Leaders from almost 100 countries led by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are meeting in Switzerland this weekend for a peace summit in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Russia was not invited, and China would not attend. Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to a ceasefire if Ukraine gives him four eastern Ukrainian provinces which Russia partially occupies and the promise that Ukraine will never join NATO. Zelensky rejected the offer and said he will not negotiate until Russian forces leave all Ukrainian territory. EU President Ursula von der Leyen said that freezing the conflict is a recipe for future wars of aggression. She wants a peace that “restores Ukraine’s sovereignty and its territorial integrity.”
A bankruptcy judge dismissed a case to close Infowars, but its owner, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, must liquidate his personal assets, valued at about $9 million, to pay the $1.5 billion in damages for claiming the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre shooting was a hoax. A bankruptcy judge said that the plaintiffs, Sandy Hook families, could pursue claims in state court “outside of a bankruptcy forum.” A court-appointee trustee for Free Speech Systems, Infowars parent company, worries that Jones’ increasingly “erratic and more unhinged” behavior could hurt the value of this empire. Plaintiffs offered to drop the charges to $85 million, but Jones wants it limited to $55 million. The court will hear arguments this month.
Jason Zengerle’s book about former Fox host Tucker Carlson, Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind, has been dropped by Little, Brown, & Co. because he is no longer important enough to bring in the money. Carlson has really sunk to the bottom: he’s planning a 15-week-tour with Alex Jones and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).
Of all likely voters, 62 percent believe that oil and gas companies should be legally accountable for their part in climate change; only 28 percent disagree.
The Biden administration has drafted rules to remove unpaid medical bills from credit reports used to determine possibility and interest rates for loans for cars, homes, and small businesses. Public comment ends on August 12 before a final version is prepared and finalized next year. About 15 million people have medical bills on their credit reports, down from 43 million in March 2022.
- New rules to benefit air travelers.
- Greater ease in filing taxes for free.
- Advancement of policy to cap credit card late fees.
- Steps to block tens of billions of “junk fees”
- Cancelation of $167 billion in student debt for almost 5 million people.
- Policies to keep gas prices low.
Eight former SpaceX employees are suing Elon Musk for firing them after they accused the company of tolerating sexual harassment on the job. The lawsuit alleged that Musk “runs his company in the dark ages—treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size, bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter. Other accusations are violations of federal and state labor law, including retaliation against employees for “opposing the discrimination, harassment, and hostile work environment that they observed.” His posts on X encourage sexually inappropriate language and behavior among workers. One post told YouTube’s former CEO, Chad Hurley, to touch Musk’s genitals in exchange for a horse, and another discussed loss of sexual arousal with a picture of Microsoft CEO Bill Gates next to an emoji of a pregnant man.
Republicans campaign on rising crime under a Democratic-controlled government, but statistics disprove their lies. “Historic” data in the first three months of 2024 saw a rapid continued drop in levels of violent crime and murder across the country. Violent crime dropped 15 percent in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the prior year. In another comparison, murders dropped more than 26 percent. The year 2023 saw an historically low murder rate in 2023, dropping by 13 percent, and violent crime plunged to one of the lowest levels in 50 years. Cities with populations of over 1 million had an 11 percent drop in overall crime.
President Joe Biden said:
“This progress we’re seeing is no accident. My Administration is putting more cops on the beat, holding violent criminals accountable, and getting illegal guns off the street—and we are doing it in partnership with communities. As a result, Americans are safer today than when I took office.”
Yet Republicans have convinced over three-fourths of people that the U.S. has more crime than a year ago. They also won’t know that the national murder rate skyrocketed 29.4 percent in the last year of former Dictator Donald Trump (DDT).
Hope across the States:
Florida: A federal court permanently blocked the state from enforcing a ban on gender-affirming care for minors as unconstitutional. He ruled that transgender opponents may have their beliefs “but they are not free to discriminate against transgender individuals just for being transgender.” The ruling cites the unscientific nature of the original ban and evidence of anti-trans bigotry motivating the ban.
Georgia: The Fulton County elections board adopted 3-2 rules requiring activists to show detailed evidence before questioning voters’ eligibility. Republicans complained that the challenge procedures were poorly worded. Georgia’s new law allows volunteers to question voters who appear to have moved from the state, and conservatives are recruiting people to add to the more than 100,000 challenges the state has seen since 2021, most of them rejected by county election boards.
Indiana: The ACLU is suing Longootee, a town of 2,600, because it rescinded its approval for the Pride festival and gave organizers from the Patoka Valley AIDS Community no opportunity to get approval, a First Amendment violation. The November 3, 2023 approval was for the September 7 celebration, but the city passed a new ordinance in February, followed in June 10, 2024 by further tightening restrictions. Last year’s pride festival occurred without major problems. The more expensive Loogootee SummerFest, lasting three days, still has a permit, and a church BBQ near the city hall had no discussion for the ordinance.
Kansas: A Wichita library will order more LGBTQ+-themed books after a hate pastor told his followers to check all of them out of local libraries. Book orders are based on use, with damaged or not-returned items replaced. (Right: The pastor posted a photo of 100 LGBTQ+ books he had checked out on an Instagram account which is not private.)
Michigan: A state Court of Claims judge refused guidance from the secretary of state that clerks should initially presume absentee ballot signatures are valid but gave them wide discretion to consider why a voter signature might not match the version on file. According to the state law’s amendment last year, a signature is “invalid only if it differs in significant and obvious respects from the elector’s signature on file.” Clerks can consider “commonsense reasons” such as whether voters aged, the surface they signed on, and name abbreviations. The new law also specifies that “slight dissimilarities” in signatures “must be resolved in favor of the elector.”
New Hampshire: On the last day of its session, the state House tabled a bill, 223-141, that blocks the current right for unregistered voters to cast their ballots on Election Day by signing an affidavit and bring in the information within a week if they don’t have identification at the polls. The proposed bill would have required people to bring in identification, including citizenship papers, and lose its exemption to motor vehicle registration existing because of the same-day registration. Also voted down was a bill to purge the voting lists every six years instead of the ten-year cycle.
New Jersey: Superior Court Judge Michael Blee ordered that 1,909 ballots from the June 4 primary election prematurely opened to be counted. He also criticized the Atlantic County Board of Elections for their sloppiness and ordered them to tighten up their procedures. Blee’s actions also settles the Democratic primary for the state’s 2nd congressional district when the top two are separated by 412 votes.
New York: Columbia University took the Columbia Law Review offline after it published an article about Palestine but returned it when students threatened work stoppage because of the censorship. Authored by Palestinian legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah, “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept,” describes the need to “accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition” in the law.
Houston surgeon Eithan Haim was indicted on four felony counts for sharing private information of transgender patients in violation of the federal law protecting patients’ medical privacy. He provided internal documents from Texas Children’s Hospital in 2023 to conservative activist Christopher Rufo, alleging that he was following the state AG Ken Paxton’s opinion that gender-affirming care is “child abuse.”
The state Supreme Court protected in vitro fertilization (IVF) by rejecting a case about whether a frozen embryo has the same rights as a child. In a lower court case, the frozen embryos went to the husband, but the ex-wife used the new abortion law stating that they have “all the rights and constitutional protections of children.” She lost in a Texas court and the 2nd Circuit Court.
Virginia: A father accusing school officials in Glen Cove Elementary School of “grooming and abusing” children on LGBTQ+ issues now faces a $20 million defamation lawsuit. In another lawsuit, the Virginia NAACP is suing a school district in Shenandoah County for restoring Confederate military names for two buildings.
Tomorrow: a week’s review of father DDT. Happy Father’s Day!
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