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On the morning of 25 August 2014, a 16-year-old girl arrived at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in a baffling condition. She was short of breath but had no chest pain. She had no history of any lung condition and no abnormal sounds in her breathing. But when the emergency room doctor on duty pressed on her neck and chest, he heard noises like Rice Krispies crackling in a bowl of milk. Spaces behind her throat, around her heart and between her lungs and chest wall were studded with pockets of air, an X-ray confirmed, and her lungs were very slightly collapsed.

The doctors were confused until she said that shed been screaming for hours the night before at the Dallas stop on One Directions Where We Are Tour. The exertion, they hypothesised, had forced open a small hole in her respiratory tract. It wasnt really a big deal she was given extra oxygen and kept overnight for observation and she required no follow-up treatment. But the incident was described in all its absurd, gory detail in a paper published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine three years later. The lead physician wrote that such a case had yet to be described in the medical literature. Doctors were familiar with military pilots, scuba divers and weightlifters straining their respiratory tract, but this case presented the first evidence that forceful screaming during pop concerts could have the same physical toll.This was a novelty news item: an easy headline and a culturally salient joke about the overzealousness of teenage girls. It was parody made real and recorded with the deepest of seriousness, for all time, in a medical journal. I know nothing else about the girl who loved One Direction so much that she collapsed her lungs over it. Her doctor wrote to me that hed asked, at the time, for her permission to tweet at TV host Jimmy Fallon about the incident hed argued that maybe she would get to meet One Direction. But she was too bashful!!!! Classic teenager, he said, adding a laugh-crying emoji.

Ill never know who she is or hear her personal explanation of what made her scream so much. In this specific circumstance, thats because of medical privacy laws, which are good. But its also emblematic of a bigger lack: we have seen so many screaming girls. Every time we see them, were like, Theyre screaming. And thats it. Yet the screaming fan doesnt scream for nothing and screaming isnt all the fan is doing. It never has been.

At Harryween, Harry Styless fancy dress party at Madison Square Garden last year, fewer girls dressed to impress in the fancy sense than in the meme sense, signalling fandom knowledge of in-jokes and stories more than a desire to look attractive. My sister dressed as Harry Styles working in a bakery in England in the 00s, while I dressed as the shrine that one fan erected at the site where Styles vomited beside the 101 freeway in Los Angeles in 2014. Of course, part of my costume was confiscated by arena security because if you let one piece of posterboard into the arena youll end up letting a chaotic amount of posterboard into the arena and no one will be able to see the show.

Reports about screaming girl fans like those from Styless current tour, which kicked off last week in Glasgow have rarely, if ever, noticed these kind of subtleties. When the Beatles visited Dublin for the first time, in 1963, the New York Times reported that young limbs snapped like twigs in a tremendous free-for-all. When they arrived in New York City in February 1964 a little more than a month into the US-radio-chart reign of I Want to Hold Your Hand there were 4,000 fans (and 100 cops) waiting at the airport and reports of a wild-eyed mob in front of the Plaza Hotel.

Nearly all of the writing about the Beatles in mainstream American publications was done by established white male journalists. Al Aronowitz, the rock critic best known for introducing the Beatles to Bob Dylan and to marijuana (simultaneously) in the summer of 1964, reported that 2,000 fans mobbed the locked metal gates of Union Station when the Beatles performed in Washington DC. Then, when the Beatles came to Miami, 7,000 teenagers created a four-mile-long traffic jam at the airport and fans shattered 23 windows and a plateglass door. A plateglass door!

Being a fan is very much associated with feminine excess, with working-class people, people of colour, people whose emotions are seen as being out of control, Allison McCracken, an associate professor and director of the American-studies programme at DePaul University, told me. Everything is set up against this idea of white straight masculinity, where the emotions are in control and the body is in control.

McCracken is an expert on the history of the crooner in American culture and her 2015 book, Real Men Dont Sing, credits Rudy Valle and Bing Crosby with making the blueprint for a pop sensation in the late 1920s and early 30s. McCracken visited the American Radio Archives, in Thousand Oaks, California, to see Valles personal archive of fan letters, dating back to 1928. She was fascinated by the way the women who were writing to him were surprised by their own emotional reactions to his music and were confused by the idea of falling in love with a voice theyd heard only over the radio. They were responding to his voice and saying, I dont understand why Im so happy and joyous and why youre moving me so much, she said. They were writing to him and saying, Can you explain whats happening to me?

