Department officials say they will continue to investigate both Jeffrey Epstein’s death and the sex crimes he was accused of committing.
Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was taken off suicide watch after being examined by a “doctoral-level psychologist” days before he hanged himself in his prison cell, according to the Justice Department.
The disclosure was made in a letter addressed Thursday to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and ranking member Doug Collins, R-Ga. The letter was obtained by Fox News on Friday.
“The Department can confirm that Mr. Epstein was placed on suicide watch in July,” Justice Department official Stephen E. Boyd wrote. “Mr. Epstein was later removed from suicide watch after being evaluated by a doctoral-level psychologist who determined that a suicide watch was no longer warranted.”
Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, N.Y., on Aug. 10, as he awaited trial on federal sex trafficking charges involving underage girls. He had been placed on suicide watch weeks earlier, on July 23, after he was found on the floor of his cell with bruises around his neck.
Both the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general are investigating the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death.
“Although Mr. Epstein is deceased, the department’s case against anyone who was complicit in his alleged crimes will continue,” the DOJ’s letter said.
Epstein’s ability to take his own life while incarcerated at one of the most secure jails in America ended the possibility of a trial that could have involved prominent figures and sparked widespread anger that he wouldn’t have to answer for his alleged crimes.
Since Epstein’s death, Attorney General William Barr has removed the director of the federal Bureau of Prisons and appointed a new director and deputy director. The jail’s warden has been reassigned to a desk post at a regional office and two guards who were supposed to be watching Epstein the night he died were placed on administrative leave.
Meanwhile, on Friday France announced it had opened an investigation into the alleged rape of minors and a raft of other charges linked to the Epstein case. Epstein had a home in Paris and was arrested in early July after arriving at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport from the French capital.
Epstein had pleaded not guilty to sexually abusing girls as young as 14 and young women in New York and Florida in the early 2000s.
His lawyers maintained that the charges were nullified by a non-prosecution agreement he reached with the federal government when he pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution. Under that agreement, besides serving 13 months in jail, he was required to reach financial settlements with dozens of his alleged victims and register as a sex offender.
Fox News’ Jake Gibson, Bill Mears and Samuel Chamberlain and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg confronted another bout with cancer this month and on Friday completed radiation treatment for a malignant tumor found on her pancreas, the Supreme Court disclosed.
It was the second treatment for cancer in nine months for the court’s oldest member and leader of its liberal wing. The 86-year-old had a lobe of her left lung removed in December, and in the past was treated both for colon and pancreatic cancer.
The court said the three-week treatment for her current condition began earlier this month at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and no additional treatment is planned.
“The tumor was treated definitively and there is no evidence of disease elsewhere in the body,” the court’s spokeswoman said in a statement. “Justice Ginsburg will continue to have periodic blood tests and scans. No further treatment is needed at this time.”
Experts on pancreatic cancer said there was no indication Ginsburg’s ability to serve on the court will be affected, but cautioned it was difficult to make predictions about her prognosis based on the scant details provided by the court.
Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaks about her work and gender equality during a panel discussion at the Georgetown University Law Center in Northwest Washington on July 2. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
Louis Weiner, director of the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, whose research focuses on pancreatic treatment models, said “there is reason to be optimistic that she will do well and will be able to continue work.”
Weiner said “high-dose, localized radiology to a particular part of the body will eradicate pancreatic cancer cells. The radiology typically works very successfully.”
A less-optimistic view of the use of radiation is that it is for “tumor control rather than cure,” said Diane Simeone, director of the Pancreatic Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health’s Perlmutter Cancer Center and a specialist in pancreatic cancer. “It’s a little bit uncommon to just do radiation only,” she said. “It’s often used for disease control. It’s not often a curative approach.”
Ginsburg seems to have tolerated the outpatient treatment well; she was at work at the Supreme Court on Friday afternoon after receiving her final treatment in New York during the morning.
She has maintained an active schedule of speaking engagements throughout the treatment, and last week attended an off-Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Photographs of her meeting actor Kate McKinnon, who portrays Ginsburg on “Saturday Night Live,” lit up social media.
Ginsburg is one of the oldest justices to serve on the Supreme Court, and her health is a constant matter of concern and speculation for both liberals and conservatives. Her inability to serve would provide President Trump with a chance to nominate a third conservative to the high court and shift it further to the right.
Ginsburg said in speeches and in an interview last month that her health was fine, and she would continue to serve as long as she felt up to the job.
“I was okay last term; I expect to be okay next term, and after that we’ll just have to see,” Ginsburg said July 24 at an appearance in Washington. According to the court’s statement, that event was after an abnormality was detected in a routine blood test, but before a biopsy confirmed a “localized malignant tumor.”
The court’s statement said Ginsburg started a three-week course of stereotactic ablative radiation therapy — a highly focused radiation treatment that concentrates an intense dose of radiation on a tumor, while limiting the dose to the surrounding organs — on Aug. 5. A bile duct stent was placed as part of the treatment.
Ginsburg canceled an annual summer visit to Santa Fe, N.M., where she attends an opera performance each night, “but has otherwise maintained an active schedule,” the statement said.
Ginsburg has been open about her past episodes with cancer.
The discovery of cancer in December was most serious. For the first time since she joined the court in 1993, she missed a two-week round of oral arguments at the court. Her absence prompted some on right-wing social media to insist she was incapacitated, or even dead.
