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Forecast this 4th of July: Fireworks with a chance of lead exposure

The coronavirus may have canceled many of this weekend’s organized Fourth of July fireworks displays, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t celebrating at home. Roadside fireworks stands are seeing an explosion of business, and firework complaints are cropping up across the country. In Boston, police calls regarding illegal fireworks were 23 times higher this year compared to last year — and that was in May. In New York in the first few weeks of June, such calls were up 236 times over the same period last year.

Bill Weimer, vice president of the retailer Phantom Fireworks, says he’s been “knocked over” by this season’s booming fireworks sales. “The demand and the business we’ve seen so far has been the strongest early fireworks season I’ve seen in my years of involvement in the fireworks business,” he told CNN.

The immediate dangers from exploding fireworks — injury and fires — are high on many public officials’ minds. But as the Fourth draws near and Independence Day partygoers snatch up the nation’s supply of sparklers, StarFires, and Raging Zombies, health experts have pointed to another troubling side effect of the pyrotechnics displays: a spike in air pollution.

They’re specifically worried about particulate matter — tiny dust and soot particles that may cause human health and environmental problems. A 2015 study in the journal Atmospheric Environment found that the average level of particulate matter across the United States increased a whopping 42 percent on the Fourth of July, and the Environmental Protection Agency warns that exposure to particulate matter may cause significant respiratory problems. For people with preexisting heart or lung conditions, it can even lead to premature death.

This week, a new study published in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology adds to the layers of concern. Not only is particulate matter bad in general, but the study found that the emissions from fireworks may pose unique health risks. After collecting particulate matter released by 12 types of commercially available fireworks, the study’s authors found high levels of toxic metals like copper and strontium in five of them.

Most of these metals are technically allowed in fireworks, said Terry Gordon, the lead author of the study and a professor of environmental medicine at NYU Langone Health. In fact, those metals are responsible for producing the fireworks’ vivid colors. But that doesn’t mean people should be inhaling them.

Krystal Pollitt, an environmental health scientist at the Yale School of Medicine who was not involved with the new study, says that when people breathe in metal particles like the ones let off by fireworks, it can cause cells to experience “oxidative stress.” This disrupts normal cellular signaling and metabolic processes and, if left unchecked, it can lead to cell damage and even cell death.

“Oxidative stress is a mechanism that underlies a lot of different diseases,” Pollitt told Grist, including a number of respiratory conditions. It is also implicated in kidney and liver failure, as well as neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s.

Gordon and his team were looking for signs of oxidative stress — and that’s what they found when they exposed human lung cells in a lab to the metal-containing particulate matter from the fireworks. Some types of fireworks, like the so-called “Saturn Battery 1,” caused a stronger reaction than others. Meanwhile, cells that were exposed to a control sample of black carbon — a common and relatively innocuous component of particulate matter —showed no signs of oxidative stress.

The researchers later confirmed the damaging effects of the particulate matter in live cells by conducting an experiment on mice. After injecting a subset of the fireworks particles into the mice’s lungs, they found that the particles with higher concentrations of toxic metals caused greater inflammation.

Gordon said he was most surprised to find that emissions from two of the fireworks contained dangerous levels of lead, despite the fact that lead is not allowed in consumer fireworks. One type of firework, called the “Black Cuckoo,” produced particulate matter with lead concentrations greater than 40,000 parts per million.

“That means it was 4 percent lead, which is outrageous,” Gordon told Grist. Even though the industry says it follows rigorous testing procedures to prevent this kind of contamination, he added, either regulators or manufacturers appear to be failing to keep it out of consumer fireworks. “To me, it’s almost criminal activity,” he said.

The American Pyrotechnics Association, an industry group, expressed concern about the fireworks’ metal content, saying the contaminated products should not have gotten past routine regulatory testing. “All consumer fireworks imported into the U.S. are prohibited from containing any form of lead,” the group’s executive director Julie Heckman told Grist. However, she added that the study did not provide detailed information on the fireworks or their manufacturers, making it difficult to determine where the oversight occurred.

Though Gordon’s study focused on small-scale fireworks displays — the kind you might have in your backyard — he said his results raise questions about the safety of larger shows. Gordon suspects that big firecrackers use many of the same chemicals as the little guys, and big displays produce much greater amounts of particulate matter. Plus, air pollution from big celebrations can blanket urban areas and linger for days.

