Media Today

[Rick Plant]

San Francisco Giants' Joc Pederson says he was slapped by Cincinnati Reds' Tommy Pham over fantasy football beef


Tommy Pham (above) allegedly slapped Joc Pederson during pregame batting practice

CINCINNATI -- San Francisco Giants outfielder Joc Pederson said Cincinnati Reds outfielder Tommy Pham slapped him prior to Friday's series opener over a dispute about their fantasy football league.

While the Giants warmed up in the outfield, Pham confronted Pederson and smacked him in the cheek before the pair was separated.

"It was a surprise," Pederson told reporters. "There was no real argument. He kind of came up and said, like, I don't know if you remember from last year and I was like fantasy football. He was like, yeah."

Major League Baseball is investigating, and Pham agreed to be scratched from Cincinnati's lineup shortly before first pitch pending results of the inquiry.

Pederson said after the Reds' 5-1 victory that he was accused of cheating for placing a player on injured reserve and replacing him with a free agent in a fantasy football league. Pederson said the player he put on IR had been ruled out for that week, which made it a legal move. He said Pham had executed essentially the same maneuver with his own team.

"I sent a screenshot of the rules, how it says that if a player's ruled out, you're allowed to put him on the IR and that's all I was doing," Pederson said. "He literally did the same thing. That was basically all of it."

He continued by saying that he thought the fantasy player at the center of the disagreement, San Francisco 49ers running back Jeff Wilson, might have been a player Pham had in two different leagues, leading to a possible mix-up.

"Maybe that was a confusion," he added. "In the ESPN league we were in, he was listed as out. It feels very similar to what I did. That was basically all of it. There's not much more to it."

Pederson said he had no advance notice that Pham might confront him during the series in Cincinnati.

The Giants outfielder said he didn't retaliate after being slapped, and he has no plans to re-engage Pham while the team is in Cincinnati.

"Violence isn't the answer. It's over as far as I'm concerned," Pederson said. "I won't talk to him. I don't think he wants to talk to me, I don't know. It was a weird interaction."

Pham threatened violence to settle an on-field score with San Diego's Luke Voit in April, challenging the slugger to a fight after Voit injured Reds catcher Tyler Stephenson with a hard, ugly slide into home.

"If Luke wants to settle it, I get down really well," Pham said. "Anything. Muay Thai, whatever. Like I said, I've got an owner here who will let me use his facility."

The scuffle was witnessed by reporters and occurred before fans entered the ballpark.

Reds manager David Bell refused to comment on the incident, and Pham refused to speak on the record with reporters.

"Major League Baseball is investigating it, and until that's complete, I'm probably not going to say much on it," Giants manager Gabe Kapler said.

Watch:

Joc Pederson describes Pham slapping incident

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/33995201/cincinnati-reds-tommy-pham-san-francisco-giants-joc-pederson-pregame-altercation

[Rick Plant]

Texas already 'hardened' schools. It didn’t save Uvalde



Four years after an armed 17-year-old opened fire inside a Texas high school, killing 10, Gov. Greg Abbott tried to tell another shell-shocked community that lost 19 children and two teachers to a teen gunman about his wins in what is now an ongoing effort against mass shootings.

“We consider what we did in 2019 to be one of the most profound legislative sessions not just in Texas but in any state to address school shootings,” Abbott said inside a Uvalde auditorium Wednesday as he sat flanked by state and local officials. “But to be clear, we understand our work is not done, our work must continue.”

Throughout the 60-minute news conference, he and other Republican leaders said a 2019 law allowed districts to “harden” schools from external threats after a deadly shooting inside an art classroom at Santa Fe High School near Houston the year before. After the Uvalde gunman was reportedly able to enter Robb Elementary School through a back door this week, their calls to secure buildings resurfaced yet again.

But a deeper dive into the 2019 law revealed many of its “hardening” elements have fallen short.

