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    Body of Tennessee Factory Worker Killed in Hurricane Helene Is Found

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    She is believed to be the last employee who was missing after the plastics plant flooded. Authorities are still investigating the circumstances around the deaths. The remains of a sixth factory worker in eastern Tennessee who was swept away in the flooding brought on by Hurricane Helene have been found, ending a search for what is believed to be the last missing employee more than a month after the storm tore through the Southeast.Officials on Friday disclosed the identity of the body as Rosa Andrade, 29, one of a half-dozen victims of the flood who worked at Impact Plastics, a factory in the close-knit town of Erwin, about 120 miles east of Knoxville.“These people were just reporting to work that morning,” Andrew Harris, a captain with Unicoi County Search and Rescue, said in an interview on Saturday. “We’re trying to provide closure for the families, and obviously grieving with them.”The deluge at the factory on Sept. 27 was part of a trail of devastation caused by Helene, the Category 4 hurricane that hit the coast of Florida on Sept. 26 and decimated neighboring states with landslides and flooding in the days that followed. Helene killed more than 200 people across the Southeast.In North Carolina alone, there were more than 100 storm-related deaths, with damages and recovery efforts projected to cost the state an estimated $53 billion.Although Ms. Andrade is thought to be the last missing person from the factory, Mr. Harris said that search and recovery efforts continue for victims from North Carolina, some of whom are believed to have been swept into Erwin and nearby counties. State officials from Tennessee and North Carolina have suggested that at least a dozen people overall remain unaccounted for in the two states.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Hurricane Helene Aftermath: 6 Issues Across the Southeast

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      The worst fallout from the hurricane is in western North Carolina, but at least five other states are grappling with their own intractable problems. More than a week after Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4 storm, state officials across the Southeast are scrambling to repair damaged electrical lines, roads and bridges affecting tens of thousands across the path of destruction.Helene wreaked havoc from Florida to the Appalachian states after making landfall on the Gulf Coast on Sept. 26. The worst fallout is still in western North Carolina, where, in addition to the mass wreckage of destroyed buildings, teams are searching for dozens of missing people, some areas have no potable water, cellphone communication remains spotty, more than 170,000 customers still don’t have power, and hundreds of roads are closed. But at least five other states are grappling with their own intractable problems from impassable highways to ruined farmland.President Biden, who surveyed the storm’s toll this week, said Helene most likely caused billions of dollars in damage, and he asked Congress on Friday to quickly replenish disaster relief funds to help. Here are some of the biggest current issues in the Southeast:In North Carolina, an untold number of people are still missing.The remains of a home in Swannanoa, N.C.Loren Elliott for The New York TimesIn the western part of the state, many families’ greatest concern is their unaccounted loved ones. But looking for them in mountain-ringed towns and rugged ravines has been a daunting task for search teams, and the effort has been hampered by poor cell service and widespread power losses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      If Trump wins the election, US protest movements could face serious crackdowns

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      This is the first part of the standfirst This is the second part of the standfirst Headline what’s at stake?
