Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for assurances about steps being taken to protect national security after sensitive plans were shared on Signal.
Wild horses have become a new and unlikely defence against bush fires in the Iberian Highlands.
Recent summers have brought a rampage of wildfires to Europe but with the hottest months approaching again, ecologists hope that horses could play a significant role in reducing the risk.
In 2023, the conservation group Rewilding Spain introduced a herd of 10 horses to the Iberian Highlands. The rare horses, known as Przewalski’s, went extinct in the wild but were successfully reintroduced from European zoos.
The horses now roam around more than 5,700 hectares of public forest, reducing the volume of combustible vegetation in the landscape.
They feed on the yellow flowers of gorse – a highly combustible plant. By “selectively clearing” it, the horses “help prevent wildfires”, said Laura Lagos, a researcher at the University of A Coruna, whose 2021 study found that wild horse grazing was the most effective method for preventing wildfires.
Other animals, including sheep and bison, can also help reduce wildfire risks through grazing, but wild horses are uniquely adapted to Galicia’s rugged terrain and they have “moustaches that appear designed to protect their lips from the prickly gorse”, Lagos told Al Jazeera .
Although the equine dectet won’t change everything on their own, the Rewilding Spain team leader Pablo Schapira told Positive News that 10 is “a good number to start a new population” and he’s “looking forward to seeing how the animals interact with the larger landscape”.
For centuries, the Serrano horse was used for “threshing and other agricultural jobs”, but “allowed to roam freely when not working”, says Positive News.
But the history of wild horses in Galicia “dates back thousands of years” and rock carvings of horses being hunted by humans “suggest their presence in the region during the Neolithic period”, said Al Jazeera.
In the 1970s, about 22,000 wild horses “roamed the region’s mountains, forests and heathlands”, and the “growing risks” of climate change, habitat loss and “declining herd numbers” show the “urgent need” to protect both the horses and the ecosystems they sustain.
Meanwhile, bison, which have “indiscriminate eating habits”, consume over 130 different plant species, “effectively clearing and rejuvenating the landscape” and helping to “prevent the undergrowth from becoming a potential fire hazard”, said Euronews .
Under the federal law governing efforts by state prisoners to seek post-conviction relief in federal courts, prisoners who lose at the trial level can only appeal that decision if they can show that reasonable judges could disagree with the ruling or that the case should be allowed to move forward. The Supreme Court declined on Monday to decide whether prisoners can make that showing as long as at least one appeals court judge votes to grant them permission to appeal.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the denial of review in the case of Lance Shockley, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2005 murder of a Missouri highway patrol officer who had been investigating a fatal car accident in which Shockley had been the driver. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Sotomayor’s six-page dissent.
The brief unsigned order denying review was part of a list of orders from the justices’ private conference on Friday, March 28.
Shockley contended that his trial counsel violated his Sixth Amendment right to have effective representation by an attorney. Although the foreman at Shockley’s trial had self-published a “fictionalized autobiography” depicting the protagonist’s attempt to seek “vengeance” after his wife was killed by a drunk driver but was only sentenced to probation, Shockley’s lawyers did not learn of the book until after Shockley had already been convicted. When they eventually became aware of it, before Shockley’s sentencing, they failed to take advantage of the judge’s suggestion that they develop the facts to support their motion for a new trial – for example, by questioning the foreman about whether he had discussed the novel with other members of the jury, which he had.
After his efforts to obtain relief in the state courts were unsuccessful, Shockley went to federal court. The district court denied his petition for post-conviction relief, as well as permission to appeal.
Shockley then went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, which – by a vote of 2-1 – also turned down his request for permission to appeal. The full court of appeals then denied his request to reconsider that decision, with a second judge joining the dissenting judge in voting for rehearing.
Shockley came to the Supreme Court in November, asking the justices to weigh in. He argued that the disagreement among judges about whether to hear his appeal indicated that, as federal law requires, reasonable judges could disagree on how his claim should be resolved. Moreover, he stressed, four other courts of appeals would have granted his request to appeal in light of that disagreement.
Missouri urged the justices to stay out of the dispute. It argued that both the Supreme Court and Congress had “left it to the circuit courts of appeal to decide how they handle applications for certificates of appealability.” Any inconsistencies on how the courts of appeals treat such applications are, therefore, it emphasized, “merely differences of administration on a procedural matter” and not deserving of the justices’ attention.