Schools didn’t receive enough state money to make the types of physical improvements lawmakers are touting publicly. Few school employees signed up to bring guns to work. And many school districts either don’t have an active shooting plan or produced insufficient ones.

In January 2020, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District received $69,000 from a one-time, $100 million state grant to enhance physical security in Texas public schools, according to a dataset detailing the Texas Education Agency grants. The funds were comparable to what similarly sized districts received.

Even with more funds and better enforcement of policies, experts have said there is no indication that beefing up security in schools has prevented any violence. Plus, they said, it can be detrimental to children, especially children of color.

“This concept of hardening, the more it has been done, it’s not shown the results,” said Jagdish Khubchandani, a public health professor at New Mexico State University who studies school security practices and their effectiveness.

Khubchandani said the majority of public schools in the United States already implement the security measures most often promoted by public officials, including locked doors to the outside and in classrooms, active-shooter plans and security cameras.

After a review of 18 years of school security measures, Khubchandani and James Price from the University of Toledo did not find any evidence that such tactics or more armed teachers reduced gun violence in schools.

“It’s not just guns. It’s not just security,” Khubchandani said. “It’s a combination of issues, and if you have a piecemeal approach, then you’ll never succeed. You need a comprehensive approach.”

Insufficient active-shooter plans

Since the shooting, GOP lawmakers have repeatedly suggested limiting access to schools to one door.

“We’ve got to, in our smaller schools where we can, get down to one entrance,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick offered at the press conference Wednesday. “One entrance might be one of those solutions. If he had taken three more minutes to find that open door … the police were there pretty quickly.”

There are still questions about the timing and details of the tragedy, however, including whether the shooter busted a lock to get into the school or if a door was unlocked. A state police official reported Thursday that the door appeared to be unlocked but that it was still under investigation.

Khubchandani and education advocates said locking doors and routing everyone through one entrance is already standard practice in most districts. And safety leaders said locking exterior doors is a best practice, but it’s one strategy that needs to be strictly enforced.

“Sometimes convenience can take priority over safety and you can have a plan in place, you can have policies in place,” said Kathy Martinez Prather, director of the Texas School Safety Center at Texas State University. “They’re only as effective as they’re being implemented.”

At Wednesday’s press conference, Abbott emphasized that the package of school safety laws passed in 2019 required school districts to submit emergency operations plans to the Texas School Safety Center and make sure they have adequate active-shooter strategies to employ in an emergency.

State law dictates that districts must be able to show how they will prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters like active threats, but also extreme weather and communicable disease. These plans must include training mechanisms, communication plans and mandatory drills. Schools must create safety committees and establish a way to assess threats. These are known as emergency operations plans. As part of those, schools need active-shooter plans.

But a three-year audit by the center in 2020 found that out of the 1,022 school districts in the state, just 200 districts had active-shooter policies as part of their plans, even though most districts had reported having them.

That same audit revealed 626 districts did not have active-shooter policies. Another 196 had active-shooter policies, but auditors found those plans were insufficient.

In addition, only 67 school districts had viable emergency operations plans overall, the report found.

Martinez Prather wouldn’t say if Uvalde’s emergency plan was considered adequate because of ongoing investigations into the shooting. But said the center’s review did not find any areas of noncompliance.

The audit reviewed school districts’ emergency plans in June 2020, and Martinez Prather said she was “absolutely” surprised that so many schools did not have clear-cut plans, especially after the Santa Fe shooting and others around the country.

“Our attention to this issue should not be as close to the nearest and latest school shooting,” she said. “We need to keep sending that message that this can happen at any point in time and to anybody.”

She said the center has spent the last year and a half following up with schools to get their plans up to standard.

Arming teachers and staff with guns

Texas leaders have already shunned the idea of restricting gun access in the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting. In fact, in recent years, Texas lawmakers have loosened gun laws after mass shootings.

