Category: News Feeds

Fulton Mangwanya, the director-general of the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, told a parliamentary committee that 34 elephants have died so far and “many” more could still die “in the short term.”

“All results to date point to the cause of these elephant deaths being a disease known as hemorrhagic septicemia,” said Mangwanya, noting that the disease does not appear to have been previously recorded as causing deaths among Africa’s savannah elephants.

“However, it has been reported to kill Asian elephants in India. It has also affected cattle, pigs, and chickens in southern Africa in which it can cause massive mortality. It has also been recognized in buffalo and some other wildlife species in this part of this world,” he said.

He said the disease “may have been around in elephants in this region for some time,” pointing to specimens from two dead elephants from the vast Hwange National Park in 2019 that showed “the same microscopic pathology,” although a definitive diagnosis could not be made at that time.

Most of the elephants that died recently in the Pandamasue Forest, located between Hwange National Park and Victoria Falls, were weak or young, mostly under 15 years old.

The dead elephants were found with their tusks still on their bodies, ruling out poaching. In recent years poachers in Zimbabwe have poisoned dozens of elephants with cyanide and then have taken their ivory tusks to sell them to illegal traders.

The parks authorities also said toxic water was an unlikely cause because the country has been pumping “clean water” from wells during this dry season.

To eliminate other causes, blood samples have been sent to the United Kingdom, while other samples will be sent to the United States and neighboring South Africa for further testing, said Mangwanya.

Not enough information is known about the disease’s effect on local elephants to predict a long-term outcome, he said.

“It is unlikely that this disease alone will have any serious overall impact,” on the survival of the southern African country’s booming elephant population, said Mangwanya.

“Yes they die, but honestly this is just nothing, a drop in the ocean because we have over 84,000 elephants in Zimbabwe, which is overpopulation already,” he said. “But this is a disease that we should work seriously to make sure that we unearth and identify properly so that corrective measures are taken,” said Mangwanya.

In neighboring Botswana, home to the world’s largest population of the pachyderms, the government last week said the sudden deaths of some 330 elephants in the northwestern region of the country earlier this year may have occurred because they drank water contaminated by toxic blue-green algae.

Mangwanya said the recent elephant deaths in Zimbabwe also showed that the animals experienced “extremely sudden death,” and that Botswana might need to conduct tests to find out if it’s not the same bacterial infection being experienced in Zimbabwe.

But many teachers did not report for work, as their union demanded that the government should first pay them a COVID-19 allowance and improve their salaries and working conditions.

Raymond Majongwe, secretary-general of the Progressive Teachers Union which is one of the largest in Zimbabwe, said teachers would report for work as soon as the government agreed to their demands.

“Teachers cannot afford the busfare to report for duty. They cannot even afford to pay school fees for their own children from the pathetic salaries that they get, yet they are expected to teach other people’s children,” said Majongwe while touring some schools in Harare on Monday.

Teachers in Zimbabwe’s government schools earn less than $50 a month and are demanding that they be paid at least $500 a month, he said.

Primary and secondary school pupils wore masks and applied sanitizer before entering classrooms on Monday. The teachers who reported for work conducted lessons. At some schools, such as at David Livingstone Primary School in the capital, Harare, lessons started more than an hour late as staff distributed sanitizing dispensers.

The students in grades 7 and the final year of secondary school are to write local public examinations in order to graduate from primary and secondary school, respectively. The examinations are expected to start in December, even though pupils lost considerable learning time since their schools have been closed since the end of March, as part of a nation-wide lockdown to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Students lucky enough to have parents who could afford internet access took online lessons. Some teachers conducted small face-to-face lessons in the backyards of their homes. Children in Zimbabwe’s rural areas were the worst affected because many have no access to electricity, internet or backyard classes.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa last week assured parents and pupils that the government has put in place adequate measures to ensure the safety of returning pupils.

Zimbabwe, a country of 14.5 million people, has recorded more than 7,500 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 227 deaths. The numbers of new cases and deaths have grown more slowly in recent weeks, encouraging the government to reopen much of the economy and to try to return the country to a semblance of normal life.

