“This ruling does not touch the University’s well-established right to express to all students its sincerely held beliefs about Torah values and sexual orientation,” the group said in its filing at the Supreme Court. At the same time, the filing adds, “it may not deny certain students access to the non-religious resources it offers the entire student community on the basis of sexual orientation.”
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U.S. and Russian negotiators failed to narrow their differences in security talks in Geneva on Monday against the backdrop of Moscow’s military buildup near Ukraine, U.S. and Russian diplomats said.
“It’s just the beginning, and we don’t know where all of this is headed quite yet,” Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who is leading the talks on Washington’s side, said after Monday’s round of talks concluded.
Source Article from https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-russia-talks-begin-to-avert-one-of-the-biggest-geopolitical-crises-since-the-cold-war-11641815752
Her probe, launched in February, is centered on the Jan. 2 phone call Trump placed to Raffensperger, in which he urged the Republican to “find” the votes to reverse Joe Biden’s win in Georgia in November 2020. But it could also include other actions from Trump’s allies who sowed doubts about the election results, including testimony his attorney Rudy Giuliani gave at a state legislative hearing.
Willis previously indicated that her office was probing potential violations of Georgia law prohibiting criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, intentional interference with the performance of election duties, conspiracy and racketeering, among others.
In her letter to Brasher, Willis said the DA’s office “has received information indicating a reasonable probability that the State of Georgia’s administration of elections in 2020, including the State’s election of the President of the United States, was subject to possible criminal disruptions.”
Special grand juries, which typically have 16 to 23 members, can’t issue indictments. But they can subpoena witnesses, compel the production of documents, inspect and enter into certain offices for the purposes of the investigation.
Willis said a special grand jury would be beneficial because jurors can be impaneled for as long as prosecutors need and would be focused on the one investigation. The veteran prosecutor said a special grand jury has “an investigatory focus appropriate to the complexity of the facts and circumstances involved.”
A regular Fulton County grand jury is seated for two months. Jurors typically hear hundreds of felony cases before their service ends.
The DA also requested that a Fulton County superior court judge be assigned to assist and supervise the special grand jury in carrying out its investigation and duties.
Willis’ request must be approved by a majority of the county’s superior court judges.
A spokesman for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Willis recently told the Associated Press that a decision on whether to bring charges against Trump could come in the first half of 2022.
“We’re going to just get the facts, get the law, be very methodical, very patient and, in some extent, unemotional about this quest for justice,” she told the wire service earlier this month.
The move comes at a time when Fulton prosecutors are trying to work their way through a backlog of some 11,000 criminal cases created by the pandemic and, as Willis has alleged, mismanagement by her predecessor Paul Howard.
Some critics believe Willis should be focusing on clearing those cases rather than devoting limited resources to probing the notoriously litigious former president.
To move forward with charges, prosecutors would need to prove that Trump knew his conduct was unlawful when he called Raffensperger and told him “find” the 11,780 votes to overcome President Joe Biden’s win in Georgia.
While some legal experts believe the criminal intent, or mens rea, is there, other defense attorneys believe the case isn’t so cut and dried.
Source Article from https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/breaking-fulton-da-requests-special-grand-jury-for-trump-probe/E5HCDM2P75ETRAEUHBK2Q7L3FY/
Almost 50 dead, 95 million under winter weather alerts as Arctic cold blankets the nation – NBC News
A strengthening Tropical Storm Ian was expected to intensify into a hurricane on Monday — and possibly into a high-end Category 4 storm as early as midweek this week.
State of play: Ian was some 355 miles southeast of the western tip of Cuba at 2am ET, and its maximum sustained winds had strengthened to 70 mph, up from 45 mph Sunday afternoon, according to the National Hurricane Center. A storm is classified as a hurricane when its maximum sustained winds reach 74 mph.
Details: A Hurricane Warning was in effect for Grand Cayman and several Cuban provinces, as the storm moved to the northwest at 13 mph.
- A tropical storm warning has been issued for the lower Florida Keys, from Seven Mile Bridge westward to Key West to Dry Tortugas, as well as several provinces in Cuba.
- A tropical storm watch was in effect for Englewood southward to Chokoloskee in Florida, and the Caribbean islands of Little Cayman and Cayman Brac.
The big picture: President Biden declared a federal state of emergency for multiple Florida counties on Saturday night, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared a state of emergency for the entire state.
What to watch: In its 2am update, the National Hurricane Center said Ian was expected to become a hurricane Monday morning and a “major hurricane” by Tuesday.
- “Storm surge could raise water levels by as much as 9 to 14 feet above normal tide levels along the coast of western Cuba in areas of onshore winds in the hurricane warning area Monday night and early Tuesday,” the agency said.
- The National Hurricane Center forecast two to four inches of rainfall from the Florida Keys into the southern and central Florida Peninsula from Monday through Wednesday morning.
Threat level: Studies show an increase in the occurrence of rapid intensification due to human-caused climate change.
- The western Caribbean Sea is a powder keg for hurricanes right now, with high ocean heat content and weak upper-level winds.
