Former South African president rejects probe report implicating him in graft

Recently released 'State Capture' report finds Jacob Zuma guilty of plundering state resources during his 9-year tenure

Hassan Isilow |25.06.2022


JOHANNESBURG

Former South African President Jacob Zuma on Saturday rejected a recent report that found him guilty of plundering state resources during his tenure.

Addressing a media briefing in Johannesburg on behalf of the former president, Zuma Foundation spokesman Mzwanele Manyi said Zuma rejected the "State Capture" report and views it as unlawful.

The report, which was published by a government-established judicial commission of inquiry known as the State Capture Commission, was the fruit of "a poisoned tree. It was wrong from the start," Manyi said in the presence of Zuma's legal team.

He said Zuma had asked Judge Raymond Zondo, who headed the State Capture Commission investigating corruption during Zuma's nine years in office, to recuse himself but that he refused.

Manyi accused the judge of having a bias against Zuma.

He said former President Zuma instructed his legal team to report Zondo, the newly-appointed chief justice of South Africa, to the Judicial Services Commission for investigation.

Zuma's lawyer Dali Mpofu said the former president could not attend the media briefing because of his parole conditions which barred him from attending gatherings unless at his place of residence.

The 80-year-old former president was arrested in July last year after he refused to appear before the State Capture Commission and was jailed for 15 months.

He was, however, released two months later on medical parole.

Zuma is accused of enabling friends, especially three Indian-born businessmen known as the Gupta brothers, to influence officials in granting them lucrative state contracts and taking control of most state operations and finances.

He claims innocence and denies these claims.

Earlier this month, South African authorities confirmed that two members of the wealthy Indian Gupta family accused of defrauding the country have been arrested in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Rajesh and Atul Gupta were arrested while the third brother, Ajay Gupta, who is also on Interpol's wanted list, is still at large.

The brothers, who enjoyed close relations with Zuma, fled South Africa for Dubai with their families shortly after Zuma resigned in 2018.

The Ministry of Justice and Correctional Services said discussions between various law enforcement agencies in the UAE and South Africa are underway to have the fugitives returned to South Africa.

Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov compares EU and NATO to Hitler

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that the European Union (EU) and NATO were building a coalition to engage in a war with Moscow and compared them to "Hitler during World War II"

IANS | Baku Last Updated at June 25, 2022 

Sergei Lavrov. Photo: Bloomberg

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that the European Union (EU) and NATO were building a coalition to engage in a war with Moscow and compared them to "Hitler during World War II".

"When World War II broke out, Hitler united a significant number, if not most, of the European countries under his banner for a war against the Soviet Union," TASS News Agency quoted Lavrov as saying at a press conference following talks with Azerbaijani top diplomat Jeyhun Bayramov in Baku on Friday.

"Today, the EU and NATO are acting in a similar way, building a modern coalition of the same kind for a fight and pretty much a war against Russia," he added.

Regarding the EU candidate status for Ukraine, the Minister said that Russia does not see any risks to its interests.

"The EU is not a political bloc like the NATO. The development of its relations with any willing countries does not create threats or risks for us."

Lavrov further said that his country is "under no illusion that the EU will change its attitude to Russia, or abandon Russophobic policies".

"The EU keeps making it clear that it does not intend toimplement the existing economic, humanitarian and internal security agreements between Russia and EU nations. It doesn't want to carry out the tasks that were outlined based on the lofty goals of creating a common space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. All this has been left behind, becoming a thing of the past."

--IANS

ksk/

Old George Carlin routine resurfaces after US abortion ruling

DANNY JONES

The clip has been doing the rounds on social media following Friday's ruling

Amid the uproar following the US Supreme Court's abortion ruling earlier this week, a clip taken from one of George Carlin's old stand-up routines has reappeared online and is currently being shared by thousands on social media.

Roe v Wade, the 1973 case that led to women gaining the constitutional right to an abortion, was overturned after nearly 50 years on Friday, June 24, with many quick to decry the decision as "against human rights" and taking the US "back to the Middle Ages".

On social media, in particular, people have been recirculating George Carlin's abortion routine in response and arguing that much of his criticism towards the so-called 'pro-life' movement is just as poignant now as it has ever been.

