ATLANTA — Amie Anderson’s first instinct was rage.
Her daughter, a nurse, had just told her how a young mother had walked into the hospital and surrendered her infant.
Under Georgia law, hospitals are among the safe places where a mother can leave her newborn.
“I was just like, ‘Who in the world does this and why?’,” the elder Anderson recalled recently.
“And I’m just raging. I mean all-Christianity-out-the-window raging,” she said. “And my daughter was like, ‘Mama no, no, no: she was so brave.'”
Amie Anderson then felt a sense of guilt so profound that it spurred her to spend three years prodding Georgia lawmakers to amend the law.
She searched online and found news about babies abandoned in dumpsters and trash cans.
She also saw heartening stories, such as one about a firefighter in Ocala, Florida, who adopted an infant left in the “baby box” at his fire station.
Then, she had an epiphany: some scared mothers needed anonymity.
“My assumption is that having to look a person in the face and hand that baby over is scary,” she said. “And when people panic, they do stupid things.”
The Anderson family — from left to right, Jay, Amie, Kerri and Kadi — inside a Henry County fire station with Georgia’s first Safe Haven Baby Box. Kerri Anderson is the nurse who set her mother, Amie Anderson, on a three-year journey to make the boxes legal in Georgia. CONTRIBUTED
The Indiana nonprofit Safe Haven Baby Boxes made the box that delivered a baby girl to the Florida firefighter and his wife.
Each unit is built into an exterior wall at a fire station, hospital or other approved site. The temperature-controlled compartment contains a plastic bassinet. The external door locks after it is closed, and two alarms alert building personnel. The box also alerts 911 if no one opens the Plexiglass door on the inside and retrieves the baby.
Anderson called Safe Haven to ask about installing boxes in Georgia.
She said the organization told her she would have to get the law changed first. At the time, babies in Georgia could only be surrendered to warm hands at a designated safe place.
Anderson gathered allies, including her local state representative, who wrote legislation and then handed it to Rep. Mike Cameron, R-Rossville.
Finally, this year, they got the box law passed, but it almost didn’t happen.
House Bill 350 got a final vote during the last minutes of this year’s legislative session.
The 164-4 House vote was nearly derailed by a Senate amendment. It required that a camera be aimed at each box, in case someone put something harmful inside.
A Democratic representative asked a salient question: Wouldn’t the loss of anonymity undermine the whole point of the boxes?
“No. Maybe not,” Cameron said, refusing to take more questions and calling for the vote.
He was worried about where that debate might go, and how long it might take, he recalled. “It was a nail-biter.”
Cameron, who lives in northwest Georgia, read accounts of these boxes being installed in nearby Tennessee. He said he thought Georgia should do the same.
Georgia is now among 27 states where they are legal, according to Safe Haven.
“There’ll be babies saved,” Cameron said.
During hearings in the Senate, some lawmakers expressed unease about the boxes and wondered about the need.
“It looks like a book depository or something,” one of them said.
Another, Sen. Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, said the concept gave him “kind of a weird feeling, because who would leave a baby in a box, right?”
But he said he felt obliged to vote for the bill because the GOP-led General Assembly had banned abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected.
“If we’re going to be a state that is pro-life, this is also notice to parents, to moms, that we’re all in, and we’re willing to help you even if you think you have no options,” Strickland said. “So I support this.”
Anderson, who testified at that March hearing, said she feared the committee would table the bill. Even if it didn’t, she worried about the addition of a camera mandate. She said that would have violated Safe Haven’s rules about the anonymity of parents.
Then, Sen. Matt Brass, R-Newnan, mentioned an account of a young woman in his part of the state who had given birth to an infant, then placed her in a cooler and left her by the side of a road. The body of the infant was found days later.
Brass worried about a failure with the baby box safety features, for instance if the alarm that calls 911 rolled over to voicemail. Still, he said, “I do think this is a way better option than a trash can or a cooler.”
A week later, the senators heard from a woman who was forever scarred by the incident Brass referenced.
Anderson had called a friend who knew her and asked her to speak at the hearing.
