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Change to 'Stand Your Ground' law taking center stage in murder trial Bradenton Herald Changes made to Florida's Stand Your Ground law are taking center stage in the case against a Bradenton man charged with the October 2015 fatal shooting of another man. Juan Carlos Ramirez, 32, is charged with second-degree murder in the death of ...

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Change to 'Stand Your Ground' law taking center stage in murder trial - Bradenton Herald

In the world of boneheaded marketing ploys, this has to rank as one of the boneheadedest.

Kendall Jenner and that dumb Pepsi ad? Move over.

Fliers from Second Amendment Sports, a local gun shop and shooting range, started showing up in mailboxes late last week.

Im just going to describe it verbatim.

The front has large, bold lettering announcing Juneteenth.

Above it is a drawing of an, apparently, African-American man with his arms raised overhead breaking a chain.

A photo of a white mans face has been imposed onto the drawing.

To the side, the flier states, Juneteenth, Dads & Grads Sale June 15th & 17th.

On the back (between clip art of shackled wrists breaking chains) it says:

Celebrate Juneteenth Dads & Grads.

Emancipate yourselves from the oppression of the man.

From your chores, from your school Buy a gun!

Take that boot off your neck and enjoy some great deals!

I found an explainer, sort of, about Juneteenth saying it is recognized mostly by black Americans and commemorates the end of the Civil War and the final Southern state of Texas announcing the emancipation of slaves. (I would argue with that interpretation, which Ill get to.)

It goes on to say that Second Amendment Sports is celebrating the date to remind people that all races at one time in history were enslaved and that freedom comes at a cost.

Buy a firearm and some ammunition and take your power back from a government that would prefer you to be a slave again! says the explainer.

Then theres a convoluted line about states' rights and keeping the Union together, presumably about the Civil War.

Remember Juneteenth, it ends. Know that it has relevance to all men.

So, that cleared up nothing about this ill-conceived ad campaign.

Just as a start, I wondered if Second Amendment had used Juneteenth as a sale-a-bration marketing concept before?

What was the response? Whats the response now?

Who's face is that photoshopped onto the drawing?

I did eventually get an email from Second Amendment Sports owner Matt Janes, who defended the fliers as opening a dialogue about the fragility of freedom for everyone.

He said this is the second year Second Amendment Sports has used the Juneteenth ad campaign and reaction has been "mixed."

"Some people choose to be offended," Janes wrote. "They do not feel it is our place to bring up U.S. history when it pertains to certain subjects. Like it is taboo or exclusive to only some. Others totally understand the meaning behind our advertisement. Others are 'Hunh? What's Juneteenth?'"

As to the face imposed on the drawing: "It is immaterial and largely the point of the image. It could be an ancestor, you, me, our children...that is the importance."

If nothing else, he wrote, he hopes the flier gets people talking.

The entire thing is disrespectful, said Jason Phillips. And to turn it (Juneteenth) into a political message to fan up emotion, which leads directly to more gun sales for them, is sickening.

Reactions on Facebook and elsewhere were similar, a mixture of outrage and derision.

I'm all for standing firm on civil liberties and slapping back government overreach. But I don't think coopting Juneteenth is the way to go.

To me, the flier and tortured explainer are boorish and just plain weird.

I mean, why not hawk high-caliber rifles on Holocaust Remembrance Day as "yellow badge repellant?"

Im not going to argue whether the fliers are also racist.

Anyone who doesnt find them racially offensive will get defensive and claim the other side is overly sensitive.

Thats a spin cycle that never ends.

Instead, hey, what exactly is Juneteenth?

I will admit that I didn't know until I covered the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, an all black rodeo, which happened to be touring in Bakersfield on Juneteenth some years back.

To me, Juneteenth is bittersweet in a lot of ways.

It recognizes the end of slavery, yes.

But it came to 250,000 slaves in Texas on June 19, 1865, two months after the official end of the Civil War.

