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  • ‘Race neutral’ replaces affirmative action. What’s next? | CNN Politics

    ‘Race neutral’ replaces affirmative action. What’s next? | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    When the Supreme Court cut affirmative action out of college admissions programs Thursday, it did not outlaw the goal of achieving diversity, but it set a new “race-neutral” standard for considering applicants.

    That term – “race neutral” – does not appear in the opinion of the court, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, which states that colleges and universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin.”

    But when Roberts clarifies that students can still refer to their race in admissions essays, explaining challenges they’ve overcome, he and the majority are buying into the idea of race neutrality.

    Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote his own concurring opinion, uses the term “race neutral” repeatedly, offering it as an antidote to affirmative action.

    Pointing to efforts in California and Michigan to enroll diverse classes at top universities even after voters in those states ended affirmative action, Thomas says race-neutral policies can “achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without any of the burdens and strife generated by affirmative action policies.”

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor shot back at Thomas and the majority, rejecting the term.

    “The majority’s vision of race neutrality will entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as it is ignored,” she wrote.

    For more on this view, read this piece in The Atlantic by scholars Uma Jayakumar and Ibram Kendi: “‘Race Neutral’ Is the New ‘Separate but Equal.’”

    If the experience of California and Michigan – where voters ended affirmative action programs years ago – is any indication, we can expect that the representation of Black and Latino students at top-level universities will fall.

    Those states argued in briefings to the court that their race-neutral efforts have not been completely successful, particularly at top-tier, flagship public schools, in creating environments that are inclusive for all.

    California has, according to its brief, tried race-neutral measures that “run the gamut from outreach programs directed at low-income students and students from families with little college experience, to programs designed to increase UC’s geographic reach, to holistic admissions policies.”

    While it has made strides, it says, there is a shortfall “especially apparent at UC’s most selective campuses, where African American, Native American, and Latinx students are underrepresented and widely report struggling with feelings of racial isolation.”

    In California, half of the college-age population – 18-24 – is Latino, according to data from the Public Policy Institute of California. Compare that with just 27% of enrollees for 2022 at the University of California’s nine undergraduate campuses who the UC system categorizes as Hispanic/Latinx.

    On the other hand, less than 13% of the college-age population is Asian, compared with 38% of UC enrollees.

    A little more than quarter of college-age Californians are White, compared with 18% of UC enrollees.

    Five percent of UC enrollees are African American, which is about on par with the 5.6% of college-age Californians who are Black.

    The figures change in comparison with the system overall at UC Berkeley, the system’s flagship undergraduate campus, where a smaller portion of entrants in 2022 were categorized as African American / Black (3.6%) and Chicanx / Latinx (21.1%), and more were White (30.7%) and Asian (52.1%).

    It’s also interesting to note that the Supreme Court exempted military academies from the decision. They can, presumably, still utilize affirmative action even though they are the higher learning institutions over which the federal government has the most control. The court, according to the majority opinion, feels the academies have “potentially distinct interests.”

    Those interests were perhaps outlined by former military leaders who wrote a brief last year arguing affirmative action aided national security.

    Meanwhile, even though race is off the table as a determinative factor, schools like Harvard University can and still will very much take into account whether an applicant’s parents went there, how much their parents might be able to donate and whether an applicant can help their sports teams.

    “While the actual language of the Supreme Court will come across as very intellectualized and esoteric, as if in a classroom, in reality, how will this work?” wondered Laura Coates, CNN’s chief legal analyst, appearing on the network Thursday.

    “How will you be able to have certain color blindedness but then at the same time allowed to take into account one’s experiences when race has been a part of that? That’s the devil in the details of every affirmative action case.”

    CNN’s Nicquel Terry Ellis wrote about what the data suggests will happen:

    A study by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that colleges and universities are less likely to meet or exceed their current levels of racial diversity in the absence of race-conscious admissions. They are also less likely to reflect the racial makeup of the population graduating from the nation’s high schools.

    Zack Mabel, a researcher for Georgetown’s Center for Education and the Workforce, told her race-neutral practices have not driven the diversity many colleges hoped for, and some students are simply not applying. Read more from Terry Ellis.

    Creating a more equitable and representative workforce has been a public aim in corporate America, where companies have created diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, departments. Multiple corporations – from Apple to IKEA – asked the Supreme Court to allow affirmative action to continue so that their potential workforce is more diverse.

    But efforts to recruit students of color in the race-neutral, post-affirmative-action world will be complicated in states where there is a growing backlash to diversity efforts.

    CNN’s Leah Asmelash recently wrote:

    More than a dozen state legislatures have introduced or passed bills reining in DEI programs in colleges and universities, claiming the offices eat up valuable financial resources with little impact.

    “The ruling by the Court’s six Republican-appointed justices prevents higher-education institutions from considering race in admissions precisely as kids of color, for the first time, comprise a majority of the nation’s high-school graduates,” writes Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior political analyst for CNN.

    He suggests the decision will “widen the mismatch between a youth population that is rapidly diversifying and a student body that is likely to remain preponderantly white in the elite colleges and universities that serve as the pipeline for leadership in the public and private sectors.”

    Rather than ease social tension, he argues, the new race-neutral requirement could actually propel it.

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  • ‘I blame one person,’ mother of teen killed by police says as hundreds arrested in fresh violence across France | CNN

    ‘I blame one person,’ mother of teen killed by police says as hundreds arrested in fresh violence across France | CNN

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    Nanterre, France
    CNN
     — 

    The mother of a 17-year-old killed by French police said she blames only the officer who shot her son for his death, a tragedy that has sparked three consecutive nights of destructive unrest and revived a heated debate about discrimination and policing in low-income, multi-ethnic communities.

    The boy, Nahel, was shot dead during a traffic stop Tuesday morning in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Footage of the incident filmed by a bystander showed two officers standing on the driver’s side of the car, one of whom fired his gun at the driver despite not appearing to be in any immediate danger.

    The officer said he fired his gun out of fear that the boy would run someone over with the car, according to Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache.

    “I don’t blame the police, I blame one person, the one who took my son’s life,” Nahel’s mother, Mounia, told television station France 5 in an on-camera interview.

    Prache said that it is believed the officer acted illegally in using his weapon. He is currently facing a formal investigation for voluntary homicide and has been placed in preliminary detention.

    Despite calls from top officials for patience to allow time for the justice system to run its course, a sizable number of people across France remain shocked and angry, especially young men and women of color who have been victims of discrimination by police.

    That anger has, for three nights in a row, given way to violent protests across the nation.

    Ahead of another expected night of unrest, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said 45,000 policemen would deploy across France on Friday, and that he is also mobilizing more special units, armored vehicles and helicopters.

    Some 917 people were detained following overnight violence on Thursday, including 13 children, Darmanin told French TV channel TF1.

    The death of the young man “cannot justify the disorder and the delinquency,” the minister added.

    Fires were set in the Paris suburb of Montreuil early Friday morning.

    Confrontations flared between protesters and police in Nanterre on Thursday, where a bank was set on fire and graffiti saying “vengeance pour Nael” (using an alternative spelling of his name) was spray painted on a wall nearby.

    Overseas French territories have also witnessed protests. A man was killed by a “stray bullet” in Cayenne, capital of French Guiana, during riots on Thursday.

    Scars from three days of protests were clear in the suburb on Friday, as was the acrid smell left behind by burning detritus, which was being removed. Streets remained charred where burning cars used to be, with patches of graffiti calling on justice for Nahel and insulting the police. Near the site of a pitched battle with police, a smattering of dug-up bricks, tear gas canisters, rubber bullets and metal barriers remain splayed about.

    Across the country, 200 government buildings were vandalized on Thursday night, according to the French Interior Ministry.

    All “large-scale events” in France have been banned as of Friday afternoon, and bus and tram services across faced a nationwide shutdown ordered for 9 p.m. on Friday evening.

    In Britain, authorities issued a travel warning due to “violent” riots targeting “shops, public buildings and parked cars.” They also cautioned disruptions to road travel, local transportation and the implementation of curfews.

    The German government expressed “concern” over the nationwide protests in France, adding there was no indication that Macron would cancel an upcoming state visit to Berlin.

    The violence has prompted President Emmanuel Macron to hold a crisis meeting the second day in a row, BFMTV reported, as his government tries to avoid a repeat of 2005. The deaths of two teenage boys hiding from police that year sparked three weeks of rioting and prompted the government to call a state of emergency.

    He had returned from a European Council summit on Thursday in Brussels to convene the crisis meeting.

    The French president called for calm and asked parents to take responsibility for their children amid the unrest. He said the situation is “unacceptable” and “unjustifiable, especially when the violence is targeting public building.”

    A third of the almost 900 people detained overnight are young, Macron told reporters at the Interior Ministry. Authorities will be investigating the role of social media in inciting the riots, and there will be further “measures” announced in the coming hours, he added.

    Continued unrest would be a major blow to the government’s agenda. Macron and his ministers have spent much of the year dealing with the fallout of pushing through extremely unpopular pension reforms that were divisive enough that the government felt it necessary to launch a 100-day plan to heal and unite the country.

    That deadline is up on July 14, France’s national day.

    Macron attended an Elton John concert in Paris on Wednesday, even as the demonstrations boiled over.

    Elton John’s husband, David Furnish posted a picture on Instagram on Thursday of himself and Elton John smiling backstage with the French president and his wife, Brigitte Macron after the show at the Accor Arena.

    If Macron’s government is to address allegations of institutional racism in response to Nahel’s death, it will be a tough balancing act.

    The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called on France to address “deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement’ on Friday, a statement the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs described as “totally unfounded.”

    The ministry described law enforcement in France as subject to various levels of “judicial control that few countries have.

    “France, and its police forces, fight with determination against racism and all forms of discrimination. There can be no doubt about this commitment,” the ministry added. “The use of force by the national police and gendarmerie is governed by the principles of absolute necessity and proportionality, strictly framed and controlled.”

    Race and discrimination are always tricky political issues, but in France they are particularly challenging due to the country’s unique brand of secularism, which seeks to ensure equality for all by removing markers of difference, rendering all citizens French first.

    In practice, however, that vigorous adherence to French Republicanism often prevents the government from doing anything that would appear to differentiate French citizens on the basis of race, including collecting statistics.

    Mounia, like other activists, believes her son’s race was a factor in his killing. French media have reported that Nahel was of Algerian descent, and the country’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday issued a statement extending its condolences to Nahel’s family.

    “He saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life,” she said, referring to the police officer who fired their weapon.

    “Killing youngsters like this, how long is this going to last?” she added. “How many mothers are going to be like me? What are they waiting for?”

    While the government’s approach has so far been cautious, left-wing politicians and some activists have called for police reform, including abolishing a 2017 law that allowed police greater leeway in when they can use firearms.