Although some of the largest Fourth of July fireworks shows won’t be happening this year — events in New Orleans, Orlando, Minneapolis, most of southern California, and elsewhere have been canceled — others are plowing ahead. Macy’s NYC fireworks show, the largest pyrotechnics display in the country, is going on as a series of short, unannounced displays to prevent crowding. And after a 10-year moratorium on pyrotechnics at Mount Rushmore due to fire danger, the Trump administration is planning to bring “THE BIG FIREWORKS” back to the national monument, along with an anticipated crowd of 7,500 people.

These events raise obvious concerns about spreading the coronavirus through person-to-person contact, but the danger posed by pollution remains unclear without more research on the population-wide toxicological effects of exposure to firework-generated particulate matter.

“We don’t know what the risks could be,” Gordon said, calling for more research. But until we know more, he says it could be worth it to investigate alternative ways of celebrating Independence Day. Laser shows, he noted, are bright and colorful without the toxic emissions.

For the time being, he recommends that viewers exercise caution, whether they’re staying home to detonate a Lava Blaster or heading to a big pyrotechnics show. “If I’m in a fireworks celebration and the wind’s blowing right at my family and me,” he told Grist. “I’m not a happy camper.”

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Forecast this 4th of July: Fireworks with a chance of lead exposure

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The first Democratic debate revealed who the real climate candidates are

land of the fee

Watch out, Big Oil. Jay Inslee’s back at it again with a greenhouse gas fee.

Adding to his growing stack of policies aimed at averting the climate crisis, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, one of the 23 Democrats running for president, announced Monday the fourth part of his Climate Mission: the Freedom from Fossil Fuels plan.

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The first Democratic debate revealed who the real climate candidates are

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As Trump questions warming, climate report warns of dire risks to U.S.

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This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The United States already warmed on average 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century and will warm at least 3 more degrees by 2100 unless fossil fuel use is dramatically curtailed, scientists from more than a dozen federal agencies concluded in their latest in-depth assessment.

The 13-agency consensus, authored by more than 300 researchers, found in the second volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment makes it clear the world is barreling toward catastrophic — perhaps irreversible — climate change. The report concluded that warming “could increase by 9°F (5°C) or more by the end of this century” without significant emissions reductions.

“Observations of global average temperature provide clear and compelling evidence the global average temperature is much higher and is rising more rapidly than anything modern civilization has experienced,” said David Easterling, chief of the scientific services division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina. “This warming trend can only be explained by human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

It’s the sort of staggering reality the Trump administration seems eager to minimize. Ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump antagonized climate scientists by tweeting, once again, that he believes cold weather disproves long-term trends of a warming climate.

“Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS – Whatever happened to Global Warming?” he posted Wednesday on Twitter.

That the White House opted to release the long-awaited update on climate change ― which Congress mandates the administration provide every four years — on Black Friday, a popular shopping holiday the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, indicates it wanted fewer people to see the news about the findings. Monica Allen, a spokeswoman for NOAA, repeatedly pushed back against questions about when the White House decided to move up the release of the report.

“The decision was made in the last week or so,” she said. “Please, I ask you to focus on the content of the report. The substance.”

The report adds to an ever-growing, all-but-irrefutable body of scientific research that shows climate change is real and driven by human carbon emissions ― a reality that President Donald Trump and his team refuse to accept as they pursue a fossil fuel-focused, “energy dominance” agenda.

Last year, the U.S. Global Change Research Program released a special report ― the first volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment ― that found Earth has entered the warmest period “in the history of modern civilization,” with global average air temperatures having increased by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 115 years. And in October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading United Nations consortium of researchers studying human-caused climate change, issued a report warning world governments must cut global emissions in half over the next 12 years to avoid warming of 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit, beyond which climate change is forecast to cause a cataclysmic $54 trillion in damages.

A series of devastating natural disasters, worsened by rising temperatures, made those findings tangible. In October, Typhoon Yutu, the most powerful storm all year, struck the Northern Mariana Islands, plunging the U.S. territory into chaos just a year after Hurricane Maria left thousands dead in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. California, meanwhile, is suffering its deadliest and most destructive wildfire on record during what was once the state’s rainy season.

