“SURFSIDE, Fla. – Responders found a body and human remains Saturday in the rubble at the site of a 12-story beachfront condominium building that collapsed just north of Miami early Thursday morning, killing at least five people and leaving 156 more unaccounted for.” Read more at USA Today
“An engineer warned in October 2018 that he had discovered ‘major structural damage’ to a concrete slab below the pool deck in the section of the Champlain Towers South condominium building that collapsed Thursday, killing at least four and leaving scores trapped, according to records released by local authorities late Friday.
The engineer, Frank P. Morabito, said in a structural survey report that waterproofing below the pool deck and entrance drive had failed, allowing damaging leaks.
‘Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially,’ Morabito wrote. He said a ‘major error’ had been made in the construction of the building when waterproofing was laid on a flat slab rather than on a sloped surface to allow water to run off.” Read more at Washington Post
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“Pakistan’s prime minister is facing protests and calls for a public apologyafter suggesting there would be fewer sexual assaults if women dressed more modestly.
In an interview with Axios earlier this week, Imran Khan was asked about whether there was a ‘rape epidemic’ in Pakistan, where advocates believe that a large number of assaults go unreported. ‘If a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on the man unless they are robots. I mean, it’s common sense,’ he responded.
Women in Pakistan responded by sharing photographs of the ‘modest’ clothing that they were wearing when they were sexually harassed, as well as anecdotes about inappropriate behavior they have encountered — such as unwanted touching — even when conservatively dressed in traditional headscarves and shalwar kameez. At a protest Saturday in Karachi, women were encouraged to bring a piece of clothing that they or an acquaintance had been wearing when they were subjected to sexual violence.
‘This is dangerously simplistic and only reinforces the common public perception that women are ‘knowing’ victims and men ‘helpless’ aggressors,’ the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and more than a dozen other civil society groups said in a statement. ‘For the head of government — a government that claims to defend the rights of women and vulnerable groups — to insist on this view is simply inexcusable.’
It’s the second time in recent months that Khan — who was one of Pakistan’s top cricket players and a national celebrity before he entered politics — has come under fire for his comments about rape. During a live television broadcast in April, he replied to a question about a perceived rise in sexual assaults by saying that the traditional custom of ‘purdah,’ or modesty, was intended to ‘stop temptation.’
‘Not every man has willpower. If you keep on increasing vulgarity, it will have consequences,’ Khan said.
The prime minister’s office said at the time that Khan’s comments had been ‘distorted to mean something that he never intended.’ Asked this past week about his April remarks, however, Khan doubled down.
When Axios journalist Jonathan Swan noted that the prime minister had been accused of ‘victim-blaming,’ Khan deemed the controversy to be ‘nonsense.’
‘We don’t have discos here. We don’t have nightclubs,’ he said in the Tuesday interview. ‘So it is a completely different society, a way of life here. So, if you raise temptation in the society to the point, and all these young guys have nowhere to go, it has consequences on the society.’
Pressed on whether women’s clothing was responsible for provoking sexual violence, Khan declined to rule out the possibility. ‘It depends which society you live in,’ he said. ‘If in a society, people haven’t seen that sort of thing, it will have an impact on them.’
Official statistics suggest that close to a dozen rapes are reported in Pakistan each day. But activists say that the vast majority of sexual assaults are never reported because of the likelihood that victims will be blamed for the attacks, or even killed for bringing shame to their families. Some high-profile cases have sparked anger and mass demonstrations, including the 2020 rape of a woman who was stranded on a deserted highway with her children at night, then blamed by police for putting herself in a dangerous situation.” Read more at Washington Post
“(CNN) It was a bad week for the Big Lie -- former President Donald Trump and his allies' false claims that widespread fraud is to blame for his 2020 election loss.
In one battleground state, Republican senators issued a report that eviscerated Trump's lies about voter fraud. In another, a judge undercut Trump's supporters' hopes to examine nearly 150,000 mail-in ballots. And one of Trump's closest allies, Rudy Giuliani, was suspended from practicing law in New York.
Trump and his conspiracy-minded supporters have eagerly been anticipating the conclusion of the problem-plagued audit of Maricopa County's results in Arizona, but regardless of its final report, it will have no impact on the 2020 election results, as the election was already certified. Trump repeated his election lies at a rally in Ohio Saturday night, but last week's blows underscored the reality that their options to continue contesting the 2020 election are narrowing.
