27 April 21
Now Would Be a Great Time to Save RSN
We’ve taken quite a beating on funding over the past several months. Clearly it’s taking its toll. RSN is here and strong, but it is and has always been dependent on a basic operating budget. That’s fallen off sharply in recent months.
The situation is bad.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
26 April 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | Republicans Want Black People to Disappear. Sports Leagues Can Help Stop Them
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Guardian UK
Abdul-Jabbar writes: "I know from personal experience that protest has its costs. But by banding together we can stop those who would subvert democracy."
READ MORE
A vaccine. (photo: Artyom Geodakyan/Tass)
Pharmaceutical Industry Dispatches Army of Lobbyists to Block Generic Covid-19 Vaccines
Lee Fang, The Intercept
Fang writes: "New lobbying disclosures show over 100 drug lobbyists working to defeat the IP waiver request at the WTO."
he pharmaceutical industry is pouring resources into the growing political fight over generic coronavirus vaccines.
Newly filed disclosure forms from the first quarter of 2021 show that over 100 lobbyists have been mobilized to contact lawmakers and members of the Biden administration, urging them to oppose a proposed temporary waiver on intellectual property rights by the World Trade Organization that would allow generic vaccines to be produced globally.
Pharmaceutical lobbyists working against the proposal include Mike McKay, a key fundraiser for House Democrats, now working on retainer for Pfizer, as well as several former staff members to the U.S. Office of Trade Representative, which oversees negotiations with the WTO.
Several trade groups funded by pharmaceutical firms have also focused closely on defeating the generic proposal, new disclosures show. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the International Intellectual Property Alliance, which all receive drug company money, have dispatched dozens of lobbyists to oppose the initiative.
The push has been followed by a number of influential voices taking the side of the drug lobby. Last week, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., released a letter demanding that the administration “oppose any and all efforts aimed at waiving intellectual property rights.” Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chair, has similarly criticized the proposal, echoing many of the arguments of the drug industry.
Currently, only 1 percent of coronavirus vaccines are going to low-income countries, and projections show much of the world’s population may not be vaccinated until 2023 or 2024. In response, a coalition of countries, led by India and South Africa, have petitioned the WTO to temporarily suspend intellectual property rights on coronavirus-related medical products so that generic vaccines can be rapidly manufactured.
The waiver requests a suspension of IP enforcement under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, treaty. If granted, local pharmaceutical plants could be granted compulsory licenses to produce coronavirus vaccines without the threat of being sued by the license holder.
The proposal has gained traction globally, with hundreds of members of the European Parliament, dozens of American lawmakers led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and increasingly vocal voices in the public health community expressing support.
But the waiver petition has encountered fierce opposition from leading drug companies, who stand to lose profit and who fear that allowing a waiver would lead to less stringent IP enforcement in the future.
“The scarcity of vaccines is not because of intellectual property but because of regrettable production and distribution challenges,” wrote Michelle McMurry-Heath, the president of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the trade group that represents Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson in an opinion column for The Economist.
The petition, she argued, is among the “empty gestures that place the cost and responsibility back on the laps of the neediest countries.” A better solution, McMurry-Heath said, would be to continue the approach led by COVAX, a nonprofit backed by billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates that facilitates purchases and donations of vaccines for the developing world.
But global public health activists remain skeptical.
“The drug company lobbyists are saying the TRIPS waiver won’t increase the supply of vaccines, but if that’s true, why do they oppose it? Because they think it will in fact expand production,” noted James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, a group that supports the waiver petition.
“The waiver itself, from a legal point of view, is most important for eliminating two restrictive provisions on the TRIPS, both dealing with exports,” added Love. “From a political point of view, it is more important, giving a green light to use existing compulsory licensing authority and putting pressure on vaccine manufacturers to do more voluntary agreements.”
And while the voluntary COVAX approach aims to supply 2 billion vaccine doses, the initiative has been plagued by delays and underfunding and has only shipped 40 million doses.
Brook K. Baker, a law professor at Northeastern University and senior policy analyst with Health GAP, also noted that the drug industry appears to be mounting a “counteroffensive” over growing demands for the TRIPS waiver.