However, she returned to the court, and she even wrote the majority decision in one of the cases argued when she was gone.
Ginsburg was treated for colorectal cancer in 1999, and pancreatic cancer was discovered at a very early stage 10 years later. She scheduled treatment for both during the court’s off days.
Pancreatic cancer is particularly dangerous, but Ginsburg in an interview with NPR last month made light of predictions about her fate at the time.
“There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced, with great glee, that I was going to be dead within six months,” she recalled in the interview. “That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I am very much alive.”
The senator was Jim Bunning (R-Ky.), who later apologized for his remarks.
Weiner said Ginsburg’s previous cancers made it more likely that an additional tumor would be found at an early, treatable stage.
“Localized measures have an excellent chance of being useful” when a tumor is detected early, Weiner said.
The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is quite low when compared with other forms of the disease, though people with localized tumors do better, according to the American Cancer Society. Ginsburg has already survived for 10 years after one bout with the disease. The survival rates are also skewed by the fact that pancreatic cancer is often not detected until it has spread significantly.
In light of Ginsburg’s cancer history, Simeone speculated that she might have a subtype of the disease that is less aggressive and grows more slowly. However, she said she could not be sure without knowing more about Ginsburg’s lung and colon cancers.
Nadia Laack, chair of radiation oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said she suspected that Ginsburg’s tumor is a new cancer, rather than a recurrence. “Normally, pancreatic cancer recurs fairly quickly, generally in the next two years,” she said.
Three justices older than Ginsburg have served in the court’s history: Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Paul Stevens and Roger B. Taney. Stevens, who served with Ginsburg and who died in July, was 90 when he retired in 2010, and Holmes served until he was almost 91.
Ginsburg was under pressure from some on the left to retire when President Barack Obama could have nominated her successor, but she was not ready to go. When Justice Antonin Scalia died of a heart attack in 2016, the Republican-controlled Senate refused to hold a hearing on Obama’s choice to replace Scalia, Judge Merrick Garland.
Trump then chose Neil M. Gorsuch for the position. Last year, he picked Brett M. Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who retired.
Ginsburg is expected to resume her normal schedule, including a teaching and speaking appearance Monday in Buffalo, and an appearance at the end of the month at the National Book Fair.
Ashley Tabaddor, a federal immigration judge in Los Angeles, is the President of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
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Ashley Tabaddor, a federal immigration judge in Los Angeles, is the President of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
Susan Walsh/AP
The Trump administration is making changes to the agency that operates the nation’s immigration court system, a move immediately denounced by the immigration judges union as a power grab.
The agency is called the Executive Office for Immigration Review and it is an arm of the Justice Department. Under the interim rule announced Friday, the agency’s director will have the power to issue appellate decisions in immigration cases that have not been decided within an allotted timeframe. It also creates a new office of policy within EOIR to implement the administration’s immigration policies.
The head of the immigration judges’ union accused the administration of trying to strip power away from judges and turn the immigration court system into a law enforcement agency.
“In an unprecedented attempt at agency overreach to dismantle the Immigration Court, the Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) today published a new interim rule, effective next Monday, which takes steps to dismantle the Immigration Court system,” Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said in a statement. “DOJ’s action ends any transparency and assurance of independent decision making over individual cases.”
The new rule, first reported by the Associated Press, comes after the administration announced an effort to decertify the immigration judges’ union. The judges, 440 in total, are employees of the Justice Department and not part of the independent judiciary. The Trump administration has also imposed quotas on judges in an effort to speed up deportations and reduce the backlog of more than 900,000 cases pending in immigration courts.
Tabaddor said the administration is trying to concentrate its power over immigration proceedings.
“The new rule is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Tabaddor said “While couched in bureaucratic language, the impact of this regulation is to substitute the policy directives of a single political appointee over the legal analysis of non-political, independent adjudicators.”
The EOIR did not respond to a call for comment.
Earlier this week, the EOIR sent the immigration judges a newsletter containing a blog post from VDare, an anti-immigration website, which included an anti-Semitic reference, according to Tabaddor. After she protested, Justice Department officials said some information included with the newsletter had been compiled by a third-party contractor and should not have been distributed.
“The Department of Justice condemns anti-Semitism in the strongest terms,” Kathryn Mattingly, a spokeswoman for EOIR told Buzzfeed.
Officials in Washington have expressed concern about the growing rupture between Japan and South Korea, worried that the end of the intelligence-sharing deal would send the wrong signal to China and North Korea, which have long sought to undermine American influence in the region.
Without the agreement, Tokyo and Seoul will have to exchange sensitive military intelligence through Washington, which has separate intelligence-sharing deals with both nations. But such an arrangement could slow down the information-sharing at critical moments, like immediately after a North Korean missile launch, analysts said.
When North Korea’s recent series of launches began in late July — involving what South Korean officials characterize as two new types of short-range ballistic missile, as well as a new guided multiple-tube rocker launcher — it blamed South Korea and the United States, for carrying out joint military exercises to which the North strongly objects.
President Trump has shrugged off the recent launches, calling them “smaller ones.”
Speaking to reporters on Friday night as he was leaving the White House for the Group of 7 meeting of industrialized nations, Mr. Trump said the tests did nothing to complicate his relationship with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, or his hopes for denuclearization talks.
“He likes testing missiles,” Mr. Trump said. “But we never restricted short-range missiles. Many nations test those missiles.”
The president said that the United States had recently “tested a very big one.”
