Citizen Cartwright

Vacation pics

There's lots of news today, none of which needs summarizing by me. 

 

So let’s widen our aperture and take a look at some of the spectacular images entered in National Geographic’s travel photo contest this year.

 

I’m savoring the vicarious thrills (I’m much too cautious and klutzy to try this myself) of hammock camping in Italy:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          National Geographic

In the news

EU leaders agree on outline of a migration deal

 

House passes $675 billion defense spending bill that bars the Pentagon from doing business with China’s ZTE

 

House Republicans grill FBI, Justice Department leaders on Russia probe

AP: Steele dossier apparently a mix of real revelations and repurposed history, with snips of likely fiction or disinformation

 

WPost: How the ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ forged ties with Russia, Trump campaign — and came under investigators’ scrutiny

 

Senate passes farm bill, setting up fight with the House over food stamps

Senate allocates $5 million to pay all its interns

 

Supreme Court confirmation process likely to follow Gorsuch playbook

 

Nate Silver: Will Anthony Kennedy’s retirement help Republicans at the midterm elections?

 

Politico: Seventeen legal thinkers on what Anthony Kennedy’s legacy will be

 

Family separations pushing new activists into migrant protests

 

In D.C., 575 arrested as hundreds of women rally to protest Trump’s immigration policy

 

ProPublica: Immigrant children’s shelters near you

 

Justice Department charges 600 people, including doctors, in healthcare fraud, opioid crackdown

 

California data privacy bill unanimously passed, signed to head off ballot initiative

 

Amazon jumps into the drug business, buying online pharmacy PillPack

 

Study: There's no fixed limit to the human life span

Supreme Court about to become the most conservative institution in U.S. history?

Well, Tom Goldstein, founder of the influential SCOTUSblog, thinks so, after court swing voter Justice Anthony Kennedy announced on Wednesday that he’s retiring.

 

And those who’ve hoped that Donald Trump would be a blip in the history of the American democratic experiment are going to have to find other things to hope for.

 

Trump’s biggest presidential achievement to date had been his nomination to the court of Neil Gorsuch, “who has already become one of the most conservative justices,” according to Lawrence Hurley of Reuters, a longtime reporter on the court.

 

Now Trump is to make his second court appointment in his 17 months in office, and that person potentially will affect Americans' lives for generations.

 

"We have to pick one that’s going to be there for 40 years, 45 years,” Trump said at a rally in North Dakota on Wednesday night.

 

If Republicans unite behind Trump’s selection, there’s little Democrats can do to stop it, notes The Associated Press. Republicans changed the Senate's rules last year so Supreme Court nominees can't be filibustered, meaning only 51 votes will be needed to confirm.

 

The prospects for the nominee’s confirmation most likely will come down to the way a handful of moderate senators vote, says The New York Times. Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are considered key votes in the narrowly divided Senate, as are Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, all Democrats up for re-election in states that Trump won.

 

Here are predictions of what a more conservative court will do, from Joan Biskupic, another longtime reporter on the court:

 

— Abortion: "It is possible a new conservative majority would trim the right to an abortion — for example with more restrictions on physicians, clinics and the timing of a termination” rather than reversing altogether Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal nationwide in 1973.

 

— Same-sex marriage: “It is likely … that the new conservative majority would defer more to religious interests and permit a broad range of exemptions to laws intended to protect people based on sexual orientation."

 

— Affirmative action: Campus affirmative action could be prohibited.

 

If there is a new swing vote, it will be Chief Justice John Roberts, according to Biskupic and others. Justices Clarence Thomas and Gorsuch are farthest on the right; Samuel Alito falls generally between them and Roberts, she says.

 

Here is a list of the possible nominees, from the Times.

Also in the news

Deal struck for Trump-Putin summit, possibly in Helsinki

 

Supreme Court rules against public sector labor unions collecting fees from nonmembers

 

House rejects GOP compromise immigration bill on 'worse-than-expected' 121-300 vote

 

KHN: Immigrant toddlers being ordered to appear in court alone

 

Ways family separation may affect children’s brains

 

Farhad Manjoo: Tech giants eyeing a world that relies less on looking at a screen

 

Amazon to help people start their own businesses to deliver its packages

 

Testing for penicillin allergy may reduce superbug infection risk

 

Trump’s Supreme Court victory on travel ban

The court on Tuesday gave President Trump one of the biggest victories of his presidency, says Reuters, when it upheld his travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries and rejecting the argument that it represented unconstitutional religious discrimination.

 

In a 5-to-4 vote, the court’s conservatives said the president’s power to secure the country’s borders, delegated by Congress over decades of immigration lawmaking, wasn’t undermined by Trump’s history of incendiary statements about the dangers he said Muslims pose to the United States, says The New York Times.

