Latest news with #JohnRoberts'
Otago Daily Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Otago Daily Times
Catnip wines designed for anxious cats and dogs
Muttley's Estate is named for director John Roberts' childhood dog, and offers a range of different strength pet wines made from catnip. The non-alcoholic beverages can be enjoyed by cats and dogs, and even people, though it is not recommended just yet. Roberts said the wines were inspired by ''dog beers'', which are usually made from bone broth. He wanted something felines could also enjoy. Cats prefer the lighter taste of whites such as Champawgne and Prosecatt while the deeper blends such as the Purrno Noir and Pawt are popular with dogs. ''With the growing international interest in catnip and the 'humanification' of pet diets, it was a natural extension to explore the development of a premium beverage for pet owners to celebrate with their pets.'' Roberts said the catnip wines also helped reduce stress in pets - catnip is a mood enhancer for cats and makes them more playful, while for dogs it helps them relax. ''We created the range to help alleviate some of the modern stressors on pets, but unlike conventional wines, our products contain zero alcohol.'' The range offers multiple varietals, each featuring a different concentration of catnip: lighter whites such as the Champawgne appeals more to cats, while the deeper blends such as the Purrno Noir and Pawt are popular with dogs, Mr Roberts said. Despite having launched less than a year ago, he was now looking to expand into the United States and was working with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise to identify distributors in overseas markets. ''We believe the reputation of New Zealand's wine sector in North America will help us establish an entry into this market and we now actively looking for US distributors.'' Mr Roberts said catnip was a resilient crop which grew well in his part of East Auckland. He said the commercial-scale farming of catnip would further diversify New Zealand's horticultural sector. Global demand for catnip is rising, driven by pet product manufacturers and natural health industries. The catnip essential oil market is projected to grow by almost 6% each year by 2030 to reach $400 million. ''We'd love to see entire fields of catnip grown right here. The idea that we could turn a small backyard experiment into a nation-wide horticultural endeavour, and share it with pet lovers worldwide, is really exciting. It's a chance for New Zealand to do something fresh and unexpected - yet again.'' Muttley's Estate is also looking at developing a variety for human consumption. - RNZ
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Will the Supreme Court Save an Apache Sacred Site?
The Supreme Court is no stranger to religious-freedom cases. Under Chief Justice John Roberts' tenure, the justices are more sympathetic to such claims than at any other point in the court's modern history. But one dispute in particular seems to be stuck in the justices' figurative craw: a land-use battle between a Native American tribe in Arizona, an Australian mining venture, and the federal government. In Apache Stronghold v. United States, a group of Western Apache tribal members are hoping to stop the U.S. Forest Service from transferring a sacred religious site on federal public lands to a mining company whose methods would effectively destroy their spiritual home. They asked the Supreme Court to intervene last September; the government and the mining company filed their own briefs in October. Here's the rub: The court has yet to decide whether it will take up the case. This in and of itself is not necessarily unusual since the justices hear only a fraction of the cases that they are asked to hear. In this case, however, the court's docket shows that the justices have scheduled it for consideration at their weekly conferences on fifteen consecutive occasions. That suggests the court is facing an unusual internal struggle over this high-stakes case. At issue is the fate of Oak Flat, a swath of high desert and bluffs in central Arizona that is sacred to nearby tribes, including the Western Apache. The land consists of 'old-growth oak groves, sacred springs, burial locations, and a singular concentration of archaeological sites' that provide evidence of almost 1,500 years of continuous usage. Apache tradition holds that Oak Flat is the home of Ga'an, spiritual beings that are central to the tribe's religious belief. 'The Ga'an are 'our creators, our saints, our saviors, our holy spirits'—'the very foundation of [Apache] religion,'' the group's lawyers told the court, quoting from earlier legal filings. 'As the dwelling place of the Ga'an, Oak Flat is a direct corridor to the Creator and is 'uniquely endowed with holiness and medicine.' Neither 'the powers resident there, nor [Apache] religious activities that pray to and through these powers can be relocated.'' Tribal members perform a variety of rituals in Oak Flat that cannot be performed anywhere else, such as prayer rituals, healing ceremonies, and rites of passage. 'One example is the Sunrise Ceremony, a multi-day celebration marking an Apache girl's entry into womanhood,' they told the justices. 'To prepare, the girl gathers plants from Oak Flat that contain 'the spirit of Chi'chil Biłdagoteel.' As she gathers, she speaks to the spirit of Oak Flat, expressing gratitude for its resources.' Lying beneath Oak Flat is a resource that is of particular interest to multinational corporations: copper. Geological engineers estimated that the deposit, which was first discovered in 1995, could amount to roughly two billion tons of the metal. Rio Tinto and BHP, two Australian mining companies, formed a joint venture named Resolution Copper shortly after the discovery to acquire the land and extract the copper from it. After years of wrangling between federal lawmakers and Resolution Copper, Congress approved a land swap in 2014 that would transfer roughly 2,400 acres in and around Oak Flat to the company in exchange for other lands elsewhere. While the law required the mining company to work with the tribes on various access and protection measures, it ultimately envisions the site's destruction. Extensive excavations will eventually cause Oak Flat's surface to distort and sink until it forms a 'large surface crater,' according to Congress. After the U.S. Forest Service announced in 2021 that it would complete a key environmental hurdle for the project, Apache Stronghold—a nonprofit group led by members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe—sued the government in federal