First Draft: First Draft Focus: Throwback Thursday — A Stampede, Before The Stampede

Rudy Giuliani has been having a rough go of things. Since trying to help former President Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election results, “America’s Mayor” has been indicted in Arizona and Georgia, New York suspended his license to practice law, and he’s facing disbarment in Washington, DC. In December, a jury hit him with a $148 million verdict in a defamation suit filed by two Georgia election workers who Giuliani had falsely accused of fraud.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Researchers are now connecting the dots between the climate crisis and the havoc heat can wreak on developing minds. Extreme heat and other climate calamities “impact our first and worst, our most vulnerable,” said Jennifer Runkle, an environmental epidemiologist at the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies.

In February, the conservative Alabama Supreme Court delivered an unprecedented opinion, ruling that failing to protect an embryo from destruction is the legal equivalent of failing to prevent a human child from dying. This implicated the state’s in vitro fertilization providers because embryos are often disposed of in the process of IVF treatment.

When the seniors at Newtown High School in Connecticut graduate on Wednesday, 20 peers will be missing: the kids who were brutally murdered in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The massacre, one of the country’s worst school shootings in history, immediately drew national attention as well as demands to prevent such tragedies with more robust gun control legislation. “As a country, we have been through this too many times,” then-President Barack Obama said when he tearfully addressed the nation on Dec.

Ya Li is a slight, soft-spoken accountant who was born in China and now lives with her husband and daughter in Australia. But from 2017 until last year, Li was also known as Mulan, a top member of an international “whistleblower movement” with the stated goal of supplanting China’s Communist Party as the country’s legitimate government. While preparing taxes for individuals and small businesses by day, Li worked as a director of the Rule of Law Foundation, a nonprofit that was launched by fugitive Chinese mogul Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon and that Guo had claimed he would donate $100 million to.

The Senate Finance Committee released on Wednesday the findings of a two-year investigation that revealed widespread abuse and neglect at residential treatment facilities attended by thousands of children each year. The report, which looked at four of the nation’s largest behavioral health providers—Universal Health Services (UHS), Acadia Healthcare, Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health, and Vivant Behavioral Healthcare—detailed a system that “optimizes profit over the wellbeing and safety of children” and incentivizes facilities to “treat children as payouts.” The companies capitalize on per diem payments from Medicaid and other sources of taxpayer dollars by filling large facilities to capacity with children—many of whom are sent by the child welfare, juvenile justice, and educational systems—while reducing the number and quality of staff, the report found.