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Edinburgh Live
3 days ago
- Edinburgh Live
Edinburgh police 'in riot gear' swoop on quiet street in ongoing incident
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info A huge police presence has descended on a quiet Edinburgh street in front of shocked neighbours. Several police vans and cars swooped on Clermiston's Birchwood View shortly before 9am on Thursday, May 29. An eye witness at the scene told Edinburgh Live how officers in 'riot gear' with shields and helmets have been spotted at the scene as well as a dog unit and CID. They said: "I was about to take the kids on the school run and seen them all in their riot gear going into the block. There were police dogs here as well. "I've been watching the flats and no one has been taken out by police. It was just police going in and out." Other images show officers wearing blue gloves appearing to search a vehicle on the street. Police Scotland has been approached for comment. We'll bring you more information and updates on this breaking news story as we get it. In the meantime, follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X for the latest news, what's on, trending stories and sport.
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Supreme Court to hear Mexico's suit against U.S. gun manufacturers
March 4 (UPI) -- The Mexican government's lawsuit against U.S. gun companies is set to go before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. The lawsuit, originally filed in federal court in Massachusetts in 2021, seeks to hold gun manufacturers responsible for violence perpetrated by cartels using firearms trafficked from the United States. The suit was dismissed in September 2022, with the court citing the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which shields gun manufacturers from being targeted by civil suits stemming from illegal use of their products. The decision was reversed in January 2024 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, which ruled that the lawsuit falls under an exception to the PLCAA that allows manufacturers to be targeted by lawsuits if they knowingly violated the law. Jonathan Lowy, a lawyer serving as co-counsel for Mexico and president of Global Action on Gun Violence, alleged the gun manufacturers are aware of unscrupulous gun dealers selling to cartels. "Manufacturers know who those dealers are, how they're supplying the cartels, and yet they continue to choose to sell their guns through those dealers, and allowing those sales practices," Lowy was quoted as saying by NPR. The Smith & Wesson Brands vs. Estados Unidos Mexicanos case is now set to go before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, marking the high court's first case involving the PLCAA. A decision in the case is expected by summer.
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
At US Supreme Court, gun companies aim to avoid Mexico's lawsuit
By John Kruzel and Blake Brittain WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court was set on Tuesday to hear a bid by two American gun companies to throw out the Mexican government's lawsuit accusing them of aiding illegal firearms trafficking to drug cartels and fueling gun violence in the southern neighbor of the United States. U.S. firearms maker Smith & Wesson and distributor Interstate Arms have appealed a lower court's ruling that the lawsuit could proceed on the grounds that Mexico has plausibly alleged that the companies aided and abetted illegal gun sales, harming the Mexican government. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. The arguments before the justices come at a fraught time for U.S.-Mexican relations as President Donald Trump pursues tariffs on Mexican goods and accuses Mexico of doing too little to stop the flow of synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and migrant arrivals at the border. At issue is whether Mexico's suit should be dismissed under a 2005 federal law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that broadly shields gun companies from liability for crimes committed with their products - or whether the alleged conduct of the companies falls outside these protections, as the lower court found. Mexico's lawsuit, filed in Boston in 2021, accused the gun companies of violating various U.S. and Mexican laws. Mexico claims that the companies have deliberately maintained a distribution system that included firearms dealers who knowingly sell weapons to third-party, or "straw," purchasers who then traffic guns to cartels in Mexico. The suit also accuses the companies of unlawfully designing and marketing their guns as military-grade weapons to drive up demand among the cartels, including by associating their products with the American military and law enforcement. Mexico is seeking monetary damages of an unspecified amount and a court order requiring Smith & Wesson and Interstate Arms to take steps to "abate and remedy the public nuisance they have created in Mexico." Most of the 180,000 homicides involving guns in Mexico, a country with strict firearms laws, from 2007 to 2019 were committed with weapons trafficked from the United States, according to court papers. The gun companies argue that they have done nothing more than make and sell lawful products. "Every business knows its products may be misused - even criminally so - by customers downstream," lawyers for the companies wrote in a Supreme Court brief. "But such knowledge has never been enough to generate criminal liability, lest the entire economy grind to a halt." Guns trafficked from the United States to Mexico - counting those made by the defendants and other companies - are valued at more than $250 million annually, according to court papers. Mexico in a Supreme Court brief said the accused companies "deliberately sell their guns through dealers who are known to disproportionately sell firearms that are recovered at crime scenes in Mexico," adding that they "intentionally do all this to boost their bottom lines." According to the lawsuit, gun violence fueled by trafficked American-made firearms has contributed to a decline in business investment and economic activity in Mexico, and forced its government to incur unusually high costs on services including healthcare, law enforcement and the military. Mexico had originally sued seven U.S. gun manufacturers - Smith & Wesson, Barrett, Beretta, Century Arms, Colt, Glock and Ruger - as well as wholesale distributor Interstate Arms. Six gun manufacturers later were removed from the case on procedural grounds, leaving Smith & Wesson and Interstate Arms as the remaining defendants. U.S. District Judge Dennis Saylor in Boston sided with the gun companies in 2022 and threw out the case, finding that the 2005 federal law "seeks to prohibit exactly the type of claim that is currently before this court." The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Saylor's decision in January 2024 and ruled that the suit could proceed. The 1st Circuit ruled that Mexico had plausibly alleged that the gun companies had aided and abetted violations of federal laws prohibiting the sale and export of guns without a license, and sales to straw purchasers - placing their alleged conduct beyond the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. The gun companies argued in a Supreme Court filing that Mexico's suit seeks to "bully the industry into adopting a host of gun-control measures that have been repeatedly rejected by American voters."
