South Carolina’s Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a state law banning abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy was unconstitutional because it violated a right to privacy, handing a major win to abortion rights supporters in the U.S. South.

Hours later, Idaho’s Supreme Court found that the constitution in that state did not protect a right to abortion, drawing the opposite conclusion in a similar case challenging the state’s restrictions on pregnancy termination.

The rulings were significant milestones in the legal battle over abortion rights that has been playing out in states since the U.S. Supreme Court in June eliminated a nearly 50-year-old federal right to abortion by overturning the Roe v. Wade decision.

In conservative states such as Idaho and South Carolina, which both quickly moved to ban abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court decision, the future of abortion access could rest on how judges interpret state constitutions.

In South Carolina’s 3-2 ruling, Justice Kaye Hearn wrote that the “state constitutional right to privacy extends to a woman’s decision to have an abortion.”

Hearn said that while the state could set some limits on abortion, any regulation on privacy in regards to the procedure should give a woman “sufficient time to determine she is pregnant and to take reasonable steps to terminate that pregnancy.” Six weeks was “not a reasonable period of time” after which to ban abortion, Hearn said.

The gestational limit on abortion in South Carolina is now 22 weeks, the Center for Reproductive Rights said.

The president of Planned Parenthood’s South Atlantic affiliate, Jenny Black, called the decision “a monumental victory in the movement to protect legal abortion in the South.” Many states neighboring South Carolina have banned abortion in most cases.

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said his office was working with the governor and legislative leaders on next steps. “We respectfully, but strongly, disagree with the Court’s ruling,” he said.

Idaho’s Supreme Court said the state constitution did not contain explicit or implicit protections for abortion rights, ruling against Planned Parenthood in a case challenging that state’s abortion bans.

In a 3-2 decision, the court ruled that there was rational basis for certain state laws. These included one that totally bans abortion, which makes providing the procedure a felony, and another that forbids abortion after six weeks. The latter, modeled on a Texas law enacted in September 2021, allows citizens to enforce it by filing lawsuits.

The decision on Thursday allows those laws to remain in effect.

“Each of these laws is constitutional because it is rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in protecting prenatal fetal life at all stages of development, and in protecting the health and safety of the mother,” Justice Robyn Brody wrote in the majority opinion.

The South Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a bill that banned abortions after six weeks’ gestation.

In a 3-2 decision, the court ruled that the state’s Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act, which has faced numerous legal challenges since Republican governor Henry McMaster signed it into law in 2021, violated a woman’s right to privacy under the state constitution. The bill barred abortions once an unborn child’s heartbeat was detectable, usually around six weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest, and saving the life of the mother.

South Carolina is one of numerous states facing legal challenges to pro-life laws since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade sent the issue back to state legislators. A Georgia county judge blocked a similar six-week heartbeat bill in November.

Twenty-one states in March announced their support for South Carolina’s Protection from Abortion Act.

Writing the majority opinion, Justice Kaye Hearn sided with Planned Parenthood South Atlantic’s argument that abortion is included in a woman’s right to privacy, the Associated Press reported.

“The time frames imposed must afford a woman sufficient time to determine she is pregnant and to take reasonable steps to terminate that pregnancy,” Hearn wrote. “Six weeks is, quite simply, not a reasonable period of time for these two things to occur, and therefore the Act violates our state Constitution’s prohibition against unreasonable invasions of privacy.”

Justices George James Jr. and John Kittredge dissented, arguing that the right to privacy did not extend to abortions.

McMaster and South Carolina attorney general Alan Wilson (R.) are reviewing options for further legal action.

“Our State Supreme Court has found a right in our Constitution which was never intended by the people of South Carolina. With this opinion, the Court has clearly exceeded its authority,” McMaster tweeted in response to the ruling.

South Carolina still bars abortions after 20 weeks.

The post South Carolina Supreme Court Strikes Down Heartbeat Bill appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol wanted to test how fast it took social media to get to radical content. The answer, when it came to TikTok and Nazis, was just over an hour.

It took TikTok 75 minutes to deliver Nazi content to a new user who did not seek it, the committee found, according to a report Thursday in Rolling Stone. The magazine is one of a number of publications reviewing the committee’s final release of documents as the U.S. House of Representatives transitions from Democratic to Republican control.

Committee staffers were testing a theory that social media giants were reluctant to police right-wing extremist content in part because of pushback from then-President Donald Trump and his supporters who argue that such controls inhibit conservative speech.

