Category: Health – Happiness

N. Korea sends more balloons as Kim’s sister warns of ‘new counteraction’

AFP

N. Korea sends more balloons as Kim’s sister warns of ‘new counteraction’

Hieun Shin and Cat Barton – June 10, 2024

In recent weeks, North Korea has sent hundreds of balloons into the South, carrying trash like cigarette butts and toilet paper (Handout)
In recent weeks, North Korea has sent hundreds of balloons into the South, carrying trash like cigarette butts and toilet paper (Handout)

North Korea has sent hundreds more trash-carrying balloons toward South Korea, Seoul’s military said Monday, after Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister warned of further responses if the South keeps up its “psychological warfare”.

In recent weeks, North Korea has sent hundreds of balloons into the South, carrying trash like cigarette butts and toilet paper, in what it calls retaliation for balloons laden with anti-Pyongyang propaganda floated northwards by activists in the South, which Seoul legally cannot stop.

The South Korean government this month fully suspended a 2018 tension-reducing military deal and restarted loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts along the border in response to Pyongyang’s balloons, infuriating the North which warned Seoul was creating “a new crisis”.

Kim’s sister and key government spokeswoman Kim Yo Jong said in a statement released early Monday that South Korea would “suffer a bitter embarrassment of picking up waste paper without rest and it will be its daily work”.

In the statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, she slammed the activists’ leaflets as “psychological warfare” and warned that unless Seoul stopped them and called off the loudspeaker broadcasts, the North would hit back.

“If the ROK simultaneously carries out the leaflet scattering and loudspeaker broadcasting provocation over the border, it will undoubtedly witness the new counteraction of the DPRK,” she said, referring to both countries by their official n

Seoul’s military said the North had sent more than 300 trash-carrying balloons overnight, but that the winds had not worked in Pyongyang’s favour.

“Although they launched over 310 balloons many of them flew toward North Korea,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, adding that around 50 had landed in the South so far, with more expected.

They said that the latest batch of trash balloons had been found to contain waste paper and plastic, but nothing toxic.

“So far we haven’t seen any special movement within the North Korean military,” a JCS official said, adding that they had “detected signs of North Korea installing loudspeakers to broadcast to the South in the front area.”

North Korea has also used its own loudspeakers along the border since the 1960s, typically broadcasting praise of the Kim family, but it suspended them in 2018 as ties warmed

– ‘Beyond our imagination’ –

The statement from Kim’s sister shows that “North Korea is raising its voice in order to shift the blame for the current situation to South Korea and also to justify their provocation,” Kim Dong-yub, professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, told AFP.

The cycle of escalation will likely continue and “North Korea will do something beyond our imagination,” Kim said.

Pyongyang could do “something creative like throwing flour (which) will cause absolute panic in the South which they will be happy about,” Kim added, referring to the possibility of the North faking a biological attack on the South.

The tit-for-tat balloon blitz started in mid-May when activists in the South — including North Korean defectors — sent dozens of missives carrying anti-Kim propaganda and flash drives of K-pop music northwards.

In 2018, during a period of improved inter-Korean relations, the leaders of the two Koreas agreed to “completely cease all hostile acts”, including stopping the leaflets and broadcasts.

The South Korean parliament passed a law in 2020 criminalising sending leaflets to the North, but activists did not stop and the law was struck down by the Constitutional Court last year as an undue limitation on free speech.

In 2018, Seoul also dismantled some of the loudspeakers, a tactic that dates back to the Korean War and which infuriates Pyongyang, which previously threatened artillery strikes against the loudspeaker units unless they were switched off.

Both sides are now facing a risky proposition, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.

“Seoul does not want military tension at the inter-Korean border, and Pyongyang does not want outside information threatening the legitimacy of the Kim regime,” he said.

“North Korea may have already miscalculated, as South Korea’s democracy cannot simply turn off NGO balloon launches the way an autocracy would expect.”

The Success Narratives of Liberal Life Leave Little Room for Having Children

By Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman – June 10, 2024

Dr. Berg and Ms. Wiseman are the authors of the forthcoming book “What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice.”

A baby atop a podium next to a man standing at another podium.
Credit…Andrea Settimo

For young, secular, politically progressive men and women, having children has become something of an afterthought. Liberal conventional wisdom encourages people to spend their 20s on journeys of personal and professional self-discovery and self-fulfillment. Children are treated as a bonus round, something to get to only after completing a long list of achievements: getting a degree, forging a satisfying and well-established career, buying a house, cultivating the ideal romantic partnership.

The standards of readiness for family are at once so high and so vague that it’s hardly a surprise when people fail to reach them. Indeed, the data suggest that people are having children later than they used to and are having fewer than they’d like.

For progressives, waiting to have children has also become a kind of ethical imperative. Gender equality and female empowerment demand that women’s self-advancement not be sacrificed on the altar of motherhood. Securing female autonomy means that under no circumstances should a woman be rushed into a reproductive decision — whether by an eager partner or tone-deaf chatter about ticking biological clocks. Unreserved enthusiasm for having children can come across as essentially reactionary.

Over the past four years, we’ve conducted interviews and surveys with hundreds of young Americans about their attitudes toward having children. These conversations revealed that the success narratives of modern liberal life leave little room for having a family. Women who want kids often come to that realization belatedly, at some point in their early 30s — the so-called panic years. If they are lucky, their partner (if they have one) will fall in line. If they are not, they face a choice of returning to the dating pool, freezing their eggs (if they haven’t done so already), single parenting or giving up their hope of having kids of their own.

In this way, the logic of postponement that has been promoted by liberals and progressives — and bolstered by overblown optimism about reproductive technologies — robs young people of their agency. How many children they have, and even whether they have them at all, is increasingly a decision made for them by circumstance and cultural convention.

