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Kansas transgender people find Democratic allies in court bid to restore their right to alter IDs

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TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Officials who work for the Democratic governor in Kansas are challenging a court ruling that has temporarily halted the state from allowing transgender people to change the gender on their driver’s licenses.

The state Department of Revenue says Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican, didn’t have legal authority to file a lawsuit that led to a district judge temporarily stopping transgender people from changing their licenses, at least until Nov. 1. The latest court response by Democrats was dated Friday.

Kobach argues that allowing people to change their gender identity on state IDs — which the state labels as their “sex” — violates a Kansas law that took effect July 1 and rolled back transgender rights. He sued after Gov. Laura Kelly said the changes would continue despite that new law. Kansas for now is among only a few states that don’t allow any such changes, along with Montana, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

The state Department of Revenue oversees driver’s license issues in Kansas through its Division of Vehicles. The department argued in court papers filed Friday that the attorney general needed authorization from the governor, the Legislature or the local district attorney to file a case in state district court. Kobach contends that past court precedents and legal traditions allowed him to sue.

The case is being argued in Shawnee County, home to the state capital of Topeka.

“This is a most serious misrepresentation and without more, requires the immediate dismissal of this case,” attorneys for the Revenue Department argued in their most recent filing.

The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to text and email requests Sunday seeking a response.

District Judge Teresa Watson initially sided with Kobach when she scheduled a Nov. 1 hearing on whether to block changes in driver’s licenses past that date. She also has an Aug. 16 hearing on a request from five transgender Kansas residents to intervene in the case, something Kobach opposes.

The new law rolling back transgender rights defines male and female based on a person’s “reproductive system” at birth, preventing legal recognition of a change in gender identity, and applying the rule in “any” other law or regulation. The Republican-controlled Legislature overrode Kelly’s veto of the measure.

The Department of Revenue initially argued unsuccessfully that it still must follow older and more specific laws regarding driver’s licenses that conflict with the new law.

It’s new arguments also are technical. They rely on a strict reading of the law setting out the attorney general’s power and other laws detailing when agency actions can be reviewed by district courts.

The transgender people seeking to intervene in the lawsuit argue that the anti-trans rights law violates civil liberties protected by the Kansas Constitution, including a right to bodily autonomy.

Kobach also is trying to stop the state from changing transgender people’s Kansas birth certificates in a separate federal court case.

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Follow John Hanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apjdhanna

Co-Host New Zealand Is Out; Colombia Stuns Germany

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New Zealand had the high of a win in their opening game, but were eliminated on Sunday with a draw against Switzerland.Credit…Lars Baron/Getty Images

The story of New Zealand’s journey in the Women’s World Cup, and of its exit on Sunday night, will be a familiar one to the team and its fans: not enough goals for New Zealand, and too many for everyone else.

For New Zealand, a co-host of the tournament with Australia, the ride had begun on a high. The team had earned its first-ever World Cup victory in the event’s opening match, leading a rugby-mad country to stir, if only momentarily, for women’s soccer. For a few days, even bigger achievements seemed possible.

But the opening victory had been narrow — the Football Ferns, as the team is known, had scored a single goal — and perhaps that was a sign. New Zealand never scores much, and it never scored again at the World Cup, eliminated quietly on Sunday in Dunedin after a 0-0 tie with Switzerland that was the home team’s ninth goalless outing in 12 games this year.

“Obviously we talked and we were proud of ourselves and what we’ve been able to accomplish, but at the end of the day we wanted to get out of this group stage and we just didn’t,” New Zealand midfielder Malia Steinmetz said. “It’s just black and white.”

In Auckland, meanwhile, Norway was raining goals on the Philippines, winning by 6-0 to save what had looked to be a star-crossed campaign. When the whistles blew to end both games, the math was unforgiving for the host nation: Switzerland and Norway were moving on, and New Zealand was out.

With that elimination, New Zealand became the first host ever eliminated in the group stage, a fate that Australia will try not to match in its own must-win game against Canada on Monday. Not even company will ease the sting for the Ferns, though.

Norway, on the other hand, will feel resurrected after a chilly night in Auckland. It had not particularly enjoyed the view from last place over the past week, not when it lost to New Zealand in its opener, not when its star Caroline Graham Hansen publicly challenged her coach to restore her to the lineup and then apologized for her outburst, not when the striker Ada Hegerberg sat out again with an injury.

Norway got on a roll.Credit…Abbie Parr/Associated Press

Faced with the humiliation of going out at the hands of the Philippines, though, something stirred in the Norwegians.

Forward Sophie Roman Haug scored on a one-time volley after only six minutes, then doubled her total with a header after only 17. Graham Hansen made it 3-0 before the half, then sent in the cross that was turned in for a Philippines own goal three minutes after halftime.

That silenced a profoundly pro-Philippines crowd of more than 34,000, and allowed Norway to set aside a week of grumbling and whispers of locker room discontent.

“We felt it was us against the world today and we performed from the very start, delivering when we really had to,” Norway Coach Hege Riise said. “This was the best response we could have given the Norwegian people and ourselves.”

Guro Reiten’s penalty made it five and then Roman Haug added her third, and Norway’s sixth, in injury time and that was that. But by then everyone knew it was over anyway, and the only outcome that mattered was the one in Dunedin, where New Zealand pressed and pressed for the goal that never came, the chance to change a scoreline the Ferns knew absolutely wouldn’t suffice.

When it didn’t arrive, when the whistle blew for full time, the players’ stunned faces told the story of a tournament that started brightly and, for them, is now over far too soon.