Taken from his 1996 HBO special, George Carlin: Back in Town, the now-deceased comic begins by saying: "Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They’re all in favour of the unborn - they will do anything for the unborn, but once you’re born, you’re on your own" - gesturing with his middle finger.

"Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the foetus from conception to nine months", he continues, "After that, they don’t want to know about you! They don't wanna hear from you, no nothing; no neo-natal care, no daycare, no headstart; no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing".

He goes on to quip, "if you're pre-born, you're fine - if you're pre-school, you're fucked", essentially taking aim at right-wing politicians, traditionally conservative and typically Christian individuals who he believed cared more about protecting a child who isn't even born yet than about looking after those born into low-income families.

In a now-iconic phrase which seems timeless in light of this week's events, he sums things up by declaring "They’re not pro-life, you know what they are? They’re anti-woman".

Carlin died in 2008 aged 71, but more than 25 years on from this pro-choice vs pro-life routine, many people believe that very little has changed and much of what he said still applies.

Many notable figures have come out to condemn the decision which will now see individual states decide whether or not they want to limit or ban access to abortions altogether - at least five of which already.

US footballer Megan Rapinoe labelled the ruling as "cruel" and "sad" in an emotional press conference on Saturday, adding that "it will completely exacerbate so many of the existing inequalities that we have in our country."

Justices Are Not Kings
There is no court legitimacy without public trust in the court.

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK

SLATE

JUNE 24, 2022

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Brad Weaver/Unsplash and 101cats/Getty Images Plus.

A few short weeks ago, speaking at a Federalist Society event, Justice Clarence Thomas warned ominously that “you cannot have a free society” without stable institutions. He contended that “we should be careful destroying our institutions because they don’t give us what we want when we want.” In hindsight his prediction that public regard for institutions—his worry that he didn’t know how much longer we would have and keep those institutions—reads more like a ransom note than a lament.

What Thomas was telling us was that institutional respect is owed, blindly and without conditions. It chimed in the same key as then–Attorney General Bill Barr’s promise that unless Americans stopped disrespecting the police, the police might stop showing up to protect them. That isn’t how respect, or public trust, works. Those things are earned, over time. They can also be squandered, we are now learning, in the span of a few careless months.

Today, for the first time in constitutional history, the United States Supreme Court, by a 6–3 margin, took a fundamental constitutionally protected right away from half the population, a right around which generations of women and families have ordered their lives. Make no mistake, the same court that just 24 hours earlier had determined that the decision to carry a gun on the streets is such an essential aspect of personal liberty that states may not be permitted to regulate it has now declared that decisions about abortion, miscarriage, contraception, economic survival, child-rearing, and intimate family matters are worthy of zero solicitude. None. In their view of liberty, women were worthy of zero solicitude at the founding, and remain unworthy of it today. As Mark Joseph Stern notes, women will suffer. Some will be refused treatment for miscarriages, and some will be turned away from emergency rooms. Some will be hunted down, spied on, and prosecuted for seeking health care, medication, and autonomy. The majority glibly tells us that because the harms to these people are unknowable, they are not urgent—or at the very least, less urgent than the harms faced by people who would like to see more guns in public spaces.

But ordinary Americans do not think these harms are trivial. On Thursday, Gallup polling showed public approval for the Supreme Court to be at a historic low—25 percent. It’s a precipitous drop from the prior historic low the court received in September, which sat at about 38 percent. The six justices in the majority of Dobbs will comfort themselves that this doesn’t matter. They will tell themselves that they corrected a historical injustice and that they saved unborn babies. They will say that they have lifetime tenure in order to protect against the whims of the majorities. They will blame protesters and they will continue to blame the press. Even the much-vaunted centrism and pragmatism of Chief Justice John Roberts seems to have left the building. Notwithstanding the fact of his seemingly moderate concurrence—in joining with a majority that could not wait to do in three years what they could do in one—it is clear that he has lost his court, and that he is surely less worried about the public regard for the institution than we had believed.