“This included the small army of high-paid lobbyists that includes many ex-Capitol Hill figures and staffers, but it also includes publicity campaigns and op-eds by industry shills directly challenging the waiver and predicting pharma-doom if it is adopted,” Baker said. “This industry will do anything to protect its intellectual property and trade secrets even as it can’t and won’t meet vaccine needs in developing countries.”
Baker has called on the administration to not only grant the waiver but to “make it clear to the American public that we cannot achieve and sustain COVID vaccine immunity until and unless all the world is vaccinated.”
So far, the Biden administration has declined to take a position on the waiver. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai has said she is reviewing the issue and has met with both representatives of the drug lobby and activists in support of the initiative.
Protesters read a list of demands outside the Kenosha Public Safety Building Sunday afternoon, after a small group marched Downtown to protest the reinstating to active duty of police officer Rusten Sheskey, calling for his firing. (photo: Terry Flores/Kenosha News)
"Our Demand Is for Him to Be Fired": Outrage in Kenosha as Cop Who Shot Jacob Blake Returns to Work
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Relatives and supporters of Jacob Blake staged a sit-in with arrests outside the Kenosha police headquarters in Wisconsin to protest the department's decision to allow police officer Rusten Sheskey to return to work."
elatives and supporters of Jacob Blake staged a sit-in with arrests outside the Kenosha police headquarters in Wisconsin to protest the department’s decision to allow police officer Rusten Sheskey to return to work. Sheskey, who is white, fired seven shots at point-blank range into the back of Jacob Blake last August, leaving the 29-year-old African American father partially paralyzed and sparking massive protests. Sheskey had been on administrative leave but faced no charges for the shooting. “There’s been so many injustices carried on through this investigation,” says Jacob Blake Sr., the father of Jacob Blake, who has also filed a lawsuit against the officer. “Our demand is for him to be fired.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Relatives and supporters of Jacob Blake staged a sit-in outside the Kenosha police headquarters in Wisconsin Sunday to protest the department’s decision to allow police officer Rusten Sheskey to return to work.
Last August, Sheskey, who’s white, fired seven shots at point-blank range into the back of Jacob Blake as the 29-year-old African American father leaned into his car. Inside the car were three of Blake’s sons, aged 3, 5 and 8. Jacob Blake miraculously survived but was left partially paralyzed. The shooting of Blake sparked days of protests in Kenosha. Sheskey had been on administrative leave, but he recently started working a desk job for the department.
At least three protesters were arrested Sunday, including Jacob Blake’s uncle Justin Blake, for blocking the doors to the police station. Demonstrators were calling for officer Sheskey to be fired and for the release of more information into the department’s internal investigation that cleared the officer. This all comes five months after the district attorney in Kenosha announced no charges would be filed against Sheskey. In March, Jacob Blake filed a lawsuit against the officer, claiming his actions were, quote, “excessive and unnecessary.”
We’re joined now by Jacob Blake Sr., the father of Jacob Blake. He was in Kenosha but is now back in Chicago.
Jacob Blake, thanks so much for being with us. Talk about what happened yesterday. And also, how is Jacob? How is your son?
JACOB BLAKE SR.: We found out about, I’d say, 11 days ago that he went back to work, and we planned on the 12th day to stage a rally. And at that time, we all decided that we would have to go a step beyond a rally to get enough attention that there’s been so many injustices carried on through this investigation. And, Amy, thank you for having me again.
AMY GOODMAN: So, your brother, Jacob’s uncle, was arrested, Justin Blake?
JACOB BLAKE SR.: Right, Justin, I forget the reverend’s name, and there was a young lady. They were all arrested.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about how you learned this? Is it true that — well, let me go to a statement earlier this month. Kenosha’s police chief said in that statement, quote, “Officer Sheskey … acted within the law and was consistent with training. … [He] was found to have been acting within policy and will not be subjected to discipline. … Although this incident has been reviewed at multiple levels, I know that some will not be pleased with the outcome. However, given the facts, the only lawful and appropriate decision was made.” So, that’s what the Kenosha police said. Sheskey was returned to work in the midst of the Chauvin trial. How did you learn that he’s back? And what are your demands right now?