This is not just a recipe for unhappiness; it also reflects a deep confusion. There is nothing inherently unprogressive about embracing the prospect of children. Even Simone de Beauvoir, the philosopher who was among the first to critique reproduction and family as instruments for the oppression of women, acknowledged that shaping the character and intellect of another human being was “the most delicate and the most serious undertaking of all.” While certain conservative visions of family life — such as “trad wives” and Silicon Valley pronatalism — no doubt have little to offer those on the left, our fellow progressives need to stop thinking of having children as a conservative hobbyhorse and reclaim it for what it is: a fundamental human concern.

The family — recognized as the seat of customs and traditional values — has long been central to the appeal of conservatism. Yet it wasn’t that long ago that Republicans and Democrats fought over who could rightfully claim to be the party of “family values.” Bill Clinton, while campaigning for president against George H.W. Bush in 1992, assailed the Republican Party’s commitment to families as little more than hypocrisy. “Where are they,” he asked, “when there is no health care for pregnant women? When too many children are born with low birth weights?” Mr. Clinton went on to announce a 14-point “American Family Values Agenda.”

But in time, liberals and progressives came to shy away from publicly embracing the American family as a symbol and an ideal. After Mr. Clinton was impeached in the wake of his own family-values hypocrisy and George W. Bush was elected with the help of energized evangelical voters, family-friendly rhetoric became anathema to liberals — perceived as phony, intrusive and toxic. (The notable exception was gay marriage, whose legalization was won with the help of arguments that promoted the virtues of families.) Today, the left proudly defends the sacrosanct right to abortion and reproductive justice while almost entirely sidestepping the question of whether having children is a worthy project to begin with.

The stark polarization of today’s public discourse has only heightened the left’s wariness of children, both privately and politically. Progressive policy defeats are often met with anti-natalist grandstanding. Members of the ecological activist group BirthStrike, founded in 2018, declared that they were protesting climate inaction by refusing to have kids. The following year, shortly after proposing legislation for a Green New Deal, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York broadcast progressives’ hesitancy to reproduce in the face of climate change to her 2.5 million Instagram followers when she said, “It does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?”

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, has also made liberals and progressives more uneasy with the idea of starting a family. A year after Dobbs, the reproductive-rights journalist Andrea González-Ramírez wrote that she had been contemplating having children in her early 30s, before the Supreme Court’s decision put an end to all that: “I have never been sure that I desire to be a mom, let alone that I desire it enough to assume the risks. These days, however, that door is shut. I choose myself.”

That choice is not uncommon. In a recent study, 34 percent of women ages 18 to 39 reported that they or someone they know had “decided not to get pregnant due to concerns about managing pregnancy-related medical emergencies.” That might sound like a worry about abortion access, but the study suggested that Dobbs intensified ambivalence about having children more generally. Indeed, of the women who said they were forgoing having children because of the Dobbs ruling, about half lived in states where abortion rights were still protected.

One can’t help noting the irony: In permitting the conservative movement to alienate them from the question of whether they want to have and raise children, these liberals and progressives are allowing the right to shape their reproductive agendas in yet another way.

But the partisan framing of the issue is flawed at a more fundamental level. The question of children ultimately transcends politics. In deciding whether to have children, we confront a philosophical challenge: Is life, however imperfect and however challenging — however fraught with political disagreement and disaster — worth living?

To be sure, having children is not the only way to address this question. But having children remains the most basic and accessible way for most of us to affirm the value of our lives and that of others. This is in part because becoming a parent represents one of the greatest responsibilities one human being can assume for another. And it is also because the perpetuation of human life is the condition of possibility for every other thing we care about.

Committing oneself to long-term leftist causes like economic, environmental, racial and social justice is more than just compatible with embracing children and family life. It presupposes a willingness to take personal and collective responsibility for the next generation — raising, nurturing and educating those who will decide the fate of our country and our planet.

Surely, progressives and conservatives will give as vastly different answers to the question of what raising children ought to look like as they will to the question of how American society ought to be governed. But progressives must not let partisan loyalties stop them from thinking about the ways in which having children does or does not express their values, and what shape they really want their lives to take. Children are too important to allow them to fall victim to the culture wars.

Anastasia Berg is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and an editor of the magazine The Point, where Rachel Wiseman is the managing editor. They are the authors of the forthcoming book “What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice.”

The Day My Old Church Canceled Me Was a Very Sad Day


The New York Times – Opinion

The Day My Old Church Canceled Me Was a Very Sad Day

By David French, Opinion Columnist – June 9, 2024

An image of a blurry American flag and of a small cross hanging in a car.
Credit…Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

This week, the leaders of the Presbyterian Church in America will gather in Richmond, Va., for their annual General Assembly. The Presbyterian Church in America is a small, theologically conservative Christian denomination that was my family’s church home for more than 15 years.

It just canceled me.

I am now deemed too divisive to speak to a gathering of Christians who share my faith. I was scheduled to speak about the challenges of dealing with toxic polarization, but I was considered too polarizing.

I was originally invited to join three other panelists on the topic of “how to be supportive of your pastor and church leaders in a polarized political year.” One of the reasons I was invited was precisely that I’ve been the target of intense attacks online and in real life.

The instant my participation was announced, those attacks started up again. There were misleading essays, vicious tweets, letters and even a parody song directed at the denomination and at me. The message was clear: Get him off the stage.

And that’s what the conference organizers chose to do. They didn’t just cancel me. They canceled the entire panel. But the reason was obvious: My presence would raise concerns about the peace and unity of the church.

