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Will the UK Scotch This Humane Approach?

Scotland, which has one of the highest drug death rates in Europe, is seeking to decriminalize all drugs for personal use, according to a policy paper published Friday.

The move would "allow people found in possession of drugs to be treated and supported rather than criminalized and excluded", the devolved Scottish government in Edinburgh said in a statement accompanying the release of the paper on drug law reform.

The decriminalization would also mean people in recovery would have a better chance of employment as they will not have a criminal record.

The proposals also include legislative changes that would allow the government to "fully and properly implement harm reduction measures" such as supervised drug consumption facilities.

"Scotland needs a caring, compassionate and human rights informed drugs policy, with public health and the reduction of harm as its underlying principles.

"We are ready to work with the UK Government to put into practice this progressive policy," Scottish drugs minister Elena Whitham said.

But the UK government in London, which is in charge of the whole country's drug laws, poured cold water on the proposals.

"Whilst (whilst??) I haven't seen those reports, I think I'm confident enough to say that there are no plans to alter our tough stance on drugs," Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's spokesman said.

The main opposition Labour party also ruled out a shift in drug policy. "The short answer is no," finance spokeswoman Rachel Reeves said.

"I don't think this sounds like a good policy," she added.

In Texas, Real Men Don't Need Water.  

Texas Republicans are being performatively evil again, and it's almost impressive how contemptuous the state's conservative lawmakers are when it comes to doing anything with government that doesn't involve hurting people.

As world temperatures spike in truly terrifying fashion, Texas has been suffering under extreme heat itself. But soon outside laborers in Austin and Dallas will have one less protection against the heat than they do now: on June 6 Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a Republican bill nullifying local ordinances in those two cities that mandated workers be given water breaks when laboring outdoors.

Yeah, that's right. Texas Republican lawmakers kicked off the summer months with a bill banning local regulations requiring water breaks for workers who work outside. In Texas. During record heat. And if that isn't just being evil for the sake of evil it's not clear what would be.

Local ordinances mandating water breaks for workers outdoors, passed in Austin in 2010 and in Dallas in 2015, have contributed to a significant decrease in annual heat-related illnesses and heat deaths. Since 2011, annual workplace heat-related illness numbers have dropped by 78 percent, while workplace heat-related deaths have cut in half. San Antonio considered a similar ordinance before the Death Star zapped its chances.

"Death Star" is the critics' name for House Bill 2127, the bill that nullified water break regulations along with stripping local ability to pass any new bills "concerning agriculture, finance, insurance, labor, natural resources, property, business and commerce, and occupations." It was another of the party's Crooked Business Enablement Acts, in a state where the party is now so focused on doing crooked things for crooked allies that the state's own attorney general (finally) got himself impeached over it.

Bye, Bye Rudy

A Washington, D.C., disciplinary committee recommended Friday that Rudy Giuliani be disbarred for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“We are convinced that a sanction must be enhanced to ensure that it adequately deters both [Giuliani] and other attorneys from acting similarly in the future,” the committee wrote in its recommendation to the D.C. Bar.

The panel of D.C. attorneys deliberated for months following a series of weekslong hearings about Giuliani’s efforts to help then-President Donald Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The committee specifically pointed to Giuliani’s legal efforts to claim that there was election fraud in Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden won by more than 80,000 votes.

The report says Giuliani first began to work on litigation alleging fraud after receiving a complaint that there were “observational boundaries” in Philadelphia during the mail-in ballot canvassing. Those boundaries were set up to protect workers from COVID-19, which was ravaging the state and country at the time.

Giuliani “ultimately sought to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election,” the committee said in its report. “He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it. By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law. He should be disbarred.”

The state of New York previously suspended Giuliani’s law license in 2021 over his “demonstrably false and misleading statements” about the 2020 election.

Earth is at its hottest in thousands of years. Here’s how we know.

Observations from both satellites and the Earth’s surface are indisputable — the planet has warmed rapidly over the past 44 years. As far back as 1850, data from weather stations all over the globe make clear the Earth’s average temperature has been rising.

In recent days, as the Earth has reached its highest average temperatures in recorded history, scientists have made a bolder claim: It may well be warmer than any time in the last 125,000 years.

Tracing climatic fluctuations back centuries and millennia is less simple and precise than checking records from satellites or thermometers. It involves poring through everything from ancient diaries to lake bed sediments to tree trunk rings.

But the observations are enough to make paleoclimatologists, who study the Earth’s climate history, confident that the current decade of warming is exceptional relative to any period since before the last ice age, about 125,000 years ago.

Our understanding of conditions so long ago is far less detailed than modern climate data, meaning it’s impossible to prove how hot it might have gotten on any given day so many thousands of years ago. Still, the Earth history gleaned from fossils and ice cores shows the recent heat would have been all but impossible over most of those millennia.

“There’s no way to drop one hot day into the middle of the ice age,” Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University, said.