Post by mhbruin on Feb 12, 2022 9:18:59 GMT -8
US Vaccine Data - We Have Now Administered 546 Million Shots (Population 333 Million)
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California Precipitation (Updated Tuesday Feb 9f)
January had NO rain or snow. February looks the same.
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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees
Case Closed! Then Case Released on Bail
A black delivery driver in Mississippi who says he was pursued and shot at by two white men while on the job has argued that they should face hate crime charges.
D'Monterrio Gibson, 24, compared his case that of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was murdered while jogging.
Similar to that case, suspects in Mr Gibson's incident are a father and son.
According to Mr Gibson, he was delivering a FedEx package in Brookhaven, about 55 miles (88km) south of Jackson, Mississippi on 24 January when his van was cut off by a pickup truck as he was pulling out of a driveway.
He swerved around it, then encountered a man in the street pointing a gun at him and gesturing for him to pull over.
He ducked behind the steering wheel as the man opened fire, he said. Bullets damaged the van and packages inside but no one was hurt in the shooting.
Mr Gibson said the two men, identified as father Gregory Charles Case and son Brandon Case, then pursued him, firing more shots, until he got onto the highway to return to the FedEx distribution centre.
The Cases were arrested eight days later. They have been released on bail.
In his complaint to police, Mr Gibson said he was not taken seriously until he and his manager went to the station the next day to show them the bullet holes in the van.
He was wearing a full FedEx uniform, and was driving a marked rental van when it happened, he said.
Brandon Case, 35, is charged with aggravated assault for shooting into moving vehicle. Gregory Case, 58, is charged with conspiracy.
Lawyers for Mr Gibson argued that the charges were too lenient, and called for a federal hate crime investigation. They also called for the Brookhaven Police to hand over the investigation to an outside agency and for the charges to be upgraded to attempted murder.
Keeping Out Schools Safe From 6-Year-Olds
A six-year-old Florida girl (guess what color she is) was arrested, cuffed and fingerprinted after she threw a kicking tantrum in her Orlando elementary school class — and grandma is not happy.
“She was charged with battery!” a stunned Meralyn Kirkland told NBC affiliate WFLA-TV of her grandaughter, Kaia.
The girl suffers from sleep apnea, a condition she is working on managing through medication, and was acting out from sleep deprivation, the grandmother said — and never should have been hauled off from her Orlando elementary school in handcuffs.
The girl’s grandmother said she was horrified to learn Kaia was was arrested Thursday after she kicked a staff member at the Lucious and Emma Nixon Elementary charter school.
The pint-sized perp was cuffed and driven 8 miles to Orlando’s Juvenile Detention Center, where she was fingerprinted and had her mug shot taken, the report said.
The Quest for the QOP's Holy Grail. Inspired By Sir Lies-A-Lot
Former President Donald Trump's stolen election lie has election officials drowning in paperwork.
Fifteen months after President Joe Biden won the White House, state, county and city-level administrators in at least five states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, Arizona and Virginia — report being inundated with time-consuming records requests and inquiries, most of them coming from amateur fraud hunters looking for proof of debunked conspiracy theories.
The officials say the number of asks, which include requests for voter rolls, images of ballots and technical information about voting machines, has surged in the last year despite overwhelming evidence that U.S. elections are fair and free. Of those states, Biden won all but Florida in his path to victory over Trump.
"Every other day there's a new public records request on something from 2020 or some process,” said Wesley Wilcox, the supervisor of elections in Marion County, Florida. “I spend the vast majority of my day either just providing accurate information, fighting myths and rumors, responding to public records requests."
Wilcox, an elected Republican who runs elections in the county of 375,000 residents, said the requests accounts for “over 60, 70 percent” of his time and have him working more than 50 hours a week, when ordinarily he'd be working an average of 40 hours a week. During periods of early voting, he added, he works upward of 80 hours a week.