 

The travel ban survives as long as it can “reasonably be understood to result from a justification independent of unconstitutional grounds,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, noting that the court hardly ever strikes down a policy under that test.

The travel ban’s stated goals of preventing entry to the United States of people who can't be adequately vetted and inducing other countries to improve their security practices provided legitimate justifications, Roberts said.

In a dissent joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the court of inconsistency. She noted that a stray remark from a state commissioner expressing hostility to religion was the basis of a ruling this month in favor of a Christian baker who refused to create a cake for a same-sex wedding.

“Those principles should apply equally here,” she wrote. “In both instances, the question is whether a government actor exhibited tolerance and neutrality in reaching a decision that affects individuals’ fundamental religious freedom.”

 

Sotomayor also noted “stark parallels” with the court’s 1944 decision that upheld U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Sotomayor described various statements Trump made on the campaign trail.

“Taking all the evidence together, a reasonable observer would conclude that the proclamation was driven primarily by anti-Muslim animus,” Sotomayor said.

Roberts officially repudiated the 1944 internment decision and rejected any comparison between the cases, saying: “The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of presidential authority. But it is wholly inapt to liken that morally repugnant order to a facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission.”

Trump-backed candidates’ primary victories

The president has been adept at bruising his adversaries but has had less success in office propelling allies to victory — until Tuesday, says The New York Times.

 

Trump propelled Gov. Henry McMaster to victory in a runoff in South Carolina, a day after appearing with him at a rally.

And Trump got another victory in New York, where Staten Island Republicans renominated Rep. Dan Donovan, thwarting the comeback bid of Michael Grimm, who had resigned from the House seat after pleading guilty to felony tax fraud. Trump endorsed Donovan, saying the party couldn’t afford a Grimm candidacy in a district that could swing to the Democrats.

Joseph Crowley, 4th-ranking House Democrat, loses

Once seen as a possible successor to Nancy Pelosi as Democratic leader of the House, Crowley’s primary defeat on Tuesday is the most significant loss for a Democratic incumbent in more than a decade, says The New York Times.

 

The New York lawmaker lost to a 28-year-old political newcomer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former organizer for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.

 

Basically, the results in the race come down to "a rusty incumbent, a charismatic challenger and a liberal district,” says the Times.

Also in the news

Reuters special report: The shock troops who expelled 700,000 Rohingya from Myanmar

Japanese space probe arrives at asteroid to collect samples

AP: Republican immigration bill faces likely defeat in showdown vote

 

Federal judge orders families separated at border reunited within 30 days, 14 days for children younger than 5

 

Seventeen states and D.C. sue over Trump’s family separation policy

 

Supreme Court’s ruling on California pregnancy centers is a blow for abortion-rights advocates

 

Court rules that 11 Virginia House districts were racially gerrymandered

 

GE to spin off healthcare division as part of major restructuring

 

Prestigious Laura Ingalls Wilder award renamed over racial insensitivity in her books

 

Unlocked and loaded: Families confronting dementia, guns

As billionaires Bezos, Buffett and Dimon build their own healthcare company

Earlier this year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon announced they were teaming up to create their own health care company to improve medical outcomes for their employees at lower cost.

Last week, they named surgeon, Harvard researcher, New Yorker writer and best-selling author Dr. Atul Gawande to be the new company’s CEO.

 

Gawande has written four books on medicine, founded projects to improve health in developing countries and received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award.

 

Dimon says he, Bezos and Buffett hired Gawande because "if you know Atul, you know he's got a big brain and a big heart. He has a huge work ethic. He's trustworthy.”

 

Gawande will be adding his new job to his current long list of activities, says Kaiser Health News. And he has no experience running a company.

 

Here are some reactions to the choice.

 

Gawande spoke with Judy Woodruff of PBS over the weekend at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

 

Gawande’s take on his task: "There are 70,000 ways the human body can fail. We've generated 4,000 medical surgical procedures, 6,000 drugs, and we're trying to deploy that capability town by town in the right way, at the right time, for everybody alive. It's the most ambitious thing anybody has ever attempted, and we're still building it on a version that says, 'Oh, we're just going to pay your clinician and they'll take care of it.'"   

Also in the news

Supreme Court punts on gerrymandering, business owners’ religious beliefs justifying service denial to same-sex couples

 

Supreme Court rules for American Express on merchant fees

 

Key races in primaries Tuesday in New York, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Maryland, Mississippi and South Carolina

 

Harley, stung by tariffs, to move production of motorcycles sold in Europe from U.S. factories to facilities overseas

 

ProPublica: FDA repaying industry by rushing risky drugs to market

Hedge funds seeking to profit from personal-injury lawsuits

 

NYTimes: New income tax form is postcard-size but more complicated than ever

 

Oxford researchers: Humans likely the only intelligent species in observable universe