Embryo decision: The University of Alabama at Birmingham’s health care system is stopping in vitro fertilization treatments at least for now because of the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision declaring that embryos are children and anyone destroying an embryo could be prosecuted for wrongful death. It is routine for some embryos to not survive the implantation procedure. The Alabama court ruling is seen as another step in the far right’s assault on women’s reproductive rights that gained traction when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Public executions: In Afghanistan today, the Taliban staged two public executions in a stadium. Thousands of people watched as members of a murder victim’s family fired the gunshots that killed the two men who were convicted of the murder. The family members fired a total of 15 shots. Religious leaders implored the family members to forgive the perpetrators but they refused and went ahead with the executions.
Putin’s flight: A Kremlin spokesman reported this morning that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin took a ride on an advanced Russian bomber that is capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The bomber has a top speed of more than 1,300 miles per hour. Putin boarded the Tu-160M bomber at the factory where the airplanes are manufactured about 450 miles from Moscow. The event was part of Putin’s presidential reelection campaign, in which he faces no serious opposition even though about three dozen people have registered as candidates.
Wireless problems: Some users of wireless networks in the U.S. experienced outages this morning. The problems affected customers of Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and other carriers. The companies did not immediately trace the cause of the problems but said they were working on it. It appeared that many of the problems were related to people trying to make calls to people who used a different carrier from the one they were using. The outages affected both voice and text.
War’s anniversary: With Saturday being the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.N. International Organization for Migration reported today that nearly 6.5 million people have fled Ukraine and are living outside of the country as refugees. The agency said that more than 14 million people have lost their homes as a result of the war that started when Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military to invade Ukraine. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, warned today that there is no end to the war in sight.
Contest winner: U.S. District Court Judge John Tunheim in St. Paul, Minnesota, has ruled that the My Pillow Guy, Mike Lindell, must pay $5 million to a computer expert who won a contest that Lindell ran. Lindell offered to have his company pay $5 million to anyone who could prove that Lindell’s data purporting to show that China changed the results of the 2020 presidential election from Trump to Biden was wrong. An arbitration panel found that Robert Zeidman had, in fact, shown that Lindell was wrong about China. Lindell said he will appeal the federal judge’s decision.
Cover image credit: Todd McDevitt