    Laurent-Franck Lienard, the lawyer of the officer accused of shooting Nahel, told French radio station RTL that his client acted in “compliance of the law.” He claimed his client’s prosecution was “political” and being used as a way to calm the violent tensions.

    He added that his client was “devastated” by Nahel’s death and he did not want to kill him.

    “He committed an act in a second, in a fraction of a second. Perhaps he made a mistake, justice will tell,” Lienard said.

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  • Facebook urged to suspend strongman leader over video threatening violence | CNN Business

    Facebook urged to suspend strongman leader over video threatening violence | CNN Business

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    The oversight board for Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms on Thursday said Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen should be suspended from the social media site for six months for posting a video violating rules against violent threats.

    The board, which is funded by Meta but operates independently, said the company had been wrong not to remove the video after it was published in January.

    Meta, in a written statement, agreed to take down the video but said it would respond to the board’s recommendation to suspend Hun Sen after a review.

    Any suspension would silence the prime minister’s Facebook page less than a month before an election in Cambodia. Opposition and rights groups have said the poll will be a sham – accusations dismissed by the government.

    Hun Sen’s Facebook account appeared to go offline late on Thursday. The prime minister – one of the world’s longest-serving leaders after nearly four decades in power – had said on Wednesday that he was switching from Facebook to the messaging app Telegram to reach more people, without mentioning the video.

    A Meta spokesperson said the company had not suspended or removed his account.

    There was no immediate government comment on the case on Thursday.

    The decision is the latest in a series of rebukes by the oversight board over how the world’s biggest social media company handles contentious statements by political leaders and posts calling for violence around elections.

    The company’s election integrity efforts are in focus as the United States prepares for presidential elections next year.

    The board endorsed Meta’s 2021 banishment of former US President Donald Trump – the current frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – after the deadly January 6 Capitol Hill riot, but criticized the indefinite nature of his suspension and urged more careful preparation for volatile political situations overall.

    Meta reinstated the former US president’s account earlier this year.

    The Cambodia case came after several users reported a January video where Hun Sen said those who accused his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) of buying votes in a 2022 local election should file a legal case, or face a beating from CPP’s supporters.

    Meta determined at the time that the video fell afoul of its rules, but opted to leave it up under a “newsworthiness” exemption, reasoning that the public had an interest in hearing warnings of violence by their government, the ruling said.

    The board held that the video’s harms outweighed its news value.

    Cambodia’s government has denied targeting the opposition and says those subject to legal action are law breakers.

    Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said Hun Sen had finally been called out for inciting violence.

    “This kind of face-off between Big Tech and a dictator over human rights issues is long overdue,” he said in a statement.

    Last week, the board said Meta’s handling of calls for violence after the 2022 Brazilian election continued to raise concerns about the effectiveness of its election efforts.

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  • Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson criticize each other in unusually sharp language in affirmative action case | CNN Politics

    Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson criticize each other in unusually sharp language in affirmative action case | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling Thursday on affirmative action pitted its two Black justices against each other, with the ideologically opposed jurists employing unusually sharp language attacking each other by name.

    The majority opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts said colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission, saying programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause because they failed to offer “measurable” objectives to justify the use of race.

    Justice Clarence Thomas and the court’s other four conservatives joined Roberts’ opinion. But Thomas, who in 1991 became the second Black person to ascend to the nation’s highest court, issued a lengthy concurrence that attacked such admissions programs and tore into arguments posited by liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to join the court, who penned her own fiery dissent in the case.

    Thomas has previously acknowledged that he made it to Yale Law School because of affirmative action, but he has long criticized such policies. He spoke in personal terms in his concurrence as he put forth his argument against the use of the policies, which he described as “rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.”

    “Even in the segregated South where I grew up, individuals were not the sum of their skin color,” Thomas wrote.

    “While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination,” he added, “I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.”

    As he read his concurrence from the bench on Thursday, Jackson, who joined the court last year, stared blankly ahead. Though Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench, Jackson did not read her own dissent, in which she went after Thomas’ concurrence and accused the majority of having a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” in how the ruling announced “‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”

    A footnote near the end of Jackson’s dissent went after the concurrence by Thomas, with the liberal justice accusing her colleague of demonstrating “an obsession with race consciousness that far outstrips my or UNC’s holistic understanding that race can be a factor that affects applicants’ unique life experiences.”

    “Justice Thomas ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here,” Jackson wrote. “The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room – the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential.”

    In her broader dissent, Jackson said that the argument made by the challengers that affirmative action programs are unfair “blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count.”

    “But the response is simple: Our country has never been colorblind,” Jackson said.

    (While Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case, she did hear the UNC case, and her dissent was focused on the latter.)

    Thomas then explicitly attacks Jackson’s opinion.

    “As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today,” Thomas wrote.

    “Worse still, Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims,” Thomas wrote at another point in his concurrence. “Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me.”

    ‘You don’t have to be perfect’: Watch Judge Jackson’s emotional message to her girls

    Thomas, one of the court’s most conservative members, has long been known for his distaste for affirmative action policies. He has been open about the fact that he made it to Yale because of affirmative action, but says the stigma of preferential treatment made it difficult for him to find a job after college.

    In his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” Thomas says he felt “tricked” by paternalistic Whites at Yale who recruited Black students.

    “After graduating from Yale, I met a black alumnus of the University of Michigan Law School who told me that he’d made a point of not mentioning his race on his application. I wished with all my heart that I’d done the same,” he wrote.

    “I learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for White graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it,” Thomas wrote. “As a symbol of my disillusionment, I peeled a fifteen-cent price sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it one the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I’d made by going to Yale.”

    He dissented in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, which allowed for the limited use of race in college admissions.

    “I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators,” he wrote in his dissent.

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  • Biden administration announces more than $3 billion in funding to tackle homelessness with veterans focus | CNN Politics

    Biden administration announces more than $3 billion in funding to tackle homelessness with veterans focus | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Biden administration announced new actions Thursday to help prevent and reduce veteran homelessness across the country, including $3.1 billion in funding to support efforts to quickly rehouse homeless Americans.

    “These funds can be used for a wide range of critical interventions from rental assistance to supportive services to technology and data sharing,” said White House domestic policy adviser Neera Tanden, referring to the funding that will be made available through the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Continuum of Care program.

    Additional actions being announced Thursday, according to a White House fact sheet, include: $11.5 million in funding for legal services for veterans experiencing homelessness; $58 million worth of funding to help homeless veterans find jobs; and a new series of “boot camps” by HUD and Veterans Affairs to help VA medical centers and public housing agencies more quickly rehouse veterans. The more than $3 billion in funding being announced by HUD is not specifically earmarked for veterans, although it will also go toward helping veterans struggling with homelessness, according to senior administration officials.

    “We like to say here that the phrase, homeless veteran, should not exist in the English language. Ending veteran homelessness has been and continues to be a top priority of the president and his relentless advocacy for that goal has led to very important investments and advancements, including robust funding,” said Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough, who added that the VA is currently on track to meet its goal of rehousing 38,000 veterans in 2023.

    The VA put 40,401 homeless veterans into permanent housing last year with 2,443 of them returning to homelessness at some point that same year, according to the VA.

    While Thursday’s actions focus on the issue of homelessness for veterans, administration officials hope that progress made in rehousing former service members will help improve efforts to tackle the issue for all Americans experiencing homelessness.

    “Homelessness is a challenge we face as a nation. But most importantly, it is a solvable one,” Tanden told reporters, adding: “There are so many lessons there, that can help us tackle this problem for all Americans.”

    The $58 million in grant funding comes from the Department of Labor Veterans’ Employment and Training Service and will help veterans learn occupational skills, participate in on-the-job training or apprenticeships and provide other support services to reintegrate into the workforce.

    The $11.5 million in legal services grants is a “first-of-its-kind,” according to the White House, and will help veterans obtain representation in landlord-tenant disputes, as well as assist with other court proceedings like child support, custody or estate planning.

    “Legal support can be the difference between becoming homeless in the first instance, or having a safe stable house and a roof over their heads,” McDonough said.

    President Joe Biden has made it a goal of his administration to reduce homelessness by 25% for all Americans by 2025, calling on the country in his State of the Union address this year to do more, including “helping veterans afford their rent because no one should be homeless in this country, especially not those who served it.”

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  • Prosecutors will seek death penalty for Bryan Kohberger in Idaho student murders case | CNN

    Prosecutors will seek death penalty for Bryan Kohberger in Idaho student murders case | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Latah County, Idaho, prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Bryan Kohberger, who is accused of killing four University of Idaho students at an off-campus home in the city of Moscow last fall, according to a court document filed Monday.

    The filing says that the state “has not identified or been provided with any mitigating circumstances” to stop it from considering the death penalty.

    “Consequently, considering all evidence currently known to the State, the State is compelled to file this notice of intent to seek the death penalty,” the filing states.

    It will continue to “review additional information as it is received” and reserves the right to amend or withdraw the notice, according to the filing.

    CNN has reached out to Kohberger’s attorneys for comment.

    Kohberger faces four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary in the November 13 killings of students Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20, at a home just outside the university’s main campus in Moscow. A not guilty plea was entered on his behalf by an Idaho judge at a hearing in May.

    The case captured the nation’s attention and left the community living in fear before Kohberger’s arrest.

    The criminal justice student was arrested at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania almost seven weeks after the killings.

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  • Victims’ families, united in grief, face 2 paths to justice as Pittsburgh synagogue shooting death penalty trial moves to next phase | CNN

    Victims’ families, united in grief, face 2 paths to justice as Pittsburgh synagogue shooting death penalty trial moves to next phase | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Federal jurors in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial will soon decide whether to sentence the convicted gunman to death or life in prison – two potential avenues for justice that in the years since the deadliest antisemitic attack in US history have found varying levels of support in an otherwise unified community.

    As expected, shooter Robert Bowers was found guilty this month of all 63 counts he faced stemming from the Sabbath morning massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue that left 11 worshipers dead as three congregations gathered to pray. Eleven counts of obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death and 11 counts of use and discharge of a firearm to commit murder during a crime of violence were capital counts, making Bowers eligible for the death penalty.

    The 50-year-old shooter’s attorneys never contested he committed the 2018 attack, and the case’s main focus is the issue now at hand: whether he is sentenced to death – still an option amid a federal moratorium on carrying out executions – or life in prison without the possibility of parole. For a death sentence to be handed down, the jury must be unanimous.

    But even in a community united – not only its grief but in its hope justice will be done – unanimity around the death penalty is elusive: In the years since the massacre, the victims’ families and congregations have expressed differing views about whether the shooter should be put to death. Some are convinced so egregious an attack warrants capital punishment, while others fear a death sentence could retraumatize their community or a life sentence would better honor the victims, they’ve said.

