WEATHER FORECAST FOR WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27TH, 2018

 

TODAY – SCATTERED THUNDERSTORMS THROUGHOUT THE
DAY. HIGH – 76.

TONIGHT – VARIABLE CLOUDS WITH SHOWERS AND
SCATTERED THUNDERSTORMS. STORMS MORE
NUMEROUS THIS EVENING. LOW – 67.

THURSDAY – SHOWERS IN THE MORNING…THEN
REMAINING PARTLY CLOUDY THROUGHOUT
THE AFTERNOON. HIGH NEAR 80.

Cop’s Facebook comment about slain rapper gets him desk duty
PITTSBURGH (AP) — A Pittsburgh police officer who posted a Facebook comment that appeared to celebrate the recent death of up-and-coming rapper Jimmy Wopo has been put on desk duty.
The police department says the city is investigating the social media post. The department says “comments that disparage victims and endanger the community and fellow officers will not be tolerated.”
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports Officer Brian Martin got into an exchange on Facebook with a person saying it seemed like Wopo’s death had been forgotten.
Martin replied: “Not me. I’m still celebrating.”
The post has since been taken down.
Martin declined to comment Monday.
Wopo, whose real name was Travon Smart, was killed and another man injured when someone opened fire on their car in Pittsburgh on June 18.
___
Information from: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, http://www.post-gazette.com

Teen detained in case that led to fatal police shooting
By ERRIN HAINES WHACK, Associated Press
PITTSBURGH (AP) — Police made an arrest in a drive-by shooting that started a chain of events resulting in the police killing of a black teenager.
The teenager under arrest was with the victim, 17-year-old Antwon Rose Jr., the night he was shot by police, authorities said Tuesday.
Authorities said Rose and the arrested teen fled after being pulled over June 19 on suspicion they had involvement with the drive-by shooting.
Police shot Rose three times, leading to daily protests around Pittsburgh.
Investigators have not said whether they believe Rose had any involvement in the earlier violence that left one wounded. Two guns were recovered from the car they were riding in, and an empty gun magazine was found in Rose’s pants pocket.
In video of the fatal shooting taken from a nearby home, Rose, in a gray shirt, is the first to run from the vehicle.
The arrest came as dozens of protesters returned to the streets of downtown Pittsburgh, blocking traffic with locked arms and raised fists, demanding justice in Rose’s death.
Chanting, “Who did this? The police did this!” and “Three shots to the back, how do you justify that?” marchers began walking several blocks shortly after 7:30 a.m., shutting down busy intersections for more than two hours.
The crowd made stops at the county and city courthouses, pausing regularly to recall the black teenager in moments of silence a week after he was shot.
Wearing a black T-shirt with the word “ENDANGERED” printed in red, white and blue, protest leader Nicki Jo Dawson told the crowd: “This isn’t something to do for fun.”
“This isn’t a hobby,” Dawson said. “We do this to get justice we’ve never seen. In this courthouse, there’s a man who refuses to indict an (officer) for killing one of our children. Not today.”
Some passers-by raised their fists in solidarity, while others — including several commuters — shouted and honked in frustration. Pittsburgh police flanked the protester route.
Christian Carter, a friend of Rose’s, read the 2016 poem Rose wrote, “I Am Not What You Think,” in which he discussed not wanting his mother to lose him to violence and not wanting to become a statistic.
In the days since Rose was fatally shot by a white police officer, marchers have demonstrated almost daily. They refrained from protest Monday, as Rose was laid to rest, out of respect for his family.
On Tuesday, they renewed their call for Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala to prosecute Officer Michael Rosefeld in Rose’s death. Zappala has said he wanted to delay publicly discussing the investigation until after Rose’s funeral, but it is unclear when he will do so.
___
Associated Press writer Claudia Lauer contributed to this report.