Jill Patterson told the lawmakers about how a detective had come to her door in March 2020. The officer told her a dead infant had been found in Troup County more than a year before, swaddled in sweatpants and zipped into a rolling cooler decorated with a pattern of watermelon slices.
Genetic evidence had linked the baby to Patterson’s family.
“Within three minutes, I learned that I had a granddaughter and she was dead,” Patterson said.
She said her 19-year-old son did not know about his high school girlfriend’s pregnancy and that the news devastated him.
The infant’s mother later pleaded guilty in the child’s death and was sent to prison.
Patterson said her family struggled every Dec. 28, the anniversary of the 2018 death, and each March 17, the date they learned of the infant they would name Eliza Jane.
“There are no simple answers for my family. Just the cold, harsh reality of what happened,” Patterson said. “But there is a simple answer before you, ladies and gentlemen.”
That was all the bill needed, Cameron said. “We all broke up. It was just a horrific story.”
One of the reluctant senators was so moved that he asked to change the name of the underlying law.
The Safe Place for Newborns Act of 2002, which gave mothers immunity from prosecution when they left their infants in a designated safe place, would become the Eliza Jane Warner Act.
The committee added that amendment and others, including the camera mandate and a ban on using state funds for the baby boxes.
The next week, on the final scheduled day of the legislative session, the Senate voted 49-1 to pass HB 350. That was about half an hour before midnight. More than an hour later, the House approved the Senate’s changes.
In late August, a fire station in Henry County celebrated the installation of the first baby box in Georgia.
Anderson said her group wants to raise $100,000 to $125,000 to install several more in the county, at a cost of $20,000 to $25,000 apiece for the installation, training and ongoing maintenance.
And what about those cameras that undermine the case for anonymity, the reason a scared mother might be drawn to such a box in the first place?
“We were all very angry about the whole camera thing,” Anderson said, but she said Safe Haven was fine with the final language in the law.
The wording requires a camera capable of recording anyone who accesses a box. It was “not real specific,” Anderson said, so they put the camera inside the box.
“That camera goes directly to 911, and you can see the baby, and you can probably see mama’s arms,” she said, “but you cannot see mama’s face.”
ATLANTA — The economic boom continued in Georgia last year, with a second record-topping year of business investment and job growth.
Gov. Brian Kemp and the state Department of Economic Development announced $35.2 billion in project investments for the fiscal year that ended June 30. That is up from $26.3 billion the prior fiscal year, which had also broken records.
The figures are for companies newly locating in Georgia and for expansions by existing companies. Expansions accounted for 79% of projects and for 15,370 of the estimated 25,300 new private-sector jobs, the joint statement Thursday said.
Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt, but that adage does not seem to apply to Georgia and business.
“The greatest vote of confidence is a company choosing to expand their existing operations in our state,” Kemp said.
Three out of four of the new projects and expansions were outside the 10-county metro Atlanta region, spreading economic opportunity to rural Georgia.
A chunk of that investment came from overseas. Foreign companies invested $7.8 billion and creating 9,350 jobs, according to the state. The top investors were South Korea, Italy, Belgium, Canada, and France.
Last month, German industrial giant Siemens announced plans to develop a 550,000-square-foot manufacturing plant near Pendergrass. The $185 million investment was expected to produce 1,400 jobs.
Kemp said the investments last year showed how his administration was delivering on its promise “to bring good-paying jobs to hardworking Georgians in every zip code.”
Kemp often refers to that magazine’s ranking when touting his administration’s record. On Thursday, he said that with the latest economic development figures, “we’re proving why we remain the No. 1 state for business.”
Rick Jackson, the Republican nominee for Georgia governor, has portrayed his priorities as a continuation of Kemp’s policies.
Jackson has said he would cut taxes while continuing to recruit companies to the state.
“I’m going to try to beat his record on putting together the most jobs, what he’s done in the rural areas,” Jackson said in August, when Kemp appeared alongside him at a Georgia Chamber of Commerce event in Athens.
