UNITED NATIONS, September 18 (IPS) – When a child is diagnosed with cancer, their chances of survival should not depend on where they live, yet according to the WHO, more than 80 percent of children with cancer in high-income countries are cured, compared with fewer than 30 percent in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — A McCordsville business owner faces prison time after admitting to stealing more than $600,000 through a fraudulent pandemic relief scheme.
Sandra Pierce, 42, pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud on Monday in connection with a yearslong effort to defraud the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), federal prosecutors announced in Indianapolis.
Pierce owned a business called Sandy’s on the Run. Federal prosecutors said Pierce claimed to help individuals and businesses get COVID-19 relief loans. Instead, Pierce carried out a wire fraud scheme by drafting and submitting 22 fraudulent loan applications under the names of other people.
In exchange for the fake applications, Pierce took more than $100,000 in fees from her clients. She also submitted applications in her own name and received $48,191 from the government. The total loss to taxpayers was approximately $632,905.
The U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General investigated the case. Pierce faces up to 20 years in federal prison for each count. A U.S. District Court judge will set a sentencing date later.
The case is part of a nationwide surge called Operation No Doze. From June 12 to Sept. 1, federal prosecutors across the country charged more than 160 defendants in cases involving roughly $245 million in intended losses.
“Exploiting a national crisis for personal gain goes against every fiber of Hoosier decency,” U.S. Attorney Tom Wheeler said. “Programs like the Paycheck Protection Program were created to help honest small business owners survive an unprecedented hardship, not to serve as an opportunity for fraud. Our office will continue working with our federal partners to identify those who took advantage of this moment of need, hold them accountable, and protect relief programs meant to support Hoosiers when they need it most.”
Attorney General Todd Blanche said the relief was meant to keep small businesses alive during government lockdowns.
“The defendants charged during our summer surge allegedly fabricated businesses, submitted false payroll and revenue claims, stole identities, and concealed foreign ties on their applications— but they will now be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Blanche said.
Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the National Fraud Enforcement Division said the surge shows what is possible when public servants work together.
“Our mission is clear: protect taxpayer funds, safeguard the integrity of federal relief programs, and deliver justice to those who exploited them,” McDonald said.
Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler said the agency has suspended 870,000 borrowers tied to $39 billion in suspected fraudulent activity.
“In partnership with Vice President J.D. Vance and the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, we’re putting fraudsters on notice: the federal government will no longer turn a blind eye to those who stole from taxpayers,” Loeffler said.
SBA Inspector General William Kirk said the focused approach helps investigators identify fraud and recover funds.
The Department of Justice created the National Fraud Enforcement Division in April to investigate those who commit fraud against the public. The effort supports a task force chaired by Vice President J.D. Vance to eliminate waste and abuse in federal benefit programs.
INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana drivers have faced a sharp increase at the fuel pump after Gov. Mike Braun extended a state gas tax holiday to help residents manage rising costs.
The average price for a gallon of regular gas in Indiana hit $3.92 Thursday, according to AAA. That is a 17-cent increase from Wednesday.
“We are in an affordability crisis. And this affordability crisis affects more and more and more of the economy,” said Andreas Hauskrecht, a clinical professor of business economics at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. “And you will feel it more and more and you will feel it in groceries and you’ll feel it in the supermarket.”
Braun originally issued the gas tax holiday in April to alleviate prices. He has now extended the holiday through Oct. 5. Diesel prices, which averaged $6.42 a gallon Thursday in Indiana, are not included in the tax relief.
“Diesel is normally used by businesses. So, businesses versus households. That was a reason it wasn’t included,” Braun said.
Hauskrecht said the spike in diesel prices hits farmers particularly hard during the harvest.
“A tractor runs on diesel,” Hauskrecht said. “Farmers are really hit by those high diesel prices because they have to bring the crops in now. They have to bring it in otherwise they go bad.”
Because most goods are transported by truck, the economist noted that rising fuel costs will eventually reach almost every consumer product.
“Think about trucking. The trucks are using diesel. We truck most of the goods. And so it affects basically every final good,” Hauskrecht said.
He added that there is little the average household can do to avoid the impact.
