Today’s Headlines and Commentary

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Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine signed into law a bill that would allow school employees to be armed in district buildings starting in the fall, writes AP News. Employees would have to complete a maximum of 24 hours of training before they can be armed, and an additional maximum of eight hours of training each year. The governor also spoke of other school security measures at the bill’s signing, including $100 million for school safety spending, which he and other politicians have proposed.

The House will vote on a Senate-passed bill that would extend security to family members of Supreme Court justices, reports NBC News. The Senate bill initially passed on May 5, but the House waited to vote on the legislation, instead considering a broader bill that would have extended security to family members of judicial clerks and other staff members, according to the Washington Post. The House vote follows the arrest of an armed man outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house last week.

The White House announced that President Biden will make a trip to Saudi Arabia next month, reports the New York Times. The news of the trip has received criticism from politicians and human rights activists who object to his meeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who is said to have ordered the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissisident and Washington Post columnist, in 2018. The visit comes as gasoline prices have risen dramatically, although White House staff say the decision to visit the kingdom is driven more by security issues than energy prices.

According to a report by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, Russia received $97 billion in revenue from fossil fuel exports in the first 100 days following its invasion of Ukraine, writes the Washington Post. The volume of Russian fuel exports fell 15 percent in May in comparison to levels before the invasion, as pressure from the West has led countries to reduce their reliance on Russian energy. China was the largest importer followed by Germany, with $13 billion worth of fossil fuels and $12.6 billion respectively.

Officials in Kyiv have started to store data outside of Ukraine as a measure to guard against Russian cyber attacks, according to the Wall Street Journal. Approximately 150 registries from Ukrainian ministries have been moved abroad since the war’s start, according to the country’s deputy minister of digital transformation. Moving the data to the cloud also protects databases from damage by Russian missiles, which had been an issue for the government in the early days of the war.

An Iraqi detainee held at Guantanamo Bay pleaded guilty to war crimes connected to attacks on allied soldiers in 2003 and 2004, writes the New York Times. Abd-Hadi al-Iraqi’s plea agreement, which has yet to be publicly released, could have him sentenced to 10 years in prison, most of which would be served in the custody of another country. Trial proceedings have been slowed in large part because of the prisoner’s health issues connected to a degenerative spinal disease that has left him paralyzed at times.

ICYMI: The Weekend on Lawfare

Jen Patja Howell shared an episode of The Lawfare Podcast in which Benjamin Wittes sat down with Roger Parloff to discuss the litigation to keep people off ballots under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment—which was the subject of Parloff’s new piece in Lawfare entitled, “After the Cawthorn Ruling, Can Trump Be Saved From Section 3 of the 14th Amendment?”

Jolynn Dellinger and Stephanie Pell argued that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, criminal investigations into women’s reproductive decisions enabled by modern technologies and the sensitive, intimate data these technologies capture would constitute an unique extension of the state’s powers of observation and coercion.

Benjamin Pollard shared a livestream of the second day of hearings by the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack.

Samantha Lai shared an episode of TechTalk in which she sat down with David Johns and Christ Wood to discuss how technology concerns surrounding privacy, content moderation, facial recognition, and more shape the online experiences of the LGBTQ+ community.

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