A Virginia mother who was reported missing earlier this month amid allegations of child abuse told a local news reporter that she and her three children are doing well.
A missing persons investigation began Sept. 13, after Lauren Cook failed to appear for a rescheduled court appearance in Franklin County Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court, authorities said. This was a rescheduled court appearance from a Sept. 5 date in which she did not appear.
Cook has been missing with her three children — 7-year-old Benjamin Cook, 5-year-old Hannah Cook and 2-year-old Elijah Cook. Her husband, Jordan Cook, said that his family was not missing.
Lauren Cook, 30, spoke with ABC 13 News via a video call and over an app that can’t be tracked, the news outlet said.
“I just don’t have any solid answers yet as to what’s happening with this case,” she said.
She said everything began with an anonymous report to social services alleging child abuse, which she denies.
Despite an investigation, Cook said she was given legal advice that she could proceed with a pre-planned Labor Day vacation. She extended the trip after receiving legal advice, but was concerned that her children would be taken away.
The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office said Cook and the children will remain listed as missing until they make in-person contact with authorities.
“The whole thing has me feeling a little paranoid about the situation with law enforcement,” Cook said. “Why do they need me to specifically come in-person with kids … when even the person that made the report is telling them that none of us are missing.”
“Of course, I wish I could come back,” she added. “It’s hard to not really able to come back, come back to your own home.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to authorities.
Jordan Cook said he and his wife have not missed any social service appointments. His attorney said the social services case was dismissed this week, the news outlet reported.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer praised President Joe Biden for coming to a debt ceiling agreement with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and told senators to prepare for a vote later this week.
Schumer made the statement in a “dear colleagues” letter to his fellow Democrats on Sunday. The caucus will meet over the phone to discuss the specifics of the budget deal later Sunday and early this week, he said in the letter.
“I salute President Biden for protecting the American economy and delivering for American families by taking the threat of default off the table,” Schumer wrote. “I look forward to seeing the language of the agreement and reviewing it carefully.”
“These have been a difficult few weeks given how intransigent and extreme the MAGA Republicans are, but nonetheless we must avoid default and its grave consequences for the American people,” he added.
McCarthy also noted a warning from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen that the U.S. would not be able to pay its debts beyond June 5 if Congress does not act.
McCarthy has vowed that lawmakers in the House will get 72 hours to review the text of the agreement before voting on it, pushing back the Senate process to later this week.
Biden’s White House team negotiated with Republican leadership throughout the weekend before announcing an “agreement in principle” on Sunday. The speaker defended that agreement in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”
“Maybe it doesn’t do everything for everyone, but this is a step in the right direction that no one thought that we would be able to today,” McCarthy told host Shannon Bream.
“I’ll debate this bill with anybody,” he continued. “Is it everything I wanted? No, because we don’t control all of it. But it is the biggest rescission in history. It is the biggest cut Congress has ever voted for in that process.”
Several Republicans remain opposed to the legislation, most of them within the House Freedom Caucus. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, blasted the bill for not cutting the vast majority of Biden’s push to expand the IRS, among other things.
Are you familiar with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?
It has been around for years (until now), and it broke the dos and don’ts of SEO.
But it was outdated. So, Google replaced it with Search Essentials which gives you a whole new set of requirements if you want to do well with SEO.
They go much more in-depth with what they like and don’t approve of. A lot of it is vague, similar to the old Webmaster Guidelines but they do provide some specifics that will help you out when it comes to SEO.
Here’s what you need to know:
Automated content
They spend a lot of time covering automated content. And it makes sense because there are a lot of tools that provide AI-generated copy.
Heck, we even offer AI content as part of our Ubersuggest tool, and to give you an idea over 20,000 people use it daily.
But I’ve been one of the biggest critics of AI content because no matter what tool you decide to use none of them are good enough to replace a human.
Instead, you can use them to give you a head start, but you need a human to help modify the content to help make it better as well as to add creativity to the piece.
