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Exclusive: EU risks ‘trade war’ with Malaysia over palm oil – Mahathir

March 28, 2019

Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad reacts during an interview with Reuters in Langkawi
Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad reacts during an interview with Reuters in Langkawi, Malaysia March 28, 2019. REUTERS/Feline Lim

March 28, 2019

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – The European Union risks opening up a trade war with Malaysia over its “grossly unfair” policies aimed at reducing the use of palm oil, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Thursday.

This month, the European Commission concluded that palm oil cultivation results in excessive deforestation and its use in transport fuel should be phased out by 2030.

Malaysia, the world’s second biggest palm oil producer after Indonesia, relies on the crop for billions of dollars in foreign exchange earnings and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Mahathir, 93, said the EU’s increasingly hostile attitude towards palm oil, a commodity used in everything from chocolate spread to lipstick, was an attempt to protect alternatives that Europe produced itself, like rape seed oil.

“To do that kind of thing to win a trade war is unfair,” Mahathir told Reuters in Langkawi, a tropical island 30 km off Malaysia’s mainland.

“Trade wars are not something we like to promote but on the other hand it is grossly unfair for rich people to try and impoverish poor people.”

(Reporting by A. Ananthalakshmi, Joseph Sipalan, Joe Brock; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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Guatemala amnesty would free war criminals, soldiers who held women as sex slaves

March 27, 2019

FILE PHOTO: Pictures of missing people, placed by activists on the floor, are seen during a protest against a bill that would grant amnesty to war crimes committed during country's 36 year civil war outside the Congress, in Guatemala City
FILE PHOTO: Pictures of missing people, placed by activists on the floor, are seen during a protest against a bill that would grant amnesty to war crimes committed during country’s 36 year civil war outside the Congress, in Guatemala City, Guatemala March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Luis Echeverria/File Photo

March 27, 2019

By Sofia Menchu and Frank Jack Daniel

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) – Starting in 1982, during one of the darkest moments of Guatemala’s civil war, at least 11 Mayan Q’eqchi indigenous women were kidnapped, enslaved and raped over a period of six years at an army camp in the jungle.

Now an alliance of lawmakers who back Guatemala’s President Jimmy Morales is drumming up support for an amnesty bill that would allow the men sentenced for the atrocity to walk free. Dozens of other army veterans convicted of crimes against humanity would also benefit.

The legislation is part of a growing pushback by conservatives against justice initiatives in the Central American nation, where a brutal U.S.-backed counterinsurgency campaign resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

“We were raped by men who we didn’t even know, and we don’t want any woman in our country to ever suffer something like that again,” said Demecia Yat, 60, one of the survivors of the enslavement at the Sepur Zarco military outpost on a plantation in northeastern Guatemala.

In 2016, two soldiers were sentenced in the case to a combined 360 years in prison for crimes against humanity, including sexual slavery and murder. They were convicted under a National Reconciliation Law signed as part of a 1996 peace deal that helped end a 36-year war between Marxist guerrillas and the government.

Almost a quarter of a million people, mostly indigenous Mayans, were killed during the conflict. Around 45,000 of the victims are thought to have been disappeared — a term widely used in Latin America for people believed to have been kidnapped and murdered but whose bodies have never been found.

Yat’s husband, and those of several other of the enslaved women, who are known as the Sepur Zarco grandmothers, were among those taken by the army and never returned. Others were killed.

“The amnesty proposal is a get-out-of-jail-free card for convicted war criminals and the dozen plus former military officials awaiting trial for war crimes,” said Jo-Marie Burt, a professor at George Mason University who monitors war crimes trials in Guatemala, including the Sepur Zarco case.

“This is a blatant attempt by some members of Congress to legislate impunity.”

While the Reconciliation Law currently grants amnesty for most crimes committed during the war, massacres, kidnapping and crimes against humanity are punishable.

A U.N.-sponsored truth commission found more than 80 percent of atrocities were carried out by the army. Since the peace deal, survivors backed by national and international rights groups have built cases that have led to prison time for more than 65 former soldiers and ex-members of army-backed paramilitary groups.

The amnesty law is part of the backlash from politicians close to the military and powerful veterans groups, who argue that the reconciliation law and what they see as a biased justice system has disproportionately punished the armed forces.

