5 dead..16 hospitalized. Parade shooting in highland park parade

Ambush of Texas cops caught on tape

About 1.35 min into video. The guy had been shooting up the neighborhood. Why did coos just walk into it..no shields or swat?

Spurred by the Supreme Court, a Nation Divides Along a Red-Blue Axis

Jake Grumbach, a University of Washington political scientist who began studying the fragmentation of the nation more than a decade ago, said America was living through a “hyper-drive of state-based dissolution,” but he cautioned against looking regionally, instead locating the fault line between cities and their suburbs on one side and rural areas on the other. A voter in Milwaukee and one in rural Wisconsin, he said, are as different ideologically as one in Oklahoma and one in New York City.

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For some people, the divides have grown so deep and so personal that they have felt compelled to pick up and move from one America to the other.

Many conservatives have taken to social media to express thanks over leaving high-tax, highly regulated blue states for red states with smaller government and, now, laws prohibiting abortion.

Others have transited the American rift in the opposite direction.

“I did everything I could to put my mouth where my money was, to bridge the divide with my own actions,” said Howard Garrett, a Black, gay 29-year-old from Franklin, Tenn., who ran for alderman in recent years, organized the town’s first Juneteenth celebration and worked on L.G.B.T.Q. outreach to local schools, only to be greeted with harassment and death threats.

Mr. Garrett moved to Washington, D.C., last year. “People were just sick in their heart,” he said, “and that was something you can’t change.”

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As the political divide between the states becomes more pronounced, what political scientists call “sorting” may accelerate. The conservative Illinois billionaire Kenneth Griffin announced last week that he had moved to Miami from Chicago, and would take Citadel, his hedge fund, with him. He told his employees that Florida offered a better corporate environment.


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Joanna Turner Bisgrove, 46, a family physician at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, had worked her whole professional life in Oregon, Wis., a small town south of Madison, when her hospital was purchased by a Catholic health care chain, that began restricting abortions and transgender care. After the Wisconsin Legislature took up the issue of transgender girls in sports, she said, friends of her gender-fluid child became magnets for bullying so bad that it made the local news.

Nearly a year ago, the Bisgroves finally moved across the red-blue border, to Evanston, Ill., where, Dr. Bisgrove said, her children would be accepted and her medical practice could thrive.

“In the end,” she said, “my morals would not square with what I could do.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/02/us/politics/us-divided-political-party.html

police called to Houston Police Chief Troy Finner's home

2 dead, 3 officers injured in Haltom City (Texas) shooting

Two people were shot and killed and four others injured, including three police officers, Saturday night in Haltom City, Texas, police said.

Sgt. Rick Alexander of Haltom City police said during a briefing that the three officers did not suffer any life-threatening injuries, as one officer was hit in the right arm, finger and leg, a second male officer hit in both legs and a third officer hit in upper thigh.

An elderly female had called 911 and police arrived at the residence where officers returned fire during the incident, Alexander said. The elderly female sustained non-life threatening injuries. A woman was found dead in the home and a man was found dead outside, Alexander said.

The suspected gunman was described as a white male with dark hair who was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and had a military style rifle handgun near him, police said. It is not yet known the relationship between the victims and the shooter.

"The main concern is getting the scene secure, trying to get to our officers, be able to get them out of harms way while also trying to keep containment on the suspect," Alexander said, WFAA reported.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/dead-officers-injured-haltom-city-shooting/story

The 53 migrants who died in Texas included this college-educated Honduran couple

MEXICO CITY — Alejandro Miguel Andino Caballero had almost completed his university studies in marketing. His fiancee, Margie Támara Paz Grajeda, had earned a degree in economics.

Both viewed education as a means to launch careers and surmount humble origins in Honduras, where endemic poverty, crime and corruption have long choked off avenues of social advancement.

But few doors opened for the ambitious young couple. The pandemic and two major hurricanes in recent years only dampened economic prospects in one of the hemisphere’s poorest nations.

So like many of their compatriots, Caballero, 23, and Paz Grajeda, 24, set out for the United States. Joining them was Caballero’s 18-year-old brother, who had also lost hope for his future in Honduras.

“They didn’t leave because they wanted to abandon their lives in Honduras, or because they didn’t like their country, or because they wanted to forsake their families,” the siblings’ mother, Karen Caballero, said Friday by telephone from her home in Las Vegas, Honduras. “They left because they had no opportunity here to advance.”

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As authorities continue to identify the victims and notify next of kin, officials have slowly been releasing the names of those who died in the big rig — dubbed the “trailer of death” in the Latin American press. Their stories have resonated deeply in a region where emigration, despite its hazards, has long been the surest path to upward mobility in many communities.

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“They had their dreams, their goals,” said Karen Caballero, still in shock from the loss of two sons and a woman she viewed as her likely future daughter-in-law.


https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-07-02/the-53-migrants-who-died-in-texas-included-this-college-educated-honduran-couple

The Women Who Leave Anti-Abortion Picket Lines to Get Abortions: "the ME exception"

A few days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, a woman who described herself as an anti-abortion activist showed up in the waiting room of Dr. Marissa Lapedis, a family-medicine doctor who performs the procedure in Atlanta.

But she wasn’t there to protest—she had an appointment.

“She talked about being in marches, and said she had spent a lot of time volunteering in crisis pregnancy centers—you know, showing patients the ultrasound image and explaining what happens,” Lapedis, a fellow with the group Physicians for Reproductive Health, told The Daily Beast. “She said she had been anti-abortion her whole life, and that her whole family was like her—and yet she was so appreciative of the care she received from us. She literally was like, ‘I’m so grateful that I’m able to make this choice for myself.’”

Lapedis’ experience is remarkable in part because she resides in a state with a looming ban on the procedure after six weeks—though the law has so far been held up in court.

“You sometimes have anti people who are like, ‘Promise me no one’s going to find out, my boss cannot know,’ [because] they work in the Republican legislature or something. Which has happened—but this patient was so appreciative.”

Abortion providers across the country are reeling from the fall of Roe, and some face the prospect of legal reprisal from law-enforcement in their own state or even other states where patients need help. Almost inevitably, they are reflecting on the many patients they’ve seen who came in for a service they claimed to fervently oppose—and in some cases actively protested against.

“All of us who do abortions see patients quite regularly who tell us, ‘I’m not pro-choice, but I just can’t continue this pregnancy,’” said Dr. Sarah Prager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington. “We’ve even seen people coming into the clinic off the protester lines to get their abortion, then return to protesting outside the clinic.” And to be clear, she added, “these are not people who turn anti-choice after having an abortion, but who simply access this essential service when they need it in spite of their personal beliefs about abortion in general.”

According to Prager, the phenomenon is so common that abortion providers have a name for it: the Me Exception.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-women-who-leave-anti-abortion-picket-lines-to-get-abortions

“We in the movement often say people believe abortion should be legal in cases of rape, incest and ‘me,’ meaning whatever reason is relevant for that person,” she said. And yet, she noted, of the many surveys describing how Americans view abortion, virtually none reflect that reality.

Woman who killed pimp at age 16 pardoned by California governor

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday pardoned a former inmate who received a life sentence when she was a teenager for killing her former pimp.

It's the final step in an official redemption that has spanned more than a decade and three governors of both political parties.

Hers was among nearly three dozen such pardons and clemencies Friday that also affected older and younger offenders. They included 82-year-old Henry Pachnowski, who was born to Polish parents who were later imprisoned in Nazi labor camps in World War II.

Sara Kruzan was 16 when she killed George Gilbert Howard in a Riverside motel room. She was 17 when she was sentenced to die in prison for the 1994 murder of the man she said had sexually abused her and trafficked her for sex starting when she was 13 years old.

She served 18 years in prison until Newsom's predecessor, then-Gov. Jerry Brown, allowed her release in 2013.

Brown's predecessor, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, had commuted her sentence to life with the possibility of parole just before he left office in early 2011.

By then Kruzan had become something of a cause célèbre for state lawmakers and reform groups seeking to soften harsh life sentences for those who committed their crimes as juveniles.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Woman-who-killed-pimp-pardoned-by-California-17280465.php

a third officer died in that Kentucky shooting

Nearly 850,000 people signed a petition demanding that Justice Clarence Thomas be booted from SCOTUS

Nearly 850,000 people signed a petition demanding that Justice Clarence Thomas should be booted from the Supreme Court following Roe v. Wade ruling

Thousands of people have signed a petition to impeach Justice Clarence Thomas.
About 841,016 people have signed the Move On petition as of Saturday.
The calls to remove Thomas were heightened after SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade.'

Hundreds of thousands of people have signed a petition demanding the removal of Justice Clarence Thomas from the Supreme Court following the reversal of Roe v. Wade, The Hill reported.

Last week, the highest court's conservative justices repealed the landmark ruling that legalized abortion across the United States, prompting protests nationwide. Now the petition created by Move On, an advocacy group, has nearly 850,000 signatures calling for Thomas to be impeached.

"The right-wing rigged Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week, effectively taking away the right to privacy and bodily autonomy that's been considered legal precedent for the past 50 years," the petition said.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/nearly-850-000-people-signed-a-petition-demanding-that-justice-clarence-thomas-should-be-booted-from-the-supreme-court-following-roe-v-wade-ruling/ar-AAZ7cqW