https://twitter.com/MrOlmos/status/1410364998971387904
Climate change and inequality: Tyson Morlock hooked up a pool to a fire hydrant under an overpass in Portland where temperatures reached 116°F (46°C)
“There’s not a lot of places you can go in the community where you can be safe.”
https://downdetector.com/
>Our movement is up against some of the most sinister and entrenched interests than anyone can imagine.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2021/07/03/ghislane-maxwell-lawyer-cosby-npa/6331625337649/
Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyers cite Bill Cosby case in seeking dismissal
July 3 (UPI) – Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyers have cited a non-prosecution agreement similar to one obtained by Bill Cosby in seeking to drop the sex trafficking case against the British socialite.
Cosby, 83, was released from prison Wednesday after serving more than two years of a three-to-10-year sentence on a 2018 conviction for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman in 2004.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction, basing the decision on the grounds that Cosby had an agreement with a previous prosecutor that he wouldn't be charged in the case.
Late Friday, lawyers for Maxwell, 59, argued in a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Alison Nathan that her case should also be dropped since she had a similar NPA.
Maxwell, a confidante of financier Jeffrey Epstein, allegedly recruited underage girls for a sex trafficking network he ran from about 1997 to 2004.
"The government is trying to renege on its agreement and prosecute Ms. Maxwell over 25 years later for the exact same offenses for which she was granted immunity in the NPA," the attorneys wrote.
Maxwell was in a "similar situation" as Cosby, they added.
Already facing six counts of participating in Epstein's sex trafficking network, Maxwell was hit with two new charges in March lengthening the duration of the alleged conspiracy due to the involvement of an additional alleged victim.
Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to all charges. If convicted, she could face up to 80 years in prison.
Epstein, 66, was found dead in August 2019 of a suspected suicide in his prison cell where he was being held on sex trafficking charges.
In April 2020, a federal appeals court ruled that federal prosecutors had not broken the law when they made a 2007 agreement with Epstein shielding him from prosecution on charges related to sexual abuse of minors.
Epstein registered as a sex offender as part of the deal made with federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta in Florida. Acosta later headed the U.S. Department of Labor under President Donald Trump's administration, but resigned after controversy about the NPA.
Maxwell attorney David Oscar Markus also compared her case to Cosby's in an opinion piece published Wednesday in the New York Daily News.
Prosecutors, however, noted in a court filing made the next day that Nathan has already ruled that the deal negotiated between Epstein and Acosta in Florida does not apply to her ongoing case in Manhattan Federal Court in New York.
>Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyers cite Bill Cosby case in seeking dismissal
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20982953/maxwell-cosby-letter.pdf
>hard war veteran
:o
https://www.flgov.com/2019/05/31/governor-ron-desantis-leads-historic-business-development-mission-to-israel-with-florida-delegation/
May 31, 2019
Governor Ron DeSantis Leads Historic Business Development Mission to Israel with Florida Delegation
Tallahassee, Fla. – Today, Governor Ron DeSantis highlighted his business development mission to Israel, which took place from May 25-31. During the mission, organized in conjunction with Enterprise Florida, Inc., more than 20 strategic partnerships and Memorandums of Understanding (MOU) were established, a historic number. MOUs included agreements between leading universities in Florida and Israel, as well as an extension of the Florida-Israel Innovation Partnership and a new MOU between Space Florida and the Israel Space Agency. The Governor also met with many leading Israeli companies, visited cultural sites throughout the nation of Israel, led a ceremonial meeting with members of the Florida Cabinet and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“This historic mission has been the prelude to future prosperity and partnership between Florida and Israel,” said Governor DeSantis. “This week, we established an unprecedented number of alliances in science, business and academia. We affirmed our solidarity with Israelis and resolved to give no quarter to anti-Semitism. Returning to Florida, we bring with us prospects for investment, high-wage jobs, water conservation and innovative ideas to keep our schools and communities safe. We also carry home a renewed belief that peace, freedom and democracy are essential to our quality of life and are to be championed, cherished and never taken for granted.”