Earlier this month, he said Mr. Kim had sent him a letter that included a “small apology” for the tests, and which said that the North wanted to begin a dialogue with Washington as soon as the joint military drills were over.
The drill ended on Tuesday, but North Korea has continued to express displeasure toward the United States. On Friday, its foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, called Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a “die-hard toxin of the U.S. diplomacy,” according to a statement carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg underwent radiation therapy this month for a tumor on her pancreas, the Supreme Court announced on Friday.
Ginsburg, 86, had three weeks of radiation on an outpatient basis beginning August 5 and finishing this week, according to NPR.
“The tumor was treated definitively and there is no evidence of disease elsewhere in the body,” a statement from the Supreme Court said. “Justice Ginsburg will continue to have periodic blood tests and scans. No further treatment is needed at this time.”
Ginsburg has been treated for cancer several times over the past 20 years, NPR notes. This summer marked her second round of treatment in less than a year. In December, she had surgery for lung cancer. Doctors said that surgery was successful and there was no evidence of remaining cancer at that time.
Health issues for the justice, a liberal who has become a feminist icon in recent years thanks to her fiery dissents and her work on women’s rights, have led to questions about how long she will remain on the bench. If she were to leave during President Trump’s term in office, he would almost certainly appoint a conservative justice, giving conservatives a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court.
That could give right-wing justices enough of a margin to overturn Roe v. Wade and accomplish a variety of other conservative priorities.
But speculation about Ginsburg’s longevity on the Court has always run up against her legendary toughness.
“There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months,” Ginsburg told NPR before her most recent round of treatment. “That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I am very much alive.”
The actress jokingly tweeted someone should give President Trump a shiv, but there was a lot of backlash showing several people did not think her comment was a laughing matter.
One of those contained a vulgar attack on Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James, who praised Koch as a “great philanthropist and friend of liberty.”
“With all due respect, Ms. James, f–k you,” Midler tweeted. “‘A friend of liberty’ Yes, his own and his family’s. The rest of us can drink leaded water and burn in the climate change he produced.”
The Heritage Foundation did not immediately respond to a Fox News request for comment. James had not responded to Midler via Twitter by publishing time.
A major donor to libertarian causes, Koch and his brother Charles have regularly been attacked by left-wing politicians and activists — often portraying them as bogeymen blocking reforms to protect the environment.
Midler also apologized for initially tweeting that Charles Koch had died, noting that she didn’t want to give “false hope.”
“Guess it was just wistful thinking,” Midler added in another tweet. “As we watch the Amazon Rainforest burning, all the #GlobalWarming culprits are foremost in one’s mind.”
She also promoted a “eulogy” titled the “terrifying legacy of David Koch” and retweeted mock requests for memorializing the billionaire.
“David Koch had a dream, which was to make things easier for himself and a few friends while also making things significantly worse for everyone else on the planet. He is gone, but now that work falls to all of us. Today, whenever you get the chance, harm someone vulnerable,” read one of them, from Deadspin writer David Roth.
David Koch’s family confirmed on Friday that the controversial businessman had succumbed to advanced-stage prostate cancer, 27 years after being diagnosed.
“David liked to say that a combination of brilliant doctors, state-of-the-art medications and his own stubbornness kept the cancer at bay,” brother Charles Koch said in the statement. “We can all be grateful that it did, because he was able to touch so many more lives as a result.”
James’ statement heaped praise on David Koch, noting his efforts on a variety of policy issues.
“David also had a passion to preserve individual liberty. He committed himself to supporting causes and candidates that empowered individuals by decreasing government control,” she said. “He was more than willing to tackle contentious issues, but eager to do so in a way that accentuated common ground rather than divisiveness. As just one example, he was a major force behind the decades-long prison reform movement, which he approached by building a coalition of activists from across the political spectrum.”
“I don’t think this type of subpoena supports a legislative inquiry,” Patrick Strawbridge, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, told the panel. “The only reason they have focused on these particular plaintiffs is because they want to investigate these plaintiffs.”
Lawyers on both sides acknowledged that some kind of compromise could be possible, but they appeared unlikely to give much ground.
Douglas Letter, a lawyer representing the congressional committees, said lawmakers would be willing to negotiate on narrowing the scope of the subpoenas to exclude records that could reveal sensitive information about people outside of the scope of their inquiries, such as low-level employees of Mr. Trump’s businesses. But, Mr. Letter said, it was necessary to review a broad swath of Mr. Trump’s documents.
“We are doing an extremely broad investigation,” Mr. Letter said, explaining the committees’ reasons for wanting to see Mr. Trump’s family members’ records as well. “Obviously if you’re laundering Russian money, moving it to the United States, you need to see how it’s handled domestically.”
Mr. Strawbridge told the judges several times throughout the hearing that he would be willing to negotiate a narrower records release, but when Judge Newman asked him which parts of the subpoenas the Trump family would be willing to allow, Mr. Strawbridge said he had not been authorized to negotiate at that moment.
But it’s a complex story, and online discussion of it has been riddled with misinformation, misleading photos and errors. To fill in the gaps and bust some common myths, we asked you to send us your questions on the Amazon fires.
We chose a sample of the many questions we received and where we didn’t know the answer, we enrolled the experts.