Post published in: Featured

The youths told ZimLive by phone that they had “found each other” with a section of the youth leadership loyal to MDC-T leader Thokozani Khupe.“We have just recovered Harvest House. It was a nice and clean retake,” an MDC Alliance youth leader said from inside the building, asking not to be named because he said all would be explained at a news conference at 10AM on Monday.

Paul Gorekore, the MDC-T’s current youth chairman for Harare province, is believed to have facilitated the latest occupation, accusing Khupe of “aiding the suffering of the masses” through working with Zanu PF.

MDC Alliance youth chairman for Harare Denford Ngadziore is understood to have also entered Harvest House, and will address Monday’s news conference.

In a brief statement, Gorekore said: “MDC-T Harare province (2014 structures) has taken over control of the party HQ tonight. This has been necessitated by our realisation o the need to unite the people in the fight for a better Zimbabwe.

“We as the youths have decided to go beyond our differences and unite to resolve the current crisis. We have been concerned by recent developments where the party (MDC-T) has been infiltrated by some Zanu PF elements battling to destroy the people’s movement thereby aiding the suffering of the masses.”

The youths said they had taken contingency measures, including changing locks and using chains to fortify the entrances.

Previous attempts by the MDC Alliance leadership to take back the building saw the party’s deputy leaders Tendai Biti and Lynette Karenyi-Kore being arrested. The youths told ZimLive they expected police and the military to try and reclaim the building for Khupe. The military has previously denied facilitating the initial occupation.

The leadership of the MDC Alliance party has been disputed since a March Supreme Court judgement which said the party’s leader Nelson Chamisa was illegitimate for failing to follow the party constitution when he succeeded founding leader Morgan Tsvangirai in February 2018.

The court said Khupe, having been elected as Tsvangirai’s sole deputy at a previous congress held in 2014, should have assumed interim charge pending an extraordinary congress.

But by the time that judgement was delivered, Chamisa had led the MDC Alliance into an election in which he narrowly lost to Zanu PF leader Emmerson Mnangagwa. Khupe took part in the elections in July 2018 as leader of the MDC-T.

Khupe has used the judgement, which the MDC Alliance says was engineered by Zanu PF, to assert herself as leader of the MDC-T party, and also the Alliance, while moving to claim the party’s properties as well as funding due to it from the government.

Despite winning just two seats in parliament through proportional representation, she is now claiming leadership of over 100 MDC Alliance lawmakers and hundreds of councillors across the country. Those who reject her leadership have been recalled, including 24 MPs and Senators and dozens of councillors.

Post published in: Featured

Tanaka, 10, is in the fifth grade. Because of a shortage of teachers, students and classrooms, she has to learn with sixth-grade students.

She and her classmates are among thousands of students who attend so-called satellite schools, created 20 years ago to serve black farmers who needed basic services after the government resettled them on larger, more fertile fields. Until then, white commercial farmers owned most of Zimbabwe’s choicest plots of land.

Officials set up temporary, bare-bones facilities, which didn’t carry formal names, weren’t registered with the government and cost far less than most schools. Farmhouses, tobacco barns, sties and stables were suddenly transformed into classrooms.

The resettlement program, known as fast-track land reform, promised greater economic opportunity and stability to Zimbabwe’s black majority. But that prosperity has eluded many black farmers. Instead, those in resettled areas remain among the country’s poorest citizens.

Satellite schools are a stark symbol of that stalled progress, as many hobble along with few resources, and annually earn the lowest scores on Zimbabwe’s critically important public exams.

“The main problem we are facing is that parents do not have a source of income to pay school fees and buy books,” says Gracious, the headmistress of Tanaka’s school, who asked not to use her full name because she feared retribution from government officials for discussing the school’s inadequacies.

Parents, education experts and government officials say the state has failed satellite-school students. The issue drew fresh attention in March when Parliament passed an education bill mandating that all children receive free schooling.

“When we are talking about the coming in of free education, it needs to be targeted at satellite schools so that we can invest in their infrastructure and in making them reasonable schools for the kids to attend,” says Priscilla Misihairimbwi Mushonga, chairperson of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Primary and Secondary Education.

Between 2006 and 2018, the number of primary satellite schools shot up by almost 42% to 1,029, according to government figures. Many of them are found here in Mashonaland West province, where Tanaka’s satellite school is located.