Lawmakers supporting the amnesty, which could free all convicted former soldiers within 24 hours of being signed into law by Morales, are led by ultraconservative congressman Fernando Linares, a veteran lawyer who has defended convicted drug traffickers and soldiers.

“The right is empowered now,” Linares said.

If successful, the bill would mark a major victory for Guatemala’s hardline conservatives, who see the struggle to keep generals out of prison as an extension of the civil war.

Even though the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled it should be archived, the amnesty bill remains on Congress’ legislative agenda and could be voted on at any time, Linares said.

Also working its way through Congress is a bill aimed at curbing funding for rights groups. And Morales, who has found something of a friend in U.S. President Donald Trump for cooperation on security and illegal migration, has declined to renew the mandate in Guatemala of a U.N.-backed body charged with investigating and prosecuting serious crimes.

Morales has declined to comment about the amnesty, saying it is up to Congress to decide its fate. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

“DARKEST ERA”

Some supporters of the amnesty bill maintain it would help to heal the wounds of the civil war.

“If there is not a true pardon by both sides, there will never be harmony,” said Cesar Calderon, who represented former military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt in a 2013 trial that led to his conviction for genocide. The sentence was later overturned. Rios Montt, in power from 1982-83, died before the appeals concluded.

The amnesty bill has drawn stiff resistance from Guatemalan media, survivors and opposition lawmakers, however, and its passage is not certain.

“If they approve this law, the space that we women have won to get justice will be lost,” said Yat, speaking through an interpreter in her native Q’eqchi language.

The horror in Sepur Zarco, the first case of conflict-related sexual violence tried in Guatemala, started at the height of army repression of civilian populations suspected of supporting the rebels.

Since the end of the war, the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation has unearthed thousands of bodies, many showing signs of torture, in mass graves scattered mainly across the Mayan highlands.

Increasingly, trials of soldiers have been successful, including one last year that led to a 5,160-year sentence for a Kaibil special forces soldier convicted of a massacre in the village Dos Erres that left more than 200 people dead.

A judge in May last year sentenced General Manuel Benedicto Lucas Garcia, brother of late Guatemalan President Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia and a former head of the army’s general staff, to 58 years for his involvement in rape and forced disappearance.

Lucas Garcia was convicted along with other high-ranking officials for the 1981 torture and rape of left-wing student activist Emma Molina Theissen. In retaliation for her escape from a military base after nine days of detention, soldiers kidnapped her 14-year-old brother Marco Antonio.

He was never seen again.

Ana Lucrecia Molina Theissen, the victims’ sister, fears the amnesty bill would undo a decades-long crusade for justice for her siblings.

“The reform not only favors a powerful, insensitive, inhumane group capable of executing the most atrocious crimes,” Molina Theissen said. “It also sends us back to the darkest era of state terrorism.”

(Reporting by Sofia Menchu and Frank Jack Daniel; Additional reporting by Diego Ore; Editing by Diego Ore, Daniel Flynn and Tom Brown)

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Amnesty lambasts EU downscaling of Mediterranean migration mission

March 27, 2019

FILE PHOTO: Migrants are seen after they were relocated from government-run detention centers, after getting trapped by clashes between rival groups in Tripoli
FILE PHOTO: Migrants are seen after they were relocated from government-run detention centres, after getting trapped by clashes between rival groups in Tripoli, Libya September 4, 2018. REUTERS/Hani Amara/File Photo

March 27, 2019

By Gabriela Baczynska

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Amnesty International criticized the European Union on Wednesday for a “shameful” abdication of its humanitarian responsibilities after the bloc agreed to withdraw ships patrolling the Mediterranean for migrants attempting the perilous voyage.

After months of wrangling, the EU agreed this week to extend its Mediterranean naval mission called Operation Sophia for six months from the end of March – but only for air patrols and training of the Libyan coast guard.

“This is an outrageous abdication of EU governments’ responsibilities,” the international rights group said.

“This shameful decision has nothing to do with the needs of people who risk their lives at sea, but everything to do with the inability of European governments to agree on a way to share responsibility for them,” it said in a statement.