The joint dissent, authored together by Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor, is elegiac in tone. It includes a shoutout to the three Republican appointees who crossed the partisan line to preserve Roe in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey—not because they liked abortion but because, as they write, they chose to privilege the legitimacy of the institution over their personal wants. Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor wrote of the triumvirate that came before them, and of their unwillingness to harm the standing of the institution they loved:

“[T]he Court,” Casey explained, “could not pretend” that overruling Roe had any “justification beyond a present doctrinal disposition to come out differently from the Court of 1973…. To reverse prior law “upon a ground no firmer than a change in [the Court’s] membership”— would invite the view that “this institution is little different from the two political branches of the Government.” No view, Casey thought, could do “more lasting injury to this Court and to the system of law which it is our abiding mission to serve. For overruling Roe, Casey concluded, the Court would pay a “terrible price.”

The dissent laments the loss of Souter, O’Connor, and Kennedy as “judges of wisdom.” The three write, “They knew that ‘the legitimacy of the Court [is] earned over time.’ ” They also would have recognized that it can be destroyed much more quickly. Quoting Breyer’s recent lament that “it is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much,” the three dissenters conclude: “For all of us, in our time on this Court, that has never been more true than today.”

Compare this to Justice Samuel Alito’s flippant dismissal of the pain soon to be heaped upon the court, the country, women, their children, and families, pain that is laid out in one meticulous amicus brief after the next:

We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision. We can only do our job, which is to interpret the law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and decide this case accordingly.

It is one thing to take away autonomy and dignity. It’s something else entirely to say that the hardship and jolt to the nation cannot be determined, and shouldn’t even matter.

The three dissenters take no joy in decrying the self-administered body blow the court has brought upon itself this term. There is no pleasure in seeing new fencing around the building, nor is there any delight in the protesters blocking D.C. streets or staking out justices’ residences. There is no mention of the fact that one of their colleagues is married to a partisan political operator who worked to support those who would have set aside the presidential election. There is simply the acceptance of that colleague’s abject refusal to take responsibility for it. This may well be one of the last published opinions of Stephen Breyer’s storied legal career, and it reads like a rebuke to his own aspirational hopes, including in a book published only this fall, for an institution he tried to protect until the end. Breyer always understood that public acceptance and regard aren’t demanded, and that for the court he is departing, it may not come back.

The dissenters understand where to place the blame for this loss of legitimacy. Even in the notoriously collegial Supreme Court, they place it squarely, and fairly, on a majority that has spent a year proving itself unwilling to moderate tone, language, conduct, and pace in exchange for the appearance of sobriety. The “stench,” as Sotomayor once warned, will not dissipate just because the majority can’t smell it.

The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Are Absolute Weasels
My Boyfriend Recently Introduced Me to His Family. Turns Out I Already, Uh, “Knew” His Brother.
One Story That Shows Amy Coney Barrett’s “Plan” for Abortion Isn’t One at All

There will not be a glorious peace that settles over the land now that this issue has been sent back to the states, no matter how much Justice Brett Kavanaugh wants you to believe it. There will be infighting among states, and vicious criminal prosecutions, and joyous theological efforts to secure future harms for gay partners and families struggling with IVF and women seeking contraception. The people who suffer the most will be the poorest, the youngest, the sickest—the people whose interests don’t even warrant acknowledgment by the majority opinion.

The dissenters sign off in “sorrow.” It is a sentiment that is surely directed at millions of women who will suffer appallingly as a result of this ruling. But it is also sorrow for an institution that was always rooted in an idea that there had to be a relationship between the public trust and judicial power. Justices are not kings. They can demand silent reverence, but it is not assured them. There have been plenty of us warning that this relationship was in jeopardy for many years, and the warnings were dismissed as efforts to undermine the court. Today’s decision confirms that, if and when the public is finally ready to give up on the court, there will be nobody to blame but the six justices who gave them nothing to believe in.

Read more of Slate’s coverage on abortion rights here.

It’s time to say it: the US supreme court has become an illegitimate institution


With its decision on Roe v Wade, the court has signaled its illegitimacy – and thrown the American project into question

‘Can a country be properly understood as a democracy 

if it subjugates half of its population?’ 

Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Jill Filipovic
THE GUARDIAN
Sat 25 Jun 2022 

As of 24 June 2022, the US supreme court should officially be understood as an illegitimate institution – a tool of minority rule over the majority, and as part of a far-right ideological and authoritarian takeover that must be snuffed out if we want American democracy to survive.

On Friday, in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, the supreme court overruled its nearly 50-year precedent of Roe v Wade, the 1973 case that legalized abortion nationwide. It is difficult to overstate just how devastating this is for pregnant people, for women as a class and for anyone with even a passing interest in individual freedom and equality.

‘Fewer rights than their grandmothers’: read three justices’ searing abortion dissent

But it’s also devastating for those of us who care quite a bit about American democratic traditions and the strength of our institutions. Because, with this ruling, the supreme court has just signaled its illegitimacy – and it throws much of the American project into question. Which means that Democrats and others who want to see America endure as a representative democracy need to act.

Of the nine justices sitting on the current court, five – all of them in the majority opinion that overturned Roe – were appointed by presidents who initially lost the popular vote; the three appointed by Donald Trump were confirmed by senators who represent a minority of Americans. A majority of this court, in other words, were not appointed by a process that is representative of the will of the American people.

Two were appointed via starkly undemocratic means, put in place by bad actors willing to change the rules to suit their needs. Neil Gorsuch only has his seat because Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, blocked the ability of Barack Obama to nominate Merrick Garland – or anyone – to a supreme court seat, claiming that, because it was an election year, voters should get to decide.

And then Donald Trump appointed Amy Coney Barrett in a radically rushed and incomplete, incoherent process – in an election year.

And now, this court, stacked with far-right judges appointed via ignoble means, has stripped from American women the right to control our own bodies. They have summarily placed women into a novel category of person with fewer rights not just than other people, but than fertilized eggs and corpses. After all, no one else is forced to donate their organs for the survival of another – not parents to their children, not the dead to the living. It is only fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses that are newly entitled to this right to use another’s body and organs against that other’s will; it is only women and other people who can get pregnant who are now subject to these unparalleled, radical demands.

This raises a fundamental question: can a country be properly understood as a democracy – an entity in which government derives its power from the people – if it subjugates half of its population, putting them into a category of sub-person with fewer rights, freedoms and liberties?

The global trend suggests that the answer to that is no. A clear pattern has emerged in the past few decades: as countries democratize, they tend to liberalize women’s rights, and they expand abortion and other reproductive rights. Luckily for the women of the world, this is where a great many nations are moving.

But the reverse is also true: as a smaller number of countries move toward authoritarian governance, they constrict the rights of women, LGBT people and many minority groups. We have seen this in every country that has scaled back abortion rights, reproductive rights, and women’s rights more broadly in the past several years: Russia, Hungary, Poland, Nicaragua and the United States.
The supreme court decision stems from … the idea that a patriarchal minority should have nearly unlimited authority over the majority

The same week that the supreme court issued its decision in Dobbs, the US House of Representatives has been holding hearings to inform the public about what actually happened during the attempted coup of 6 January 2021, and to ideally hold perpetrators, traitors and seditionists to account. We are only a year and a half past that disgraceful day, when an angry mob decided that they, an authoritarian, patriarchal, white supremacist minority, should rule – that any other outcome, no matter how free and fair the election, was illegitimate.

The supreme court decision stems from that same rotted root: the idea that a patriarchal minority should have nearly unlimited authority over the majority. The conservatives on the court rightly understand that individual rights and women’s freedoms are incompatible with a system of broad male control over women and children, and a broader male monopoly on the public, political and economic spheres.

But that authoritarian vision is also incompatible with democracy.

And so Democrats now have a choice. They can give speeches and send fundraising emails. Or they can act: declare this court illegitimate. Demand its expansion. Abolish the filibuster. Treat this like the emergency it is, and make America a representative democracy.

Jill Filipovic is the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind

ORIGINALISM 

The Constitution Was Literally Written By Slaveowners. Why Is America Obsessed With Upholding It?


Candace McDuffie

THE ROOT
Mon, June 27, 2022

Members of the Supreme Court pose for a group photo at the Supreme Court in Washington, April 23, 2021.