What they’re saying: Even if the west coast of Florida doesn’t sustain a direct hit from Ian, “it doesn’t take an onshore or direct hit from a hurricane to pile up the water,” acting NHC director Jamie Rhome said in a Sunday briefing.
- He urged Florida residents to find out if they’re in a likely evacuation zone at FloridaDisaster.org in case evacuations are ordered.
What’s next: The key questions facing forecasters, public officials and tens of millions of residents along the Gulf Coast are where the storm will head once it becomes a hurricane, and how strong it will be once it gets there.
- The computer models have been diverging, with some showing a landfall in northwestern Florida or perhaps southeastern Alabama. Others show a hit much farther east, closer to Tampa.
- Forecast trends since Friday have nudged the most likely track of the center of Ian to the west, closer to the Panhandle region of Florida.
- While the likelihood of significant impacts in South Florida has decreased, it has not entirely disappeared, and the Hurricane Center is urging all Floridians to prepare for storm impacts.
Context: Human-caused climate change is altering the characteristics of nature’s most powerful storms.
- For example, sea level rise from melting ice sheets makes a hurricane’s storm surge more harmful.
This story has been updated with the storm’s strengthening and the latest estimates of when the storm is expected to become a hurricane.
Source Article from https://www.axios.com/2022/09/25/hurricane-ian-intensifies-florida-threat
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden is considering a federal judge in South Carolina as one of several candidates to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the White House confirmed, and may be casting a wider net than the three or four potential nominees whose names have widely circulated.
Judge J. Michelle Childs, who has served on the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina since 2010, is one of several candidates the president is considering for the opening, a White House spokesman said. Childs has been supported by House Majority Whip James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and key ally to the Biden administration.
Childs, who Biden nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit earlier this month, is the first candidate the White House has publicly confirmed. Her consideration, first reported by The Washington Post, came days before she was scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for her confirmation hearing.
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That hearing has been postponed.
Biden has pledged to name the first Black woman to the Supreme Court in the nation’s history next month. While Supreme Court nominees are frequently pulled from federal appeals courts that’s not always the case – and a president has wide latitude to choose.
Biden is considering more than a dozen candidates for the seat, according to a source familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitives involved with the nomination process.
Some of the names under consideration have been circulating for months, including Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the D.C. Circuit and California Supreme Court Associate Justice Leondra Kruger – both of whom are considered frontrunners.
But the White House is also considering Sherrilyn Ifill, who is stepping down as president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls, the source said.
How many?:Biden pledge puts spotlight on lack of diversity in lower courts
Other names include Judge Holly Thomas, recently confirmed to the California-based U.S. Court of Appeal for the 9th Circuit; Judge Wilhelmina Wright, a federal district judge in Minnesota; Nancy Abudu, who Biden recently nominated for a spot on the 11th Circuit; Arianna Freeman, nominated to the 3rd Circuit; Judge Candace Rae Jackson-Akiwumi on the 7th Circuit and Judge Tiffany Cunningham on the Federal Circuit.
The Biden administration has sought to increase the diversity of the federal courts. When Biden became president last year there were four African American women out of 179 appellate judgeships. Now, there are nine with three more nominees in the pipeline.
Supreme Court nominees almost always come from federal appeals courts and, more recently, they have frequently come from the D.C. Circuit, considered the second-most influential court in the nation because of its work adjudicating cases involving the federal government and its historic status as a proving ground for Supreme Court justices. Only one current justice didn’t hear appeals – Elena Kagan – and she was the U.S. solicitor general, the federal government’s top lawyer arguing cases before the high court.
Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/01/29/white-house-biden-considering-judge-childs-supreme-court/9267824002/
Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/02/politics/joe-biden-guns-speech/index.html
UVALDE, Texas (AP) — The state agency investigating the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde has determined that the commander facing criticism for the slow police response was not carrying a radio as the massacre unfolded, a Texas state senator said Friday.
Sen. Roland Gutierrez told The Associated Press in a brief telephone interview that a Texas Department of Public Safety official told him school district police Chief Pete Arredondo was without a radio during the May 24 attack by a lone gunman at Robb Elementary School that left 19 students and two teachers dead. Seventeen more people were injured.
Authorities have not said how Arredondo was communicating with other law enforcement officials at the scene, including the more than a dozen officers who were at one point waiting outside the classroom where the gunman was holed up. Arredondo heads the district’s small department and was in charge of the multi-agency response to the shooting.
He has not responded to multiple interview requests from AP since the attack, including a telephone message left with district police Friday.
The apparently missing radio is the latest detail to underscore concerns about how police handled the shooting and why they didn’t confront the gunman faster, even as anguished parents outside the school urged officers to go inside. The Justice Department has said it will review the law enforcement response.
Focus has turned to the chief in recent days after Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Arredondo believed the active shooting had turned into a hostage situation, and that he made the “wrong decision” to not order officers to breach the classroom more quickly to confront the gunman.
Gutierrez, who represents Uvalde, complained Thursday that Arredondo was not informed of panicked 911 calls coming from students trapped inside a classroom where the gunman had holed up. The Democrat called it a “system failure.”