1) Why are there fires? Is it Bolsonaro’s men doing it to clear rainforest for mining/farming etc? – Alex
Brazilian journalist Silio Boccanera argues that some fires at this time of year – the dry season in Brazil – are to be expected. But many of the fires burning through the Amazon are believed to have been started deliberately.
President Bolsonaro has not condemned deforestation and supports clearing the Amazon for agriculture and mining.
“So it’s a combination of natural phenomena with locals feeling comfortable enough to do it because the government has not made any effort to prevent it,” Mr Boccanera says.
Image copyright Reuters
Image caption
Smoke rising through the rainforest
He thinks that smaller groups of people are more responsible for starting the fires than big corporations selling beef and soy, which could run the risk of being boycotted.
Although the big corporations are not innocent, they are better informed, he says.
But smaller groups – who benefit from destroying areas of the forest for farming – have gone ahead because they have not been stopped by authorities, Mr Boccanera explains.
Although deliberate fire-starting has always been a problem, it has never been seen to this extent. Mr Boccanera says perpetrators now know that if they are caught, they won’t be punished.
2) The number of fires seems like a bad metric, because the size of fires varies. Is there year-on-year data on the total area affected? – Peter
This is a fair point – Brazil’s satellite agency found there’s been an 84% increase in the number of fires compared with the same period in 2018. It detected more than 74,000 fires in Brazil between January and August – the highest number since records began in 2013. Most of those were in the Amazon.
But does this mean more land is being burned? After all, we could be looking at 74,000 tiny fires.
The truth is we don’t know yet, but the evidence points towards more land being consumed.
We don’t have the full picture at the moment, partly because many fires are still burning. We asked Copernicus, the European Union’s earth observation programme, and they said the best way to assess how destructive these fires are is to look at how much carbon dioxide is being released.
So far this year, the equivalent of 228 megatonnes has been released, according to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. This is the highest level since 2010.
At some point in the future, there should be more detailed satellite information about how much land had been burned, but that information isn’t available yet.
Mr Bolsonaro says he is calling in the armed forces, who have more resources to tackle the fires, including the use of helicopters and aeroplanes to drop water.
However, journalist Silio Boccanera says that he considers this “just talk”.
Mr Boccanera says he believes the attitude at the top of government needs to change. Before, people believed deforestation needed to be prevented. But now “people are burning without fear”, he says.
4) The coverage on this subject has only come to light recently because of the #PrayforAmazonas and #PrayforAmazonia hashtag. Why have you not reported it? – Jake
Image caption
Demonstrations took place in Barcelona against the fires
At 23:29 on Tuesday, we published an article about the new satellite data that was released that day, which for the first time highlighted how serious the extent of the fires was. This article immediately became the lead story on the BBC News website internationally.
The #PrayforAmazonas hashtag was first used about two hours later. This, and others such as #prayforrondonia have become trending topics around the world.
5) Is this a natural, healthy way the forest self-clears for new growth? – Lucy
As Lucy suggests, there is a case to be made that some fire-adapted forests benefit from fires – they can help clear the forest and allow trees space to grow stronger.
But this is not the situation right now in the Amazon, says Yadvinder Malhi, Professor of Ecosystem Science at the University of Oxford. “These are fires that we are concerned about,” he says. The humid forests of the Amazon have no adaptation to fire and suffer immense damage. Almost all fires in humid forests are started by people.
He believes the driving force behind the fire is human rather than natural.
While statistics show that 2016 also saw a significant number of fires in the Amazon, this was considered a “drought year”- when there is naturally less rain so the forest is drier and therefore more fire-prone.
But 2019 has not been a drought year. Professor Malhi says there is such a large number of fires because people have lit them.
6) How quickly does the Amazon rainforest regenerate after a fire? – Emily
“The forest takes around 20-40 years if it’s allowed to regenerate,” says Prof Malhi.
But any fires that are currently burning will leave the surviving trees more vulnerable to drought and repeated fires.
Prof Malhi is worried that if the Amazon is hit by fires every few years large parts of it will shift to a degraded shrubby state.
“Once you’ve had multiple fires there’s the chance of permanent damage,” he says.
7) If this current trend were to continue at its present rate, how long would the Amazon rainforest area survive? – Christopher
“We are at an early stage where we can still do lots to save the forest,” says Prof Malhi. About 80% of the Amazon is still intact.
But he says that climate change and deforestation are a dangerous combination. A reduction in rainfall would create dry conditions for fires to spread.
If 30-40% of the Amazon was cleared, then there would be a danger of changing the forest’s entire climate, he says.
In the years before 2005, Brazil had an extremely high rate of deforestation.
Image copyright Getty Images
Image caption
Photos from 2003 showing aggressive deforestation in Brazil
“If Brazil were to return to that, it would take around 50-60 years to deforest 40% of the Amazon,” Prof Malhi says. “But in eastern and southern Amazonia it would take only 20-30 years to reach that threshold.”
8) What percentage of oxygen does the Amazon supply? – Tom
Our colleagues from BBC Reality Check spent most of the day on Friday getting to the bottom of this.
Many claim on social media that the Amazon produces about 20% of the world’s oxygen. It’s widely quoted – by campaign groups and well-known figures, including Emmanuel Macron and footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.
But academics say this is a very common misconception, and that the figure is less than 10%.
Oxygen is released by plants during the process of photosynthesis, where sunlight and carbon dioxide are converted into energy in the form of carbohydrates.
A large proportion of the world’s oxygen is produced by plankton, explains Professor Malhi. He says of the oxygen produced by land-based plants, about 16% comes from the Amazon.