— Andrew Das Reporting from Auckland, New Zealand

Israeli Court Ruling May Determine Democracy’s Fate

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When the Israeli Supreme Court announced Wednesday that it would review a new law designed to curb its power, it set up a complicated choice for itself. Will it directly confront the elected branches of government by overturning the law? Or will it instead rule in such a way that sidesteps a constitutional crisis?

Over the last few decades, attempts to weaken the courts around the world have become recurring signals that a democracy is in trouble. Attacks on judicial independence were early steps toward one-party dominance in Russia, Turkey and Venezuela, for example.

But a move to limit the authority of the courts — like the new law adopted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition barring judges from using the longstanding legal principle of “reasonableness” to overrule government decisions — does not make democratic collapse inevitable. It’s more like a flashing red light, and how the judiciary responds can begin to decide how much damage is done.

“What helps determine whether courts come back from the brink?” said Rosalind Dixon, a law professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “The mix of skills and strategic behavior of the court, and the degree of support it has from civil society and institutions and elites.”

“If a court stands alone,” she added, “it’s very hard to see how the court prevails.”

And once judicial independence takes a major hit, the slide toward autocracy can come quickly, said Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton.

Hungary became a full-fledged democracy after the Soviet Union loosened its grip on Eastern Europe in 1989, with the new Hungarian Constitutional Court serving as the primary check on the nation’s single house of Parliament and prime minister.

But in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orban won election with a supermajority in Parliament, which his governing party then used to amend the Constitution and curtail the high court’s power to review legislation. The government also expanded the number of judges and put the new appointments in the hands of Parliament.

A slim majority on the court tried to hold the line, for example, by striking down a voter registration law as an unnecessary barrier to participating in elections. But Mr. Orban and his party amended the Constitution again to nullify several court decisions, going on to take control of the national media council, the election commission and other key institutions.

“By the time Orban ran for re-election in 2014, it was over,” Professor Scheppele said. “He captured everything.”

It was an example of rapid change to the judicial system that has fueled fears in Israel, where the courts also serve as one of the only formal checks on the power of a Parliament with a single house, and where Mr. Netanyahu and his allies have also proposed bills to further restrict judicial review and give the government greater control over the appointment of judges. And unlike Hungary, Israel does not have a constitution. Mr. Netanyahu needs only a simple majority to change the country’s Basic Laws, which set national standards.

Democratic deterioration unfolded more slowly after the courts came under attack in other countries, sometimes with changes that can seem unexceptional on the surface.

In Poland, for example, after the right-wing Law and Justice Party won the presidency and parliamentary majorities in 2015, it mandated the retirement of lower-court judges over the age of 65. The government also took control of the independent body that makes judicial appointments and created a new disciplinary chamber that can punish judges and has targeted more than a thousand of them.

The Polish Constitutional Tribunal did not invalidate these changes; the government had moved early on to bring it to heel. But other judges publicly denounced the moves and found support from a wide section of civil society and Polish opposition parties, which staged mass street protests and appealed to the European Union — Poland became a member in 2004 — for help.

In June, the European Court of Justice ruled that Poland had infringed on E.U. law by diminishing the independence and impartiality of the judiciary. Protests against the government have continued, and the opposition has a shot at winning elections this fall.

“I know people want to know, ‘Are we there yet?’” Professor Scheppele said of Poland’s democratic decline. “But it’s not clear.”

In India, too, the effort of a right-wing government to dominate the judiciary is still playing out.

The selection of new members of the Supreme Court of India has been in the hands of fellow judges since the 1990s. But in 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party pushed through a constitutional amendment to give the government greater say over judicial appointments.

Later that year, asked to review an attempt to limit its own power, just as the Israeli Supreme Court is being asked to do now, the Indian Supreme Court struck down the amendment.

Since then, though, Mr. Modi’s government has continued to chip away at judicial independence, tilting the court in its favor by refusing to accept or act on some appointments while fast-tracking those it favors, Nandini Sundar, a sociologist at the University of Delhi, has argued in a new article.

While continuing to make some progressive decisions in favor of gender and sexual equality, for example, the court has upheld the convictions of critics of the government, decided other key cases to the benefit of Mr. Modi and his party, and even refused to hear “challenges to laws that rewrite fundamental principles of the constitution,” Professor Sundar writes.

The upshot is that Mr. Modi and his government can “push some of the blame for what they’ve done to the courts,” Ms. Sundar said in an interview. “For example, if you demolish a Muslim mosque to build a Hindu temple, you can say the court gave its blessing.”

But Mr. Modi’s control over the courts is incomplete, she added. “We’ll know in the next election whether the country has rescued itself.”

In Brazil, judicial independence came under threat but survived after making it to the other side of a crucial election.

The right-wing former president, Jair Bolsonaro, went after the Federal Supreme Court after it ruled against him on several issues, and in August 2021, he asked the Senate to impeach one of the justices, Alexandre de Moraes. A month later, in a fiery speech to more than 100,000 demonstrators, Mr. Bolsonaro said he would not abide by Mr. de Moraes’s rulings. A mob gathered at the court, threatening to break in.

The court’s response at first was an approach that Yaniv Roznai, an Israeli law professor at Reichman University, calls “business as usual,” meaning neither directly confronting the government nor acceding to its demands.

Then in the run-up to Brazil’s 2022 election, Mr. de Moraes, who was also the country’s elections chief, ordered the removal of thousands of social media posts to stop the spread of misinformation and took other extraordinary steps to parry antidemocratic attacks by Mr. Bolsonaro, whom voters then ousted.

Some hailed Mr. de Moraes as the man who saved Brazil’s young democracy. But others argued he went too far, going beyond business as usual and taking too much power.

The Israeli Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the challenges to the law limiting its power in September. Professor Dixon said it should “carefully think through any frontal confrontation” with the government.