Though psychologists had in the early 1900s started describing adolescence as a unique stage of life, the word teenager itself wasnt widely used until the late 1940s, McCracken explained, and the most eager speakers of the term were also marketers. They realised in the postwar boom years that far fewer kids were dropping out of school to earn money for their families and that far more were being given allowances and plenty of leisure time. The 1950s and 60s saw more and more products marketed explicitly to teenagers, often reinforcing the idea that they were a distinct group of people with a separate identity from their parents and with the rise of teen-marketed products came teen-oriented TV shows during which they could be advertised.

So long as teens existed as a lucrative market category, the industry would supply them with a teenybopper idol. When these idols were written about by journalists and critics, it was often with full acquiescence to their marketing, tinged with disdain. This was the case as recently as 2010, when the idol was Justin Bieber. When he performed his first sold-out show at Madison Square Garden that September, the New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica titled his review Send in the Heart-throbs, Cue the Shrieks and wrote that Bieber teased the crowd with flashes of direct emotional manipulation.

Two years later, One Direction were battling Bieber for the No 1 spot on the US charts, and in the hearts of American teenagers, and Caramanica started reviewing the bands output with equal attentiveness. He called their 2012 second album, Take Me Home, a reliable shriek-inducer in girls who have not yet decided that shrieking doesnt become them. He panned the bands 2013 album, Midnight Memories, writing: They play the part almost resentfully, with the mien of people who know better Whether this is transparent to the squealers who make up their fanbase is tough to tell.

This idea that fans are an amorphous mass and that culture is something that happens to all of them in the same way can be traced back to Theodor Adorno, whose 1938 essay, cited in the New York Timess coverage of Beatlemania, described fans at live music performances as empty vessels: Their ecstasy is without content. Adornos work has been the starting point for the past 70 years of pop culture analysis, perhaps right up until the 1990s when cultural historian Daniel Cavicchi spent three years interviewing Bruce Springsteen fans about where their love of Bruce had come from and how it had coloured their lives for his book Tramps Like Us. At the time it was still up for serious debate whether the adoration of a pop star turned a person into an idiot. The cultural anxiety around popular culture then which has relaxed now, even if it hasnt totally disappeared was that it was a homogenising force that turned every participant into a mindless consumer. But in speaking to hundreds of fans, Cavicchi found something different. These people were exploiting the ultra-popular things they loved in order to become more completely themselves. Springsteen fans do not indicate that popular culture is shaping their identity but rather that they are shaping their identity with popular culture, he wrote.

What many commentators couldnt or wouldnt see was that fans have not just passively enjoyed or loudly desired the objects of their fandom. Theyve also edited them and recirculated them and used them as the inspiration for a range of creative works on and offline. The art, the stories, the fan fiction and the in-jokes are as much a part of what it means to be a fan as staking out an airport or memorising dozens of songs. Fans transform their own image by playing with expectations and flouting the rules; dress themselves up in the spirit of Harry Styles indulging in elaborate cosplay as an expression of devotion that is also a prolonged creative exercise. When Styles started wearing blouses and pearls and high-waisted trousers, so did they. They bought old-school rocker platform boots or knitted their own sweaters in the styles of his expensive, designer ones and expressed their fandom through aesthetic iteration.

Theres something else the critics didnt realise: fan girls are funny. In 1964, a group of girls in Encino, California, founded an organisation they called Beatlesaniacs Ltd. It was advertised as group therapy and offered withdrawal literature for fans of the Beatles who felt that their emotions had got out of hand. In a 1964 issue of Life magazine, the group is covered credulously. (The spread on Beatlemania features a full-page image of a girl kneeling on the ground, grass clenched in her hand, tears streaming down her face whether or not she was actually thinking, Ringo! Ringo walked on this grass!, that is how the photo is captioned.) The club is mentioned in a small sidebar, entitled How to Kick the Beatle Habit. What Beatlesaniacs Ltd offers is group therapy and withdrawal literature, it reads. Its membership card immediately identifies the bearer as someone who needs help.

