Ukrainian officials have said at least seven were killed in Lviv after missiles struck the city that has served as a refuge for those displaced. NBC’s Raf Sanchez has details.
Summerville High School’s head football coach John McKissick leads the team in a prayer in Summerville, South Carolina.Randall Hill/Reuters
On April 25, the Supreme Court will hear Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, a case that was carefully engineered to return prayer to public schools. Kennedy marks an effort to overturn nearly 60 years of precedent protecting schoolchildren from state-sponsored religion by flipping the First Amendment on its head. The case erases the rights of children who wish to avoid religious coercion at school, fixating instead on the right of school officials to practice their religion during the course of their formal duties. It is the culmination of a decadeslong battle to reframe government neutrality toward religion as unconstitutional discrimination against people of faith. And it is chillingly likely to succeed.
It would be a mistake, however, to view Kennedy as a mere doctrinal shift in constitutional law, as radical as that doctrinal shift would be. This case is also the product of the Republican political campaign aimed at restoring public schools’ authority to indoctrinate students with Christianity. The campaign is on the brink of success in the courts because proponents of school prayer have perfected a tactic that reverses the victim and offender.
Today, school officials who coerce students into prayer go on the offensive, claiming that any attempt to halt their efforts at religious coercion is actually persecution of their religious beliefs. Supervisors, lawmakers, and judges who attempt to shield children from being indoctrinated are recast as anti-Christian bigots.
If there were any doubt about this inversion of the First Amendment, the House of Representatives recently decided to dispel it. Late last month, the House was considering a bill to name a federal courthouse in Florida after Joseph W. Hatchett, the first Black man to serve on that state’s Supreme Court. The bipartisan bill was sponsored by Florida’s two Republican senators and backed unanimously by its 27 House members—until, suddenly, it wasn’t.
With little notice and nothing more than a 23-year-old news clipping, a right-wing, first-term congressman mounted an 11th-hour effort on the House floor to persuade his colleagues that Judge Hatchett, a trailblazing judge who broke barriers as the first Black State Supreme Court justice south of the Mason-Dixon line, was undeserving of being honored.
The 23-year-old news clipping? It was a brief account of a decision Hatchett had written in 1999 as a judge on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. His opinion struck down a policy allowing student-approved prayers at public school graduation ceremonies in Florida as a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause. Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, disgusted by this outcome, circulated the article to every Republican member of the House ostensibly under the theory that they should be aware of Hatchett’s alleged anti-religious animus before honoring his memory with a courthouse.
In reality, the pioneering Hatchett—an army veteran who faced racial segregation when he took the bar in 1959—ruled in that fashion because he was obligated to. Ample Supreme Court precedent, most notably the 1992 decision Lee v. Weisman, barred sectarian prayer in public schools. In 2000, SCOTUS would also vindicate Hatchett in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, a 6–3 decision holding that a school district policy allowing even student-led prayer at football games violated the constitutional separation of church and state.
This vindication didn’t matter. To Clyde and many of his Republican colleagues, applying precedent that limited school prayer was an unforgivable sin that marred an entire legacy. So unforgivable, in fact, that it disqualifies Hatchett from respect and commemoration as a civil rights hero who broke down racial barriers at every turn in his long career, desegregating two different courts in the Deep South.
How did we get here? To start, we have to turn back to Kennedy, a case that clarifies, with depressing topicality, the vilification of Judge Hatchett. Joe Kennedy was a football coach in Washington state who led explicitly religious prayer circles with students at the 50-yard line after games. When the school district discovered this conduct in 2015, it repeatedly sought to accommodate his beliefs, asking him to pray in a less public location to avoid conveying the school’s endorsement of his beliefs. Kennedy refused, instead hiring lawyers at the far-right First Liberty Institute to threaten the school with a lawsuit.
He and his lawyers then launched a media blitz, falsely claiming that he had been persecuted for quiet, private prayer. School district officials were inundated with hateful threats from the public. His postgame prayer circles then became a spectacle, with media and spectators rushing onto the field to watch or join. At one game, students racing from the stands tripped over cables and knocked over members of the school band; parents later complained about the “stampede” threatening their children’s safety. In effect, Kennedy had hijacked the school’s football games to pray with team members in the most public manner conceivable. After he refused multiple offers of potential accommodations, the school placed him on paid administrative leave.
