(WASHINGTON) — The state of Mississippi formally asked the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday to uphold its ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy and overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that gave women the unfettered right to end a pregnancy before a fetus is viable outside the womb.
“Under the Constitution, may a State prohibit elective abortions before viability? Yes. Why? Because nothing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion,” the state says bluntly in its opening brief in a blockbuster case that will dominate the court’s next term.
The cascade of arguments Mississippi lays out constitute the most direct and aggressive attack on abortion rights in years before the high court.
Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch, leading the case, declares outright that the time has come for the justices to discard long-standing precedent because Roe and Casey, a 1992 decision that reaffirmed the right to abortion access for women, are “egregiously wrong.”
“Roe and Casey are unprincipled decisions that have damaged the democratic process, poisoned our national discourse, plagued the law — and, in doing so, harmed this Court,” the brief says.
Mississippi argues that states have compelling interests in protecting the lives of the unborn — interests that have been neglected, it claims, by decades of flawed legal analyses by the court’s majority.
“Scientific advances show that an unborn child has taken on the human form and features months before viability. States should be able to act on those developments. But Roe and Casey shackle States to a view of the facts that is decades out of date.”
Abortion rights advocates were quick to respond Thursday, calling Mississippi’s legal case “stunning” and “extreme.”
“Their goal is for the Supreme Court to take away our right to control our own bodies and our own futures — not just in Mississippi, but everywhere,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is challenging the law, in a statement.
“Let’s be clear; any ruling in favor of Mississippi in this case overturns the core holding of Roe — the right to make a decision about whether to continue a pregnancy before viability,” she continued. “The Court has held that the Constitution guarantees this right. If Roe falls, half the states in the country are poised to ban abortion entirely. “
The Supreme Court has not yet scheduled the case for oral argument in the term set to begin in October. A decision is expected by June 2022.
(NEW YORK) — The Bootleg Fire is now the third-largest fire in Oregon state history as firefighters try to limit its spread amid extremely dry conditions.
The blaze had grown to nearly 400,000 acres in southern Oregon by Thursday morning and remained just 38% contained.
While the wildfire is affecting mostly rural areas, it has climbed to the top three fires to engulf the state, according to records dating back to 1900. The Long Draw Fire in 2012 scorched 557,028 acres, while the Biscuit Fire in 2002 burned 500,000 acres.
In comparison, the Beachie Creek Fire that destroyed more than 1,200 structures in northern Oregon in 2020 burned through 193,573 acres.
This year’s dry season, exacerbated by the megadrought and climate change, has created tinderbox conditions in the West.
Nearly 90 large wildfires are burning in 13 states, with more than 2.5 million acres burned so far this year.
Thousands of homes are threatened and have been evacuated in Oregon due to the Bootleg Fire.
Evacuations have also been ordered near Lake Tahoe due to the Tamarack Fire, which had burned through more than 50,000 acres by Wednesday morning and was 4% contained.
The Dixie Fire in Butte County, California, had scorched nearly 104,000 acres by Thursday and was 17% contained.
Air quality alerts were issued earlier in the week on the East Coast due to the large amounts of smoke being emitted from the fires.
The possibility for new fires to spark remained high on Thursday. Red flag warnings have been issued in parts of Montana and Idaho due to gusty winds and low humidity, while dry thunderstorms caused by the heat of the Bootleg Fire could bring lightning strikes to the drought-ridden region.
Currently, more than 46% of the contiguous U.S. is in a moderate or worse drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, and some of the regions that need rain the most are not forecast to receive any major precipitation that could alleviate the fires.
Rain is not expected for California and the Pacific Northwest. However, parts of the Southwest are seeing some relief due to monsoon storms.
ABC News’ Matthew Fuhrman, Melissa Griffin and Bonnie Mclean contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — In his first steps toward his own Cuba policy, President Joe Biden is sanctioning the Cuban defense minister and its special forces for the aggressive crackdowns on protests across the island nation earlier this month, the White House announced Thursday.