Our family joined the P.C.A. denomination in 2004. We lived in Philadelphia and attended Tenth Presbyterian Church in Center City. At the time, the denomination fit us perfectly. I’m conservative theologically and politically, and in 2004 I was still a partisan Republican. At the same time, however, I perceived the denomination as relatively apolitical. I never heard political messages from the pulpit, and I worshiped alongside Democratic friends.

When we moved to Tennessee in 2006, we selected our house in part because it was close to a P.C.A. church, and that church became the center of our lives. On Sundays we attended services, and Monday through Friday our kids attended the school our church founded and supported.

We loved the people in that church, and they loved us. When I deployed to Iraq in 2007, the entire church rallied to support my family and to support the men I served with. They flooded our small forward operating base with care packages, and back home, members of the church helped my wife and children with meals, car repairs and plenty of love and companionship in anxious times.

Two things happened that changed our lives, however, and in hindsight they’re related. First, in 2010, we adopted a 2-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Second, in 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign.

There was no way I could support Trump. It wasn’t just his obvious lack of character that troubled me; he was opening the door to a level of extremism and malice in Republican politics that I’d never encountered. Trump’s rise coincided with the rise of the alt-right.

I was a senior writer for National Review at the time, and when I wrote pieces critical of Trump, members of the alt-right pounced, and they attacked us through our daughter. They pulled pictures of her from social media and photoshopped her into gas chambers and lynchings. Trolls found my wife’s blog on a religious website called Patheos and filled the comments section with gruesome pictures of dead and dying Black victims of crime and war. We also received direct threats.

The experience was shocking. At times, it was terrifying. And so we did what we always did in times of trouble: We turned to our church for support and comfort. Our pastors and close friends came to our aid, but support was hardly universal. The church as a whole did not respond the way it did when I deployed. Instead, we began encountering racism and hatred up close, from people in our church and in our church school.

The racism was grotesque. One church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia. A teacher at the school asked my son if we had purchased his sister for a “loaf of bread.” We later learned that there were coaches and teachers who used racial slurs to describe the few Black students at the school. There were terrible incidents of peer racism, including a student telling my daughter that slavery was good for Black people because it taught them how to live in America. Another told her that she couldn’t come to our house to play because “my dad said Black people are dangerous.”

There were disturbing political confrontations. A church elder came up to my wife and me after one service to criticize our opposition to Trump and told me to “get your wife under control” after she contrasted his support for Trump with his opposition to Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair. Another man confronted me at the communion table.

On several occasions, men approached my wife when I was out of town, challenging her to defend my writing and sometimes quoting a far-right pastor named Douglas Wilson. Wilson is a notorious Christian nationalist and slavery apologist who once wrote that abolitionists were “driven by a zealous hatred of the word of God” and that “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the war or since.”

We also began to see the denomination itself with new eyes. To my shame, the racism and extremism within the denomination were invisible to us before our own ordeal. But there is a faction of explicitly authoritarian Christian nationalists in the church, and some of that Christian nationalism has disturbing racial elements underpinning it.

A member of the denomination wrote “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” one of the most popular Christian nationalist books of the Trump era. It argues that “no nation (properly conceived) is composed of two or more ethnicities” and that “to exclude an out-group is to recognize a universal good for man.”

I do not want to paint with too broad a brush. Our pastors and close friends continued to stand with us. Our church disciplined the man who confronted me about Trump during communion. And most church members didn’t follow politics closely and had no idea about any of the attacks we faced.

But for us, church no longer felt like home. We could withstand the trolls online. We could guard against physical threats. But it was hard to live without any respite, and the targeting of my children was a bridge too far. So we left for a wonderful multiethnic church in Nashville. We didn’t leave Christianity; we left a church that inflicted harm on my family.

I still have many friends in the Presbyterian Church in America, people who are fighting the very forces that drove us from the church. In March, one of those friends reached out and asked if I’d join a panel at this year’s General Assembly.

I agreed to come. The P.C.A. extended a formal invitation for me to join a panel with three church elders to speak at a session before the main event. I knew the invitation would be controversial. Members of the denomination have continued to attack me online. But that was part of the point of the panel. My experience was directly relevant to others who might find themselves in the cross hairs of extremists.

The anger against me wasn’t simply over my opposition to Trump. It was directly related to the authoritarian turn in white evangelical politics. My commitment to individual liberty and pluralism means that I defend the civil liberties of all Americans, including people with whom I have substantial disagreements. A number of Republican evangelicals are furious at me, for example, for defending the civil liberties of drag queens and L.G.B.T.Q. families. A writer for The Federalist ranted that granting me a platform was akin to “giving the wolf a brand-new wool coat and microphone and daring the sheep to object.”

The panel was announced on May 9. On May 14, the denomination caved. It canceled the panel, and in its public statement, I was to blame. I was sacrificed on the altar of peace and unity. But it is a false peace and a false unity if extremists can bully a family out of a church and then block the church from hearing one of its former members describe his experience. It is a false peace and a false unity if it is preserved by granting the most malicious members of the congregation veto power over church events.

When I left the Republican Party, I thought a shared faith would preserve my denominational home. But I was wrong. Race and politics trumped truth and grace, and now I’m no longer welcome in the church I loved.

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Not Paying Taxes

By Paul Krugman, Opinion Columnist  – June 10, 2024

An American flag being flown upside-down next to the flag of the Heritage Foundation.
Outside the Heritage Foundation in Washington on May 31.Credit…Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

After Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, the Heritage Foundation — a right-wing think tank that has, among other things, produced the Project 2025 agenda, a blueprint for policy if Trump wins — flew an upside-down American flag, which has become an emblem for support of MAGA in general and election denial in particular.

This action may have shocked some old-line conservatives who still thought of Heritage as a serious institution, but Heritage is, after all, just a think tank. It’s not as if upside-down flags were being flown by people we expect to defend our constitutional order, like Supreme Court justices.

