Sun - Gov DeathSentence Lives Up to His Nickname

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Mississippi Was Missing.  Finally Delbert Made it Official.

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, was ratified in 1865. Lawmakers in Mississippi, however, only got around to officially ratifying the amendment in 2013 -- 148 years later.

Mississippi voted to ratify the amendment in 1995 but failed to make it official by notifying the U.S. Archivist.  Finally, on Jan. 30, Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann sent the Office of the Federal Register a copy of the 1995 resolution, and on Feb. 7, the Federal Register made the ratification official.
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Today's Worst Joke in the World

I didn't mean to push all your buttons.  I just tried to hit mute.
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This is Only Anecdotal, But ...

I have been believing for a while that there is a TON of COVID cases going around.  Obviously, there are a lot more than the 100,000 daily cases being reported by the CDC.   Fortunately, although hospitalizations are rising, they are rising very slowly and deaths are staying flat.  It's still a lot of deaths.  We are currently on track for 100,000 per year, which is quite a bit more than the 30,000 to 60,000 in a typical flu year.

The latest evidence is that my second daughter has test positive.  They didn't get it from each other, but they tested positive within 10 days of each other.  One got it at an outdoor concert at the Hollywood Bowl.

Both are sick enough to be miserable, but neither looks like it will turn dangerous.   We just pray for no long COVID.

We just ordered more masks.
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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees

Apple Plays "Never Would I Ever"

Millions of iPhone users could be eligible for payouts, following the launch of a legal claim accusing Apple of secretly slowing the performance of older phones.

Justin Gutmann alleges the company misled users over an upgrade that it said would enhance performance but, in fact, slowed phones down.

He is seeking damages of around £768m for up to 25 million UK iPhone users.

Apple says it has "never" intentionally shortened the life of its products.

The claim, which has been filed with the Competition Appeal Tribunal, alleges Apple slowed down the performance of older iPhones, in a process known as "throttling", in order to avoid expensive recalls or repairs.

It relates to the introduction of a power management tool released in a software update to iPhone users in January 2017, to combat performance issues and stop older devices from abruptly shutting down.

Mr Gutmann, a consumer champion, says the information about the tool was not included in the software update download description at the time, and that the company failed to make clear that it would slow down devices.

He claims that Apple introduced this tool to hide the fact that iPhone batteries may have struggled to run the latest iOS software, and that rather than recalling products or offering replacement batteries, the firm instead pushed users to download the software updates.

Mr Gutmann said: "Instead of doing the honourable and legal thing by their customers and offering a free replacement, repair service or compensation, Apple instead misled people by concealing a tool in software updates that slowed their devices by up to 58%."

The models covered by the claim are the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6S, 6S Plus, SE, 7, 7 Plus, 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X models.

It is an opt-out claim, which means customers will not need to actively join the case to seek damages.

In a statement, Apple said: "We have never, and would never, do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades.

But in 2020 ...

Apple will pay $113m (£85m) to settle allegations that it slowed down older iPhones.

Thirty-three US states claimed that Apple had done this to drive users into buying new devices.

Millions of people were affected when the models of iPhone 6 and 7 and SE were slowed down in 2016 in a scandal that was dubbed batterygate.

Apple declined to comment, however, it has previously said the phones were slowed to preserve ageing battery life.

The deal is separate from a proposed settlement Apple reached in March to pay affected iPhone owners up to $500m in a class action lawsuit.

In 2016 Apple updated software on models of the iPhone 6, 7 and SE - which throttled chip speeds on aging phones.

IS Likes to Kill the Innocent

An Islamic State affiliate has claimed responsibility for an attack on a Sikh temple in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul that killed at least two people and injured seven.

The attack on Saturday was “an act of revenge” following insults made by members of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party about the Prophet Mohammed, ISIS-Khorasan said on its Telegram channel.

Nupur Sharma, a spokesperson for the party, had made derogatory remarks regarding the Prophet Mohammed during a panel discussion on a news channel and her comments were allegedly followed by anti-Islam comments by another party leader on Twitter.

Governor DeathSentence May Have Sentenced Some Kids to Death

Florida officials on Friday began allowing doctors to order the newly authorized Covid vaccine for the youngest children, while limiting the state’s involvement in helping get the vaccine to them.

Florida is the only state that hasn’t requested from the federal government any doses of the vaccine for children ages six months to 5 years old, and until Friday no doctors in the state had been able to place an order for it with the state’s health department.

