Arizona high court won’t review Kari Lake’s appeal over 2022 governor’s race defeat

Court News 2024/11/08 08:04   Bookmark and Share
The Arizona Supreme Court has declined to hear Republican Kari Lake’s latest appeal over her defeat in the 2022 governor’s race, marking yet another loss in her attempt to overturn the race’s outcome.

The court made its refusal to take up the former TV anchor’s appeal public on Thursday without explaining its decision.

Lake, now locked in a U.S. Senate race against Democrat Ruben Gallego, had lost the governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs by over 17,000 votes.

The courts had previously rejected Lake’s claims that problems with ballot printers at some Maricopa County polling places on Election Day in 2022 were the result of intentional misconduct and that Maricopa County didn’t verify signatures on mail ballots as required by law. A judge also turned down Lake’s request to examine the ballot envelopes of 1.3 million early voters. In all, Lake had three trials related to the 2022 election.

Despite her earlier losses in court and a ruling affirming Hobbs’ victory, Lake had asked the Arizona Supreme Court to review her case, claiming she had new evidence to support her claims. Lawyers for Maricopa County told the court that Lake failed to present any new evidence that would change the courts’ findings.

Lake is among the most vocal of Republican candidates promoting lies that Donald Trump had won the 2020 election over President Joe Biden, which she made the centerpiece of her campaign for governor. While most other election deniers around the country conceded after losing their races, Lake did not.

The Lake campaign didn’t respond to an email seeking comment on the Supreme Court’s latest decision.
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What to know about the unprecedented floods that killed more than 200 in Spain

Topics in Legal News 2024/11/04 08:04   Bookmark and Share
In a matter of minutes, flash floods caused by heavy downpours in eastern Spain swept away almost everything in their path. With no time to react, people were trapped in vehicles, homes and businesses. Many died and thousands of livelihoods were shattered.

A week later, authorities have recovered 218 bodies — with 213 of them in the eastern Valencia region. Police, firefighters and soldiers continued to search Tuesday for an unknown number of missing people.

In many of the 69 devastated localities, mostly located in the southern outskirts of Valencia city, people still face shortages of basic goods. Water is back to running through pipes but authorities say it is only for cleaning and not fit for drinking. Lines form at impromptu emergency kitchens and food relief stands in streets still covered with mud and debris.

Thousands of volunteers are helping soldiers and police reinforcements with the gargantuan task of cleaning up the mire and the countless wrecked cars. At least 46,000 insurance claims for totaled vehicles had been filed, according to Spain’s Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo.

The ground floors of thousands of homes have been ruined. Inside some of the vehicles that the water washed away or trapped in underground garages, there were still bodies waiting to be identified.

The frustration over the crisis management boiled over on Sunday when a crowd in hard-hit Paiporta hurled mud and other objects at Spain’s royals, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and regional officials when they made their first visit to the epicenter of the flood damage.

The storms concentrated over the Magro and Turia river basins and, in the Poyo canal, produced walls of water that overflowed riverbanks, catching people unaware as they went on with their daily lives on Tuesday evening and early Wednesday.

In the blink of an eye, the muddy water covered roads and railways, and entered houses and businesses in towns and villages on the southern outskirts of Valencia city. Drivers had to take shelter on car roofs, while residents took refuge on higher ground.

Spain’s national weather service said that in the hard-hit locality of Chiva, it rained more in eight hours than it had in the preceding 20 months, calling the deluge “extraordinary.” Other areas on the southern outskirts of Valencia city didn’t get rain before they were wiped out by the wall of water that overflowed the drainage canals.

When authorities sent alerts to mobile phones warning of the seriousness of the flooding and asking people to stay at home, many were already on the road, working or covered in water in low-lying areas or underground garages, which became death traps.

Scientists trying to explain what happened see two likely connections to human-caused climate change. One is that warmer air holds and then dumps more rain. The other is possible changes in the jet stream — the river of air above land that moves weather systems across the globe — that spawn extreme weather.

Climate scientists and meteorologists said the immediate cause of the flooding is called a cut-off lower-pressure storm system that migrated from an unusually wavy and stalled jet stream. That system simply parked over the region and poured rain. This happens often enough that in Spain they call them DANAs, the Spanish acronym for the system, meteorologists said.

And then there is the unusually high temperature of the Mediterranean Sea. It had its warmest surface temperature on record in mid-August, at 28.47 degrees Celsius (83.25 degrees Fahrenheit), said Carola Koenig of the Centre for Flood Risk and Resilience at Brunel University of London.

The extreme weather event came after Spain battled with prolonged droughts in 2022 and 2023. Experts say that drought and flood cycles are increasing with climate change.

“Climate change kills, and now, unfortunately, we are seeing it firsthand,” Sánchez said Tuesday after announcing a 10.6-billion-euro relief package for 78 municipalities.
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