Connect with us

Midwest

Wisconsin attorney argues 175-year-old abortion ban validity to state Supreme Court

Published

on

Wisconsin attorney argues 175-year-old abortion ban validity to state Supreme Court

An attorney for a Wisconsin prosecutor made the case to reinstate a 175-year-old abortion ban to the state’s Supreme Court on Monday.

His argument comes more than two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which effectively ended recognition of a constitutional right to abortion and gave states the power to allow, limit or ban the practice altogether.

In December, Sheboygan County District Attorney Joel Urmanski appealed a Dane County judge’s ruling that said there is no state ban on abortions, invalidating the 175-year-old abortion ban.

While a ruling is not expected for weeks, abortion advocates are almost certain to win the case, since liberal justices control the court.

WI REPUBLICAN PROSECUTOR PLANS APPEAL IN STATE ABORTION CASE

Advertisement

Janet Protasiewicz, 60, is sworn in for her position as a State Supreme Court Justice at the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda in Madison, Wis. on August 1, 2023. (Sara Stathas for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The Associated Press reported that one of the judges, Janet Protasiewicz, made remarks on the campaign trail that she supports abortion rights.

The hearing on Monday lasted about two hours, though no decision was made.

Rebecca Dallet, another liberal justice, told Matthew Thome, the attorney representing Urmanski, that the ban was passed in 1849 by white men who had all the power.

Liberal Justice Jill Karofsky pointed out to Thome that the 1849 law does not provide exceptions for rape or incest, and reactivating the ban could result in doctors not providing medical care.

Advertisement

WISCONSIN DISTRICT ATTORNEY APPEALS COURT DECISION ALLOWING ABORTIONS TO RESUME WITHIN STATE

Ultrasound image of a baby at 19 weeks gestation. (Fox News)

Thome told the court on Monday that he was not arguing about the implications of reinstating the ban on abortion. Instead, he maintained that the legal theory of new laws repealing old ones is shaky.

He also argued that the ban and newer restrictions on abortion can overlap.

Thome pleaded to the justices that a ruling that the 1985 law effectively repealed the ban would be “anti-democratic.”

Advertisement

“It’s a statute this Legislature has not repealed, and you’re saying, no, you actually repealed it,” he said.

Justice Dallet told Thome that disregarding laws passed over the last 40 years to go back to 1849 would be undemocratic.

The state’s ban on abortion from 1849 held up until 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the right to abortion nationwide in the landmark Roe v. Wade case. But when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Dobbs decision and overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, states regained the power to decide their own laws on abortion.

PLANNED PARENTHOOD OF WISCONSIN TO RESUME ABORTIONS IN SHEBOYGAN BEFORE YEAR’S END

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul speaks at a campaign stop, Oct. 27, 2022, in Milwaukee.

Advertisement

Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit challenging the law in 2022. He argued that a 1985 Wisconsin law that allows abortions before a baby can survive outside the womb supersedes the ban.

Urmanski contends that the ban was never repealed, and it can co-exist with the 1985 law since it did not legalize abortion at any point.

He also argues that other modern-day abortion restrictions do not legalize the practice.

Dane County Circuit Judge Diane Schlipper ruled last year that the ban outlaws feticide, or the killing of a fetus without the mother’s consent, but not consensual abortions.

 

Advertisement

Because of the ruling, Planned Parenthood was able to resume offering abortions in Wisconsin after halting procedures when Roe was overturned.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read the full article from Here

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

South Dakota

SD Lottery Powerball, Lotto America winning numbers for June 27, 2026

Published

on


The South Dakota Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big.

Here’s a look at June 27, 2026, results for each game:

Winning Powerball numbers from June 27 drawing

03-16-28-30-59, Powerball: 11, Power Play: 2

Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.

Advertisement

Winning Lotto America numbers from June 27 drawing

03-08-18-22-39, Star Ball: 06, ASB: 02

Check Lotto America payouts and previous drawings here.

Winning Dakota Cash numbers from June 27 drawing

02-21-25-30-32

Check Dakota Cash payouts and previous drawings here.

Winning Millionaire for Life numbers from June 27 drawing

26-32-38-51-52, Bonus: 05

Advertisement

Check Millionaire for Life payouts and previous drawings here.

Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results

Are you a winner? Here’s how to claim your prize

  • Prizes of $100 or less: Can be claimed at any South Dakota Lottery retailer.
  • Prizes of $101 or more: Must be claimed from the Lottery. By mail, send a claim form and a signed winning ticket to the Lottery at 711 E. Wells Avenue, Pierre, SD 57501.
  • Any jackpot-winning ticket for Dakota Cash or Lotto America, top prize-winning ticket for Lucky for Life, or for the second prizes for Powerball and Mega Millions must be presented in person at a Lottery office. A jackpot-winning Powerball or Mega Millions ticket must be presented in person at the Lottery office in Pierre.

When are the South Dakota Lottery drawings held?

  • Powerball: 9:59 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
  • Mega Millions: 10 p.m. CT on Tuesday and Friday.
  • Lucky for Life: 9:38 p.m. CT daily.
  • Lotto America: 9:15 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
  • Dakota Cash: 9 p.m. CT on Wednesday and Saturday.
  • Millionaire for Life: 10:15 p.m. CT daily.

This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a South Dakota editor. You can send feedback using this form.



Source link

Continue Reading

Wisconsin

The retired college professor fighting a $313 trespassing ticket in Wisconsin thinks he’s part of a national struggle | Fortune

Published

on

The retired college professor fighting a 3 trespassing ticket in Wisconsin thinks he’s part of a national struggle | Fortune


“Lake Michigan has sort of got a personality,” Paul Florsheim said wryly, as if describing an old friend rather than the center of a legal battle that has consumed the last year of his life. “It changes its moods all the time. I go all throughout the year, even in the bitterest part of winter, because it’s just beautiful down there. You have these ice flows, and they’re sort of like volcanoes, and the waves come crashing through these structures. It’s like another world.”

Florsheim has been walking that world, a stretch of the Lake Michigan shoreline in Shorewood, Wis., a small village north of Milwaukee, for more than 50 years, since his childhood. He walked it with his parents. He walked it when he returned to his hometown in 2008 after 30 years away. He walked it with his dog in the early mornings, before anyone else was out, in every season.

Courtesy Florsheim’s stepdaughter Jessica Lakind and her mother Marcy Lichterman

And when the recently retired UW-Milwaukee professor walked the route last year, the Village of Shorewood issued him a $313 trespassing ticket for doing so. Now, he’s one face of a growing trend: America’s public waterfronts are increasingly … less so.

Advertisement

Florsheim’s legal fight is winding its way through the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, on his way, he hopes, to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Florsheim thinks the stakes are considerably larger than one man’s morning walk. He sees the same dynamic at work in the Texas Supreme Court’s June 19 ruling that handed Elon Musk’s SpaceX effective control over Boca Chica Beach—known locally as “poor man’s beach”—and in the wave of data center projects now competing for access to Great Lakes freshwater.

“If we don’t stand up for what is ours, sort of collectively ours, we’re going to regret it down the road,” he told Fortune.” People don’t want to give up what belongs to them, just as members of the citizenry. And I do think that’s what’s resonating right now.”

Exclusivity in the public realm

Florsheim’s case began when his neighbor—a dentist who built a boathouse on the beach and monitored foot traffic from it—began calling cops on walkers. When Shorewood issued him the ticket, Florsheim’s first instinct was to fight it. When the village lawyer called before the Dec. 2024 trial and encouraged him to settle, warning of mounting court fees, Florsheim declined. When the trial began, it drew a packed courtroom, and the NPR member station story previewing it became the most-read piece in the station’s history, per Florsheim.

He’s well aware about what makes his case unusual. “A water policy professor at UW told me, ‘I’ve been waiting for a case like this my whole life.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean? This must happen all the time.’ She said, ‘No, it doesn’t. People probably get tickets with some regularity for walking on the private part of the beach, but nobody fights them.’” The retired professor, the grandson of the founder of Florsheim Shoes, paused: he had the resources to lead the charge. “The average person would not be doing what I’m doing. I’m retired, so I have the time. Would I be doing this if I was hiring a lawyer? The honest answer is probably no.”

Courtesy Florsheim’s stepdaughter Jessica Lakind and her mother Marcy Lichterman

Wisconsin, like most states, recognizes the “Ordinary High Water Mark”—the line where exposed shoreline ends and open water begins—as the boundary of public ownership. But where many states allow the public to cross private beachfront in transit to reach those publicly held waters (also known as “riparian” access) Wisconsin grants landowners exclusive control over that strip of shoreline. You can boat, fish, or swim freely if you’re in the water, but you just can’t set foot on the sand to get there.

