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Overnight News Digest: Medical abortion remains a battleground [1]

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Date: 2023-03-06

x RIP Gary Rossington of @Skynyrd



Here's my 2002 @VH1 doc on the band (yes, I’m cringe but the doc holds up)



Too many of the brilliant musicians in the doc are no longer with us!https://t.co/mRgYFuvgxe — Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) March 6, 2023

BBC

Some 10% of the local population in the tropical island nation of Seychelles is dependent on heroin in what is now an epidemic, according to the country's government. Even being locked away offers no protection for those dependent on the drug. BBC Africa Eye gained rare access to the main jail to witness the sharp end of a problem threatening to overwhelm the country. … Nestled on the top of a hill, surrounded by beautiful views of the Indian ocean is Montagne Posée Prison, Seychelles' main correctional facility. ... Beside the smiling face of the late South African president - who was of course a prisoner himself - there is a quote which reads: "It is said that no one knows a nation until one has been inside its jails."

BBC

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has called the wave of suspected poisonings of schoolgirls in recent months an "unforgivable crime". "If there are any people involved in the matter, and there certainly are... the perpetrators must be given the most severe of punishments," he warned. More than 1,000 girls at dozens of schools have been affected by unexplained illnesses since November.

Reuters

MEXICO CITY, March 6 (Reuters) - Mexican and U.S. authorities said on Monday they were working to locate four Americans who were shot at by gunmen in northern Mexico and then kidnapped shortly after crossing the border. The four unidentified Americans were in a white minivan with North Carolina license plates when they entered Matamoros, Tamaulipas, on Friday, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico said, seeking the public's help in identifying the kidnappers.

Reuters

March 6 (Reuters) - California would not do business with Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc (WBA.O), state Governor Gavin Newsom said in a tweet on Monday, days after the pharmacy chain said it will not dispense abortion pills in some Republican states. The state refuses to do business with Walgreens or "any company that cowers to the extremists and puts women's lives at risk," Democrat governor Newsom said. Walgreens did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Al Jazeera

Turkish opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu has been named as the main challenger to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a landmark presidential and parliamentary vote, after days of wrangling by a six-party alliance over the nomination. “Our table is the table of peace. Our only goal is to take the country to days of prosperity, peace and joy,” Kilicdaroglu, chairman of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), told about 2,000 people gathered in Ankara on Monday. … The bloc has said it will reverse many of Erdogan’s policies on the economy, civil rights and foreign affairs in what many see as the most consequential election in the republic’s 100-year history.

Al Jazeera

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has been handed a 15-year prison term after being convicted in absentia of treason and conspiracy to seize power, a verdict she says is punishment for her efforts to promote democracy. Tsikhanouskaya, 40, a former English teacher, fled to neighbouring Lithuania in 2020 after running against incumbent Alexander Lukashenko in a presidential election, which official results showed Lukashenko won by a landslide. She and the opposition said at the time that the results had been doctored to hand victory to Lukashenko. Anger at the official results triggered widescale protests.

Deutsche Welle

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Russia's taking control of the city of Bakhmut would not mean that Ukraine was losing in the broader conflict. Austin said the city was of more emblematic than practical value to Russia when it came to winning the war. "I think it is more of a symbolic value than it is strategic and operational value," Austin told reporters while visiting Jordan. "The fall of Bakhmut won't necessarily mean that the Russians have changed the tide of this fight," Austin added. The Russian mercenary group Wagner has been at the forefront of Moscow's effort to capture Bakhmut.

Deutsche Welle

Members of Georgia's Parliament brawled openly on Monday as a committee discussed a law with the stated purpose of cracking down on "foreign agents." The legislation has been likened to a Russian law introduced in 2012, which the Kremlin has used to stifle dissent in civil society and shut down independent media outlets. Video from the parliamentary chamber in the capital, Tbilisi, appeared to show the chairman of the chamber's legal affairs committee striking the leader of the United National Movement opposition party. Other lawmakers then started to jostle and hit one another. Some of the men were removed from the room amid shouting and a loud scream. One woman threw down her papers as a group of men tried to carry her away from the chairman's podium.

NPR

The Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, is a multi-state partnership that experts across the political spectrum say is the only reliable, secure way for states to share voter registration data with each other. But on Monday, three Republican-led states announced they are pulling out of ERIC — leaving questions about the future of a system that up until recently was a bipartisan success story, as well as questions about how these three states will maintain accurate voter lists without such a resource. "[ERIC] is a godsend," Paul Pate, the GOP secretary of state of Iowa, told NPR in an interview last month.

NPR

Outside legal observers say the Fox News Channel finds itself in real legal jeopardy in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought by an election tech company over lies broadcast about the 2020 presidential race. The amount and weight of evidence is perhaps without equal among other major, recent defamation cases. "How often do you get 'smoking gun' emails that show, first, that persons responsible for the editorial content knew that the accusation was false, and also convincing emails that show the reason Fox reported this was for its own mercenary interests?" says Rutgers University law professor Ronald Chen, an authority on constitutional and media law.

The Guardian

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/6/2156566/-Overnight-News-Digest-Medical-abortion-remains-a-battleground

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