EU states have been at loggerheads over migration since a spike in Mediterranean arrivals caught the bloc by surprise in 2015, stretching social and security services and fuelling support for far-right, nationalist and populist groups.

Sea arrivals have fallen from more than a million in the peak year to some 140,000 people last year, according to U.N. data. But political tensions around migration run high in the EU, especially ahead of European Parliament election in May.

Italy’s anti-immigration hardline deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, pushed to remove European aid groups’ boats from the search and rescue area between his country and Libya, where people smugglers operate.

The bloc then moved its Sophia ships north where fewer rescues take place as, under international law, the EU would have to take care of people it plucks from the water.

Salvini then moved to shut Italian ports for them, demanding that other EU states also host the new arrivals or else Rome would pull the plug on the operation in the Mediterranean, where the United Nations says nearly 2,300 people perished last year.

SMUGGLERS

But none wanted to, from major economies like Germany and France that already host many of the people who reached Europe from the Middle East and Africa since 2015, to nationalists ruling in the post-communist east Europe averse to Muslims.

Berlin and others have, however, wanted to continue the Sophia mission to fight smugglers. The awkward compromise this week is another step in the EU’s increasingly restrictive approach to irregular immigration.

“EU governments are now removing their own ships, leaving no-one to save the lives of women, men and children in peril,” Amensty said, adding EU air patrols would from now on only report emergencies to the Libyan coast guard, which can turn the people back to the country where rights abuses are rife.

A spokeswoman for the EU’s executive European Commission on Wednesday acknowledged the diminished mission would play a much smaller role in saving lives: “It’s clear that without naval assets, Operation Sophia will not be able to effectively implement its mandate,” Maja Kocijancic told a news briefing.

The EU has been funding U.N. agencies to help improve conditions in migrant camps in Libya gripped by lawlessness since the 2011 the ousting of veteran ruler Muammar Gaddafi.

U.N. aid agencies have long decried abuse of human rights in the camps such as rape, lack of medical care and forced labor.

They sound the alarm at refugees and migrants being sent back to Libya in violation of international humanitarian law, which forbids returning people to where their lives are at risk.

(Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska, Editing by William Maclean)

Source: OANN

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Grindr defeats appeal over harassment on gay dating app

March 27, 2019

FILE PHOTO: An unidentified man using a smart phone walks through London's Canary Wharf financial district in the evening light in London
FILE PHOTO: An unidentified man using a smart phone walks through London’s Canary Wharf financial district in the evening light in London, Britain, September 28, 2018. REUTERS/Russell Boyce/File Photo

March 27, 2019

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. federal appeals court refused to hold Grindr liable to a New York man who said his former boyfriend used the gay dating app to post fake profiles, in a harassment campaign that caused more than 1,000 men to approach the victim for sex.

The 3-0 decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals against Matthew Herrick came in a closely watched case over how far the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 federal law meant to restrict pornography while allowing other speech online, should shield Internet-based companies from user abuses.

The court rejected Herrick’s negligence and emotional distress claims for Grindr’s failure to edit or remove his former boyfriend’s offensive content.

It said Grindr was shielded from liability for exercising “a publisher’s traditional editorial functions,” or providing “‘neutral assistance’ in the form of tools and functionality available equally to bad actors and the app’s intended users.”

Grindr is owned by Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. The Chinese gaming company is trying to sell Grindr after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States said its ownership posed a national security risk, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Herrick, who stopped using Grindr in 2015, said the fake profiles caused as many as 16 strangers a day to visit his home and the restaurant where he worked, expecting sex, for several months starting in Oct. 2016.

He sued in Jan. 2017, and a federal judge dismissed his case a year later, prompting the appeal.

Herrick’s lawyer Tor Ekeland said in an interview he was “disappointed but not surprised” by Wednesday’s decision because courts are “extremely deferential to big tech” when interpreting the CDA.

He may ask the entire Manhattan-based appeals court to rehear the case.

“What happened to Matthew is not an isolated incident,” Ekeland said. “Apps are being used to stalk, rape and murder. Under the court’s reading of the CDA, big tech companies don’t have responsibility to do anything about it, even if they know it is happening. Congress needs to amend this statute.”

Moez Kaba, a lawyer for Grindr, said the decision clarified that CDA protections extend to apps, which is “important in the smartphone era, where so much activity is done on apps rather than through traditional web pages.

