By Lois Beckett, ProPublica

If you feel unsafe at a public pool in Charleston, W.Va., you may soon have the right to lie there on a towel with a handgun at your side.

For 20 years, Charleston has been an island of modest gun restrictions in a very pro-gun rights state. But its gun laws — including a ban on guns in city parks, pools and recreation centers — are now likely to be rolled back, the latest victory in a long-standing push to deny cities the power to regulate guns.

Since the 1980s, the National Rifle Association and other groups have led a successful campaign to get state legislatures to limit local control over gun regulations. These "preemption" laws block cities from enacting their own gun policies, effectively requiring cities with higher rates of gun violence to have the same gun regulations as smaller towns.

Before 1981, when an Illinois town banned the possession of handguns, just a handful of states had preemption laws on the books. Today, 42 states block cities from making gun laws, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Even Illinois, which has long allowed its cities to pass gun control measures, is about to invalidate local restrictions on concealed handguns and ban any future local regulation of assault weapons.

Gun rights advocates argue that allowing cities to have their own gun laws creates an impossible situation for law-abiding gun owners, who cannot be expected to read ordinances for every town they might pass through.

The preemption campaign has racked up so many victories nationwide, it's now focusing on holdouts like Charleston, population 51,000.

Charleston's current gun restrictions include a three-day waiting period to buy a handgun, and a limit of one handgun purchase per month, as well as bans on guns on publicly owned property, such as parks and pools.

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Good morning, and happy Tuesday. During his recent speech on national security and counterterrorism, Obama introduced The Re-Obamulator, the latest in presidential technology. See what's new in executive power!

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In Appalachia, children are 42 percent more likely to have birth defects if they live near a mountaintop removal coal mine. Citizens are 50 percent more likely to suffer from cancer. This video from Appalachian Voices features children giving the basic lesson that blowing up mountains and dumping the waste in nearby rivers is harming their communities. Share the video and join the campaign to tell President Obama: No more excuses. End Mountaintop Removal. Now.

Anti-capitalist demonstrators from the Blockupy movement paralysed Germany's financial center on Friday, cutting off access to the European Central Bank and Deutsche Bank's headquarters.

Police estimated 1,500 protesters (Blockupy says there were 3,000) against Europe's austerity policies arrived in Frankfurt's financial district on Friday to disrupt business at banking institutions they say are to blame for the deep recession in euro zone countries, such as Spain and Greece.

Reuters:

"Riot police, showered with stones and paint bombs, used pepper spray to prevent the protesters breaking into the ECB. Several protesters were injured and police made some arrests, though they gave no numbers.

"The aim of this blockade is to prevent normal operations at the ECB," said Blockupy spokesman Martin Sommer, adding that some people who had tried to come to work had been sent home by the protesters.

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A fire that broke out early Monday morning in a Chinese slaughterhouse has killed 119, state media reported. There are still some workers unaccounted for, although it’s unclear how many. More than 300 workers were in the plant at the time, and China’s official news agency, Xinhua, reported that about 100 workers had managed to escape. “The complicated interior structure of the prefabricated house in which the fire broke out and the narrow exits have added difficulties to the rescue work,” Xinhua reported, although China’s safety record is infamously abysmal. People took to China’s social-media website Weibo to express their anger, writing things like “was this place ever regularly inspected by fire safety authorities?”

Reuters:

"Victims' relatives gathered outside the building to "demand the government investigate and announce the cause of the accident as soon as possible", Xinhua said.

Hong Kong's Phoenix Television cited family members as saying that the doors were always kept locked during working hours during which workers were forbidden to leave and that the slaughterhouse never carried out fire drills.

China's record is poor. Fire exits in factories are often locked or blocked and regulations can be easily skirted by bribing corrupt officials."

Many of China's most deadly industrial accidents happen in the large coal mining industry, in which more than 1,300 people died last year alone from explosions, mine cave-ins and floods.

