AMERIKA

A California woman was jailed for having a stillbirth. 

Her attorney says prosecution for miscarriages will 'only get worse' under the nation's current abortion rights crackdown.

Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert
Sat, June 4, 2022


Attendees hold up signs during a Texas Rally for Abortion Rights at Discovery Green in Houston, Texas, on May 7, 2022.

Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images

Attorney Samantha Lee represented a woman charged with murder after her stillborn tested positive for drugs.

Chelsea Becker, who struggled with addiction during her pregnancy, was freed from jail after 16 months.

Lee told the San Francisco Chronicle she expects similar prosecution for miscarriages "to only get worse."

The attorney who represented a California woman charged with murder after her stillborn baby tested positive for drugs said cases like her clients' will "only get worse" amid a national crackdown on reproductive rights.

Chelsea Becker, who struggled with addiction during her pregnancy, faced murder charges in Kings County after experiencing a stillbirth in 2019, which the DA blamed on her drug use. Though she was unable to raise the $2 million needed to post bail and served 16 months in jail, the charges were ultimately dropped and she was freed in 2021.

Becker's attorney, Samatha Lee of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, told the San Francisco Chronicle her client's case — and a similar 2018 case — are part of a growing national trend of criminalizing pregnant people after stillbirth and miscarriage.

"When that door is opened, then anything someone does or doesn't do during their pregnancy could be charged similarly," Lee told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We're already seeing it, and we expect it to only get worse."

National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found criminal prosecutions against pregnant people have tripled from 2006 to 2020 compared to cases prosecuted from 1973 to 2005. As the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade protections after a draft court opinion was leaked, several states have laws in place to make abortion a criminal offense.

Becker, who had a second child who was placed into foster care and adopted before her release from jail, has since become an advocate for a California bill that would stop pregnancy loss criminalization.

"I hope that in the future, no woman will ever be prosecuted for losing a pregnancy," she wrote in a letter to state lawmakers.

BIDEN'S POLLING NUMBERS

Biden entered office facing daunting crises – only to be hit with more crises

Lauren Gambino in Washington

THE GUARDIAN
Mon, June 6, 2022

Photograph: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images

In his third run for president, Joe Biden’s pitch to Americans was simple: after half-a-century in elected office, including eight years as vice-president, he understood the demands of what is arguably the hardest job in the world. It was a point Biden stressed on the campaign trail, in his own folksy way: “Everything landed on the president’s desk but locusts.”

Nearly a year-and-a-half into his presidency, Biden now appraises his own fortunes differently. “I used to say in Barack’s administration: ‘Everything landed on his desk but locusts’,” he told Democratic donors in Oregon. “Well, they landed on my desk.”

Successive mass shootings, including a racist attack at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and a massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 elementary school students and their teachers dead, present just the latest test for a president desperate to act but constrained, once again, by the limits of his own power.

“Enough. Enough,” Biden repeated in a rare primetime address to the nation, pleading with Congress to honor the communities shattered by mass shootings by finally tightening the nation’s gun laws. He called for a ban on assault-style weapons and lifting legal immunity for gun manufacturers. With razor-thin Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Biden does not have the votes to move his legislative agenda without consensus.

“I just told you what I’d do,” he said. “The question now is: What will the Congress do?

Biden inherited a nation in tumult, plagued by disease and division and still reeling from the bloody insurrection at the US Capitol. In his inaugural address, he said the country faced a “historic moment of crisis and challenge” and identified four national trials that he vowed to confront: the pandemic, the ensuing economic downturn, racial injustice and climate change.

Though his administration has made varying degrees of progress on each, those issues remain unresolved while the list of unforeseen challenges demanding the president’s attention grows ever-longer.

Inflation has surged to its highest level in nearly four decades, leaving American families struggling to afford the basic necessities like groceries, gas and rent. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens the liberal world order, while pushing the cost of food and fuel even higher.

A shortage of baby formula, caused by the closure of a major manufacturing plant due to contamination, has become so dire that Biden has invoked wartime powers to speed up production and restock shelves. And any moment now, the supreme court is expected overturn the constitutional right to an abortion, leaving tens of millions of American women without access to the procedure.

The confluence of high-stakes events has left Americans deeply pessimistic about the direction of the country and frustrated with their leaders in Washington. The pandemic, which has now claimed more than 1 million American lives, warnings of an economic “hurricane” and a stalled legislative agenda have only deepened public dissatisfaction, including among Biden’s supporters.

“Biden came into office facing arguably the most daunting challenges since FDR, between the pandemic and the economy and global warming and racial justice, only to then be hit by an almost-perfect storm of crises with inflation and Ukraine and the supply chain and baby formula,” said Chris Whipple, author of the forthcoming book, The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House.

Joe Biden speaks on mass shootings from the White House on Thursday. 

Photograph: Yuri Gripas/EPA

“He’s been dealt an extraordinarily bad hand.”

Leon Panetta, a former CIA director and defense secretary under Barack Obama and a former White House chief of staff to Bill Clinton, agreed.

“In my over 50 years of public life, I’ve never seen as many critical crises taking place as we’ve seen in these last few years,” he said.

Republican opposition, the courts and a host of new troubles have thwarted many of the president’s most ambitious goals, leaving the administration struggling to respond to the many domestic concerns. The predicament threatens a central promise of the Biden presidency: “I got elected to solve problems,” he told reporters in March 2021.

