AFP

A US federal judge blocked part of a law banning most abortions in Idaho Wednesday, a victory for US President Joe Biden’s administration.

The state cannot prosecute doctors who perform abortions for the sake of the pregnant woman’s health, Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled. 

The temporary injunction will remain in effect until a court case challenging the abortion law can be decided, the judge ruled. 

Idaho, a rural and conservative state, was one of the first to pass a strict law prohibiting abortion in most cases after the US Supreme Court overturned the national right to the procedure in June. 

The rest of the bill, which remains highly restrictive, is set to go into effect Thursday. 

US Attorney General Merrick Garland had asked the court to block the whole bill, saying it violated federal law around medical emergencies because it did not provide an exception in cases of risk to the health of the pregnant patient, and authorized legal action against health care providers. 

Winmill said his decision is “not about the bygone constitutional right to an abortion.”

“This Court is not grappling with that larger, more profound question.

“Rather, the Court is called upon to address a far more modest issue—whether Idaho’s criminal abortion statute conflicts with a small but important corner of federal legislation. It does,” he wrote.

Despite its narrow focus, the ruling represents a win for the Biden administration. 

It “ensures that women in the State of Idaho can obtain the emergency medical treatment to which they are entitled under federal law. This includes abortion when that is the necessary treatment,” Garland said in a statement Wednesday evening. 

Following the June Supreme Court decision,13 states have banned abortion using so-called “trigger laws,” and around half of all 50 states are expected to ban the procedure.

The widely criticized police officer in charge of the response to the Uvalde, Texas school shooting that saw 19 children and two teachers killed was fired Wednesday, US media reported.

The Uvalde school board voted unanimously to terminate the contract of district police chief Pete Arredondo, the Texas Tribune reported.

The state’s public safety chief previously said Arredondo had placed “the lives of officers before the lives of children” and made “terrible decisions” while managing the crime scene. 

Nineteen young children and two teachers were killed when a teenage gunman went on a rampage at Robb Elementary School on May 24 in America’s worst school shooting in a decade. Police eventually shot and killed the gunman.

Local police have been under intense scrutiny since it emerged that more than a dozen officers waited for over an hour outside a pair of adjoining classrooms where the shooting was taking place and did nothing as children lay dead or dying inside.

Arredondo, who was suspended in June pending an investigation, earlier on Wednesday asked for his suspension to be lifted through a statement from his lawyer, criticizing his treatment since the shooting.

“Chief Arredondo will not participate in his own illegal and unconstitutional public lynching and respectfully requests the Board immediately reinstate him, with all backpay and benefits and close the complaint as unfounded,” lawyer George Hyde said in a statement released shortly before the school board’s vote.

Texas state lawmakers also slammed Arredondo in a report last month, saying he “did not assume his preassigned responsibility of incident command” and made analytical errors because he did not have all the necessary information. 

The lawmakers said the situation was “chaotic” due to the 376 on-scene officers’ “lackadaisical approach” to subduing the gunman. 

They said no other officers offered to help or replace Arredondo during the massacre.

Seventy-three minutes elapsed between the first officers’ arrival and the shooter’s death, an “unacceptably long period of time.”

“The void of leadership could have contributed to the loss of life,” the report said.

“It is plausible that some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait 73 additional minutes for rescue,” according to the report.

Following the release of the Texas lawmakers’ report, local media reported that Uvalde police lieutenant Mariano Pargas had been suspended while the city investigated his role in the shooting response. 

The United States has faced a spate of brutal gun massacres in recent months, including at a grocery store in a predominately Black neighborhood in New York state and at an Independence Day parade in Illinois.

In June, US lawmakers broke a decades-long stalemate on firearms control, passing the first major safety regulations in almost 30 years, less than 24 hours after the Supreme Court bolstered the constitutional right to bear arms.

Los Angeles County must pay $31 million in damages to Kobe Bryant’s widow and a co-plaintiff over graphic photos taken at the site of the helicopter crash that killed the basketball star and eight others, a jury ordered Wednesday.

Sheriff’s deputies and firefighters who rushed to the scene of the January 2020 crash snapped pictures of the carnage, including the mangled remains of the Los Angeles Lakers legend and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna.

A trial in Los Angeles heard how some of these first responders showed the photographs to members of the public — including a bartender — while one deputy texted them to a friend as the pair played video games.

Vanessa Bryant and Chris Chester, whose wife, Sarah, and daughter, Payton, also perished in the crash, sued for emotional damages over the pictures, which they said they feared would one day surface on the internet.

The civil jury ordered the county to pay $16 million to Bryant, and $15 million to Chester, after deliberating for just a few hours.

The award represents redress for past and future suffering.

Bryant wept while the verdict was read and left court without speaking to waiting reporters.

She later posted a picture on Instagram of her with her late husband and daughter, with the caption: “All for you! I love you! JUSTICE for Kobe and Gigi!”