High court OKs Trump’s travel ban, rejects Muslim bias claim
By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — A sharply divided Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from several mostly Muslim countries Tuesday, the conservative majority taking his side in a major ruling supporting his presidential power. A dissenting liberal justice said the court was making a historic mistake by refusing to recognize the ban discriminates against Muslims.
The 5-4 decision was a big victory for Trump in the court’s first substantive ruling on one of his administration’s policies. It also was the latest demonstration of a newly invigorated conservative majority and a bitter defeat for the court’s liberals.
The ruling came on an issue that has been central for Trump, from his campaign outbursts against “radical Islamic terrorism” through his presidency. He tweeted a quick reaction — “Wow!” — and then celebrated at greater length before TV cameras.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion for the five conservative justices, including Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch, who got his seat only after Republicans blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee for the last 10 months of Obama’s term.
Roberts wrote that the travel ban was well within U.S. presidents’ considerable authority over immigration and responsibility for keeping the nation safe. He rejected the challengers’ claim of anti-Muslim bias that rested in large part on Trump’s own tweets and statements over the past three years.
But Roberts was careful not to endorse either Trump’s statements about immigration in general or Muslims in particular, including his campaign call for “a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
“We express no view on the soundness of the policy,” Roberts wrote.
The travel ban has been fully in place since December, when the justices put the brakes on lower court rulings that had ruled the policy out of bounds and blocked part of it from being enforced. It applies even to people with close relatives in the United States and other strong connections to the country.
In a dissent she summarized aloud in court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “History will not look kindly on the court’s misguided decision today, nor should it.” Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan also dissented.
Sotomayor wrote that based on the evidence in the case “a reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.” She said her colleagues in the majority arrived at the opposite result by “ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.”
She likened the case to the discredited Korematsu V. U.S. decision that upheld the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Roberts responded in his opinion that “Korematsu has nothing to do with this case” and “was gravely wrong the day it was decided.”
The travel ban was among the court’s biggest cases this term and the latest in a string of 5-4 decisions in which the conservative side of the court, bolstered by the addition of Gorsuch last year, prevailed. He was chosen by Trump after Republicans in the Senate refused to grant a hearing to federal appeals Judge Merrick Garland who was nominated by Obama in March 2016.
Soon after the ruling, the campaign of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who orchestrated the strategy to keep the high court seat away from Obama, tweeted a photo of McConnell and Gorsuch.
The Trump policy applies to travelers from five countries with overwhelmingly Muslim populations — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. It also affects two non-Muslim countries, blocking travelers from North Korea and some Venezuelan government officials and their families. A sixth majority Muslim country, Chad, was removed from the list in April after improving “its identity-management and information sharing practices,” Trump said in a proclamation.
The administration had pointed to the Chad decision to show that the restrictions were premised only on national security concerns.
The challengers, though, argued that the court could not just ignore all that had happened, beginning with Trump’s campaign tweets to prevent the entry of Muslims into the United States.
Trump had proposed a broad, all-encompassing Muslim ban during the presidential campaign in 2015, drawing swift rebukes from Republicans as well as Democrats. And within a week of taking office, the first travel ban was announced with little notice, sparking chaos at airports and protests across the nation.
While the ban has changed shape since then, it has remained a key part of Trump’s “America First” vision, with the president contending that the restriction, taken in tandem with his promised wall at the southern border, would make the Unites States safer from potentially hostile foreigners.
On Tuesday, he hailed the ruling as “a moment of profound vindication” following “months of hysterical commentary from the media and Democratic politicians who refuse to do what it takes to secure our border and our country.”
Strongly disagreeing, Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota said, “This decision will someday serve as a marker of shame.” Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, and Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, who was born in Japan, both compared the ban and the ruling to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Critics of Trump’s ban had urged the justices to affirm the decisions in lower courts that generally concluded that the changes made to the travel policy did not erase the ban’s legal problems. Trump had also imposed a temporary ban on refugees along with earlier versions of the travel ban, but he did not reimpose a refugee ban when the last one expired in the fall.
The current travel ban dates from last September and it followed what the administration has called a thorough review by several federal agencies, although no such review has been shared with courts or the public.
Federal trial judges in Hawaii and Maryland had blocked the travel ban from taking effect, finding that the new version looked too much like its predecessors. Those rulings that were largely upheld by federal appeals courts in Richmond, Virginia, and San Francisco.
But the Supreme Court came to a different conclusion Tuesday. The policy has “a legitimate grounding in national security concerns,” and it has several moderating features, including a waiver program that would allow some people from the affected countries to enter the U.S., Roberts said. The administration has said that 809 people have received waivers since the ban took full effect in December.
Roberts wrote that presidents have frequently used their power to talk to the nation “to espouse the principles of religious freedom and tolerance on which this Nation was founded.” But he added that presidents and the country have not always lived up “to those inspiring words.”
The challengers to the ban asserted that Trump’s statements crossed a constitutional line, Roberts said.
“But the issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements. It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing a Presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility,” he said
___
Associated Press writers Ashraf Khalil and Jonathan Lemire contributed to this report.