Oh, wait.

But Heritage’s embrace of what amounts to an attack on democracy is a useful symbol of one of the really troubling developments of this election as it heads into the final stretch. Heritage presents itself as a defender of freedom, but its real mission has always been to produce arguments — frequently based on shoddy research — for low taxes on rich people. And its tacit endorsement of lawlessness illustrates the way many of America’s plutocrats — both in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street — have, after flirting with the crank candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., been rallying around Trump.

Why would billionaires support Trump? It’s not as if they’ve done badly under President Biden. Stock prices — which Trump predicted would crash if he lost in 2020 — have soared. High interest rates, which are a burden on many Americans, are if anything a net positive for wealthy people with money to invest. And I doubt that the superrich are suffering much from higher prices for fast food.

Wealthy Americans, though, are surely betting they’ll pay lower taxes if Trump wins.

Biden and his team have offered fairly explicit guidance about their tax agenda, which would directly raise taxes on high-income Americans and also raise corporate taxes, which would indirectly be mainly a tax on the wealthy. These measures wouldn’t produce taxes at the top remotely comparable to what they were during the Eisenhower years, when the top marginal income tax rate was 91 percent and large estates could face inheritance taxes as high as 77 percent. Still, Biden’s plans, if carried out, would make the rich a bit less rich.

Trump has been far less explicit, but he clearly wants to retain his 2017 tax cut in full, and his allies in Congress are committed not just to tax cuts but to starving the Internal Revenue Service of resources, which would allow more wealthy Americans to evade the taxes they legally owe.

So billionaires aren’t wrong in thinking they’ll pay less in taxes if Trump wins. But why aren’t they more concerned about the bigger picture?

After all, even if all you care about is money, Trump’s agenda should make you very worried. His advisers’ plans to deport millions of immigrants (supposedly only the undocumented, but do you really believe many legal residents wouldn’t get caught up in the dragnets?) would shrink the U.S. labor force and be hugely disruptive. His protectionist proposals (which would be very different from Biden’s targeted measures) could mean an all-out global trade war. If he’s able to make good on them, his attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve risk much more serious inflation than anything we’ve experienced in recent years.

Beyond all that, Trump will almost certainly try to weaponize the justice system to go after his perceived enemies. Only someone completely ignorant of history would imagine himself safe from that kind of weaponization — even if Trump considers you an ally now, that can change in an instant.

And if you’ve been following Trump’s rantings, you know that his rhetoric is getting less rational and more vindictive by the week. Yet his support among billionaires seems if anything to be consolidating.

So what’s going on? Here’s what I think, although it’s admittedly speculative.

First, America’s oligarchs probably believe that their wealth and influence would protect them from the arbitrary exercise of power. Trump and company might turn corrupt law enforcement and a cowed judiciary against other people, but surely not them! By the time they realized how wrong they were, it would be too late.

As I’ve written before, the superrich can be remarkably obtuse and ignorant of history.

Second, at some level I don’t really think it’s about the money. How much difference does it make to a billionaire’s quality of life if he has to settle for a slightly smaller superyacht? At the top of the pyramid, wealth is largely about status and self-importance; as Tom Wolfe wrote long ago, it’s about “seeing ’em jump.”

And when politicians don’t jump, when they don’t treat the very wealthy with the deference and admiration they consider their due, some of them become enraged. We saw this when many Wall Streeters turned on President Barack Obama — after he helped bail them out in the financial crisis — because they felt insulted by his occasional criticisms.

Biden is hardly a class warrior, but he clearly doesn’t worship the superrich. And all too many of them are turning to Trump out of sheer pettiness.

In Secret Recordings, Alito Endorses Nation of ‘Godliness.’ Roberts Talks of Pluralism.

The two justices were surreptitiously recorded at a Supreme Court gala last week by a woman posing as a Catholic conservative.

Abbie VanSickle, Reporting from Washington – June 10, 2024

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., wearing a black robe.
“One side or the other is going to win,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said in a recording when talking about differences between the left and the right in the United States. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told a woman posing as a Catholic conservative last week that compromise in America between the left and right might be impossible and then agreed with the view that the nation should return to a place of godliness.

“One side or the other is going to win,” Justice Alito told the woman, Lauren Windsor, at an exclusive gala at the Supreme Court. “There can be a way of working, a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”

Ms. Windsor pressed Justice Alito further. “I think that the solution really is like winning the moral argument,” she told him, according to the edited recordings of Justice Alito and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., which were posted and distributed widely on social media on Monday. “Like, people in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that, to return our country to a place of godliness.”

“I agree with you, I agree with you,” he responded.

The justice’s comments appeared to be in marked contrast to those of Chief Justice Roberts, who was also secretly recorded at the same event but who pushed back against Ms. Windsor’s assertion that the court had an obligation to lead the country on a more “moral path.”

“Would you want me to be in charge of putting the nation on a more moral path?” the chief justice said. “That’s for people we elect. That’s not for lawyers.”

Ms. Windsor pressed the chief justice about religion, saying, “I believe that the founders were godly, like were Christians, and I think that we live in a Christian nation and that our Supreme Court should be guiding us in that path.”

Chief Justice Roberts quickly answered, “I don’t know if that’s true.”

He added: “I don’t know that we live in a Christian nation. I know a lot of Jewish and Muslim friends who would say maybe not, and it’s not our job to do that.”

The chief justice also said he did not think polarization in the country was irreparable, pointing out that the United States had managed crises as severe as the Civil War and the Vietnam War.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., wearing a black robe.
Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in a recording, pushed back against the notion that the United States is a “Christian nation.”Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

When Ms. Windsor pressed him on whether he thought that there was “a role for the court” in “guiding us toward a more moral path,” the chief justice’s answer was immediate.