Last year was the United States’ second-hottest in history, and the costliest in terms of climate-related disasters, with a record $306 billion in damages. Sixteen of the last 17 years have been the warmest on record globally.

In January, the Trump administration unveiled a proposal to open nearly all U.S. waters to oil and gas development. It has since worked to roll back safeguards adopted after the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In October, the Department of the Interior approved the development of the first oil production facility in Arctic waters off Alaska, but the company behind the project has since had to extend its construction timeline due to dwindling sea ice brought on by Arctic warming, as NPR reported.

The latest findings are likely to bolster the growing protests and legal battles over climate change. Over the past two weeks, activists in the United States and United Kingdom staged major demonstrations. In Washington, youth activists with the climate justice group Sunrise Movement stormed Democratic leaders’ offices demanding support for the so-called Green New Deal, the only policy to emerge in the American political mainstream that comes close to the scale of economic change needed to make a serious dent in national emissions. British activists stopped traffic this week as part of the so-called Extinction Rebellion.

The assessment could have weight in some critical court cases. The Supreme Court is considering a landmark suit brought by 21 plaintiffs between the ages of 11 and 22, who accuse the federal government of violating their civil rights to a safe climate by pursuing fossil fuel-focused energy policies. And various states and cities are suing big oil companies over climate damages, a number that could grow since Democrats scored victories in a number of attorney general seats in the midterm elections.

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As Trump questions warming, climate report warns of dire risks to U.S.

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A fiery Fourth of July threatens Southwest economies

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Around the country, Americans are cooking up hamburgers and bratwursts on their barbecues, embarking on backcountry camping trips, and preparing fireworks displays to celebrate the Fourth of July.

In the Southwest, those celebrations will be markedly different. Fire restrictions — and in some cases closures — are in place for many national forests in the four corners region of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. Officials hope to avoid adding to the wildfires already burning there and across the West, including in Alaska, Northern California, and Oregon. Over a dozen fireworks celebrations have been canceled in Colorado mountain towns, which often depend on the holiday to bring in tourism revenue.

The cancellations aren’t new, but they are more prevalent this year as the Southwest grapples with a severe drought. While precipitation levels vary from year to year, all signs point to further aridification in the region over the long term. This year may illustrate the likely changes to come as communities across the West are forced to confront challenges to their economies — and their quality of life.

Take the town of Silverton, Colorado, for example. This year’s weather hit the town of 630 people doubly hard. First, a bad snow season delayed the town’s ski resort opening date until mid-January; then drought brought forest closures and fast-moving wildfire, including the 416 Fire, which closed off one of the main gateways to town. The blaze also halted service of the narrow gauge train, a major tourist attraction, between Silverton and Durango. Those factors, and the ensuing media coverage, led to a “tsunami of lodging cancellations for all the summer season,” said DeAnne Gallegos, executive director of the Silverton Area Chamber of Commerce. The town usually makes most of its money during the summer months. This year, however, Gallegos estimates the summer economy is down by 60 to 80 percent, with businesses along the train route faring even worse. Fourth of July is typically the area’s biggest summer draw, but this year the town had to cancel its fireworks.

Nearby towns, including Durango, Ouray, and Pagosa Springs, also decided to skip the pyrotechnics this year. Where officials have the financial resources, however, they are embracing new forms of celebration. Glenwood Springs and Steamboat Springs have scheduled laser shows, and Aspen is advertising a patriotic drone light display in lieu of explosives. Closer to the Front Range, Breckenridge town council members acknowledged that doing away with fireworks might be a permanent reality. “If we see our summers continuing to get hotter and drier that’s definitely going to be probably more of the future,” Breckenridge spokeswoman Haley Littleton said at a city council meeting last week.

In addition to fireworks cancellations, most of the national forests in the region are under at least Stage 2 fire restrictions. That means anything that can produce a spark is forbidden, including campfires, barbecues, smoking in open areas, target shooting on public land, and using tools like chainsaws without a device to stop sparks. The situation is dire enough to close many national forests in the Southwest. In New Mexico, for example, the 1.5 million-acre Carson National Forest shut down last week — a month after the Santa Fe National Forest closed. The Cibola National Forest has also been closed since mid-June. In Arizona, where several wildfires have cropped up, popular areas in the Prescott National Forest, the Tonto National Forest, and the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests have also been shuttered until conditions improve.

