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Wisconsin AG blasts conservative state Supreme Court candidate for being too slow to test rape kits

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Wisconsin AG blasts conservative state Supreme Court candidate for being too slow to test rape kits


MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul waded into the state’s Supreme Court race Monday, renewing an old feud with conservative candidate Brad Schimel over delays in testing sexual assault evidence kits almost a decade ago.

Kaul, a Democrat, ousted Schimel, then a Republican, from the attorney general post in the 2018 elections. Kaul hammered Schimel relentlessly during the campaign for taking more than two years to test about 4,000 kits sitting unanalyzed on police department and hospital shelves.

Schimel’s opponent in the Supreme Court race, Susan Crawford, has attacked Schimel over his handling of the kits in ads. Kaul brought up the delays again Monday during an afternoon news conference organized by the state Democratic Party. He accused Schimel of not paying close attention to the testing project and prematurely declaring he had completed the work when his administration left hundreds of kits for Kaul’s administration to test.

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When asked what the testing delays have to do with being a state Supreme Court justice, Kaul said justices must be straightforward and Schimel isn’t candid about what went on with the kits.

Schimel defended himself in the days before the 2018 election by saying the state Justice Department needed time to inventory the kits and struggled to find private labs to test them because labs were overwhelmed with untested kits from other states. Jacob Fisher, Schimel’s Supreme Court campaign spokesperson, said in a statement Monday that Schimel voluntarily took the initiative to lead a first-of-its-kind effort to test the kits. He accused Kaul of playing politics and rewriting history.

Schimel and Crawford are vying for an open seat on the Supreme Court in an April 1 election. The race is officially nonpartisan, but Schimel was a Republican attorney general and has GOP backing while Democrats are rallying behind Crawford.

The race has enormous implications in swing state Wisconsin, with majority control of the state’s highest court on the line as it is expected to face issues that will affect abortion and reproductive rights, the strength of public sector unions, voting rules and congressional district boundaries.

Crawford and her allies are increasingly trying to nationalize the contest against Schimel by focusing on Elon Musk, a top adviser to President Donald Trump. America PAC, a group created by Musk, has spent $3.2 million on digital ads, mailers and canvassing to support Schimel in the Supreme Court race. Another Musk-funded group, Building America’s Future, has spent more than $2 million on TV ads attacking Crawford.

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In 2014, the state Justice Department learned of some 6,800 sexual assault evidence kits that had not been tested. They went unanalyzed for various reasons. Prosecutors may have decided cases were too weak to pursue or been forced to drop cases because victims wouldn’t cooperate, according to Schimel’s administration.

The problem wasn’t unique to Wisconsin. A USA Today Network investigation in 2015 found at least 70,000 untested kits nationwide, leading to calls from victim advocacy groups to analyze them all in hopes of getting DNA hits that would identify serial offenders.

Schimel took over as attorney general in 2015. He secured a $4 million federal grant in September of that year to start testing Wisconsin’s kits, but the work didn’t begin until January 2017. He announced in September 2018, two months before the election, that his administration had finished testing 4,150 kits and declared the project finished. He chose not to test the rest because victims in those cases wouldn’t consent to analysis or prosecutors had already won a conviction in those cases, according to Schimel’s administration at the time.

Kaul announced in November 2019 that his administration finished the work after discovering Schimel had left about 300 kits untested.



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Wisconsin Weekend: Pride bar crawl, Father’s Day deals, and more

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Wisconsin Weekend: Pride bar crawl, Father’s Day deals, and more


MILWAUKEE — Milwaukee has no shortage of ways to celebrate this weekend, from a Pride bar crawl to Father’s Day deals around the city and Juneteenth celebrations.

Summerfest and Northcott Neighborhood House are hosting a Juneteenth celebration filled with music and culture at the Summerfest grounds.

Watch: Kidd O’Shea breaks down this weekend’s events:

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Wisconsin Weekend in a Minute: June 19-21

The event kicks off right after the traditional Juneteenth Day Festival wraps up.

Pride Bar Crawl

The 9th annual Pride Bar Crawl kicks off Saturday at 4 p.m. at Walker’s Pint.

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Tickets include drinks and access to exclusive specials at partner bars. Twenty percent of proceeds will benefit the Milwaukee LGBT Community Center.

The crawl wraps up with an after-party and drag show at La Cage Nightclub.

Father’s Day

On Sunday, The Motor Restaurant at the Harley-Davidson Museum is offering a free beer for dad when purchased with a meal, along with free admission to the museum. Reservations are highly encouraged.

Families can also take dad to the Milwaukee County Zoo, where all fathers receive free admission on Sunday.

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These Wisconsin swing voters say Trump’s war in Iran wasn’t worth it

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These Wisconsin swing voters say Trump’s war in Iran wasn’t worth it


Vessels are anchored along the Strait of Hormuz.

Amirhossein Khorgooei/ISNA/AFP via Getty Images


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Amirhossein Khorgooei/ISNA/AFP via Getty Images

The war in Iran was a costly blunder, according to swing voters in the battleground state of Wisconsin.

NPR observed two online focus groups on Tuesday featuring voters who supported Joe Biden in 2020 and then Donald Trump in 2024.