Send Him a Bill for $233,652
We knew that former unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf was corruptly campaigning for the insurrectionist president while on the taxpayer dime, dispatched to campaign stops in states including Arizona and Texas before the 2020 election. DHS basically operated as the former president’s taxpayer-funded super PAC, and Unlawful Chad ran it.
What we didn’t know was exactly how much taxpayers were forking over for Unlawful Chad’s coiffed rear to get shuttled around in government aircraft to lie and tout that stupid border wall. The latter was just five days before Election Day, by the way. But we do have a number now, thanks to watchdog organization American Oversight: nearly a quarter of a million dollars.
“Four trips taken by Wolf to the battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Texas cost $223,652, roughly $221,300 of which was spent on government planes, according to the documents, which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act,” TIME reports. The outlet notes that a video posted to DHS social media accounts touting the wall “was indistinguishable from a campaign ad.”
Follow the Money to the DINOs
Billionaire Republican Donors Are Now Giving To Manchin And Sinema
As Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) stood in the way of President Joe Biden’s agenda last year, they attracted the support of a small–but very rich–cohort: billionaires who gave money to Donald Trump’s previous campaigns.
In 2021, Manchin and Sinema received campaign contributions from at least 13 billionaires who previously donated to Trump, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission records. Among the donors: Continental Resources chairman Harold Hamm, investor Ken Langone, and Apollo private equity CEO Marc Rowan. At least 10 gave to Manchin, while at least six gave to Sinema. Some of the billionaires gave to both. Such support is new: Between 2017 and 2020, only three billionaires gave to both Trump and Manchin. One gave to Trump and Sinema.
“This is something that we see when particular members become more prominent,” says Robert Maguire, a campaign finance expert who serves as research director at Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Funding becomes more nationalized. We start to see that people who want access and influence to powerful members start giving to them.” Long-time Republican donors, he added, “are going to want to support any Democrat who is going to stymie Joe Biden’s agenda.”
Does She Drink Her Covfefe With Gazpacho?
Sure Sign It's a Cult. It's Breaking Up Families
Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah says her father boycotted her wedding over her criticism of the former president, whom she blamed for inciting the deadly U.S. Capitol riot.
On Friday’s broadcast of “The View,” Farah said her father, the conservative figure Joseph Farah, and her stepmother refused to attend her nuptials in November because of “political differences after I spoke out against President Trump.”
They Are Making Voting As Easy as Filing Your Taxes
A restrictive new voting law in Texas has sown confusion and erected hurdles for those casting ballots in the state’s March 1 primary, with election administrators rejecting early batches of mail ballots at historic rates and voters uncertain about whether they will be able to participate.
In recent days, thousands of ballots have been rejected because voters did not meet a new requirement to provide an identification number inside the return envelope.
In Harris County, the state’s most populous county and home to Houston, election officials said Friday that 40 percent of roughly 3,600 returned ballots so far have lacked the identification number required under Senate Bill 1, as the new law is known. In Williamson County, a populous northern suburb of Austin, the rejection rate has been about 25 percent in the first few days that ballots have come in, the top election official there said.
Didn't He Know it was "Be Nice to Nazis Week"?
An Alabama school system's “disconcerting” response to complaints from a Jewish student that a teacher had classmates perform a Nazi salute shows a lack of commitment to diversity, an organization that promotes civil and human rights said Friday.
While Mountain Brooks Schools issued a statement saying it was “deeply apologetic for the pain" caused by a lesson that “lacked sensitivity,” the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute questioned actions by the system, which previously ditched a diversity program produced by an organization that combats antisemitism.
In a story first reported by the Birmingham-based Southern Jewish Life, a Jewish student said he was shocked last month when a history teacher at Mountain Brook High School had classmates stand and give a stiff-armed Nazi salute during a lesson on the way symbols change.
The student, Ephraim Tytell, said school officials reprimanded him and told him to apologize to the teacher after he shared a video and photos of the incident on social media. The student said he refused.
