Texas passed the most restrictive abortion law in the country by banning abortion when the fetal heatbeat can be detected, usually about six weeks, which is before the fetus is viable and often before a woman knows she is pregnant. The “Heartbeat Law” has no exception for rape or incest. The law authorizes a citizen to file a lawsuit against any person who provides an abortion, or “aids or abets” an abortion, including paying for it, or even intends to perform an abortion. Courts will enjoin the defendant and award the citizen plaintiff at least $10,000 in “statutory damages” for each abortion performed. The US Supreme Court declined to intervene by a vote of 5 to 4. When asked about victims of rape, Governor Greg Abbott responded that six weeks was plenty of time to get an abortion, and then committed to removing all rapists from the streets of Texas. In 2019, there were 14,650 rape cases in Texas, but only 3,900 arrests. Weeks later, Texas passed another law restricting abortions, this time by limiting prescriptions of the abortion-inducing pill to seven weeks after pregnancy.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that penalizing abortion is unconstitutional, opening the way to legalization nationwide. Elsewhere in Latin America, Argentina legalized abortion last year. In France, all contraceptive methods are free for girls up to 18 years old, and that is being expanded to all women up to 25. Abortions in France are free for all women and girls.
Texas also passed a voting law that banned drive-through voting, 24-hour voting, and mailing ballots to those who did not request one. Republicans say it will prevent fraud, but Democrats say it will make it harder for minorities to vote.
Texas saw another surge of migrants – this time Haitians. 15,000 Haitians displaced in Central America – some refugees from the earthquake in 2010 – crossed the Rio Grande river and were held underneath the Del Rio International Bridge in the 100° heat. Understaffed Border Patrol agents will process and then deport some of them back to Haiti, where they have not lived for many years. 12,000 were admitted to the US for asylum processing. The Haitian refugees were the latest caravan of 200,000 migrants a month surging at the southern border, mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Hondorus.
El Salvador adopted BitCoin as an official currency. Cryptocurrency exchanges reacted, with the value of BitCoin dropping 14% overnight on Coinbase. El Salvador still accepts the US Dollar, but adopted BitCoin to make it easier for those in the US to send money back home without paying money transfer fees. The move may cost Western Union and other money transfer services $400 million per year, because payments sent to individuals in El Salvador account for nearly a quarter of the country’s GDP.
A Dallas-area high school football quarterback skipped his senior year to cash in on new NCAA rules that allow college athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness. He enrolled at Ohio State and as an 18 year old has contracts worth more than one million dollars.
The first all-amateur crew of astronauts orbited the Earth for three days aboard a SpaceX capsule. Billionaire Jared Isaacman, who personally financed the trip for $200 million, raffled and selected the three other people. Previous private space missions by billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos were only suborbital flights that lasted for a few minutes.
A new defense pact between the US, UK and Australia called AUKUS is aimed at containing China, and began with Australia acquiring nuclear submarines. It also opens the way for greater military cooperation on areas such as cyber-security, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, which China is pursuing intensively.
Afghanistan’s poor are facing hunger because the economy collapsed after the Taliban took over. Big building projects in the city have stopped. The banks are closed. The foreign money tap has been turned off.
A United Nations report found that the world risks hitting 1.5°C of global warming in the 2030s, a threshold that would ignite “extreme events unprecedented in the observational record.” Despite the dire warning, none of the world’s major economic countries have sufficient plans to combat climate change.
Covid News September 2021
With US deaths approaching 700,000, more than 1 in every 500 Americans have died from Covid-19 – about the same amount who died from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Hospitals in the US are struggling to keep up with the volume of patients and more children are grappling with the virus. In some cases, children are dying due to lack of available ICU beds.
Idaho hospitals are so overwhelmed with the surge in coronavirus cases that doctors and nurses have to contact dozens of regional hospitals across the West in hopes of finding places to transfer critical patients.
The US is easing coronavirus travel restrictions, re-opening to passengers from the UK, EU and other nations for the first time in over a year.