But this isn’t the whole story. In the long run, the Amazon absorbs about the same amount of oxygen as it produces, effectively making the total produced net zero.
Professor Jon Lloyd from Imperial College London says although the Amazon produces a lot of oxygen during the day through photosynthesis, it absorbs about half of it back through the process of respiration to grow. Further oxygen is used up by the forest’s soil, animals and microbes.
9) Will the smoke from these fires have an effect on global weather in future months? – David
Prof Malhi says the immediate effect of the fires will be on the climate of South America. Reduced rain fall is likely, leading to a more intensive dry season.
“The carbon emission could contribute to global warming,” he adds, but the longer term global impact is “more difficult to pin down”.
10) How are these fires affecting the indigenous people? – Samantha
Just this week, 68 fires were registered in indigenous territories and conservation areas, the majority in the Amazon, according to Jonathan Mozower from Survival International, which campaigns for indigenous rights.
“It’s hard to overstate the importance of these forests for indigenous peoples,” he says. “They depend on them for food, medicines, clothing and a sense of identity and belonging.
But the incentives to steal these resources are high and “sadly it’s not a question of one or two rogue actors”, Mr Mazower says. He says this could be the “worst moment for the indigenous people of the Amazon” since the military dictatorship, which ended in the 1980s.
Media captionMembers of Brazil’s indigenous Mura tribe vow to defend their land
Court orders that the state of Idaho pay for gender confirmation surgery for Adree Edmo, a transgender inmate who was incarcerated at the Idaho State Correctional Institution, pictured above.
Heath Druzin/Boise State Public Radio
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Court orders that the state of Idaho pay for gender confirmation surgery for Adree Edmo, a transgender inmate who was incarcerated at the Idaho State Correctional Institution, pictured above.
Heath Druzin/Boise State Public Radio
Updated Aug. 23 at 4:34 p.m. ET
Editor’s Note: This story includes accounts of self-harm.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the state of Idaho must provide gender confirmation surgery to inmate Adree Edmo.
The panel of judges agreed with Federal District Judge B. Lynn Winmill’s ruling in Edmo’s favor last December, writing that his findings were “logical and well-supported” and that, “responsible prison officials were deliberately indifferent to Edmo’s gender dysphoria, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.”
That means Edmo could be the first transgender inmate in the nation to receive sex reassignment surgery through a court order.
Edmo is serving a 10-year prison sentence for sexually abusing a 15-year-old boy when she was 22. Edmo is scheduled for release in 2021 and is not eligible for parole. Per Idaho Department of Correction policy, she will be transferred to a state women’s prison following the surgery.
Idaho has 90 days to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. In a statement, Gov. Little wrote, “We cannot divert critical public dollars away from the higher priorities of keeping the public safe and rehabilitating offenders.”
“The hardworking taxpayers of Idaho should not be forced to pay for a convicted sex offender’s gender reassignment surgery when it is contrary to the medical opinions of the treating physician and multiple mental health professionals,” he wrote.
But the 85-page opinion from the 9th Circuit repeatedly rejected those opinions from Edmo’s healthcare providers.
“It is enough that [her doctor] knew of and disregarded an excessive risk to Edmo’s health by rejecting her request for [gender confirmation surgery] and then never re-evaluating his decision despite ongoing harm to Edmo,” the judges wrote.
Despite two other physicians agreeing with the original treatment plan, the ruling found that “general agreement in a medically unacceptable form of treatment does not somehow make it reasonable.”
Edmo’s lead attorney, Lori Rifkin, called the news of the appeal “unfortunate” and “reprehensible.” “She suffers every single day while they have denied this treatment to her for years and there can be no reason justifying Idaho’s continued refusal to provide her care except bias,” Rifkin said.
Edmo is diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which can cause a person severe distress stemming from being born in a body that does not match their gender identity.
Treatments for gender dysphoria can vary. Some people experience relief by changing their appearance through clothing or receiving hormone treatments. Others require more medically intensive transition-related care, such as mastectomies or gender confirmation surgery.
“…prison authorities have not provided that treatment despite full knowledge of Edmo’s ongoing and extreme suffering and medical needs,” the judges wrote in their decision Friday.
Edmo has twice attempted self-castration while in prison to try to alleviate her symptoms of gender dysphoria and more closely conform her physical body to her gender identity.
The ruling doesn’t mean that the Idaho Department of Correction will now have to provide gender confirmation surgery to all transgender inmates. Rather, it sets a standard for providing the surgery to certain inmates who experience severe gender dysphoria and for whom the surgery is deemed medically necessary.
Federal district Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled in Edmo’s favor in December 2018, and ordered the prison to provide the surgery. Now that the 9th Circuit has agreed with the lower judge, the state and Corizon, the state’s contracted healthcare provider for prisons, will have to move forward with arranging for the procedure, which can cost between $20,000 and $30,000.
This issue could be timely for the Supreme Court. In two similar cases in the 5th and the 1st Circuit Courts of Appeals, judges ruled against inmates requesting gender confirmation surgery. With this decision, there’s now a split in the circuit courts. That could make it more likely that justices would consider the case.
The 9th Circuit Friday explicitly rejected the 5th Circuit’s opinion, which found that denying an inmate gender confirmation surgery could not violate the Eighth Amendment.