      The Knox county commission was questioning a property developer one evening in April three years ago when protesters quietly filed in to their auditorium and raised their fists in the air.A week earlier, police had shot and killed 17-year-old Anthony Thompson Jr in a bathroom at his high school after they found him with a gun. Protests erupted in Knoxville, the county seat and largest city in eastern Tennessee, and one the loudest voices speaking out was Constance Every, who had organized demonstrations in the city during the national outrage that followed George Floyd’s death less than a year earlier. Now, she was in the county commission chamber with about two dozen others, intending to press them for the release of police body-camera footage that captured Thompson’s death.As the protesters lined up near the meeting room’s back wall, Every, who was wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt, retrieved from her backpack a white T-shirt Thompson’s aunt gave her, which read: “Who do you call when the murderer wears a badge?” Then, she pulled out an electronic bullhorn, and sounded the siren.“Knox county, county commission, your meeting is over,” Every said through the bullhorn, as the protesters clustered around her. “’Cause what we’re not going to tolerate is that we got a kid who was murdered at Knox county schools, and y’all going to carry on like these children don’t deserve to have their rights and other factors. It is not OK, what you all are doing, whatsoever.”View image in fullscreenWithin seconds of the siren going off, sheriff’s deputies, both in uniform and in plainclothes, converged on Every, grabbing her and some of her group, and marching them outside. While many kept silent as they left, Every did not. “I have not broke any laws! I am exercising my right to peacefully assemble and use my freedom of speech, you fucking murderers!” she shouted.The disruption lasted just over 70 seconds. But for Every and the six others arrested in the commission chambers, it marked the beginning of a three-year legal saga, after the county prosecutor charged them with disrupting a lawful meeting – a misdemeanor for which Tennessee’s Republican leaders had just months earlier doubled the punishment.Since Floyd’s death in May 2020, Republican-led states have enacted laws expanding the definition of rioting to encompass protesters who stayed peaceful when others did not, protecting drivers who run over demonstrators that block roads and enhancing penalties against protesters who target oil and gas infrastructure and deface monuments. The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), which tracks the legislation, has found that hundreds of proposals have been made by state and federal lawmakers nationwide, and more than two dozen signed into law.The push comes as the GOP’s standard bearer, Donald Trump, campaigns for the presidency on a platform that includes suppressing protests. He has vowed to deploy the national guard “where there has been a complete breakdown of law and order”, while simultaneously promising pardons for people convicted over the January 6 insurrection. As president, Trump reportedly encouraged the military to shoot protesters, and, this year, allies such as the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, have said the national guard should be used against college students demonstrating over Israel’s invasion of Gaza.If he returned to the White House, Trump could direct a militarized response to protests and pressure congressional Republicans to pass legislation that would impose nationwide penalties like those already in effect in Tennessee.Tennessee is a thoroughly red state where the GOP holds a supermajority in its general assembly. Last year lawmakers temporarily expelled two Black Democratic representatives who staged a noisy protest calling for gun control legislation in the state house chamber. In August 2020, Republicans passed a bill that increased penalties for blocking a street or sidewalk and created a new felony offense for protest encampments on state property, in addition to making disrupting a meeting a more severe category of misdemeanor.The Republican governor, Bill Lee, justified the legislation as necessary to prevent “lawlessness”, and in the years since, he has signed two more anti-protest bills, one of which made blocking roads a felony, and the other of which expanded the definition of aggravated rioting and created a mandatory minimum sentence for people convicted.View image in fullscreen“These laws that we are seeing in Tennessee are really representative of the kinds of tactics that we’re seeing nationwide in response to particular protest movements,” said Nick Robinson, a senior legal advisor at ICNL’s US program.To Amelia Parker, a Black Lives Matter activist who now serves on the Knoxville city council, it is not surprising that Every wound up being perhaps the first person to run afoul of such laws.“She’s one that authorities would want to make an example out of. They definitely would not want another Constance,” Parker said.An African American army veteran who is disabled with post-traumatic stress disorder from two tours in Afghanistan, Every became politically active after struggling to find services during a period of homelessness in Knoxville, the home town she returned to after leaving the military.