PORTLAND, Ore. — Midterm voters in Oregon narrowly passed one of the toughest gun control laws in the nation, buoying the hopes of gun control supporters, but the new permit-to-purchase mandate and ban on high-capacity magazines now faces a lawsuit that could put it on ice just days before it’s set to take effect.
A federal judge in Portland will hear oral arguments Friday on whether Measure 114, which is scheduled to go into law Dec. 8, violates Americans’ constitutionally protected right to bear arms. Depending on the outcome, the groundbreaking law could be delayed for months or longer as it works its way through the courts, legal experts said.
The Oregon ballot measure is part of a national trend of gun policy being decided by voters because “significant reform is stalled and that has put all the battles over gun control and gun safety at the state level,” said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor and expert in gun policy at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.
“Ballot measures are one way for people to seize the reins of policy-making. People can act for themselves to change the law and on an issue like gun safety there is a really growing and active gun safety movement in America,” he said. “That’s not something we probably would have said 20 years ago.”
Measure 114, which passed by a slim majority in November, was born out of concern about the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida and gained public momentum last spring following massacres at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y. and at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, said Mark Knutson, chairman of the interfaith Lift Every Voice Oregon campaign and pastor at Portland’s Augustana Lutheran Church.
“The arc of the moral universe is bending towards justice, and justice today is going to be ending gun violence in this country,” he said. “That’s why I trust this process will work … and a year and a half, two years from now, it’ll be 70% of the population saying this was the right thing to do — not the 51% that passed it.”
The biggest legal flash point is a ban on magazines over 10 rounds unless they are owned by law enforcement or a military member or were owned before the measure’s passage. Those who already own high-capacity magazines can only possess them in their homes or use them at a firing range, in shooting competitions or for hunting as allowed by state law after the measure takes effect.
The law also requires gun buyers to obtain a permit to purchase a new gun. Permit applicants must take a state-approved, hands-on gun safety training course with live or dry rounds, submit a photo ID and undergo fingerprinting and a criminal background check. The state will keep a list of permit-holders that’s exempt from public disclosure; the $65 permits will be good for five years and can be used to buy multiple guns in that five-year period with a fresh background check.
The lawsuit filed by the Oregon Firearms Federation, a local sheriff and a gun store owner asks the court to declare the law unconstitutional and issue an injunction to prevent it from going into effect next week. Alternatively, the plaintiffs seek a partial order on the high-capacity magazine ban.
John Kaempf, attorney for the plaintiffs, declined to comment before Friday’s hearing.
His filing cites a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June which struck down a New York law that placed limits on carrying guns outside the home. That 6-3 ruling indicated a shift in the way the nation’s high court will evaluate Second Amendment infringement claims and resulted in the court sending a similar ban on high-capacity magazines in California back to a lower court for review.
Legal experts say Oregon’s ban on high-capacity magazines will face the same scrutiny and the court will also take a close look at Oregon’s “permit to purchase” mandate to determine if the additional steps now required to gain access to firearms are also a Second Amendment violation, said Norman Williams, a constitutional law professor at Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Oregon.
While supporters of Measure 114 have cited the recent mass shootings in Colorado and Virginia as further evidence the law is needed and timely, Williams says that likely won’t have much bearing on the courts’ rulings in this case.
“It’s going to take the federal courts months, if not years, to sort out what parts of Measure 114 are constitutional and what parts, if any, aren’t … and I think this is the type of measure that the U.S. Supreme Court itself might have some interest in reviewing,” he said.
“Proponents of gun safety regulations, in emphasizing the continuing gun violence in our society, are in some sense making an argument that doesn’t resonate with the federal judges considering the constitutionality of these measures.”
Details about the permit process and hands-on training are still being worked out and some local agencies have complained they don’t have the budget or staff necessary to enforce the law’s provisions. Several local sheriffs have said publicly they won’t enforce the law in their jurisdictions.
State lawmakers are likely to advance legislation to aid the law’s implementation and provide funding in the upcoming session, said Elizabeth McKanna, chair of the Measure 114 legislative committee.
The uncertainty around Measure 114’s future has driven a surge in firearms sales that began after it passed as gun owners worry they might not be able to obtain a new permit for weeks or months if some or all of it goes into effect.
As of this week, Oregon State Police had more than 35,000 pending background check transactions for gun purchases and was averaging 3,000 requests a day compared to less than 900 a day the week before Measure 114 passed, according to agency data. On Black Friday, the agency received 6,000 background check requests alone, OSP Capt. Kyle Kennedy said in an email.
Shaun Lacasse, vice president of The Gun Room Inc., said the increase in background checks reflects the increase in gun sales he’s seen at his store in response to anxiety about the impacts of the new law.
“How long is it going to take for all of that system to get started and be implemented? It’s going to be months — many many months — before the first permits are even going to be able to be issued,” said Lacasse, who said sales at his Portland business have at least quadrupled since the law passed.
“We don’t how long we’re going to have to be in purgatory until this is all sorted out.”
Meanwhile, OSP is “working diligently” with local law enforcement agencies to implement the law next week, Kennedy said.
The 19 high-profile defendants in the ‘hidden debt’ case are accused of a wide range of financial crimes connected to illicit state-backed loans.
A court in Mozambique has begun handing down verdicts in the country’s biggest corruption scandal, in which the government unleashed a financial earthquake by trying to conceal huge debts.
The 19 high-profile defendants, who include former state security officials and the son of an ex-president, faced charges ranging from money laundering to bribery and blackmail related to a $2bn “hidden debt” scandal that crashed the nation’s economy.
Judge Efigenio Baptista of the Maputo City Court said on Wednesday that reading the 1,388 page judgement was likely to take five days. The trial, which started in August last year, ran until March.
All the accused, who were present in court on Wednesday, have denied any wrongdoing.
The scandal arose after state-owned companies in the impoverished country illicitly borrowed $2bn in 2013 and 2014 from international banks to buy a tuna-fishing fleet and surveillance vessels. The government masked the loans from parliament and the public.
When the “hidden debt” finally surfaced in 2016, donors including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cut off financial support, triggering a sovereign debt default and currency collapse.
An independent audit found $500m of the loans had been diverted. The money remains unaccounted for.
Former Finance Minister Manuel Chang – who signed off the loans – has been held in South Africa since 2018, pending extradition to the United States for allegedly using the US financial system to carry out the fraudulent scheme.
Former President Armando Guebuza, who was in office when the loans were contracted, testified at the trial. He was not charged himself, but his eldest son Ndambi was in the dock along with the 18 other defendants.
‘Corruption doesn’t pay off’
About 100 people sat in the special courtroom, set up in a white marquee on the grounds of a high-security jail in Maputo to accommodate the large number of defendants, their lawyers and other parties, the AFP news agency reported.
Local civil society organisations welcomed the trial.
“I think for the public has been very important trial,” Denise Namburete, the founder of the non-profit N’weti and a member of the Mozambique Budget Monitoring Forum, a coalition of civil society organisations, told Al Jazeera from Maputo. “It has been naturally the first time that the public … see high level government officials being indicted and judged at court.”
“It sends out the message that high level government officials can be held to account. It also sends the message that corruption doesn’t pay off. And at the end of the day, I think it is an opportunity for Mozambique to restore trust in the judicial system,” she added.
Anti-corruption activists are also calling for tough sentences.
“The conviction must be strong enough so that it is not annulled or significantly reduced in a second instance court,” Borges Nhamirre, a researcher at the anti-corruption non-profit watchdog Public Integrity Center, told AFP. But Adriano Nuvunga, the head of a rights group called the Centre for Democracy and Development, predicted the sentences would be “politically rigged”.
Namburete told Al Jazeera: “I think there is an understanding that this is a political trial,” adding, “Unfortunately, we’ve only seen 19 defendants being indicted but there were many more people involved in this case that weren’t indicted and we probably will not see that justice made in regard to these people.”
BERLIN — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call “soft” targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Cyprus, authorities believe Iran, which blames Israel for a series of assassinations of nuclear specialists working on the Iranian nuclear program, was trying to signal that it could strike back where Israel least expects it.
“This is a regime that bases its rule on intimidation and violence and espouses violence as a legitimate measure,” David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said in rare public remarks in September, describing what he said was a recent uptick in violent plots. “It is not spontaneous. It is planned, systematic, state terrorism — strategic terrorism.”
He left out one important detail: It’s working.
That success has come in large part because Europe — the staging ground for most Iranian operations in recent years — has been afraid to make Tehran pay. Since 2015, Iran has carried out about a dozen operations in Europe, killing at least three people and abducting several others, security officials say.
“The Europeans have not just been soft on the Islamic Republic, they’ve been cooperating with them, working with them, legitimizing the killers,” Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American author and women’s rights activist said, highlighting the continuing willingness of European heads of state to meet with Iran’s leaders.
Alinejad, one of the most outspoken critics of the regime, understands better than most just how far Iran’s leadership is willing to go after narrowly escaping both a kidnapping and assassination attempt.
“If the Islamic Republic doesn’t receive any punishment, is there any reason for them to stop taking hostages or kidnapping or killing?” she said, and then answered: “No.”
Method of first resort
Assassination has been the sharpest instrument in the policy toolbox ever since Brutus and his co-conspirators stabbed Julius Caesar repeatedly. Over the millennia, it’s also proved risky, often triggering disastrous unintended consequences (see the Roman Empire after Caesar’s killing or Europe after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo).
And yet, for both rogue states like Iran, Russia and North Korea, and democracies such as the United States and Israel — the attraction of solving a problem by removing it often proves irresistible.
Even so, there’s a fundamental difference between the two spheres: In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds.