Instead, lawmakers point to the nearly decade-old school marshal program in Texas as another measure to deter and prevent mass shootings. That program was created in response to the deadly shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 26 people dead, including 20 first-graders.

Designated school employees who take an 80-hour training course and pass a psychological exam are allowed to keep a firearm in a lockbox on school grounds, an idea most attractive to rural schools in areas where law enforcement response can take longer.

After the school shooting in Santa Fe, state lawmakers removed the cap that limited schools to one marshal per 200 students. Today, according to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which oversees the training for the program, there are 256 marshals across the state.

While lawmakers tout it as a potential tool to prevent mass shootings, just 6% of school districts use it, according to a report from the Texas School Safety Center. Martinez Prather at the Texas School Safety Center said many school districts say it’s expensive and the training is time-consuming for educators.

Meanwhile, 280 school districts are utilizing an unregulated option known as the Guardian Program, which allows local school boards to approve individuals in schools to carry concealed weapons. Each “guardian” must have a handgun license and take 15 to 20 hours of specialized training by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Nicole Golden, executive director of Texas Gun Sense, said she’s concerned by the “minimal” level of training school staff go through before they are approved to have a weapon in the classroom.

“These aren’t law enforcement officers,” she said. “These are school staff who have some training, and there’s really not a lot of data to support that that’s the safe direction to go in.”

Plus, Golden said, placing more guns on school grounds can be problematic when data shows students of color are disproportionately disciplined.

When lawmakers decided to expand the number of marshals in Texas schools in 2019, Black students and parents said the idea made them feel less safe in school, knowing they are disciplined more than other students.

The study from Khubchandani and Price pointed to a 2018 shooting at a high school in Kentucky where the shooter killed two and injured 14 students in 10 seconds.

“Armed school personnel would have needed to be in the exact same spot in the school as the shooter to significantly reduce this level of trauma,” the researchers wrote. “Ten seconds is too fast to stop a school shooter with a semiautomatic firearm when the armed school guard is in another place in the school.”

$10 per student for safety

Big changes often take big money, and officials have noted that the 2019 school safety bill gives about $100 million per biennium to the Texas Education Agency. The agency then distributes the money to school districts to use on equipment, programs and training related to school safety and security, a little less than $10 per student based on average daily attendance. The money can be used broadly, ranging from physical security enhancements to suicide prevention programs.

According to a self-reported survey of districts by the Texas School Safety Center, more than two thirds of school districts have used this money for security cameras. 20% used it for active-shooter response training. Nearly 40% of districts installed physical barriers with the allotment.

But Zeph Capo, president of the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, said that money wasn’t enough to pay for the more expensive projects lawmakers were suggesting.

“Districts ended up spending money on some programs, some electronic AV equipment, but I don’t think it was nearly enough to do what needs to be done in most of the schools, which is really change the structures of the buildings so there’s better control over entrance and egress,” he said, noting that AFT believes more gun restrictions is a better solution.

The TEA also received a separate one-time $100 million pool of money to provide grants to districts specifically for physical security enhancements, like metal detectors, door-locking systems or bullet-resistant glass.

It’s unclear how Uvalde CISD spent the $69,000 it received from the state to enhance its physical security. School officials did not respond to questions Wednesday. As of the May 2 report, the district had spent about $48,000 of the grant, which is set to end at the end of the month.

Other remote town school districts received comparable grants per their student population, according to an analysis by The Texas Tribune. For example, the Sulphur Springs Independent School District in East Texas has only a slightly larger student population and received about $71,000 in grant funds.

According to a district document, Uvalde CISD, which enrolls around 4,100 students, had a variety of so-called hardening measures in place that lawmakers and school safety leaders recommend.

The district employed four district police officers, installed perimeter fencing meant to limit access around schools, including Robb, and instituted a policy that all classroom doors remain locked during the day.

There are campus teams that identify and address potential threats, and schools hold emergency drills for students “regularly.” The district employed a threat reporting system for community members to raise concerns. Some schools had security vestibules at their entrances and buzz-in systems to get inside from the outdoors.