“I’m not a sugar-coater, I’m not a person that’s going to come in and say, ‘with all due respect’. I’m not that,” Every said in an interview from her apartment, where a framed photograph of her speaking to protesters in a police station parking lot in the days after Floyd’s death hangs over the couch.“I’m going to come in and tell you straight to your face the failures, the problems, and more importantly, you holding this role as a political, elected body or member, that you should hold a lot of accountability for what’s happening.”Her leadership of the 2020 protests, which in Knoxville were generally peaceful, put her on the radar of local authorities, she believes. Tensions in the city escalated again following Thompson’s shooting on 12 April of the following year at Austin-East, a predominantly Black high school where, in the few months since the new year, four students had already died in shootings in its neighborhood.Officers went to the school that afternoon to find Thompson after his ex-girlfriend reported him for assaulting her earlier in the day and warned he was known to carry a gun, an investigation by Knoxville’s police department would find. In a lawsuit filed against the city and the four officers involved in his death, attorneys for Thompson’s mother and his best friend would write that he carried a pistol because his ex-girlfriend’s family had threatened him, and because the streets around the school were unsafe.The fours officers looking for Thompson found him in a bathroom stall with a gun. A struggle ensued, and after Thompson’s pistol went off and hit a garbage can, one of the officers fired twice, fatally wounding the teenager and injuring a school resource officer.Days later, the Knox county district attorney general, Charme Allen, said she would not prosecute the officers who encountered Thompson. The lawsuit filed by his mother and friend was dismissed by a federal judge, who found the officers had qualified immunity – the controversial doctrine that limits law enforcement officials’ liability for some lawsuits. Their attorney has appealed the decision.Every and other activists in Knoxville remember an atmosphere of distrust in the days after Thompson’s death, which was worsened by authorities’ decision to initially describe him as an “active shooter” and lead the public to believe the teenager was responsible for wounding the school resource officer, when he was in fact shot by one of their colleagues. They decided to hold protests to demand more details of what really happened, including the release of footage from the cameras the police were wearing on their uniforms.“We knew we had to double down and, as activists, that we had to really rally around each other and dig in on having fortitude to ensure we put a spotlight to this,” said Calvin Skinner, a Baptist minister who has collaborated on social justice work with Every, and was arrested at the county commission meeting.Days after Thompson’s death, Every, Skinner and others disrupted a school board meeting without issue. But when they went to the county commission meeting a week after the teen’s fatal wounding, they knew something was off. Dozens of sheriff’s deputies were waiting for them, and signs had been posted warning of the state’s law.In the past, disruptions had not been uncommon at the Knox county commission. Like many local governments, the body had just weathered a tense period as they dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic, during which protesters opposed to mask mandates would sometimes start shouting at them during meetings, recalled the former county commissioner Dasha Lundy. The same thing would happen when people grew upset over zoning decisions, she said, but, to her knowledge, nobody from either group was arrested.“I keep going back to the people who were not supportive of [mask mandates] and how they were interrupting our meetings, but they just so happened to be white folks,” said Lundy, who was the sole Black commissioner during her four years in office.“They just tell them, be quiet, do this, whatever. They interrupted the meeting too, but we don’t want to talk about that.”After Every began talking, the commission’s then chair, Larsen Jay, a Republican, gaveled the meeting into a 10-minute recess. When it resumed, he called the disruption “clearly a staged set-up for one purpose: to draw attention, to draw in police reaction, and to make this commission put in a very bad position”. He then added that anyone who wanted to speak could sign up for their public forum.The seven protesters who were removed from the commission chambers were jailed for a few hours, then released and charged with disrupting a meeting. That was one of the offenses that the Tennessee general assembly had raised penalties for in their bill passed after Floyd’s death, upgrading it from a class B misdemeanor to class A, the most serious category that carries a maximum jail sentence of just under 12 months.View image in fullscreenThough the protesters were a multiracial group, Every believes their cause made them a target. “If we were talking about anything else than Black Lives Matter, [there] probably