2 weeks Ago By Agence France-Presse
Churches dot the green hills of Rabun County, Georgia, where American flags flutter and God is everything -- but Donald Trump is not far behind. In the southern battleground state, the faithful are well aware that the Republican former president is hardly a model Christian. But they are quick to forgive him because he appointed three conservative-leaning justices to the Supreme Court that voted in 2022 to overturn Roe v.
Wade, eliminating a woman's constitutional right to an abortion . Yance Thompson, a strapping 40-year-old with piercing blue eyes, lives on one of those sun-dappled green hills of the Appalachian Mountains. A Bible rests on the table of the patio of his spacious house.
He and his wife Meredith -- who have 10 children, nine of them adopted -- speak with one voice on faith and politics. "I believe that abortion is wrong. I would say he did a great job on that," Yance Thompson says of Trump.
"I do not like abortion at all. I feel like it's not OK. I feel like a child is a child as soon as conception happens," adds Meredith, 38.
"I do not agree with abortion at all. It breaks my heart. It makes me very sad.
" Nearly half of Rabun County's residents identify as evangelical Christians, and more than 70 percent call themselves religious. As a kid whose father was a preacher, Yance says with a smile, "I was always in church. I grew up in church.
" "You get this real sense of community," he said of Rabun. "You see families that have stayed in those churches, and just been faithful, for hundreds of years." "We kind of live in a little bubble around here," says Meredith.
Both say they will vote Republican in November. - Bible Belt - Of course, Yance is not blind to some of Trump's failings. He says the real estate mogul is "not a bad" politician -- while admitting he might not be as good a Christian.
In 2023, Trump was found liable for sexual assault; this past May, he was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush money payments to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election. He has owned casinos and been married three times. Trump, who was targeted in an assassination attempt in July, has nevertheless played the divine intervention card on the campaign trail, saying God saved his life.
That stump speech line is certain to play well among the most pious voters, including those in Rabun County in the heart of America's Bible Belt, which runs from southeastern states like Georgia all the way out to Texas. Some residents fly Confederate flags from their pickup trucks, often alongside a Trump 2024 sign. Trump won Georgia in 2016 and evangelical Christians were key to that victory.
In Rabun, eight of every 10 people voted for him in 2020, when he lost narrowly to Joe Biden . Meredith Thompson, who runs a furniture store, went to Christian school and a Christian university. She says she prays whenever she can.
Her opposition to abortion has led her to vote Republican consistently, she says. "It seems like a lot of the, you know, Democratic nature is very controversial, is very angry. You know, protesting, burning down buildings.
I don't like violence," she says. "I lean obviously Republican. I want our freedoms to remain intact.
" - 'On pins and needles' - In the town of Clayton, the Rabun County seat tucked away in the woods, Sunday is for prayer. The Baptist church in the center of town is packed -- more than 400 people occupy chairs in a gym that has been turned into a place of worship, with a large screen overhead and plenty of music. The Thompson family sits in the front row as Yance delivers a sermon.
Everyone remembers what happened four years ago when Biden narrowly defeated Trump to claim Georgia -- a state divided between primarily Democratic urban areas like Atlanta and conservative rural zones -- by less than 12,000 votes. Trump was indicted in the state last year for trying to overturn the result. Will Griffin, the young pastor of the Baptist church in Clayton, says people are still angry about that loss.
“They feel like their rug was jerked out from under them in the last election," Griffin says. "And so everybody is on pins and needles," wondering what will happen this time, he said. "They're going to vote for their candidate.
And they're going to hope and really pray that the process is faithful." " Paxton takes Dallas to court over gun ban at State Fair " was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. Sign up for The Brief , The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
The state and its third biggest city are set to square off in court over a ban on guns at Texas' most celebrated tribute to itself — the State Fair. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Thursday that he is suing the city of Dallas and state fair officials for its new policy of banning all firearms from the fairgrounds. The Attorney General’s lawsuit asks a Dallas County District Court to order the City of Dallas and state fair officials not to enforce the gun ban at the Fair during its run from Sept.