As the climate changes, these types of forest closures and fire restrictions will continue to strain town coffers around the West. That means places like Silverton will be tasked with examining their identities as weather-dependent tourism economies. For Gallegos, that realization is hitting home now as the residents of her community take financial hits in order to keep their businesses open and their neighbors employed. “When you live in a high alpine town that is completely connected to Mother Nature and the weather and tourism … it impacts you that much more dramatically and exponentially,” she said.

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A fiery Fourth of July threatens Southwest economies

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This Policeman Says He Was Fired for Not Shooting a Man

Mother Jones

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Police reform advocates have demanded in recent years that officers face consequences for using excessive force, especially in shootings. But a new lawsuit alleges that a former Weirton, West Virginia, police officer was disciplined for doing the opposite. During an incident last May, Officer Stephen Mader decided not to shoot an armed suicidal man. Police brass determined he showed poor judgment during the encounter. Soon after, Mader was fired from the town’s police force. Now he is suing the city for wrongful termination.

The lawsuit, filed May 10 against the city of Weirton by Mader’s attorney along with the ACLU of West Virginia, accuses the department of firing Mader to buttress its defense of another officer who did shoot the man. In an emailed statement to Mother Jones, Weirton’s mayor’s office declined to comment on the suit, adding that the “the city hasn’t received a copy of the lawsuit or been made aware of any allegations.”

According to the lawsuit, on the evening of May 6, 2016, Mader responded to a 911 call from a woman who reported that her ex-boyfriend was at her home and had threatened to kill himself. Mader—a veteran of the Marines—was a rookie officer at the time. When he arrived at the scene, he encountered Ronald Williams, a 21-year-old African American man, standing outside the home with his hands behind his back. After initially refusing to show his hands, Williams brought them to his side and revealed that he was holding a handgun. Mader demanded that Williams drop it, but he refused and told Mader to shoot him.

During the encounter, Williams was visibly despondent but not aggressive, the lawsuit says. Mader says he determined that Williams was attempting to commit suicide-by-cop and—believing that he was not a threat—decided not to shoot him. As Mader tried to talk him down, two other officers arrived on the scene. Williams then raised his gun, and one of the officers shot him in the head, killing him. The officers later determined that Williams’ gun was unloaded.

Mader was fired the next month following an investigation into the incident. Weirton’s city manager told local media after Mader’s dismissal that he was fired because of two other incidents that took place earlier in the year. In the termination letter, the Weirton police chief wrote that Mader displayed “difficulties in critical incident reasoning” and had failed “to meet probationary standards of an officer.” The letter does not refer to Mader’s encounter with Williams or other incidents. But in an accompanying memo, a police captain accused Mader of “negligence” during the May 6 incident because he “failed to engage the suspect” and eliminate a threat, forcing another officer to shoot Williams in order to protect his ex-girlfriend, her child, and other officers on the scene. A prosecutor also determined that the officer who shot Williams—and who remains on the force—was justified in doing so.

According to his lawsuit, it was Mader’s responsibility to decide for himself what kind of force to use based on his own assessment of whether Williams posed an imminent threat. Department protocol—and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution—barred him from using deadly force in any other circumstance. The suit also argues that the department’s decision to fire him encourages other Weirton Police Department officers to use force in incidents where it may not be necessary by sending the message that they could lose their jobs if they don’t. “What I think it shows—and this is a problem I think we have throughout the country—is that because you can use deadly force, you should use deadly force,” Mader’s attorney Tim O’Brien told me. “And what this case is about is that an officer should be entitled to exercise that discretion based on facts known to that officer.” The same can be said of officers who choose to shoot, O’Brien noted, but the same Fourth Amendment standard applies.

General de-escalation training for police and more precise training on dealing with individuals in a mental health crisis have been increasingly adopted by police departments around the country in recent years, but the training is still not widespread. Just 16 states mandate de-escalation training for police officers, according to a recent investigation by AMP Reports. West Virginia is not one of them. Among those states that do require it, some require as little as one hour of training per year.