court to stop it. They invoked federal law, the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause, and treaty obligations to argue that permanently destroying their sacred sites would illegally and unconstitutionally infringe upon their religious freedom. The courts have historically resisted recognizing Native American religious claims over public land. In the 1988 case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protection Association, for example, the Supreme Court ruled against a group of Native American and environmental litigants who argued that a planned logging road—and the logging itself—would unconstitutionally damage a sacred site in northwest California. The justices concluded that the plaintiffs' plight did not fall under the Free Exercise Clause because there was no coercion, discrimination, or penalty for their religious beliefs. The government, the court wrote, 'simply could not operate if it were required to satisfy every citizen's religious needs and desires.' The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals leaned on that ruling and others to reject Apache Stronghold's claims last year. Its 246-page decision is something of a mess. Since a majority of justices were unable to agree on every aspect (or even most) of the case, it essentially consists of two majority opinions that each deal with half of Apache Stronghold's claims. One of them dispensed with the group's constitutional claims by relying heavily upon Lyng. Apache Stronghold told the justices in their petition that the Ninth Circuit had misapplied the prevailing legal precedents. In the 1990 case Employment Division v. Smith, for example, the high court declined to allow Free Exercise Clause claims against what it described as 'neutral laws of general applicability.' That decision prompted a political backlash that led Congress to enact the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, more commonly known as RFRA, in 1993. Under RFRA, the federal government cannot impose a 'substantial burden' on someone's religious practices unless that burden is the 'least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest.' In practice, RFRA allows for Americans to claim religious exemptions to various federal laws under certain circumstances. Perhaps the most famous case involving RFRA was the 2014 decision Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, where the high court exempted the Christian craft-supply company from the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive mandate. The Ninth Circuit concluded that RFRA had 'subsumed' the court's decision in Lyng instead of 'overriding' it. In other words, the judges concluded that RFRA had meant to work in harmony with Lyng instead of superseding it. Apache Stronghold disagreed. It argued that the Supreme Court had previously rejected efforts to draw upon pre-Smith cases when interpreting RFRA and treated the law as a break from the Supreme Court's approach, not a continuation of it. Apache Stronghold's claims have drawn broad support from other religious groups, including a wide range of Arizona and New Mexico religious organizations, as well as the national leaderships of some of the country's most prominent Christian denominations. 'This court has already held that when [the] government controls the resources required for religious practice, barring access to those resources is a substantial burden on free exercise,' one of their briefs argued. 'The same must be true for federal lands.' Top Republican figures have also sided with what they described as an important religious-liberty case. Utah Senator Mike Lee, a top Trump ally in the Senate, argued in a friend-of-the-court brief that it was 'important to defend the religious liberty of minority faiths and religious communities like Apache Stronghold—because the religious liberties of all rise or fall together.' Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond also filed a brief alongside three other states urging the court to review the lower-court ruling, pointing to different approaches in federal courts in his state. 'The present decision of the Ninth Circuit, however, if left unchecked and uncorrected by this Court, will lead to the harms that Oklahoma has avoided: an imbalance between private religious belief and broad government power, the destruction of sacred places, and the extinguishment of timeless practices without significant scrutiny to ensure that such action is truly necessary,' Drummond argued. All of which leads to the big question: Why hasn't the court decided for or against taking the case yet? It's worth noting that the Supreme Court's weekly conferences are perhaps its most opaque proceedings. When the justices gather to debate pending petitions and other administrative matters, they do so alone and they generally do not discuss the outcomes. Their semi-weekly orders sheet is the only record of their decisions within, and it almost never reveals vote totals or the court's reasoning behind an action. The most likely possibility is that the court has already voted not to hear the Apache Stronghold case and one or more justices are writing a dissenting opinion. The justices' usual practice is to not announce a decision or outcome until a dissent is ready for publication. (The recent extraordinary order in A.A.R.P. v. Trump, an Alien Enemies Act case, is the exception that proves the rule.) In the next few weeks, the court may announce that it will not hear the case in its weekly orders, complete with a lengthy dissent by Justice Neil Gorsuch or one of his colleagues. But that outcome is far from certain. Over the last few terms, the Supreme Court kept relisting Hamm v. Smith for more than a year, far longer than the usual repeat flyer at weekly conferences. That case involved a death-row prisoner's intellectual disability and whether it would preclude his execution. In November, the justices ultimately decided to send it back to the lower courts for reconsideration, writing a short, unsigned opinion that instructed the Eleventh Circuit on the next steps it should take. Whatever the reason, the court is right to take its time with this particular case. The justices often hear religious-freedom cases that involve relatively modest real-world stakes: One recent decision involved a state agency's refusal to allow a church to participate in a tire-recycling program for playgrounds, for example. If such petty indignities can draw the Supreme Court's attention, then allowing a foreign mining company to forever despoil and desacralize a Native American spiritual site to create shareholder value should as well.