JACOB BLAKE SR.: We learned that he was back through — just like everybody else did. We didn’t know, and then we found out. Our law team found out. But our demand is for him to be fired. And we’re demanding an understanding of where his weapon was that was fired at my son. They mislocated — the weapon is gone. So we’re calling for the Department of Justice to come in as an outside entity to investigate what’s going on in Kenosha.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you spoken with anyone in the Biden administration? I mean, clearly, Merrick Garland, the new attorney general, is investigating a number of police departments now, reconsidering consent decrees, reimposing them, and particularly, for example, looking at the Minneapolis Police Department after the murder of George Floyd.
JACOB BLAKE SR.: Well, if you didn’t know, Amy, I was sick after President Biden’s inaugural. I was hospitalized for some eight weeks. And I did not get a chance to follow up, but we are definitely going to follow up with the Biden administration, and we will be speaking with them later on this week.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m very sorry to hear that you were sick. How is your son? How is Jacob right now? And where is he?
JACOB BLAKE SR.: As of yesterday, Amy, he’s in great spirits. We talk all the time. We text each other all the time. When I go see him — I went to see him after I got out of the hospital, on my birthday. And, you know, he’s a fighter. He’s a fighter. And he’s not going to give up. And he’s continuing to be lifted up. So he’s in much better spirits than he was, still paralyzed from the waist down.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, of course, there’s Kyle Rittenhouse. After the shooting of your son by the police officer, the Black Lives Matter protest, Kyle Rittenhouse murdered two people in the streets and was allowed —
JACOB BLAKE SR.: And maimed —
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.
JACOB BLAKE SR.: And maimed another and was allowed to walk home, go home. They gave him water and a high five. I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all.
AMY GOODMAN: And now news of officers — because of a leak, it’s known that officers are raising money for his legal support.
JACOB BLAKE SR.: Well, I mean, MyPillow guy, $2 million, and Ricky Schroder followed up the money. I don’t — I mean, is hatred the thing now? Is that — that’s the thumbs-up thing now, I guess. To hate my people because they look like I look? I’m so perplexed, Amy, I don’t — you know, it’s like there’s two, three — there’s three or four different Americas. There’s definitely two justice systems. But then there’s other — you know, the people that were arrested with my brother yesterday were white.
AMY GOODMAN: The latest news from The New York Times, a police lieutenant in Virginia fired this week after he contributed $25 to a legal defense fund and expressed praise for Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen who killed two people during the protests in Kenosha. The lieutenant, William Kelly, a member of the Norfolk Police Department for nearly 19 years, was relieved of his duty last Tuesday by city officials.
I wanted to then ask you, very quickly, before we go, Jacob Blake, about what’s happening in your home state of North Carolina, protests erupting demanding justice for Andrew Brown Jr., the Black man shot dead by Elizabeth City police officers serving an arrest warrant Wednesday morning. Eyewitnesses described an unlawful, unjustified killing by multiple officers who opened fire as Brown tried to flee in a vehicle. This is Brown’s neighbor and longtime friend.
JEAN FEREBEE: And I’ve got my neighbor across the street killed, and my baby comes running in my room with fear in his face. Like, how do I keep him safe, if the people that are supposed to serve and protect doesn’t keep us safe, are the ones taking them out?
AMY GOODMAN: A family lawyer said Brown was unarmed, and demanded the release of police body-camera footage. And apparently, today, the family will be viewing body-camera footage after just enormous protests.
JACOB BLAKE SR.: Well, you know, our counterparts flee all the time, but they make it to jail. When a Black man seems to flee or not pay attention, it’s murder. It’s you’re dead. And I don’t understand that, either.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, your response to the verdict in the Derek Chauvin murder trial, Derek Chauvin convicted of murdering George Floyd?
JACOB BLAKE SR.: Well, had that young lady not been there with the camera the whole time, none of this — you understand, none of this would have happened. It would have been just, say, hearsay, she say, they say. But you saw what happened. The jury saw what happened and came to the correct conclusion. And that’s a step in the right direction, a small step. There’s so many steps that we have to take, because it’s been 68 murders since that court case started.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, ,Jacob Blake, I want to thank you so much for being with us. Jacob Blake Sr., the father of Jacob Blake Jr., shot seven times in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by a white police officer. All health to you and to your son.
