Good morning.
The Democrat Mary Peltola has won the special election for Alaska’s only US House seat, becoming the first Alaska Native to serve in the House after beating candidates including the Republican Sarah Palin.
Peltola, 49, who is Yup’ik, is also the first woman to hold the seat and the first from her party to gain the seat in more than half a century. During the campaign, she emphasized her support for such issues as abortion rights. She will serve the remaining months of the late Republican US Representative Don Young’s term until a general election in November.
Palin, the state’s former governor, had the backing of Donald Trump and was hoping to make a political comeback. Along with Peltola and the other Republican candidate, Nick Begich, she will run again for a two-year term in November.
How much did Peltola win by? The race was determined by a ranked-choice voting tabulation, putting the Democrat in first place with 51.5% to Palin’s 48.5%.
Why was there a special election? The poll was held after Young, who had held the seat for 49 years, died in March at the age of 88.
Ohio officer kills 20-year-old Black man within a second of opening his bedroom door
An Ohio police officer with decades of experience fatally shot a Black man a second after opening his bedroom door on Tuesday morning.
The Columbus officer Ricky Anderson was attempting to serve the man, identified as 20-year-old Donovan Lewis, an arrest warrant. Lewis was unarmed and the killing was captured on police body camera.
Lewis was being apprehended on charges of improperly handling a firearm, assault and domestic violence. The police chief Elaine Bryant said Anderson fired when Lewis appeared to raise his hand while holding on to something. A vape pen was found on the bed beside him.
The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation has taken over the investigation.
How many people have been killed by police in 2022? According to Mapping Police Violence, officers have killed 391 people so far this year. Black people were 2.9 times more likely to be killed by police than white people in the US, it said.
China’s treatment of Uyghurs may be crime against humanity, says UN human rights chief
China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province may amount to crimes against humanity, the outgoing UN human rights commissioner has said, accusing Beijing of committing “serious human rights violations”.
Published just 11 minutes before her term came to an end, Michelle Bachelet’s damning report has been welcomed by human rights organisations, with the Uyghur Human Rights Project pressure group declaring it as “a gamechanger for the international response to the Uyghur crisis”.
China has put an estimated 1 million Uyghurs and other minority groups into internment camps, which it calls training centres, over the past five years. There have been credible allegations of torture, forced abortion and sterilization, the UN report says.
The Chinese government, which attempted until the last moment to stop the publication of the report, said in an official response that it was “based on the disinformation and lies fabricated by anti-China forces”.
The average rate of sterilization per 100,000 inhabitants in the whole of China was just over 32; in the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region it was 243, the report notes.
In other news …
A plaque commemorating the Ku Klux Klan should be taken down from the science centre at West Point, a congressional panel has said. The Naming Commission made the recommendation despite the matter falling outside its remit as the KKK was formed after the civil war.
Two of Donald Trump’s lawyers may become witnesses or targets in the obstruction investigation connected to the criminal inquiry into the former president keeping government documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, according to legal experts.
Boston children’s hospital received a bomb threat on Tuesday night after weeks of harassment from far-right groups that have targeted the hospital for working with young transgender people. A bomb squad was sent but nothing was found.
Stat of the day: ‘supermajority’ of up to 80% of Americans support climate bills
While a staggering “supermajority” of 66-80% of voters support climate policies such as a Green New Deal and carbon taxes for fossil fuel companies, voters massively underestimate public support for climate action. The average person in the US estimates that just 37-43% of the public back such policies. Republicans proved especially pessimistic about how much others care about tackling the climate emergency.
Don’t miss this: ‘Speak out against pushbacks, you’re an enemy of Greece,’ says refugee hero
Once celebrated as a Greek hero, Iasonas Apostolopoulos is facing daily death threats online and has been accused by the prime minister’s office of “insulting Greece” for speaking out against illegal pushbacks of asylum seekers. Apostolopoulos was informed last year that he would be awarded a medal for his work rescuing refugees off the Greek coast, but was then told it had been withdrawn, with media reports suggesting the U-turn was a result of government pressure. “If love of country means accepting the killing of refugees on our border, then I’m proud to be a traitor,” he says.
Last Thing: Why Japan’s war on disks could prove to be another flop
Japan’s digital minister, Taro Kono, tweeted on Wednesday that he had “declared a war on floppy disks” in an attempt to drive out the largely obsolete technology from the country’s bureaucracy. Businesses are still required to use floppy disks for 1,900 government-related procedures such as submitting applications. Japan is not alone here: the US air force replaced the floppy disks it had used to manage its nuclear arsenal in 2019.