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Get These Mother Truckers Out of Here!
Police have started to clear a blockade of the main crossing between Canada and the United States.
After days of protests by truckers against Covid rules at the Ambassador Bridge in Ontario, officers urged them to heed an injunction against the demonstration.
Slowly, and with the help of an armoured vehicle, police have been inching forward, encroaching on the blockade.
Some have voluntarily driven away. Others began to break down the mess-hall tents.
It will likely take a few hours to move the hundred or so vehicles - most of them pickups and SUVs, with a handful of heavy commercial lorries - to disperse.
Few actual commercial trucks are a part of the blockade at the Ambassador Bridge. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Friday that the last count he had was five of them there, with the rest being personal cars: “Ninety-nine percent of the truckers are working their backs off. ... This is about a political statement, that's what this is about.”
Some Canadian Truckers Carried Confederate and Swastika Flags
So Naturally, TucKKKer Loves Them
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What Happens In Canada Doesn't Stay in Canada
Police in Paris intercepted at least 500 vehicles attempting to enter the French capital Saturday, in defiance of a police order, to take part in protests against virus restrictions inspired by Canada’s horn-honking “Freedom Convoy.”
The police said on Twitter that several convoys were stopped from entering at key city arteries and over 200 motorists were handed tickets.
The protesters made it into central Paris, despite an order banning them from entering the capital and the deployment of over 7,000 police officers. Authorities said earlier in the day that they had prevented 500 vehicles from entering, and penalized hundreds of people.
Police appeared to fire tear gas to disperse protesters on the central Parisian luxury shopping boulevard. Demonstrators honked horns from vehicles with slogans demanding an end to the country’s vaccine pass.
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What Happens In Canada Doesn't Stay in Canada - Part 2
There is growing momentum in the U.S. anti-vaccination community to conduct rallies similar to Canada's “Freedom Convoy” that has paralyzed Ottawa, Ontario, and the effort is receiving a boost from a familiar source: overseas content mills.
Some Facebook groups that have promoted American “trucker convoys” similar to demonstrations that have clogged roads in Ottawa are being run by fake accounts tied to content mills in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania and several other countries, Facebook officials told NBC News on Friday.
The groups have popped up as extremism researchers have begun to warn that many anti-vaccine and conspiracy-driven communities in the U.S. are quickly pivoting to embrace and promote the idea of disruptive convoys.
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What Happens In Canada Doesn't Stay in Canada - Part 3
Police call handlers saved a woman from an intruder 3,000 miles away in Canada after she contacted the wrong force.
The team at Durham Police, England, were contacted via online chat by a woman who reported an intruder in her home in Durham, Canada.
She had typed "I need help, he is in the house" before falling silent.
Realising the woman's mistake, Durham Police contacted their Canadian counterparts and a man was arrested 30 minutes later near her home.
A spokeswoman for Durham Police said the call handlers kept the live chat open while contacting Canadian officers from the Ontario province, who were immediately sent to the scene in the town of Ajax.
A 35-year-old man was cornered in a nearby yard and Tasered.
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It Almost Makes You Want to Move to North Macedonia. And, They Did It Without Handcuffs
The President of North Macedonia walked an 11-year-old girl with Down syndrome to school after he heard she was being bullied.
President Stevo Pendarovski held Embla Ademi's hand as he walked her to her elementary school in the city of Gostivar on Monday.
Embla has experienced bullying at school due as a result of having Down syndrome -- a genetic condition that causes learning disabilities, health problems and distinctive facial characteristics -- a spokesperson for the President's office told CNN.
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Asking About Masking
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Leave It ToBeaver SCOTUS. Or Is It SCOTUS Knows Best?
The Supreme Court’s ‘Dead Hand’
The 6–3 majority-conservative Supreme Court is dangerously out of step with a demographically and culturally changing America.