TODAY WE BRING YOU PART TWO OF OUR SPECIAL SERIES TAKING A CLOSER LOOK AT THE BEAVER VALLEY POWER STATION IN SHIPPINGPORT, WHICH FIRST ENERGY HAS ANNOUNCED WILL SHUT DOWN FOR GOOD BY THE YEAR 2021, AND THE GRASS ROOTS EFFORTS UNDERWAY TO BRING THOSE PLANS TO A HALT. BV MATTERS IS A PRIVATE CITIZEN ENDEAVOR STARTED BY ERIC LOEHLEIN, WHO IS CURRENTLY A SITE MAINTENANCE MANAGER WITH THE BEAVER VALLEY POWER STATION. LOEHLEIN SPOKE WITH BEAVER COUNTY RADIO NEWSMAN PAT SEPTAK ABOUT WHAT THE ORGANIZATION IS ALL ABOUT…

LOEHLEIN SPOKE WITH BEAVER COUNTY RADIO NEWS ABOUT THE OBJECTIVE OF THE INITIATIVE…

LOEHLEIN TALKED TO BEAVER COUNTY RADIO NEWS ABOUT THE IMPACT THE PLANT’S CLOSING WILL HAVE ON THE COUNTY….INCLUDING THE LOSS OF ONE-THOUSAND JOBS…

LOEHLEIN TALKED ABOUT  THE LOSS OF SIGNIFICANT TAX BASE:

LOEHLEIN TALKED ABOUT THE EFFECT THAT THE PLANT’S CLOSING WILL HAVE TO THE POWER GRID:

LOEHLEIN SAYS THE PLANT WILL CONTINUE TO OPERATE AT 100% AND TO CURRENT SAFETY AND RELIABILITY STANDARDS UNTIL IT CLOSES….

LOEHLEIN SAYS EMERGENCY RESPONSE PLANS AND EXERCISES WILL CONTINUE BEYOND 2021 AND IF THE PLANT SHUTS DOWN, AS THE DECOMMISSIONING PROCESS WILL BEGIN… AND FUEL WILL REMAIN ON SITE FOR SOME TIME…

LOEHLEIN WAS ASKED…IS THERE SOMETHING THAT REGULAR FOLKS CAN DO?

…AND FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN THE GRASS ROOTS EFFORT UNERWAY TO KEEP THE PLANT OPEN, VISIT BVMATTERS.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION. TOMORROW…AS WE CONCLUDE OUR THREE-PART SERIES ON THE FUTURE OF THE BEAVER VALLEY POWER STATION, WE ASK THE QUESTION….COULD LEGISLATIVE ACTION CHANGE THE COURSE OF EVENTS? WE’LL SPEAK WITH CONGRESSMAN KEITH ROTHFUS FOR ANSWERS.

THE HOPEWELL TOWNSHIP COMMISSIONERS WERE QUESTIONED BY A CITIZENS GROUP LAST NIGHT ABOUT A PROPOSED DRUG REHAB FACILITY TO BE BUILT AT AN OLD ELEMENTARY SCHOOL BUILDING. BEAVER COUNTY RADIO NEWS CORRESPONDENT SANDY GIORDANO WAS THERE. Click on ‘play’ to hear Sandy’s report….

A LEET TOWNSHIP MAN FACES A HEARING THIS MORNING AT THE BEAVER COUNTY COURTHOUSE…AFTER BEING CHARGED AND JAILED ON NUMEROUS CHARGES. BEAVER COUNTY RADIO NEWS CORRESPONDENT SANDY GIORDANO HAS MORE. Click on ‘play’ to hear Sandy’s report…

 

AN ALIQUIPPA DRUG DEALER’S HOME HAS BEEN RAIDED BY THE ATTORNEY GENERAL’S OFFICE. BEAVER COUNTY RADIO NEWS CORRESPONDENT SANDY GIORDANO HAS DETAILS. Click on ‘play’ to hear Sandy’s report…

WEATHER FORECAST FOR TUESDAY, JUNE 26TH, 2018

 

TODAY – A MIX OF CLOUDS AND SUN. A SHOWER OR
THUNDERSTORM IS POSSIBLE. HIGH – 82.

TONIGHT – CLOUDY WITH SHOWERS…POSSIBLY A
THUNDERSTORM. LOW – 68.

WEDNESDAY – THUNDERSTORMS LIKELY. GUSTY WINDS
AND SMALL HAIL ARE POSSIBLE.
HIGH NEAR 80.

WASHINGTON – Congressman Keith Rothfus (PA-12) issued the statement following after voting for the House-passed Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act of 2017 (H.R.299). This bill requires the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to expand the presumption of exposure to herbicide agents, like Agent Orange, to Blue Water Navy veterans who fought in offshore waters of the Republic of Vietnam or in and around the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between September 1, 1967 and April 1, 1968. This presumption serves to simplify claims of disability for those exposed to herbicide agents and may have developed health issues because of it. The Congressman is also a cosponsor of H.R. 299.

“Our Vietnam veterans endured harrowing danger and hardship in serving our national defense,” said Congressman Rothfus. “The Blue Water Navy veterans have earned the right to claim disability from exposure to Agent Orange and other herbicides for their heroic service. With my support, I am glad the long-overdue Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act passed the House and I look forward to working with the Senate to send this bill to the President’s desk. It is time these veterans receive the medical treatment they have earned.”