“In Israel, there is massive support from civil society for the court right now,” she said. “If the court plays nice a bit, maybe the anger of the right dissipates, and the court in due time works around this particular law. You try to live to see another day, so to speak.”

In October, though, two liberal judges are scheduled to retire from the 15-member court. If the government goes ahead with its plans to exert more control over judicial appointments, as well as to strip the court of the power to hear some cases, Professor Dixon argued, the calculation changes.

“Then,” she said, “the only options for the court will be confrontation or acquiescence.”

Flipping a Switch and Making Cancers Self-Destruct

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Within every cancer are molecules that spur deadly, uncontrollable growth. What if scientists could hook those molecules to others that make cells self-destruct? Could the very drivers of a cancer’s survival instead activate the program for its destruction?

That idea came as an epiphany to Dr. Gerald Crabtree, a developmental biologist at Stanford, some years ago during a walk through the redwoods near his home in the Santa Cruz mountains.

“I ran home,” he said, excited by the idea and planning ways to make it work.

Now, in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Dr. Crabtree, a founder of Shenandoah Therapeutics, which is developing cancer drugs, along with Nathanael S. Gray, a professor of chemical and system biology at Stanford, and their colleagues report that they have done what he imagined on that walk. While the concept is a long way from a drug that could be given to cancer patients, it could be a target for drug developers in the future.

“It’s very cool,” said Jason Gestwicki, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. “It turns something the cancer cell needs to stay alive into something that kills it, like changing your vitamin into a poison.”

“This is a potentially new way to turn cancer against itself,” said Dr. Louis Staudt, director of the Center for Cancer Genomics at the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Staudt wrote an editorial to accompany Dr. Crabtree’s paper.

Once the treatment is further developed, he added, “I would love to try it in a clinical trial with our patients who have exhausted all other options.”

In laboratory experiments with cells from a blood cancer, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, the researchers designed and built molecules that hooked together two proteins: BCL6, a mutated protein that the cancer relies on to aggressively grow and survive, and a normal cell protein that switches on any genes it gets near.

The new construction, a dumbbell shaped molecule, is unlike anything seen in nature. BCL6, at one end of the dumbbell, guides the molecule toward cell-death genes that are part of every cell’s DNA and are used to get rid of cells that are no longer needed. But when a person has diffuse large B cell lymphoma, BCL6 has turned off those cell-death genes, making the cells essentially immortal.

When the dumbbell, guided by BCL6, gets near the cell-death genes, the normal protein on the end of the dumbbell arms those death genes. Unlike other processes in the cell that can be reversed, turning on cell-death genes is irreversible.

The new approach could be an improvement over the difficult task of using drugs to block all BCL6 molecules. With the dumbbell-shaped molecules, it is sufficient to rewire just a portion of BCL6 molecules in order to kill cells.

The concept could potentially work for half of all cancers, which have known mutations that result in proteins that drive growth, Dr. Crabtree said. And because the treatment relies on the mutated proteins produced by the cancer cells, it could be extremely specific, sparing healthy cells.

Dr. Crabtree explained the two areas of discovery that made the work possible. One is the discovery of “driver genes” — several hundred genes that, when mutated, drive the spread of cancer.

The second is the discovery of death pathways in cells. Those pathways, Dr. Crabtree said, “are used to eliminate cells that have gone rogue for one reason or other” — 60 billion cells in each individual every day.

The quest was to make the pathways driving cancer cell growth communicate with silenced pathways that drive cell death, something they would not normally do.

When the hybrid molecule drifted to the cells’ DNA, it not only turned on cell-death genes but also did more. BCL6 guided the hybrid to other genes that the cancer had silenced. The hybrid turned those genes on again, creating internal chaos in the cell.

“The cell has never experienced this,” Dr. Staudt said.

“BCL6 is the organizing principle of these cancer cells,” he explained. When its function is totally disrupted, “the cell has lost its identity and says, ‘something very wrong is happening here. I’d better die.’”

But the main effect of the experimental treatment was to activate the cell-death genes, Dr. Crabtree said. “That is the therapeutic effect,” he said.

The group tested its hybrid molecule in mice, where it seemed safe. But, Dr. Staudt noted, “humans are a lot different than mice.”

The work is “exciting,” said Stuart L. Schreiber, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard and a previous collaborator with Dr. Crabtree. But he offered words of caution.

What Dr. Crabtree created “is not a drug — it still has a long way to go,” he said.

Opinion | The English Countryside Is a Place of Profound Inequality

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Often people assume I am someone I am not. My childhood was spent making dens in the hidden corners of the landscaped gardens of a grand country estate in the Lake District. I wandered woods full of baby pheasants being fattened up for the shoot. I roamed the hills listening to my Walkman like a modern Brontë sister. I had lakes to paddle in and a dinghy that we bumped down the ­path to a private beach.

But they weren’t my gardens. It wasn’t my beach.

Until the age of 18, I lived on three private country estates in England. First in Yorkshire, then in Bedford, then on Graythwaite Estate, in Cumbria in the Lake District. In each of these my dad had the job of forester, working his way up until he was head forester, overseeing 500 hectares of woodland at Graythwaite, where the job came with a three-bedroom lodge on the estate.

The house was old and four miles from any kind of shop. But to me, it was idyllic. It had an open coal fire, a huge walk-in pantry and bay windows. A story — probably apocryphal — had it that there had been an upstairs but the landowner didn’t like the way it ruined his view, so he just sliced it off, like a layer of Victoria sponge cake.

Our house was a tied cottage. For centuries, it was not uncommon for the offer of a job in the English countryside to include accommodation. The rent would be minimal or nothing — a fact reflected in the wages. And when the job ended, so, often, did your right to housing.