“No, I think the role for the court is deciding the cases,” he said.

The justices were secretly recorded at an annual black-tie event for the Supreme Court Historical Society, a charity aimed at preserving the court’s history and educating the public about the role of the court. The gala was open only to members, not journalists, and tickets cost $500.

Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but the charity released a statement on Monday that its “policy is to ensure that all attendees, including the justices, are treated with respect.”

The charity added: “We condemn the surreptitious recording of justices at the event, which is inconsistent with the entire spirit of the evening.”

Ms. Windsor describes herself as a documentary filmmaker and “advocacy journalist.” She has a reputation for approaching conservatives, including former Vice President Mike Pence, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio and Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia.

She said in an interview on Monday that she felt she had no other way to report on the candid thoughts of the justices.

“We have a court that has refused to submit to any accountability whatsoever — they are shrouded in secrecy,” Ms. Windsor said. “I don’t know how, other than going undercover, I would have been able to get answers to these questions.”

Ms. Windsor would not say how she recorded the encounters, other than that she did not tell the justices she was a journalist or that they were being recorded. She said she felt she needed to record the justices secretly to ensure that her account would be believed.

“I wanted to get them on the record,” she said. “So recording them was the only way to have proof of that encounter. Otherwise, it’s just my word against theirs.”

Some journalism ethics experts questioned her tactics.

Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, said that the episode called to mind the tactics used by Project Veritas, a conservative group well known for using covert recordings to embarrass its political opponents.

“I think it’s fair to say that most ethical journalists deplore those kind of techniques,” Ms. Kirtley said. “How do you expect your readers or your viewers to trust you if you’re getting your story through deception?”

Bob Steele, a retired ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute, has written ethics guidelines for journalists on when it is appropriate to use secret recordings or to conceal their identities as reporters.

“I don’t believe that in this particular case the level of misrepresentation of her identity and the surreptitious audio recording is justifiable,” Mr. Steele said.

The secret recording is the latest controversy around the Supreme Court and its justices, particularly Justice Alito, who has faced recent revelations that provocative flags flew outside two of his homes. The flags raised concerns about an appearance of bias in cases currently pending before the court tied to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

In the weeks following the attack, an upside-down American flag, a symbol used by Trump supporters who contested the 2020 election results, flew outside the Alitos’ suburban Virginia home. Last summer, a flag carried by Capitol rioters, known as an “Appeal to Heaven” flag, was flown at their New Jersey vacation home.

Justice Alito has declined to recuse himself from any of the Jan. 6-related cases and has said that it was his wife who flew the flags.

This is also not the first time the historical society has been in the spotlight. The group, which has raised millions of dollars in recent decades, made news after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade when a former anti-abortion leader came forward to say that he had used the historical society to encourage wealthy donors, whom he called “stealth missionaries,” to give money and mingle with the justices.

Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting. 

South Korea to resume loudspeaker broadcasts over border in balloon row

BBC News

South Korea to resume loudspeaker broadcasts over border in balloon row

Shaimaa Khalil and Thomas Mackintosh – June 9, 2024

A balloon carrying various objects including what appeared to be trash, believed to have been sent by North Korea, is pictured at the sea off Incheon, South Korea
The move comes as North Korea continues to send balloons carrying rubbish across the border into South Korea [Reuters]

South Korea has said it will resume propaganda broadcasts against North Korea for the first time in six years in response to Pyongyang’s campaign of sending rubbish-filled balloons across the border.

Over 300 North Korean balloons were detected over Saturday and Sunday with around 80 landing in the South carrying scrap paper and plastic sheets.

North Korea is yet to respond to the announcement, but Pyongyang considers the loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts an act of war and has threatened to blow them up in the past.

Last month North Korea appeared to send at least 200 balloons carrying rubbish over the border in retaliation for propaganda leaflets sent from the south.

I recent weeks Pyongyang has launched around one thousand sacks of waste paper, cigarette butts and excrement across the border
South Korean officials warn the public not to touch the balloons, but to report them [Reuters]

Over the weekend North Korea resumed its waste campaign against its neighbour by sending balloons carrying sacks of rubbish over the border into South Korea.

It was in retaliation for activists in the South sending 10 balloons containing leaflets critical of the North Korean regime on Friday, according to AFP news agency.

South Korea’s military said there are no more balloons in the air adding that no hazardous materials have been found.

It has warned the public not to touch the balloons and to be aware of falling objects.

The public should report any sightings to the nearest police or military unit, the military added.

Following the latest batch of balloons, South Korea’s National Security Council said loudspeaker broadcasts on the border would resume on Sunday after agreeing to restart the loudspeakers for the first time since 2018.

On Thursday an activist group in South Korea said it had flown balloons into North Korea carrying leaflets criticising the leader Kim Jong Un, dollar bills and USB sticks with K-pop music videos – which is banned in the North.

In recent years, the broadcasts have included news from both Koreas and abroad as well as information on democracy and life in South Korea.

The South Korean military claims the broadcasts can be heard as much as 10km (6.2 miles) across the border in the day and up to 24km (15 miles) at night.

In May, a South Korea-based activist group claimed it had sent 20 balloons carrying anti-Pyongyang leaflets and USB sticks containing Korean pop music and music videos across the border.

Seoul’s parliament passed a law in December 2020 that criminalises the launch of anti-Pyongyang leaflets, but critics have raised concerns related to freedom of speech and human rights.

North Korea has also launched balloons southward that attacked Seoul’s leaders.

In one such launch in 2016, the balloons reportedly carried toilet paper, cigarette butts and rubbish. Seoul police described them as “hazardous biochemical substances”.