The Jan. 6 riot, which resulted in multiple deaths, was carried out by supporters of Trump who believed his false claim that he had won the 2020 election. That lie spread on social media, where right-wing accounts were some of the most seen during the period between the election and Jan. 6, after which several social media giants, including Twitter, banned Trump.

The staffers on the committee’s social media team invented Alice, a 41-year-old woman from Acton, Massachusetts. It took “Alice” 75 minutes of scrolling without prompts or interactions to get to Nazi content, the staffers reported.

The social media team said in a draft summary that “Alice” was “just one of the Committee’s experiments that further evidenced the power of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm in creating rabbit holes toward potentially harmful content.”

The incoming Republican majority in the House, which includes a substantial portion of Trump backers, has indicated that it will seek to bury as much of the findings of the Jan. 6 committee as it can. Meanwhile, legislators on both sides of the aisle have said they plan to scrutinize TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company, because of its presentation of harmful content and its potential security risks.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post How long before new TikTokers see Nazi content? 75 minutes, according to a Jan. 6 committee test appeared first on The Forward.

Ira Wechterman knows that Jewish tradition says Jewish bodies should be interred. It’s what he was taught, and what his own daughter, a rabbi and executive director of the Reconstructionist movement, encourages.

But Wechterman, 82, and his wife, Helene, 80, have decided they’re going to be cremated after they die. He sees cemeteries as a waste of land, and said he doesn’t tend his own parents’ cemetery plots but is pretty sure they don’t care about the weeds growing around their graves.

“I would rather have my children go to a place that was meaningful to us — they can go to any body of water and think of mother and dad sailing,” said the retired Long Island dentist who now lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida. “If my wife and I are cremated, we can have our ashes put into the Gulf Stream and eventually they will float up to Port Jefferson where we used to live.”

Helene and Ira Wechterman, parents of a rabbi, have opted to be cremated after death. Courtesy of Helene and Ira Wechterman

The Wechtermans’ choice is one more and more Americans are making. According to the Cremation Association of North America, more than half — 58% — of Americans who died in 2020 were cremated. The National Funeral Directors Association expects about 80% to be cremated by 2040.

Cremation figures for Jews are lower because a traditional Jewish funeral involves a burial. Even the more liberal streams of Judaism, including the Reform and Reconstructionist movements, call for it.

There are nuances among Jewish viewpoints. Orthodox Jews are more likely to describe cremation as unacceptable and a desecration. Jewish law “is unequivocal that the dead must be buried in the earth,” states a Chabad website. According to a Reform movement document, cremation should be discouraged, but in Biblical text “nowhere do we find an express prohibition of the burning of the corpse.”

What is clear across movements is that an increasing number of Jews are opting for cremation. There are no hard numbers on this. But rabbis, Jewish funeral directors and others who work closely with bereaved families are estimating numbers not far behind those for Americans in general. Some are trying to push back against the trend. A leader in this countermovement, Rabbi Elchonon Zohn, has called on rabbis to dedicate this coming Shabbat to combatting “the cremation crisis.”

Zohn, who is Orthodox and the founder and director of the National Association of Chevra Kadisha, or Jewish burial societies, said that based on reports from members, about half of American Jews who die are cremated. It is growing “by leaps and bounds,” he said.

Among those who seek out Jewish burial societies, which tend to attract Jewish families seeking more traditional funerals, the numbers may be lower. But they are climbing, said Charles Hirschberg, of the Dallas Chevra Kadisha. About 20% of the families his group serves request cremation, up 50% in the last three years, he said.

These figures are far higher than the single and low-double digits that the Forward found 10 years ago when it asked clergy and others to estimate the number of Jews being cremated.

But Hirshberg, Zohn and others who want to dissuade Jews to stop choosing cremation are working against increasingly strong convictions within the larger Jewish community that people should be free to decide how they want to dispose of their bodies and that their families and clergy should support them.

‘The cremation crisis’

Zohn has organized a national campaign to “help all Jews choose burial.” Its website lists more than 650 synagogues in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and Australia that are taking part.

A flyer for a campaign to dissuade Jews from cremation. Courtesy of Rabbi Elchonon Zohn

“Burial is not merely a Jewish ‘tradition,’” the website states, explaining that the mitzvah, or commandment, of burying the dead comprises two of the 613 compiled by Maimonides: “a positive commandment of burying a body, and a negative commandment of not leaving a body unburied.”

Zohn, who is hosting two webinars on the topic on Saturday night and Sunday, said he picked this Shabbat to dedicate to the cause because the Torah reading this week, Vayechi, deals with Jacob’s death and his directive to his children that he be buried in Israel and not in Egypt, where he was then living.