That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa. In Colombia, police arrested two men in Bogotá on suspicion they were plotting to assassinate a group of Americans and a former Israeli intelligence officer for $100,000; a similar scene played out in Africa, as authorities in Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal arrested five men on suspicion they were planning attacks on Israeli targets, including tourists on safari; in February of this year, Turkish police disrupted an intricate Iranian plot to kill a 75-year-old Turkish-Israeli who owns a local aerospace company; and in November, authorities in Georgia said they foiled a plan hatched by Iran’s Quds Force to murder a 62-year-old Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi.
Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: They won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.
While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and renewing business ties.
Unlike the U.S. and Israel, which have taken a hard line on Iran ever since the mullahs came to power in 1979, Europe has been more open to the regime. Many EU officials make no secret of their ennui with America’s hard-line stance vis-à-vis Iran.
“Iran wants to wipe out Israel, nothing new about that,” the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told POLITICO in 2019 when he was still Spanish foreign minister. “You have to live with it.”
History of assassinations
There’s also nothing new about Iran’s love of assassination.
Indeed, many scholars trace the word “assassin” to Hasan-i Sabbah, a 12th-century Persian missionary who founded the “Order of Assassins,” a brutal force known for quietly eliminating adversaries.
Hasan’s spirit lived on in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the hardline cleric who led Iran’s Islamic revolution and took power in 1979. One of his first victims as supreme leader was Shahriar Shafiq, a former captain in the Iranian navy and the nephew of the country’s exiled shah. He was shot twice in the head in December 1979 by a masked gunman outside his mother’s home on Rue Pergolèse in Paris’ fashionable 16th arrondissement.
In the years that followed, Iranian death squads took out members and supporters of the shah and other opponents across Europe, from France to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In most instances, the culprits were never caught. Not that the authorities really needed to look.
In 1989, for example, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a leader of Iran’s Kurdish minority who supported autonomy for his people, was gunned down along with two associates by Iranian assassins in an apartment in Vienna.
The gunmen took refuge in the Iranian embassy. They were allowed to leave Austria after Iran’s ambassador to Vienna hinted to the government that Austrians in his country might be in danger if the killers were arrested. One of the men alleged to have participated in the Vienna operation would later become one of his country’s most prominent figures: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 until 2013.
Not even the bad publicity surrounding that case tempered the regime’s killing spree. In the years that followed, the body count only increased. Some of the murders were intentionally gruesome in order to send a clear message.
Fereydoun Farrokhzad, for example, a dissident Iranian popstar who found exile in Germany, was killed in his home in Bonn in 1992. The killers cut off his genitals, his tongue and beheaded him.
His slaying was just one of dozens in what came to be known as Iran’s “chain murders,” a decade-long killing spree in which the government targeted artists and dissidents at home and abroad. Public outcry over the murder of a trio of prominent writers in 1998, including a husband and wife, forced the regime hard-liners behind the killings to retreat. But only for a time.
Illustration by Joan Wong for POLITICO
Then, as now, the dictatorship’s rationale for such killings has been to protect itself.
“The highest priority of the Iranian regime is internal stability,” a Western intelligence source said. “The regime views its opponents inside and outside Iran as a significant threat to this stability.”
Much of that paranoia is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s own history. Before returning to Iran in 1979, Khomeini spent nearly 15 years in exile, including in Paris, an experience that etched the power of exile into the Islamic Republic’s mythology. In other words, if Khomeini managed to lead a revolution from abroad, the regime’s enemies could too.
Bargaining chips
Given Europe’s proximity to Iran, the presence of many Iranian exiles there and the often-magnanimous view of some EU governments toward Tehran, Europe is a natural staging ground for the Islamic Republic’s terror.
The regime’s intelligence service, known as MOIS, has built operational networks across the Continent trained to abduct and murder through a variety of means, Western intelligence officials say.
As anti-regime protests have erupted in Iran with increasing regularity since 2009, the pace of foreign operations aimed at eliminating those the regime accuses of stoking the unrest has increased.
While several of the smaller-scale assassinations — such as the 2015 hit in the Netherlands on Iranian exile Mohammad-Reza Kolahi — have succeeded, Tehran’s more ambitious operations have gone awry.
The most prominent example involved a 2018 plot to blow up the annual Paris meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an alliance of exile groups seeking to oust the regime. Among those attending the gathering, which attracted tens of thousands, was Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Following a tip from American intelligence, European authorities foiled the plot, arresting six, including a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat who delivered a detonation device and bombmaking equipment to an Iranian couple tasked with carrying out an attack on the rally. Authorities observed the handover at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg and subsequently arrested the diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, on the German autobahn as he sped back to Vienna, where he enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
Assadi was convicted on terror charges in Belgium last year and sentenced to 20 years is prison. He may not even serve two.
The diplomat’s conviction marked the first time an Iranian operative had been held accountable for his actions by a European court since the Islamic revolution. But Belgium’s courage didn’t last long.
In February, Iran arrested Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele on trumped-up espionage charges and placed him into solitary confinement at the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. Vandecasteele headed the Iran office of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group.
Following reports that Vandecasteele’s health was deteriorating and tearful public pleas from his family, the Belgian government — ignoring warnings from Washington and other governments that it was inviting further kidnappings — relented and laid the groundwork for an exchange to trade Assadi for Vandecasteele. The swap could happen any day.
“Right now, French, Swedish, German, U.K., U.S., Belgian citizens, all innocents, are in Iranian prisons,” said Alinejad, the Iranian women’s rights campaigner.
“They are being used like bargaining chips,” she said. “It works.”
Amateur hour
Even so, the messiness surrounding the Assadi case might explain why most of Iran’s recent operations have been carried out by small-time criminals who usually have no idea who they’re working for. The crew in last year’s Cyprus attack, for example, included several Pakistani delivery boys. While that gives Iran plausible deniability if the perpetrators get caught, it also increases the likelihood that the operations will fail.
“It’s very amateur, but an amateur can be difficult to trace,” one intelligence official said. “They’re also dispensable. They get caught, no one cares.”
Iranian intelligence has had more success in luring dissidents away from Europe to friendly third countries where they are arrested and then sent back to Iran. That’s what happened to Ruhollah Zam, a journalist critical of the regime who had been living in Paris. The circumstances surrounding his abduction remain murky, but what is known is that someone convinced him to travel to Iraq in 2019, where he was arrested and extradited to Iran. He was convicted for agitating against the regime and hanged in December of 2020.
One could be forgiven for thinking that negotiations between Iran and world powers over renewing its dormant nuclear accord (which offered Tehran sanctions relief in return for supervision of its nuclear program) would have tamed its covert killing program. In fact, the opposite occurred.
In July of 2021, U.S. authorities exposed a plot by Iranian operatives to kidnap Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn as part of an elaborate plan that involved taking her by speedboat to a tanker in New York Harbor before spiriting her off to Venezuela, an Iranian ally, and then on to the Islamic Republic.
A year later, police disrupted what the FBI believed was an attempt to assassinate Alinejad, arresting a man with an assault rifle and more than 60 rounds of ammunition who had knocked on her door.
American authorities also say Tehran planned to avenge the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of its feared paramilitary Quds Force who was the target of a U.S. drone strike in 2020, by seeking to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, among other officials.
Through it all, neither the U.S. nor Europe gave up hope for a nuclear deal.
“From the point of view of the Iranians, this is proof that it is possible to separate and maintain a civilized discourse on the nuclear agreement with a deceptive Western appearance, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to plan terrorist acts against senior American officials and citizens,” Barnea, the Mossad chief said. “This artificial separation will continue for as long as the world allows it to.”
Kremlin’s killings
Some hope the growing outrage in Western societies over Iran’s crackdown on peaceful protestors could be the spark that convinces Europe to get tough on Iran. But Europe’s handling of its other favorite rogue actor — Russia — suggests otherwise.
Long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, much less its all-out war against Ukraine, Moscow, similar to Iran, undertook an aggressive campaign against its enemies abroad and made little effort to hide it.
Russian police investigators stand near the body of killed Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov | Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
The most prominent victim was Alexander Litvinenko. A former KGB officer like Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko had defected to the U.K., where he joined other exiles opposed to Putin. In 2006, he was poisoned in London by Russian intelligence with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that investigators concluded was mixed into his tea. The daring operation signaled Moscow’s return to the Soviet-era practice of artful assassination.
Litvinenko died a painful death within weeks, but not before he blamed Putin for killing him, calling the Russian president “barbaric.”
“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” Litvinenko said from his deathbed.
In the end, however, the only one who really paid a price was Litvinenko. Putin continued as before and despite deep tensions in the U.K.’s relationship with Russia over the assassination, it did nothing to halt the transformation of the British capital into what has come to be known as “Londongrad,” a playground and second home for Russia’s Kremlin-backed oligarchs, who critics say use the British financial and legal systems to hide and launder their money.
Litvinenko’s killing was remarkable both for its brutality and audacity. If Putin was willing to take out an enemy on British soil with a radioactive element, what else was he capable of?
It didn’t take long to find out. In the months and years that followed, the bodies started to pile up. Critical journalists, political opponents and irksome oligarchs in the prime of life began dropping like flies.
Europe didn’t blink.
Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, visited Putin in his vacation residence in Sochi just weeks after the murders of Litvinenko and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and said … nothing.
Even after there was no denying Putin’s campaign to eradicate anyone who challenged him, European leaders kept coming in the hope of deepening economic ties.
Neither the assassination of prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov just steps away from the Kremlin in 2015, nor the poisoning of a KGB defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018 and of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 with nerve agents disabused European leaders of the notion that Putin was someone they could do business with and, more importantly, control.
‘Anything can happen’
Just how comfortable Russia felt about using Europe as a killing field became clear in the summer of 2019. Around noon on a sunny August day, a Russian assassin approached Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen with Georgian nationality, and shot him twice in the head with a 9mm pistol. The murder took place in a park located just a few hundred meters from Germany’s interior ministry and several witnesses saw the killer flee. He was nabbed within minutes as he was changing his clothes and trying to dispose of his weapon and bike in a nearby canal.