Advertisement

The charge rests on Doemel v. Jantz, a 1923 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that Florsheim has spent months researching. He said he contacted the archivist at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, which sits on Lake Winnebago where the original dispute originated, finding that it involved a dairy farmer’s right to walk his cattle through the privately owned property to get to the publicly owned water. If his cattle remained in the public water, he was golden; if they crossed that barrier onto sand, not so.

The municipal judge who ruled against him in January wrote a 16-page opinion—extraordinary for a small municipal court—holding that she was bound by Doemel, but that it “probably should be revisited and perhaps overturned.” On June 22, Florsheim’s attorneys filed their response brief with the circuit court, arguing the land he walked is owned by the state of Wisconsin, not his neighbor. “It is decidedly not his land; it is the public’s land,” the brief states. The access to that land, Florsheim argues, doesn’t require a public vote to be protected. “The access to the beach is part of the public trust doctrine, which is baked into the state’s constitution,” he said. “So even though there hasn’t been a vote, there really doesn’t need to be, because it is established.” A hearing is set for August 13.

He is also clear about where his fight sits in the broader picture. His “bitter feud,” he says, is not with the dentist. “My bitter feud is much more with the village, because they should be protecting the rights of the general citizenry rather than the property owners on the beach.”

The ‘poor man’s beach’ in Texas ceded to SpaceX

A similar phenomenon playing out some 1,400 miles south. On June 19, the Texas Supreme Court unanimously ruled that SaveRGV, the Sierra Club, and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas had no legal standing to challenge SpaceX’s closure of Boca Chica Beach during rocket launches. The state’s attorney general had intervened to defend SpaceX throughout, never reaching the constitutional question of whether a 2009 amendment, backed by 77% of Texas voters protecting public beach access, outweighed a 2013 law written specifically for SpaceX. The court dismissed on standing. “The affected public has no remedy to enforce their constitutional right to access their own beach,” Marisa Perales, the attorney for the groups, told Fortune. That same week, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire following SpaceX’s record-breaking $75 billion IPO.

Boca Chica Beach is a free, undeveloped eight-mile stretch of Gulf shoreline near Brownsville—the southernmost city in Texas—where Highway 4 dead-ends at the water and SpaceX’s Starbase launch towers loom to the north. The stretch of Gulf shoreline, known locally as “poor man’s beach,” is the last wild, free, publicly accessible beach on the southernmost tip of Texas.

Advertisement

The Boca Chica takeover had been proceeding on the ground regardless of the litigation. SpaceX employees voted to incorporate the area as the city of Starbase in 2025; just as the county handed the new municipality authority to close the beach during launches. In Feb., Starbase officials voted to annex 7,133 additional acres near the beach, much of it within the Boca Chica Wildlife Refuge. The court ruling removed the last legal obstacle. “Starbase is clearly Elon Musk’s company town,” South Texas Environmental Justice Network co-founder Bekah Hinojosa told The Texas Tribune. Neither the Village of Shorewood, the Texas General Land Office, a lawyer representing the environmental groups, nor SpaceX responded to Fortune’s requests for comment.

Data centers in the Midwest and afar

Closer to Florsheim in the Midwest, over 220 data centers are planned across the Great Lakes region, drawn by the basin’s freshwater—21% of the world’s surface supply—for server cooling. Microsoft is investing $20 billion in data centers at Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, a community that straddles the Great Lakes basin line and can divert lake water. Midwest Environmental Advocates—the same nonprofit representing Florsheim—sued after Racine, Wis. withheld public records on a data center’s water consumption for seven months. Fewer than one-third of data centers currently track water usage, and in Great Lakes states the reporting obligation falls on public water systems, not the corporate users drawing from them.

“A lot of these data centers want to be near the Great Lakes,” Florsheim said. “The question of what is in the public domain, and should we allow that to become privatized — that’s what’s ringing. It’s not just the beach. It’s the water. It’s who owns the resources that belong to all of us. And I think people are standing up.”

The problem goes beyond the Great Lakes region as well, and well beyond the country’s shorelines. In July 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to use “federally owned land and resources for the expeditious and orderly development of data centers,” fast-tracking construction on Department of Energy sites and opening military bases to proposals.

