Sun: Meet the New South. Same as the Old South

It's Time to Stop the Filiming of Pornography in Schools That Isn't Happening

A Republican state senator is urging the Arizona governor to sign a bill that would end the “practice of filming pornography in K-12 schools,” something that is currently not allowed or encouraged at public schools in the state.
Sen. Jake Hoffman, R-Queen Creek, put out a statement earlier this week asking Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to sign his Senate Bill 1696, which would make it illegal for sexually explicit acts to be filmed or facilitated on property owned, leased or managed by the state or any other government entity in Arizona.

But the bill also stops workers for any government agency in the state from referring minors to sexually explicit materials, which could stop public librarians from referring teens to some classic works of literature and even informative books about reproduction and puberty.

Lwt's Have a Panel Discussion

While they are being promoted around the world as a crucial weapon in reducing carbon emissions, solar panels only have a lifespan of up to 25 years.

Experts say billions of panels will eventually all need to be disposed of and replaced.

"The world has installed more than one terawatt of solar capacity. Ordinary solar panels have a capacity of about 400W, so if you count both rooftops and solar farms, there could be as many as 2.5 billion solar panels.," says Dr Rong Deng, an expert in solar panel recycling at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

According to the British government, there are tens of millions of solar panels in the UK. But the specialist infrastructure to scrap and recycle them is lacking.

Energy experts are calling for urgent government action to prevent a looming global environmental disaster.

"It's going to be a waste mountain by 2050, unless we get recycling chains going now," says Ute Collier, deputy director of the International Renewable Energy Agency.

"We're producing more and more solar panels - which is great - but how are we going to deal with the waste?" she asks.

Clean Hands Aren't Always Healthy Hands

Before vaccines, before masks, before much at all was known about how the novel coronavirus spread and whether it lived on surfaces (remember wiping down grocery bags with Lysol?), hand sanitizer took on a mythos as the essential protective elixir. In the first week of March 2020, year-over-year sales of the product jumped 470 percent. Panicked shoppers soon emptied shelves. California governor Gavin Newsom tweeted a photo of a 24-pack of 2-ounce bottles of Purell selling for $400.

On March 20, the US Food and Drug Administration announced that it was relaxing its regulations on hand sanitizer to “provide flexibility to help meet demand during this outbreak.” Those regulations, known as the Current Good Manufacturing Practices, had been in place since 1994 and included regularly updated rules on everything from record-keeping to product testing to packaging. The agency also paused the requirement under the Federal Food Drug & Cosmetics Act that sanitizer be sourced from pharmaceutical-grade ethanol, which is free of industrial toxins that are commonly found in fuel-grade ethanol. Businesses were still expected to test their sanitizers for benzene and other toxic compounds, but essentially on an honor system. The FDA noted that it did “not intend to take action against firms” for violations during the public health emergency.

Within weeks of the FDA’s move to deregulate hand sanitizer, complaints started pouring in to the agency. Poison Control Centers across the country received thousands of reports of people seeking treatment for exposure to hand sanitizer that contained methanol, a highly toxic form of alcohol used in antifreeze that can cause skin and lung irritation, nausea, vomiting, headache, or worse. That summer, 17 people died after drinking sanitizer with methanol; a telltale sign was that people who ingested it showed up to hospitals with seizures and sudden loss of vision. (Although sanitizer made with pharmaceutical-grade ethanol isn’t safe to drink, it is not usually deadly.)

The Night When the Freedom Went Out in Georgia

On May 31, scores of heavily armed police raided the homes of Marlon Kautz, Adele Maclean, and Savannah Patterson in Atlanta, GA. All three were raising bail funds for 42 protesters via the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. They were arrested and charged with Money Laundering and fraud.

Police on Wednesday arrested three Atlanta organizers who have been aiding protesters against the city’s proposed police and fire training center, striking at the structure that supports the fight against what opponents derisively call “Cop City.”

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced its agents and Atlanta police had arrested three leaders of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has bailed out protesters and helped them find lawyers.

Charged with money laundering and charity fraud are Marlon Scott Kautz, 39, of Atlanta; Savannah D. Patterson, 30, of Savannah; and Adele MacLean, 42, of Atlanta.

Kautz himself predicted in a February statement that investigators were trying to build a criminal case against protesters using Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law.

That law allows prosecutors to bring charges against multiple people accused of committing separate crimes while working toward a common goal. RICO is a felony charge that carries stiff penalties: A prison term of five to 20 years; a fine of $25,000 or three times the amount of money gained from the criminal activity, whichever is greater; or both.


At Friday’s bond hearing, Don Samuels, an attorney representing the three who were arrested, said, “My real concern here is if you look at these warrants ... of what they’ve done with the money that prompts both the money laundering and the charitable fraud, I mean, $37.11 to build yard signs. What could be more First Amendment activity than getting materials to build yard signs?”

The judge who granted bond to the defendants said that at this point in the prosecution’s case, “I don’t find it very impressive. “There’s not a lot of meat on the bones.”

In contrast, on the day of the arrests, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp took to Twitter to announce that the state would not rest until all those involved in the “criminal organization” known as the Stop Cop City movement are “arrested, tried, and face punishment.”

Don't Say "Health Insurance"

Florida’s Ron DeSantis is now officially a candidate for president, and so far his campaign is going about as expected.

The Republican governor has decried the “malignant ideology” of the left and “the woke mob,” and he’s promised to make the rest of America more like his “free state of Florida.” He has suggested that Disney is trying to brainwash America, and he’s gone after former President Donald Trump too, albeit indirectly, by urging Republicans to “dispense with a culture of losing” during an appearance in New Hampshire.

These are the subjects DeSantis wants to discuss and, quite possibly, the ones that matter most to Republican primary voters. But there’s another topic in the news that could use some attention.

Over the past few weeks, roughly a quarter-million Floridians have lost health insurance coverage through Medicaid. And that’s just the beginning. In the coming months, even more Medicaid beneficiaries in Florida could lose their coverage as well ― with many, and quite possibly most, ending up uninsured altogether.

It’s a big deal in Florida. It should be a big deal elsewhere too, because a major reason for the coverage losses are a series of policy decisions that DeSantis and his administration have made. These decisions say a lot about his priorities and values, and how he might govern as president.

Indentured Servitude

Nurses and other health care workers who have been brought to the U.S. from overseas to fill thousands of vacant jobs say in some instances they’ve been subjected to unsafe working conditions, wage theft and threats of tens of thousands of dollars in debt if they quit or are fired.

In interviews, more than a dozen immigrant health care workers from across the country described being placed in jobs where there was so little staff that they weren’t able to meet patients’ basic needs and feared for their physical safety. They also described being paid less than their American counterparts despite immigration laws that require they be paid the local prevailing wage, working unpaid overtime and having been misled about benefits, such as free housing, which in one case amounted to a vacant room in the nursing home where the nurse worked.

But when the workers tried to leave their jobs before the expiration of multi-year contracts, they were faced with paying tens of thousands of dollars in penalties from their employers, forced into arbitration or sued, in some cases for more than $100,000, according to a review of employment contracts, lawsuits and other documentation obtained by NBC News. As a result, the workers said they felt trapped between continuing in untenable jobs or risking financial ruin.

“These unconscionable contracts effectively trap these workers in debt bondage, making it impossible for them to leave their jobs,” said Martina Vandenberg, president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, in congressional testimony last month about what she sees as a wider problem. “The workers are handcuffed by debt, unable to flee.”

Trapped at work: Immigrant health care workers can face harsh working conditions and $100,000 lawsuits for quitting

The Thirteenth Amedment

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.