Philip Olson of Iowa City, right, listens during his sentencing at the Johnson County Courthouse in Iowa City, Iowa. (Nick Rohlman/The Gazette via AP)
A 71-year old Iowa City, Iowa, man was fined $855 for shooting and injuring a U.S. Marine with an air rifle in October 2021.
In April, Philip Olson, who claimed he was hunting a squirrel, pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor crime after turning himself in to the police, violating a local ordinance prohibiting the discharge of toy guns and slingshots, according to theIowa City Press-Citizen.
He accidentally shot 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Gabe Heefner in the head while the Marine was driving by, leaving the Marine severely injured.
Heefner was in town on leave seeing grandparents and friends when he decided to go out and grab Panda Express for dinner. He was due for his first deployment to Okinawa, Japan…
Front row from left, Representatives Veronica Escobar, Judy Chu, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Gomez and Carolyn Maloney sing “God Bless America,” outside the U.S. Capitol before the House voted to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act on June 24, 2022.
There is but one true thing to be said of a country whose highest court, from which there is no recourse and almost fully staffed by a fanatical majority appointed by two presidents who lost the popular vote, sweeps aside the hard-fought rights of half its residents in a day. There is one thing to be said of a country whose Congress permits the ongoing existence of the filibuster, a tool originally concocted to protect slave-owners that is now deployed daily to empower and continue the tyranny of the minority. There is one thing to say of a country whose Democratic Party leadership has become so ossified and bereft of ideas that all they can think to do after half that country lost their rights is to fundraise off the outrage.
The one true thing? That country is a living nightmare.
The defining image from Friday’s appalling Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the epitaph for that vital law, will forever be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing before reporters, her body contracted into an elaborate shrug as she said, “What is going on here?” Nothing better captures the state of Democratic Party leadership. The Party professed for 50 years to be the defenders of Roe, but in that 50 years did nothing of substance to keep this grim moment at arm’s length. Now, we are here.
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“It didn’t take a weatherman to know Roe was in trouble,” I wrote back in May after the Alito draft dropped, “and yet the Democrats spent all these years staring at it like a deer pinned by oncoming headlights, relentlessly confident that five far right political hack Supreme Court justices wouldn’t finally do what the Republican Party has been vowing to do since the year after I was born.”
There is a revolting irony in this. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with President Joe Biden, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, former Secretary Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama and others — most certainly Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia — represent the institutionalist wing of the Democratic Party. In their passive, crouching, one-step-forward-nine-steps-back way, the institutionalists have spent every day since the rise of Ronald Reagan running scared, clinging to the scraps of “bipartisanship” even as the wolves gnaw their ankles. All they know how to do now is fundraise, and it must be said, they are quite good at it.
Thanks to the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, however, a progressive faction within Congress has grown muscular. The Congressional Progressive Caucus enjoys nearly 100 members, and no legislation leaves the House without their support. Yet their most sought-for goals — real gun control, real effort at pushing back on the climate crisis, and now a real defense of Roe — have been thwarted by the filibuster championed by Joe Manchin with the blessing of the Democratic leadership.
Efforts to codify the rights protected by Roe with legislation are currently doomed because of the filibuster. “The filibuster is the only protection we have in democracy,” Manchin said, again, in defense of keeping that blood-soaked parliamentary bludgeon intact after Friday’s despicable ruling. Manchin will not budge, and the leadership has chosen not to try and move him, because they see the filibuster as part of the institution. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — another institutionalist — agrees heartily … until the day comes when the filibuster inconveniences him, at which point he will sweep it aside with the wave of his hand if he can.
Through all this, the congressional progressives are demonized as being too grasping, too eager, for seeking too much too quickly, even as the bullets fly and the waters rise. Herein lives the irony: The institutionalists who are bereft of policy ideas beyond fundraising disdain the progressives, while those same progressives fight for the policies that first created and later sustained the institution to begin with.