The next year, he did not apply for a contract renewal—then falsely claimed that he had been fired. Kennedy later sued the school for violating his First Amendment rights.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court is going to rule in Kennedy’s favor. When the case first came up on appeal, in 2019, Justices Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh all signaled their belief that the school district had violated Kennedy’s rights. They only punted due to “unresolved factual questions.”
These justices, now joined by Amy Coney Barrett, have jacked up their rhetoric about government “discrimination” against religious speech and exercise in the intervening years. They have demandedspecial rights for religious groups and individuals while insisting that the separation of church and stateis actually unconstitutional. Under this view, the government is not barred from endorsing or coercing religion in schools; it is required to do so.
Kennedy takes this principle to its logical extreme. The court appears likely to hold that the First Amendment does not prohibit school officials from praying publicly on the job—but rather protects their ability to intermingle church and state, whatever the impact on students and their parents.
Lost in this establishment clause rebrand are the voices of students who do not share officials’ beliefs but feel pressured to endorse them anyway. The Supreme Court was keenly concerned about such children in Lee and Santa Fe, identifying an overwhelming government interest in protecting children from religious coercion with an eye toward the type of state-sponsored religious indoctrination that animated the Framers. Now, the rights of those students have been scrubbed from the constitutional calculus.
But even if SCOTUS no longer cares about them, they still exist. As Kennedy martyred himself in the media, parents revealed to the school that their children were extremely uncomfortable with his prayer circles. At least one member of the football team felt obligated to join Kennedy’s prayers because he feared that otherwise, “he wouldn’t get to play as much.” Other members participated only because “they did not wish to separate themselves from the team.”
The prayer circle, in short, created favored insiders (Christian believers) and alienated outsiders (everybody else). This dynamic is not only offensive to religious freedom; it also has a uniquely pernicious impact on children. As a group of psychology and neuroscience scholars explained to the court, coaches have a powerful effect on the behavior of the student athletes in their charge, athletes who crave their approval and support. Adolescents also have “heightened neurobiological sensitivity” to rewards in the presence of their peers, which makes them especially “susceptible to social conformity.” Kennedy did not have to explicitly force his students to join him in prayer; the intense social pressures were enough to coerce them into joining.
It is astonishing to contemplate that at the precise moment in which American parents are demanding access to the books their children are reading and video surveillance of public school educators, the rights of those parents who don’t believe that public school should privilege certain majoritarian religious viewpoints are poised to be eradicated at the Supreme Court. But in a sense, it’s not surprising at all. As those who want to banish Judge Hatchett’s entire historical and legal legacy based on a single opinion would tell you, reinjecting express religious indoctrination into public schools has nothing to do with the Constitution. It has everything to do with political power, and the way in which courts and Congress can wield it to refashion coerced Christian conformity into religious liberty.
As Russia refocuses its war on Ukraine’s east and south, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria argues it will take much more military assistance from the West to ensure that Russia does not succeed in crippling Ukraine.
I know that CNN has bad CC and that it is hard for hearing impaired viewers to decipher what is being said. I am hoping that the host speaking in a slow measured way will help the hearing impaired to follow what he is saying. It is important in my view as he talks about Russia / Putin’s plans and possible threats to come.
Russia is intensifying its attacks on Ukrainian cities as officials report the bodies of more than 900 civilians have been found near Kyiv. CBS News foreign correspondent Holly Williams gives an update on the war from Vinnytsia, Ukraine.
Ukrainians troops are holding out in the besieged port city of Mariupol as Russian forces are demanding they surrender. CBS News foreign correspondent Chris Livesay reports on the latest and then joins CBS News’ Lana Zak from Kyiv to discuss Russia’s tactics in Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities.
Please notice there are no military institutions and no threats coming from these cities hitting Russia. This is indiscriminate killing of civilians and the destruction of all forms of civilization to terrorize the Ukrainian people. Women and children killed in terrorist acts officially called a genocide. Are we going to allow this? Look Putin keeps giving ultimatums to the west. He is making the rules and just expects the west to follow them. How about the west make a few rules also that he will be just expected to follow? One of those is not indiscriminately killing civilians. Is Putin the only one that has the right to set conditions?