Because Florida just began taking orders from doctors on Friday, unlike other states that have been placing orders over the past two weeks, patients in Florida will receive those doses later than those in other states, said White House Covid coordinator Ashish Jah.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said earlier this week that the state wouldn’t be distributing the vaccine for the youngest kids and wasn’t recommending parents give it to those children. While DeSantis said doctors would be able to place individual orders, the state didn’t provide doctors the means to do so until Friday.

TucKKKer Can't Tell Comedy From Attempted Murder

Here's his rant:

"This is almost beyond belief, but just before this show aired we learned that last night producers for Stephen Colbert's show on CBS committed insurrection at the United States Capitol. Adam Schiff, the congressman from California who spent the last year and a half telling you that unauthorized violations of Capitol space are a coup - Adam Schiff illegally gave producers from CBS access to the Capitol.

Then the group, which includes the show's senior producer, director, comedian and writer, remained in the Longworth House office building after hours. And the point of them being there was for them to harass sitting members of congress. It’s exactly like what happened on January 6th, So, we’ll take a close look at what the punishments are."

They Wouldn't Want to Destroy School Property

Police officers who responded to the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre didn’t try to open a door to classrooms even as they had access to a “crowbar-like tool” to do so when the shooter was inside, a source told the San Antonio Express-News.

The source, whom the newspaper identified as law enforcement close to the investigation, revealed officers didn’t make an attempt at the door in the 77 minutes between when the gunman entered the classrooms and when law enforcement breached the door.

The massacre left 19 children and two teachers dead in May after the gunman entered Robb Elementary through an unlocked door.

Classroom doors were “designed to lock automatically,” however, the source said video shows the gunman opened a door to enter a classroom connected to another classroom.

The “crowbar-like tool” could have opened the door and Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo didn’t try keys on the door to the classroom where the shooter was inside, the source said.

The new details come just one day after a report in The New York Times indicated a police officer had a “brief chance” to shoot the gunman with his AR-15-style rifle but didn’t out of concern he might also hit students.

Texas state Rep. Roland Gutierrez (D), who represents the district where the shooting took place, told the San Antonio Express-News that “three or four extra” children or a teacher’s life could have been spared if the door had been opened sooner by police.

The Old Book Tour Excuse

Former Trump administration adviser Peter Navarro pleaded not guilty on Friday and will go on trial in mid-November on charges that he defied a subpoena of the Jan. 6 select committee.

U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta set the schedule after Navarro’s attorneys initially requested an April 2023 trial date to avoid interfering with Navarro’s plans to market a pro-Donald Trump book he will release in September.

But Justice Department attorneys rejected that request, saying the trial should begin as quickly as possible and that the government has “serious concerns about delaying trial for a book tour.”

Mehta agreed that the case was not particularly complicated and that a delay into next spring would be unwarranted.
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Today's Best Person in the World Nominees

He's a Rocket Man.  Russia Wants Him Back

Anatoly Lazarev, 68, holds out his right hand, to show the hard black plastic wristband attached to it. 'Made in Israel!" he laughs. At least house arrest is better than being in extradition detention.

The wristband sends signals to a radio receiver in his living room, to ensure he doesn't stray more than a few kilometres from the small, comfortable house where he whiles away the hours, waiting to find out if he, his wife, and two children aged seven and 10 can stay in Hungary.

His work at Russian space corporation Roscosmos, and then for its daughter companies, put him at the heart of rocket design - building the fuel systems for the Sputnik, Proton and Angara rockets.

The trouble started, he said, in 2012. His company was "invited" to contribute the equivalent of $1m to United Russia, Vladimir Putin's political party. When he refused, a series of investigations was launched against his company, first by the civil, then the military prosecutor. Then began visits from the FSB, successor to the KGB secret police.

"Why don't you just pay up?" a police inspector asked him. He didn't - and by 2018, when it was clear the harassment would continue, he escaped from Russia through Belarus by car, carefully avoiding taking a booked flight from Moscow to Vienna.

He chose Hungary as his new home by chance, he explained: "I once visited a friend at a spa here, liked it and thought one EU country would be much like another. And that if need be, the courts would defend me."

In August 2019, Hungarian police arrested him at home, acting on an Interpol red alert issued by the Russian prosecutor. He was taken away in handcuffs after his lawyer had already launched an asylum request.

In April 2020, a Hungarian court ordered his release into house arrest which means he is barred from leaving the county. Hungary's asylum office was asked by another department of the court to re-examine its decision to reject his asylum claim.

The asylum office - or to give its full name the National Directorate-General for Aliens Policing - refused on the grounds that the Russian chief prosecutor had "offered guarantees that their (extradition) request was not aimed at political persecution based on political, ethnic, religious, national or other grounds".

This was presented as "new evidence".