    The divergence reflects a broader national split on capital punishment. Recent high-profile cases, too, have shown juries don’t always send mass killers to death row, with the gunman who killed 17 people at a Parkland, Florida, high school and the terrorist who killed eight on a New York City bike path sentenced to life in prison after their juries declined to unanimously opt for death.

    Most of the families of those killed at the Pittsburgh synagogue want the shooter sentenced to die, according to a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle published in November and signed by seven of the nine families whose relatives were murdered.

    “We are not a ruthless, uncompassionate people; we, as a persecuted people, understand when there is a time for compassion and when there is a time to stand up and say enough is enough – such violent hatred will not be tolerated on this earth,” reads the letter written to counter unspecified opinion pieces opposing the US Justice Department’s decision to seek a death sentence.

    “Please don’t tell us how we should feel, what is best for us, what will comfort us and what will bring closure for the victims’ families. You can not and will not speak for us,” it reads. “The massacre of our loved ones was a clear violation of American law – mass murder of Jews for simply being Jewish and practicing Judaism, driven by sheer antisemitism – which the law rightfully deems is a capital offense.”

    Others have offered a different view. The targeted Dor Hadash Congregation previously voiced its opposition to the death penalty in this case, as did the rabbi of New Light Congregation, who narrowly escaped the shooting in which his faith community lost three worshipers. CNN reached out to Rabbi Jonathan Perlman for comment on his prior position.

    “I would like the Pittsburgh killer to be incarcerated for the rest of his life without parole,” Perlman wrote in an August 2019 letter to then-Attorney General William Barr before the decision to seek a death sentence was made. “He should meditate on whether taking action on some white separatist fantasy against the Jewish people was really worth it. Let him live with it forever.”

    Perlman’s focus, he wrote, was “not letting this thug cause my community any further pain.”

    “We are still attending to our wounds, both physical and emotional, and I don’t want to see them reopened any more. Many of us are healing but many of us (have) been re-traumatized multiple times,” Perlman said. “A drawn out and difficult death penalty trial would be a disaster with witnesses and attorneys dredging up horrifying drama and giving this killer the media attention he does not deserve.”

    While the Torah “unambiguously” allows for capital punishment, rabbis in the first and second centuries were hesitant to support its implementation, said David Kraemer, professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

    They feared the flaws of a human court system out of concern innocents could be inadvertently punished, he told CNN. Those rabbis believed it best to err on the side of letting a guilty person go free in part because they believed the guilty would receive an appropriate punishment after death.

    “I think the reason they were comfortable with that is because they believed that there was a divine court,” Kraemer said, “that would correct the error that the human court may have made.”

    The Justice Department under Barr, an appointee of Republican President Donald Trump, initially chose to try the Pittsburgh shooting as a capital case, even as the US government at that time had not executed a federal death row inmate in almost 20 years. That changed in the Trump administration’s waning days, when 13 federal inmates were put to death over six months ending in January 2021.

    The Dor Hadash Congregation lamented the Barr-era decision, writing afterward in late August 2019 it was “saddened and disappointed” the agency chose to push forward with a capital case, despite a letter the congregation said it had sent that same month asking both sides to agree to a plea deal giving the gunman life in prison without parole.

    “A deal would have honored the memory of Dor Hadash congregant Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, who was firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty,” its statement read. “It would have prevented the attacker from getting the attention and publicity that will inevitably come with a trial, and eliminated any possibility of further trauma that could result from a trial and protracted appeals.”

    The congregation did not feel commenting on the death penalty was appropriate now that the trial has moved on from the guilt phase, its spokesperson told CNN. “We remain very grateful to the Department of Justice and the US Attorney’s office for their work in this matter over the course of the past 4 1/2 years,” Pamina Ewing of Dor Hadash said.

    Then in July 2021 – a day after he issued a moratorium on federal executions – Democratic President Joe Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland was sent a letter from seven of the nine families of those slain in the Pittsburgh synagogue attack, urging him to continue to pursue a death sentence in the case, according to Diane and Michele Rosenthal, the sisters of victims David and Cecil Rosenthal.

    The letter said the “vast majority of the immediate victim-family members” had not wavered in their desire for the death penalty. “As such, we respectfully beseech you to uphold the prior DOJ decision on the death-penalty qualification of this Capital Murder case and permit it to proceed as originally decided.”

    The letter aimed to “reflect … our support in seeking the death penalty in this particular tragedy,” the sisters told reporters in April, weeks before the trial began. They spoke only for their own family, they said, adding the other signatories had agreed to let them share the letter.

    Ellen Surloff, left, vice president of Congregation Dor Hadash, and Jo Recht, president of the congregation, speak on June 16 after the gunman was found guilty.

    The Justice Department under Garland is prosecuting the case, making it the second federal death penalty trial in the era of Biden, who’d campaigned on a promise to abolish the punishment at the federal level but has taken few substantive steps toward doing so.

    Since his appointment two years ago, Garland has not authorized the department to seek the death penalty in any new cases, a Justice Department spokesman said, and he continues to assess new requests for authorization to seek or withdraw the death penalty on a case-by-case basis, consistent with federal law and the Justice Manual.

    Americans overall remain divided nearly down the middle on the death penalty, as they have been for years following precipitous drops in support for it over recent decades. About 55% of Americans say they are in favor of the death penalty for convicted murderers, a split that’s been relatively unchanged for at least six consecutive years, polling from Gallup shows.

    And like in Pittsburgh – where community members have supported each other before the trial and during it – victims of violent crime and their families are no monolith. While some express opposition to capital punishment, others look to it for some semblance of closure or justice.

    The Pittsburgh synagogue “massacre was not just a mass murder of innocent citizens during the service in a house of worship. It was an antisemitic hate crime,” Diane Rosenthal said in April. “The death penalty must apply to vindicate justice and to offer some measure of deterrence from horrific hate crimes happening again and again.”

    “We don’t want to be here,” she said, “and we know the emotional toll this trial potentially brings. But we owe it to our brothers, Cecil and David.”

    Added Michele Rosenthal: “The suggestions published or reported that family members be relieved of the stress of a trial or that a cost-benefit analysis dictates a plea are offensive to our family,” she said. “Our family has suffered long and hard over the last four and a half years. … We don’t want to have to continue to defend ourselves and our position.

    “We want justice.”

    Beyond the families, many simply are bracing for the Pittsburgh synagogue trial’s penalty phase and how it may impact those touched by the wider ripples of the attack. After the gunman’s conviction, the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh opted to “take no position on what justice is,” its president and CEO told reporters.

    “We trust the justice process,” Brian Schreiber said.

    Whatever comes of the penalty phase, it will be “gut wrenching,” and “reopen wounds,” said Jeff Finkelstein, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh.

    “They keep getting reopened for us here in our Pittsburgh community,” he said, “not just the Jewish community but this greater Pittsburgh region.”

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  • Prince William believes you can have zero homelessness and he’s using Finland as a case study | CNN

    Prince William believes you can have zero homelessness and he’s using Finland as a case study | CNN

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    Prince William believes you can have zero homelessness and he’s using Finland as a case study.

    The Prince of Wales is launching a five-year, locally led plan in six flagship locations around the UK that will demonstrate it is possible to end homelessness, Kensington Palace announced on Monday.

    The program, “Homewards,” will bring together “an unprecedented network of organisations and individuals,” tapping into their collective expertise to “create and deliver a tailored plan to prevent homelessness in their areas,” the palace said.

    It will provide up to £500,000 ($637,000) of flexible seed funding in each of the six locations – which will be announced later this week – to support projects, and findings from the program will be used to create a model that can be used elsewhere across the UK and internationally.

    “In a modern and progressive society, everyone should have a safe and secure home, be treated with dignity and given the support they need,” the Prince of Wales said in a statement Monday, marking the launch of his first big initiative as heir to the throne.

    “Through Homewards, I want to make this a reality and over the next five years, give people across the UK hope that homelessness can be prevented when we collaborate.”

    The project draws inspiration from Finland’s “Housing First” policy which unconditionally offers rental homes with contracts to people experiencing homelessness, as well as support if needed and wanted.

    Finland’s successful homelessness policy “has been the leading example for a number of years,” Matt Downie, CEO of homeless charity Crisis told reporters. Its collaborative approach and “the whole of society committing for the long term” is key to its success, added a spokesperson for the Royal Foundation, the charity established by the Prince and Princess of Wales.

    Similarly, William said in an interview with British newspaper The Sunday Times last week that he hopes to bring “all the wonderful people and pieces together of the puzzle.”

    “And from that, we can then get other councils in other parts of the country to copy,” he added. “It’s about that momentum. So you go, ‘Right, we can fix this and we will fix this.’”

    William was careful to stress that he wasn’t trying to interfere with government policy, saying that his plan “is an additive to what is already being done.”

    His initiative will also focus on reframing the issue and improving understanding among the general public.

    More than 300,000 people in the UK are affected by homelessness, research from the Royal Foundation found, though the number is likely to be larger given the number of people sofa surfing, living in cars, or staying in hostels or other types of temporary accommodation.

    Over the next two days, William will travel to each of the six locations to formally kickstart the program.

    William has long used his platform to spotlight homelessness, ever since his mother, Princess Diana, first took him to homeless shelters as a child.

    “I was 11 when I first visited a homeless shelter with my mother, who in her own inimitable style was determined to shine a light on an overlooked, misunderstood problem,” he wrote in a piece last year published in The Big Issue, a magazine which offers employment opportunities to people in poverty.

    He took up Princess Diana’s patronage of the homelessness charity Centrepoint in 2005, spent a night sleeping rough in temperatures that reached -4 degrees Celsius (24.8 degrees Fahrenheit) four years later, and spent two days volunteering with Centrepoint, helping young people directly with its accommodation services.

    Last year, William attempted to go undercover on the streets of London and sell The Big Issue to “experience the other side and see what it was like to be a Big Issue vendor,” he wrote in the magazine afterwards.

    Sign up for CNN’s Royal News, a weekly dispatch bringing you the inside track on the royal family, what they are up to in public and what’s happening behind palace walls.

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  • Klobuchar says she supports allowing abortion restrictions in late pregnancy | CNN Politics

    Klobuchar says she supports allowing abortion restrictions in late pregnancy | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar said Sunday she would support allowing limitations on abortion in the third trimester of pregnancy, breaking with many Democrats in Congress who have been hesitant to offer specifics on abortion limitations.

    “I support allowing for limitations in the third trimester that do not interfere with the life or health of the women,” Klobuchar told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” Sunday.

    The third trimester in a pregnancy begins at 27 weeks. Less than 1% of abortions are performed at 21 weeks or later, according to a 2020 report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Abortion has become an especially potent political topic in the year since the monumental US Supreme Court decision one year ago to overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate the federal constitutional right to abortion nationwide. More than a dozen US states have banned or severely restricted access to the procedure since the ruling.

