Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — In images posted on social media and beamed around the world Wednesday, small clusters of U.S. Capitol Police officers retreated, fell away from violent assaults or simply moved aside as a large mob descended on the seat of American legislative power. Officers at a U.S. Capitol perimeter fence tried to hold their line but failed as intruders overturned the barrier. Officers at another gate, seemingly overwhelmed, appeared to walk off as the intruders passed by. Another lone officer tried to hold back an a...
WASHINGTON - Supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, pounding on the door of the House chamber, as lawmakers huddled inside, and strolling across the Senate floor carrying signs to object to the election of Joe Biden. The invasion of the Capitol building forced the House and Senate to abruptly stop their debate over the formal counting and announcement of electoral votes for Biden, a constitutionally mandated process. CNN reported one woman died...
More than 5,000 years ago, the warriors of Babylonia painted their fingernails with kohl to go to battle. More recently, A-list actor Brad Pitt wore nail polish, apparently just for the heck of it. Yet for some reason, it’s a showstopper when a 17-year-old male in Texas wears nail polish to school? Granted, women have been practically the only ones decorating their nails for the last few centuries. But custom and convention are no reason for nail polish to be an exclusively female style — witness how earrings have become com...
The prescription opioid crisis that has taken well over 100,000 American lives and ruined hundreds of thousands more wasn’t just an accident of time or the byproduct of a dysfunctional society. It was in good part the deliberate result of unethical and occasionally illegal machinations by the pharmaceutical industry, particularly by Purdue Pharma, which paid kickbacks and willfully misled physicians and the public to boost sales of its addictive signature drug, OxyContin. The company has agreed to plead guilty to criminal c...
For years the Supreme Court has resisted calls to let the public outside the courtroom listen in on its oral arguments. But live audio streams finally became a reality in May when the coronavirus pandemic forced the justices to hold two weeks’ worth of arguments in telephone conference calls. The justices’ decision to livestream those arguments was a dramatic departure from their usual practice of posting the recordings on the court’s website at the end of the week, when public interest and news coverage have ebbed. The e...
Let’s get out of here. Who hasn’t thought that at some point in the past four months, as we hunkered down in our homes, brooding and restless but with no place to go? The pandemic shuttered our offices and made the idea of venturing anywhere more ambitious than a grocery store seem like a perilous journey. Any trip that required a flight or a stroll among the masses — even masked — seemed an unreasonable risk. So is it any wonder, in our longing to get away from this virus-riddled existence, that we have found an escape...
Joe Biden is approaching the most important decision of his presidential campaign — choosing the woman who will be his running mate — on political terrain that has changed dramatically since he began the search, and amid intense lobbying that has showered uncommon attention on the contenders. With the former vice president enjoying a strong polling lead over President Donald Trump, some supporters say Biden is under less pressure to make a game-changing pick to galvanize voters than when he was first struggling to unify the p...
The Supreme Court last week needlessly poked a hole in Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state.” By a 5-4 vote, the court ruled in a case from Montana that if a state provides a tax break that benefits students at a secular private school, it must include private religious schools as well. The decision is doubly disappointing. First, states should be free to decline to subsidize religious instruction so long as they treat all religious schools the same. Second, the way the court broke down on ideol...
The NBA is suspending the 2019-20 season. The announcement came after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus. The league announced the decision, which will go into effect after Wednesday's slate of games, after a bizarre scene in Oklahoma City, where a game between the Thunder and the Jazz was cancelled seconds before tipoff. "The NBA announced that a player on the Utah Jazz has preliminarily tested positive for COVID-19. The test result was reported shortly prior to the tipoff of tonight's game...
The death toll in a west Texas mass shooting increased to eight Sunday, including the gunman, authorities said. At least one of the shooting victims remained in life-threatening condition, authorities said. Those killed ranged in age from 15 to 57 years old, Odessa, Texas, Police Chief Michael Gerke said Sunday. Police identified the gunman as Seth Aaron Ator, 36, of Odessa. He was arrested in 2001 for criminal trespass and evading arrest, both misdemeanors, according to a...
A surveillance program that allows the U.S. government to comb through hundreds of millions of Americans’ telephone records in search of connections to terrorism could soon be a thing of the past. That would be good news for personal privacy and responsible intelligence-gathering. Reports in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal suggest that the National Security Agency has lost its enthusiasm for a program that is the successor to the massive “bulk collection” of telephone records revealed six years ago by Edwar...
President Trump has repeatedly crowed that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report is a “total exoneration.” After its release Thursday morning, he tweeted: “No collusion. No obstruction. For the haters and the radical left Democrats — Game Over.” But the report itself, for those who bothered to read it, makes a mockery of that assertion. Even with its multiple redactions, the voluminous document made public Thursday by the Justice Department contains numerous examples of Trump degrading his office by engaging in sleazy and...
If you weren’t already convinced that the blanket federal prohibition on marijuana is illogical, counterproductive and confusing, consider this: Despite the ban, all but three states have legalized some form of cannabis. That creates a serious and obvious conflict. To address it, the federal government — under President Trump as well as President Obama — has for the most part opted not to enforce its own prohibition, so that marijuana growers and sellers in California and elsewhere are effectively permitted to violate feder...