"I think the influence of the Hungarian government's politics is clear in the asylum authority's decision," said Tamas Fazekas, a lawyer from the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, who represents Mr Lazarev.

"When we are so dependent on Russian oil and gas, and as it is so clear that the Hungarian prime minister is in a good friendship with Mr Putin, it would be not just naive but stupid to believe that this is not affecting the decisions of the Hungarian authority."

Since he returned to power in 2010, Hungary's Viktor Orban has pursued what he calls a "pragmatic" relationship with Russia, with meetings with President Putin every year, and long-term contracts for Russian gas, oil and nuclear power. Most recently, the prime minister successfully won an exemption for Russian pipeline oil, and vetoed the addition of the pro-war Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill to the EU sanctions list.

If You Are Waiting For Justice in Hungary, I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time



19 Million Bottles of Formula in the Air, 19 Million Bottles of Formula.  Take One Down and Pass It Around, 18,999,999 Bottles of Formula in the Air

Approximately 750,000 cans of Danone formula -- equivalent to 1.3 million pounds of formula or roughly 19 million 8-ounce bottles -- will be imported from the company's facility in Ireland and is expected to be sold at major retailers in July.

Kennesaw Has a Mandatory Gun-Possession Ordinance Requiring All Households in Kennesaw to Have a Gun,.

A city councilman in Georgia has resigned to protest the reopening of a Confederate souvenir shop that sells images with racial slurs and dolls and statues that caricature Black people, news outlets reported.

Kennesaw Councilman James “Doc” Eaton said he wanted no part of the city's decision to issue a business license to the downtown store. His resignation is effective on June 21.

“It breaks my heart to have to do it,” Eaton told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Eaton's daughter, Cris Eaton Welsh, owns a chiropractic business across the street from the souvenir shop and said she plans to relocate.

“There’s a difference between selling merchandise and propagating hate,” Eaton Welsh said.

Wildman’s Civil War Surplus reopened Tuesday after closing earlier this year following the death of its founder, Dent “Wildman” Myers, and the expiration of its business license, the AJC reported.

Marjorie Lyon, who worked with Myers for years, said reopening Wildman’s “wasn’t a decision."

"It’s an honor,” she told the AJC. Lyon identified herself as the store's manager.
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Invasions Have Consequences

Day 116

Fighting

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited front-line troops again, including near Severodonetsk, praising soldiers holding forward positions as brave and hardworking.

The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces says they have suffered a military setback in Metolkine, to the southeast of Severodonetsk.

Three Russian missiles destroyed a fuel storage depot in the eastern town of Novomoskovsk, said the head of the regional administration.

Russia is sending a large number of reserve troops to Severodonetsk from other battle zones to try to gain full control of the eastern city, which they control most of, said Luhansk Governor Serhiy Haidai.

Diplomacy

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has warned that the war in Ukraine could last years as he called for state-of-the-art weaponry for Ukrainian troops.

Two commanders who defended the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol have been transferred to Russia for investigation, Russia’s state news agency TASS reported.

Ukraine’s defence intelligence directorate said five Ukrainian civilians had been returned in a swap for five Russian prisoners. It did not say whether the Russians were combatants.

British Prime Minister Johnson warned of a need to prepare for a long war, which meant ensuring “Ukraine receives weapons, equipment, ammunition and training more rapidly than the invader”.

Economy

BP remains Rosneft’s biggest private shareholder despite having announced its departure in February, said Igor Sechin, head of the Russian oil major. BP could not be reached for comment.

Russia’s 2022 coal production could fall 17 percent to 365.1 million tonnes and exports could decrease 30 percent to 156 million tonnes, Russian news agency Interfax reported, citing the energy ministry.

Kherson

The lengthy front on Kherson oblast includes dozens of towns and villages. It is the most open, most featureless, most treeless area of combat in the whole invasion. There are a few geographic obstacles, like the Inhulets River, but for the most part what’s going on in Kherson is a game of maneuver. Ukraine is looking for the places where they can press through the Russian lines by achieving localized advantage.

This heat map gives a pretty good sense of how Russian forces are deployed in Kherson. It’s not that they’re spread thin on the ground, but they are trying to hold a large area with a lot fewer forces per square kilometer than the area from Izyum over to Severodonetsk.

Because they have good visibility of the battlefield (and accurate, frequently updated intelligence) Ukraine doesn’t have to look for points of weakness the way that Russia has done in some areas. That’s the method known in militarese as “probing by fire.” The simple description for that is sending people out until they get shot, then noting where the shots originated. Russia has carried out a seemingly infinite number of these “probes” since the war began. You do not want to be a member of one of these probing forces.

