Walensky Resigns as CDC Director
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will step down from her position June 30, she announced Friday, capping a tumultuous tenure at the nation’s leading public health agency as it struggled to rein in the COVID-19 pandemic. Her departure comes as the administration contends with major vacancies in its COVID response team. Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID coordinator, plans to leave his position this month, along with other key officials, including Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, a White House adviser on the global response. A new White House pandemic office has no leader or staffing.
Jan. 6 Rioter Gets 14 Years, Longest Sentence Yet
A Pennsylvania welder who attacked police officers at the Capitol with a chair and then chemical spray was sentenced Friday to slightly more than 14 years in prison, the most severe penalty handed down so far in connection with the events of Jan. 6, 2021. At a hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, the man, Peter Schwartz, 49, joined a growing list of people charged with assaulting police on that day who have received stiff sentences. The judge cited Schwartz’s substantial history of violent offenses, and lack of remorse for his actions.
Supreme Court Stays Execution of Death Row Inmate
The Supreme Court granted a stay of execution Friday to Richard Glossip, a death row inmate in Oklahoma, after the state’s attorney general, Gentner F. Drummond, a Republican, told the justices that he agreed that Glossip’s execution should be halted. In a rare move, Drummond wrote that the state had “come to the difficult but essential conclusion that Glossip’s capital conviction is unsustainable and a new trial imperative.” Lawyers call such statements “confessions of error,” and courts ordinarily give them great weight. As is customary in rulings on stay applications, the court provided no reasoning.
Florida Passes Bill Banning Transition Care for Minors
The Florida Legislature passed a bill Thursday that would prohibit gender-transition care for minors and restrict it for adults, one of several measures aimed at LGBTQ communities that have been passed during this year’s legislative session. Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign it into law. The legislation goes further than policies adopted last year by a state board banning hormone treatments and surgical care for transgender people under 18. The new bill would codify the ban and penalize doctors who violate it with up to five years in prison.
CDC to Scale Back COVID Tracking Efforts
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will cease tracking community levels of COVID-19 and the percentage of tests that come back positive, a metric used to calculate transmission rates, the agency announced Friday. To track death rates, agency officials now will rely on the National Vital Statistics System, which is highly accurate but tends to lag behind other kinds of surveillance by two to three weeks. The CDC is also scaling back the data that hospitals are required to report. But the agency will continue to track overall COVID hospitalizations and intensive care admissions.
Most Fake Trump Electors in Georgia Took Immunity Deals
More than half of the bogus Georgia electors who were convened in December 2020 to try to keep former President Donald Trump in power have taken immunity deals in the investigation into election interference there, according to a court filing Friday and people with knowledge of the inquiry. The office of Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, has spent more than two years investigating whether the former president and his allies illegally meddled in the 2020 election in Georgia, which Trump narrowly lost to President Joe Biden.
Nearly All the King’s Realms Want to Say Goodbye and Good Riddance
For countries that are still constitutionally joined to the crown, King Charles III’s coronation arrived with little fanfare, and with some cringing discomfort. The chorus of calls for British apologies, reparations and repatriation has also grown louder, placing the new king in a vexing position. Charles represents nearly 1,000 years of unbroken royal lineage; he also now stands on a volatile fault line between Britain, where much of that history tends to be romanticized, and a group of forthright former colonies demanding that he confront the harsh realities of his country’s imperial past.
Iran Targets Businesses to Stop Women Defying Hijab Law
Emboldened since the women-led protests that broke out last fall, which turned into nationwide demonstrations against the Islamic Republic, growing numbers of Iranian women have started going around without headscarves and wearing Western-style clothes. In Iran, the theocratic government considers the dress code a matter of existential importance. Determined to reclaim control after months of destabilizing protests that called its authority into question, the government recently tried a fresh tack in its campaign to enforce the hijab law, closing 150 businesses in just 24 hours for serving improperly veiled women. It also announced that authorities would use surveillance cameras and other tools to go after women violating the law.
Back-to-Back Shooting Massacres Rock Serbia
Just one day after a 13-year-old shot to death nine people at his school in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, eight more victims lay dead or dying Thursday night, with at least 14 others newly wounded. This small Balkan nation, which had not had a mass shooting in seven years, had suffered two of them in as many days. Early Friday, after an overnight search involving hundreds of officers, police captured a man who officials said was the gunman, a 21-year-old wearing a white supremacist symbol. Neither officials nor area residents could offer a coherent motive for the massacre. President Aleksandar Vucic vowed sweeping changes to Serbia’s gun laws.
WHO Ends Global Health Emergency Designation for COVID-19
The World Health Organization announced Friday it was ending the emergency it declared for COVID-19 over three years ago, a milestone in the fitful emergence from a pandemic that has killed millions of people around the world. “It is with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. But WHO officials warned that the decision to lift the emergency does not signal an end to the pandemic, and cautioned countries not to take this as reason to dismantle COVID-response systems. “The emergency phase is over, but COVID is not,” said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on COVID.
Conservative Party Suffers Stinging Losses in England’s Local Elections
Britain’s Conservative Party suffered sweeping losses Friday in local elections, a stinging rejection of the status quo that raises doubts about its ability to hold on to power after 14 years. The vote for control over hundreds of municipalities, which took place Thursday across England, was the biggest test of the governing party’s popularity before a general election likely to take place in the fall of 2024. It left Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wounded, fracturing the pro-Brexit coalition assembled by one of his predecessors, Boris Johnson, in 2019 and opening a plausible path to power for the main opposition Labour Party.
Israel’s Refusal to Hand Over Body of Prisoner Heightens Scrutiny
Israel’s refusal to hand over the body of a prominent prisoner who died on a hunger strike this week has drawn renewed attention to its practice of keeping the remains of scores of Palestinians in freezers and numbered graves, partly as leverage to obtain the bodies of Israelis held by Palestinian groups. Khader Adnan, a leader of the Palestinian armed group Islamic Jihad who was arrested by Israel on suspicion of supporting terrorism, was the first Palestinian to die during a hunger strike in an Israeli prison in more than 30 years. Since his death Tuesday, Israel has not returned his body to his family and the government won’t say whether it intends to do so.
By wire sources