It later emerged that Khangoshvili, a Chechen fighter who had sought asylum in Germany, was on a Russian kill list. Russian authorities considered him a terrorist and accused him of participating in a 2010 attack on the Moscow subway that killed nearly 40 people.
In December of 2019, Putin denied involvement in Khangoshvili’s killing. Sort of. Sitting next to French President Emmanuel Macron, Merkel and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian referred to him as a “very barbaric man with blood on his hands.”
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Putin said. “Those are opaque criminal structures where anything can happen.”
Early on October 19 of last year, Berlin police discovered a dead man on the sidewalk outside the Russian embassy. He was identified as Kirill Zhalo, a junior diplomat at the embassy. He was also the son of General Major Alexey Zhalo, the deputy head of a covert division in Russia’s FSB security service in Moscow that ordered Khangoshvili’s killing. Western intelligence officials believe that Kirill Zhalo, who arrived in Berlin just weeks before the hit on the Chechen, was involved in the operation and was held responsible for its exposure.
The Russian embassy called his death “a tragic accident,” suggesting he had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Russia refused to allow German authorities to perform an autopsy (such permission is required under diplomatic protocols) and sent his body back to Moscow.
Less than two months later, the Russian hitman who killed Khangoshvili, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Russia recently tried to negotiate his release, floating the possibility of exchanging American basketball player Brittney Griner and another U.S. citizen they have in custody. Washington rejected the idea.
The war in Ukraine offers profound lessons about the inherent risks of coddling dictators.
Though Germany, with its thirst for Russian gas, is often criticized in that regard, it was far from alone in Europe. Europe’s insistence on giving Putin the benefit of the doubt over the years in the face of his crimes convinced him that he would face few consequences in the West for his invasion of Ukraine. That’s turned out to be wrong; but who could blame the Russian leader for thinking it?
Iran presents Europe with an opportunity to learn from that history and confront Tehran before it’s too late. But there are few signs it’s prepared to really get tough. EU officials say they are “considering” following Washington’s lead and designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a vast military organization that also controls much of the Iran’s economy, as a terror organization. Last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spearheaded an effort at the United Nations to launch a formal investigation into Iran’s brutal crackdown against the ongoing protests in the country.
Yet even as the regime in Tehran snuffs out enemies and races to fulfil its goal of building both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach any point on the Continent, some EU leaders appear blind to the wider context as they pursue the elusive renewal of the nuclear accord.
“It is still there,” Borrell said recently of the deal he has taken a leading role in trying to resurrect. “It has nothing to do with other issues, which certainly concern us.”
LOS ANGELES — A federal judge threw out a lawsuit against the maker of an anti-malarial drug blamed for causing psychotic behavior and neurological damage to U.S. servicemembers, ruling that the case had no right to be filed in California.
The proposed class-action case brought last year by an Army veteran accused Roche Laboratories Inc. and Genentech Inc. of intentionally misleading the Department of Defense and the Food and Drug Administration about the dangers of mefloquine, the generic version of the drug Lariam.
Similar cases had been brought in Canada and Australia, but the lawsuit in federal court in Northern California was the first large-scale case of its kind in the U.S., attorneys said.
The U.S. military, which developed the drug during the Vietnam War, was once its largest user to combat malaria. It was given to hundreds of thousands of troops sent to Afghanistan and Somalia.
Roche, which was granted the intellectual property rights and won FDA approval for Lariam in 1989, said it manufactured its last lots for U.S. distribution in 2005. Those drugs expired in 2008 — a year before the company’s 2009 merger with Genentech.
The Pentagon continued to distribute generic versions of the drug, though elite Army units were ordered to stop using mefloquine in 2013 after the FDA put a black box warning on it after it was found to cause permanent brain damage in rare cases. The warning said it caused side effects such as dizziness, loss of balance and ringing in the ears that could become permanent.
The Army has mainly replaced mefloquine with drugs found to be safer.
John Nelson of Florida brought the suit after he said he became permanently disabled from taking the drug during his Army service from 2005 to 2015. Nelson said he never experienced any neuropsychiatric symptoms until he began taking mefloquine just before being stationed in Afghanistan.
U.S. District Court Judge Trina Thompson ruled in San Francisco on Monday that Nelson had sufficiently alleged that the manufacturer knew about dangers of the drug and did not warn the U.S. military.
But the judge said it was a stretch to apply a California law that holds name brand manufacturers responsible for warnings on the generic version of their drugs. Nelson never lived in California and Roche and Genentech were only headquartered in the state for two months while he took the drug overseas in 2009.
“It would be unfair for plaintiff to be able to bring his claims in California and, by virtue of the state’s innovator liability doctrine, he would be extended greater rights than he would be granted in his own state of residence, Florida,” Thompson wrote.
The judge noted that other possible venues — New Jersey, where Roche had been based, and Florida, where Nelson lives and Kentucky, Oregon and Tennessee where he lived previously — either don’t have similar laws that would extend liability to the original manufacturer of a generic drug or have courts that have issued opinions making such a finding unlikely.
Roche issued a one sentence statement asserting that lawyers were “forum shopping” and said it was pleased the court found the case didn’t belong in a California court.
Nelson said his symptoms went from vivid stimulating dreams that disrupted his sleep and made him anxious to having panic attacks, paranoia, insomnia and twice tried to take his own life, the lawsuit said. He was diagnosed as depressed and later as bipolar, though medications, including antipsychotics, did not help.
After attending a conference in 2020 about effects of anti-malarial drugs, Nelson suspected he may have experienced mefloquine toxicity and pursued testing that confirmed the diagnosis.
The lawsuit sought unspecified damages for negligence, failure to warn users, and fraudulent misrepresentation, among other claims. It also sought to have the companies pay for medical monitoring of those who took the drug to understand the impacts.
Attorneys for Nelson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
DETROIT — The Michigan Supreme Court on Tuesday postponed the January trial for the parents of the teenager who killed four students at his high school, a victory for defense lawyers who argue that involuntary manslaughter charges don’t fit.
The court ordered the state appeals court to hear an appeal from James and Jennifer Crumbley.
The order coincidentally emerged a day before the one-year anniversary of the shooting at Oxford High School. Ethan Crumbley, who was 15 at the time, killed four students and injured six more plus a teacher.
The now 16-year-old recently pleaded guilty to murder and terrorism.
The teen’s parents are accused of ignoring his mental health needs and making a gun accessible at home. Defense lawyers argue that the Crumbleys can’t be held criminally responsible for Ethan Crumbley’s independent acts.
The Supreme Court said the appeal is limited to whether there was “sufficient evidence of causation” to send the Crumbleys to trial.
Jury selection in Oakland County court had been scheduled for Jan. 17.
“The Crumbleys did not counsel EC in the commission of the school shooting or act jointly with EC in any way,” attorney Shannon Smith said in a court filing, using Ethan Crumbley’s initials. “To the contrary, the Crumbleys had no knowledge that their son intended to commit multiple homicides.”
FOR MOVEMENT TUESDAY AT 1 AM ET. EDITED BY CBLAKE.
A Missouri inmate convicted of ambushing and killing a St. Louis area police officer he blamed in the death of his younger brother was scheduled to be executed Tuesday, though his lawyers are seeking to have the lethal injection halted.
Kevin Johnson’s legal team doesn’t deny that he killed Police Officer William McEntee in 2005, but contend in an appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court that he was sentenced to death in part because he is Black. The U.S. Supreme Court declined a stay request last week, and Gov. Mike Parson on Monday announced he would not grant clemency.
“The violent murder of any citizen, let alone a Missouri law enforcement officer, should be met only with the fullest punishment state law allows,” Parson, a Republican and a former county sheriff, said in a statement. “Through Mr. Johnson’s own heinous actions, he stole the life of Sergeant McEntee and left a family grieving, a wife widowed, and children fatherless. Clemency will not be granted.”
Johnson, 37, faces execution at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the state prison in Bonne Terre. He would be the second Missouri man put to death in 2022 and the 17th nationally.
McEntee, 43, was a 20-year veteran of the police department in Kirkwood, a St. Louis suburb. The father of three was among the officers sent to Johnson’s home on July 5, 2005, to serve a warrant for his arrest. Johnson was on probation for assaulting his girlfriend, and police believed he had violated probation.
Johnson saw officers arrive and awoke his 12-year-old brother, Joseph “Bam Bam” Long, who ran to a house next door. Once there, the boy, who suffered from a congenital heart defect, collapsed and began having a seizure.
Johnson testified at trial that McEntee kept his mother from entering the house to aid his brother, who died a short time later at a hospital.
That same evening, McEntee returned to the neighborhood to check on unrelated reports of fireworks being shot off. A court filing from the Missouri attorney general’s office said McEntee was in his car questioning three children when Johnson shot him through the open passenger-side window, striking the officer’s leg, head and torso. Johnson then got into the car and took McEntee’s gun.
The court filing said Johnson walked down the street and told his mother that McEntee “let my brother die” and “needs to see what it feels like to die.” Though she told him, “That’s not true,” Johnson returned to the shooting scene and found McEntee alive, on his knees near the patrol car. Johnson shot McEntee in the back and in the head, killing him.
Johnson’s lawyers have previously asked the courts to intervene for other reasons, including a history of mental illness and his age — 19 — at the time of the crime. Courts have increasingly moved away from sentencing teen offenders to death since the Supreme Court in 2005 banned the execution of offenders who were younger than 18 at the time of their crime.
