“There are already a dozen cases piling up against me,” she said. “I’m a journalist. One murder case is enough to frame me.”

Rupa, a former chief correspondent at privately owned broadcaster Ekattor TV, now faces nine murder cases. Her husband, Shakil Ahmed, the channel’s former head of news, is named in eight.  

A year ago, Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus took charge of Bangladesh’s interim government after Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country following weeks of student-led protests, during which two journalists were killed.

Yunus promised media reform and repealed the Cyber Security Act, a law used to target journalists under Hasina. But in a November 2024 interview with newspaper The Daily Star, Yunus said that murder accusations against journalists were being made hastily. He said the government had since halted such actions and that a committee had been formed to review the cases.

Still, nearly a year later, Rupa, Ahmed, Shyamal Dutta and Mozammel Haque Babu, arrested on accusations of instigating murders in separate cases, remain behind bars. The repeated use of such charges against journalists who are widely seen as sympathetic to the former regime appear to be politically motivated censorship.

In addition to such legal charges, CPJ has documented physical attacks against journalists, threats from political activists, and exile. At least 25 journalists are under investigation for genocide by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal – a charge that has been used to target figures linked to the former Hasina government. 

“Keeping four journalists behind bars without credible evidence a year on undermines the interim government’s stated commitment to protect press freedom,” said CPJ Regional Director Beh Lih Yi. “Real reform means breaking from the past, not replicating its abuses. All political parties must respect journalists’ right to report as the country is set for polls in coming months.”

A CPJ review of legal documents and reports found that journalists are often added to First Information Reports (FIRs) – documents that open an investigation – long after they are filed. In May, UN experts raised concern that over 140 journalists had been charged with murder following last year’s protests.

Shyamal Dutta’s daughter, Shashi, told CPJ the family has lost track of how many cases he now faces. They are aware of at least six murder cases in which he is named, while Babu’s family is aware of 10. Rupa and Ahmed’s family told CPJ that they haven’t received FIRs for five cases in which one or the other journalist has been named, which means that neither can apply for bail.

Shafiqul Alam, Yunus’s press secretary, and police spokesperson Enamul Haque Sagor did not respond to CPJ’s emailed request for comment. 

Violence and threats

In 2025, reporters across Bangladesh have faced violence and harassment while covering political events, with CPJ documenting at least 10 such incidents, most of which were carried out by members or affiliates of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its student wing, Chhatra Dal. In several instances, journalists sustained serious injuries or were prevented from reporting after footage was deleted or phones seized, including Bahar Raihan, Abdullah Al Mahmud, and Rocky Hossain.

Responding to the allegations, Mahdi Amin, adviser to Acting BNP Chair Tarique Rahman, told CPJ that while isolated misconduct may occur in a party of BNP’s size, the party does not protect wrongdoers. 

Others have faced threats from supporters of different political parties and the student groups that led the protests against Hasina. Reporters covering opposition groups like Jamaat-e-Islami or its student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir, have come under particular pressure. On June 9, Hasanat Kamal, editor of EyeNews.news, told CPJ he’d fled to the United Kingdom after being falsely accused by Islami Chhatra Shibir of participating in a violent student protest. Anwar Hossain, a journalist for the local daily Dabanol, told CPJ he’d been threatened by Jamaat supporters after publishing negative reports about a local party leader. 

CPJ reached out via messaging app to Abdus Sattar Sumon, a spokesperson for Jamaat-e-Islami, but received no response.

Since Hasina’s ouster, student protesters from the Anti-Discrimination Students Movement (ADSM) have increasinglytargeted journalists they accuse of supporting the former regime, which in one case led to the firing of five journalists. Student-led mobs have also besieged outlets like Prothom Alo and The Daily Star. 

CPJ reached out via messaging app to ADSM leader Rifat Rashid but received no response.

On July 14, exiled investigative journalist Zulkarnain Saer Khan, who fled Bangladesh after exposing alleged high-level corruption under Hasina and receiving threats from Awami League officials, posted on X about the repression of the media: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Kunal Majumder/CPJ India Representative.

“It is a grave injustice that Sandra Muhoza remains behind bars two months after an appeal court effectively invalidated her earlier trial and conviction,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Muthoki Mumo. “Authorities must do the right thing and release Muhoza without further delay.”

In December 2024, Mukaza High Court, in eastern Bujumbura province, convicted Muhoza of undermining the integrity of Burundi’s national territory and inciting ethnic hatred, in connection with comments she made in a journalists’ WhatsApp group, and sentenced her 21 months in prison.

The Bujumbura Mairie Court of Appeal, in a May 30, 2025judgment reviewed by CPJ, said that it and the lower court lacked the jurisdiction to hear Muhoza’s case. It cited a law on judicial procedures, which stipulates that a defendant should be tried by a court in the region where they were arrested, live, or where the crime was allegedly committed. 

Muhoza was arrested in the northern Ngozi region where she lived. The appeal court ordered that the case be referred to a competent court.

Burundian authorities have previously convicted other journalists for anti-state crimes, such as Floriane Irangabiye, who in 2023 was sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of undermining the integrity of the national territory. She was released in August 2024, following a presidential pardon.

CPJ’s emails to the justice ministry, and text messages to justice minister Domine Banyankimbona, interior ministry spokesperson Pierre Nkurikiye, Prosecutor General’s Office spokesperson Agnès Bagiricenge, and government spokesperson Jérôme Niyonzima did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

New Zealand is lagging behind the rest of the world through its failure to recognise Palestinian statehood, says Former Prime Minister Helen Clark.

Canada yesterday became the latest country to announce it would formally recognise the state of Palestine when world leaders met at the UN General Assembly in September.

It follows recent similar commitments from the France and the United Kingdom.

• READ MORE: What would New Zealand recognising Palestinian statehood mean?
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon suggested the discussion was a distraction and said the immediate focus should be on getting humanitarian aid into Gaza.

But, speaking to RNZ Midday Report, Clark said New Zealand needed to come on board.

“We are watching a catastrophe unfold in Gaza. We’re watching starvation. We’re watching famine conditions for many. Many are using the word genocide,” she said.

“If New Zealand can’t act in these circumstances, when can it act?”

Elders call for recognition
“The Elders, a group of world leaders of which Clark is a part, last month issued a call for countries to recognise the state of Palestine, calling it the “beginning, not the end of a political pathway towards lasting peace”.

Clark said the government seemed to be trying avoid the ire of the United States by waiting until the peace process was well underway or nearing its end.

“That is no longer tenable,” she said.

“New Zealand really is lagging behind.”

Even before the recent commitments from France, Canada and the UK, 147 of the UN’s 193 member states had recognised the Palestinian state.

Clark said the hope was that the series of recognitions from major Western states would first shift the US position and then Israel’s.

“When the US moves, Israel eventually jumps because it owes so much to the United States for the support, financial, military and otherwise,” she said.

“At some point, Israel has to smell the coffee.”

Surprised over Peters
Clark said she was “a little surprised” that Foreign Minister Winston Peters had not been more forward-leaning given he historically had strongly advocated New Zealand’s even-handed position.

On Wednesday, New Zealand signed a joint statement with 14 other countries expressing a willingness to recognise the State of Palestine as a necessary step towards a two-state solution.

However, later speaking in Parliament, Peters said that was conditional on first seeing progress from Palestine, including representative governance, commitment to non-violence, and security guarantees for Israel.

“If we are to recognise the state of Palestine, New Zealand wants to know that what we are recognising is a legitimate, representative, viable, political entity,” Peters told MPs.

Peters also agreed with a contribution from ACT’s Simon Court that recognising the state of Palestine could be viewed as “a reward [to Hamas] for acts of terrorism” if it was done before Hamas had returned hostages or laid down arms.

Luxon earlier told RNZ New Zealand had long supported the eventual recognition of Palestinian statehood, but that the immediate focus should be on getting aid into Gaza rather than “fragmenting and talking about all sorts of other things that are distractions”.

“We need to put the pressure on Israel to get humanitarian assistance unfettered, at scale, at volume, into Gaza,” he told RNZ.

“You can talk about a whole bunch of other things, but for right now, the world needs to focus.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

So what exactly is a heat dome, and why does it last so long? And what gives with all the extra moisture? 

A heat dome is a self-reinforcing machine of misery. It’s a system of high-pressure air, which sinks from a few thousand feet up and compresses as it gets closer to the ground. When molecules in the air have less space, they bump into each other and heat up. “I think about it like a mosh pit,” said Shel Winkley, the weather and climate engagement specialist at the research group Climate Central. “Everybody’s moving around and bumping into each other, and it gets hotter.”

But these soaring temperatures aren’t happening on their own with this heat dome. The high pressure also discourages the formation of clouds, which typically need rising air. “There’s going to be very little in the way of cloudiness, so it’ll be a lot of sunshine which, in turn, will warm the atmosphere even more,” said AccuWeather senior meteorologist Tom Kines. “You’re just kind of trapping that hot air over one part of the country.”

In the beginning, a heat dome evaporates moisture in the soil, which provides a bit of cooling. But then, the evaporation will significantly raise humidity. (A major contributor during this month’s heat dome will be the swaths of corn crops across the central U.S., which could help raise humidity in states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana above that of Florida.) This sort of high pressure system also grabs moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, which evaporate more water the hotter they get. And generally speaking, the warmer the atmosphere becomes, the more moisture it can hold. Once that moisture in the landscape is all gone, more heat accumulates — and more and more. A heat dome, then, essentially feeds off itself, potentially for weeks, a sort of giant blow drier pointed at the landscape. 

On their own, temperatures soaring over 100 are bad enough for human health. Such high humidity makes it even harder for the human body to cool itself, because it’s harder for sweat to evaporate. Hence 100 degrees on the thermometer feeling more like 110. The elderly and very young can’t cool their bodies as efficiently, putting them at higher risk. Those with heart conditions are also vulnerable, because the human body tries to cool itself by pumping more blood. And those with outdoor jobs — construction workers, garbage collectors, delivery drivers on bikes or scooters — have little choice but to toil in the heat, with vanishing few laws to protect them.

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After deadly flash floods, a Texas town takes halting, painful steps toward recovery

Naveena Sadasivam

The humidity effect is especially pronounced in areas whose soils are soaked with recent rainfall, like central Texas, which earlier this month suffered catastrophic flooding. There’s the potential for “compound disasters” here: relief efforts in inundated areas like Kerr County now have to reckon with soaring temperatures as well. The Gulf of Mexico provided the moisture that made the flooding so bad, and now it’s providing additional humidity during the heat dome.

A heat dome gets all the more dangerous the longer it stagnates on the landscape. And unfortunately, climate change is making these sorts of heat waves longer and more intense. According to Climate Central, climate change made this heat dome at least five times more likely. “These temperatures aren’t necessarily impossible, but they’d be very hard to happen without a fingerprint of climate change,” Winkley said.

Summer nights are warming almost twice as fast as summer days, Winkley adds, which makes heat waves all the more dangerous. As this heat dome takes hold, nighttime low temperatures may go up 15 degrees above average. For those without air conditioning — or who can’t afford to run it even if they have AC — their homes will swelter through the night, the time when temperatures are supposed to come down and give respite. Without that, the stress builds and builds, especially for those vulnerable groups. 

“When you look at this heat wave, yes, it is going to be uncomfortable during the day,” Winkley said. “But it’s especially those nighttime temperatures that are the big blinking red light that this is a climate-change-boosted event.”

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

• Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

• Are you affected by the flooding in Texas? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.

• Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The science behind the heat dome — ‘a mosh pit’ of molecules on Jul 22, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

ICE is reportedly racing to build more detention tent camps nationwide after Congress allocated an unprecedented $45 billion in new funding over the next four years to lock up immigrants, as part of Trump’s massive tax and spending package. The Department of Homeland Security is also preparing to start detaining immigrants at more military bases, including in New Jersey and Indiana, as well as to transfer more immigrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to NPR. This comes as the Trump administration is moving to revoke access to bond hearings for people who entered the U.S. through “non-approved channels.” The new policy could potentially impact millions of undocumented people and orders officers to detain immigrants for the length of their removal proceedings — a process which can take months or even years. “This administration is using every tool that it has to target the immigrant community, to scare the immigrant community,” says Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council. Orozco notes that most immigrants will likely never get the chance to fight their case before a judge under Trump’s aggressive deportation policies.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

ICE is reportedly racing to build more detention tent camps nationwide after Congress allocated an unprecedented $45 billion in new funding over the next four years to lock up immigrants, as part of Trump’s massive tax and spending package. The Department of Homeland Security is also preparing to start detaining immigrants at more military bases, including in New Jersey and Indiana, as well as to transfer more immigrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to NPR. This comes as the Trump administration is moving to revoke access to bond hearings for people who entered the U.S. through “non-approved channels.” The new policy could potentially impact millions of undocumented people and orders officers to detain immigrants for the length of their removal proceedings — a process which can take months or even years. “This administration is using every tool that it has to target the immigrant community, to scare the immigrant community,” says Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council. Orozco notes that most immigrants will likely never get the chance to fight their case before a judge under Trump’s aggressive deportation policies.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Since the beginning of its genocidal assault on Gaza twenty-one months ago, the Israeli government has deprived millions of Palestinians of food and other basic necessities for life. Now, amid the widespread starvation that it has created, the Netanyahu government has sidelined the U.N.’s neutral, internationally recognized Gaza-wide system of aid delivery in favor of GHF’s privatized and militarized model, which one U.N. expert describes as a “death trap.” Israeli soldiers were ordered to fire on Palestinians waiting for food, according to a report in Haaretz.

GHF’s system was designed to align with the Israeli’s government stated goal of forcibly displacing Palestinians from the north to the south of Gaza – a war crime under international law. While the UN’s 400 distribution sites largely sit dormant, GHF delivers aid at a handful of sites primarily located in the south. In fact, internal planning documents reveal that people involved in the development of GHF understood the risk that its distribution hubs would force the displacement of Palestinians.

In its FOIA request, the Center for Constitutional Rights seeks records that could reveal whether GHF was also created to further President Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” redevelopment – and ethnic cleansing – plan. The Center of Constitutional Rights has previously joined other human rights and legal organizations in warning that individuals and entities involved in GHF could face legal liability for complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

It is against this backdrop that the State Department approved a $30 million United States Agency for International Development (USAID) grant for GHF, which is chaired by Johnnie Moore, an evangelical preacher who worked in the first Trump administration. GHF has not disclosed information about its funding, yet in announcing the grant, the State Department exempted it from the audit required for groups receiving USAID funds for the first time.

“It is outrageous that rather than investigating GHF and the private military contractors at its distribution hubs for complicity in war crimes, the Trump administration has doubled down in furthering Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by giving GHF tens of millions of dollars,” said, Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Staff Attorney Katherine Gallagher. “The GHF operation raises many concerning questions about U.S. long-term plans for Gaza, and we will use this FOIA to get answers. The United States must stop sending arms and contractors to Gaza, and instead demand that the United Nations be permitted to resume its aid operations until Palestinians can fully return and rebuild a free Gaza.”

With its FOIA request, the Center for Constitutional Rights seeks all relevant records from the State Department and USAID from October 1st, 2024 to present, including information about GHF’s creation, the role of consulting groups like the Boston Consulting Group, its leadership, and financing. The FOIA also seeks information about the U.S. government links to the newly formed private military contractors in Gaza, Safe Reach Solutions (SRS) and UG Solutions.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“It’s the worst-case scenario for a very extreme, very sudden, literal wall of water,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, during a livestream Monday morning. “I don’t think that’s an exaggeration in this case, based on the eyewitness accounts and the science involved.”

It will take some time for scientists to do proper “attribution” studies here, to say for instance how much extra rain they can blame on climate change. But generally speaking, this disaster has climate change’s marks all over it — a perfect storm of conspiring phenomena, both in the atmosphere and on the ground. “To people who are still skeptical that the climate crisis is real, there’s such a clear signal and fingerprint of climate change in this type of event,” said Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

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This tragedy actually started hundreds of miles to the southeast, out at sea. As the planet has warmed, the gulf has gotten several degrees Fahrenheit hotter. That’s turned it into a giant puddle of fuel for hurricanes barreling toward the Gulf Coast, since those storms feed on warm seawater. 

Even when a hurricane isn’t brewing, the gulf is sending more moisture into the atmosphere — think about how your bathroom mirror fogs up when you draw a hot bath. This pushes wet, unstable air higher and higher into the atmosphere, condensing into clouds. As these systems release heat, they grow even more unstable, creating a towering thundercloud that can drop extreme amounts of rainfall. Indeed, preceding the floods, the amount of moisture above Texas was at or above the all-time record for July, according to Swain. “That is fairly extraordinary, in the sense that this is a place that experiences very moist air this time of year,” Swain said. 

That meant the system both had the requisite moisture for torrential rainfall, plus the instability that creates the thunderstorms that make that rain fall very quickly. This storm was dumping two to four inches of rain an hour, and it was moving very slowly, so it essentially stalled over the landscape — a gigantic atmospheric fire hose soaking Central Texas.