These are the 10 most bacteria-polluted beaches in America, group says

Fox Weather

These are the 10 most bacteria-polluted beaches in America, group says

Hillary Andrews – June 9, 2024

One of nation's most polluted beaches making California residents sick

The Surfrider Foundation just released its list of the top 10 most bacteria-polluted beaches in America during 2023. At two beaches, every sample taken throughout the year exceeded state health standards.

The organization set up the Blue Water Task Force (BWTF) which sampled water at 567 different sites across beaches, oceans, estuaries and freshwater creeks throughout the U.S. They collected 9,538 samples. About 22% of the samples showed high bacteria levels and 64% of the almost 600 beaches monitored didn’t pass state health standards at least once.

According to the report, funding is leading to a reduction in the number of beaches being monitored by government agencies on a regular basis.

“Chronic underfunding has forced states to prioritize which beaches to monitor, reduce sampling frequency, and limit beach seasons in order to stretch their federal grant dollars as far as possible,” stated the Surfrider’s Clean Water Report 2023.

“Most chapter water testing programs are designed to fill in the gaps and extend the coverage of state and local agency beach monitoring programs,” the report continued. “Surfrider volunteers are not only testing beaches that are not covered by agencies, but they are also monitoring potential sources of pollution, such as stormwater outlets, rivers, and creeks that discharge onto our beaches.”

Some beaches only monitor in the summer. About 67% of the samples showed low bacteria levels and 11% showed medium levels.

“The majority of the water samples that failed to meet health standards were collected from freshwater sources, such as rivers, creeks, and marshes, which are influenced by storm water runoff, or at beaches near these outlets,” wrote Surfrider. “These results are consistent with national trends, which show that storm water runoff is the number one cause of beach closures and swimming advisories in the U.S.“

FECAL MATTER POSED RISK AT 90% OF TEXAS BEACHES LAST YEAR, REPORT SAYS. HERE’S HOW TO TRACK IT

Stormwater washes chemicals and other pollutants from streets and lawns into local waterways and down to the beach, the group said. Stormwater and flooding after heavy rain can also cause wastewater systems, like cesspools, septic systems and sewers, to fail and send untreated sewage into rivers, streams, oceans and lakes.

“Nearly 10 trillion gallons of untreated stormwater runoff flow into U.S. waterways every year, carrying a cocktail of pollutants including road dust, oil, animal waste, fertilizers, and other chemicals,” Surfrider wrote. “Sewage can contain bacteria, viruses, and parasites that make people sick with gastrointestinal symptoms, rashes, skin and eye infections, flu-like symptoms, and worse.”

Both Imperial Beach in San Diego County, California, and Nawiliwili Stream at Kalapaki Bay in Lihue, Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, failed every test. That means that bacterial levels were so high, the state deems the beach unsafe for swimming.

HOW TO TRACK YOUR BEACH’S WATER QUALITY

Authorities have closed Imperial Beach for 930 days, according to local media. However, closing the beach to swimming still won’t keep everyone safe.

“These closures don’t fully prevent people from getting sick as some toxins are aerosolizing and contaminating the air in Imperial Beach and other nearby border communities,” said Surfrider. “People are getting sick just by breathing the air as they go to work, school, and even trying to enjoy their own backyards.”

South Bay Urgent Care in Imperial Beach told FOX 5 San Diego that in the past year the number of patients needing breathing treatments grew by 140%.

RAINWATER POLLUTED BY FOREVER CHEMICALS WORLDWIDE, STUDY SAYS

File: A dog competes during the 5th annual Loews Coronado bay resort surf dog competition in Imperial Beach, south of San Diego, California on May 22, 2010.
File: A dog competes during the 5th annual Loews Coronado bay resort surf dog competition in Imperial Beach, south of San Diego, California on May 22, 2010.

“Every day is another patient getting sick, and we don’t want that anymore. We see newborns come in. It’s tough for people over 100,” Dr. Mathew Dickson said. “They’re coughing, eyes are running, eyes are watering, and they’re wheezing a lot.”

He is on a task force researching long-term effects of pollution exposure.

The Scripps Institute of Oceanography linked 34,000 illnesses to Imperial Beach pollution in 2017.

“Coastal waters along Tijuana, Mexico, and Imperial Beach, USA, are frequently polluted by millions of gallons of untreated sewage and stormwater runoff,” the research stated. “Entering coastal waters causes over 100 million global annual illnesses, but CWP (coastal water pollution) has the potential to reach many more people on land via transfer in sea spray aerosol.”

Hurricane Hilary alone released 2.5 billion gallons of contaminated stormwater through the Tijuana River Valley, according to the Clean Water Report. Volunteers found bacterial levels almost 100 times higher than California’s health standard for safe recreation.

TOXIC ALGAE BLOOM BECOMING DEADLY FOR SEA LIONS, DOLPHINS IN PACIFIC OCEAN

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - AUGUST 19: A surfer walks out of the Pacific Ocean at Ocean Beach shortly after sunset with Hurricane Hilary approaching on August 19, 2023 in San Diego, California. Southern California is under a first-ever tropical storm warning as Hurricane Hilary approaches with parts of California, Arizona and Nevada preparing for flooding and heavy rains.
File: A surfer walks out of the Pacific Ocean at Ocean Beach shortly after sunset with Hurricane Hilary approaching on August 19, 2023 in San Diego, California.

HOW TO WATCH FOX WEATHER

A Scripps study from 2021 pointed out that in the U.S. alone, an estimated 90 million cases of waterborne illness of the gastrointestinal tract, ear, eye, respiratory tract and skin occur every year from recreational contact. The estimated cost of that is $2 billion every year.

“These priority beaches represent a variety of recreational waters and access points that are important to local communities, yet water quality conditions could be putting public health at risk,” Surfrider said. “No one should get sick from spending time at the beach.”