Last week, the Supreme Court eviscerated a woman’s right to abortion, undermined Miranda rights, expanded gun rights and allowed border patrol agents to operate with even further impunity. Today, it ruled that a former Washington state high school football coach can pray on the field immediately after games—regardless of the religious backgrounds of the students.

The mostly conservative justices are using the Constitution as a smoke screen for their rulings—which will continue to demolish even more human rights. The governing document was constructed during the Constitutional Convention that occurred in Philadelphia from May 5, 1787 to September 17, 1787.

The primary authors consisted of: John Adams, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. The last two men on that list owned slaves. How can this set of laws still guide a nation when it was concocted by white men who looked at Black people as property and not as human?

The fact that a Black man—Justice Clarence Thomas—is working to erode the rights of millions of people is more than ironic: it’s downright pathetic. In a concurring opinion Thomas wrote Friday, he claimed that the Supreme Court’s controversial June decisions aimed to weaken substantive due process which protects certain rights even if they’re not listed in the Constitution.

“As I have previously explained, ‘substantive due process’ is an oxymoron that ‘lack[s] any basis in the Constitution,’” he wrote. He also said that it’s “legal fiction” that is “particularly dangerous.” Even more ironically, how is it up to the states to decide a woman’s right to abortion yet not interfere with a person’s right to carry a concealed firearm?

In Justice Samuel Alito’s concurrence, he stated:

“Does the dissent think that laws like New York’s prevent or deter such atrocities? How does the dissent account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo? The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop the perpetrator.”

Does Alito realize that by that line of reasoning, abortion laws won’t stop abortions from happening?

Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices were put there by presidents from a party who haven’t won a popular vote more than once in three decades. Shouldn’t the Twelfth Amendment, which established the electoral college, be revisited?

The Fifteenth Amendment gave Black people the right to vote. However, last year nineteen states passed laws that restricted access to voting. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, but America’s mass incarceration problem proves this as untrue.

Why isn’t the Supreme Court clamoring to restore these rights or rectify systems that fail the people?

It’s clear that the right will continue to twist and contort anything they can to carry out their agenda—an agenda that has and will always harm this country’s most marginalized and vulnerable populations. And honestly, the Constitution will always be a hell of an excuse to oppress Black folks on behalf of white supremacy.

Americans are paying $54,000 on average for an electric vehicle. A year ago, they were paying closer to $44,000.


Stephen Jones
Mon, June 27, 2022 

The cost of raw materials needed to make EV batteries have jumped by 140% since March 2020, according to data from Alix Partners.picture alliance / Contributor

The average price paid by Americans for EVs jumped 22% in the year to May, data from JD Power shows.


For non-EVs, inflation over the same period was 14%, according to the data, cited by The WSJ.


Americans are now paying $54,000 on average for EVs and $44,400 for non-EVs, per JD Power.

Americans are paying $54,000 on average for an electric vehicle (EV), a surge of 22% in a year, figures show.

Meanwhile, Americans are paying $44,400 on average for fossil fuel-powered vehicles, representing a gain of 14% in the year to May, research by JD Power, cited by the The Wall Street Journal, found.

Automakers are hiking prices to offset the soaring cost of raw materials. Long-running supply chain challenges, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, has caused the cost of materials like nickel, cobalt, and lithium — all of which are essential ingredients for EV batteries — to surge.

In March 2020, it cost on average $3,381 to gather the raw materials needed for a single EV, but that cost is now $8,255, up 140%, according to Alix Partners.

The EV price spike is causing a headache for motorists who want to ditch fossil fuel-powered cars to avoid record gas prices. The average cost of regular gas was last put at $4.90 a gallon by the American Automobile Association, down from above $5 earlier in June but well up from $3.10 a year earlier.

Online searches for EVs have increased 73% since January, according to data from auto-shopping websites Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader, per The WSJ.

EVs represented 4.5% of US car sales in 2021, according to the International Energy Agency.

Norwich Sikh independence celebration is criticized by Indian residents


Claire Bessette, 

The Day, 

New London, Conn.
Sun, June 26, 2022 

Jun. 26—NORWICH — City leaders and state legislators are in the middle of a bitter rift between Sikhs and a group calling itself "Indian American Community of CT" concerning the city's support of an April 29 celebration of Sikh Independence Day.

