IDABEL, Okla. – The National Rifle Association called Monday for a boycott of companies that do not allow workers to keep firearms in the cars they park at work.
The boycott will focus most immediately, NRA officials said, on ConocoPhillips, which has sued to block an Oklahoma law that gives residents the right to keep firearms in cars outside their workplaces.
“Across the country, we’re going to make ConocoPhillips the example of what happens when a corporation takes away your Second Amendment rights,” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said.
In a statement, ConocoPhillips said Monday that it supported its workers’ Second Amendment rights.
LaPierre announced the boycott effort in a small town where 12 workers at a nearby Weyerhaeuser paper mill were fired in 2002 after they were found to have locked firearms in cars parked outside the plant.
After the incident, the Oklahoma Legislature approved a measure to prohibit companies from restricting workers’ ability to carry legal firearms in their cars. A series of companies sued to block the law, which remains tied up in court.
D.C.: Novak defends naming agent
Columnist Robert Novak broke his silence Monday about his 2003 disclosure of an undercover CIA operative’s identity, defending himself against former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow’s account that he twice warned Novak not to publish the name. Novak reasserted that no CIA official ever told him in advance “that Valerie Plame Wilson’s disclosure would endanger her or anybody else.”
Nearly 600 netted in gang arrests
Homeland Security investigators arrested 582 alleged gang members over a two-week period in July, officials said Monday, targeting an estimated 80 violent groups they say have spawned street crimes across the country. Authorities picked up most of the offenders on immigration violations for being in the United States illegally. Seventy-six face criminal charges, ranging from illegal possession of a firearm to holding fraudulent documents.
California: Same-sex rights won
Businesses that provide discounts, special services or other privileges to married couples must extend the same rights and benefits to same-sex couples registered as state domestic partners, the California Supreme Court decided 6-0 Monday. The ruling will affect a range of businesses, including banks and mortgage lenders, auto insurers and health clubs. Lenders will have to consider domestic partners’ joint income in making loans, and insurers will have to offer the same multiple-driver discounts they give married couples.
Arkansas: Woodpecker believers
Researchers who last month questioned the existence of the ivory-billed woodpecker, saying blurry videotape of a bird in flight wasn’t enough evidence, have changed their minds after hearing recordings from the wild. Bird experts from a variety of universities, including Yale, had prepared an article for a scientific journal questioning whether the bird, once thought extinct, had really been found in an eastern Arkansas swamp. They now plan to withdraw the article.
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