The White House has been working to rebuild public confidence in Biden’s leadership since America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August. The devastating end to America’s longest war, in which 13 US service-members and scores of Afghans died, marked a precipitous decline of the president’s approval ratings which now hover at around 40%. Satisfaction with his stewardship of the economy is even lower.

As the challenges mount, Biden has become increasingly frank about the constraints on his presidency while Republicans accuse him of shirking responsibility.

Speaking to reporters after a virtual roundtable with infant formula manufacturers last week, Biden said the administration couldn’t simply “click a switch” to bring down the cost of gas or food. Despite airlifts of formula from abroad, he predicted the formula shortage would persist for another two months and then revealed he wasn’t made aware of the crisis until April. The admission raised new questions about why an administration composed of Washington veterans was so slow to recognize the problem.

In my over 50 years of public life, I’ve never seen as many critical crises taking place as we’ve seen in these last few years 

Leon Panetta

When pressed to explain the administration’s response, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pointed to the cascade of challenges Biden faced.

“The President has multiple issues – crises – at the moment,” she said. “When he walked into the administration, he talked about the multiple crises that we needed to deal with as a country – so that’s number one to remember.”

Panetta said the White House has a positive story to tell about American resilience in the face of extraordinary hardship but has done a “lousy” job of sharing its vision to the public. In the vacuum, he said the White House is left scrambling to respond.

“When you deliver a different message every day, at a time when there are so many problems and people are feeling frustrated, it’s very difficult for them to feel like anything’s getting done,” Panetta said, adding: “If you can have that larger message… then you don’t have to spend your time bouncing off the wall, every time there’s a new crisis.”

Since taking office, Biden has had a number of hard-won victories, largely eclipsed by anxiety over inflation and rising costs.

Congress passed a $1.9tn Covid-19 relief package that slashed poverty and sent him a $1.2tn infrastructure package approved with bipartisan support. The administration’s mass vaccination campaign has resulted in nearly 67% of Americans being fully immunized against Covid-19, with shots for children younger than five potentially available within the coming weeks. He filled a record number of federal judicial vacancies during his first year and successfully nominated the first Black woman to supreme court justice.

Meanwhile, the economy continues to grow, with unemployment at record lows and consumer spending robust. On Friday, it was reported that 390,000 more jobs were created.

“Biden has done a very good job with things over which he can use the levers of the presidency and the levers of the government to do it,” Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said, noting the consequential exception of the Afghanistan exit. “But there are many things happening now where there simply are no levers.”

The tools for combating inflation – voters’ top priority – rest largely with the Fed, not the president. Still, rising costs have become a major political liability for Biden ahead of the November elections, as the administration faces sharp criticism for wrongly predicting inflation would likely be “transitory”.

Biden speaks on Uvalde Texas mass shooting from White House, on 24 May. 

Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Biden has sought to blame Russian president Vladimir Putin for exacerbating inflation and new lockdowns in China, as well as Republicans for blocking his domestic policy agenda, which he has said would ease the financial burden on American families.

“All presidents suffer a decline in their popularity midway through their first term and it’s often due to the fact that they cannot deliver on all of the promises that they make,” said Todd Belt, the director of the political management program at the George Washington University and co-author of The Post-Heroic Presidency. “This is particularly acute for Biden because he did make a lot of promises and he hasn’t been able to follow through on them.”

Even when the president is powerless to act unilaterally, Belt added, “he at least has to look like he’s trying”.

Democrats, with their slim control of Congress at risk, have grown frustrated with the president.

Progressives want to see him throw all his energy and political capital into issues like climate change, votings rights, immigration and abortion – and where this fails to push for rule-changes in the Senate to overcome Republican opposition. They also want to see him take more executive action, like on student-debt forgiveness. Meanwhile, many moderates in his party are upset that he promised bipartisanship and then put forward proposals that failed to win over their most conservative members, much less a single Republican.

Donna Brazile, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said Biden must continue to “lead and communicate directly with the American people”.

“Congress is broken,” Brazile wrote in an email, “and Biden doesn’t have a big majority in either chamber, so it’s vital that he builds out and not just clamor inside.”

Biden has received widespread praise for rallying Nato allies in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps the most consequential act of his presidency was to rally Western allies in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said Whipple, the author.

“Almost unquestionably, Joe Biden’s presidency is going to be defined by Ukraine and by how well he defends democracy against autocracy in its moment of danger with an invasion in the heart of Europe,” he said.

But in the short-term and at home – which is where most voters’ concerns lie – Biden’s handling of Ukraine has done little to improve his approval ratings or increase the likelihood of Democrats keeping control of Congress. And last week Biden warned that Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports could raise the cost of staples like bread even more.

“I understand that families who are struggling probably don’t care why the prices are up – they just want them to go down,” Biden conceded in a speech on Friday.

He couldn’t promise that inflation would recede, only that he would try his best to make it happen.

“As your President,” he said, “I remain committed to doing everything in my power to blunt the impact on American families.”

Pope Francis fuels new speculation on future of pontificate

Pope Francis fuels new speculation on future of pontificateFILE - Pope Francis arrives on a wheelchair for an audience with children in the San Damaso courtyard at the Vatican, Saturday, June 4, 2022. Pope Francis added fuel to rumors about the future of his pontificate on Saturday by announcing he would visit the central Italian city of L'Aquila in August for a feast initiated by Pope Celestine V, one of the few pontiffs who resigned before Pope Benedict XVI stepped down in 2013. 

(AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)


NICOLE WINFIELD
Sun, June 5, 2022

ROME (AP) — Pope Francis added fuel to rumors about the future of his pontificate by announcing he would visit the central Italian city of L'Aquila in August for a feast initiated by Pope Celestine V, one of the few pontiffs who resigned before Pope Benedict XVI stepped down in 2013.

Italian and Catholic media have been rife with unsourced speculation that the 85-year-old Francis might be planning to follow in Benedict’s footsteps, given his increased mobility problems that have forced him to use a wheelchair for the last month.

Those rumors gained steam last week when Francis announced a consistory to create 21 new cardinals scheduled for Aug. 27. Sixteen of those cardinals are under age 80 and eligible to vote in a conclave to elect Francis’ successor.

Once they are added to the ranks of princes of the church, Francis will have stacked the College of Cardinals with 83 of the 132 voting-age cardinals. While there is no guarantee how the cardinals might vote, the chances that they will tap a successor who shares Francis’ pastoral priorities become ever greater.

In announcing the Aug. 27 consistory, Francis also announced he would host two days of talks the following week to brief the cardinals about his recent apostolic constitution reforming the Vatican bureaucracy. That document, which goes into effect Sunday, allows women to head Vatican offices, imposes term limits on priestly Vatican employees and positions the Holy See as an institution at the service of local churches, rather than vice versa.

Francis was elected pope in 2013 on a mandate to reform the Roman Curia. Now that the nine-year project has been rolled out and at least partially implemented, Francis’ main task as pope has in some ways been accomplished.

All of which made Saturday’s otherwise routine announcement of a pastoral visit to L’Aquila carry more speculative weight than it might otherwise have.

Notable was the timing: The Vatican and the rest of Italy are usually on holiday in August to mid-September, with all but essential business closed. Calling a major consistory in late August to create new cardinals, gathering churchmen for two days of talks on implementing his reform and making a symbolically significant pastoral visit suggests Francis might have out-of-the-ordinary business in mind.

“With today’s news that @Pontifex will go to L’Aquila in the very middle of the August consistory, it all got even more intriguing,” tweeted Vatican commentator Robert Mickens, linking to an essay he had published in La Croix International about the rumors swirling around the future of the pontificate.

The basilica in L’Aquila hosts the tomb of Celestine V, a hermit pope who resigned after five months in 1294, overwhelmed by the job. In 2009, Benedict visited L’Aquila, which had been devastated by a recent earthquake and prayed at Celestine’s tomb, leaving his pallium stole on it.

No one at the time appreciated the significance of the gesture. But four years later, the 85-year-old Benedict would follow in Celestine’s footsteps and resign, saying he no longer had the strength of body and mind to carry on the rigors of the papacy.

The Vatican announced Saturday Francis would visit L’Aquila to celebrate Mass on Aug. 28 and open the “Holy Door” at the basilica hosting Celestine’s tomb. The timing coincides with the L’Aquila church’s celebration of the Feast of Forgiveness, which was created by Celestine in a papal bull.

No pope has travelled to L’Aquila since to close out the annual feast, which celebrates the sacrament of forgiveness so dear to Francis, noted the current archbishop of L’Aquila, Cardinal Giuseppe Petrocchi.

“We hope that all people, especially those harmed by conflicts and internal divisions, might (come) and find the path of solidarity and peace,” he said in a statement announcing the visit.

Francis has praised Benedict’s decision to retire as “opening the door” for future popes to do the same, and he had originally predicted a short papacy for himself of two to five years.

Nine years later, Francis has shown no signs he wants to step down, and he has major projects still on the horizon.

In addition to upcoming trips this year to Congo, South Sudan, Canada and Kazakhstan, in 2023 he has scheduled a major meeting of the world’s bishops to debate the increasing decentralization of the Catholic Church, as well as the continued implementation of his reforms.

But Francis has been hobbled by the strained ligaments in his right knee that have made walking painful and difficult. He has told friends he doesn’t want to undergo surgery, reportedly because of his reaction to anesthesia last July when he had 33 centimeters (13 inches) of his large intestine removed.

This week, one of his closest advisers and friends, Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, said talk of a papal resignation or the end of Francis’ pontificate was unfounded.

“I think these are optical illusions, cerebral illusions,” Maradiaga told Religion Digital, a Spanish-language Catholic site.

Christopher Bellitto, a church historian at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, noted that most Vatican watchers expect Francis will eventually resign, but not before Benedict dies. The 95-year-old retired pope is physically frail but still alert and receiving occasional visitors in his home in the Vatican gardens.

“He’s not going to have two former popes floating around,” Bellitto said in an email. Referring to Francis' planned visit to L'Aquila, he suggested not reading too much into it, noting that Benedict’s gesture in 2009 was missed by most everyone.

“I don’t recall a lot of stories at the time saying that Benedict’s visit in 2009 made us think he was going to resign,” he said, suggesting that Francis’ pastoral visit to l’Aquila might be just that: a pastoral visit.

Percentage of Americans who say Trump was responsible for Jan. 6 drops: poll

Brad Dress - 

The percentage of Americans who say former President Trump was responsible for the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol dropped to 45 percent in an NBC News poll released on Monday.