The order’s reach has extended to places once considered untouchable: in Northern Virginia, data center construction has pushed directly against Manassas National Battlefield Park, a Civil War site that saw 541,000 visitors in 2024, bounded on three sides by federal land, as part of a broader buildout that has made Virginia home to 663 operating data centers with another 595 planned, facilities that collectively handle roughly 70% of the world’s internet traffic. The pattern is consistent: public land, identified as available, converted to private use.

Advertisement

Florsheim still walks the beach and plans to keep walking it as he awaits the August 13 hearing.

“It’s become much bigger than my little spat on the beach,” he said. “I do feel confident that we will eventually prevail.”



Source link

Continue Reading

Detroit, MI

Rick Mahorn returns to coaching Detroit basketball with BIG3 Amps

Published

on

Rick Mahorn returns to coaching Detroit basketball with BIG3 Amps


play

Hartford, Connecticut may be Rick Mahorn’s hometown, but Detroit has his heart.

The original Pistons’ “Bad Boy” has worn many hats in basketball, from player to coach to broadcaster, but now he is back in the coaching realm leading Detroit’s BIG3 team, the Detroit Amps. 

Advertisement

“The city has always been good to me, I figured I have to give something back,” Mahorn said about coming back and representing Detroit. “The fact is that I made Detroit home and one thing about Detroit, it’s always going to love me and Imma love Detroit.”

Mahorn spent 18 seasons in the NBA and won the 1989 championship with the Pistons. After retirement in 1999 as a Philadelphia 76er, he started his coaching career with the Atlanta Hawks, and the “coaching phase” never faded. 

Serving as the assistant coach for the Detroit Shock for four years, he helped lead them to two championships and moved up to the head coach position before the franchise was relocated. 

Years later he joined the BIG3 when it launched in 2017 as the head coach for the Trilogy and won the league’s first ever championship, along with its first ever Coach of the Year Award. He recently stepped back into coaching for the BIG3 as the Amps coach. 

Advertisement

Along with his love for coaching, his love for the Pistons was at the heart of it. In between each coaching position, he took a break to focus on being a color analyst for the Pistons radio network and recently completed his 20th season in that role. 

“It keeps calling me back, but the thing I love about coaching is that you have to ‘each one, teach one,’” Mahorn said.  “Someone taught me as a coach, that kept me on the straight and narrow, making sure I was always positive about what I do for a living, but basketball opens up so many avenues.”

Founded by Ice Cube and Jeff Kwatinetz, the BIG3 played its inaugural season in January 2017 with eight teams. It expanded to 12 teams in 2019 but dropped back to eight with new cities and logos. 

Detroit was a part of the rebrand with the Detroit Amps, also known as the Detroit Amplifiers, and they joined the league last season.

Advertisement

Although this isn’t Mahorn’s first rodeo coaching in the BIG3, or coaching Detroit basketball, it is his first season coaching the Amps after taking over the role following the former coach, hall of famer George Gervin. 

Mahorn technically never left the Detroit fan base, and has continuously been connected with the Pistons, but it is still a great feeling for him to be back coaching on Detroit’s side for the Amps. 

“What they do to me is keep me young. You think you getting old and the next thing you know you’re coaching some young guys,” Mahorn said. “I want them to have the respect of being a professional. The fact is they’re the ones carrying the torch later.”

Ice Cube or Kwatinetz weren’t in attendance Saturday, but Ice Cube’s son, Oshea Jackson Jr., was present and working with CBS Sports on interviews. 

Other celebrities came out to support, like Pistons forward Ronald Holland, former Detroit Amps head coach and hall of famer George Gervin, and local artist Payroll Giovanni, who performed at halftime of the Amps game. 

Advertisement

Week two of season nine kicked off Saturday, and the Amps continued their losing streak, falling to 0-2 after a 51- 44 loss to Miami 305. 

This isn’t the only time Michiganders will see the league this season at Little Caesars Arena. It will be back for week six on July 23. 

“Detroit is a beautiful city — it’s a hardworking city,” Mahorn said. “One thing about Detroit: they embrace everybody that comes back, that’s done some things — the championships I have in my repertoire, but it’s just the fact that I just love Detroit.”

BIG3 WEEK TWO RESULTS 

Game 1:  Dallas Power 50, LA Riot 33

Advertisement

Game 2: Chicago Triplets 51, DMV Trilogy 49

Game 3: Miami 305 51, Detroit Amps 44

Game 4: Boston Ball Hogs 51, Houston Rig Hands 36



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending