Since recreational marijuana was legalized in Nevada in 2016, there’s been a great paradox. It’s legal to buy and possess recreational marijuana, but unless you’re a local resident or friends with one, there’s no place you can legally consume it. Efforts by the City of Las Vegas to greenlight public consumption lounges have been delayed until at least July 2021 by the state Legislature. But there are exceptions.

On October 5, the NuWu Cannabis Marketplace made history by opening the first cannabis consumption lounge in Nevada.

Located on sovereign land owned by the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, the nearly 16,000-square-foot marketplace, located just north of the Fremont Street casino corridor, is not beholden to the same restrictions as the rest of the state. Instead, it’s self-regulated through the Las Vegas Paiute Cannabis Authority. As such, there are no Nevada marijuana taxes, no waiting rooms and no reason not to open a consumption lounge.

If approved, the ordinance would make it a misdemeanor to sleep or camp in a public right-of-way if there are beds available at emergency shelters or space at the Homeless Courtyard Resource Center. The punishment comes with up to a $1,000 fine and six months in jail.

Mayor Carolyn Goodman, who is sponsoring the ordinance, reiterated on Twitter Monday that the proposal is about the health and safety of the community and will help connect people to homeless services.

“The mayor said this ordinance is about compassion, but that’s ridiculous,” Paulsen told the crowd. “There is nothing compassionate about jailing and ticketing people for not having a home. This proposal is absurd, cruel and unjust.”

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes district courts in Nevada, ruled in 2018 that cities can’t punish people for sleeping on the streets if there isn’t adequate shelter. The city argues since the ordinance only works when shelter beds and space at the courtyard are at capacity. The community services department would alert Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the department of public safety of capacity every night.

However, Wesley Juhl, communications director with the ACLU of Nevada, countered the ordinance would still block people from life-sustaining activities.

“Those are things people do on the streets just to survive,” he said. “We’re talking about putting down a tarp down on hot pavement, sitting down in the shade or using a blanket when it’s cold. Under this ordinance, these are the things that are going to cost people $1,000 or lock them up behind bars.”

The ordinance is slated to be discussed at an Oct. 14 meeting of a recommending committee, which decides whether proposals will advance to the City Council agenda for a final vote. However, the groups are hoping Goodman pulls the ordinance beforehand.

If it does pass, Paulsen worries it could have a chilling effect on the outreach being done, especially considering the City of Las Vegas’ outreach team includes Metro officers.

“If someone has a warrant, they disengage from services,” Paulsen said. “They won’t trust law enforcement and officers doing street outreach if they have a warrant. They would be scared they’ll be taken to jail.”

If President Trump does not release the report from a whistleblower alleging he attempted to coerce Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden, “Congress has the constitutional duty to begin impeachment proceedings and we will exercise our solemn responsibility as Members of Congress to support those proceedings,” Nevada Democratic Reps. Steven Horsford and Susie Lee said in a joint statement Tuesday.

“Despite our past insistence that the Committee’s process should play out before any action be taken,” the freshman members of Congress said Tuesday, “the latest allegations of the President threatening to withhold a foreign nation’s aid—which was appropriated by Congress for specific purposes—as leverage to force an investigation of a political rival are an escalation that requires explicit action by this Congress.”

“If these allegations are true, as the President has admitted, he threatened our national security and abused hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars.”

long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, thoughts of maybe becoming a lawyer someday led me into paralegal work at a number of law firms on both coasts. As a litigation paralegal, I worked on cases involving major automakers, pharmaceutical giants, international banks, large pipeline manufacturers and other sundry corporate monstrosities. The work, by and large, was a grueling paper chase involving long archaeological digs through massive post-subpoena document dumps. You rarely came across The Document that would turn the whole case on its ear, but it happened every so often, and when it did, the cheers from the cubicles would rattle the fluorescent lights: Plowing through all the boxes, dust bunnies, ink stains, paper cuts and miles of memos had finally paid off!

The story of this document dump begins in June of 2013, when a grassroots advocacy group called Moms Across America published an open letter to then-Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant about the dangers involved in his company’s wide distribution of genetically modified (GM) foods and the use of their pesticide, Roundup.

“We ask you to have the courage to acknowledge that GM practices and Roundup are hurting our world,” read the letter. “We have seen the recent and new scientific studies on the impact of GMOs and Glyphosate with links to autism, Alzheimer’s, food allergies, liver cancer, IBS, breast cancer in humans and possibly mental illness and we have witnessed the results firsthand in our kids.”

As the resulting emails show, these accusations did not sit well with the folks at Monsanto. One conversation between Monsanto scientist Dr. Daniel Goldstein and two outside consultants — Bruce Chassy, a former professor at the University of Illinois and Wayne Parrot, a crop scientist at the University of Georgia — stand out in stark relief.

Dr. Goldstein stated that Moms Across America was making “a pretty nasty looking set of allegations,” and he had been arguing for a week that the company should “beat the shit out of them” in return. Chassy was all for attacking the group, but Parrot was less sanguine. “You can’t beat up mothers,” he wrote, “even if they are dumb mothers but you can beat up the organic industry.”

That conversation verged into a discussion of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which was at the time holding a public comment period regarding supermarket produce and glyphosate, the ingredient in Roundup that has been directly connected to incidents of cancer. “BTW,” wrote Dr. Goldstein, “a minor tolerance increase petition for glyphosate on specialty crops got 10,821 negative public comments in the last 48 hours — NOT form letters — individually written comments. We’re on our way to being corporate road kill.”

read more at https://truthout.org/articles/monsanto-emails-show-employees-wanted-to-beat-the-shit-out-of-concerned-moms/

Growing up in the Mojave Desert in the mining town of Searchlight, I never understood the sensitivity of the environment — even as mining ravaged the beautiful desert landscape.

There were holes everywhere. There were tunnels. There were shafts, some vertical and some at various angles. But each was a disturbance of the desert surface. And, to top it off, 99 percent of the diggings produced no gold or other precious metals. It was mostly for nothing.

It was only as an adult that I began to realize the fragility of my place of birth.

Today, the Nevada deserts — along with environments throughout the country and the world — are facing threats much greater than bulldozers, shovels and unscrupulous mining operations. That threat is climate change.

I won’t be around to see the worst impacts of climate change, but my children, grandchildren and countless families around the world will be. They’ll suffer the brunt of this crisis. They’ll bear the burden of cleaning up my generation’s mess.

We can, and must, do better.