Since that day, emails, texts, angry phone calls and letters have circulated by Indians demanding that Norwich Mayor Peter Nystrom and the City Council rescind their proclamation declaring April 29 as Sikh Declaration of Independence Day.

Similar demands have been made of state legislators to revoke a General Assembly citation started by state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, and signed by the Norwich delegation and state legislative leaders.

A petition on www.change.org asks the Connecticut General Assembly to rescind its citation in support of the Declaration of Sikh Independence Day. The petition had 747 signatures as of Friday afternoon.

Sikh community leaders, including the World Sikh Parliament, have fired back with their own emails, videos, links to articles describing atrocities against Sikhs allegedly supported by the Indian government. A petition started by Norwich Sikh community leader Swaranjit Singh Khalsa on www.change.org asks that U.S. lawmakers, including President Joe Biden, "must allow Sikh history to be celebrated and acknowledged in U.S." That petition had 737 signatures by Friday afternoon.

The Indian American Community of CT claims that the General Assembly and Norwich are illegally interfering with U.S. international affairs. The group accused the World Sikh Parliament, which ran the April 29 event program, of having ties to Sikh terrorist organizations. Norwich and state leaders have been "misguided by fringe organizations with nefarious intentions," said one email sent by Vikram Bhandari of Wilton and signed only by Indian American Community of CT.

The group called the independence celebration of the 1986 declaration of independence by Sikhs for an independent state of Khalistan, "uncalled for recognition of a separatist movement calling for the breakup of India."

The email contained links to published articles about the 1984 assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two Sikh bodyguards and the bombing of an Air India passenger jet on June 23, 1985, allegedly by Sikh extremists.

Notably, the email sent Monday, June 20 to Norwich Mayor Nystrom and City Council members was not sent to Alderman Singh Khalsa, whom is a Sikh. He said he was not surprised.

"They don't like Sikhs, and it's very painful for them to see me as elected official," Khalsa said in response to the slight.

Khalsa and other Sikh leaders accused the Indian consulate in New York of stirring up the controversy in Connecticut. Khalsa's email responses contain links to articles describing an Indian government "disinformation" campaign against Sikhs and Indian government military actions against Sikhs, including the June 1984 military assault on a Sikh temple, and the widely labeled "Sikh genocide" riots against Sikhs in November 1984 following Indira Gandhi's assassination.

Khalsa cited a book that claims the Air India bombing was planned by the Indian foreign intelligence agency to blame Sikhs.

Khalsa said Sikhs view the Punjab region as the Sikh homeland occupied by India. Khalsa said the 1986 Sikh Declaration of Independence in Amritsar Punjab was "made in peaceful manner among 500,000 people." He said the April 29 Norwich anniversary celebration likewise was peaceful.

"Sikh nation seeks peaceful resolution with India and just wanted their right of self-determination," Khalsa said in an email to The Day last week.

On Friday, Khalsa said Sikh leaders are working to set up a meeting with officials at the U.S. State Department to file a written complaint against Indian consulate of New York "and all parties involved in it."

Reactions to the demand by the Indian American Community of CT's request that the citation and city proclamation be revoked are mixed.

Norwich Mayor Peter Nystrom staunchly defended the city proclamation and support for the local Sikh community. Nystrom said more than 25 Sikh families live in Norwich and are peaceful, productive members of the community. Nystrom said he has read about violent attacks and political persecution against Sikhs and Sikhism in India.

"We have Sikh residents living in the city of Norwich who are kind, peace-loving families," Nystrom said. "This is an argument between people that can never be settled, not even by us and our resolutions."

On May 24, state Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, Deputy Senate Majority Leader Matthew L. Lesser, D-Middletown, and state Sen. Saud Anwar, D-South Windsor, issued a joint letter clarifying their position regarding the citation "perceived as challenging the sovereignty of India." The letter stated the citation "mistakenly" included their names as introducers and said they were grateful to the Consul General of India for the chance to clarify their position.

"As state senators, we each represent large and diverse Indian American communities," the letter stated. "We support continuing friendship between the people of India and the residents of Connecticut."

Duff issued a separate letter June 1 saying he did not authorize his signature and was not aware of the citation at the time.

