HIGHLANDVILLE, Mo. (AP) — Two Missouri sheriff’s deputies were fatally shot, one during a traffic stop and the other hours later during a shootout with the suspect, who was also killed, authorities said.

Christian County Sheriff Brad Cole said the initial shooting happened during a traffic stop south of Highlandville on Monday in southwest Missouri, news outlets reported.

About 100 officers, deputies, and state troopers helped with the search for the suspect, Cole said. He says U.S. Marshals and FBI and ATF agents were also involved.

The suspected shooter’s truck was found abandoned several miles south near Reeds Spring and law enforcement officers searched the area nearby, Cole said. Early Tuesday, deputies approached a heat signature detected in the woods. Cole said the suspect opened fire, hitting three deputies.

One Christian County deputy was killed and two other deputies — from Christian and Webster counties — were wounded with injuries that are not considered life-threatening, Cole said. Law enforcement officers shot back, killing the suspect, he said.

Cole identified the deputy killed in the initial shooting as Deputy Gabriel Ramirez.

“Deputy Ramirez was always kind to everybody, Cole said. “He was always a friend, was always there for anybody who needed a shoulder to lean on.”

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The city is seeking providers to operate an additional 190 units of Justice-Involved Supportive Housing—affordable units paired with support services for people with mental health needs who tend to cycle between jail and homeless shelters.

The proposed site for the “Just Home” project at 1900 Seminole Ave. on the Jacobi Medical Center campus.

New York City is seeking providers to operate an additional 190 units of Justice-Involved Supportive Housing—affordable apartments paired with support services for people with mental or behavioral health needs who tend to cycle between jail, hospitals and homeless shelters.

Homeless and criminal justice advocates have been calling for the city to expand the niche program, known as JISH, as a means to reduce both the number of people behind bars and in its shelter system. Stable housing and access to mental health care is key to helping people avoid returns to jail, officials say: almost 90 percent of current JISH participants—living in 120 units across the city—had no further arrests since joining the initiative, which launched in 2015.

“Nearly 30 percent of our patients report being homeless prior to entering jail or likely to be unhoused on release,” Dr. Patsy Yang, senior vice president for Correctional Health Services, which provides health care in the city’s jails, said in a statement announcing the planned JISH expansion. “Each one deserves the chance to return safely and successfully to the community.”

City Hall released a request for proposals (RFP) earlier this month seeking operators to open the additional 190 JISH apartments, thanks to a $4.8 million funding boost included in the last budget deal. Earlier city efforts to grow the program had previously failed to take off: providers largely declined to bid on a 2019 RFP, telling City Limits the funding rates were too low to adequately provide the housing and services required.

But advocates cheered the city’s latest request, saying it’s “in line with service funding provided in comparable programs across New York City,” said Gary Jenkins, interim CEO of Urban Pathways, which runs 30 of the existing JISH apartments.

“We are thrilled to see Mayor Mamdani taking such a significant step so quickly toward closing the revolving door between jail and homelessness,” said Darren Mack, director of Freedom Agenda at the Urban Justice Center, in a statement to City Limits.

“It means so much, not just for the tenants, but for what the providers are able to do,” said Rob DeLeon, interim president and CEO at The Fortune Society, which currently operates JISH housing for roughly 60 people, where residents have access to medical and behavioral health care, medication management, job training, art programs and other resources.

The latest round of funding includes the option of a congregate model—where tenants in the program are housed within the same building run by a nonprofit, rather than “scattered-site” units rented in privately-run properties—which advocates say can offer participants a deeper sense of community and easier access to programs.

“When you’re in a congregate setting, it’s as simple as having folks come downstairs,” DeLeon said. “Or if you’re meeting with them right in their units and checking in on how they’re doing and all of those things, you don’t have very far to go to meet with a number of people that you’re serving.”

The planned 190 new apartments will bring the total number of JISH units to 390, officials said. That count includes 83 affordable rentals planned for an underused building on the Jacobi Hospital Campus in the Bronx, which will primarily house people with complex medical needs after they leave city jails.

The project, dubbed “Just Home” had spurred furious opposition from some locals, prompting former Mayor Eric Adams to pull his support for it last fall after years of planning. New Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced last month that his administration would restart the plan.