About 17 percent of respondents said the former president is solely responsible for the rioting, while 28 percent say he is mainly responsible, according to the survey.

In January 2021, 52 percent of respondents said Trump was responsible, with 28 percent saying he was solely responsible and 24 percent saying he was mainly responsible.

By comparison, the percentage of Americans in the new poll who say Trump was “not really” responsible for Jan. 6 grew to 35 percent, up from 29 percent in January 2021. About 20 percent of Americans now say he is somewhat responsible, up from 18 percent 18 months ago.

The findings come as the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot prepares for its first public hearing Thursday night. Lawmakers are expected to present their findings to the public after collecting thousands of documents and conducting more than 1,000 interviews.

On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn certification of the 2020 election, which the former president and his supporters continue to claim, without evidence, was stolen. The rioting came shortly after Trump held a rally, dubbed “Stop the Steal,” on the White House Ellipse.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the House committee investigating the rioting, on Sunday said Americans would for the first time get a look at a “comprehensive narrative” of the events leading up to Jan. 6.

“Our goal is to present the narrative of what happened in this country, how close we came to losing our democracy, what led to the violence,” Schiff told host Margaret Brennan on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“Americans, I think, know a great deal already — they have seen a number of bombshells already, [but] there’s a great deal they haven’t seen,” the lawmaker continued. “But perhaps the most important is the public has not seen it woven together, how one thing led to another.”

Schiff was responding to a question from Brennan about whether the committee’s investigation would lose the public’s interest if they did not produce any “bombshells.”

The committee has taken the 8 p.m. prime-time slot on Thursday to present its findings, hoping they can use the popular cable time to present a captivating case for Americans.

While most of what lawmakers have gathered is private, the public has already learned through the committee there was a seven-hour gap in Trump’s phone call logs on Jan. 6, when people were asking him to quell the rioting, and that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had pushed to invalidate the 2020 election.

But a recent poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows the public is evenly divided on how much discussion should be centered on Jan. 6.

Fifty-two percent of Americans say they want to learn more about what happened that day, compared to 48 percent who say it is time to “move on.”

Trump and his supporters, despite continuing to claim the 2020 election was rigged, have moved on from the Jan. 6 rioting, accusing Democrats of using the event as a political tool against the GOP. Several former Trump aides have avoided sitting for depositions, resulting in the Department of Justice charging Peter Navarro and Stephen Bannon with contempt of Congress.

The Justice Department also continues to vigorously prosecute the rioters involved in Jan. 6, with more than 800 charged in connection to the Capitol attack.

The NBC News poll was conducted from May 5 to May 7 and May 9 to May 10 among 1,000 U.S. adults. The margin of error is 3 percentage points.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.

NOT A FAIRYTALE IT'S TRUMP TRUTH

Trump Wants Children's Book Defending 'King Donald' In 'Every School In America'



Mary Papenfuss
Sun, June 5, 2022, 7:35 PM·3 min read

Former President Donald Trump is peddling a children’s book written by a former member of his administration that stars “King Donald” and reimagines a kingdom where the “Russionians” weren’t a factor in the 2016 election.

Now Trump wants to distribute the book to children across the land. “Let’s put this amazing book in every school in America,” Trump posted on Truth Social last week.



“The Plot Against the King” was written by Republican and Trump loyalist Kash Patel, the former president’s hand-picked Pentagon chief of staff.

Conservative publisher Brave Books is presenting the work as both fairytale and fact. It calls the book a “fantastical retelling of the terrible true story.”

“A key player in uncovering one of our nation’s biggest injustices tells the whole story — for kids! Kash Patel ..... brings a fantastical retelling of Hillary’s horrible plot against Trump to the whole family,” says a statement by the publisher. Patel says in his own statement that he believes it’s important for people to know the “truth” in the fairytale.

The book focuses on an evil plot by mean “Hillary Queenton” and her “shifty knights” to reveal that King Donald was working with the “Russionians” to cheat his way into the Oval Office. Patel himself appears in the book as a “wizard” who attempts to prove King Donald was wrongly accused.

The book claims, in fairytale speak, that the discredited dossier on King Donald and the “Russionians” — gathered in real life by former MI-5 officer Christopher Steele — triggered the American intelligence probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The book slyly claims that the dossier was “written” by Hillary Queenton and “put in a steel box.”

In fact, U.S. intelligence launched its investigation the summer of 2016, months before the Steele dossier was available. The probe determined that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the launch of an influence campaign aimed at getting Trump elected in 2016 and “undermining public faith” in the democratic process. Those findings were supported in a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

An investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion with the Trump campaign uncovered “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.” Trump’s Attorney General William Barr determined there was no collision.

Trump much prefers Patel’s version of the world.

An Amazon review comment on the book, that also included the former president’s photo, gushed: “This is the most spectacular children’s book ever! This will be YUGE!”!

Google last month temporarily suspended the book publisher from its ad platform for “circumventing system policy,” according to a Google statement to Brave Books obtained by Fox Business.

It was unclear exactly what the publisher did to break the rules. But the Google statement noted that the company “doesn’t want users to feel misled by the content promoted in Shopping ads,” and referred to “promotions that represent you or your products in a way that is not accurate, realistic, or truthful.”

Patel later blasted the move as a “witchhunt.”

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

Ottawa museum's lack of interest in acquiring RCAF aircraft prompts offer from U.S.