Mader says he received some de-escalation training in the Weirton police academy, but he mostly drew on his military training during his encounter with Williams. There is little research on whether military veterans—which account for nearly 20 percent of of all police officers nationwide, according to a recent Marshall Project investigation—are more or less likely to use force. A recent Pew Research survey found that cops who were veterans were slightly more likely to say they had used force than their non-veteran peers.

Mader told me he believes Williams might still be alive if he had had more time to talk to him before other officers arrived on the scene. O’Brien agreed, and said that while the case is about a single officer, it has implications for policing nationwide “and the context in which we have arrived in this society where it has become almost second nature to accept the fact that a first option is to shoot and kill a citizen. It’s become much more the norm than perhaps it should be and that’s what we need to evaluate.”

You can read the full lawsuit here.

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This Policeman Says He Was Fired for Not Shooting a Man

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Trump’s Immigration Order Is Now Effectively Dead

Mother Jones

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The Hawaii judge who halted enforcement of President Trump’s executive order on immigration has now gone a step further, turning his temporary restraining order into a preliminary injunction. Dara Lind explains:

A temporary restraining order is only supposed to last a couple of weeks. It’s supposed to grant enough time for the judge to do another round of briefs and hearings, and then issue a more considered decision about whether to keep the provision on hold indefinitely while the case works its way through the courts. That indefinite hold is called a preliminary injunction, and a judge in the Western District of Maryland (part of the Fourth Circuit) has already issued one against part of the executive order.

With two separate courts ruling against the travel ban, the administration’s only hope to get the ban back into effect without Supreme Court intervention was for both of those rulings to be overturned — or for the Maryland injunction to be overturned and Judge Watson to decide not to extend his temporary order into a preliminary injunction.

The first option wasn’t likely. The Ninth Circuit is famously liberal, and it’s the same court that put the first version of the travel ban on hold. So the administration’s last hope was Watson.

On Wednesday night, Watson did exactly what the administration hoped he wouldn’t. He issued a preliminary injunction covering both the section of the travel ban temporarily banning people from particular countries and the part temporarily banning refugees.

This may seem like it’s not too big a deal. The immigration order has been on hold for weeks, and now it’s going to stay on hold. But it’s actually a huge deal. For all practical purposes, it means Trump might as well give up.

As you’ll recall, the original immigration order was temporary: it would last about three months, which would give the Trump administration time to put “extreme vetting” procedures into place. That three months is up at the end of May. Presumably, DHS has been working diligently on the new procedures all along, so they should be ready to put them into effect by then.

At some point in May or June, the case becomes legally moot. But that doesn’t really matter. More practically, by the end of May it means that the extreme vetting procedures should be in place and Trump no longer needs the travel ban. After all, its only purpose was to provide time to work out the new procedures.

This is only about six weeks away. Maybe eight if they’ve run into snags. There’s no realistic chance that this case is going to get through two levels of lower courts and the Supreme Court in that time. Trump may keep fighting in order to save face, but it’s pointless. This case is now dead.

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Trump’s Immigration Order Is Now Effectively Dead

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Let’s Hear It for Kevin, the Coolest Kid Going Back to School

Mother Jones

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This fourth grader from Texas just entered the fourth grade at a new school and he could not be more thrilled. Because as Kevin recently revealed to a local reporter, after he conquers the fourth grade, he’s going to master the fifth grade, and then college. Or is it high school? Maybe preschool.

“I don’t even know the orders anymore!” Kevin said, clearly exasperated by his own enthusiasm.

He continued by taking the opportunity to protest his mother’s insistence that he wear a helmet while riding his bike because he is not a baby anymore and no longer needs “protected gear.” Kevin also told the reporter he is pumped to make more friends at his new school, as he only had one friend at his first.

“I am hoping I can make more friends than just one.”

To all the other kids at Kevin’s old school, let it be known you clearly missed out.