In Michigan, the Republican-led state Senate Oversight Committee said in a report released Wednesday that there was ‘no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud’ in the state's 2020 election. The report included a stinging condemnation of the lies about voter fraud pushed by Trump and his supporters.
‘Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan,’ the committee, chaired by Republican state Sen. Ed McBroom, said in its report. ‘The Committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.’
Then, in Georgia on Thursday, a judge dismissed most of a lawsuit that claimed fraudulent mail-in ballots had been cast in Fulton County, the state's largest county, in last year's election -- a blow to the pro-Trump plaintiffs' bid to conduct an in-person examination of nearly 150,000 mail-in ballots with high-powered microscopes.
The judge dismissed seven of the lawsuit's nine claims against Fulton County officials, only allowing the plaintiffs' request for digital images of the ballots under the state's open records law to move forward. Biden won the state by 12,000 votes, and Georgia officials have already audited the 2020 results three times, including a hand recount.
‘Last year, I told President Trump and others who push the Big Lie to 'put up or shut up.' It's been six months and no proof of wrongdoing has been produced. Enough is enough -- this whole circus must end,’ Robb Pitts, the chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, said in a statement.
The same day, Giuliani, who had been Trump's personal lawyer and one of Trump's closest allies in advancing lies about the 2020 election, was suspended from practicing law in New York state by an appellate court that found he made ‘demonstrably false and misleading statements’ about the 2020 election.
In a ruling released following disciplinary proceedings, the court concluded that ‘there is uncontroverted evidence’ that Giuliani, the former Manhattan US attorney, ‘communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump's failed effort at reelection in 2020.’
Giuliani's ‘conduct immediately threatens the public interest and warrants interim suspension from the practice of law,’ the court wrote.
Trump has railed against the actions that challenge his lies about the 2020 election. He attacked his political opponents on Saturday in front of an Ohio crowd that chanted ‘Trump won’ and issued statements last week riven with more falsehoods.
Targeting Michigan's McBroom and state Senate Republican leader Mike Shirkey, he included both senators' phone numbers in a statement that said: ‘Call those two Senators now and get them to do the right thing, or vote them the hell out of office!’
In another statement,he complained about the Justice Department's Georgia lawsuit: ‘Actually, it should be the other way around! The PEOPLE of Georgia should SUE the State, and their elected officials, for running a CORRUPT AND RIGGED 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION—and for trying to suppress the VOTE of the AMERICAN PEOPLE in Georgia.’
Of Giuliani, he said: ‘Can you believe that New York wants to strip Rudy Giuliani, a great American Patriot, of his law license because he has been fighting what has already been proven to be a Fraudulent Election?"‘
Arizona audit wrapping up
Another important moment could come when the results of the so-called audit ordered up by state Senate Republicans and conducted by Cyber Ninjas -- a Florida-based company with no experience auditing elections, led by a chief executive who had advanced Trump's lies about voter fraud on social media -- are released.
The Twitter account for the audit tweeted Friday night that ‘paper examination and counting are finished today.’ And the individual hand count which looked at two races, the 2020 presidential and US Senate contest, finished days ago, according to Arizona audit spokesman Randy Pullen.
But the Arizona Senate Republicans have not stated when their report will be released.
‘Everybody is anxiously awaiting the result!’ Trump said in a Wednesday statement.
That, though, was another falsehood.
Trump's most ardent supporters are awaiting the report on the audit's findings -- which is likely to be delivered first to state Senate Republicans, who would then determine how to release it.
However, experts in conducting and auditing elections and observers of Arizona's proceedings have repeatedly said that the Cyber Ninjas' methods are deeply flawed and could easily introduce errors into its final tallies. Those problems have made the audit's findings more likely to be used as a propaganda tool by Trump's supporters than a document that is taken seriously outside the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement -- a rallying cry adopted by Trump and his supporters.
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who is running for governor, has maintained a list of problems that observers on the floor of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix have noticed.
Among the recent updates: ‘insecure cybersecurity practices’ used by Cyber Ninjas; misplaced ballots; and auditors writing directly on the original labels on Maricopa County's ballot boxes, which Hobbs' document notes ‘violates the agreements and questions the reliability and integrity of all the county records.’