Police radios are a crucial source of real-time communication during an emergency and, according to experts, often how information from 911 calls is relayed to officers on the ground. It’s unclear who at the scene was aware of the calls. Uvalde police did not respond to questions about the calls Thursday.
The news emerged amid tensions between state and local authorities over how police handled the shooting and communicated what happened to the public.
The gunman in Uvalde, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, spent roughly 80 minutes inside the school, and more than an hour passed from when the first officers followed him into the building and when he was killed by law enforcement, according to an official timeline.
Ramos slipped through an unlocked door into adjoining fourth-grade classrooms at 11:33, authorities said. He rapidly fired off more than 100 rounds.
Officers entered minutes later, exchanging fire with Ramos, and by 12:03 there were as many as 19 officers in the hallway outside the classroom, McCraw said. Authorities have not said where Arredondo was during this period.
Officers from other agencies urged the school police chief to let them move in because children were in danger, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.
A U.S. Border Patrol tactical team used a school employee’s key to unlock the classroom door and kill the gunman around 12:50 p.m., McCraw said.
Law enforcement and state officials have struggled to present an accurate timeline and details of the shooting and how police responded, sometimes providing conflicting information or withdrawing statements hours later. State police have said some accounts were preliminary and may change as more witnesses are interviewed.
Gutierrez said Friday that a Texas Department of Public Safety official told him that the Uvalde-area district attorney, Christina Mitchell Busbee, a Republican, had directed the agency to not release more information about the shooting investigation to the senator or the public.
The Department of Public Safety on Friday referred all questions about the shooting investigation to Busbee, who has not returned telephone and text messages seeking comment.
Gutierrez said Thursday that many people should shoulder some blame in the Uvalde shooting, including the Texas governor.
“There was error at every level, including the legislative level. Greg Abbott has plenty of blame in all of this,” he said.
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More on the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas: https://apnews.com/hub/uvalde-school-shooting
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Coronado reported from Austin, Texas. Associated Press writers Jake Bleiberg in Dallas; Jim Vertuno in Austin, Texas; and Mike Balsamo in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
Source Article from https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-school-shooting-politics-texas-shootings-6900bca21a95c38bff9183cf1ea103f0
Cheney: Jan. 6 probe not about stopping Trump from running
Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney weighs in on President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s speeches given one year after Capitol riot.
Former Republican President George W. Bush donated to two prominent critics of former President Trump who both voted to impeach him toward the end of his term.
Campaign finance reports, first reported by Politico, show that Bush donated thousands of dollars to Republicans Rep. Liz Cheney and Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2021.
Former President George W. Bush, center, stands amongst members of the U.S. armed forces during the playing of the national anthem before the first half of an NFL football game between the Denver Broncos and Dallas Cowboys in Arlington, Texas, Sunday, Nov. 7, 2021.
(AP Photo/Michael Ainsworth)
GEORGE W. BUSH SAYS HE REGRETS SUGGESTING ENTIRE GOP IS ‘ISOLATIONIST,’ ‘NATIVIST’
Bush donated the maximum individual contribution of $5,800 to Cheney, whose father Dick served as his vice-president for eight years, last October and gave the maximum available primary donation to Murkowski.
Both Cheney and Murkowski voted to remove Trump from office in response to the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill last year. Cheney is also one of the more vocal members of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 riot.
A spokesman for Bush told PEOPLE that he also donated to Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign as well as the campaign of his nephew George P. Bush, who is running for attorney general in Texas. The younger Bush finished third in fundraising in the GOP attorney general field in the last half of 2021. Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman raised the most money during the reporting period, followed by incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) asks questions during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing to discuss reopening schools during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 30, 2021. Greg Nash/Pool via REUTERS
(Reuters)
Trump has backed primary challengers against both Cheney and Murkowski.
Trump endorsed Harriet Hageman, the leading Republican candidate challenging Cheney, reported this week that she’s hauled in over $1 million in fundraising since declaring her candidacy for Congress less than five months ago.
Cheney reported earlier this week that she raised $7 million last year as part of her reelection push.
In Alaska, Trump has endorsed the state’s former commissioner of administration Kelly Tshibaka in her quest to replace Murkowski in the United States Senate.
FILE – In this July 27, 2021 file photo, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wy., listens to testimony from Washington Metropolitan Police Department Officer Daniel Hodges during the House select committee hearing on the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Jim Bourg/Pool via AP, File)
(AP )
“Lisa Murkowski is bad for Alaska. Her vote to confirm Biden’s Interior Secretary was a vote to kill long sought for, and approved, ANWR, and Alaska jobs,” Trump said in a statement. “Murkowski has got to go! Kelly Tshibaka is the candidate who can beat Murkowski—and she will. Kelly is a fighter who stands for Alaska values and America First. She is MAGA all the way, pro-energy, strong on the Border, tough on Crime and totally supports our Military and our great Vets.”
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“Get rid of them all,” Trump said in a speech last year regarding Republicans who voted to impeach him during his presidency.
Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/george-w-bush-donated-thousands-trump-impeachment-supporters-cheney-murkowski