Photo: Science Photo Library RF
1 Tropical Storm Alberto Reaching Mexican Coastline Today
The first named storm of the 2024 hurricane season claimed its name yesterday. Tropical Storm Alberto strengthened yesterday morning, and its center is expected to reach the coast of Mexico early today. While it’s just a tropical storm, there are two things making it more impactful than it might otherwise be. First, the storm covers a large area with tropical-storm-force winds of 50 mph stretching over 400 miles from the center. The second feature of Alberto that makes it a large problem is the torrential amounts of rain the storm is dropping. Even though landfall for the eye is forecast on the Mexican coast, the system has dumped massive amounts of rain on southern Texas, with maximum totals of 20 inches of rain possible in some areas. Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 51 counties in Texas yesterday “to ensure Texans and at-risk regions have the resources and personnel needed to respond to this storm.” Alberto is expected to most likely dissipate by tonight.
2 Louisiana Becomes First State To Require The Ten Commandments In Classrooms
With the stroke of his pen yesterday, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry put the Ten Commandments into classrooms. At a signing ceremony yesterday afternoon, Gov. Landry said, “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.” The new law requires that a poster-sized version of the Ten Commandments must be posted in all public classrooms from kindergartens to state-funded universities in “large, easily readable font.” The posters are also required to include a four-paragraph “context statement” talking about how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.” While the law goes into effect now, the posters aren’t going up immediately. The posters must be in place in classrooms by the start of 2025, and must be paid for by donations. Shortly after the bill was signed, civil rights groups and organizations promised to file a lawsuit to challenge the new requirement. In 1980, the US Supreme Court ruled that a Kentucky law similar to the new Louisiana law was unconstitutional and said it violated the establishment clause of the Constitution, with the court saying the law had no secular purpose but rather served a plainly religious purpose. In response to the threats of legal challenges to the law, Gov. Landry said earlier this week “I can’t wait to be sued.”
3 Second Death Confirmed In New Mexico Wildfires
The wildfires burning in New Mexico have now been confirmed to have taken at least two lives. One person was found in a burned vehicle in the South Fork Fire, which forced the evacuation of the town of Ruidoso, while a second body was found on the side of the road near a motel with burn injuries from the fire. With well over 20,000 acres burned by the South Fork and Salt fires so far, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said last night that the loss of around 1,400 structures and two lives makes this “one of the most devastating fires in New Mexico’s history.”