Leading progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for a massive congressional push to defend what is left of freedom in this country. Her plan includes expanding the Supreme Court, establishing women’s health care clinics on federal land where they would be free from state obstruction, and holding floor votes to support several existing cases the high court may soon choose to overthrow the way they did Roe.The time has come for the majority in this country to recognize the inflection point we have arrived at.
“And if you are a lawmaker who, in the time between the leak & ruling, spent more manpower on a fundraising plan than a policy response, then I highly recommend rethinking your priorities,” she tweeted. “Our job right now is to protect people. Doing so will drive the vote more than browbeating.”
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez must be heeded, because this is far from over. Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the most radical judges ever to sit on that court, appears to have emerged from decades of near-silence to become the avatar for this new majority and its priorities. Thomas has already stated that he wants the court to review Griswold, the case protecting access to contraception which sits at the heart of the right to privacy. Thomas has also noted his desire to strip the media of its libel protections, and court observers expect the court to attack LGBTQ marriage rights with an assault on Obergefell.
Many voices will be raised to demand that people storm the voting booths in five months, and I do not gainsay them. The next two elections feel an awful lot like the endgame. If this heedless sprint toward minority radical Republican rule continues past the midterms and into the next presidential election, we risk becoming in full what Hunter S. Thompson said we were 50 years ago: “just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
However the 2022 elections turn out, the current leadership of the Democratic Party must be replaced from root to branch. This is not negotiable, because nothing will happen without it. The same goes for the filibuster, which deserves no better fate than to curl and burn on the ash heap of history.
Before — and probably after — those ballot actions, the time has come for the majority in this country to recognize the inflection point we have arrived at, lest we find ourselves utterly undone by our preference for pleasing arguments over mass action beyond the ballot. I am reminded of the words of Mario Savio, the poet laureate of the Berkeley Free Speech movement:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
The country is a living nightmare. What will you do?
On Sunday, June 26th, a 67-year-old man lost his life after being mistaken for a deer while hunting.
The events were recorded Sunday morning in the mountains of the Kunché community, belonging to the municipality of Temozón. According to what was found out, a group of people went hunting, and the party split in two.
The tragedy came when a young man, 20 years old, with little experience, mistook the elderly E.U.P., 67 years old, for a deer and shot him, the pellets injured the sixty-year-old, and he died at the scene.
Paramedics from the Ministry of Public Security (SSP) arrived at the scene, but they could only confirm the man’s death.
Municipal and SSP agents cordoned off the area and notified the personnel of the Public Ministry of the events for the corresponding legal purposes.
Jens Stoltenberg speaks during the press conference to preview the Nato summit in Madrid on Monday.Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images
Dan SabbaghDefence and security editorMon 27 Jun 2022 11.05 EDT
Nato’s secretary general has said this week’s Madrid summit will agree the alliance’s most significant transformation for a generation, putting 300,000 troops at high readiness in response to Russia’s invasion ofUkraine.
Jens Stoltenberg said the military alliance’s forces in the Baltic states and five other frontline countries would be increased “up to brigade levels” – doubled or trebled to between 3,000 and 5,000 troops.
That would amount to “the biggest overhaul of our collective defence and deterrence since the cold war,” Stoltenberg said before the meeting of the 30-country alliance, which runs from Tuesday to Thursday this…
California’s wildfire season intensifies between July and October when temperatures soar, vegetation becomes bone dry and desiccating winds develop.
The peak season that has been marked by devastating blazes and smoky skies in recent years is approaching fast, and many are wondering just how bad it will be.
The consensus among experts is that the next few months will see above-average fire activity as has been the case in recent years amid a changing climate marked by hotter temperatures and longer dry periods. Nearly all of California is in a severe or extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
“We do have the ingredients for an active, above-normal fire year, with the snowpack being below average,” said Brent Wachter, a fire meteorologist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Geographic Coordination Center in Redding, Calif. “We also have an above-normal grass crop. That’s a big driver.”