Making matters worse, the ground in this part of Texas is loaded with limestone, which doesn’t readily absorb rainwater compared to places with thick layers of soil at the surface. Rainwater rapidly flowed down hills and valleys and gathered in rivers, which is why the Guadalupe rose so fast. “That means that not very much of the rain is going to soak into the ground, partly because the soil is shallow and partly because there’s steep slopes in the terrain, so that water is able to run off fairly quickly,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas’ state climatologist and director of the Southern Regional Climate Center at Texas A&M University

This is exactly the kind of precipitation event that’s increasing fastest in a warming climate, Swain added. In California, for instance, alternating periods of extremely wet conditions and extremely dry ones are creating “weather whiplash.” As the world’s bodies of water heat up, more moisture can evaporate into the atmosphere. And due to some basic physics, the warmer it gets, the more moisture the atmosphere can hold, so there’s more potential for heavier rainfall. 

“The Gulf of Mexico has been going through several marine heat waves recently, and so it’s just adding that much more heat to the atmosphere, loading it up for more extreme rainfall events,” said Brett Anderson, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather. “A lot of these places, 1-in-100-year floods may be becoming more like 1-in-50, even 1-in-10.” AccuWeather’s preliminary estimate puts the economic damage of the flooding at between $18 billion and $22 billion.

The Trump administration did make deep staffing cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration earlier this year, but it’s too early to tell why some people didn’t get warnings in time. The National Weather Service did indeed provide multiple flood warnings, and some people are reporting they got alerts on their cell phones, prompting them to escape. Still, with so many people dead or missing, they either didn’t get the alerts or didn’t adequately understand the danger they were in. Officials in Kerr County previously considered a more robust warning system for Guadalupe River floods, but rejected it as too expensive.

For the girls and staff at the summer camp, the deluge arrived at the worst possible time, in the early hours of the morning while they slept. “In my view — and this seems to be the consensus view of meteorologists — this is not really a failure of meteorology here,” Swain said. “To my eye, the Weather Service predictions, they certainly weren’t perfect, but they were as good as could have been expected given the state of the science.”

Swain warns that if the administration follows through on its promises of further more cuts to NOAA, forecasts of flooding could well suffer. “That really could be catastrophic,” he said. “That will 100 percent be responsible for costing lives.” 

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

• Are you affected by the flooding in Texas and North Carolina? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.
• Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.
• Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The science behind Texas’ catastrophic floods on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

But those who attended this week’s conference in Bonn, which concluded on Thursday, say that negotiators made only halting progress. While diplomats made headway on measures to help countries adapt to the effects of global warming and prepare their workers for the energy transition, they stalled out on two critical issues that could derail negotiations at COP30, this year’s United Nations climate conference in Belém, Brazil, in November. As a result, there is still little clarity on the path to mobilizing $1.3 trillion in climate-related funding for developing nations, a key promise made at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, last year. Countries also failed to move beyond procedural discussions about how to phase out fossil fuels worldwide, in accordance with an agreement made at the climate talks in Dubai nearly two years ago. 

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it. We have a lot more to do before we meet again in Belém,” said Simon Stiell, executive secretary for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body which oversees UN climate talks. “There is so much more work to do to keep 1.5 alive, as science demands,” he added, referring to the landmark goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, itself a result of COP negotiations, to keep planetary warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit compared to preindustrial levels.

As at past climate summits, the key conflicts in Bonn appeared to be about money. In Baku last year, countries were locked in a protracted debate over how much funding richer, developed nations should provide to help poorer, industrializing nations move away from fossil fuels and adapt to climate change. Although researchers estimated that developing countries need trillions of dollars to do so, wealthy nations only committed to $300 billion in transfers per year by 2035. And while the decision in Baku recognized a larger need by calling on rich countries to help raise $1.3 trillion in global climate investment, it provided no specifics on how this will be accomplished. 

In order to develop a pathway to expand and clarify those financial goals, Brazilian and Azerbaijani climate diplomats began an effort to develop what they called the “Baku to Belém roadmap,” a report intended to lay out how rich nations could mobilize the $1.3 trillion in funding. At Bonn, Brazilian officials were expected to begin finding common ground with other countries to make the roadmap a reality. Instead, however, the meeting began with a contentious debate over whether a provision on climate finance from developed to developing countries should be on the agenda at all. The dispute, which suggested that tensions between developed and developing countries over who would pay for climate action and how have only grown, consumed the first two days of the conference. That left little time to discuss the roadmap.

“Countries are quite uncertain about the roadmap, how it’s going to look, and to what extent it will reflect the views of all countries,” said Sandra Guzmán Luna, who has attended every COP since 2008 and is the general director of the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean, a research and advocacy initiative in the region. “There are more doubts about the roadmap than support.”

The uncertainty around finance has ripple effects on the scale of climate ambition that developing nations are willing to display. Countries are required to submit plans for lowering their greenhouse gas emissions — formally called Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs — every five years. Despite a deadline looming later this year, only two dozen or so countries have submitted updated NDCs. Guzmán Luna said that many developing countries are refusing to submit new NDCs with more ambitious climate goals because of a lack of financial support from wealthy nations. Given that rich, early-industrializing countries caused the lion’s share of global warming so far, the argument goes, it’s only fair that they should shoulder most of the burden of financing the energy transition.

“There is a clear political statement from many developing countries that if there is no money, they are not going to increase ambition,” said Guzmán Luna. “It’s a legitimate point from developing countries to say so — but obviously, it’s a huge risk for climate action.”

These disagreements don’t bode well for negotiations at COP30 in Belém, where world leaders will gather amid mounting frustration over a growing pile of unfulfilled promises from previous COPs.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This year’s UN climate talks are already behind — 5 months before COP30 kicks off in Brazil on Jun 27, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rise of Asia.

Several Indian media outlets picked up the story and began reporting on it. Republic Bharat, News24, IndiaTV, and Ahmedabad Mirror published reports claiming that Apple had fired the chief designer behind the Liquid Glass UI and his entire design team, and that this termination happened just a few hours after the official announcement of iOS 26. However, after the story began receiving scrutiny, all the outlets either updated their articles to correct the information or deleted them altogether.

NDTV Profit and Gadget 360 Hindi, both owned by the Adani Group, also published similar stories amplifying the same claims. The report published by NDTV was also republished by MSN.com.

‘Intended as Satire’

Alt News conducted a search of Jon Yongfook’s profiles on X as well as LinkedIn. Upon examining his professional history, we found no confirmation indicating he had ever been employed by Apple. His X profile bio however, clearly states that he is the founder of BannerBear, which is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform for the automatic generation of images, social media visuals, ecommerce banners and more. Furthermore, according to the job history listed on his LinkedIn profile, Yongfook is a former employee of Aviva.

In addition, Yongfook later posted a clarification on his X account in a follow-up tweet. He explained that his original post had been intended as satire. He wrote, “I have been an Apple user for more than 20 years, this is the worst UI I have seen, I hope Apple will make some changes to it.”

Bless all of you who recognized this as satire. I’ve been enjoying the puns. I’ve been an Apple user for 20+ years, this is the worst UI I’ve seen, I hope they tweak it.

To be perfectly transparent, this is overwhelming my notifications now, so I’m putting the thread on mute

— Jon Yongfook (@yongfook) June 10, 2025

To sum up, X user Jon Yongfook is not an Apple employee but rather an Apple user who posted a satirical comment on social media. The post was amplified as ‘news’ by several media outlets including Republic Bharat, NDTV Group, and News24 seemingly without any verification. These outlets falsely reported that Apple had fired the lead designer and the team behind Liquid Glass UI.

The post Indian media picked up Apple user’s satiric tweet, ‘reported’ team behind newly launched UI had been fired appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Pawan Kumar.

The post Behind Bars and Binaries: Music, Identity, and the Fight for Liberation appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

It’s a shame, though, because in this hypothetical, decaffeinated coffee is in high demand. People will pay a premium for bags of 100 percent decaf coffee. So instead of labeling each bag as a 10/90 blend of decaf/caffeinated coffee, you decide to label 90 bags as regular, fully caffeinated coffee beans, and the remaining 10 as “100 percent decaf.” You can now charge much more for those “decaf” bags.

It’s a misleading strategy, at best, and one that could cause rioting among coffee drinkers. But it’s not just a thought experiment. Plastic companies are using an even more convoluted version of this accounting technique in order to make it seem that their products have more recycled content than they really do.

Mondelez, the owner of snack food brands like Chips Ahoy, Clif, Oreo, and Ritz, announced last September it would use this system, known as “mass balance,” for its North American Triscuit packaging. According to a press release, up to 50 percent of the plastic in the cracker boxes’ inner bags would be “sourced from advanced recycling technology” and provided by two of the companies in Mondelez’s supply chain, the plastics maker Berry and the chemical company LyondellBasell. 

Mondelez hasn’t labeled its Triscuit packaging with these recycled content claims. But the company said the plan would contribute to its overall goal of achieving 5 percent recycled plastic content by the end of 2025, and that it would ease consumer guilt. “Triscuit fans can snack easier knowing that the brand is playing a role in helping reduce plastic waste,” Mondelez said.

Independent and government watchdogs, however, aren’t as keen on mass balance. Last year, two dozen environmental organizations sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission arguing that it was “not based on scientific facts or operational engineering evidence.” They drew an analogy similar to the decaf coffee one outlined above. The California attorney general’s office recently called mass balance a “false and misleading marketing scheme,” and the accounting system was rejected last August by the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, which had considered whether to allow it to be used in products labeled with its “Safer Choice” logo. Now, mass balance has made Mondelez the target of a shareholder resolution demanding that the company substantiate its recycled content claims. 

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Joseph Winters

“This is just a bogus scheme,” said Jan Dell, a chemical engineer and founder of the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup, who owns Mondelez stock and filed the resolution. “As a shareholder, I’m very upset that they’re spending corporate funds on this — just return that money to me as a dividend. Don’t waste it on a PR stunt that’s actually going to cause you legal liability.”

To understand mass balance, you first have to understand “advanced recycling.” Also known as chemical recycling, the term refers to a suite of recycling methods that use high heat and pressure to convert plastics into their chemical building blocks. The most common method, pyrolysis, produces a kind of oil that, after further refinement, can theoretically be turned into plastic consumer goods.

Pyrolysis represents an opportunity for the plastics industry to save face in light of its widely reported failure to recycle more than 9 percent of the world’s plastic waste via conventional methods. Instead of addressing plastic pollution by making less plastic, companies are trying to restore consumer confidence in the idea of recycling by promoting this supposedly cutting-edge type of reprocessing, which they say can handle mixed plastic waste and “hard-to-recycle” items like snack food wrappers and grocery bags. 

But actually creating new products from pyrolysis has proven to be a major challenge. 

The first problem is that there aren’t very many pyrolysis facilities in operation, so there isn’t much pyrolysis oil available. Furthermore — and this is the more central problem for recycled content claims — it isn’t possible to convert pure pyrolysis oil directly into new plastic. It first has to be separated into a derivative called naphtha, which, due to contamination from additives in the used plastic it was made from, has to be diluted with cleaner naphtha from virgin fossil fuels. Only then can the naphtha mixture go through a “steam cracker” to extract the chemical bases needed for new plastic pellets.

This process is so complicated and expensive, said Andrew Rollinson, a chemical engineering consultant, that most pyrolysis oil is turned into fuels that can be burned for energy. “Often it’s burned because it’s no good for anything else,” he said. 

The need to dilute pyrolysis-derived naphtha means that any products claiming to contain “chemically recycled” plastic necessarily have a lot of virgin plastic in them too. The ratio is at most 10 percent recycled to 90 percent virgin content, according to one investigation from ProPublica. Rollinson said the actual number for plastic consumer goods may be less than 1 percent.

Read Next

‘Plastics are awesome’: Inside the Energy Department’s partnership with the plastics industry

Joseph Winters & Emily Sanders

Those figures mean that, using normal accounting methods, companies would only be able to claim their products are made from 10 percent or less recycled content. They’d rather say a higher number, since it makes their products look more environmentally friendly. Surveys suggest that consumers are more likely to buy — and pay more for — products that appear sustainable.

This is where mass balance comes in. Instead of keeping track of exactly where recycled naphtha goes, what it’s diluted with, and so on, the owner of a plastics facility only has to write down the amount of pyrolysis oil it started out with. This oil was made from some amount of plastic waste, which can be translated into recycled content credits or certificates — pieces of paper or cells on a spreadsheet.

Using an accounting method called “free allocation,” a plastics company can attribute these certificates to any of its finished products, regardless of the amount of pyrolysis oil that was actually used to make them. Maybe it decided to turn all of its pyrolysis oil into fuels and lubricants while continuing to make plastic from 100 percent virgin fossil fuels. It could still decide to move the credits over to a portion of that plastic and say that 40 percent, 50 percent, or 90 percent is recycled.

Renée Sharp, director of plastics and petrochemical advocacy at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, called this a “deceptive greenwashing scheme” because it allows companies to say that their products contain more recycled content than they actually do.

It’s actually more extreme than the coffee example, Sharp argued. Even though it’s misleading to claim bags of coffee have more or fewer decaf beans than they really do, at least all the coffee beans are used to make a coffee blend, and not burned to generate energy. “Recycled” plastic associated with pyrolysis via the free-allocation approach may not actually be linked to any genuinely recycled content at all, if pyrolysis oil is exclusively burned or turned into waxes, lubricants, and other byproducts.

In those cases, “That ‘recycled’ plastic does not exist anywhere,” Sharp said. “The industry is trying to obscure what they’re actually doing.”

Read Next

Plastics companies know about chemical recycling’s shortcomings — but still sell it as a solution

Joseph Winters

There is a lot of uncertainty around Mondelez’s use of mass balance, and neither Mondelez nor Berry, one of the two companies it’s working with, responded to multiple requests for comment. LyondellBasell, the other company named in Mondelez’s press release, declined to comment.

Dell, who used to work with large plastic-producing companies, believes LyondellBasell is buying pyrolysis oil and mixing it with the large amount of virgin stuff it already processes into plastics, fuels, and other products. Then LyondellBesell may be transferring credits generated by the pyrolysis oil to Mondelez, via Berry.

“The same plastic continues to be sold, but now they’re just handing out a certificate to say, ‘You get credit for all that pyrolysis oil,’” Dell said. The claim that 50 percent of Triscuit packaging will be sourced from chemical recycling suggests that the companies are using free allocation, she said, because it is “technically impossible” to incorporate this much chemically recycled plastic into a particular product. 

Her shareholder proposal against Mondelez claims that the purchase of chemically recycled plastic linked to mass balance creates legal and financial risks while doing “nothing to help the environment.” She estimates that Mondelez is spending around $2,000 per ton of plastic tied to mass balance, based on an analysis from the consulting firm McKinsey, compared to around $1,300 a ton for virgin plastic. The proposal requests that Mondelez issue a report by the end of the year “including the factual basis for legitimacy of all recycled content claims made on plastic packaging.”

In a written response to the shareholder proposal, Mondelez’s board of directors affirmed its commitment to a “more circular economy for packaging” and said their company has policies to help ensure that marketing claims “are not misleading to consumers in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.” 

The board said a report substantiating its recycled content claims, as requested by the proposal, “would not provide shareholders with additional meaningful information” and that it would divert time and expenses from its current efforts. Mondelez shareholders are scheduled to vote on the resolution in mid-May. 

The International Sustainability and Carbon Certification, or ISCC, an industry-affiliated standard-setter for the use of mass balance, has lent its imprimatur to Mondelez’s recycled content claims. Facilities owned by Berry and LyondellBasell have been approved to use the mass balance approach developed by the organization, allowing Mondelez to claim that its Triscuits packaging is ISCC certified. A spokesperson for the ISCC said it sets “strict requirements to ensure transparency” regarding the use of mass balance-based marketing claims. It encourages the companies it works with — which also include Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Chevron Phillips Chemical — to provide information to consumers explaining the mass balance approach.

Peter Blair, policy and advocacy director for the environmental nonprofit Just Zero, doesn’t think efforts like these are sufficient. “When we’re talking about accuracy, there’s not really room for mass balance,” he said. And while plastics trade groups are lobbying for the accounting system, including at the federal level, at least some actors within the industry have called for caution. At an industry conference in 2023, an executive from the toy company Lego warned that mass balance claims could lead to accusations of greenwashing. The Association of Plastic Recyclers — an industry group that focuses on mechanical, rather than chemical, recycling — raised similar concerns, drawing on results from a 16,000-person survey in 2021 in which it found that “virtually no adults” know what mass balance means.

Dell hopes her proposal will spur Mondelez to rethink its strategy on sustainable packaging. “They should focus on investment in paper-ification,” she said, referring to the replacement of plastic with paper packaging. Lots of consumer goods companies are already pursuing this strategy, for everything from candy bar wrappers to tissue packs to coffee bags.

The other important strategy she endorsed: reducing the amount of material used to package any given product. Mondelez did this last September when it announced a new type of packaging for its Lu cookies in parts of Europe. The company said the new packaging would reduce the need for virgin plastic by 63 percent per package.