On all of these fronts, and others, the Republican justices are siding with what America has been—a mostly white, Christian, and heavily rural nation—over the urbanized, racially and religiously diverse country America is becoming.
“The Court seems to be pulling the United States back into a prior era without regard for changing notions and understandings of equity, equality, and fairness,” Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for LGBTQ rights, told me. “It is about almost trying to maintain a 1940s, 1950s view of what the United States is and what its obligations are to its citizens.”
They Love Lucy. Desi -- Not So Much.
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Star Light, Star Bright, First Star We See With Our New Telescope
NASA’s new space telescope has captured its first starlight and even taken a selfie of its giant, gold mirror.
All 18 segments of the primary mirror on the James Webb Space Telescope seem to be working properly 1 1/2 months into the mission, officials said Friday.
The telescope’s first target was a bright star 258 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.
“That was just a real wow moment,” said Marshall Perrin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Over the next few months, the hexagonal mirror segments — each the size of a coffee table — will be aligned and focused as one, allowing science observations to begin by the end of June.
They Did All This for a Selfie?
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God Help Me! I Agree with the Taliban About Something
Demonstrators in Afghanistan’s capital Saturday condemned President Joe Biden’s order freeing up $3.5 billion in Afghan assets held in the U.S. for families of America’s 9/11 victims — saying the money belongs to Afghans.
Protesters who gathered outside Kabul's grand Eid Gah mosque asked America for financial compensation for the tens of thousands of Afghans killed during the last 20 years of war in Afghanistan.
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CDC doesn't do a good job of reporting around holidays.
Doses Administered 7-Day Average | Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses | Number of People 2 or More Doses | New Cases 7-Day Average | Deaths 7-Day Average | |
| Feb 12 | 486,374 | 251,926,344 | 213,734,419 | ||
| Feb 11 | 568,820 | 251,755,851 | 213,563,173 | 175,395 | 2,241 |
| Feb 10 | 580,896 | 251,655,172 | 213,430,434 | 190,401 | 2,305 |
| Feb 9 | 591,786 | 251,467,303 | 213,246,140 | 215,418 | 2,313 |
| Feb 8 | 602,606 | 251,312,470 | 213,061,117 | 230,602 | 2,303 |
| Feb 7 | 611,742 | 251,176,199 | 212,920,278 | 247,319 | 2,404 |
| Feb 6 | 627,161 | 251,070,439 | 212,806,521 | 291,471 | 2,294 |
| Feb 5 | 655,591 | 250,915,858 | 212,657,682 | 298,890 | 2,331 |
| Feb 4 | 680,135 | 250,731,754 | 212,481,465 | 313,117 | 2,404 |
| Feb 3 | 719,986 | 250,593,665 | 212,336,183 | 343,563 | 2,371 |
| Feb 2 | 494,092 | 250,378,993 | 212,130,684 | 378,015 | 2,403 |
| Feb 1 | 510,477 | 250,184,240 | 211,954,555 | 415,552 | 2,369 |
| Jan 31 | 575,732 | 250,029,773 | 211,818,885 | 446,355 | 2,287 |
| Jan 30 | 603,030 | 249,892,470 | 211,695,131 | 497,296 | 2,234 |
| Jan 29 | 595,871 | 249,695,301 | 211,533,229 | 522,626 | 2,261 |
| Jan 28 | 626,946 | 249,473,925 | 211,343,818 | 543,016 | 2,265 |
| Jan 27 | 643,725 | 249,267,851 (I don't know why) | 211,162,083 | 577,748 | 2,300 |
| Jan 26 | 962,958 | 251,518,114 | 210,850,212 | 596,859 | 2,288 |