During fast-track land reform, scores of black farmers were resettled in this farm-rich province, 139 kilometers (86 miles) west of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. Today satellites make up 31% of the province’s schools — the highest percentage in the country.

“Satellite schools are not going to disappear overnight,” says Caiphus Nziramasanga, who led an education commission inquiry in 1998.

This wasn’t the plan 20 years ago.

Back then, the land reform program handed property to at least 150,000 black farmers with the promise of food security and economic empowerment. Instead, a host of challenges have held them back, including lack of seeds and fertilizer and little access to machinery and financing. As of 2017, the government reported, about 83% of the resettled and communal farmers lived in poverty.

Satellite schools, originally fashioned as short-term facilities, reflect that poverty. They lack textbooks, technology and furniture, and at many satellites, few students pass public exams, which shape a student’s academic path.

“The infrastructure is bad for most of them,” Mushonga says. “It’s raining now, and some pupils sit outside. Some learn in barns. Reading materials and teachers are limited. This is not an ideal learning setup.”

Tanaka’s school sits a few meters from the Chirundu highway that leads to neighboring Zambia. Nearby are thatched huts and clay-brick houses, surrounded by small patches of farmland.

Built in 2002 for resettled farmers, the school hosts 339 students, from toddlers in early childhood development classes up to seventh-graders. There are seven teachers. (Some urban primary schools enroll as many as 2,000 students.)

The school, which charges fees of 30 Zimbabwean dollars (ZWL) (36 cents) per term, has only one classroom, used for early childhood development students. It offers few extracurricular activities. There are no netball hoops and no football pitch — staples at many schools.

Administrators have managed to buy desks, but students have few textbooks.

Miriam Mangwiro, mother of a first-grade student, wants to send her child elsewhere, but can’t afford anything else.

The lack of proper classrooms is “a health risk,” says Mangwiro, who grows tobacco and maize. “Such learning facilities aren’t good for students.”

Still, Gracious and her staff press on. In particular, they have paid special attention to raising scores on public exams. Since 2017, the headmistress says, her school’s pass rate has climbed from 24% to 34% last year.

“We have managed to do our best,” she says, “despite the challenges we are facing.”

Linda Mujuru, GPJ, translated some interviews from Shona.

There’s major news in the ART world out of Georgia this week. On Monday, September 28, 2020, the Peach State’s Supreme Court released its opinion in Norman v. Xytex. It reverses lower court decisions that had essentially granted blanket immunity to all sperm banks, regardless of any negligence — indeed, even intentional wrongdoing — in failing to screen sperm donors or misrepresenting their personal history. A Georgia trial and appellate court had found that the defendant sperm bank, Xytex, couldn’t be found liable even if it had done all the terrible things the plaintiffs claimed. Wow! Really? Yes. Hence, some pretty incredulous sounding Georgia Supreme Court judges during oral arguments back in May 2020.

The accusations in this case stem from Xytex’s sale of sperm from Donor 9623. Plaintiffs alleged the sperm bank encouraged the donor to lie about his credentials, falsely marketed his sperm as some of the “best,” opted not to confirm the truth of the donor’s social, educational, or medical background; and did not tell the plaintiffs when the bank received concerning medical information about the donor that could have immensely helped in dealing with their donor-conceived child’s mental health issues.

I am sure loyal readers remember this case. Xytex promoted Donor 9623’s sperm (for almost 14 years!) as sourced from a neuroscience Ph.D. student with a 160 IQ, proficient in multiple languages, and with an essentially perfect medical and social background. In reality, Donor 9623 was a felon and college dropout, who suffered from severe mental health issues, causing him to be in and out of institutions. To hear the whole story, and a breakdown of the legal and ethical issues, check out law professor Dov Fox’s Audible series, Donor 9623. Professor Fox even landed an exclusive interview with the donor himself!

This lawsuit was not against the donor. Instead, the case sought damages against the sperm bank related to some of the serious challenges the plaintiffs’ child had faced due to their genetic background. But thanks to prior Georgia precedents — a case called Abelson to be precise — the lower courts dismissed all of plaintiffs’ claims under the heading of “wrongful birth.” Fox told me wrongful birth claims have been thought to violate public policy for sending an intolerable message that: “People of a certain type are too defective to exist.” Or, maybe worse: “I wish my own child hadn’t been born.”