But a security vestibule, which is basically a secure lobby to the school, can be a huge expense for school districts already tight on money. In 2019, the Waller Independent School District estimated that the addition of two of these entrances to the junior high school would cost $345,000. Security cameras at a small elementary school can cost more than $20,000, according to industry experts.

In recent years — even before the Santa Fe shooting — school districts have begun to rely on bond proposals to find the money to implement some of these changes.

But Texas voters have expressed hesitancy at the ballot box to approve such bonds in recent years, which the Texas Association of School Boards attributed to the lingering pandemic and political polarization. Recent changes by the Texas Legislature have also complicated bond requests for schools after it started to require districts to write, “This is a property tax increase,” on bond project signs, even when the proposals wouldn’t affect the tax rate.

Overall, Monty Exter, a senior lobbyist with the Association of Texas Professional Educators, said the per-student allotment and one-time grants set aside for school security could never pay for the types of construction projects lawmakers have touted publicly in the wake of the shooting.

“Thinking about making significant changes to 8,000-plus campuses, $100 million doesn’t necessarily go that far,” he said.

https://www.rawstory.com/texas-already-hardened-schools-it-didnt-save-uvalde/

[Rick Plant]

11-year-old Uvalde survivor gives chilling details about music killer played as he murdered her friends

An 11-year-old survivor of the Robb Elementary School massacre provided chilling new details about the murders of her classmates and teachers.

Miah Cerrillo spoke alongside her mother to CNN's Nora Neus about her traumatic experience, which began suddenly Tuesday morning as the classroom full of fourth and fifth graders watched a Disney movie as a treat for the end of the school year.

"They were watching 'Lilo and Stitch,' it was the end of the school year, and she said one of her teachers got the email that there was a shooter in the building and went to the door, and he was right there," Neus said. "They made eye contact."

The 18-year-old gunman then shot out the window in the classroom door and came into the room.

"Miah says it just happened all so fast, he backed the teacher into the classroom and he made eye contact with the teacher again, looked her right in the eye and said, 'Goodnight,' and then shot her and killed her," Neus said. "He said, 'Goodnight,' then it happened pretty fast after that, as well. He started open firing in the classroom. He hit the other teacher, a lot of Miah's friends. At that point Miah was hit by fragments of the bullets. You could even see them yesterday on her back, on her shoulders, the back of her head."

The killer then went through a doorway to an adjoining classroom, and he kept firing his AR-15 rifle.

"At that point Miah could hear screams, she heard a lot more gunfire and then she said she heard music," Neus said. "She thinks it was the gunman that put it on. He started blasting sad music, and I asked her, like, what was that? What kind of music? What do you mean by that? And she said -- she just said it sounded like 'I want people to die music.'"

Miah managed to survive by pretending she was dead, Neus said.

"She had a friend next to her that she was pretty sure was already dead and was laying on the ground bleeding out, and she put her hands in her friend's blood and then smeared it she said all over her body," Neus said. "She wanted to seem like -- she wanted to look like she was dead."

Miah lay there for what felt like three hours, covered in her friend’s blood, waiting for police to arrive.

She later overheard a conversation about police waiting outside the school, and she cried when she told the reporter, saying she didn’t understand why officers didn’t come inside and rescue them.

Watch:

New timeline of Texas school shooting includes student 911 calls as officers wait outside

Students trapped in a classroom with the gunman repeatedly called 911 during this week’s attack on a Texas elementary school as nearly 20 officers waited in the hallway for more than 45 minutes, authorities said Friday, according to the Associated Press.

The commander at the scene in Uvalde — the school district’s police chief — believed that 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos was barricaded inside adjoining classrooms at Robb Elementary School and that children were no longer at risk, said Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, at a contentious news conference.

“It was the wrong decision,” he said.