would have been a whole different approach,” she said.A spokeswoman for the Knox county sheriff, Tom Spangler, said he was unavailable to comment. A spokesman for Allen, the district attorney general, said she declined to comment, because the case was still “pending”.The arrest came as a surprise to Mary Winter, a white Ihop manager who had traveled from a Tennessee city nearly two hours west to attend the protest. She didn’t think she was in danger of breaking the law and had walked into the chamber holding Every’s phone, which was streaming the protest on Facebook. That video, as well as another recorded by the Knoxville News Sentinel, shows that Winter stayed silent until she was detained, but in an affidavit, the deputy who arrested her accused her of disrupting the meeting by “yelling and encouraging others to do the same”.“This sworn statement of this officer in my arrest affidavit, that was the basis for my being arrested. And it flat-out did not happen,” Winter said.Shortly before the trial started on 8 April, Winter opted to plead guilty in exchange for six months of unsupervised probation and paying court costs. She was already on probation for felony attempted murder after shooting her husband, with whom she said she was in an abusive relationship, and feared a conviction that would send her to jail. Two other protesters, Carrie Hopper and Kevin Andrews, also took plea deals.At the trial, attorneys for Every, Skinner and two co-defendants, Gavin Guinn and Aaron Valentine, attempted to convince the jury that prosecutors had failed to prove that they had “substantially” disrupted the meeting, as the statute demanded. Every testified that they never intended to halt the commission’s meeting, because that would defeat the purpose – rather, they wanted the lawmakers to use their power over the district attorney general’s budget to have the body-camera footage released. The video was made public two days after the protesters’ arrest.View image in fullscreenThe trial also answered the question of how the sheriff’s department was aware of Every’s plans: they had been monitoring her Facebook account.“We’ll check various activist groups, activist individuals, individuals who somebody calls to us about and says they have concerns. And one of those individuals was Ms Every,” testified John Sharp, a sergeant in the Knox county sheriff’s office’s narcotics division, one of the plainclothes officers that removed Skinner from the commission chambers.Both sides questioned Jay about why the mask mandate protesters were not arrested when they were disruptive. The commission chair replied: “I’m not aware that they got arrested” but “several of them were escorted out of the room after being disruptive. I don’t know what the result of their actions were afterwards.”“And you say [these two parties] disrupted your meeting in similar ways?” asked Mike Whalen, Skinner’s attorney.“Yes, basically shouting out and disrupting it from an auditory perspective,” the commissioner replied.The prosecution, led by the deputy district attorney, Sean McDermott, put Every’s use of the bullhorn, and the protesters gathering around her, at the center of their case.“Did any of the mask people pull a siren and announce that your meeting was over?” McDermott asked Jay. “No,” he replied.In his closing argument, McDermott said: “The group was acting as one. They were protecting the one with the bullhorn, surrounding her, making it more difficult, slowing law enforcement down, stopping the meeting.”After about six hours of deliberations, the jury found Every guilty, but acquitted the three other defendants. She was sentenced to nearly a year of probation. Her attorney, Andrew Beamer, has appealed the verdict.Even with the heightened penalties, it was unlikely that Every would have been sentenced to jail, Beamer said. But he believes the new law serves as a “shot across the bow of everybody, that they weren’t going to let you protest in this way.“I think that the state saying, ‘hey, we care about these protest laws, let’s charge people.’ I don’t think that was lost on the county here.” More

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      Eastern Tennessee Officials Brace Residents for ‘Life Lost’ After Helene

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      There has been “life lost” in Tennessee, an emergency official in the state said on Saturday evening, making it the sixth state where people have been killed by Hurricane Helene, which ravaged the Southeast and left more than 50 dead this week.Jimmy Erwin, the director of emergency management in Unicoi County, Tenn., fought back tears at a news conference as he said there had been some deaths in the storm. He declined to say how many people had died, and the police chief in Erwin, Tenn., Regan Tilson, said no bodies had yet been recovered.Mr. Erwin said five or six people remained missing — a list winnowed significantly from more than 30 missing people earlier in the day — and that search and rescue teams would be looking for people along the Nolichucky River until nightfall. They would then pick back up first thing in the morning.A shelter has been set up at Unicoi County High School.David Kasnic for The New York TimesIn Erwin, Tenn., officials