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Robinson, who is running for governor as a Republican, has publicly backed the current ban in the state, which restricts abortion after 12 weeks.

A Democratic group has released new audio of North Carolina Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who is running for governor, saying that he wants to get abortion restrictions down to “zero” weeks. 

In the audio, which the group said was recorded on Sept. 3 at a Robinson campaign event in Troy, N.C., a woman asked Robinson about his stance on abortion and why he was supporting North Carolina’s current 12-week ban on the procedure. 

Robinson replied by saying, “That 12 weeks, exceptions for rape and incest … I’m not going to say it’s reasonable. But my faith allows me to live with that, because that’s where the consensus is. Do I want to continue to lower it? You better know it. I would love to get down to six weeks. And I’d like to get down to zero. I would like to push it back as far as we could and eliminate as many abortions as we can.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20052486

Julia Conley

Sep 07, 2024

The IRS said Friday that it has recovered $1.3 billion in unpaid taxes from high-income Americans who had either failed to file their returns or who hadn't fully paid what they owed. 

The announcement, made jointly with the U.S. Treasury Department, is aimed at highlighting the agency's ramped-up enforcement efforts against tax cheats, which have been funded under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. 

That IRS funding has proved controversial, with some Republican lawmakers falsely claiming the money would be used to hire 87,000 new IRS agents to "to audit Walmart shoppers."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20051098

by Julian Borger and Sufian Taha in Beita and Bethan McKernan in Jerusalem

Sat 7 Sep 2024 14.43 EDT

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20051547

by Arwa Mahdawi

Fri 6 Sep 2024 06.07 EDT

Users say harmful content from accounts they do not follow appears even after requests to block it

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The Observer has uncovered seven further groups, with a combined total of almost 200,000 members, openly sharing content that promotes ­eating disorders. All of the groups were ­created after Twitter was bought by the billionaire Elon Musk in 2022 and rebranded as X.

Eating-disorder campaigners said the scale of harmful content ­demonstrates serious failings in moderation by X. Wera Hobhouse MP, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on eating disorders, said: “These findings are most concerning … X should be held accountable for allowing this harmful content to be promoted on its platform, which puts many lives at risk.”

The internet has long been a breeding ground for content that promotes eating disorders – sometimes called “pro-ana” – from ­message boards to early social media sites including Tumblr and Pinterest. Both sites banned posts promoting eating disorders and self-harm in 2012 after an outcry over their proliferation.

Debbie said she remembers the pro-ana internet message boards, “but you’d have to search to find them”, she said.

This kind of content is now more accessible than ever and, critics of social media companies argue, is pushed to users by algorithms, which serve people more – and sometimes increasingly extreme – posts.

For those baffled by Donald Trump’s forays into meandering discourses about electrocution, bacons sales or cannibal killers at his recent political rallies, the former US president had an explanation.

Trump assured supporters in Pennsylvania on Saturday that what might look like incoherent ramblings as he frequently departed from his scripted speech were instead indicators of his brilliance that impressed other great minds.

“I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like friends of mine that are like English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,’” he told a bemused audience.

“But the fake news, you know what they say, ‘He rambled.’ It’s not rambling. What you do is you get off a subject to mention another little tidbit, then you get back on to the subject, and you go through this and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.”

But, increasingly, many others are not persuaded, including some of his own supporters.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20051980

by Harriet Sherwood

Fri 6 Sep 2024 12.02 EDT

Keir Starmer’s former pollster, Deborah Mattinson, is to meet Kamala Harris’s campaign team in Washington this week to share details of how Labour pulled off its stunning election win by targeting key groups of “squeezed working-class voters who wanted change”.

The visit comes ahead of a separate trip by Starmer to Washington on Friday to meet US president Joe Biden, his second since becoming prime minister. It will also be his first since Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic nominee.

With the race for the White House on a knife-edge, Mattinson, who stepped down from Starmer’s office after the election, and the prime minister’s former director of policy, Claire Ainsley, who will also attend the briefings, believe the same strategy that delivered for Labour could play an important role in Harris defeating Donald Trump on 5 November.

With its vast expanses of forest, Canada has the most “certified” sustainable timber operations of any nation, according to the nonprofit organizations that attest to the environmental soundness of logging practices.

Such forestry-standards groups were born in the 1990s out of rage over tropical rainforest destruction. Today, they put their leafy seals of approval on toilet paper, two-by-fours and other wood and paper goods to assure eco-conscious consumers and investors they were responsibly produced.

Yet research shows Canadian forests have seen some of the world’s largest declines in ecologically critical primary and old-growth woodlands over the last two decades, even as sustainability-certification programs grew to include nearly all of Canada’s logging.

To track destruction of older woodlands in these certified zones, Reuters analyzed forestry data in Ontario, a major logging province. The analysis found that about 30% of the certified boreal forests harvested from 2016 to 2020 were at least 100 years old. That resulted in the loss of 377 square miles of these older forests, an area the size of New York City and Washington D.C. combined, the analysis found.

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Ruling, which may be reviewed by appellate court, could strike reproductive rights measure off November ballot

A Missouri judge has ruled that a ballot measure asking voters whether abortion rights should be enshrined in the state constitution is invalid, potentially jeopardizing an election scheduled for November.