Kemp said Georgia had “the most people working ever in the history of the state,” and he said he believed Jackson could “keep this going, and that’s why I’m supporting him.”
Jackson’s Democratic opponent, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, has targeted the cost of living as a top campaign issue, saying she has a plan to help Georgians afford their grocery bills.
During a campaign stop at a Gwinnett County grocery store Wednesday, Bottoms unveiled her plan to encourage cities and counties to waive sales taxes on groceries.
The Democratic state senator for the area opened the event by saying that Kemp — and by extension Jackson — had their priorities backward.
“Things are tough for everyone,” Sen. Sheikh Rahman, D-Lawrenceville, said, asserting that Bottoms, not Jackson, would be best at attacking high costs.
She will do “everything to make sure the state of Georgia is not the No. 1 state for business,” he said, “but the No. 1 state for family.”
ATLANTA — With voters upset about the cost of living, both candidates for governor are rolling out affordability plans to woo them.
After Republican Rick Jackson pitched cuts to income and energy taxes last month, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms unveiled her proposal Wednesday to lower grocery bills by cutting the sales tax.
The state already exempts groceries from its 4% sales tax. Her new plan would give cities and counties the option of waiving theirs, too.
The former Atlanta mayor said that if voters make her the first Democratic governor of Georgia in more than two decades — and the first Black woman ever — she will ask lawmakers to let cities and counties opt out, too.
Speaking at a campaign stop in a small grocery store in Lawrenceville, Bottoms framed rising costs as an existential crisis.
Whether she goes to the hair or nail salon, the grocery store or church, Bottoms said, “people are talking about how expensive it is just to exist.”
Democratic gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms discussed rising prices and her plan to reduce costs by cutting local grocery sales taxes at a press conference at Al Huda Grocery in Lawrenceville, Georgia, on Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (Caroline Newbern/Capitol Beat)
President Donald Trump has endorsed Jackson, and Jackson has said he would be Trump’s favorite governor.
The Bottoms campaign hopes that alliance hurts Jackson more than it helps him.
“Donald Trump ran on lowering grocery costs, specifically the cost of eggs, immediately when he came into office,” Bottoms said. “Well, we are still waiting on him to deliver on that.”
Bottoms’ affordability plan offers local leaders two options: permanently eliminate their sales taxes on groceries and other eligible essentials, or temporarily suspend those taxes when prices rise sharply.
She would establish a one-year $250 million state fund to subsidize communities for revenue losses in excess of 5% of the prior-year grocery-tax collections.
Bottoms could not do this alone as governor. Her plan is predicated on a major assumption: that Democrats will win control of both the state House and Senate, long controlled by Republicans.
She would need the cooperation of the General Assembly to get enabling legislation approved.
Bottoms said she hopes Democrats seize control of the Legislature but said she was prepared to collaborate with Republicans if they remained in power.
The Jackson campaign dismissed Bottoms’ plan, asserting that Atlanta became unaffordable when she was mayor from 2018 through 2021.
“Rick Jackson has treated it as a crisis since day one, and his plan doesn’t need permission from 159 county commissions,” Jackson campaign spokesman Garrison Douglas said in an email.
Speaking at an Atlanta barbershop in mid-August, Jackson said he would address the cost of living by attacking other types of taxes.
He said he would gradually cut the state income tax in half, eliminate state taxes on the electricity and natural gas delivered to residences and suspend the motor fuels tax during gasoline price spikes.
Jackson also pledged to freeze the rising home valuations that are driving up property tax bills.
The Bottoms campaign has labeled her opponent “Slick Rick,” an insult she used at her Al Huda Grocery stop Wednesday.
When a reporter asked her why Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, the Republican who lost to Jackson in the GOP primary runoff, had not endorsed Jackson, Bottoms said she thought it was because Jones did not trust Jackson, in part due to the money Jackson’s healthcare staffing company has earned from the state.
“Slick Rick received a $700 million no-bid contract in the middle of COVID, and he stood before cameras like this and said if he were elected, he wouldn’t continue to do business with the state of Georgia,” Bottoms said. “And then he just extended that contract three weeks ago.”
