortly thereafter, but many residents have struggled to find alternative housing using those vouchers. According to CBS Chicago, some 157 families of 332 living in the complex have yet to relocate as of this month.

The citys lead crisis was the subject of a longform HuffPost video, titled Dear Mike Pence, released last December.

In the piece, East Chicago residents living inside the Superfund sites three impacted zones express frustration that it took health officials so long to make them aware of the dangers of lead in their community.

One East Chicago resident, Mauro Jimenez, described to video producer Matthew Perkins how the EPA visited his familys house about six years earlier.

They came here and took samples out of my yard, Jimenez told Perkins. They never did say for what. They never sent it to me. They sent it to me this year, giving me the numbers of lead and arsenic too. Why did they hold that information from us?

Jimenez, along with his wife Sara, is a homeowner essentially trapped in the affected area, unable to sell his home due to the lead.

In good conscience, because they had small children, I couldnt even sell them the house because were all contaminated here, Sara told Perkins.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has saidno blood lead level in children should be considered safe. Exposure to lead has been linked with developmental delays, learning difficulties and other problems.

Credit: Joshua Lott/Getty Images

Since the HuffPost piece was filmed, advocates for the residents say the situation has gotten more serious. The Environmental Protection Agency discovered elevated lead levels in the drinking water of 40 percent of area homes that were recently tested. The EPA advised residents to use water filters.

Thats also the advice that Marc Edwards, a whistleblower in the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, offered for residents of the Indiana city. Edwards told HuffPost the city should also recommend that residents living in homes with lead pipes switch to bottled water, implement lead-corrosion control strategies and remind children to wash their hands to reduce their exposure to lead dust and soil.

A city spokesman did not respond to a request for information concerning the citys action plan on lead. An Indiana Department of Environmental Management pointed only to the text of last weeks emergency declaration in response to a request for additional comment.

For her part, Chizewer hopes the state may move to provide water filters to residents to help them reduce their exposure to lead, a problem she admits will not be an easy or cheap fix.

The ongoing crisis in Flint, to which some have likened East Chicagos troubles, is evidence, she says, of just that.

It cant be fixed overnight, Chizewer said. This is a cleanup of hundreds of properties. Its going to take years, but I hope there is a concerted effort to clean the properties up as quickly as possible.

Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

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Mike Pence Ignored A Lead Contamination Crisis In His Backyard - Huffington Post

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By Shoshana Walter Reveal from The Center for Investigative ReportingFebruary 15, 2017

As a nonprofit newsroom, we want to share our work with as many people as possible. You are free to embed our audio and video content from SoundCloud and YouTube, respectively. You may republish any story free of charge and will be fully indemnified by us from legal challenges as long as you follow these guidelines:

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By Shoshana Walter / February 15, 2017

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.

Kids detained at Pierceton Woods Academy in Indiana received meals, beds and Bibles. What they didnt receive? An education.

Between 2013 and 2015, the juvenile detention wing of the Christian residential treatment program, owned by a nonprofit with ties to Vice President Mike Pence, failed to provide educational programs to children, according to Indiana Department of Corrections audits reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

Indiana law requires juvenile detention facilities provide kids with an education. But during one visit by state auditors, several youths said they were not receiving educational services. On another visit, auditors noted, a staffing shortage was to blame. Mark Terrell, chief executive officer of parent organization Lifeline Youth and Family Services, did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite the lack of schooling, state auditors continually found Pierceton Woods in full compliance with mandatory standards for juvenile facilities. The Department of Correction does not enforce the law, and there appears to be no punishment for facilities that dont provide educational services. Chief counsel Bob Bugher said Pierceton Woods initiated access to online courses before shutting down itsdetention center last year.

Though they no longer have a locked facility, Pierceton Woods Academy still accepts court-ordered and paroled kids from around the state as part of its residential treatment program. The 52-acre facility caters to boys between 10 and 21, offers chapel services and baptisms, and has been plagued by complaints of escapes and violence. After one teenage escapee shot a reserve deputy in the chest, local officials demanded an investigation by the state. Last year, a teen sentenced to four months at the facility escaped by fleeing into the woods. The facility remains licensed.

Its the kind of faith-based programming once championed by then-Gov. Pence in his home state, where he helped expand faith-based services into the criminal justice system.

Last year, Pence and his wife, Karen, were featured speakers at the nonprofits annual fundraiser. Brenda Vincent, Lifelines vice president of development, was chief of staff to Indianas first lady and deputy finance director of Pences gubernatorial campaign. Mark Terrell, Lifelines chief executive officer, was appointed by Pence to a judicial nominating commission.

In addition to the academy, Lifeline runs other faith-based programs across Oklahoma for troubled youth and families, as well as mission trips in the Dominican Republic.

Shoshana Walter can be reached at swalter@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @shoeshine.

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Juvenile justice center with ties to Mike Pence broke Indiana law - Reveal (blog)