AP correspondent Norman Hall reports congressional Democrats have pushed through a resolution that says hospitals must provide emergency abortions.
Day: September 12, 2024
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Should schools ban cellphones?
As students return to school, more states and districts are cracking down on cellphones. But not everyone agrees. On “Post Reports,” we hear how things look on the frontlines of this battle. Read more: A few years ago, Jennifer Rosenzweig’s high school students gave her a strange nickname: the “Bucket Lady.” That’s because Rosenzweig, an English teacher at Scarsdale High School in New York state, saw students increasingly on their cellphones, including in class, and having trouble focusing. Her solution? Have students drop their phones in a bucket before class. Today, Rosenzweig is no longer the sole phone cop at her school, which now has a caddy on every classroom door, with pockets that students drop their phones into as they enter. New policies like this are spreading at schools throughout the United States, with pressure coming from teachers and parents who see phones as a distraction , an impediment to learning and a burden on students’ mental health. Host Martine Powers speaks with national education reporter Laura Meckler about the growing battle over phones in schools and the different opinions on the correct approach. Today’s show was produced by Emma Talkoff with help from Ted Muldoon and Rennie Svirnovskiy. It was mixed by Sean Carter and edited by Monica Campbell. Thanks to Karina Elwood and Chastity Pratt. Subscribe to The Washington Post here .
The United States has recently detected indications of increased Russian military activity around key undersea cables, CNN reports. The news is adding to existing concerns over the vulnerability of critical undersea communications infrastructure at a time when the Kremlin is accused of waging an escalating hybrid war against the West in parallel to its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Undersea cables play a key role in many aspects of modern society, accounting for the vast majority of digital communication including internet traffic and more than $10 trillion in daily worldwide financial transactions. Hundreds of undersea cables run across the world’s seas and oceans, with cables in the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea seen as being particularly at risk from potential Russian sabotage.
The world’s critical undersea infrastructure is largely unguarded and its exact positions are available in the public domain, creating a potentially tempting target for the Kremlin. Western intelligence officials believe Russia’s efforts to monitor and build up technical capability to access this vast undersea infrastructure are expanding and are currently spread among a number of different branches of the country’s military and security services, including the Russian Navy and the Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research (GUGI).
Though Russian officials have remained largely tight-lipped over the Kremlin’s alleged interest in undersea cables, former Russian President and close Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev stated in 2023 that there were no longer any constraints left “to prevent us from destroying the ocean floor cable communications of our enemies.”
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Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began just over two and a half years ago, reports of suspicious Russian activity close to undersea cables have been mounting. This threat to underwater infrastructure is viewed as one of the many tools in a far broader Kremlin toolbox of hybrid warfare methods against the West.
In September 2024, CIA and MI6 chiefs accused Russia of engaging in a “reckless campaign of sabotage” across Europe. Alleged recent Russian attacks on communications systems have included disruption to the Global Positioning System (GPS) that affected thousands of civilian passenger flights in the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, and eastern Mediterranean regions.
Attempts to disrupt vital digital infrastructure are all too familiar to Ukrainians. For example, just one month before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Moscow launched a massive cyber attack that shut down more than sixty Ukrainian government sites. Russia was also linked to a major attack on one of Ukraine’s largest telecommunications companies in late 2023 that temporarily left approximately twenty four million users without connection to phone or internet services.
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Amid mounting alarm over the possibility of Russian attacks on undersea cables, security measures are currently being reviewed and beefed up. NATO has set up an undersea infrastructure coordination group that brings together a wide range of public sector, military, and business representatives to share information regarding potential threats. Late last year, the alliance also announced that it was stepping up naval patrols in the Baltic Sea in response to damage to underwater infrastructure in the region.
In spring 2024, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Norway, and Denmark signed an agreement to protect critical underwater infrastructure in the North Sea from potential Russian sabotage. The move came amid recognition that the North Sea now serves as a critical hub connecting European countries through power cables, gas pipelines, and telecommunications links.
