There’s an easy way to get rid of all the reusable bags piling up in your home

• September 21, 2026

By ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN

NEW YORK (AP) — When professional home organizer Britnee Tanner visits her clients, she often spots extra reusable bags buried under the kitchen sink or stuffed in a corner of the pantry.

“They just are sneaky,” said Tanner, who lives in Salt Lake City. “I purchased a handful of these and then somehow I’ve collected ones I’ve never purchased, and I don’t really know where they’ve come from.”

Reusable totes are intended as durable alternatives to single-use plastic bags. But it’s easy to accumulate too many, from freebies at events to giveaways at the grocery store.

The environmental impact of a reusable bag is relatively small, so ending up with a sizable stash isn’t a significant problem. Still, paring down can declutter cupboards and lead to a smaller collection that’ll actually get used. As for the excess, donate to food banks and thrift stores.

“You don’t want an entire closet of reusable bags,” said sustainability scientist Shelie Miller with the University of Michigan. “You want well-loved reusable items, and that’s really what gives the environmental benefit.”

Reusable bags are helpful but can accumulate

Single-use plastic grocery bags aren’t meant to last. They become urban tumbleweeds or break down in the environment, releasing harmful microplastics. Single-use plastic shopping bags are banned across 12 U.S. states, and several more cities and towns have instituted their own initiatives, including bag taxes.

As a result, many people stock up on reusable bags made from canvas, cloth or thicker plastic. A few solid, durable bags used for errands or groceries can stand the test of time. Environmental economist Kimberly Oremus uses hers for up to a decade. But whether we intend to or not, additional bags of various shapes and sizes worm their way into our homes.

Just like any product, reusable bags require energy and resources to make — like the water that’s used to grow cotton. Researchers have found that the number of times a bag needs to be reused to offset the environmental cost of its production varies widely based on what the bag is made of.

There isn’t a magic number of uses to strive for, but durable bags that look and feel thicker tend to accrue more environmental debt than flimsy plastic totes and need to be reused more times to pay it off.

Reusables “are generally good for the environment, with the caveat that they have to be reused,” said Miller.

Save your best reusables and donate the rest

The simplest way to cut down on a reusable bag supply is to avoid getting new ones. But life gets in the way, and people get stuck at the store empty-handed. When Oremus forgets to bring a reusable bag to the store, she asks the employees if they have any empty cardboard boxes for her to use.

“If you forget it, it’s not the end of the world,” Oremus said. She tries to use her reusable bags until they can’t be used anymore, then donates the scraps to textile recycling centers.

If you’ve already accumulated a crowded kitchen cupboard, save the best and give away the rest.

Home organizer Tanner tells clients to pick out their favorites and assign a job to each. Reserve one bag for library books, a handful for groceries and another for packed lunches. After using one, put it back where it came from — be it the trunk of a car or inside a purse — so it’s ready for the next use.

As for the extras, give some to a friend or offload a larger amount by donating. Reusable bags generally can’t be recycled through curbside programs.

Tanner brings her extras to thrift stores. Other stores or food banks may also accept donations.

Las Vegas Books accepts reusable bag donations to hand out when customers at the used book store in Nevada need one. Burbank Animal Shelter in California uses larger totes for food, toys and other pet care supplies.

The Community FoodBank of New Jersey has collected reusable bags since 2022 for neighbors who visit their food pantries. They welcome bag donations as long as the items are reasonably clean and not ripped.

“They’re always something that our pantries need, and that we have available on hand whenever we can,” said the organization’s president, Elizabeth McCarthy.

The Associated Press’ health and science coverage receives financial support from the AP Fund for Journalism and private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

​ Orange County Register 

Operator of 314 US Wendy’s locations files for bankruptcy protection

• September 21, 2026

By DEE-ANN DURBIN, AP Business Writer

One of Wendy’s largest U.S. franchisees has filed for bankruptcy protection after Wendy’s tried to terminate its franchise agreement.

Meritage Hospitality Group, which operates 314 Wendy’s restaurants in 15 states, said in a statement last week it intends to keep operating its restaurants and paying its 9,000 employees during the bankruptcy process.

Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Meritage filed its bankruptcy petition in federal court in western Michigan on Sept. 17. According to court documents, Wendy’s filed a notice of termination of the company’s franchise agreement “effective immediately” on Sept. 16.

Wendy’s claims Meritage owes $27.4 million in royalties and fees and $119.5 million in continuous operations fees, which companies charge to franchisees when they close locations, according to court filings. Meritage closed 60 underperforming Wendy’s locations late last year as part of a restructuring.

Asked for comment Monday on Meritage, Wendy’s said its focus is “strengthening the long-term health of the brand.”

“We partner closely with franchisees that are experiencing challenges to support them and evaluate each situation on a case-by-case basis to identify the best and most sustainable path forward,” the company said.

Michigan is Meritage’s largest market; it operates 54 Wendy’s locations there as well as five Morning Belle and Blue Porch Bar & Grill restaurants. The company also runs 44 Wendy’s in both Georgia and Florida; 29 Wendy’s in Connecticut; 24 Wendy’s in Tennessee; 23 Wendy’s in Oklahoma and less than 20 Wendy’s each in Arkansas, Indiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virgina.

Dublin, Ohio-based Wendy’s has been struggling for several years with outdated stores, high beef prices and stiff competition. It closed 240 restaurants in 2024 and said earlier this year that it planned to shutter up to 358 locations this year.

Wendy’s same-store U.S. sales fell 7% in its most recent quarter.

“Wendy’s is an iconic brand with exceptional assets. Today we are clearly not performing at our potential,” Wendy’s President and CEO Bob Wright said in a statement last month. Wright joined Wendy’s in May after previously serving as the CEO of Potbelly.

​ Orange County Register 

Jury convicts Vermont man of attempted murder in shooting of 3 Palestinian students

• September 21, 2026

By MICHAEL R. SISAK and AMANDA SWINHART, Associated Press

A jury on Monday convicted a Vermont man of attempted murder in the shootings of three Palestinian college students who were walking near his home, rejecting an insanity defense rooted in his claims that he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad.

Jason Eaton, 51, faces up to life in prison in the November 2023 attack near the University of Vermont campus in Burlington, which left Hisham Awartani paralyzed from the waist down and his friends, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid, wounded.

The jury deliberated for several hours before reaching its verdict after a weeklong trial that saw testimony from the three wounded men and psychiatric experts called by the defense and prosecution.

Eaton was ordered jailed pending sentencing, which has yet to be scheduled. He stared ahead blankly as the verdict was read. Awartani and Aliahmad, sitting in the front row of the courtroom gallery, smiled and hugged people around them.

Eaton had pleaded not guilty but did not dispute that he was the shooter. His lawyers argued that he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity, pointing to his claims that the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies transmitted orders to shoot the men to him via FM radio and that God was commanding him to protect his Jewish neighbors.

Had he been found not guilty by reason of insanity, he could have been ordered to undergo mental health treatment.

The shooting, a few days after Thanksgiving, shook Burlington, Vermont, and reverberated in the West Bank, where the three wounded men grew up and became friends as schoolmates in Ramallah before moving to the U.S. for college.

The November 2023 shooting, weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, spawned calls for a hate crime investigation.

But no hate crime charges were filed as questions persisted about whether anti-Palestinian animus, an altered mental state or something else had compelled Eaton to open fire on Awartani, Aliahmad and Abdalhamid, who were all 20 at the time.

Eaton’s lawyers argued he was suffering from a delusional, psychotic disorder after losing his job at a credit union two weeks before the shooting.

While listening to a local NPR affiliate, Eaton believed he was hearing messages he attributed to the CIA, defense lawyer Joshua O’Hara said. At first, the messages were encouraging and validating, the lawyer said, but subsequent messages turned dark, insisting that Eaton “has to go out and shoot somebody.”

Authorities found three shotguns in Eaton’s apartment and a Ruger .380-caliber handgun that crime lab testing concluded was the gun used in the shooting, prosecutor Sally Adams said. Eaton had purchased the gun seven months earlier from a Vermont gun store.

Awartani, Aliahmad and Abdalhamid, all of whom are now 23, told jurors of their holiday weekend visit to Awartani’s grandmother’s house, a trip to a bowling alley to celebrate his twin cousins’ birthday, and the walk they took near the University of Vermont campus after dusk that ended in bloodshed.