“This is what authentic, honest progress on packaging looks like,” Dell said in an email to Mondelez at the time.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The misleading accounting behind your ‘recycled’ plastic on May 12, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

Patrick Guarasci, chief political strategist for Judge Crawford, and Sam Roecker, senior campaign advisor and communications lead, share how they pulled off a landmark win in Wisconsin’s pivotal Supreme Court race, offering a blueprint for reclaiming power in GOP-dominated states.

In Wisconsin, the land of cheese, beer, and GOP ratf*cking, progressives scored a major victory. And they did it despite daunting odds, including opposition from none other than the world’s richest man/psychopath. When Musk is not launching cars into space or tweeting himself into SEC investigations, he has been throwing his weight, and giant checks, behind efforts to tilt the judiciary in his favor.

Judge Crawford's campaign wasn’t about crypto hype or culture war distractions; it was about qualifications, a smart strategy, and staying laser-focused on issues people actually care about: reproductive rights, fair electoral maps, and keeping the courts independent.

This wasn’t just a Wisconsin win. It was a blueprint for how to beat big money with big people power. Students, first-time voters, and folks who typically only turn out for Packers games showed up in force. The lesson? When campaigns speak to real concerns and mobilize communities, they can overcome even the deepest pockets. Senator Ron Johnson, MAGA/Russia loyalist and 2028 re-election hopeful, might want to start updating his résumé.

Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION:

• April 28 4pm ET – Book club discussion of Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower  

• Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon. 

• Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, available on Patreon. 

• Have you taken Gaslit Nation’s HyperNormalization Survey Yet?

• Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and the first ~40 minutes are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community 

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

China is one of the world’s largest consumer markets, and its thriving industrial ecosystem and broad application scenarios provide crucial momentum for continuous innovation for many American companies like Nvidia. As Huang put it, in-depth cooperation with Chinese companies has enabled it to evolve into an even more competitive international enterprise. Previously, some US business leaders also noted that they don’t need to hitch a ride with the US government, they need the government to clear the path for us. The importance and urgency of cooperation with China have “unexpectedly” been highlighted against the backdrop of the US’ reckless imposition of tariffs.

Not just in the tech and business industry, the call for “We need China” has recently spread across various sectors of American society. A recent poll by Pew Research Center also revealed surprising results. The survey showed that fewer and fewer Americans now view China as an enemy, with significant year-over-year decline in the share of Americans with an unfavorable view of China over the past five years. Bloomberg described this as “a sentiment that runs counter to the tariff,” calling the finding “surprising.” Moreover, on overseas social platforms like TikTok, Chinese e-commerce has unexpectedly risen to prominence, sparking a new wave of “Made in China” enthusiasm among US consumers. Many influencers have posted unboxing videos of products bought from Chinese e-commerce platforms, exclaiming that they can get the same quality items for just a tenth of the price.

Despite Washington frequently having sent signals of confrontation, which has pushed China-US economic relations to the brink, American society is not in favor of a zero-sum game between the two countries. Pew’s survey results, to some extent, puncture the bubble of the so-called tariff policies inflated by Washington. Relevant approach has not reflected public opinion in the US, but instead oversimplifies the complexity and multifaceted nature of the bilateral relationship, turning it into a full-scale confrontation. Washington’s abuse of tariffs ignores the high degree of economic complementarity between the two countries and the practical needs of their people, creating chaos and uncertainty for both the US and the global economy – something the American public is feeling firsthand.

Those who are “surprised” by public opinion should reflect on what exactly is American public’s attitude toward China, and who is “influencing” Americans’ perceptions of China. Over the past few years, the so-called “China threat” has almost become the default opening line for politicians when discussing China, and the attitudes of some members of the public have also been affected. “China is taking advantage of the US,” “the US must get the trade imbalance fixed,” and “pursuing economic containment of China to achieve ‘America First'” – this is the outdated logic behind Washington’s so-called tariff policies toward China.

China-US economic and trade cooperation has brought enormous economic benefits to both sides, and the US has benefited just as much as China. The US imports a large volume of consumer goods, intermediate goods, and capital goods from China, supporting the development of its manufacturing supply chains and industrial chains, enriching consumer choices, lowering the cost of living, and improving the real purchasing power of the American public, especially for middle- and lower-income groups. When taking into account goods trade, services trade, and the local sales revenue of domestic enterprises operating in each other’s countries, the economic gains from China-US trade are roughly balanced. These facts cannot be concealed by lies or slander; in fact, the more China-US economic and trade relations come under strain, the more likely these truths are to resonate within the US.

Gavin Newsom, governor of California, recently announced plans to sue the US federal government over its abuse of tariff policies, stating, “We’re standing up for American families who can’t afford to let the chaos continue.”

The hope of the China-US relationship lies in the people, its foundation is in the two societies, its future depends on the youth, and its vitality comes from exchanges at subnational levels. According to the public opinion survey conducted by the Global Times Institute (GTI) on “mutual perceptions between China and the US” in 2024, around 90 percent of respondents from both China and the US express concern over bilateral relations, with mainstream public opinion in both countries favoring strengthened economic and trade exchanges, people-to-people exchanges, and cooperation on climate change.

The phenomenal grassroots interactions between Americans and Chinese on social media recently also reflect that, beneath the anti-China clamor stirred up by some Washington politicians, there remains a strong, constructive desire among the people of both nations for peaceful coexistence and cooperative engagement. If the US continues to go its own way, pressing China with tariff blackmail and inciting for China-US “decoupling,” the growing opposition from their voters may become a political reality that Washington can no longer ignore.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Global Times.

Image by Phạm Nhật.

Recall those feverish days leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq when Colin Powell presented his dubious evidence to the United Nations Security Council, claiming Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs. The result of those bogus lies was The Iraq Resolution, which authorized the use of force against the sovereign state, and passed the Senate by a decisive 77-23 margin, with only 23 dissenting votes. Support crossed party lines as Hillary Clinton and many other prominent Democrats consistently reached into George W. Bush’s basket of lies, repeating the neocons’ WMD propaganda. The New York Times, fulfilling its usual perfunctory role, ran Judith Miller’s series of bogus articles parroting the same falsehoods. Outrage grew, and we took to the streets as the U.S. invasion loomed.

Today, I have the same sense of helplessness each time Israel is engulfed in yet another murderous deception, which warmakers spread through a compliant mainstream press. Much like their selling of the Iraq war, The New York Times relentlessly publishes pieces reiterating Israel’s rationale for bombing hospitals and promoting the (now thoroughly debunked) allegations of mass sexual assault, which have been used to depict all Palestinians as savages deserving of execution. The New York Times often qualifies its errors with caveats but rarely admits fault. Democrats still vote against halting arms shipments to war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, knowing it will likely harm innocent children in Gaza. History repeats, and mothers weep.

In March 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we were still adapting to the emerging digital media landscape. There were no smartphones, TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram. While information was accessible, distribution was limited to email lists and message boards. Independent outlets like CounterPunch, TomDispatch, and Antiwar.com were trailblazing radical journalism, countering the tide of pro-war disinformation from mainstream sources.

Consider YellowTimes.org, a prominent alternative to The New York Times before the Iraq War. Shortly after the U.S. military arrived in Iraq, their server was suspended for posting screenshots from Al Jazeera of dead U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians. The outrage stemmed not from dead Iraqis but from the sight of lifeless troops, victims of the Bush administration’s deceit.

“No TV station in the US is allowing dead US soldiers of POWs to be displayed and we will not either. We understand free press and all that but we don’t want someone’s family member to see them on some site. It is disrespectful, tacky and disgusting,” read an email to Yellow Times editor Erich Marquardt from the site’s Florida-based server provider, VortechHosting.

YellowTimes was finished, never to return. While their decision to publish graphic war photos might have smacked of poor taste, there was nothing illegal about publishing gruesome war photos. The blatant suppression of the YellowTimes, along with the mainstream media’s unwillingness to question the government’s WMD narrative, would have disastrous consequences. Over the next eight years, nearly 500,000 excess deaths would be attributed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, including 4,419 U.S. service members, and mainstream media outlets would be disseminating the majority of the reporting.

First They Came for the Students

In March, nearly 22 years to the day since YellowTimes was taken down, a video captured six plainclothes ICE agents apprehending Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk on the streets near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts. As widely reported, Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar, was in the country on a student visa, concluding a PhD program in Child Study and Human Development. The disturbing video footage provides a bird’s eye view of the authoritarian overreach we are experiencing, highlighting the intensification of Trump’s efforts to suppress pro-Palestine activism and a broader assault on press freedom.

Like Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University, and others who’ve been arrested in recent weeks, Öztürk had not been accused of breaking any laws; she had merely co-written an op-ed for the student newspaper urging Tufts’ President Sunil Kumar to recognize resolutions passed by the student senate, which included a call for the university to disclose and divest from companies with ties to Israel.

“These resolutions were the product of meaningful debate by the Senate and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law,” Öztürk and her co-authors wrote. “Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.”

Öztürk’s arrest by ICE and the threat of deportation represent an escalation. The ICE abduction of Öztürk was a draconian strategy intended to dissuade others, especially those on student visas, from expressing similar empathy for Palestinian suffering. As of April 10, a total of 600 student visas have been revoked in the United States, with most citing pro-Palestine activism.

Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine protests at universities like Columbia—and the threat to withhold $400 million in federal funding–is an escalation of a bipartisan effort to silence pro-Palestinian voices. While President Biden spoke against alleged anti-Semitism, he only weakly addressed the violence directed at pro-Palestine encampments last year, which drew criticism.

“Rather than addressing the sources of violence and heeding calls for immediate federal action to protect student activists and uphold their rights to free expression and assembly, President Biden has misplaced the blame on the peaceful student activists,” wrote American Muslims for Palestine in a May 2024 statement. “Doing so sets a dangerous precedent for students across the United States, making them open targets for attacks by police, administrators, and extremist Zionist groups.”

It was Biden’s dangerous precedent that set the stage for Trump’s escalating attacks on those speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Students on visas in the country have been an easy target, but these ICE arrests may only signal the beginning of what’s to come. The press, especially media outlets that expose Israel’s genocide, are likely to be next.

The Case of the Alleged Hamas Freelancer

Ramzy Baroud, one of CounterPunch’s popular contributors, was born in a Gaza refugee camp and now resides in the U.S. His early life in the refugee camps gave him a profound understanding of his people’s struggle for liberation. A prolific journalist and author, Ramzy also serves as the editor of the Palestine Chronicle, one of the first English-language Palestinian media sources on the internet, which has been active since 1999.. Last October, his sister, Dr. Soma Baroud, was assassinated by the Israeli Defense Forces when a missile struck her vehicle. Her crime? Being a doctor in Gaza. At that time, she was one of over 1,000 healthcare workers killed by Israel.

Ramzy clearly explains why his sister, like many others, was targeted. We recently had him discuss it on our CounterPunch Radio podcast.

“ [Israel knows] the importance of our women in our society. They know the significance of doctors in our society, especially doctors who play more than the role of just someone who heals wounds and helps people at hospitals,” Ramzy explained. “Doctors who also serve the role of community leaders. And she really was a [leader] … So it’s kind of layers of devastation. I think the family is still unable to understand fully or to come to terms with the emotional loss just because the loss is never really stopped and there is just no time to even reflect in any profound or deep way about all of this.”

While Ramzy’s sister was targeted in Gaza, the non-profit Palestine Chronicle has also faced attacks. Last July, The New York Times published an article about a former Israeli hostage in Gaza named Andrey Kozlov, who had been held captive by Hamas fighters for six excruciating months after being kidnapped. Kozlov claimed that one of his captors, Abdallah Aljamal, was moonlighting as a journalist for the Palestine Chronicle. This accusation was repeated by Almog Meir Jan, who had been abducted along with Kozlov and another Israeli named Shlomi Ziv at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023.

Aljamal was killed in a massacre at the Nuseirat refugee camp in June 2024. He was 37 years old. Israel has provided no evidence that Aljamal, a well-known Palestinian journalist, was ever a member of Hamas, participated in the October 7 attacks, or held Israeli hostages. However, as we know, Israel doesn’t require evidence to commit war crimes, including the murder of journalists. Aljamal wasn’t the only contributor to the Palestine Chronicle who Israel killed; notable journalists Wafa Al-Udani and Yousef Dawas were also targeted, among the over 175 media workers killed by Israel during its onslaught on Gaza.

In July 2024, Almond Meir Jan, one of the Israeli hostages, filed a lawsuit against the Palestine Chronicle, claiming that, by publishing Aljama, they had provided “material support” for a “designated foreign terrorist organization.” The suit was later dismissed for lack of evidence that Baroud’s media project was in any way connected to Hamas.

U.S. District Court Judge Tiffany Cartwright stated in her ruling, “Many of the positions taken by the Chronicle, such as highlighting the deaths of Palestinian civilians and criticizing Israeli airstrikes, have been echoed by countless news organizations, protesters, and political leaders around the world … These articles do not cross the line from protected speech to inciting or preparing for unlawful activity. Nothing in the complaint alleges that Defendants advocated for, incited, or planned specific human rights violations.”

For its part, the Palestine Chronicle denied having knowledge of any ties between Aljama and Hamas, noting that he was an unpaid freelancer and not a staff writer. Additionally, they stated in their response to Jan’s lawsuit that “Defendants do not contest that the underlying torts committed against Jan by Aljamal and Hamas—the kidnapping and imprisonment of a civilian hostage—are international human rights violations.”

Following the death of Ramzy’s sister last October, Almond Meir Jan and Shlomi Ziv filed another lawsuit against the Palestine Chronicle, submitting a similar complaint that by publishing Abdallah Aljamal, they were providing “material support” for terrorism. This suit is supported by the National Jewish Advocacy Center, led by Mark Goldfeder, who argues that he perceives anti-Zionist activism as inherently antisemitic. The organization has filed similar lawsuits against other media outlets, including the Associated Press, for their reporting on the October 7 attacks.

“ [Trump] wants to silence dissent in the United States, and there’s been a major war on Palestinian voices and pro-Palestinian voices, [anyone] who dares stand up for the Palestinian people,” Ramzy Baroud told CounterPunch Radio. “For many Americans, what is happening [to] Mahmoud Khalil … [is] not igniting the kind of attention that it really should be igniting … [Next we] are going to see attacks on American citizens under various guises. The Espionage Act of this and that. The Israelis have done it … I feel like the Americans are following that trajectory.”

The lawsuits targeting the Palestine Chronicle are not standalone incidents; they form part of a larger strategy involving widespread visa cancellations and, illustrated by Rümeysa Öztürk’s case, a repression of student journalism aimed at silencing those seen as threatening U.S. interests. Consider the fate of YellowTimes during the Iraq War, now intensified many times over. A fresh wave of McCarthyism is resurfacing, energized by Donald Trump.

The Media as Terrorist Enablers

Palestine supporters have faced various forms of censorship since October 7, including significant collaboration between Israel and Meta to eliminate anti-genocide content from their Facebook and Instagram platforms. Additionally, Meta has radically adjusted its algorithms to shadow ban posts criticizing Israel. In a 2023 report, Human Rights Watch described Meta’s assault on free speech as “systemic and global.”

In June 2024, former Meta engineer Ferras Hamad filed a lawsuit against Meta, claiming he was wrongfully terminated for attempting to undo a program used to suppress content related to Palestine.

These well-documented actions have affected not only personal accounts but also media outlets. And it’s not just Meta. The New York Times, seemingly acting on behalf of the State Department, has done its best to discredit journalists like Vijay Prashad, peace organizations like CODEPINK, and others, suggesting they are pawns of the Chinese Communist Party (a claim they openly deny). The Times’ questionable reporting has led conservative lawmakers to urge Attorney General Pamela Bondi to investigate the situation in hopes of shutting them down. Our own podcast, CounterPunch Radio, had an episode discussing the October 7 attacks with investigative journalist Arun Gupta removed twice, without notice, by our hosting service Blubrry. While these various attempts at censorship might seem disparate, collectively they signify a deliberate assault on media free speech.

The U.S. government has stepped up its legislative efforts against non-profit media, viewing it as detrimental to its foreign policy goals. In November 2024, HR 9495, referred to as the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, was approved with a vote of 219-184. This legislation allows the Treasury Department to strip the tax-exempt status of any non-profit organization it classifies as a “terrorist-supporting organization.” Full authority would be granted to Treasury officials, bypassing due process. While the bill has stalled in the Senate, it could be brought back at any moment and, with considerable Democratic support, might find an easier route to the President’s desk. The act would first target organizations that oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

This legislation is not an isolated act but a continuation of the government’s crackdown on voices it finds uncomfortable–a ruthless campaign that dates back to the  Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which laid the foundation for the PATRIOT Act, enacted after the 9/11 attacks. What we are experiencing now is an extension of these policies. The plan is to expand the government’s authority to curtail free speech. Under the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, journalists and whistleblowers could face prosecution. Additionally, Project Esther—developed by the same goons behind Project 2025—outlines a strategy to categorize all pro-Palestine protests as anti-Semitic and supportive of Hamas. This sinister initiative, as exposed by Mondoweiss last year, also advocates for the removal of pro-Palestine students and professors from universities.