There was tied housing for the servants of the families and houses on grand country estates — for the gardener, gamekeeper, plumber, forester and tenant farmers.

For workers, it was a precarious, contingent way of life. Both the quality of the accommodation and your rights to it were entirely dependent on the benevolence of the landowner. But none of that lay heavily on me as a child. In the summer, I would climb out of my bedroom window when I should have been asleep and ride my bike up and down the estate road. My brother and I made rhododendron perfume to sell to visitors and dangled from an old tire swing. We didn’t realize yet that the ground was shifting beneath our feet.

For a lot of people, the English countryside is Elizabeth Bennet starting to change her mind about Mr. Darcy as the road opens up to a view of Pemberley, or the new Mrs. de Winter and the drive that “twisted and turned as a serpent” up to Manderley, “lovelier even than I had ever dreamed.”

But for the landless who work and belong to the British countryside but do not own a piece of it, it’s a place of profound inequality. Damp, cold and underresourced but beautiful.

When I was growing up on Graythwaite, it was still possible to live, work and raise a family in some of the most beautiful parts of England on a working-class wage. That’s less true now. Rural Britain, long a scenic playground for the rich, is in danger of becoming only that, for tourists, second-homers and wealthy retirees.

Hawkshead, about five miles from Graythwaite, is one of the prettiest villages in the Lake District. It used to have two banks, a police station, four pubs, cafes and businesses. When I was a teenager, I worked in the King’s Arms, one of the pubs. There was a chalkboard on which someone had written, “I wandered lonely as a cloud, then thought: Sod it, I’ll have a pint instead.” Wordsworth, whose cottage is a popular stop a few miles north, would not have approved.

These days, there are still lots of cafes, but now the police station is apartments, one bank is a gallery, and the other one is a ticket office for a Beatrix Potter attraction. Many of the village homes are vacation rentals or second homes, empty for most of the year, pushing the prices higher for the few homes that do go up for sale. There were always bus trippers, but the streams of tourists at this time of year, its busiest, make it feel a bit like a rural Disneyland.

In the early 2000s, when a lot of the big landowners were starting to realize how profitable renting property to these visitors could be, Graythwaite Estate decided not to employ a forester anymore. Dad became self-employed, and we started paying market rent. The farm and other houses on the estate started to become vacation cottages; some became beautiful wedding venues. Eventually, Mum and Dad moved to a terraced house in a nearby town. It had a yard, not a garden, but it was theirs.

This story is repeated in many of the prettiest places in Britain. In some of the villages around where I grew up, as many as 80 percent of the houses are second homes, according to housing advocates.

Over and over again, people who grew up or made a life there have been forced to make way for others. (In Dinorwig, a former slate-mining town in Wales that is popular with visitors, a schoolteacher told The Guardian that her family was evicted by a landlady who admitted that she could make four times as much by renting their home to tourists.) These visitors spend money in the local shops, but they don’t put children in the school. They don’t become part of the church congregation. A way of life slowly suffocates.

When I lived at Graythwaite, the estate threw big hunting parties every winter. Men came from all over the world to shoot, mainly pheasant but a few deer, too, to help control the deer population. Range Rovers would be parked in rows at the side of the woods, and shots would echo off the fells behind our house on cold mornings.

I once joined the shoot as a beater. I tagged along with a few other estate kids and the dogs to flush out birds from copses of trees or bushes. I hated it. I don’t think it was the shooting of the pheasants I didn’t like; it was tramping through the cold, wet grass for someone else’s fun. As a child, I found it troubling on levels that I couldn’t yet pick apart, and my parents never suggested I do it again.

As an adult, I was invited on a pheasant shoot in Scotland by an old boss. I went, admittedly thrilled to be on the other side of the party. I sat high up on the heated seats of a Range Rover and watched the beaters and their dogs go ahead and scare the pheasants into the sky. I ate one of the fanciest sausage rolls I’ve ever tasted. I felt as though I had put on the wrong shoes.

I think that growing up the way I did has given me a kind of class ambiguity. As if having access to all this land, the outside world and all that’s in it, made us rich. As a teenager, if I answered the phone and it was one of the landowners, I learned to change my accent — I could and can still do a pretty good imitation. But class is one thing; land is another. If you don’t own land, you’re forever at the mercy of the people who do.

Tied housing still exists, albeit in a much-reduced form — and mostly for people who work in agriculture or hospitality. These days, I live in a new house in the suburbs near Falkirk, in Scotland. The central heating is cozy and reliable. I don’t need to chop logs or get coal delivered. When I move the pictures on the wall, I don’t see the true color of the wallpaper, untouched by soot. It doesn’t take hours to get to my kids’ school or the hospital.

But elementally I know that I am not where I am meant to be. I am constantly drawn to tree-lined roads, dry stone walls and a house — big or small, old or new — in the country.

I have been back to Graythwaite a few times, but it always felt like trespassing. In my dreams, though, I am often in the garden of the old house, in the shade of the big trees. Comfy as a dandelion in the dirt.

Rebecca Smith is the author of “Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside,” from which this essay is adapted.

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‘A Dangerous Combination’: Teenagers’ Accidents Expose E-Bike Risks

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On a Thursday evening in late June, Clarissa Champlain learned that her 15-year-old son Brodee had been in a terrible crash, the latest teen victim of an e-bike accident.

He had been riding from home to shot-putting practice. The e-bike, a model made by Rad Power, had a top speed of 20 miles per hour, but his route took him on a busy road with a 55-mile-per-hour limit. While turning left, he was clipped by a Nissan van and thrown violently.

