On Saturday June 20, President Rodrigo Paz declared a state of emergency in Bolivia. The decree came shortly after he reached an agreement with the Bolivian Workers’ Confederation (COB), the country’s largest trade union. Roadblocks had continued during the weeks prior, mainly in La Paz and Cochabamba. Conditions were becoming increasingly difficult due to food [...]
A New York City Council employee who was detained at the Delaney Hall ICE jail in Newark, New Jersey, for more than five months was released from custody in June. Rafael Andres Rubio Bohorquez was taken by federal immigration officers in January during a routine asylum interview. Rubio Bohorquez, who is from Venezuela, was detained despite holding temporary protected status that should have shielded him from deportation.
“People are sad; detainees are sad. It’s people that try to build a future in this country, people that have complied with the law,” says Rafael Andres Rubio Bohorquez of detained immigrants he met while being held in multiple ICE jails. “They have paid their taxes. They are raising families.”
Rubio Bohorquez says he fears being detained again, even though his attorney Gwyneth Hesser says that would be in violation of a court order. “But it seems right now that’s not that much solace, because sometimes things are happening that are outside of the law,” says Hesser.
A massive heat dome settled above the eastern half of the United States over the Fourth of July weekend, bringing triple-digit temperatures, disrupting travel and prompting emergency measures for millions of people. At least 25 people died in New Jersey due to extreme heat and humidity, and more than 185 million people — over half of U.S. residents — were under heat alerts over the weekend. This follows a record-shattering European heat wave that’s been blamed for thousands of deaths across Spain, France and Germany. Climate scientists say the burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of global warming and the reason why heat waves are becoming longer, hotter and more frequent.
“Global warming is accelerating past thresholds that we used to consider unacceptable,” says climate journalist David Wallace-Wells. “There are a lot of questions about why we haven’t prepared adequately for these heat waves,” says Wallace-Wells, but he argues that it is still possible to retrofit the planet to mitigate the climate catastrophe.
A grand jury in Washington, D.C., has indicted former U.S. Olympic canoeist David “Davey” Hearn on a felony charge for allegedly vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 19. He is facing a possible maximum sentence of 10 years in prison if convicted. Hearn, who denies the accusations, says he had noticed a partly detached piece of the Reflecting Pool’s blue liner and reached into the water to see what it felt like, when he was quickly arrested and subsequently held in jail for five hours. He is one of at least six people who have been arrested for allegedly vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, which has turned green due to algae blooms despite being painted “American-flag blue” at the behest of President Trump.
“We do think that Davey is being scapegoated for the failures of the White House with respect to the Reflecting Pool, that the blame is being shifted,” says Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund. “He’s innocent, and we intend to vigorously defend the matter.”
Eisen speaks about some of the other 300 cases Democracy Defenders Fund is involved in, including legal fights against the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger and the Trump administration’s executive order that attempted to end birthright citizenship. He also comments on President Trump having made $2.2 billion last year, mostly fueled by cryptocurrency profits. “It’s corruption on a scale we’ve never seen in American history, and, frankly, seldom in world history,” says Eisen.