Meanderings, 8 July 2022
It’s been a hard week around here. On July 4th a mass shooting occurred in a local community, Highland Park, killing seven and injuring dozens. Two families from our church were at that parade and have experienced the trauma of evil violence and tragic deaths.
Photo by Jacqueline O'Gara on Unsplash
(NewsNation) — Hundreds of people were sent scrambling, running for cover when a gunman fired more than 70 rounds at an Independence Day parade in suburban Chicago.
Many businesses in the downtown Highland Park area offered parade-goers shelter from the gunfire, including Lindsay Meltzer, who owns Bright Bowls.
Meltzer was working inside her restaurant when she heard shots ring out. She immediately went outside to gather her family and fellow community members who were outside in front of the restaurant and ushered them inside.
“My husband jumped up and we both screamed, “Get inside, run inside.” We didn’t know how many people we were shoveling inside, we just opened the doors and said, “Go, come in, we have a basement, go downstairs,” and my staff helped shuttle everyone downstairs,” Meltzer recalled.
In the midst of what was happening outside, Meltzer’s friend, Lucy, jumped in to help keep the children who evacuated to their basement calm.
“She’s a teacher and probably the only person there that was trained on what to do in an active shooting situation. She sat down immediately with about 20 kids in a circle and started doing a calming exercise. Because I have kids, we have a stash of markers and pens and crayons and paper at the store, and we brought everything down for the kids to play with and just keep calm. They didn’t see what was going on outside after they had gone into the basement. So for all they knew, it was a play space.”
Sabrina Ionescu couldn't be stopped Wednesday night.
She exploded for 31 points, 13 rebounds and 10 assists in the New York Liberty's 116-107 win over the Las Vegas Aces.
Ionescu's triple-double is incredible on its own, but it's even more impressive when put into historical context.
That performance marked Ionescu's third triple-double of her career, which ties her with Chicago Sky forward Candace Parker for the most in a WNBA career. That re-broke the WNBA record for most in one season – five. No other WNBA season had more than one triple-double prior to 2022.
Ionescu also tied Parker for first WNBA player with multiple triple-doubles in one season. The difference between Ionescu and Parker, though, is Ionescu reached her third triple-double in just her 54th WNBA game, while Parker hit that mark in her 375th.
That's not even the coolest part of her performance. Ionescu also became the first WNBA player to score at least 30 points for a triple-double and the first WNBA player to do it without a turnover.
(CNN)The Onondaga Nation is set to regain over 1,000 acres of ancestral land in central New York in what the Department of Interior calls "one of the largest returns of land to an Indigenous nation by a state."
"This historic agreement represents a unique opportunity to return traditional homelands back to Indigenous people to steward for the benefit of their community," said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in a Wednesday news release.
"We look forward to drawing upon the Onondaga Nation's expertise and Indigenous knowledge in helping manage the area's valuable wildlife and habitat. Consistent with the President's America the Beautiful initiative, all of us have a role to play in this Administration's work to ensure our conservation efforts are locally led and support communities' health and well-being."
The land transfer includes the headwaters of Onondaga Creek, more than 45 acres of wetland and flood plains, and approximately 980 acres of forest and fields, says the Department of Interior. The area is also home to a variety of wildlife, including brook trout in the creek, great blue heron, songbirds, waterfowl, hawks, bald eagles, frogs, bats, and white-tailed deer.
I had a crazy fantasy thought the other night, in the wake of the latest mass shooting incident in Highland Park. What if instead of trying to pass more gun safety legislation, we just banned men from purchasing or possessing guns?
I know there are all kinds of constitutional issues that make this utterly unworkable. But statistics suggest that if we could do this, mass shootings and gun violence would drop dramatically. Over 90 percent of mass shootings are committed by men, most with legally obtained weapons. Over 80 percent of all gun violence is committed by men. Men also make up 86 percent of all firearm deaths. Men own three times as many firearms as women. And 52 women a month die from gun violence at the hands of a male domestic partner. (Source: Men Against Gun Violence) …
This seems an important matter wrestle with in our churches, our schools, and our community organizations. I also think the social isolation, and the distorted ways of thinking that arise, fed by “dark web” sites, are factors in mass shootings desperately needing to be recognized and understood and addressed.