This year’s grass crop got a healthy boost when a string of weak storms delivered light rain to Northern California in May and June. While the systems may have prevented wildfire conditions from advancing rapidly in Northern California in June, they didn’t provide enough precipitation to put a dent in the state’s drought. Plus, they helped grasses grow more prolifically. Those grasses will dry out quickly in summer when the state typically receives no or very little rain and heat events are common, creating fuel for wildfires.
A helicopter prepares to drop water on the Dixie Fire in Aug. 20, 2021.Ty O’Neil/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
This year’s meager snowpack is only exacerbating the dire situation. In an ideal year, a robust snowpack is spread across the Sierra Nevada by spring, and it melts through summer with the runoff feeding the landscape. When the ground and vegetation are moist, fires don’t spread quite as rapidly. This year, while the snowpack got an early start with a historic October storm and a wet December, January through March were abnormally dry, resulting in a well-below-average snowpack. Going into summer, little snow remains in the Sierra Nevada range this year, with the northern section at 16% of normal for this date and the central and southern at 0%, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
Without a slow trickle of snowmelt through summer, trees and plants dry out more quickly and some will die. Trees that don’t get enough water become stressed and more prone to bark beetle attacks that kill trees. “Since 2010, an estimated 129 million trees have died in California’s national forests due to conditions caused by climate change, unprecedented drought, bark beetle infestation and high tree densities,” the U.S. Forest Service said.
There may be a bit of good news: While peak fire season is bound to be more severe than average, there’s a chance it might not be as bad as last year’s near-record or the 2020 season, a study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research said. The scientists estimated the number of acres that are likely to burn in the West by analyzing precipitation, temperatures, drought and other climate conditions in the winter and spring.
“What our research shows is that the climate of the preceding winter and spring can explain over 50% of the year-to-year variability and overall trend in summer fire activity,” Ronnie Abolafia-Rosenzweig, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the center, said in a statement. “This gives us the ability to predict fire activity before the summer fire season begins.”
The researchers predicted that that fires this summer will burn 1.9 to 5.3 million acres in the West, with 3.8 million acres being the most likely total. Although well short of the record 8.7 million acres burned in 2020, this would represent the 8th-largest burned area since 1984, a continuation of the long-term trend of more widespread conflagrations, the study said.
Of the study, Wachter said his “professional guess” is this upcoming season will be severe — but not as bad as in 2020 when a dry lightning storm in August sparked fires throughout California or last year when the Dixie Fire grew to be 963,309 acres, becoming the second-largest wildfire in state history.
A home burns as the Dixie fire rips through the Indian Falls neighborhood of unincorporated Plumas County, California on July 24, 2021. JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
Wachter said long-term weather forecasts suggests heat waves this summer may be less intense than in recent years, and this could help lower wildfire risk.
“This summer, the heat wave events aren’t expected to be as prolific and as long as duration in previous years,” he said. “We’ve seen several excessive heat warnings issued for 4 to 5 years in a row. I would expect they would be a little more limited this year.”
This point is reinforced in the most recent wildland fire seasonal outlook for June through September from the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. “Drought conditions are expected to intensify some during the summer, but likely not as dramatic compared to the previous two years due to less potential for extended hot periods,” according to the outlook created by experts from more than a half dozen government agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. “Regardless, dead fuel moisture will spend ample time at unusually dry and critically dry levels, especially away from the coast. Live fuels will continue to become more flammable starting with the lower elevations and transitioning upwards in elevation from June into July, with coincident critically dry dead and live fuels expected to increase during this period then continue into August and September.”
Wachter said that while certain factors impacting the fire season are easy to predict, what he calls “acute weather” events, such as dry lightning storms that spark fires and offshore winds that fan flames, are much harder to pin down.
“Any kind of lightning can be problematic, especially if it’s of the dry variety, especially if it’s a mix of wet and dry,” he said.