He also wants rabbis to talk to their congregants this weekend about other end-of-life issues, “purchasing a grave and about having a living will and life insurance.”

But Zohn and others who are trying to convince more Jews to choose burial also know they are up against compelling financial realities. In general, burial costs more than cremation.

“Ninety percent of the problem is that the cost of a funeral in Dallas is about $10,000 and the cost of cremation is $2,700,” said Hirschberg of the Dallas Chevra Kadisha. In response, his group is offering loans to families to shoulder the burden.

A 2021 study from the National Funeral Directors Association shows the median cost of burial to be closer to that of cremation, with a viewing and burial of a body at $7,848, compared to $6,970 for a viewing and cremation.

Jews who are trying to get other Jews to reject cremation also invoke the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews died, many in crematoria.

“From time immemorial Jews have avoided cremation,” Hirschberg said. “One of the reasons the Nazis used cremation is because they knew what a shanda” — a disgrace — “it was for Jews.”

Accommodating

A survey of the four major Jewish movements — Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist — shows that all discourage cremation, some more strongly than others. All also indicate that there are rabbis within them who will take part in a memorial service for someone who was cremated.

Rabbi Avi Shafran, a spokesperson for Agudath Israel of America, a group that represents Orthodox Jews, said that while he believes some Orthodox rabbis might decline to speak at a memorial service for a person who was cremated “as a matter of principle,” others would agree no matter the plans for the body. He also noted that Judaism does not call for a rabbi to be present at a Jewish burial.

The Reform movement has changed its position on cremation over the years, and not in the direction some might expect. In past years the movement had considered cremation permissible, but a recent statement from the Central Conference of American Rabbis calls for its members to “discourage” the practice. The position is based upon two threads of argument: that burial is the traditional Jewish practice and that, since the Holocaust, cremation has become associated with “one of the darkest periods in Jewish and human history.”

And “every rabbi can respond to requests for cremation based on their own understanding of tradition, Jewish history, the needs of the family, and their own conscience,” said Tamar Amitai, a spokesperson for the conference.

Rabbi Elyse Wechterman is executive director of the Reconstructionist movement Courtesy of Rabbi Elyse Wechterman

The Conservative movement holds that cremation “should be discouraged, but it is not formally forbidden,” according to Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, spiritual leader of Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side of New York City. His writings on the subject were adopted by the movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards.

Rabbi David Steinhardt, spiritual leader of Congregation B’nai Torah in Boca Raton, one of the largest Conservative congregations in Florida, takes a stance on cremation that many rabbis favor — keeping a distance from the process but embracing the family that chooses it. He said he will preside at a service for a person whose body was cremated, but only after shloshim, the 30 days following a funeral.

Rabbi Elyse Wechterman of the Reconstructionist movement said she will officiate at the funeral for a person who is to be cremated, reasoning that “just because there wasn’t a traditional burial, does not mean the mourners can’t have traditional mourning.”

She said she has seen tahara, the traditional washing of the body, performed in advance of a cremation. And she notes a case in which someone donated his body to science and research. “What came back six to eight months later were cremated remains and the family then had a funeral to make sure those remains were buried.”

Wechterman refers to her parents, Ira and Helene Wechterman, when she explains her willingness to serve families who have chosen cremation. It is a choice she would not make, she emphasized, but one she will honor.“So I approach it with an eye towards Jewish tradition and a pastoral response,” she said. “The key is flexibility with an eye on kavod hamet, honoring the deceased and comforting the mourners.”

The post More and more Jews are choosing cremation. These rabbis aren’t happy about it. appeared first on The Forward.

(NewsNation) — The year that followed the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was one of increased harassment and threats against federal public officials in the nation’s capital as well as local leaders in cities like Anchorage, Alaska.

“We witnessed our own version of Jan. 6 in Anchorage, Alaska, and we stood against them, fought them down,” said Chris Constant, vice chair of the Anchorage Assembly.

In October 2021, a city employee attempted to cut a public meeting’s livestream and dismiss security amid heated debates about COVID-19 mask mandates, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

Constant told NewsNation that the harassment of local elected leaders peaked in Anchorage around the time municipalities began enforcing COVID-19 mandates. The restrictions came with strong opposition and drew waves of people to city meetings, he said, and eventually to his home.

“They’re circling the house with trucks, blaring horns, ‘You can’t hide from us!’ ‘Open Anchorage!’ ‘We’re coming for you!’” Just insanity,” Constant said.