Other beaches and waterways on the list are recreational waters and access points to rivers and bays for paddleboarders and kayakers in local communities.

Nawiliwili Stream in Hawaii flows across a Kauai, Hawaii, beach where families bring kids to play in the calm shallow waters, according to Surfrider.

HOW FLOODWATER CAN MAKE YOU VERY SICK

Linda Mar Beach in Pacifica, California is a popular surf break. Kahalulu on Oahu in Hawaii is an access point for snorkeling, boating and fishing in Kaneohe Bay.

File: Beachgoers walk at Linda Mar Beach in Pacifica, Calif., on Wednesday, June 15, 2023.
File: Beachgoers walk at Linda Mar Beach in Pacifica, Calif., on Wednesday, June 15, 2023.

The BWTF posts recent water test results on their website. The EPA has a list of all beaches that are monitored. The EPA also posts beach closures and advisories along with water test results.

Alex Jones’ lies about the Sandy Hook shooting may have finally caught up with him

MSNBC

Alex Jones’ lies about the Sandy Hook shooting may have finally caught up with him

Clarissa-Jan Lim – June 8, 2024

Tyler Sizemore

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has agreed to sell his assets to help pay the massive debt he owes to families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, whom he has spent years spreading lies about and defaming.

Jones’ decision to liquidate his assets this week ends his pursuit of Chapter 11 bankruptcy as part of an effort to avoid paying the $1.5 billion he owes the families after they successfully sued him for defamation in Texas and Connecticut. The move also could see him lose ownership of Infowars, the far-right platform from which he’s peddled lies that the deadly Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a “hoax” perpetrated to strip Americans of their Second Amendment rights. Proceeds from the sale of his assets would go to his creditors and the families.

“Alex Jones has hurt so many people,” Christopher Mattei, who represents the Sandy Hook families, said in a statement. “The Connecticut families have fought for years to hold him responsible no matter the cost and at great personal peril. Their steadfast focus on meaningful accountability, and not just money, is what has now brought him to the brink of justice in the way that matters most.”

Jones’ Chapter 7 liquidation will not cover the debt that he owes the shooting victims’ families, but it is an outcome they have been seeking. Last year, Jones offered the families a $55 million settlement, a fraction of the $1.5 billion he owes them. The families filed a counterproposal that sought to liquidate nearly all his assets, including Free Speech Systems, the company that owns Infowars. A judge is set to rule on June 14 as to whether Free Speech Systems will be liquidated.

The far-right radio show host spent part of his Friday broadcast railing against the latest development in his financial troubles, NBC News reported. He also lamented Infowars’ potential impending doom, though he suggested he may “relaunch” a similar platform.

After Trump felony conviction, Biden leads for 1st time in months — but not by much

Yahoo! News

New Yahoo News/YouGov poll: After Trump felony conviction, Biden leads for 1st time in months — but not by much

Slightly more Americans think Donald Trump should get a prison sentence (43%) than think he should not (40%).

Andrew Romano, National Correspondent – June 7, 2024

President Biden delivers a speech during the U.S. ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Colleville-sur-Mer, France.
President Biden at Colleville-sur-Mer, France, on June 6. (Daniel Cole/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

In the wake of former President Donald Trump’s felony conviction last week for falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment to a porn star, President Biden (46%) now leads his Republican rival (44%) in a two-way race for the White House for the first time since October 2023, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.

The past six Yahoo News/YouGov surveys showed Trump leading or tied with Biden among registered voters in a head-to-head matchup. At 46%, Biden’s current level of support is his highest since August 2023.

Yet even with Trump’s felony conviction factored in, the 2024 contest remains so close that Biden’s narrow lead vanishes once voters are given third-party options on a follow-up question.

In that scenario, Trump loses just 1 point of support, slipping to 43%; Biden (42%) sheds 4 points and falls behind.

Meanwhile, 9% of voters opt for “another candidate” — and then, when presented with specific names to choose from, they primarily select independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (4%) followed by independent Cornel West, Libertarian Chase Oliver and Green Party nominee Jill Stein at 1% apiece.

Most Americans say jury reached ‘right verdict’ but haven’t changed their views of Trump

The survey of 1,854 U.S. adults, which was conducted from June 3 to 6, highlights the fine margins that will likely decide this year’s Trump-Biden rematch.

The problem for Biden is not that Americans believe Trump is innocent. In fact, far more of them — a 51% majority — think the New York jury reached the “right verdict” in Trump’s hush money case than think the verdict was “wrong” (30%). Likewise, more Americans than ever (54%) now believe Trump committed the crime for which he was on trial.

Overall, 52% say Trump’s conviction was a “fair outcome meant to hold him accountable for his own actions”; just 35% who say it was “an unfair outcome meant to damage him politically.” And 49% think Trump was “more of a criminal” in the trial, versus 34% who consider him “more of a victim.”

But Trump’s conviction hasn’t really changed how Americans see him. For instance:

● 42% of Americans now rate Trump favorably, and 53% rate him unfavorably — slightly better than his 41%-55% rating last month, before the conviction.

● 40% of Americans now consider Trump “fit to serve another term as president,” and 47% do not — essentially identical to his 41%-46% split in May.

● And 44% of Americans now say the criminal charges against Trump are a “big problem” when it comes to his fitness to be president — unchanged from his number in April, the last time the question was asked.

In other words, public opinion of Trump is so baked in at this point that not even his new status as America’s first “felon president” can alter it. And this dynamic is especially true among those least inclined to accept unflattering information about the former president: his supporters.

Trump supporters no longer consider hush money payments to be ‘serious crime’

On previous Yahoo News/YouGov surveys, a small subset of Trump supporters expressed uncertainty about how they might view a potential conviction in the hush money case — and indicated possible second thoughts about voting for Trump in that scenario.

