They both fought to break free from guardianship. Only one escaped.
THE BIG STORY
They both fought to break free from guardianship. Only one escaped. Doug Keegan was a retired electrical engineer when he met Monica Steele, an energetic trainee nurse who had emigrated from Kenya a decade earlier and become a US citizen. Romance quickly blossomed, and the two married in 2014.
When Keegan's relatives found out he had married Steele, they hired lawyers to persuade a judge to put him under guardianship. Lawyers cited his alcoholism and his marriage to a woman they claimed was stealing from him as proof that he was incapable of making his own decisions. Keegan was locked in a series of homes for people with severe mental impairments, while accounting records show that the professionals managing his life charged him hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and other guardianship expenses.
Arieana Wynter struggled with depression, anger management, and PTSD throughout her teenage years. An abuse survivor with no money and no permanent home, she cycled in and out of residential treatment facilities before being placed under a guardianship at age 18. But the care home was abusive, and Wynter said she was "getting worse every day." She begged for months to be reunited with her husband.
The public rarely hears directly from people under guardianship given the restrictions they live under. Concealing burner phones and secretly logging on to computers, Keegan and Wynter overcame tremendous odds to speak to BuzzFeed News about their experiences.
They both fought hard to get out of their guardianships. In the end, only one of them would escape.
STAYING ON TOP OF THIS
The federal government is finally acknowledging that extreme heat kills workers  A cooling shelter during a heat wave in Portland, Oregon, in August 2021. (Mathieu Lewis-rolland/Reuters) The US government will develop national rules to protect workers from extreme heat, as part of a series of White House initiatives addressing the growing health risk posed by climate change.
Extreme heat is now the leading weather-related killer in the US — and this summer revealed how unprepared the country is for the emerging threat. Hundreds of people died in June from a record-shattering heatwave that battered the Pacific Northwest. And in the absence of federal heat rules, workers have been especially vulnerable, with at least 384 workers dying from environmental heat exposure across the US in the past decade.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is set to launch a process to develop a federal heat standard for workers and conduct more heat-related company inspections to ensure adequate working conditions for employees.
"As with other weather events, extreme heat is gaining in frequency and ferocity due to climate change, threatening communities across the country," President Joe Biden said in a statement. "My administration will not leave Americans to face this threat alone." SNAPSHOTS
The US is ending its international travel ban for fully vaccinated people. Travelers will need to provide airlines with detailed contact information to allow for contact tracing if they are involved in an outbreak.
A former police officer who worked for R. Kelly claimed he never saw the singer with young girls — then acknowledged he actually had. Larry Hood, who left the Chicago Police Department after a forgery conviction, admitted to seeing Kelly around Aaliyah and her "little friends" starting when she was 12 or 13.
Joe Biden's agenda is hanging by a thread as Democrats in Congress fight with each other. Progressives and centrists are holding major pieces of legislation hostage, and both have the numbers to make good on their threats.
THE PRO-ABORTION FIGHT CONTINUES
Hundreds of athletes have signed onto a brief calling for the Supreme Court to protect abortion rights More than 500 athletes and coaches, as well as the players' unions for two major women's sports leagues, said in an amicus brief filed Monday that forcing people to carry pregnancies to term would reverse major gains in gender equality in sports.
The brief includes several personal accounts from the athletes, including Crissy Perham, a swimmer and Olympic gold medalist, who publicly shared her abortion story for the first time. Perham, who captained the 1992 Olympic swim team, said her decision to end a pregnancy during college gave her "a second chance at life."
"I was able to take control of my future and refocus my priorities. I got better in school, I started training really hard, and that summer, I won my first national championship," she said. "That choice ultimately led me to being an Olympian, a college graduate, and a proud mother today."
Monday's brief was released as the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments in a major abortion case later this year, one that concerns a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In December, the court is set to consider the question of whether any ban on abortion before a fetus can survive outside the womb is unconstitutional. EGO DEATH
Psychedelics summer camp: a new form of tourism  (Pedro Nekoi for BuzzFeed News) Psychedelic tourism in the Western world is trending. Gwyneth Paltrow dispatched her staffers to a magic mushroom retreat for an episode of her Netflix series, The Goop Lab. Megan Fox recently told Jimmy Kimmel about visiting a Costa Rican resort serving ayahuasca, a ceremonial brew used by pan-Amazonian Indigenous groups; Lindsay Lohan is an evangelist. Luxury retreats for (mostly white, middle-class) Americans to experiment with psychedelic rituals are popping up left and right.
So what does it feel like to embark on a psychedelic retreat in search of "ego death"? John Semley traveled to Montego, Jamaica, to try 5-MeO-DMT, a drug that's been dubbed the most powerful psychedelic on the planet. His experience was weird, illuminating, and life-altering. Read more about it here.
(5-MeO-DMT is illegal in the United States and could cause short-term and long-term health and medical effects. Semley and BuzzFeed News are not promoting the use of 5-MeO-DMT among readers.) Trust your instincts, Alexa 📝 This letter was edited and brought to you by Alexa Lee and BuzzFeed News. You can always reach us here.
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