David Pugliese, Ottawa Citizen - 


The lack of interest from Ottawa’s national aviation museum in acquiring the Royal Canadian Air Force’s last available Buffalo aircraft has prompted a U.S. organization to make a bid for the plane.


© Provided by Ottawa CitizenDeHavilland CC-115 Buffalo

Officials with the Pima Air and Space Museum in Arizona, one of the largest aviation museums in the world, say they can provide an excellent home for the iconic RCAF search-and-rescue plane.

The RCAF removed the last of its six Buffalo planes from service in January. Four have already been donated to museums associated with the Canadian military while a fifth will be used for military firefighter training. That leaves one Buffalo still available.

The RCAF wanted to see that aircraft sent to the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa. However, it appears the donation might not proceed as the organization responsible for three national museums related to science and technology has a moratorium on collecting, say National Defence sources. It is unclear how long that moratorium, put in place while artifacts are relocated to a new storage facility, will last.

“No final decision has yet been made for the final remaining Buffalo,” confirmed National Defence spokesman Dan Le Bouthillier.

Scott Marchand, the executive director of the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, noted his organization has one of the world’s largest and most diverse aerospace collections. In addition, the climate in Arizona is very favourable to long-term preservations and display of such aircraft, he added.

“We have 136 acres here and over 300,000 square feet of indoor displays for our 430-plus aircraft collection,” explained Marchand, who is Canadian. “We have several former CAF/RCAF aircraft in our collection already and the Buffalo is certainly a notable type that has given incredible service over its lifespan. We’d be honoured to have the opportunity to preserve it here and further highlight the long NATO/NORAD partnership between the U.S.A. and Canada.”

He noted the museum has a runway right next to it at the local U.S. Air Force base so the plane can be flown to that location.

“We have huge annual visitorship from Canada out here too,” Marchand said. “It would be unique in the U.S.A., that’s for certain.”

Purchased between June 1967 and December 1968, the Buffalo aircraft fleet provided medium tactical transportation and search and rescue services for the RCAF.

The planes initially served in the RCAF as multi-purpose transportation aircraft and were flown on multiple United Nations missions overseas, according to the Canadian Forces. On Aug. 9, 1974, a Buffalo aircraft was shot down by Syrian anti-aircraft missiles while on United Nations duty supporting peacekeepers in the Golan Heights. All nine Canadian Forces members on board were killed, making it the largest single loss of lives in Canadian peacekeeping history, according to the RCAF.

Later, the Buffalos were exclusively flown in Canada as fixed-wing search-and-rescue aircraft.

Le Bouthillier said Buffalo aircraft have already been donated to the Air Force Heritage Park in Summerside, P.E.I.; the National Air Force Museum in Trenton; and the Comox Air Force Museum, Comox, B.C. He said another Buffalo was provided to the Air Force Heritage Museum and Air Park at 17 Wing in Winnipeg.

Another of the planes will be used as a military firefighter training aid at the Canadian Forces Fire and Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Academy in Borden, Ont., he said.

How a 15-year-old Ukrainian drone pilot helped destroy a Russian army column

Stewart Bell and Jeff Semple - 

KYIV, Ukraine — As the Russian army made its move on Kyiv in late February, the Ukrainian defences enlisted a drone pilot to pinpoint a column of military vehicles approaching the capital from the west.


© Stewart Bell/Global NewsAndrii Pokrasa with drone, June 2, 2022.

The civilian who took on the task sent his drone up in a field near his house and found the Russian convoy. Ukrainian artillery destroyed it and the drone operator was quietly saluted as a hero.

He's also 15.

Read more:

The first 100 days of war through the eyes of a Ukrainian village

In an interview with Global News, Andrii Pokrasa acknowledged he was the kid who helped stop the Russian invasion of Kyiv.

The incident was confirmed by his parents, the head of the Ukrainian drone owners federation and a commander in the armed forces unmanned reconnaissance section.

"He was the only one who was experienced with drones in that region," explained the commander, Yurii Kasjanov. "He's a real hero, a hero of Ukraine."

Pokrasa said the experience was “very, very scary” but he didn't want the Russian soldiers to overrun his town.

He said the civil defence forces turned to him because they needed the GPS coordinates of the Russian column so it could be targeted.

“They provided us information where approximately the Russian column could be. Our goal was to find the exact coordinates and provide the coordinates to the soldiers,” Pokrasa said.

“It was one of the biggest columns that was moving on the Zhytomyr road and we managed to find it because one of the trucks turned on its lights for a long time."

His father passed the details over to a territorial defence unit using a social media app and the Russian invasion force was stopped near Berezivka, about 40 kilometres west of Kyiv.

“I gave them the coordinates and photos, and after that they targeted the location," the teenager said. "And I needed to coordinate more specifically where they should shell with artillery.”

Global News is not publishing the name of Pokrasa's town for security reasons.

Consumer drones have become a crucial tool in the Ukraine war. Hundreds of civilian drone operators have been documenting everything from Russian troop movements to evidence of war crimes.

Their images are posted online or shared with Ukrainian authorities, leaving the Russian invasion force nowhere to hide, all because of commercial technology that even kids can operate.

“It’s a game-changer for the war,” said Taras Troiak, a former drone retailer who heads the Federation of Drone Owners of Ukraine.


Following the Feb. 24 invasion ordered by President Vladimir Putin, Troiak started a Facebook group to encourage civilian drone operators to locate Russian forces near Kyiv and inform the military.