Awartani, who was studying at Brown University in Rhode Island at the time, said they were smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic. Two of them said they were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs. Awartani said he first noticed Eaton standing on a porch as they approached the apartment house where he lived.

Within seconds, Awartani said, Eaton was off the porch and walking toward them. His face was expressionless and he didn’t say anything. As Eaton got to about five to 10 feet away, “he pulled out a handgun and started shooting at us,” said Awartani, who was paralyzed from the waist down in the shooting and now uses a wheelchair.

Jacob Pyne, who lived in a different apartment in the same house as Eaton, testified that he heard four to six gunshots, followed by footsteps going up the stairs of the apartment house. He said he ran outside and heard two men speaking, one of whom was more vocal and yelling, “I’ve been shot, help me.” He then brought the men blankets and called 911.

Abdalhamid, a student at Haverford College near Philadelphia, said he fled and hid behind another home after seeing Aliahmad fall to the ground. He said he only realized later when he sat down that he had also been wounded. Awartani was shot in the chest and the bullet ricocheted off his scapula, causing paraplegia in his spinal cord. Aliahmad, who was a student at Trinity College in Connecticut, was struck in the collarbone, and Abdalhamid was shot in the right buttock.

​ Orange County Register 

Are restaurants the new anchors at Orange County malls?

• September 21, 2026

By 4 a.m. on a Friday morning, people were already waiting in the parking lot. By 8:40 a.m., nearly 400 people had lined up at Newport Beach’s Fashion Island. The queue snaked through the labyrinthine, open-air ode to luxury retail. Even a Los Angeles news helicopter hovered overhead to capture the scene.

The reason for this ballyhoo? Levain Bakery, the New York City-born purveyor of fat, six-ounce cookies, had opened its first Orange County location. And people, caught in the throes of new-dessert ecstasy, wanted in.

These customers weren’t grabbing a cookie while they shopped. They had come to the mall for the cookies themselves. The same food-first, shopping-second inversion can be found at Din Tai Fung at Brea Mall, Hello Kitty Grand Cafe at Irvine Spectrum Center and the new Blue Box Cafe by Daniel Boulud (surely its caviar-topped eggshell has found its way into your feed by now) at South Coast Plaza.

A far cry from the mall food of yore, when a Hot Dog on a Stick or a Mrs. Fields’ cookie served as fuel between stops at Macy’s and Spencer’s Gifts, not the reason for the trip.

ALSO READ: Mall dining: The ultimate guide to eating at Westminster’s Asian Garden Mall

While some traditional malls in some of the country’s glittering metropolises have stalled — San Francisco Centre, once that city’s largest mall, closed in January — Orange County’s gleaming retail palaces continue to pull people in. Restaurants, bakeries and snack shops, from high-end splurges to affordable bites, are being treated less like galleria amenities and more like destinations in their own right.

“What people show up for now is dining and restaurants and food experiences — just what communities want in their neighborhood now,” said Anastasia Kouimelis Scott, vice president of real estate and development at Levain Bakery. “I think that has reflected in leasing patterns.”

At Fashion Island and Irvine Spectrum, the shift is measurable in the tenant roster. The two properties now have 83 dining and specialty-dining concepts between them, according to the Irvine Company. Sixteen opened within the past two years. Recent arrivals include Levain, Din Tai Fung and Ralph’s Coffee, the brand’s first West Coast location.

“We’ve seen over time that restaurants have become much more than an amenity to shopping,” said Ken Gillett, president of Irvine Company Retail Properties. “Our customers are looking for places where they can spend time, connect and have an experience in addition to shopping.”

Irvine Company said combined traffic at the two centers increased 18% over the past five years. It did not say how much of that gain could be attributed to dining. Gillett said visitors who come for coffee, lunch or dinner tend to stay longer, shop afterward, visit more stores and return more often.

That does not mean the old anchors are kaput. Gillett said Nordstrom and Target at Irvine Spectrum and Neiman Marcus at Fashion Island remain important “for designer fashion and beauty.” Malls fold meals into the visit, with eateries including Sushi Roku, 59th & Lex, Sessions, Bazille and Cafe Bistro. The strategy, he said, is to balance retail, dining, entertainment and other experiences.