But a broader focus of appeals has been on alleged racial bias. In October, St. Louis Circuit Judge Mary Elizabeth Ott appointed a special prosecutor to review the case. The special prosecutor, E.E. Keenan, filed a motion earlier this month to vacate the death sentence, stating that race played a “decisive factor” in the death sentence.
Ott declined to set aside the death penalty. The Missouri Supreme Court convened an emergency hearing Monday to consider the request.
Keenan’ told the state Supreme Court that former St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s office handled five cases involving the deaths of police officers during his 28 years in office. McCulloch sought the death penalty in the four cases involving Black defendants, but did not seek death in the one case where the defendant was white, the file said.
Assistant Attorney General Andrew Crane responded that “a fair jury determined he deserves the death penalty.”
McCulloch does not have a listed phone number and could not be reached for comment.
Johnson’s 19-year-old daughter, Khorry Ramey, had sought to witness the execution, but a state law prohibits anyone under 21 from observing the process. Courts have declined to step in on Ramey’s behalf.
The U.S. saw 98 executions in 1999 but the number has dropped dramatically in recent years. Missouri already has two scheduled for early 2023. Convicted killer Scott McLaughlin is scheduled to die on Jan. 3, and convicted killer Leonard Taylor’s execution is set for Feb. 7.
JACKSON, Miss. — A federal judge will decide whether to block Mississippi from using three drugs when it puts inmates to death, and his ruling could determine whether the state carries out its next execution in about two weeks.
U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate heard several hours of arguments Monday in a lawsuit filed in 2015 on behalf of some Mississippi death row inmates. Wingate noted that one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Thomas Edwin Loden Jr., is facing a Dec. 14 execution date, which was recently set by the Mississippi Supreme Court.
“The court is going to move expeditiously on this matter,” Wingate said, an indication that he could issue a decision within days.
The mother of the 16-year-old girl killed by Loden watched the court hearing. Wanda Farris of Fulton said she has waited 22 years for justice for her daughter, Leesa Gray.
“She was a sweet Christian girl, loved the Lord, had a lot of life ahead of her,” Farris told reporters outside the courtroom.
Farris’ best friend, Sondra Pearce, was also in court to listen. She said she taught Leesa in kindergarten, and she didn’t like hearing the judge and attorneys discuss whether Loden might feel pain during an execution.
“Let’s talk about Leesa and the inhumane things he put her through,” Pearce said outside the courtroom.
Wingate requested a sworn statement from Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain about the state’s current stock of execution drugs.
Gerald Kucia, a Mississippi special assistant attorney general, told Wingate that none of the execution drugs currently in stock are expired. He said some expired execution drugs were recently destroyed by the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics.
Attorneys for the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center sued the Mississippi prison system, saying the state’s lethal injection protocol is inhumane.
Jim Craig, a MacArthur Center attorney, said Monday that since 2019, only Alabama, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Tennessee have conducted executions using a three-drug protocol.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 27 states have the death penalty. Craig said a majority of death-penalty states and the federal government used a three-drug protocol in 2008, but the federal government and most of those states have since started using one drug.
“Mississippi also has no serious training of their staff before an execution takes place,” Craig said. He said the people who insert needles into a condemned inmate for the execution are not present during practice runs of the procedure.
Craig also pointed out that Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey last week sought a pause in executions. Ivey ordered a “top-to-bottom” review of the state’s capital punishment system after an unprecedented third failed lethal injection.
Kucia told Wingate that the U.S. Supreme Court has never blocked a method of execution.
“This court should not say that Mississippi’s method of carrying out executions is unconstitutional,” Kucia said.
Mississippi’s most recent execution was in November 2021 — its first in nine years. The Mississippi Department of Corrections revealed in court papers in July 2021 that it had acquired three drugs for the lethal injection protocol: midazolam, which is a sedative; vecuronium bromide, which paralyzes the muscles; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. Cain said the drugs listed in the court records were the ones used for the execution that November. He would not say where the department obtained them.
Mississippi and several other states have had trouble finding drugs for lethal injections in recent years since pharmaceutical companies in the United States and Europe began blocking the use of their drugs for executions.
Loden joined four other Mississippi death row inmates in the federal lawsuit challenging the state’s lethal injection protocol. Mississippi revised the protocol to allow the use of midazolam if thiopental or pentobarbital cannot be obtained.
Wingate granted an injunction to prevent the state from using compounded pentobarbital or midazolam, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling. That sent the case back to Wingate.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A psychiatrist called to the stand by Arkansas as the state defends its ban on gender-affirming care for children said Monday he was concerned about the impact the law could have on some transgender youth who would see their treatments cut off.
Dr. Stephen Levine, a psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Ohio, testified as the nation’s first trial over such a ban continued before a federal judge after a five-week break.
Arkansas’ law, which was temporarily blocked last year, would prohibit doctors from providing gender-affirming hormone treatment, puberty blockers or surgery to anyone under 18 years old. It also would prohibit doctors from referring patients elsewhere for such care.
Levine criticized the use of gender-affirming medical treatment for minors, but under cross examination acknowledged his concerns about the psychological impacts of cutting off such care for some trans youth already receiving it. Levine said it could be “shocking and devastating” for some youth receiving the care.
“My concern with the law, the way it was originally written, is it seemed to leave out what you’re talking about,” Levine testified.
Republican lawmakers in Arkansas enacted the ban last year, overriding a veto by GOP Gov. Asa Hutchinson. Hutchinson, who leaves office in January, also said that the law went too far by cutting off treatments for children currently receiving such care. Arkansas was the first state to enact such a ban.
Multiple medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, oppose the bans and experts say the treatments are safe if properly administered. The American Psychiatric Association has supported the ruling blocking Arkansas’ ban, saying denying such care to adolescents who need it could harm their mental health.
But Levine said he recommends psychotherapy over gender-affirming care for the treatment of gender dysphoria, criticizing the current standard of care as using psychotherapy as “cheerleading” for such treatments.
Levine, however, testified that he wasn’t aware of what protocols are followed by doctors who provide such care in Arkansas.
The state has argued that the prohibition is within its authority to regulate the medical profession. People opposed to such treatments for children argue they are too young to make such decisions about their futures.
Levine echoed that argument, saying minor patients “really have very little concept of what their future holds.”
A similar ban has been blocked by a federal judge in Alabama, and other states have taken steps to restrict such care. Florida medical officials earlier this month approved a rule banning gender-affirming care for minors, at the urging of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
A judge in Texas has blocked that state’s efforts to investigate gender-confirming care for minors as child abuse. Children’s hospitals around the country have faced harassment and threats of violence for providing gender-confirming care.
The families of four transgender youth sued challenging Arkansas’ ban. Last month, a 17-year-old testified that his life has been transformed by the hormone therapy he’s been receiving and said ending the treatments could force his family to leave the state.
Warning: This story contains details of sexual assault.
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Uyo, Nigeria – When Blessing* boarded a bus early on a January morning in 2017 for the 60km (37 miles) journey from her home in Calabar, in Nigeria’s Cross River State, to a village in neighbouring Akwa Ibom State, she thought she was going to meet a corporate executive about a potential job offer.
The 10-hour ordeal that followed still haunts her, years later.
It all started with a job posting on Jiji, an online trade platform, in December 2016.
At the time, Blessing was 24 years old. She had just finished a diploma course and was planning to begin university the following year. But first, she needed to save money for her fees and living expenses. And that meant finding a job.
Like many other young Nigerians seeking employment in the digital age, Blessing made a social media post in search of job offers, leaving her contact information so that prospective employers could reach her.
A few weeks later, she got a call from a man who told her there was an opening for an entry-level role at ExxonMobil, an American oil and gas company with a drilling licence in Nigeria. He asked that she bring a hard copy of her ID to an address in the neighbouring state to continue the application process.
She had doubts but hoped her weeks of job hunting were finally about to pay off.
“I told [the man] that I wasn’t comfortable [travelling so far to meet him], being that I don’t know him. But he insisted that I didn’t have a choice. And I was desperately in need of a job at that time,” Blessing, who is now 30, recalls.
When she told her mother about the call, she too tried to persuade the man that Blessing could simply scan her ID and email him a copy of it, instead of travelling across states. But the man insisted, so Blessing’s mother borrowed the money for her bus fare.
‘Beware of dogs’
After four hours on the bus, Blessing arrived in the town of Uyo in Akwa Ibom State at 10am.
“When I got there, I called him. He sent me the location [an address in the village] via SMS. He told me to take a taxi to Oron road, then I should take a [motorcycle taxi] and look for a house with [a] ‘beware of dogs’ [sign],” she says.
The road to the village of Nung Ikono Obio is untarred and lined by thick vegetation on both sides. When she saw the condition of the road, Blessing contemplated turning back but reasoned that she had already spent too much on travel.
“I did not want to go home without feedback [for my mother],” she recalls.
[Jawahir Al-Naimi/Al Jazeera]
But when Blessing arrived at the house with the “beware of dogs” sign, she was shocked by what she saw. It was the site of ongoing construction; outside, labourers were moving sand from a heap to mix concrete which they used for the foundation.
The man she had been speaking to on the phone also surprised her – he looked too young to be a corporate executive. It later turned out that he was just 16.
Blessing says he asked her to sit on a bench and wait for his father, who would discuss the job offer with her. Meanwhile, the labourers continued working around her.
“There were people working so I did not suspect anything,” she recalls. “At about 2 o’clock, I became uncomfortable because time was running fast and I was supposed to be heading back to Calabar.”
The boy told her not to worry, that they would leave as soon as he had paid the labourers.
But at 5pm, when the labourers left, the boy locked the gate, and Blessing was left alone with him inside the compound. When she protested, he threatened to kill her and demanded that she enter a nearby room.
She describes what happened next. “He told me to obey him and not hesitate, otherwise he would hurt me and no one would come to my rescue. The room was so dark but there was a small mattress. He told me to sit on it. He told me to undress. That was when I started pleading.”
