Police questioning person in suspected opioid death at Bronx day care
At least one person was in police custody and being questioned Saturday in connection with the death of a 1-year-old boy who was apparently exposed to an opioid at a state-licensed New York City day care center Friday, according to police. Three other children were hospitalized after showing signs of opioid exposure at the Bronx day care, where police later found a packaging device typically used by drug dealers, officials said. The New York City medical examiner’s office said an autopsy to determine the cause of death of the boy, whom the police identified as Nicholas Dominici, was scheduled for Saturday.
Kansas, citing new law, will stop changing
gender identities
on birth certificates
Kansas will no longer change the birth certificates of transgender people to reflect their gender identities, the state health department said Friday, citing a state law that took effect this year that defines male and female as a person’s sex assigned at birth. The legislation says that any school district, public school, state agency, department or office that “collects vital statistics for the purpose of complying with anti-discrimination laws or for the purpose of gathering accurate public health, crime, economic or other data shall identify each person who is part of the collected data set as either male or female at birth.”
Boebert apologizes for vaping in a Denver theater
Rep. Lauren Boebert, a hard-right rabble-rouser from Colorado, apologized Friday night for her behavior at a recent performance of the family-friendly musical “Beetlejuice” in Denver, after surveillance video revealed her vaping and behaving disruptively in the theater. Boebert, 36, previously denied reports that she had been vaping. A pregnant woman seated behind her asked her to stop before she was ejected for “causing a disturbance” at the show, according to The Denver Post. “The past few days have been difficult and humbling, and I’m truly sorry for the unwanted attention my Sunday evening in Denver has brought to the community,” Boebert said in a statement Friday night.
Principals made and shared meme of a student’s exposed
breast, lawsuit says
Aniya Harmon, 18, said she was distraught when she discovered in May that a rumor going around Sussex Central High School was true: Someone had created a meme that showed her nude breast and had shared it with school employees. Harmon and her mother, Tosha White, said they later learned a disturbing detail. Two principals at the school in Sussex County, Delaware, they said, had made the meme. The mother and daughter detailed their claims in a lawsuit filed this past week in Delaware Superior Court in New Castle County against the former Sussex Central principals, Bradley Layfield and Matthew Jones, who have been placed on administrative leave.
Rebellion against
college rankings fails to muster many followers
Yale Law School started the exodus last November: Dozens of law and medical schools vowed not to cooperate with the U.S. News &World Report rankings juggernaut. The publisher’s priority-skewing formula was flawed, administrators complained. Critics of the rankings dared to hope that undergraduate programs at the same universities would defect, too. But most of those colleges conspicuously skipped the uprising. That the rebellion went only so far, for now, has underscored the psychic hold that the rankings have on American higher education, even for the country’s most renowned schools. The rankings remain a front door, an easy way to reach and enchant possible applicants.
Dire warnings about Libya dams went unheeded
It had been clear for years that the dams protecting Derna, on Libya’s Mediterranean coast, were in danger of giving way. There were the decades of neglect by officials in a country torn by years of civil war. Academics had warned it would not require a storm of biblical proportions to overwhelm the dams. This past week, those predictions proved true, when flooding from a storm broke through both dams and swept parts of the city into the sea. Thousands are dead, and many more missing, according to authorities.
How do we feel about global warming? It’s called eco-anxiety.
In Greece, nerves are shot as weeks of blazes have given way to flooding. Italians are frazzled as a summer of heat waves lingers. A group of young Portuguese, exhausted by sweltering temperatures and spreading fires, are suing European nations for causing the climate change that they claim has damaged their mental health. In an era of ever-increasing anxiety, now is the summer — and autumn — of our disquiet, and eco-anxiety, a catchall term to describe all-encompassing environmental concerns, is having its moment. Experts say the feeling of gloom and doom prompted by all of the inescapable images of planetary gloom and doom is becoming more widespread.
Three neighbors of Ukraine ban its grain as EU restrictions expire
Hours after the European Union ended a temporary ban on imports of Ukrainian grain and other products to five member nations, three of them — Poland, Hungary and Slovakia — defied the bloc and said they would continue to bar Ukrainian grain from being sold within their borders. As Ukraine, one of the world’s largest grain exporters, has struggled to ship its grain because of Russia’s invasion, the EU has opened up to tariff-free food imports from the country — a move that had the unintended consequence of undercutting prices and hurting farmers in several countries in the east of the EU.
Kim Jong Un inspects missiles and nuclear bombers in Russia
North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, inspected nuclear-capable strategic bombers in Russia on Saturday, according to Russian state media, as he continued a trip that has raised fears of the two nations deepening their military ties against a common enemy, the United States. Kim arrived in Primorsky Krai, in Russia’s Far East, on Saturday morning. There, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and other top Russian military officers showed him Russia’s hypersonic Kinzhal missile mounted on a MIG-31 jet, as well as three other key elements of Russia’s nuclear force: the Tu-95MS turboprop strategic bomber and Tu-160 and Tu-22M3 supersonic bombers, according to RIA Novosti, a Russian news outlet.
Son of El Chapo extradited to Chicago to face federal drug charges
Ovidio Guzmán López, one of four sons of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord best known as El Chapo, was extradited to Chicago on Friday to face trial on a sprawling set of federal drug charges, according to his lawyer and U.S. officials. The extradition came a little more than nine months after Guzmán López was arrested by Mexican authorities in Culiacán, a city in northwestern Mexico that has long been the home base of the Sinaloa drug cartel, the criminal organization his father helped bring to prominence. Ovidio Guzmán López is expected to appear in U.S. District Court in Chicago on Monday.
Letter found in Vatican archives confirms Church was told about death camps
A letter found among the private papers of Pope Pius XII suggests that the Holy See was told in 1942 that up to 6,000 people, “above all Poles and Jews,” were being killed in furnaces every day at Belzec, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Although news of the atrocities being perpetrated by Adolf Hitler was already reaching Pius’ ears, this information was especially important because it came from a trusted church source based in Germany, said Giovanni Coco, a Vatican archivist who discovered the letter. The document adds to the evidence that some scholars say shows Pius knew about the Holocaust as it happened.
By wire sources