Injured civilians sit in an ambulance before being taken to a hospital after a Russian attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
A radiation sign is seen near a broken Russian vehicle with a V letter, a sign of the Russian army, close to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
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Nadiya Trubchaninova, 70, cries while holding the cross of her son Vadym, 48, who was killed by Russian soldiers last March 30 in Bucha, during his funeral in the cemetery of Mykulychi, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. After nine days since the discovery of Vadym’s corpse, finally Nadiya could have a proper funeral for him. This is not where Nadiya Trubchaninova thought she would find herself at 70 years of age, hitchhiking daily from her village to the shattered town of Bucha trying to bring her son’s body home for burial. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
Nadiya Trubchaninova, 70, next to his soon Oleg Trubchaninov, 46, attends the funeral of her son Vadym, 48, who was killed by a Russian Army gunshot last March 30, during his funeral in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine on Saturday, April 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Bodies of civilians lie on the ground as local residents walk past a destroyed part of the Illich Iron & Steel Works Metallurgical Plant, the second largest metallurgical enterprise in Ukraine, in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces in Mariupol, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, has been besieged by Russian troops and forces from self-proclaimed separatist areas in eastern Ukraine for more than six weeks. (AP Photo/Alexei Alexandrov)
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Firefighters work to extinguish a fire after a Russian attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
Galyna Bondar, mourns next to the grave of her son Oleksandr, 32, after burying him at the cemetery in Bucha, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine on Saturday, April 16, 2022. Oleksandr, who joined the territorial Ukrainian defence as a co-ordinator was killed by a gunshot by the Russian Army. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Firefighters work to extinguish a fire after a Russian attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
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Nadiya Trubchaninova, 70, looks at the black bags containing the bodies of dead civilians, while she waits for her son’s body to be delivered to the morgue so that she can have a decent burial in the cemetery of Mykulychi, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. After nine days since the discovery of Vadym’s corpse, finally Nadiya could have a proper funeral for him. This is not where Nadiya Trubchaninova thought she would find herself at 70 years of age, hitchhiking daily from her village to the shattered town of Bucha trying to bring her son’s body home for burial. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
A mother hugs her daughter as they wait for a bus to flee from Sloviansk city, in Donetsk district, to travel to Rivne , western Ukraine, on Saturday, April 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Petros
Damaged Ukrainian Army military trucks are parked at the Illich Iron & Steel Works Metallurgical Plant, the second largest metallurgical enterprise in Ukraine, in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces in Mariupol, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, has been besieged by Russian troops and forces from self-proclaimed separatist areas in eastern Ukraine for more than six weeks. (AP Photo/Alexei Alexandrov)
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Peopleattends a pro-Ukrainian protest under the slogan “March for true Peace in Ukraine”, in Berlin, Germany, Saturday, April 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Hannibal Hanschke)
Civilians injured in a Russian attack are treated at a hospital in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
Rescuers continued to clear rubble from damaged buildings in the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv on Saturday, after shelling and airstrikes left the city in ruins. (April 16)
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An elderly local resident stands behind a destroyed part of the Illich Iron & Steel Works Metallurgical Plant, the second largest metallurgical enterprise in Ukraine, in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces in Mariupol, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, has been besieged by Russian troops and forces from self-proclaimed separatist areas in eastern Ukraine for more than six weeks. (AP Photo/Alexei Alexandrov)
Volodymyr Bondar, 61, mourns next to the grave of his son Oleksandr, 32, after burying him at the cemetery in Bucha, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine on Saturday, April 16, 2022. Oleksandr, who joined the territorial Ukrainian defence as a co-ordinator was killed by a gunshot by the Russian Army. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
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An elderly local resident stands behind a destroyed part of the Illich Iron & Steel Works Metallurgical Plant, the second largest metallurgical enterprise in Ukraine, in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces in Mariupol, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, has been besieged by Russian troops and forces from self-proclaimed separatist areas in eastern Ukraine for more than six weeks. (AP Photo/Alexei Alexandrov)
Firefighters work to extinguish multiple fires after a Russian attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
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Russian forces accelerated scattered attacks on Kyiv, western Ukraine and beyond Saturday in an explosive reminder to Ukrainians and their Western supporters that the whole country remains under threat despite Moscow’s pivot toward mounting a new offensive in the east.