Beyond their food courts, Orange County malls offer an impressive culinary lineup. At South Coast Plaza, Michelin twinkler Knife Pleat shares space with AnQi Bistro and Vox Kitchen & Bar. Taiwan-born Din Tai Fung opened its first Orange County spot there, while Singapore-based Paradise Dynasty made its U.S. debut there in 2021. Blue Box Café by Daniel Boulud is the only one outside Tiffany & Co.’s New York City space. Even affordable concepts with chef pedigree have popped up at the Costa Mesa mall; Tiny’s Burger, chef Sang Yoon burger-and-bodega concept, opened in June.

“Dining is a major draw at South Coast Plaza,” said Tenley Zinke, the center’s executive director of marketing. “Whether it’s a leisurely lunch or a celebratory dinner, a memorable restaurant experience gives guests a reason to linger and make a day of it.”

Fine dining, however you see it, is nothing new at malls. Zinke traces South Coast Plaza’s retail-dining marriage to 1968 when Joseph Magnin featured Le Soupçon (both closing in 1984). Charlie Palmer and others followed. What has changed, though, is the breadth of the offerings and their weight in leasing decisions, with restaurants increasingly expected to generate some of the traffic historically supplied by department stores.

Nationally, that shift comes as department stores, once the almighty anchors of American malls, lose some of their pull. U.S. department store sales were virtually flat through the first eight months of 2026, rising above 0.2% year over year. Meanwhile, total retail and food service sales rose 5.2%, according to a recent Census Bureau report.

At Brea Mall, that shift is visible outside. Its exterior redevelopment adds an outdoor plaza and 11 retail and dining space, including a 14,000-square-foot Din Tai Fung, North Italia and Pacific Catch. The Shops at Mission Viejo is building a 50,000-square-foot open-air village near its food court. North Italia is slated for late 2026, followed by Gus’s BBQ, Tommy Bahama Marlin Bar and Blue Bottle Coffee in early 2027.

“People are planning dining occasions more intentionally than ever, and they’re willing to go out of their way for experiences they’re excited about,” said DJ Duporte, senior director of marketing at North Italia. “Whether someone comes for dinner and stays to shop or comes to shop and decides to grab a meal, the best properties create that natural connection.”

The buildout comes as several of the country’s malls post traffic gains. Estimates supplied by location-analytics firm Placer.ai show visits increased year-over-year every month from January through August at Brea Mall, Irvine Spectrum and Fashion Island. In August, visits rose 30.4% at Brea Mall, 14.8% at Irvine Spectrum and 6% at Fashion Island. South Coast Plaza gained 6.3% while The Shops at Mission Viejo climbed 1.2%.

Placer.ai, which provides location intelligence and demographic data for retailers, cannot isolate dining visits or establish cause and effect. Redevelopment, retail openings, events and other factors could also affect traffic. But it’s hard to ignore the importance of food – and humongous cookies – as a main draw.

Neither Irvine Company nor South Coast Plaza disclosed what share of revenue comes from dining. South Coast Plaza does not publish its landlord revenue. But a November 2025 Orange County Business Journal report put its annual taxable sales at $2.6 billion, placing it among the country’s biggest revenue generators.

At that scale, dining is hardly a side dish anymore. In today’s Orange County mall, where denizens are more prone to “add to cart” than hit a brick-and-mortar, a six-ounce cookie or basket of xiao long bao may be what gets customers through the door.

​ Orange County Register 

ICE hides locations of thousands of detainees with final removal orders

• September 21, 2026

By RYAN J. FOLEY

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding thousands of detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, an unannounced move that has made it far more difficult for lawyers and relatives to find them, according to current and former officials familiar with the practice.

ICE removed those detainees from its online detainee locator system on Sept. 15, according to three current and former ICE officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the change. Several lawyers contacted by The Associated Press confirmed their clients vanished from the system this week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members about the situation Friday.

The move represents a stark departure from previous practice and highlights the hardline nature of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, leaving thousands of detainees exceedingly hard to trace and potentially unable to exercise all of their legal options.