“As the more notorious U.S. policies of the post-9/11 era … fade from public memory, these older antiterrorism laws have been normalized as a comparatively liberal baseline, their structurally anti-Palestinian character having been obscured in the meantime,” writes Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights in a 2024 report. “The most important of these has been the statute criminalizing ‘material support’ for terrorist organizations, the most commonly charged federal antiterrorism offense … As in prior moments of crisis, the same Zionist organizations that pushed for expanded antiterrorism laws – most no- tably the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – now brazenly tar all advocacy of Palestinian liberation as support for terrorism.”

Frederick Douglass once stated, “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.”

Douglass recognized that it’s our responsibility to resist censorship in all its forms. This begins by speaking out and supporting radical, independent media. Because, no matter how hard the tyrants try, they’ll never silence us all.

The post Media Censorship in the Age of Palestinian Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.

Last week, President Trump escalated his administration’s war on the federal workforce and workers’ rights when he signed an executive order to end collective bargaining with federal labor unions across the government. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 government employees, has sued the Trump administration over the executive order.

In response to these intensifying assaults on federal workers, agencies, and critical programs like Social Security, unions, social justice and community organizations, veterans groups, and people of conscience will be participating in protest actions in locales across the US on Saturday, April 5. In this episode, we speak with James Jones, a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service, a veteran, and a member of the Federal Unionists Network, to get a firsthand account of the Trump administration’s attacks on federal workers, agencies, and the people who depend on their services.

Additional links/info:

• Federal Unionists Network website
• Indivisible website
• “Hands Off!” National Day of Action (April 5) website
• Joe DeManuelle-Hall, Labor Notes, “Trump Goes Nuclear on the Federal Workforce”
• Tyler Pager, The New York Times, “Trump Moves to End Union Protections Across Broad Swath of Government”
• Daniel Weissner, Reuters, “Union Sues to Block Trump from Ending Collective Bargaining for Many federal workers”
• Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica, “Curious How Trump’s Cost Cutting Could Affect Your National Park Visit? You Might Not Get a Straight Answer”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘It’s not Elon versus government, it’s Elon versus everyone’: A dire warning from fired federal workers”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximilian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’ll be hosting new episodes this month and my co-host Mel er, will be hosting again in May. Today. We continue our coverage of the Trump Musk administration’s all out assault on federal workers in the United States Constitution and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. In the last episode that I hosted at the end of February, I spoke with current and illegally fired employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the CFPB, as well as the USDA Agricultural Research Service, and we spoke in that episode about what was then a newly launched assault on federal workers, government agencies, and the people who depend on them by President Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, and the unelected head of the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge Musk has been granted immense power to cut government agencies and their federal workforce and unprecedented access to sensitive government and citizen data.

Now that assault has continued, it’s hard to sum up the scale and scope of the damage that Trump and Musk are wrecking upon our government and our government workers and contractors right now, all ostensibly in the name of increasing efficiency and rooting out so-called wokeness. But to give you a sense at the top of the show, here’s the latest report from Newsweek. Tens of thousands of job losses have been announced across numerous federal agencies. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it will eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a major restructuring plan. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research office and could fire more than a thousand scientists and other employees according to the Associated Press. It has also been reported that the Internal Revenue Service or IRS plans to lose about 18,000 employees, about 20% of its workforce.

Meanwhile, former postmaster General Lewis DeJoy told Congress that 10,000 workers at the United States Postal Service would be cut. The Department of Education has announced plans to lay off more than 1300 employees while the Department of Veterans Affairs is planning a reorganization that includes cutting 80,000 jobs. According to an internal memo obtained by the AP in March, the Pentagon reportedly plans to cut its civilian workforce by about 50,000 to 60,000 people. At least 24,000 probationary workers have been terminated since Trump took office, according to a lawsuit filed by nearly 20 states alleging the mass firings are illegal. In March two, federal judges ordered 19 federal agencies to reinstate fired probationary workers. Meanwhile, about 75,000 federal workers accepted the offer to quit in return for receiving pay and benefits. Until September 30th and last week, president Trump escalated his war on the federal workforce when he signed an executive order to end collective bargaining with federal labor unions and agencies with national security missions across the federal government citing authority granted to Trump under a 1978 law.

And as the AP reports affected, agencies could include the Department of State Defense, veterans Affairs, energy, health and Human Services, the Treasury, justice and Commerce, and the part of Homeland Security responsible for border security. Now, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 government employees, has already sued the Trump administration over the executive order to end collective bargaining across the federal workforce. In response to these attacks, union’s, social justice and community organizations, veterans groups and people of conscience around the country are also showing up to local and national protest actions. They’re showing up to town halls with elected officials and making their voices heard, signing petitions and writing letters to their representatives. And one such engaged group includes the Federal Unionist Network, an informal association of federal unionists and their allies on their website. The Federal Unionist Network say plainly that Elon Musk is trying to steal the federal government slashing public services, firing essential workers, and handing power to billionaires like himself.

It’s illegal, it’s dangerous, and we won’t stand for it. Through a mass action campaign, federal workers and community supporters will challenge every illegitimate and unjustified layoff. Instead of letting Musk steal their jobs, they’ll show up for duty with a clear message. Let me work. I serve the American people, not the richest man on earth who nobody elected to be my boss. To get an inside view of the Trump Musk administration’s attacks on the federal government and the federal workforce and why you and every working person should care about it, and to talk about who’s fighting back, how they’re fighting back, and what people can do to get involved. I’m honored to be joined today by James Jones. James is a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service based in North Carolina. He’s a veteran and a member of the Federal Unionist Network. James, thank you so much for joining us today on the show. Man, I really appreciate it.

James Jones:

Hey, it’s my pleasure, max. Thanks for inviting me.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, it’s an honor to be connected to you, although of course, I wish we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances, which we’re going to dig into over the next 50 minutes. But I wanted to just start here at the top, just getting your response to all this, especially since we’re talking just days after Trump’s executive order to end collective bargaining rights for workers like yourself across the federal government.

James Jones:

Well, I think as far as my union, I’m an A FG member with local 4 4 6 out of Asheville, North Carolina. I live in Boone. We expected a lot to happen from Trump’s first term. He did things to attack our union the first time, and we expected him to do it again, albeit maybe not on this level, but I think maybe some people at the national level of a FG would probably, they probably counted on what was going to happen even with some of the atrocious things he’s done already, a FG and my local both. We’ve been fighting a FG national, they’ve sued the Trump administration over several of these illegal acts he’s done after he came on after his inauguration, like firing a bunch of probationary workers and some other things. And the courts have sided with the unions a FG, especially over some of these illegal acts.

And I think if you read the order, I didn’t read it closely, but it did mention a FG in that order is EO banning collective bargaining for these agencies that are so-called entwined with national security. So to me, it sounds like it’s retaliatory against the unions, the NTEU, the FFE and a FG for bringing suit against Trump because they’re fighting back and we’re fighting back at the local level. We’ve held several rallies in Asheville. We had a town hall here in Boone. Our representative Virginia Fox never showed up. We had a packed house of 165 people and she never showed up to address the constituents in her district, which was expected because we’re a dot of blue and a sea of red here in Boone, North Carolina. So she usually avoids meeting with her constituents in Watauga County. And this Saturday, April 5th we’re we have a mass march in rally in downtown Boone to address the attacks on all these agencies and what it means for the American people. So I’ll be there at that as well.

Maximilian Alvarez:

I definitely want to make sure that we talk a bit more later in the show about the attempt to repeal collective bargaining rights as if you could just sign that kind of thing away and talk about the fight back in more detail ending with the day of action coming up at this weekend. But I guess before we get there, let’s take a step back because so much as I read in the intro, so many federal workers are being impacted by this and the amount of people who depend on their labor is incalculable at this point. But when you start reading just the thousands, the numbers and the thousands of folks who are losing their jobs or getting fired or what have you, it’s really easy to lose sight of the human beings behind every single one of those numbers. And I wanted to ask for folks who are hearing those numbers, but they’re not hearing the human beings behind them. If we could just talk a bit more about your time working as a federal worker and in the National Park Service. Could you tell us a bit more about yourself, how you got into doing that work and what up until, I guess recently that work entailed?

James Jones:

Yeah, so I started working with the Park Service in 2002. I served in the military prior to that, went to college, got two degrees and decided I didn’t want to do what I had gone to college for, a lot of folks do, I guess, and just took a job with the park service doing maintenance work, and I’ve worked here on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina my whole career. So yeah, I started out as a wage grade eight employee. I worked my way up to a wage grade 10. I’m still a wage grade 10 today, and I enjoy taking care of the park. I enjoy where I work. We have, it’s called the Moses Cone Estate. It’s about a 4,000 acres state that’s part of the parkway proper. There’s 26 miles of historic carriage trails that I maintain. And then there’s some other areas that we try to do historic preservation work to keep the facilities up like the cone manor and the carriage barn and the historic apple barn and that sort of thing.

Over the years, I mean since I’ve been there in 2002, there’s just been a steady decline of money. The budget basically has remained static over that timeframe. It’s increased a little bit over the course of say, 23 years. The budget has remained static, which is basically a budget reduction, cost of living, cost of doing business keeps going up, but your budget remains static. When you lose people to retirement, you’re really not able to cover that position sometimes because you’ve got to cover the cost of living raises, the cost of insurance, and all these other things go up. So over that span of time, we’ve actually lost employees in great numbers. And if you remember back in 2013 when they passed that sequestration bill, the Park service I think in general lost about 30% of the workforce then, and we’ve really never retained that number of employees back since that time.

And so now we’re faced again with a possible 30% cut under DO’S proposal to cut the park service. We’re already lean. I always joke and say, we’re not down to the bone anymore, we’re down to the marrow. We can’t really operate anymore unless we get more money and people and equipment and things to do our job. So it’s been a struggle, especially for the last 12 years, and people are noticing with the proposed doge cuts and what they’re saying about the park service people here in this area, most people love the outdoors. We’re in the mountains. They’re turning out, they’re turning out and protesting this stuff. They don’t want to see their parks decline further than what they already are. They want their parks to be taken care of. And when you still, I think the maintenance backlog now is something like 16 billion for the whole park service. They just don’t have any money to maintain a lot of the facilities and trails and roads and such. So this is just another blow. It’s another gut punch to an agency that’s already suffering from a lot.

Maximilian Alvarez:

James, I wanted to ask a little more about what you were just talking about, right, because I think this is really important for folks to understand that it’s not as if Elon Musk and Donald Trump have come with their axes and hatchets and started making cuts to fully funded agencies. Like you were describing how your agency has been losing budget and people for your entire time working there. And I wanted to ask if you could say a little more about what that translates to on a day-to-day level for folks who are still working for the Park service when they have to now deal with an underfunded, understaffed agency and what that looks like for folks who are coming to take advantage of the parks and enjoy them.

James Jones:

Well, I’m sure President Trump and Elon Musk don’t visit national parks and some of the other billionaires that he’s appointed in his cabinet, I am sure they don’t visit those areas public lands because they own their own land. They probably own as much land as some national parks having capacity as far as acreage. But yeah, so any given day in the park service at my park particularly, and I’m sure it’s park wide, I know people that work in different parks around the country, you just don’t get all the work done. I mean, things that need to be tended to, there’s a priority list. Obviously. You got to do the things that take priority over other things. So if you don’t have enough people to take care of what needs to be taken care of, that gets put to the wayside. And then the important things like cleaning restrooms, cutting trees out of the roads so people don’t get the trees driving 50 miles an hour through the park.

I mean, picking up trash. I mean, I don’t do those things, but I do more of the skilled labor. But even then, you’ve got these systems, these infrastructure systems in the park service that are outdated and most of ’em need to be replaced. Water systems, sewer systems, electrical systems. Most of the park service have antiquated systems. I mean, they’re running, some of these systems are probably 60, 70 years old. I mean, they’ve been upgraded some over the years, but a lot of these systems just need a total replacement. And so when more people visit the parks, which is the case year after year, population increases, more people come. We’re not upgrading these systems. We’re not building newer facilities, bigger facilities. We’re not making more parking lots for people because there’s no money. Then it takes a hit, and we have to shut these systems down sometimes because they’re overwhelmed. The water system can’t keep up. Our sewer systems can’t keep up. People park all over the place now they’re beating the sides of the road down the shoulders of the road with their vehicles, and we don’t have enough rangers to enforce a lot of the rules and regs on the parking anymore. We’ve lost a significant number of law enforcement people. So yeah, it’s a problem, and it’s going to get worse if we don’t change course and protect our parks.

Maximilian Alvarez:

I want to ask kind of a follow-up question to that. That is really for anyone listening who is still sort of buying into the justifications for this that are coming out of the Trump administration all over Fox News, all over Musk’s, social media, platform X, all that stuff, what would you say to folks out there who are still convincing themselves that, oh, it’s a park. You don’t need that many people. I can just go and walk around. What do I need all these government aid workers for or beyond that, people who are pretending that flesh and blood working people like yourself, maintaining our parks are somehow like this part of this evil deep state bureaucracy?

James Jones:

Well, we’re not. We’re working people. We live in the same communities as these people do. Our kids go to the same schools, they go to the same churches. We go to the same grocery store, whatever. I mean, we’re all part of the community. We’re not some sort of evil sect or cult that we have ulterior motives in the Park Service or any other federal agency for that matter, to do harm to people. And this notion that government workers are lazy, that one always floors me because I know plenty of people in government service that work hard and they’re dedicated to their missions. I sometimes think the public may not understand the depth of some of the work government workers do, because a lot of it is different than the private sector. Government doesn’t operate to make profit. We’re here to serve people. This notion that we should run government like a business, I don’t buy that.

We’re not a business. We provide services. And since we’re not in the business of making a profit, then maybe some people see that as they’re not motivated enough to work hard because they’re not making money. Well, that’s not true. I myself, and I know a lot of other people that could quit government tomorrow and go to work in the private sector and make more money, but we don’t because we enjoy public service. We enjoy providing. Me personally, I enjoy, I take pride in my work I do at Mile Park. I know people come there, they enjoy my area of the park. They tell me a lot. I know people in the community and blowing rock where I work. They tell me, you do great work here. This place is nice. I mean, I take a lot of pride in that, and to me that’s more important than making another $10 an hour somewhere. That’s my take on it. And I think I can speak for a lot of other federal employees and a FG members too that work in different agencies with that.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, I’m curious, again, given that you’ve been doing that work for decades and you’ve seen so many kind of changes in American politics and the ways that the population talks about government workers. I mean, I remember what was it like over 10 years ago in Wisconsin, like Scott Walker and the Republicans really rammed through a lot of these same anti-labor policies, including eventually turning Wisconsin into a right to work state in a large part based on vilifying government workers in the ways that you’re talking about. So this problem is not new. I mean, I grew up conservative. I remember us talking about government workers this way when I was a kid. I wanted to ask if you could say a little more about how deep that goes and how it’s impacted you and other government workers and what we need to correct in the ways that we understand the work and lives of our federal workforce to stop falling into these traps that lead to us just not caring when we slash budgets year after year, we lay off more people year after year. It feels like this has been a slow building crisis that’s now just reached a critical point, but the roots of that run deep all the way through your career.

James Jones:

Well, max as well as I do, a lot of politicians hate labor unions. And it’s pretty obvious why, because unions traditionally have always been the tip of the spear to fight corruption. Greed read these businesses that prey and exploit on people’s vulnerabilities. I mean, it’s been going on for well over a century. Labor unions have had to fight and scratch for everything for their members. As Frederick Douglass said back in the 1850s, power concedes nothing without demand. And it’s true. They’re not going to give up anything. The billionaire class, they’re not going to give up anything. They’re just going to keep taking. And it is just sheer greed. It seems to me like a disease. I think the message needs to be that these people, and I think Bernie Sanders does a good job of messaging when it comes. He’s always harping on the billionaire class, these people are greedy.

They want everything you have. They can’t ever get enough. I think he was on the Senate floor yesterday and maybe the day before addressing the Senate, how he’s traveled the country and how so many Americans are fed up with the economy. You have two Americas, the ones with everything and the ones with nothing. I think that has to be the message. And as far as government workers go, we need to be in that category. We’re working people. We are not special people. I think the other problem is too, the government has to abide by the law.

President Obama, when he was in office, he had the standing that the federal government was a model employer, that we did everything by law, by Reg, did the right thing. And I think that we need to get back to that. But in order to do that, there is a lot of, sometimes what people perceive as waste is just the government doing what they’re supposed to be doing. A lot of private companies, I’ve worked in the private sector, they don’t always do what they should be doing. They try every which way in the world to circumvent the law. Cause it costs ’em money if they have to abide by all these policies that the government imposes on ’em. But a lot of these policies are for good reason. They protect people health and safety. Look at osha. When I was a local president, I worked closely with OSHA because when you work for an agency like mine and even the va, and I know people that work at the va, the VA try to cut corners on safety and health, and you’ve got to have some sort of safeguard and check on that. And some people might view that as waste for one example, that it shuts down production so the OSHA guy can come in and check out on everything. But I mean, it’s just the way things have to work.