The club was obviously a joke. Its rules included such items as Do not mention the word Beatles (or beetles), Do not mention the word England. But nobody is primed to see self-critique or sarcasm in fans. Seeing them toy with their own image or recognise their own condition contradicts the popular image that has circulated for the past 100 or so years.

Take the story of the shrine to Harry Styless vomit. The facts are these: in October 2014, Styles went to a party at the British pop singer Lily Allens house in Los Angeles. The next morning, riding in a chauffeured Audi, in his gym clothes, on the way back from a very long hike, he requested that the driver pull over. On the side of the 101 freeway, just outside Calabasas, he threw up near a metal barrier, looked up and locked eyes with a camera.

The day they were taken, the photos circulated in tabloids and online, and a few hours later, a Los Angeles-based 18-year-old named Gabrielle Kopera set out to find the spot and label it for posterity. She taped a piece of posterboard to the barrier: Harry Styles threw-up here 10-12-14, she wrote in big letters. The grainy photo she posted first to her own Instagram circled the globe. It is referenced in articles about the moment Harry Styles knew hed made it, which was supposedly the moment someone told him his vomit had been scooped off the ground and was up for sale on eBay.

At the time she took the shot, Kopera was bored: she didnt have the money for a four-year university course so shed stayed home to work and to study at a local community college while most of her friends moved away. Being a fan of Styles and One Direction made her feel as if she had something to do that wasnt a chore.

She was surprised and confused by the way her photo was covered in the media, as if it was something more bizarre than a comedy routine she was performing, primarily with herself as the audience. It was more a joke about my life than his, she told me.

By the end of One Direction, the medias treatment of the bands music and its fans had changed significantly. In part, this was because of a rise in the estimation of pop music among critics and a new focus among content makers on womens websites for celebrating almost everything any girl did as inspiring and empowering. Guilty pleasures were to be enjoyed, not insulted, and it was rude to call them guilty pleasures at all. It is inappropriate now to make fun of girls for screaming or boybands for existing or anybody for liking anything.

You could argue Harry Styles helped drive this cultural change when he appeared in spring 2017 on the cover of Rolling Stone, interviewed by the music journalist and Almost Famous writer-director Cameron Crowe. Whos to say that young girls who like pop music short for popular, right? have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy? Thats not up to you to say, he told Crowe. Young girls like the Beatles. You gonna tell me theyre not serious? How can you say young girls dont get it? Theyre our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going. He really went for it. Teenage-girl fans they dont lie. If they like you, theyre there. They dont act too cool. They like you and they tell you. Which is sick.

Im happy that he said that, because I know it meant something important to a lot of people. But its hard to celebrate the fangirls coming of age the way Id like to, because it is also being celebrated by the sort of people who will use it to make more money out of us. And its being celebrated by well-meaning people in sort of embarrassing ways as if liking a boyband is a radical political act, the same way wearing well-designed T-shirts with punchy slogans on them is a sincere expression of feminism and Pantone creating a shade of red called Period is empowering for anyone who menstruates. Not all women are our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, I would love to tell Harry Styles. Not all women keep the world going!

But alongside the overenthusiastic acceptance lies an essential truth: the little indignities and the big disappointments of being young, of not finding the love you want or of not becoming the person youd hoped these things are tempered by fandom. Fandom is an interruption; its as simple as enjoying something for no reason and its as complicated as growing up. It should be celebrated for what it can provide in individual lives. What this is, exactly, is hard to know if you dont bother to ask. Its generally much more than a scream.

Kaitlyn Tiffany is a writer at the Atlantic. This is an edited extract from her book Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (13.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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The truth about screaming fangirls | Pop and rock - The Guardian

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The Texas Republican Party on Saturday voted on two new party platform planks aimed at barring the teaching of sex and sexuality in schools while simultaneously calling on Texas schools to teach the dignity of the preborn human and that life begins at fertilization.

One policy proposal called on state lawmakers to prohibit the teaching, exposure, and/or discussion of sexual matters (mechanics, feelings, orientation or gender identity issues), as well as remove related books or materials from schools.

