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This week, ProPublica released two studies tracing the deaths of two women to Georgia’s six-week abortion ban—the first to be reported since the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Twenty-eight-year-old Amber Thurman took abortion pills but did not completely expel the fetal tissue from her body. She developed a serious infection and went to the hospital, where physicians would ordinarily have performed a dilation and curettage to remove the remaining tissue. In Thurman’s case, however, physicians failed to act for roughly 20 hours. They waited to operate until the situation was dire, and Thurman died.

Candi Miller, a mother of three, suffered from lupus, diabetes, and hypertension, and she was warned that her health was so fragile that she might not survive another pregnancy. When she accidentally became pregnant again, she ordered abortion pills online. Like Thurman, Miller didn’t entirely expel the fetal tissue and developed a serious infection. But Miller did not seek out care. Her family reported that she was aware of Georgia’s criminal abortion law and afraid of what would happen if she sought emergency care. Her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.

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Don’t worry, everybody. It was just AI. What a relief! I almost thought this guy was a terrible person.

The Supreme Court has rejected an emergency appeal from Nevada’s Green Party seeking to include presidential candidate Jill Stein on the ballot in the battleground state.

The court’s order Friday, without any noted dissents, allows ballot preparation and printing to proceed in Nevada without Stein and other Green Party candidates included.

The outcome is a victory for Democrats who had challenged the Greens’ inclusion on the ballot in a state with a history of extremely close statewide races. In 2020, President Joe Biden outpaced former President Donald Trump by fewer than 35,000 votes in the state.

Georgia's Republican-controlled state election board voted on Friday to require a labor-intensive hand count of potentially millions of ballots in November's election, a move voting rights advocates say could cause delays, introduce errors and lay the groundwork for spurious election challenges.

The hand count rule, passed in a 3-2 vote, will make Georgia the only state in the U.S. to implement such a requirement as part of the normal process of tabulating results, according to Gowri Ramachandran, the director of elections and security at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning public policy institute.

A federal judge has partially sided with the family of a Black man who was fatally shot by a now-imprisoned white Kansas City, Missouri, police detective, ruling that the officer should not have entered the man’s backyard.

U.S. District Judge Beth Phillips ruled Wednesday that Eric DeValkenaere violated 26-year-old Cameron Lamb’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure by entering his property in 2019 without a warrant or other legal reason to be there.

However, Phillips declined to issue a summary judgment on the family’s claim that the ensuing shooting amounted to excessive force, and made no immediate decision on any damages in the wrongful death case filed against the Kansas City police board and DeValkenaere.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued the country's three largest pharmacy benefit managers on Friday, accusing them of steering diabetes patients towards higher priced insulin in order to reap millions of dollars in rebates from pharmaceutical companies.

The case accuses UnitedHealth Group Inc's Optum unit, CVS Health Corp's CVS Caremark and Cigna Corp's Express Scripts of unfairly excluding lower cost insulin products from lists of drugs covered by insurers.

The conduct hurt patients, such as those with coinsurance and deductibles, who were not eligible for the rebated price, the FTC said. The three PBMs together administer 80% of all prescriptions in the U.S., according to the case, which was filed in the FTC's in-house court.

The sheriff charged with murder in the shooting of a rural Kentucky judge in his courthouse chambers was accused in a federal lawsuit of failing to investigate allegations that one of his deputies repeatedly sexually abused a woman in the same judge’s chambers.

The preliminary investigation indicates that Letcher County Sheriff Shawn M. Stines shot District Judge Kevin Mullins multiple times on Thursday following an argument inside the courthouse, according to Kentucky State Police.

Mullins, who held the judgeship for 15 years, died at the scene, and Stines surrendered without incident.

Three members of a foster family have pleaded guilty to abusing children, including several who previously were tortured by their parents in a Southern California home.

The Press-Enterprise reports that Marcelino Olguin pleaded guilty Thursday to multiple counts of lewd acts on a child in addition to false imprisonment and injuring a child. His attorney, Paul Grech, said he entered the pleas in Superior Court in Riverside to bring closure to his family.

Olguin’s wife Rosa and daughter Lennys pleaded guilty to child cruelty, false imprisonment and other charges.

Among the children they cared for were six members of the Turpin family, who were placed with the Olguins after being rescued from horribly abusive conditions in their parents’ home.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20513974

Patrick Wintour
Diplomatic editor
Fri 20 Sep 2024 03.48 EDT

Five years ago, Celia Johnson rebuffed an offer from SpaceX, billionaire Elon Musk’s space venture, to buy two brick ranch houses she owns near the mouth of the Rio Grande.

SpaceX’s breakneck development, and fast-changing local regulations that facilitated it, disrupted her quiet retirement and halted much of the beach traffic. It also raised her property taxes, inflated by soaring values all around her as neighbors sold land to SpaceX.

To seek relief, Johnson wrote local officials, including Alex Dominguez, a state legislator who at the time represented her district. In a 2021 email reviewed by Reuters, Dominguez replied that he was “sympathetic.” He couldn’t “choose sides,” though, because it was a matter for the county government.