said it could be a week before some in the area have electricity again. David Kasnic for The New York Times“We didn’t think we’d be here today,” Mr. Erwin said. Many residents are without water or power, and he said it could be a week before the electricity returns for some. The county also lost its water treatment plant, and he said anyone with water should boil their drinking water. Showers are being set up at a shelter at a local high school for residents to use.Scenes of devastation abounded throughout the hilly, green Appalachian county of 17,000, particularly in and around Erwin, where a baptist church was surrounded by rubble, and a crumpled R.V. sat in a parking lot filled with debris. Downed trees lay on an impassable highway that cuts through the town.Cody Scott, a Unicoi County commissioner, said he had never seen flooding in the county this bad. His brother had checked on the family’s farm on Friday afternoon and been shaken by what he saw.The Nolichucky River in Erwin, Tenn, contained trees that drifted downstream. David Kasnic for The New York Times“He couldn’t believe his eyes,” Mr. Scott said. “It’s devastated the community.”He said he and his family were evaluating how many trucks, tractors, pumps and other farm equipment they had lost, as well as how much of the farmland was flooded, but that he was most worried about his constituents who had lost homes. He said he was holding out hope that those missing would be found.“The longer it goes, in any type of search and rescue situation, that’s not what you want to hear,” he said. More

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      Why fascists hate universities | Jason Stanley

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      In Bangladesh, something remarkable has happened. Initially in response to a quota system that reserved the majority of government jobs for specific groups, university students initiated large-scale non-violent protests. Bangladesh’s increasingly autocratic prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, responded essentially with “let them eat cake.” Instead of calming the protests down, Hasina’s response made the protests grow nationwide.In mid-July, the government responded with extreme violence, with police gunning down hundreds of students and shutting down the internet across the country. Scenes of extreme police brutality flooded social media. By the end of July, the protests had grown into a nationwide pro-democracy movement. Eventually, the military joined the students, and Hasina fled the country. A nationwide student-led democracy movement successfully challenged a violent autocratic leader, and, at least for now, appears to have won.Bangladesh’s non-violent student movement has not gone unnoticed in neighboring countries. In Pakistan, the popular former prime minister and leader of the opposition party, Imran Khan, was jailed a year ago, an act dictated by Pakistan’s military. Media companies were instructed not to mention his name, quote his words, or show his picture. Members of his opposition party were imprisoned. But something astonishing has begun there. Motivated by the success of the student-led pro-democracy movement in Bangladesh, the Pakistan Students Federation declared an ultimatum for the government: free Khan by 30 August or face nationwide student protests.What has happened in Bangladesh and now could happen in Pakistan is the nightmare of every autocratic regime. Authoritarians and would-be authoritarians are only too aware that universities are primary sites of critique and dissent. Attacks on universities are the canary in the coalmine of fascism.Narendra Modi, India’s autocratic Hindu nationalist prime minister, has ruled the country since 2014. Attacking India’s elite universities as “anti-India” is a hallmark of his government. Similarly, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, started a political campaign with an attack on Central European University in Budapest, with demagogic rhetoric directed against its supposed spreading of “gender ideology”. With the use of legislation, Orbán’s government went so far as to drive the university out of the country.The situation is structurally the same in the United States – would-be authoritarians and one-party states centrally target universities with the aim of restricting dissent. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, is an aspiring autocrat who has used the myth of widespread voter fraud to severely restrict minority voting. (Voter fraud practically never happens in the United States; rigorous investigation estimated it as between 0.0003 and 0.0025%.) DeSantis also created an office of election crimes and security, to pursue supposed cases of voter fraud.Besides minority voting populations, DeSantis has focused on public and higher education as central targets. According to an AAUP report by the special committee on political interference and academic freedom in Florida’s public education system in May 2023, “academic freedom, tenure and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history.” The committee’s final report reveals an atmosphere of intimidation and indeed terror, as the administrative threat to public university professors has been