At Friday’s news conference, McCraw also offered a new timeline of the shooting after law enforcement officials backtracked on previous statements about police response to the mass shooting.

11:27 a.m. — Video footage shows a teacher at Robb Elementary propping open an exterior door. Ramos reportedly entered through this door.

11:28 a.m. — Ramos’ vehicle crashes near the school. A teacher ran back to a classroom to get a phone and came back to the door, allowing it to remain open. Two men, at a nearby funeral home, made their way to the crash scene where they saw Ramos exit the vehicle from the passenger side with a gun and backpack. The witnesses reportedly began running and Ramos tried shooting at them.

11:30 a.m. — 911 receives a phone call that there was a man who crashed his vehicle and has a gun.

11:31 a.m. — Ramos “reaches the last row of vehicles in the school parking lot,” McCraw said. The 18-year-old began shooting at the school, while police responded to the funeral home. McCraw adds that previous statements that officers confronted Ramos were inaccurate, and that an officer who heard the 911 call “drove immediately to the area he thought was the man with the gun, to the back of the school, which turned out to be a teacher.” McCraw said the officer drove by the suspect, who was “hunkered down behind a vehicle.”

11:32 a.m. — Ramos fires multiple shots at the school from outside, then enters the building.

11:33 a.m. — Ramos begins shooting in a classroom. McCraw says audio evidence from video footage shows Ramos shooting over 100 rounds.

11:35 a.m. — Three officers enter the school through the same doors that Ramos reportedly entered. Later, four more officers joined. The initial three officers were shot at, and some were grazed by bullets. Ramos shut the door to the classroom.

11:37 a.m. — Over 16 rounds are fired.

11:51 a.m. — More police begin to arrive.

12:03 p.m. — As many as 19 police officers were in the hallway outside the classroom. McCraw said they believed the active shooter situation had transitioned into a barricaded person call. A female caller dialed 911 from the classroom. The length of the call was less than 90 seconds. She said her name and said she was in classroom 112.

12:10 p.m. — The caller tells 911 that multiple people were dead.

12:13 p.m. — The female calls 911 again.

12:15 p.m. — More technicians arrive with shields.

12:16 p.m. — Female calls 911 again, adding that eight to nine students are still alive.

12:19 p.m. — Another person, in room 111 called 911. “She hung up when another student told her to hang up,” McCraw said.

12:21 p.m. — Suspect fires more shots at the door. Law enforcement moved down the hallway. A 911 call also captured three shots being fired.

12:36 p.m. — Another 911 call lasted for 21 seconds. The caller, a student, stayed on the line quietly. “She told 911 that he shot the door,” McCraw said, adding that the student asked 911 to “please send the police now.”

12:46 p.m. — Student tells 911 she can hear police next door.

12:50 p.m. — Officers breach the door using keys obtained from a janitor and kill the suspect.

12:51 p.m. — The 911 call was “loud” and “sounded like officers were moving children out of the room,” McCraw said.

© Fort Worth Star-Telegram

[Rick Plant]

What a bogus excuse this is coming from a so called police lieutenant.

The job of an officer is to go in these active shooter situations because that is their damn job. Does a fireman not go in and put out a fire because they are afraid of getting burned? Does a hitter refuse to bat because he's afraid of getting hit by a baseball? Of course not. What an asinine comment to say on national cable television. Now people know the police are afraid of these deadly weapons and they won't go in to help save people when people desperately call for help when their lives are on the line.           

So, the police were afraid to go in and they just let children get slaughtered inside the classrooms by an 18 year old who never should have had these weapons in the first place while hysterical parents were in the parking lot begging and pleading with the cops to go in and save their children. And we now learn from the police lieutenant the reason why the police didn't go inside the classrooms is because "the cops were afraid of getting shot or killed".

Which brings up another point, if police are afraid of these military grade murder weapons then these rifles have no business being in the hands of ordinary citizens because their weapons overpower the police. No person should have a weapon that can do that much damage to a human body and render law enforcement ineffective from doing what they are supposed to do which is protecting the public.     

