Mayah Zamora, a 10-year-old who was critically injured in the deadly school shooting in Uvalde in May, was discharged from the hospital on Friday, 66 days after she was first admitted.

Mayah was taken to University Hospital in San Antonio in critical condition on May 24, when a shooter opened fire inside Robb Elementary School, killing 19 children and 2 adults.

Since then, Mayah has undergone a series of surgeries and treatment. Her family said in a GoFundMe on June 10 that she was facing a "long road to recovery," including future hospital visits, as well as mental health and trauma treatment.

When President Joe Biden entered the Oval Office last year, he expressed a commitment to working across the aisle with Republicans to craft legislation — something he practiced in his 36-year career in the Senate.

From last year's $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package to a recent $52 billion chips-funding bill, the administration has notched some major successes in attracting support from Democrats and Republicans and breaking part of the filibuster logjam that has become an all-too-common form of blocking legislation in recent years.

However, the wave of consensus doesn't sit too well with Rep. Jim Jordan, the conservative Ohio Republican and longtime ally of former President Donald Trump who could play a major role in Congress next year if Republicans win back control of the House.

Jordan recently told Politico that Senate Republicans who join their Democratic counterparts in supporting legislation backed by Biden are "wrong."

"I wish they wouldn't," the lawmaker said of his GOP counterparts in the upper chamber.

A University of Vermont student was shot and killed and another woman was injured by a man who broke in with an AR-15 rifle and then turned the gun on himself, authorities said.

Mikal Dixon, 27, allegedly shot and killed Kayla Noonan, 22, and another 22-year-old woman before turning the short-barrel rifle on himself, according to the Burlington Police Department. The other woman survived the shooting but remains hospitalized.

Emergency dispatchers received several calls about reports of gunfire on North Winooski Avenue — about a mile northwest of campus — on July 25 at around 2:20 a.m., according to a Burlington Police Department press release. Upon arrival, officers made contact with and spoke to one of the two shooting victims, who was on the phone with emergency dispatchers but too severely injured to come to the door.

Police ultimately broke a window in order to gain access to the dwelling. Once inside the apartment, officers found both Noonan and Dixon dead from apparent gunshot wounds. An AR-15 rifle was recovered from the scene.

The other shooting victim had been shot twice and was “very close to death,” by the time officers gained entry to the apartment, police said. The woman, identified only as “C.R.,” was rushed to hospital in critical condition. Her condition has since stabilized, according to officials.

On June 8, the U.S. District Court for Idaho ordered the state to — yet again — pay over $320,000 in attorneys’ fee to plaintiffs after it unsuccessfully defended an Idaho law prohibiting individuals from changing the gender markers on their birth certificates.

I was a member of the legal team that successfully challenged that anti-transgender birth certificate law. I am also a native, tax-paying Idahoan.

I am incredibly proud of the result my team achieved for our clients and all those affected by the law. I am also proud of the fees we were awarded, which will help my colleagues at Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund continue fighting for the rights of LGBTQ individuals. But I am also disheartened to know my family and my neighbors will be the ones to — yet again — pick up the tab for the state’s poor legal decisions.

This is not the first time the state has been ordered to pay a plaintiff’s attorneys’ fees after defending an unconstitutional law.

In 2021, Idaho paid $150,000 in legal fees after the Idaho Supreme Court deemed the state’s ballot initiative unconstitutional.

In 2015, Idaho paid nearly $1 million in attorneys’ fees and interests after defending and losing cases over same-sex marriage, abortion and free speech.

These fees come out of Idaho’s “Constitutional Defense Fund,” which is funded by taxpayer money and which has reportedly paid over $3 million in attorneys’ fees to opponents who successfully challenged Idaho’s unconstitutional laws since it was established in 1995.

President Biden
@POTUS
United States government official

I'd planned to stop by the Capitol and visit families fighting to pass burn pits legislation. COVID got in the way, so I FaceTimed them and sent some pizza.

It’s our sacred obligation to care for our veterans. I won’t stop fighting alongside them to get this bill passed.

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1553760943166951427

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio has become the most prominent Florida opponent of a proposed federal law that would safeguard the right to same-sex marriage. LGBTQ+ married couples, community leaders and political allies say the law is needed in case the U.S. Supreme Court reverses its ruling that the ability of gay and lesbian couples to marry is protected by the Constitution.