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President Trump had just announced a framework agreement to end the war, which he signed on Wednesday.

Yet among the focus groups’ 13 participants, no one said they thought the conflict with Iran was “worth it,” and nine said they felt that the U.S. is coming out of this conflict weaker than before.

Corey M., a 33-year-old independent voter, said he is concerned that the U.S. expended “so much financially and so much of our arsenal,” with little to show for it. (All participants agreed to be part of the focus groups on the condition that they be identified by their first name and last initial only.)

“We essentially got nothing out of it,” he said. “It’s hurt our economy and increased expenses for the everyday American, and it accomplished the square root of nothing.”

Focus groups are not scientifically significant like polling. But they provide insight into how Americans are thinking about what they see in the news.

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These focus groups — made up of 10 self-described independents, two Democrats and one Republican — were conducted by messaging and market research firms Engagious and Sago as part of the Swing Voter Project. NPR is a partner on the project.

Rich Thau, president of Engagious, moderated the focus groups. He has been asking voters in key states about this conflict since March. And he said voters have been consistent.

“They were never on board,” Thau said. “Not the beginning. Not in the middle. And as we just learned, not at the end either, judging from what we heard from Wisconsin swing voters.”

Sam M., a 30-year-old independent, said from what he read about the deal, it wasn’t leaving the U.S. in a better position than before the war. In fact, he said he thought the Iran nuclear deal brokered by the Obama administration — which Trump backed out of — was a better deal for the United States.



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President of Wisconsin’s largest mosque released from ICE custody

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President of Wisconsin’s largest mosque released from ICE custody


A federal judge has ordered the release of the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque, after finding that immigration officials probably detained him in retaliation against his public advocacy for Palestinian rights, suppressing his first amendment rights in the process.

The US district judge James Patrick Hanlon’s order on Thursday marked a sharp rebuke against Trump officials, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who had tried to paint Salah Sarsour as a national security threat.

“Salah Sarsour, who has lived in this country for more than three decades and served as a core pillar in his community without any issues, should never have been detained in the first place,” his legal team wrote in a statement. “While we continue to fight these baseless claims in court, today is about celebrating a family being reunited. It is also a sober reminder that, if the government can target Mr Sarsour, everyone’s free speech rights are at risk.”

Sarsour describes himself as a stateless Palestinian, according to the order. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says that he is a Jordanian citizen. He has lived in the United States for more than three decades, becoming a legal permanent resident in 1998. Immigration officials approved Sarsour’s citizenship application decades ago, though he did not naturalize.

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Sarsour has garnered public attention as a champion for Palestinian rights, and serves as a board member of an advocacy group called American Muslims for Palestine.

But Rubio personally signed off on a memo to the DHS last year describing Sarsour as deportable despite his green card, because “his actions undermine US foreign policy to combat antisemitism around the world”. The memo, cited in Hanlon’s order, accuses Sarsour’s group of being “found to have been involved in activities providing funds to Hamas”.

A group of plainclothes ICE officers from at least 10 unmarked vehicles swarmed Sarsour on 30 March of this year, arresting him and putting him in deportation proceedings. ICE ultimately detained him in Clay county jail in Indiana.

Sarsour lost 30lb while detained, the order says. His lawyers told the court that he was “at constant risk of developing serious complications from diabetes given that the medical staff only checks his blood-sugar levels once a month”. Tightly controlling diabetes typically requires multiple glucose checks daily.

Hanlon’s order says that homeland security officials and Rubio probably trampled on Sarsour’s first amendment right to free speech and appeared to have arrested him in retaliation for his Palestinian rights advocacy.

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The order cited a New York Times story and the website for the Heritage Foundation, the conservative thinktank that dreamed up Project 2025,

The Heritage Foundation presented the White House with the idea to present prominent foreign-born Muslims and Palestinian rights leaders as terrorists in order to sue them, deport them or pressure employers to fire them, the order says, citing reporting from the Times and Heritage’s own website. Sarsour was probably among the targets of that campaign, the order says.

The federal government, through its lawyers, contended that Sarsour should be deported based on two convictions from more than three decades ago in Israel – one for throwing a molotov cocktail and the other for attempting to store weapons and ammunition.

Sarsour denies having committed those crimes.

But Hanlon viewed those crimes as a non-issue for justifying his incarceration, noting that the federal government knew about them since the 1990s and approved his legal permanent residency and his citizenship application anyway.

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Sarsour’s speech on Palestinian rights “is core political speech and squarely within the scope of the First Amendment”, the order says. “Mr Sarsour has submitted evidence allowing a reasonable inference that his protected speech was ‘at least a motivating factor’ in Respondents’ decision to detain him.”

A spokesperson for homeland security described Sarsour as a “terrorist”, citing the convictions from his youth in Israel.

Government lawyers had argued that Sarsour did not have the same first amendment rights as US citizens. If he were released, they said, he should have to pay a $25,000 bond, wear an ankle monitor, check in routinely with ICE and remain confined to his house.

Instead, Hanlon ordered his release on personal recognizance, meaning that Sarsour does not have to pay a cash bond to compel him to show up in court again. The order, however, requires him to remain in the state of Wisconsin.



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