Alarm over the security of the world’s vital undersea communications arteries comes as concern mounts over a possible further escalation in Russia’s hybrid war. The Kremlin is believed to be considering a variety of options as it looks to retaliate for Western military support provided to Ukraine. While direct military action is viewed as unlikely, attacks on critical infrastructure could cause chaos and impose significant costs.
With no end in sight to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the threat to undersea cables looks set to remain for some time to come. A range of measures are already being implemented to improve security, but much more needs to be done. As Western governments look to bolster protection for existing underwater infrastructure, it may also be wise to further expand backup capacity in order to minimize disruption and bolster Western resilience against potentially devastating attacks.
Aleksander Cwalina is assistant director for the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
Further reading
UkraineAlert
Sep 1, 2024
Key Ukrainian front line city evacuates as Russian offensive gains pace
By
Maria Avdeeva
Evacuation efforts are accelerating in Pokrovsk as Russian troops draw closer amid fears the city will soon become the latest in a growing list of Ukrainian urban centers reduced to rubble by Putin’s invading army, writes Maria Avdeeva.
UkraineAlert
Sep 10, 2024
Ukraine’s biggest wartime government shakeup prompts muted reaction in Kyiv
By
Andrew D’Anieri
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presided over his government’s largest wartime reshuffle in early September, with nine ministries getting new permanent leadership, writes Andrew D’Anieri.
UkraineAlert
Aug 21, 2024
Invasion? What invasion? Putin is downplaying Ukraine’s Kursk offensive
By
Peter Dickinson
Vladimir Putin’s efforts to downplay Ukraine’s invasion of Russia have severely dented his strongman image and make a mockery of the West’s escalation fears, writes Peter Dickinson.
The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.
The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.
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The post Concerns grow over possible Russian sabotage of undersea cables appeared first on Atlantic Council.
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A St. Louis County, Missouri, judge upheld the murder conviction of Marcellus Williams, ruling that a prosecutor who contaminated key evidence by handling it without wearing gloves before Williams’s trial had not acted in “bad faith,” but instead was merely following his normal procedure.
The ruling, issued on Thursday by Circuit Court Judge Bruce Hilton, dismantles Williams’s latest attempt to prove his innocence and paves the way for his execution on September 24. “There is no basis for a court to find that Williams is innocent,” Hilton wrote. “Williams is guilty of first-degree murder, and has been sentenced to death.”
The ruling comes three weeks after the judge had agreed to a deal between Williams and St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell’s office that would have spared Williams’s life. The agreement, which would have seen Williams sentenced to life in prison, was based on the recent discovery that prosecutors had failed to adequately preserve the murder weapon used to kill Felicia Anne Gayle Picus in 1998.
Lawyers representing Attorney General Andrew Bailey scoffed at the deal, arguing that Hilton didn’t have the right to resentence Williams. Bailey ran to the Missouri Supreme Court to stop the proceeding, which it did, ordering Hilton to hold an evidentiary hearing instead.
During that hearing, on August 28, Bell and Williams’s attorneys maintained that the contamination of the murder weapon had violated Williams’s rights. Lawyers representing the attorney general meanwhile argued that handling evidence without protection was merely what the prosecutors did in St. Louis County at the time of Williams’s trial. Hilton has now agreed with that position.
In a statement following the ruling, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project and one of Williams’s attorneys, emphasized how rare and meaningful it was for Bell’s office to seek to vacate Williams’s conviction. “The decision of a prosecutor to move to vacate a murder conviction and death sentence is not done lightly,” she said, but Bell had done so because “there is overwhelming evidence that Marcellus Williams’s trial was unconstitutionally unfair, including revelations that the State contaminated the most critical evidence in the case — the murder weapon.”