“By housing New Yorkers who are too often left on the streets or shuttled through emergency rooms, Just Home meets our housing crisis with dignity,” Mamdani said in a statement at the time.

Just Home is now expected to break ground by the end of this year or early next year, said DeLeon of Fortune, which will build and operate the facility.

Still, even with the expected expansion, the JISH network will fall short of what the city pledged in 2019 as part of its agreement to close the notorious jail complex on Rikers Island and replace it with smaller borough-based jails. That deal initially called for 500 JISH units, a nod to the important role access to housing plays in lowering the number of people behind bars.

But advocates say they’re hopeful new Mayor Mamdani will eventually reach that goal. “His messaging is really about meeting the moment, helping all New Yorkers to live lives of dignity,” said DeLeon.

“We are locked in, in this journey, this mission, to get individuals housed,” he added. “To help them to be whole and not to continue to be judged for their worst mistakes for the rest of their lives.”

To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

The post NYC Looks to Expand Supportive Housing for New Yorkers Coming Out of Jail appeared first on City Limits.

By DAVID KLEPPER, MATT O’BRIEN and KONSTANTIN TOROPIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to meet Tuesday with the CEO of Anthropic, with the artificial intelligence company the only one of its peers to not supply its technology to a new U.S. military internal network.

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Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, declined to comment on the meeting but CEO Dario Amodei has made clear his ethical concerns about unchecked government use of AI, including the dangers of fully autonomous armed drones and of AI-assisted mass surveillance that could track dissent.

The meeting between Hegseth and Amodei was confirmed by a defense official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

It underscores the debate over AI’s role in national security and concerns about how the technology could be used in high-stakes situations involving lethal force, sensitive information or government surveillance. It also comes as Hegseth has vowed to root out what he calls a “woke culture” in the armed forces.

“A powerful AI looking across billions of conversations from millions of people could gauge public sentiment, detect pockets of disloyalty forming, and stamp them out before they grow,” Amodei wrote in an essay last month.

Anthropic is the only AI company approved for classified military networks

The Pentagon announced last summer that it was awarding defense contracts to four AI companies — Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. Each contract is worth up to $200 million.

Anthropic was the first AI company to get approved for classified military networks, where it works with partners like Palantir. The other three companies, for now, are only operating in unclassified environments.

By early this year, Hegseth was highlighting only two of them: xAI and Google.

The defense secretary said in a January speech at Musk’s space flight company, SpaceX, in South Texas that he was shrugging off any AI models “that won’t allow you to fight wars.”

Hegseth said his vision for military AI systems means that they operate “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications,” before adding that the Pentagon’s “AI will not be woke.”

In January, Hegseth said Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok would join the Pentagon network, called GenAI.mil. The announcement came days after Grok — which is embedded into X, the social media network owned by Musk — drew global scrutiny for generating highly sexualized deepfake images of people without their consent.

OpenAI announced in early February that it, too, would join the military’s secure AI platform, enabling service members to use a custom version of ChatGPT for unclassified tasks.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth leaves an oath of enlistment ceremony, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, held on the base of the Washington Monument in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

Anthropic calls itself more safety-minded

Anthropic has long pitched itself as the more responsible and safety-minded of the leading AI companies, ever since its founders quit OpenAI to form the startup in 2021.

The uncertainty with the Pentagon is putting those intentions to the test, according to Owen Daniels, associate director of analysis and fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

“Anthropic’s peers, including Meta, Google and xAI, have been willing to comply with the department’s policy on using models for all lawful applications,” Owens said. “So the company’s bargaining power here is limited, and it risks losing influence in the department’s push to adopt AI.”

In the AI craze that followed the release of ChatGPT, Anthropic closely aligned with President Joe Biden’s administration in volunteering to subject its AI systems to third-party scrutiny to guard against national security risks.

Amodei, the CEO, has warned of AI’s potentially catastrophic dangers while rejecting the label that he’s an AI “doomer.” He argued in the January essay that “we are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023″ but that those risks should be managed in a “realistic, pragmatic manner.”

