Liberty Wildlife: Goose Euthanized After Showing Signs Of Bird Flu
Liberty Wildlife: Goose Euthanized After Showing Signs Of Bird Flu https://digitalarizonanews.com/liberty-wildlife-goose-euthanized-after-showing-signs-of-bird-flu/
Employees with Liberty Wildlife sent the body to Arizona Game and Fish for testing. Anyone who sees dead waterfowl should report it to Arizona Game and Fish.
PHOENIX — Staff with Liberty Wildlife are advising the public to keep a lookout for dead waterfowl after they euthanized a goose that was showing signs of bird flu.
Also known as avian influenza, bird flu is a highly infectious disease that can occasionally make the jump to humans if proper precautions aren’t taken.
Earlier in the summer, three cases were found at a park in Scottsdale. Now, staff with Liberty Wildlife have sent a recently euthanized goose for testing after it was showing signs of infection.
A spokesperson with the organization said the goose was brought into their care in poor condition, and was suspected to have bird flu.
Liberty Wildlife staff decided that euthanasia was in the animal’s best interest. Its body has been sent to Arizona Game and Fish for testing to determine if the animal was positive for bird flu.
Arizona Game and Fish handles both the testing and tracking of bird flu cases.
Due to cases in the area, Liberty Wildlife has reinstated its bird flu protocols at the recommendation of Arizona Game and Fish. Officials remind residents to contact the department at 1-800-352-0700 if they see dead waterfowl.
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Oath Keepers Founder: Be ready To Fight After Trump Loss
Oath Keepers Founder: Be ‘ready To Fight’ After Trump Loss https://digitalarizonanews.com/oath-keepers-founder-be-ready-to-fight-after-trump-loss/
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hours after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, the leader of the Oath Keepers extremist group was discussing how to push President Donald Trump to go further in his fight to cling to power, according to messages shown to jurors Tuesday in his U.S. Capitol attack trial.
Prosecutors used Stewart Rhodes’ messages and recordings of him speaking from November 2020 to try to show that he had been working behind the scenes for two months to try to stop the transfer of presidential power before his followers attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Rhodes and four associates are facing charges of seditious conspiracy for what authorities allege was a detailed, drawn-out plot to keep Biden out of the White House that included putting armed teams on standby outside of Washington. Tuesday was the first full day of testimony in the high-stakes case that’s expected to last several weeks.
The five defendants are the first people arrested in the Jan. 6 attack to stand trial for seditious conspiracy — a rarely used Civil War-era charge that can be difficult to prove. Rhodes’ attorneys have said their defense will focus on Rhodes’ belief that Trump was going to invoke the Insurrection Act and call up the militia to support his bid to stay in power.
The messages were revealed during testimony of an FBI agent investigating the insurrection. In several messages sent around Nov. 7, 2020 — the day that The Associated Press and other news outlets called the election for Biden — Rhodes pressed others to refuse to accept the results and “bend the knee” to what he saw as an illegitimate administration. In one message, Rhodes urged his followers to get their “get your gear squared away” and be “ready to fight.”
In another — sent to a group called “FOS” or “Friends of Stone” that included Trump ally Roger Stone — Rhodes urged his fellow Oath Keepers to think of the ways early Americans had resisted the British.
“We are now where the founders were in March, 1775,” he wrote. He implored them to “step up and push Trump to finally take decisive action.”
“The final defense is us and our rifles,” Rhodes wrote to the group. “Trump has one last chance, right now, to stand. But he will need us and our rifles too.”
The evening of Nov. 9, Rhodes held a conference call with more than 100 of his followers to discuss the plan. It was secretly recorded by someone on the call and sent to the FBI.
Rhodes urged people on the call to go to Washington and let Trump know that “the people are behind him,” according to a recording played to jurors. Rhodes expressed hope that left-wing antifa activists would start clashes because that would give Trump the “reason and rationale for dropping the Insurrection Act.”
“So we have a chance to get President Trump to fight as Commander in Chief. If you’re going to have a fight, guys, you want to start now while he’s still Commander in Chief,” Rhodes told the group.
Rhodes said they would have some of their “best men bolstered up outside” — or “quick reaction forces” that he said would be “awaiting the president’s orders.” It needed to be that way because that gives you “legal cover,” Rhodes said on the call.
Rhodes’ attorney sought to show that prosecutors are cherry-picking messages from hundreds of chats on his phone. Defense attorney Phillip Linder pressed the FBI agent over whether he ever saw Rhodes encourage anybody to do anything illegal before prosecutors objected to the question.
“All we have is bombastic language,” Linder said.
Rhodes’ lawyers have said they will argue that their client can’t be guilty of seditious conspiracy because all of his actions were in anticipation of orders he expected were coming from Trump under the Insurrection Act. Even though Trump never did, Rhodes’ lawyers say he was merely lobbying the president to invoke the law, which gives the president wide discretion to decide when military force is necessary, and what qualifies as military force.
On trial with Rhodes, of Granbury, Texas, are Kelly Meggs, leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers; Kenneth Harrelson, another Florida Oath Keeper; Thomas Caldwell, a retired U.S. Navy intelligence officer from Virginia, and Jessica Watkins, who led an Ohio militia group.
Prosecutors showed jurors several items found at Caldwell’s home, including a notebook with writing about things like “comms” and “lookouts.” The FBI agent said that “was all indicative to us of some sort of an operation.”
Caldwell’s attorney, David Fischer, pressed the agent on whether the government has any witnesses who claim Caldwell had a plan to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6. The agent said it did not.
___
For full coverage of the Capitol riot, go to https://apnews.com/hub/capitol-siege
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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My Katsina Doll Collection, And Related Items. https://digitalarizonanews.com/my-katsina-doll-collection-and-related-items/
Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour.
I still feel weird calling them dolls. A couple of mine are of a style that resemble playthings as I know them; most are not. One is what I’d categorize as fine art. But “doll” seems to be the accepted term. So, “doll” it is. I’ll do my best to tell everything I know about each piece. Unfortunately it’s not nearly as much as I know about my jewelry collection. But then, I’ve only been collecting katsina dolls for a few years now. I’m definitely not an expert.
I’ll start with this little guy.
Hunter katsina doll by Hopi artist Grace Pooley. About 3″ tall.
Ms Pooley’s dolls are made in what is called the Route 66 style, and resemble the katsina dolls that were sold to tourists in Fred Harvey stores throughout the southwest in the first half of the twentieth century. Ms Pooley is the only Hopi woman I know of that creates katsina dolls.
Mountain Lion katsina, signed B. Honie, 1st Mesa, AZ. I love the way it’s mantle enfolds a village, with rain clouds above and the face of another Katsina, Tawa, the sun, peeking through.
A view of the reverse side, showing the delicate details of the hair, feathers, and fringe. This katsina doll is about 8″ tall.
Both male and female Katsinas are enacted in Katsina dances by costumed male dancers. One way to tell them apart is by looking at their footwear. Female Katsinas (Katsin Mana) wear white shoes. Male Katsinas (Katsin Taka), usually wear turquoise blue or sometimes a reddish shade.
A Shalako maiden katsina, wearing the characteristic feather mantle and adorned with bits of soft wool and feathers. The figure was carved from a single piece of cottonwood root, and the tablita (headdress) was made separately and attached. Katsina dolls with thin wooden pieces like this one can be especially fragile and easily damaged. The work of Ambrose Tewa of Moencopi, AZ, she’s just under 12″ tall. Shalako Katsinas are divine messengers and bringers of rain. In Katsina dances the Shalakos tower over everyone else at around seven feet tall.
Quick tip for collectors of art, antiques, and other things- a small UV “blacklight” flashlight is good for detecting repairs, artificial pigments, and “enhanced” or stabilized gemstones. Glues, heat treated and/or dyed stones, added plastic resins, and artificial pigments will glow brightly under UV light. These flashlights are used to locate scorpions and all sorts of things, and are sold by hardware stores and big box retailers.
This Red Tail Hawk katsina doll was carved from a single piece of cottonwood root, in which the artist made use of the natural branching out and curves of the wood. With it’s feather mantle it resembles a Shalako, and is accompanied by a smaller Broadface katsina. I found this one in a thrift store; it has some small pieces broken off, which I will eventually attempt to replace. I’ve done similar restoration work on other katsina dolls. The replacement pieces must be carefully shaped, and the colors matched as closely as possible.
There are hundreds of Katsinas, which can embody everything from specific gods and deified humans to animals, plants, weather, and even abstract concepts. When a Hopi puts on the costume of a Katsina he also takes on that Katsina’s personality and mindset. He becomes the Katsina he is portraying in the dance.
The reverse side, showing the details of the hair and ornamentation. Cottonwood root is pretty fragile, and many galleries won’t ship katsina dolls with small, easily broken parts. Both the Red Tail Hawk and Broadface Whipper Katsinas serve as guards for the more sacred Katsinas taking part in a ceremony. This katsina doll is the work of Hopi artist E. Honyestewa, and at 14″ tall is the largest in my collection.
The Katsina religion is practiced by several Native American tribes in the southwest, including the Hopi, Zuni, and Tewa tribes. Katsinas have no spiritual significance for the Navajo, however Navajo artists do create katsina dolls for sale to collectors. Navajo katsina dolls have a distinctly different look from those of peoples for whom the Katsinas are a vital part of their religion and culture.
This Wolf katsina doll is the only Navajo-made one in my collection. Navajo katsina dolls tend to be made of pine or aspen rather than cottonwood root, and adorned with a lot of fur, leather, bits of turquoise, and feathers. This Wolf katsina is the work of Navajo artist R. Wilson and stands 8″ tall.
The Navajo do however have their own spirit beings, called Yei’i. Which are sometimes depicted in weavings, sand paintings, jewelry, and carved images. While the Katsina religion revolves around a set ceremonial calendar, Yei’i ceremonies are held on an as-needed basis.
This Navajo Yei’i figure group and the weaving behind it were gifts from my son. At far right is the figure of Talking God, who leads the ceremony. At far left is Water Sprinkler. The carving is signed by Dine’ artist Jerry Whitethorne. The weaving is of course unsigned.
This Talavai, or Morning Singer, is actually a ceramic coin bank. The back is incised with the signature Lowell Talashoma Sr, which to me indicates that the Hopi artist made a carving from which a mold was taken to make the ceramic bank. It’s 8″ tall.
The underside, showing the bank which had it created (perhaps as a promotional item) and the date.
Morning Singer Katsinas stand on the rooftops at dawn, singing to the rising sun to awaken the village for a new day.
Last of all, my very favorite katsina doll, and an item of Zuni jewelry which depicts Tawa, the Sun Katsina.
This Katsin Mana depicts a Supai mother and her baby son. The feathers on her headdress, and the ties at her wrists had broken off. One tie had been lost. When I first met her, I had accepted a commission to restore the carving. It took a couple of weeks, from very carefully removing the accumulation of dust to reattaching the broken bits. Fabricating the replacement wrist tie took several attempts until I was satisfied with it. (it’s on the far side of her left wrist)
The Supai are a neighboring tribe living near Havasupai Falls at the Grand Canyon. Many shrines and sacred sites of different southwest tribes are located at the Grand Canyon, and there’s always been interaction (and occasionally friction) between the various peoples living and visiting there. The face mask of this katsina doll has distinctive geometric designs which appear on other Hopi representations of Supai people.
This truly exquisite carving is made from a single piece of cottonwood root, apart from her headdress, and colored with natural pigments, except for the one wrist tie that I made.
It is 9″ tall, and signed by Hopi artist Adrian Poleahla, Old Oraibi, AZ. Oraibi has the distinction of being the oldest continuously occupied village in the US.
I was paid well enough for my efforts to restore her. But I still hated having to give her back to her owner. He owns a second hand shop, selling mainly furniture and appliances but occasionally artworks as well. I’d done cleaning and restoration work for him before. I didn’t think to ask how much he’d sell this one for. I was fairly certain that, repaired though it was, I could not have afforded it. So I packaged her carefully, handed her back, collected my money, and went home feeling sorry for myself.
Until the following Yule, when my husband (who also does repairs on the guy’s appliances) gave her back to me. Whenever I’m tempted to damn him for a clueless, insensitive jerk, I remind myself that he isn’t always. Not always.
This Zuni inlay pendant depicts Tawa, the Sun Katsina, and is made of sterling silver, mother-of-pearl, coral, turquoise, and jet. It’s one and a half inches wide, and simply marked “NT Zuni” on the back. It was a lucky pawn shop find, and came with the fluted Navajo pearls. I have other Zuni jewelry but none has the kind of detailed carving shown on this one.
I hope you enjoyed seeing my collection as much as I enjoyed sharing it with you.
Thank you for reading. This is an open thread, all topics are welcome.
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Oath Keepers Founder: Be 'ready To Fight' After Trump Loss KION546
Oath Keepers Founder: Be 'ready To Fight' After Trump Loss – KION546 https://digitalarizonanews.com/oath-keepers-founder-be-ready-to-fight-after-trump-loss-kion546/
By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER and LINDSAY WHITEHURST
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hours after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, the leader of the Oath Keepers extremist group was discussing how to push President Donald Trump to go further in his fight to cling to power, according to messages shown to jurors Tuesday in his U.S. Capitol attack trial.
Prosecutors used Stewart Rhodes’ messages and recordings of him speaking from November 2020 to try to show that he had been working behind the scenes for two months to try to stop the transfer of presidential power before his followers attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Rhodes and four associates are facing charges of seditious conspiracy for what authorities allege was a detailed, drawn-out plot to keep Biden out of the White House that included putting armed teams on standby outside of Washington. Tuesday was the first full day of testimony in the high-stakes case that’s expected to last several weeks.
The five defendants are the first people arrested in the Jan. 6 attack to stand trial for seditious conspiracy — a rarely used Civil War-era charge that can be difficult to prove. Rhodes’ attorneys have said their defense will focus on Rhodes’ belief that Trump was going to invoke the Insurrection Act and call up the militia to support his bid to stay in power.
The messages were revealed during testimony of an FBI agent investigating the insurrection. In several messages sent around Nov. 7, 2020 — the day that The Associated Press and other news outlets called the election for Biden — Rhodes pressed others to refuse to accept the results and “bend the knee” to what he saw as an illegitimate administration. In one message, Rhodes urged his followers to get their “get your gear squared away” and be “ready to fight.”
In another — sent to a group called “FOS” or “Friends of Stone” that included Trump ally Roger Stone — Rhodes urged his fellow Oath Keepers to think of the ways early Americans had resisted the British.
“We are now where the founders were in March, 1775,” he wrote. He implored them to “step up and push Trump to finally take decisive action.”
“The final defense is us and our rifles,” Rhodes wrote to the group. “Trump has one last chance, right now, to stand. But he will need us and our rifles too.”
The evening of Nov. 9, Rhodes held a conference call with more than 100 of his followers to discuss the plan. It was secretly recorded by someone on the call and sent to the FBI.
Rhodes urged people on the call to go to Washington and let Trump know that “the people are behind him,” according to a recording played to jurors. Rhodes expressed hope that left-wing antifa activists would start clashes because that would give Trump the “reason and rationale for dropping the Insurrection Act.”
“So we have a chance to get President Trump to fight as Commander in Chief. If you’re going to have a fight, guys, you want to start now while he’s still Commander in Chief,” Rhodes told the group.
Rhodes said they would have some of their “best men bolstered up outside” — or “quick reaction forces” that he said would be “awaiting the president’s orders.” It needed to be that way because that gives you “legal cover,” Rhodes said on the call.
Rhodes’ attorney sought to show that prosecutors are cherry-picking messages from hundreds of chats on his phone. Defense attorney Phillip Linder pressed the FBI agent over whether he ever saw Rhodes encourage anybody to do anything illegal before prosecutors objected to the question.