Bikes lie on the ground after a car struck multiple Black Lives Matter protesters in New York City on Dec. 11. (photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP Getty Images)
Why Republicans Are Passing Laws Protecting Drivers Who Hit Protesters
Nitish Pahwa, Slate
Pahwa writes: "Over the past 11 months of anti-racism protests, demonstrators have had to protect themselves: from police, sometimes; from white supremacists, occasionally; and from cars."
ver the past 11 months of anti-racism protests, demonstrators have had to protect themselves: from police, sometimes; from white supremacists, occasionally; and from cars. Since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, more than 100 incidents of hostile drivers ramming into activists have been documented. These assailants have included police officers, gun-toters, and even, in one instance, a Ku Klux Klan leader. Many, though not all, of these aggressors were charged under local statutes—but now, a growing number of Republican state lawmakers are trying to ensure that, in the future, such vehicular attacks get a pass.
On Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an “anti-riot” bill that allows harsher police crackdowns on demonstrators—an apparent response to the “defund the police” and Black Lives Matter movements. (“This bill actually prevents local governments from defunding law enforcement,” DeSantis said.) A public gathering of three or more people can be classified as a “riot” under the law, and anyone who “willingly” participates in such a gathering can be charged with a third-degree felony. Plus, participants in rallies that turn violent can be also be charged with a third-degree felony even if they had no involvement with the violence. Most jarring of all, the law grants civil immunity to drivers who ram into protesting crowds and even injure or kill participants, if they claim the protests made them concerned for their own well-being in the moment.
On Wednesday, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill that grants immunity to drivers who unintentionally hurt or kill protesters on public streets, should they claim they feared for their lives or attempted to escape the premises, and makes protesting by obstructing a public street itself a misdemeanor punishable by fines or prison time. The act was initially introduced in response to an incident in May 2020 when a pickup truck rammed into a mass of people in Tulsa protesting Floyd’s killing, injuring three of them, one of whom was paralyzed from the waist down. (The Tulsa County District Attorney’s Office declined to press charges and suggested that the standing protesters were the real instigators and the driver was the victim.) Though Oklahoma’s bill is not nearly as elaborate as Florida’s, it does go further in protecting protester-killing drivers by shielding them from even criminal charges.
These two laws are only the latest examples of anti-dissent legislation introduced by state-level Republican lawmakers across the country. According to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law’s U.S. Protest Law Tracker, 17 states have enacted a total of 30 anti-protest bills and executive orders prohibiting protests at fossil fuel facilities, expanding the definitions of the words incitement and riot, heightening requisite penalties, and granting state officials further power to crack down on grassroots demonstrations on both public and private property. South Dakota and Tennessee have had laws on the books since 2017 that allow those states to penalize conscientious objectors who obstruct traffic, but neither has gone so far as to protect belligerent drivers. Since 2016, hundreds of state laws cracking down on various forms of dissent have been proposed, and 45 states have tabled these proposals; 68 of these bills are currently pending. This is the largest number of concurrently considered anti-protest laws at any point in American history.
More and more of these bills have been introduced since 2017, especially since last summer. That includes the subcategory of measures protecting drivers who hit protesters. After the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, legislative proposals in Republican-led states to protect drivers from lawsuits brought by harmed demonstrators proliferated—and, as I noted last year, mass demonstrations against racist police brutality also brought out dozens of counterprotesting drivers who ran over protesters, in a few cases even killing them. In these rallies, often led by Black activists, protesters have taken to streets and highways in symbolic and generally peaceful gestures, inconveniencing those who might otherwise ignore them and sometimes bringing attention to highways whose construction destroyed Black Americans’ neighborhoods. The bills introduced in 2017 all faltered, but the idea has rebounded. Measures have been introduced in Missouri and Nevada, among other states, that would grant civil immunity to drivers who hit permitless protesters if the drivers are exercising “due care.” Prominent critics and legal experts argue that all this will serve to do is throttle free speech rights—and that it could, as Alex Pareene wrote in the New Republic this weekend, create a sort of Second Amendment for cars in order to intimidate and discourage Americans exercising their rights to protest on the streets.