But right wing Republicans say "oh no, you can't take our guns from us, that's our right."

No, nobody has a right to own a weapon that can do that much mayhem and carnage. Nobody should be allowed to own a weapon that mutilates the human body or that can penetrate through police vests that makes them afraid to do their job. That's giving the criminals the advantage over our law enforcement that's there to protect us. Making law enforcement irrelevant is a complete collapse of our society and Republicans are allowing this to happen. 

The 2nd Amendment was never intended to have weapons on par with the military that can wipe out dozens of people in one crack and if you could bring back our founding fathers for one day they would agree with that as well.

Public safety and our freedom comes first, and when that is infringed upon, laws are made to prevent that danger. And the direct danger is these military grade murder weapons that people are stockpiling.   

Republicans pretend that they "love the police" and they claim to "back the blue". How can they "love the blue" when they are putting cops lives in danger by having people with military grade weapons that overpower what the police have? That is not seriously backing the blue. And when you have people with more powerful weapons than the police have, we have a serious national security danger on our hands.

And it's the Republicans who are allowing this carnage to continue because they are in bed with the NRA and need their blood money to keep filling their campaign coffers each election. They are also afraid of losing votes and losing an election if they do what over 80% of Americans want which is gun reform. So, Republicans are allowing children and adults to get slaughtered and are putting law enforcement at a serious disadvantage just so they can serve their own selfish purposes. And instead of addressing the murder weapon itself, Republicans pivot to other lame excuses like "unlocked doors", "too many entrances", or "rap music". For Republicans, it's always everything else except for the gun. And they claim to be "pro life" while they shrug off children being murdered and attend an NRA convention 4 days later to glorify the weapons that murdered the children.         

What's even worse is more red states are allowing anyone to purchase these weapons with no questions asked. No background checks, no permits, no nothing. They just walk in, buy the weapons and ammo, and they are good to go. People have to jump through hoops just to get a driver's license or to secure a loan, but for an AR-15 just take it off the shelf and out the door they go. So, violent criminals, terrorists, people with mental disorders, suicidal people can buy a weapon and there is no check on them to see if they are even able to own a weapon.

So, how are Republicans "keeping Americans safe" or "strong on crime" by allowing criminals to buy weapons that overpower the police? Then these criminals use these weapons they bought to commit crimes and violence while Republicans whine the crime rate is high. Well of course crime is going to be high....Republicans are making the crime rates high by giving criminals guns to do the crimes. Republicans are weak on crime and allow violence because Republicans let criminals take over our cities with easy access to guns to commit crimes against the citizens.   

We could easily stop this carnage and mayhem today if Republicans agreed to background checks and gun reform that 80% of the American population demands. But Republicans refuse to do it because they can't go aganst the NRA that dumps millions of dollars into their campaign coffers. So, as a result more kids will get slaughtered, more criminals will commit crimes, and people with military grade weapons will continue to have an advantage over the police.

Republicans are weak on crime and safety and they need to be voted out of office so common sense gun reform can be implemented because these mass shootings can happen anywhere and they are now becoming more frequent. We shouldn't be held hostage to violence by a minority Republican party when 80% of Americans want something done about gun violence.                       

           
Texas law enforcement official defends police inaction: 'They could've been shot'



A Texas law enforcement official defended the lack of response by Uvalde police officers after a gunman walked into an elementary school and started murdering children.

Texas DPS Lt. Chris Olivarez agreed during an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer that state guidelines call for officers to disable an active shooter as quickly as possible, with or without backup, but also said police were concerned about the gunman's threat to them, reported the Houston Chronicle.

"In the active shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life," Olivarez said. "But also one thing that, of course, the American people need to understand is that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is. They are hearing gunshots. They are receiving gunshots."

"At that point," Olivarez added, "if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could've been shot, they could've been killed, and at that point that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school, so they were able to contain the gunman inside that classroom so that he was not able to go to any other portions of the school to commit any other killings."