Those protests were some of the largest and most widespread in decades as Cuba reels from a new wave of the coronavirus, the economic pain of COVID-19, and shortages of food and medicine.
They also short-circuited Biden’s administration into a response. Six months into his term, Biden has yet to formulate a policy toward America’s close neighbor after his former boss Barack Obama warmed relations with Cuba’s communist government and his immediate predecessor Donald Trump all but cut contact and implemented the toughest sanctions and restrictions.”This is just the beginning – the United States will continue to sanction individuals responsible for oppression of the Cuban people,” Biden said in a statement Thursday, demanding the government “immediately release wrongfully detained political prisoners, restore internet access, and allow the Cuban people to enjoy their fundamental rights.”
The Treasury Department announced that it sanctioned Defense Minister Alvaro Lopez Miera and the Brigada Especial Nacional, the government’s special forces unit within the Interior Ministry that was deployed “to suppress and attack protesters,” according to the agency.
The new sanctions are not likely to inflict any new pain in Havana beyond the decades-old embargo, but they send a clearer message about where Biden will stand after Obama’s rapprochement and Trump’s heavy penalties. The Cuban Foreign Ministry has not yet responded, but government leaders including President Miguel Díaz-Canel repeatedly blamed the U.S. government or the Cuban diaspora in Miami for stirring up the protests.
“Treasury will continue to enforce its Cuba-related sanctions, including those imposed today, to support the people of Cuba in their quest for democracy and relief from the Cuban regime,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.
While he helped Obama’s efforts to ease tensions with Cuba and reopen trade and travel, Biden has kept most of Trump’s sanctions and restrictions in place so far as his administration completes his review.
Beyond Thursday’s sanctions, the administration announced other baby steps in staking out its own Cuba policy earlier this week, including creating a working group to study the issue of remittances — the money that Americans, especially Cuban Americans, send back to the island.
Remittances were severely restricted by the Trump administration, which said they were largely lining the pockets of the Cuban government as it charged large fees for their transmission. The limits imposed by Trump led Western Union, the financial services company, to close its operations in Cuba.
Biden’s new working group will look for ways to allow money to flow to the Cuban people without enriching the Cuban government, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday.
Biden had said last week that he would not ease those Trump-era restrictions, but administration officials denied they were backing away from that pledge, noting that the president said during a press conference that it was “highly likely that the regime would confiscate those remittances or a big chunk of it.”
“That’s certainly something that we’re mindful of and we’re looking at. That will be a point of discussion in these working groups,” Psaki said Tuesday.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price added that there’s no amount of Cuban government collection on remittances that would be “acceptable to us” but declined to get ahead of what the working group may decide.
He also announced that the State Department will launch its own review about adding staff at the U.S. embassy in Havana. Only a skeleton crew works there now after Trump’s first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson drew down embassy staff after the first reports of medical incidents sometimes known as “Havana syndrome” emerged publicly.
“The staffing at our embassy will serve to enhance our diplomatic, our engagement – our diplomatic activity, our engagement with civil society, our consular service engagement, all of which will be in service of helping the Cuban people to secure greater degrees of human rights, of freedom, of the universal rights that have been denied to them for far too long,” Price said Tuesday.
He declined to provide any timeline on when staffing changes could be made or speak to any changes in security after those “unexplained health incidents,” as the department calls them, that cause “Havana syndrome” — except to say safety will be a top consideration in this review.
(RUSSIA) — Russia is enduring a devastating third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, registering record numbers of daily virus deaths many days for the past month as the virus rages in the country where there are few quarantine restrictions in place and much of the population is reluctant to get vaccinated.
In many parts of the country doctors have said hospitals have been overflowing for almost a month, placing huge strain on medical workers already battered by a year and a half of the pandemic.
Despite surging death tolls, authorities have declined to introduce tough restrictions or even strictly enforce ones in place like mask wearing.
In the late spring, authorities had hailed a supposed end to the worst of the pandemic, following a grim winter that saw Russia reach the highest death toll per capita among developing nations. The few restrictions in place were almost all lifted. President Vladimir Putin at an economic forum in St. Petersburg at the start of June told a large crowd that “life is gradually returning to its normal course.”