Abortion rights campaigners participate in nationwide demonstrations following the leaked Supreme Court opinion suggesting the possibility of overturning the Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision, at Duncan Plaza in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S., May 14, 2022. REUTERS/Kathleen Flynn/File Photo
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June 27 (Reuters) – Battles over abortion shifted to state courts on Monday after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to the procedure nationwide, as a judge blocked a statewide ban in Louisiana and clinics in Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi and Texas sued seeking similar relief.
The five are among the 13 states with “trigger laws” designed to ban or severely restrict abortions once the Supreme Court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that recognized a right to the procedure, as it did on Friday.read more
Political pressure is mounting on Joe Biden to take more action to protect abortion rights across the US as firebrand New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for supreme court justices to be impeached for misleading statements about their views on Roe v Wade.
Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks took aim at justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch. Both were appointed by former president Donald Trump and had signaled that they would not reverse the supreme court’s landmark 1973 decision in Roe v Wade during confirmation hearings as well as in meetings with senators.
On Friday, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch formed part of the conservative majority which in effect ended legal access to abortion in most states, and Ocasio-Cortez said “there must be consequences” for that.
“They lied,” the leftwing, second-term representative said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I believe lying under oath is an impeachable offense … and I believe that this is something that should be very seriously considered.”
Ocasio-Cortez added that standing idly by “sends a blaring signal to all future nominees that they can now lie to duly elected members of the United States Senate in order to secure … confirmations and seats on the supreme court”.
She also mentioned impeaching Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni emailed 29 Republican lawmakers in Arizona as she tried to help undermine Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Thomas has not recused himself from election-related cases, drawing criticism.
“I believe that not recusing from cases that one clearly has family members involved in with very deep violations of conflict of interest are also impeachable offenses,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
House members can impeach a judge with a simple majority vote. But to be removed from office a justice would need to be convicted by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.
Biden’s Democratic party controls the House with a clear majority, but its standing in the Senate is much more tenuous. The Senate is split 50-50, though Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, can serve as a tiebreaker for votes that can be carried by a simple majority.
The president dismissed the overturning of Roe v Wade as “cruel” but stopped well short of calling for the impeachment of any justices. He has also rejected the strategy proposed in some quarters to expand the supreme court in a way that would allow for the addition of more liberals and blunt the bench’s current conservative majority.
Joining Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Thomas as conservatives on the supreme court are justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts. The liberals are Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Breyer is retiring and due to be replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson, another liberal.
Nonetheless, on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez urged Biden to personally take steps to address what she called the supreme court’s “crisis of legitimacy”.
“President Biden must address that,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez suggested Biden could order the opening up of abortion clinics on federal lands in states where terminating pregnancies has been outlawed “to help people access the healthcare services they need”, echoing an idea from the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren.
In states where abortion is no longer allowed because of Friday’s ruling, residents who need to terminate pregnancies must now travel hundreds of miles – if not more – to get access to the procedure.
Many US corporate giants have taken steps to provide support and financial assistance to employees seeking abortions in states where that is outlawed in most cases. But such measures won’t help millions of people who need abortions but are not employed by a large international or national company.
That’s where an order from Biden to allow abortion on federal lands in anti-abortion rights states would come in and help.
Ocasio-Cortez also discussed possibly expanding access to abortion pills that could be mailed to those in need, though Republican politicians are gearing up to limit access to those as well.
For instance, South Dakota’s governor, Kristi Noem, said her state would move to block medical providers in states where abortion is legal from mailing to South Dakotans pills that could end a pregnancy.
The pressure on Biden follows Ocasio-Cortez’s remark earlier this month that she could not yet commit to endorsing him for another run at the White House in the 2024 election.
Her comments on Sunday also came after senators such as Susan Collins of Maine and Joe Manchin of West Virginia said they felt deceived by Friday’s controversial supreme court decision to end nearly 50 years of protections granted by Roe v Wade.