The issue of gender has nothing to do with education, said Cindi Castilla, president of the Texas Eagle Forum and who served on the party platform committee. Education is about reading, writing, math, science, history and fine arts. Maybe some foreign language and PE. Schools arent the social educators of our kids.

Elsewhere, the GOP platform also added that Texas students should learn about the dignity of the preborn human and that life begins at fertilization.

That goes back to biology, back into teaching sex as biology, said Julie Pickren, who told The Texas Tribune that sex education has a place only if it follows state health education standards and is age appropriate. If it has a heartbeat, it's a human, right?

Pickren, a Republican, is running for the State Board of Education District that represents Southeast Texas. Incumbent Matt Robinson is not running for reelection.

The platform plank does not specify which grades should get these lessons, except to say that high school students should read the Womans Right to Know booklet. Critics say that booklet, written by the state, includes scientifically unsupported claims and shames women seeking abortion care.

The platform plank also states that students should witness a live ultrasound and watch a Miracle of Life type video. The 1982 film documents the human reproductive process from conception to birth.

Kristen Ylana, executive director of The Texas Womens Health Caucus, said the push to teach public school students that life begins at fertilization represents a broader push by the Texas Republican Party to broadly establish a legal foundation to claim a fetus is a person with constitutional rights.

They want to get to the point where we can say, Well, no, this is a person. So they require legal protections, criminal protection, constitutional protections. They have rights that are just as valid and equal. So therefore, you cant do certain things, Ylana said.

During the last regular legislative session, Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, filed a bill that defined personhood at fertilization and would provide due process to a fetus. The bill died in committee.

The State Board of Education recently wrapped up its review of health curriculum standards, which include requirements to teach about fertilization in fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

My thought is to leave well enough alone. What we put in the standards is factual and balanced, Patricia Hardy, a Republican board member from Fort Worth, told the Tribune Saturday after the platform vote.

Many delegates at the convention argued that young children dont need to learn about issues of gender and sexuality, including conversations and lessons about people who are transgender. Those delegates said Saturday they prefer such conversations happen at home. Under Texas law, parents currently must provide written consent for their children to attend sex education classes, which are required to emphasize abstinence.

Some womens health advocates and public education leaders criticized the policies as harmful and discriminatory and questioned the legality of barring the teaching of gender and sexuality in schools.

The Texas GOP is out of step with the majority of Americans who believe in equality, said Zeph Capo, president of the Texas chapter of American Federation of Teachers. Capo said the platform plank banning the teaching of sexual matters appears to violate Title IX, which protects against sex-based discrimination, including discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Parents may try to restrict what their own kids read or who they love, but they do not have the right to restrict others, Capo said, not in a truly free society.

The newly approved Texas GOP party platform broadly places the culture wars at its core, as the party adopted a slew of new platforms that shift the party further to the right on Saturday.

Delegates Saturday voted on 275 platform planks, which will now need to be tallied and certified in Austin. It is rare for a plank to be rejected, Texas GOP party spokesperson James Wesolek said. In addition to the platform, the delegates voted to choose 8 among 15 legislative priorities to be shared with Republican lawmakers ahead of the legislative session that starts in January. Which 8 were selected will not be known for several days.

Party platforms are often more aspirational than practical and, in Texas, they have long reflected the opinions of the most activist wings of the parties. Elected officials are not bound to adhere to their parties platforms.

The additions to the state GOP platform related to teaching Texas students about sex and sexuality come months after Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents who provide gender-affirming care to their transgender children as child abuse. The state also has seen a push from far-right lawmakers and conservative parents to remove obscene content from school libraries and classrooms. The book bans often have targeted young adult literature with racial and LGBTQ+ themes.

The platform also calls for lawmakers to remove an exemption in the Texas Penal Code that allows children access to harmful, explicit or pornographic materials under the guise of educational materials.

Castilla said the exemption allows schools to use educational materials she considers to be obscene pornography.

Join us Sept. 22-24 in person in downtown Austin for The Texas Tribune Festival and experience 100+ conversation events featuring big names you know and others you should from the worlds of politics, public policy, the media and tech all curated by The Texas Tribunes award-winning journalists. Buy tickets.