“All we have is bombastic language,” Linder said.
Rhodes’ lawyers have said they will argue that their client can’t be guilty of seditious conspiracy because all of his actions were in anticipation of orders he expected were coming from Trump under the Insurrection Act. Even though Trump never did, Rhodes’ lawyers say he was merely lobbying the president to invoke the law, which gives the president wide discretion to decide when military force is necessary, and what qualifies as military force.
On trial with Rhodes, of Granbury, Texas, are Kelly Meggs, leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers; Kenneth Harrelson, another Florida Oath Keeper; Thomas Caldwell, a retired U.S. Navy intelligence officer from Virginia, and Jessica Watkins, who led an Ohio militia group.
Prosecutors showed jurors several items found at Caldwell’s home, including a notebook with writing about things like “comms” and “lookouts.” The FBI agent said that “was all indicative to us of some sort of an operation.”
Caldwell’s attorney, David Fischer, pressed the agent on whether the government has any witnesses who claim Caldwell had a plan to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6. The agent said it did not.
___
For full coverage of the Capitol riot, go to https://apnews.com/hub/capitol-siege
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Trump Asks Supreme Court To Intervene In Mar-A-Lago Case
Trump Asks Supreme Court To Intervene In Mar-A-Lago Case https://digitalarizonanews.com/trump-asks-supreme-court-to-intervene-in-mar-a-lago-case/
By Eric Tucker | Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Lawyers for former President Donald Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to step into the legal fight over the classified documents seized during an FBI search of his Florida estate, escalating a dispute over the powers of an independent arbiter appointed to inspect the records.
The Trump team asked the justices to overturn a lower court ruling and permit an independent arbiter, or special master, to review the roughly 100 documents with classified markings that were taken in the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.
A three-judge panel from the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit last month limited the special master’s review to the much larger tranche of non-classified documents. The judges, including two Trump appointees, sided with the Justice Department, which had argued there was no legal basis for the special master to conduct his own review of the classified records.
But Trump’s lawyers said in their application to the Supreme Court that it was essential for the special master to have access to the classified records to “determine whether documents bearing classification markings are in fact classified, and regardless of classification, whether those records are personal records or Presidential records.”
“Since President Trump had absolute authority over classification decisions during his Presidency, the current status of any disputed document cannot possibly be determined solely by reference to the markings on that document,” the application states.
It says that without the special master review, “the unchallenged views of the current Justice Department would supersede the established authority of the Chief Executive.”
The FBI says it seized roughly 11,000 documents, including about 100 with classification markings, during its search. The Trump team asked a judge in Florida, Aileen Cannon, to appoint a special master to do an independent review of the records.
Cannon subsequently assigned a veteran Brooklyn judge, Raymond Dearie, to review the records and segregate those that may be protected by claims of attorney-client privilege and executive privilege. The Justice Department objected to Dearie’s ability to review the classified records, prompting the 11th Circuit to side with the department.
Trump’s lawyers submitted the Supreme Court application to Justice Clarence Thomas, who oversees emergency matters from Florida and several other Southern states. Thomas can act on his own or, as is usually done, refer the emergency appeal to the rest of the court.
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Hurricane Ian's Death Toll Rises As Crews In Florida Go Door To Door In Search For Survivors In Decimated Neighborhoods | CNN
Hurricane Ian's Death Toll Rises As Crews In Florida Go Door To Door In Search For Survivors In Decimated Neighborhoods | CNN https://digitalarizonanews.com/hurricane-ians-death-toll-rises-as-crews-in-florida-go-door-to-door-in-search-for-survivors-in-decimated-neighborhoods-cnn/
CNN —
After Hurricane Ian obliterated communities in Florida, rescue crews going door to door in search of survivors are reporting more deaths, and residents grappling with loss are facing a long, daunting recovery.
As of Tuesday, at least 102 people have been reported killed by the hurricane in Florida – 55 of them in Lee County. Ian also claimed the lives of four people in North Carolina.
The storm slammed into Florida as a furious Category 4 hurricane last Wednesday. Days later, some residents of island communities are cut off from the mainland, hundreds of thousands of people are without power and many Floridians have found themselves homeless.
In some cases, government officials dealing with recovery efforts are among those who lost their homes.
Fort Myers Beach City Councilman Bill Veach said his 90-year-old cottage is in ruins, with only one section that was a recent addition left standing. Pieces of his home were found two blocks away, he said.
“When you are walking around the ruins, it’s an apocalyptic scene,” Veach said of his neighborhood.
Still, even in the wreckage, there have been moments of hope, he said.
“You see a friend that you weren’t sure was alive or dead and that brings you joy. A joy that is so much more than the loss of property,” he added.
Rescuers have been coming to the aid of trapped residents via boat and aircraft. Statewide, more than 2,300 rescues have been made and over 1,000 urban search and rescue personnel have checked 79,000 structures, Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a news conference Tuesday. The governor also announced the opening of the first Disaster Recovery Center – or “one-stop shop” – in Fort Myers for residents and businesses that have been affected by Hurricane Ian.
Live updates: Hurricane Ian’s aftermath in Florida
Some residents who were anxiously waiting to hear from their loved ones have received unimaginable news.
Elizabeth McGuire’s family said they last spoke with her Wednesday and had been having trouble reaching her. They learned Friday that the 49-year-old had been found dead in her Cape Coral home.
Police told her family she died in her bed holding her cell phone and it looked like she died instantly, her son Andrew Chedester said.
McGuire’s mother, Susan McGuire, said the destruction of the storm “is massive.”
“One hundred blizzards will not cost you what one hurricane will cost you,” said Susan McGuire, who moved to Florida from Maryland a few years ago. “My husband’s business whipped out, my daughter is dead … I never had a blizzard take anything away from me.”
On Sanibel Island, now cut off from the Florida peninsula after Ian wiped out a portion of the roadway connecting them, every house shows damage, Sanibel Fire Chief William Briscoe said.
“There are a lot of places that are not livable. There are places off their foundation, and it’s very dangerous out there,” Briscoe said. “There are alligators running around, and there are snakes all over the place.”
Crews have evacuated 1,000 people from Sanibel since Ian ripped through the island, Briscoe said.
Sanibel Mayor Holly Smith told CNN Tuesday that residents will be allowed back on the island Wednesday to assess the damage to their property, but the island is still “extremely unsafe.”
A similar situation is playing out on nearby Pine Island, the largest barrier island on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Just days ago, it was a tranquil fishing and kayaking destination known for its small-town atmosphere. Now it’s a scene of carnage, with cracked roadways and destroyed homes.
Ian destroyed the only bridge to Pine Island, making it only accessible by boat or aircraft. Supplies are now being airdropped to the island by helicopter as some residents choose to stay, authorities said.
County officials are trying to get a temporary ferry service for Sanibel, Sheriff Carmine Marceno said Tuesday. For Pine Island, work is underway to install a temporary bridge, with a goal to have it ready by the end of the week, DeSantis has said.
Emergency physician Dr. Ben Abo, who joined rescuers on Pine Island, said crews are encountering residents who were in denial the storm would hit the area and are now running out of supplies.
“I’m seeing a lot of despair, but I’m also seeing hope,” Abo said. “I’m seeing urban search and rescue, fire rescue, bringing hope to people that we’re going to get through this. But we have to do it in stages.”
The National Guard will also be flying power crews to Sanibel and Pine islands to start working on restoring power. It could take at least a month to restore power for some places on those islands, Lee County Electric Cooperative spokesperson Karen Ryan said Tuesday.
DeSantis said Tuesday he has already vistied Pine Island and will likely visit Sanibel Island on Wednesday, one week after the island was ravaged by Hurricane Ian.
“We’re gonna have that bridge patched this week,” DeSantis said Tuesday of Pine Island. “Yesterday we had 130 (Florida Department of Transportation) trucks that were there working to get this temporary bridge fixed. It will be done this week.”
At Fort Myers Beach, where storm surge and wind combined to wipe out numerous homes and businesses, it may also take a month to restore power due to damage to the electrical infrastructure,” Lee County Manager Roger Desjarlais said.
It’s unclear how many people remain unaccounted for after the storm. Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said authorities are working to consolidate a list of the missing.
Search teams have been combing a 7-mile stretch of Fort Myers Beach for days, looking for anyone still in need of help. One of the teams, South Florida Task Force 2, found 150 people trapped in homes in its first 48 hours in the community, some of whom had ascended to attics to avoid floodwater, it said.
On Monday, the team still was helping people off the island town, as well as telling them where to get food and water. The team has found people who died at Fort Myers Beach, but it has not said how many.
Bob and Rosemary Kopsack were among those the team helped off the island Monday, after the storm ruined virtually everything inside their home. Bob Kopsack still didn’t know the fate of at least one of their friends on the island.
“Our best friend, we have not been able to contact him … and he’d said he’s not leaving the island. And I hope he did,” he said. “His phone’s out. … I’ve sent the police over to his home.”
In Lee County, which includes Fort Myers and Fort Meyers Beach, more than half the schools had at least some damage from Ian – and 14% had major damage, the school district said. Schools will reopen as quickly as possible, Superintendent Christopher Bernier said, without providing a timeline.
At Fort Myers Beach Elementary, mud lined a cafeteria; damaged desks, toppled supplies and other debris were piled up in a hallway; and water marks reached nearly to the tops of doorjambs, photos released by the district showed.
Some residents who lost property and belongings are recounting narrow escapes.
When Ian hit Florida’s west coast and floodwater surged through Fort Myers, Stan Pentz, 69, texted his daughter, Stephanie Downing, and told her the water was rising in his condo and he might drown. Then, he lost phone service, he told CNN on Tuesday.
More than an hour away, Downing assumed the worst. When she saw her sister the next day, “we just held each other and we just cried because we truly thought he was gone.”
Pentz managed to get out, however. Upon escaping his home, he was “swished away,” he recalled, and he latched onto some branches, clinging to them for hours, “with the wind blowing and the water gushing over my head. It was a long time.” After a while. the wind and water shifted and he reached the second floor of a building, where he huddled in a corner till sunrise, he said.
“It just kept going and going. It wouldn’t stop and I was just thinking about my kids and my grandkids and just everybody I know, and they just kept me going in my mind,” he said.
The storm passed, and Pentz found someone to text Downing for him. Downing’s sister and brother-in-law drove down to Fort Myers and retrieved him.
When Downing finally saw her dad, “I laid my head on his chest and I said, ‘Hey, Michael Phelps, you had a nice swim,’” she recalled as Pentz chuckled, playfully pantomiming slapping his daughter.
Pentz lost everything. He kicked his own submerged automobile as he swam to safety, he said. Downing said he’s now staying with her family at their Rotonda West home. A GoFundMe has raised thousands and a generous friend brought her dad some clothes and shoes. He was able to replace his cell phone and driver’s license Tuesday, Downing said.
“We’re getting somewhere,” she said.
A Naples man, meanwhile, trekked through nearly half a mile of floodwater to save his 85-year-old mother after Ian hit.
Johnny Lauder, a former police officer, told CNN he sprang into action after his mother, who uses a wheelchair, called in a panic and said water was rushing into her home and reaching her chest.
He arrived at her home to find her neck-deep in floodwater, but happy to see her son.
“The water was up to the windows, and I heard her screaming inside,” Lauder said. “It was a scare and a sigh of relief at the time – a scare thinking she might be hurt, a sigh of relief knowing that there was still air in her lungs.”
Lauder was able to bring his mother to safety as floodwaters began to recede.
Hospitals in Florida have been experiencing “significant pressure” on capacity since Ian hit, said Mary Mayhew, president and CEO of the Florida Hospital Association.
Emergency departments have sustai...
Dow Rallies More Than 1500 Points In Two Days As Fear Begins To Fade | CNN Business
Dow Rallies More Than 1,500 Points In Two Days As Fear Begins To Fade | CNN Business https://digitalarizonanews.com/dow-rallies-more-than-1500-points-in-two-days-as-fear-begins-to-fade-cnn-business/
New York CNN Business —
Is the worst really over on Wall Street? It’s too soon to say. But stocks rose sharply again Tuesday following Monday’s big rally.
The Dow surged 825 points, or 2.8%. The Dow has soared more than 1,500 points in the past two days. It is now back above the key 30,000 milestone and is about 18% off its most recent record high, meaning that is no longer in a bear market.
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq gained 3.1% and 3.3%, respectively. But both of those indexes remain in bear territory, at more than 20% off their all-time highs.
It appears that the market bears may be going into hibernation, at least temporarily. Not even the news of North Korea firing a missile over Japan was enough to stop the bulls from celebrating.
“It almost feels like a panic rally. The market mood got way too sour and people started to jump in,” said Callie Cox, US investment analyst with eToro. “But this rally feels random. It’s great to see stocks go up but these moves are a little disorienting. I’m being cautious.”
The market’s mood has improved due to renewed hopes that banking giant Credit Suisse (CS) will be able to avoid a financial meltdown similar to Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers 14 years ago.
There have been growing fears that Credit Suisse is in serious trouble. But the bank’s stock price has rebounded in the past two days and the cost to insure Credit Suisse’s bonds fell too. That’s a sign that investor anxiety about the bank’s future has subsided somewhat.
Major European stock exchanges have rallied in the past few days as well as jittery investors relax a bit. One fund manager noted that there are more companies that look attractive lately given the large pullback in global markets so far this year.
“There are opportunities within Europe. There are some companies we have admired from afar that are getting interesting,” said Louis Florentin-Lee, a manager with the Lazard International Quality Growth Portfolio.
In other corporate news, semiconductor stocks got a boost after chip giant Micron (MU) announced plans to spend $100 billion over the next two decades to build a new plant in upstate New York. Shares of Micron (MU) gained 4%. Fellow semiconductor companies Intel (INTC), Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD) rallied as well.
Shares of Twitter (TWTR) surged 22% after Elon Musk once again offered to buy the social media site for $44 billion, or $54.20 a share. The stock was halted earlier in the day following reports of the Musk deal.
A smaller than expected interest rate hike by the The Reserve Bank of Australia also is lifting spirits on Wall Street. Central banks around the world are boosting rates to fight inflation. But economic and market uncertainty could lead the Federal Reserve and other banks to slow the pace of rate increases.
The worry is that overly aggressive rate hikes could lead to a significant recession. CEOs surveyed by KPMG US are predicting a downturn in the next 12 months and they are worried that it won’t be mild or short.
But bond investors are now starting to price in the possibility that the Fed will pull back on its rate hiking spree. The benchmark 10-year US Treasury yield, which briefly spiked to 4% and hit its highest level since 2008 last week, has since tumbled and is now back around 3.6%.
Investors no longer seem as nervous about the future as they did just a week ago either. The VIX (VIX), a key indicator of volatility on Wall Street, fell about 3% Tuesday.
The CNN Business Fear & Greed Index, which looks at the VIX and six other measures of market sentiment, moved out of Extreme Fear territory as well. But it remains at Fear levels.
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Live Updates: Russia's War In Ukraine https://digitalarizonanews.com/live-updates-russias-war-in-ukraine-8/
1 min ago
Ukraine pushes further towards Kherson as Zelensky praises “fast and powerful advance”
From CNN’s Yulia Kesaieva and Victoria Butenko in Kyiv
Ukrainian forces have pushed even further towards the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday.
“The Ukrainian army is making a rather fast and powerful advance in the south of our country in the course of the ongoing defensive operation,” Zelensky said in his evening address. “Dozens of settlements have already been liberated from the Russian pseudo-referendum this week alone.”