| Jan 25 | 1,011,603 | 251,289,667 | 210,682,471 | 627,294 | 2,246 |
| Jan 24 | 1,201,186 | 250,964,433 | 210,459,963 | 692,359 | 2,166 |
| Jan 23 | 1,101,405 | 250,763,600 | 210,358,008 | 663,908 | 1,936 |
| Jan 22 | 1,002,322 | 250,568,431 | 210,229,586 | 686,715 | 1,939 |
| Jan 21 | 1,035,111 | 250,262,153 | 210,021,766 | 716,829 | 1,974 |
| Jan 20 | 1,094,988 | 250,028,635 | 209,842,610 | 726,870 | 1,843 |
| Jan 19 | 1,135,453 | 249,702,939 | 209,509,297 | 744,615 | 1,749 |
| Jan 18 | 1,158,537 | 249,393,487 | 209,312,770 | 755,095 | 1,669 |
| Jan 17 | No Data | 736,350 | 1,746 | ||
| Jan 16 | No Data | 771,131 | 1,851 | ||
| Jan 15 | 1,268,202 | 248,707,432 | 208,995,438 | 788,628 | 1,858 |
| Jan 14 | 1,286,773 | 248,338,448 | 208,791,862 | 798,335 | 1,784 |
| Jan 13 | 1,291,013 | 247,987,225 | 208,564,894 | 794,587 | 1,730 |
| Jan 12 | 1,234,672 | 247,695,845 | 208,182,657 | 782,765 | 1,729 |
| Feb 16, 2021 | 1,716,311 | 39,670,551 | 15,015,434 | 78,292 |
| At Least One Dose | Fully Vaccinated | % of Vaccinated W/ Boosters | |
| % of Total Population | 75.9% | 64.4% | 42.8% |
| % of Population 5+ | 80.7% | 68.4% | |
| % of Population 12+ | 85.6% | 73.0% | 44.2% |
| % of Population 18+ | 87.4% | 74.5% | 46.0% |
| % of Population 65+ | 95.0% | 88.5% | 65.5% |
California Precipitation (Updated Tuesday Feb 9f)
January had NO rain or snow. February looks the same.
| Percent of Average for this Date | Last Week | 2 Weeks ago | 3 Weeks ago | 4 Weeks ago | 5 Weeks ago | 6 Weeks ago | |
| Northern Sierra Precipitation | 105% (59% of average for full season) | 113% | 124% | 134% | 149% | 158% | 170% |
| San Joaquin Precipitation | 92% (51%) | 99% | 110% | 121% | 138% | 156% | 170% |
| Tulare Basin Precipitation | 84% (46%) | 91% | 101% | 112% | 127% | 145% | 151% |
| Snow Water Content - North | 80% (58%) | 89% | 117% | 128% | 135% | 134% | |
| Snow Water Content - Central | 80% (57%) | 89% | 114% | 129% | 148% | 148% | |
| Snow Water Content - South | 81% (57%) | 92% | 121% | 135% | 160% | 158% |
Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees
Case Closed! Then Case Released on Bail
A black delivery driver in Mississippi who says he was pursued and shot at by two white men while on the job has argued that they should face hate crime charges.
D'Monterrio Gibson, 24, compared his case that of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was murdered while jogging.
Similar to that case, suspects in Mr Gibson's incident are a father and son.
According to Mr Gibson, he was delivering a FedEx package in Brookhaven, about 55 miles (88km) south of Jackson, Mississippi on 24 January when his van was cut off by a pickup truck as he was pulling out of a driveway.
He swerved around it, then encountered a man in the street pointing a gun at him and gesturing for him to pull over.
He ducked behind the steering wheel as the man opened fire, he said. Bullets damaged the van and packages inside but no one was hurt in the shooting.
Mr Gibson said the two men, identified as father Gregory Charles Case and son Brandon Case, then pursued him, firing more shots, until he got onto the highway to return to the FedEx distribution centre.
The Cases were arrested eight days later. They have been released on bail.
In his complaint to police, Mr Gibson said he was not taken seriously until he and his manager went to the station the next day to show them the bullet holes in the van.