The practice, which applies to detainees who have received final orders of removal from an immigration court, could speed deportations by making last-minute legal challenges harder to pursue, immigration lawyers said. Nearly 16,000 people who were arrested and booked into ICE detention in July were subject to final removal orders, more than a third of the overall bookings, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.

The practice does not apply to detainees held at a detention facility in Adelanto, California, or at temporary holding facilities in Minneapolis, New York City or suburban Chicago, the sources said. Judges have ordered ICE to list detainees in those facilities in the online locator promptly upon their arrival, as part of litigation over their detention practices.

Lawyers and relatives distressed by lack of information on detainees

The effort to hide their locations adds to the ways in which the Trump administration has made life harder for detainees and their families as it has increased pressure on them to waive appeals and agree to deportation.

ICE did not publicize the move and in a statement issued to the AP, the agency did not confirm or deny it. The statement said detainees with final removal orders were being prioritized for deportation, even as ICE faces a “historic number of injunctions” from courts stopping individual removals.

As a result of the change, lawyers and relatives lost track of their clients and loved ones without explanation, which is especially concerning because detainees are frequently moved to new facilities before deportation, said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“Families are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don’t know where the person might be,” he said. “On the attorney side, this has serious implications for the ability to contact their client. It certainly has implications about how it will interfere with the attorney-client relationship.”

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has argued that people who are subject to final removal orders have received due process. That usually means an immigration judge has ordered their removal after a hearing, including cases when immigrants fail to show up, and the decision was affirmed on appeal or not appealed.

Detainees with final removal orders still have options to appeal

Still, those detainees have options to challenge their detention and removal, including seeking to reopen the case or by bringing what’s known as a habeas petition asking a judge to release them on constitutional grounds. Federal judges have granted thousands of rulings ordering that detainees be released or granted bond hearings.

ICE detention facilities held more than 65,000 people as of early July, the most recent available data. Around 30% of them likely have final removal orders, said Michelle Mendez, legal director at the National Immigration Project.

More people have been issued final removal orders after failing to show up for hearings in recent months because the administration’s immigration courts have taken steps to make it harder to participate and to reopen such cases, she said.

“To me, it’s just another iteration of disappearing people,” she said. “Why would we do that in the United States of America? It’s something we’d hear about in another country and be concerned about individual rights and due process.”

Some with final removal orders also have legal protections against deportation to their countries of origin based on the likelihood they would be tortured or persecuted. Many of them are facing removal to third-party countries where they have no ties and their disappearance in ICE’s system will make legal challenges harder, lawyers said.

Lawyers say clients have vanished from ICE locator system

ICE initiated the online detainee locator system in 2010 to allow relatives, lawyers and the public to search for people in custody. Previously they had to call ICE regional offices or individual facilities to try to track them down.

Many advocates and lawmakers have complained that the system updates too slowly and contains too much inaccurate or missing information, allowing ICE to shield the locations of detainees for days or weeks. Minors, people who have been held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection for less than 48 hours, and detainees who are being transported are not in the system, among others.

But the exclusion of detainees with final removal orders has no apparent parallel, several immigration lawyers said. Atenas Burrola Estrada, a deputy program director with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said that “every single one of our clients who has a final order has disappeared from the locator,” including 17 in all as of Monday.

Among those disappeared from the locator system are eight Somali men being detained at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to one of their attorneys, My Khanh Ngo, of the American Civil Liberties Union. She said the change could make it “nearly impossible” for people to challenge their removals in some cases.

“If you can’t find your client, don’t know what’s happening to your client, you can’t get that information to the court to stop their removal,” she said.

​ Orange County Register 

Gates Foundation launches coalition to build more representative language data sets for AI

• September 21, 2026

By JAMES POLLARD

NEW YORK (AP) — The Gates Foundation is convening Anthropic, Google, OpenAI Foundation and dozens of other organizations to help make artificial intelligence more accessible in underrepresented languages.

The partners — 60 in total, according to Monday’s announcement — include frontier AI labs, corporations, philanthropies and others already working to expand the number of languages available in AI tools that the Gates Foundation believes could combat global inequality. The coalition aims to reach more than 3 billion people over five years by better coordinating existing efforts.