Yeah, the messaging’s just got to change with federal workers and state workers and local workers. We’re not lazy people. A lot of it’s just things we have to go by through legislative action and law and that sort of thing.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, and it makes me think about what you were saying earlier, right, about the fallacy of wanting government to be run a business. That may sound good to certain people in theory, but as someone who my entire job is interviewing workers in the public and private sector, I can tell you that most workplaces are dictatorships where your working person does not have any rights, let alone the right to make any demands on their employers without losing their livelihoods. And so why would we want that to be the model of our government? I think there’s really something missing for folks who really aren’t making the connection between this is how businesses are run and this is how they treat their workers in America, and this is how it’s going to look if that takes over government entirely.

James Jones:

Yeah. To me, corporations are tyrannies. There’s no democratic process with corporations private power. They have a board of directors. They make the decisions. I mean, there are some companies like the automotive industry, the big three where they’re unionized and the UAW has a lot of power and they have good collective bargaining agreements, but if they didn’t, they wouldn’t enjoy those benefits and privileges that they have now through a contract. So at least with the government and in unionized workplaces, you have due process with the federal government. It’s a little more restrictive. We can’t bargain over certain things like wages, healthcare, that sort of thing, but we can still bargain over a lot of things that affect our working conditions. And if that’s taken away, then these agencies, a lot of ’em run just like a corporation. They’re a top down. You have no rights. I mean, you have certain rights. I mean, I shouldn’t say that you still have certain rights as a federal worker without a union, but I would prefer to have a union contract over any kind of administrative procedure that I’m granted. I’ll put it that way, because I’ve seen both. I’ve seen how both work. I’ll take my union any day over that.

Maximilian Alvarez:

James, I wanted to ask if you could just follow up on what we were just talking about. For folks out there listening who may not fully grasp the differences between unions representing government workers and other unions that they may have heard of the Teamsters, UAW. Could you just say a little more for folks out there about what the role of a union is for a federal workforce like the National Park Service where you work?

James Jones:

Yeah, so federal unions, they’re like private sector unions, trade unions. They’re there to protect the workers. They’re there to promote better working conditions and that sort of thing that we’re no different in that regard. A FGE, my union, I’m sure NTEU and FFE, they’re there to bargain collectively bargain with their respective agencies, better working conditions. And that can be everything from a grievance procedure to disciplinary adverse actions over time. Your lunch break, when you’re going to take that, your 15 minute breaks. And I want to say something real quick there. Some people don’t realize this. The federal government does not have to give you two breaks during your workday. We have that in our contract. We get a 15 minute break between the start of the shift and lunch and get another 15 minute break between the end of lunch and the end of the workday.

A lot of people don’t realize that they don’t have to give you that. We have that in our contract. I mean, it’s those little things like that that make a difference. And I’m not saying some of these agencies might be very good and it doesn’t matter, but management comes and goes, and believe me, their solicitor and their HR departments tell ’em what they can get by with than what they can’t get by with. I would much rather have that contract that outlines how they’re going to treat their workers and not having that at all. So generally speaking, most unions, that’s what they’re looking to do is to promote good ties with management, improve the working conditions. We just can’t do certain things. Like the big one is strike. We can’t strike, which is, I get it, you’re a public servant. You go on strike. I mean, the taxpayers, basically, they’re paying you to work. So that was laid out in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

The other ones are we can’t negotiate pay, we can’t negotiate the amount of leave we get all that is set by Congress. Congress. You probably, a lot of people realize that every year the president presents a budget, Congress approves the budget or they go back and forth until they get a budget. Federal employees usually get, depending on inflation, we usually get two, three, 4% cost of living raise at the end of the year for the following year. That’s set by Congress and the president. We can’t negotiate over that. A lot of private sector unions can, the UAW, the Teamsters, those big unions, they can strike their employer. If they don’t lock what’s happening, their membership votes to strike, they go out on strike. We can’t do that. So we don’t have a lot of power as related to some of those private sector unions. But we still have power as far as establishing certain things, certain rights in the workplace.

And the billionaire class can’t stand that. They pretty much destroyed the private sector unions. I think union density now in the private sector is 7% the last number I looked at or somewhere hovering around that. So we’re now, yeah, it’s probably lower. North Carolina is one of the lowest states. I think it is the lowest state when it comes to union density. The state I’m in, the public sector, unions are up, I think around 30 some percent, maybe close to 40, and they want to get rid of that power. These billionaires, they want to take that away. Just two years ago, we had a decertification drive at my park where a disgruntled employee brought in the National Right to Work Foundation to represent her to decertify the union at my park, and we beat it. And these people, I think the National Right to Work Foundation, they’re backed by the Koch brothers and other big money interest. It doesn’t even matter if these federal employee unions are part of their company, which they’re not. But they know if they can keep undermining that power structure, it helps their cause. And that’s why it’s so important that we fight this and win it.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, and there’s clearly some power on top of that that has been frustrating, the Trump administration in terms of the power of federal unions to stall or stop or challenge or reverse these decisions coming from the White House and through Trump’s administration. I wanted to ask from your vantage point from your union, why is he going after the unions and your collective bargaining rights? Trump is claiming that this is a national security issue. Do you believe that?

James Jones:

No, I don’t. It is already in the Civil Service Reform Act. Certain agencies can’t unionize that are involved with National Security, FBI, the CIA, national Security Agency. And then there’s some other smaller agencies out there that kind of fall under that umbrella. Maybe I think some of the department homeland security folks, law enforcement types, I’m not sure, but I think there’s some of those that are excluded. Yeah, I mean, it’s the same old playbook. They use this broad umbrella of saying, alright, all these agencies, I’m going to declare part of national security. They’re not part of national security. I mean, already in the law that there’s certain agencies excluded from unionization because they’re already involved with that. And I fought my own agency over this a few years ago. We had a guy, he was an IT when I was the local president, and they had him mislabeled as non bargaining unit as a non bargaining unit employee like management or HR employee.

And he asked me one day, he’s like, Hey James. He said, I want to join the union, but they say I can’t because I’m non bargaining unit status. And I’m like, no, you’re not. You’re in it. So when I inquired about why they had him labeled as such, they said, well, he sees sensitive information because he’s an IT guy. Well, so what? He’s still eligible to join the union. So I had to file an unfair labor practice and enforce the agency to classify him as union eligible. And so he joined the union, but I mean, they come up with all these, I mean, it’s no different than what Trump’s doing. They come up with all these excuses, these legal arguments that, oh, well, we got to exclude all these people now from collective bargaining, I mean wasn, that wasn’t the reasoning. The reasoning was because a FG and other unions have beat him already on two big cases.

One was the TSA, the other was the probationary people that were getting fired, I’m sorry, the TSA people. That’s still pending, but the probationary employees, and then they filed the suit on the deferred resignation program, which they had to backpedal on that quite a bit. So it is retaliatory for sure. I mean, I would think any judge or judicial panel would see that and say basically what you’re saying about national security, it’s overly broad. It doesn’t apply here because we’ve already got that in the, it’s already covered by, and secondly, it’s clear retaliation. They even mentioned A FGE in the order that they’re thwarting Mr. Trump’s agenda. Well, that’s just too bad. That’s what unions do, protect their members, right? I mean, yeah, it’s insane. It is, but we’ll still be here.

Maximilian Alvarez:

And the thwarting of Trump’s agenda thing, two kind questions on that one. If this executive order just sort of became totally the law of the land and collective bargaining rights were gone from these federal agencies, what would that look like for workers like you and what would that mean for executing Trump’s agenda without the unions getting in the way? Why are they doing this?

James Jones:

Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I think there’s so much animosity at this point. Unions are still going to do what they’re going to do and they would still fight. You would just have to keep filing actions against the government, against his administration, still follow your contract, still file grievances, whatever you needed to do, LPs, et cetera, on fair labor practices. And then wait it out until he’s out and then have your day in court then and bring it all back. I mean, of course I’m not an attorney. I don’t know if they outlaw collective bargaining for these agencies. I don’t know how that would work as far as getting any kind of recourse or being made whole. It probably wouldn’t even happen, but I think they would would still be a lot of resistance toward that. Another thing is, if he’s successful at this, that’s going to be a green light for big corporations to basically go after their unions.

Just like the PATCO strike in 81. I’m old enough to remember that strike. I was 10 years old and I remember watching it on tv and my dad, he was a factory worker, unionized factory worker, and he said, we’ll never get another contract, a good contract because of this. And he was right. That company, he worked for the union basically. Every time they’d go to negotiate a new contract, they just kept losing. They had to concede things. The company would say, they’re going to shut the plant down. They’re going to do this, they’re going to do that. And it’s just been a steady decline since the PATCO strike. Basically, the Reagan administration said, we’re going to turn a blind eye. You guys want to break labor law. Go ahead. We’re not going to do anything about it. And that would be the same thing today, if they’re successful with this EO that he just signed s strip away collective bargaining rights. But much worse, I think

Maximilian Alvarez:

I work in the news and it’s impossible to keep up with all these executive orders, right? We’ve talked about on this show, I mean, that’s very much part of the strategy. The flood, the zone overwhelm. People hit people with so much bad news that we just become immobilized and unions may challenge some of them while others get through. It’s been a very dizzying couple months. I wanted to ask what the last two months have looked like from your vantage point in Boone as a government worker in a union that represents workers across different agencies, like from Trump’s to now. Could you just give us a bit of a play by play on how this has all unfolded in your life and how folks are reacting to it?

James Jones:

Yeah, obviously there’s been a lot of uncertainty, especially for folks that probationary folks after he was inaugurated and they first proposed firing all the probationary workers because they were easy to get rid of, easier to get rid of, and that hasn’t worked for him. But still, even these folks that are probationary, they’re still hesitant because they don’t know. Even though a lot of ’em got reinstated, they’re still going to do a RIF probably down the road. Who knows? I mean, I’m sure they will with certain agencies. I can’t speak for my agency. I know they’ve offered another round of voluntary buyouts and voluntary early retirement. But yeah, it’s been stressful. Even folks like me that have a lot of time, and I could have taken that first round of deferred resignation program when they offered it, but I don’t want to retire right now. I’m just 53 years old.

I’ve still got a lot of years left, and I’ll retire on my terms, not their terms. That’s the way I look at it. But yeah, I can’t imagine some of these folks, these folks that are just now getting into the government, they’re scared. They’re scared they can’t plan. I mean, I’ve heard of stories where people moved all the way across the country to take another job. These are people that have 5, 10, 15 years with the government. They took a new job. They were put into, they accepted a new job series, which basically your probationary period starts over. Anytime you leave a job series, go into another job series, you still have a one year probationary period. And then to get fired after you’ve had that many years in to say, well, you’re no longer needed, even though you’ve been a good worker and you’ve had good performance ratings, I mean, it’s crushing for those people, I’m sure.

And not all those people got their job back either. I think out of that 24,000, I think only 16,000 were ordered reinstated. So I can’t imagine having to moving into a new job, federal job, two 3000 miles away where I was at and then told You’re fired after you’re trying to resettle in an area. I mean, it is just cruel, inhumane. It’s just unbelievable. But yeah, as far as my agency goes, we don’t have a lot of people anyway. As I mentioned earlier, we’re down to the marrow. I call it the marrow instead of down to the bone, but I think we lost one probationary worker. That’s all we had when that order was signed. And that person is reinstated, to my knowledge, has been reinstated, but I don’t know what’s to happen with this Vera. The voluntary early retirement authority that came back out and the vsip, the Voluntary Separation Incentive payment Department of Interior offered that.

They excluded my job series on maintenance. The Department of Interior excluded a bunch of jobs from that where you couldn’t retire early law enforcement, firefighting, wildland firefighting, and then the park service excluded just about all the maintenance positions. So I couldn’t take it. I wouldn’t have taken it anyway, so I tend to think with maintenance, the reason they did that is because we don’t have many people anyway, so if they get rid of all the maintenance, just close the parks because you’re not going to be able to go in the park because nobody’s going to be there to do anything. Yeah, but there’s a lot of other jobs I’m worried about that they’re going to try, try to riff. They’ll try to do a riff. If they don’t get the so-called 30% reduction, which nobody seems to know what that means, there’s been no guidance issued. 30% of watt, 30% of this park, 30% across the board, 30% of a certain cap of money that they need to cut. I mean, who nobody knows. It’s kind like one of those things they, they’re just flying by the seat of their pants and doing things, whatever they feel like when they feel like it. So that’s the uncertainty of it too. You don’t know,

Maximilian Alvarez:

James, we talked at the top of this episode about the fact that you yourself are a veteran, right? That you’re union local. A FGE also represents workers at the VA over there in North Carolina where you are near Boone. I wanted to ask just a little bit about that, how all of this is hitting you as a veteran who has served your country and also served your country like working for the Park Service while we’re also seeing these devastating cuts to the VA and so many veterans who are being affected by these cuts outside of the VA even as well.

James Jones:

Yeah, the va, I’m disabled, so I use the VA for all my healthcare, dental, health, vision, the gamut. And one of my providers, I do telehealth quite often just because it saves me from having to drive to Asheville, which is an hour and a half drive and Hickory’s about an hour drive. So I’ve been doing a lot of telehealth appointments over the years and now that a lot of that’s gone because of the return to office mandate. A lot of these counselors and some other people were able to telework at home to treat veterans, especially with mental illness stuff, therapists, certified mental health counselors, that sort of thing. They were working at home and even some of the people in admin that I know that work at the VA national that do billing, they were able to work at home and do billing and this notion that we got to get everybody back in the office because they’re not doing anything.

Well, that’s a total lie and a myth. The VA uses tracking software on these folks that do telehealth. They know when they’re working, they know when they’re not working. They’re not at home doing nothing or doing the laundry or on the treadmill or whatever these people think. I mean, they’re being tracked. They have to meet their production quotas. But now since they’re back in the office, especially like with the care with Veterans Care, now I’m having to wait longer to get an appointment for my mental health counselor because now he has to drive 45 minutes to work to the nearest facility. And you say, well, that’s not much. Well, that’s time. He could be at home working, helping another veteran. I mean, I don’t understand where they get this, that people that telework or work remotely don’t do anything because I’m pretty sure most of the federal government, especially the bigger agency, well even the Park service, we had some folks at Telework, they have tracking software.

They know what they’re doing. I mean, if they’re not working, if they’re down less than more than 10 minutes, they get a text or an email. What are you doing? I mean, I don’t know how it works. I don’t telework, but I’ve been told that by many employees that our union represent. There is accountability with that system. But yeah, that’s just one thing. The other thing with Veterans Care, I think President Biden ordered about 60,000 people hired after the PACT Act was signed in 2022. They needed those people to file more claims to help process claims that veterans were filing after the war in Afghanistan ended in sometime in 20 21, 20 22, I can’t remember right after Biden took office, there’s been a flood of veterans from that era, from Iraq, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have come into the VA fold. Thousands of veterans, tens of thousands of veterans, and this administration’s proposing to go back to the 2020 levels of VA staffing.

Are you kidding me? You’ve grown the veteran population tenfold since then. It is not like Secretary Collins. The VA secretary said something the other day on TV about the VA’s not an employment agent. See, dude, dude, you’ve got all these veterans coming back from Afghanistan that are filing even veterans like myself. I filed on the PACT Act. I’m a Gulf War vet. I filed on the PACT Act as soon as it was passed. There’s some Vietnam era veterans that have filed under it. I mean, you’ve got a flood of claims being filed and plus people with real health issues, me included. I’ve got breathing problems. I’ve got all kinds of issues from my surface in the Gulf floor. It’s all connected. And for them to propose to reduce 80,000 positions in the VA system, they call it bloat or waste. It’s a farce. They’re basically sticking their nose up in the air to all of America’s veterans, the people that went over and served their country and sacrificed everything.

Maximilian Alvarez:

I mean, even just hearing that it’s my blood boiling, I can only imagine what it feels like for you and other people who have actually served in the military. I have not. Right, and it really brings us to the point that we’re at now, right? Where I think the rage is really setting in. For the past two months, there’s been a lot of fear, understandable fear. I am a brown tattooed man in the state of Maryland where someone who looks like me just got abducted and disappeared to a fascist colony in El Salvador under a administrative error by the Trump administration, and now he’s going to sit there and languish for who knows how long. I mean, the terror is real. We’re all feeling it in different ways, but I think after two months, the anger is really starting to boil up as well, the need to do something, the need to fight back, the need to speak out, and also the developments that have frustrated the Trump administration’s agenda both in the courts and elsewhere.

So we find ourselves at a very critical moment here at the beginning of April, and I wanted us to sort of end the discussion on that. I could talk to you for hours, but I know I got to let you go, but I wanted to ask if you could say more about how you got involved in the Federal Unionist Network, what local unions like yours are doing to fight back and what folks out there listening, whether they work for the government or not, whether they’re in a union or not. What’s your message to folks out there about why they should care about this and what they can do to get involved in the pushback?