But by mid-June, the virus came roaring back, fuelled by the virus’ delta variant, and Russia’s health system is struggling under a wave that many experts estimate is as bad and potentially even worse than this winter’s deadly one. Although there are signs now the wave is now easing in Moscow, it is continuing to batter much of the rest of the country where it arrived later.
“Compared with the second wave, it’s much tougher,” said Viktoria, an ambulance work in the Leningrad region, who asked to withhold her last name because she did not have permission to speak publicly. “The first wave was tough because no one knew anything what to do. And now it’s just on account of a very high infection rate.”
Since the start of July, Russia’s official coronavirus statistics have shown over 700 people dying most days, on many days breaking previous daily records from the winter.
That may be a significant undercount, many experts said. Throughout the pandemic Russia’s official COVID-19 statistics have been criticized for drastically underplaying its real virus numbers.
Calculations of so-called “excess deaths” from publicly available mortality data — considered internationally as the best way of assessing the pandemic’s true toll — show that Russia has recorded nearly 550,000 more deaths than in an average year between June 2021 and the start of the pandemic.
That is nearly four times higher than the official toll of 150,000, provided by Russia’s government coronavirus task force. It also does not take into account June and July, which have been the deadliest months of the third wave for the country.
[We] “are in the heart of a storm, which no one even tried to prevent,” Alexander Dragan, a data analyst who has tracked Russia’s pandemic statistics, wrote in a Medium post this month.
The wave of infections and deaths has hit as Russia had erected few defences to stem it. By June, authorities had lifted most of the limited restrictions that had been in place and spoke of an end to the pandemic in sight. Restaurants, bars and shops were working as usual, most workers had returned to offices, people were packing out events.
As the numbers surged in June, authorities in some regions scrambled to reimpose measures. In Moscow, where the mayor’s office has taken a more pro-active approach, companies were told to make some staff work from home and bars made to shut at 11 p.m. A small number of badly hit regions reimposed lockdowns.
But in most places restrictions have remained light and life is largely unaltered. In St. Petersburg, authorities in June allowed mass events, permitting thousands to throng during a city-wide graduation celebration and to attend Euros 2020 soccer matches. And in most regions, events involving hundreds of people are still permitted.
The result has been the virus — accelerated by the delta variant — has burned through Russia almost unrestricted.
The wave flooded hospitals in many regions from the start of June. In cities across Russia, local authorities warned they had run out of beds and were forced to open emergency reserve hospitals.
In St. Petersburg, medics told ABC News hospitals were packed with COVID patients since mid-June. Dmitry, a doctor at a hospital in the city said its 450 beds had been filled for the last month and that patients had to be kept in corridors, although the situation had improved in the last week.
The numbers were putting a huge strain on medical workers, he said, saying one medic was often having to look after 30 patients.
“It’s really a lot,” he said, also requesting anonymity because he was not permitted to comment publicly.
In Moscow and St. Petersburg the wave appears to be finally easing, with space appearing at last in hospitals. But in other regions where the wave arrived later, cases continue to climb. And the peak of deaths, which lag two to three weeks behind infections, in most places has still not arrived.
Alexey Raksha, a demographer who formerly worked at Russia’s state statistics agency Rostat, told ABC News he estimated Russia might see between 70,000-90,000 deaths for July alone.
“We’re yet to see the peak of deaths. And I predict that July could be the worst month” so far, Raksha said.
Some doctors and experts blamed the scale of the third wave on the messaging from authorities that the pandemic was essentially over and abandoning restrictions.
“At the end of the second wave they were telling us that everything is going down, down, down, everything is super. They loosened everything up and basically people cut loose,” said Viktoria.
“Russia is the country where COVID dissidents actually won,” Raksha said. “The result is hundreds of thousands (at least 200-300k) deaths above what could have happened otherwise,” he wrote in a message.
Russian officials had said they hoped to end the pandemic with vaccines developed by the country.