27 until Oct. 20. “Neither the City of Dallas nor the State Fair of Texas can infringe on Texans’ right to self-defense,” Paxton wrote in his statement.
“I warned fifteen days ago that if they did not end their unlawful conduct I would see them in court, and now I will.” The City of Dallas said it disagreed with Paxton’s allegations against its interim city manager. “The City was not involved in the State Fair of Texas’ announcement of its enhanced weapons policy,” a Dallas spokesperson said in a statement.
“The State Fair of Texas is a private event operated and controlled by a private, nonprofit entity and not the City.” Earlier this month, a state fair spokesperson said that fair officials would follow the city of Dallas’s guidance on the matter. Fair officials announced the new gun ban last month, a year after a shooting at the fair injured three people.
Paxton’s suit says that since Fair Park is owned by Dallas, the policy change violates state law, which allows licensed gun owners to carry in places owned or leased by governmental entities, unless otherwise prohibited by state law. According to the filing, Paxton is seeking fines for each day the policy is still in place. In his 15-day ultimatum letter to the interim city manager , he acknowledged that some buildings located on the Fair Park premises, like the Cotton Bowl and other buildings that are used for scholastic events are areas where guns are prohibited by state law.
Hours before the lawsuit was announced, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson told The Texas Tribune that he has “absolute confidence in the Dallas Police Department and in the organizers of the nonprofit State Fair of Texas to keep people safe during the largest annual event in Dallas." Fair officials have said the fair policy change was a safety measure related to last year’s shooting. Law enforcement arrested 22-year-old Cameron Turner in connection with the shooting.
The officials said he opened fire at the fair’s food court and charged him with three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and one count of unlawfully carrying a weapon in a prohibited place. Paxton was not the only government official to express frustrations about the new gun policy; shortly after the announcement, a wave of Republican state lawmakers and gun advocacy groups voiced displeasure with it. The state lawmakers signed a petition pressuring State Fair officials to rescind the new policy, saying the new policy makes the fair “less safe” and adding: “Gun free zones are magnets for crime because they present less of a threat to those who seek to do evil.
” Crews breached the final of four dams on a key stretch of the Klamath River on Wednesday, letting salmon run freely there for the first time in over a century and garnering tears from Indigenous activists who had campaigned for the dam removals for decades. Together the four demolitions mark the largest dam removal project in U.S.
history. The Klamath, which runs from south-central Oregon into northwestern California , has long been bordered by Native American tribes—"Salmon People," as they call themselves—that once relied on the protein-rich fish for about half of their caloric intake but were impoverished by the institution of the dams, among other white settler colonialist initiatives. "Another wall fell today," Frankie Myers, vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, said in a statement .
"The dams that have divided the basin are now gone and the river is free. Our sacred duty to our children, our ancestors, and for ourselves, is to take care of the river, and today's events represent a fulfillment of that obligation." The four dams were built between 1918 and 1962 to generate electricity in the region and have been owned in recent years by PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, a conglomerate owned by Warren Buffett.
Beforehand, chinook and coho salmon were plentiful in the river. "My grandpa said that there were so many salmon when he was younger that you could walk across their backs to the other side," Brook Thompson, a 28-year-old activist who grew up on the Yurok reservation, told The New York Times . "It's just so hard to express to people who are so used to fishing for sport or fun that salmon is really everything for us.
The health of the river is literally our health." The campaign to remove the dams took flight in 2002 following a devastating salmon die-off which Thompson and other Indigenous activists still talk about as a turning point. Campaigners went as far as the United Kingdom—where Scottish Power, which then owned the dams, was headquartered—to demand their removal.
The campaign faced opposition but was pushed through by a coalition that included Democratic Govs. Gavin Newsom of California and Kate Brown of Oregon, who left office in 2023. "This moment is decades in the making—and reflects California's commitment to righting the wrongs of the past," Newsom said in a statement on Wednesday.
"Today, fish are swimming freely in the Klamath for the first time in more than a century, thanks to the incredible work of our tribal, local, and federal partners." The Klamath decommissioning project is part of a larger movement aimed at restorative justice for Indigenous peoples and ecological renewal. More than 2,000 dams have been removed in the United States, mostly in the last 25 years, according to American Rivers, an advocacy group.