While debating Florida’s anti-dissent bill the week before it passed, Democratic legislators asked their Republican colleagues whether someone like Heather Heyer’s murderer, who hit her with a car during a counterprotest in Charlottesville, would have been shielded by their bill; a GOP state senator dismissed the question, stating that that driver was clearly attempting to hurt people and thus would not be insulated from legal consequences. Indeed, Heyer’s killer faced hate crime charges and was convicted in Virginia through the kind of process the Florida bill still allows. But that was an extreme, and clear-cut, case: The ambiguity of incitement and riot under Florida’s law could help shield future assailants from some consequences. Whatever the impact, this sends a clear message to would-be protesters about whose side the state’s power structure is on.
In some ways these laws are also land grabs, marking off the places where civic dissenters don’t belong. Oklahoma is slated to pass laws in addition to the driver-immunity bill that would, according to the Oklahoman, “allow localities to establish ordinances for citizens to paint blue lines on streets as a show of support for law enforcement”—an evident reference to the notorious “thin blue line” flag—and make it illegal to post information about police officers online. The latter measure, as state Democrats noted, could unfairly target “those who take photos or videos of instances of police brutality”—like the many bystanders who’ve recorded such instances on their cellphones in cities across the nation. A Republican state senator also introduced another bill that would “make it a misdemeanor for protesters to block or restrict traffic on public streets or highways.”
This ever-growing morass of anti-dissent legislation is, for now, one legacy of our yearlong consideration of police brutality. More bills protecting drivers who strike demonstrators remain in the works; Iowa is on the verge of passing its own. People, especially activists of color, will keep getting injured or even killed. What will happen if even more states tell drivers they can ram whomever they want?
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, left, talks with Chief Justice John Roberts on the steps of the Supreme Court following his official investiture at the Supreme Court June 15, 2017, in Washington, DC. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
The Supreme Court Will Hear a Major Second Amendment Case That Could Gut US Gun Laws
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Corlett, a case that could transform the judiciary's understanding of the Second Amendment and lay waste to many of the nation's gun laws."
The Supreme Court could make the NRA’s dreams come true.
he Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Corlett, a case that could transform the judiciary’s understanding of the Second Amendment and lay waste to many of the nation’s gun laws.
The case involves New York state’s handgun licensing law — a law that has been in place since 1913 — which requires someone who wishes to carry a handgun in public to demonstrate “proper cause” in order to obtain a license permitting them to do so.
Proper cause can be demonstrated in several ways. Someone who wishes to use a gun for hunting or target practice may obtain a license permitting them to do so, although this type of license can be restricted to only allow the bearer to use their gun for these purposes. People in certain kinds of work may also obtain licenses — a storekeeper might be issued a limited license allowing them to keep a gun in their store for protection, for example, or a bank messenger may be allowed to carry a gun to protect themselves and the money they transport.
But to obtain an unrestricted license to carry, New York courts have established that an applicant must “demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession.” So someone might be able to obtain a license because they have a particular fear of their stalker — but someone who merely wants to carry a gun, because of a general belief that it would be useful if they are ever the victim of a violent crime, cannot obtain a license.
The plaintiffs in Corlett include a New York state gun rights group and two New York men who applied for a license to carry a handgun in public and were denied that license. They claim that “law-abiding citizens” have a Second Amendment right to carry a gun in public — and the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, could agree with them.
Indeed, Corlett could potentially dismantle more than a decade of judicial decisions interpreting the Second Amendment, imposing prohibitive limits on lawmakers’ ability to reduce gun violence.
In fairness, there is one early sign that the Court may be inclined to place some limits on its decision in Corlett. Although the plaintiffs asked the Court to rule on a broad question — “whether the Second Amendment allows the government to prohibit ordinary law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns outside the home for self-defense” — the justices announced on Monday that they will only resolve a more narrow question: “whether the State’s denial of petitioners’ applications for concealed-carry licenses for self-defense violated the Second Amendment.”
Nevertheless, this narrower question is still broad enough to allow the Supreme Court to rewrite a decade of Second Amendment precedents, to unwind a consensus within the lower courts that permits many gun regulations to stand, and then to allow those lower courts to complete the process of dismantling other gun laws.
How the Supreme Court’s current precedents approach the Second Amendment
The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” and until fairly recently, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of this amendment very seriously. As the Court explained in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. Thus, the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.”
But the Supreme Court largely abandoned this approach in its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, holding for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms.