Blessing started crying. She told him that she did not want the job any more.
“He brought out a knife tied with red cloths and [said] that if I did not undress, he would stab me.”
Then he raped her.
Rape and murder
In August this year, Uduak “Ezekiel” Akpan, now 22, was found guilty of raping and murdering Iniubong Umoren, a 26-year-old job seeker, in April 2021. After Umoren’s case started trending on social media, Blessing saw posts and realised the attacker was the same man who had raped her in 2017.
Like Blessing, Umoren had made an open call on social media for a job. “#AkwaIbomTwitter please. I’m really in need of a job, something to do to keep my mind and soul together while contributing dutifully to the organization. My location is Uyo. I’m creative, really good at thinking critically, and most importantly a fast learner. CV available on request,” she tweeted on April 27, 2021.
As with Blessing, Akpan had then lured her to his home – the same one, still under construction all these years later – under the pretext of a job interview.
While there, Umoren sent a one-second WhatsApp audio message to her friend Uduak Obong. When Obong called her back, she heard her friend’s screams. So she sent a frantic tweet suggesting Umoren might be in danger. Online, Nigerians began investigating. Within a few hours, they found Akpan’s Facebook pages and dug up his digital footprint. A Twitter user got a leak of Akpan’s call log. With the call logs, he geolocated where Akpan was when he had last called Umoren’s phone.
The following day, Umoren’s body was found in a shallow grave in the same compound in Nung Ikono Obio where Blessing had been raped years earlier.
After Akpan attacked Blessing, she was too traumatised to report it. She did not even tell her mother what had happened. But she did go to the hospital to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
Blessing came forward after Umoren’s death, and prosecutors called her to give evidence against Akpan at his trial. Although she did not end up testifying – she was told her testimony was no longer needed – she sees her decision as a first attempt at seeking justice for what happened to her.
In the statement Akpan gave to the police before his trial commenced – a confession he later tried to recant, saying it was obtained under duress, although the judge ruled against him – he admitted to having attacked six other women, including Blessing. Umoren was the only one he killed.
[Jawahir Al-Naimi/Al Jazeera]
Multiple victims
Twenty-five-year-old Miriam Akpan (no relation to the perpetrator) was one of Akpan’s other victims. In December 2020, desperate for a job, she posted on a Facebook group called Job Vacancy in Uyo, advertising her interests and qualifications.
“Please, anything, I can do,” she wrote, mentioning that she had the equivalent of a high school certificate and would take any job. No one offered her one until Akpan said he would pay her 35,000 Nigerian naira ($80) a month as a secretary in an “integrated farm”. Miriam was excited. For someone without a university degree, a job that paid more than the minimum monthly wage of 30,000 naira ($69) felt like a great opportunity.
She agreed to meet him to discuss the details of the job offer. But instead of an interview, she was drugged and raped.
For more than a year Miriam had suppressed the memory of what happened to her. She kept it from her sister, the only immediate family she has. But as people tried to locate Umoren, she saw Akpan’s picture being shared on Twitter and all the emotion she had tried to bury came rushing back. “I did not even think about it, I just commented [on Twitter] that this person robbed me last December,” she says.
But her last name raised suspicions, and some accused her of being related to Uduak Akpan. Umoren’s relatives did not immediately trust her when she advised them to go to Akpan’s house that night to search for the missing woman.
The following day, Miriam’s directions led the police and Umoren’s relatives to the compound where they found her body.
Miriam’s court testimony also helped convict Akpan.
He was subsequently sentenced to death by hanging for the murder of Umoren, and life imprisonment for her rape.
Soaring unemployment
But Akpan is not the only person to have taken advantage of Nigeria’s employment crisis.
It is common for Nigerians to announce on social media that they are seeking jobs. With a soaring unemployment rate, many explore unconventional ways of finding work. Graduates are sometimes seen holding placards at major bus stops and expressways pleading for jobs; others make online banners; and members of the National Youth Corps who finish their service also post their certificates on social media, announcing that they are ready for employment.
Nigeria’s unemployment rate stands at 33.3 percent, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, which means that more than 23 million people either have no job or work for less than 20 hours a week. Among those aged between 15 and 35, the unemployment rate stood at 42.5 percent in 2020.
[Jawahir Al-Naimi/Al Jazeera]
The high number of unemployed people seeking jobs also makes Nigeria’s labour market a “breeding ground” for criminals who lure applicants in with job interviews, said Taibat Hussain, a youth and gender equality advocate. “Criminals … lure applicants in with fake job interviews, and then rob, rape and, in extreme cases, kill them. This category of youth, after spending years without employment opportunities, falls prey to the tactics and is left with no other choice than to give in,” she told Al Jazeera.
As part of reporting this story, Al Jazeera met a 26-year-old man arrested in Cross River State for the alleged rape of an 18-year-old woman to whom he had promised a job. We are not naming him as he is awaiting trial.
When Al Jazeera met him at Calabar Correctional Centre, he was wearing a blue shirt with its collar raised and a pair of too-small slippers. He had already been behind bars for more than a year. He told Al Jazeera he had slept with the woman but denied raping her. “I was going to help her get the job but she is angry because the job did not come as fast as she wanted,” he said.
But in a statement the woman gave to the police detailing her experience, she told a different story. She met the man while looking for work vacancies, she said. He told her there was a cleaning position open in his workplace – a manufacturing company in Calabar.
“He asked me to bring my application to his house so that he can help me correct it and submit [it]. He looked at my application and said it is not correct. He wrote another one and told me to recopy it with my handwriting. After I finished copying it, I wanted to go but he did not let me go. He started kissing me and touching my breast. He used his right hand to hold my hands together and his left hand to cover my mouth,” her statement in the police report reads.
Experts say that most victims of dubious employment scams are younger women seeking low-skilled jobs, who make up a significant number of the unemployed population, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Extorted by ‘jobs for sale’
While predators like Akpan take advantage of desperate job seekers, there are registered companies that also extort these desperate people in other ways.
Oladeinde Olawoyin, a Nigerian journalist who has investigated fake employment agencies, found 50 cases of applicants being extorted. These agencies get applicants to pay for a registration package – usually charging 5,000-10,000 naira ($11-23) – with the promise of finding them a job, yet most never do. Some of these companies are registered as consultancies to circumvent the law that makes it illegal for a person to pay to gain employment, Olawoyin explains.
“Many of the agencies do not have jobs to give,” he says. “They charge applicants for registration forms and don’t really get them any job. There are a few who might have [a] few jobs but they recruit more people than the [number of] job[s] they have. In a pool of about 1,000, they might throw in maybe 20 jobs or less.
“These agencies know that Nigeria is [a] free for all. So they … gamble with people’s life and extort them. Most often they change their location when their notoriety spreads. They change their name and location. So it is possible that a job seeker might get scammed two, three, or four times by the same set of people with different names and addresses.”
John Nyamani, the director of employment and wages at Nigeria’s Ministry of Labour, told Al Jazeera that “desperation”, social media and job seekers wanting a quick fix were to blame for people being preyed upon.
“We don’t want to follow the rules because we are in a hurry to get employment,” he said.
Nyamani advised job seekers to be circumspect of opportunities advertised on social media that cannot be traced to an established organisation. “They are deceived with jobs and it is because of the situation of things. The government can only try its best through the security agencies to educate people on how to be careful. Not every advert you see on social media [is one] that you respond to. If you have to respond to it, make clarifications, and ask the Ministry of Labour. The Ministry of Labour has a good, functional website,” he added, referring to the National Employment Electronic Labour Exchange (NELEX).
The website has a pool of vacancies and a list of legal organisations where Nigerians seeking employment can carry out background checks on their prospective employers, Nyamani said.
However, advocate Hussain, who has looked into the government’s youth unemployment reduction scheme, says such initiatives only provide “temporary relief”, and that there is a need for permanent and sustainable connections between the labour market and government initiatives that hope to help young people.
For many, Umoren’s death highlighted how dire the unemployment situation is in Nigeria, and the risks young people are willing to take to find a job.
Miriam has gone back to school where she is learning to become a data scientist. She said facing Akpan again was one of the toughest things she has ever done but, after the incident, she decided to relocate to Lagos to start afresh.
“I have left Uyo and everything else behind me,” she says. “I can now build a future that I want. I bought a laptop. I am going to start learning how to code.”
For Blessing, it has been harder. She will only feel that there has been justice when Akpan hangs, she says, adding: “I don’t think he will ever be killed.”
ST. LOUIS — A federal judge has denied a request from a 19-year-old woman to allow her to watch her father’s death by injection, upholding a Missouri law that bars anyone under 21 from witnessing an execution.
Kevin Johnson is set to be executed Tuesday for killing Kirkwood, Missouri, Police Officer William McEntee in 2005. Johnson’s lawyers have appeals pending that seek to spare his life.
His daughter, Khorry Ramey, had sought to attend the execution, and the American Civil Liberties Union had filed an emergency motion with a federal court in Kansas City. The ACLU’s court filing said the age requirement served no safety purpose and violates Ramey’s constitutional rights. But U.S. District Judge Brian C. Wimes ruled late Friday that Ramey’s constitutional rights would not be violated by the law.
“I’m heartbroken that I won’t be able to be with my dad in his last moments,” Ramey said in a statement. “My dad is the most important person in my life. He has been there for me my whole life, even though he’s been incarcerated.”
While the judge acknowledged that the law would cause emotional harm for Ramey, he found that was just one part of the court’s consideration and the law did not violate her constitutional rights.
Ramey said she was praying that Gov. Michael Parson would grant her father clemency. Johnson’s lawyers have filed appeals seeking to halt the execution. They don’t challenge his guilt but claim racism played a role in the decision to seek the death penalty, and in the jury’s decision to sentence him to die. Johnson is Black and McEntee was white.