About 1,000 civilian operators have since joined the effort, and drones have been arriving from supporters in Europe and North America, he said.

“If we didn’t have such operators and drones who can help the Ukrainian army, I think Kyiv already could be occupied by Russian forces,” said Troiak.

Youths were also involved, he added, recounting how Pokrasa detected a Russian column that had crossed the border from Belarus and was on the highway between Zhytomyr and Kyiv.

“This kid sent GPS coordinates and Russians, after this, became dead,” he said during an interview at his office in Kyiv.

Despite his role repelling the invasion, Pokrasa seemed like an otherwise typical teen. There was a skateboard and trampoline in his yard, and a bike on the front porch.

Afraid of heights, he saw a YouTube video of drone footage filmed over Kyiv and became hooked on looking at the world from above, he said.

Using money he and his father made buying and selling crypto-currency, he bought his first mini-drone last summer and began flying it every day, although once school began he wasn’t able to spend as much time with it.

When the Russians came, he initially stayed home with his family. But a few days into the war he was asked to help because he was the only person in the region with a working drone.

Read more:

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Wolverines’ of Ukraine step out of shadows

Because his neighbors frowned on his drone, fearing it would make them targets, he took it to a nearby field with his father after dark. He eventually spotted the moving headlights that gave away the Russian convoy.

“It was two kilometres from us,” he said.

He had mixed feelings about the Russian soldiers who were killed as a result.

“First of all I was so happy, but also it was people there. They were occupiers but anyway they were people,” he said.

Using a bigger drone with a longer range supplied by the Ukrainian forces, Pokrasa continued to help spot Russian military movements.

"I tried to protect them as much as possible," Kasjanov said of Pokrasa and his father. "I asked Andrii 'Are you not afraid?' And he replied 'Yes I am scared but I can't do it any other way.'"

The commander said many youths too young to join the armed forces had been contributing, not only with drones but also by relaying information collected by watching Russian troops from their homes and vehicles.

"They feel themselves free people in a free land so that's why they wanted to be part of it." he said.

Pokrasa's mother Iryna said she was worried when her husband began taking their son out at night to look for Russian soldiers “but they also didn’t tell me a lot of things.”

She eventually took him to Poland to finish the grade nine school year, although she said he wanted to stay in Ukraine and keep helping.

She said she was proud of her son, whom she felt was destined for a career as an entrepreneur but needed to spend more time on his studies.

Pokrasa said some of his friends were impressed and others weren’t when they heard about how he had taken on one of the world’s strongest armies with his drone.

“They’re not really the strongest army,” he said.

Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca

USA
Can journalists and grieving communities coexist in tragedy?



NEW YORK (AP) — As a knot of journalists stood across from a mortuary witnessing a funeral for a child killed in the Uvalde school massacre, some people passing by didn't disguise their anger.


© Provided by The Canadian PressCan journalists and grieving communities coexist in tragedy?

“Y'all are the scum of the Earth,” said one woman, surveying the cameras.

When tragedy comes to town in the 21st century, the media follows, focusing the world's eyes on a community during its most difficult hours. Columbine, Sandy Hook, now Uvalde, Texas — the list of places synonymous with horrible mass killings keeps growing.

Journalists are called upon to explain what happened, and sometimes to ask uncomfortable questions in places where many people want to be left alone to grieve. Is it possible to do it better, to co-exist within a moment no one wants to be part of?

Tempers have flared in Uvalde. One female journalist was told, “I hope your entire family dies in a massacre.” Some are threatened with arrest for trespassing while on public property. A group called “Guardians of the Children” blocked camera views, often with the encouragement of police.

Yet there are also people like Ben Gonzalez, who approached reporters near the mortuary after hearing the woman lash out to say that she doesn't speak for everyone. “Thank you for documenting this tragedy,” he said. “We'll look back at the photos you take and appreciate it.”

The shady courthouse square in Uvalde has been dotted by canopies erected by TV news crews. Journalists have been stationed at Robb Elementary School, where the shooting took place, near a makeshift memorial piled with flowers, stuffed animals and messages. At the local Starbucks, where many journalists go to work, tables are set aside for Uvalde residents.

These are the typical signs of the invasion of journalists that accompany such events.

“I respect the wishes of people if they want me to leave,” said Guillermo Contreras, a senior writer at the San Antonio Express-News. “By the second day (after the shooting), the people were overwhelmed. The town has been overrun by reporters. There was pretty much nowhere you could go without running into the media.”

Like most colleagues, Contreras tries to be sensitive to what Uvalde's people are enduring. He has a 10-year-old daughter at home.

“When you are at the epicenter of a situation like that, you really do need protection,” said Michele Gay, who lost her daughter Josephine in the Newtown school shooting a decade ago. “You are really not in a state of mind to be offering your feelings in front of the camera.”

Gay said she had no idea of the extent of attention given to the story until the state trooper assigned to protect her family drove them around town to see the memorials.

“At first, I was angry,” said Gay, co-founder and executive director of Safe and Sound Schools, an advocacy group. “It felt invasive. It felt hurtful ... At the same time, there were members of the media who were so thoughtful, caring and compassionate.”

The sensitivity that most journalists try to bring to such assignments can be undermined by those who stick cameras in the faces of people crying, or ask a grieving parent how it feels. One parent who lost a child in Newtown saw someone outside her home with a camera peering into a window, said Monsignor Robert Weiss of the town's St. Rose of Lima Parish.