“No one disputes that the plaintiff’s situation was unfortunate,” he said, “but the 2nd Circuit was plainly correct in finding that apps and their owners cannot be liable for this sort of third-party conduct.”

The case is Herrick v Grindr LLC et al, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 18-396.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Additional reporting by Carl O’Donnell, Liana Baker and and Echo Wang; Editing by Susan Thomas)

Source: OANN

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Spain: Migrants Gang Rape 12-Year-Old, Let Her Friend Go Because She’s Muslim

March 27, 2019

A group of migrants in Spain subjected a 12-year-old girl to a brutal gang rape but let her friend go because she was a Muslim, with residents complaining that the Mayor of the town helped cover up the incident.

The incident occurred on March 18th last year but full details only just came to light in a report by Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

According to the report, the attack in Azuqueca de Henares began when the 12-year-old girl was playing with several friends in the Lavadero de Azuqueca park just after 1pm in the afternoon.

A group of Moroccan youths and one Nigerian then arrived, some of whom were known to the victim.

The youths then kidnapped the girl and one of her friends, taking them to an abandoned building nearby. After a discussion in Arabic that lasted several minutes, the perpetrators decided to let her friend go free because she was “North African” and a Muslim.

The youths then took the Spanish girl to a bathroom, knocked her down, undressed her, held down her hands and feet, covered her mouth and then began to anally rape her one by one.

At least 5 different individuals took part in the attack, according to the victim, one of whom was 18-years-old and therefore legally an adult.

The girl screamed out as she was then raped vaginally. Her friends who were outside attempted to intervene but were threatened to stay away by one of the suspects who was carrying a stick.

“Anyone who comes in doesn’t come out,” he told the girls.

The attack lasted a full 45 minutes before the victim was allowed to leave.

Three of the youths involved in the attack received 3 years of “confinement,” while one of the adults involved received “preventive detention”. Another adult involved in the attack is still at large.

Local municipal groups wrote a letter condemning Mayor Jose Luis Blanco, who they accused of helping to cover up the full details of the incident. No official details were released about the incident, with the newspaper learning of it via pupils at the local school.

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Source: InfoWars

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Joe Biden Blames “White Man’s Culture” For Violence Against Women

March 27, 2019

During a speech on Tuesday, potential presidential candidate Joe Biden blamed “a white man’s culture” for violence towards women.

The former VP asserted that Anita Hill, who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, should not have been forced to forced to face a panel of “a bunch of white guys.”

Biden went on to suggest that English common law, the foundation of the western legal system, was anti-women.

“I realize I get a little too passionate about this sometimes, but we all have an obligation to do nothing less than change the culture in this country. Not just the laws, we changed laws — change the culture. The culture. You all know what the phrase rule of thumb means? Where it’s derived from? In English common law, not codification or common law, back in the late 1300s, so many women were dying at the hands of her husbands because they were chattel, just like the cattle or the sheep, that the Court of Common Law decided they had to do something about the extent of the deaths. So, you know what they said? No man has a right to chastise his woman with a rod thicker than the circumference of his thumb. This is English jurisprudential culture a white man’s culture. That’s got to change it’s got to change.”

While lambasting “white man’s culture” for violence against women, Biden failed to mention the fact that black hip hop culture is dominated by actual misogyny and disrespect for women.

According to the CDC, “Non-Hispanic black and American Indian/Alaska Native women experienced the highest rates of homicide” in America from 2003-2017, clearly indicating that white men are not overrepresented when it comes to violence against women.

A 2014 study of college campus rape statistics by the BJS found that 19% were committed by black males, despite them making up only about 6% of the U.S. population.

This is not the first time that Biden has caused controversy with his remarks about white people.

He previously celebrated the fact that white people were in demographic decline, insisting, “Whites will be an absolute minority in America – that’s a source of our strength.”

Some may point to Biden’s creepy behavior around women in asserting that the former Vice President shouldn’t be treated as an authority on the issue.

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How I Knew Russia Collusion Was a Lie From the Start

March 26, 2019

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From the beginning, I repeatedly said the charge that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election was a lie. The president’s description of it as a “witch hunt” was accurate.