"They could've been shot. They could've been killed," Texas police lieutenant explains why law enforcement did not go into Uvalde school right away"

https://twitter.com/i/status/1529977770931113987

[Rick Plant]

Climate change effect on Peruvian glaciers debated in German court



German judges and experts have arrived at the edge of a melting glacier high up in the Peruvian Andes to examine a complaint made by a local farmer who accuses energy giant RWE of threatening his home by contributing to global warming.

The visit by the nine-member delegation to the region is the latest stage in a case the plaintiffs hope will set a new worldwide precedent.

Leading the demand for "climate justice" is 41-year-old Peruvian farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya, who lives in the mountains close to the city of Huaraz.

He has filed suit against the German firm RWE, saying its greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for the melting of nearby glaciers.

The trip was ordered by the Higher Regional Court in the northern German city of Hamm, where Lliuya submitted his claim against RWE, having previously had his case dismissed by another court in Essen.

The delegation must determine what risk the melting glaciers pose to the city of Huaraz and its 120,000 inhabitants below the Palcacocha glacier.

"We want the RWE company to be held responsible for environmental damages," Lliuya, a farmer and tourist guide supported by the German environmental NGO Germanwatch, told AFP.

"In general they have polluted all over the world and with this claim we are trying to do something," added Lliuya.

RWE operates in 27 countries in the world, including Chile and Brazil, but not Peru.

The claim "was rejected in the first instance because it did not have any legal basis and did not respect German civil law," RWE spokesman Guido Steffen told AFP.

"We are confident this will happen again with the appeal."

RWE insists that "according to law, individual emitters are not responsible for universal processes, that are effectively global, such as climate change."

Lliuya and Germanwatch met during the COP20 climate change conference in Lima in 2014, after which the German NGO's activists traveled to Huaraz to discuss a potential claim in Germany.

Feeling 'impotent'

Lliuya says his greatest fear is that the melting glaciers result in the Palcacocha lake overflowing.

At an altitude of 4,650 meters (15,000 feet), the huge blue-turquoise lake sits below the Palcaraju and Pucaranra glaciers in the Huascaran national park, and could flood Huaraz below if it bursts its banks.

"As a farmer and citizen I don't want these glaciers to disappear, they're important," said Lliuya.

But he says he feels "impotent" because "you know you're in a risk zone and there are businesses and industries that have caused this."

Lliuya owns a half hectare "chacra" -- the Quechua word for a small farmstead -- on the slopes of the mountain.

He owns chickens and sheep and grows corn and quinoa.

Lliuya lives a modest life with his wife and two children. Their kitchen has few utensils and a wide tree trunk that serves as the dining table.

He is also afraid that a drought in the underground aquifers could threaten local agriculture and Huaraz's water provisions.

Battle in German courts

The case against RWE was brought in 2015 and the German company won at the first instance the following year. But in 2017, the court in Hamm agreed to hear the case.

The visit by experts, which was ordered in 2019, was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Germanwatch and Lliuya want RWE to pay for the costs to protect Huaraz from any eventual flooding.

"This case refers to our historic emissions of greenhouse gases, and we have always complied with governmental limits, including our carbon dioxide emissions," says RWE, which has stated a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2040.

Peru has lost 51 percent of its glaciers over the last 50 years, the national water authority said in 2020.

Noah Walker-Crawford, a climate change researcher at University College London (UCL) and Germanwatch analyst, told AFP that 1,800 people died in 1941 when Palcacocha flooded Huaraz due to a glacial avalanche.

Since then, the volume of Palcacocha dropped by 96 percent over three decades.

"But then, due to the rapid recession of the glaciers due to global warming, the lake has grown rapidly," said Walker-Crawford.