But the level of vaccination in Russia has stalled in mid-spring at around 14%, despite Russia having one of the world’s first COVID-19 vaccines, amid widespread reluctance among Russians to get the jab. Polls have showed around two-thirds of Russians do not intend to get vaccinated.
Experts have in part blamed that reluctance on authorities’ refusal to enforce tough restrictions and mixed messages suggesting that the situation in Russia was not so bad and underplaying the real number of deaths.
“Naturally, if people don’t believe that COVID is serious they have no motivation to get vaccinated,” Irina Yakutenko, a science journalist told the Russian news site, Bumaga.”Crudely speaking, the government did a lot so that so many people haven’t got the jab.”
As the third wave hit, authorities have launched a drive to try to overcome the vaccine hesitancy.
Moscow’s mayor made vaccination mandatory for people working in public-facing roles including restaurant workers, teachers, hairdressers and public transport staff — amounting to around 2 million people. A growing number of other regions followed suit, making Russia one of the few countries in the world to introduce large-scale mandatory vaccination.
In Moscow, authorities also announced unvaccinated people would not be able to access routine medical treatments at hospitals. For three weeks, a new rule required people to get a QR-code showing proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test to dine inside restaurants.
The push appears to have had an effect; the number of those vaccinated has climbed in the few weeks, according to official statistics and independent experts.
However, it’s not clear that pace will be kept up. Moscow has now backtracked over the rule requiring vaccination for indoor dining and the Kremlin has indicated it opposes broadening mandatory vaccination to the population at large. That puts in doubt whether Russia will reach a sufficient level of vaccination by the autumn to head off a deadly fourth wave.
Dmitry, the doctor in St. Petersburg said he did not have much hope a new wave would be avoided, even as the current wave eased.
“I think it’s a sort of calm before the storm,” he told ABC News.
He said both authorities and citizens needed to accept more restrictions to do so, alongside vaccination.
“In my view it’s better to cancel concerts for half a year than over the course of two years bury a large number of people,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is sticking with its guidance for now that only unvaccinated people need to wear masks to be safe, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told reporters on Thursday.
Asked about The Washington Post report that administration officials are rethinking its messaging on masks, Walensky said “we are always looking at the data as the data come in.”
But she said the CDC guidance hasn’t changed and suggested that — for now — there’s no need.
“Fully vaccinated people are protected from severe illness, and we’ve always said that communities and individuals to make the decisions that are right for them based on what’s going on in their local areas,” she said.
She later added: “In areas that have high and low amounts of vaccination … if you’re unvaccinated, you should absolutely be wearing a mask. If you’re vaccinated, you have exceptional levels of protection from that vaccine, and you may choose to add an extra layer of protection by putting on your mask and that’s a very individual choice.”
Jeff Zients, the White House coordinator on COVID-19, said any public health guidance is up to the CDC.
(NEW YORK) — Daimler has announced its brand Mercedes-Benz will go all-electric by 2030, where market conditions allow, and the company will invest over $45 billion between 2022 and 2030 for research and development into battery electric vehicle technology.
“The EV shift is picking up speed – especially in the luxury segment, where Mercedes-Benz belongs. The tipping point is getting closer and we will be ready as markets switch to electric-only by the end of this decade,” said Ola Källenius, CEO of Daimler AG and Mercedes-Benz AG, in a statement.
The company announced Mercedes-Benz will sell BEVs in all segments they serve by 2022. By 2025, all new cars will be all-electric in markets that have charging technology and customers will be able to purchase an electric version of every model the company makes.
In markets that cannot sustain a charging network, Mercedes-Benz could still sell internal combustion engines.
Daimler says they will launch three new Mercedes-Benz electric-vehicle architectures in 2025; the MB.EA, which will cover medium to full-sized passenger cars; the AMG.EA, which will cover performance cars, and the VAN.EA, which will cover vans and light commercial vehicles.
In addition, the company says it is developing the Vision EQXX, an electric vehicle, that will have a range of over 600 miles, which would be the longest range for an EV.
The announcement comes a week after the European Union adopted new climate proposals to limit greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. One of the proposals was reducing car emissions by 55% by 2030 and 100% by 2035, meaning all new cars purchased will have to be zero-emission.