Private Bradley Manning, 25, faces his first day on trial Monday -- accused of the largest leak of classified information in U.S. history -- with prosecutors saying his actions aided the enemy.

His charges stem from providing more than 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks, an international, online, non-profit organization which publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. The leak included a video showing an Apache helicopter kill a group of civilians and two Reuters journalists in Iraq.

Manning, who has already admitted to releasing the information to Wikileaks said the move was intended to spark renewed debate on U.S. military action. "I take full responsibility for my actions," he said at the time. "I felt I accomplished something that would allow me to have a clear conscience." But the government says the leaks damaged national security and endangered American lives. He faces a possible life sentence if convicted.

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The three storm chasers killed while tracking a massive twister in Oklahoma died "doing what they loved," Tim Samaras' brother said on his Facebook page Sunday night. A jarring image of the flattened car that they were riding in sheds light on their final moments. Authorities say the truck was "crushed like a tin can...smashed to bits." Close friends of the three -- Tim Samaras, 55, his son Paul Samaras, 24, and Carl Young, 54 -- are blaming the fatal incident on the sudden, deadly left-hand turn made by the twister. Samaras, who had received 18 grants from the National Geographic, founded TWISTEX, a project dedicated to getting more scientific information about twisters.

More at CNN.

Jeremy Scahill's film "Dirty Wars," is opening in Los Angeles on Friday, June 7, and many other cities nationwide.

Dirty Wars follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater, into the heart of America’s covert wars, from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond.

The film won the Cinematography Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Variety says it is "astonishingly hard-hitting" and adds: "This jaw-dropping, persuasively researched pic has the power to pry open government lockboxes."

From the LA Times:

"Though the film tackles complex matters of national security policy, its approach is decidedly personal. In a series of gripping and sobering scenes, Scahill and Rowley bring us face to face with the family of an Afghan police commander whose home in the city of Gardez was erroneously attacked with lethal force by Americans; with Nasser al-Awlaki, an academic and former Fulbright scholar whose American-born son, a radical imam, and 16-year-old grandson were killed in U.S. drone strikes in Yemen; with Somali warlords who have become Washington's proxies in the murky fight against Al Qaeda in Africa.

Scahill goes a step beyond that, foregoing the standard role of detached journalist guide. Instead, he narrates "Dirty Wars" in first person, revealing himself as a character wrung out by his own journey in a moral no man's land. Acknowledging what many war correspondents feel but rarely include in their dispatches, he shares an inner monologue of doubts and dilemmas, both as a reporter and simply as an American.

"When I first visited Gardez, I had no idea where the story would lead," he says in a voice-over. "I didn't know just how much the world had changed, or how much the journey would change me."'

Jeremy is an amazing investigative reporter, and I can't wait to see his first documentary. Hopefully it will be the first of many.

Monday, Monday...

Happy Birthday to Anderson Cooper, Ian Hunter(Mott the Hoople), Suzie Quatro, and Mike Gordon of Phish.

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On Saturday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for an immediate end to the protests that were triggered by government redevelopment plans of a park in Istanbul's Taksim Square.

Via:

Demonstrations to prevent the demolition of a park on Istanbul's Taksim Square, which is due to be replaced with a shopping mall, entered their third day with police using tear gas at the break of dawn. However, the attack seems to have backfired, triggering more participation in the demonstrations during the day, which continued peacefully and festively.

A group of young demonstrators, who spent a third night in Taksim Gezi Park in an effort to halt the controversial demolition, woke up engulfed in huge clouds of tear gas fired by the police at 5 a.m. this morning. One demonstrator was hospitalized after the police’s attack.

The police used the Mass Incident Intervention Vehicle (TOMA) to disperse the demonstrators in the park, before seizing their tents. Some of the tents were burnt in the park, as the demonstrators remonstrated with civilian police officers for burning their tents.

After the police’s attack, the demolition vehicles resumed their work. One demonstrator who lay in front of a vehicle was forcibly removed.

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