“For a normal household, there is nothing you can avoid. I mean, you can try saving, but Americans have very low saving rate. And the low and middle class American have an extremely low saving rate,” Hauskrecht said.
UZHGOROD, Ukraine, September 17 (IPS) – It happened in 1920. At the Grand Trianon Palace at Versailles, the Allies drew a new map of Hungary that sliced away two-thirds of its territory. Such a cartographic mutilation went down in history as the Treaty of Trianon. No country lost more territory after the First World War.
Read the full story, “War in Ukraine: Hungarian Minority Pushed to the Edge”, on globalissues.org →
NEW YORK (CNN) — Touchscreen kiosks, self-checkout machines and QR-code menus were only here to help.
The dream was that these self-service technologies would recommend food we’d like at McDonald’s and speed up CVS lines. But kiosks ended up presenting way too many choices when we just wanted the burger. Self-checkout machines kept announcing there were unexpected items in the bagging area. And we got sick of looking at our phones to pick a main course at dinner.
Consumers are tired of tech that defeats the whole purpose of going out to shop and eat in person. Many miss the fleeting interactions with baristas and other human beings. The signs of our collective frustration with technology are everywhere: people waiting hours in lines at yogurt shops to meet someone and locking up their phones when they go out to dinner. A longing for in-person connection helps explain the resurgence of movie theaters, malls and Chili’s.
Fast-food chains, restaurants and retailers are now ditching endless automation and screens to humanize their stores and attract workers. All the self-service tech they pushed for years alienated their employees.
A decade ago, Starbucks baristas had personal relationships with customers. Part of the draw of working at Starbucks was that you felt like a bright spot in customers’ days, said Ryan Buell, a professor of business administration at Harvard who studies interactions between service businesses and customers.
But Starbucks transformed into a takeout stand. Customers picked up online orders of coffee and iced lemonades without saying a word to baristas. Sales slumped and many of the company’s employees felt they’d been turned into robots. They began to unionize.
Starbucks has added extra staff and is spending $1 billion on armchairs, plants and books to make its coffee shops feel like coffee shops again.
The company is “pulling the employee and customer experience back from the brink,” Buell said.
Fast-food chains, never known for their human touch, have lost business to sit-down restaurants with better service. They now want to give customers the option to do more than tap on screens to order food.
McDonald’s is training workers to emphasize hospitality, with energetic greetings to customers such as “Enjoy your meal!” and “See you soon!” according to the Wall Street Journal. Burger King is hiring 60,000 new employees and creating a customer service position in stores: the “Your Way Champion.”
&pizza, a chain offering customizable, oblong-shaped pizzas, expanded touchscreen kiosks and voice ordering systems using AI the last few years. It hoped to speed up order times and get customers to add extras.
But kiosks created a “disconnect” between crew and customers and voice AI “erased any attempt at hospitality,” Sergio Perez, the chief marketing officer at Latitude Food Group, the parent company of &pizza and Tijuana Flats, said in an interview. It recently pulled kiosks and AI ordering from its stores.
“We were so focused on the promise of digital that we forgot about the dining room,” Perez said.
Self-checkout was also supposed to be a way for stores to save money on labor and free up workers for other tasks.
But customers became frustrated with all the malfunctions they encountered at self-checkout stations. People ended up stealing more products through self-checkout than when human beings rang them up.
Walmart, Target and Costco ripped out some self-checkout stands. Amazon shut down its cashier-less Go stores.
Customers feel more rewarded by a store and “treated more valuably” when they check out with humans than self-checkout machines, researchers at Drexel University found in a 2024 study. A human ringing up customers makes them likelier to revisit in the future, the study found.
The main issue was that businesses invented solutions in search of problems that people never had, rather than finding ways to improve customers’ experiences.
They offered up newer, cheaper ways of ordering food and checking out and then tried to sell customers why they should change, said Christopher Andrews, a sociologist at Drew University and author of “The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets and the Do-It-Yourself Economy.”
“What we have been seeing is putting the cart in front of the proverbial horse,” he said.
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Six people were arrested Wednesday night after police broke up a series of reckless driving incidents on Indianapolis’ west side, according to the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.
IMPD, Indiana State Police and Cumberland Metropolitan Police Department worked together during the enforcement operation.