James Jones:

Yeah, it’s not just an attack on federal workers. I mean, when the administration attacks, federal workers are basically attacking the American people because federal workers serve the American people. We’ve heard this over and over and over again, but it has to be said again, if you don’t have federal workers, you’re not going to have clean air and water. You’re not going to have safe food. You might not get your social security check. You might get it delayed. I mean, all this is up in the air. Your national parks close or they’ll be restricted to where you can’t access all parts of the park BVA services for Veterans Healthcare Benefit claim processing. That’s going to be reduced, and this is for people that don’t even work for the government, the FAA, they keep our airline, our airways safe, our border people that keep, hopefully they’re keeping the border safe and vetting people that are actually dangerous, that this stereotypical myth that everybody that comes across our border is some kind of criminal is just insane.

That’s scary too. Well, just like you mentioned earlier about the person that they arrested, I think it was in New York the other day, or the El Salvadorian guy, they took what’s next? They’re going to arrest American people, American citizens because they think you might be linked to the Venezuelan gang or something, and like you said, they’ll languish and you sit there in jail without any kind of due process. I mean, it’s just a matter of time if people don’t start fighting this, and I think they are. I mean, it is really, I think in the last two months we’ve seen the tides start shifting. People are starting to get involved, and I work with a group here, it’s called Indivisible Watauga, and I think it’s a nationwide group, indivisible. They’re kind of organizing these marches I think for April 5th, one of the many groups. And I’ve talked with a lot of my friends in Indivisible and in the county where I live, and we’ve been doing a lot of grassroots organizing.

I mean, I’ve been doing it through my union, through these people, but I think that’s what it takes is a collective effort. The united front across the community, your community and the nation to fight this. And I think we’re going to be okay, but it’s going to be a fight. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but we can’t rest. We can’t rest. We’ve got to keep the pressure mounted for as long as it takes. I don’t think the courts alone are going to be our savior. I think they’re important and I think they’ll keep things somewhat between the guardrails, but I think the major power here is going to be us. We the people. If you can get out on April 5th, I think it’s a nationwide effort. Find out where April 5th rally is going to be a hands-off rally march slash rally. I think they’re happening everywhere and I think there’s going to be a huge turnout, and I think it’s going to send a direct message to Trump and Elon Musk that we’re not going to take it. You want to try to be a dictator or king or whatever you’re wanting to try to be. It’s not going to work out for you because we live in a democracy and Americans like their democracy and they will fight to keep it.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guest, James Jones, veteran and a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

Image by Markus Spiske.

The Trump administration likes numbers. Numbers of dollars spent on his campaign and numbers of federal workers fired. Numbers of dollars the rich will get back after tax cuts and numbers of dollars that will be saved by throwing people off their health insurance (Medicaid) and food subsidies(SNAP). Then there’s the numbers regarding immigrants being rounded up and sent away. Plus, the number forty-three represents the number of countries whose citizens will be restricted and banned from entering the United States. There are also numbers describing the tariffs and numbers of voters who voted for Trump. Who can ignore the numbers of Palestinians and Yemenis killed—approaching 1000 as I write this—by Israel and Washington since Trump moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Nobody really knows how truthful the numbers we are told are and nobody seems to care enough to do much about them. Every person fired is a person who wonders how they’re going to pay for their home and their food. Every person fired supporting a family finds that scenario magnified with each family member they support. And now the trumpists are going after unions, threatening to terminate the federal government’s contract with the union representing TSA workers and talking about firing postal workers. This is the beginning, not the end of what might well be fascism.

Recently a legal resident who spoke out against government policies overseas was kidnapped from their home and held incognito. No one, not even the arrested man’s pregnant wife knew where he was for a day. Although 102 congresspeople responded to this gross violation of the Constitution, flawed document that it is, by noting that this is what dictators do, only fourteen signed a previous letter calling for the man’s release. The trumpists threaten more of these actions and continue cutting funding from schools with anti-occupation student organizations. School and corporations line up to enforce the contempt for humanity these actions represent even after the trumpists take back millions of dollars in dedicated grants. Most of the media colludes with the people in power, unwilling to challenge the authoritarians almost certain to repress their freedom to write no matter how much they acquiesce.

A billionaire named Musk is given power to reshape the bureaucracy as he sees fit. No oligarch has ever ruled a regime that did not put their greed for money and power first. Elon Musk is not any different. Nor is Donald Trump. Still, it’s not enough to only go after Musk and the rest of the billionaires forcing austerity on the very class that made them obscenely wealthy. It’s a good place to begin, but they are not alone in their onslaught. The number of co-conspirators is greater than you think but not as great as they think it is. This is a battle between the ruling class and the rest of us. Those who are not in the former but identify with that class’s interests should not be surprised when their heroes in the halls of money and power leave them as if they were compost ready to be turned over in the bin. This is a good place to once again remind those who think their interests are the same as the billionaires that the only thing the ruling class wants from them is their surrender (and maybe their children should the rulers decide a war is useful to their future.

All these numbers don’t mean much as numbers. They mean a whole lot more when it’s your neighbor who got laid off or your partner who got fired. Or your kids whose school had to close after the teachers were sent home. Wait until hospitals start closing because working class people who were on Medicaid can no longer take care of their medical needs. Wait until your parents stop getting social security checks. Wait until you can’t pay your rent or your mortgage because your job either doesn’t exist or has been privatized and your wage was cut. Wait until the ripple effect of the public sector cuts reaches your city or town—recession will barely begin to describe the situation. The Democrats—bless their capitalist hearts—would like to help you out but they’ve got an election coming up somewhere and they need you to donate to their party. Take that donation out of your unemployment check before the trumpists take that away, too. If you’re lucky, there will be another election for you to vote in. That’ll show them.

We need to fight. I mean, seriously fight. Fighting back means going beyond the courts, beyond performance protests and well beyond elections. I know it’s difficult for many to accept, but if you’re not part of the oligarchy the United States government is not interested in your existence. This is true even if you march to its orders. Even if you wear a MAGA hat and pay your dues. Most judges, politicians, military officers are either part of the problem or afraid to stand up to it. Most men and women in the media and the rest of the corporate sector are of a similar mind. That’s what can happen when one identifies with the powerful even when they have no love for you. The Democrats are slowly learning this fact, but we shouldn’t wait for them to lead given their hesitancy to risk their livelihood.

There’s a meme making the rounds that says nothing will stop this but mass non-compliance. I think that this sentiment is a good beginning. However, I believe it’s going to take something more. Those who oppose Trumpism need to make the country ungovernable ultimately. If they keep firing people, raising tariffs locking up and deporting protesters, those of us out of work will have plenty of time to go about it. Nothing is the same and it’s unlikely to improve for those who aren’t in the 1%. It won’t matter how long you wait. Might as well fight back.

The post Behind the Numbers Lies Austerity and Authoritarianism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

Last month, we saw the Argentinian federal court issue arrest warrants against 25 Myanmar officials, including the seniormost military leaders, for genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the Rohingya community between 2012 and 2018. Our thoughts immediately went to the brave Rohingya women who helped make this significant legal action possible.

For years, the Shanti Mohila (Peace Women), a group of over 400 Rohingya women living in the refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, have defied societal expectations and conservative gender norms.

They are leaders in their community fighting for recognition and justice for the harms endured at the hands of the Myanmar military. They play a vital role as leaders, educators, and advocates for justice.

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The 2017 “clearance operations” by the Myanmar military against the historically persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority living in the Rakhine state were a series of widespread and systematic attacks involving mass killings, torture, and destruction of houses that led to the largest forced displacement of the Rohingya community from Myanmar into neighboring Bangladesh.

Sexual violence was a hallmark of these “clearance operations,” with young women and girls disproportionately affected by brutal and inhuman acts of sexual and gender-based violence. Yet, despite efforts to destroy them through long-term serious physical and mental harm, Rohingya women fought back.

(Ayesha Nawshin/Legal Action Worldwide)

Shanti Mohila members have mobilized to raise awareness of the large-scale sexual and gender-based violence endured by Rohingya women between 2016 and 2017. They have spoken about their experiences before international justice proceedings and catalyzed change by breaking down the stigma associated with victimhood and inspiring next generations of Rohingya women through action.

In 2023, their remarkable achievements were recognized as they were honored as Raphael Lemkin Champions of Prevention by the U.N. Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide.

Contributing evidence to justice mechanisms

The testimonies Shanti Mohila members have provided and encouraged other survivors to step forward to provide over the past years have given the opportunity to investigative mechanisms, NGOs, and lawyers to present evidence before all ongoing international justice proceedings.

Specifically, Shanti Mohila members are among the survivors who provided key witness statements in The Gambia v. Myanmar case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

In 2019, two representatives were in The Hague as part of The Gambia delegation to observe provisional measures hearings at the ICJ.

In 2023, they were among the group of seven witnesses in Buenos Aires to testify in the investigative hearings under the universal jurisdiction principle before the federal criminal court – leading to the recent court order of the first-ever arrest warrants for crimes of genocide against key state officials and members of the Myanmar military.

“I could not believe I could tell an international court about my sufferings. I could not believe it until I stepped into the courtroom,” said “Salma” (not her real name), a Rohingya female witness who requested anonymity for privacy and safety concerns.

“It was difficult for me to speak about the death of my family and their names, but I did it for justice, for my grandchildren, for a future where we can return home with dignity,” she said. “They [perpetrators] targeted women first to break our community, our morale.”

“Who would have thought that we, the Rohingya women, would one day be taking the Myanmar military to the court?”

It is worth highlighting here why exactly the evidence from survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is so critical to successfully prosecute and hold the Myanmar military accountable, particularly for genocide.

The “intent to destroy a group in whole or in part” is a necessary element to prove the crime of genocide, which can be notoriously difficult to evidence.

In the Rohingya context, the scale and brutality of SGBV during the 2017 “clearance operations” was identified by the U.N. Independent Fact-Finding Mission as one of the key factors that “inferred” the Myanmar military’s genocidal intent to destroy the Rohingya people.

(Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

Sexual violence against Rohingya women and young mothers in front of their families, and the accompanying sexual mutilations and forced pregnancies, are some of the most significant reflections of the perpetrators’ desire to inflict severe social and reproductive harm on the community.

The SGBV was not only a part of the campaign of mass killings, torture and destruction of property in 2017 but also committed in the context of decades-long propagated narrative that uncontrolled Rohingya birth rate is a threat to the survival of the nation, and state policies that placed significant legal restraint on Rohingya reproductive rights.

In a 2023 study on long-term impact of sexual and gender-based violence against the Rohingya men, women, and hijra conducted by the Legal Action Worldwide (LAW), clinical analysis by psychologists and medical doctors revealed that the SGBV against Rohingya had resulted in: permanent damage to survivors’ genitalia impacting their ability to procreate; severe psychological injuries that have left them in a state of extreme emotional distress; damaged the survivors’ family relations including with their spouse and children; severe ostracization of the women and children born of rape; and forced reorganization of the Rohingya households.

The evidence of SGBV is critical in that its commission and its enduring and foreseeable impact on survivors clearly shows that the Myanmar military inflicted serious mental and bodily harm and imposed measures intending to prevent births within the community. It also reflects a deliberate incremental step in causing the biological or physical destruction of the group while inflicting acute suffering on its members in the process.

Leaders within the Shanti Mohila network have been instrumental in supporting the conceptualization and implementation of studies such as the 2023 report – making them truly the grassroots advocates for the community.

Towards holistic justice and healing

Alongside these important contributions, the Shanti Mohila members continuously work within the camps in Cox’s Bazar to ensure awareness of the ongoing justice processes and provide peer support to one another and the wider community.

Last year, LAW and Shanti Mohila engaged with Rohingya activists around the globe through LAW’s Rohingya Diaspora Dialogue initiative to foster wider recognition and advocacy for the significant work being done by the Rohingya women in Cox’s Bazar on gender equality and to hold the perpetrators of serious crimes responsible.

These actions embody Shanti Mohila’s commitment and openness to learning.

They are dedicated to remaining bold and effective advocates for their community and being against the illegitimate military regime that continues to commit atrocities against civilians across Myanmar.

(Ayesha Nawshin/Legal Action Worldwide)

The challenges remain plenty since the renewed conflict between Arakan Army and Myanmar military in late 2023 has led to upward of 60,000 Rohingya arriving in Cox’s Bazar in a new wave of forced displacement, joining over 1 million Rohingya refugees already living in the camps.

The evolving conflict dynamics in the Rakhine state and its impact on the Rohingya there add to the tensions in the camps. The risk of another surge in the forced recruitment of the Rohingya in the camps by organized groups pressuring youths to join the civil war in Myanmar persists.

Amid this, the work and growth of Shanti Mohila can prove to be a stabilizing force, beyond their contributions to women empowerment and the justice process. They can provide an avenue to offset the negative impacts of the deteriorating regional security situation through promoting efforts toward reconciliation and encouraging people to keep the rule of law and justice at the center of their struggle.

On this International Women’s Day, we celebrate the groundbreaking work of Shanti Mohila and the power and legacy they are creating for generations of Rohingya women, their community as a whole, and women across fragile and conflict-affected contexts worldwide.

Ishita Kumar, based in Cox’s Bazar, is the legal and program adviser on the Rohingya crisis for Legal Action Worldwide (LAW), an independent, non-profit organization of human rights lawyers and jurists working in fragile and conflict-affected areas. LAW has been supporting Shanti Mohila leaders and representing over 300 Rohingya in the ongoing international justice processes about their treatment in Myanmar, including at the International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court and supporting universal jurisdiction cases in foreign domestic courts such as in Argentina. The views expressed here are hers, not those of Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by guest commentator Ishita Kumar.

For decades, Republican lawmakers and industry lobbyists have tried to chip away at the small program in the Environmental Protection Agency that measures the threat of toxic chemicals.

Most people don’t know IRIS, as the program is called, but it is the scientific engine of the agency that protects human health and the environment. Its scientists assess the toxicity of chemicals, estimating the amount of each that triggers cancer and other health effects. And these values serve as the independent, nonpartisan basis for the rules, regulations and permits that limit our exposure to toxic chemicals.

Now IRIS faces the gravest threat to its existence since it was created under President Ronald Reagan four decades ago.

Legislation introduced in Congress would prohibit the EPA from using any of IRIS’ hundreds of chemical assessments in environmental rules, regulations, enforcement actions and permits that limit the amount of pollution allowed into air and water. The EPA would also be forbidden from using them to map the health risks from toxic chemicals. The bills, filed in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives earlier this year, are championed by companies that make and use chemicals, along with industry groups that have long opposed environmental rules. If it becomes law, the “No IRIS Act,” as it’s called, would essentially bar the agency from carrying out its mission, experts told ProPublica.

“They’re trying to undermine the foundations for doing any kind of regulation,” said William Boyd, a professor at UCLA School of Law who specializes in environmental law. Boyd noted that IRIS reports on chemicals’ toxicity are the first step in the long process of creating legal protections from toxic pollutants in air and water.

“If you get rid of step one, you’re totally in the dark,” he said.

If the act passes, companies could even use the law to fight the enforcement of environmental rules that have long been on the books or permits that limit their toxic emissions, environmental lawyers told ProPublica.

The attack on IRIS has a good chance of succeeding at a time when Republicans are eager to support President Donald Trump’s agenda, according to environmental advocates who monitor Congress. The bills dovetail with the anti-regulatory efforts that have marked the second Trump administration, which has begun to dismantle climate protections, nominated industry insiders to top positions in the EPA and announced plans for unprecedented cuts that could slash the agency’s budget by 65%.

Project 2025, the ultraconservative playbook that has guided much of Trump’s second presidency, calls for the elimination of IRIS on the grounds that it “often sets ‘safe levels’ based on questionable science” and that its reviews result in “billions in economic costs.” The policy blueprint echoes industry claims that IRIS does not adequately reflect all of the research on chemicals; there are sometimes significant differences between the program’s conclusions and those of corporate-funded scientists.

IRIS has long been a target of industry and has at times been criticized by independent scientific bodies. More than a decade ago, for example, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine took issue with the organization, length and clarity of IRIS reviews; a more recent report from the same group found that IRIS had made “significant progress” in addressing the problems.

IRIS’ work stands out in a world where much of the science on toxic chemicals is funded by corporations with a vested stake in them. Studies have shown that industry-funded science tends to be biased in favor of the sponsor’s products. But IRIS’ several dozen scientists do not have a financial interest in their findings. Their work has had a tangible impact on real people. The program’s calculations are the hard science that allow the agency to identify heightened disease risk due to chemicals in the air, water and land. And these revelations have, in some cases, led to stricter chemical regulations and grassroots efforts to curtail pollution.

IRIS, which stands for Integrated Risk Information System, was created in 1985. Until that point, different parts of the EPA had often assessed chemicals in isolation, and their methods and values were not always consistent.

At first, IRIS just collected assessments completed by various divisions of the EPA. Then, in 1996, it began conducting its own, independent reviews of chemicals. Its scientists analyze studies of a chemical and use them to calculate the amount of the substance that people can be exposed to without being harmed. IRIS sends drafts of its reports to multiple reviewers, who critique its methods and findings.

As the tranche of assessments grew, so did its value to the world. States began relying on IRIS’ numbers to set limits in air and water permits. Some also use them to prioritize their environmental efforts, acting first on the chemicals IRIS deems most harmful. Countries that don’t have the expertise to assess chemicals themselves often adopt IRIS values to guide their own regulations.