Ms. Champlain rushed to the hospital and was taken to Brodee’s room. She could see the marks left by the chin strap of his bike helmet. “I went to grab his head and kiss him,” she recalled. “But there was no back of his head. It wasn’t the skull, it was just mush.”

Three days later, another teenage boy was taken to the same hospital after the e-bike he was riding collided with a car, leaving him sprawled beneath a BMW, hurt but alive. In the days following, the town of Encinitas, where both incidents occurred, declared a state of emergency for e-bike safety.

The e-bike industry is booming, but the summer of 2023 has brought sharp questions about how safe e-bikes are, especially for teenagers. Many e-bikes can exceed the 20-mile-per-hour speed limit that is legal for teenagers in most states; some can go 70 miles an hour. But even when ridden at legal speeds, there are risks, especially for young, inexperienced riders merging into traffic with cars.

“The speed they are going is too fast for sidewalks, but it’s too slow to be in traffic,” said Jeremy Collis, a sergeant at the North Coastal Station of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating Brodee’s accident.

To some policymakers and law enforcement officials, the technology has far outpaced existing laws, regulations and safety guidelines. Police and industry officials charge that some companies appear to knowingly sell products that can easily evade speed limits and endanger young riders.

“It’s not like a bicycle,” Sergeant Collis said. “But the laws are treating it like any bicycle.”

Two federal agencies, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said they were evaluating “how best to oversee the safety of e-bikes,” according to a statement provided by the highway safety agency.

Communities have begun to alert their residents to the dangers of e-bikes. In June, the police department in Bend, Ore., ran a public service campaign acquainting the public with the e-bike laws that were frequently being broken there. Days later, a 15-year-old boy was killed when the e-bike he was riding was struck by a van.

Sheila Miller, who is the spokeswoman for the Bend police and helped develop the public service campaign, emphasized that not everything that calls itself an e-bike qualifies as one, or is safe or legal for minors. Under Oregon law, which is more restrictive than those in most states, a person must be at least 16 to ride an e-bike of any kind.

“Parents, please don’t buy these bikes for kids when they are not legally allowed to ride them,” Ms. Miller said. “And if you own an e-bike, make sure that everyone who is using them knows the rules of the road.”

The typical e-bike has functioning pedals as well as a motor that is recharged with an electrical cord; the pedals and the motor can be used individually or simultaneously. Unlike a combustion engine, an electric motor can accelerate instantly, which makes e-bikes appealing to ride.

E-bikes are also seen as vital in shifting the transportation system away from emission-spewing cars and the congestion they create, said Rachel Hultin, the policy and governmental affairs director for Bicycle Colorado, a nonprofit advocacy group for bicycle safety and policy. E-bikes and electric scooters are part of the so-called micromobility movement, propelling commuters and other people short distances across crowded spaces.

The number of e-bikes being sold is unclear because, like regular bikes, they do not need to be registered with the government. (Cars, motorcycles and mopeds must be registered through a state’s Department of Motor Vehicles.) Many are sold directly to consumers over the internet, rather than through physical retailers that often track sales. John MacArthur, an e-bike industry expert with the Transportation Research and Education Center at Portland State University, estimated that roughly one million e-bikes would be sold in the United States this year.

The minimal regulation around e-bikes is a selling point for the industry. Super73, a company in Irvine, Calif., that makes popular models, advertises on its website: “RIDE WITHOUT RESTRICTIONS. No license, registration, or insurance required.”

“It’s one of the very unique categories of vehicle that there really isn’t any kind of onerous regulation,” a company co-founder, LeGrand Crewse, said in an interview, noting that helmet requirements were also modest, depending on the state and the rider’s age.

Law enforcement officials have begun to express concerns about the minimal training required of teenage e-bike owners, and about their behavior. Car drivers ages 16 to 19 are three times as likely to be killed in a crash as drivers 20 or older, and bicyclists ages 10 to 24 have the highest rate of emergency room visits for crashes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some states have begun to raise the training requirements for young drivers, including adding graduated license programs that require extended hours of supervised driving, limit night driving or restrict the number or age of passengers.

The California Legislature is considering a bill that would prohibit e-bike use by people under 12 and “state the intent of the Legislature to create an e-bike license program with an online written test and a state-issued photo identification for those persons without a valid driver’s license.”

“I know the e-bike situation is evolving,” said Sergeant Collis of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office. “But personally, with all these bikes, you should have at least a permit or a license to ride them at the speed they’re going.”

As a transportation solution, e-bikes seem promising. “I’m really bullish about middle and high schoolers being able to use e-bikes,” said Ms. Hultin of Bicycle Colorado. She noted that e-bikes offered children and busy families more transportation options at lower cost. But she worried that the vehicles could lead to an unsafe mix of untrained e-cyclists and unaware car drivers.

That problem, Ms. Hultin said, was exacerbated by “an algae bloom of noncompliant e-bikes.” She was referring to products on the market that call themselves e-bikes but are not, either because they can go faster than allowed by law or because, once purchased, they can be modified to do so.

One vehicle that has drawn attention for its speed is made by Sur-Ron, whose products have been involved in several recent deaths. In June in Cardiff, Wales, two boys on a Sur-Ron bike died in a crash while being followed by the police; days earlier, a boy riding a Sur-Ron in Greater Manchester had died after colliding with an ambulance.

In its marketing materials, Sur-Ron describes one model, the Light Bee Electric Bike, as “easy to maneuver like a bicycle, with the torque and power of an off-road motorcycle.” Its operating manual cautions the owner to “please follow the traffic rules and with the safe speed (the top speed for this electric vehicle is 20 km/h).”

But the speed restraint — equivalent to about 12 m.p.h. — can be removed by simply clipping a wire, a procedure that is widely shared in online videos, and which law enforcement officials said appeared to be there by design.

