Month: June 2022

Authorities confirmed that one climber is dead, and several others were injured in separate incidents on Northern California’s Mount Shasta on Monday during “very tough conditions”. Mount Shasta is a potentially active volcano and a major peak of the Cascade Range. It has an elevation of 14,179 feet.

The Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office said rescuers responded to three incidents on the mountain near the Oregon border over the course of several hours. The fatal incident involving three climbers was reported at 8:39 a.m. around Avalanche Gulch, which authorities described as a snowy glacier climb on the mountain. One climber was confirmed dead before rescue efforts could be performed, the sheriff’s office said. The second climber in this incident was in critical condition while a third was recovering from injuries that included a broken ankle.

A second incident occurred around Avalanche Gulch at 12:31 p.m., with rescue crews airlifting one climber in critical condition to safety. The sheriff’s office said that in yet another separate incident, a fifth climber was rescued around 4 p.m. after suffering injuries on the mountain. A helicopter crew located her and airlifted her to a hospital.

The sheriff’s office later posted a climbing advisory video with another climber describing the conditions on the mountain as “very tough.”  In the video, Wallace Casper of Bozeman, Montana said a lot of people were slipping and sliding due to a layer of water ice on top of the snowpack, conditions which he said make it “pretty much impossible to self-arrest” as a skier.

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Uvalde, Texas native Matthew McConaughey visited the White House on Tuesday, and emotionally urged leaders to make the loss of 19 children and two teachers in last month’s mass school shooting “matter” by enacting stricter gun laws.

McConaughey said during the White House briefing:  “So I am here today in the hopes of applying what energy, reason and passion that I have and to try and turn this moment into a reality because this moment is different. We start by making the loss of these lives matter.  We start by making laws that save lives and don’t infringe on our Second Amendment rights. We start right now by voting to pass policies that can keep us from having so many Columbine, Sandy Hooks, Parklands, Las Vegas and Uvaldes.”

McConaughey called for gun responsibility, not gun control, saying: “We need background checks. We need to raise the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 rifle to 21. We need a waiting period for those rifles. We need red flag laws and consequences for those who abuse them.”

McConaughey visited his hometown after the shooting, and as he spoke he showed photos of the children killed and described how their families pleaded with him to make sure their loss mattered.  The actor said: “We need to invest in mental health care. We need safer schools. We need to restrain sensationalized media coverage. We need to restore our family values. We need to restore American values.”

McConaughey challenged leaders in Washington, D.C. to finally enact gun laws that save lives: “Can both sides see beyond the political problem at hand and admit that we have a life preservation problem on our hands This should not be a partisan issue. As divided as our country is, this gun responsibility issue is one that we agree on more than we don’t Find the middle ground, a place where most of us Americans live anyway, especially on this issue, because I promise you, America, you and me, we are not as divided as we are being told we are.”

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Elon Musk threatened to cancel his purchase of Twitter on Monday, accusing the social media platform of breaching the merger agreement by not providing the data he has requested on spam and fake accounts.

Musk alleged in a letter written to Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust, that Twitter is “actively resisting and thwarting his information rights” as outlined by the deal.  An attorney representing Musk wrote to the company: “This is a clear material breach of Twitter’s obligations under the merger agreement and Mr. Musk reserves all rights resulting therefrom, including his right not to consummate the transaction and his right to terminate the merger agreement.”  Musk has demanded that Twitter turn over information about its testing methodologies to support its claims that bots and fake accounts constitute less than 5% of the platform’s active user base. Musk has also alleged that the true number of spam accounts is likely much more, potentially as high as 90%. Musk has previously said the acquisition “cannot move forward” until the company provides “proof” of its spam metric.

Musk’s letter also insinuated that Twitter may be “withholding the requested data due to concern for what Mr. Musk’s own analysis of that data will uncover” and claimed Twitter had ‘sought to restrict access to the information by interpreting the merger agreement narrowly, such that providing the information would fall outside the scope of Twitter’s contractual requirements.’

Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, said in a statement Monday that “Twitter has and will continue to cooperatively share information with Mr. Musk to consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement.” The company also said it intends to “close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.”

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed sweeping gun reform bills on Monday, banning individuals under the age of 21 from buying or possessing a semi-automatic rifle. The package was passed by the New York Assembly on June 2 after the May 14 shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo that left 13 dead and the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Texas that left 19 children and two adults dead.

The new legislation will add to previous gun laws by banning the purchase or possession of semi-automatic rifles by those under 21, requiring state and local law enforcement agencies to share gun crime information with federal databases, expanding the ability of health care professionals, police and district attorneys to file Extreme Risk Protection Orders, banning the sale of body armor to the general public and requiring a license to purchase assault weapons. The package will also criminalize both the act of making a threat of mass harm and adding to a threat with overt acts to further it.

Gov. Hochul said:  “This is a moral moment for the people of New York but also the rest of the nation. Follow what we did here in New York, and we’ll finally start to be at the beginning of the end of all this gun violence and the massacres that are occurring every day in our country.” Hochul announced further funding as part of New York State’s Gun Involved Violence Elimination initiative.  The funding will go towards 20 local police departments across these 17 counties that account for over 80% of the violent crime in New York.

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