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump foreign aid freeze to stay for now, US Supreme Court chief rules
The top judge in the United States has given temporary backing to the Trump administration's freeze on foreign aid payments. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts' intervention came as the administration faced a midnight deadline (05:00 GMT on Thursday) to pay contractors. Officials had argued that they could not process the payments within the timeframe set by a lower court judge. Since coming to power in January, US President Donald Trump has taken quick action to end many aid programmes, largely run by the US Agency for International Development, USAID, and placed most of its staff on administrative leave or sacked them. The Trump administration is seeking to shrink the federal workforce and cut costs in a drive led by Elon Musk. The billionaire Trump adviser asked millions of bureaucrats over the weekend to list their accomplishments from the past week - sparking fury amongst the workforce and disagreement with officials leading the departments. Most USAID staff laid off or placed on leave What is USAID and why does Trump want to close it down? US District Judge Amir Ali had ordered the US State Department and USAID to pay about $2bn-worth of bills (£1.6bn) to contractors by midnight on Wednesday. It is one of many interventions by judges trying to stop or pause a wave of Trump administration orders. As the deadline approached, the Trump administration went to the Supreme Court, arguing it was impossible to process claims in an orderly fashion in such a short period of time. The US federal government freeze comes as the administration carries out a review of foreign aid funding. Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris said Judge Ali's order "has thrown what should be an orderly review by the government into chaos". The cutbacks to USAID have already upended the global aid system. Hundreds of programmes have been frozen in countries around the world since the president announced his intentions in January. The US is by far the biggest single provider of humanitarian aid around the world. It has bases in more than 60 countries and works in dozens of others, with much of its work carried out by its contractors. According to the Associated Press news agency, the Trump administration wants to eliminate more than 90% of the USAID's foreign aid contracts - and $60bn of US overseas aid.
BBC News
27-02-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Trump foreign aid freeze to stay, Supreme Court chief says
The top judge in the United States has given temporary backing to the Trump administration's freeze on foreign aid Court Chief Justice John Roberts' intervention came as the administration faced a midnight deadline (05:00 GMT on Thursday) to pay had argued that they could not process the payments within the timeframe set by a lower court coming to power in January, Donald Trump has taken quick action to end many aid programmes, largely run by the US Agency for International Development, USAID, and placed most of its staff on administrative leave or sacked them. The Trump administration is seeking to shrink the federal workforce and cut costs in a drive led by Elon billionaire Trump adviser asked millions of bureaucrats over the weekend to list their accomplishments from the past week - sparking fury amongst the workforce and disagreement with officials leading the USAID staff laid off or placed on leaveWhat is USAID and why does Trump want to close it down? US District Judge Amir Ali had ordered the State Department and USAID to pay about $2bn-worth of bills (£1.6bn) to contractors by midnight on is one of many interventions by judges trying to stop or pause a wave of Trump administration the deadline approached, the Trump administration went to the Supreme Court arguing it was impossible to process claims in an orderly fashion in such a short period of US federal government freeze comes as the administration carries out a review of foreign aid Solicitor General Sarah Harris said Judge Ali's order "has thrown what should be an orderly review by the government into chaos". The cutbacks to USAID have already upended the global aid system. Hundreds of programmes have been frozen in countries around the world since the president announced his intentions in US is by far the biggest single provider of humanitarian aid around the has bases in more than 60 countries and works in dozens of others, with much of its work carried out by its to the Associated Press news agency, the Trump government wants to eliminate more than 90% of the USAID's foreign aid contracts - and $60bn of US overseas aid.