Officers said they saw drivers spinning their vehicles in parking lots, blocking intersections and speeding near people who had gathered to watch.
Police dispersed the crowds and stopped six vehicles. All six vehicles were towed.
The drivers were preliminarily arrested on Level 6 felony charges of criminal recklessness, police said. One driver also had a failure-to-appear warrant stemming from a reckless driving case in Johnson County.
The arrests come as Indianapolis police continue to respond to illegal spinning and other organized reckless driving activity.
Police are asking people who see illegal spinning, street takeovers or reckless driving to call 911 or IMPD’s non-emergency line at 317-327-3811.
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Mitch Frazier is leaving IBJ Media to become president of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation.
Gov. Mike Braun announced Thursday that Frazier will take over as IEDC president Oct. 5. He will succeed Josh Richardson, who is leaving the position Oct. 2 to move to the private sector.
Frazier joined IBJ Media as president in 2025 after serving as president and CEO of AgriNovus Indiana. At IBJ Media, he oversaw the company’s day-to-day operations, including its Indianapolis Business Journal and Inside INdiana Business operations.
Before joining IBJ Media, Frazier was CEO of AgriNovus Indiana and previously served as CEO of Reynolds Farm Equipment. He also held leadership roles at ExactTarget, including during the company’s initial public offering and acquisition by Salesforce.
Frazier has prior experience with the IEDC. Earlier in his career, he served as the agency’s director of media relations while Nate Feltman was Indiana’s secretary of commerce. Frazier also served on active duty in the U.S. Army and worked in federal civilian public affairs.
As IEDC president, Frazier will lead the state’s economic development organization, which works to attract new investment to Indiana, support existing businesses and develop partnerships with communities and industries.
Indiana Secretary of Commerce Chuck Goodrich said Frazier’s background in business and public service will help advance the state’s economic development efforts.
Richardson has served as IEDC president since October 2025. Goodrich credited Richardson with helping guide the agency through a period of leadership transition and increased coordination between economic development and workforce efforts.
Frazier’s departure comes about 16 months after he joined IBJ Media. The company announced his hiring in May 2025, when he succeeded as president from his role leading AgriNovus Indiana.
KUNMING, China, September 17 (IPS) – The world may have enough money to protect nature. The bigger problem, according to the head of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), is that too much of it is still being spent on activities that destroy it.
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Central Indiana stays hot and humid for the next few days as a stalled front keeps storm chances in the forecast through the weekend.
Early morning storms are tracking across northern Indiana. These storms will stay north of Interstate 70 through mid-morning. Any storms that develop could produce gusty winds and heavy rain. A Flood Watch remains in effect for northeastern Indiana, where several inches of rain has fallen since early Wednesday morning.
The heat is the main story Thursday. Highs will reach the mid-80s across northeastern Indiana, near 90 in the metro, and into the mid-90s across southern counties. Many across central and southern Indiana will feel head indices pushing close to 100° again.
Scattered storms will be possible, mainly during the afternoon and evening hours. The stalled front will provide the focus for storm development, but severe weather is not expected.
Mostly cloudy with a few lingering showers possible. Lows will drop into the low to mid-70s.
Friday brings another warm, unsettled day – but a touch cooler than previous days. Highs will top out in the mid 80s across central Indiana, and closer to 90° over southern Indiana. The front continues to wobble across the state, keeping spotty rain and storms in the forecast. No organized severe weather is expected.
Saturday will be another very warm day. Highs will climb back into the low to mid-90s across southern Indiana, with upper 80s for central portions of the state. Storm chances continue, especially Saturday afternoon and evening – starting in northern portions of the state, and eventually sagging south into central Indiana late night/overnight.
Sunday brings similar conditions with highs in the upper 80s to low 90s. Scattered storms remain possible.
Relief arrives early next week. The front finally pushes south of Indiana on Monday, bringing more comfortable air. Highs Monday will drop into the upper 70s to low 80s. Tuesday and Wednesday stay pleasant with highs in the mid-70s to near 80 and lower humidity.
CIVICUS discusses renewed conflict and a growing crackdown on independent media in Ethiopia with Yonas Kedir, Editor-in-Chief of the independent news outlet Addis Standard, who was recently abducted and detained by government forces.