The Ruling — A Victory For Reasonableness In Justice

In yesterday’s opinion, the Georgia Supreme Court started by reaffirming the precedent that bona fide wrongful birth claims are barred under current Georgia law. And that only the legislative branch of government, not the judiciary, can change that. However, the court went on to say the lower courts had erred in determining that all of plaintiffs’ claims were, in fact, wrongful birth claims. While, yes, some of plaintiffs’ damages were prohibited under the category, many of plaintiffs’ claims were not specifically tied to the existence of the child, and should not be dismissed on those grounds.

Multiple Claims Still Standing. The court walked through several claims by the plaintiffs that did not fall under the rubric of a wrongful birth claim. For example, the court pointed out that the plaintiffs’ evidence suggested that Xytex knew of the donor’s serious mental health issues as early as 2014. Plaintiffs did not find out until 2017, despite an alleged promise by the sperm bank to update recipients as to any significant medical developments every six months. Such delays may have exacerbated the pain and suffering, and additional expenses of the plaintiffs and their child. That’s just a straight-up negligence claim.

Fox said one of most striking conclusions comes at the very end of the 27-page opinion, where the court adds, almost as an afterthought, that misrepresenting donor information can leave companies liable for “deceptive trade practices” that “essentially amount to ordinary consumer fraud.” That may not sound all that surprising, Fox acknowledges. It’s just sperm — advertised like crazy — and sold for a pretty penny. “But,” he told me, “admitting that donor selection is shopping — and treating parents as consumers — gets at one of the biggest controversies in this whole story: What’s okay to want in a child, when you’re in a position to try to choose? Just 10 fingers and toes? Good looks and fancy degrees? What about height or perfect pitch? When does it cross the line from just wanting the best for your future kid, to designing a baby to satisfy your tastes?”

Overall, the opinion is a major move toward accountability for sperm banks in the just about half of states that ban wrongful birth claims. Facilities there would have been able to misrepresent their “products” with impunity. Now, hopeful parents in Georgia at least will have recourse when sperm banks don’t meet their promises. I expect high courts in other states will follow the persuasive opinion on this issue by the Georgia Supreme Court.

As to this particular suit, it’s not over. Now that the plaintiffs have overcome the motion to dismiss, they will have to actually prove the allegations against Xytex — that the sperm bank was not just a victim of a clever and conniving donor. (That’s what Xytex’s CEO at the time told Fox in the Audible Original about the case.) Moreover, as is frequently a challenge in assisted reproductive technology litigation, the plaintiffs will need to prove their exact damages, by calculating the value of intangible factors that are inherently difficult to value. I’m looking forward to seeing how they handle those challenges in the next steps of the litigation.

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Ellen Trachman is the Managing Attorney of Trachman Law Center, LLC, a Denver-based law firm specializing in assisted reproductive technology law, and co-host of the podcast I Want To Put A Baby In You. You can reach her at babies@abovethelaw.com.

Over the course of September, Vault has rolled out a variety of law firm rankings — from the firms that are the most prestigious to the firms that offer the best quality of life to the firms with the top-ranked practice areas in their region to the best midsized firms — and there’s yet another important one that we’ll dive into today.

Money can buy prestige and can certainly improve your quality of life, but the diversity of your colleagues is worth more than what any salary scale can possibly pay.

In a companion ranking to the Vault 100, associates were asked to rank their own law firms based on categories most relevant to how the firm does at creating, maintaining, and fostering a diverse workforce, including diversity relating to racial minorities, women, LGBTQ individuals, and individuals with disabilities. To create the overall Best 30 Firms for Diversity ranking, Vault averages the scores from all four ratings.