The biannual shifting of the clocks took place Sunday morning, and you may be a little discombobulated. The transition to daylight saving time each March means losing the extra hour of night we enjoyed when the clocks shifted back four months earlier, and it can take a while for sleep schedules to adjust. If the twice-a-year clock-resetting leaves you grumpy, you’re not alone; there’s a growing global movement to end this pointless and, frankly, weird 20th century tradition that has persisted despite having no real practical...
Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee did themselves no favors Wednesday by approaching Michael Cohen as a man to be tarred and feathered, not probed as a witness. But they raised a question about the hearing that Democrats had no good answer for: What was the point? Cohen was there to dish dirt on his former employer, erstwhile real estate entrepreneur Donald J. Trump. And Democrats were eager to accumulate it as Cohen recited his view of Trump’s legal, ethical and moral failings. Members of the majority s...
The Supreme Court last week struck a blow against one of the most insidious practices of the American criminal justice system: the unfair confiscation of property from people convicted — or even merely suspected — of committing a crime. So-called civil asset forfeiture has been a cash cow for police departments even as it has disproportionately impoverished poor people and people of color. The court unanimously held that seizures by state governments of property used in the commission of a crime are covered by the Eighth Ame...
The National Rifle Association deserves all the condemnation it has received and more for standing in the way of reasonable, lifesaving gun-control efforts. Because of the gun group’s cynical hard-line policies and near-religious embrace of the 2nd Amendment, more and more Americans live at daily risk from gunfire, be it from a random shooter, an intimate partner or by their own hands. But the NRA is a legally constituted organization with the same right to exist and go about its business as any other organization (though s...
FALFURRIAS, Texas - The college students took turns removing yellowed shards of bone from a trench carved between the headstones in this ranching town's cemetery. The volunteers were here to help exhume the remains of unidentified migrants buried near what's been the busiest stretch of border for illicit crossings in recent years: Texas' Rio Grande Valley. The students found 15 bodies, but said based on sheriff's records, there were probably more crammed between the existing...
Public health officials in New York and New Jersey are fighting a measles outbreak that has sickened dozens of people since November, most of them unvaccinated members of orthodox Jewish communities. The virus was traced to travelers from Israel, which is dealing with its own measles outbreak at the moment So far, the outbreak has been relatively small because, despite gaps in what’s known as community immunity, the overall national vaccination remains high enough to prevent wide-scale epidemics such as the one that raged t...
U.S. automakers breathed a bit easier last week after President Donald Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced an agreement to shelve threatened U.S. tariffs on imported autos and retaliatory European tariffs on U.S. goods while the two sides negotiate lower trade barriers. And if the episode eventually produces a true free-trade agreement between Europe and the United States, it will be a win for businesses, workers and consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. But it wouldn’t validate the m...
Most Americans are far likelier to be searched by an agent of the Transportation Security Administration than by an FBI agent. But according to a federal appeals court, if an FBI agent violates your rights you can file a lawsuit. If you’re manhandled by a TSA employee you’re out of luck. By a 2-1 vote, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia has ruled against Nadine Pellegrino, a business consultant from Boca Raton, Florida, who claimed that a search of her belongings at Philadelphia International Airport in...
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a death penalty case that hinges on a fine point. The court has ruled in the past that it is unconstitutional to execute people who can’t understand why they face death at the hands of the state — usually people with mental illnesses or diminished intellectual abilities. Vernon Madison, who killed a Mobile, Alabama, police officer in 1985, knows the state intends to execute him for committing a murder, but a series of strokes and other ailments have left him incontinent, barely able to...
In an off-the-cuff comment with legislators gathered in the Oval Office on Thursday to discuss immigration, President Donald Trump laid bare his world vision. There are wealthy white countries such as Norway, which are welcome to send immigrants to the United States. Then there are what the president called “shithole countries” — Haiti and all the nations of Africa — whose people (overwhelmingly black and brown) the president doesn’t think belong here. Trump’s comment was outrageous, immature, inhumane and vulgar — and it sha...
Cassini, the NASA spacecraft whose breakthrough discoveries about Saturn and its many moons revolutionized the search for life beyond Earth, disintegrated Friday morning in the skies above the ringed planet. It was one month shy of its 20th anniversary in space. The explorer’s death was swift and deliberate. Traveling at 76,000 mph, it hurtled into the planet’s atmosphere shortly after 3:30 a.m. Pacific time and stopped communicating with Earth one minute later, according to NASA’s carefully choreographed plan. Within three...
MIAMI — Florida prepared for deadly winds and life-threatening storm surge from Hurricane Irma Saturday by asking 700,000 more residents to leave their homes in advance of a storm that already has killed at least 20 people as it moved through the Caribbean. Irma was poised to emerge from northern Cuba Saturday afternoon and head through the warm waters of the Florida Straits. From there, it is expected to intensify, and then cross the Keys for a potentially catastrophic d...
