Chrisley Carpio and Victoria Hinckley, 20, speak to protesters during an abortion rights rally last Saturday in Temple Terrace, Fla. A Florida judge on Thursday said he would temporarily block a 15-week abortion ban from taking effect in that state. — Tampa Bay Times Photo via AP/Jefferee Woo
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden told Democratic governors Friday that he is “looking at all the alternatives” for protecting abortion access following the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
One day after returning from international summits in Europe, Biden described the ruling as “tragic” and warned that Republicans could try to enact a nationwide ban on abortion if they retake control of Congress.
He urged Democrats to elect at least two more senators so they could create an exception to the filibuster and codify in law the protections that had been provided under Roe v. Wade.
At least two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have blocked efforts to sidestep the filibuster. The party would need unanimous backing from the Senate’s 48 Democrats and two allied independents, plus the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris, to make that rules change over solid GOP opposition.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul suggested that Biden consider having abortions performed at federal facilities like Veterans Affairs hospitals or military bases in states that restrict abortions.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said Native American tribes, which have a level of sovereignty over their own lands, could also be valuable partners.
“We’re in the process of looking at all the alternatives,” Biden said.
However, he did not make any announcements. Some activists and Democrats have been frustrated by what they consider an overly cautious approach from the administration, especially since the court decision has been expected since a draft leaked nearly two months ago.
The justice’s June 24 ruling overturned a 1973 decision that had declared a constitutional right to abortion. Each state will now determine whether the procedure can be performed.
R. Kelly appears during a hearing at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse on Sept. 17, 2019, in Chicago. — The Chicago Tribune Photo via Getty Images/Antonio Perez
R. Kelly has been placed on suicide watch at the federal detention facility in New York where he is being held after he was sentenced this week to 30 years in prison on racketeering and sex trafficking charges, his lawyer said Friday.
But the disgraced R&B singer is not suicidal, attorney Jennifer Bonjean told CNN she believes, adding Kelly had been fearful of being put on suicide watch.
“The irony of putting someone on suicide watch when they’re not suicidal is it actually causes more harm,” Bonjean said.
Kelly, 55, was placed on suicide watch because he is well known, Bonjean said she was told by prosecutors who spoke with prison officials. CNN has reached out to prosecutors and the Bureau of Prisons for confirmation.
“It’s punishment for being high-profile. And it’s horrifying frankly,” she said. “To put someone under suicide watch under those conditions is cruel and unusual when they don’t need it.”
Bonjean had asked Kelly to email her after he was taken back into the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn following his sentencing Wednesday but never got an email from him, she said. She hasn’t gotten answers about his status from the detention center until prosecutors requested information from the facility, Bonjean added.
A jury convicted Kelly last September on nine counts, including one charge of racketeering and eight counts of violations of the Mann Act, a sex trafficking law. Prosecutors from the Eastern District of New York accused Kelly of using his status as a celebrity and a “network of people at his disposal to target girls, boys and young women for his own sexual gratification.”
The five-week federal trial in Brooklyn included testimony from witnesses who said they were sexually and physically abused by Kelly. The court also heard from people involved with orchestrating the disgraced R&B singer’s 1994 marriage to the late singer Aaliyah when she was just 15 years old and he was an adult after she believed she’d gotten pregnant.
Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Kelly to more than 25 years behind bars, while his defense attorneys asked for 10 or fewer.
LEISURE
BARBECUE TIPS FROM A PITMASTER
This rendering imagines what part of the Navy Yard would look like under the 20-year plan. — Courtesy of Ensemble/Mosaic and PIDC
From left, Michael Moskowitz of Ensemble, Leslie Smallwood Lewis, co-owner and co-founder of Mosaic Development Partners, and Kare McNamara, PIDC senior vice president.
— Tribune Photo/Abdul R. Sulayman
This rendering imagines how the Navy Yard entrance and gateway area will look under the 20-year redevelopment plan.— Ensemble/Mosaic and PIDC
Tribune Staff Writer
Ensemble/Mosaic, a joint venture leading the multi-billion dollar redevelopment of the Navy Yard, said it would invest $1 million in a new foundation to help small, minority- and woman-owned firms to be part of the deal.
It will be called Ensemble-Mosaic Navy Yard Empowerment Foundation. In addition to the $1 million, the joint venture will contribute 2% of its net cash flow to the foundation and ask companies involved in the development to contribute funds or in-kind services, such as paid internships.
“We are going to provide credit enhancement opportunities for small minority contractors. We will be trying to create opportunities to help grow their business, providing paid internships and development programs,” said Leslie Smallwood-Lewis, co-founder of Mosaic Development Partners. “We are going to institute quite a few initiatives to support what is going on throughout all of our projects here.”
The foundation will also donate $10,000 to the NAIOP Drexel University Summer Real Estate program, which is designed to introduce high school students of color to careers in commercial real estate.
Ensemble/Mosaic is a joint venture between Mosaic Development Partners, a Black-owned commercial real estate development firm in Philadelphia, and Ensemble Real Estate Investments and Oxford Property Group.
Smallwood-Lewis made her announcement at the Navy Yard on Tuesday, on the same day Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. (PIDC) released its 2022 master plan for the 109-acre campus in South Philadelphia. PIDC, a public-private group, manages the Navy Yard on behalf of the city.