shown to be very real.Even more so than Florida, Tennessee is a one-party state, with a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature. The Tennessee house and senate passed a resolution to honor the Danube Institute; on the floor of the Tennessee house, the state representative Justin Jones questioned why the state was honoring the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán’s thinktank. Tennessee has a state ban on the teaching of “divisive concepts”, one that includes public universities. To report a professor for teaching such a concept (such as intersectionality), Tennessee provides an online form.Attacks on voting, and democratic systems generally, almost invariably center on universities, and vice versa. The Yale Law School graduate and current Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has claimed that the 2020 election should not have been certified because of suspicion of voter fraud. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, Vance also proclaimed, echoing Richard Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.”In the fall of 2023, in response to Israel’s brutal retaliation in Gaza for Hamas’s terrorist attack, anti-genocide protests erupted in American universities, with the active participation of a significant number of Jewish students. These anti-genocide protests were labeled as pro-Hamas and used as a basis to attack elite universities, their students, their professors and their administrations, verbally, politically and physically. It is not implausible to take the goal to have been, at least largely, a preliminary show of police power to university students.In the United States, the Republican party has long been aware of the democratic potential of student movements. As it lurches closer and closer to authoritarianism, it will, like all rightwing authoritarian movements worldwide, seek to crush dissent, starting with university students and faculty. With great courage and determination, the students in Bangladesh have shown that this strategy can be made to backfire.

      Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and author of Erasing History: How Fascists rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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      Gun reform advocates embrace a new tactic: running for office

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      After losing her son to gun violence, Shaundelle Brooks knew she had to do something big.Brooks’ son, Akilah DaSilva, was killed in a mass shooting at a Nashville Waffle House in 2018 that left four dead and two wounded. His death launched Brooks into advocacy.While still mourning, Brooks fought for gun reform at the Tennessee legislature. Testifying in front of lawmakers, she evoked DaSilva in her demands for more restrictive gun laws. “I realized quickly that I had lost my child, but didn’t want to lose any more children or see another mom go through what I’ve been through,” she said. “I learned to channel my grief into action.”While Brooks felt empowered as an organizer, she also faced real challenges. Lawmakers shut down her proposals. Gun owners harassed her, claiming that if DaSilva had been carrying a gun, he would have been able to protect himself. Brooks would leave the statehouse in tears, heartbroken by the lack of accountability she witnessed. “I thought: ‘I have to do more than what I’m doing. I have to find ways to get through,’” Brooks said.So in February, Brooks announced her bid for a seat in the Tennessee state House of Representatives. On 1 August, she’ll be vying in the Democratic primary.View image in fullscreenPropelled by and fed up with what they see as a lack of progress when it comes to addressing America’s epidemic of gun violence, many activists like Brooks, who have felt the effects of gun violence first hand, are embracing a new tactic: running for elected office. For political organizers, this group represents a promising new cohort, whose members, if elected, may finally move the needle on gun reform.“There is a new wave of activists-turned-candidates, particularly among women and mothers, who are no longer willing to stand by,” Brooks said. “How can we not think about our kids?”Pinpointing the moments that led them to run for office comes easily to these candidates.For Emily Busch, who is running for a US congressional seat in Michigan, it was the November 2021 mass shooting at Oxford high school, where her son was a freshman, that propelled her to action. The event left four dead and seven injured. “My son ran for his life with 1,700 other kids,” Busch said. “It’s something that you never ever want to experience, which is why I’m running.”At a school board meeting held shortly after, Busch was appalled that masking received more attention than gun safety. “It wasn’t until the third or fourth person got up to speak that they actually addressed that four children had just been murdered two weeks before,” she recalled.Busch began organizing, urging neighbors and fellow parents to support gun reform legislation like universal background checks and safe storage requirements. She was then asked to run for state representative in a heavily Republican district in 2022 – but lost. Undeterred, her eyes are now set on Washington, as she readies for the Democratic primary on 6 August.For those who have lost loved ones, championing gun reform has served as a way to carry grief.Rhonda Hart, who is running in Texas’ 14th congressional district, “went full tilt into volunteer and activism” after her daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, was killed. Vaughan was one of 10 people murdered in the 2018 Santa Fe high school shooting.