(h/t Select All)

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Let’s Hear It for Kevin, the Coolest Kid Going Back to School

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Voting-Rights Advocates Keep Scoring Major Victories, But the Fight Isn’t Over Yet

Mother Jones

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Update, 8/16/16, 12:04 p.m.: North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory formally asked the Supreme Court late Monday night to reinstate the state’s voter ID law. “Allowing the Fourth Circuit’s ruling to stand creates confusion among voters and poll workers and it disregards our successful rollout of Voter ID in the 2016 primary elections,” McCrory said in a statement. “The Fourth Circuit’s ruling is just plain wrong and we cannot allow it to stand. We are confident that the Supreme Court will uphold our state’s law and reverse the Fourth Circuit.”

Over the last month and a half, voting rights advocates have scored a string of legal victories against state-level voting restrictions in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Michigan, and North Dakota. Still, for many voters, the rules for Election Day remain in flux.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty on what the rules are going to be, and we’re getting closer to the early voting period,” says election law expert Rick Hasen. “That kind of uncertainty creates problems.”

Where do the problems begin? First, it will be up to state and local election officials to inform voters of their rights months before the general election. On Wednesday, nearly three weeks after a federal appeals court determined that Texas’ voter identification law had a discriminatory effect on black and Latino voters, state officials reached an agreement that gave people the option to sign a form stating they had a “reasonable impediment” in acquiring a photo ID to vote in November. (Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has said he planned to appeal the decision in the future.)

As part of the arrangement, Texas officials agreed to allocate $2.5 million toward an education campaign to let voters know about the changes. Poll workers would have to know that voters can cast ballots without an ID, leaving open the potential for confusion on Election Day, Hasen says. “There are a lot of polling places in Texas,” he adds. “It’s going to take a lot of effort to get the word out.”

Restrictive voting laws in Wisconsin and North Carolina also went in front of federal judges earlier this summer. In late July, a federal appeals court found that North Carolina’s voter identification law was passed with “discriminatory intent” that burdened African American voters “with almost surgical precision.” The ruling brought down numerous provisions that included instituting new identification requirements, eliminating same-day voter registration, and reducing the time for early voting, among others. The decision has left it up to county election officials to decide how long voters will have during the early voting period to cast their ballots as state officials prepare for a high voter turnout. Meanwhile, Gov. Pat McCrory said he plans on appealing the decision to the Supreme Court.

Last Wednesday, a panel of federal judges took a different tack in Wisconsin, putting on hold a lower-court ruling that let voters without the necessary ID sign a form showing that they had reasonable issues with obtaining an ID. They concluded that the case would “likely to be reversed on appeal and disruption of the state’s electoral system in the interim will cause irreparable injury.” A federal judge in a separate case found that several of Wisconsin’s voting restrictions were unconstitutional and that its voter ID rules should be changed. The appellate panel decision effectively ensures Wisconsin voters operate under the state’s voter ID law, pending an appeal to the 7th Circuit or the Supreme Court.

Now, with the general election quickly approaching, those hoping to further shape the voting rights landscape via the courts have only a few weeks left to appeal their cases. The ACLU filed a petition on Thursday to get the entire 7th Circuit to rule on the case in Wisconsin. In the North Carolina case, Hasen notes, the court gave its decision in late July under the state’s assurances it could comply with any possible changes ordered before the November election. It’s been 17 days and counting since the decision came down, and the state has yet to file an appeal.

In the past, the Supreme Court has issued emergency stays on orders shortly before elections. A month before the 2014 midterm elections were set to begin, for example, the justices took action in three familiar cases involving North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. The justices blocked Wisconsin’s attempt to implement its strict voter ID law, yet permitted Texas’ and North Carolina’s voting restrictions to continue for the midterms without an opinion. A stay in the more recent North Carolina’s case “threatens to confuse voters further, and to make election administrators’ life hell,” Hasen wrote in a recent blog post.

And this time around, timing isn’t the only question for the justices. With the Supreme Court currently divided after the death of Antonin Scalia, last-minute challenges before the justices could result in split decisions that could ultimately empower the lower courts’ decisions. “Everyday it’s a different set of rules,” Hasen says, “so you can’t really have a concerted education effort until you have some finality.”