While Heller marked a sea change in the Court’s approach to the Second Amendment, it was also a heavily caveated victory for gun rights advocates. Among other things, Heller suggests that bans on “carrying concealed weapons” are lawful, as are “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” or bans on “dangerous and unusual weapons.”
Additionally, while Heller struck down the District of Columbia’s “absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home,” the opinion is much less clear about gun rights outside the home.
Since Heller, the Supreme Court has largely been silent about the scope of the Second Amendment, handing down only one significant Second Amendment decision, McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010). That case merely held that states, and not just the federal government, are bound by the Second Amendment’s restrictions on gun laws — whatever those restrictions may be.
And yet, while the Supreme Court has largely stayed out of the business of interpreting the Second Amendment since Heller, a clear consensus has emerged in the lower courts regarding how to interpret that amendment — even though this consensus is not shared by many key members of the Supreme Court.
The consensus approach to the Second Amendment, briefly explained
In the absence of more guidance from the Supreme Court on how to apply the Heller decision, lower federal courts have largely coalesced around the same basic approach to Second Amendment cases.
At least 10 federal appeals courts apply what federal appellate Judge Stephen Higginson describes as a “two-step analytic framework.” Under this framework, “severe burdens on core Second Amendment rights” are subject to “strict scrutiny,” the most skeptical level of review in most constitutional cases. Meanwhile, “less onerous laws, or laws that govern conduct outside of the Second Amendment’s ‘core,’” are subject to a more permissive test known as “intermediate scrutiny.”
Under this consensus framework, gun regulations that impose very serious restrictions on “core” Second Amendment rights — which Higginson described as the right of “law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home” that the Court recognized in Heller, but may also include some guns rights that were historically considered important — will typically be struck down, while less severe restrictions or gun laws that don’t burden the Second Amendment’s “core” are more likely to be upheld.
In 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit applied this framework to the gun licensing regime at issue in the Corlett case, and it upheld that regime. In an opinion by George W. Bush appointee Judge Richard Wesley, the Second Circuit explained that there is a long tradition of laws in the United States that prevent people from carrying guns outside of their homes.
“During the Founding Era,” Wesley wrote, “many states prohibited the use of firearms on certain occasions and in certain locations.” North Carolina, for example, forbade “going armed at night or day ‘in fairs, markets, nor in the presence of the King’s Justices, or other ministers, nor in no part elsewhere.’” In the 19th century, Georgia and Tennessee banned outright the sale of weapons, such as handguns, that could be concealed. And New York’s own licensing regime is more than a century old.
In light of this history, the Second Circuit concluded that “state regulation of the use of firearms in public was ‘enshrined with[in] the scope’ of the Second Amendment when it was adopted,” and thus a licensing regime for people who want to carry firearms in public did not fall within the core of the Second Amendment.
Why the consensus approach is in danger
While lower court judges have largely embraced the “two-step analytic framework” applied by most circuits, there have been a few dissenters. One dissenter is Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who argued in a 2011 dissenting opinion, when he was still a lower court judge, that the consensus approach should be abandoned. “Courts are to assess gun bans and regulations based on text, history, and tradition,” Kavanaugh claimed, “not by a balancing test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny.”
In that 2011 case, Kavanaugh would have struck down a law banning semi-automatic assault weapons and requiring gun owners to register their firearms.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, meanwhile, also called for a stricter Second Amendment when she was a lower court judge. Recall that Heller suggested that “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill” are constitutional. But, dissenting in Kantor v. Barr (2019), Barrett claimed that this rule should be shrunk so that only “dangerous people” may be prohibited from owning a gun. So under Barrett’s framework, a person convicted of a nonviolent felony like mail fraud would still have a Second Amendment right to own a gun.
There’s also a third reason to suspect that the Supreme Court is likely to use the Corlett case to move the law dramatically to the right.
Shortly before his death in 2019, retired Justice John Paul Stevens revealed some of the internal deliberations behind the Supreme Court’s Heller decision. After former Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of Heller, circulated his original draft to the Court, former Justice Anthony Kennedy asked for “some important changes” to that draft.
Because Heller was a 5-4 decision, Scalia needed Kennedy’s vote to hold onto his majority. According to Stevens, it was Kennedy who requested that the opinion include language stating that Heller “should not be taken to cast doubt” on many existing gun laws.