“You can sit here and be sad 24/7 and twiddle your thumbs, or, for me, I needed to get up and do something,” Hart said. So, in 2019, Hart began working on a bill in her daughter’s name that focused on preventative measures, such as safe storage and gun safety educational programs.View image in fullscreenThe US House passed the Kimberly Vaughan Firearm Safe Storage Act last session, but Hart, a disabled veteran, was surprised by the amount of resistance she faced along the way. Her own congressman, Republican Randy Weber – now her opponent – refused to support it, even after she and other advocates traveled to DC to meet with him after the 2022 Uvalde mass shooting. Weber has a record of supporting pro-gun legislation, including bills that would increase police presence at schools and allow gun owners to carry a firearm on school grounds.An enraged Hart knew then and there that if she wanted effective legislation to be passed, she would have to do it herself. “If anybody has an axe to grind and a story to tell, it’s me,” Hart said. “We don’t want these people to go uncontested.”Brooks says gun violence survivors and their loved ones are in a unique position to convince others of the pressing need for reform.“I think we’re going to be more passionate because we’ve experienced it,” she said, emphasizing the growing need for “leaders who understand this issue on a personal level and who can bring authentic, passionate advocacy to the legislative process”.That same vision is driving progressive groups to find more candidates who are willing to run for office on gun violence platforms. Last February, nearly 50 new candidates gathered in Las Vegas with Demand a Seat, an initiative to train gun safety advocates to run for office and work on campaigns offered by advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety. At the four-day boot camp, participants received mentorship from veteran politicians, training in the fundamentals of campaign building and guidance in how to effectively elevate a gun safety platform.The program capitalizes on a trend that gun safety advocates have been witnessing for several years. “Gun safety is actually good politics now, it’s not just good policy,” said Moms Demand Action’s executive director, Angela Ferrell-Zabala. “Folks [are] choosing to run and win on gun safety.”View image in fullscreenSince 2021, more than 250 volunteers from Everytown alone have been elected into office, and the organization has a 58%-win rate, said Ferrell-Zabala. And while a decade ago, half of congressional Democrats had A-ratings from the National Rifle Association (NRA), today, that number is zero. Down-ballot races are especially important to this electoral strategy, with almost 95% of the program’s volunteers-turned-candidates running in state and local elections.Participants in the program – and gun reform candidates more broadly – share more than their experiences as gun safety advocates and gun violence survivors. They are also connected by gender and parenthood: the cohort is “overwhelmingly” made up of women and mothers, explained Ferrell-Zabala. “We intentionally aim to empower people who may never have thought they could run for office, like women and mothers – especially Black and brown survivors of gun violence,” she said.Members of the so-called “mass shooting generation” themselves are also entering races, taking inspiration from young progressives who won seats during the 2022 midterms. Most notable is Florida’s Maxwell Frost, the first member of gen Z to be elected to US Congress after serving as national organizing director for March for Our Lives, the gun control advocacy group founded after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.Earlier this year, 19-year-old Navian Scarlett, a vocal gun safety organizer just two years out of high school, ran for school board in Frederick county, Maryland. While she lost her bid in April, Scarlett’s candidacy offered insight into how violence prevention policy is felt by youth on the ground.As an adolescent, she felt the ripples of gun violence on numerous occasions: first when members of her high school basketball team were shot and wounded on campus, and again when shots rang out at a prom after-party that her brother attended. Days after that party, her school ran an active shooter drill that she says traumatized the student body. “I witnessed students having breakdowns. Some of them were curled up with their knees to their chests rocking back and forth and crying,” she said. “It wasn’t as effective for students as [school leaders] may have thought.”For her, that disconnect speaks to the importance of having youth voices in the movement.In Nashville, Brooks says that when the the race catches up with her, she remembers why she is running in the first place.She’s proposing expanding background checks, striking down laws that allow gun owners carry without permits and elevating red flag laws, something she said could have saved her son. “Akilah could have been here,” she said, explaining that the man who killed him had a mental illness and had previously had his gun taken away.“The journey has been transformative. It has shown me that from immense loss can come a powerful drive to create a better world.” More