Governor-led missions are part of a global trade development and business recruitment strategy that involves leaders from business, government and economic development organizations throughout Florida. The missions provide a unique opportunity to promote Florida’s business advantages, assist exporters in meeting clients, and identify and attract foreign direct investment. Governor-led missions target markets where a significant opportunity exists to expand Florida’s economy. Agreements made will benefit Florida students, businesses and residents from securing high-wage jobs, to the development of environmental technology to research and academic opportunities.
Governor DeSantis’ mission included many historic firsts and important business, cultural and academic meetings and partnerships that will benefit Floridians and Israelis for generations to come.
https://apnews.com/article/fl-state-wire-hurricane-irma-surfside-building-collapse-313072caccc14b2597daa4f3b04bc21a
Demolition preparations begin at condo with storm looming
SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP) — Rescuers suspended their search for the living and the dead in the rubble of a collapsed South Florida condo building Saturday to allow crews to start preparing the unstable remainder of the structure for demolition ahead of a tropical storm.
The search and rescue mission was halted in the afternoon as workers began the precarious business of boring holes to hold explosives in the concrete of the still-standing portion of the Champlain Towers South tower in Surfside, Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah told relatives awaiting word on missing loved ones.
In the closed-door briefing, Jadallah said the suspension was a necessary safety measure because the drilling could cause the structure to fail. If that were to happen, he said, “It’s just going to collapse without warning.”
But in video that one of the relatives livestreamed on social media, one of them was heard calling it “devastating” that the search was on pause. She asked whether rescuers could at least work the perimeter of the site so as not “to stop the operation for so many painful hours.”
Also Saturday, the confirmed death toll from the partial collapse of the 12-story building rose to 24 with the discovery of two more bodies. There were 121 people still unaccounted for.
Concerns had been mounting over the past week that the damaged structure was at risk of failure, endangering the crews below. The search in adjacent areas of the collapse site was curtailed, and shifts detected by monitors early Thursday prompted a 15-hour suspension of the entire effort until engineers determined it was safe to resume.
The building won’t come down until Monday at the earliest, according to Jadallah. That estimate was based on how many holes the demolition team needs to drill, he said, adding that the process has to move slowly to prevent a premature collapse.
With Tropical Storm Elsa looming in the Caribbean and forecast to move toward the state in the coming days, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said demolishing the “tottering” and “structurally unsound” structure is the prudent thing to do.
“If the building is taken down, this will protect our search and rescue teams, because we don’t know when it could fall over,” DeSantis said at a news conference earlier in the day. “And, of course, with these gusts, potentially that would create a really severe hazard.”
“The fear was that (Elsa) may take the building down for us and take it down in the wrong direction,” Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said.
Elsa was downgraded Saturday from a Category 1 hurricane to a tropical storm with maximum sustained winds of 70 mph (110 kph) as it brushed past the island of Hispaniola, home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The long-term forecast track showed it heading toward Florida as a tropical storm by Tuesday morning, though some models would carry it into the Gulf or up the Atlantic Coast. Meteorologists warned that it could bring heavy rain and gusty winds to the Miami area.
“So we can’t let our guard down,” said Robert Molleda of the National Weather Service. “You still need to be watching this very closely.”
Once the structure is demolished, the remnants will be removed immediately with the intent of giving rescuers access for the first time to parts of the garage area that are a focus of interest, Jadallah said. That could give a clearer picture of voids that may exist in the rubble and could possibly harbor survivors.
No one has been rescued alive since the first hours after the June 24 collapse.
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said officials would resume the search and rescue on any sections of the pile that are “safe to access as soon as we are cleared.”
Some families had asked to be able to return to the building to retrieve personal belongings, but they will not be allowed to do so.
“At the end of the day, that building is too unsafe to let people go back in,” DeSantis said. “I know there’s a lot of people who were able to get out, fortunately, who have things there. We’re very sensitive to that, but I don’t think there’s any way you can let somebody go up in that building given the shape that it’s in now.”
