Woman charged with murder over abortion sues prosecutors

In Texas a woman who was charged with murder for self-managing an abortion, and spent two nights in jail before the charge was dropped, is now suing the prosecutors for $1 million.

The lawsuit filed by Lizelle Gonzalez in federal court Thursday comes a month after the state bar of Texas fined and disciplined the district attorney in rural Starr county over the case in 2022, when Gonzalez was charged with murder in “the death of an individual by self-induced abortion”.

Under the abortion restrictions in Texas and other states, women who seek abortions are exempt from criminal charges.

The lawsuit argues Gonzalez suffered harm from the arrest and subsequent media coverage. She is seeking $1m in damages.
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According to the lawsuit, Gonzalez was 19 weeks pregnant when she used misoprostol, one of two drugs used in medication abortions. Misoprostol is also used to treat stomach ulcers.

After taking the pills, Gonzalez received an obstetrical examination at a hospital emergency room and was discharged with abdominal pain. She returned with bleeding the next day and an exam found no fetal heartbeat. Doctors performed a caesarian section to deliver a stillborn baby.

The lawsuit argues that the hospital violated the patient’s privacy rights when they reported the abortion to the district attorney’s office, which then carried out its own investigation and produced a murder charge against Gonzalez.

Cecilia Garza, an attorney for Gonzalez, said prosecutors pursued an indictment despite knowing that a woman receiving an abortion is exempted from a murder charge by state law.

Prosecutors would had to have known that even in Texas, women could not be charged for receiving an abortion but they decided on charging her with murder anyway, in what seems like a purely vindictive effort to frighten other women who may seek to terminate their pregnancies using legal medications.

Shock win for Democrat in Alabama, and Kari Lake admits defaming election official

There is an old political saying that ‘all politics is local‘, meaning that candidates for office needed to emphasize their local connections and highlight local issues in order to connect with voters. This was especially true for down ballot races that were for seats in state and local elected bodies. While national issues sometimes entered the discussion, they tended not to be front and center.

Not anymore. Nowadays, national issues are driving pretty much all elections, tending to overshadow local issues like infrastructure projects. As a consequence, local races are now viewed as venues for testing national issues. Hence the shock result in an Alabama state house race is raising eyebrows.

Alabama is a solid red state and the house seat had been comfortably won in 2022 by a Republican David Cole by a margin of 54-46% over Democrat Marilyn Lands. But Cole had to resign after being found guilty of voter fraud. (Is anyone surprised snymore that the party that shouts loudest about voter fraud seems to regularly produce people who actually commit it?)
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Nitrogen gas manufacturers try to block use for executions

Many states in the US that still have the death penalty are finding it hard to find ways to execute people. Apart from the recorded cases of being unable to find veins into which the lethal drugs are delivered, the manufacturers of those drugs, not wishing to be associated with this death industry, are refusing to supply the drugs. But those states that are determined to retain the death penalty are now seeking other ways, even suggesting that we bring back hanging or the electric chair or the firing squad.

One method that is gaining vogue is to use nitrogen gas to essentially asphyxiate people. Given that nitrogen is so plentiful and makes up about 80% of the air around us, it would seem that getting access to it would be easy. But apparently it has to be bought from medical suppliers and three top suppliers that provide medical nitrogen are balking at having their product be used by the death industry.
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Trump gets good and bad legal news

The good news for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is that a panel of New York state appeals court judges has agreed to a reduction in the bond that he has to pay in his appeal of the civil fraud judgment obtained by state attorney general Letitia James to $175 million, and given him ten days to come up with the money. The original amount of $454 million plus interest was due today and SSAT’s lawyers had said that he could not pay it. This allows the appeal to go ahead once he pays this reduced amount but he will still have to pay the full amount if his appeal fails. The appeals process could take several months.

The bad news for him is that the judge overseeing the criminal case involving his hush money payments to Stormy Daniels has rejected his appeal for further delays and has scheduled the trial to begin on April 15th with jury selection. The original trial date was set to begin earlier this month and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg had already agreed to a one month delay due to new documents surfacing.
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The UFO cult

I do not believe that we have been visited by extra-terrestrials. However, I do think it is quite possible, even likely, that intelligent life has emerged in many places in the universe. The universe is an immensely large place with an estimated 1022 stars within the visible part and since we know that the probability of intelligent life, let alone any kind of life, emerging is not zero (since it has happened here), it is not hard to imagine that it also emerged elsewhere.

What I do not believe is that they visited here, simply because of the vast distances that they would have had to travel, even if they originated on a planet of the nearest star to the Sun. To be able to traverse such distances would require some spectacularly new science and technology that is unlike anything that we know, that is also able to circumvent the limits of the speed of light and the lifetimes of organisms that seem to be so firmly based.

Furthermore, the idea that they have arrived and are playing coy by giving us just hints of their visits, and that the government is covering up those visits, adds another layer of implausibility. Why go to all the trouble of interstellar travel just to take a peek and go away? To arrive here would require incredibly sophisticated technology. To think that they were able to do that only to have their craft crash in the desert in the US, not just once but several times, just compounds the unbelievability.
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The student loan problem

John Oliver explains why so many students in the US acquire such large college debts and have a hard time paying off their loans. It is a familiar story. A government program meant to serve a good end is handed over to the supposedly efficient private sector to manage, which then turns out to be both inefficient and corrupt and results is people making loan payments for decades while making hardly a dent in the principal.

Oliver says that Joe Biden, over the objections of Republicans and obstacles placed by the US Supreme Court, has actually managed to eliminate or reduce student debt for a considerable number of people.

The Havana syndrome is still a mystery

The strange symptoms reported by US diplomatic personnel at various locations around the globe got the name ‘Havana Syndrome’ because it first surfaced in Havana in 2016. They complained of headaches, dizziness, nausea, hearing sounds, and difficulties with thinking and sleep;.

But repeated efforts to try and identify any kind of systematic pattern that might lead to a diagnosis of the cause have come up short, with various alternative theories being postulated ranging from the benign (that the sounds were caused by crickets) to sinister (that the diplomats were being targeted as part of some kind of technological warfare). But none of the theories covered all the cases.
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Revolting evidence of people’s capacity for brutality

I am old enough and have read enough history to know that people can act in incredibly cruel ways towards other people. The current conflicts in Gaza, Haiti, Yemen, Sudan, and other places provide enough testimony as to how people can be so lacking in empathy that they can subject their fellow human beings to such awful treatment. And yet, I still feel disgusted and shocked when I read news stories that take place outside of conflict zones that describe awful behavior.

Take the case of how six white police officers in the town of Rankin, Mississippi treated two black men in their own home.

The group of six burst into a Rankin County home without a warrant and assaulted Jenkins and Parker with stun guns, a sex toy and other objects. Elward admitted to shoving a gun into Jenkins’ mouth and firing in a “mock execution” that went awry.

Once inside, they handcuffed Jenkins and his friend Parker and poured milk, alcohol and chocolate syrup over their faces. They forced them to strip naked and shower together to conceal the mess. They mocked the victims with racial slurs and shocked them with stun guns.

After Elward shot Jenkins in the mouth, they devised a coverup that included planting drugs and a gun. False charges stood against Jenkins and Parker for months.
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“I am hurt. I am broken,” Jenkins wrote in his statement. “They tried to take my manhood from me. They did some unimaginable things to me, and the effects will linger for the rest of my life.”

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