Today, IRIS’ collection of more than 500 assessments of chemicals, groups of related chemicals, and mixtures of chemicals is the largest database of authoritative toxicity values in the world, according to Vincent Cogliano, a recently retired scientist who worked on IRIS assessments for more than 25 years.

From the beginning, industry scientists challenged IRIS with calculations that showed their chemicals to be less dangerous.

“There were a lot of pretty bitter battles,” said Cogliano, who remembers particularly intense opposition to the assessments of diesel engine exhaust and formaldehyde during the 1990s. Critiques of IRIS assessments intensified over the years and began to slow the program’s work. “It took so long to get through that there were fewer and fewer assessments,” said Cogliano.

In 2017, opposition to IRIS escalated further. Trump’s budget proposal would have slashed funding for the program. Although Congress funded IRIS and the program survived, some of its work was halted during his first presidency. Trump appointed a chemical engineer named David Dunlap to head the division of the EPA that includes IRIS. Dunlap had challenged the EPA’s science on formaldehyde when he was working as the director of environmental regulatory affairs for Koch Industries. Koch’s subsidiary, Georgia-Pacific, made formaldehyde and many products that emit it. (Georgia-Pacific has since sold its chemicals business to Bakelite Synthetics.) While Dunlap was at the EPA, work on several IRIS assessments was suspended, including the report on formaldehyde. IRIS completed that report last year.

That assessment proved controversial, as ProPublica documented in its investigation of the chemical late last year. In calculating the risks that formaldehyde can cause cancer, IRIS decided not to include the chance that the chemical can cause myeloid leukemia, a potentially fatal blood cancer. The EPA said IRIS made this decision because it lacked confidence in its calculation; the agency admitted that the omission drastically underestimated formaldehyde’s cancer risk.

Still, some of IRIS’ assessments have made a huge difference in parts of the country.

In 2016, IRIS updated its assessment of a colorless gas called ethylene oxide. The evaluation changed the chemical’s status from a probable human carcinogen to plainly “carcinogenic to humans.” And IRIS calculated the uppermost amount of the chemical before it starts to cause cancer, finding that it was 30 times lower than previously believed.

The EPA used that information to create a map, which showed that people living near a sterilizing plant in Willowbrook, Illinois, had an elevated cancer risk because the facility was releasing ethylene oxide into the air. Once locals learned of their risk, they kicked into action.

“That knowledge led us to be able to really activate the groundswell of community members,” said Lauren Kaeseberg, who was part of a group that held protests outside the plant, met with state and local officials, and testified at hearings. Not long after the protests, Illinois passed legislation limiting the release of the pollutant, the local plant shut down and the cancer-causing pollution was gone from the air.

Around the country, the pattern has been repeated. After IRIS issues its estimate of the amount of a chemical that people can safely be exposed to without developing cancer and other diseases, the EPA uses that information to map the threats from chemicals in air. IRIS’ evidence showing that people have an elevated risk of cancer has sparked some hard-hit communities to fight back, suing polluters, shuttering plants and demanding the offending chemical be removed from their environment.

In St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, residents had long felt as if they had more than their share of sickness. The small rectangle of land near the Mississippi River abuts a chemical plant that emits foul-smelling gases. For decades, as they breathed in the fumes, residents suffered from respiratory problems, autoimmune diseases, cancers and other ailments. In 2016, after IRIS assessed the toxicity of chloroprene, one of the chemicals coming out of the plant’s smokestacks, the people of St. John discovered the main source of their problems. The IRIS assessment showed that chloroprene was a likely carcinogen and caused damage to the immune system. With this information, the EPA concluded that St. John had the highest cancer risk from air pollution in the country.

“I didn’t realize the depth of the poisoning that was taking place until EPA came to our community in 2016 and brought us that IRIS report,” said Robert Taylor, who has lived his entire life in St. John. When the agency representatives arrived, Taylor’s wife had cancer and his daughter was bedridden with a rare autoimmune condition. A lifelong musician who was then 75, Taylor began organizing his neighbors to demand a stop to the deadly pollution. (His wife died in December.)

The assessments of chloroprene and ethylene oxide — and the activism they sparked around the country — eventually led the EPA to crack down. Last year, the agency announced several rules that aimed to reduce toxic emissions. The rules call for changes in how companies produce and release chemicals — the type of reforms that can be expensive to undertake.

The Biden administration sued Denka, the company that owns the chloroprene-releasing plant in St. John, in an effort to force it to curb the amount of the chemical it released. But the Trump administration intends to drop that suit, according to The New York Times.

For its part, Denka sued the EPA over one of the rules in July, asking the court for more time to implement the changes. The company argued that the agency was on a “politically motivated, unscientific crusade” to shut down the plant.

Critics of IRIS have used similarly barbed language in their recent attacks. In his press release introducing what he calls the “No Industrial Restrictions in Secret Act” in the House, Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., wrote that “Unelected bureaucrats in the Biden Administration have disrupted the work of Wisconsin’s chemical manufacturers and inhibited upon the success of the industry through the abuse of the EPA’s IRIS program.” The press release said the bill is supported by Hexion, which has a plant in his district. Hexion makes formaldehyde, a chemical that increases the cancer risk nationwide.

Neither Grothman nor Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who introduced the Senate version of the bill, responded to questions from ProPublica, including how they think the EPA could regulate chemicals if the bill passes. The EPA did not answer questions for this story.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents more than 190 companies, sent a letter to Lee Zeldin in late January calling on the EPA administrator to disband IRIS and prohibit the use of its assessments in rules and regulations. IRIS “has been increasingly used to develop overly burdensome regulations on critical chemistries,” the letter states, going on to argue that the program lacks transparency and “has often fallen short of scientific standards.” (The letter was first reported by Inside EPA.) The American Petroleum Institute, the Extruded Polystyrene Foam Association, the Independent Lubricant Manufacturers Association, the Fertilizer Institute and the Plastics Industry Association were among the dozens of organizations representing industries financially impacted by IRIS’ chemical assessments that signed the letter.

Industry groups have also criticized IRIS for being slow and overstepping its authority. And they have noted that outside organizations have found fault with it.

In addition to the National Academies criticism in 2011 about the clarity and transparency of its reports, IRIS has responded to recommendations from the Government Accounting Office, according to a report the congressional watchdog issued last week. The GAO, which monitors how taxpayer dollars are spent, placed IRIS on its “high risk list” in 2009. But the GAO did so not because it was vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse — the reasons some programs land on the list — but because the watchdog decided IRIS wasn’t doing enough assessments of dangerous chemicals. Since 2009, the GAO made 22 recommendations to IRIS, all of which have been implemented, according to the agency’s website. The new report acknowledged improvements but noted that the program’s current pace of finalizing assessments “likely cannot increase without more resources.” According to the GAO report, in 2023 and 2024, IRIS had reported needing 26 additional staff members to meet the demand for chemical assessments.

Defenders of the program say the criticisms mask a simple motive: protecting industry profits rather than public health.

“It’s blatant self-interest,” said Robert Sussman, a veteran attorney who worked at the EPA as well as for environmental groups and chemical companies. “What they’re really trying to do here is prevent the EPA from doing assessments of their chemicals.”

While he has witnessed many attempts to scale back the EPA’s power in his 40-year career, Sussman described the current effort to eliminate its use of IRIS’ chemical assessments as “completely off the deep end.”

Weaker bills targeting IRIS were introduced into both the House and Senate in February of last year but did not have the political support to advance. Now, after the election, the possibility of success is entirely different, according to Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that if it does pass Congress — and it now could — the president will sign it,” said Rosenberg. But Rosenberg added that he believes that if the public understood the consequences of doing away with the science at the core of the EPA’s work, people could potentially sway their lawmakers to stand up to the attack on IRIS.

“The current political alignment is clearly very favorable to the chemical lobby, but their actual agenda has never been popular,” said Rosenberg. “There’s never been a case where people are in favor of more carcinogens in their environment.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Sharon Lerner.

We kick off the new season of Working People with another crucial installment of our ongoing series where we speak with the people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s “sacrifice zones.” In this episode, TRNN editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with a panel of guests about the ongoing public health crises in East Palestine, OH, where a Norfolk Southern train derailment in Feb. 2023 changed residents’ lives forever, and in Conyers, GA, where residents continue to deal with the toxic fallout of a chemical fire that broke out in Sept. 2024 at a facility owned by pool chemical company BioLab. Panelists include: Ashley McCollom, a displaced resident of East Palestine; Hannah Loyd, a displaced resident of Conyers; and Kristina Baehr, a community safety lawyer with Just Well Law. 

Additional links/info: 

• Ashley’s Facebook page
• Ashley’s GoFundMe page
• Hannah’s Facebook page
• Just Well Law website 
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘Everytime we come back, we all get sick’: GA residents affected by September BioLab fire are still going through hell”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH (DOCUMENTARY)”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “One year later, East Palestine residents want Norfolk-Southern held accountable”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, ““Let’s unite!”: Poisoned residents of America’s sacrifice zones are banding together”
• Steve Mellon, Pittsburgh Union Progress, “Vance visit on derailment’s second anniversary leaves residents wondering, ‘Who has our backs?’”
• Grace Gibson, The Georgetown Environmental Law Review, “Hawaiʻi’s Red Hill Water Crisis Isn’t Over”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. We’re broadcasting today’s show on 89.3 WPFW out of Washington dc, the home of jazz and justice. For folks across the DMV, my name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’ll be hosting new episodes for the month of February and my co-host Mel er will be hosting next month. Today we are kicking off our new season with another crucial installment of our ongoing series where we speak with people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones. Now, more working people live in sacrifice zones today than we realize and more of us are being set up for sacrifice than we’d care to admit.

And unless we start banding together and doing something to stop it, the best that we can do is sit and hope that our community won’t be the next one to be upended by an explosive train derailment or a toxic chemical fire. The best that we can hope for is that our homes are not the next to be destroyed by evermore frequent wildfires and evermore destructive hurricanes that we and our families won’t be made sick by some massive waste incinerator or petrochemical plant, some industrial hog farm or fracking operation landfill or military base near our homes. You may think it won’t happen to you, but neither did so many of the residents that we’ve spoken to over the past couple of years. This ongoing investigation began two years ago when I started speaking with the chemically poisoned residents living in and around East Palestinian, Ohio, a small working class town about an hour outside of Pittsburgh, February 3rd, marked the two year anniversary of the day that changed their lives forever when a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed in their backyard on a frigid Friday night, followed three days later by the disastrous criminal and unnecessary decision by Norfolk Southern to pressure emergency responders and contractors to empty five cars worth of toxic vinyl chloride and set them on fire, releasing a massive black death plume and exposing residents to toxins that have been making them sick ever since, like carbon monoxide, hydrogen chloride, and even phosgene gas.

And late last year, I began speaking with residents living in and around Conyers, Georgia, who have been living through a hellish situation that is both distinct from and eerily similar to East Palestine. At the end of our last season, I interviewed three local residents who have all been affected by the nightmare inducing chemical fire at the Biolab facility in Conyers, which is about half an hour outside of Atlanta. And the fire broke out on September 29th, 2024. The fire was pool chemical company Biolabs fourth in the last two decades, and residents have described experiencing breathing difficulties, headaches, dizziness, skin rashes, and other negative health effects after being exposed to the fumes from the fire. Ashley McCollum is the very first resident of East Palestine that I connected with two years ago, and Hannah Lloyd is the first Conyers resident I connected with. Today I am truly honored to have both Ashley and Hannah with us on the show together. And we are also so grateful to be joined by Kristina Baehr. Kristina is a community safety lawyer with Just Well Law. Thank you all so much for joining us, and as always, I wish we were speaking under less horrifying circumstances and we are sending all of our love and solidarity to you and your communities. Ashley, I want to come to you first here. We just crossed the two year anniversary of the derailment. How are you and your family doing what has happened since we last spoke?

Ashley McCollom:

Well, first Max, I’d like to say thank you for having myself and others on here to be able to speak. It’s been a long stressful ride. Nothing has changed that. It feels like the town is basically the same, the reactions, the uncomfortable feeling, the stress you walk in, you can clearly smell something’s not right. So it has been going consistently the same and it feels like we don’t know what safe is and everyone’s confused and running a mile a minute and we’re getting nowhere.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Ashley, you yourself, you had to move, right? I mean since we last spoke, you had to get out of your home, is that right?

Ashley McCollom:

Yeah, but you still have to deal with the burden of what happened your forever home that you don’t want to put that forever problem on someone because we don’t have clear answers of what we can do. But I mean, I continue to pay a tax on something that I don’t want to put on someone else, and I don’t know if I’m okay doing so and haven’t had the right directive from anyone involved in the incident that happened on February 3rd.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man. And I want to dig into this more and we will over the next hour. But Hannah, I want to come to you because you are one of the voices that our listeners last heard at the end of last season. And I wanted to just ask if you could tell our listeners about what’s been happening in your life and in Coner since we last spoke a few months ago.

Hannah Loyd:

Well, one thing that has recently happened is the fire chief resigned and we’re not sure why. And they are still running, but they’re not manufacturing is what they’re stating. Since we talked last I up and left my house and I had to move away from everything that I ever had, and I’m better, but I’m not, if that makes sense.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It does. I mean, could you tell people a little bit about what that was like? I can only imagine what you’re going through leaving your home. We talked about the health effects that you were feeling living near Conyers. I mean, have those lifted since you’ve left? I mean, I guess, yeah. What wait are you carrying now that you’ve had to leave your home to escape this tragedy that you did not cause?

Hannah Loyd:

So since we’ve left, yes, we’re better, but every time we go back to get more stuff that we need, we get re-exposed and we get sick again. The last time we went, me and my daughter went up and within a couple of hours she was vomiting. She had a surgery performed when she was six weeks old. She’s not even supposed to vomit. So if she does vomit, that means something serious. So that means that whatever it is is still there and it’s almost like it’s getting worse. So not only was she sick, I was sick. So trying to pack more stuff up and be sick and all that stuff, it’s just hard. And you know what you have to do for your family and your kid, but you also know that there’s just no one holding any accountability still. So you just have to figure out what you have to do somehow get it done and just do it. That’s the only way I had three doctors tell me plus her, so four, to leave the state that that’s all that I could do to get better. And we did because we had no other choice. My daughter was sick and she’s three. So when a three-year-old can’t really express things but say, I’m sad, I’m itchy, I hurt. And then you go somewhere else and she’s happy and she’s laughing and she’s fine. That tells you right there, something’s not right.

Maximillian Alvarez:

God, I’m like,

Hannah Loyd:

That’s the big two changes since I talked to you last.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m just, again, I’m getting really emotional here because as a father, I can’t imagine what’s going through your heart in that situation. And of course you got to do what you got to do to protect your family. But Christina, I want to kind of bring you in here on this because escaping danger is not accountability for the people who have caused residents like Hannah and Ashley to leave their homes. I want to ask first if you could say a little more about the kind of work that you do and about your involvement in the case of East Palestine. What have you been seeing from your side as a community safety lawyer about the situation that folks in East Palestinian are really facing right now?

Kristina Baehr:

Well, I’m a survivor of toxic exposure myself, and so I started a little law firm called Justwell Law to help other families, and now I get called into sick communities all around the country and I help them unite and rise up and take on the bad guys. And I’ve done that now in Hawaii representing the Red Hill victims against the United States Navy. We won that case. We had a trial in May, and now we’re waiting on the judgment so that those people can get paid and move on with their lives. And then while that case was on hold, I got a call from an expert in East Palestine and invited me to come and meet Ashley and some of her comrades in arms. And I heard a familiar story. I heard about doctors not treating people. I heard about the EPA lying to people and telling them that it was safe when it wasn’t.

I heard about tests not being done properly and not testing for the right things, which drives me insane. And I got fired up. And when I went that December night, I had not a single client, but I was willing to represent any one of them, just any one of them. And I started talking to more people and more people. And now I represent 744 of them. And we filed on Monday in an enormous case, first in Ohio, and we’re seeking a jury trial and then separately in DC claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the EPA and the CDC because the EPA and the CDC have to stop coming to communities and telling people that it’s safe when it’s not, and looking at sick people and telling them that they’re not sick. There’s a movement of families around the country, including Hannah and Ashley and many, many others who are standing up and saying, no more, we’re not going to do this anymore.

We are not going to allow you to poison our families and we’re going to stand up not just for ourselves and our community, but for the next community. And one of the things that I think is so beautiful is seeing Ashley and Hannah’s relationship, and likewise, my clients in Hawaii knew the clients at Camp Lejeune, knew the families at Camp Lejeune. There is this club that none of us ever wanted to join, but it is a fierce and loyal community and people are ready to take a stand against institutions, and I’m just here to help them. It’s their movement.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I feel intense solidarity with you on that front as a journalist who’s been connecting with these folks that way, but hearing the same things that you’re hearing, I keep telling people it feels like I’m investigating a serial killer because I keep hearing the same things from communities across the country, whether it be causes of the pollution, the gaslighting about how it’s all in their heads, the sort of ways that communities are split apart between the people who are feeling the effects and the people who are not all that stuff. You can only interview so many people from what feel like disparate, disconnected communities and start hearing them describe the same things before you start putting these connections together. And I guess before we have our first break, I wanted to ask if just on that point, what you would want folks listening to this to know as someone who has spoken with community members in Red Hill, spoken with community members in East Palestine, I guess what’s the sort of big message folks need to understand here about how widespread this is or what the real kind of situation we’re facing is in this country?