Anthropic has been at odds with the Trump administration

This would not be the first time Anthropic’s advocacy for stricter AI safeguards has put it at odds with the Trump administration. Anthropic needled chipmaker Nvidia publicly, criticizing Trump’s proposals to loosen export controls to enable some AI computer chips to be sold in China. The AI company, however, remains a close partner with Nvidia.

The Trump administration and Anthropic also have been on opposite sides of a lobbying push to regulate AI in U.S. states.

Trump’s top AI adviser, David Sacks, accused Anthropic in October of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.”

Sacks made the remarks on X in response to an Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark, writing about his attempt to balance technological optimism with “appropriate fear” about the steady march toward more capable AI systems.

Anthropic hired a number of ex-Biden officials soon after Trump’s return to the White House, but it’s also tried to signal a bipartisan approach. The company recently added Chris Liddell, a former White House official from Trump’s first term, to its board of directors.

The Pentagon-Anthropic debate is reminiscent of an uproar several years ago when some tech workers objected to their companies’ participation in Project Maven, a Pentagon drone surveillance program. While some workers quit over the project and Google itself dropped out, the Pentagon’s reliance on drone surveillance has only increased.

Similarly, “the use of AI in military contexts is already a reality and it is not going away,” Owens said.

“Some contexts are lower stakes, including for back-office work, but battlefield deployments of AI entail different, higher-stakes risks,” he said, referring to the use of lethal force or weapons like nuclear arms. “Military users are aware of these risks and have been thinking about mitigation for almost a decade.”

O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

By Trisha Walrath Cole

From the first time I heard that three friends had taken on the Herculean task of renovating the 1950s roadside Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel, an hour east of San Diego, I’d been trying to find a reason to go. So when a road-tripping pal moved close to me, I immediately knew where our first Thelma-and-Louise-esque adventure would take us.

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Jacumba today feels like what Marfa, Texas, must have been like before Donald Judd arrived: a quiet, slightly rough-edged desert outpost on the brink of something special. The 20-room hotel and mineral-spring pools lie hidden behind sand-colored walls. You check in at a retro trailer out front, then enter through a massive 500-year-old Moroccan wooden door that is your portal to a bohemian desert version of Wonderland.

Alice could easily whisper “Drink Me” if you go left into the bar with its snake-shaped doorknob, or “Eat Me” if you go right into the sunlit restaurant, Long Shadow. Both are open to the public daily. We chose the latter, settling beneath a wall lined with oil paintings of desert scenes in muted, serene tones.

As we ventured deeper into the hotel, the calming effect of the monochromatic color palette set in.

“I’m obsessed with environmental psychology and how people move through a space,” founding partner Melissa Sturkel told me. “We made an intentional decision to stay in this lane,” said her partner and chief of design, Corbin Winters, about their commitment to the use of desert beiges and soft earth tones found in every room, wall, textile, and vantage point.

Guests see stars on a clear night at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. (Photo by Joey Taylor/Courtesy Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel)

A walk to the end of the first long block of ranch-style rooms surrounding the pools brought us to our room. Stone flooring flows from the walkway into each space, enhancing the sense of continuity. The Siren Suite featured a deep, cushy couch, a cloudlike bed, stuccoed nooks in the open closet, and curated touches like Moroccan pendant lighting and oversized Mongolian sheepskin ottomans.

Sliding into either of the outdoor mineral pools, you can almost feel the energy of the vortex beneath the hotel, working its steady, ancient magic. Guests also have access to the Echo Room, a 24-hour enclosed circular soaking tub. If I lived closer, I’d invest in one of the hotel’s flexible pool passes. A massage in one of the secluded Sahara tents near the Afghan Pines was tempting, but surrendering to the ethereal mineral water felt like more than enough.

“Everyone loves the water — the way it makes them feel, how well they sleep after they’ve soaked, how their skin feels. Just overall … more relaxed,” Winters said.

I couldn’t have agreed more.

As I sank into bed, the spell of the magnesium-rich water took hold. I slept deeply, waking at sunrise for a final soak. Coffee in hand, as heat rose off the water, a new word drifted into my mind: returnasy. The feeling of being in a place while already dreaming of coming back.