Photo: Midwest Innocence Project
A Deal Undone
Keith Larner, a retired former prosecutor who handled Williams’s case, was a key witness during the evidentiary hearing. He admitted that, before Williams’s trial, he had repeatedly handled the butcher knife used to kill Picus without wearing gloves that would have preserved any biological material on it linking her killer to the murder.
Larner testified that after the local crime lab failed to find any fingerprints on the weapon and had matched blood found on it to Picus, he felt free to handle the knife without taking precautions because the testing was complete. Larner also said he had already concluded that Picus’s killer had worn gloves. There is no concrete evidence in the case record that Picus’s killer wore gloves. Nonetheless, Larner insisted that there “was nothing to link anybody to the crime on that knife.” Larner recalled touching the knife at least five times prior to the trial without wearing protective gloves.
Williams maintains his innocence in the killing. No crime scene evidence linked him to the murder inside Picus’s home, and Williams long argued that testing of the weapon used to kill Picus could prove he was innocent. The trial judge denied his attorneys’ request to test the knife for DNA before trial, and he was convicted in 2001 based on the questionable testimony of two informants. DNA testing done in 2016, however, revealed unknown genetic material on the knife’s handle.
Based in part on the unidentified DNA, Bell filed a motion in January to vacate Williams’s conviction, invoking a relatively new Missouri law that allows elected prosecutors in the state to undo convictions they believe their offices wrongly obtained. The court was scheduled to hold an evidentiary hearing on the case, where a special-appointed counsel was slated to argue that Williams should be freed. Yet additional testing on the knife revealed at the last minute that neither Larner nor his investigator could be excluded as the source of the unknown DNA. In other words, whatever crime scene DNA might have been on the knife was irrevocably lost by the prosecution team’s handling of it before Williams’s trial.
Because of those findings, Bell admitted that the road to exonerate Williams would be steep. In mid-August, Bell struck a deal with Williams and his attorneys: The prosecutor would take the death penalty off the table if Williams would enter a so-called Alford plea that would allow him to maintain his innocence while conceding the state had enough to convict him. In exchange, Williams would be resentenced to life in prison. Picus’s husband, Dan Picus, had also approved the deal; he believes Williams is guilty, but told the court he does not want to see Williams executed.
Yet that wasn’t enough for the attorney general’s office, whose appeal to the state’s high court scuttled the agreement and prompted the court to schedule the evidentiary hearing the following week.
“There Is Still Time”
In his ruling on Thursday, Hilton concluded that because Larner’s actions weren’t intentional, under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Williams’s rights had not been violated. The handling of the knife had been part of the prosecution’s normal practices, Hilton found. Larner, the judge wrote, had a “good faith basis and reasons for handling the knife without gloves.”
Hilton also rejected Williams and Bell’s other claims, including that Williams’s previous attorneys were ineffective in representing him at trial, and that Larner had struck people from the pool of potential jurors on Williams’s case because they were Black, which is unconstitutional. During the hearing, Jonathan Potts, who is working with Williams’s attorneys at the Midwest Innocence Project, pressed Larner about his stated decision to strike one potential juror because the man “looked very similar” to Williams. Larner said that what he meant was that they looked like “brothers,” he said. “Like familial brothers, not like Black people.”
During his short tenure as attorney general, Bailey has spent a considerable amount of time fighting efforts to exonerate the wrongly convicted. Still, as of Thursday afternoon, his office had not released a statement regarding Hilton’s ruling.
Rojo Bushnell, of the Midwest Innocence Project, said Williams’s legal team would continue to seek relief via the courts and Gov. Mike Parsons, who could grant clemency. “We will continue pursuing every possible option to prevent Mr. Williams’s wrongful execution,” she said in her statement. “There is still time … to ensure that Missouri does not commit the irreparable injustice of executing an innocent person.”
The post A Prosecutor Wanted to Spare Marcellus Williams’s Life. Missouri’s Attorney General Got in the Way. appeared first on The Intercept.