In the year that started with the Jan. 6 insurrection, harassment, violence and threats against public officials were on the rise across the country. Threats and attacks against national figures including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Paul Pelosi, husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, made headlines.

Police in Albuquerque, New Mexico are investigating shootings at four elected officials’ homes and offices, NewsNation affiliate KRQE reported.

“Three of the bullets passed through my ten-year old daughter’s bedroom,” Senator Lopez said in a statement. “I am asking the public to provide any information they may have that will assist the police in bringing about the arrest of the perpetrators.”

It was not immediately clear if the incidents were connected. No injuries were reported.

A 2021 National League of Cities survey of local officials found that 87% reported an increase in attacks on public officials in recent years, and 81% said they personally experienced harassment threats or attacks.

Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona reported the highest number of harassment claims, according to a separate Princeton University report.

Of the 400 cases observed in the NCL report, the majority stemmed from concerns over elections, education or the government’s response to COVID-19.

Minnetonka, Minnesota, City Council Member At Large Deb Calvert received backlash for the city’s public health restrictions. The aggression ultimately emboldened her, she said.

The mask mandates seemed to fuel otherwise stereotypically “civil” Minnesotans, Calvert said. Soon, she and her colleagues were fielding hundreds of emails and phone calls, occasionally met with incoherent screaming on the other line.

“That was the first time I ever hung up on someone because there was no use trying to converse with this person,” Calvert said. “I literally couldn’t understand what they were saying.”

In the summer of 2021, Calvert was campaigning door-to-door when a man shouted at her to leave his property and called her a terrible person, the councilwoman said.

“I said, ‘Sir, I’m leaving your property. There’s no reason to be so angry. Just don’t vote for me,’” Calvert said. “I didn’t even feel safe turning around and walking down the stairs so I backed all the way down the stairs and a car saw this man being incredibly aggressive to me and actually stopped to make sure I could get off the property.”

Calvert caught her breath and continued going door-to-door. She now takes extra precautions, such as telling people where she’s going and tries to bring a partner.

Back in Anchorage, Constant wasn’t campaigning, but rather talking to a neighbor who pointed out that a camouflage hunting camera was strapped to a tree facing Constant’s house. 

He took the matter to the police, who weren’t able to track down the camera’s owner, Constant said. 

“It’s created a little box in the back of my brain in which I pushed all of my insecurities and doubts and fears and closed it off and did my duty,” he said. “It just was a matter of bottling it up and moving forward because you have a job to do.”

As time went on, Constant said what might have typically been normal assembly meetings grew disorderly. 

Some who attended a meeting in September of 2021 wore six-pointed yellow stars that said “Do Not Comply” in an effort to compare mask mandates to the Holocaust. Four people total were arrested during the meeting. One man was kicked out after hurling a derogatory and homophobic insult at Constant, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

Things have calmed down some since the onset of the pandemic, both Constant and Calvert agreed.

Moving forward, the NCL recommended cities plan in advance for de-escalation and security protection, as well as institute a code of conduct for public city meetings and prioritize the mental health of their elected officials. The preservation of local news also plays an important role.

“According to a study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, more than one-fourth of the country’s newspapers have disappeared, leaving residents in thousands of communities in news deserts,” the report stated.

The local news outlets in Anchorage and Minnetonka have helped to uncover some of the harassment over the past two years, both politicians agreed, but the harassment hasn’t stopped.

Just this week Constant, who is gay, received another email using homophobic language. He saves messages like those in a folder labeled “Bigots and Haters” and fantasizes about publishing them someday. Since they came through his professional email, they’re already a part of the public record.

“It was bad,” Constant said. “We have a lot we can learn from it, and it’s getting better. And let’s not forget the lessons that we learned because we may find ourselves here again.”

A 42-year-old Utah man whose wife had filed for divorce just before Christmas shot dead seven members of his family including his five children ranging in age from 4 to 17 and then turned the gun on himself, officials said on Thursday.

The massacre on Wednesday has stunned the close-knit community of Enoch City in southwestern Utah, where both the mayor and the city manager said they knew the Haight family as neighbors.

After reporting the shooting with scant details on Wednesday, city officials called a news conference on Thursday and identified the shooter as Michael Haight, the father of the five children he killed.

Haight also shot dead his wife, Tausha Haight, 40, and her mother, Gail Earl, 78.

The children killed were a 4-year-old boy, a 7-year-old boy, a 7-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl and a 17-year-old girl, officials said without naming them.