    “What I support – and I will be very clear about this – is Roe v. Wade, which does allow for limitations, but it also protects the life of the woman and the health of the woman,” Klobuchar said Sunday.

    “I think that is the best way to go. But you look at what they are doing, their leading Republican candidates, Dana, are asking for abortion bans. Trump was on just last night gloating about how he had put these Supreme Court justices in place that had reversed Roe v. Wade.”

    Klobuchar has long articulated the need for some restrictions on late-term abortions, telling Bloomberg in 2019 “there are limits there in the third trimester that are very important – about – except for the health of the woman.”

    In the 2022 midterms, abortion was a crucial motivator for many voters, as CNN exit polls showed that 46% of people said that abortion was the most important issue to their vote. Abortion is also likely to be a cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, as administration officials highlight what Democrats have done to protect access to abortion.

    “MAGA Republicans made clear that they don’t intend to stop with the Dobbs decision. No, they won’t, until they get a national ban on abortion,” Biden said this week, promising to issue a veto if a national ban is ever passed by Congress.

    This headline and story have been updated.

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  • In country with world’s lowest fertility rate, doubts creep in about wisdom of ‘no-kids zones’ | CNN

    In country with world’s lowest fertility rate, doubts creep in about wisdom of ‘no-kids zones’ | CNN

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    Seoul
    CNN
     — 

    For a country with the world’s lowest fertility rate – one that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to encourage women to have more babies – the idea of barring children from places like cafes and restaurants might seem a little counterproductive.

    But in South Korea, “no-kids zones” have become remarkably popular in recent years. Hundreds have sprung up across the country, aimed largely at ensuring disturbance-free environments for the grown-ups.

    There are nearly 80 such zones on the holiday island of Jeju alone, according to a local think tank, and more than four hundred in the rest of the country, according to activist groups.

    Doubts, though, are beginning to creep in about the wisdom of restricting children from so many places, fueled by concerns over the country’s growing demographic problems.

    In addition to the world’s lowest birthrate, South Korea has one of the world’s fastest aging populations. That has left it with a problem familiar to graying nations across the world, namely: how to fund the pension and health care needs of a growing pool of retirees on the tax income generated by a slowly vanishing pool of workers.

    And South Korea’s problem is more acute than most.

    Last year, its fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.78 – not even half the 2.1 needed for a stable population and far below even that of Japan (1.3), currently the world’s grayest nation. (And even further below the United States, which at 1.6 faces aging problems of its own).

    With young South Koreans already facing pressure on multiple fronts – from sky-high real estate costs and long working weeks to rising economic anxiety – critics of the zones say the last thing the country needs is yet one more thing to make them think twice about starting a family.

    The government, they point out, should know this better than anyone. After all, it’s spent more than $200 billion over the past 16 years trying to encourage more people to have children. Critics suggest that, rather than throwing more money at the problem, it needs to work on changing society’s attitudes towards the young.

    With polls suggesting a majority of South Koreans support no-kids zones, shifting those mindsets won’t be easy. But there are signs opinions may be shifting.

    In recent weeks, a pushback against the zones has gained momentum thanks to Yong Hye-in, a mother and a lawmaker for the Basic Income Party who, in a show of defiance to mark Children’s Day, took her 2-year-old son to a meeting of the National Assembly – where babies are not usually allowed.

    “Everyday life with children is not easy,” she told the assembled lawmakers in an impassioned speech, during which she was pictured both cuddling her son and letting him wander around the podium. “Our society must be reborn into one where children are included.”

    That speech gained media coverage across the world, but it is not the only sign attitudes may slowly be changing.

    Jeju island – a tourist hotspot off the southern tip of the Korean peninsula – recently debated the country’s first-ever bill aimed at making such zones illegal (though if passed it would apply only to the island).

    The move by its provincial council comes amid growing concerns that the age limits imposed by many guesthouses and campsites on the tourism-dependent island may be damaging its reputation for hospitality.

    As Bonnie Tilland, a university lecturer who specializes in South Korean culture, puts it: “Families with children who travel to Jeju on holiday are disgruntled if they drive to a scenic café only to be told that their children are not allowed.”

    Other critics say the problem goes deeper than lost business opportunities. Some see no-kids zones as an unjustifiable act of age discrimination that runs contrary to the Korean constitution.

    South Korean lawmaker Yong Hye-in with her son on May 4, 2023.

    In 2017, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea judged that no-kids zones violated the right to equality and called for businesses to end the practice in what was the first official statement on the matter by a state institution. It cited clause 11 of the constitution, which bans discrimination on the basis of gender, religion or social status, and pointed to a UN convention stipulating that “No child should be treated unfairly on any basis.”

    The ruling came in response to a petition by a father of three who was turned away from an Italian restaurant on Jeju. But it is not legally binding and critics say the ongoing popularity of no-kids zones highlights how hard it will be to change people’s mindsets.

    South Korea’s embrace of no-kids zones is widely thought to date back to an incident in 2012, in which a restaurant diner carrying hot broth accidentally scalded a child.

    The incident caused a stir online, after the child’s mother made a series of posts on social media attacking the diner.

    Initially, there was much public sympathy for the mother as the case appeared to have parallels to other incidents in which establishments had been forced to pay compensation following accidents involving children.

    But the public’s mood began to change after security camera footage emerged showing the child running around moments beforehand, Tilland said. Many began to blame the mother for not reining in her child’s behavior.

    “Then discussion unfolded over the next few years on social media about the rights and responsibilities of parents and guardians of young children in public spaces and private businesses,” said Tilland, who used to teach at Yonsei University in Seoul but is now with Leiden University in the Netherlands.

    By 2014, she says, no-kids zones had become a familiar sight, “most commonly in cafes but also in some restaurants and other businesses.”

    Over the years, the zones have grown in popularity, with a survey in 2021 by Hankook Research finding that more than 7 in 10 adults were in favor, and fewer than 2 in 10 against (the rest were undecided).

    And it is not only childless adults who back them. In South Korea, so widely acknowledged is the right to some peace and quiet that even many parents see the zones as reasonable and justified.

    “When I’m out with my child, I see a lot of situations that may make me frown,” said Lee Yi-rang, a mother of a two-year-old boy.

    “It’s not difficult to find parents who don’t control their children, causing damage to facilities and other people. That makes me understand why there are no-kids zones,” she said.

    Mother-of-two Lee Ji-eun from Seoul agrees. She thinks it’s a decision best left “to the business owners” – and if a parent “doesn’t like that, then they can seek a kids-allowed zone.”

    Not all parents are so understanding. Kim Se-hee, also from Seoul, said she feels “attacked when I see a blatant no-kids sign like that posted at a shop.”

    “There’s so much hatred against mothers already in Korea with terms like ‘mom-choong’ (‘mother bug,’ a derogatory term for mothers who care only about their children to the disregard of others) and I think no-kids zones validate that kind of negative sentiment toward moms,” she said.

    A man looks at strollers at a baby fair in Seoul, South Korea, in September 2022. South Korea's fertility rate is the lowest in the world.

    Meanwhile, it would be wrong to suggest that it is only the youngest in society who are subject to such “zoning” requirements.

    On Jeju, it’s not unusual to see signs at camping grounds or guest houses stipulating both lower and upper age limits for would-be guests. There are “no-teenager zones” and “no-senior zones”, for example, and even plenty of zones targeting those somewhere in between.

    So numerous have the “no-middle-aged zones” become that they have collectively been dubbed “no-ajae zones,” in reference to a slang term for “uncle.”

    One restaurant in Seoul rose to notoriety after “politely declining” people over 49 (on the basis men of that age might harass female staff), while in 2021, a camping ground in Jeju sparked heated debate with a notice saying it did not accept reservations from people aged 40 or above. Citing a desire to keep noise and alcohol use to a minimum, it stated a preference for women in their 20s and 30s.

    Other zones are even more niche.

    Among those to have caused a stir on social media are a cafe in Seoul that in 2018 declared itself a “no-rapper zone,” a “no-YouTuber zone” and even a “no-professor zone”.

    But most such zones follow a similar logic – that of preventing disturbance to other customers. For instance, no-YouTuber zones became popular in response to a trend known as “mukbang” (based on words for “eating” and “broadcast”) in which some livestreamers would show up at restaurants without prior consent to film themselves eating.

    Tilland says the appeal of such zones is complex, but derives in part from the strong pro-business sentiment in the country. A common mindset is that it is only natural that business owners should have a say on who they accept as clientele, she says.

    As for no-kids zones specifically, she has another theory.

    “Koreans in their 20s and 30s, in particular, tend to have a strong concept of personal space, and are increasingly less tolerant of both noisy children in their midst and noisy older people,” Tilland said.

    But such mindsets need to be re-examined if the country is to get a grip on its population problems, Tilland says, arguing they “reflect a worrying intolerance for anyone existing in public places who is different from oneself.”

    “Deep-rooted attitudes that every category of people belongs in ‘their place’ – and for mothers this is home with children, not out participating in public life – are one of the reasons young women are reluctant to have children,” she said.

    south korea fertility vpx

    See why South Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate

    Lawmaker Yong came to a similar realization after giving birth in 2021.

    She had suffered postpartum depression and stayed at home for the first nearly 100 days of her child’s life. When she finally felt well enough to take her child for a walk the experience was alienating.

    “When we tried to go into a cafe nearby, we were immediately denied entry because it was a no-kids zone,” she recalled in an interview with CNN. “I was helplessly in tears. It felt like society didn’t want people like me.”

    She says many new mothers feel this way, citing a case being investigated by the labor ministry in which a working mother, a computer programmer at a leading tech firm, killed herself and left a suicide note asking, “Is a working mom a sinner?”

    “I am doing politics to create a society where working working moms don’t have to (feel like) a sinner,” Yong said.

    Her ultimate aim is to make childcare the “responsibility of society as a whole, not of individual caregivers and parents,” which she believes is the only way to overcome the population crisis.

    One way she hopes to bring about this change is by pushing for an equality bill that would outlaw discrimination based on age.

    But legislation isn’t the only way, she says. She thinks the government and local authorities can achieve much simply by guiding businesses away from no-kids zones and learning from other countries where families with young children are fast-tracked through queues at public places like museums and zoos.

    There may be other ways to compromise too.

    Barista Ahn Hee-yul says he has faced situations in a cafe he once worked for where parents appeared unable to keep their children from causing a nuisance, yet he appreciates the need to strike a balance between the needs of parents and non-parents.

    “I suggest no-kids times, instead of no-kids zones,” he said, suggesting that venues for instance allow children until 5 p.m., after which it’s adults only.

    “In the end, they’re just kids. It’s the best middle ground I could think of.”

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  • New York governor signs bill to legally protect doctors who prescribe abortion pills for out-of-state patients into law | CNN Politics

    New York governor signs bill to legally protect doctors who prescribe abortion pills for out-of-state patients into law | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill into law Friday that legally protects doctors who prescribe and send abortion pills to patients in states where abortion services are outlawed or restricted.