In the southern Kherson region, he said that the towns of Liubymivka, Khreshchenivka, Zolota Balka, Biliaiivka, Ukraiinka, Velyka, Mala Oleksandrivka, and Davydiv Brid had all been liberated, “and this is not a complete list.”
“Our warriors do not stop. And it is only a matter of time when we will expel the occupier from all our land,” he said.
Kherson is one of the four regions in Ukraine that Russia has claimed it is annexing in violation of international law.
55 min ago
Russian diplomat: US military aid to Ukraine hastens possibility of “direct military clash”
From Mick Krever, Uliana Pavlova, and Josh Pennington
US military aid to Ukraine is hastening the possibility of a “direct military clash” between Russia and NATO, a Russian diplomat said on Tuesday.
“The US continues to pump more weapons into Ukraine, facilitating the direct participation of its fighters and advisers in the conflict,” Konstantin Vorontsov, the head of the Russian delegation to the United Nations Disarmament Commission, said at the UN General Assembly’s First Committee.
“Not only does this prolong the fighting, but it also brings the situation closer to a dangerous line of a direct military clash between Russia and NATO,” he added.
The diplomat’s comments come as the US announced an additional $625 million in security assistance to Ukraine. In a statement Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken cited Ukrainian forces effectively using US support to push ahead with their “successful counter-offensive to take back their lands seized illegally by Russia.”
54 min ago
“We want to liberate all of our territory,” key Zelensky advisor tells CNN
From CNN’s Emmet Lyons and Maddie Araujo
Mykhailo Podolyak in an interview with Christiane Amanpour for CNN, on Tuesday. (CNN)
Ukraine intends to liberate all of the country’s territory, including Crimea which has been under Russian occupation since 2014, Mykhailo Podolyak, a key advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, told CNN.
“We are for western values. We want to liberate all of our territory,” Podolyak said Tuesday. “All the threats by the Russian Federation will not stop Ukraine in order to liberate our territory … including the occupied territories from back in 2014.”
He was unambiguous on Ukraine’s aims following successful counteroffensives in the east and in the south of the country.
“We are liberating cities and towns in all sorts of directions. In the south, in Kharkiv, in Luhansk. We will have to hold on to those territories,” Podolyak told CNN. “Using western weaponry our partners have sent to us, it has proven to be more effective than all Russian repertory that the Russian army is using.”
“All of this mobilization panic that Russia is demonstrating shows the Russian army does not have enough soldiers,” he said.
Podolyak was Ukraine’s lead negotiator in the last round of diplomatic negotiations between Ukraine and Russia earlier this year.
1 hr 48 min ago
Zaporizhzhia plant director will be replaced following release from Russia detention, UN nuclear watchdog says
From CNN’s Chris Liakos
Ihor Murashov, the director general of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, will not continue his duties at the facility following his release from Russian detention, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Tuesday.
Murashov was detained by a Russian patrol, the president of Ukraine’s state nuclear company Energoatom, Petro Kotin, said on Saturday. Kotin said Murashov was in his vehicle on his way from the plant when he was stopped, taken out of the car, and driven in an unknown direction while blindfolded. The IAEA said Monday that it had received confirmation that Murashov had returned to his family safely.
“The IAEA understands that Mr Murashov is now with his family in territory controlled by Ukraine and will not be continuing with his duties at the ZNPP. It is not yet clear who will replace him in this role,” IAEA said in an updated statement on Tuesday.
The IAEA, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, said that Murashov’s “absence from duty in this way had an immediate and serious impact on decision-making in ensuring the safety and security of the plant.”
Key things to know about the plant: The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest nuclear complex of its kind in Europe, was seized by Russian forces at the start of the war.
The plant and the area around it, including the nearby city of Enerhodar, have endured persistent shelling in recent months, with Ukraine and Russia trading accusations for the shelling.
The agency also said that “IAEA experts present at the ZNPP reported that repair work was completed today at the sprinkler pond in the area of Unit 5 and Unit 6, which had been damaged from shelling on 20 September.”
There has been no reported shelling in the vicinity of the ZNPP since Oct. 4, according to IAEA.
IAEA chief Rafael Grossi is due to travel to Kyiv and then to Moscow later this week for consultations “aimed at agreeing and implementing a nuclear safety and security protection zone around the ZNPP as soon as possible.”
1 hr 38 min ago
Ukrainian official: Russia is trying to establish a “state border” at line of control in Zaporizhzhia region
From CNN’s Yulia Kesaieva in Kyiv.
Russia is trying to establish a “state border” at the point that divides Russian and Ukrainian control in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, a regional Ukrainian official said on Tuesday.
The number of people crossing out of Russian-occupied territory through the Vasylivka checkpoint has dropped from several thousand per day last week — before Russia’s claimed annexations — to just a handful now, according to the Ukrainian government, which says that the crossing is effectively closed.
In establishing these borders, they are placing “rules to pass that they had come up with,” Oleksandr Starukh, head of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Authority, said on national television.
Zaporizhzhia is one four territories in Ukraine that Russia claims it is annexing.
“As a result, they are not allowing the men of the conscription age [to cross]. The day before yesterday only eight people managed to get out by some side and goat trails. Otherwise, one can say that transit in both directions has been stopped,” he said.
These actions replicate what Moscow “did with Crimea and Donbas,” Starukh said.
Ukraine is “trying to solve this issue through the international communities, and through addressing Russia, who are obliged to open the humanitarian corridors,” said Iryna Vereshchuk, the Ukrainian minister of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories.
The Kremlin does not appear to be clear on what territory exactly it has annexed, as large parts of the regions it says are Russia are still controlled by Ukrainian forces. On Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said, “we will continue consulting with the population of these regions.”
2 hr 24 min ago
Leader of Belarus says his country is “participating” in the war but is not an active military party
From CNN’s Uliana Pavlova and Chris Liakos
Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko speaks during an interview at his residence, the Independence Palace, in the capital Minsk, on July 21. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images/File)
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said Tuesday that his country has been caught up in the Russia-Ukraine war but that it is not an active military party to the conflict.
“As for our participation in a special military operation in Ukraine, we are participating. We do not hide it. But we are not killing anyone. We are not sending our military anywhere. We do not violate our obligations,” Lukashenko said during a military meeting, according to a video recording of the meeting by the state news agency Belta. Russia also calls its war in Ukraine a “special military operation.”
He then said that his country is “participating” in the war by preventing its spread into Belarus and by preventing “a strike on Belarus under the guise of a special military operation from Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.”
“As I said, no one will shoot Russians in the back from the territory of Belarus. That’s our participation,” the Belarusian leader said.
He added that Belarus is also caught up in the conflict as a point of entry for refugees.
“Yes, treat people if necessary. Yes, we feed people. And not only Russians. We feed most of all those refugees, beggars, poor people who come to us from Ukraine,” Lukashenko said. “… How not to feed them, how not to treat them? This is our participation in this military operation. There is no other way and there won’t be.”
He stressed that Belarus is not planning to announce any mobilization but that it intends to learn from Russia’s experience.
Lukashenko has been a close ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and Belarus was used as a launch point for Russian troops in February.
The Belarusian leader has previously said his country was “being dragged” into the war.
2 hr 40 min ago
US secretary of state announces details of additional $625 million in military assistance to Ukraine
From CNN’s Kylie Atwood
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the US is giving an additional $625 million in security assistance to Ukraine.
He cite...
Magnolia Park Announce 'Baku's Revenge' Release Misfits
Magnolia Park Announce 'Baku's Revenge' + Release “Misfits” https://digitalarizonanews.com/magnolia-park-announce-bakus-revenge-release-misfits/
Orlando, Florida-based rock band Magnolia Park have announced that their new album, Baku’s Revenge, will be released on November 4th via Epitaph Records.
The album was produced by Andrew Wade (A Day to Remember, Wage War), and finds Magnolia Park continuing to push the envelope. They intertwine elements of punk, pop, and hip-hop with ever-catchy hooks and massive guitars, blended all together with slick production.
On top of the album announcement today, Magnolia Park have released a new song from the album, “Misfits,” featuring Taylor Acorn.
Taking cues from early/mid 2000’s alternative acts, the track is complete with thundering distorted guitars, a dynamic drum pattern and screamo vocals that precede a breakdown as heavy as they come.
Check out the album artwork and track-listing below, as well as their remaining upcoming tour dates with A Day to Remember and The Used.
Artwork:
Track-listing:
?
Feel Something (feat. Derek Sanders)
Misfits (feat. Taylor Acorn)
Radio Reject
!!
Drugs
Paralyzed
Addison Rae
Ghost 2 U (feat. FRED & Joshua Roberts)
$$$
I should’ve listened to my friends
Tour Dates:
supporting A Day To Remember & The Used
Oct. 1 – Pensacola, FL – Pensacola Bay Center
Oct. 2 – Birmingham, AL – Legacy Arena
Oct. 4 – Oklahoma City, OK – The Zoo Amphitheater
Oct. 7 – San Diego, CA – Petco at the Park
Oct. 10 – Portland, OR – Theater Of The Clouds
Oct. 11 – Seattle, WA – WaMu Theater
Oct. 13 – Calgary, AB – Grey Eagle Event Center
Oct. 14 – Spokane, WA – TBD
Oct. 16 – Grand Junction, CO – Amphitheater at Los Colonias Park
Oct. 18 – Austin, TX – Moody Amphitheater
Oct. 21 – Las Vegas, NV – Pearl Theater
Oct. 25 – Lubbock, TX – The Pavillion
Oct. 27 – Mesa, AZ – Mesa Amphitheatre
Oct. 28 – Irvine, CA – Five Points Amphitheater
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Truss' Crackerjack PR Team Let Her Down https://digitalarizonanews.com/truss-crackerjack-pr-team-let-her-down/
Tue., Oct. 4, 2022
By Kevin McCauley
Embattled UK prime minister Liz Truss entered 10 Downing Street backed by a communications team that was highly touted by the Financial Times, Guardian and other members of the British press.
The PR squad was said to be second to none.
Here’s the lineup of heavy-hitters.
Ruth Porter, deputy chief of staff, was a managing director at FGS Global and head of international affairs, government relations and regulatory strategy at the London Stock Exchange.
Adam Jones, political director for communications, was a speechwriter for the CEO of HSBC and a veteran of Omnicom’s Portland shop. He worked with Truss when she was foreign secretary and minister for women and equalities.
Sarah Ludlow, special advisor to the prime minister, did a nearly seven-year stint at Portland. She also worked with Truss in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
Jason Stein, another special advisor to Truss, ran her “Liz for Leader” campaign as a managing director at FGS responsible for its government affairs team.
With such a stellar PR group, what could go wrong? Everything.
They failed to counter the sheer hubris of Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng who introduced an off-the-wall package of $48B in unfunded tax cuts, which included scrapping the top bracket covering the wealthy.
Introducing such a plan during a period of high global inflation, jittery financial markets, an impending European energy crunch and war in Ukraine was nuts.
It also may be the cause of the undoing of both Liz and Kwasi.
The dynamic duo also snubbed the UK’s financial watchdog by failing to submit the plan to the independent Office of Budget Responsibility watchdog.
The Economist called that fiscally reckless.
The magazine noted that Truss’ government in its first weeks in office shredded its own reputation, unleashed higher inflation, forced energy action from the central bank and made growth harder.
“Just imagine what it can do in a month or two,” said the Economist.
We may not find that out.
Truss’ government and the Conservative Party are in a state of chaos.
Grant Shapps, a former party chair, said on Oct. 4 that Truss has 10 days to get her act together.
Had only Truss’ crackerjack PR team pushed back on her economic plan?
They put loyalty to Liz ahead of common sense.
She had it right…..During her campaign for the PM job, Truss thanked her supporters after she eliminated a top rival, Penny Mordaunt, from the contest to succeed Boris Johnson.
Truss tweeted: “Thank you for putting your trust in me. I’m ready to hit the ground from day one.”
Yikes.
That tweet drew widespread ridicule on social media, as people recommended that Truss wear a helmet if she planned to fall flat on her face.
What size do you need, Liz?
A press release from Truss’ campaign team noted that she would “hit the ground running from day one.”
Is Joe Biden so out of touch that he forgot to bring rolls of paper towels to Puerto Rico to throw at people.
Donald Trump flung rolls of paper towels into a crowd of Puerto Ricans in a suburb of San Juan in 2017 after the island was walloped by Hurricane Maria.
The storm killed thousands of people.
Trump’s towel toss was a condescending gesture and one of the many embarrassing moments of his wretched four years in office.
The ex-president also got into a verbal fight with Puerto Rican officials, accusing them of shaking down the US government.
A report released in 2021 by the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development found that the petulant Trump administration delayed more than $20B in hurricane relief to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
The delay was due to the creation of “bureaucratic obstacles” that Team Trump put into place to slow the flow of money that was specifically allocated to Puerto Rico.
Biden said he went to Puerto Rico because “it’s been trying like hell to catch up from the last hurricane.”
And we know who is to blame for that.
Category: PR Commentary
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AP Explains: Voting Systems Reliable Despite Conspiracies
AP Explains: Voting Systems Reliable, Despite Conspiracies https://digitalarizonanews.com/ap-explains-voting-systems-reliable-despite-conspiracies/
ATLANTA (AP) — Former President Donald Trump and his allies have whipped up a relentless campaign of attacks against voting equipment since his loss in the 2020 election. After nearly two years, no evidence has emerged that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election or that there was any widespread fraud.
Conspiracy theories spread online and in forums across the country nevertheless have undermined public confidence in voting machines and election results, while leading some counties to consider ditching the equipment in favor of hand-marked and hand-counted ballots.
Elections have been held across the country this year during a busy primary season. While programming errors sometimes occur and equipment can malfunction, no major problems have been reported. Voting equipment is tested before and after to identify any problems, while audits done after the election confirm it worked correctly.
The Associated Press explains how we got to this point, the efforts to increase security of the vote and the fallout from the false claims surrounding the 2020 presidential election.
VOTING TECHNOLOGY IN USE IN THE U.S.
The types of voting equipment used throughout the U.S. varies by location. For in-person voting, most people fill out ballots by hand, and those ballots are inserted into an electronic tabulator. In many cases, this happens at the polling location. Elsewhere, the ballots are collected in a secured box, with rules governing the chain of custody, and taken to an election office for electronic tabulation.
In some places, a specialized computer is used by voters to mark their ballots electronically. Those ballots are printed, reviewed by the voter for accuracy and then inserted into a tabulator at their polling location. A lawsuit in Georgia is challenging the use of these “ballot-marking” machines because they use bar codes to record votes.
Mailed ballots also are counted by tabulators at a local election office. A small number of jurisdictions, mostly small towns in New England, don’t use tabulators and count their ballots by hand.
HOW HAS THIS CHANGED OVER THE YEARS?
After the “hanging chad” chaos of the 2000 election, Congress provided money for voting system upgrades. Many jurisdictions opted for electronic voting machines to replace their punch-card ballot systems. But those machines did not produce a paper record; instead, all votes were cast and recorded electronically.
For years, election security experts raised concerns about these “direct-recording” machines and the potential for someone to tamper with them. A more secure method, they say, is a system that uses paper ballots and electronic tabulation with post-election reviews and tests to ensure the machines faithfully recorded voters’ choices.
Over the last decade, state and local governments began replacing their paperless machines, a process that accelerated after the 2016 election and revelations that Russia had scanned U.S. voting systems looking for vulnerabilities. Today, paperless machines are used only in Louisiana and a small number of jurisdictions in Indiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Tennessee and Texas, according to Verified Voting, a group that tracks voting technology in the U.S.
CLAIMS MADE AFTER THE 2020 ELECTION
In the weeks after the 2020 election, Trump and his allies made numerous unsupported claims about voting machines, including that their software was created in foreign countries and designed to flip votes for desired candidates: “With the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you can press a button for Trump and it goes to Biden,” Trump said in a Dec. 2 speech.