– ‘Accountability’ –

Chester’s lawyer on Tuesday had called for $1 million for every year of the plaintiffs’ expected lives, a figure that amounted to $40 million for 40-year-old Bryant, and $30 million for 48-year-old Chester.

“You can’t award too much money for what they went through,” said attorney Jerry Jackson.

Bryant’s lawyer Craig Lavoie said he was asking for “justice and accountability” for the basketball great — a hero to the city of Los Angeles — and his widow.

“We’re here because of intentional conduct. Intentional conduct by those who were charged with protecting the dignity of Sarah and Payton, and Kobe and Gianna.”

“The county violated Mrs Bryant and Mr Chester’s constitutional rights,” Lavoie said, asking the jury to hold the county liable for “the constitutional violations of its employees.”

For the county, Mira Hashmall said that while employees had broken confidentiality policies, Bryant and Chester’s privacy had not been violated because the pictures had never been in the public domain.

“This is a photo case, but there are no photos,” she told jurors earlier. “There’s a simple truth that cannot be ignored — there’s been no public dissemination.”

After the verdict, Hashmall said she and fellow lawyers would be consulting with the county about “next steps.”

“Meanwhile, we hope the Bryant and Chester families continue to heal from their tragic loss,” a statement said.

Relatives of other victims of the crash were last year granted a total $2.5 million in compensation over the photo-taking.

The jury’s order came as Los Angeles celebrated “Mamba Day” on August 24, or 8/24, the two numbers Kobe Bryant wore over 20 years as a professional.

An investigation into the crash found the pilot had probably become disoriented after flying the Sikorsky S-76 into fog as he transported his passengers to a girls’ basketball tournament in nearby Thousand Oaks.

Kobe Bryant is widely recognized as one of the greatest basketball players ever, a figure who became the face of his sport during a glittering two decades with the Los Angeles Lakers.

He was a five-time NBA champion in a career that began in 1996 straight out of high school and lasted until his retirement in 2016.

All new cars sold in California by 2035 will have to be zero emission under plans set to be adopted by the state this week, as the biggest economy in the United States drives a nationwide fossil fuel evolution.

Proposals to be debated by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) this week will formalize targets set by Governor Gavin Newsom — and will likely prod other US states in the same direction.

The plans, which board member Daniel Sperling recently told CNN he was “99.9 percent” confident would be adopted, also include incremental steps mandating more than a third of 2026 car sales in the state be zero emission, and over two-thirds by 2030.

“This is monumental,” Sperling told CNN. “This is the most important thing that CARB has done in the last 30 years. It’s important not just for California, but it’s important for the country and the world.”

California’s more-than 40 million consumers make it the biggest market in the United States.

As such, rules imposed there impact manufacturers’ production plans across the country, as well as further afield, because they cannot afford to miss out.

This means California can, in effect, set national standards. 

The likely ruling Thursday comes on the heels of a climate law signed last week by US President Joe Biden, which sets aside hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives for clean energy programs.

Biden and his Democratic Party are rushing to make up climate policy ground they feel was lost under former president Donald Trump, who yanked the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord and reversed what many environmentalists viewed as already-weak progress in combating the fossil fuel emissions that drive global warming.

In recent years jurisdictions around the world, notably in Europe, have set their sights on the polluting automobile sector.

Norway is aiming to have all new cars produce zero tailpipe emissions by 2025.

The UK, Singapore and Israel are eyeing 2030, while the European Union wants to end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035. 

Human-caused global warming has already raised average temperatures around the planet, affecting weather patterns and worsening natural hazards like wildfires and storms.

Scientists say dramatic action is required to limit the damage, and point to curbing emissions from fossil fuels as key to the battle.

A man who hid snakes and lizards in his trousers as he tried to sneak them into the United States as part of a $750,000 reptile smuggling enterprise faces decades in prison, officials said Wednesday.

Jose Manuel Perez masterminded the six-year scheme from his home in southern California, which involved bringing 1,700 animals into the United States from Mexico and Hong Kong.

In a plea deal with the Department of Justice, Perez acknowledged that he had paid mules to transport some of his illicit cargo, and at other times had made border crossings himself.

The animals that he netted, which included Yucatan box turtles, Mexican box turtles, baby crocodiles and Mexican beaded lizards, were sold to clients across the country for upwards of $739,000, documents show.

His downfall came in March when he tried to drive from Mexico with 60 creatures secreted around his groin and in other parts of his clothing.

After initially telling customs officers he was transporting his pet lizards in his pockets, he was found to have 60 reptiles on him.

They included arboreal alligator lizards and Isthmian dwarf boas, a kind of snake that changes color and whose defense mechanisms include bleeding from its eyes.

Three of the reptiles were dead.

Perez, who admitted two counts of smuggling, each of which carries up to 20 years in prison, and one of wildlife trafficking, which carries a maximum five-year jail term, will be sentenced on December 1.