Friday, May 20 top stories
It is Friday, May 20. Here are today’s top stories.
Elon Musk accused of sexual misconduct
Business Insider reported that in 2016, a flight attendant for SpaceX accused Elon Musk of sexual misconduct and was paid $250,000 in 2018 to settle the claim as a part of a severance agreement.
The report said the attendant worked on Musk’s private jet and also provided massages. During one of the massages, Musk exposed himself and asked the attendant to “do more” and offered to buy her a horse.
Musk recently tweeted that the “wild accusations are utterly untrue” and that “it never happened.” He said the goal of the Insider article was to put out a hit piece to interfere with his acquisition of Twitter.
Oklahoma passes bill banning abortions after fertilization
The Oklahoma legislature passed a bill that would ban all abortions in the state beginning at fertilization and sent it to the governor’s desk. The bill seeks to enforce the abortion ban by allowing private citizens to sue anyone suspected of helping a person to get an abortion. If a citizen successfully sues someone, they will receive $10,000 from the Oklahoma government.
Texas has a similar law in place that allows private citizens to sue those who helped a woman obtain an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. But now Oklahoma seeks to ban it at the moment of fertilization. Oklahoma already bans abortions after six weeks so this bill, if signed into law, would make Oklahoma the most restrictive state regarding abortion laws.
The White House said the bill is the most extreme effort to undo abortion rights in the U.S. and warned that “ultra MAGA officials across the country” could seek to roll back freedoms on the right to contraception and marriage equality in the future.
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Ex-deputy sentenced to 18 years in van drowning case
In South Carolina, a former deputy named Stephen Flood was sentenced to 18 years in prison for driving a police van with two female inmates locked in a cage around a barricaded road with floodwaters, which caused the van to stall and fill up with water and drown the women.
This happened in 2018. Roads in Marion County were flooded because of the aftermath of Hurricane Florence. The deputy was carrying Wendy Newton (45) and Nicolette Green (43) to be involuntarily committed due to mental health issues.
The deputy’s van came to barricades set up by the National Guard near the Little Pee Dee River. The troops allowed the deputy to go around the barricades and the van pushed forward in deeper and rushing water before it was lifted off its wheels and slammed against a guardrail that blocked the van’s sliding door. The deputy and another deputy with him were unable to open a second door because they didn’t have the keys for it and even tried shooting the locks off, but it didn’t work. Firefighters were called and cut off the van’s roof and tried to cut the cage, but the floodwaters got higher and faster and they had to stop.
The deputy’s defense team argued that he was unfairly blamed for the women’s deaths, pointing to equipment problems and the National Guard troops that allowed the van to go through. But a jury found Flood guilty of two counts of involuntary manslaughter and two counts of reckless homicide.
The second deputy who was with Flood will stand trial for two counts of involuntary manslaughter in the future.
8,000-year-old human skull found in Minnesota River
Last September two kayakers found a piece of a bone on the banks of the Minnesota River and reported it to the local sheriff’s office, who then sent it to a medical examiner and a forensic anthropologist with the F.B.I.
Carbon dating testing showed that the bone, a part of a skull, was from a young man who lived about 8,000 years ago, between 5500 and 6000 B.C.
Archaeologists believe the young man, a Native American, traveled through ancient lands in present-day Minnesota, eating plants, deer, fish, turtles, and freshwater mussels.
The sheriff’s office posted a photograph of the skull but later took it down because it is considered offensive to Native American culture to publish photos of their ancestors’ bones. I did see the image and it shows what seems to be a piece of person’s forehead bone and the tops of the orbital bones.
The F.B.I. anthropologist said there was a depression in the skull that shows the man sustained a severe head wound but it’s not clear if the man died from it or survived.
The skull will be returned to Native American tribes in the state.
That is all the top stories for this week. Have a great weekend and stay with the light.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1527519328245059592
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/deputy-18-years-detainees-drown-locked-van-84843412
https://www.axios.com/2022/04/28/oklahoma-abortion-ban-texas-law-stitt-pass