The day after all four South Florida Republicans in the U.S. House voted in favor of the Respect for Marriage legislation, which passed the House 267-157, the Republican U.S. senator told CNN that dealing with the issue would be “a stupid waste of time.”

Days later, he doubled down on that view. “I’m gonna focus on the real problems. I’m not gonna focus on the agenda that [is] dictated by a bunch of affluent, elite liberals, and a bunch of Marxist misfits who sadly today control the agenda of the modern Democratic Party,” Rubio said in a video posted to social media.”

Many LGBTQ Floridians, including Republicans, feel differently.

“Marriage equality is something which has very much been accepted in this country, and is very much accepted within the Republican Party,” said Charles LoPiccolo, a longtime Broward Republican precinct committeeman and member of the LGBT Log Cabin Republicans, speaking on behalf of himself, not the organizations.

Congress should pass the proposed Respect for Marriage Act and Rubio should “of course” vote for it, he said. Enacting the measure “would end any doubt that this is established law throughout the country.”

Across Texas, Democratic-held cities are galvanizing to mitigate the effects of the Republican-run state’s near-total abortion ban after the US supreme court voted in June to overturn Roe v Wade, the landmark case that gave Americans a constitutional right to terminate their pregnancies.

Texas’s capital, Austin, voted last week to “decriminalize” abortion in the city by passing the Guarding the Right to Abortion Care for Everyone (Grace) Act. Although abortion is still illegal in the state, the passing of the Grace Act will redirect the city’s budget to focus on going after more important crimes such as sexual assault, theft and burglary.

Local politicians in Waco, a city halfway between Austin and Dallas, followed suit and put forward their own version of the Grace Act for consideration.

Other cities such as San Antonio are also gearing up to protect those who receive and provide abortions. On Wednesday, the mayor, Ron Nirenberg, and the city council gathered on the steps of city hall to announce the consideration of a similar resolution in support of reproductive rights.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas law allowing deadly force against an attacker doesn't protect people from prosecution if a bystander is injured, the state's highest court declared Friday.

The Kansas Supreme Court ruled in the case of a Wichita police officer whose shots at a charging dog wounded a 9-year-old girl. The justices ordered a trial in Sedgwick County District Court for former Officer Dexter Betts on a felony reckless aggravated battery charge.

The December 2017 shooting happened after Betts and other officers responded to a call about domestic violence and a suicide threat at a Wichita home. Once inside, the dog charged at Betts, and he fired twice. His shots missed and hit the floor, and bullet fragments hit the girl above an eye and on a toe, according to the court's decision.

Betts argued that he acted in self defense. A judge dismissed the case before trial, and the Kansas Court of Appeals upheld that decision. But Supreme Court Justice Dan Biles, writing for a unanimous state Supreme Court, said Kansas law grants immunity from prosecution for force used specifically against an attacker and doesn't mention bystanders.

“If the Legislature wishes to extend self-defense immunity when an innocent bystander is hurt, it can do so,” Biles wrote. “In the meantime, we find nothing in the statutes providing a blanket shield for reckless conduct injuring an innocent bystander who was not reasonably perceived as an attacker.”

July 29 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden on Friday nominated a lawyer who represented the Mississippi clinic at the heart of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision to become a federal appeals court judge.

Biden's latest slate of nine new judicial nominees included Julie Rikelman, an abortion rights lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights whom the president picked to serve on the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The nomination, which Republicans are likely to oppose in the narrowly Democratic-controlled Senate, came a month after the conservative-majority Supreme Court overturned Roe, which for nearly five decades had guaranteed women nationally a constitutional right to obtain abortions.

Rikelman had argued against such a ruling in representing the Jackson Women's Health Organization - Mississippi's only abortion clinic - in challenging a Republican-backed law that banned abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Bill Pascrell, Jr.
@PascrellforNJ

Today I’ve officially nominated my North Jersey constituent Dr. Oz for membership in the New Jersey Hall of Fame, the highest honor there is for Garden Staters. Congratulations Dr. Oz! @JohnFetterman