Texas Public Radio (via NPR)
A report released Sunday by the Texas House Committee investigating the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde outlined “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” among local, state, and federal officers during the incident, which left 21 children and adults dead.
After weeks of changes in the official narrative about the response, the committee report was the clearest, most-detailed picture yet of what happened that day, during which local, state, and federal law enforcement waited for more than an hour to confront the gunman.
The report explained there were 376 law enforcement officers on the scene, including 150 U.S. Border Patrol Agents, 91 DPS troopers, 25 Uvalde police officers, 16 sheriff’s deputies, and five Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District officers.
Steve McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, had blamed Uvalde CISD Police Chief Pete Arredondo for the response. But this report outlined a clear failure beyond local police.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
New York Times (7/3/22) Subscription Required
SAN FRANCISCO — Cleve Jones has lived in the Castro neighborhood for nearly 50 years, almost from the day he graduated from high school in Phoenix and hitchhiked to California.
He has been a political and cultural leader in San Francisco, organizing gay men and lesbians when the AIDS epidemic devastated these streets in the early 1980s. He created the nationally recognized AIDS Memorial Quilt from a storefront on Market Street. He was a face of the anger and sorrow that swept the Castro in 1978 after the assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to the Board of Supervisors.
Mr. Jones has helped define the Castro, dancing at its gay bars seven nights a week when he was younger, gathering with friends for drinks and gossip as he grew older. To this day, he is recognized when he walks down its sidewalks. “Hi Cleve — I know who you are,” said Lt. Amy Hurwitz of the San Francisco Police Department, after Mr. Jones began to introduce himself.
C/Net (7/16/22)
Net neutrality and the rest of US President Joe Biden's broadband agenda hang in the balance as the president's nominee for the deadlock-breaking fifth commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission awaits a vote in the US Senate. But the process has stalled for nine months and time is running out.
Gigi Sohn, a longtime public-interest advocate and former FCC adviser, was nominated in October last year to be the third Democrat at the agency. Since then, she's faced two contentious Senate confirmation hearings in which Republicans grilled her over her social media activity and other issues, like her criticism of Fox News.
BBC
France has evacuated more than 14,000 people threatened by wildfires in the south-west, as fires also spread in Spain, Croatia and Greece.
Authorities in France's Gironde, a popular tourist region, have evacuated guards from campsites - the tourists left earlier. Fires have spread in the Teste-de-Buch and Landiras areas.
In southern Spain, more than 3,200 people fled fires in the Mijas hills, though later some were able to return.
Portugal's fires are contained for now.
However, the Portuguese government says 659 people have died - mostly elderly - from the heat over the past week.
The Mijas fires in Spain are not far from Málaga, a popular tourist area. Elsewhere in Spain, wildfires have broken out in the provinces of Castilla y León, Galicia and Extremadura.
BBC
A British man has been shown in a video appealing for help from Boris Johnson, while appearing to be held captive by pro-Russian separatists in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) in eastern Ukraine.
John Harding, who is in his fifties and originally from Sunderland, is being interviewed by a Russian TV presenter.
In the video he says he could face the death penalty.
The Foreign Office said it was concerned by his detention.
It understood Mr Harding was captured in May when Ukrainian units he was fighting with at the Azovstal steelworks were forced to surrender. The units had been defending the south-eastern city of Mariupol at the time.
The video says he was part of the Azov regiment. Mr Harding had told friends he was fighting as part of the Ukrainian National Guard.
Friends and family of Mr Harding have confirmed to the BBC it was him in the video, and his family are being supported by the Foreign Office.
Bangkok Times
The Public Health Ministry will on Monday tell Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt to limit public activities to minimise a possible coronavirus resurgence.
Kiattiphum Wongrajit, permanent secretary for public health affairs, said on Sunday he will call for the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) to reduce the number of events drawing large crowds.
Dr Kiattiphum said figures showed government hospitals in the capital should brace for a swell of new Covid-19 patients.
About 2,000 people a day are now being treated in hospitals, more than half of them in Bangkok, he said. Worse, 42% of coronavirus inpatients in the capital are seriously ill or showing life-threatening symptoms, he continued.
Bangkok Times
The latest subvariant of the Omicron strain of the coronavirus is as harmful to the lungs as the previous Delta variant although it still mainly attacks only the most vulnerable groups -- the unvaccinated and the under-vaccinated -- says an expert from Siriraj Hospital.
Among people currently receiving Covid-19 treatment, about 800 are suffering from lung infections which account for about 8% of all Covid-19 hospitalisations, says Dr Nithipat Jearakul, head of Siriraj Hospital's Department of Respiratory Disease and Tuberculosis within the Department of Internal Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine.
Deutsche Welle (5/15/22)
If you want to see firsthand the impact of climate change, take a trip to Es Trenc, one of Mallorca's finest beaches. Here, massive concrete bunkers — built in the mid-20th century by the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco — were originally hidden amid the sand dunes. Today, these structures stand out like sore thumbs: Rising sea levels have swallowed up parts of the beach and radically altered this coastal landscape. In total, scientists have found that Es Trenc beach is now 40 meters (130 feet) shorter than it once was. Should global warming continue as projected, many more Mallorca beaches will disappear into the sea.