    “We are witnessing a shameful regression of women’s rights in this country as abortion access is restricted in states across the nation,” Hochul said in a news release, adding that the law will ensure that more women will be able to access reproductive health care.

    The measure – passed by the state legislature Tuesday – will block out-of-state litigation, prohibiting prosecution against doctors in New York who provide telehealth services, prescribe medication abortion, or deliver reproductive health care to patients living in states with restrictive abortion laws.

    Telehealth medication abortions have accounted for an increasing share of total US abortions since last year’s Supreme Court ruling that established there is no constitutional right to abortion, CNN previously reported. Prior to the June 2022 ruling, medication abortions provided by virtual-only providers made up 4% of all abortions in April 2022 and 5% in May 2022, according to data from the Society of Family Planning. However, between June and December 2022, the share of such procedure grew from 6 to 11%. And as of 2020, more than half of US abortions were conducted using medication.

    Assemblymember Karines Reyes, a registered nurse who sponsored the bill, said Tuesday she was “proud to sponsor this critical piece of legislation to fully protect abortion providers using telemedicine.”

    Hochul previously signed legislation aimed at expanding reproductive rights. Last month, the governor signed a bill to ensure that every student at a State University of New York (SUNY) or City University of New York (CUNY) college will be able to access medication abortion, along with another bill that allows pharmacists across the state to dispense contraceptives over the counter.

    The governor’s recent moves demonstrate the changing abortion landscape nationwide. As Democratic-led states aim to expand access, states with Republican majorities have enacted widespread restrictions, including near-total bans.

    Last month, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature overrode a veto by its Democratic governor to ban most abortions after 12 weeks.

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  • Thousands of Americans are leaving homes in flood-risk areas. But where are they moving to? | CNN

    Thousands of Americans are leaving homes in flood-risk areas. But where are they moving to? | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    For more than four decades, the US government has been paying cities and states to move homeowners away from areas that are at high risk of severe flooding.

    When a hurricane or major flooding event devastates an area, a neighborhood can send a request for the local or state government to buy the impacted land and give residents money to start over someplace else.

    The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s buyout program is a form of so-called “managed retreat” – a long process that relocates people, businesses, homes and infrastructure to an area that’s safer from the impacts of climate change-fueled weather events. But until recently, little was known about where people ultimately moved and whether their new location actually reduced their flood risk.

    A new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters — which coincides with a managed retreat conference unfolding in New York City this week — provides a clearer picture of these home buyouts.

    Data from thousands of home buyouts shows people aren’t moving that far from their original homes — and often they are moving within the same floodplain. But overall, their risk of flooding decreased after the move, a nod to the program’s success. Researchers also found that race has played a role in who is moving and where they’re relocating to.

    “As climate change and rising insurance costs increase the pressures to retreat from the coast and flooded areas, we need to pay more attention to where people are going,” James Elliott, a professor of sociology at Rice University and a co-author on the study, told CNN.

    The findings “point to how the program plays out differently in different types of communities and neighborhoods across the country,” he said.

    Using flood risk estimates, housing values, race and income data from the US Census Bureau, and FEMA relocation data between 1990 and 2017, researchers from Rice University built a nationwide database to map out where nearly 10,000 Americans sold their flood-prone homes and where they moved.

    They found people who have taken advantage of the FEMA buyouts typically did not move that far to reduce their risk, and usually stayed within the same floodplain.

    On average, buyout participants reduced their future flood risk by up to 65%, Elliott said. The average driving distance between their former homes and their new ones was around seven miles, with almost 74% of homeowners remaining within 20 miles of their old, flood-damaged homes.

    The findings were also racially segmented, Elliot said. About 96% of homeowners who relocated from a predominantly White neighborhood ended up moving to another majority White community.

    In contrast, residents of predominantly Black and Hispanic communities were far more likely to relocate to a new neighborhood with a different demographic: Only 48 percent of Black homeowners who go through the buyout moved to predominantly Black neighborhoods.

    The study also found that buyout areas with predominantly White homeowners had a nearly 90% chance of flooding by 2050, while majority-Black buyout areas had a roughly 50% chance, suggesting that White residents tend to only participate in buyouts when flood risk is much more intense.

    Though the data suggests that homeowners in White neighborhoods have a higher tolerance for flood risk, 80% of the people who took advantage of the FEMA program previously lived in majority-White neighborhoods. This could be because White communities “are more successful at winning the opportunity and money to participate” in the FEMA program, Elliott said.

    The home buyout program, which is the largest managed-retreat initiative in the country so far, is “disproportionately targeted toward Whiter residential areas,” Elliott said.

    “Communities of color and lower income areas just have fewer options to move nearby, so they are less likely to participate in the managed buyout,” Elliott said. In Houston, he found in a previous study that most of the people participating in buyouts in racially diverse communities tend to be White homeowners.

    “It’s sort of the last wave of White flight in those neighborhoods,” he added. And when “flood risks come, the final White residents begin to pull up stakes through the buyout program and move further out.”

    Alexander de Sherbinin, a senior research scientist at the Columbia Climate School and deputy manager of NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, said it’s not clear from the study that White homeowners are reluctant to move to racially diverse neighborhoods, and noted that there is evidence to the contrary.

    De Sherbinin pointed out that there is a process of “climate gentrification” playing out in areas that have experienced climate disasters, “whereby more affluent households are moving into ethnically diverse neighborhoods that are less at risk of flooding, and are even displacing local residents.”

    He pointed to Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood as an example of this phenomenon, where higher ground helps protect the neighborhood from sea level rise and higher storm surges.

    “The research findings make sense in one regard, which is that whiter, more affluent neighborhoods are more likely to have the insurance coverage and resources to stay in place, despite rising risks,” de Sherbinin told CNN. “In other words, they’re able to rebuild, and possibly accommodate risks by raising their houses above flood lines.”

    As the climate crisis advances, more homeowners and businesses will be forced to relocate, adding stress and vulnerability to new regions. Previous research has shown that climate migration will become more likely as the planet warms and people seek places they consider safer and more stable.

    “We really need to think about how people relocate locally, what the options are, and how the ongoing racial segregation, especially in urban environments, is affecting those local retreats and people’s decisions and abilities not to retreat, because all we see are the people who actually say yes to the program,” Elliott said.

    “That’s the classic thing with climate change — it’s not about ‘if’ people have to move from these places, but ‘when and how’.”

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  • Pride flags vandalized at Stonewall National Monument in New York | CNN

    Pride flags vandalized at Stonewall National Monument in New York | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The New York Police Department is investigating “a criminal mischief pattern” of vandalism against Pride and transgender flags at the Stonewall National Monument during Pride month, it said in a statement.

    The police department said its Hate Crime Task Force is investigating three incidents, which occurred June 10, June 15 and June 20.

    According to police, individual or individuals were seen removing Pride flags that were displayed on the fence of the monument. In two of the incidents, the flags were also broken, the statement said.

    There were no injuries as a result of the alleged crimes, and it’s not clear from the statement released Monday if the same person or people were involved.

    Earlier this month, the NYPD tweeted a photo of individuals it said were “wanted for criminal mischief” in connection to the June 10 incident and asked for public assistance.

    President Barack Obama in 2016 designated the area around the Stonewall Inn, the site of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, as the country’s first national monument to honor the LGBTQ+ community.

    The uprising occurred when a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, turned violent after patrons fought back. The incident led to the first march for gay and lesbian rights.

    The Stonewall National Monument includes Christopher Park, the Stonewall Inn and the surrounding streets and sidewalks where the uprising occurred.

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  • 1 dead, at least 20 hurt in a shooting at a Juneteenth celebration in Willowbrook, Illinois, police say | CNN

    1 dead, at least 20 hurt in a shooting at a Juneteenth celebration in Willowbrook, Illinois, police say | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    At least 20 people were injured and one person has died in a shooting overnight, according to police, in what witnesses say was a Juneteenth celebration turned deadly.

    The shooting took place around 12:30 a.m. in a parking lot in Willowbrook, about 21 miles west of Chicago. Witnesses say people were gathered in the area to celebrate Juneteenth.

    Some of the injured were transported to hospitals by ambulance and others walked in, DuPage County Deputy Sheriff Eric Swanson told reporters Sunday.

    At least 12 ambulances responded to the scene, Ostrander said.

    Ten patients were transported to four hospitals with injuries ranging from graze wounds to more serious gunshot wounds, and two people were in critical condition, Joe Ostrander, battalion chief of the Tri-State Fire Protection District said earlier.

    The motive behind the shooting is unclear and it is still an active investigation, Swanson said.

    It joins a growing list of celebrations interrupted by gunfire, like the graduation ceremony in Virginia, the NBA championship celebration in Colorado and the birthday party in California, all in the last month.

    The incident is now one of 310 mass shootings in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

    After the 2022 shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, less than 40 miles from Willowbrook, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed into law a ban on assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines in the state. The ban faced immediate legal challenges, but the Supreme Court refused an emergency request from gun rights advocates to block the ban in May.

    “This shooting shows that even states with strong gun laws like Illinois are not immune from gun violence due to our incredibly weak federal laws and weak laws in neighboring states.” Kris Brown, president of Brady, the country’s oldest gun violence prevention organization, said in a statement.

    “Unfortunately, because of the gun industry’s influence on our lawmakers, there is no place in America that’s safe from gun violence,” Brown said.

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  • As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery | CNN

    As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry.

    The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not know her exact age, shared stories of uninterrupted woe until she recounted how she and her mother discovered that they had been freed.

    She said her mother, a cook for their former slave owner’s family, liked to hide in the chimney corner to eavesdrop on dinner conversations. One day in 1865, she overheard her owner say that slavery had ended, but he wasn’t going to let his slaves know until they harvested “another crop or two.”

    “When mother heard that she say she slip out the chimney corner and crack her heels together four times and shouts, ‘I’s free, I’s free,’ ” Cummins told the historian, who recorded her story for a New Deal writers’ project that collected the narratives of the formerly enslaved during the Great Depression. “Then she runs to the field, ‘gainst marster’s will and tol’ all the other slaves and they quit work.”

    That story is one of the first recorded memoires of an experience that would inspire the creation of Juneteenth, an annual holiday celebrating the end of slavery that the US will commemorate this Monday. It marks the moment in June of 1865 when Union troops arrived in Texas to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free by executive decree. Many people like Cummins in remote areas of Texas and elsewhere did not know that they were free as their White owners hid the news from them.

    Juneteenth has since become known as “America’s Second Independence Day.” Now a federal holiday, it will be celebrated by parades, proclamations, and ceremonies throughout the US. Though it commemorates a moment when enslaved African Americans were freed, the US is still held captive by several myths about slavery and people like Cummins.