Johnson’s lawyers also have asked the courts to intervene for other reasons, including a history of mental illness and his age — he was 19 at the time of the crime. Courts have increasingly moved away from sentencing teen offenders to death since the Supreme Court in 2005 banned the execution of offenders who were younger than 18 at the time of their crime.
In a court filing to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office stated there were no grounds for court intervention.
“The surviving victims of Johnson’s crimes have waited long enough for justice, and every day longer that they must wait is a day they are denied the chance to finally make peace with their loss,” the state petition stated.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A federal judge has denied a new trial request by two men convicted of conspiring to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Lawyers for Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. alleged misconduct by a juror and unfairness by U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker following their conviction by a federal jury in August.
Jonker in a written ruling Friday shot down claims of juror misconduct and said he found “no constitutional violation and no credible evidence” to convene a new hearing.
Fox and Croft face up to life in prison when they’re sentenced Dec. 28.
Whitmer, who was reelected Nov. 8 to a second term, was never physically harmed in the plot, which led to more than a dozen arrests in 2020.
Fox and Croft’s first trial ended in a mistrial earlier this year when the jury was unable to come to a unanimous verdict. A motion for a third trial was filed in September.
Defense lawyers said a juror seated in the second trial was described by a co-worker as “far-left leaning,” was eager to get on the jury and poised to convict before hearing evidence.
The defense team’s investigator said he interviewed two co-workers who said they had heard about it but had no firsthand knowledge. A third person declined to speak to him in the parking lot.
The allegation first was raised early in the second trial. Jonker said he spoke privately to the juror, who denied saying that a vote to convict was already settled.
Separately, defense lawyers said the judge violated the rights of Fox and Croft by imposing a time limit on the cross-examination of a star government witness.
“Defendants have neither demonstrated that the jury verdict is ‘against the manifest weight of the evidence’ nor that a ‘substantial legal error has occurred’ such that the interests of justice demand a new trial,” Jonker wrote in Friday’s ruling.
Croft is from Bear, Delaware. Fox lived in the Grand Rapids area in western Michigan.
Two other men have pleaded guilty in the federal case, while two more were acquitted.
Three other men accused of supporting terrorism in the kidnapping plot were convicted in October in state court.
Joe Morrison; Morrison’s father-in-law, Pete Musico; and Paul Bellar were found guilty of supplying “material support” for a terrorist act as members of a group known as the Wolverine Watchmen. They await sentencing on Dec. 15.
They held gun training in rural Jackson County with Fox who was disgusted with Whitmer and other officials and said he wanted to snatch her.
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — Former Youth Minister Charles Ble Goude, who was acquitted of crimes at the International Criminal Court, returned home Saturday to Ivory Coast after more than a decade of exile.
He arrived in Abidjan on a commercial flight and made no comment at the airport, which was heavily guarded by police.
Ble Goude was the leader of the Young Patriots, a pro-government youth organization seen by many as a militia, and youth minister under Former President Laurent Gbagbo.
More than 3,000 people were killed in violence that erupted after Gbagbo refused to accept defeat by his rival in the 2010 election, current Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara.
Ble Goude was ultimately cleared in 2019 at the International Criminal Court, along with Gbagbo, of responsibility for crimes including murder, rape and persecution following the disputed election.
Judges halted the trial before defense lawyers had even presented evidence, saying prosecutors failed to prove their case, and appeals judges upheld the acquittal.
Gbagbo returned to Ivory Coast last year and while some had feared his return could set off new unrest, Gbagbo was received by Ouattara himself and has mostly maintained a low profile.
Human rights groups say the Young Patriots created a climate of terror, erecting barricades and checkpoints where they attempted to identify “enemies of Ivory Coast” — meaning supporters of Ouattara. Because Ouattara is from northern Ivory Coast and one side of his family has roots in Burkina Faso, anyone having a northern name, as well as immigrants from neighboring nations, became targets.
Until Gbagbo was forced from power in April 2011, Ble Goude held regular rallies where he used increasingly xenophobic rhetoric, which many believe incited his supporters to violence — claims that he has denied.
“Can you show me a single video, or a single audio, where I asked the youth of Ivory Coast to hurt foreigners?” Ble Goude told The Associated Press in 2012 from an undisclosed location. “These are vulgar lies that I deny. It’s not true.”
Ble Goude was later arrested in 2013 in Ghana after nearly two years in hiding, and then was extradited to the ICC. After his acquittal, he sought financial compensation, saying that he was “the victim of a wrongful prosecution amounting to a grave and manifest miscarriage of justice.” ICC judges rejected the claim earlier this year.
———
Associated Press writer Krista Larson in Dakar, Senegal, contributed.
CINCINNATI — A federal appeals court has revived a wrongful death claim against Walmart by the family of a Black man who was fatally shot by a white police officer inside an Ohio store after picking up a pellet rifle from a shelf.
Twenty-two-year-old John Crawford III was shot at the Beavercreek store in suburban Dayton in August 2014 after someone called 911. A judge dismissed his family’s wrongful death claim, but a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reversed that in a 2-1 decision Wednesday.
Two judges concluded “a reasonable jury could find that Walmart failed to prevent Crawford from carrying a look-alike AR-15 openly around the store,” which could alarm shoppers, confuse police and cause an officer to respond as though the weapon were real.
The decision means the family can proceed toward trial on the wrongful death claim along with its other pending claims against the retailer, including negligence, one of the family’s attorneys, Michael Wright, said Friday.
Walmart has denied that its actions caused Crawford’s death. Messages seeking comment were left Friday for Walmart and its attorney.
The family previously settled a wrongful death claim with Beavercreek and its police.
A grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot Crawford.
The 911 caller who reported that a man was waving a gun in the store also wasn’t charged. The prosecutor who made that decision said he didn’t find evidence that the caller knew the information he provided was false.
RIO DE JANEIRO — The two men were sitting at a bar on Nov. 21, sipping drinks for relief from the scorching heat of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, when police officers barged in and arrested them for allegedly torching trucks and an ambulance with Molotov cocktails.
One man attempted to flee and ditch his illegal firearm. Inside their pickup truck, officers found jugs of gasoline, knives, a pistol, slingshots and hundreds of stones — as well as 9,999 reais (nearly $1,900) in cash.
A federal judge ordered their preventive detention, noting that their apparent motive for the violence was “dissatisfaction with the result of the last presidential election and pursuit of its undemocratic reversal,” according to court documents reviewed by The Associated Press.
For more than three weeks, supporters of incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro who refuse to accept his narrow defeat in October’s election have blocked roads and camped outside military buildings in Mato Grosso, Brazil’s soy-producing powerhouse. They also have protested in other states across the nation, while pleading for intervention from the armed forces or marching orders from their commander in chief.
Since his election loss, Bolsonaro has only addressed the nation twice, to say that the protests are legitimate and encourage them to continue, as long as they don’t prevent people from coming and going.
Bolsonaro has not disavowed the recent emergence of violence, either. He has, however, challenged the election results — which the electoral authority’s president said appears aimed at stoking protests.
While most demonstrations are peaceful, tactics deployed by hardcore participants have begun concerning authorities. José Antônio Borges, chief state prosecutor in Mato Grosso, compared their actions to that of guerrilla fighters, militia groups and domestic terrorists.
Mato Grosso is one of the nation’s hotbeds for unrest. The chief targets, Borges says, are soy trucks from Grupo Maggi, owned by a tycoon who declared support for President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. There are also indications that people and companies from the state may be fueling protests elsewhere.
Road blockades and acts of violence have been reported in the states of Rondonia, Para, Parana and Santa Catarina. In the latter, federal highway police said protesters blocking highways have employed “terrorist” methods including homemade bombs, fireworks, nails, stones and barricades made of burnt tires.
Police also noted that roadblocks over the weekend were different from those carried out immediately after the Oct. 30 runoff election, when truckers blocked more than 1,000 roads and highways across the country, with only isolated incidents.
Now, most acts of resistance are taking place at night, carried out by “extremely violent and coordinated hooded men,” acting in different regions of the state at the same time, federal highway police said.
“The situation is getting very critical” in Mato Grosso state, chief state prosecutor Borges told the AP. Among other examples, he noted that protesters in Sinop, the state’s second most populous city, this week ordered shops and businesses to close in support of the movement. “Whoever doesn’t shut down suffers reprisals,” he said.
Since the vote, Bolsonaro has dropped out of public view and his daily agenda has been largely vacant, prompting speculation as to whether he is stewing or scheming.
Government transition duties have been led by his chief of staff, while Vice President Hamilton Mourão has stepped in to preside over official ceremonies. In an interview with newspaper O Globo, Mourão chalked up Bolsonaro’s absence to erysipelas, a skin infection on his legs that he said prevents the president from wearing pants.
But even Bolsonaro’s social media accounts have gone silent – aside from generic posts about his administration, apparently from his communications team. And the live social media broadcasts that, with rare exception, he conducted every Thursday night during his administration have ceased. The silence marks an abrupt about-face for the bombastic Brazilian leader whose legions of supporters hang on his every word.
Still, demonstrators, who have camped outside military barracks across Brazil for weeks, are certain they have his tacit support.
“We understand perfectly well why he doesn’t want to talk: They (the news media) distort his words,” said a 49-year-old woman who identified herself only as Joelma during a protest outside the monumental regional military command center in Rio de Janeiro. She declined to give her full name, claiming the protest had been infiltrated by informants.
Joelma and others say they are outraged with Bolsonaro’s loss and claim the election was rigged, echoing the incumbent president’s claims — made without evidence — that the electronic voting system is prone to fraud.