“There are all kinds of videos on how to jailbreak your Sur-Ron,” said Capt. Christopher McDonald of the Sheriff’s Department in Orange County, Calif., where e-bike accidents and injuries are rising. With the speed wire clipped, the vehicle can approach 70 miles per hour, he said. Several requests for comment were sent through the Sur-Ron website but did not receive a response.

Matt Moore, the general counsel for PeopleForBikes, the main trade group for bicycles and e-bikes, said he worried about products like Sur-Ron’s. “Some products are sold as ostensibly compliant but are easily modified by the user with the knowledge and presumably the blessing of the manufacturer,” he said. “Unfortunately, there appears to be a lack of resources at the federal level to investigate and address e-mobility products that may actually be motor vehicles.”

The day after Brodee entered the hospital, his family sat at his bedside. They played his favorite music, including Kendrick Lamar and early Wu-Tang Clan. “I read to him for hours,” his mother said. “We wanted to wake up his brain.”

Three days later, as Brodee clung to life, Niko Sougias, the owner of Charlie’s Electric Bike, a popular e-bike shop in town, was driving in Encinitas on Highway 101 when he saw two teenage boys riding Sur-Rons in the opposite direction.

“They were doing wheelies,” Mr. Sougias said. He has grown concerned about the e-bike industry, he said, and does not sell many models that are popular with teenagers.

His route that Saturday followed the path of the boys on the Sur-Rons. Moments later, after a turn, Mr. Sougias saw that one of the Sur-Ron riders had collided with an S.U.V., had been thrown from his bike and was under a BMW.

According to the police, the Sur-Ron rider had been seen driving recklessly and was found at fault. “He was lucky to escape with his life,” Mr. Sougias said.

Ms. Champlain was at the hospital with Brodee when the boy who had been riding the Sur-Ron was brought in. Paramedics stopped by Brodee’s room to check in. “I can’t believe I’m here again for this,” she said one of them had told her; the same paramedic had brought in Brodee by ambulance.

Hours later, Brodee was pronounced dead. He was a beloved young man with a bright future ahead of him. He was fluent in Spanish and had a college-level knowledge of Japanese; he could dead-lift 300 pounds and, in 2020, was named student of the year at his high school. “I had so many people call me to tell me they’d lost their best friend,” his mother said.

Ms. Champlain said witnesses had told her that her son “did everything right,” including signaling to make a left turn.

“There should be more education for drivers with the change that’s happened,” she said. “I’d never seen an e-bike on the road until three years ago. Now I see hundreds.”

“They’re treated like bicycles when they’re not. They’re not equal.”

CNN Political Commentator Says Making Trump the GOP Nominee Would Be ‘A Lot Like Peeing in Your Pants’

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Despite his ongoing legal troubles — with more indictments still expected to come — Donald Trump is still the frontrunner to become the Republican nominee for president in 2024. But, CNN political commentator Geoff Duncan thinks that would be “a lot like peeing in your pants” for the party.

Duncan appeared on “CNN This Morning Weekend” on Saturday with that assertion, saying that what the GOP really needs is “somebody that’s got the whole package.” And Trump, he asserted, is definitely not that.

“Nominating Donald Trump for the Republican party is a lot like peeing in your pants,” Duncan said. “It’s going to feel good for a couple seconds, but then you wake up and you realize the realities of what you just did. We’re going to get beat in the general because we picked the wrong candidate. We couldn’t get out of our own way.”

Duncan argued that there are “certainly some” candidates that are doing what they need to do to possibly break through, including Chris Christie and Will Hurd. But, he added, there’s one thing that every Republican needs to do in order to have a chance.

“Look, they should all be unanimous in rebuking anything Donald Trump has to do and say,” Duncan argued. “He’s hijacked our Republican party.”

The post CNN Political Commentator Says Making Trump the GOP Nominee Would Be ‘A Lot Like Peeing in Your Pants’ appeared first on TheWrap.

Sweden Clinches Group; France and Jamaica Endanger Brazil

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For one night only, the combined interest of the World Cup co-hosts Australia and New Zealand coalesced on Australia’s most hallowed sporting arena, the Melbourne Cricket Ground. But the game on Saturday night was not soccer. It was a much-celebrated rugby classic played at the same time.

In front of a crowd of more than almost 84,000 fans, the men’s rugby teams of Australia and New Zealand renewed their rivalry by competing in the latest installment of two-game, home-and-home series that dates back more than 90 years.

That the game took place during the Women’s World Cup, simultaneously with matches in other cities — including a showdown between two of the top teams, Brazil and France — and two days before Australia’s must-win match against Canada, highlighted the competition that women’s soccer faces to attract interest and audience in the two sports-mad countries hosting soccer’s biggest showcase.

There were attempts to entice the rugby crowd, the biggest to watch the game in Australia in two decades, to attend local World Cup games, which were being held in an arena just yards away from where they were sitting on Saturday night. Digital advertising boards periodically flagged the dates of the World Cup and a link to where tickets could be purchased. But it was the Melbourne Cricket Ground that staked its claim for the most eyeballs.

Stadium operators predicted that more than 220,000 people would pass through its doors across three days as part of a run of games that started with its hosting what is considered to be the biggest rivalry in Australian domestic sports, a meeting between the Australian rules football teams Carlton and Collingwood on Friday night, and that will end on Sunday with a third spectacle, another Australian Football League game.

The rugby crowd, made up of not only Australians but also thousands of New Zealanders, a mix of expatriates and tour groups, skewed older than the fans that have been attending World Cup games.

Soccer, though popular as a participatory sport, languishes well behind sports played with an oval ball, a legacy of the past and migration patterns, according to one expert on Australian sports.