Republican state Rep. Doug Dubitsky, R-Chaplin, whose district includes Norwich, wrote in a June 9 letter to state Rep. Harry Arora, R-Greenwich, an immigrant from India, that Dubitsky too did not give permission for his name to appear on the citation. But Dubitsky's letter explained that it is common practice and courtesy for a legislator to include the names of fellow legislators representing that municipality on celebratory citations.

"When I present a citation in the Norwich area, I typically ensure that the names of the other Norwich delegation members are on the citations, even if they had no involvement in the subject matter of the citation. It is a common courtesy among legislators," Dubitsky wrote.

Dubitsky compared the Sikh-India controversy to an effort several years ago in the state legislature to support the people of Northern Ireland in their fight against British rule. Saying he "truly did not know who was right and who was wrong in that conflict," Dubitsky declined to support the move.

"If I had been asked in advance about adding my name to the Sikh Independence citation, I likely would have taken that same position," Dubitsky wrote.

Like Nystrom, Osten strongly defended the Sikh citation and said her office sent requests to legislative staffs of all Norwich legislators and Senate leaders Duff, Lesser and Anwar for support of the 36th anniversary of the declaration of Sikh independence. Osten said she has been issuing citations for the past several years for the anniversary, and this was the first time the citation has drawn controversy.

"I'm not retracting mine," Osten said. "I've done this for the past five or six years. Apparently, this has become a political issue this year. I'm not disrespecting either side in this issue. They think that this is the state government taking sides. It is not. It's a citation. it's a legislative document, not government action."

c.bessette@theday.com

WNBA star Brittney Griner ordered to trial Friday in Russia


JIM HEINTZ
Mon, June 27, 2022 

MOSCOW (AP) — Shackled and looking wary, WNBA star Brittney Griner was ordered to stand trial Friday by a court near Moscow on cannabis possession charges, about 4 1/2 months after her arrest at an airport while returning to play for a Russian team.

The Phoenix Mercury center and two-time U.S. Olympic gold medalist also was ordered to remain in custody for the duration of her criminal trial. Griner could face 10 years in prison if convicted on charges of large-scale transportation of drugs. Fewer than 1% of defendants in Russian criminal cases are acquitted, and unlike in the U.S., acquittals can be overturned.

At Monday's closed-door preliminary hearing at the court in the Moscow suburb of Khimki, Griner's detention was extended for another six months. Photos obtained by The Associated Press showed the 31-year-old in handcuffs and looking straight ahead, unlike a previous court appearance where she kept her head down and covered with a hood.

Her detention and trial come at an extraordinarily low point in Moscow-Washington relations. She was arrested at Sheremetyevo International Airport less than a week before Russia sent troops into Ukraine, which aggravated already-high tensions with sweeping sanctions by the United States and Russia’s denunciation of U.S. weapon supplies to Ukraine.

Amid the tensions, Griner’s supporters had taken a low profile in hopes of a quiet resolution, until May, when the State Department reclassified her as wrongfully detained and shifted oversight of her case to its special presidential envoy for hostage affairs — effectively the U.S. government’s chief negotiator.

Griner’s wife, Cherelle, urged President Joe Biden in May to secure her release, calling her "a political pawn.”

Her supporters have encouraged a prisoner swap like the one in April that brought home Marine veteran Trevor Reed in exchange for a Russian pilot convicted of drug trafficking conspiracy.

Russian news media have repeatedly raised speculation that she could be swapped for Russian arms trader Viktor Bout, nicknamed “The Merchant of Death,” who is serving a 25-year sentence on conviction of conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens and providing aid to a terrorist organization.

Russia has agitated for Bout’s release for years. But the discrepancy between Griner’s case — she allegedly was found in possession of vape cartridges containing cannabis oil — and Bout’s global dealings in deadly weapons could make such a swap unpalatable to the U.S.

Others have suggested that she could be traded in tandem with Paul Whelan, a former Marine and security director serving a 16-year sentence on an espionage conviction that the United States has repeatedly described as a set-up.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, asked Sunday on CNN whether a joint swap of Griner and Whelan for Bout was being considered, sidestepped the question.