Collins, a Republican, said she felt “misled” after Kavanaugh and Gorsuch had said they would leave in place “longstanding precedents that the country has relied upon” during their confirmation hearings and in meetings with her.
Meanwhile, Manchin said he had trusted both Kavanaugh and Gorsuch when they “testified under oath that they … believed Roe v Wade was settled legal precedent”.
Manchin was the lone Democrat to support Kavanaugh’s appointment.
(CNN)Russian forces are arguably having their best spell since the invasion of Ukraine began four months ago.
They have eliminated most Ukrainian defenses in the Luhansk region, consolidated control of a belt of territory in the south, improved their logistics and command structure and blunted the effectiveness of Ukrainian attack drones.
Within the last week, the Russians have been rewarded for their intense — some would say merciless — bombardments of the remaining parts of the Luhansk region held by Ukrainian forces, which have finally given up Severodonetsk and lost territory south of Lysychansk.
The head of the self-declared Luhansk People’s Republic, Leonid Pasechnik, predicted last Friday that Russian forces would completely encircle Lysychansk within two or three days. So far they haven’t, but the city is in imminent peril.
By the numbers:Japan recorded its first June temperature of 104°F (40°C) or higher, and records continue to be set there. Officialsare urging millionsto conserve electricity as the heat continues, including in Tokyo.
104.4°F (40.2°C):Thehigh temperature in Isesaki, Japan, about 50 miles northwest of Tokyo, on June 25. This set a national heat record for the month of June.
There’s no reason to force rabbits, guinea pigs, mice and rats to undergo painful new chemical tests for cosmetics when today’s science allows for non-animal testing methods that are more relevant to human safety. iStock.com
In a victory for rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, rats and all animals used for testing, Louisiana is the latest state to take steps to end the cruel and unnecessary use of animals to test cosmetics. Eight other states (California, Nevada, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Maine, Hawaii and New Jersey) have already banned the sale of cosmetics that have been newly tested on animals. This win aligns with rising consumer opinion that there is no need to test products like shampoo, aftershave and lipstick on animals. There is also a similar bill that will be heading to the governor’s desk in New York.
As we celebrate the passage of this law in Louisiana, we remain focused on the need for a comprehensive national solution. While we have worked hard to ensure states pass these laws, it’s imperative for animals that we ban animal testing for cosmetics at the federal level. That will do more to bring the United States into greater harmony with the many nations that have prohibited such testing and strengthen the international regulatory frameworks that govern animal testing and the many non-animal methods coming to replace them.
Congress recently had a golden opportunity to end cosmetics animal testing in the U.S. but, sadly, did not seize it. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee recently considered must-pass legislation that grants the Food and Drug Administration additional oversight on cosmetics. We urged committee members to include language from the federal Humane Cosmetics Act into this legislative package. In a major missed opportunity for animals, the language was not included in this legislation. Still more concerning is that the current bill’s language may preempt state laws that end the production and/or sale of cosmetics tested on animals, like the one just passed in Louisiana. We will not rest until this issue is addressed by Congress, and we will not stop until animals no longer have to suffer for these cruel and outdated cosmetics tests.
Some of the strongest support for ending animal testing for cosmetics is coming from the cosmetics industry itself. The Humane Cosmetics Act has the endorsement of the Personal Care Products Council, the trade association representing nearly 600 companies that make and market cosmetics, in addition to more than 375 companies that have individually signed on to support this legislation. Companies want a federal law that aligns the U.S. with the nine states and 41 countries that have already passed laws to end or limit animal testing for cosmetics.
Our thanks to state Rep. Barbara Freiberg (R, 70) for her leadership on this issue. Her work to make Louisiana the latest state to take on the cruelty of cosmetics animal testing will help solidify congressional support for this issue and bring us one step closer to finally relegating animal testing for cosmetics to history.
Sara Amundson is president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund.
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Exposing the Big Game 