Calvan reported from Tallahassee, Florida. Associated Press writer Rebecca Santana contributed to this report.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/nyregion/american-flag-politics-polarization.html
A Fourth of July Symbol of Unity That May No Longer Unite
SOUTHOLD, N.Y. — The American flag flies in paint on the side of Peter Treiber Jr.’s potato truck, a local landmark parked permanently on County Route 48, doing little more, he thought, than drawing attention to his family’s farm.
Until he tried to sell his produce.
At a local greenmarket where he sells things like wild bergamot, honey and sunflowers, he had trouble striking a deal until, he said, he let his liberal leanings slip out in conversation with a customer.
“She said, ‘Oh, whew. You know, I wasn’t so sure about you, I thought you were some flag-waving something-or-other,’” Mr. Treiber, 32, recalled the woman saying and citing his potato truck display. “That’s why she was apprehensive of interacting with me.”
He paused: “It was a little sad to me. It shows the dichotomy of the country that a flag can mean that. That I had to think, ‘Do I need to reconsider having that out there?’”
Thirteen stripes, a dusting of stars, the American flag has had infinite meanings over the 244 years since the country began flying one. Raised at Iwo Jima, it was a symbol of victory. Lit on fire, it became a searing image of the protests against the Vietnam War. Ribboned around the twin towers on commemorative Sept. 11 lapel pins, it is a reminder of the threats against a delicate democracy.
Politicians of both parties have long sought to wrap themselves in the flag. But something may be changing: Today, flying the flag from the back of a pickup truck or over a lawn is increasingly seen as a clue, albeit an imperfect one, to a person’s political affiliation in a deeply divided nation.
Supporters of former President Donald J. Trump have embraced the flag so fervently — at his rallies, across conservative media and even during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — that many liberals like Mr. Treiber worry that the left has all but ceded the national emblem to the right.
What was once a unifying symbol — there is a star on it for each state, after all — is now alienating to some, its stripes now fault lines between people who kneel while “The Star-Spangled Banner” plays and those for whom not pledging allegiance is an affront.
And it has made the celebration of the Fourth of July, of patriotic bunting and cakes with blueberries and strawberries arranged into Old Glory, into another cleft in a country that seems no longer quite so indivisible, under a flag threatening to fray.
Mr. Treiber’s farm is in the town of Southold, a string of hamlets and a village on the North Fork of Long Island’s Suffolk County. The county chose Mr. Trump for president in 2020 by just 232 votes out of more than 770,000 cast.
Southold is predominantly white, with a small, longstanding Black population — families who reside mostly in the village, Greenport, at the edge of the salty Peconic River. There is also a significant Latino population, many of them undocumented, their labor underpinning the vineyards, farms and landscaping businesses that line the peninsula.
The pressure to draw partisan lines is fierce.
Just across the street from Treiber Farms, David Surozenski, 66, was weeding around the flagpole in his front yard a few days before the Fourth of July. Bouquets of miniature American flags flapped among the marigolds at his feet. Above him flew the flags of the Marines and the Coast Guard — he has children in each service — and at the top, an American flag.
A Republican, Mr. Surozenski said friends constantly pressured him to add Trump banners to his flag-and-flower garden, to fly “Make America Great Again” signs between his red, white and blue pinwheels whirling in the grass. But Mr. Surozenski declined — some of his eight children are Democrats.
“They said, ‘Dave, you’ve got to put Trump’s flag up!’ and I said, ‘No, that’s not happening,’” Mr. Surozenski recalled. “That’s not the way I was brought up. The American flag political? No.”
About 70 percent of Americans say the flag makes them feel proud, according to a recent survey by YouGov, a global public opinion and data research firm, and NBCLX, a mobile information platform. The sentiment was shared by about 80 percent of white Americans, just under 70 percent of Hispanic Americans and slightly less than 60 percent of Black Americans.
The divisions were deeper when it came to politics. While 66 percent of Republicans surveyed said they associated the flag with their own party, only 34 percent of Democrats said the same.