These claims have largely centered on Dominion Voting Systems, one of a handful of companies that dominate the U.S. voting technology market. In response, Dominion has filed defamation lawsuits against conservative media companies and Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, saying “lies and misinformation have severely damaged our company and diminished the credibility of U.S. elections.”
But rather than dissipate, conspiracies surrounding voting machines have only grown. Trump allies have been traveling the country to speak at conferences and with community groups, armed with algorithms and charts purporting to show machines have somehow been rigged.
Election technology expert Kevin Skoglund said part of the challenge is that voting systems are complex. It’s understandable that some people would be persuaded that something nefarious happened when it did not.
“If you are a person who is not technical, if someone is telling you the machines are cheating you, you might believe it because you don’t understand how the systems work,” Skoglund said.
ARE VOTING SYSTEMS SECURE?
Any device run by software — a cell phone, a laptop or voting system — is vulnerable to hacking. That’s why election experts have been pressing for the replacement of paperless voting machines.
Experts say the U.S. has taken steps to improve election security in recent years. That includes designating U.S. voting systems in 2017 as “critical infrastructure” — on par with the nation’s banks, dams and nuclear power plants.
Congress has sent nearly $900 million in election security funding to states, which has been used to replace outdated voting systems, hire cybersecurity staff and beef up cybersecurity defenses.
“There is no such thing as an invulnerable system,” said Larry Norden, an election security expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “That doesn’t mean we can’t do better. We should always be looking at how we can do better, but you can’t eliminate risk.”
FALSE CLAIMS FUEL DOUBT AND SECURITY CONCERNS
The false claims have not only undermined public confidence in elections. They also have led to security breaches at some local election offices in Colorado, Georgia and Michigan.
Soon after the 2020 election, Trump allies seized on a programming error in a Michigan county and, through the courts, gained legal access to its voting system. But a copy of the county’s election management system was made available at an August 2021 event hosted by a Trump ally, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, according to attendees.
Also released at that event was a copy of the system used in Mesa County, Colorado. Details have surfaced recently of another suspected breach — in Coffee County, Georgia in January 2021 as Trump allies sought ways to overturn the result of the presidential election. And Michigan authorities are investigating after voting equipment in a handful of counties was made accessible to unauthorized people.
Those developments have prompted concerns that rogue election workers sympathetic to conspiracies might use their access to election equipment and the knowledge to launch an attack from within. A poll worker in Michigan was recently charged with inserting a personal thumb drive into an electronic pollbook during the state’s primary, while authorities in Colorado are investigating a case in which a voter is suspected of tampering with a voting machine earlier this year.
Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, told reporters Monday that threats to the security of elections have never been more complex — citing misinformation, the insider threats and harassment of election workers.
THE “MOST SECURE” ELECTION
After the 2020 presidential election, a coalition of federal cybersecurity and election officials along with state election officials and representatives from voting machine companies issued a statement calling it the “most secure in American history.”
The group said there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
This was due largely to paper records being available for an estimated 93% of all ballots cast and a system of post-election checks to test the accuracy of the electronic tabulators. In Georgia, the presidential vote was counted three times — once entirely by hand — and each tally affirmed President Joe Biden’s win in the state.
“It doesn’t matter what happens in the machine,” said Norden, of the Brennan Center. “We have a piece of paper that tells us whether votes were recorded accurately.”
___
Associated Press technology writer Frank Bajak in Lima, Peru, contributed to this report.
___
Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ap_politics
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A New Book's Behind-The-Scenes Look At Congress' Jan. 6 Capitol Riot Investigation
A New Book's Behind-The-Scenes Look At Congress' Jan. 6 Capitol Riot Investigation https://digitalarizonanews.com/a-new-books-behind-the-scenes-look-at-congress-jan-6-capitol-riot-investigation/
Denver Riggleman served eight months as a senior technical adviser for the congressional select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In a new book, titled “The Breach,” Riggleman delves into a few key parts of the committee’s investigation, including an examination of a trove of text messages sent and received by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the lead-up to the Capitol riot. The book also revealed for the first time that during the Capitol breach, someone at the Trump White House made a call to a rioter who had entered the building.
Riggleman took a somewhat unusual path to the committee. After serving in the United States Air Force and working as a contractor for the National Security Agency, he ran for – and won – a seat in Congress representing a district in Virginia in 2018.
At the time, Riggleman was a Republican. He describes himself as “a full-blooded redneck.” Former president Trump actually endorsed him – twice – and Riggleman joined the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus.
Despite Trump’s endorsement, Riggleman lost a primary to a more hard-right Republican, and Riggleman became more outspoken about the former president’s embrace of extremism and amplification of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory. After the Nov. 2020 election, Riggleman was one of the few Republican elected officials to quickly acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory.
When Congress eventually launched its investigation into the Jan. 6 attack, Riggleman raised his hand and joined the committee, where he found himself examining some of his former colleagues who tried to overturn the election. He ultimately left the investigation in April 2022, before the committee began holding public hearings. Some members of the committee have expressed frustration with Riggleman’s decision to write a book, especially before the final hearing has taken place.
In an interview with NPR, Riggleman discussed his work on the investigation, his experience as a member of congress, and whether the committee should submit a criminal referral to the Department of Justice.
Here are four takeaways from that conversation:
The significance of the White House call to a Jan. 6 rioter remains unclear
“The Breach” revealed for the first time that congressional investigators discovered at 4:34 pm on Jan. 6, 2021, someone used a White House phone to call a man who had participated in the rioting.
“The call was outgoing to an individual rioter as the violence played out,” Riggleman writes.
The identity of the person who made the call remains unknown.
However, multiple news outlets have identified the recipient of the call as a low-level Capitol riot defendant, who pleaded guilty to a non-violent misdemeanor. According to court documents, he had already left the building by the time of that phone call.
The call lasted nine seconds, and the content is also unknown.
Since this detail was made public, some members of the Jan. 6 Select Committee have appeared to downplay its significance.
“That’s one of thousands of details that obviously the committee is aware of,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on NBC’s Meet the Press. “And so, you know, to me, it’s interesting, but much less interesting than the fact that Donald Trump told the crowd in public, ‘You’ve got to fight like hell. And if you don’t, you’re not going to have a country anymore.'”
Still, Riggleman told NPR that the mere existence of the call demands further investigation.
“Nine seconds is an eternity to a counterterrorism analyst,” Riggleman said. “The fact that the call came from inside the White House at a desk, was routed through the switchboard or defaulted to that number and went out to a rioter, is something that’s extremely important.”
Political pressure is driving some elected Republicans further right
During his short-lived political career, Riggleman vocally supported Trump and joined the House Freedom Caucus not out of principle, he says, but out of political expediency.
“There’s some things that you do that you think you have to [do to] win,” he said. “I had a consultant who was correct. He said, ‘hey, Denver, you gotta be a little bit crazy if you’re gonna beat the crazier people on the right.'”
He said a similar dynamic may have played a role in the thought process for some House Republicans, who supported Trump’s lies about the election.
“I know there’s a few that absolutely didn’t believe the election was stolen, but there was no way they could go against the grain,” Riggleman said.
In Riggleman’s case, conservatives in his district turned on his campaign in 2020, in part because he officiated a same-sex wedding for his campaign volunteers. That contributed to his loss of a primary contest against an ever more conservative opponent.
“Being a politician – I wasn’t as talented as I thought I was gonna be at it,” Riggleman told NPR.
He says he now regrets his support for Trump, and in 2020, he did not vote for the then-president.
“I might have been one of the first Republicans that was a sitting member to see that Trump was retweeting some pretty crazy QAnon-based sort of troll-farm conspiracies and some things that were very dangerous, even things that were calling for violence,” he said. “So no, I did not vote for him.”
Instead, Riggleman said he decided to write in himself for president.
Riggleman believes there are grounds to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows provided a large number of text messages to congressional investigators, which Riggleman describes as “the crown jewels” for the committee’s work.
“What we found in the texts was a road map to an insurrection fueled by apocalyptic propaganda,” Riggleman writes in the book. “It was a toxic stew of old-school zealotry and internet authoritarianism.”
Among the trove of messages were texts sent by Ginni Thomas, a longtime conservative activist and spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In those texts, Thomas expressed the view that the 2020 election was stolen, and appeared to brainstorm legal and congressional strategies to overturning the result.
Shortly after the Nov. 2020 election, Thomas wrote a message to Meadows that bore some similarities to rhetoric spread by adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory:
“Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”
“The first time I saw the Ginni Thomas texts, I called it a ‘bourbon text,'” Riggleman said. “You have to take a shot of bourbon to get through it.”
Ginni Thomas testified to the Jan. 6 committee last week, and denied ever discussing her post-election activities with her husband.
In a statement, her lawyer, Mark Paoletta, said, “Mrs. Thomas had significant concerns about fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election. And, as she told the committee, her minimal and mainstream activity focused on ensuring that reports of fraud and irregularities were investigated. Beyond that, she played no role in any events after the 2020 election results.”
Riggleman expressed skepticism that Ginni and Clarence Thomas maintained such a strict firewall when it came to discussions of the election.
“It’s possible that Clarence Thomas didn’t know about Ginni Thomas’ activities not just around Jan. 6 and the election but through the years as a Republican activist,” he said. “But I don’t know if it’s probable.”
Riggleman said Congress would be justified in taking the extraordinary step of seeking information from Justice Thomas himself, though he said it was unlikely given that the committee is currently wrapping up its work.
“I think it would’ve been appropriate to talk to Justice Thomas,” he said. “I think Ginni [Thomas] coming in is a heck of a great step by the Committee. But I do believe, at some point, the American public is going to have to come to their own conclusions about that.”
Should the Jan. 6 committee issue a criminal referral to the Justice Department?
Political and legal commentators – as well as members of the Jan. 6 committee themselves – have debated whether Congress should make a criminal referral to the Department of Justice at the close of their investigation.
The decision on whether to charge former President Trump or any other target of the investigation would still remain with the Justice Department, but a referral could potentially add political pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Riggleman told NPR he opposed sending a referral.
“Let the DOJ make that decision,” he said. “Instead of getting caught up in the politics of referrals, just present the best case you can to the American public.”
“They’ve already proven that based on conspiracy theories, based on coordination, that based on really a president that decided to really cavort with the craziest in the far-right base…all that suggests that you had a president that was unfit for office,” Riggleman said. “Because even with criminal referrals, it’s gonna be up to the voters if they want to support that kind of nonsense.”
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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A Night To Remember https://digitalarizonanews.com/a-night-to-remember/
Kingman area residents, from left, Don Martin, Jennifer Chambers and Marc Schwartzkopf are shown at a Desert Bighorn Sheep Society banquet and awards ceremony where Chambers received an award and spoke about her hunt. Chambers shot a 6-year-old desert bighorn sheep after an 11-day hunt in 2021. (Courtesy photo)
Originally Published: October 4, 2022 12:15 p.m.
SCOTTSDALE – Kingman sportswoman Jennifer Chambers was recognized at the annual awards and recognition banquet sponsored by the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society on Saturday, Sept. 30 in Scottsdale.
Jennifer was recognized for taking a 6-year-old desert bighorn sheep in 2021 in Unit 15C North.
This unit in northwest Arizona is located west of Highway 93 from Hoover Dam all the way down to Cottonwood Road. The Colorado River is the western boundary of this unit. The area in 15C North is approximately 200,000 acres.
Jennifer had been applying for a coveted sheep tag for 32-years. When she drew the only tag offered by the Arizona Game and Fish Department for that unit, and saw she had two full months to hunt, it didn’t take long for her to learn the reason why there was only one tag offered and a hunt that could last for up to two months.
“After I drew that tag last year, I knew I was in trouble,” the now 80-year-old hunter told a crowd of over 100 sheep enthusiasts who were in attendance at the banquet. And was she ever right!
The start of her once-in-a-lifetime sheep hunt started many years ago. Jennifer and her husband, the late Gene Chambers, were both very involved in hunting in Arizona.
Both had gone on many sheep hunts that I was guiding on. Gene and Jennifer had also gone on hunts when friends drew coveted sheep tags. Gene had taken a ram in Unit 15D many, many years ago.
Not only did the pair do a lot of glassing for sheep on these various hunts, Gene even carried out the trophies of other successful hunters.
When Gene was diagnosed with cancer over five years ago, he knew he was not going to live. Gene asked me for a favor.
“If Jennifer ever draws a sheep tag, would you and the other guys take her on her hunt?” I told him that I and the other friends of theirs that had been on sheep hunts with them would gladly offer our assistance.
And that’s how it came to be that in December 2021 I and a few men that were friends and part of a sheep team I had worked with in the past, were honored to be with Jennifer on what was to be her once-in-a-lifetime desert bighorn sheep hunt.
Those on the hunt included Jay Chan, Marc Schwartzkopf, Dan Reed and Gary Martin. Page McDonald did a lot of meal prep for the hunt.
As we all expected, the hunt turned out to be appropriately called “a needle in a haystack hunt” as sheep were few and far between, and finding rams was almost impossible.
It was Day 11 that the first group of three rams were located by Jay. But they were over 1,000 yards away on a vertical wall, and there was no way Jennifer or anyone else could have got to them. We named the group” the three amigos.”
The next day Jay spotted a single ram on top of a mountain almost two miles away. It was a young ram and definitely not part of the ram band we had seen on Day 11.
Danny Reed later that day found “the three amigos” and Jay took Jennifer in on a stalk. After some very tense moments, Jennifer’s life-long quest for a ram was over!
When Jennifer finished telling her story to the audience, cheers and clapping broke out, and in a few seconds, people started standing up! For 30 seconds everyone in the room shared their emotions on hearing the story of Jennifer, her late husband, and how she had persevered on one of the toughest hunts imaginable. It was the only standing ovation given that night.
Marc and I were happy and proud to have been with Jennifer at the banquet and watch as she relived her hunt. Jennifer’s grandson and his wife were also in attendance on this special night.
After the banquet, several people that had never met Jennifer came up and congratulated her on taking a ram under the toughest of conditions.
It will be a night that none of us will forget.
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The Zone' In Phoenix Sees Homelessness Crime Surge: Goldwater Demands Action AZ Big Media
‘The Zone' In Phoenix Sees Homelessness, Crime Surge: Goldwater Demands Action – AZ Big Media https://digitalarizonanews.com/the-zone-in-phoenix-sees-homelessness-crime-surge-goldwater-demands-action-az-big-media/
It’s known as “The Zone”—a vast section of downtown Phoenix where 1,000 homeless people have set up camp. And it’s led to a spike in violent crimes like shootings, stabbings, and rapes, as well as the destruction of dozens of businesses in the area. But despite government’s obligation to all its citizens’ rights, the city is refusing to take action, and in fact is even making the situation worse.
Now, the Goldwater Institute is demanding that officials enforce the law.
For months, Phoenix officials have been shunting the city’s homeless population into “The Zone.” And city leaders have reportedly instructed police officers to take no action, resulting in an area that has now become one of the nation’s largest homeless encampments.
READ ALSO: Threshold enlists Maricopa County landlords to help solve homelessness
READ ALSO: Arizona looks to establish sanctioned homeless encampments
A group of Phoenix citizens has now filed a lawsuit, arguing that the city is effectively destroying their property by ignoring its responsibilities, and is fostering a nuisance in the middle of the city. That last point is based on a 1985 Arizona Supreme Court decision in which the justices held that inviting vagrants into an area can constitute an illegal nuisance. But it’s not just the crime—it’s also the pollution. People in The Zone report that its inhabitants urinate and defecate on the streets, on sidewalks, and on both buildings and vacant property. But Arizona law forbids the city from “maintaining” any “activity” that can pollute public waterways—and The Zone is within easy walking distance of the Salt River. As we note in our friend of the court brief, by maintaining The Zone, the city is violating state environmental laws.