But Kennedy retired from the Supreme Court in 2018 and was replaced by Kavanaugh. And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who joined the dissent in Heller, died in 2020 and was replaced by Barrett.
The current Court, in other words, is much more conservative than the Court that decided Heller in 2008. It’s not even clear that a majority of the current Court supports the portions of Heller that limit the scope of the Second Amendment — much less the kind of analysis that led the Second Circuit to uphold New York’s gun licensing law.
The future of gun control in the United States could be quite grim — and Corlett could mark the moment when lawmakers’ power to fight gun violence falls apart.
Over 600 LGBTI people have been murdered in El Salvador since 1993. Around 68 percent of the victims were trans women. (photo: EFE)
El Salvador: LGBT Community Denounces Trans Activist's Murder
teleSUR
Excerpt: "El Salvador's Comcavis Trans, a social organization protecting the rights of transgender women, denounced the murder of activist Zachy Zuley del Cid and urged authorities to investigate this hate crime."
READ MORE
This picture taken on Oct. 30, 2020 shows a macaque monkey playing with a face mask, used as a preventive measure against the spread of the COVID-19, in Genting Sempah in Malaysias Pahang state. (photo: Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images)
PPE May Save Human Lives, but It's Deadly for Wildlife
Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute
Loki writes: "One of the most distinguishable features of the COVID-19 era is the public, everyday use of personal protective equipment (PPE), mainly in the form of disposable face masks and latex gloves."
ne of the most distinguishable features of the COVID-19 era is the public, everyday use of personal protective equipment (PPE), mainly in the form of disposable face masks and latex gloves. And while these thin layers protect us and others from transmitting and contracting SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes the lower respiratory tract disease, scientists are now beginning to understand just how harmful these objects can be for ecosystems and wildlife.
The demand for PPE has put some countries on a war footing, to give governments sweeping wartime authorities to control the economy and compel private businesses to join national fights against the pandemic. "Our national plan launches a full-scale war-time effort to address the supply shortages by ramping up production and protective equipment, syringes, needles, you name it," said President Joe Biden in January. Even the inventor of the lifesaving N95 mask favored by front-line medical workers, Dr. Peter Tsai, said that countries should stockpile PPE as if they were on a war footing. "Weapons are not profitable," he said in August. "But they need to have the weapons and then they don't use them for 10 or 20 years. You need to see this kind of PPE as military weapons." A majority of U.S. states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have instituted "mask mandates" requiring people to wear face coverings in public to limit the spread of COVID-19.
But while these "weapons" that fight coronavirus have proved to be lifesaving for humans, an increasing number of non-human animals are finding them to be a brand-new, and often deadly, threat that has suddenly littered their natural habitat. One main problem is that face masks and latex gloves are disposable, and people often do not dispose of them properly. How many times have you seen a used mask or glove lying on the street or stuck in a bush or floating in a waterway? Welcome to the world's new pollution problem. (As if the scourge of plastic waste weren't enough of an issue for the global ecosystem.)
According to the World Health Organization, the fabric masks that should be used to fight the pandemic are made of three layers of fabric: an inner layer of absorbent material like cotton, a middle layer of non-woven non-absorbent material, like polypropylene, which is a kind of plastic, and an outer layer of non-absorbent material, like polyester. That means that these masks, if improperly discarded, have the power to threaten ecosystems for many decades, even centuries, to come. Polypropylene takes 20 to 30 years to decompose in a landfill. Polyester can take up to 200 years. Researchers from the University College London Plastic Waste Innovation Hub recently released a report that estimated that about 70,000 tons of plastic waste would be produced if all Britons wore a single-use mask each day for a year.
In August 2020, during a cleanup project at a canal in the Dutch city of Leiden, scientists discovered a fish trapped in a latex glove, a finding that prompted them to investigate whether this problem was more widespread. Their fears were soon realized: In just a few months, researchers found hundreds of face masks littering the city's historic canals. Their findings were released in a March report published in the journal Animal Biology about the impact that PPE litter is having on wildlife. The grim conclusion: All those face masks and latex gloves are killing birds, fish and other wildlife across the globe. The researchers, from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Institute of Biology at Leiden University, and the Institute for Water and Wetland Research, all based in the Netherlands, said that animals are becoming entangled in the gear, while others, mistaking it for food, are dying from fatally ingesting it. Some animals are building homes with it.