And 2 1/2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln in January 1863.

And the state of Texas certainly did not announce it, as implied by Second Amendment Sports' explainer.

Union Gen. Gordon Granger landed in Galveston with 2,000 troops to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation.

Granger made it his first order of business to stand on a balcony and read aloud:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

Today, Juneteenth is typically marked with gatherings of family and friends, food, remembrances and prayer.

Its a recognition, a friend told me.

That sounds right. A recognition. Not a door buster.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry. Her column runs Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at http://www.bakersfield.com, call her at 661-395-7373 or emaillhenry@bakersfield.comfollow her on Twitter @loishenry or on Facebook at Lois Henry.

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LOIS HENRY: Use of Juneteenth as marketing ploy to sell guns doesn't go over well - The Bakersfield Californian

BUNGLING Donald Trump has put Europe on a collision course with a fresh migrant crisis.

The US President has pulled his country out of a deal designed to stop the world heating up too much.

The Paris Climate Change Agreement was meant to keep global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees.

But with the US one of the worlds biggest polluters pulling out, experts say were almost certain to miss the temperature target.

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If we go too far it will become unstoppable

And with some places in the Middle East and Africa already on the verge of being too hot for humans, Europe could face an influx of climate refugees.

Professor Eric Wolff from Cambridge Universitys Department of Earth Sciences told Daily Star Online the change would come in our lifetimes.

He said: "The changes in where it rains, and where we get droughts, floods and heatwaves will happen over the next few decades.

"It is likely places will become I dont like to say uninhabitable but difficult enough to live in that people will want to move."

As migrants clash with each other in over crowded camps across Europe, we take a look through the hard task of policing the migrant crisis in Europe.

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Moroccan Police look at immigrants trying to jump the six-meter-high fence in Ceuta, Spanish enclave on the north of Africa, 09 December 2016.

The warning follows scorching highs of 60c in Iran and the United Arab Emirates last summer, and 54c in Iraq and Kuwait.

Professor Wolff, who is a member of the Royal Society, said places on the edge of the Sahara were also at risk.

He said: "Places which are already close to not having enough water to grow things would definitely not have enough water.

"Some places would become very uncomfortably hot you could have air conditioning, but that uses more energy so thats a feedback loop.

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"Some places that are currently marginal to live in become much harder to live in still and that will cause economic disruption as well as national disruption."

And thats only the effect over the next 20 to 50 years in the longer term, melting ice would send sea levels surging, displacing even more people.

Professor Wolff said: "If we dont do anything at all then we will set in motion melting parts of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet.

"I dont want to exaggerate that thats going to happen in peoples lifetimes, but if we go too far it will become unstoppable."

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Gavin Schmidt of NASA says we must now try to adapt to, rather than prevent, climate change and Professor Wolff agrees.

He said: "Youve got to try to do as much as possible but also prepare for the fact that climate is going to change.

"I think its a shame. Wed found a way, through the Paris Agreement, to at least reduce the likelihood of there being any really bad effects."

Withdrawing the US from the deal last week, President Trump accused the other signatory states of costing America "trillions of dollars" in tough trade practices.

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NEW MIGRANT MAYHEM: Trump mistake to unleash refugee crisis on Europe - Daily Star

Tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants have been granted work permits by the Trump administration under an Obama-era deferred-action program that President Trump had promised to end on his first day in office, according to federaldata.

Trump had called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program an unconstitutional executive amnesty during his campaign. But statistics from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services released last week showed that more than 17,000 new DACA applicants were approved for the program in the first three months of 2017.

In addition, 107,000 immigrants already enrolled in DACA had their two-year work permits renewed during that time, which includes the final 20 days of President Barack Obamas tenure in January.

The new figures make clear that the deferred-action program for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children often known as dreamers has continued at a robust pace under Trump. This comes despite concerns from some immigrant advocates that the administration would start targeting work permit-holders for deportations.

