Yellowstone flooding rebuild could take years, cost billions
Yellowstone National Park is celebrating its 150th anniversary as it faces its biggest challenge in decades. Floodwaters that tore through the park this week destroyed potentially hundreds of bridges, washed out miles of roads and drove out more than 10,000 visitors. The scope of the damage is still being tallied by Yellowstone officials, but based on other national park disasters, it could take years and cost upwards of $1 billion to rebuild in an environmentally sensitive landscape. Park officials hope to reopen the southern half of the park next week but the northern half likely won’t reopen this year.
Juneteenth is a federal holiday, but in most states it’s still not a day off
Last June, President Joe Biden made Juneteenth a federal holiday, a day for Americans to commemorate slavery’s end. Only 18 states have since passed legislation that would provide funding to let state employees observe the day as a paid state holiday, according to the Congressional Research Service. Opponents of bills that would create funding for the permanent holiday have complained of the costs associated with giving workers another paid day off. Some say not enough people know about the holiday to make the effort worthwhile. This month, nearly 60% of Americans said they knew about the holiday, compared with 37% in May 2021, according to a Gallup poll.
Jan. 6 witnesses push Trump stalwarts back to rabbit hole
Instead of convincing Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters of his misdeeds, the revelations from the hearings into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol are prompting many of them to reassert their views that he was correct in falsely asserting a claim to victory. They’re concocting new stories to explain why the former president’s own daughter Ivanka told Congress she didn’t accept his claims about a rigged election. They’re also creating new conspiracy theories to explain testimony from Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr, who told investigators that Trump’s claims were “bogus” and that the former president wasn’t interested in the facts.
Herschel Walker says he ‘never denied’ having 4 children
Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker says he “never denied” the existence of children he hadn’t publicly disclosed before and he’s telling conservative Christians that his kids “knew the truth.” Walker’s comments came after The Daily Beast reported that Walker has four children, including two sons and a daughter, whom he had never discussed publicly. Walker has repeatedly criticized absentee fathers and called on Black men to play an active role in their children’s lives. His spoke in front of a friendly audience at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual “Road to Majority” conference.
Not just for the birds: Avian influenza also felling wild mammals
As Eurasian H5N1, a new version of bird flu, spread through North America this spring, scientists began finding the virus in mammals. At least seven U.S. states have detected the virus in red fox kits, to which the virus appeared to be particularly lethal. Two bobcats in Wisconsin, a coyote pup in Michigan and skunks in Canada have also tested positive for the virus, as have foxes, otters, a lynx, a polecat and a badger in Europe. Two human cases have been reported as well, both of which were in people who had close contact with birds.
Despite growing evidence, a prosecution of Trump would face challenges
As new questions swirl about former President Donald Trump’s potential criminal exposure for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, Trump issued a statement including outlandish claims, hyperbole and falsehoods. It also included something notable and different: the beginnings of a legal defense. Trump gave explanations for why he was convinced that the 2020 election had been stolen and why he was within his rights to challenge the results. It is far from a guarantee against prosecution. But his continued stream of falsehoods highlights some of the complexities of pursuing any criminal case against him, despite how well established the key facts are.
The metric of the war: Deaths
In Ukraine, no one is quite sure exactly what the human toll of the war is, except that many people are dead. In its latest updates, the Office of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said 4,509 civilians had been killed in the conflict. But it is clear many thousands more have been killed. Ukraine’s chief of police, Ihor Klymenko, said recently prosecutors had opened criminal proceedings “for the deaths of more than 12,000 people.” Ukrainian officials in exile said examinations of mass graves using satellite imagery, witness testimony and other evidence led them to believe at least 22,000 were killed — possibly thousands more.
Several killed in militant attack on Sikh temple in Afghanistan
Militants stormed a Sikh temple in Afghanistan’s capital Saturday, leaving several people dead and others wounded, and stoking already heightened concerns among the country’s religious minorities about whether the new Taliban government will be able to protect them from rising violence by extremist groups. The assault, which lasted more than an hour, was the first to target the country’s Sikh community since the Taliban seized power last summer. It was the latest in a series of bloody terrorist attacks that since April have killed more than 100 people, predominantly civilians among the country’s Shiite and Sufi minorities.
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