"As always with these single-use items, you're not really looking after them and they end up in the environment really soon. They start becoming a real problem," Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden and a co-author of the report, told CNN. "I think it's ironic that the materials that protect us are so harmful to the animals around us," he added.
The scientists included specific examples in their study, such as a dead perch (Perca fluviatilis) entrapped in a latex glove "with only its tail sticking out" in the Netherlands; a common coot (Fulica atra) building a nest with a face mask, also in the Netherlands; an American robin (Turdus migratorius) entangled in a face mask in British Columbia; a juvenile peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) whose talons got stuck in a face mask in Yorkshire; cygnets from a mute swan (Cygnus olor) with face masks wrapped around their beaks in Lake Bracciano, near Rome, Italy; and a red fox (Vulpes vulpes), entangled in a face mask, and a European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus), entangled in a glove, both in the United Kingdom. Even stray dogs have been found with PPE in their stomachs. The list goes on and sadly, will go on and on: Hiemstra warned that the entire animal kingdom may ultimately be impacted by humans' COVID-19 litter.
"It makes sense that birds are being reported—they're conspicuous, and you have a lot of people looking at them," said Greg Pauly, a herpetologist and co-director of the Urban Nature Research Center at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who suspects that PPE litter is being ingested by many wild animals—a serious problem, the impact of which we're not going to fully understand any time soon. "Ingestion isn't something you can easily see, and almost no one is looking at it," he said, recommending that wildlife biologists conduct more necropsies of wildlife across all species to collect data for future studies.
More than 30 years ago, the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group based in Washington, D.C., launched the International Coastal Cleanup (ICC), a global trash-picking event meant to eliminate ocean trash, mainly in the form of plastic waste. Every year, volunteers from states and territories throughout the United States and more than 100 countries around the world come together to participate in a local cleanup event. The COVID-19 pandemic has broadened the event's remit: In July of 2020, Ocean Conservancy added a new category of trash to Clean Swell, the mobile app that volunteers use to log their cleanup work: "PPE."
In March, the group released a report on the rising threat of PPE pollution and found that, based on a survey of ICC volunteers and coordinators conducted in early 2021, 94 percent of respondents observed PPE pollution at a cleanup in 2020, during which more than 100,000 pieces of PPE—mainly masks and gloves—were picked up on beaches across 70 countries. More than half of the survey respondents said they saw PPE littering their home communities every day.
What can we do? "We really encourage people to use reusable face masks," said Liselotte Rambonnet, a biologist at the Institute of Biology at Leiden University and co-author of the Animal Biology report, told CNN. "All the interactions we found were with single-use face masks because they are inexpensive and can be lost more easily," she added. Unfortunately, disposable PPE cannot be recycled, so they must go into the regular trash. When doing so, make sure that all contaminated PPE is disposed of in a covered waste bin lined with a garbage bag and that they are always out of reach from children and pets. In no case should you simply toss your used PPE on the street or in a waterway.
In addition, it is critical to cut the two ear straps on each side of your mask before disposing of it to reduce the possibility of wildlife getting entangled in it. And let's take this opportunity to look at the big picture: How all our medical and plastic waste is impacting the natural world and what we can do to reduce this global pollution crisis.
"As we protect our communities and each other in the face of this invisible threat, we can also do more to protect our communities and our ocean from the impacts of the pandemic," writes Janis Searles Jones, the CEO of Ocean Conservancy. "Once the need for PPE subsides as the pandemic recedes, we have a real opportunity to reduce our overall plastics footprint and to ensure that the plastics that we use are recyclable, made of recycled content, and stay out of the ocean and our environment."
But even if we change our behavior now when it comes to PPE disposal, it may be too late. According to a report by OceansAsia, a marine conservation group based in Hong Kong, an estimated 1.56 billion face masks entered the ocean in 2020 alone. "Even if we take steps tomorrow, then for hundreds of years there will be face masks floating around in the ocean, still impacting our wildlife," said Hiemstra. "I'm afraid it will not stop very soon, and actually the problem will only get worse over time, sadly."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.