The ruling found that the 5th Circuit’s decision, “Relies on an incorrect, or at best outdated, premise: that ‘[t]here is no medical consensus that [gender confirmation surgery] is a necessary or even effective treatment for gender dysphoria.’ “
Amanda Peacher is a reporter for the Mountain West News Bureau. James Dawson is a reporter for Boise State Public Radio.
With its announcement on Friday of new 5-10% tariffs on $75 billion in U.S. goods, China is escalating pressure on President Trump. Xi Jinping senses that Trump is increasingly desperate for a trade deal. He believes he can cajole Trump into making a more China-friendly trade deal.
Trump’s response on Friday has been mixed.
While his latest attack on Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell — questioning whether Powell is more of an enemy than Xi Jinping — is idiotic, Trump is right to point out the central threat of Chinese intellectual property theft. He is also right to threaten to escalate U.S. tariffs further. Strength of resolve is the only way to deter Xi. And U.S. threats aren’t so easy for the Chinese leader to ignore. After all, China’s economy is in significant trouble, more so than is publicly known.
Moreover, it’s not like Trump has many choices of how to respond in the face of such blatant Chinese escalation. He cannot yield to Beijing on the most critical concerns of technology transfers, either forced or stolen, at this point. Those are the crown jewels of the U.S. economy and the foundations of our future economic prosperity. He’d also look like a weakling.
Yes, the markets are falling. Yes, the risks here are significant. But Trump is right to push back hard against Xi. That’s the surest way to get a near-term trade deal, which works for both nations. Kneeling to Xi is a recipe only for U.S. disaster.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaks with NPR in July.
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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaks with NPR in July.
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Updated at 2:37 p.m. ET
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has just completed three weeks of radiation treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the U.S. Supreme Court disclosed Friday.
The radiation therapy, conducted on an outpatient basis, began Aug. 5, shortly after a localized cancerous tumor was discovered on Ginsburg’s pancreas. The treatment included the insertion of a stent in Ginsburg’s bile duct, according to a statement issued by the court.
Doctors at Sloan Kettering said further tests showed no evidence of disease elsewhere in the body. The treatment comes just months after Ginsburg was operated on for lung cancer last December. The 86-year-old justice has been treated for cancer in various forms over the past 20 years.
“Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg today completed a three-week course of stereotactic ablative radiation therapy at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City,” a statement from the Supreme Court read. “The focused radiation treatment began on August 5 and was administered on an outpatient basis to treat a tumor on her pancreas. The abnormality was first detected after a routine blood test in early July, and a biopsy performed on July 31 at Sloan Kettering confirmed a localized malignant tumor.
“As part of her treatment, a bile duct stent was placed. The Justice tolerated treatment well. She cancelled her annual summer visit to Santa Fe, but has otherwise maintained an active schedule. The tumor was treated definitively and there is no evidence of disease elsewhere in the body. Justice Ginsburg will continue to have periodic blood tests and scans. No further treatment is needed at this time.”
“There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months,” Ginsburg said. “That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I,” she added with a smile, “am very much alive.”
During Ginsburg’s three weeks of treatment in New York, she kept up a busy schedule in New York, often going out in the evening to the movies, the opera and the theater.
At the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, where Fiddler on the Roof is playing, word spread during intermission that Ginsburg was there, and the audience stood for several minutes applauding the diminutive justice.
Also in the audience that night was Kate McKinnon, whose frequent portrayal of Ginsburg on NBC’s Saturday Night Live has become a marquee event on the show. Soon, the justice and her imitator were caught in photos clasping hands for the first time.
The justice also continued to work during her time in New York, according to court sources, and she has been spotted frequently window shopping, even going in to try on shoes and other items that have interested her.
Ginsburg has 11 public events planned for September and has not canceled any of them to date.
The Supreme Court is set to open a new term on the first Monday in October, and the justices routinely return to work in September.
President Trump has already named two conservative justices to the court, thus ensuring a five-justice conservative majority in most controversial cases.
Were Ginsburg to leave the court prior to the 2020 election or even the inauguration, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has made clear the GOP would move immediately to fill the vacancy. That would ensure a 6-to-3 conservative majority on the court, all but guaranteeing a conservative grip on the court for decades to come.
From July: Ginsburg Talks With NPR About Her Health
David Koch, billionaire businessman and GOP donor, has passed away at the age of 79 according to a statement released by his brother Charles Koch.
The death of billionaire GOP power player David Koch on Friday morning showed the best and worst of Twitter, with plugged-in journalists quickly disseminating news of his death — and then ghoulish users rushing into the fray to memorialize their most vile thoughts.
The Koch brothers have for decades been loathed by the left, with their generous apolitical philanthropy obscured by their more widely reported donations to GOP politicians and causes. And Trump supporters don’t exactly back them either given the wide philosophical gap between the billionaire brothers and the president.
So Friday’s news sent many who already view the Koch brothers as Republican boogeymen to their keyboards to “celebrate” David’s passing and taunt his grieving older brother, Charles.
Tweets such as “Today Charles Koch is learning how overjoyed the world will be when he dies” and “Here’s hoping Charles Koch follows in his brothers David Koch’s footsteps…” did little to help the social media site’s reputation as a toxic cesspool of negativity.
Other users simply celebrated David’s passing, while some criticized those who dared to mourn him.