That’s a textbook example of a nuisance. In a 1938 case, the state Supreme Court found Phoenix liable for maintaining a faulty sewage treatment facility on its property, which frequently broke down and caused pollution. “While it is true that a sewer system is, indeed, a vital necessity for the maintenance of health in any large municipality,” the court said, “even that necessity does not authorize the municipality to injure the person or property of another without responsibility.” The same is true here: while homelessness is a problem in most cities, Phoenix cannot maintain an encampment of vagrants—many of them violent criminals—who cause dangerous biohazards in the middle of downtown.
That’s why our brief urges the court to issue an injunction blocking the city from maintaining The Zone in Phoenix or from restricting police services to the hardworking business owners affected by the encampment.
Among the businesses harmed by The Zone is the Arizona Rock Products Association (ARPA), the state’s oldest trade organization devoted to the mining and rock industry, whose headquarters are located within The Zone. Ever since the city established The Zone, ARPA’s employees have been forced to put out fires on their property and to clean up needles, used condoms, and human waste left by The Zone’s residents. Moreover, residents of The Zone have trespassed on ARPA’s property, including by breaking into cars and even, on one occasion, entering the building and helping themselves to food in the refrigerator. ARPA is one of the many crucial contributors to Arizona’s economy, all of whom deserve to have their public officials enforce the law and protect their rights. Yet thanks to this nuisance the city has created, ARPA is finding it increasingly difficult to do business at all in Arizona.
It’s not compassion to let people live on the streets, in an atmosphere riddled with unpoliced gang violence. But it’s even more outrageous for the city to withhold police protection from the innocent property and business owners who happen to be located in The Zone. Hardworking Phoenicians should be able to rely on the public services their tax dollars pay for—and their elected officials owe them a duty to enforce the laws.
You can read the brief here and learn more about the case here.
Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute.
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Letter: Comics Canceled – Are You Kidding? https://digitalarizonanews.com/letter-comics-canceled-are-you-kidding/
TO: Mr John D’Oriando, MS Jill Jorden Spitz, Mr Mark Lolwing and Ms Heather Locke
As the AZ Star wrote “Change is tough” regarding canceling most of our comics. So how about if we all cancel our subscriptions to the paper? Is that tough enough for you, AZ Star? I agree with Patricia Howel of Vail in today’s Letters to the Editor – “What are you thinking?” I do not want to read a computer at the breakfast table. I look forward to reading all the comics each morning. You canceled most of my favorite comics and reduced the reading from one and a half pages to just a half page and filled it with crummy comics. I am giving the Star one week to reverse its decision and to bring back our comics or I will cancel my subscription to the paper. Change is tough – will others follow?
Reed Olson
Green Valley, AZ
Reed Olson
Green Valley
Disclaimer: As submitted to the Arizona Daily Star.
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In Trump White House Classified Records Routinely Mishandled Aides Say
In Trump White House, Classified Records Routinely Mishandled, Aides Say https://digitalarizonanews.com/in-trump-white-house-classified-records-routinely-mishandled-aides-say/
Aides who had worked in Donald Trump’s White House were not surprised this summer when the FBI found highly classified material in boxes at Mar-a-Lago, mixed with news clippings and other items.
They’d seen such haphazard collections before.
During his four years in office, Trump never strictly followed the rules and customs for handling sensitive government documents, according to 14 officials from his administration, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss what they called Trump’s mishandling of classified information.
He took transcripts of his calls with foreign leaders as well as photos and charts used in his intelligence briefings to his private residence with no explanation. He demanded that letters he exchanged with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un be kept close at hand so he could show them off to visitors. Documents that would ordinarily be kept under lock and key mingled with piles of newspaper articles in Trump’s living quarters and in a dining room that he used as an informal office.
The warrant authorizing the search of former president Donald Trump’s home said agents were seeking documents possessed in violation of the Espionage Act. (Video: Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
Officials and aides who worked in proximity to Trump said they are not sure how more than 300 classified documents ended up at his Mar-a-Lago estate, triggering a lengthy effort to retrieve them that has resulted in a criminal investigation. But in the waning days of his presidency, as Trump grudgingly began to pack up his belongings, he included documents that should have been sent to the National Archives and Records Administration, along with news articles and gifts he received while president, several former officials said.
What those ex-Trump aides and advisers saw in an inventory of items recovered by the FBI in August — classified documents in boxes, stored alongside newspaper and magazine articles, books and gifts — looked to them like the idiosyncratic filing system Trump used in the White House.
Senior aides said they tried for years to impose some order on the flow of classified information in the White House — with little success.
“The rigor I had felt at the end of meetings during the Obama administration … where someone very carefully collected all the pieces of paper or stayed behind in the room and made sure there was nothing left — that rigor just did not exist at the end during the Trump period,” said one former official who regularly attended Situation Room meetings.
A longtime adviser who still sees Trump regularly described him as a “pack rat” and a “hoarder.” Several former aides said Trump spent his time in office flouting classification rules and intimidating staffers who might try to take secret intelligence material away from him.
“I can’t say what went wrong that resulted in some boxes ending up at Mar-a-Lago,” said a former official who knew that Trump took classified information to his White House quarters. “But you can see that as an extension of four years of accommodating the president.”
A spokesman for Trump declined to comment for this article, other than to repeat a previously issued statement in which he accused the Justice Department of leaking information to The Washington Post to hurt Trump’s image. “President Trump remains committed to defending the Constitution and the Office of the Presidency, ensuring the integrity of America for generations to come,” that statement said.
Many of Trump’s aides had not previously worked in senior government positions, and they came to the White House naive about the established procedures for handling classified information. In August 2017, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who had served as secretary of homeland security, tried to set things straight.
Kelly issued written guidance requiring that any document sent to the president for his review first be cleared by the staff secretary, the official in charge of keeping track of documents, as well as the chief of staff. Kelly also set up rules for what to do after Trump had seen a document.
“All paper leaving the Oval Office must be submitted to the Staff Secretary for appropriate processing,” said the guidance, a copy of which was reviewed by The Post. It was the staff secretary’s job to mark the document “President Has Seen” and submit it to the Office of Records Management. “This process is vital for compliance with the Presidential Records Act,” the guidance states, referring to the law that makes White House records the property of the federal government.
“It wasn’t perfect, but we did have a better idea of what was going and coming,” said a former senior administration official.
The White House normally establishes a “chain of custody” for classified documents, said Larry Pfeiffer, the senior director of the White House Situation Room in the Obama administration and a former CIA chief of staff. “They log [the documents], track them, give them numbers. If anyone says, ‘Hey, whatever happened to that memo given to the president?’ the [staff secretary] can say, ‘Hey, it’s in the national security adviser’s office.’ ”
Former officials credited Kelly and then-Staff Secretary Rob Porter, as well as his successor, Derek Lyons, with trying to impose some order on Trump’s chaotic ways. But it was a struggle. John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, said Trump sometimes asked to keep material after intelligence briefings, with no clear pattern as to what he wanted. Sometimes, Bolton said, he would ask the president to give documents back. “It was very erratic,” he said. “Some things would catch his attention, and other things wouldn’t.”
Kelly said Trump “rejected the Presidential Records Act entirely.” He added that “many people would regularly say to him, ‘We have to capture these things.’ ”
“What he did doesn’t surprise me at all,” Kelly said.
Two Trump advisers said he took, or had aides take, all the documents he wanted to the private dining room or the residence. These documents were not usually closely tracked, one of these people said. One former official said some classified documents in the residence were visible to anyone passing by.
Although it was not necessarily improper for a president to take classified information to the residence to continue working and White House staffers are accustomed to adjusting to any president’s working style and preference, it was not always clear that Trump needed the documents for official business, another former official said.
White House staffers found ways to accommodate Trump’s demands. The letters he exchanged with Kim, for example, were not stored in the White House space customarily used for sensitive documents but were kept where aides could quickly retrieve them at Trump’s request. The letters were among the items first flagged as missing by the Archives after Trump left office and were included in the 15 boxes of material sent back from Mar-a-Lago in January.
Aides also found other ways to circumvent Trump’s “sticky fingers,” as one put it. White House staffers retrieved from the residence documents that Trump had torn into pieces, then reassembled the papers and returned to them to secure facilities so that they could be preserved as presidential records. Others who routinely briefed Trump said they developed a practice of never leaving classified documents in his possession unless he demanded them.
Several former officials said they knew that the system, or lack of one, for handling classified information carried risks. Sensitive documents could get lost. Intelligence might fall into the hands of people not authorized to see it.
But Trump intimidated his aides. “They didn’t challenge him,” one former official said.
Several people singled out Mark Meadows, who became Trump’s chief of staff in March 2020 and stayed through the end of his term, as incapable of telling the president no. That set a tone that others followed, these people said.
“This characterization is completely absurd,” said Ben Williamson, a Meadows spokesman.
In the absence of higher authority backing them up, personnel in the staff secretary’s office could not be expected to remove documents from the president’s possession, another former aide said. “They would have gotten their heads cut off by the president if they tried to take things from him.”
Whatever fragile discipline Kelly and others tried to instill began to disintegrate after the 2020 election. The usual packing process that occurs during a presidential transition was delayed because Trump would not concede that he had lost reelection and did not want to move out of the White House, two former administration officials said. Many officials who by then had some experience with security procedures had left the White House, to be replaced by less-seasoned personnel who did not understand classification rules and were afraid to say no to the president, former officials said.
“This created the opportunity for mistakes to happen,” one of the former officials said. “What the president’s intent was is the key question,” the former official said of the transfer of classified material to Mar-a-Lago
As Trump dug in his heels, officials in the staff secretary’s office tried unsuccessfully to find some sensitive documents they believed were still in his possession. With the White House expected to hand over all original, relevant documents to the Archives, senior administration officials held several conversations about missing materials, former officials said.
Lyons, the staff secretary, and some White House aides discussed places in the residence and elsewhere in the White House where Trump could be keeping the documents, as well as gifts he had a...
Republican Herschel Walker Pledges To Sue Over Report He Paid For Abortion Live
Republican Herschel Walker Pledges To Sue Over Report He Paid For Abortion – Live https://digitalarizonanews.com/republican-herschel-walker-pledges-to-sue-over-report-he-paid-for-abortion-live-2/
Walker campaign crisis in Georgia over abortion row turns heat up further in furious midterms battle for Senate
Herschel Walker, the controversial Republican candidate in Georgia for a vital US Senate seat, is attempting to weather the latest tempest that has tossed his midterm election campaign from turbulent into full-blown crisis.
The news broke last night that the former NFL football player turned political candidate, who is campaigning on a hard anti-abortion line, had paid for an abortion for a former girlfriend in 2009, according to a report by the Daily Beast.
As the Beast puts it in the strap below the headline to its report: “The woman has receipts – and a ‘get well’ card she says the football star, now a Senate candidate, sent her.”
Walker blasted out a top-line denial via Twitter, calling the story overall a flat-out lie, also calling it a “Democrat attack”, while the Beast insists its article is backed up to the hilt. Walker says he’ll sue the Beast today.
He also appeared on Fox News to blame politics, saying: “Now everyone knows how important this seat is and they [Democrats] will do anything to win this seat. They wanted to make it about anything except inflation, crime and the border being wide open.”
But Walker’s son, 23-year-old Christian Walker, then responded on Twitter. Yikes.
And:
The sitting Senator from Georgia whom Herschel Walker is challenging, Democrat Raphael Warnock, is striving to stay above the fray – maybe hoping the former running back will be hoisted by his own petard?
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Joe Biden told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy earlier today that Washington will provide Kyiv with $625 million in new security assistance, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, the White House said.
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Giant tents for temporarily housing asylum seekers arriving in New York City after crossing the US-Mexico border are being moved to an island off Manhattan from a remote corner of the Bronx, after storms raised concerns over flooding at the original site.
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There is no sign of a lawsuit (yet) from Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker against the Daily Beast following the latest chapter of Walker’s tumultuous campaign for the Senate unfolded last night.
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US climate envoy John Kerry said today some western government ministers avoided a so-called “family photo” of participants at climate talks in Kinshasa because they were uncomfortable with the presence of Russia’s representative.
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Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign is in crisis in Georgia after the latest twist in the abortion row became very personal and turns the heat up further in the furious midterms battle for control of the US Senate.
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Joe Biden told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy earlier today that Washington will provide Kyiv with $625 million in new security assistance, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, the White House said.
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The US president was joined in the call by vice president Kamala Harris, the White House said in a statement, Reuters reports.
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The president underscored that Washington will never recognize Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory, it added.
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Biden:
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pledged to continue supporting Ukraine as it defends itself from Russian aggression for as long as it takes,” the statement said.
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Check out all the Guardian’s detailed reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine here, and you can follow our global live blog on the war here.
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When the latest chapter of Herschel Walker’s tumultuous campaign for the Senate unfolded last night, the former NFL player noted that he was going to sue the Daily Beast the following morning.
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It looks like the ex-running back is now running back on that. Is morning AM or just, before lunch? No sign yet of a suit from the GOP candidate in his Senate race against incumbent and Democrat, Raphael Warnock.
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Was it a bluff? There’s also been mention that maybe it’s coming tomorrow morning. It remains to be seen how voters will respond to all this. The Daily Beast reported last night that despite being an anti-abortion fundamentalist in his campaigning in these mid-terms, in the past Walker paid for an ex to have an abortion. He’s called that story a flat-out lie, though, with close scrutiny, his denials are not as watertight as he’d like them to sound.
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Critics are salivating about what might surface in discovery if Walker plowed ahead with a lawsuit, to say nothing of success being very much against the odds for him even if he had a flawless reputation in such a suit in the US, anyway.
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Who wants to bet Hershel will NEVER file suit? The Discovery will destroy his case.
Now- every woman who was paid by a congressman in office now to have an abortion should come forward before the elections to expose the hypocrisy.
— Carmela (@denise_yak) October 4, 2022
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Now there is light pouring through the cracks and there may be no lawsuit at all.
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NEW: Walker’s lawyer tells me “We are currently considering our options but no final decision has been made on the future handling of this matter.” https://t.co/Pq482nRRAC
— Elizabeth Campbell (@ECampbell360) October 4, 2022
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US climate envoy John Kerry said today some western government ministers avoided a so-called “family photo” of participants at climate talks in Kinshasa because they were uncomfortable with the presence of Russia’s representative.
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shattered relations with the west, complicating international efforts to cooperate on global crises like the climate crisis, Reuters reports.
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Republican Herschel Walker Pledges To Sue Over Report He Paid For Abortion Live
Republican Herschel Walker Pledges To Sue Over Report He Paid For Abortion – Live https://digitalarizonanews.com/republican-herschel-walker-pledges-to-sue-over-report-he-paid-for-abortion-live/
Walker campaign crisis in Georgia over abortion row turns heat up further in furious midterms battle for Senate
Herschel Walker, the controversial Republican candidate in Georgia for a vital US Senate seat, is attempting to weather the latest tempest that has tossed his midterm election campaign from turbulent into full-blown crisis.
The news broke last night that the former NFL football player turned political candidate, who is campaigning on a hard anti-abortion line, had paid for an abortion for a former girlfriend in 2009, according to a report by the Daily Beast.
As the Beast puts it in the strap below the headline to its report: “The woman has receipts – and a ‘get well’ card she says the football star, now a Senate candidate, sent her.”
Walker blasted out a top-line denial via Twitter, calling the story overall a flat-out lie, also calling it a “Democrat attack”, while the Beast insists its article is backed up to the hilt. Walker says he’ll sue the Beast today.