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Texas GOP platform calls for ban on teaching sexual matters, while requiring students to learn about dignity of the preborn human - The Texas Tribune

I commute 35 miles each way to work. In my comparatively compact and fuel efficient car, that works out to a gallon of gas each way. At current fuel prices, it costs me about $12 each day to get to work.

It adds up. Its frustrating.

Im not the only one with fewer, less experienced coworkers sharing the same work. Im not the only one looking at the rising cost of everything rent, fuel, food, and so on and wondering when it will stop. Yes, wages are higher, especially for entry-level employees, and thats great, but the constant shortages of basic goods and services since the pandemic started a couple of years ago has been irritating. Violent crime is increasing as well no, the Bronx isnt burning, but just as we shouldnt wait for live-action reenactments of the Laramie Project before we take white nationalists showing up to violently disrupt Pride events seriously, we shouldnt wait for American cities to look like hollowed out war zones again before we take crime seriously, either.

Im also not the only one whos noticed that the people in charge dont seem to have any fixes for these problems.

I understand, then, why so many political analysts believe Republicans will have a banner year this year. Democrats are currently in charge (for whatever definition of in charge any political party can be said to be in our famously fractious country) and things are a little rough at the moment and getting rougher. Naturally, many voters will likely conclude, rightly or wrongly, that throwing todays bums out might make things better at least until tomorrows bums either wield political power effectively enough to create other problems or are unfortunate enough to be in power while we create entirely new and novel problems for ourselves.

What I dont understand is what Nevadas Republican primary voters, especially in Washoe County, think theyre doing about any of this.

Start with the gubernatorial primary, which produced one of the more comparatively sane outcomes. Whether you agree or disagree with Lombardos positions or policies, nominating a sheriff for governor is a logical thing to do if youre a voter whos worried about crime. Whats less logical, however, is nominating a conspiratorial former boxer and current ambulance chaser who thinks the establishment is conspiring to deny him his place on the general election ballot and consequently refuses to concede his race despite receiving nearly 30,000 fewer votes than the victor never mind how many Democratic political organizations, including here in Nevada, spent millions of dollars propping candidates like Joey Gilbert up.

But that ambulance chaser is exactly who a plurality of Republican voters in several counties including our state capital wanted for governor. Even in Washoe County, Gilbert was fewer than 300 votes away from Joe Lombardo. If Clark County Republicans didnt think so fondly of their sheriff, Sisolak would have needed to recruit Ross Miller as a stunt double in the next gubernatorial debate.

What made Joey Gilbert appealing? It wasnt his willingness nor perceived ability to solve Nevadas problems it was instead his willingness to fight reality itself. According to his headcanon, Donald Trump was still president, COVID-19 wasnt real (and, if it was, it was a plandemic anyway), and Nevadas students cant read because they dont say the Pledge of Allegiance often enough. Does any of that have any relationship with reality? Well, no, but reality left Joey and his supporters behind years ago.

Then theres Jim Marchant. Marchant is running for secretary of state on a platform of replacing every voting machine with thousands of bleary-eyed precinct captains hand-counting every ballot, handwriting their tallies with fountain pens on parchment, then delivering election results by Pony Express. If you ask him, every election result since Mark Twain published Roughing It has been fraudulent, including every primary and Assembly seat he ever won. Hes running because, as he readily admits, QAnon organizers the sort who are waiting for John F. Kennedy Jr. to arise from his watery grave off the coast of Marthas Vineyard so he can run as Trumps running mate in 2024 saw him as a kindred spirit and asked him to.

Is he a delusional crank spouting unhinged nonsense? Absolutely. In a just world, would he file as a paper candidate, pick up a couple thousand votes statewide from voters who had no clue who he was, then die in obscurity? You bet. Is he instead the Nevada Republican Partys general election candidate for secretary of state this year? By a landslide. Will electing him secretary of state make Nevada a better place or address a single meaningful problem faced by residents of our state? No, but if Otero County in New Mexico, a jurisdiction which refused to certify its own election results, is any indication, hell at least keep our judicial system gainfully employed.