Thompson said the removal of the dams showed that activism can pay off. "The biggest thing for me, the significance of the dam removal project, is just hope—understanding that change can be made," she recently told the Los Angeles Times . The Klamath is unusual in that it runs from a desert area into the mountains and then back down to the Pacific Ocean— National Geographic has called it "a river upside down.
" Two upstream dams on the river have not been removed, but they have swim ladders that allow salmon to get through. Construction work to remove the last infrastructure on the four dams is expected to last another month, while ecological restoration work will go on for years, led by Indigenous groups and Resource Environmental Solutions, a company contracted to do the work. President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday defended a decision to grant French nationality to Telegram chief Pavel Durov, who faces a possible trial related to illegal content carried on his popular messaging app.
Speaking to reporters on a visit to Serbia, the French president said he did not know that Durov would be coming to France and denied having issued "any invitation whatsoever" to the Russian-born billionaire. "We are a country where there is a separation of powers," Macron said. "I was completely unaware that he was coming.
This is normal," he added. Macron said he "totally" backed the decision to grant Durov citizenship, adding it was a "strategy" concerning those who "make the effort to learn the French language" and who "shine in the world". Durov, 39, was sensationally detained at Le Bourget airport outside Paris at the weekend and on Wednesday evening charged with a litany of violations related to the messaging app.
He was also banned from leaving the country. Numerous questions have been raised about the timing and circumstances of Durov's detention, with supporters seeing him as a freedom of speech champion and detractors as a menace who willfully allowed Telegram to get out of control. According to a source close to the investigation , Durov had emphasized his links to the French head of state during questioning.
Le Monde newspaper reported on Wednesday that Durov had met Macron on several occasions prior to receiving French nationality in 2021, via a special procedure reserved for those deemed to have made a special contribution to France. Durov's lawyer David-Olivier Kaminski said it was "absurd" to suggest Durov could be implicated in any crime committed on the app, adding: "Telegram complies in all respects with European rules concerning digital technology." In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned France against turning the case into "political persecution", emphasizing he is a "Russian citizen" and "we will be watching what happens next.
" Among those also voicing support for Durov is fellow tech tycoon and chief executive of X, Elon Musk, who has posted comments under the hashtag #FreePavel. After the charges, Musk posted a meme on X of a surveillance camera attached to buildings inscribed with France's motto, "liberty, equality, fraternity." - Litany of charges - Durov was granted conditional release on a bail of five million euros and on the condition he must report to a police station twice a week as well as remaining in France, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement.
The charges concern alleged crimes involving an organized group, including "complicity in the administration of an online platform to enable an illicit transaction". This charge alone could see him jailed for up to 10 years and fined 500,000 euros if convicted. Durov has also been charged with refusing to share documents demanded by authorities as well as "dissemination in an organized group of images of minors in child pornography" as well as drug trafficking, fraud and money laundering.
The next step will be for the case to be sent to trial. Separately, Durov is also being investigated on suspicion of "serious acts of violence" towards one of his children while he and the boy's mother were in Paris, a source said. She filed a criminal complaint against Durov in Switzerland last year.
The tech mogul founded Telegram as he was in the process of quitting his native Russia a decade ago following a dispute with authorities related to ownership of his first project, the Russian-language social network VKontakte. An enigmatic figure who rarely speaks in public, Durov is a citizen of Russia, France and the United Arab Emirates, where Telegram is based. Forbes magazine estimates his current fortune at $15.
5 billion, though he proudly promotes the virtues of an ascetic life that includes ice baths and not drinking alcohol or coffee. A source close to the case, who asked not to be named, told AFP on Thursday that after his arrest Durov asked that French telecoms tycoon Xavier Niel, chairman and founder of the Iliad mobile operator, be informed of his arrest. Niel is seen as being close to Macron.
Contacted by AFP, Niel's entourage declined to comment. A UAE government official said it "prioritizes the welfare of its citizens" and was "in touch with the French authorities about this case.".