He was wearing a full FedEx uniform, and was driving a marked rental van when it happened, he said.
Brandon Case, 35, is charged with aggravated assault for shooting into moving vehicle. Gregory Case, 58, is charged with conspiracy.
Lawyers for Mr Gibson argued that the charges were too lenient, and called for a federal hate crime investigation. They also called for the Brookhaven Police to hand over the investigation to an outside agency and for the charges to be upgraded to attempted murder.
Keeping Out Schools Safe From 6-Year-Olds
A six-year-old Florida girl (guess what color she is) was arrested, cuffed and fingerprinted after she threw a kicking tantrum in her Orlando elementary school class — and grandma is not happy.
“She was charged with battery!” a stunned Meralyn Kirkland told NBC affiliate WFLA-TV of her grandaughter, Kaia.
The girl suffers from sleep apnea, a condition she is working on managing through medication, and was acting out from sleep deprivation, the grandmother said — and never should have been hauled off from her Orlando elementary school in handcuffs.
The girl’s grandmother said she was horrified to learn Kaia was was arrested Thursday after she kicked a staff member at the Lucious and Emma Nixon Elementary charter school.
The pint-sized perp was cuffed and driven 8 miles to Orlando’s Juvenile Detention Center, where she was fingerprinted and had her mug shot taken, the report said.
The Quest for the QOP's Holy Grail. Inspired By Sir Lies-A-Lot
Former President Donald Trump's stolen election lie has election officials drowning in paperwork.
Fifteen months after President Joe Biden won the White House, state, county and city-level administrators in at least five states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, Arizona and Virginia — report being inundated with time-consuming records requests and inquiries, most of them coming from amateur fraud hunters looking for proof of debunked conspiracy theories.
The officials say the number of asks, which include requests for voter rolls, images of ballots and technical information about voting machines, has surged in the last year despite overwhelming evidence that U.S. elections are fair and free. Of those states, Biden won all but Florida in his path to victory over Trump.
"Every other day there's a new public records request on something from 2020 or some process,” said Wesley Wilcox, the supervisor of elections in Marion County, Florida. “I spend the vast majority of my day either just providing accurate information, fighting myths and rumors, responding to public records requests."
Wilcox, an elected Republican who runs elections in the county of 375,000 residents, said the requests accounts for “over 60, 70 percent” of his time and have him working more than 50 hours a week, when ordinarily he'd be working an average of 40 hours a week. During periods of early voting, he added, he works upward of 80 hours a week.
Send Him a Bill for $233,652
We knew that former unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf was corruptly campaigning for the insurrectionist president while on the taxpayer dime, dispatched to campaign stops in states including Arizona and Texas before the 2020 election. DHS basically operated as the former president’s taxpayer-funded super PAC, and Unlawful Chad ran it.
What we didn’t know was exactly how much taxpayers were forking over for Unlawful Chad’s coiffed rear to get shuttled around in government aircraft to lie and tout that stupid border wall. The latter was just five days before Election Day, by the way. But we do have a number now, thanks to watchdog organization American Oversight: nearly a quarter of a million dollars.
“Four trips taken by Wolf to the battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Texas cost $223,652, roughly $221,300 of which was spent on government planes, according to the documents, which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act,” TIME reports. The outlet notes that a video posted to DHS social media accounts touting the wall “was indistinguishable from a campaign ad.”
Follow the Money to the DINOs
Billionaire Republican Donors Are Now Giving To Manchin And Sinema
As Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) stood in the way of President Joe Biden’s agenda last year, they attracted the support of a small–but very rich–cohort: billionaires who gave money to Donald Trump’s previous campaigns.
In 2021, Manchin and Sinema received campaign contributions from at least 13 billionaires who previously donated to Trump, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission records. Among the donors: Continental Resources chairman Harold Hamm, investor Ken Langone, and Apollo private equity CEO Marc Rowan. At least 10 gave to Manchin, while at least six gave to Sinema. Some of the billionaires gave to both. Such support is new: Between 2017 and 2020, only three billionaires gave to both Trump and Manchin. One gave to Trump and Sinema.