    One of the biggest myths that historians and storytellers have successfully challenged in recent years is that enslaved African Americans were docile, passive victims who had to wait until White abolitionists and “The Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln freed them. Black soldiers, for example, played a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. This new understanding of slavery has led to a rhetorical shift: It’s no longer proper to refer to people like Cummins as simply “slaves.”

    “There’s been a shift in the historical community attempting to not define the period or the people by what was done to them in the sense that their identity becomes a noun, a slave, but rather that they are that they were in the process of being enslaved,” says Tobin Miller Shearer, a historian and director of African American Studies at the University of Montana.

    “There were slavers who did that to them,” he says, “but there’s more to their identity than what was being done to them.”

    Yet other myths about slavery persist, in part, because of the sheer enormity and brutality of slavery.

    “The enslavement of an estimated ten million Africans over a period of almost four centuries in the Atlantic slave trade was a tragedy of such scope that it is difficult to imagine, much less comprehend,” Albert J. Raboteau wrote in “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South.”

    Here are three other myths about slavery that historians say persist:

    There is a popular conception that the formerly enslaved were freed after the Civil War ended. But many had to continually fight for their freedom because so many Whites still tried to keep them in captivity and were willing to use deceit and violence to do so.

    The author Clint Smith described this dynamic in his New York Times bestselling book, “How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with The History of Slavery Across America.” Smith said the Juneteenth jubilation didn’t last for many formerly enslaved people. Former Confederate soldiers still tried to round up Black “runaways” to return them to their owners though that term no longer had any legal merit. And White vigilantes tracked down and punished formerly enslaved people.

    Smith unearthed the narrative of a woman named Susan Merritt of Rusk Country, Texas, who recounted what happened when some people like Cummins in Texas tried to claim their freedom:

    “Lots of Negroes were killed after freedom…bushwhacked, shot down while they were trying to get away,” Merritt said. “You could see lots of Negroes hanging from trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom. They would catch them swimming across Sabine River and shoot them.”

    A sketch of

    And then there was the practice of taking away Black freedom through other means, like convict-leasing programs and a corrupt justice system throughout the South that the historian Douglas A. Blackmon documented in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Slavery By Another Name.”

    The lesson from history: Slavery didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation. Black people still had to literally fight for their freedom long afterward. Smith quotes the historian W. Caleb McDaniel who wrote:

    “Slavery did not end cleanly or on a single day. It ended through a violent, uneven process.”

    Mention slavery and it still evokes images of half-naked Africans stumbling onto the American shores, struggling to learn to read and write in a strange and alien land. The focus of many stories about the formerly enslaved is what was taken from them. But they gave plenty to America in ways that are still not appreciated.

    Captive Africans who came here didn’t need to be civilized. They came to the US as fully formed individuals, not blank canvases, with their own cultures and specialized knowledge, says Leslie Wilson, a historian at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

    The thumbprints of the culture that formerly enslaved people created are now stamped on virtually every facet of American culture, Wilson says. By the Civil War, Black people had already changed American concepts of architecture, burial, music, storytelling and medicine, Wilson says.

    “Much of Southern culture is nothing more than blackness,” Wilson says. “It is the blues and jazz of the 19th century and the rock and roll of the 20th. It is the chicken and grits, the way that people rock in church or the cadence of the pastor.”

    If that sounds like hyperbole, consider how much of Americans’ contemporary landscape is shaped by the legacy of the formerly enslaved:

    • The Statue of Liberty was originally created to commemorate freed enslaved people, not the arrival of immigrants.
    • An enslaved person called Onesimus changed the way Americans treated epidemics, pioneering a technique to prevent the spread of smallpox that he had learned from his native West Africa.
    • Country music owes much of its musical legacy to the influence of the formerly enslaved. The banjo, for example, is a descendant of an instrument that was brought to America by enslaved West Africans and many of the genre’s earliest hits were adapted from slave spirituals.
    • Bugs Bunny cartoons and other stories like Brer Rabbit featuring clever, talking animals were originally inspired by African folktales first told by enslaved people.
    Brer Rabbit chatting with little rabbit children in an illustration for the book,

    Black and White culture is so intertwined that the cultural critic, Albert Murray, declared in his book, “The Omni-Americans,” that “American culture is “incontestably mulatto.” White and Black people in the US “resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

    “The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people,” Murray wrote. “Any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another.”

    In the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, there is a special exhibit of an artifact that is so rare that there are only a handful now in existence. It is what historians call a “Slave Bible.” It is a copy of a Bible that was used by British missionaries to convert enslaved African Americans. Published in 1807, the Bible deletes any passages that may inspire liberation – about 90% of the Old Testament is missing along with half of the New Testament.

    “They literally blacked out, portions of the Bible that had anything to do with freedom, anything to do with equality, anything to do with God delivering folk,” says Leon Harris, a theology professor at Biola University in California.

    There is misconception that Christianity was successfully used to create docile slaves who were conditioned to heed New Testament passages such as “slaves obey your earthly masters.” Malcolm X derided Christianity as a White man’s religion used to brainwash Black people to “shout and sing and pray until we die ‘for some dreamy heaven-in-the-hereafter’” while the White man “has his milk and honey in the streets paved with golden dollars right here on this earth!”

    But historians like Harris say most slaves disdained the type of Christianity that was taught to them. Many instead discovered those missing passages in the Slave Bible, such as the Old Testament stories of God freeing the Israelites from Egyptian captivity. It’s no accident that many Black leaders who have led freedom struggles, from Nat Turner to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were Christian ministers.

    “Instead of Christianity being a religion of African oppression, many interpreted it as a religion of freedom,” Harris says.

    A

    The historical record shows that enslaved African Americans revitalized Christianity in other ways, historians say. They injected emotionalism and an emphasis on ecstatic worship into evangelical Christianity that can still be seen in how many White Pentecostal worship today. And Negro spirituals, often called the nation’s first musical form unique to America, continue to be sung throughout churches of all races and ethnicities today.

    Former slaves remade Christianity – it didn’t remake them, says Raboteau, author of “Slave Religion.” He wrote that it had a “this-worldly” impact:

    “To describe slave religion as merely otherworldly is inaccurate, for the slaves believed that God had acted, was acting, and would continue to act within human history and within their own particular history as a peculiar people just as long ago he had acted on behalf of another chosen people, biblical Israel,” Raboteau wrote.

    This year, Juneteenth comes at a time when White educators and politicians are passing laws that ban the teaching of Black history in schools that could make White students or others feel “discomfort.” How many students will be able to learn about the resilience of the formerly enslaved?

    That’s a question that no holiday celebration can answer. But one historical debate has been settled:

    Even as the stories of the formerly enslaved are forgotten by history, we live in a contemporary America that was profoundly shaped by how they resisted captivity – whether some of us care to know it or not.

    John Blake is a Senior Writer at CNN and the author of “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”

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  • Why Japan is rethinking its rape laws and raising the age of consent from 13 | CNN

    Why Japan is rethinking its rape laws and raising the age of consent from 13 | CNN

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    Tokyo, Japan
    CNN
     — 

    When Kaneko Miyuki reported her sexual assault as a seven-year-old in Japan, she remembers the police laughing at her. “I was already confused and scared,” she said. “They wouldn’t take me seriously as a child.”

    The following investigation made things worse. After being questioned, she was taken back to the scene of her assault without a guardian present, against all modern guidelines.

    The police never did bring her attacker to justice. The whole experience was so traumatizing for Kaneko that she repressed her memory of it until she began having flashbacks in her twenties, and didn’t come to terms with the fact she had been sexually assaulted until her 40s.

    Kaneko is among countless Japanese women who say their experiences of sexual assault and abuse were ignored because they “didn’t fit the criteria” of a victim. About 95% of survivors never report their assault to police, and nearly 60% never tell anyone at all, according to a 2020 government survey.

    But that could be about to change. On Friday, the Japanese parliament passed a raft of bills overhauling the country’s sex crime laws, long criticized as outdated and restrictive, reflecting conservative social attitudes that often stigmatize and cast doubt on victims.

    The new laws expand the definition of rape to place greater emphasis on the concept of consent; introduce national legislation against taking explicit photos with hidden cameras; and raise the age of consent to 16. The previous age of consent, at 13, had been among the lowest in the developed world.

    It marks a major victory for sexual assault survivors and activists, some of whom have spent decades lobbying for these changes.

    “We … would like to express our deepest gratitude to all the victims of sexual violence who have raised their voices together with us,” Spring, a survivor advocacy group, said on Friday.

    While cautioning there was still more work to be done, such as extending the statute of limitations and in recognizing power imbalances in cases involving authority figures, it said the bills were nonetheless a sign of progress.

    “Our earnest wish is that those who have been victims of sexual violence will find hope in their lives, and that sexual violence will disappear from Japanese society,” it said.

    One of the biggest reforms passed on Friday is to change the language used to define rape to include a greater emphasis on the concept of consent.

    Rape had previously been defined as “forcible sexual intercourse” committed “through assault or intimidation,” including by taking advantage of a victim’s “unconscious state or inability to resist.”

    The law had also previously required evidence of “intent to resist.”

    But activists had argued this is too hard to prove in many cases, such as when a victim experiences the common “freeze” response, or is too afraid to resist physically.

    Members of Spring, with Kaneko Miyuki in the center, during a news conference.

    Tadokoro Yuu, a representative of Spring, said the law had discouraged victims from coming forward due to “a fear of acquittal” if courts found insufficient evidence of resistance.

    The new law replaces “forcible sexual intercourse” with “non-consensual sexual intercourse,” and expands the definition of assault to include victims under the influence of alcohol or drugs, those with mental or physical disorders, and those intimidated through their attacker’s economic or social status. It also includes those unable to voice resistance due to shock or other “psychological reactions.”

    Other major changes include raising the age of consent to 16 years old except for when both parties are underage – on par with many US states and European nations including the United Kingdom, Finland and Norway.

    The amendments also expand protections for minors, establishing grooming as a crime for the first time. They further criminalize activity like asking those under 16 for sexual images, or asking to visit a minor for sexual purposes.

    It also makes it easier to prosecute people accused of taking or distributing photos of a sexual nature without the subject’s knowledge or consent – a hot button issue in Japan where upskirting and hidden cameras taking explicit photos of women has long been a problem.

    A survey last year found that nearly 9% of more than 38,000 respondents across Japan had experienced this kind of “voyeurism,” according to public broadcaster NHK. Victims described having photos taken up their skirt and shared on social media; others had photos secretly taken in changing rooms and bathrooms.

    They also described the long-term impact on their mental health, with many feeling unsafe in public spaces including trains and schools. Reporting the issue rarely helped: often, peers and even police officers would place the blame on their clothing, arguing that they had placed themselves at risk by wearing skirts, NHK reported.

    Until now, laws against voyeurism have been enforced only by local governments, and can vary across prefectures, complicating matters.

