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June 2018

The nation of Colombia just elected conservative candidate Ivan Duque as its new president. We always try to be careful with terms like conservative and liberal when it comes to world news because they have very different meanings in other countries. However, most media outlets are describing Duque as right wing.

I first blogged about Juneteenth in 2015. As I noted then, the day’s significance is almost criminally underappreciated. Over the last few years, the 19th of June and its significance, are slowly gaining national popularity, reverence, and acknowledgment.

Houston's Mayor Sylvester Turner held a press conference with local community leaders Monday to push back against plans to use a former warehouse located just outside of downtown Houston as an immigrant child holding facility. Turner, "said he is in no rush to issue city permits at the site, and called on the state not to issue a childcare license to the 54,000-square-foot facility," reports the Houston Chronicle.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is never one to mince words and she didn't hold back as America withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council. From CNN:
"Human rights abusers continue to serve on, and be elected to, the council," said Haley, listing US grievances with the body. "The world's most inhumane regimes continue to escape its scrutiny, and the council continues politicizing scapegoating of countries with positive human rights records in an attempt to distract from the abusers in its ranks."

Labor Secretary Alex Acosta announced a new rule that will help small businesses and self-employed individuals purchase health insurance. From The Wall Street Journal:
The rule makes it far easier for small businesses and self-employed individuals to band together and obtain “association health plans” for themselves and their employees. Many of the plans will be subject to the same rules as larger employers, which means they won’t have to provide comprehensive benefits, such as maternity services, prescription drugs, or mental health care, mandated under the ACA.

President Donald Trump certainly goes where no man has gone before, executively. He has steadily erased his predecessor's legacy, returning the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to its original mission of space exploration after it spent years orbiting Planet Diversity. He has directed NASA to partner with American companies to advance small spacecraft and launch vehicle technologies.

I'm so old, I remember when two partisan gerrymandering cases in the Supreme Court -- one from Wisconsin and one from Maryland -- were on just about everyone's list of blockbuster cases this term, including Bloomberg, Politico, and CNN, among many others. The Wisconsin case involved a very pro-Republican legislative district map that would help Republicans retain control of the state legislature, and the Maryland case involved a single very pro-Democrat congressional district.