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - Sorry Democrats, but Trump's ‘two sexes' executive order is constitutional
Under the last presidential administration, progressive politicians made the expansion of transgender rights their raison d'etre. They happily marched in lockstep to President Joe Biden's executive order directing every federal agency chief to prohibit discrimination based on gender expression or identity — case law to the contrary be damned. Now, however, those same politicians are apoplectic over the current administration's return to biological reality, the rule of law and common sense. Leading the charge are Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Mark Takano (D-Calif.) and Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). In a letter to acting director of the Office of Personnel Management Charles Ezell, the trio stridently assert that President Trump's executive order recognizing a government-wide 'two sexes' policy and the accompanying memorandum guiding its implementation are unconstitutional. One of the three has a law degree, but that certainly doesn't bolster their cock-eyed legal conclusions. Among its flaws, the letter cites the Supreme Court's 1996 decision in Roemer v. Evans for the proposition that 'government policies motivated by animus are clear violations of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws.' Roemer involved a state constitutional amendment that forbade any legislative, judicial or executive protection to gays suffering discrimination — leaving them completely without the ability to participate in the political process, in violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The president's EO and federal directives on gender identity, in contrast, disenfranchise no one. Rather, they restore to women the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause, motivated by the legitimate government interest in protecting their personal safety, privacy and equality. The EO simultaneously shields religious objectors to gender orthodoxy from being discriminated against for simply following the dictates of their conscience. What's more, the Supreme Court has never placed transgender identity in the same category as biological sex, requiring the same heightened level of judicial scrutiny. This renders any government action implicating transgender status presumptively constitutional. The court explained this in Frontiero v. Richardson (1973): '[S]ince sex, like race and national origin, is an immutable characteristic determined solely by the accident of birth, the imposition of special disabilities upon the members of a particular sex because of their sex would seem to violate 'the basic concept of our system that legal burdens should bear some relationship to individual responsibility.'' Unlike sex, transgender status is not immutable — something even a transgender attorney representing the ACLU had to admit under questioning from Justice Samuel Alito during oral arguments just two months ago in United States v. Skrmetti. Gender identity is a subjective, internal, malleable and often transitory sense of oneself. As such, it is an insufficient basis to expand the notion of equal protection or protection of 'immutable characteristics' — one that would defy decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence to the contrary. The congressional letter also cites the court's decision in 2020, Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act — a federal law prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of, among other things, sex. The court in that decision did not, however, equate sex with transgender status or sexual orientation. Rather, it determined only that both were 'inextricably bound up with sex.' The Bostock decision has repeatedly been cited by the left to argue that the court's ruling on a federal employment law statute forbidding sex discrimination somehow magically transforms every federal law and regulation into one also forbidding gender identity discrimination. The congressmen fail to acknowledge what Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion — that there are indeed 'biological distinctions between male and female.' Without exposition or evidence, the congressmen also argue that the 'directive to withdraw [Biden's gender identity] regulations in a matter of days contradicts the Administrative Procedure Act.' That APA governs the process by which federal agencies develop and issue regulations and other agency actions such as policy statements and guidances. But if these congressmen fully understood the operation of the APA, they would recognize that rules can only be amended or reversed through a subsequent agency rulemaking process. That process is precisely what the appropriate agencies have been tasked with doing, pursuant to the EO and associated memorandum. It involves publishing a 'notice of proposed rulemaking' — something that can easily be accomplished within 30 days, and which starts the long, detailed process set forth in the APA of recission through new rule construction. In their quixotic and legally faulty letter, the congressmen are tilting at windmills. What the current administration is doing is legal, common-sense and long overdue. Sarah Parshall Perry is a senior legal fellow for The Heritage Foundation's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