“This is something that we see when particular members become more prominent,” says Robert Maguire, a campaign finance expert who serves as research director at Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Funding becomes more nationalized. We start to see that people who want access and influence to powerful members start giving to them.” Long-time Republican donors, he added, “are going to want to support any Democrat who is going to stymie Joe Biden’s agenda.”
Does She Drink Her Covfefe With Gazpacho?
Sure Sign It's a Cult. It's Breaking Up Families
Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah says her father boycotted her wedding over her criticism of the former president, whom she blamed for inciting the deadly U.S. Capitol riot.
On Friday’s broadcast of “The View,” Farah said her father, the conservative figure Joseph Farah, and her stepmother refused to attend her nuptials in November because of “political differences after I spoke out against President Trump.”
They Are Making Voting As Easy as Filing Your Taxes
A restrictive new voting law in Texas has sown confusion and erected hurdles for those casting ballots in the state’s March 1 primary, with election administrators rejecting early batches of mail ballots at historic rates and voters uncertain about whether they will be able to participate.
In recent days, thousands of ballots have been rejected because voters did not meet a new requirement to provide an identification number inside the return envelope.
In Harris County, the state’s most populous county and home to Houston, election officials said Friday that 40 percent of roughly 3,600 returned ballots so far have lacked the identification number required under Senate Bill 1, as the new law is known. In Williamson County, a populous northern suburb of Austin, the rejection rate has been about 25 percent in the first few days that ballots have come in, the top election official there said.
Didn't He Know it was "Be Nice to Nazis Week"?
An Alabama school system's “disconcerting” response to complaints from a Jewish student that a teacher had classmates perform a Nazi salute shows a lack of commitment to diversity, an organization that promotes civil and human rights said Friday.
While Mountain Brooks Schools issued a statement saying it was “deeply apologetic for the pain" caused by a lesson that “lacked sensitivity,” the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute questioned actions by the system, which previously ditched a diversity program produced by an organization that combats antisemitism.
In a story first reported by the Birmingham-based Southern Jewish Life, a Jewish student said he was shocked last month when a history teacher at Mountain Brook High School had classmates stand and give a stiff-armed Nazi salute during a lesson on the way symbols change.
The student, Ephraim Tytell, said school officials reprimanded him and told him to apologize to the teacher after he shared a video and photos of the incident on social media. The student said he refused.
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Get These Mother Truckers Out of Here!
Police have started to clear a blockade of the main crossing between Canada and the United States.
After days of protests by truckers against Covid rules at the Ambassador Bridge in Ontario, officers urged them to heed an injunction against the demonstration.
Slowly, and with the help of an armoured vehicle, police have been inching forward, encroaching on the blockade.
Some have voluntarily driven away. Others began to break down the mess-hall tents.
It will likely take a few hours to move the hundred or so vehicles - most of them pickups and SUVs, with a handful of heavy commercial lorries - to disperse.
Few actual commercial trucks are a part of the blockade at the Ambassador Bridge. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Friday that the last count he had was five of them there, with the rest being personal cars: “Ninety-nine percent of the truckers are working their backs off. ... This is about a political statement, that's what this is about.”
Some Canadian Truckers Carried Confederate and Swastika Flags
So Naturally, TucKKKer Loves Them
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What Happens In Canada Doesn't Stay in Canada
Police in Paris intercepted at least 500 vehicles attempting to enter the French capital Saturday, in defiance of a police order, to take part in protests against virus restrictions inspired by Canada’s horn-honking “Freedom Convoy.”
The police said on Twitter that several convoys were stopped from entering at key city arteries and over 200 motorists were handed tickets.