“When a bad person dies they don’t suddenly become a saint. Their legacy of destruction and pain doesn’t just float away. David Koch is dead, we have to deal with the fallout of his villainy for hundreds of years,” liberal writer Oliver Willis wrote.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro noticed the “glee” over Koch’s death and called it “a perfect example of how poisonous our politics have become.”
Koch’s family, in a statement attributed to Charles, confirmed David’s death at age 79.
“It is with a heavy heart that I announce the passing of my brother, David,” Charles Koch said in the news release. “Anyone who worked with David surely experienced his giant personality and passion for life.”
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Koch was reportedly worth about $59 billion, making him — along with his equally wealthy older brother — one of the richest people in the world.
The Koch brothers more recently had drawn the ire of President Trump after snubbing his bid for the White House in 2016 and then announcing earlier this year that they would not support the president’s 2020 re-election bid.
David leaves behind his wife, Julia Flesher, and their three children.
Mr. Macron, an advocate of battling climate change and a leader of one of the world’s biggest agricultural producers, has been hesitant about the deal. In June, before a political agreement was reached, he threatened to block the deal if Mr. Bolsonaro pulled Brazil out of the Paris climate accord, as he had threatened to do.
“We’re asking our farmers to stop using pesticides, we’re asking our companies to produce less carbon — that has a competitiveness cost,” Mr. Macron said at the time. “So we’re not going to say from one day to the next that we’ll let in goods from countries that don’t respect any of that.”
The two presidents discussed the matter later that month, at a Group of 20 meeting in Osaka, Japan.
“Given Brazil’s attitude over the past weeks, the president of the republic can only conclude that President Bolsonaro lied to him at the Osaka summit,” Mr. Macron’s office said in a statement released on Friday morning.
“Brazil’s decisions and comments over the past weeks,” it continued, “show that President Bolsonaro has decided not to respect his obligations on climate change, nor to commit on issues related to biodiversity. Under these conditions, France is opposed to the Mercosur agreement as it stands.”
To go into effect, the trade agreement must be ratified by the European Parliament, and some member nations might insist on having their national parliaments vote on it as well. Resistance was already strong enough that Mr. Macron’s opposition could be decisive.
Media captionMembers of Brazil’s indigenous Mura tribe vow to defend their land
France and Ireland say they will not ratify a huge trade deal with South American nations unless Brazil does more to fight fires in the Amazon.
French leader Emmanuel Macron said President Jair Bolsonaro had lied to him about his stance on climate change.
There are currently a record number of fires in the Amazon rainforest – a major source of oxygen for the world.
Environmental groups say the fires are linked to Mr Bolsonaro’s policies, which he denies.
European leaders have also expressed dismay over the fires, with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson saying he is “deeply concerned” about “the impact of the tragic loss of these precious habitats”.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called the fire an “acute emergency… shocking and threatening not only for Brazil and the other affected countries, but also for the whole world”.
Mr Bolsonaro said on Friday that he was considering options for fighting the fires, including deploying the military.
However, he has also accused Mr Macron of meddling for “political gain”, and previously said calls to discuss the fires at this weekend’s G7 summit in Biarritz, France – which Brazil is not participating in – showed “a misplaced colonialist mindset”.
It took 20 years of negotiations to strike the agreement with the South American bloc, consisting of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay.
It would cut or remove trade tariffs on both sides, giving EU firms that make industrial products and cars access to Mercosur, and helping Mercosur countries export farm products, including beef, sugar, and poultry, to the EU.
Will international pressure work?
Analysis by Daniel Gallas, BBC News, São Paulo
Mr Bolsonaro is often called the “Trump of the Tropics” because of his unpredictable and brash manners. So it is anyone’s guess whether he will back down or carry on with this stance.
Back in June, he hailed the Mercosur-EU trade deal as “historic” and “one of the most important trade deals of all time”.
Now his own words and actions are threatening the deal – which still needs to be approved by parliaments of all Mercosur and EU countries.
The deal explicitly says countries have to commit to tackling climate change.
Mr Bolsonaro’s son – who wants to become Brazil’s ambassador in Washington – retweeted a video calling Mr Macron an idiot.
But even Mr Bolsonaro’s agriculture minister and the country’s farmers associations have suggested there needs to be a change of tone from the president.
Meanwhile, Finland’s finance minister has called on the EU to consider banning Brazilian beef imports.
Finland is currently president of the Council of the EU – a role which is rotated among member states every six months.
Image caption
Protesters outside the Brazilian embassy in London
Environmental groups have called for protests in cities across Brazil on Friday to demand action to combat the fires.
Hundreds of protesters also gathered outside the Brazilian embassies in London, Berlin and Paris.
“We can’t stand around waiting for the sky to turn black all the way here in London too,” protester Laura Villares House, 33, told BBC Brasil.
Why does the Amazon matter?
The largest rainforest in the world, the Amazon is a vital carbon store that slows down the pace of global warming.
It is known as the “lungs of the world” and is home to about three million species of plants and animals, and one million indigenous people.
Media captionOne campaigner called the forest fires a “vicious cycle”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres tweeted on Thursday: “In the midst of the global climate crisis, we cannot afford more damage to a major source of oxygen and biodiversity. The Amazon must be protected.”
Mr Bolsonaro has brushed off the latest data, arguing that it was the season of the “queimada”, when farmers burn land to clear it before planting.
However, Inpe has noted that the number of fires is not in line with those normally reported during the dry season.
