June 28, 2000 – CBS World News Roundup: Late Edition – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
June 28, 2000 – A day to celebrate if you were in Havana. A day of mourning if you were in Miami. Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year old who was orphaned after his mother died while the two were on a boat bound for Florida from Cuba, was finally reunited with his father. The issue; whether Elian should stay in the U.S. or go back to Cuba, sparked an intense debate on whether the boy should be allowed to stay with relatives in Miami or be sent back to this father in Cuba. The Justice Department stepped in and determined the boy should go back to his father. The resulting episode created an uproar, as photos of Elian being taken away by INS Agents made headlines all over the world. And division over whether the boy should have stayed or gone raged on for months after.
Meanwhile, SCOTUS was wrapping up and was busy handing down decisions on numerous cases. One being upholding a ban on admitted homosexuals serving as Boy Scout Troop leaders. The other was striking down a Nebraska law that banned certain Late-term Abortions. The decision told states that if they were going to try and limit Abortions, that had to write their statutes narrowly to distinguish the types of abortions they want to prohibit from those protected under Roe v. Wade. The narrowness of the court decision (5-4) had implications that the issue was far from over and that other challenges would be expected in the future. All it would take to reverse that, and other abortion issues, would be the retiring of one judge and their replacement of a more conservative one under a Republican administration.
All that, and much-much more for this June 28, 2000 as reported by The CBS World News Roundup: Late Edition.
