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The Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey yesterday urged US lawmakers to “reach a higher ground” and bolster gun purchase background checks and raise the minimum age to buy an AR-15-style rifle from 18 to 21.
“We want secure and safe schools and we want gun laws that won’t make it so easy for the bad guys to get the damn guns,” McConaughey said at the White House, after the elementary school mass shooting last month in his home town of Uvalde that killed 19 students and two teachers. “We are in a window of opportunity right now that we have not been in before. A window where it seems like real change can happen.”
He said that gun law reform would not end mass shootings but suggested that steps could be taken to reduce the likelihood of such tragedies. “We need to invest in mental healthcare. We need safer schools. We need to restrain sensationalized media coverage. We need to restore our family values. We need to restore our American values and we need responsible gun ownership,” McConaughey said. “Is this a cure-all? Hell no, but people are hurting.”
Gun owner McConaughey met briefly in private with Joe Biden before addressing the White House press corps. He said he and his wife drove back to Uvalde on the day after the shooting and spent time with the families of some of the victims and others directly affected by the rampage.
Only cultural change will free America from its gun problem, writes lecturer Andrew Gawthorpe in the Guardian today. “The pleasure derived from guns, the sense of participation in America’s deepest myths about itself which they might foster, come at the expense of tens of thousands of lives a year.”
In the US, Australian traveler strip-searched, held in prison, deported over entry condition
Due to not satisfying an obscure entry requirement, an Australian student was cavity-searched in the US after being denied entry and was sent to prison alongside criminals before being deported 30 hours later.
Jack Dunn, 23, from Victoria, had applied for a visa waiver for his trip to the US in May and planned to travel on to Mexico. He had been warned about the need to prove his plan to exit the US, but was unaware of a rule requiring those entering on the waiver to have booked either a return flight or onward travel to a country that does not border the US.
After arriving in Honolulu, Dunn – who had spent more than half a year saving for his trip and quit his job as a youth worker to go – was refused entry to the US and detained at a federal prison until he could be put on a return flight to Australia.
Upon landing last month, he was interrogated and refused entry after it was determined he had not booked onward travel beyond Mexico. Dunn said about six hours after landing he was handcuffed and taken to the federal detention center in Honolulu, where he was told to strip naked and was twice searched under his scrotum and anus for contraband before being admitted for about 30 hours.
Dunn was placed in a cell with another prisoner who had smeared blood and feces on the wall. He was told to sleep on a concrete floor with a paper bag for a pillow. “They treat you like a criminal, they treat you like shit,” he said.
He has since attempted to go on a different holiday in Thailand, but had several panic attacks while there and had to return home.
No regrets over handling of Vladimir Putin, says Angela Merkel
The former German chancellor Angela Merkel has no regrets over her handling of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, during her 16 years in power, she has said.
A 2008 Nato membership plan for Ukraine that was blocked by her government would have been perceived as a “declaration of war”, she said in her first public appearance since leaving office six months ago.
“I would feel very bad if I had said, ‘There’s no point talking to that man [Putin].’ It is a great tragedy that it didn’t work, but I don’t blame myself for trying.”
On opposing the US-led membership action plan for Ukraine and Georgia in 2008, Merkel said: “Ukraine was not the country that we know now. It was a Ukraine that was very split … even the reformist forces [Yulia] Tymoshenko and [Viktor] Yushchenko were very at odds. That means it was not a country whose democracy was inwardly strengthened.” She said Ukraine at the time was “ruled by oligarchs”.
Ukraine’s route to membership of the Nato military alliance was blocked with the country’s best interests at heart, she said. “I knew Putin would have done something to Ukraine that would not have been good for it.”
In other news …
Hunter Biden’s first wife has described how a denial of secret service protection while her father-in-law was vice-president “triggered” her fear of exclusion from the Biden family, years before the breakup of her marriage.
In the Mexican city of Cuernavaca, dozens – including the mayor – fell 3 metres into a gully as a new footbridge over a picturesque waterway collapsed as it was inaugurated yesterday amid farcical scenes. It appeared the bridge was over capacity.
Japan is preparing to open to international travelers after two years of Covid border restrictions. From Friday, limited numbers of foreign visitors on package tours will have to wear masks and be chaperoned for their entire stay by local guides.
In a blow to the movement across the US to elect progressive district attorneys, San Francisco residents have voted to recall the criminal justice reformer DA Chesa Boudin amid a backlash from law enforcement, conservatives and residents concerned about crime.
Don’t Miss This: A deadly ideology: how the ‘great replacement theory’ went mainstream
Before the Buffalo, New York shooting last month in which 10 black people were killed in a grocery store by an 18-year-old alleged shooter said to have endorsed the “great replacement theory”, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson had mentioned replacement theories more than 400 times on his show. The racist conspiracy falsely claims that white Americans and Europeans are being actively “replaced” by non-white immigrants. It’s a deadly ideology being pushed by the far-right Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán, and a recent YouGov poll suggested 61% of Trump voters and 53% of Fox News viewers believe it is true. But how did it go mainstream?
Climate check: ‘Gold rush’ for gas production threatens to lock in global heating
Investments into new natural gas production facilities by governments including the US, Germany, the UK and Canada could destroy the chances of limiting global heating, warns new research as western states seek to sanction Russia over the Ukraine invasion amid rising energy prices. In a report, scientists sound a clarion call of restraint since climate breakdown can be staved off only through radical moves towards lower-carbon alternatives. Among other developments, the US has signed a deal to export additional LNG to the EU, through an increased effort on fracking.
Stat of the day: Microplastics found in freshly fallen Antarctic snow for first time
Tiny plastics smaller than grains of rice have previously been identified in Antarctic sea ice and surface water but now for the first time researchers have found them in fresh snowfall in the region. Plastic particles were found in every one of 19 samples collected from the Ross Ice Shelf at an average of 29 microplastic particles per liter of melted snow. “It’s incredibly sad but finding microplastics in fresh Antarctic snow highlights the extent of plastic pollution into even the most remote regions of the world,” said the lead researcher. A recent study found that the particles cause damage to human cells. Samples taken from immediately next to the scientific bases on Ross Island, Scott Base and McMurdo Station also threw up larger concentrations – nearly three times that of remote areas.
Last Thing: The Congolese student fighting with pro-Russia separatists in Ukraine
It was economics that Jean Claude Sangwa, a 27-year-old from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, went to the breakaway region of Luhansk last year to study. But when the self-declared republic mobilized in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he decided to join the local militia. “I joined because the war came to our republic. What should I have done? I am a man and have to fight,” Sangwa said in broken Russian. “The whole world is fighting against Russia.” While his story is unusual, his pro-Moscow sentiments and opinions about who is responsible for the war are mainstream in large parts of Africa, writes Pjotr Sauer, a Russia affairs correspondent for the Guardian.
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