In general, journalists do a poor job explaining what they do and a poor job putting themselves in the shoes of the people they are interviewing, many on the worst day of their lives, said Joy Mayer, a former journalism professor.


“It's really valid for people in that community to feel overwhelmed and resentful,” said Mayer, the director of Trusting News, which helps members of the media improve their relationship with the public.

Kelly McBride, an expert on journalism ethics at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, advises news organizations to better prepare when assigned to these stories. Most interviews on the street indicate this work hasn't been done; people in shock and trauma, she said, shouldn't have to make an on-the-spot decision about dealing with a reporter.

She praised CNN for sensitively handling the interview of a young survivor of the shooting who smeared herself in the blood of a dead classmate to appear dead. CNN reported on what the girl said, but didn't show her or play her voice.

Ana Rodriguez, who lost her daughter Maite in the shooting, sat at her dining room table to tell The Associated Press about how the girl aspired to become a marine biologist. She didn’t want her face to appear on camera to divert attention from her daughter.

Sometimes there's little time to prepare. Tony Dokoupil of CBS News was told to get on a plane to Texas. Fast. Dokoupil said he tried to get away from the pack and knock on doors; in one case, he came upon someone close to a child who died who helped arrange an interview with her parents.

He found residents polite and respectful even when they didn't want to talk. He was thanked by some people for being there and telling the stories.

Gay recommends journalists focus their attention on people who have lost their lives, not perpetrators. There has been a marked effort on the part of news organizations to minimize mentions of shooters, although Gay was concerned that she had seen more after Uvalde.

In Uvalde, questions raised about the police response to the shooting have lengthened the time the shooting has lingered in the news and increased hostility toward journalists. CNN used a tag team to stake out Pete Arredondo, the schools police chief who directed operations, and get an ambush interview.

“You have people who are supportive of law enforcement,” Contreras said. “It’s a small town; people know each other. All of a sudden people are pointing fingers at the officers you know, so there’s a division.”

For people in communities like Newtown and Uvalde in the immediate aftermath of these stories, the sheer repetitiveness is often wearing.

“If there’s been one interview out here there’s been 150,” said one downtown shopkeeper who, like many in Uvalde, didn’t want his name in a news story. “I mean, how many times can you interview people who don’t know nothing?”

There are some suggestions of what is known in the industry as a pool — where a handful of reporters ask questions of officials and report answers to a larger group. This is used most famously at the White House.

But McBride said this inevitably leads to less aggressive journalism. Most reporters are driven by the impulse to get things their competitors don't. It was tried in a few instances in Uvalde and proved unsatisfying, Contreras said.

Things grew quieter in Uvalde by this past weekend. Only a television satellite truck remained at the Robb school, and just a handful of journalists were at the courthouse square Saturday as a Hawaiian group presented a giant lei and sang songs.

There's no avoiding the shock an influx of journalists brings to a quiet community. Weiss recalls being swarmed by reporters after emerging from a meeting with parents. He didn't know what to say. But in general, the Catholic monsignor said he found the press respectful and has come to understand the importance of its role.

“We needed to get the story out there and we needed to keep this story out there,” Weiss said. “Because in 10 years, what has changed? If anything, it has gotten worse.”

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Associated Press journalists Acacia Coronado, Jae C. Hong, Adriana Gomez Licon, Jay Reeves and Eliot Spagat in Uvalde, Texas, contributed to this report.

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More on the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas: https://apnews.com/hub/uvalde-school-shooting

David Bauder, The Associated Press

Abortion rights advocates say they need more men's voices


NEW YORK (AP) — If Donovan Atterberry thought about abortion at all as a young man, it was perhaps with some vague discomfort, or a memory of the anti-abortion protesters outside the clinic that he would pass on his way to the park as a child.


© Provided by The Canadian PressAbortion rights advocates say they need more men's voices

It became real to him in 2013, when his girlfriend, now his wife, became pregnant with their first child together. She’d had a healthy pregnancy before, his stepdaughter, but this time genetic testing found a lethal chromosomal disorder in the developing fetus, one that would likely result in a stillbirth and also possibly put her life at risk during a delivery.

“As a man, I didn’t know how to console her, how to advise her,” Atterberry, now 32, recalls. “I said, ‘If I had to choose, I would choose you.’ ... It wasn’t a matter of do I believe in abortion or I don’t believe in abortion. At that point, I was thinking about her life.”

She chose to terminate the pregnancy and “it changed my whole perspective ... on bodily autonomy and things of that nature,” said Atterberry.

So much so, that he now works as a voting engagement organizer for New Voices for Reproductive Justice, which focuses on the health of Black women and girls, with abortion access being among the areas of concern.

“What I’m trying to convey is that it’s a human right for someone to have a choice,” he said.

That Atterberry is a man in support of abortion rights isn’t unusual; according to polls, a majority of American men say they support some level of access to abortion. And history is replete with men who have played active roles in supporting abortion, through organizations, as legislators and in the case of Dr. George Tiller, as an abortion provider. Tiller was assassinated in church by an anti-abortion extremist in Kansas in 2009.

Still, there is room for a lot more who are willing to speak out and be active in the political battles over abortion availability, Atterberry says.

