NC Senate votes to punish doctors who don’t try to save abortion survivors
RALEIGH, N.C. — For a second time, North Carolina’s Republican-majority legislature is moving to make it a crime to not treat infants who survive abortion.
The Senate passed the legislation in a party-line vote Tuesday evening, but the bill is likely to meet the same fate that a similar bill met just two years ago.
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed that 2019 bill, saying laws already protect newborn babies, and that the legislation was unnecessary. The legislature did not have enough support from Democratic lawmakers to override that veto.
Republicans’ second attempt to criminalize doctors who don’t provide care to abortion survivors comes as a federal appeals court considers reinstating North Carolina’s ban on abortions after 20 weeks. Lawmakers are pushing to pass the legislation because, they say, if the law is struck down, more babies could be “born alive.”
Sen. Joyce Krawiec, one of the main sponsors of the bill, said the legislation is “more important now than ever.”
“We’re going to have more and more babies that will be in that situation,” said Krawiec, a Republican from Kernersville.
The bill will likely pass North Carolina’s House, too, but is expected to again be met with a veto by Cooper. Though the legislature is majority-Republican, lawmakers may once again not have enough support from Democrats to meet the required three-fifths of support in each chamber to override the veto. Just 28 senators voted in favor of the legislation Monday night, while 21 voted against it.
—The News & Observer
Russian school shooting leaves at least 9 dead in Kazan
At least nine people, most of them eighth-grade students, were killed in a school shooting in the Russian city of Kazan on Tuesday, officials said.
A 19-year-old suspect who acted alone was taken into custody with his motive still under investigation, said authorities in the Tatarstan republic, where Kazan is the capital.
Around 20 people were taken to hospitals, some of them in critical condition. Among them, according to the regional Ministry of Education, were 18 children between the ages of 7 and 15. Citizens in Tatarstan were called upon to donate blood.
Among the dead were seven children and two adults, law enforcement sources told Russia's TASS news agency.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said medical specialists had been flown into to the Muslim-majority republic to aid local doctors.
The shooting took place on the first day of school following May holidays.
Television footage showed parents, fearing for the fate of their children, gathered in front of the cordoned-off school grounds. Some pupils were taken out of the building via ladders and moved to a nearby kindergarten. Other students sat injured on the pavement.
Children jumped from the windows of the third floor of the building, a local television broadcaster reported.
The suspect had reportedly entered the school's main entrance, carrying a machine gun, and started shooting immediately. The gun was said to have been registered in the suspect's name.
According to media reports, he had recently been expelled from a vocational school for debts.
—dpa
Florida accounts for nearly one-third of the country’s new Obamacare sign-ups
WASHINGTON — Florida leads the country in new Obamacare sign-ups during an ongoing six-month special enrollment period announced by President Joe Biden shortly after he took office.
The state saw 264,088 new people enroll in the healthcare.gov marketplace between Feb. 15 and April 30, higher than the number of new enrollees during the shorter enrollment periods of 2020 and 2019 combined, the White House told McClatchy on Tuesday. Florida accounts for nearly a third of all new enrollees so far this year in the entire country.
The special enrollment period ends on Aug. 15, so the final tally will be higher.
Christen Young, deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council for Health Care at the White House, said in an interview that the high numbers are an indication that “barriers have been worn down” by temporary new subsidies that were introduced by the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill signed into law earlier this year, known as the American Rescue Plan.
Citing the coronavirus emergency, the Biden administration opened up a special enrollment period outside of the typical open enrollment window. The initial period was three months, from February to May, but the Department of Health and Human Services later extended the deadline until Aug. 15.
—Miami Herald
Suspects in Arbery killing plead not guilty to hate crime charges
ATLANTA — The three Georgia men already facing state murder charges for last year’s fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery answered, for the first time, federal hate crime charges leveled at them in late April.
Greg McMichael, his son Travis McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan all pleaded not guilty Tuesday at their arraignment on five federal counts. They were not accompanied by attorneys. Each man asked for court-appointed representation.
The charges, read aloud by U.S. Magistrate Benjamin Cheesbro, allege the three white suspects “did willfully, by force and threat of force, injure, intimidate, and interfere with Ahmaud Arbery, an African American man, because of his race and color.”
Two of the counts, revolving around the use of firearms during an alleged crime of violence, carry the possibility of life in prison if convicted.
The prosecution said they are prepared to turn over one terabyte of discovery evidence to the defense within the next week, along with the complete GBI case file.
Travis McMichael, 35, shot and killed Arbery with a Remington shotgun, and his 65-year-old father — a former cop and investigator for the Brunswick district attorney’s office — was toting a .357 magnum revolver.
Travis McMichael acted in self-defense, say his attorneys in the state case.
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
