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After Donald Trump attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word, his far-right supporters have jumped on his comments to harass Fani Willis, the African American Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump used the term “riggers” to reference “those that Rigged the Election”, but that hasn’t stopped his supporters from reproducing images of nooses and gallows and calling for Willis and the grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged.
The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, the two Black poll workers from Atlanta who were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton county case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count.
More on the Georgia indictment: Trump and his 18 co-defendants are to be booked at a jail in Fulton county, Georgia. The defendants have until 25 August to surrender voluntarily, after which they will be arrested.
More on the classified documents indictment: The attorney for the Mar-a-Lago club’s maintenance chief, who is charged with helping Trump obstruct the government’s attempt to retrieve the classified documents at the property, may have conflicts of interest, special prosecutors said.
Joe and Jill Biden to visit Hawaii as wildfire death toll rises to 110
Joe and Jill Biden will travel to Hawaii next week to witness first-hand the impact of the wildfires that have so far killed 110 people.
The visit comes after Biden faced criticism for his response to the Maui fires from Republicans.
More on the Maui wildfires: the devastation following the blaze has exposed a rift over the dominance of tourism on the island.
In other news …
Joe Biden prepares to host the first-ever summit between Japan and South Korea, as the US promises a “new era” in relations with its most important allies in Asia.
Attorneys for Dianne Feinstein are alleging financial elder abuse in a new lawsuit seeking to remove managers of a trust established by the senator’s late husband Richard Blum.
A US appeals court upheld restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone, making a ruling on Wednesday that brings the country back to regulations that were in place in several years ago.
Don’t miss this: a new kind of refugee
Hundreds of Cambodians who fled genocide and civil war are being sent back to a country they barely know, over crimes they had already been punished for. These individuals had already repaid their full debt to society when they were deported. Many had entered the prison system while still in their youth, leaving in their middle age. Many of the former prisoners have gone through counseling, attended classes and participated in restorative justice programs. They either fulfilled their sentences or underwent the taxing process of getting approved for parole.
But just as they’re finally released – to reunite with their families and to rebuild the communities they played a part in shattering – the US is punishing them once more by exiling them from their home and loved ones.
“It’s made me feel like a lost cause,” said Chamroeun Mich, who was deported in 2022. “It was a strenuous process to get parole. It took years and years of discipline, of educating myself, of changing the way I thought, and then I had to go in front of a board of six to seven members who scrutinized everything that I did during my incarceration and my life prior to that. But even though I made it out of that strenuous process, the federal government decided, you know what, he’s not rehabilitated. He can’t be rehabilitated. Send him away. We don’t want him.”
… or this: a narco-highway in an Honduran rainforest
A network of illicit roads that serve as narco-highways are slicing through the Moskitia, an Indigenous territory rich in tradition, and creating chaos in once-protected Honduran rainforest. The loss of virgin forest in Gracias a Dios nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021 because of these roads. If the cutting continues at its current pace, most of the Moskitia forest – and the way of life it sustains – could be lost by 2050.
“In 20 to 30 years, we’ll have lost all of Tawahka [Asagni biosphere], all of Patuca [national park] and we’ll probably just have a little bit left of the central zone of the Río Plátano biosphere,” said Héctor Portillo, a leading Honduran biologist. “We’re going to have chaos, at the level of loss of coverage, loss of biodiversity and aspects of social, economic and health wellbeing in the area.”
Climate check: Atlantic storms are excessively killing people of color
As the climate crisis worsens, a study has found that Atlantic storms, which have become deadlier as the planet warms, are disproportionately killing people of color in the US.
More than two-thirds of the total excess death toll have occurred during the past 15 years, with the highest death counts in counties with majority Black, brown and Indigenous residents.
Last Thing: how tourists are ruining the great holiday destinations
In the 20 years before the Covid lockdowns, international tourism doubled, to 2.4 billion arrivals in 2019. While tourism last year was at 63% of its pre-Covid levels, some increasingly are resentful of the bounce back.
“I think it really helps to think of travelling as a kind of consumption,” says Frederik Fischer, the CEO and founder of the social enterprise Neulandia, which connects creative digital workers to rural communities in Germany. “If you only consume another country, or you only consume a city, I’m not sure you’re really doing a benefit to the people and the place.”
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