“As a general proposition ... I have got no higher priority than making sure that Americans who are being illegally detained in one way or another around the world come home,” he said. But “I can’t comment in any detail on what we’re doing, except to say this is an absolute priority.”

Cape Coral women revamp 'community fridge' to help combat food insecurity


Luis Zambrano, Fort Myers News-Press
Mon, June 27, 2022 

Forty years ago, a family with their daughter came to the city of Cape Coral after using all their money to buy a plumbing supply store.

They were a family of first-generation Cuban Americans from New Jersey, surviving on inexpensive groceries like rice and beans in the first few years of arriving here.

"Not being able to have the luxury of having money, and so sometimes we were hungry," Dionne Lopez, 52, said.

Lopez, who runs Lee County Plumbing & Supply now, started a community fridge in November 2020, before Thanksgiving, to help Cape Coral residents who were suffering because of the pandemic.


"Nobody should have an empty stomach, so when that pandemic started, and people lost their jobs, and they couldn't go out and buy food and so forth, we started the refrigerator," Lopez said.

Dionne Lopez who runs Lee County Plumbing & Supply, started a community fridge in November of 2020, before Thanksgiving, to help Cape Coral residents who were suffering because of the pandemic.

The community fridge, located at 532 Southeast 47th Terrace, provides free food and is open 24/7 to any Cape Coral residents who are in need.

People are free to take what they need, and volunteers can donate and place food and canned goods inside or on the shelves. No raw meat or expired food is accepted.

While the fridge was a welcome addition to the city, its usage declined since 2020 as Lopez couldn't manage both the fridge and her business until she got help from her now collaborator, Gabrielle Ferraro, 28.

From the elderly to people with families and kids, even some pregnant women, there was a need for the fridge in Cape Coral, Ferraro said.

Ferraro owns Double Dee's Munchies, a food truck, and she met Lopez in November 2020.

"She has a big propane tank and I stopped and started talking to her, and she had the fridge out front, and she told me about it and I was like obsessed with it. This is so great," Ferraro said.

She kept tabs on the community fridge, and when she noticed a dip in activity Ferraro pitched in to run the advertising and help manage the fridge two weeks ago.

"I was trying to figure out a way to give back, so I reached out to her and just said, 'Hey, I think I can help. Like, I have the connections of like being able to get this, like, blown up,'" Ferraro said.

Using her connections, she started a Facebook page and TikTok last Monday, and they have both seen a surge in donations and people coming and going since last week.

"On Facebook, the first post I made has over 400 shares," Ferraro said.

Katie Seaver, 31, of Cape Coral, helps restore a refrigerator being used as a food supply for local residents. Dionne Lopez who runs Lee County Plumbing & Supply, started a community fridge in November of 2020, before Thanksgiving, to help Cape Coral residents who were suffering because of the pandemic.

Cape Coral has a population of 204,510 and a poverty rate of almost 10%, according to the U.S. Census.

Julie Ferguson, executive director of Cape Coral Caring Center, a nonprofit agency providing food and utility assistance to Cape Coral residents, said hardships are felt in Cape Coral for working families.

"Cape Coral kind of has the haves and the have-nots. We have very wealthy people, and then we have kind of the middle income and then we do have kind of the working families that find it very difficult," Ferguson said.

"When you are supposed to spend no more than 30% of your income on rent or mortgage, for our working family that is not an easy thing, and in this community with rents being a minimum of about $2,200 a month," She added.

Lopez said she sees many long-time residents suffering the most in her area.

"There is a big variety of people that we see," Lopez said. "We see a few of the homeless guys that come every day. People that are trying to get back on their feet."

She hopes to continue doing what she can for her community, and that maybe someone from North Cape Coral can make something similar to what she's doing.

"I can't feed everybody, but the communities stepped in," Lopez said. "I'm hoping that maybe somebody north from here is seeing this and say, 'Hey, I'm going to try it.'"

Luis Zambrano is a Watchdog/Cape Coral reporter for The News-Press and the Naples Daily News. You can reach Luis at Lzambrano@gannett.com or 239-266-5604. Follow him on Twitter @Lz2official.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Cape Coral businesswomen fight food insecurity with community fridge