There was a huge amount of movement in the Top 10 this year. Which firms made the cut? Without any further ado, here are the Top 10 Best Law Firms for Diversity based on Vault’s Annual Associate Survey for 2021:

1. O’Melveny & Myers (no change)
2. Constangy Brooks, Smith & Prophete (+1)
3. Ropes & Gray (+2)
4. Carlton Fields (-2)
5. Paul Hastings (+12)
6. Eversheds Sutherland (US) (+12)
7. White & Case (-1)
8. Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe (-4)
9. Littler Mendelson (-1)
10. Clifford Chance US (+3)

It’s worth noting that O’Melveny once again swept Vault’s diversity rankings, but there are some other firms worth acknowledging here. Here’s some additional commentary on that:

In this year’s 2021 diversity rankings, one firm stood out from the rest—for the second year in a row, O’Melveny took the crown as the No.1-ranked firm in every diversity category. The rankings also saw a particularly strong showing from five additional firms that placed in the top 10 in all five diversity categories: Carlton Fields, P.A.; Constangy Brooks, Smith & Prophete, LLP; Eversheds Sutherland; Ropes & Gray; and White & Case LLP.

Congratulations to each of the Biglaw firms that made the latest edition of the Vault Best Firms for Diversity rankings, and a huge congratulations to O’Melveny for yet another rankings sweep. How did your firm do? Email us, text us at (646) 820-8477, or tweet us @atlblog to let us know how you feel.

Best Law Firms for Diversity (2021) [Vault]

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

It’s possible that the whole point of the bar exam as a project is to keep people from having anything that the bar examiners might consider an unfair advantage on the test. Of course, bar examiners would recoil at phrasing it this way, but if the goal was to test minimum competency to be an attorney, the exam would reflect the skills attorneys actually employ, like conducting research to find answers. However, this isn’t at all what it tests and everything about the pandemic experience with bar exams confirms this with bar examiners oscillating between forcing people to subject themselves to COVID in order to ensure the integrity of the exam and pushing ahead with glitchy and racist tech solutions in a death drive to get something that ostensibly robs anyone of the sort of advantage they don’t want.

With a slew of ExamSoft online exams happening across the country next week, at least there’s no cause for alarm that someone out there might be undermining the integrity of the exam that the examiners seem to care so much about…

Oh dear.

To understand what these ads are talking about, you need to know how the online bar exam works. The testing platform doesn’t actually blast the exam to everyone on Monday morning. Much like the in-person proctors who hand out sealed booklets and instruct everyone to break them open at once, ExamSoft sends the exam to the applicant’s computer days in advance and decrypts it at the appointed time. And what these ads propose is that hackers are selling the decryption key to allow people to get started on the test early.

Assuming ExamSoft is on top of things, they’re changing around how they encrypt files with every administration to ensure that they stay ahead of these hackers. And if bar examiners have faith that the vendor has done this diligently then there’s nothing to worry about. Except….

In the immediate aftermath of Desktopgate — where multiple ExamSoft jurisdictions unexpectedly banned desktop computers days before the exam — a Redditor offered some thoughts as a computer expert on why this might be happening. While this was mostly an issue with external monitors, the author took some time to talk about security too and it wasn’t encouraging. In a nutshell, the update schedule suggests that the decryption code is already present on the computer — or will be at some point in advance of the exam — and given that ExamSoft historically uses hexadecimal codes, it could be cracked remarkably quickly.

The takeaway here is that a motivated reverse engineer will have a cracker ready to run as soon as the exam files are downloaded to our machines. From there, it’s only a matter of time before the exam files are decrypted and distributable. If this happens before the exam starts, it will be fatally compromised. Worse, because this can all be done offline and the exam files extracted and distributed separately, it is literally impossible to know if somebody has succeeded in doing this.

Running a bar exam is as much about perception as anything else. If the public believes the exam is compromised, it loses all credibility whether or not it’s actually true. Right now, bar examiners across the country are on notice that someone might be able to distribute the test materials before it begins.

So far, the only bar examiner response we’ve seen to these sorts of issues is to stress that the code of conduct bans cheating like this. Fair enough. Though if the code of conduct is strong enough to overlook decryption keys, one wonders why they need to have draconian bathroom and food rules at all. Let alone why diabetics should have to skip their insulin. Either the honor system is good enough and we can dispense with all these rules or hackers sending around the test is a serious problem. It’s almost as if enforcing rules that treat applicants like children is more important than a severe risk of a hacked exam.

This is, to put it mildly, the wrong response to this claim. This is the sort of story that needs to be swiftly shut down with an emphatic statement that the exam really doesn’t work this way and that prior decryption keys won’t work with this year’s edition of the test. If that’s true, we should see statements within minutes.