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Voting-Rights Advocates Keep Scoring Major Victories, But the Fight Isn’t Over Yet

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Voting Rights Advocates Score a Huge Win in North Carolina

Mother Jones

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A federal appeals court struck down a restrictive voting law in North Carolina on Friday, ruling that the state legislature acted with the intent to limit African American voting in enacting the measure. The law, which took effect in March, contained provisions that created new ID requirements, eliminated same-day voter registration, reduced early voting by a week, blocked a law that allowed 16 and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote, and prevented ballots cast in the wrong precincts from being counted.

The law, originally passed in 2013 after the US Supreme Court gutted a key section of the Voting Rights Act, was immediately challenged by a lawsuit but was upheld at the district court level in April. Friday’s decision reverses the lower court’s ruling.

“In holding that the legislature did not enact the challenged provisions with discriminatory intent, the court seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees,” wrote Judge Diana Gribbon Motz for the unanimous three-judge panel. “This failure of perspective led the court to ignore critical facts bearing on legislative intent, including the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina.”

The court’s decision notes that North Carolina’s law was initiated by state Republicans the day after the Supreme Court gutted a key portion of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. That decision, Shelby v. Holder, ruled that the mechanism used to determine which states needed pre-clearance for voting law changes due to a history of racial discrimination was outdated. This ruling cleared the way for states like North Carolina—which previously had to have all voting law and procedural changes reviewed by the US Department of Justice or a federal judge—to enact any voting changes they wished.

Marc Elias, one of the lawyers who fought the law on behalf of a group of younger voters in North Carolina, told Mother Jones Friday that the decision represented a strong rebuke of race-based voting legislation.

“The Fourth Circuit decision is a milestone in the protection of voting rights,” Elias said. “It is a great day for the citizens of North Carolina and those who care about voting rights. Significantly, the court put down an important marker against discrimination in voting when it wrote, ‘We recognize that elections have consequences, but winning an election does not empower anyone in any party to engage in purposeful racial discrimination.'”

Rick Hasen, a national expert on election law, wrote Friday that the decision reversed “the largest collection of voting rollbacks contained in a single law that I could find since the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act.” Hasen noted that this was the third major voting rights victory of the past two weeks. On July 19, a federal court weakened Wisconsin’s strict voter ID law; the next day, a panel of federal judges ruled that Texas’ strict voter ID law violated federal law.

The state of North Carolina could now seek to have the case reheard before the entire Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, or it could appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

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Voting Rights Advocates Score a Huge Win in North Carolina

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What to Expect When You’re Expecting – Heidi Murkoff & Sharon Mazel

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

What to Expect When You’re Expecting

4th Edition

Heidi Murkoff & Sharon Mazel

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: April 10, 2008

Publisher: Workman Publishing Company

Seller: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.


Announcing a brand new, cover-to-cover revision of America's pregnancy bible. What to Expect When You're Expecting is a perennial New York Times bestseller and one of USA Today's 25 most influential books of the past 25 years. It's read by more than 90% of pregnant women who read a pregnancy book—the most iconic, must-have book for parents-to-be, with over 14.5 million copies in print. Now comes the Fourth Edition, a new book for a new generation of expectant moms—featuring a new look, a fresh perspective, and a friendlier-than-ever voice. It's filled with the most up-to-date information reflecting not only what's new in pregnancy, but what's relevant to pregnant women. Heidi Murkoff has rewritten every section of the book, answering dozens of new questions and including loads of new asked-for material, such as a detailed week-by-week fetal development section in each of the monthly chapters, an expanded chapter on pre-conception, and a brand new one on carrying multiples. More comprehensive, reassuring, and empathetic than ever, the Fourth Edition incorporates the most recent developments in obstetrics and addresses the most current lifestyle trends (from tattooing and belly piercing to Botox and aromatherapy). There's more than ever on pregnancy matters practical (including an expanded section on workplace concerns), physical (with more symptoms, more solutions), emotional (more advice on riding the mood roller coaster), nutritional (from low-carb to vegan, from junk food–dependent to caffeine-addicted), and sexual (what's hot and what's not in pregnant lovemaking), as well as much more support for that very important partner in parenting, the dad-to-be. Overflowing with tips, helpful hints, and humor (a pregnant woman's best friend), this new edition is more accessible and easier to use than ever before. It's everything parents-to-be have come to expect from What to Expect…only better?.

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What to Expect When You’re Expecting – Heidi Murkoff & Sharon Mazel

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