Trump has waffled on DACA since taking office. In April, he told the Associated Press that dreamers should rest easy and not fear deportation. But his failure to follow through on a key pledge to voters has angered immigration hawks.

Its a violation of a campaign promise, said Dale Jackson, a conservative radio host in Huntsville, Ala., who asked White House press secretary Sean Spicer in February why Trump had not ended the program.

Jackson emphasized that unlike some of Trumps other promises, such as repealing the Affordable Care Act or building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border wall, the president could halt the issuance of work permits through executive decree without congressional approval.

This is completely within his singular power to do by himself, he said. Theres no rationalization I can come up with. The guy said one thing during the campaign and hes outright not doingit.

A White House spokesman did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

Trump has touted successes in his efforts to get tougher on undocumented immigrants, including a significant drop in the number of people trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have ramped up arrests of illegal immigrants under new guidelines from the administration that broaden the pool of people identified as a priority for removal.

While we still welcome legal immigrants to tune of 1 million a year, we are no longer a friendly environment for illegal border-crossers, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly said during a Cabinet meeting with Trump at the White House onMonday.

But the DACA program, which Obama instituted through executive action in 2012, is popular among Latino and Asian communities and has presented a political conundrum for Trump.

More than 750,000 immigrants have participated, and Obama emphasized the programs value to Trump in a meeting at the White House after the election. Obama told reporters that he would speak out if the new administration attempted to deport dreamers.

Since then, there have been a handful of highly publicized arrests of dreamers that have raised fears among immigrant rights groups. In some cases, the immigrants had allowed their DACA standing to lapse before their arrests.

On Monday, a federal judge in Atlanta ordered that a Mexican woman living in Georgia, Jessica Colotl, be temporarily reinstated in DACA after the Trump administration attempted to place her in deportation proceedings because of a 2010 traffic stop.

Her attorney, Charles Kuck, said in an interview that he thinks cases such as hers are outliers and that it appears nothing has changed in the processing of DACA applications. He added that he has filed about 100 applications for clients trying to enroll in the program or renew their DACA standing since Trump took office.

Immigration hard-liners said Trump, with his inaction, now shares ownership of the deferred-action program with Obama. Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA, a group that advocates for lower immigration levels, said Trumps inaction is denying jobs to native-born workers.

This is not a symbolic thing; this has real consequences, said Beck, whose organization has more than 7 million followers on Facebook. Theres a sense that he believes its almost okay not to act. The trouble is, theres no neutral position in this.

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Trump administration grants work permits to thousands of illegal immigrants - Washington Post

Illegal immigration across the southwest border appears to have jumped 27 percent in May, according to numbers released this week by Homeland Security, breaking a three-month streak of declines under President Trump and suggesting that the slump in migrants has bottomed out.

The Border Patrol nabbed 14,535 illegal immigrants in the southwest last month, up from just 11,129 in April. Analysts said that the number of people caught is a rough measure of the overall flow of people trying to sneak in.

The number of illegal immigrants showing up at ports of entry without authorization also ticked up, from 4,649 to 5,432.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol and the ports of entry, acknowledged the increase in crossings, but attributed it to a seasonal uptick.

CBP said it expects the uptick to continue through the summer months.

The numbers suggest that while Mr. Trump appears to have changed the calculations of many border crossers, theres still a segment of the population particularly among Central Americans determined to make the journey.

Agents usually record an uptick from April to May, but the jump this year is the largest on record.

Still, its by far the lowest May total on record. For example, May 2016 saw more than 40,000 illegal immigrants caught at the border.

Illegal immigration from Cuba and Haiti had been a problem last year, but had dipped under the final months of President Obama and again under Mr. Trump.

Now, Cubans appear to be surging again, while Haitians remain low.

Two other special categories of migrants unaccompanied minors and families traveling together also saw increases last month, rising from a combined 2,117 nabbed by the Border Patrol in April to 3,070 in May.

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Illegal immigration across southwest border increased during May ... - Washington Times