Jackson addressed the issue last month.
During his campaign stop at Tommy’s Barbershop, Jackson said any contracts his company held with the state could and would be canceled if he were elected governor.
ATLANTA — A Stone Mountain rapper will spend six years in federal prison after pleading guilty to charges involving the theft of thousands of checks from the mail.
Shamarri Tache Brooks, 34, pleaded guilty in May to bank fraud and aggravated identity theft, according to his record in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.
The federal indictment filed against him in December accused him of altering purloined checks to name recruits with their own accounts as the payees.
One check from August 2024 was for more than $655,000. Another the same day was for more than $122,000. Another the next day was for more than $405,000.
In a brazen twist that displayed an instinct for business, Brooks traded on his knowledge by promoting and selling a collection of his financial fraud methods, the indictment said.
As part of his fraud-promotion business, the indictment said, Brooks sold the check images on their own or packaged with check-forgery tutorials in what he called the “Sauce Book,” accepting payment on various digital platforms.
He even sold apparel, registering Brooks Merchandise as a limited liability company with the Georgia Secretary of State and marketing balaclava-style masks with bank logos and clothing with the logo “No Free Sauce” or “NFS.”
Authorities alleged that he used his own product while working: the indictment said he wore “No Free Sauce” masks when depositing stolen, altered checks at ATMs.
It is unclear how much money Brooks made from the side hustles, but Hertzberg’s office said he went unrewarded by the underlying work of check theft.
Brooks and his associates stole checks with a combined face value of more than $6.5 million, but law enforcement recovered many of the checks from Brooks’s home, adding that there was no evidence Brooks succeeded in “negotiating” the remainder of the stolen checks.
Hertzberg said Brooks’ victims were spared from any known loss. “Thankfully, Brooks’s ineptitude matched his boldness,” he said.
After prison, Brooks, who also goes by Juney Knotzz, will serve five years of supervised release.
Authorities noted that Brooks already had a criminal history, including convictions for drug trafficking, weapon possession, obstruction of law enforcement and battery.
This case was investigated by the FBI, FDIC Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General. The Dunwoody Police Department and the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration assisted.
Neither the indictment nor Hertzberg explained how Brooks and his associates were able to obtain so many stolen checks, but authorities warned the public against leaving checks or other mail in mailboxes overnight and to use the letter slot inside a Post Office when sending mail.
ATLANTA — In late July, a new website popped online carrying local news stories from Georgia.
There was an article about a disgraced former Atlanta City Council member, another about President Donald Trump’s visit to Cobb County and one about Georgia coach Kirby Smart.
The stories were copied and pasted from other journalism sites, including Capitol Beat, and carried the original authors’ bylines, with links to the original publications.
But two pieces with no bylines have appeared on the Peach State Post’s website.
Both attack Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff for his votes against Republican tax initiatives.
Then, there is another new website with a shared interest in publishing local news but with a divergent take on partisan politics.
It carried articles about Flock Safety cameras and a data center proposed in Columbia County, both originally published by USA Today Network properties and shared via Reuters Connect.
The site, called Courier Georgia, launched in May with one correspondent and features her original articles. Her reporting covers topics that are priorities for Democratic politicians, such as Medicaid expansion and the social media posts by the son-in-law of U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, the Republican running to unseat Ossoff in November.
The Courier also runs unbylined videos, with one featuring Collins walking away from a news conference about his son-in-law as Collins’ guards block the videographer following him. Another shows Ossoff calling Trump a “draft-dodging crook president.”
Both news sites have something in common besides being new: they’re run by people with partisan ties.
The Peach State Post site discloses it is paid for by One Nation.
It is part of a “fake news network” and Republican dark money, according to an article on a Substack site called Popular Information.
The article, published in early August, reported that One Nation was a dark money group that had given more than $70 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Republicans. And it said One Nation had started six news sites in states with key U.S. Senate races, including Georgia.
Judd Legum, the author, was a campaign researcher for Hillary Clinton who switched to independent publishing.