Scenes of large barbecues with free food and portable bathrooms at several protests, plus reports of free bus rides bringing demonstrators to the capital, Brasilia, have prompted investigations into the people and companies financing and organizing the gatherings and roadblocks.
The Supreme Court has frozen at least 43 bank accounts for suspicion of involvement, news site G1 reported, saying most are from Mato Grosso. Borges cited the involvement of agribusiness players in the protests, many of whom support Bolsonaro’s push for development of the Amazon rainforest and his authorization of previously banned pesticides. By contrast, President-elect da Silva has pledged to rebuild environmental protections.
Most recently, protesters have been emboldened by the president’s decision to officially contest the election results.
On Tuesday, Bolsonaro and his party filed a request for the electoral authority to annul votes cast on nearly 60% of electronic voting machines, citing a software bug in older models. Independent experts have said the bug, while newly discovered, doesn’t affect the results and the electoral authority’s president, Alexandre de Moraes swiftly rejected the “bizarre and illicit” request.
De Moraes, who is also a Supreme Court justice, called it “an attack on the Democratic Rule of Law … with the purpose of encouraging criminal and anti-democratic movements.”
On Nov. 21, Prosecutor-general Augusto Aras summoned federal prosecutors from states where roadblocks and violence have become more intense for a crisis meeting. Aras, who is widely seen as a Bolsonaro stalwart, said he received intelligence reports from local prosecutors and instructed Mato Grosso’s governor to request federal backup to clear its blocked highways.
Ultimately that wasn’t necessary, as local law enforcement managed to break up demonstrations and, by Monday night, roads in Mato Grosso and elsewhere were all liberated, according to the federal highway police. It was unclear how long this would last, however, amid Bolsonaro’s continued silence, said Guilherme Casarões, a political science professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation university.
“With his silence, he keeps people in the streets,” Casarões said. “This is the great advantage he has today: a very mobilized, and very radical base.”
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Associated Press reporter Carla Bridi in Brasilia, Brazil, contributed to this report.
MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s Supreme Court struck down part of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s ‘jail, no bail’ policy Thursday.
The court voted against mandatory pre-trial detention for people accused of fraud, smuggling or tax evasion. Because trials often take years in Mexico, the justices argued that being held in prison during trial was equivalent to being subjected to punishment before being convicted.
Instead, prosecutors would have to convince judges there are valid reasons not to release people on their own recognizance — for example, by arguing that they may pose a flight risk. The justices may vote next week on whether the possibility of pre-trial release may be justified for other crimes.
In 2019, López Obrador imposed mandatory pre-trial detention for a long list of crimes, and he views it as part of his crack-down on white collar criminals, like those accused of tax fraud. Mexico does not have cash bail, but before López Obrador changed the rules, judges could release suspects and require them to wear monitors, sign in at court or agree not to travel.
The president has long railed about corrupt judges and court rulings he doesn’t like, and Thursday’s supreme court vote was likely to spark more vocal attacks by the president.
Even before the ruling, López Obrador criticized the court for the widely expected Thursday vote.
“How can judges, magistrates and justices be defending white collar criminals? How can it be that money triumphs over justice?” López Obrador said before the ruling. “What tremendous shamelessness!”
The president has not been shy about accusing lower court judges of releasing drug and other suspects on procedural or technical points he clearly does not agree with. Underpaid, and often under threat, Mexican prosecutors often don’t bring strong cases, or make intentional or unintentional errors.
“They free them because the prosecution case was poorly written, or for any other excuse, any other pretext,” the president said, “because they have become very, very, very fixated on the fine points of the law.”
López Obrador has fought the courts, often attacking their legitimacy and singling out individual judges for scorn, because courts have often blocked some of the president’s key initiatives.
Observers say the courts have acted because López Obrador has often shoved through laws that openly contradict the country’s Constitution or international treaties.
Previously, the president has focused most of his wrath on lower courts. On Thursday at a press briefing with López Obrador, Ricardo Mejia, Mexico’s assistant secretary of public safety, said the administration would recommend bringing criminal charges against a judge who ordered the release of a suspected drug gang leader.
But much of the president’s anger Thursday was directed at the Supreme Court, which is about to hear an appeal by a group that says government money and property should no longer be used to erect Christmas-season Nativity scenes, a staple in Mexico.
The appeal says that the government’s participation in displaying Nativity scenes violates the constitutional separation of church and state.
The president angrily rejected that, even though the court has not ruled on the issue yet.
“That’s an example. Why should they go against the traditions, the customs of the people?” López Obrador said.
López Obrador expanded the list of charges that require a suspect to be detained pending trial to 16, including some nonviolent crimes that may carry sentences of just a few months — far less than the amount of time most people spend awaiting trial.
Only about two of every 10 people accused of a crime in Mexico are ever found guilty. That means that of the estimated 92,000 suspects held pending trial — often in the same cells with hardened criminals — around 75,000 won’t be convicted despite sometimes spending years locked up in Mexico’s crowded, dangerous prisons.
Trials in Mexico can drag on for a surprisingly long time. Two men were recently released with ankle monitors after spending 17 years in prison while on trial for murder.
Being put into Mexican prisons, which are overcrowded, underfunded and controlled by gangs, can be hell for those on pretrial detention, who often enter with no prison smarts or gang connections.
The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention says that “mandatory pretrial detention violates international standards on human rights.”
A Twitter executive in Ireland secured a temporary court injunction preventing Elon Musk from firing her in his mass layoffs at the social media giant.
Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s global vice president for public policy, was granted the interim injunction on Friday by Ireland’s High Court, local media reported. The court order temporarily prevents Twitter from terminating McSweeney’s employment contract.
McSweeney claimed before the court that she received mixed messages from Twitter, according to the reports.
Even if she didn’t explicitly accept an exit package that was proposed to her, McSweeney said she had been locked out of Twitter’s Dublin office and of the company’s IT system, the Irish Examiner reported. Twitter lawyers however reassured her in an e-mail that they knew she didn’t want to resign and that her access to the IT system would be restored, according to the Examiner report. But McSweeney told the court that she was still concretely unable to work, the outlet said.
Musk, Twitter’s new owner, has fired thousands of employees across the globe since he took over the popular social network.
An email that Musk sent to employees on November 16 asked them to click on “yes” if they wanted to continue working for Twitter; McSweeney didn’t respond to that email, according to the reports.
The court injunction states that that email has no effect on McSweeney’s contract, but it doesn’t go as far as re-instating her in her job, as judges still have to take a final decision on her case, according to the reports.
Today is Thursday, Nov. 24, the 328th day of 2022. There are 37 days left in the year. Today is Thanksgiving.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Nov. 24, 1963, Jack Ruby shot and mortally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, in a scene captured on live television.
On this date:
In 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” which explained his theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
In 1865, Mississippi became the first Southern state to enact laws which came to be known as “Black Codes” aimed at limiting the rights of newly freed Blacks; other states of the former Confederacy soon followed.
In 1941, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Edwards v. California, unanimously struck down a California law prohibiting people from bringing impoverished non-residents into the state.
In 1947, a group of writers, producers and directors that became known as the “Hollywood Ten” was cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about alleged Communist influence in the movie industry. John Steinbeck’s novel “The Pearl” was first published.
In 1971, a hijacker calling himself “Dan Cooper” (but who became popularly known as “D.B. Cooper”) parachuted from a Northwest Orient Airlines 727 over the Pacific Northwest after receiving $200,000 in ransom; his fate remains unknown.
In 1974, the bone fragments of a 3.2 million-year-old hominid were discovered by scientists in Ethiopia; the skeletal remains were nicknamed “Lucy.”
In 1987, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed on terms to scrap shorter- and medium-range missiles. (The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev the following month.)
In 1989, Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu (chow-SHES’-koo) was unanimously re-elected Communist Party chief. (Within a month, he was overthrown in a popular uprising and executed along with his wife, Elena, on Christmas Day.)
In 1991, rock singer Freddie Mercury died in London at age 45 of AIDS-related pneumonia.
In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped into the bitter, overtime struggle for the White House, agreeing to consider George W. Bush’s appeal against the hand recounting of ballots in Florida.
In 2014, it was announced that a grand jury in St. Louis County, Missouri, had decided against indicting Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown; the decision enraged protesters who set fire to buildings and cars and looted businesses in the area where Brown had been fatally shot.
In 2020, Pennsylvania officials certified Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential vote in the state; the Trump campaign had gone to court trying to prevent the certification. The Nevada Supreme Court made Biden’s win in the state official. County election workers across Georgia began an official machine recount of the roughly 5 million votes cast in the presidential race in the state; certified results had shown Biden winning in Georgia by 12,670 votes.
Ten years ago: Fire raced through a garment factory in Bangladesh that supplied major retailers in the West, killing 112 people; an official said many of the victims were trapped because the eight-story building lacked emergency exits. Former championship boxer Hector “Macho” Camacho died at a hospital in Puerto Rico after doctors disconnected life support; he’d been shot in his hometown of Bayamon earlier in the week.
Five years ago: Militants attacked a crowded mosque in Egypt with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades, killing more than 300 people in the deadliest-ever attack by Islamic extremists in the country. Zimbabwe swore in its new leader, Emmerson Mnangagwa, after the resignation of President Robert Mugabe, who had fired his longtime deputy just two and a half weeks earlier. South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal increased the prison sentence of Olympic athlete Oscar Pistorius to 13 years and five months in the shooting death of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, more than doubling the original six-year sentence.
One year ago: Three men were convicted of murder in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the Black man who was running through a Georgia subdivision in February 2020 when the white strangers chased him, trapped him on a quiet street and blasted him with a shotgun. At least 27 people died when a boat carrying migrants across the English Channel to Britain sank a few miles from the French coast.