The protesters made it into central Paris, despite an order banning them from entering the capital and the deployment of over 7,000 police officers. Authorities said earlier in the day that they had prevented 500 vehicles from entering, and penalized hundreds of people.
Police appeared to fire tear gas to disperse protesters on the central Parisian luxury shopping boulevard. Demonstrators honked horns from vehicles with slogans demanding an end to the country’s vaccine pass.
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What Happens In Canada Doesn't Stay in Canada - Part 2
There is growing momentum in the U.S. anti-vaccination community to conduct rallies similar to Canada's “Freedom Convoy” that has paralyzed Ottawa, Ontario, and the effort is receiving a boost from a familiar source: overseas content mills.
Some Facebook groups that have promoted American “trucker convoys” similar to demonstrations that have clogged roads in Ottawa are being run by fake accounts tied to content mills in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania and several other countries, Facebook officials told NBC News on Friday.
The groups have popped up as extremism researchers have begun to warn that many anti-vaccine and conspiracy-driven communities in the U.S. are quickly pivoting to embrace and promote the idea of disruptive convoys.
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What Happens In Canada Doesn't Stay in Canada - Part 3
Police call handlers saved a woman from an intruder 3,000 miles away in Canada after she contacted the wrong force.
The team at Durham Police, England, were contacted via online chat by a woman who reported an intruder in her home in Durham, Canada.
She had typed "I need help, he is in the house" before falling silent.
Realising the woman's mistake, Durham Police contacted their Canadian counterparts and a man was arrested 30 minutes later near her home.
A spokeswoman for Durham Police said the call handlers kept the live chat open while contacting Canadian officers from the Ontario province, who were immediately sent to the scene in the town of Ajax.
A 35-year-old man was cornered in a nearby yard and Tasered.
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It Almost Makes You Want to Move to North Macedonia. And, They Did It Without Handcuffs
The President of North Macedonia walked an 11-year-old girl with Down syndrome to school after he heard she was being bullied.
President Stevo Pendarovski held Embla Ademi's hand as he walked her to her elementary school in the city of Gostivar on Monday.
Embla has experienced bullying at school due as a result of having Down syndrome -- a genetic condition that causes learning disabilities, health problems and distinctive facial characteristics -- a spokesperson for the President's office told CNN.
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Asking About Masking
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Leave It To
The Supreme Court’s ‘Dead Hand’
The 6–3 majority-conservative Supreme Court is dangerously out of step with a demographically and culturally changing America.
On all of these fronts, and others, the Republican justices are siding with what America has been—a mostly white, Christian, and heavily rural nation—over the urbanized, racially and religiously diverse country America is becoming.
“The Court seems to be pulling the United States back into a prior era without regard for changing notions and understandings of equity, equality, and fairness,” Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for LGBTQ rights, told me. “It is about almost trying to maintain a 1940s, 1950s view of what the United States is and what its obligations are to its citizens.”
They Love Lucy. Desi -- Not So Much.
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Star Light, Star Bright, First Star We See With Our New Telescope
NASA’s new space telescope has captured its first starlight and even taken a selfie of its giant, gold mirror.
All 18 segments of the primary mirror on the James Webb Space Telescope seem to be working properly 1 1/2 months into the mission, officials said Friday.
The telescope’s first target was a bright star 258 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.
“That was just a real wow moment,” said Marshall Perrin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Over the next few months, the hexagonal mirror segments — each the size of a coffee table — will be aligned and focused as one, allowing science observations to begin by the end of June.
They Did All This for a Selfie?
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God Help Me! I Agree with the Taliban About Something
Demonstrators in Afghanistan’s capital Saturday condemned President Joe Biden’s order freeing up $3.5 billion in Afghan assets held in the U.S. for families of America’s 9/11 victims — saying the money belongs to Afghans.
Protesters who gathered outside Kabul's grand Eid Gah mosque asked America for financial compensation for the tens of thousands of Afghans killed during the last 20 years of war in Afghanistan.
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