    In one notorious incident in 2012, a plane passenger took an upskirt photo of a flight attendant, was caught with several images on his phone, and admitted guilt – but was ultimately never charged, according to NHK. The problem? The crime had taken place midair on a moving plane – so it was impossible to know which prefecture they had been traveling over at the time, thus which location’s law should be applied.

    These amendments build on the work of an entire generation of activists who have tried with little success to push forth change, said Nakayama Junko, a lawyer and member of the non-profit Human Rights Now.

    “It’s been a long time … It’s not just a movement that has been going on for 50 years, it’s a voice that has been heard for decades,” she said.

    These previous attempts were blocked by governmental inertia and sometimes outright opposition from parliament members who believed the changes unnecessary, she said. Many people, including Japanese media, had a limited understanding of consent and believed “the crime of rape was being properly punished,” meaning little attention was paid to the issue.

    Things began to change in 2019 when the country was gripped by several high-profile rape acquittals, handed down within the span of a few weeks.

    In the most controversial case, a father was acquitted of raping his 19-year-old daughter in the central Japanese city of Nagoya. The court recognized that the sex was non-consensual, that the father had used force, and that he had physically and sexually abused his daughter – but judges argued she could have resisted, according to Reuters, which reviewed the verdict.

    Around 150 protesters demonstrate against several rape acquittals in Tokyo, Japan, on June 11, 2019.

    The father’s acquittal prompted nationwide protests, with women from Tokyo to Fukuoka taking to the streets for months and calling for legal change. Demonstrators held flowers as a sign of protest, and signs with slogans against sexual violence, including #MeToo.

    In the Nagoya case, the father’s acquittal was eventually overturned by Japan’s high court. But the spark had been lit, finally setting into motion the proposed reforms that have for years failed to take hold.

    The protests “conveyed (that) the reality of the damage was very significant,” Nakayama said, calling it a “main driving force that led to this amendment.”

    Both nonprofit organizations CNN interviewed praised the bills as an important step forward – but cautioned that much work remains to be done.

    Japan still lags far behind other developed nations in its ideas toward sex and consent, Nakayama said. Other countries have already begun amending their laws to reflect a “Yes means yes” mentality – meaning sexual partners should seek clear affirmative consent, rather than assuming consent unless told otherwise. Meanwhile, “in Japan, it seems that (the concept of) ‘No means no’ has just been communicated,” she said.

    Tadokoro, the Spring representative, echoed this point, saying it was important to recognize that consent isn’t inherently or permanently granted between couples, and can be withdrawn; that “it’s wrong to assume it’s a ‘yes’ even if they come over, or do not say no clearly.”

    There are other legal reforms they want to tackle in future amendments: better laws protecting people with disability from sexual abuse, and outlining the ways they can give consent, and extending the statute of limitations since many survivors go decades before coming to terms with what happened to them – as in Kaneko’s case.

    Others spend most of their life dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health consequences, before reaching a point where they have healed enough to consider pursuing justice.

    But perhaps the biggest obstacle is the Japanese public itself, and the harmful views on sexual abuse and victimhood that are still widespread.

    “When I talk to other people about (my assault), I get avoided, and am not accepted,” said Kaneko, recalling people who told her she would “forget with time” or that that’s just life.

    Sometimes their responses are far crueler. “I get ruthless reactions like, ‘You got done?’” she said.

    There are some positive signs of change, she said, pointing to public awareness campaigns by the government and increasing sexual education in schools. But there is still a gaping lack of systemic support for survivors like counseling, therapy, and public services to help them re-enter society.

    “Survivors of sexual assault like myself cannot even work, or go about your life – you become mentally ill, and you can’t take care of yourself,” she said.

    Authorities also need to introduce trauma-informed training for law enforcement and other workers dealing with survivors, said Tadokoro, adding that “some police investigators understand (how to approach the situation), while others do not understand at all.”

    For Kaneko, who went on to become the general secretary of Spring, the damage done at the police station when she was seven years old compounded the trauma from her assault – leaving scars that took decades to untangle.

    “I was implanted with a distrust of people when I experienced that kind of thing in an institution that is supposed to protect citizens, such as the adults and the police,” she said.

    “For many years, despite a lot of pain, I had no idea what (the source) was for many years … Having PTSD is not easy to heal on your own.”

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  • FBI arrests 19-year-old suspected of making antisemitic threats and planning violence against Michigan Jewish community | CNN

    FBI arrests 19-year-old suspected of making antisemitic threats and planning violence against Michigan Jewish community | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A 19-year-old from Pickford, Michigan, was arrested by the FBI on Friday for allegedly making antisemitic threats on Instagram.

    Seann Pietila was charged in a criminal complaint with “transmitting a communication containing a threat to injure another,” US Attorney Mark Totten announced Friday in a news release.

    “Antisemitic threats and violence against our Jewish communities – or any other group for that matter – will not be tolerated in the Western District of Michigan,” Totten said.

    According to a probable cause affidavit, Pietila had conversations with another Instagram user about committing a mass casualty or mass killing. Pietila told investigators that he didn’t plan on following through with the mass killings he discussed, the affidavit says.

    Investigators found the name of an East Lansing synagogue, a date and a list of weapons – including bombs, Molotov cocktails and guns – in the notes app of Pietila’s phone, according to the affidavit.

    His home was searched on Friday and among the items found were ammunition, magazines, a shotgun, rifle, various knives and a Nazi flag, Totten said.

    Beth Lacosse, Pietila’s public defender, declined to comment, saying she had just been appointed to the case.

    Pietila made his first court appearance on Friday and his detention hearing is set for June 22, according to court documents.

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  • Celebrate Juneteenth by promoting Black health, wealth and joy | CNN

    Celebrate Juneteenth by promoting Black health, wealth and joy | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    June 19, 2023 is the third annual observance of Juneteenth. The federal holiday commemorates June 19, 1865, when the enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their emancipation two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

    Although Juneteenth has recently become more widely recognized, the date has long been a deeply spiritual time of remembrance and celebration for the Black community.

    Across the country, African Americans have rejoiced with fireworks and cookouts, sipping red drinks – a nod to ancestors’ bloodshed and endurance.

    “We know the horrors that we went through,” explained Kleaver Cruz, writer of the forthcoming book “The Black Joy Project” and creator of a digital initiative of the same name. “It’s always concurrent: the joy and the pain. We use one to get through the other.”

    On a particularly joyous note, this June 19, CNN and OWN (both properties of Warner Bros. Discovery) will simulcast Juneteenth: A Global Celebration for Freedom at 8 PM Eastern time. The concert will feature artists across multiple genres including Charlie Wilson, Miguel, Kirk Franklin, Nelly, SWV, Davido, Coi Leray, Jodeci and Mike Phillips. CNN will kick off pre-show coverage at 7 PM Eastern time, highlighting Black advocates, trailblazers, and creators.

    “We get to celebrate our freedoms; we get to celebrate the dismantling of things and lean into what we want in the future,” Cruz said of Juneteenth observance. “We want more of that space and less of the one that harms us.”

    The Black community still struggles with pain and inequity. Impact Your World has gathered ways you can help reject the pathology of racism and thoughtfully celebrate Juneteenth through non-profits that support Black health, wealth, joy, and overall empowerment. You can donate to those charities here.

    For Black Americans, the end of slavery was just the beginning of a 158-year quest for equality. Along the way, the cumulative effect of institutional and systemic racism fomented stark disparities in income, health, education, and opportunity.

    “Those that came before us were physically free but were unable to earn livable wages or receive an education without its share of defeating challenges,” said Marsha Barnes, Founder of The Finance Bar.

    Data collected by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System shows that in the fourth quarter of 2022, the average Black household’s net worth was about one-fourth that of the average White household.

    “Taking the time to address the racial wealth gap highlights many of the roadblocks we as Black Americans currently face,” explained Barnes, a certified financial therapist. She sees the well-documented connection between financial literacy and financial wellness as a key to enhancing wealth in the Black community.

    “We still are at a disadvantage, but it’s important we become comfortable with having to learn while playing the game,” Barnes told CNN.

    HomeFree-USA is a non-profit aiming to close the racial wealth gap by improving financial education, homeownership, and opportunities. Their Center for Financial Advancement (CFA) recruits, trains, and places Historically Black College and University students into internships and careers with mortgage and real estate companies. The goal is to enhance diversity in the financial sector, expose students to credit and money management and help them become savvy consumers and future homeowners.

    The African American Alliance for Homeownership is a non-profit counseling agency that helps families obtain, retain, maintain, and sustain their homes. The organization offers HUD-certified counselors who support first-time homebuyers and foreclosure prevention. The group recently expanded its services to help homeowners with estate plans, resource navigation, home repairs, and energy-efficiency upgrades.

    Former NFL Player Warrick Dunn started Warrick Dunn Charities in 1997 to help single parents buy homes by providing $5,000 down payments and home furnishings.

    “The more I learned, we wanted to get into the business of giving people the potential to break their cycle of poverty,” Dunn explained in a 2021 interview with CNN.

    The non-profit has expanded its priorities to include financial literacy, health and wellness, education attainment, workforce development, and entrepreneurship support.

    The National Urban League is committed to the advancement of African Americans through economic empowerment, equality, and social justice. The organization champions education, job training, workforce development, and civic engagement through community and national initiatives.

    The legacy of racism in America continues to fuel health and healthcare inequities for Black people.

    “We’re seeing diseases that, when I was in medical school, I thought to be diseases that would start to develop in people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. I’m seeing these diseases sometimes in teenage years,” said Dr. Barbara Joy Jones, an Atlanta-based family medicine physician.

    According to the CDC, five health conditions particularly affect the Black community at higher rates: cardiovascular disease, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), metabolic syndrome, colon cancer, and mental health conditions.

    “I consider hypertension, Diabetes, and obesity the triad,” said Jones.

    The leading contributor to that triad is what you eat.

    “Diet is 80% of health, and just access to quality food and education about food has been very hard,” Jones explained.

    “When you go back and look at slavery, the foods we had to eat were the last scraps, so through the passing down of culture, you’re eating foods that are not the healthiest because it was simply for survival,” said Jones.

    According to Feeding America, eight of the ten US counties with the highest food insecurity rates are at least 60% Black and one in every four Black American children is affected by hunger.

    Addressing food insecurity, nutrition education, and better food access can make a difference.

    Feeding America runs a network of food banks in those mostly Black hard-hit counties.

    Share Our Strength runs a program called Cooking Matters offering cooking classes, grocery store tours, and digital content to help marginalized families across the country shop and cook with an eye towards health and budget.

    The African American Diabetes Association uses targeted outreach projects to help Black people prevent or delay type 2 diabetes.

    Despite progress over the years, racism continues to impact the mental health of African American people.

