The inaugural flight of a controversial UK government scheme to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda was stopped on Tuesday at the eleventh hour, after an intervention by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
According to the UK’s PA Media news agency, “all migrants have been removed from the plane and the flight to Rwanda will not take off as scheduled tonight.”
Britain’s government had announced the deal with the east African country in April. Those people granted asylum would then be allowed to resettle in Rwanda. The government insisted the program was aimed at disrupting people-smuggling networks and deterring migrants from making the dangerous sea journey across the Channel to England from France.
Advocacy groups had initiated multiple legal challenges to stop the aircraft, including veja sneakers an appeal that was rejected by the Court of Appeal in London on Monday. Several dozen asylum seekers saw their tickets canceled, Care4Calais refugee charity said, leaving just seven people due to be deported by Tuesday morning.
But on the evening that the plane was expected to depart, the ECHR issued a series of rulings in the cases of the last Rwanda-bound asylum-seekers, ordering the British government not to remove them.
A Rwandan government spokeswoman Yolande Makolo said the country is “not deterred” after the UK deportation flight to Rwanda was grounded.
A partisan audit of the 2020 election in Arizona continued this week, brooks shoes with further accusations of ineptitude against the firm running it and a gubernatorial campaign launch from a top Democrat opposing it.
The audit of votes in Maricopa County, which has drawn criticism from a number of local Republican officials, will not affect the actual results of November’s election but has been used in right-wing media to justify the widespread belief among Republicans that the 2020 results were fraudulent. It’s being spearheaded by Cyber Ninjas, an obscure Florida-based cybersecurity firm whose CEO has promoted election conspiracies, and which was hired by the GOP-controlled state Senate to handle the process.
On Tuesday, the office of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs released a report detailing what it described as serious problems with the audit that had arisen skechers shoes over the last week. Among the issues listed were a Monday software update “that created so many errors and problems during the first shift that they stated they were going to roll back to the old software during the afternoon shift” and the fact that “copies of voting system data [were] sent to a lab in Montana.”
Per Hobbs’s office, there were no specifications on “what security measures were in place, or what the lab in Montana will do with the data or how long it will be in possession of the copies.”
Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas recount ballots from the 2020 election in Phoenix after two election audits found no evidence of widespread fraud.
“Observers saw that hey dude shoes at least three people who are not residents of Maricopa County rifling through thousands of military and overseas ballots,” read the report. “Observers had been previously told that only Maricopa County residents would be allowed to handle any ballots, yet all three people were not residents.”
The report accused workers of carrying black pens on the floor, which is not allowed because the pens can be used to alter ballots. Observers quoted in the report also stated that “audit co-chair Randy Pullen told an observer that the shirt he was required to wear on the floor made him ‘look like a transgender’ because of the color of his shirt.”
Maricopa County — the state’s largest — is where the most Arizonans reside. Biden narrowly won Arizona in November, becoming the first Democrat to do so since Bill Clinton took the state in 1996.
With the highly suspect audit stretching past the initial deadline set by Cyber Ninjas, the stadium where it is taking place has been skechers outlet visited by Republicans who are promoting former President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the election was stolen from him.
This week, three Republican state legislators from Pennsylvania, including one who had been a leading advocate for Trump’s false allegations, visited the stadium. Last month, embattled Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., held a rally in Maricopa County, where the audit was a key topic of discussion. The actual process was on pause at the time because the building was being used that weekend for high school graduations.
“So, let me just check and make sure with all of you: Who do you think won in Arizona on Nov. 3?” Greene asked, with Gaetz adding, “We are here in solidarity with the Arizona election audit.”
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs watches as Gov. Doug Ducey signs documents to certify election results, golden goose sneakers Nov. 30, 2020.
Hobbs has been expected to announce her candidacy for next year’s gubernatorial race and did so on Wednesday, centering election integrity in her announcement video.
“There’s real harm going on for many, and the other side isn’t offering policies to make our lives better — they’re offering conspiracies that only make our lives worse,” Hobbs said.
Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who cannot run for reelection due to term limits, has largely refrained from discussing the audit and certified the election results in November. Ducey dispatched police protection for Hobbs and her family this year after they received death threats tied to the audit.
On Wednesday, Trump criticized Ducey ecco shoes for vetoing a number of bills as he awaits a budget proposal from the Legislature, including one that would have required voters to request an absentee ballot before they receive one.
“For those of you who think Doug Ducey is good for Arizona, you are wrong,” the former president said in a statement.