“Given that it was colonized by the British you’d have thought soccer would be the dominant code, but it’s not,” David Rowe, a professor for culture and society at Western Sydney University.

On Saturday, Melbourne’s airport was bustling with fans arriving from other parts of Australia and overseas visitors to witness the first installment of the yearly rivalry in which New Zealand’s team, known as the All Blacks, arrived as the overwhelming favorite to retain the title it has held for two decades.

New Zealand left with the trophy for a 21st time following a comprehensive dismantling of an Australian team that its new coach, Eddie Jones, is attempting to rebuild. The gulf in experience and class was evident once the All Blacks pegged back an early Australian score and eventually ran away with the win, 38-7.

They even got to hold aloft the Bledisloe Cup before the second game of the series takes place next week across the Tasman Sea in Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island. The stadium is likely to be packed, while some World Cup matches there have struggled to fill the stands. New Zealand’s women’s soccer team, at risk of being eliminated from the World Cup, was scheduled to play its critical third game on Sunday against Switzerland in Dunedin.

Decisions over the World Cup’s television coverage in Australia have been questioned already, and they are likely to face scrutiny again on Saturday night as one of the tournament’s most anticipated group games, an encounter between France and Brazil, kicked off 15 minutes after the start of the clash between the All Blacks and the Wallabies.

Only one of those games was being broadcast on a free-to-air network in Australia. The answer will not have pleased soccer fans.

But such is the interest in the fate of the Australian women’s team that even its rugby coach, Jones, talked about the injury to its star striker, Sam Kerr, after the rugby game.

Kerr, who is dealing with a calf injury, has missed two games. On Saturday she declared herself ready but said the status of participation would go “to the wire.”

Jones, recalling a similar injury to one of his players, described calf injuries as difficult to predict. But he was clear about what he would do if he was in the position of Tony Gustavsson, the coach of the Australian women’s soccer team.

“They’ve got to win,” Jones said, adding that Kerr’s talent meant there was no option but to play her. “Strap her up,” he said.

— Tariq Panja Reporting from Melbourne, Australia

Wildfires and Heat Transform Italy and Greece Into Tourism Nightmares

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As a family sat vigil over a coffin containing the body of an elderly relative, the wooded hills around their apartment building in Palermo burned from wildfires. Winds blew the blazes closer, torching cars, dumpsters, sheds and electricity poles. Then the flames licked the apartment building, forcing its inhabitants to flee.

“We wanted to leave the house, but then the flames were behind the door,” a resident told Live Sicilia television. She said she and her family wrapped their faces in wet towels and, looking for a way out, “knocked on the door where there was the cadaver.” They all managed to escape before the coffin and the rest of the house went up in flames.

Things could hardly be worse for Italy and its Mediterranean neighbors this month. Wildfires and successive heat waves transformed their summer paradises into ghoulish hellscapes. Fires in Greece caused wartime-scale airlifts of tourists and ammunition depots to explode. Sicilian churches burned with the relics of saints inside them. And if it was not the heat, it was hail — the size of billiards in northern Italy — as the country ricocheted between weather extremes.

It was bad enough for those who lived there. But the many tourists who had come looking for a summer holiday found an inferno, and there was more than a hint of buyer’s remorse.

“This was not a good idea,” said Maria Turkovic, 64, from Bosnia, as she prepared for a 2 p.m. tour of the Colosseum in the middle of the heat wave. She sought the shade of a short bush across from the landmark as the temperature hovered around 100 degrees Fahrenheit and a nearby ambulance checked the blood pressure of another tourist.

“My head is burning,” she said. Rather than a vacation, she said she felt trapped in a “nightmare.”

Even as the Mediterranean’s high fever finally broke this past week thanks to the influx of North Atlantic air, the realization that it was not even August — when new bouts of extreme heat are anticipated — dampened any sense of relief. Tour operators, officials and tourists across the region are wondering what happens when a preferred destination for summer getaways becomes a place you absolutely must get away from in the summer.

Countries like Italy and Greece, which increasingly depend on tourism — particularly summer tourism — are staring at a bleak and smoke-filled future, while the damp and chilly places normally shunned by travelers see a future in the sun.

Tourism would drop by 9 percent in the Greek Ionian Islands in a world that reached four degrees Celsius of warming, according to a European Commission report published this year, but it would increase by about 16 percent in western Wales.

“Between the fires, the lack of energy and the broken Catania airport, we are living a nightmare,” said Italy’s civil protection minister, Nello Musumeci, who added that the country was “split in two, between hail and fires,” and was “at the mercy of tropicalization.”

“In the face of climatic phenomenon of this type,” he said, “either we change approach or we will be counting the dead.”

Heat is of course nothing new to this part of the world. For centuries, natives of the southern Mediterranean have coped with the brutal afternoon heat by altering hours, hiding behind the thick walls of their homes and sealing the shutters.

But that seems to no longer suffice. Locals are instead shuddering as the toll of the heat causes hospitals to fill up with the old and stricken, and televisions now routinely broadcast tips on staying cool. For tourists, sightseeing in July has become a form of torture. “My Summer Vacation” essays promise to be horror stories.

“It feels like you are sweating all the time,” said Shelina Radvan, 29, a tourist from Canada, who sat near the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy, during the heat wave. “Many apartments don’t have the A.C. here.”

Locals shifted from being vendors and tour guides to acting as frontline health care workers for wilting tourists.

“You need to cool off, lower your temperature, replenish liquids, sugar, vitamins,” said Alessandro Simoni, whose family has for generations run the grattachecca, or flavored shaved ice stand, just off the Tiber Island in Rome. He said he repeatedly had to bring sugar water to tourists who had collapsed in the heat, and he now felt like “the neighborhood nurse.”