Perhaps Nevadas Republicans had more sense when it came time to select their candidate for Treasurer. Surely surely they wouldnt support someone with a history of failed businesses, sweetheart deals for family members, constant out-of-state distractions, bullying and fighting fellow Republicans, and a scrambled misunderstanding of germ theory to manage the states money.

Dont call them surely. Fiore was the most popular candidate on the Republican statewide primary ballot. More than 125,000 Republicans voted for Fiore thats more votes than Adam Laxalt or any statewide candidate received.

Does she know what the job of a state treasurer is? Does she know how to balance a checkbook? Is she self aware enough to realize shes actually the angry racist aunt instead of the fun-loving party girl at every family gathering? The answer to all of these questions is almost certainly no. Did that stop Republicans from putting her on our general election ballots? The answer to that question is also no.

What about the position of attorney general the chief prosecutor for the state? Did Nevadas Republicans select someone who will be tough on crime? Or did they select someone who jokes about lynching people and is an open embarrassment in court? Does thirty men breaking into a local jail to kill a man while the local constable is asleep sound like law and order? As Republicans selected Sigal Chattah to run against Aaron Ford, it seems we have four more months to find out.

Then there are the races further down the ballot.

Washoe County Republicans the same bunch which used to reliably produce moderate Republicans like Bill Raggio, Brian Sandoval, Jill Tolles, Ben Kieckhefer and Heidi Gansert instead chose to replace an incumbent Republican county commissioner with a county assessor whos still not allowed in his own office. Instead of ensuring county properties were assessed fairly and equitably, Mike Clark used his time and resources to obsess over a picture of one of his staff members in a bikini a picture which he bundled in 162 novella-length mailers he sent to elected officials and county employees, each labeled as if they came from someone elses address.

Nothing says moral courage like trying to pin your mailed rants on someone elses head.

Then theres Jeanne Herman. Ive written about Washoe County Commissioner Herman before shes the one who wanted to deploy the Nevada National Guard to every single precinct in the county to shoot voter fraud because a Californian cryptocurrency lottery winner told her to. Did the Republican residents of Renos exurbs use the ridiculous press she generated from her buffoonery to select someone who will do the job of county commissioner quietly and effectively? Or did they double down on the election denial and Bircher-grade conspiracy theory spinning?

Take a guess.

Finally, we have the elections for Washoe County School Board. Districts B, C, D and F face election this year. Each of them face incumbents who, at the time of the writing of this piece, are leading in their races Ellen Minetto, Joe Rodriguez, Beth Smith, and Adam Mayberry, respectively. Three of those four, however, will face a general election against candidates handpicked by Save WCSD, a far-right organization obsessed with the notion that Critical Transgendered Race Theory (or whatever) is being taught in Renos famously progressive classrooms Beth Smith handily dispatched her Save WCSD-anointed opponent, Ed Hitti, in the primary.

As I pointed out fairly recently, the Save WCSD candidates sincerely believe Washoe County students will read better if they have the power to control which books Washoe County students read just dont ask them which books your students will be able to take home. Either theyd rather we found out which books were fit for reading and which books were fit for their Suberung by surprise, or the Californian cryptocurrency millionaire funding their organization failed to furnish them with his list of forbidden books before they were interviewed by local media. Whether these candidates are mendacious or ignorant, its extremely unlikely electing any of them to my countys school board will have a positive effect on any childs education.

***

Will pretending Donald Trump was actually elected in 2020 resolve our nations supply shortages? Will electing an innumerate bully with a gun fetish make our states finances more sound? Will lynching political opponents make our streets safer? Will banning books raise Nevadas educational results? Will throwing every election machine into the nearest river reduce inflation? Will electing a disgraced assessor with a temporary restraining order against him as county commissioner make Washoe County great again?

I dont see how.

Are any of these candidates offering a single tangible policy solution that can be delivered by our existing political processes that might concretely benefit Nevadans?

Not that I can see.

Thats a shame. We have real problems in this state which call out for real solutions. There was a time when voters in Nevadas second-largest political party took itself seriously enough to address them and selected candidates accordingly. Unfortunately, last week's primary has demonstrated theyd rather add their collective delusions to the list instead.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered nonpartisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [emailprotected].