In April, for example, 17% of Trump supporters said he should not be allowed to serve as president again “if convicted of a serious crime in the coming months.” And in May, 14% indicated they would shift away from supporting Trump if he were to be “convicted of a crime in the hush money case” (with 10% unsure who they would support, 4% saying they would not vote at all and 1% flipping to Biden).

As a result, Biden led Trump by 7 points in the May poll — 46% to 39% — when voters were asked which candidate they would back in the hypothetical case of a Trump conviction.

Obviously, the vast majority of Trump’s previously squeamish supporters have decided to stick with him now that his conviction is a reality.

But why, and how? By changing their view of the crime itself. In six surveys conducted by Yahoo News and YouGov between June 2023 and April 2024, at least a quarter of Republicans (between 25% and 29%) said they considered “falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to a porn star” to be a “serious crime.”

But last month, that number dropped to 18%. Now, post-conviction, it is just 9%.

In contrast, the corresponding “serious crime” number among Democrats is 79% — essentially unchanged over the past year.

Similarly, 81% of current Trump supporters think the jury reached the wrong verdict last week; 83% say Trump was more of a victim than a criminal in the trial; and 87% believe the outcome was unfair and meant to damage him politically.

Given that, just 2% of Trump supporters now say he should not be allowed to serve as president after being convicted of “34 felony counts of falsifying business records.” Again, the number of Trump supporters who said the same in May — assuming a conviction for a “serious crime” — was 17%.

The risks ahead for Trump

Still, the new Yahoo News/YouGov poll does show a small shift in Biden’s direction — a result consistent with other post-conviction surveys.

The shift is so modest that it’s well within the poll’s 2.8% margin of error. And it disappears entirely when swing voters can choose third-party candidates instead of the incumbent.

Yet at the very least, Biden’s improvement on a two-way ballot suggests that being found guilty of 34 felony counts is not good news for Trump.

The next beat in the former president’s legal saga is his sentencing, which is currently scheduled for July 11. Slightly more Americans think Trump should get a prison sentence (43%) than think he should not (40%).

After that, Trump faces three additional criminal trials, all of which have been delayed indefinitely. Yet a full 64% of Americans now say it is important “that voters get a verdict in Trump’s trials before the 2024 general election” — versus just 25% who say it is not important.

Trump’s conviction in the hush money case may have even made some otherwise skeptical Democrats and independents more inclined to believe that Trump is guilty of other crimes. The number of Americans who now think Trump “conspired to overturn the results of a presidential election,” for instance, has grown from 45% to 50% since January (which includes a 79% to 88% uptick among Democrats, plus a 45% to 50% uptick among independents). And belief that Trump is guilty of “taking highly classified documents from the White House and obstructing efforts to retrieve them” has increased from 48% to 52% over the same period (with similar gains among Democrats and independents).

Whether these changes carry any political consequences for the former president remains to be seen. Legal experts think it’s unlikely that any of Trump’s other trials will conclude before Election Day. Yet if they did, and if Trump were “convicted of ANOTHER serious crime in the coming months,” voters again say they would favor Biden by a 46% to 40% margin.

Records tumble across Southwest U.S. as temperatures soar well into triple digits

Associated Press

Records tumble across Southwest U.S. as temperatures soar well into triple digits

Scott Sonner – June 6, 2024

Sofia Ramirez, left, of Mexico drinks water as she waits in line to take a photo at the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign in Las Vegas Thursday, June 6, 2024. (Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP)
Sofia Ramirez, left, of Mexico drinks water as she waits in line to take a photo at the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign in Las Vegas Thursday, June 6, 2024. (Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP)
Dean Leano takes a water break while photographing tourists at the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign in Las Vegas Thursday, June 6, 2024. (Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP)
Dean Leano takes a water break while photographing tourists at the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign in Las Vegas Thursday, June 6, 2024. (Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP)

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Records tumbled across the U.S. Southwest on Thursday as temperatures soared past 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) in some areas, and the region’s first heat wave of the year was expected to maintain its grip for at least another day.

Although the official start of summer was still two weeks away, roughly half of Arizona, California and Nevada were under an excessive heat alert, which the National Weather Service said it was extending until Friday evening.

At a campaign rally for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in Phoenix, 11 people fell ill from heat exhaustion by late afternoon and were taken to the hospital, where they were treated and released, fire officials said.

The weather service in Phoenix described the city experiencing “dangerously hot conditions.”

And in Las Vegas, the Clark County Fire Department said it has responded to at least 12 calls for heat exposure since midnight Wednesday. Nine of those calls ended with a patient needing treatment in a hospital. A spokesperson for the county said the number is likely higher, as the heat can also play a role in other types of calls to the fire department, including those related to alcohol intoxication or when conditions like fainting, dizziness or nausea are reported.

New record highs Thursday included 113 F (45 C) in Phoenix, breaking the old mark of 111 F (44 C) set in 2016, and 111 F (44 C) in Las Vegas, topping the 110 F (43 C) last reached in 2010. Other areas of Arizona, California and Nevada also broke records by a few degrees.

The heat has arrived weeks earlier than usual even in places farther to the north at higher elevations — areas typically a dozen degrees cooler. That includes Reno, Nevada, where the normal high of 81 F (27 C) for this time of year soared to a record 98 F (37 C) on Thursday.

The National Weather Service in Reno forecast mild cooling this weekend, but only by a few degrees. In central and southern Arizona, that will still means triple-digit highs, even up to 110 F (43 C).

____

Associated Press writers Anita Snow and Ty O’Neil in Phoenix, and Rio Yamat in Las Vegas contributed to this report.