After considering Shockley’s petition for review at five conferences, the justices denied review.
Sotomayor would have granted review and, she suggested, allowed Shockley’s appeal to go forward. In her dissent, Sotomayor contended that there “are good reasons to think that Congress conditioned the right to an appeal on a single judge’s vote.” She observed that, under federal law, most cases “must be resolved by ‘a majority of the number of judges authorized to constitute a court or panel thereof’ or by the appropriate ‘court of appeals.’” Congress could have done the same for post-conviction cases, she noted, but instead indicated only that “’a circuit justice or judge’ can grant permission to appeal.”
Allowing an appeal to move forward as long as at least one judge votes to grant permission to appeal “also promotes efficiency,” Sotomayor contended. “Because appeals should proceed so long as they present a debatable issue,” she wrote, “the question whether to grant” permission “should not be a contentious one.”
Addressing the substance of Shockley’s appeal, Sotomayor concluded that it “is difficult to see how an attorney’s decision not to call witnesses in support of a credible mistrial motion, when invited to so by the presiding judge in a capital murder trial, could fail to constitute ineffective assistance of counsel.” The court of appeals, she wrote, was “plainly” wrong when it ruled that the district court’s contrary decision was “not even debatable.”
The court once again did not act on several high-profile petitions for review that have been pending for several weeks, including challenges to Rhode Island’s ban on large-capacity magazines and Maryland’s ban on military-style assault rifles , as well as a challenge to the transfer of federal land in Arizona that the San Carlos Apache Tribe regards as a sacred site to a mining company.
The justices will meet again for a private conference on Friday, April 4. Orders from that conference are expected at 9:30 a.m. on Monday, April 7.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court .
The post Justices decline to hear post-conviction relief dispute in Missouri capital case appeared first on SCOTUSblog .
“The consumer confidence in this country has gone way down.”
For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.
The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday. If you don’t spend a lot of time online, you probably don’t know who Loomer is, and that’s healthy . To say that she is a “conspiracy theorist” is not quite enough: She has referred to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and has claimed that 9/11 was an “inside job”; she has charged that some school shootings were staged, accused Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis of “exaggerating” her struggle with breast cancer, and questioned whether the “deep state” might have used an atmospheric-research facility in Alaska to create a snowstorm over Des Moines. (Why? So that foul weather would suppress the turnout in the 2024 Iowa GOP caucuses and hurt Trump’s campaign.)
Loomer has even alienated her ostensible allies in the MAGA movement, to say nothing of the hostility she has engendered among various other Republicans. (Peter Schorsch, a former Republican operative who now runs the website Florida Politics, described her to The Washington Post as “what happens when you take a gadfly and inject it with that radioactive waste from Godzilla.”) Indeed, Trump’s own aides found Loomer so toxic that they tried to keep her away from the 2024 campaign, as my colleague Tim Alberta reported last year. A source close to the Trump campaign told Semafor last fall that Trump’s people were “‘100%’ concerned about her exacerbating Trump’s weaknesses,” but that attempts to put “guardrails” around her weren’t working. Trump clearly likes the 31-year-old provocateur, and in Trumpworld, there’s apparently very little anyone can do once the boss takes a shine to someone.
And so Loomer reportedly walked into the Oval Office yesterday with a list of people who should be removed from the National Security Council because of their disloyalty to Trump and the MAGA cause. (Asked for comment, Loomer declined to divulge “any details about my Oval Office meeting with President Trump.” She added, “I will continue working hard to support his agenda, and I will continue reiterating the importance of strong vetting, for the sake of protecting the President and our national security.”)
The next day, at least six staff members, including three senior officials, were fired. If Loomer had nothing to do with it, that’s a hell of a coincidence. (The NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes told The Atlantic that the NSC does not comment on personnel matters.)
Today, an unnamed U.S. official told Axios that Loomer went to the White House because she was furious that “neocons” had “slipped through” the vetting process for administration jobs. The result, according to the official, was a “bloodbath” that took down perhaps as many as 10 NSC staff members. Most reports named Brian Walsh, the senior director for intelligence, and Thomas Boodry, the senior director for legislative affairs; other reports claim that David Feith, a senior director overseeing technology and national security, and Maggie Dougherty, senior director for international organizations, are among those dismissed. Walsh formerly worked as a senior staff member for Marco Rubio on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Boodry was National Security Adviser Michael Waltz’s legislative director when Waltz was a House member, and Feith was a State Department appointee in the first Trump administration.