It’s work that must continue “full speed ahead,” according to Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, even as some of the largest AI companies urge their industry to slow down development of advanced models. Governments must regulate the impacts on cybersecurity or children’s development, he said, while they extend AI’s humanitarian applications to poor communities currently “shut out” from the technology.

“Even if AI was frozen right now — which I don’t expect and I am not calling for — we would want to be building these language sets and making them usable with the tools that we have available right now,” Suzman told The Associated Press.

The collaboration follows last week’s Goalkeepers report, where the foundation committed $1 billion toward AI-focused efforts to improve health outcomes, upgrade educational tools and inform small farmers’ practices around the world. Unrepresentative language data could lead a model to mistranslate a pregnant Malawi woman saying her “water has broken” into the direct English that she’d “thrown away water,” the report warned.

The “original sin” is that many AI tools were trained on language data scraped from the internet, according to Mozilla Data Collective CEO E.M. Lewis-Jong, whose company was incubated by the Mozilla Foundation and is now a subsidiary of the not-for-profit Mozilla.org. The data-sharing platform seeks to help communities upload cultural and linguistic data sets on their own terms rather than have that data taken from the web without their explicit consent.

“The internet is not a representative space,” she said. “Why would you think that you were going to get a culturally diverse and representative system out of something that was predominantly trained on Reddit?”

Details such as the coalition’s governance are still getting hammered out, according to Suzman. A secretariat will track each signatory’s commitments and the Gates Foundation may nudge partners to fill larger gaps when necessary.

Google, a member of the coalition, has been funding an effort to collect more than 150,000 hours of audio across every district in India. Known as Project Vaani, the push underscores the need to gather speech data on dialects within languages, according to Google senior vice president James Manyika. To get there, he said, Google is working with local partners to record speech in the field.

Anthropic, whose CEO published an essay calling for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements, was already working with the foundation to speed up vaccine developments and bolster its chatbot’s data set of local crops. Elizabeth Kelly, the head of beneficial deployments at Anthropic, acknowledged the company’s products “lag in many African languages in particular.”

“We’re acutely aware that we can’t achieve any of the benefits we want to see in terms of improving patient outcomes or improving literacy and numeracy for students across the globe unless we actually get this language piece right,” she said.

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

​ Orange County Register 

Recipe: Ginger pumps up the flavor of salmon fillets in this tasty main dish

• September 21, 2026

Salmon and fresh ginger are delectable partners. When a soy sauce-based marinade comes to the party, the umami-boosted flavors render the fish irresistible.

I like to serve this salmon concoction with rice to capture excess pan juices, along with either cooked baby bok choy, broccoli or Chinese broccoli (gai lan).

Gingered Salmon Fillets with Soy Sauce and Sesame Seeds

Yield: 4 servings

INGREDIENTS

4 large garlic cloves, peeled

2 crosswise slices of fresh unpeeled ginger (enough to produce about 2 to 3 teaspoons minced ginger)

4 tablespoons soy sauce

1 1/2 tablespoons Asian-style (roasted) sesame oil

1 tablespoon light brown sugar

3 tablespoons minced yellow or brown onion

1 tablespoon toasted sesame seeds, see cook’s notes

3 1/2 tablespoons chopped green onion, white and green stalk

4 (5- to 6-ounce) salmon fillets, skin-on preferred

Garnish: 1 green onion, thinly sliced, including green stalk

Cook’s notes: To toast sesame seeds, place in small skillet on medium heat. Frequently shake handle or stir seeds until they are lightly browned; transfer to plate to cool. Keep an eye on them while browning because they burn easily.

DIRECTIONS

1. Prepare marinade: With the motor running on food processor, drop garlic and ginger in feedtube; process until minced, scraping down sides if needed. Add soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar, onion; pulse on/off to combine. Stir in sesame seeds and chopped green onion. Place salmon in large zipper-style plastic bag; add marinade and seal. Refrigerate 2 to 3 hours.