"We are seeing large-scale land loss in the Mediterranean region," said Thomas Dworak, who coordinated a study by Germany's federal environment agency on the effects of global warming on tourism that was published in 2021. This is a very concerning prospect for islands such as Mallorca, which are popular with holidaymakers precisely because of their expansive beaches. For now, though, none of this is reflected in visitor numbers. On the contrary: Mallorca is seeing a record number of guests this summer.
"There is little evidence to suggest that people are changing their travel behavior because of climate change," Dworak said. Though warnings about the consequences for the tourism industry have been mounting for many years, he said there had only been a few studies that demonstrate the potential for concrete effects.
Deutsche Welle
Russian President Vladimir Putin may have ordered Russian forces to seize the city of Kharkiv and the rest of the unoccupied Kharkiv region despite the extreme improbability of success, according to the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) research group.
However, in its daily report, ISW said it was offering the observation as a hypothesis rather than an assessment as it was based on "limited and circumstantial" indicators.
Russian forces have tried to take the town of Dementiivka, to the north of Kharkiv city, in recent weeks even though it has limited significance for defending Russian territory.
In addition, Ukrainian intelligence released an intercepted conversation on Saturday in which a Russian soldier stated that his commander cares nothing for his losses and only wants to reach Kharkiv.
A previous IOW report said Russian-backed authorities in occupied parts of the Kharkiv region have stated that the area is an "inalienable part of Russian land."
Pro-Moscow officials there unveiled a new flag for the occupation regime, which contains the Russian imperial double-headed eagle and symbols from the 18th century Kharkiv coat of arms.
Al Jazeera
Police in South Africa are on the hunt for suspects after nine people were killed in separate shooting incidents in two provinces in the country on Saturday night, law enforcement said.
The latest slew of shootings comes on the heels of an uptick in violent deaths in a country with one of the world’s highest murder rates.
Four people were shot and two more were injured in the Thembelihle informal settlement, a southern suburb of Johannesburg.
Preliminary investigation suggests that a group of men was playing dice on a street corner, at approximately 7:30pm (17:30 GMT) on Saturday, when they were attacked by unknown assailants who shot at them, the authorities said in a statement.
“Four people were certified dead on the scene on Saturday while two people were taken to the nearest medical care centre after sustaining gunshot wounds,” the police said on Sunday.
The Guardian
The UK’s first ever red warning for exceptional heat came into force at midnight, with temperatures expected to climb up to 41C (105.8F) over the next two days, breaking the country’s heat records.
Passengers have been urged not to travel by train from Monday as a record-breaking heatwave hits the UK, while the deputy prime minister said schools should not close and people should be resilient enough to “enjoy the sunshine”.
Transport services are expected to be disrupted on both Monday and Tuesday, with Network Rail asking people not to travel unless absolutely necessary and painting some train tracks white to try to prevent them from buckling in the heat.
The Guardian
Rishi Sunak accused his rival Conservative leadership candidates of promoting “socialism” by promising unfunded tax cuts, as the deep divisions in the party over economic policy were exposed in a bad-tempered televised debate.
As the contenders clashed repeatedly over tax and spending in the ITV debate, Liz Truss confronted her former cabinet colleague, saying: “Rishi, you have raised taxes to the highest level in 70 years. That is not going to drive economic growth.
“The fact is that raising taxes at this moment will choke off economic growth,” she added.
Truss has promised tax cuts worth as much as £30bn, suggesting they can be paid for through additional borrowing and faster growth.
NPR
In March of 2017, as clashes with the FBI director and attorney general were erupting just weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump was asking out loud: "Where's my Roy Cohn?"
In December of 2020, with just weeks left in his term, Trump still had not had his question answered.
He was surrounded by lawyers. But none could play the role — or take the place — of the controversial counselor who decades earlier had changed his life.Cohn was already a legend when Trump met him in 1973. Cohn had been in the news for decades, prosecuting nuclear espionage or searching for communists or defending celebrity clients. Among those he represented were Cardinal Francis Spellman, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and the New York crime bosses Carmine Galante and John Gotti.
CNN
As a single mom with a full-time job, Wendy Ahrenkiel had little time for politics. But after the 2020 election, when Joe Biden was declared President, she felt cheated — and found the time.
Ahrenkiel, 47, has heard the arguments in the mainstream media about how claims of a stolen election in 2020 are unsupported by credible evidence. But she still doesn’t buy it.
“I thought that there's a lot of funny things that went on with the election,” she told CNN. “That made me just do my own research.”
That research led her to talk politics with friends — many of them moms like her — who clued her in to a show called “War Room,” hosted by a man with whom she was only vaguely familiar: Stephen K. Bannon.
Bannon doesn’t just touch on the election canard, he pounds it with a sledgehammer day after day on “War Room” — a program that reaches audiences online and on air.
The Guardian
efore he left Veracruz, Pablo Ortega asked his sister Rosa to do two things: look after his pregnant wife, and, should anything happen to him on his way to the US, make sure his body was brought home so it could be carried through the streets where he grew up. This week, Rosa found herself having to fulfil both duties to her little brother.
At 6.20pm on 27 June, an abandoned trailer was discovered on a remote backroad in San Antonio, Texas. Inside were the bodies of dozens of people who had died as they tried to migrate from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Among them was Pablo, 20, whose body was found alongside that of his 43-year-old uncle, Jesús Álvarez. In total, 53 people died and more than a dozen were taken to hospital, including four children. Four people have been charged.
The disaster, which is believed to be the deadliest smuggling episode on the US-Mexico border, has made plain the terrible human cost of the frontier crossings.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.