The firings at the NSC represent an ongoing struggle between the most extreme MAGA loyalists and what’s left of a Republican foreign-policy establishment. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, for example, has been in an online tussle with the Republican fringe—a group that makes Cotton seem almost centrist by comparison—over Alex Wong, another Trump NSC official, whom Loomer and others have, for various reasons, accused of disloyalty to Trump. Other conflicts, however, seem to center on a struggle between Waltz and the head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, Sergio Gor, who has reportedly been blocking people Waltz wants on his team because Gor and others doubt their commitment to the president’s foreign policy.
Such internal ideological and political food fights are common in Washington, but the national security adviser usually doesn’t have to stand by while his staff gets turfed on the say-so of an online troll. If these firings happened because Loomer wanted them, it’s difficult to imagine how Waltz stays in his job—or why he’d want to.
Waltz, of course, is already slogging through a mess of his own creation because of the controversy surrounding his use of the chat app Signal to have a highly sensitive national-security discussion about a strike on Houthi targets, to which he inadvertently invited a journalist—The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. (Waltz’s week wasn’t getting any better before Loomer showed up: New reports claim that the meeting about the Yemen strikes was only one of many conversations about important national-security operations that Waltz held over Signal.) Trump reportedly kept Waltz on the team purely to deny giving “a scalp” to the Democrats and what he perceives as their allies in the mainstream media.
Now Waltz’s authority as national security adviser is subject to a veto from … Laura Loomer? It’s one thing to dodge the barbs of the administration’s critics; that’s a normal part of life in the capital. It’s another entirely to have to stand there and take it when an unhinged conspiracy monger walks into the White House and then several accomplished Republican national-security staffers are fired.
The reason all of this is happening is that in his second term, Trump is free of any adult supervision . The days when a Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis or a Chief of Staff John Kelly would throw themselves in front of the door rather than let someone like Loomer anywhere near the Oval Office are long gone. Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants who are apparently so scared of being exiled from their liege’s presence that they can’t bring themselves to stop someone as far out on the fringe as Loomer from advising the president of the United States.
Meanwhile, a person close to the administration told my colleague Michael Scherer today that “Loomer has been asked to put together a list of people at State who are not MAGA loyalists.” Waltz might yet get fired, but whether he stays or goes, he doesn’t seem to be in charge of the NSC. Perhaps next we’ll see if Marco Rubio is actually running the State Department.
Related:
Michael Scherer contributed reporting.
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
The president of the European Commission said that the bloc is “prepared to respond” with countermeasures to President Donald Trump’s tariffs but will attempt to negotiate with him first.
Hungary announced that it will pull out of the International Criminal Court . Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an ICC arrest warrant, landed in Budapest today for a visit.
At least seven people have died after intense flooding, tornados, and storms hit the central United States. More extreme weather is expected to continue affecting the area this week.
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Evening Read
To Be Happier, Stop Resisting Change
By Arthur C. Brooks
In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel set out to learn about Zen Buddhism, which was starting to penetrate the West. He found a teaching position in Japan, where he hoped to locate someone who could instruct him in the philosophy. Rather than the sort of course he had in mind, he was informed that because he lacked proficiency in Japanese, he would be required instead to learn a skill—namely, kyūdō (the way of the bow)—and this would indirectly impart the Zen truths that he sought …
In short, Herrigel learned that the secret to archery—and the approach to life he was seeking—is to know when to stop resisting change and simply let it occur. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend half a decade studying archery in Japan to benefit from this central insight.
Culture Break
Take a look. In the 1960s, Vine Deloria Jr. was a budding Native American activist. Philip J. Deloria writes about his father’s transformation —and the world he built at home.
Read. Derek Thompson interviews Richard White, the historian and author of The Republic for Which It Stands, about the real story behind the Gilded Age .
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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International markets reeled from President Donald Trump’s announcement hours earlier of even more sweeping tariffs set to begin later this week and next.
Nike and Apple were among brands worst hit, but Trump maintained the US economy would ultimately “boom”.
Kenneth D. DeGiorgio, the chief executive of First American Financial, was charged with assault. His lawyers say that the other man was harassing the executive’s wife.
On a chilly Wednesday afternoon, the President announced he would single-handedly blow up a century’s worth of globalization.
As markets plunged and world leaders expressed anger and dismay over Trump’s tariffs, Mexico took a more measured and hopeful approach.