Justice Department targets Georgia law
The legal battles and audits are only one front of the ongoing fight over the 2020 election. In Republican-led states, including Florida, Georgia and Iowa, GOP lawmakers and governors have already enacted new laws that will make voting more difficult. Republican lawmakers in Michigan, Arizona, Texas and other states are also advancing restrictive voting measures.
President Joe Biden's Justice Department said Friday it is suing the state of Georgia over its new restrictive voting law.
The state law imposes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots, empowers state officials to take over local elections boards, limits the use of ballot drop boxes and makes it a crime to approach voters in line to give them food and water.
Republicans had cast the measure as necessary to boost confidence in elections after the 2020 election and Trump's repeated and unsubstantiated claims of fraud, but Democrats in the state have called the new law voter suppression and likened it to Jim Crow-era voting laws.
‘These legislative actions occurred at a time when the Black population in Georgia continues to steadily increase and after a historic election that saw record voter turnout across the state, particularly for absentee voting, which Black voters are now more likely to use than White voters,’ Justice Department Civil Rights Division leader Kristen Clarke said in a news conference. ‘Our complaint challenges several provisions of SB 202 on the grounds that they were adopted with the intent to deny or abridge, Black citizens, equal access to the political process.’
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, issued a defiant statement in response to the department's announcement, calling the lawsuit ‘born out of the lies and misinformation the Biden administration has pushed against Georgia's Election Integrity Act from the start.’
Kemp accused the administration of ‘weaponizing the US Department of Justice to carry out their far-left agenda that undermines election integrity and empowers federal government overreach in our democracy.’” Read more at CNN
“The Transportation Security Administration will once again offer self-defense classes to flight attendants and pilots as the airline industry deals with a surge in cases of unruly passengers and sometimes violent behavior on flights.
The return of the classes comes after the coronavirus pandemic prevented crew members from receiving the training for more than a year.
The Federal Aviation Administration has documented more than 3,000 reports of unruly passengers on flights so far this year. It has initiated investigations into 487 of those cases, more than triple the 146 cases that were investigated in all of 2019.
‘With unruly passenger incidents on the rise, the TSA remains committed to equip flight crews with another tool to keep our skies safe,’ the agency said in a statement.” Read more at Boston Globe
“LONDON — Britain’s embattled health minister, Matt Hancock, resigned Saturday, a day after a tabloid newspaper published photos of him in a steamy embrace with one of his senior aides — an apparent violation of Britain’s social distancing guidelines.
Hancock, who spearheaded Britain’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, was the latest member of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government to be accused of violating the strict rules imposed on the rest of the country.
‘I understand the enormous sacrifices that everybody in this county has made — that you have made,’ a chastened-looking Hancock said in a video statement released Saturday evening. ‘Those of us who make these rules have got to stick by them, and that’s why I’ve got to resign.’” Read more at Boston Globe
“Johnson & Johnson will pay New York State more than $230 million in a settlement that also ensures the company will permanently stay out of the opioid business in the United States, the state attorney general’s office announced on Saturday.
The settlement comes at a time when the opioid industry is facing over 3,000 lawsuits across the nation for its contribution to an epidemic of prescription and street opioid abuse that has killed more than 800,000 Americans in the last 20 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And it came just days before opening arguments in a sweeping New York trial in which the company was to be among the defendants. That trial will be the first of its kind to go before a jury, and the first to target the entire opioid supply chain, from the drugmakers who manufactured the pills to the distributors that supplied them to a pharmacy chain that filled prescriptions for them.” Read more at New York Times
SEASIDE, Calif. (AP) — Mike Gravel, a former U.S. senator from Alaska who read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record and confronted Barack Obama about nuclear weapons during a later presidential run, has died. He was 91.
Gravel, who represented Alaska as a Democrat in the Senate from 1969 to 1981, died Saturday, according to his daughter, Lynne Mosier. Gravel had been living in Seaside, California, and was in failing health, said Theodore W. Johnson, a former aide.
Gravel’s two terms came during tumultuous years for Alaska when construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was authorized and when Congress was deciding how to settle Alaska Native land claims and whether to classify enormous amounts of federal land as parks, preserves and monuments.