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      City Illegally Fined Woman Over Profane Political Yard Sign, U.S. Judge Rules

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      A federal judge in Tennessee said that it was unconstitutional for the City of Lakeland, Tenn., to fine Julie Pereira for the sign she posted expressing disapproval of President Biden and Donald J. Trump.A federal judge in Tennessee ruled this week that it was unconstitutional for a city to fine a woman who had displayed a sign in her yard that used profane language to express disapproval of both President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.The woman, Julie Pereira, 40, of Lakeland, Tenn., who posted the sign, which said “Fuck Em’ Both 2024,” in January, was fined hundreds of dollars by the city. It told her that the political sign violated its municipal code because it was obscene.In June, Ms. Pereira sued Lakeland in federal court, arguing that she had a First Amendment right to post the sign in her yard.Judge Mark S. Norris of U.S. District Court in Memphis, said in an order issued on Tuesday that Ms. Pereira’s yard sign was not obscene, and that it was unconstitutional for the city of Lakeland to take action against Ms. Pereira over the sign.Judge Norris ordered the city to reimburse her for nearly $700 in fines and pay Ms. Pereira damages of $1 for violating her First Amendment rights, according to the order. Ms. Pereira was also awarded legal fees of $31,000. The judge also barred the city from taking any additional action against her.Julie Pereira’s sign in her yard in Lakeland, Tenn. She won her lawsuit against the city of Lakeland after they fined her hundreds of dollars for putting up the sign.Julie PereiraWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court Will Hear Challenge to Tennessee Law Banning Transition Care for Minors

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      The move comes as states around the country have pushed to curtail transgender rights.The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether a Tennessee law that bans certain medical treatments for transgender minors violates the Constitution.The move means the court will for the first time hear arguments on the issue of medical care for transgender youth.The Biden administration had asked the justices to take up the case, United States v. Skrmetti, arguing that the measure outlaws treatment for gender dysphoria in youths and “frames that prohibition in explicitly sex-based terms.”In the government’s petition to the court, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote that the law bans transgender medical care but that it “leaves the same treatments entirely unrestricted if they are prescribed for any other purpose.”Federal courts have splintered over laws aimed at blocking transition care, intensifying pressure on the Supreme Court to intervene. The justices have considered whether to take up the appeals at their private conference each week, but they had repeatedly postponed making a decision.The move comes as states around the country have pushed to curtail transgender rights. Conservative lawmakers have prioritized legislation in recent years that targets gender-transition care and at least 20 Republican-led states have enacted measures restricting access to such medical care for minors.It is also part of a broader effort at legislation aimed at regulating other parts of life, including laws about which bathrooms students and others can use and which sports teams they can play on.This spring, the justices temporarily allowed Idaho to enforce a state ban that limited medical treatment for transgender youth. The law, passed by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature, makes it a felony for doctors to provide transgender medical care for minors, including hormone treatment.The decision in that case, which came to the justices as an emergency application, appeared to split largely along ideological lines, with the court’s liberals dissenting.Along with Idaho, the justices had been asked to weigh in on legislation in Kentucky and Tennessee.The Tennessee measure bans health care providers from offering transition care to minors, including puberty blockers and hormone treatments.The Kentucky law, known as S.B. 150, bans doctors from providing gender-transition surgery or administering puberty blockers or hormone therapy to people under 18.In June 2023, federal judges in both states, in separate rulings, temporarily blocked the laws days before key parts of the laws were set to go into effect.Shortly after, a divided panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit overturned the lower court decision, reinstating the bans. Plaintiffs in Kentucky and Tennessee appealed to the Supreme Court. More