Today’s Birthdays: Basketball Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson is 84. Country singer Johnny Carver is 82. Former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue (TAG’-lee-uh-boo) is 82. Rock drummer Pete Best is 81. Actor-comedian Billy Connolly is 80. Former White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater is 80. Former congressman and Motion Picture Association of America Chairman Dan Glickman is 78. Singer Lee Michaels is 77. Actor Dwight Schultz is 75. Actor Stanley Livingston is 72. Rock musician Clem Burke (Blondie; The Romantics) is 68. Actor/director Ruben Santiago-Hudson is 66. Actor Denise Crosby is 65. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is 63. Actor Shae D’Lyn is 60. Rock musician John Squire (The Stone Roses) is 60. Rock musician Gary Stonadge (Big Audio) is 60. Actor Conleth Hill is 58. Actor-comedian Brad Sherwood is 58. Actor Garret Dillahunt is 58. Actor-comedian Scott Krinsky is 54. Rock musician Chad Taylor (Live) is 52. Actor Lola Glaudini is 51. Actor Danielle Nicolet is 49. Actor-writer-director-producer Stephen Merchant is 48. Actor Colin Hanks is 45. Actor Katherine Heigl (HY’-guhl) is 44. Actor Sarah Hyland is 32.
WEST BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. — Surrounded by a slew of players with their arms draped over shoulders, West Bloomfield High School assistant coach Justin Ibe bowed his head and led a Christian prayer before a recent Friday night game.
Forty yards down the sideline, three Muslim young men were having a quiet moment of their own.
“Ameen,” the players quietly said, using the Arabic word for amen.
Across America, most high school football seasons are winding down. Thousands of games, the first since the Supreme Court in June ruled it was OK for a public school coach near Seattle to pray on the field. The decision prompted speculation that prayer would become an even bigger part of the game-day fabric, though that hasn’t seemed to be the case.
Fouad Zaban, the head coach at Fordson High in Dearborn, calls the area just outside Detroit the “Middle East of America” and it is indeed home to thousands of people of Arab descent. After the court ruling, Zaban said, he was flooded with requests to use his platform and constitutional right to pray publicly. After thinking about it, he chose to keep his team’s prayers behind closed doors to avoid potential anti-Islamic jeers from fans in other communities.
“That was a concern that they were going to get backlash,” Zaban said.
With the nation’s culture wars spilling into education, it is challenging to have teachable moments about big news — like a precedent-setting court ruling — and coaches such as Zaban would rather punt than pray publicly.
“It’s harder, whether you’re a coach, librarian, teacher or counselor,” said Lara Schwartz, an American University professor whose specialties include campus speech and constitutional law. “There are activist groups targeting books and ideas, saying you can lose your license if you have these conversations. That to me is a threat to people having good constructive dialogue in classrooms, or with coaches.”
In Michigan, some teams with multiple religions represented on their rosters have found ways for everyone who wants to participate to do so if they wish.
“We don’t force anybody to do that,” said Ibe, the defensive line coach in West Bloomfield. “We just take that moment to really just come together and give glory to God at that moment.”
At Crestwood High School in Dearborn Heights, where most of the football team is Muslim, the entire team gathers before practices and games to pray on one knee. First, most of the players recite Al-Fatiha. Then, a player says a Christian prayer to the attentive group.
“Between those two prayers, they’re pretty much all the same,” said Adam Berry, a senior and a team captain. “Asking God for protection, asking God for forgiveness, and asking God for any way to help us through our game.”
According to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, a majority of Americans think a coach leading a team in prayer (60%), a player leading a team in prayer (64%) and a coach praying on the field without asking the team to join in (71%) should all be allowed in public high school sports.
Still, the team plays it safe at Fordson High, where coaches clear the locker room and leave players to pray if they wish.
“No one can ever say that we were involved in it,” Zaban said, adding he just wants to coach instead of drawing attention.
Hassan Shinawah, a senior and team captain at Fordson, said players supported keeping their prayers in the locker room and away from the public.
“We don’t know if people are comfortable,” he said. “We don’t know what their opinions are about it. We just don’t want any conflict with anybody else.”
In the South, at least three high schools, two in Alabama and another in North Carolina, received letters in recent months from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The nonprofit that advocates for atheists and agnostics said it fielded complaints about the promotion of religion surrounding football games. Jefferson County (Ala.) officials were asked to “ensure that its schools are no longer scheduling prayer at school-sponsored events, including football games.”
The Associated Press left multiple messages for athletic directors and principals at the schools in both North Carolina and Alabama that were not returned.
Outside Detroit, coaches gave time and space for their players to pray, showing the teenagers that accomdations can be made for different faiths as well as the right to decline.
At West Bloomfield High, an assistant football coach once walked miles with a Jewish player — whose faith would not allow him to ride in a car one particular day — to make sure he got to his hotel after a road game. The unique nature of having Christians, Muslims and Jews playing on the same team was not lost on one of the players who participates in a pregame Islamic prayer.
“Some other teams, they probably don’t have the same thing,” said Mohamed Menisy, a 16-year-old junior offensive tackle. “We’re one team, one family. We just respect each other.”
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Follow Larry Lage at https://twitter.com/larrylage
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for the imminent handover of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to a congressional committee after a three-year legal fight.
The court, with no noted dissents, rejected Trump’s plea for an order that would have prevented the Treasury Department from giving six years of tax returns for Trump and some of his businesses to the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee.
Alone among recent presidents, Trump refused to release his tax returns either during his successful 2016 campaign or his four years in the White House, citing what he said was an ongoing audit by the IRS. Last week, Trump announced he would run again in 2024.
It was the former president’s second loss at the Supreme Court in as many months, and third this year. In October, the court refused to step into the legal fight surrounding the FBI search of Trump’s Florida estate that turned up classified documents.
In January, the court refused to stop the National Archives from turning over documents to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Justice Clarence Thomas was the only vote in Trump’s favor.
In the dispute over his tax returns, the Treasury Department had refused to provide the records during Trump’s presidency. But the Biden administration said federal law is clear that the committee has the right to examine any taxpayer’s return, including the president’s.
Lower courts agreed that the committee has broad authority to obtain tax returns and rejected Trump’s claims that it was overstepping and only wanted the documents so they could be made public.
Chief Justice John Roberts imposed a temporary freeze on Nov. 1 to allow the court to weigh the legal issues raised by Trump’s lawyers and the counter arguments of the administration and the House of Representatives.
Just over three weeks later, the court lifted Roberts’ order without comment.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The House contended an order preventing the IRS from providing the tax returns would leave lawmakers “little or no time to complete their legislative work during this Congress, which is quickly approaching its end.”
Had Trump persuaded the nation’s highest court to intervene, he could have run out the clock on the committee, with Republicans ready to take control of the House in January. They almost certainly would have dropped the records request if the issue had not been resolved by then.
The House Ways and Means panel and its chairman, Democrat Richard Neal of Massachusetts, first requested Trump’s tax returns in 2019 as part of an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s audit program and tax law compliance by the former president. A federal law says the Internal Revenue Service “shall furnish” the returns of any taxpayer to a handful of top lawmakers.
The Justice Department under the Trump administration had defended a decision by then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to withhold the tax returns from Congress. Mnuchin argued that he could withhold the documents because he concluded they were being sought by Democrats for partisan reasons. A lawsuit ensued.
After President Joe Biden took office, the committee renewed the request, seeking Trump’s tax returns and additional information from 2015-2020. The White House took the position that the request was a valid one and that the Treasury Department had no choice but to comply. Trump then attempted to halt the handover in court.
Then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. obtained copies of Trump’s personal and business tax records as part of a criminal investigation. That case, too, went to the Supreme Court, which rejected Trump’s argument that he had broad immunity as president.
NEW YORK — A federal judge has ordered Amazon to stop retaliating against employees engaged in workplace activism, issuing a mixed ruling that also hands a loss to the federal labor agency that sued the company earlier this year.
The ruling came in a court case brought by the National Labor Relations Board, which sued Amazon in March seeking the reinstatement of a fired employee who was involved in organizing a company warehouse on Staten Island, New York.
In its lawsuit, the agency argued Amazon’s termination of the former employee, Gerald Bryson, was unlawful and would have a chilling effect on organizing. It said that not reinstating Bryson to his role would make workers think the agency would not be able to protect their labor rights under federal law.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Diane Gujarati ruled there was “reasonable cause” to believe the e-commerce giant committed an unfair labor practice by firing Bryson. She issued a cease-and-desist order directing the Seattle-based company to not retaliate against employees involved in workplace activism.
But Gujarati denied the agency’s request to reinstate Bryson. She determined that the NLRB did not present evidence that Bryson’s termination is having considerable effect on organizing efforts by employees or the Amazon Labor Union, the nascent group in connection to Bryson that ultimately pulled off the first-ever labor win at an Amazon warehouse in the U.S. in March.
In her ruling, Gujarati also noted Bryson was fired before the union was formed, which makes it different from other cases where a slowdown of organizing support was shown after the firing of a union activist.
Bryson was fired in April 2020, weeks after participating in a protest over working conditions during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. While off the job during a second protest, he got into a dispute with another employee. Amazon did its own investigation into the dispute and cited a violation of the company’s vulgar-language policy for terminating Bryson. The company denies the firing was connected to organizing activities.
Shortly after Bryson was fired, he filed a complaint with the NLRB. An administrative law judge concluded earlier this year the company pursued a “skewed investigation” into the dispute designed to blame Bryson. Amazon has said it would appeal that ruling in the NLRB’s own administrative process. Friday’s court ruling came from a separate federal case filed by the agency, which doesn’t have enforcement powers.
On Friday, Gujarati ordered Amazon to post English and Spanish copies of the court order at the Staten Island facility that voted to unionize. She also ordered the company distribute electronic copies to employees and hold a mandatory meeting where the order can be read aloud.
