Ex-pharmacist who ‘intentionally’ destroyed vaccines gets 3-year term
A former pharmacist who tampered with and destroyed COVID-19 vaccines at a Wisconsin hospital has been sentenced to three years in federal prison.
Steven Brandenburg, 46, was sentenced Tuesday after he ruined more than 500 doses in 60 vials of the Moderna vaccine at Advocate Aurora Hospital in Grafton, about 25 miles north of Milwaukee, in December 2020.
In a previous court appearance shortly after his arrest, prosecutors said Brandenburg intentionally left the vaccines out of refrigeration to make them inert and lead people to believe they had been vaccinated properly. Prosecutors added that Brandenburg admitted to being a conspiracy theorist who believed the vaccines were unsafe and change people’s DNA structures.
In January, Brandenburg agreed to plead guilty to two counts of attempting to tamper with consumer products with reckless disregard. He had faced up to 10 years for each count.
—New York Daily News
Border Patrol agents find 5-year-old girl dropped alone at border wall
SAN DIEGO — U.S. Border Patrol agents found a 5-year-old Guatemalan girl running along the border wall in San Ysidro after she'd been dropped off alone, the agency said Tuesday.
About 10:45 a.m. Monday, agents spotted someone leaving the child at the end of a border wall just west of the San Ysidro Point of Entry, the agency said in a news release.
The girl walked north along the Tijuana River channel into the United States, the agency said. Surveillance footage shows the girl running along the wall, her ponytail swinging.
Border Patrol agents picked her up and brought her back to a nearby station. The little girl told them her parents were in the U.S., but she did not have contact information for them.
She also told agents that her 7-year-old cousin was still in Mexico with an unidentified man. The agency said it contacted both the Guatemalan and Mexican consulates.
"Sadly, this is the latest example of how the most vulnerable populations are being exploited for financial gain," Chief Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke said in the news release. "Thankfully our agents encountered this child before any harm could befall her."
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
New SC execution law still in place after judge denies injunction
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Just 10 days before South Carolina is scheduled to carry out its first execution in a decade, Circuit Court Judge Joceyln Newman denied a move by two death row inmates’ lawyers to block the new execution law requiring them to choose between the electric chair and the firing squad.
Newman did not issue an injunction to the new law Tuesday, saying the inmates’ lawyers' claims that the change in the law is unconstitutional had “little likelihood of success.”
Newman’s decision comes about a month after the South Carolina Legislature voted to change the state’s execution law. State lawmakers voted to change the execution law due to the state’s ongoing inability to purchase the necessary drugs to carry out a lethal injection, which some argue is a more humane way to put people to death.
In the 2000’s, drug companies decided to crack down on how their drugs are being used and stopped selling drugs commonly used in lethal injections to state corrections departments. That, coupled with a portion of an old execution law that made the lethal injection the default method of execution, ground the state’s ability to execute Death Row inmates to a halt. Under the old South Carolina law, if an inmate did not explicitly choose to die in the electric chair, the state could not kill them that way.
In May, the Legislature voted to change the state’s execution law so it could resume carrying out executions. Under the new law, the electric chair is the default method of execution, but if the firing squad or the lethal injection are available, inmates can choose those.
—The State
Harris invites all 24 female senators to dinner as infrastructure talks stall
Vice President Kamala Harris has invited all female members of the Senate for a dinner party at her residence next week, according to an aide, reviving a bygone tradition as the White House struggles to muster bipartisan support for a major infrastructure plan.
The dinner is set for June 15 at the Observatory, and all 24 women senators — 16 Democrats and eight Republicans — have been asked to attend, the aide told the Daily News on Tuesday. Word of the get-together was first reported by Politico.
The Senate’s female members used to gather for dinners regularly up until 2017, when Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., a frequent host, retired.
The dinners gave lawmakers an opportunity to take a break from the daily muck of politics and blow off some steam with colleagues from both sides of the aisle.
But the brutal 2016 and 2020 elections cycles caused deep rifts between Democrats and Republicans, and the bipartisan shindigs became a thing of the past.
Harris’ decision to bring the tradition back to life comes at a critical juncture for her and President Joe Biden.
Biden, Harris and their White House negotiators are at loggerheads with Senate Republicans over legislation to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into fixing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure systems.
—New York Daily News
