Monday, June 20 top stories

It is Monday, June 20. Happy Belated Juneteenth. Ready for today’s top stories?

Juneteenth celebrations across the U.S.

On Sunday — and today belatedly — it is Juneteenth, a federal holiday to honor the end of slavery. Currently only 24 states and the D.C. provides funding to let state employees have a paid day off. There is an ongoing effort to get all 50 states to take action to make it a paid day off.

News reports said on Sunday people across the U.S. gathered at events with parades, music, food and fireworks, and listened to speeches by historians and activists.

Juneteenth is to commemorate the day a Union general arrived in Galveston, Texas to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free after the Civil War’s end on June 19, 1865. This was the last group of people to be freed.

A lot of attention was on Opal Lee, a 95-year-old woman in Texas who is called the “grandmother of Juneteenth” because she has worked for decades to make Juneteenth a federal holiday.

She has conducted annual “Walk for Freedom,” a 2.5 mile walk in the Forth Worth area, to symbolize the 2.5 years that Texas slaves waited for their freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.

Last year President Biden made Juneteenth an official federal holiday and Lee was at the White House on the day he signed the Juneteenth bill.

Lee said in an interview on CNN last night that Americans should celebrate from the 19th of June to the 4th of July because “That would be celebrating freedom.”

FINA to restrict transgender women

FINA, the international organization that governs swimming competitions around the world, voted to restrict transgender women from competing into women’s events.

The new restriction is that transgender athletes must complete their transitions by the age of 12 before they can participate in women’s competitions.

FINA has 152 national federations and their members voted 71% to impose this rule change.

This ruling means that Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer at the University of Penn who won a NCAA championship in the 500-meter freestyle, wouldn’t be able to compete in the Olympics. She transitioned when she was a college student at around 20 years of age.

The idea for the rule change is that if a person has gone through “male puberty,” they will have physical advantages that makes women’s competition unfair.

This rule only applies to elite swimming competitions organized by FINA, such as world championships or Olympic Games.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger shows letter with death threat

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who is one of the only two Republicans on the Jan 6. Committee, showed a death threat that was sent to his wife at their home address.

The letter was handwritten and addressed to Sofia, Adam’s wife. It said Adam would be executed and that Sofia and their five-month-old son would join him in hell.

Kinzinger said the letter was sent from a local area and that he’s never seen or had anything like that.

He warned the nation by saying, “There’s violence in the future, I’m going to tell you. And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently.”

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Republican Party of Texas says 2020 election illegitimate

The Republican Party of Texas had a state convention over the weekend and passed by voice vote a resolution to reject “the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election” and “hold that… Biden… was not legitimately elected.”

This means that members of the Republican Party of Texas are endorsing a falsehood that the 2020 election was rigged.

The convention also adopted a platform that called homosexuality an “abnormal lifestyle choice” and opposed all efforts to validate transgender identity.

During the convention, some attendees harassed Rep. Dan Crenshaw by calling him “eye patch McCain.” Others booed Sen. John Cornyn for his efforts to improve gun safety.

Report: Uvalde police never tried to open classroom doors

The San Antonio News Express reported that surveillance footage inside of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas — where 19 students and two teachers were killed last month — shows that none of the responding police officers attempted to open doors leading into the classroom where the gunman and the victims were in. The door may have been unlocked the entire time.

There were 77 minutes between the moment the gunman entered the school and when he was shot and killed by police.

Uvalde police have previously said they had to wait to get keys for the classroom before entering. Uvalde police waited for over an hour in a hallway before a group of Border Patrol agents entered the classroom.

The police chief of the Uvalde school system, Pete Arredondo, have been heavily criticized for the long delay in police response on the day of the shooting and for a lack of transparency.

2,000 cattle deaths blamed on heat wave

Last week a viral video showed hundreds of dead cattle lying down on a farm in Kansas. Officials in the state said a heat wave, in which degrees reached 100 degrees in many areas, caused “heat stress” that led to the cattle’s deaths.

A livestock official said the sudden change in heat was too much because it did not allow the cattle to acclimate.

At least 2,000 cattle deaths are confirmed, but there may be hundreds or thousands more. Cattle ranchers are not required to report their losses.

Each animal is worth about $2,000, so it is a significant economic loss for the farms.

That is all the top stories for today. See you tomorrow and stay with the light.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/us/juneteenth-states-paid-holiday.html

https://news.yahoo.com/juneteenth-celebrations-emphasize-ending-racial-193937517.html

https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/article262534242.html

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/19/entertainment/juneteenth-cnn-event-2022-cec/index.html

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/10039188-fina-to-restrict-participation-of-transgender-women-from-elite-swimming-competitions

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/20/sport/swimming-transgender-ruling-explainer-spt-intl/index.html

https://abc7chicago.com/adam-kinzinger-wife-george-stephanopoulos-congressman/11977786/

https://people.com/crime/uvalde-police-never-attempted-to-open-doors-to-classroom-with-shooter-inside-report/