I regularly acknowledged that I was putting my credibility on the line by stating that it was all a hoax. But how did I know that? After all, I wasn’t privy to any confidential intelligence.

One answer is I used common sense. The Trump-Russia collusion charge and the Donald-Trump-is-an-agent-of-the-Kremlin charge struck me — and tens of millions of other Americans — as absurd. Vladimir Putin’s influence on the 2016 election was negligible, and as president, Trump has been harder on Russia — in supporting Ukraine’s anti-Russian government, in fighting Syria’s pro-Russian government and in confronting Iran’s pro-Russian regime — than Barack Obama was.

But the biggest reason I never believed the Russian collusion charge was that the charge emanated from the left. And the left lies about everything. Truth is a liberal value, and truth is a conservative value, but it has never been a left-wing value. People on the left say whatever advances their immediate agenda. Power is their moral lodestar; therefore, truth is always subservient to it.

The left wanted to undo the 2016 presidential election from the day Trump won. So they made up the Russian collusion story. This was obvious to every conservative — except for “Never Trumpers,” who, with regard to Trump, have been indistinguishable from the left and were therefore as prepared as any leftist to believe the Trump-Russia collusion tale. We conservatives knew that a) the left wanted to invalidate the election and b) the left lies when it is in their interest to do so. So we knew the collusion charge was a fabrication.

We also suspected that the collusion hoax may well have been an effort to divert attention from the real crimes here: American intelligence agencies’ being used to spy on a presidential candidate for the first time in American history; getting Clinton off the hook for her illegal use of a private server while secretary of state; her use of that office to enrich herself and her husband; and her destruction of the evidence once her hidden emails were subpoenaed.

If you always doubt a leftist claim, you will almost always be closer to the truth. I employed that rule in concluding the collusion story was a fraud, and it served me well.

Name the issue and you will likely find a left-wing lie. The left claims our universities are saturated by a “culture of rape.” Not only is that a lie, but deep down, leftists know it’s a lie. The proof? Every left-wing parent who speaks about the “culture of rape” on college campuses sends his or her daughter to college. As no parents would ever send their daughter to an actual rape culture, left-wing parents who send their daughters to college know it is not really a rape culture. They say it is a rape culture solely to buttress the feminist argument that American males are misogynists and to provide young women with the highest status in the left-wing value system: victim.

Although I haven’t been a student or taught at a college in many decades, that’s how I knew American colleges were not rape cultures. I knew it because the left said they were. Again, just assume the left is lying and you will be close to arriving at the truth.

How do I know there are only two sexes? The most obvious reason is, again, common sense. But the second most powerful reason is the left denies there are only two sexes and claims there is no such thing as sex, only subjective “gender.” Last week, a writer for the left-wing magazine The Nation defended the victory of two high school male-bodied trans women who defeated all the female-bodied women in a Connecticut track competition — because, in his words, “trans women are in fact women.”

Now, we all know trans women are not in fact women, that they are biologically men who regard themselves as women. And in private life, I have no problem treating trans women as women if they look and dress female and take on a female name. But it is completely unjust to have them compete against born females in sports. They are not in fact women; they consider themselves women despite the facts. Again, assuming the left is lying to advance its agenda leads one to truth.

When the left tells us the Earth has 12 years left because of global warming, I assume they are not telling the truth. One bit of proof is that almost no one on the global-warming-will-destroy-life left advocates the safest, cheapest and most practical non-fossil-based source of energy: nuclear power. If they really believed life was existentially threatened by fossil-based fuel, they would be building nuclear reactors as fast they could make them. One reason I haven’t believed man-made global warming will destroy the Earth is that the left does.

So, while the latest left-wing lie — Trump-Russia collusion — is now exposed, there is little to cheer about. Without missing a beat, the left — the Democratic Party, the media and academia — will move on to another lie.

And there will be no soul-searching on the part of the media or the rest of the left.

Why won’t there be? Because no leftist acknowledges the collusion story was a lie.

Truth has never been a left-wing value. Like “gender,” it is whatever you want it to be.