But if that statement isn’t true… you’ve really got to wonder how bar examiners can close their eyes and go forward with this under these circumstances. After public health warnings, the mental fatigue of having the date jerked around, worries about crashing prior tests, racial bias in facial recognition tech, constant glitches, no technical support, now — finally — the vaunted “integrity” of the exam is in question. Now the examiners have a problem they actually care about.

Unless we’ve got this wrong and they don’t even care about that. Maybe it’s really just sufficient if there’s something written that lets them yell at applicants about eating a bag of chips while declaring that 20 percent of people have failed, thus justifying the organization’s existence as the sentinal of public protection for another year. If that’s the case, the public really should be a lot more worried about the profession.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

The Tice family reached out to the Pentagon press corps and asked us to help get the word out and see if something can be done to help get Austin Tice back home from Syria. The piece speaks for itself. Read on! The Editor.

I was at the beach with my family when my brother Austin called. His schedule at Georgetown Law School had prevented him from joining us. I slipped into an empty room at the little house we were renting and listened, astonished, as he told me he was planning a trip to Syria that summer of 2012, and he was asking me to come with him.

To this day, I’m not sure why he asked me. We had been on some adventures together, to Glacier National Park and in the beautiful Pacific Northwest where I have made my home, but nothing approaching these stakes. Maybe he believed I was up for it, that I had the same adventurous spirit burning in him and that I would leap at the chance, fresh out of college with vague plans for the future, to help him change the world.

I turned him down. I couldn’t imagine myself in those circumstances, untrained, lacking the war zone experience he had as a Marine Corps veteran with three tours behind him. I encouraged him to follow his heart, to bear witness to the escalating conflict in Syria. I believed in his vision, admired his grit and was behind him completely. He left in May.

On August 14, 2012, at a checkpoint outside Damascus, he disappeared.

That was 2,965 days ago as of this writing. I have not heard from my brother since. No one has claimed responsibility for his detention. Every single one of those days, and every day, my family wakes up hoping, praying, that this will be the last day of his captivity.

I think of that call when I read about Austin now, and how easily my name could have been next to his. I think of what he has endured in captivity and of what he has missed — all the birthdays, weddings, births, Thanksgivings and Christmases that my family and I have celebrated without him. In dark moments, I wonder if maybe, maybe, I could have been the difference. Maybe I would’ve said, “We shouldn’t get into this car.” Maybe the hairs on the back of my neck would’ve stood up at the offer, and we would have gone another way. Maybe he wouldn’t have stayed so long had he felt responsible for keeping me, his scrawny, inexperienced, intellectualized little brother, safe.

I don’t dwell on those thoughts, but they have persisted. They grew beneath the slow realization that this would not be resolved quickly, that he wouldn’t be home in days, or weeks. Beneath the pride of every award he has received and every column calling for his return, they persist. The thought of what he has endured in eight years is made fresh in each one; I cannot avoid it. I could have been there.

No president in our history has been more personally committed than President Donald Trump to bringing home American citizens held abroad. Our president has made it clear, time and again: The return of Americans is a deeply personal priority for him. It was from him, this March, that America first heard Austin’s name said aloud by a president. My heart leapt that day. My family appreciates the powerful effort this administration is exerting to bring him home. We have felt the progress, centimeter by excruciating centimeter.

Now, as we approach a ninth holiday season with an empty seat at our family’s Thanksgiving, a ninth Christmas spent wondering if Austin can see the stars, my brothers and sisters and I implore you from the depths of our hearts: Please help.

We beg you to reach out to your representatives in Congress. Tell them the story of the brother we love. Tell them it is a priority to see Austin’s safest and soonest return. Tell them to use their power to urge the president to restore Austin to our Thanksgiving table. Every second he stays in captivity cuts a deeper wound in the hearts of my family, and we can wait no longer. Help us make this summer the last he spends alone, and give 2020 a spark of brightness we so desperately need.

Join the campaign. Ask about Austin Tice. Bring him home.

Jacob Tice is the middle son of seven siblings and lives in Tacoma, Washington. You can learn more about Austin at AustinTiceFamily.com.