At its 1777 inception, the flag’s very design signified unity, the joining of the 13 colonies, said John R. Vile, a professor of political science and a dean at Middle Tennessee State University.
Politicizing the American flag is thus a perversion of its original intent, according to Professor Vile, who is also the author of “The American Flag: An Encyclopedia of the Stars and Stripes In U.S. History, Culture and Law.” He added, “We can’t allow that to happen.”
“It’s E Pluribus Unum — from many, one,” he said, citing the Latin motto on the Great Seal of the United States. “If the pluribus overwhelms the unum, then what do we have left?”
The sentiment of some conservatives is that a line was drawn when Colin Kaepernick, the former National Football League quarterback, set off a national movement protesting the shootings of Black men by police by taking a knee during the anthem in 2016. His kneeling protest, Mr. Kaepernick has said, still demonstrated respect for the flag, but others saw him as hijacking the flag for political purposes.
Maryneily Rodriguez, 33, said she believed that Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters had done the same. Ms. Rodriguez, who was visiting Greenport with her fiancé during the Fourth of July weekend, said that she once regularly flew the flag at her home in Freeport, about 80 miles west on Long Island, taking it down only in winter for safekeeping. But about three years ago when spring came, Ms. Rodriguez, who is Black and a Democrat, left the flag in storage. It hasn’t come out since.
“It felt like it didn’t belong to me anymore,” she said.
John Hocker, a Republican who said he sometimes votes Democratic, also said he felt the flag had lost its meaning of unity. Instead of saluting the same flag as one people, he said, too many Americans were modifying it to become emblems of their own identities or belief systems, for instance with rainbow stripes, a symbol of gay pride, or blue stripes to show solidarity with the police.
He flies the flag — the red, white and blue one — from a towering crane several stories above the gravel piles of Latham Sand & Gravel, where he is a co-owner.
“There is a lot of history with this country, some that maybe people don’t like today, and some that people are being judged for today for what they did 300 years ago,” he said.
“It’s still our country and every good and bad thing made it our country,” Mr. Hocker said, glancing upward. “And that’s what that represents.”
The culture war he was alluding to was on full display a few miles away, hanging from the eaves of an empty roadside stand: “SAVE AMERICA” was printed along the flag’s top border, and below: “FIGHT SOCIALISM.”
And on a notice tacked nearby: “If this offends you LEAVE.”
At Rinconcito Hispano in Greenport, Ana Perez, 33, served up pupusas, stuffed masa flour patties from her native El Salvador, to customers who ordered exclusively in Spanish. Many of them are the laborers who clean the pools at the beach houses and scare the crows off the grapes at the wineries.
In 2017, as Mr. Trump began his crackdown on illegal immigration, village trustees unanimously adopted a resolution to declare Greenport “a welcoming community.” One resident opposing the measure at the meeting urged the public to call and report anyone who employed undocumented immigrants. Wearing an American flag on his chest, he held up a sign with a phone number.
Ms. Perez said she has an American flag T-shirt, too, and she intended to wear it on the holiday. “This symbolizes this country, and I live in this country,” she said, speaking in Spanish because she is not fluent in English. “This flag is for all.”
Strolling with her fiancé, Anthony Dipolito, Ms. Rodriguez took in the 1920 wooden carousel beside the marina in Greenport.
As she crossed through Mitchell Park, she was struck by the sight of a forest of American flags. It was not a prop for a political rally, but rather a peaceful “field of honor” installed by the Greenport Rotary Club.
Each flag represented not an ideological belief, according to the club, but a veteran or other citizen who had inspired or helped the community.
“I’ve always loved the American flag so much, and now seeing it by the carousel I felt happy again,” Ms. Rodriguez said, as all around her red, white, and blue cloth still waved. “And I haven’t felt that way about the flag in such a long time.”
Correction: July 3, 2021
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to an organization that had installed a flag display. It was the Greenport Rotary Club, not the Greenpoint Rotary Club.
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1411424532590694410
who wears short shorts