Here’s what Google shared what they don’t like when it comes to AI written content (keep in mind Google also put this in the spam section of Google Essentials):
Text that makes no sense to the reader but contains search keywords
Text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing
Text generated through automated processes without regard for quality or user experience
Text generated using automated synonymizing, paraphrasing, or obfuscation techniques
Text generated from scraping feeds or search results
Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value
The big takeaway for you here is that Google isn’t saying that you can’t use AI-created content. They have an issue with the quality of AI content.
Just think of it this way if you create AI-written content on a mass scale and don’t have humans editing it, people won’t find it valuable, they will bounce away, and the user metrics won’t be great… which all just means it won’t rank well.
With your content marketing efforts if you want to rank well you really only have a few good options:
Write content yourself
Pay someone to create your content
Use an AI tool to create content, and then use a human to HEAVILY modify it.
If you choose option 3 and still want to rank well, when I say you need someone to “heavily” modify it you’ll have to do a few things:
Expand upon the length – most AI-based content is too short and barely covers the topic. Adding more words will provide more value to the reader.
Add in personal experiences – people love storytelling and reading about personal experiences. It’s how we learn. It’s too hard for an AI writer to add in “personal experiences”. So you will want a human to add that part in.
Make your content fresh – what’s old is old and has probably already been read before. AI writers are pulling from the web and using what’s been written on before to create something that is “new”. But in all honesty, it really isn’t new, it is just regurgitated content. So, you’ll need someone to add in new stats, data, information… anything that makes it stand out from the competition.
Add a dash of personality – in the future AI writers should be able to add personality to the content they create, but I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve literally paid for most if not all the AI writers and tested them out. I’ve yet to see one that adds personality. People connect with humans, not robots, so show your personality through your content.
To even place more emphasis on quality content, Google also recently released the helpful content update, which pretty much breaks downs that you should focus on writing content for users and not Google.
Content types
Reading is becoming less and less popular, especially among the younger generation. According to the American Phycological Association, less than 20% of teens read a book, magazine or newspaper daily. Yet more than 80% say they use social media daily.
And can you guess what type of content social media prefers?
Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan told Fortune:
Something like almost 40% of young people when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search, they go to TikTok or Instagram.
So how is Google adapting? They of course index all forms of content… from videos to podcasts. Plus they released shorts on YouTube which now has over 1.5 billion viewers.
When you are creating different types of content on your website you need to make sure Google can easily classify and index it.
Within Search Essentials, they break down how you can help Google understand the type of content you are creating. This is nothing new, but for them to emphasize this it shows that they understand that the future of SEO isn’t just text-based content and they of course need websites to help them out by using things like schema markup.
This will help ensure that you get the SEO traffic you deserve no matter how Google adjusts its results in the future.
Local SEO
Google mentions a few things that also affect local SEO.
They didn’t really specify that it is for local SEO, but partly is. They don’t want you to keyword stuff and here are some examples of what they don’t want:
Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value
Blocks of text that list cities and regions that a web page is trying to rank for
Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural.
A lot of companies have multiple locations. Or if they just have one physical location they tend to create pages for each city/region that is close to their location. That way they can get more SEO traffic.
And what happens is they tend to use similar blocks of text with the same keywords on each of those pages, but they just adjust it slightly by adding a new city or region-based content.
Those pages don’t really add value. They are just for search engines so you can capture traffic from a user searching for local results.
I bet you will see Google cracking down more on that in the future.
If you want to create multiple pages for each city that your company serves you need to add more value.
For example, if I were a solar panel installation and service company that serviced Los Angeles, CA I would want to create city-based pages. Because within Los Angeles you have sub-sections such as Hollywood or Beverly Hills.
I would customize each city page and make it very specific. For example, in Beverly Hills, you can’t place solar panels on the roof that are visible to people on the street or your neighbors. And you can’t place Tesla solar roof tiles that just look like normal “roof tiles” as the Beverly Hills design board won’t approve it.
I would even go as far as showing an image of the Tesla solar roof, like the one below so people know what won’t be approved.
Or I could discuss how long it takes to get city approval and what the process is for Beverly Hills as it is different than Hollywood.
There are many more ways to customize your local city pages, but the above are just two simple ways I would make them valuable to both users and Google.
If you want to create multiple city pages think about what value you can provide. Sure you want the traffic and rankings, but to get that put the user first and make sure they are getting more value from you than the competition.
Conclusion
There are a lot of things Google covers in Search Essentials, but most of it is old or nothing that you already didn’t know.
The bigger things are:
They want humans to adjust AI-written content and not just publish it as is because it doesn’t provide much value.
Make sure you help Google understand the content types that you are using. SEO is mainly about text-based content today, but that is going to change as many users (especially the younger audience) prefer image and video-based content.
Google wants to crack down on local SEO spam of users just creating duplicate pages that don’t change much other than they are targeting specific cities or regions.
So what do you think about the Google Search Essentials?
Afghan interpreter Jamil Hassan appeared on “Sunday Night in America” to discuss the state of his home country after being forced to flee from it last year.
August marks the one-year anniversary of President Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, leading to the fall of the country to Taliban forces. Although Biden previously insisted that U.S. military would stay in the country until all American and Afghan allies were evacuated, hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghanistan allies were left stranded after the troops left.
Hassan, who was one of many Afghan allies evacuated through the Kabul airport, lamented to host Trey Gowdy that he has felt betrayed by Biden and his decision to abandon the country.
“Most of those promises were broken by President Biden’s decision to withdraw all forces from Afghanistan. I did not think myself being here, being interviewed on Fox News, I was hopeful for my future in my own country, serving my own people. But unfortunately, because of the decision made by President Biden, here I am with hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens leaving their country, starting life from scratch here and across the world. And tens of thousands of them still at refugee camps in Pakistan and the UAE, and Qatar and even Ukraine. Their lives are destroyed. Their hopes are destroyed. Our country is destroyed. Everything that we have achieved in the past 20 years, because of the presence of international community, they are all gone,” Hassan said.
“There is no explanation to this. This is just a crystal-clear mistake. This decision should not have been made in the first place,” he added.
During the evacuation at Kabul airport, suicide bombers killed 183 people, including 13 U.S. service members. In retaliation, the U.S. launched two drone strikes against suspected ISIS-K terrorists, killing 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children.
Hassan recounted his own experiences leaving his country, speculating that many had felt the same.
“When I was on a C-17 as it lifted off Kabul airport, I had this deep sorrow in my heart. Everyone was asleep and started to fall asleep, but I couldn’t sleep because I thought I was losing something big, something that I cannot gain back. And still, I am thinking that either the last 20 years of the life that I spent in democracy, in happiness and in peace, was it a dream or is this a dream, and I will wake up one day and things will be normal as they were last year and in the past 20 years. That is the feeling I can express,” Hassan said.
In regard to Afghanistan now, Hassan argued that the country had “backwarded a hundred years” and continues to be ignored by the U.S.
“It is not even the Afghanistan of before 9/11. It’s worse than that, because despite that they know the realities of the facts about Afghanistan, what the people achieve, they turn a blind eye onto all of them. Worst of that is that the entire world has forgotten Afghanistan. Not only because of the war in Ukraine but because they do not want to hear about it. For instance, President Biden multiple times made it clear he doesn’t want to hear anything about Afghanistan. And he should hear about it,” he said.
Hassan also warned that this could have further worse implications worldwide, especially in Ukraine and Taiwan.
“Because this is the catastrophe, the disaster that he brought on not only my country and my people but also on Ukrainians. Right after America and its allies left Afghanistan, that gave an incentive to Russia to attack Ukraine. And God knows what next, we’re following the news about Taiwan, China threatening Taiwan security. And the outcome of this chaotic withdrawal for Americans and for America is that the world does not trust America as an ally anymore. Look at Japan, at South Korea, Middle East countries, do they think that the United States will stay with them, will stand alongside them? I am sure they don’t think so. They are looking for other allies,” Hassan closed.
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