(CALHOUN, Ga.) — A Georgia family is mourning the loss of their 5-year-old son who they say died after contracting COVID-19.
Wyatt Gibson, 5, died on July 16 after suffering a stroke, according to a statement written by his grandmother, Andrea Mitchell, and shared with ABC News.
Mitchell described Wyatt, of Calhoun, Georgia, as a “typical healthy, happy boy” who became sick last week with what the family originally thought was food poisoning.
After two days of symptoms, including vomiting, no appetite and lethargy, Wyatt’s parents took him to a local hospital. He was then transferred to a children’s hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he was diagnosed with strep and staph infections and COVID-19, according to Mitchell. Viral respiratory infection, such as COVID-19, can pre-dispose a person to secondary bacterial infections such as bacterial pneumonia or meningitis.
Days later, Wyatt suffered a stroke and died, according to Mitchell. It is unclear which infection caused the stroke. The official cause of death is unknown and hospital officials declined to comment citing federal privacy laws.
“All we know is a bright light has left. He left rainbows everywhere for us to see. We’ll be constantly reminded, saddened, then maybe in time, make peace with it,” she wrote. “For there was so much life in this 5-year-old boy. So much joy. So maybe it’s not the quantity of life that we will miss. But the quality of life. That was pure bliss.”
Wyatt’s father, Wes Gibson, was also diagnosed with COVID-19 at the same time as his son, according to Mitchell. It is unclear whether any of Wyatt’s family members were fully vaccinated.
Gibson, a local law enforcement officer, and his wife Alexis, who also share a daughter, declined to be interviewed.
The number of young children diagnosed with COVID-19 is also increasing. There were more than 23,000 new pediatric cases diagnosed in the U.S. last week, twice as many as the end of June, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
Children under the age of 12 are currently not eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine. Public health experts have stressed the importance of parents and caregivers being fully vaccinated to help protect those who are not yet eligible for the vaccine.
People who are fully vaccinated, a term used to describe a person two weeks after their last shot, are still considered safe from serious illness or death, even if they are exposed to the delta variant, which is quickly becoming the dominant variant spread in the U.S.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 99.5% of hospitalizations are people who weren’t immunized.
(IOWA) — Democrat Abby Finkenauer, a one-term congresswoman who represented Iowa’s 1st Congressional District until she was unseated by a Republican in 2020, announced Thursday she’s running for Senate.
In her announcement video, Finkenauer, who is also a former state representative, shares the news with an intimate group of Iowans, calling out longtime fixtures of the Senate for how “obsessed” they are with maintaining power, citing their response to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
“The politicians who’ve been there for decades … [t]hey think they own democracy, and they were silent when it was attacked. You see it’s politicians like Senator Grassley and Mitch McConnell, who should know better, but are so obsessed with power that they oppose anything that moves us forward. Since the Capitol was attacked, they’ve turned their backs on democracy, and on us,” she says. “They made their choice, and I’m making mine. I’m running for the United States Senate.”
The seat Finkenauer is seeking has been held by Republican Chuck Grassley for 40 years. First elected in 1980 when Republican Ronald Reagan ascended to the White House and defeating incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter, Grassley is the longest serving senator to ever represent the Hawkeye State.
The 87-year-old has been fundraising, earning nearly $2 million in contributions so far this cycle, according to the Federal Election Commission filing for his campaign committee submitted a week ago. But Grassley has not made his reelection bid official yet, despite the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s chairman persistently “bugging” the senator to make an announcement.
However, Sen. Rick Scott, the NRSC’s chairman, indicated in a podcast interview Tuesday he feels good about Grassley seeking another term, citing a fundraiser he recently held for him in Florida.
“If he flies all the way from Iowa down to Naples, Florida, I think he’s gonna run,” Scott said.
The Republican Party of Iowa was quick to blast Finkenauer after her announcement.