Where men have always played an outsize role is in pushing for and enacting abortion restrictions — as advocates, state elected officials and most recently, as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Justice Samuel Alito authored a draft of a high court ruling that would overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision establishing a nationwide right to abortion. The draft, which was leaked to a news outlet last month, appears to have the support of the majority of the six men sitting on the nine-justice court.

Women have always taken the lead in the fight to preserve abortion rights, for obvious reasons: They are the ones who give birth and who, in so many instances, are tasked with caring for children once they are brought into the world.

No one is calling for that leadership to change, said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University who specializes in law and gender.

“Men should not be out there trying to run the movement or take away leadership positions,” he said. “But being a part of it, supporting, listening and being active are all things that men can and should be doing.”

That’s what Oren Jacobson is trying to do at Men4Choice, the organization he co-founded in 2015, where the goal is to get men who say they support abortion rights to speak out and do more, such as protesting, making it a voting priority, and especially talking to other men.

“Everything we’re doing is focused on getting what are really millions of men — who in theory are pro-choice but are completely passive when it comes to their voice and their energy and their time in the fight for abortion rights and abortion access — to get off the sidelines and step in the fight as allies,” he said.

It hasn’t been the easiest of tasks.

Abortion “is almost never a conversation inside of male circles unless it’s introduced by somebody who is impacted by the issue in most cases,” he said. “Not only that, but ... you’re talking about a heavily stigmatized issue in society. You’re talking about sex and sexuality, you’re talking about anatomy, and none of those things are things that guys feel particularly comfortable talking about.”

But it is something that affects them and the culture they live in, notes Barbara Risman, sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“Sexuality has become so integrated into our lives, whether or not we’re partnered,” she said. “That is directly related to women’s control of fertility — and women do not control fertility in a world where abortion is not legal. ... Certainly, heterosexual sexual freedom is dependent on the ability to end an unwanted pregnancy.”

Also, a society in which the state has a say in reproductive decisions could lead to one in which the state has control over other decisions that could affect men more directly, Cohen said.

“Abortion law, abortion precedent is not just about abortion, it’s also about controlling intimate details to your life," he said. "So whether it’s your sex life, your family life, other parts of your private life, medical care, decision-making, all of those are wrapped up into abortion law and abortion jurisprudence and abortion policy,” he said.

Since the Supreme Court draft was leaked, Jacobson said he's seen more men speak out about abortion access and show more interest in his group's work than he has in the past several years.

What remains to be seen, he said, “is whether or not it’s going to catalyze the type of allyship that’s needed now and frankly has been needed for a long time."

Deepti Hajela, The Associated Press

Transgender, nonbinary teens at higher risk of suicide compared with peers: study



MONTREAL — Transgender and nonbinary teens are at much greater risk than their cisgender peers of having suicidal thoughts or attempting suicide, warns a new study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.


© Provided by The Canadian PressTransgender, nonbinary teens at higher risk of suicide compared with peers: study

The study, led by researchers from the University of Ottawa and published on Monday, indicates more than half of transgender teens said they had seriously considered suicide in the 12 months preceding the survey.

In total, 14 per cent of adolescents reported having suicidal thoughts over the previous year, while 6.8 per cent said they'd attempted to take their own lives. Transgender youth were five times more likely to have thought about suicide and 7.6 times more likely to have attempted suicide compared with youth who are cisgender — people whose gender identity corresponds with their sex at birth.

"This is very concerning," said Dr. Ian Colman, the study's author, based at the school of epidemiology and public health at the University of Ottawa's faculty of medicine. "Even though the stigma is going down, even though we see social progress in this area, it seems that our teenagers continue to experience difficulties.”

The data studied by Colman and his colleagues came from the Canadian Survey of Child and Youth Health published by Statistics Canada in 2019. Their sample consisted of 6,800 adolescents aged 15 to 17, the vast majority of whom (99.4 per cent) identified as cisgender and 0.6 per cent as transgender.

The majority (78.6 per cent) of survey participants identified as heterosexual, 14.7 per cent said they were attracted to more than one gender, and 4.3 per cent were unsure of their attraction. The survey indicated 1.6 per cent of respondents were young women who said they were attracted to the same sex, while 0.8 per cent of respondents were boys who said they were attracted to boys.

"One in five teenagers is a sexual or gender minority," Colman said, adding that the survey results indicated that mental health concerns are not a small problem.

"When you think that more than half of young transgender people have recently considered ending their lives, it means that even if we are aware of the problem and even if we try to help them, it is not enough, and we need to do more to try to provide safe spaces for these youth, as they are going through what is a difficult time for everybody,” he said.

Adolescence can be a turbulent time, especially for young transgender people, and even those who can count on the support of people around them will not be entirely immune to the turmoil, Colman said. It is even more difficult, he said, for young people who do not have such support and must weather the storm alone.

Researchers say the association between contemplating suicide or attempting suicide and belonging to a sexual or gender minority is in part explained by the bullying or cyberbullying to which these young people are subjected.

The findings of the Ontario study are consistent with those of a Quebec survey, the results of which were released earlier this year and found young people who reported having an "other gender identity" were up to three times more likely than their peers to show worrying signs of mental health problems.

These young people, for example, were much more likely than others to perceive their mental health as “fair” or “poor”; to experience moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety or depression; or to have recently considered that it would be better for their life to end.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death in Canada among adolescents and young adults aged 15 to 24.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 6, 2022.

Jean-Benoit Legault, The Canadian Press