Stung by the loss of its Black Sea flagship and indignant over alleged Ukrainian aggression on Russian territory, Russia’s military command had warned of renewed missile strikes on Ukraine’s capital. Officials in Moscow said they were targeting military sites, a claim repeated — and refuted by witnesses — throughout 52 days of war.
The toll reaches much deeper. Each day brings new discoveries of civilian victims of an invasion that has shattered European security. As Russia prepared for the anticipated offensive, a mother wept over her 15-year-old son’s body after rockets hit a residential area of Kharkiv, a city in northeast Ukraine. An infant and at least eight other people died, officials said.
In the towns and villages just outside Kyiv, authorities have reported finding the bodies of more than 900 civilians, most shot dead, since Russian troops retreated two weeks ago. Smoke rose from the capital again early Saturday as Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported a strike that killed one person and wounded several.
The mayor advised residents who fled the city earlier in the war not to return.
“We’re not ruling out further strikes on the capital,” Klitschko said. “If you have the opportunity to stay a little bit longer in the cities where it’s safer, do it.”
It was not immediately clear from the ground what was hit in the strike on Kyiv’s Darnytskyi district. The sprawling area on the southeastern edge of the capital contains a mixture of Soviet-style apartment blocks, newer shopping centers and big-box retail outlets, industrial areas and railyards.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said an armored vehicle plant was targeted. He didn’t specify where the factory was located, but there is one in the Darnytskyi district.
He said the plant was among multiple Ukrainian military sites hit with “air-launched high-precision long-range weapons.” As the U.S. and Europe send new arms to Ukraine, the strategy could be aimed at hobbling Ukraine’s defenses ahead of what’s expected to be a full-scale Russian assault in the east.
It was the second strike in the Kyiv area since the Russian military vowed this week to step up missile strikes on the capital. Another hit a missile plant Friday.
The Russian missiles hit the city just as residents were emerging for walks, foreign embassies planned to reopen and other tentative signs of the city’s prewar life started resurfacing, following the failure of Russian troops to capture Kyiv and their withdrawal.
Kyiv was one of many targets Saturday. The Ukrainian president’s office reported missile strikes and shelling over the past 24 hours in eight regions across the country.
The governor of the Lviv region in western Ukraine, which has been only sporadically touched by the war’s violence, reported airstrikes on the region by Russian Su-35 aircraft that took off from neighboring Belarus.
In apparent preparations for its assault on the east, the Russian military has intensified shelling of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, in recent days. Friday’s attack killed civilians and wounded more than 50 people, the Ukrainian president’s office reported.
On Saturday an explosion believed to be caused by a missile sent emergency workers scrambling near an outdoor market in Kharkiv, according to AP journalists at the scene. One person was killed, and at least 18 people were wounded, according to rescue workers.
“All the windows, all the furniture, all destroyed. And the door, too,” recounted stunned resident Valentina Ulianova.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said Saturday’s toll was three dead and 34 wounded.
Nate Mook, a member of the World Central Kitchen NGO run by celebrity chef José Andrés, said in a tweet that four workers in Kharkiv were wounded by a strike. José Andrés tweeted that staff members were unnerved but safe.
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who met with Vladimir Putin this past week in Moscow — the first European leader to do so since the invasion began Feb. 24 — said the Russian president is “in his own war logic” on Ukraine.
In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Nehammer said he thinks Putin believes he is winning the war and “we have to look in his eyes and we have to confront him with that, what we see in Ukraine.”
Nehammer said he confronted Putin with what he saw during a visit to the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where more than 350 bodies have been found along with evidence of killings and torture under Russian occupation, and “it was not a friendly conversation.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with Ukrainian journalists that the continuing siege of the port city of Mariupol, which has come at a horrific cost to trapped and starving civilians, could scuttle attempts to negotiate an end to the war.