“Let me be as clear as possible – Abby Finkenauer will never represent the state of Iowa in the U.S. Senate,” Chairman Jeff Kaufmann said in a statement. “Iowans know Finkenauer and her disastrous record, it’s why they rejected her last November. No matter how she tries to reinvent herself, Iowans will see that her values and priorities are just the same as AOC’s and Chuck Schumer’s. Finkenauer will fall in line with Democrat leadership every chance she gets in hopes to gain media notoriety. … I look forward to seeing even more Iowans reject Finkenauer once again.”
When Finkenauer won in 2018, she became one of the youngest members of Congress along with New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. At only 32 years old, Grassley was already serving his second Senate term when she was born.
After flipping her district from red to blue in the 2018 blue wave, the Democrat narrowly lost reelection in 2020 to Republican Ashley Hinson. Hinson won about 10,700 more votes than Finkenauer, giving her a 2.6-point lead over Finkenauer. Across the country in 2020, Republicans picked up 14 seats, not including Republican-turned independent Justin Amash’s district, giving Democrats the slimmest House majority since the early 2000s.
Based on the 2020 election, Democrats are facing an uphill battle to win statewide in Iowa. The Republican in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, also won her election, flipping an open seat from blue to red as well. Republican Joni Ernst fended off a challenge from Democrat Theresa Greenfield, winning reelection by a 6.6-point margin. Former President Donald Trump’s margin against President Joe Biden was even bigger, 8.2 points.
But if Grassley chooses to forgo a bid, an open race could be much more competitive.
(WASHINGTON) — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shot back at House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday and said the Jan. 6 select committee is “deadly serious” after McCarthy accused Pelosi of an “egregious abuse of power.”
“It’s my responsibility as speaker of the House, to make sure we get to the truth on this, and we will not let their antics stand in the way of that,” she said at her weekly press conference on Capitol Hill.
The boiling tensions between the two come after Pelosi rejected two of McCarthy’s nominees for the committee — Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and Indiana Rep. Jim Banks — citing concerns with “statements made and actions taken by these members” that might compromise the integrity of the investigation. Jordan and Banks are vocal allies of former President Donald Trump and supported his efforts to overturn the election.
“It’s bipartisan, and we have a quorum. Staff is being hired to do the job,” Pelosi continued. “We’re there to get the truth, not to get Trump.”
While Pelosi accepted McCarthy’s other three picks — Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis, North Dakota Rep. Kelly Armstrong and Texas Rep. Troy Nehls — McCarthy threatened Wednesday to pull all of his members.
“Unless Speaker Pelosi reverses course and seats all five Republican nominees, Republicans will not be party to their sham process and will instead pursue our own investigation of the facts,” McCarthy said at a press conference on the Hill.
Pelosi acknowledged at her press conference that Nehls had also voted against certifying election results for President Joe Biden, but said the two members she rejected, Jordan and Banks, had taken the big lie to another level.
“The other two made statements and took actions that just made it ridiculous to put them on such a committee seeking the truth,” she said.
She said some counseled her to allow Jordan and Banks on the committee “and then when they act up you can take them off,” she disclosed. “I said, ‘why should we waste time on something so predictable?'”
“I’m not going to spend any more time talking about them,” she added later.
Back in May, Senate Republicans killed a proposal for an independent, bipartisan commission that would have given Republicans equal representation to investigate the Capitol attack. Under the House select committee proposal, which was approved by the House mostly along party lines with GOP Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger or Illinois joining Democrats, Pelosi gets seven appointments and McCarthy has five.
Pelosi also maintained the power to reject McCarthy’s appointments, which she exercised Wednesday.
The House Select Committee was expected to hold its first hearing on Tuesday. Capitol police officers are among the first witnesses.
(WASHINGTON) — Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats are considering inviting former House Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman to serve as an adviser to the Jan. 6 select committee investigating the Capitol assault, according to sources familiar with the deliberations.
Riggleman, a former intelligence officer who lost his primary last year, has been a forceful critic of other Republicans over election-related disinformation and QAnon conspiracy theories.
Rep. Liz Cheney, picked by Pelosi to serve on the committee, has been pushing the idea even before Pelosi rejected two of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s choices on Wednesday.