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Nevada's Republican voters have lost their collective minds The Nevada Independent - The Nevada Independent

Republican Michigan Rep. Fred Upton tried to downplay the concerns of Second Amendment advocates over new gun control legislation while speaking on CNNs State of the Union Sunday.

Host Dana Bash asked whether its possible Congress would strike a deal on gun control before the impending recess.

I want to turn to guns. A bipartisan group in the Senate is trying to lock down a compromise deal, but funding for state red flag laws and eliminating the so-called boyfriend loophole do remain sticking points for Republicans. Congress leaves for recess in a week. Do you think a deal is still gettable? Bash asked.

Upton said he thinks a deal is still possible before recess, but the two sticking points are common sense.

Law abiding folks shouldnt have any fears in terms of whats going on. Its been a rallying point, particularly for the NRA and Gun Owners of America. You look at their website and theyre raising cash like you wouldnt believe in terms of, their Second Amendment rights are being taken away.'

Thats not whats happening here. This is common sense stuff. But its been elevated, for sure, particularly when you have some pretty well-respected Republicans, whether it be John Cornyn or Dan Crenshaw literally being accosted at their state conventions in Texas this weekend.

Red flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders, allow a court to confiscate a firearm from an individual who is believed to pose a violent threat. (RELATED: Police Use Red Flag Law To Seize Guns From Black Panther Member Who Allegedly Plotted To Kill Colorado Officials)

In the Supreme Court case of Canglia v. Strom, the high court ruled seizing a citizens gun violates search and seizure rights protected under the Fourth Amendment.

Cornyn and several other Republicans have voiced support for the red flag laws, stoking a wave of criticism.

Daily Caller co-founder and Fox News host Tucker Carlson blasted the unconstitutional red flag laws.

If you can seize peoples guns without proving that they committed a crime, why cant you imprison them without proving that they committed a crime? If you can take their guns, why cant you take their homes? Why cant you empty their bank accounts? Carlson said Monday.

Cornyn was drowned out by chants of no red flags, no red flags, while speaking Friday at a convention in Texas.

Link:
Law Abiding Folks Shouldnt Have Any Fears, Claims Republican On Gun Control Bill - Daily Caller

The44th edition oftheChess Olympiad will be held inMahabalipuram, near Chennai, from July 28 toAugust 10. Today Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off thefirst-ever torch relay fortheChess Olympiad!

With animpressive ceremony attheIG Stadium inNew Delhi, India welcomed chess players andthechess fraternity from around theworld tocelebrate thevery first torch relay inaChess Olympiad. According tonews9live, FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich handed over thetorch tothePrime Minister who gave it tothelegendary Viswanathan Anand.

Thetorch will be taken to75 cities inaspan of40 days before arriving inMahabalipuram, andatevery location, chess grandmasters ofthestate will receive thetorch. Theceremony started with thetraditional dances ofIndia depicting the64 squares, andduring theshow, thehosts showcased thehistory ofchess, its origin, andits evolution.

The44th edition oftheChess Olympiad was initially scheduled totake place inRussia. However, with thewar-like situation between Russia andUkraine, FIDE began searching fornew hosts andinvited new bidders. Thestrong efforts from thefederation andAll India Chess Federation Secretary Bharat Singh Chauhan brought theimpossible toreality asFIDE granted India therights tohost theOlympiad which has been taking place forthelast 95 years. So, innearly 100 years ofthehistory oftheChess Olympiad, its thefirst time that India will be hosting theprestigious event.

We are proud that thesport rose from its birthplace andhas made its presence felt all over theworld. We are delighted tosee chess return toits birthplace andcelebrate its success intheform oftheChess Olympiad. PM Modi said, adding: InIndia wrestling, kabaddi, malkhamb were played toremain fit andforanalytical skills, our forefathers invented chess. Chess traveled tothewhole world andbecame popular. Today chess has become aneducational tool, chess players are becoming problem solvers!

With 188 countries registered fortheOlympiad, India is set towitness ahuge congregation ofnations forasporting event forthefirst time on Indian soil.

Find more about the44th edition oftheChess Olympiad attheofficial website.

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The first-ever torch relay for the Chess Olympiad - World Chess