“The destruction of all our guys in Mariupol — what they are doing now — can put an end to any format of negotiations,” he said.
Later, in his nightly video address to the nation, Zelenskyy said Ukraine needs more support from the West to have a chance at saving Mariupol.
“Either our partners give Ukraine all of the necessary heavy weapons, the planes, and without exaggeration immediately, so we can reduce the pressure of the occupiers on Mariupol and break the blockade,” he said, “or we do so through negotiations, in which the role of our partners should be decisive.”
Zelenskyy said the situation in Mariupol remains “inhuman” and Russia “is deliberately trying to destroy everyone who is there.”
Konashenkov, the Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, said Saturday that Ukrainian forces had been driven out of most of the city and remained only in the huge Azovstal steel mill.
Capturing Mariupol would allow Russian forces in the south, which came up through the annexed Crimean Peninsula, to fully link up with troops in the Donbas region, Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland.
Zelenskyy estimated that 2,500 to 3,000 Ukrainian troops have died in the war, and about 10,000 have been wounded. The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general said Saturday that at least 200 children have been killed, and more than 360 wounded.
Russian forces also have taken captive some 700 Ukrainian troops and more than 1,000 civilians, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Saturday. Ukraine holds about the same number of Russian troops as prisoners and intends to arrange a swap but is demanding the release of civilians “without any conditions,” she said.
Russia’s warning of stepped-up attacks on Kyiv came after it accused Ukraine on Thursday of wounding seven people and damaging about 100 residential buildings with airstrikes in Bryansk, a region bordering Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have not confirmed hitting targets in Russia.
Russian Maj. Gen. Vladimir Frolov, whose troops have been among those besieging Mariupol, was buried Saturday in St. Petersburg after dying in battle, Gov. Alexander Beglov said. Ukraine has said several Russian generals and dozens of other high-ranking officers have been killed in the war.
In the Vatican, Pope Francis on Saturday invoked “gestures of peace in these days marked by the horror of war” in an Easter vigil homily at St. Peter’s Basilica that was attended by the mayor of the occupied Ukrainian city of Melitopol and three members of Ukraine’s parliament. Francis did not refer directly to Russia’s invasion but has called, apparently in vain, for an Easter truce to reach a negotiated peace.
Saturday's strike on the Ukrainian capital was among the first since invading #Russian forces began withdrawing from regions around #Kyiv last month, instead turning their focus on gaining control of the eastern Donbas region.#UkraineRussianWar videohttps://t.co/wo7wW41iKl
Moscow threatened renewed missile attacks on Kyiv, where authorities said the bodies of more than 900 civilians were found outside the capital. Most had been shot dead, police said, and likely “simply executed.” https://t.co/NRCFjYfF6K
Russia’s military command had warned a day earlier of renewed missile strikes on Ukraine’s capital. Officials in Moscow said they were targeting military sites.https://t.co/HZ4gOxkX3x
An update I hoped I’d never have to make. I’m at a @WCKitchen restaurant in Kharkiv, where less than 24 hours ago I was meeting with their amazing team. Today, a missile stuck. 4 staff were wounded. This is the reality here—cooking is a heroic act of bravery. #ChefsForUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/AyU4fUnA61
Rescuers continued to clear rubble from damaged buildings in the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv on Saturday, after shelling and airstrikes left the city in ruins. (April 16)2 of 24An elderly local resident stands behind a destroyed part of the Illich Iron & Steel Works Metallurgical Plant, the second largest metallurgical enterprise in Ukraine, in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces in Mariupol, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, has been besieged by Russian troops and forces from self-proclaimed separatist areas in eastern Ukraine for more than six weeks. (AP Photo/Alexei Alexandrov)Volodymyr Bondar, 61, mourns next to the grave of his son Oleksandr, 32, after burying him at the cemetery in Bucha, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine on Saturday, April 16, 2022. Oleksandr, who joined the territorial Ukrainian defence as a co-ordinator was killed by a gunshot by the Russian Army. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)7 of 24Firefighters work to extinguish multiple fires after a Russian attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Saturday, April 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)10 of 24
Scottie's Playtime 