Wildfires often occur in the dry season in Brazil but they are also deliberately started in efforts to illegally deforest land for cattle ranching.
Conservationists say Mr Bolsonaro has encouraged loggers and farmers to clear the land.
During his campaign, he pledged to limit fines for damaging the rainforest and to weaken the influence of the environmental agency.
Mr Bolsonaro has suggested that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) started the fires, but admitted he had no evidence for this claim. In comments on Thursday, he acknowledged that farmers might be involved in setting fires in the region, according to Reuters news agency.
Smoke billows during a fire in an area of the Amazon rainforest near Porto Velho, Rondonia State, Brazil, Brazil earlier this week.
Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters
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Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters
Smoke billows during a fire in an area of the Amazon rainforest near Porto Velho, Rondonia State, Brazil, Brazil earlier this week.
Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters
French President Emmanuel Macron is calling on world leaders to place the massive fires destroying Brazil’s Amazon rainforest at the top of their agenda as they gather in France’s southwest for the G7 Summit.
“Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest – the lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen – is on fire,” Macron wrote in a tweet Thursday. “It is an international crisis. Members of the G7 Summit, let’s discuss this emergency first order in two days!”
France is hosting the summit in the city of Biarritz, on the Atlantic coast, which begins on Saturday. President Trump and leaders from Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom will also attend.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres echoed Macron, saying in a tweet that “we cannot afford more damage to a major source of oxygen and biodiversity. The Amazon must be protected.”
I’m deeply concerned by the fires in the Amazon rainforest. In the midst of the global climate crisis, we cannot afford more damage to a major source of oxygen and biodiversity.
An estimated 2,500 active fires in the Amazon have caused international concern, prompting a backlash against Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has described measures to protect the rainforest as “obstacles” to economic growth. Bolsonaro, who took office in January, has said repeatedly that he wants to open the Amazon to development.
Many of the fires are believed to have been set by farmers clearing land. Environmentalists claim Bolsonaro’s attitude about the Amazon has encouraged them, as well as cattle ranchers, loggers and miners.
Bolsonaro has said without evidence that there is a “very strong” indication that some non-governmental organizations were setting the fires in retaliation for losing funding from his administration.
Besides France, both Germany and Norway have also weighed in on the fires, criticizing Bolsonaro’s lack of action and saying they would withhold $60 million in funds for sustainability projects in Brazil’s forests.
Onyx Lorenzoni, Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, on Thursday accused European countries of exaggerating environmental problems in an effort to stifle rainforest development.
“There is deforestation in Brazil, yes, but not at the rate and level that they say,” he said, according to the Brazilian news website globo.com.
In a tweet later on Thursday, Bolsonaro responded to Macron: “I regret that Macron seeks to make personal political gains in an internal matter for Brazil and other Amazonian countries. The sensationalist tone he used does nothing to solve the problem.”
Bolsonaro has also accused the media of hyping the fires to undermine him. “Most of the media wants Brazil to end up like Venezuela,” he said.
In an announcement this week by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, or INPE, the agency said there have been 74,155 fires in the country so far this year – about half in the last month and most of them in the Amazon. That represents an 84% increase from the previous year.
Federal prosecutors in the Brazilian state of Para – one of the worst hit areas – have announced an investigation into why there has been such a huge rise in wild fires this year.
Neighboring Bolivia has also struggled to contain the fires.
In our globalized economy, highly mobile capital works in favor of investors and consumers who value democratic protections. That dooms China’s authoritarian model unless Beijing can force the world to submit to its peculiar form of feudal mercantilism.
Just look at Hong Kong.
Multiple reports on Thursday suggest that Alibaba, China’s equivalent of Amazon, has suspended its plan to float shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The head of Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific Airways recently resigned, and the head of a subsidiary airline’s union, Cathay Dragon, has been forced out. Qantas airlines is reducing flights to the Chinese territory, and Hong Kong’s service economy is in free fall. The simple takeaway: Witnessing Hong Kong’s battle between individual freedom and state authoritarianism, international businesses are turning away.
That Chinese weakness is America’s opportunity. Our countermanding investment model: one that balances democratic protections and the rule-of-law to free-market capitalism is one that can attract those investors now disillusioned by Hong Kong. Defending against Chinese aggression and strengthening an investor-friendly stable economy, we can take advantage from China’s economic isolation.
Still not convinced?
Then just look at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (with my annotation). It has been spiraling downwards since the start of protests in April. Market stabilization has been impossible in face of oscillating protests.
Again, this is Beijing caught between reality and ideology.
The reality is that people do not want to kneel in submission to Chinese President Xi Jinping in return for whatever scraps he throws at them. They prefer to earn profits under protection of democratic law. But because Xi’s ideology is centered in a long-term project to reshape the world under Chinese rule, he cannot yield to the protesters, which further hurts China’s investment appeal.
It’s not just absent freedom which makes China weak. It’s the very model that Xi pursues. Where free markets allocate capital based on objective assessments of a return, Xi burns capital at the altar of his all-knowing delusion. Xi and his cronies believe they know better than the invisible hand. They are manifestly wrong.
Still, America must not take for granted our great systemic comparative advantage over China. President Trump’s cultivation of chaos over the Federal Reserve is extraordinarily misguided. So too is it alarming that Democratic presidential front-runners now deride free markets. We should refocus on that which makes us economically great: freedom matched to capitalism.
If we do, Hong Kong shows that we’ll win this new struggle for the 21st century.
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