2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place salmon and marinade in medium-sized baking pan (I use a medium-sized glass baking dish), skin-side down. Bake until just barely cooked through, 12 to 15 minutes, depending on thickness and degree of doneness you prefer (it may take as much as 20 to 25 minutes). If using skin-on salmon, use a thin metal spatula between the flesh and skin to remove fillets from the pan, leaving the skin behind. Serve with pan juices.

Award-winning food writer Cathy Thomas has written three cookbooks, including “Melissa’s 50 Best Plants on the Planet.” Follow her at CathyThomasCooks.com.

​ Orange County Register 

Report offers rare insight into the risks and challenges facing US deportees in Haiti

• September 21, 2026

By DÁNICA COTO

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Human Rights Watch released a report on Monday detailing the hardships faced by hundreds of people deported by the United States to gang-ravaged Haiti.

The report is the first intimate look at the lives of deportees who have declined to speak at length with journalists because they fear for their safety. Gang violence is surging and hunger and poverty are deepening.

The U.S. has deported more than 470 people to Haiti since July, including people who lost Temporary Protected Status, which had allowed them to live and work legally in the U.S.

The main international airport in Port-au-Prince is considered too dangerous because of persistent gang violence, so deportation flights are landing in the northern city of Cap-Haitien. Mayor Michel Saint-Croix told Human Rights Watch that the city’s population has tripled to more than 1 million in the past two years as it receives deportees and Haitians fleeing violence elsewhere in the country.

The deportees’ arrival has strained already limited resources. Haitian migration officials said the U.S. government has told them it planned to send as many as two deportation flights a week, each carrying about 200 people, according to the report.

Deportees share details of their lives

Human Rights Watch said it interviewed 44 deportees, as well as Haitian and international officials.

Deportees said they went for hours without food or water and days without bathing or changing clothes while held at U.S. immigration detention facilities. The interviewees said their belongings, including official documents and money, were not returned to them when they arrived in Haiti.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The rights group said it reviewed passenger manifests for two deportation flights in August. Neither contained information about the deportees’ immigration status or the grounds for their removal.

Most of the 44 deportees interviewed said they had fled Haiti’s worsening security and humanitarian crises and settled in U.S. states, including Florida, New York, Indiana and Ohio. They found work in sectors such as construction, healthcare and manufacturing.

Many said they were from Port-au-Prince or surrounding areas, where armed men control an estimated 70% of the capital. Others said they were from the Artibonite region, which is under assault by violent gangs.

The deportees lived in the U.S. for anywhere from two to 14 years before being sent back to Haiti. Among them was a 38-year-old unidentified man who said he had lived in Florida since December 2019 and worked at the same hotel for more than six years.

His wife and 5-year-old son, who is a U.S. citizen, remain in Florida, according to the report.

“I worked so that he could grow up without the fear, violence, and uncertainty that I had known in Haiti,” the man was quoted as saying.

He and several other deportees said they had Temporary Protected Status, although the rights group noted it could not independently verify those claims.

A 47-year-old woman said she had lived in Miami with her husband, a U.S. citizen, and was arrested when she attended an interview to apply for permanent residence.

“Once detained, most interviewees said authorities did not allow them to contact their lawyers or appear before an immigration judge, while many received little or no information about their pending asylum claims, the grounds for their detention, or how they could challenge their deportation,” Human Rights Watch said.

Another deportee was a 24-year-old nursing assistant student who said she applied for asylum after fleeing Haiti in 2023 after gangs attacked her community.

Violence, hunger and poverty persist

At least 19,380 people were reported killed across Haiti between January 2023 and June 2026, according to the United Nations.

Hunger and poverty also are deepening as Haitian police and a U.N.-backed mission struggle to contain gang violence. More than 253,000 children aged six months to 5 years are expected to suffer acute malnutrition in upcoming months, according to a new report by Haiti’s government and agencies including UNICEF.

“The United States is returning people, some with pending asylum claims, to a country that doesn’t have the capacity to protect them from violence, let alone help them find food and shelter,” said Nathalye Cotrino, senior Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The U.S. government should immediately halt these removals.”

Deportees arriving in Haiti are given a simple meal, a drink and about $77 in cash.

“After registering, deportees were left to fend for themselves, and many did not know what to do or where to go next,” the report said.

​ Orange County Register