He also appeared on Fox News to blame politics, saying: “Now everyone knows how important this seat is and they [Democrats] will do anything to win this seat. They wanted to make it about anything except inflation, crime and the border being wide open.”
But Walker’s son, 23-year-old Christian Walker, then responded on Twitter. Yikes.
And:
The sitting Senator from Georgia whom Herschel Walker is challenging, Democrat Raphael Warnock, is striving to stay above the fray – maybe hoping the former running back will be hoisted by his own petard?
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Joe Biden told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy earlier today that Washington will provide Kyiv with $625 million in new security assistance, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, the White House said.
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Giant tents for temporarily housing asylum seekers arriving in New York City after crossing the US-Mexico border are being moved to an island off Manhattan from a remote corner of the Bronx, after storms raised concerns over flooding at the original site.
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There is no sign of a lawsuit (yet) from Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker against the Daily Beast following the latest chapter of Walker’s tumultuous campaign for the Senate unfolded last night.
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US climate envoy John Kerry said today some western government ministers avoided a so-called “family photo” of participants at climate talks in Kinshasa because they were uncomfortable with the presence of Russia’s representative.
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Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign is in crisis in Georgia after the latest twist in the abortion row became very personal and turns the heat up further in the furious midterms battle for control of the US Senate.
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Joe Biden told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy earlier today that Washington will provide Kyiv with $625 million in new security assistance, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, the White House said.
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The US president was joined in the call by vice president Kamala Harris, the White House said in a statement, Reuters reports.
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The president underscored that Washington will never recognize Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory, it added.
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Biden:
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pledged to continue supporting Ukraine as it defends itself from Russian aggression for as long as it takes,” the statement said.
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Check out all the Guardian’s detailed reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine here, and you can follow our global live blog on the war here.
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When the latest chapter of Herschel Walker’s tumultuous campaign for the Senate unfolded last night, the former NFL player noted that he was going to sue the Daily Beast the following morning.
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It looks like the ex-running back is now running back on that. Is morning AM or just, before lunch? No sign yet of a suit from the GOP candidate in his Senate race against incumbent and Democrat, Raphael Warnock.
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Was it a bluff? There’s also been mention that maybe it’s coming tomorrow morning. It remains to be seen how voters will respond to all this. The Daily Beast reported last night that despite being an anti-abortion fundamentalist in his campaigning in these mid-terms, in the past Walker paid for an ex to have an abortion. He’s called that story a flat-out lie, though, with close scrutiny, his denials are not as watertight as he’d like them to sound.
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Critics are salivating about what might surface in discovery if Walker plowed ahead with a lawsuit, to say nothing of success being very much against the odds for him even if he had a flawless reputation in such a suit in the US, anyway.
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Who wants to bet Hershel will NEVER file suit? The Discovery will destroy his case.
Now- every woman who was paid by a congressman in office now to have an abortion should come forward before the elections to expose the hypocrisy.
— Carmela (@denise_yak) October 4, 2022
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Now there is light pouring through the cracks and there may be no lawsuit at all.
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NEW: Walker’s lawyer tells me “We are currently considering our options but no final decision has been made on the future handling of this matter.” https://t.co/Pq482nRRAC
— Elizabeth Campbell (@ECampbell360) October 4, 2022
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US climate envoy John Kerry said today some western government ministers avoided a so-called “family photo” of participants at climate talks in Kinshasa because they were uncomfortable with the presence of Russia’s representative.
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shattered relations with the west, complicating international efforts to cooperate on global crises like the climate crisis, Reuters reports.
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Ukraine Drives Russians From More Villages; Elon Musk Peace Plan Sparks Outrage; Russia Fines TikTok: Live Updates
Ukraine Drives Russians From More Villages; Elon Musk Peace Plan Sparks Outrage; Russia Fines TikTok: Live Updates https://digitalarizonanews.com/ukraine-drives-russians-from-more-villages-elon-musk-peace-plan-sparks-outrage-russia-fines-tiktok-live-updates/
Ukraine reclaimed several more villages Tuesday and the bodies of Russian soldiers were seen lying in the streets of a crucial city liberated days ago as a Ukraine counteroffensive continued to drive Russian forces into retreat.
More than 450 settlements in the Kharkiv region, one of four being annexed by Russia, have been liberated in the last month, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. Cities and towns in the other regions have also been retaken, he said.
“Fierce fighting continues in many areas of the front,” Zelenskyy said. “More and more occupiers are trying to escape, more and more losses are being inflicted on the enemy army.”
The Kharkiv region hub of Lyman was retaken over the weekend, providing Ukraine forces with a key staging area for pressing its offensive. On Tuesday, an Associated Press team reporting from the town saw at least 18 bodies of Russian soldiers still on the ground. AP said the Ukrainian military appeared to have collected the bodies of their comrades but had not immediately removed those of the Russians.
TURNING POINT?:As Russia admits defeat in Kharkiv, Ukraine regains land, confidence
Other developments
►Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the military has recruited over 200,000 reservists as part of a partial mobilization launched two weeks ago. Shoigu has said the goal is 300,000.
►Japan ordered the Russian consul in the northern city of Sapporo to leave the country within six days in retaliation for Moscow’s expulsion of a Japanese diplomat last month for alleged espionage.
►The city council of Kyiv says it is providing evacuation centers with potassium iodine pills in preparation for a possible nuclear strike on the capital, Ukraine’s largest city.
RUSSIA’S RETREAT DRAWS CRITICISM AT HOME: Russian drone attack targets Zelenskyy’s hometown: Ukraine updates
Elon musk sparks outrage for suggesting Ukraine abandon Crimea
Ukraine leaders and supporters were seething on social media Tuesday after Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted his proposed peace plan that includes Ukraine giving up its efforts to regain control of Crimea. Russian activist and former world chess champion Gary Kasparov dismissed Musk’s plans as “moral idiocy, repetition of Kremlin propaganda, a betrayal of Ukrainian courage & sacrifice.” The response from Ukraine’s parliament was one word: “No.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, however, credited Musky with trying to find a peaceful solution.
Under Musk’s proposal, Crimea would formally become part of Russia and Ukraine must remain neutral, suggesting that efforts to join NATO would be shelved. Musk also calls for new voting in the areas where Russia’s sham referendums held last month resulted in Russian annexing four Ukraine regions. Musk says the votes would be held under U.N. supervision.
He attached a poll, and more than 2.5 million voters rejected his plan by about 60% to 40%. Zelenskyy countered with his own poll, asking Twitter users if they preferred Musk supporting Russia or Ukraine. About 80% of over 2 million voters selected Ukraine.
Russia fines TikTok for allowing pro-LGBT posts
A Russian court fined TikTok $50,000 for failing to delete LGBT material in what is the country’s latest crackdown on Big Tech companies. The court in Moscow ruled against the video-sharing social media platform following a complaint by Russian regulators. TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance Ltd., didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Russian leaders approve annexations, transition period until 2026
Russia’s Federation Council – the upper house of parliament – unanimously approved four federal constitutional laws rubber-stamping the annexation of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk “republics” in the hotly contested Donbas area of Ukraine, as well as the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. The lower house already signed off and Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to quickly close the deal. Residents are recognized as Russian citizens under the laws but have a month to reject that citizenship. The annexation includes a transition period until 2026 for integration into “the economic, financial, credit and legal systems.”
Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies have refused to recognize the annexations.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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Twitter Stock Surges On Reports Elon Musk Again Proposes Buying The Company At Full Price | CNN Business
Twitter Stock Surges On Reports Elon Musk Again Proposes Buying The Company At Full Price | CNN Business https://digitalarizonanews.com/twitter-stock-surges-on-reports-elon-musk-again-proposes-buying-the-company-at-full-price-cnn-business/
02:57 – Source: CNN Business
Here’s how Elon Musk calculated the number of bots on Twitter
CNN —
Twitter stock was halted twice, the second time for news pending, and rose around 13% in midday trading Tuesday following reports that Elon Musk has proposed to move forward with his deal to buy the company at the originally agreed upon price of $54.20 per share.
Bloomberg and the Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Musk had sent a letter to Twitter proposing to complete the deal as originally signed, citing people familiar with the negotiations.
Representatives for Musk and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The news comes as the the two sides have been preparing to head to trial in two weeks over Musk’s attempt to pull out of the $44 billion acquisition agreement, which Twitter had sued him to complete. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal had been set to be deposed by Musk’s lawyers on Monday, and Twitter’s lawyers had planned to depose Musk starting on Thursday.
Such an agreement could bring to an end a contentious, months-long back and forth between Musk and Twitter that has caused massive uncertainty for employees, investors and users of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.
Twitter’s board would likely agree to suspend the litigation to move forward with closing the deal, according to Josh White, assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University.
“The very public saga has certainly taken a toll on them and Twitter employees,” White said. “It is best for all parties to finish the deal and make a quick and seamless transition. I suspect it will close quickly.”
The saga began in April when Musk revealed he had become Twitter’s largest shareholder. Over the next several months, Musk accepted and then backed out of an offer to sit on Twitter’s board, threatened a hostile takeover of the company, signed an agreement to buy the company, started raising concerns about bots on the platform, attempted to terminate the agreement, was sued by Twitter to follow through with the deal and added claims from a Twitter whistleblower to his argument.
Musk initially moved to terminate the deal citing claims that the company has misstated the number of spam and fake bot accounts on the platform. Twitter claimed that Musk had breached the deal and was using bots as a pretext to exit a deal he’d gotten buyer’s remorse over after the broader market decline, which also hurt Tesla stock and, by extension, Musk’s personal wealth.
Still, many legal experts have said that Twitter has the stronger argument heading into court, and that Musk would a face a significant burden in trying to prove that the company had made materially misleading statements in its securities filings or in the deal contract.
The lawsuit was the final hurdle remaining in the way of the deal getting closed, after Twitter shareholders last month voted to approve the deal. The deal had originally been set to close this month.
With news that the deal could end up closing, attention may once again shift to what Musk’s control could mean for the social media platform.
Musk has previously suggested a series of potential changes to Twitter, the most significant of which could be returning former President Donald Trump to the platform and doing away with permanent account bans. Musk has also said he wants to make Twitter more open to “free speech” and could change its content moderation policies.
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Jo Ann Garvey – Albion News Online https://digitalarizonanews.com/jo-ann-garvey-albion-news-online/
Jo Ann Garvey, 95, of South Sioux City, passed away Friday, Sept. 30, 2022 at her home, comforted by family. Survivors include two sons, Bill (Donna) Garvey, Sr. of South Sioux City and Bob Garvey of Mesa, AZ., three grandchildren: Bill (Tracy) Garvey, Jr., Katie Garvey and Michael Garvey (Kourtney Janata), five great granddaughters: Lula, Mila, Kirra, Willa and Annistyn, sister Beverly Romberg of Albion, many nieces and nephews, who were very much a part of her life. One day after her passing, a sixth great granddaughter, Karsyn Jo, was born to Mike and Kourtney.
She was preceded in death by her husband in 2004, daughter Barbara in 1975, her parents, an infant brother Donald, brother Kenneth and sister Ruby Haas.
Funeral services will be held Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2022 at 10:30 a.m. at Mohr & Becker-Hunt Funeral Home in South Sioux City with Pastor Sandra Braasch and Pastor Fred Penner officiating.
Visitation from will be from 9-10:30 a.m.
Burial will be held at 4 p.m. at the Rose Hill Cemetery in Albion.
In lieu of flowers, memorials may be directed to the family to be divided among her favorite charities.
Mohr & Becker-Hunt Funeral Home was in charge of arrangements. Online condolences can be expressed at www.meyerbroschapels.com.
Complete obituary in Print & Online editions of Albion News/Boone County Tribune
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Promising Future Storied Past Of Arizona Hoops On Display At Red-Blue Game The Gila Herald
Promising Future, Storied Past Of Arizona Hoops On Display At Red-Blue Game – The Gila Herald https://digitalarizonanews.com/promising-future-storied-past-of-arizona-hoops-on-display-at-red-blue-game-the-gila-herald/
Photo by Ryan Meza/Cronkite News: Second-year coach Tommy Lloyd, left, is clearly enjoying his experience at Tucson and is grateful that former players remain connected. “The longer I’m here, the more I love it,” Lloyd said.
By Brendan Mau/Cronkite News
TUCSON – Arizona men’s basketball coach Tommy Lloyd gave a sellout crowd at McKale Center its first look at a remastered Wildcats roster along with a glimpse into the program’s storied past during Arizona’s annual First Watch Red-Blue Game on alumni weekend.
The Wildcats, who lost three players to the 2022 NBA Draft, rocked new uniforms that are a throwback to 1987-88, paying homage to the program’s first Final Four team that included NBA standouts Steve Kerr, Sean Elliott, and Tom Tolbert.
“There’s a pride in wearing an Arizona uniform, especially (when it is from) back in the day,” said junior center Oumar Ballo. “Guys like Steve Kerr really set the tone for us, so we’re just proud to get a throwback jersey.”
Lloyd, who was named the 2022 AP Coach of the Year in his first season with Arizona, welcomed nine newcomers to the court for the intrasquad scrimmage, highlighted by a couple of graduate transfers.
Guard Courtney Ramey, who played at Texas last season, and wing Cedric Henderson Jr., who transferred from Campbell University in North Carolina joined four freshmen newcomers, all either from Arizona or Europe.
Freshman Henri Veesaar, a 7-footer from Estonia, stole the show during the game with 16 points on 7-of-11 shooting.
“I think that Henri is going to have a real impact on this team,” Lloyd said following the game. “I mean, you look at a kid that I think is going to be able to throw in some 3s here and there. He’s quick-twitch. He’s got a great second jump. He can catch lobs. You know, he’s got a high IQ.
“He’s just going to have to learn how to tighten some things up and just physically develop a little bit and get some experience.”
Veesaar, who most recently played in the youth program of Spanish professional club Real Madrid, showcased his ability to create shots from inside and outside throughout the game as Arizona looks to expand its arsenal of frontcourt players following the departure of Christian Koloko, who was a second-round pick of the Toronto Raptors in June.
Lloyd said that he likes the old-school style of playing two bigs on the court together, so it certainly helps to add someone like Veesaar along with 7-foot freshman Dylan Anderson (from Perry), who tacked on 10 points and seven rebounds in the game.
“Me, Zu (Azuolas Tubelis), Oumar and Dylan, everybody is their own way, so there’s a lot of versatility in our big guys,” Veesaar said. “We can all stretch the floor, and we can play quick. We just got to pick it up and be better with the ball, make less turnovers.”
Ballo, who played center behind Koloko last season, appears ready to dominate. He tied Veesaar’s game-high 16 points and said he worked hard all offseason to expand his game. With a minute remaining, Ballo, listed at 7-feet, 260 pounds, stole the ball and ran the floor for a dunk to give the Blue team the lead.
“I’m not sure if I could make that play last year because I was not as fast and didn’t have great handles,” Ballo said, semi-jokingly.
Lloyd said he wasn’t sweating a poor performance by Ramey in the Red-Blue game and added that the guard is the newcomer who could bring the most to the team as a “natural leader” with experience. He started 20 games or more in each of his four seasons at Texas.
“I think Arizona is going to be able to put a nice finishing touch on his college career and set him up for that next step, whatever it may be,” Lloyd said. “I’m going to take it really personal to make sure that I try to deliver on everything we talked about when I recruited him.”
Lloyd also said highly-touted 17-year-old point guard Kylan Boswell, an AZ Compass Prep graduate who reclassified to play for the Wildcats this season and is currently injured, is another player with natural leadership qualities and playmaking skills.