July is poised to be Earth’s hottest month ever. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European Union-funded research institution, the first three weeks of the month, when an African anticyclone hovered above much of the region like a heat lamp, temperatures in Italy reached as high as 118 degrees. Few experts think that record will last long.

“A foretaste of the future,” said Petteri Taalas, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization.

Greece registered its longest and most unrelenting heat wave since people started keeping track. Outside work was banned in the afternoon heat. Archaeological sites were closed. Some 400 wildfires illuminated satellite photographs and devastated olive groves and pine forests, as well as homes, farms and flocks.

The Greek authorities evacuated about 20,000 tourists from the island of Rhodes in an operation that the British news media compared with the evacuation of Dunkirk. The government was exploring issuing holiday vouchers and compensation packages to bring back the tourists who were chased from Rhodes.

The death toll in Greece hit five, including two pilots of a water-bombing plane that crashed while trying to put out the fires. On Thursday afternoon, wildfires torching the center of Greece reached a military warehouse, setting off enormous explosions of ammunition and prompting evacuations of residents and tourists.

In Madrid, the few people out at midday in the Barrio de las Letras avoided the embedded quotations from Quixote, blinding in the sun, and walked in the slivers of shade alongside buildings.

In Sicily, wildfires forced the closure of the island’s two main airports, Palermo and Catania. The island’s governor, Renato Schifani, declared a state of emergency and lamented arsonists, “crazy people” compounding the problem and the relics that were consumed by fire.

“With a heart in tears, it saddens us to tell you that little remains of the bodies of Benedict the Moor and the Blessed Matteo di Agrigento,” the parish priest wrote on Facebook after fires engulfed the church of Santa Maria di Gesù in Palermo. When Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella visited the scene on Friday, a firefighter told him “it was hell.”

On Friday, Pope Francis sent his thoughts of compassion to the victims of climate change, including what Cardinal Pietro Parolin, his second in command, called “grave disasters.”

Those disasters have not just been fires and the insufferable heat. The extreme weather turned the sky into a menace for those who thought they could seek refuge in the mountains, too.

In Italy’s northern provinces, whipping winds and hail larger than tennis balls battered pedestrians, demolished windows and cars, felled hundreds of trees, wiped out orchards and smashed the nose of a plane traveling to the United States, forcing an emergency landing. In Calabria, a 98-year-old man died as the wildfires consumed his home in the Aspromonte mountains.

In Florence, the skin on the shoulders of Michaela Polášková, 46, was blistered as she waited in line in the sun to enter a cathedral.

“We went to the mountains because the beach was too hot for us, but still, I got sun burned,” she said. She could not sleep at night.

“It’s no good,” she lamented. “We love Italy, but the summer is too much for us.”

Elisabetta Povoledo and Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

Rapper G Herbo pleads guilty in credit card fraud that paid for private jets and designer puppies

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The rapper G Herbo pleaded guilty Friday to his role in a scheme that used stolen credit card information to pay for a lavish lifestyle including private jets, exotic car rentals, a luxury vacation rental and even expensive designer puppies.

Under a deal with prosecutors, the 27-year-old Chicago rapper, whose real name is Herbert Wright III, entered a guilty plea in federal court in Springfield, Massachusetts, to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and making false statements. In exchange, prosecutors dismissed several counts of aggravated identity theft.

He also agreed to forfeit nearly $140,000, the amount he benefited from what prosecutors have said was a $1.5 million scheme that involved several other people.

“Mr. Wright used stolen account information as his very own unlimited funding source, using victims’ payment cards to finance an extravagant lifestyle and advance his career,” acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy said in a statement.

Sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 7, and he faces a maximum of 25 years in prison. A voicemail seeking comment was left with his attorney.

From at least March 2017 until November 2018, G Herbo and his promoter, Antonio Strong, used text messages, social media messages and emails to share account information taken from dark websites, authorities said.

On one occasion, the stolen account information was used to pay for a chartered jet to fly the rapper and members of his entourage from Chicago to Austin, Texas, authorities said. On another, a stolen account was used to pay nearly $15,000 for Wright and seven others to stay several days in a six-bedroom Jamaican villa.

In court documents, prosecutors said G Herbo “used the proceeds of these frauds to travel to various concert venues and to advance his career by posting photographs and/or videos of himself on the private jets, in the exotic cars, and at the Jamaican villa.”

G Herbo also helped Strong order two designer Yorkshire terrier puppies from a Michigan pet shop using a stolen credit card and a fake Washington state driver’s license, according to the indictment. The total cost was more than $10,000, prosecutors said.

When the pet shop’s owner asked to confirm the purchase with G Herbo, Strong directed her to do so through an Instagram message, and G Herbo confirmed he was buying the puppies, authorities said.

Because the stolen credit card information was authentic, the transactions went through and it wasn’t until later that the real credit card holders noticed and reported the fraud.

G Herbo was also charged in May 2021 with lying to investigators by denying that he had any ties to Strong when in fact the two had worked together since at least 2016, prosecutors said.

Strong has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

G Herbo’s music is centered on his experiences growing up on the East Side of Chicago in a neighborhood dubbed Terror Town, including gang and gun violence.

He released his debut mix tapes “Welcome to Fazoland” and “Pistol P Project” in 2014, both named for friends who had been killed in the city. His first album was 2017’s “Humble Beast,” and his latest is “Survivor’s Remorse,” released last year.

His 2020 album “PTSD” debuted at number 7 on the Billboard 200.

G Herbo also started a program in Chicago called Swervin’ Through Stress, aimed at giving urban youths tools to navigate mental health crises, after publicly acknowledging his own struggle with PTSD. In 2021 he was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 music list.

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