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Judge extends custody for suspect in Utrecht shooting

March 22, 2019

Makeshift memorial at tram shooting site in Utrecht
FILE PHOTO: A makeshift memorial is seen at the site of a tram shooting in Utrecht, Netherlands March 19, 2019. REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw

March 22, 2019

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – A Dutch judge on Friday extended for two weeks the detention of the suspect in a shooting that killed three people in the city of Utrecht this week.

Turkish-born Gokmen Tanis, 37, is accused of carrying out the shooting aboard a tram out of terrorist intent, while authorities are also investigating whether he had other personal motives.

Prosecutors a day earlier had said they believe Tanis had a radicalized ideology and that there was no evidence of any relationship between him and the victims.

Tanis, who has been convicted of illegal weapons possession, shop lifting and burglary in recent years and has to appear in court on rape charges in July, is believed to have acted alone.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte is expected to join a march through Utrecht on Friday evening, commemorating the 19-year old woman and the 28-year old and 49-year old men who were shot dead in the attack.

The Utrecht District Court said the judge had ruled that Tanis should be permitted to communicate only with a lawyer.

(Reporting by Toby Sterling and Bart Meijer; Editing by Peter Graff and Angus MacSwan)

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Alan Dershowitz: FBI, Feds Should Investigate Me

March 21, 2019

Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz wants the FBI and federal prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into allegations he sexually assaulted two women, including one who was underage.

"All three of us have filed sworn affidavits in federal court. These affidavits are in irreconcilable conflict: I have sworn that I never met either of them; they have both sworn that I engaged in sexual acts with them. Either I have committed perjury or they have,” Dershowitz wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

Dershowitz has been accused of being involved in billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's alleged sex-trafficking ring by an attorney for one of Epstein’s victims. The lawyer, Paul Cassell, who represents Virginia Roberts Giuffre, in early March claimed in federal court that testimony from other witnesses will show Dershowitz's involvement in the alleged trafficking of "his close friend Jeffrey Epstein."

Dershowitz and his lawyers have requested the court release the trove of documents to the public in order to prove his innocence. He says being accused of sexual assault has left a stain on his career.

"There are some in the #MeToo movement for whom there is no such thing as innocence," he writes in the WSJ. "Despite having proved I never even met my accuser, my appearances on college campuses have been greeted with protests accusing me of being part of a 'rape culture.' . . . Someone has committed a serious felony, a crime against America's justice system."

Source: NewsMax America

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Mississippi Governor Signs 'Heartbeat' Abortion Law

March 21, 2019

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant on Thursday signed one of the strictest abortion laws in the nation — a measure that bans most abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, about six weeks into pregnancy.

The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights called the measure "cruel and clearly unconstitutional" and said it would sue Mississippi to try to block the law from taking effect on July 1. Bryant's action came despite a federal judge's decision last year striking down a less-restrictive law limiting abortions in the state.

After a bill signing ceremony at the state Capitol, Bryant told reporters that he's not worried about lawsuits.

"They don't have to sue us. It's up to them," Bryant said. "If they do not believe in the sanctity of life, these that are in organizations like Planned Parenthood, we will have to fight that fight. But it is worth it."

Mississippi is one of several states that have considered bills this year to ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is found. Abortion opponents are emboldened by new conservatives on the Supreme Court and are seeking cases to challenge the court's 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

A federal judge in 2018 struck down a Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, saying it is unconstitutional.

"Lawmakers didn't get the message," Hillary Schneller, staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement Thursday. "They are determined to rob Mississippians of the right to abortion, and they are doing it at the expense of women's health and taxpayer money. This ban — just like the 15-week ban the governor signed a year ago — is cruel and clearly unconstitutional."

The law that Bryant signed Thursday says a physician who performs an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected could face revocation of his or her Mississippi medical license. It also says abortions could be allowed after a fetal heartbeat is found if a pregnancy endangers a woman's life or one of her major bodily functions. The House and Senate both rejected efforts to allow exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

Georgia and Tennessee are among the states considering similar bills. Kentucky's law banning abortion after the detection of a heartbeat was immediately challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union when Republican Gov. Matt Bevin signed it on March 14, and a federal judge temporarily blocked it. A federal judge on Wednesday also blocked another Kentucky law that would ban abortion for women seeking to end their pregnancies because of the gender, race or disability of the fetus.

Source: NewsMax America

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