    “The stress and microaggressions that happen daily for a person of color in the work environment and everyday life add up, and unmitigated stress can lead to disease,” Jones told CNN.

    The Black Mental Health Alliance and the Trevor Project, provide training and networks of mental health providers specifically supportive of the Black and Black LGBTQ communities.

    In 2019, the CDC found that Black people comprised 41% of the new HIV infections in the US. The Black AIDS Institute was founded in 1999 to mobilize and educate Black Americans about HIV/AIDS treatment and care. The Black AIDS Institute advances research, support groups, and education and runs a clinic catering to BIPOC and underserved communities.

    As recently as the 1990’s, unethical medical research was conducted on Black Americans. The Tuskegee Study is one of the most widely recognized examples of the racist practice that led many Black people to distrust the healthcare system and avoid doctors altogether.

    Beyond investing in cultural sensitivity training and prioritizing preventative care, Jones said, “For anti-doctor people, find someone that looks like you; representation matters.”

    “Half of the getting to know your part of medicine is to know why psychosocial and economically you are where you are, and having a doctor that looks like you can support that.”

    Only about 5.7% of US physicians identify as Black or African American, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

    The White Coats Black Doctors Foundation is working to increase diversity in the medical profession, supporting educational preparation to become a doctor and helping offset the costs associated with applying and transitioning to residencies.

    Janice Lloyd of Annapolis, Maryland watches a Juneteenth parade in 2021.

    Black joy has been essential for survival, resistance, and self-development for centuries. But these days, it’s often exploited and misunderstood.

    “I see the ways that Black joy at this moment is being commercialized or co-opted to make it feel like it’s Black people smiling,” lamented Cruz. “It’s much, much deeper than that.”

    Cruz launched the Black Joy Project as a photo essay on social media in 2015 following the deaths of Michael Brown and Sandra Bland to help the Black community process its collective pain.

    “I posted it on Facebook in the stream of consciousness and said, ‘Let us bombard the internet that joy is important too, and as people are sharing these traumatic videos, we have to make space for joy.’ And it was an invitation for anybody else that wanted to do that.”

    Enslaved Black people knew they weren’t free but still hoped their future generations would be. That empowering optimism gave them the will to press forward, no matter the circumstance.

    “This (joy) is just a continuation of those practices,” Cruz said. “Joy is intrinsic. It’s something that can’t be taken from us because it comes within us; it’s always ours to have.”

    Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom, culture, and history, and it’s important to uplift non-profits that positively nourish the arts, music, and all the things that foster Black joy.

    The Robey Theatre Company was founded in 1994 by actors Danny Glover and Ben Guillory to tell the complex stories of the Black experience. The theater showcases and develops up-and-coming actors and playwrights to sustain Black theater.

    The Debbie Allen Dance Academy uses dance, theater, and performance to enrich, inspire and transform students’ lives.

    As some states are moving to block Critical Race Theory and Black history from public education, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration gives visitors an interactive history lesson on the harsh repercussions of slavery and systemic racism in the US. The immersive exhibition carries visitors through the transatlantic slave trade up to the current mass incarceration of Black people. The museum occupies a site in Montgomery, Alabama where enslaved Black people were historically auctioned off.

    “If we’re being serious about Black joy, that means we’re being serious about Black lives, period,” Cruz concluded.

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  • ‘Systemic problems’ at Minneapolis Police Dept. led to George Floyd’s murder, Justice Department says | CNN Politics

    ‘Systemic problems’ at Minneapolis Police Dept. led to George Floyd’s murder, Justice Department says | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Three years after George Floyd was murdered by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the Justice Department issued a blistering report Friday of the city’s police department, detailing racial discrimination, excessive and unlawful use of force, First Amendment violations and a lack of accountability for officers.

    “Our investigation found that the systemic problems in MPD made what happened to George Floyd possible,” the report states.

    The Minneapolis Police Department has, for years, used dangerous “techniques and weapons” against people who had committed a petty offense or no offense at all, “including unjustified deadly force,” it adds.

    “MPD used force to punish people who made officers angry or criticized the police,” the report says, and “patrolled neighborhoods differently based on their racial composition and discriminated based on race when searching, handcuffing, or using force against people during stops.”

    In its investigation, the Justice Department reviewed hundreds of police body-worn camera videos, incident and police reports, hundreds of complaints filed against officers and dozens of interviews with city leaders, community leaders and police officials.

    “As I told George Floyd’s family this morning, his death has had an irrevocable impact on the Minneapolis community, on our country and on the world,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference Friday.

    “George Floyd should be alive today,” Garland added.

    Chauvin was convicted in Floyd’s death and pleaded guilty for violating Floyd’s civil rights.

    In a review of the 19 police shootings that took place between 2016 and the summer of 2022, the investigation found that “a significant portion of them were unconstitutional uses of deadly force” including officers shooting at individuals without determining any immediate threat and MPD officers using deadly force against “people who are a threat only to themselves,” the report says.

    In one example cited by the report, a woman had been shot by an officer after she reportedly “spooked” him as she came to his police car.

    On May 25, 2020, Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck and back for over nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and gasping for air. According to the DOJ’s report, at the time, neck restraints were used by Minneapolis police officers 197 times between 2016 and 2020. Nearly a fourth of those were used in cases where no arrest was made.

    Three years on: reflections on the legacy of George Floyd

    Officers would “frequently used neck restraints without warning” and used the restraints against individuals – including teenagers – accused of low-level offenses, passively resisted arrest, posed no threat or “had merely angered the officer.”

    MPD officers, the investigation found, also used takedowns, strikes, tasers, chemical spray and other methods of force in ways that violated individuals’ rights.

    The department now prohibits neck restraints, “no-knock” raids and requires approval for officers to use certain crowd control weapons without approval from the chief of police.

    The investigation also found that MPD officers disproportionately stop and use force against Black and Native American people.

    “During stops involving Black and Native American people, MPD conducts searches and uses force more often than it does during stops involving white people engaged in similar behavior,” the report, which reviewed data of roughly 187,000 pedestrian and traffic stops says.

    “We estimate that MPD stops Black people at 6.5 times the rate at which it stops White people, given their shares of the population. Similarly, we estimate MPD stops Native American people at 7.9 times the rate at which it stops white people, given population shares.”

    During these stops, the DOJ found that MPD officers unlawfully discriminated against Black and Native American people in both searches and use of force.

    After Floyd’s murder in 2020, many police officers in the department stopped listing the race or gender of individuals in their reports in violation of the department’s policy, according to the investigation.

    The report also found evidence of some officers, including those in leadership positions, have made racist or discriminatory comments to other officers.

    During one of the protests following Floyd’s murder, an MPD lieutenant said a group of protesters were likely mostly White because “there’s not looting and fires.”

    Other MPD employees told the Justice Department about similar discriminatory comments made by their colleagues, including comments about how “you don’t have to worry about Black people during the day ‘cuz they haven’t woken up—crime starts at night.”

    The investigation found that officers were often only held accountable for biased conduct after public calls of outrage.

    minneapolis police surveillance

    How the fatal arrest of George Floyd unfolded

    Garland outlined several incidents where MPD officers were not held accountable for racist conduct until public outrage surfaced.

    “For example,” Garland said Friday, “after MPD officers stopped a car carrying four Somalian-American teens, one officer told the teens, ‘Do you remember what happened in Black Hawk Down. When we killed a bunch of your folk? I’m proud of that. We didn’t finish the job over there. If we had, you guys wouldn’t be over here right now.’”

    According to the Justice Department’s report, MPD officers also violated people’s First Amendment rights, including journalists, and found that officers “regularly retaliate against people for their speech or presence at protests – particularly when they criticize police.”

    “MPD officers frequently use indiscriminate force, failing to distinguish between peaceful protesters and those committing crimes,” the report says. “For example, MPD officers regularly use 40 mm launchers – firearms that shoot impact projectiles, like rubber bullets – against protesters who are committing no crime or who are dispersing.”

    The investigation found that in the protests following Floyd’s murder, officers had pepper sprayed a journalist in the face after pushing the reporter’s head to the pavement.

    Other incidents cited in the report include police officers retaliating against individuals who were recording the officers by illegally grabbing phones, destroying recording equipment or using force – including pepper spray – against them.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Montana man sentenced to 18 years in prison for shooting at and threatening LGBTQ residents in his town, officials say | CNN

    Montana man sentenced to 18 years in prison for shooting at and threatening LGBTQ residents in his town, officials say | CNN

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    A Montana man has been sentenced to 18 years in prison after his conviction on federal hate crime and firearm charges related to a “self-described mission to rid the town of Basin of its lesbian, queer and gay community,” officials said.

    John Russell Howald was convicted in February for firing an AK-style rifle at the home of a woman who openly identified as a lesbian, the US Department of Justice said in a news release. The woman was inside the home during the March 2020 incident.

    Howald was armed with two assault rifles, a hunting rifle, two pistols and multiple high-capacity magazines that were taped together for faster reloading, the release said.

    “Hoping he had killed her, Howald set off toward other houses occupied by people who identify as lesbian, queer or gay,” the release said.

    Some residents who knew Howald spotted him and stalled him long enough for a Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office deputy to respond, prosecutors said.

    Howald was recorded “yelling and firing more rounds with the same rifle, expressing his hatred toward the community’s gay and lesbian residents and his determination to ‘clean’ them from his town,” the release said.

    Howald pointed his rifle at a responding deputy, “nearly starting a shootout in downtown Basin,” before running into surrounding hills, according to the release.

    He was arrested the next day, armed with a loaded pistol and a knife. “In Howald’s car, officers found an AR-style rifle and a revolver. During a search of Howald’s camper, officers found an AK-style rifle, a hunting rifle, and ammunition,” prosecutors said.

    “Motivated by hatred of the LGBTQI+ community and armed with multiple firearms and high-capacity magazines, this defendant sought to intimidate – even terrorize – an entire community by shooting into the victim’s home trying to kill her for no reason other than her sexual orientation,” ATF Director Steven Dettelbach said in the release.

    Howald’s 18-year prison sentence, to be followed by five years of supervised release, was announced during Pride Month and comes as the Human Rights Campaign has declared a national state of emergency for the LGBTQ+ community in the US.

    “The multiplying threats facing millions in our community are not just perceived – they are real, tangible and dangerous,” the group’s president, Kelley Robinson, said. “In many cases they are resulting in violence against LGBTQ+ people, forcing families to uproot their lives and flee their homes in search of safer states, and triggering a tidal wave of increased homophobia and transphobia that puts the safety of each and every one of us at risk.”

    Howald hoped to inspire similar attacks around the country, said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

    “The Justice Department will continue to vigorously defend the rights of all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, to be free from hate-fueled violence,” Clarke said in the release. “This Pride Month, we affirm our commitment to using the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act to hold perpetrators of hate-fueled violence targeting the LGBTQI+ community accountable.”

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