The plan calls for 8.9 million square feet of mixed-use development, including about 4,000 apartments, some of which will be reserved for affordable housing, PIDC officials said. It also includes bike paths, bus lanes and 37 acres of green space for recreation.
Kate McNamara, senior vice president of PIDC, said the redevelopment of the Navy yard will bring $6 billion in new investment to the city and up to 12,000 jobs.
“The 2022 Plan for the Philadelphia Navy Yard presents a vision for the best of what a city can be: healthy, resilient, connected, vibrant, and equitable,” said James Corner, founder and CEO of James Corner Field Operations and designer of the master plan. “Leveraging the Navy Yard’s open spaces and extraordinary waterfront, the plan offers a new identity forged around welcoming all; one that balances innovation with history and ecology with urban life.”
McNamara said PIDC chose Ensemble/Mosaic over more than 30 development companies from across the U.S. because of their “incredible” vision for growth for the Navy Yard.
“They also brought a really spectacular commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion that we hadn’t seen before,” McNamara said. “This team has dedicated $1 billion to incorporating diversity and inclusion into all aspects of this plan, starting at the ownership level and working through construction, operations and professional services.”
The Navy Yard had been in operation from 1876 to 1996.
“When we took this property from the Navy in 2000 … thousands of jobs had been lost,” said McNamara, of PIDC. “The campus looked nothing like it does today. It was a lot of vacant buildings and crumbling infrastructure.”
Today, the Navy Yard has 150 companies, with about 15,000 employees among them.
Included in those companies is a thriving life sciences community and the regional headquarters for Ben Franklin Technology Partners, which connects technology firms, entrepreneurs and investors.
In March, Ensemble/Mosaic broke ground on a 137,000-square-foot research and development laboratory at the Navy Yard, which will serve as a business incubator for small gene and cell therapy firms.
The development of the Navy Yard “has been a tremendous success story,” McNamara said.
U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon’s 5th district represents the Navy Yard area.
“The Navy Yard is really emerging as a center of economic activity for our region,” she said. “We are making the transition from our industrial roots to the economy of the future. It’s going to drive development and growth for years to come.”
A boy doing school work. — Stock Photo
A group of educators in Texas proposed referring to slavery as “involuntary relocation” in second-grade classes — before being rebuffed by the State Board of Education.
The nine educators made up one of many groups tasked with advising the Texas board on changes to the social studies curriculum, which would affect the state’s almost 9,000 public schools.
Minutes of a June 15 meeting in Austin, which lasted over 13 hours, said committee members got an update on the social studies review before giving their feedback.
“The committee provided the following guidance to the work group completing recommendations for kindergarten-grade 8: ... For K-2, carefully examine the language used to describe events, specifically the term ‘involuntary relocation.’”
Aicha Davis, a Democratic board member representing Dallas and Fort Worth, raised the wording during the meeting, which was first reported by the Texas Tribune.
She told The Washington Post on Friday that when looking through a hefty package of recommendations, she saw the proposed language the group wanted to suggest, and “I immediately questioned it.”
“I am not going to support anything that describes the slave trade as ‘involuntary relocation,’” she said. “I’m not gonna support anything that diminishes that journey.”
Part of the proposed draft standards for the curriculum directed students to “compare journeys to America, including voluntary Irish immigration and involuntary relocation of African people during colonial times,” the Texas Tribune Texas reported and Davis confirmed to The Post.
She said that such comparisons were “absolutely” not fair. “The journey for the Irish folk is totally different from the journey of Africans,” she said, adding that any comparisons “will distort a lot of things in a young child’s mind.”
The chair of the State Board of Education, Keven Ellis, told the Tribune that the board “with unanimous consent directed the work group to revisit that specific language.”
Ellis and the Texas Education Agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
The work group behind the recommendation included teachers, social studies specialists, instructional coaches and a university professor, according to a list on the education agency’s website.
In a statement posted on Twitter on Thursday, the Texas Education Agency responded to the backlash the proposal had created.
“As documented in the meeting minutes, the SBOE provided feedback in the meeting indicating that the working group needed to change the language related to ‘involuntary relocation,’” it said.
“Any assertion that the SBOE is considering downplaying the role of slavery in American history is completely inaccurate.”
The State Board of Education mandates policies and standards for Texas public schools, setting curriculum rules, reviewing and adopting instructional materials and overseeing some funding. It will have a final vote on the curriculum at the end of the year, according to board member Davis, who said it had a responsibility to adopt truthful information to prepare students for their futures.
Next year, the board will also select textbooks to match the standards they eventually adopt, she added. “We have some work to do.”
The incident has sparked anger on social media. Former Austin and Houston police chief Art Acevedo called it “whitewashing history” and said “slavery deniers are just as dangerous as Holocaust deniers.”
One user wrote: “Involuntary relocation is what happens when you lose your home in a hurricane. Not what happened during slavery.”
Texas’s education system has been the subject of much recent controversy amid a culture war over how historical and current events should be taught.
Recent policies have led to books on sexual orientation being banned, as well as those that “contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.”
Last year, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill prohibiting K-12 public schools from teaching “critical race theory” — an academic framework centered on the idea that racism is systemic, not limited to individual prejudices, that conservatives have used as a label for any discussion of race in schools.
More recently, a north Texas school district was forced to apologize after an administrator advised teachers that if they have books about the Holocaust in their classrooms, they should also include reading materials that have “opposing” perspectives.