Dominguez is one of dozens of current and former public officials here whose finances, business relationships and political fortunes are enmeshed with the speedy growth of Starbase, as the Musk development is known. Starbase’s expansion has injected a dizzying influx of money into campaign coffers, business dealings and the personal finances of people elected to represent the public.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20510681

Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem
Fri 20 Sep 2024 08.34 EDT

Florida's two state health agencies clarified for doctors on Thursday morning that an abortion is allowed at "any stage in pregnancy" to save the life and health of the mother, according to a press release.

"Providers are reminded that Florida requires life-saving medical care to a mother without delay when necessary, and the Florida Department of Health and the Agency for Health Care Administration will take regulatory action when a provider fails to follow this standard of care," the press release says in bold text.

The release, aimed to dispel what the state called "misinformation" about abortion in Florida, also says "miscarriage is not an abortion" in bold text and warns health care facilities and providers that a failure to provide life-saving treatment for pregnant women may constitute malpractice.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240920014357/https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/09/19/smell-of-burnt-cannabis-alone-no-longer-justifies-a-police-search-of-a-vehicle-illinois-supreme-court-rules/

Springfield mayor Rob Rue says the order will allow city officials to ‘acquire resources to address potential threats’

The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, has issued an emergency proclamation following the continued rise in public safety threats over false rightwing rumors about the city’s migrant communities.

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According to a city statement, the proclamation allows Rue and other city officials to “swiftly acquire resources needed to address potential threats” and will “enable departments to respond more efficiently to emerging risks, including civil unrest, cyber threats and potential acts of violence”.

In recent days, following Donald Trump, JD Vance and other rightwing politicians publicly repeating falsehoods about the city’s Haitian immigrants eating other locals’ pets, the city has received more than 30 bomb threats against its schools, government buildings and city officials’ homes.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240919145816/https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/18/media/haitian-times-springfield-ohio-immigrants-false-claim/index.html

The Democratic and Republican national conventions are just a memory, the first and perhaps only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is in the bag, and election offices are beginning to send out absentee ballots.

Now come the voters.

Friday is the start of early in-person voting for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, kicking off in Virginia, South Dakota and Minnesota, the home state of Harris' running mate, Gov. Tim Walz.

The first ballots being cast in person come with just over six weeks left before Election Day on Nov. 5. About a dozen more states will follow with early in-person voting by mid-October.

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“Let’s be clear. A vote for this bill would further support the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” said Rashida Tlaib.

Republican majority eager for hand-counts of voting tallies, which experts say are time-consuming and unreliable

The Georgia state election board is set to meet on Friday and consider another round of last-minute election changes that could cause delays and confusion after election day in a critical battleground state.

The Republican majority on the board is expected to approve a rule that would require three people in every precinct to check machine-vote tallies by hand-counting the election results. Voting experts have long warned that hand-counts are time consuming, costly, and less reliable than machines. It’s a process that nonetheless has been favored by conservative activists who doubt the results of the 2020 election.

The board will also consider proposed rules that would mandate daily hand-counts of early votes, require public reports of voters who have cast a ballot during early voting, allow for greater poll-watcher access during tabulation, distinguish emergency and mail-in ballots, and require that ballots be tracked through the mail.

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Nearly two dozen juveniles have been charged in connection with online threats made against schools in South Carolina since early September, the authorities said on Tuesday.

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According to the news release, the charges are part of a sprawling investigation into more than 60 threats targeting schools in 23 counties since Sept. 4, when the authorities say a 14-year-old gunman fatally shot two students and two teachers at his high school in Georgia.

Threats of mass violence have proliferated on social media since the Georgia shooting and have left law enforcement officials, who traditionally have been limited in their response to threats of possible violence, feeling exasperated. In Central California, several teens have been arrested in connection with threats. In Broward County, Fla., where 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland in 2018, officials said last week that they had arrested nine students since August in connection with threats of violence.

e; archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/rlrUp

The connective tissue between the Trump campaign and the grassroots activists spreading the conspiracy is the Election Integrity Network, a group established in the wake of the 2020 election by Mitchell. The Election Integrity Network, which earlier this year was involved in mass voter roll challenges, has established a huge network of regional, state, and county-level groups with tens of thousands of activists who attend regular online information sessions about everything from poll worker recruitment to media training.

In recent weeks, Mitchell and her staff have been laser-focused on the threat of noncitizens voting, according to WIRED’s review of recordings of more than half a dozen meetings. In a series of online webinars, each attended by hundreds of volunteers, Mitchell and her colleagues have spoken at length about the supposed threat posed by immigrants, while providing no evidence to back up their claims

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240920015320/https://www.wired.com/story/election-deniers-trump-anti-immigrant-voting/

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240918171026/https://www.stlpr.org/law-order/2024-09-18/chief-judge-st-clair-county-illinois-safer-cash-bail