Cardinal Wilton D. Gregory attends a Mass celebrated by Pope Francis the day after he raised 13 new cardinals to brooks shoes the highest rank in the Catholic hierarchy, at St. Peter’s Basilica, at the Vatican, November 29, 2020.
WASHINGTON – U.S. Catholic bishops next month are expected to take a vote aimed directly at the question of whether pro-abortion rights politicians should receive Communion. The vote will go ahead despite efforts from some bishops who think urging the exclusion of Catholics like President Joe Biden is not pastoral.
The decision by leaders of the District of Columbia-based U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to have the vote comes after dozens of U.S. bishops asked for it to be postponed, saying the men are currently too divided. The Catholic news site the Pillar first reported Tuesday that the effort to postpone the vote was led in part by Washington Archbishop Wilton Gregory.
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U.S. bishops have long been divided about how to deal with prominent Catholics who support abortion access, but the issue for some skechers shoes became urgent with Biden’s election. For other bishops Biden is a boost for the faith as a weekly Mass attender who describes Catholicism as a core of his life and emphasizes key church priorities such as poverty, heath care and refugees. Biden is the second-ever Catholic president, after John F. Kennedy.
After weeks of back and forth – and including a weigh-in from the Vatican – USCCB President Jose Gomez on May 22 sent his fellow bishops an outline of a document they are expected to vote on at the virtual meeting in mid-June. The document asks bishops if they want the USCCB’s doctrine committee to start drafting a teaching document about the meaning in the life of the church of Communion, the core sacrament in traditional Catholic practice.
The Pillar reported first on Gomez’s letter.
Watchers of the USCCB say the vote is expected to pass. Then the doctrine committee would create a proposed document for the bishops to discuss when they meet in the fall. While the USCCB is more of an advisory industry group and has no authority over what bishops tell their own priests to do in their dioceses, the church aims to work on consensus and a vote spotlighting clergy who give Communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians would be striking and historic.
Biden’s bishop in Washington, Cardinal Gregory, has already said he won’t deny Biden Communion, calling that a politicization of the rite. Gregory is in line with his predecessors in the District and other bishops who condemn abortion but focus on empathizing with the reasons women have them and looking to draw them closer to God and Catholic community.
In other words, the bishops can’t vote whether to deny Biden Communion. But the conversation and votes could further divide the already-polarized American Catholic community just as the U.S. Supreme Court readies to vote on abortion rights.
“The focus of this proposed teaching document is on how best to help people to understand the beauty and mystery of the Eucharist as the center of their Christian lives,” Gomez, who is archbishop of Los Angeles, wrote to the other bishops in a note with the outline. “It is clear that there is a lack of understanding among many Catholics about the nature and meaning of the Eucharist … this includes the call to all the faithful for ongoing conversion, moral transformation and missionary discipleship.”
The draft letter lays out three basic areas the teaching document will cover to explain “why it matters.” It includes that the sacrament is the real presence of Christ, that it’s healing, beautiful and unifies the church. The part of the future document most likely to stir controversy is about “eucharistic consistency” — in other words who should receive communion.
“A person should examine himself … for anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself,” it reads, then adds in parentheses: “The nature of eucharistic communion and the problem of serious sin.”
More than 60 bishops wrote to Gomez earlier this month, the Pillar reported Tuesday, asking him to postpone a vote related to Communion. The Pillar said the letter was written on the letterhead of the Washington Archdiocese, and that the effort was led by Gregory and Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich. There are about 280 voting U.S. bishops.
Gregory’s office did not return several messages, nor did Gomez’s. Two sources familiar with the planning of the USCCB meeting confirmed the letter requesting a delay, but could not confirm Gregory’s role.
The bishops’ requesting the delay pointed to a recent letter from the Vatican’s doctrine arm, urging them to move slowly on a divisive topic, and not to elevate abortion as the only grave matter Catholics should consider. Cardinal Luis Ladaria, the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s watchdog for doctrinal matters, said in the letter that the bishops must first talk amongst themselves at length, and also bishops must talk with politicians who support abortion rights.
Any policy produced by the USCCB would require near unanimity and could not upend the right of an individual bishop to decide whether to deny a politician Eucharist in their diocese. In addition, Ladaria argued it would be “misleading” to suggest abortion and euthanasia are “the only grave matters of Catholic moral and social teaching that demand the fullest level of accountability on the part of Catholics,” Religion News Service wrote earlier this month.
Citing Ladaria’s letter, the bishops asking for a delay said his “high standard of consensus…is far from being achieved in the present moment.”