Ramey and Pelle Larsson, last season’s Pac-12 Sixth Man of the Year who Lloyd thinks will be an all-conference-caliber player this season, will have the tough task of replacing wings Dalen Terry and Bennedict Mathurin, both first-round NBA draft picks.
Returning sophomore Adama Bal, who showed flashes of his potential late last season, freshman forward Filip Borovicanin from Serbia, and Henderson, who Lloyd called “savvy” with “great instincts,” also are expected to be in the mix at the wing.
Photo by Ryan Meza/Cronkite News: Many Arizona basketball fans showed up early for the First Watch Red-Blue Game at McKale Center on Friday night. The Wildcats showcased new uniforms that are a throwback to 1987-88 and honored the program’s first Final Four team.
More familiar faces to Wildcat fans from last season’s 33-4 team included starters Kerr Kriisa and Azuolas Tubelis, who was named First Team All Pac-12 last season.
Tubelis and Larsson advanced to the championship round in the night’s dunk competition.
Both received perfect 60s on their final dunks, but Tubelis’s 360-degree windmill slam won the contest based on fan reaction. Larsson lifted up Kriisa for the slam instead of dunking the ball himself for his last attempt.
At halftime of the scrimmage, the teams were switched around, and the Blue team started the second half with what could end up being Lloyd’s starting five when real games begin: Kriisa, Ramey, Larsson, Tubelis, and Ballo.
That group managed to come back from a 12-point deficit to win the game 49-45 over the Red team, which was composed mainly of practice squad players in the second half.
“Playing in front of the crowd for the first time, it felt amazing,” Veesaar said. “I mean … it was just really hard because you play against your own teammates, and it’s not really like a real game. Normally, when you (make) your debut, it’s like against a real team. (You get) more into it. Kind of hard to play against your own brothers.”
Photo by Ryan Meza/Cronkite News: The festive atmosphere was complemented by some eye-opening basketball. Freshman Henri Veesaar, a 7-footer from Estonia, had16 points on 7-of-11 shooting.
Lloyd called Arizona a “special place” to play because of the community and history of the program. He added that this was a perfect opportunity for his players to play in front of a full stadium and celebrate Arizona basketball, especially with the premiere of the upcoming documentary on Lute Olson screening on campus at Centennial Hall before the game.
Wildcat legends such as Richard Jefferson and Bob Elliott were shown on the McKale Center Jumbotron, sending the crowd into a frenzy, as did the introduction of the pregame slam dunk competition judges, which included former Arizona stars A.J. Bramlett, Lauri Markkannen, Rawle Alkins (who replaced Stanley Johnson), Jason Terry and Deandre Ayton, along with Arizona women’s basketball legend Aari McDonald, comedian Frank Caliendo, and singer Mark Wystrach.
Ayton, the Phoenix Suns center, drew the largest round of applause in his surprise appearance, and all of the Wildcats soaked it in.
“The longer I’m here, the more I love it,” Lloyd said. “And it’s been really cool to have these former players, you know, embrace the program like they are.
“And to make the effort they did to come here and be a part of this was really cool.”
Afterward, at an event hosted by the team’s NIL collective, Arizona Assist, fans mingled with the Wildcats coaches along with Jefferson, Terry, and Markkanen.
“I think for us, seeing those guys who played here a long time ago, we’re really grateful for them,” Ballo said. “We are here because of them. They set the standard high, and every time we play in front of them, we know they’re watching us. So we have to do our best for the program and for those guys who made this possible for us.”
Perhaps capturing the attitude of the 2022-23 Wildcats as well as the program’s past, Lloyd said his message to his players as the season approaches is simple.
“Kick ass,” Lloyd said. “I mean, that’s what we’re going to do.”
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Janice “Jan” Ann Abbe, Age 84, Of Carroll, IA https://digitalarizonanews.com/janice-jan-ann-abbe-age-84-of-carroll-ia/
Funeral services for Janice “Jan” Ann Abbe, 84, of Carroll, IA will be held at the St. Paul Lutheran Church in Carroll on Saturday, October 15, 2022 at 10:30AM. Burial will be in the Carroll City Cemetery. Visitation will be held at the Dahn and Woodhouse Funeral Home in Carroll from 5 – 7 P.M. on Friday evening. Additional visitation will be held at the church on Saturday from 9:30 – 10:15 A.M. prior to the service. Funeral arrangements are under the direction of the Dahn and Woodhouse Funeral Home in Carroll and online condolences may be left for the family at www.dahnandwoodhouse.com. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made online to the Alzheimer’s research at https://alzfdn.org/support-us/donate
Jan is survived by Paul (Marie) Abbe of Pine Hurst, NC; Scott (Pam) Abbe of Chandler, AZ; Steve (Linda) Abbe of Maywood, IL; grandchildren Emelia (Bryce) Robertson, Julia Abbe, James Abbe, and Kathryn Abbe; and great-grandson Everett Robertson.
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Judge Expects Steve Bannons Wall Fraud Trial In Nov. 2023
Judge Expects Steve Bannon’s Wall Fraud Trial In Nov. 2023 https://digitalarizonanews.com/judge-expects-steve-bannons-wall-fraud-trial-in-nov-2023/
Oct. 4, 2022Updated: Oct. 4, 2022 10:48 a.m.
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1of3Former White House strategist Steve Bannon arrives at court, Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2022, in New York.John Minchillo/APShow MoreShow Less
2of3Former White House strategist Steve Bannon arrives at court, Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2022, in New York.John Minchillo/APShow MoreShow Less
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NEW YORK (AP) — Steve Bannon’s trial on charges he defrauded donors who gave money to build a wall on the U.S. southern border might not happen until late next year, a judge said Tuesday.
Judge Juan Manuel Merchan said he anticipates Bannon, former President Donald Trump’s longtime ally, will go to trial in November 2023 — about a year before the 2024 presidential election.
Manhattan prosecutors charged Bannon, 68, last month with state-level money laundering, fraud and conspiracy charges related to the “We Build the Wall” campaign. Bannon has pleaded not guilty.
The New York case stems from much of the same alleged conduct as a federal case cut short last year by a Trump presidential pardon.
Prosecutors say that Bannon falsely promised donors that all money would go to constructing a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Instead, prosecutors allege, Bannon was involved in transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars to third-party entities and used them to funnel payments to two other people involved in the scheme.
At a hearing Tuesday, Merchan set various deadlines for pretrial motions through next summer and gave Bannon’s lawyers until February to comb through evidence and file motions.
Prosecutors say so far they’ve turned over about four terabytes of material — the size equivalent of millions of written pages or hundreds of hours of video.
If Bannon’s trial happens in November 2023, it could coincide with the trial in the New York attorney general’s fraud lawsuit against Trump and his company.
Attorney General Letitia James’ office said in court papers last week that she intends to seek a trial date before the end of 2023.
Trump has been been laying groundwork for a potential comeback campaign for president in 2024.
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ABORTED Sign With Nuclear Blast Records; Infinite Terror Single Due This Month
ABORTED Sign With Nuclear Blast Records; “Infinite Terror” Single Due This Month https://digitalarizonanews.com/aborted-sign-with-nuclear-blast-records-infinite-terror-single-due-this-month/
On a moonless night, metal powerhouse Nuclear Blast dared to gaze into the pitch black abyss and summoned one of the most vicious and menacing forces roaming the European death metal scene to join their ranks. Today, both of them are proud to announce that Aborted have inked a contract with Nuclear Blast.
The true scenario behind the signing of this outstanding genre pioneer might have been a bit less dramatic but the promise of an exciting future remains.
Aborted have announced their first single right in time for the kick-off of their North American Tour with Lorna Shore. “Infinite Terror” will come to haunt your dreams, destroy your ears and musically seal the devilish deal that Nuclear Blast and Aborted have closed to spread the word of brutal death metal all around the world. Pre-save the single here.
Sven de Caluwé (vocals) comments: “We couldn’t be more excited to announce our signing to Nuclear Blast — one of the premier labels for extreme music with tons of label mates we love. We are very excited to see where this mad caravan leads to next! After a very long and solid partnership with Century Media, it was time for us to try something new. To celebrate our signing with Nuclear Blast and the upcoming monster of a tour with our friends Lorna Shore, Ingested and more, we decided to unleash a new single. ‘Infinite Terror’ will obliterate all your senses on October 19. The song is inspired by ‘Event Horizon’ and marks the debut of new guitarist Dan Konradsson (Ophidian I, Une Misère). Expect something dark, imposing, and HEAVY as fuck!”
Jaap Wagemaker, A&R Nuclear Blast Europe, adds: “Nuclear Blast is very excited to announce the signing of brutal death metal maniacs Aborted. Aborted is one of the pioneers of the genre. Originally founded in Belgium, they have come a long way from the death/grind underground to creating a very successful, unique brand of horror-themed, cinematic extreme metal that’s highly compatible with today’s tech death and deathcore scenes. Aborted have influenced a lot of bands worldwide, and for many bands being invited to go on tour with Aborted meant the start of a successful career. Aborted worked on their status even more by releasing classics such as The Necrotic Manifesto and Retrogore which somehow managed to surpass that album and showcased what the band is capable of: lifting death metal to a higher level of intensity, atmosphere and brutality. Nuclear Blast and Aborted are looking forward to keep pushing the boundaries of high class brutal death metal together in the future!”
Aborted live dates:
October
21 – Philadelphia, PA – Theatre of Living Arts
22 – New York, NY – The Gramercy Theatre
23 – Worcester, MA – The Palladium
24 – Baltimore, MD – Baltimore Soundstage
25 – Charlotte, NC – Neighborhood Theatre
26 – Nashville, TN – Brooklyn Bowl Nashville
27 – Atlanta, GA – The Masquerade (Heaven)
28 – Tampa, FL – The Orpheum
29 – Orlando, FL – The Abbey
31 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall
November
1 – San Antonio, TX – Vibes Event Center
2 – Fort Worth, TX – Ridglea Theater
4 – Mesa, AZ – Nile Theater
5 – Los Angeles, CA – 1720
6 – Roseville, CA – Goldfield Trading Post
8 – Seattle, WA – El Corazon
9 – Portland, OR – Hawthorne Theater
11 – Salt Lake City, UT – The Complex
12 – Denver, CO – Summit
13 – Lawrence, KS – The Bottleneck
15 – Chicago, IL – Bottom Lounge
16 – Detroit, MI – St. Andrew’s Hall
17 – Cleveland, OH – House of Blues
18 – McKees Rocks, PA – Roxian Theatre
19 – Toronto, ON – Phoenix Concert Hall
20 – Montreal, QC – L’Astral
With their horror-themed, cinematic extreme metal, Aborted have mastered a dark craft that’s tough to compete with. The Belgian band has been dominating the world of death metal since vocalist Sven de Caluwé formed the band 26 years ago. As the lone original member, he’s directed the band like a demented conductor.
Aborted are shapeshifters, evolving from blazing deathgrind to groovier fare before settling into a technical approach on death metal.
Their ability to compose and perform an uncompromising mix of death metal and grindcore, complemented with provocative artwork and merchandise designs, has allowed Aborted to become an essential pioneer of the extreme metal scene over the course of their career, that has seen them release 11 successful full-length albums since the mid-Nineties.
Despite the seemingly sinister image that’s portrayed by the bands wildly heavy, gore-fueled music, Aborted have actively supported charity campaigns throughout their career. They’ve donated parts of their merchandise income to “National Alliance To End Homelessness”, teamed up with other bands to launch a shirt to benefit the Ukrainian war refugees and have also been a long term member of “Metalheads Against Racism”.
Aborted are:
Sven de Caluwé – vocals
Ian Jekelis – guitars
Daniel Konradsson – guitars
Stefano Franceschini – bass
Ken Bedene – drums
(Photo – Bartek Sadowski)
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Trump Remains King' To Some In Pa. But Whether It Helps GOP Is Unclear
Trump Remains ‘King' To Some In Pa., But Whether It Helps GOP Is Unclear https://digitalarizonanews.com/trump-remains-king-to-some-in-pa-but-whether-it-helps-gop-is-unclear/
What to Know
Some voters in rural Pennsylvania continue to show mistrust in elections, and they cite former President Donald Trump’s lies as their source.
Many of those voters would like to see Trump run again in 2024.
It remains to be seen how their outlook on democracy and elections will affect Pennsylvania’s open races for governor and U.S. Senate in the Nov. 8 midterm elections.
The Trump-Pence sign still hangs on the older building off Main Street in the historic town of Monongahela in western Pennsylvania, a lasting vestige of the campaign fervor that roused voters, including many who still believe the falsehood that the former president didn’t lose in 2020 and hope he’ll run in 2024.
The enthusiasm for Donald Trump’s unique brand of nationalist populism has cut into traditional Democratic strongholds like Monongahela, about 25 miles south of Pittsburgh, where brick storefronts and a Slovak fellowship hall dot Main Street and church bells mark the hours of the day. Republicans are counting on political nostalgia for the Trump era as they battle Democrats this fall in Pennsylvania in races for governor, the U.S. Senate and control of Congress.
“Trump just came along and filled the empty space,” said Matti Gruzs, who stitches old blue jeans into tote bags, place mats and other creations she sells at the weekly Farmer’s Market downtown. “He’s still the king, and the kingmaker.”
Against the backdrop of this picturesque place, House Republicans recently released their campaign agenda, hoping their “Commitment to America” can tap into the same political sentiment Trump used to attract not just Republican but independent and former Democratic voters. But it’s unclear whether the support that six years ago propelled Trump to the White House will be there on Election Day, Nov. 8.
Perhaps even more challenging for the GOP is whether Trump’s false claims of voter fraud will cost the party if people believe, as the defeated president claims without evidence, the elections are rigged. Some may just decide to sit out the election.
“It started out as a low-enthusiasm race,” said Dave Ball, the Republican Party chairman in Washington County, which includes much of western Pennsylvania.
Ball said enthusiasm has been “building rapidly” — his main metric for voter interest in the elections is the demand for lawn signs. “We were wondering, at one point, you know, (if) we were going to see any,” he said. “Right now, I can’t get my hands on enough.”
But Amy Michalic, who was born and raised in Monongahela and works the polls during elections, said she hears skepticism from some voters, particularly Trump supporters, “who think my vote doesn’t count.”
Trump’s claims of fraud have no basis in fact. Dozens of court cases filed by Trump and his supporters have been dismissed or rejected by judges across the nation, but he continues to challenge Joe Biden’s victory. In every state, officials have attested to the accuracy of their elections, and Trump’s own attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, said in 2020 there was no voter fraud on a scale to change the outcome.
Michalic reminds skeptical voters in her hometown of the importance of voting and notes that in 2016, no one thought Trump could win. “Look what he did, he took Pennsylvania,” she said.
At the Farmer’s Market on a recent afternoon, voters shared concerns that many people in the United States voice this election year — about the high prices of everything, about finding workers and good-paying jobs, about the culture wars.
“Where do you start?” said Michelle DeHosse, wearing an American flag shirt as she helped vendors set up stands.
Lisa Mascaro/AP
Michelle DeHosse poses for a photo at the farmer’s market in downtown Monongahela, Pa., Sept. 23, 2022. DeHosse runs a custom screen-print and embroidery shop on Main Street but said she has had trouble hiring employees since the COVID-19 crisis. While she said just can’t afford the $20 an hour and health care benefits many applicants demand, she understands that many workers need both. “It’s the economy that’s the biggest concern,” she said.
DeHosse, who runs a custom-screen print and embroidery shop on Main Street, said she has had trouble hiring employees since the pandemic. While she said just cannot afford the $20 an hour and health care benefits many applicants demand, she understands that many workers need both. “It’s the economy that’s the biggest concern,” she said.