At this point we are a society determined to maintain our “right” to own guns and the maintenance of this right means that nowhere is safe–our schools, our houses of worship, our groceries, our parks, our restaurants, our parades and public events, our shopping districts and malls, our neighborhoods and our homes. For those who argue that an armed presence, a police presence is what we need–all kinds of public safety forces were present at the parade in Highland Park. No doubt they saved lives in their rapid response but seven died and twenty or so were wounded by the 80 rounds fired in the brief period before the gunman needed to flee–some with devastating wounds that will take months or years to heal, if they ever fully do. This is the price of our freedom.
(CNN)A Florida county is under quarantine due to the discovery of a fast-growing population of invasive giant African land snails.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS) confirmed there were giant African land snails in the New Port Richey area of Pasco County on June 23, according to FDACS' website.
The snails pose a health risk to humans because they carry a parasite called rat lungworm, which can cause meningitis, Christina Chitty, a public information director at FDACS, told CNN.
They can produce up to 2,500 eggs per year, so the population is difficult to control.
Australia's 2021 Census reveals that the percentage of people identifying as Christian has dipped below 50% for the first time, a drop of 17 percentage points over the last 10 years. At the same time, the number of people who describe themselves as "non-religious" has risen.
The diversity in the religions Australians identified is increasing, "reflecting continuing changes in our social attitudes and belief systems," the Australian Bureau of Statistics said in a statement.
While Christianity remains the most common religion in the Oceania country, with 43.9% identifying as Christian, it's down from 52.1% in 2016 and 61.1% in 2011.
The Sydney Morning Herald noted that 96% of Australians listed a form of Christianity as their religion in the first census in 1911.
The largest Christian denomination remains Catholic, with 20%, followed by Anglican with 9.8%.
Nearly four in 10 Australians (38.9%) reported having "no religion" in the 2021 Census, up from about 30% in 2016 and 22.3% in 2011.
In the mid-1960s, less than 1% of people in Australia identified as having no religion, according to The Herald.
Publication rights can get very very tricky, and a new case will rise — so we hear — to the Supreme Court:
The battle lines have now been drawn in a potentially landmark lawsuit over the scanning and lending of books. In a motion for summary judgment filed this week, lawyers for Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House argue that the Internet Archive's controversial program to scan and lend books under an untested legal theory known as "controlled digital lending" is a massive piracy operation "masquerading as a not-for-profit library." And in a dueling motion for summary judgment, the Internet Archive counters that its scanning and lending program does not harm authors and publishers and is a public good protected by fair use.
The filings come more than two years after the publishers, organized by the Association of American Publishers, first filed its copyright infringement lawsuit in the Southern District of New York.
While publishers and authors groups had long been troubled by the IA's program, tensions came to a head in late March 2020 when the IA rattled publishers and authors by unilaterally launching its now shuttered National Emergency Library initiative, which temporarily removed the "one copy/one user" restrictions on its collection of in-copyright scans, making them available to multiple simultaneous users in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak. In filing suit, the publishers made clear the suit was about more than the NEL, characterizing the IA's scanning program as an attempt “to bludgeon the legal framework that governs copyright investments and transactions in the modern world.”
In its motion for summary judgment this week, lawyers for the publishers argued that the IA's scanning program is clearly illegal.
“Masquerading as a not-for-profit library, the Internet Archive digitizes in-copyright print books on an industrial scale and distributes full-text digital bootlegs for free,” the publishers' brief states, pointing out that the IA “has amassed a collection of more than three million unauthorized in-copyright e-books, including more than 33,000 of the Publishers’ commercially available titles, without obtaining licenses to do so or paying the rightsholders a cent” for the works. “No case has held or even suggested that IA’s conduct is a lawful fair use.”