“The Haights were my neighbors. The youngest children played in my yard with my sons,” Enoch City Mayor Geoffrey Chesnut told reporters. “Enoch City is a very close community. The neighbors are good. The people are wonderful. And the effort we make on one another’s behalf is like family.”

The rural town of about 7,500 is home to a high number of young professionals with children, Chesnut said.

Police were sent to the home for a welfare check after Tausha Haight had missed an appointment in town and efforts to reach her had failed, Chesnut said.

Tausha Haight and one of her daughters had been seen at a church event on Tuesday night, Chesnut said.

Officials declined to draw conclusions about the impact of the divorce petition that they said had been filed on Dec. 21.

Police Chief Jackson Ames said officers were once called to the couple’s home a couple of years ago for an incident that he declined to describe, but that there had been no recent complaints.

“From what we saw outside, they were just phenomenally kind, and so everyone I’ve talked to has just been absolutely shocked about losing them,” neighbor Garrett Minkler told ABC4 television.

School officials said counselors were being made available to classmates of the victims.

City Manager Rob Dotson noted that officials at the news conference were misty-eyed, their voices cracking, because of the emotional toll.

“We don’t know why this happened,” Dotson said. “However, we do know that they were our friends. They were our neighbors. And that we loved them.”

President Joe Biden said on Thursday the U.S. economy was seeing “really bright spots” after a rough few years, and was headed to a “new plateau,” a new term for the stable, slower growth White House officials see ahead.

While investors, many economists and some CEOs have warned recently that a U.S. recession is due in 2023, the Biden administration considers it unlikely, in part because of federal spending.

Biden told members of his Cabinet ahead of a private meeting that he sees public and private investments of $3.5 trillion in manufacturing and technology over the next decade strengthening the U.S. economy and boosting prospects for American companies and workers.

“This is not about getting to a level spot. This is about going to a whole new plateau,” the Democratic president said. “We’re the only country in the world who’s come out of the crisis stronger than we went in.”

Biden cited recent data showing easing inflation, solid growth and a resilient labor market, but said it would be critical to implement hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending contained in three key signature laws passed last year.

The U.S. economy is forecast to grow 3.8% in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to an Atlanta Fed model, while the Consumer Price Index rose 0.1% in November.

“That doesn’t mean it’s all over. It means that we’re off to a pretty darned good start,” he said. “I just don’t want to get us suckered into thinking that we can sort of let up on the gas pedal.”

Biden is not alone in his optimism.

The United States may avoid the outright contraction that could hit a third of the world’s economies, Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Monetary Fund, said on Sunday. read more

St. Louis Federal Reserve leader James Bullard said Thursday that the risk of a U.S. recession has fallen in recent weeks.

Still, if the U.S. avoids recession, it will likely be by a narrow margin. The Federal Reserve predicts 0.5% growth in 2023, for example.

Speaking to Cabinet members, Biden also lauded plans by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which enforces antitrust law, to ban companies from requiring workers to sign noncompete and some training repayment agreements that keep workers from leaving for better jobs. read more

“The bottom line is, I believe our economic vision is working, and we’re in the process of implementing the first pieces we’ve gotten done and we’re going to move on,” he said.

Biden’s upbeat comments came as Wall Street’s main indexes closed more than 1% lower, with evidence of a tight labor market eating away at any hopes investors had that the Federal Reserve could soon pause its rate hike cycle.

The following story is about something we KNEW would happen. We knew it was going to happen at some point. How could it not? This is MAGA we’re talking about. They’re a bunch of crazed, conspiracy-driven drama seekers. So perhaps this was inevitable.

Witchcraft has reared its ugly head. That’s right. The witching hour is here, signed, sealed, and brought to you by Maga republicans. There is a newly elected republican. She is from Florida, and her name is Anna Paulina Luna. And Ms. Lina has just retained legal representation over a Maga republican’s claims that she’s a witch.

How happy Samual Alito must be right now! A letter has been sent by Lina’s attorneys to Michael Tito, who also happens to be a friend of Roger Stone’s. In the letter, attorneys for Luna claim that Tito made false claims on a radio show called “Bubba, the love sponge.” You cannot make this up.

Calling the statements “defamatory,” the letter claims Tito had exercised “gross negligence” in making a variety of claims against Luna, including that she practices witchcraft. The letter demands a retraction and an apology, either on radio or video. Luna insists she is not a witch.

But one knows something like this would happen. Maga has accused everyone of doing and being everything. It was only a matter of time until allegations of witchcraft surfaced, I suppose.

The post These MAGA loons are even further gone than we thought appeared first on Palmer Report.