Legum said in an interview that in addition to tracking campaign contributions he linked One Nation to the GOP Senate fund through technical methods, such as the tracking pixels on their websites.
An article published in July by Axios quoted an anonymous source who said One Nation’s executive director had said in a conference call with GOP donors and Senate Majority Leader John Thune that the group would be spending about $100 million against Democratic Senate incumbents in Georgia and two other states.
The Peach State Post and One Nation websites do not list contact information. A request for comment left by Capitol Beat on One Nation’s web contact portal in mid-August yielded no response.
Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McKoon did not respond to text messages asking about Peach State Post.
“I personally doubt that they’re involved,” Legum said. “I think that this is an extension of the super PAC and One Nation spending.”
Courier Georgia is part of the Courier Newsroom, which is owned by Good Information, Inc.
The Courier sites list Tara McGowan as publisher of Courier Georgia and as publisher and CEO of Courier Newsroom. The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school and research organization, identifies McGowan as the founder of Good Information.
The news site Notus reported in 2024 that McGowan was a Democratic operative who had pitched the Courier in a 2019 memo as an answer to GOP and right-wing investment in digital media. Axios reported in 2021 that Good Information was launching with millions of dollars in seed money from wealthy left-leaning donors, including Reid Hoffman and George Soros.
The Georgia Democratic Party said it had no comment, but Courier Newsroom responded in writing to an email asking about the organization’s reported partisan links.
“Every day, our award-winning reporters, editors, and social teams tell the stories shaping people’s lives — from Medicaid cuts and ICE raids to education battles,” wrote Mariela Rosario, the Courier Newsroom state managing director.
The email touted Courier’s presence on TikTok and said the network had an audience of millions and planned to have 20 newsrooms by year’s end.
“As local news disappears in too many places, we’re proving independent, values-driven journalism can grow without sacrificing credibility,” Rosario wrote.
Courier Georgia and Peach State Post started publishing in Georgia ahead of an election that could help decide which party controls the U.S. Senate.
Both sandwich real news around what journalism expert Karin Assmann described as political advertorials.
“It’s political branded content hiding behind real news, so it’s just muddying the waters,” said Assmann, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s journalism school.
Assmann and Burton Speakman, an associate professor at Kennesaw State University, collaborated on a research article published in June that examined websites posing as news outlets while promoting a partisan worldview.
The industry term, they wrote, is “pink slime,” a metaphor ripped from headlines over a decade ago about the food-industry term for ammonia-treated beef trimmings.
It applies to digital sites masquerading as news, they wrote, because both the meat and the sites are slippery and hard to digest.
Assmann said the two new news entrants in Georgia look more sophisticated.
“It is more subtle than obvious propaganda, like an advertorial with political messaging disguised as news to encourage people to believe it — and without disclosing whose money is behind the message,” she said. “It’s actually a political ad, and it should be marked as such.”
Speakman, when asked if he thought Peach State Post was propaganda, sighed.
“Well, yeah. Of course it is. I mean, it’s being funded by One Nation,” he said. “The Peach State Post is trying to use legitimate news sources’ articles to provide them some credibility for the other stuff that they’re trying to slide in.”
Speakman called it “an advancement of the technique” used by the 30 sites in Georgia that he and Assmann characterized as pink slime in their paper.
But Speakman said the Post and the Courier, which were too new to have made it into their paper, are also misleading readers.
“They’re trying to legitimize themselves by using mainstream sources to manipulate the public into having a worse understanding of what’s going on in politics in the world,” he said.
Both Speakman and Assmann said that mixing partisan messaging with republished reporting was a dangerous development for democracy.
But Speakman thought the new projects would be short-lived, particularly those operated by One Nation.
“Unless there’s some sort of unforeseen runoff in one of these six states, those six sites are going to disappear,” he said. “They only bought their web domains, each of the web domains, for one year.”
As for the Courier properties, Speakman said Democratic media projects have often struggled to attract sustained funding.
“The history of liberal and progressive media sticking around has not been good historically,” he said. “Air America fizzled out, most of the liberal talk radio fizzled out.”