Democrats were sparse among the voters, who didn’t seem to have strong feelings for their choices this fall for either of the Senate candidates, Democrat John Fetterman or the Trump-backed Republican Mehmet Oz. Several said they probably would vote party line.
“I don’t like either one of them,” said Carolyn McCuen, 84, a Republican enjoying sunset with friends and McDonald’s coffee at a picnic table by the river.
“Me either,” said another Republican, Sam Reo, 76, a retired mechanical engineer, playing oldies from the portable speaker he sets up for the group.
Decision 2022
Both still plan to vote. Support for the GOP candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, who was outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, can be seen in the giant signs along Lincoln Highway, an east-west route across the state.
Mastriano is a “folk hero around here,” said Gruzs, who recalled his regular updates broadcast during the pandemic.
A history buff who home-schooled her children, Gruzs hasn’t missed a vote since she cast her first presidential ballot for Ronald Reagan. The same goes for her husband, Sam, a plumber. They moved here two decades ago from Baltimore, for a better life. Now a grandmother, she spends her days working on her crafts and listening to far-right broadcasts – Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk and others.
She is not a fan of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. and isn’t convinced he has the toughness needed to push the party’s ideas forward. But she did attend the event at a nearby manufacturing facility where lawmakers outlined the GOP agenda. She was heartened to see far-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene at the event with McCarthy, and made sure to shake Greene’s hand.
“If she’s behind him,” she said, trailing off. “It looked today he had enough behind him, pushing him.”
Trump remains popular, and the sign hanging on the building off Main Street from his 2020 campaign was far from the only one still visible in the state, two years since that election.
Several of the voters dismissed the investigations against Trump as nothing more than a “witch hunt” designed to keep him from running again office, despite the potentially serious charges being raised in state and federal inquiries. Some voters said they didn’t believe the attack on the Capitol was an insurrection, despite the violence waged by pro-Trump supporters trying to overturn Biden’s election.
Those views stand in contrast to the hard facts of Jan. 6: More than 850 people have been arrested and charged in the insurrection, some given lengthy sentences by the courts for their involvement. Hours before the siege, Trump told a rally crowd to “fight like hell” for his presidency. Loyalists soon broke into the Capitol, fighting in hand-to-hand combat with police, interrupting Congress as it was certifying the election results. Five people, including a Trump supporter shot by police, died in the immediate aftermath.
And if Trump runs again?
“I wish he would,” said McCuen, a retired church secretary. “But I don’t know if he will.”
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A GOP Insider On The Republicans Who Knew Trump Was Dangerous And Went MAGA Anyway
A GOP Insider On The Republicans Who Knew Trump Was Dangerous — And Went MAGA Anyway https://digitalarizonanews.com/a-gop-insider-on-the-republicans-who-knew-trump-was-dangerous-and-went-maga-anyway/
One of the many things we’ve learned in the Trump era is that a lot of the people in positions of power are either cynics or nihilists or both.
This is true on both sides of the political aisle, but it’s especially true on the right at the moment. That’s not a partisan statement, even if it may sound like one. The reality is that ever since Donald Trump took over the party in 2016, there are many people working in Republican politics who don’t believe in what they’re doing, who know that Trump is and was a dangerous figure, and yet they’ve plowed ahead anyway.
The question is: Why?
A new book by Tim Miller called Why We Did It gives about as good an answer as you’ll find. Miller is a former political operative who worked at various levels of Republican politics since he was 16 years old. He broke ranks with the party when Trump won the nomination and his book is a genuine attempt to grapple with his own contradictions and make sense of the people he left behind. The result is an unusually insightful glimpse behind the curtain. That’s why I invited Miller to talk about his book on the latest episode of Vox Conversations.
Below is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Sean Illing
Your journey in Republican politics is the core of the book and I just wanna start there. You started working in Republican politics when you were 16. Were you just a political junkie that early in your life?
Tim Miller
Total political junkie. I don’t know why, my parents weren’t. My grandmother was really into Republican politics, and so we would talk about politics and we gambled on the 1992 presidential race. I took Bill Clinton. She took George H.W. Bush. She had to mail me $1 with my winnings, which I was extremely proud of in fifth grade. And that was the last time I supported a Democrat until Hillary Clinton in 2016. So, you know, I kind of went full circle there.
Sean Illing
The Republican Party has changed a lot since you were 16. But for reasons you’ve suggested it was always an awkward home for you. You’re gay, and you talk about how easily you contorted yourself to defend homophobes for years.
You call it “championship-level compartmentalization” in the book. That sounds like a really difficult pose to maintain for so many years.
Tim Miller
Actually not really. It wasn’t that difficult and that’s the thing that makes it so gross. It makes me feel so bad about it.
I think that it’s important for me to explain that because if I could work for homophobes, when the people that I was working for were literally trying to use the law to deny me the things that are the most important things in my life right now — my husband, my child — well, then, think about how easy it is for somebody to justify working for Donald Trump when none of the impacts of his policies hurt them.
Like, they aren’t kids on the border. They’re not gonna be the ones that are punished by the new abortion laws. So that’s why I tried to make this parallel and try to make you really understand my mindset.
Sean Illing
What was your eureka moment? When did you finally realize that you had had enough, that this whole thing had gone too far and you weren’t a Republican anymore?
Tim Miller
I fucking knew it with [Sarah] Palin. I knew it.
And this is why the first half of the book is me in a hair shirt. I come to these interviews and they are like, “Why is it Why We Did It? You opposed Trump from Day One.” Which I did.
But it’s Why We Did It because I sat there for seven years as this beast kind of grew and grew and became more and more dangerous. And I knew it.
I leave the McCain campaign, I move to DC, I come out of the closet, and I’m working for a PR firm. I still can see what’s happening clearly. I was like, the crazies are taking this over. John McCain is a good man who’s trying to manage the crazy and making some good choices, some bad choices while he does that. But the power, the energy is with the reactionaries. And I saw it then, and yet I still just keep getting sucked back in.
And the first way I get sucked back in is kind of earnest, actually — I go to work for Jon Huntsman and I’m like, I kind of know this guy’s gonna lose, but I’m a moderate Republican, and I’m gonna go work for this moderate. But I get addicted to the competition of it again, and then kind of slowly start going down the path to working for more and more gross people.
Sean Illing
The second half of the book is really about actors behind the scenes in the Republican Party, the functionaries, the spin doctors, the campaign hacks. These are the people who often know what they’re doing, often know they shouldn’t do it, and just do it anyway. And the reasons they do it are as banal as they are depressing.
One thing that comes across is that it really is a game for a lot of these people. And if you really push them on it, what you find is that there’s no real moral core behind it. It’s just careerist, jockeying for influence and attention.
Tim Miller
It’s really depressing. The characters in the book, almost all of them, with one or two exceptions, in the second half about the Trump era, go along with it anyway.
So the question is, why? This is gross in a different way, but you almost want it to be because they’ve really bought the bullshit about how we need to have a secure border to help wages. Or they just are so hard line on protecting fetuses or so hard line on whatever.
And some of those people exist in real America. But in the DC class? None of ’em, and that includes the named people in the book. I also interviewed a bunch of people I didn’t name and nobody — nobody — got passionate talking about any policy issue. That’s all a feint, it’s all bullshit.
The only time I would sense any emotion in their voice when they were explaining why they went along with Trump, besides the banal careerist reasons, was that they’ve really started to really not like you, Sean. I mean, not you, but, like, your people, right? The liberal media elites — they’ve developed a very deep well of hatred and resentment and jealousy of them.
Sean Illing
Of all the characters in the book, all the operator types, some of them you know personally, some of them you don’t — which of them sticks out to you the most in terms of just like abject nihilism or cynicism?
Tim Miller
It’s Elise for me. Elise Stefanik.
Sean Illing
Can you say who she is?
Tim Miller
Yeah, sure.
So just going all the way back, I worked with her on the Republican “autopsy.” People might remember, after Mitt Romney lost, we put together this document that basically had a bunch of blocking and tackling recommendations for how the party can catch up to Obama’s data nerds, but also said that we should soften our rhetoric around immigration and other issues.
Elise was the editor of that document. And I was the spokesperson at the time. So I was working with her very closely.
So Elise then runs for Congress as a very moderate Republican — climate change is a problem, gay marriage, immigration reform. You know, as moderate of a Republican as you have in Congress when she wins in 2014. 2016, she runs for reelection with Trump on the ballot, won’t say his name. Literally can’t even spit out his name.
In 2018, something happens. Trump comes to campaign in her district, huge crowd. She gets this huge applause on the stage. She starts to reassess her power trajectory. Paul Ryan, who was kind of her mentor, retires. So her little path up through the normal establishment ranks in Congress started to seem not as likely.
And she flips on a dime. And in the first impeachment becomes Trump’s most rabid defender with the most absurd defenses. She was like a foreign policy neocon Republican who would’ve been very much “arm the Ukrainians against the Russians,” flips on it, sides with Trump against Zelenskyy. And is now literally indistinguishable from a MAGA troll.
And there was no policy anything about this. I interviewed tons of mutual friends. She wouldn’t talk to me. She emailed me saying that she sees my tweets and is not interested in participating in the book. And didn’t reply to any other of my entreaties.
So to me, she is the worst because it’s just the most brazen. It also is the worst at some level because it’s paying off for her. I truly think she’ll be on a VP shortlist for Trump, ’cause he’ll want a woman if he runs in 2024. And if not that, I think she’s on a speaker of the house trajectory.
Sean Illing
Part of me is perversely fascinated by some of the people you talk to, the ones who really, truly hate the cultural left so much, so that they pretend that there’s just two choices, right? Wokeness or fascism.
How common is that sentiment?
Tim Miller
It’s pretty common.
So in all those drunk off-the-record conversations, people kept bringing this up. Literally this was the thing that people were volunteering, these Republican staffers.
The formulation that you just laid out is not an exaggeration. [One source] said, “My wife’s friends think I’m a racist. My kids are getting these DEI packets. There’s cancel culture everywhere. And as a white male, like, sometimes I feel like my only choice to combat the wokeness is to just think about the one or two things that I agree with Donald Trump on and ride with him.”
That’s not the direct quote, ’cause I don’t have it in front of me, but like that’s very close to his direct quote.
That’s a common sentiment. That’s how they all soothe each other, by expressing something to that same effect, maybe not quite as brazen.
That’s why I don’t have a last chapter in the book — what ...
Voting Rights: Supreme Court To Dig Into Claims Of Racial Gerrymandering In Alabama
Voting Rights: Supreme Court To Dig Into Claims Of Racial Gerrymandering In Alabama https://digitalarizonanews.com/voting-rights-supreme-court-to-dig-into-claims-of-racial-gerrymandering-in-alabama/
WASHINGTON – Just over a year ago the Supreme Court walloped a key provision of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, making it tougher to establish that a change to an election law – say, cutting back on early voting – discriminated against minority voters.
Now, voting rights advocates fear, the court is winding up for another swing.
The justices will hear oral arguments Tuesday in a challenge to Alabama’s recently redrawn congressional map, which includes one district out of seven with a majority of Black voters – even though African Americans make up 27% of the state’s population. The court’s ruling could have sweeping implications for congressional maps nationwide.
Alabama officials assert the new districts are race-neutral and that creating a second African American district would require mapmakers to focus on race as their top priority, a command they say would itself amount to unconstitutional discrimination. Opponents say that argument turns the whole point of the Voting Rights Act on its head.
“The Voting Rights Act was created precisely to prevent the kind of manipulation of district lines that undermine the political power of Black communities that we see in Alabama,” said Sophia Lin Lakin of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups that initially challenged Alabama’s new congressional districts last fall.
Impact: Supreme Court ruling could give advantage to restrictive voting laws
Midterms: How the Supreme Court is influencing the November midterm elections
Race: America’s fierce debate over voting access intensifies as midterm elections loom
The case arrives at the high court weeks before the November midterms, though the decision won’t land in time to affect this year’s election. It is one of several cases involving race the justices are considering as the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority has viewed policies that focus to combat discrimination with skepticism.
Conservatives who side with Alabama argue that lower courts have misread the Voting Rights Act. The intention is to bar discrimination, they say, not to compel states to go out of their way to do everything possible to avoid the appearance of discrimination.
“Alabama enacted districts in 2021 for the purely race-neutral purpose of equalizing the population across districts, while making minor changes to the overall map,” said Carrie Severino, president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network. “The plaintiffs are now demanding that the state’s race-neutral map be thrown out in favor of a racially gerrymandered map that makes radical changes to Alabama’s longstanding congressional districts. Nothing in the Voting Rights Act requires this.”
Looked at one way, the case is partly about a much broader question courts and lawmakers have wrestled with: Whether plaintiffs must show a state intended to discriminate against minority voters or whether the discrimination was a byproduct of other motives.
Robert Redford: Supreme Court should not dishonor 50th anniversary of Clean Water Act
More from Opinion: The Supreme Court’s new term could be historic. Remember that ‘legitimacy’ works both ways.
The Alabama litigation, Merrill v. Milligan, is one of two major election cases before the court this term. The other comes from North Carolina and raises the question of how much power state legislatures have to create the rules for federal elections without oversight from state courts. At issue there is the meaning of a clause in the Constitution that delegates responsibility for federal elections to the “legislature” of each state.
Guide: A look at the key cases pending at the Supreme Court
On the docket: Supreme Court to grapple with race, elections in new term
States redraw their congressional boundaries every decade following the census. In some states the process is governed by a non-partisan body, but in most cases the endeavor is a political one – led by state lawmakers who seek an advantage for their party. The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that federal courts would not get involved in partisan gerrymandering suits. Racial gerrymandering, though, is another matter.
A 1986 Supreme Court decision, Thornburg v. Gingles, lays out how federal courts are supposed to determine whether a congressional map violates the Voting Rights Act. Courts must first consider factors such as whether there is a majority group large enough and compact enough to make up a district. Plaintiffs also must demonstrate that white residents vote together cohesively enough to defeat a minority group’s preferred candidate.
A three-judge federal court in January ruled against Alabama, asserting that its congressional map likely violated the Voting Rights Act in light of the factors set forth in Thornburg. The court said it didn’t regard the question of whether the maps violated the law “as a close one.” Two of the three judges were nominated by a Republican president.
The state asked the Supreme Court to put that ruling on hold temporarily and a 5-4 majority in February ruled that it was too late to change the map ahead of the state’s primary election in May.
“Filing deadlines need to be met, but candidates cannot be sure what district they need to file for,” Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in an opinion joined by Associate Justice Samuel Alito. “Indeed, at this point, some potential candidates do not even know which district they live in. Nor do incumbents know if they now might be running against other incumbents in the upcoming primaries.”
Shadow docket: Alabama redistricting case renews procedure fight among justices
Ruling: Supreme Court OKs congressional map lower court said may dilute Black vote
But the emergency order drew a dissent from Chief Justice John Roberts as well as the court’s three liberal justices. Associate Justice Elena Kagan said the decision “does a disservice to Black Alabamians who…have had their electoral power diminished – in violation of a law this court once knew to buttress all of American democracy.”
In a related decision in June, the Supreme Court allowed Louisiana to use a map in this year’s election that includes white majorities in five of six congressional districts. That litigation is on hold pending the outcome of the Alabama case.
In the most significant case to deal with voting rights since 2013, the Supreme Court last year upheld an Arizona law barring unions and advocacy organizations from collecting voters’ mail-in ballots, a practice critics call “ballot harvesting.” The court signaled that challenges to voting rules brought under the Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on discrimination – though still possible – may become far harder to win.
That opinion came eight years after the court gutted another provision of the Voting Rights Act that permitted the Justice Department to review election laws in states with a history of racial discrimination.
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