Attacking in a thousand directions at once (see what Russia is doing at Popasna) is rarely a good idea. But in Kherson, Ukraine is making multiple attacks work for them by pinning Russian forces down at locations they very much want to hold—Vysokopillya, Snihurivka, Kyselivka—then moving around those positions to take villages and towns that were more lightly held.

Ukrainian counterattacks in Kherson oblast have also seen some of the first examples of something that’s been missing in much of this invasion: Tanks acting like tanks. That is, lining up and heading cross country in formations, largely ignoring roads and utilizing what terrain there is to stay hull-down as they press enemy positions. That’s how Ukraine captured numerous villages around the bridgehead south of Davydiv Brid, and what’s happening now at the far south of the line.

All of this has brought Ukraine to where they are now, brushing up against more securely held Russian positions. The good news is that, because they’ve been able to maneuver and flush Russia from weak positions, Ukraine now has options in terms of direction of approach. Some Russian positions, like Kyselivka, are all but encircled.

However, to press through the points where Russia is solidly entrenched, Ukraine is going to have to concentrate forces. So don’t be surprised to see some of those current points of attack fall silent, or even Russian announcements that it has rolled back some of the Ukrainian advances.

The obvious place to drop troops in large numbers is down south, where Ukrainian forces are approaching Russian fortifications at Tomyna Balka and Chornobaivka, which are only a few kilometers from Kherson. If Ukraine can crack Russian defenses at either of those locations, they might actually be positioned to go into Kherson proper. But Russia also knows this, and there’s no doubt that Russia is also willing to sacrifice some of those outlying villages to get its troops into position to resist an attack near the city. And Ukraine knows that.

That’s where we are. The two forces in Kherson oblast appear to be roughly equal. Ukraine has been playing a game of maneuver that allows it to grab back territory and confront Russia at multiple points. However, as Russia loses ground and falls back toward Kherson, its forces become more concentrated and opportunities to find a gap become few. What ends up happening here may end up being defined by what happens elsewhere in Ukraine, and whether either side feels it can peel off additional forces to give them that edge necessary to advance without taking heavy losses.

In any case, don’t expect either Kherson or Khariv to suddenly break open and be done. In both cases, the last steps are going to be the most difficult. And Kherson is going to be a very tough nut to crack without causing massive damage.

Will There Be a 4th Round?

The new head of the British Army has issued a rallying cry to troops - telling them they need to be ready to face Russia on the battlefield.

Gen Sir Patrick Sanders, who started the job last week, addressed all ranks and civil servants in an internal message on 16 June, seen by the BBC.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine shows the need "to protect the UK and be ready to fight and win wars on land", he says.

He adds the Army and allies must now be "capable of...defeating Russia".

A defence source told the BBC's defence correspondent Jonathan Beale the tone of the message - issued on the Ministry of Defence's internal intranet - was unsurprising.

They said all armies train to fight, but the threat has clearly changed.

Gen Sir Patrick noted in the message that he was the first Chief of the General Staff "since 1941 to take command of the Army in the shadow of a land war in Europe involving a major continental power".

Rounds 1-3

The UK has fought three wars with Russia: in 1807–12 while the Tsar was allied to Napoleon; the Crimean War of 1853–56; and intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1918–20. The Crimean War pitched Great Britain directly against the Russian Empire.
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Who Won the Week?

The hundreds of thousands of March For Our Lives demonstrators who took to the streets prodding the calcified political class to pass new gun-control laws with actual teeth

President Biden: nominates more female/minority judges; OKs another $1 billion for Ukraine; reaffirms support for unions in AFL-CIO speech; improves baby formula/supply chain situation

New York Governor Kathy Hochul, for signing a "safe harbor" law protecting women from being prosecuted in other states when they travel to NY for an abortion

The Idaho tipster who called police about a group of Nazi-affiliated domestic terrorists plotting violence at an LGBTQ pride festival, resulting in the arrest of 31 of them

The James Beard Restaurant & Chef Award winners, including Outstanding Restaurant Chai Pani in Asheville NC and chef Mashama Bailey of The Grey in Savannah GA

The students at Seattle Pacific University who handed the president rainbow flags during commencement instead of shaking his hand to protest the school's ban on hiring LGBTQ people

The Jan. 6 Subcommittee, for continuing its avalanche of video and witness testimony exposing how the attempted coup was planned by Trump and his treasonous stooges

The 84 senators who voted to to expand health care and disability benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxic waste

Jennifer Hudson, for joining the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) Club with her Tony win for co-producing "A Strange Loop"
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