He had the unenviable position of being an Alaska Democrat when some residents were burning President Jimmy Carter in effigy for his measures to place large sections of public lands in the state under protection from development.
Gravel feuded with Alaska’s other senator, Republican Ted Stevens, on the land matter, preferring to fight Carter’s actions and rejecting Stevens’ advocacy for a compromise.
In the end, Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, a compromise that set aside millions of acres for national parks, wildlife refuges and other protected areas. It was one of the last bills Carter signed before leaving office.
Gravel’s Senate tenure also was notable for his anti-war activity. In 1971, he led a one-man filibuster to protest the Vietnam-era draft and he read into the Congressional Record 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page leaked document known as the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s history of the country’s early involvement in Vietnam.
Gravel reentered national politics decades after his time in the Senate to twice run for president. Gravel, then 75, and his wife, Whitney, took public transportation in 2006 to announce he was running for president as a Democrat in the 2008 election ultimately won by Obama.” Read more at Axios
“The Environmental Protection Agency watchdog has found two former EPA employees were kept on the payroll by political appointees of former President Trump after their contracts were terminated, Politico first reported Saturday.
Why it matters: The EPA's Office of Inspector General found the agency's former chief of staff Ryan Jackson and former White House liaison Charles Muñoz had ‘made and used official time sheets and personnel forms that contained materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statements,’ per the Washington Post.
Improper payments alleged to have been directed by Jackson and carried out by Muñoz cost the EPA $37,913.23.
The OIG also determined that Muñoz ‘received an improper raise and submitted 'fraudulent timesheets' that cost EPA almost $96,000,’ according to Politico.
Of note: Federal prosecutors have declined to press charges over the OIG's findings.
Driving the news: The March OIG report was released under a Freedom of Information Act request by Politico.
Both employees who'd had their contracts ended had ‘objected to the deletion of items from Pruitt's public calendar, including a dinner in Rome with a Vatican cardinal later charged with sexual misconduct,’ WashPost notes.
Details: The report found one employee, whose contract as scheduler for former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt was terminated in August 2017, was told by Jackson that she would receive ‘severance pay’ despite this not being allowed, per WashPost.
Jackson told investigators he ‘wanted a transition period’ because he didn't think her ouster was fair, according to the report. ‘I wanted to be helpful to her,’ he added.
The other aide, who was forced out of his role as deputy chief of staff of operations in February 2018, continued receiving pay through April 2018 allegedly at the direction of Muñoz, according to the report, per the Post.
Jackson told investigators he wanted to help out while the second aide found work. The aide told WashPost ‘weeks and months went by where I was still receiving a paycheck.’
Representatives for Jackson, Muñoz and the former Trump administration could not immediately be reached for comment.
Flashback:The scandals that led to Scott Pruitt's resignation” Read more at Axios
J. Robert Oppenheimer. Photo: CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images.
“Four U.S. senators signed a letter to President Biden on June 16 urging the exoneration of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who in 1954 was the government’s top atomic physicist when he came under suspicion as a Soviet spy.
The big picture: The letter asks Biden to issue an executive order to rescind the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) characterization of Oppenheimer as ‘untrustworthy and unfit to serve his country.’
The letter is signed by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Jeffrey Merkley (D-Ore.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).
Flashback: After 19 days of secret hearings in April and May of 1954, the AEC revoked Oppenheimer's security clearance, per the New York Times.
60 years later in 2014 the Department of Energy released declassified transcripts of the AEC security board’s hearings, which offered ‘no damning evidence against him,’ per the NYT.
One element used in the case against Oppenheimer was his resistance to early work on the hydrogen bomb. The declassified material released in 2014 suggests he opposed work on the bomb out of technical and military concerns, not Soviet sympathies, per the NYT.
What they're saying: ‘The flawed judgment and the decision-making process in the hearing of J. Robert Oppenheimer were tragic products of their time,’ the senators write. ‘Only a clear nullification of the AEC’s politically contrived and grossly unjust 1954 decision can erase this “black mark” on the nation’s honor.’
‘We can never wholly right the wrongs of history. Nonetheless, we urge you to issue an executive order to vacate the Atomic Energy Commission’s erroneous decision that Dr. Oppenheimer was untrustworthy and unfit to serve his country,’ the senators write. Read more at Axios
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