In a ruling issued on Friday, Cole county circuit judge Christopher Limbaugh said that the reproductive rights petition – also known as Amendment 3 – led by Missourians for Constitutional Freedom did not comply with state law.

Abortion rights activists are hopeful an appellate court could reverse Limbaugh’s decision, but for now it remains unclear whether voters will be able to decide the issue as scheduled on 5 November, the same day as the presidential election.

US health officials have confirmed a human case of bird flu in a patient that had no immediately known animal exposure.

The patient, in the state of Missouri, was treated in hospital and has since recovered, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

It is the 14th human case of bird flu in the US in 2024 and the first without a known occupational exposure to infected animals, according to the CDC.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20044676

Her trip to the West Bank, where she was shot on Friday, was Ms. Eygi’s latest effort in years of activism that began nearly a decade ago when was still a teenager.

By Ephrat Livni

Published Sept. 6, 2024Updated Sept. 7, 2024, 4:27 a.m. ET

Police said an argument between groom James Shirah and groomsman Terry Lewis Taylor Jr. after the wedding allegedly led Shirah to hit Taylor Jr. with an SUV at high speed.

A bride and groom were arrested in Flint, Michigan, last week after the groom allegedly ran over and killed one of his groomsmen hours after the wedding, according to police.

The City of Flint Police Department responded to the 1400 block of E Hamilton Avenue on Aug. 30 for a report of a "pedestrian injury crash," the department said Wednesday in a Facebook post. 

The victim was identified as 29-year-old Terry Lewis Taylor Jr., who was found with severe injuries and taken to a nearby medical center where he later died.

KYLE ADKINS WAS leaving his parents’ house in Kincaid, a small village in central Illinois’ Christian County, to pick up his young children from their mother’s house just a few blocks away on the night of May 8, 2021.

Kincaid police officer Sean Grayson pulled him over — but he wasn’t sure why.

Grayson told Adkins there was a warrant out for his arrest and issued him a “notice to appear,” a document equivalent to an arrest, recommending felony drug charges against him. The case dragged out for two years before it was dropped, and a new investigation reveals the warrant — and other evidence Grayson said he had against Adkins — never actually existed. Body camera footage shows Grayson admitting to the chief of police he had no evidence to recommend charges, but even after the footage surfaced in court, no other department or agency was notified.

Grayson, now 30, would go on to work at four other police departments across central Illinois, the last being the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office, where he would fatally shoot and kill Sonya Massey, 36, in her home in July 2024 after she called the police for help. Grayson shot at Massey, an unarmed Black woman whose family had called police with concerns about her mental health, three times, hitting her once in the head. He’s since been charged with murdering her.

A 2020 CBS/YouGov survey found that a slight majority of Pennsylvanians actually oppose fracking, with 52 percent of voters opposed and 48 percent in favor. Another 2020 poll, this one by Franklin & Marshall College, reported that 48 percent of registered Pennsylvania voters supported a ban on fracking, while only 39 percent opposed such a ban. And in a 2021 poll by the Ohio River Valley Institute, a sustainability-focused think tank, less than a third of Pennsylvanians said they supported continued fracking in the state.

Popular support for fracking has declined in Pennsylvania as understanding of its adverse effects has grown. A review of more than 2,500 scientific, medical, government and media reports — many of which focused on Pennsylvania — found that fracking is linked to numerous health problems, including cancer, asthma and congenital anomalies. The evidence is staggering, but here are some particularly egregious examples: An August 2023 report by the University of Pittsburgh determined that children living within a mile of a natural gas fracking well were seven times more likely to contract lymphoma, a rare form of childhood cancer. Another study found that children within a mile of a fracking well were also more likely to develop juvenile leukemia.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are veering sharply in how they gear up for Tuesday’s presidential debate, setting up a showdown that reflects not just two separate visions for the country but two politicians who approach big moments very differently.

The vice president is cloistered in a historic hotel in downtown Pittsburgh where she can focus on honing crisp two-minute answers, per the debate’s rules. She’s been working with aides since Thursday and chose a venue that allows the Democratic nominee the option of mingling with swing-state voters.

Trump, the Republican nominee, publicly dismisses the value of studying for the debate. The former president is choosing instead to fill his days with campaign-related events on the premise that he’ll know what he needs to do once he steps on the debate stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

“You can go in with all the strategy you want but you have to sort of feel it out as the debate’s taking place,” he said during a town hall with Fox News host Sean Hannity.

Trump then quoted former boxing great Mike Tyson, who said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Driver Chris Begley’s death in August underscores a list of alleged heat-related incidents across Texas

Neysa Lambeth was in Florida caring for her ailing father on 23 August 2023 when she received a call from her husband, Chris Begley, who had worked as a UPS driver for 28 years in Texas.

Begley, 57, had collapsed from the heat while delivering packages. Lambeth said a manager picked him up and took him home to recover. He had fallen ill a couple of times from the heat over the previous two years, Lambeth said, and she had picked him up from the UPS service center on those occasions.

“This time I wasn’t home, and so instead of taking him to the hospital or dialling 911, they took him home to an empty house and left him,” said Lambeth.