© 2022 AFP

[Rick Plant]

'Taking us all for fools': Critics slam Greg Abbott’s defense of his actions in wake of school shooting



Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott in a press conference that left reporters frustrated defended his actions and insisted his earlier praise for law enforcement's widely criticized response to the Uvalde school massacre was the result of being "misled."

"I am livid about what happened," Abbott declared, blaming others for his "recitation of what people in that room told me."

Watch: https://twitter.com/i/status/1530292988110589952

Critics aren't buying his claims.

Abbott, who's in the middle of a heated re-election campaign, appeared extremely defensive when reporters asked him questions.

“Let's be clear about one thing. None of the laws I signed this past session had any intersection with this crime at all," Abbott told reporters when asked if he would call the legislature back for a special session, as The Texas Tribune's Sewell Chan noted.

"No law that I signed allowed him to get a gun,” Abbott insisted.

"The answers fell pretty flat," opined MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, who noted the press event lasted just 36 minutes, less time than the police officers "stood outside and did nothing," which was 47 minutes.

Abbott ended the press conference with many reporters almost begging him to take more questions. As the governor left one frustrated reporter was caught on a hot mic saying "unbelievable."

Chan, who is the editor in chief of the Tribune, added on Twitter: "Abbott rejects background checks as a simplistic and ineffective fix. Wouldn't have prevented Sutherland Springs and Santa Fe shootings, he says. Tries to turn focus to broken mental health system."

Former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi on MSNBC delivered a strong rebuke to Governor Abbott's remarks.

"No amount of free flights, no amount of free caskets, no amount of mental health counseling is going to bring back any one of those murdered children," Figliuzzi said, referring to Abbott's announcement an anonymous donor is putting up $175,000 for funeral expenses of those who were murdered in the shooting and said the state will pay for mental health treatment.

Abbott also insisted that since Texas became a state it's been legal for 18-year-olds to buy long guns.

Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was murdered in the Parkland school shooting, blasted Abbott:

@GregAbbott_TX responding to a question on long rifles "it seems like only in the past decade or two we have had school shootings."  Governor, the assault weapons ban ended in 2004.  See the connection?  You have actively helped to sell millions of weapons since then.

And long guns of today, as Figliuzzi noted, are often semi-automatic "killing machines."

"The governor seems completely unable to understand that he can easily make a distinction when you're talking about whether an 18-year-old should buy an assault rifle or not. And all he cares about is a century of history in Texas on long guns. We didn't have the AR-15 style assault weapons back then. He can easily make a distinction and say, 'you can go hunting, here are the rifles you can do, you can buy, you can possess – and here's an assault-style rifle.'"

"If he thinks that people are stupid and unable to understand that there is a clear distinction between a killing machine and a hunting rifle, that he's taking us all for fools."

https://www.rawstory.com/taking-us-all-for-fools-critics-decimate-greg-abbotts-claims-and-defense-of-his-actions-in-wake-of-school-shooting/

[Rick Plant]

1 dead, 7 injured during shooting at Memorial Day festival in Oklahoma
Two juveniles were among the injured, authorities said

One person was killed and another seven were injured after a shooting broke out during a Memorial Day festival in Oklahoma.

About 1,500 people were in attendance at the festival at the Old City Square in Taft, Oklahoma, about 45 miles southeast of Tulsa, when the shooting took place early Sunday, according to a statement from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

Witnesses told investigators the gunfire erupted after an argument took place just after midnight, authorities said. One juvenile, a 9-year-old, was among the injured.

The deceased is a 39-year-old Black female, authorities said. The other seven injured range in age from 9 to 56 and sustained non-life-threatening injuries, authorities said.

The suspect, 26-year-old Skyler Buckner, turned himself in at the Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office at 4:05 p.m. on Sunday,

The Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office was in attendance at the event and immediately rendered aid to the victims, authorities said.

Officials are asking anyone who may have a tip to contact the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

Additional information on the shooting was not immediately available.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/dead-injured-shooting-memorial-day-festival-oklahoma/story?id=85055051