Kristina Baehr:

It is very real, and that’s what I want people to know. I looked at my own testimony recently. I testified before a jury about the people who poisoned my family. And when I looked back at what I wanted that jury to know is I wanted them to know that it happened, that it’s real and it can happen to you. And I just had this. And when this happened to me, I had never, for me, it was toxic mold, but I had never heard of Stacky. I never, I have two Ivy League degrees, my husband has three, and neither of us have even heard the words. And there is a reason for that. There is a massive coverup in this country. There are people who are trying to influence, there are people who say that there are acceptable limits of whatever X is, right? And so you just talked about the gaslighting, but this is how it plays out. The federal lawyers at Red Hill stood up in front of a judge and said, judge, there was never enough fuel in the water to make anybody sick. It was always within acceptable limits, and it didn’t even affect half of the waterline. Therefore, anybody who says that they were sick or believes them to be themselves To have been sick were psychosomatic. I mean, These are federal officers [who] called my 7,000 clients who had rashes, vomiting, diarrhea, kids who had welts on them, esophagus that were burned, pets that were throwing up. All of them are psychosomatic, all of them. And of course, that’s what they said about me in my own case. I was just as stressed out mom during C, right? In every case, they say the same thing. It’s all within acceptable limits. And therefore, anyone who says they’re sick really is suffering from a lot of stress. Well, what caused the stress, dude, right? It makes me so angry because I hear that same thing day in and day out, this BS about acceptable limits. And no, I know that Ashley and people in East Palestine are sick because I hear the same symptoms, the brain fog, the short-term memory loss, the intense sweating in the middle of the night night. My clients in Hawaii had migraines, and now the United States is finally issuing the paper that says, oh yeah, according to our own data, there were more migraines amongst Red Hill families and there was more burning of the esophagus. This is true. This is historical fact. And when you come in and you hire experts to say otherwise, you are denying a historical event and it’s deeply unsettling. And the EPA and the CDC in particular have to stop looking at sick people and telling them they’re crazy.

That’s my soapbox, but I will continue to proclaim it from the mountaintops that this is real and it really affects people. And why can’t we show up in East Palestine with people to help? Why do we have to show up at Red Hill and take tests of water and say that it’s all non-detect when we just didn’t test for the right thing? Right? Literally, the Navy and Hawaii stood up and said, there’s no indication the water is not safe. People could smell the fuel. They knew there had been a fuel release right next to the well, but the officers in charge had the audacity to tell the people at town halls that there was no indication the water was not safe. So I get these people at deposition and I say, well, tell me sir, is the smell of gasoline, is that an indication? It’s not safe?

Of course it is. And what I think you’re doing, and I’m doing, and everyone here is doing, is we are bringing common sense to these issues. We are speaking in plain English about what is actually happening and we need to continue to do it. And so you’re doing God’s work by bringing these issues to light, by bringing these stories to light because they’re real. And it can happen to us and we are next, unless the people in charge follow their own safety rules, unless the institutions actually follow their own rules, it will happen again. And so I’m proud of the families that are rising up and saying not on our watch.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ashley, I want to come back to you here for a second because as folks know, vice President JD Vance just visited your town this month on the anniversary of the derailment, and as a Senator Vance teamed up with Democrat Sherrod Brown to put forward the Railway Safety Act in response to what Norfolk Southern did to you and your town. Now, that Bill effectively went nowhere, but when Vance was in East Palestine earlier this month, he did vow to the cameras that more action would be taken particularly on holding Norfolk Southern accountable and implementing new rail safety measures. So let’s take a listen

Vice President JD Vance:

And you can be damn sure that over the next six months you’re going to hear a lot from the vice president of the United States and the entire administration. If Norfolk Southern doesn’t keep these promises, we are going to talk about it and we are going to fight for it. And so certainly I think that we can say with confidence, the president shares my view that we need some common sense rail safety. And yes, that is something that we’re going to work on over the next couple of years.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So that’s what Vance said. Ashley, how did that trip go? How did folks in town respond to the vice president being in East Palestine?

Ashley McCollom:

He has been here multiple times before. Any help is good help to the community. I mean, people look at different colors, different sides, it doesn’t matter. Anyone that’s willing to help and hopefully things can go through a lot and they should be because we’re just one example as to why these should have been put in place beforehand. And I hope that he comes back and makes as many visits as he did before to help us and get these things put in place because we were all just people sitting in our town enjoying our normal evening. And because this wasn’t there and things weren’t done correctly, we’re now here in this situation talking to you. And granted, all of us enjoy talking to you, but it shouldn’t be a situation that it should come to this and we should be going through it because we already see this big disaster. So it would be a good idea for things to be put forward quicker if possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

As we’ve talked about ad nauseum on the show with residents of East Palestine, with residents here in South Baltimore who are also being polluted by another rail company that’s CSX transportation, we’ve spoken with them on the show, so I’m not going to go into the whole kind of explanation here, but you guys who listen to the show know that when we say the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine was avoidable, it’s because we’ve heard directly from railroad workers that they are chronically understaffed, overworked. There aren’t enough guys to check the cars to make sure that faulty systems like the one that the train had with its bearings don’t end up with trains on the track that shouldn’t be there. You have people in place to make sure that doesn’t happen. You have safety layers done by union workers across the rail industry who have been getting laid off having more work piled onto fewer people for years, right?

All of these top-down corporate and Wall Street minded decisions to cut costs and boost profits have translated to a railroad system that has over a thousand derailments a year, and workers fleeing the industry on mass because they can’t take this anymore. And they keep warning that more catastrophes like this are going to happen. And so of course we would be hypocrites if we didn’t say we were in favor of more rail safety of more accountability for these companies. And frankly, I don’t give a crap if the person helping residents of East Palestine has a D or an R next to their names, just help. These people need help. That’s all we care about right now. But to this point, it’s not just rail safety that community members need. And Christina, I wanted to ask if you could say a little bit about the other needs that folks in town and around, let’s not forget, it’s not just East Palestinian, Ohio, it’s the Pennsylvania side, it’s folks from miles around. What do folks need that are not going to be addressed by more rail safety and more accountability from Norfolk Southern?

Kristina Baehr:

I think more than anything, they need healthcare. When a disaster like this happens, why can’t we come in and teach doctors how to treat toxic exposure? Why can’t we talk about how to detox the body? Why can’t we talk about some of the signs that you might look out for, things that might happen down the road instead, the EPA comes in and says it’s going to be in and out of your body in 48 hours. I don’t know if you have heard this Max, but I’ve heard that at every site, okay, well, vinyl chloride in and out of your body in 48 hours, jet fuel in and out of your body in 48 hours, where is this 48 hours coming from?

What scientific ground is there for this 48 hours vs. That’s not true and people are sick and let’s help them get better. We know how to treat toxic exposure. We know for example, that there are people who are exposed to these chemicals in their vocations. What are the treatment protocols we’ve developed for those people? What are the blood tests we have had them take? How about just c, b, C count for people? Can we help them get better? And instead, we come into these places and we tell the doctors not to help anybody. So I think that we need some real medical care and from doctors who care, from doctors who care.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it should really be noted that this is explicitly what residents have been asking for demanding. There are coalitions like the Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers Coalition, folks from in town calling for the President Biden and now President Trump to issue an emergency declaration for East Palestine, which would unlock a suite of federal resources including guaranteed healthcare for all affected residents who are bioaccumulation these toxins in their bodies. They’re feeling the effects of them. I was standing in East Palestine last year, I could smell the damn chemicals. I could taste the metallic stuff in my mouth. Imagine living in that stuff for two years and being told, ah, it’s all washed out of your system. I mean, this is the kind of gaslighting that we’re talking about here, but you can feel the lie just by standing in the middle of the street if you’re there in East Palestine. And Hannah, before we go to another break, I wanted to ask you what if anything has been done to address the causes of the Biolab fire and the impacts that it’s been having on your community?

Hannah Loyd:

I mean, everything is real. Kind of like we can’t talk about it until the lawsuit or whatever because the county turned around and sued by a lab, so they say, oh, we can’t have any updates or anything to say until this is resolved.

Kristina Baehr:

Sorry. No, after Hannah talks, I want to answer that. That is bs.

Hannah Loyd:

So we’re just here every day living in it. In the beginning we had updates and this that, and we all knew it wasn’t right, and then it was like radio silence. And then the new commissioner came in and she was worried about the jobs of the people that were there. And now something’s been put out about the people that work there have the option to either retire with some kind of guaranteed salary forever. Everything’s real hush hush. So to be honest with you, I don’t know because we don’t know because they haven’t said anything. But it’s toxic there. Nothing’s changed. It’s toxic.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Christina, we got to go to a break in a second, but yeah, I know you add something you want to hop in on to follow up on that.

Kristina Baehr:

There is no legal basis to stop communicating and speaking truth to the people who are there. And what happens is the bad guys always do that. They say, well, their investigation’s pending, and therefore everyone has to be silent. And that is, there’s no legal basis for that. And it’s unfair to the communities that litigation is about accountability and truth and transparency. And for the bad guys to come in and say, we’re going to shut it all down just makes it even worse.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to, in this second half gang, talk a bit about the special and important circumstances that have led Hannah and Ashley to you guys have actually connected over social media and it’s really incredible that we have you both on together. Having interviewed you separately in East Palestine and in Conyers, I wanted to ask if Hannah, you could just tell us a bit more about that. How did you and Ashley find each other? What was it like for you to be going through what you’ve been going through in Conyers and then find someone like Ashley, who knows what it’s like to go through that and what have you guys been talking about in that time?

Hannah Loyd:

Well, honestly, once I started learning things about different disaster areas and started hearing about East Palestine, east Palestine, I started watching YouTube videos. I think it was one, it may have been, I don’t remember who did it, but it was, I watched some on here there and I was like, I’m literally going through the same exact thing as her everything. And so I just messaged her and just kind of went from there. And she has been the biggest mentor, helper how to get bring pop out of my kids’ hair. I have literally been so honored to have met her even though I’ve never met her in person because she has helped me through some of the hardest days that I never thought that I was going to have to go through things that she learned in her area with kids and her own kid that she was able to teach me that I had no idea why my kid was screaming. And she told me why. And it was right. And I mean, She’s become family to me, to be honest. And I am just so thankful that I was able to connect with her just through social media from a disaster that literally uprooted all of our lives. And we talk sometimes every day. Sometimes we go weeks without talking. You just never know. And we don’t always talk about disasters. We talk about stuff to do with my kid that I never even thought of how to make something simple for dinner. I mean, we talk about it all, so it’s not always disaster related. But she taught me about chemicals, dioxin, what to ask my doctor to test me for what? To ask my doctor. Things that I never thought I would have to ask anyone or my doctor. And so I’ll say again, it’s literally been an honor her to be my friend.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ashley, what is it like to get a message like that having gone through what you’ve gone, I have to imagine it’s both bittersweet because it’s like it’s happening again, but you can hear how much it means to someone like Hannah. What is it like for you to get a message like that?

Ashley McCollom:

It’s emotional because a lot of what she mentioned, I remember those times and going through that and being confused with everyone else, and I had people reach out to me that became my mentors the same and help me through it. And even like how she said, we can just talk about normal things because it’s nice to know that we went through similar things and have that break away to still be people, still be moms, still take care of a family out of every curve ball. This has thrown both of us from watching an entire plant catch on fire and not knowing is it safe, is what is going on normal. Hey, I went through that. Don’t be ashamed to ask. A lot of people need that need to understand we were there. I mean, the community understands. We understand each other and it is a privilege to meet Hannah and so many people and to be there and have that support because it feels like you have no other support but each other.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I guess if there are folks watching this right now who are living near a landfill that they suspect is making their contaminating their water, making them sick, if there are folks listening to this who are saying they are describing what I’m feeling the same way. Hannah, you felt that when you watched Ashley. I guess what would be your message to folks out there right now who maybe believe that it’s nothing or maybe it’s all in their heads? What would you advise them to do?

Hannah Loyd:

Well, I mean, some people it didn’t affect and some people it did, and some people still are unsure. I mean, if you are really unsure Or you’re on the fence, message me. I’ll talk to you. I mean, I have no shame in anything. I lost everything I ever had. I mean, can’t. I’ll be here. I’m here. I’ll talk to you. I may have to call Ashley and ask her. I may not know, but I’ll talk to you. I’m here. I have people in Max, Christina on our other interview, we talk to her. So I mean, we all kind of help each other I guess. So if you’re in doubt, just reach out because even though you may Not be for sure, think it’s in your head, just if you want to know, just ask Ash.

Ashley McCollom:

Don’t ever be ashamed to ask anything, especially in this, don’t ever be ashamed or don’t ever feel like you’re the only one because you’re not. Just remember that you’re not the only one. And it does get hard and it gets lonely and it gets tough.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Christina, I want to kind of toss that to you as well. Again, as someone who’s seen this from your side working as a lawyer, but hearing these stories from folks in affected communities as far away as Hawaii to here in Ohio or anywhere else, what would you say to folks who are maybe feeling that or thinking that as they’re hearing us talk right now, what would you advise folks to do if they suspect they are also being contaminated poison, lied to about this stuff,

Kristina Baehr:

Look for The helpers and look for the truth tellers, and they’re always there. And when I was in Hawaii, I showed up in the midst of it. I mean, not November, it happened in November, but I was there the first week of January. And so I was there to help point people to the test that Ashley’s talking about to say, here’s what you need to ask your doctor. I’m showing up in East Palestine a little bit late just because I was invited late and these events kind of happened around the same time, so I was focused on Hawaii. But in each case, there are truth tellers. There is someone who worked for the railroad who tried to get on neighborhood pages and warn people about what they were being exposed to. There are good people and there are people who are telling the truth and find them and then follow them and ask questions and find each other, find the helpers, find the truth tellers, and find each other.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And on that, I think again, this is really important, powerful lessons for folks listening in Washington take to heart. And before we go to our break, Christina, I have one more question that you sort of referred to earlier in our conversation. I think it’s still really hard for a lot of average Americans to confront the reality that their government is not looking out for them. I’ve heard it from affected communities who trusted the EPA when agents were telling ’em, you’re fine. And then they keep accumulating the evidence in their bodies that they’re not fine. So before we go to our final break, do you have any other kind of thoughts you wanted to share on that, about folks who are still trusting of the agency that was set up to protect us against things like this? How do we manage the sort of the truth tellers, the whistleblowers, the folks who are there who want to help residents mixed in with all these other interests that maybe don’t?

Kristina Baehr:

It was hard for me to come to terms with as I was, I used to represent the United States, and I believed I was one of the good guys and I think I was charged with doing the right thing. And so when I had people standing up in federal court, these lawyers saying that it basically didn’t happen. I was personally upset because our country is supposed to represent us. Our country is supposed to do the right thing in those circumstances, our federal officers are supposed to tell the truth. And then I learned, actually, that was a really good for me from a litigation perspective. I’m so glad they took that approach. And I hope that the railroad does the same thing because a jury and a judge, it doesn’t go far with them. But I think you’re going to learn when you’re faced with this to start trusting yourself too.

So I said find the truth tellers, find the helpers, find each other, but also find yourself because you know your mama heart or your dad a heart knows. And so trust yourself over the institutions around you, and then trust the people that you trust. And what we’re finding when I gave the example of it’s like kids are in a school and they’re smelling smoke, and the firemen came and said, stay where you are, you’re fine. That’s how the Navy acted in Hawaii. That’s what’s happening when the EPA shows up to these communities. They’re more interested in getting the economic world back on track than they are in protecting the people. And I think all of us have a lot of distrust after everything that happened with Covid. And we all learned a little bit to trust ourselves over institutions. And that’s not a bad lesson, but I also believe that these institutions can change, and I think that there are good people within them. So when you look for the helpers, you can look for the helpers in the institutions too. They’re there.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ashley, Hannah, Christina, in the final kind of 10 minutes that we have to, I wanted to focus in on where we are as of now, February, 2025. What do you, your families and your communities still need? What are the needs that are not being met? Right? Yeah. We mentioned earlier in the episode that JD Vance went and visited East Palestine on the two year anniversary of the derailment, promising that there will be more developments in terms of the Trump administration’s focus on railway safety, on holding Norfolk Southern accountable. But Vance also explicitly said that a disaster declaration, and I quote may have been very helpful 18 months ago. I don’t know that it’s still helpful today. Let’s talk about what your community still need, who is trying to meet those needs and what people watching and listening can do to help. So Ashley, I want to start with you and then Hannah, we’ll go to you

Ashley McCollom:

For how long we’ve been doing this and it doesn’t get easier. I remember doing the first interview with you and I feel like I’m not as emotional as I was in the beginning because now I’m really getting into that reality and it’s stagnant it, and there’s no help. We need either a disaster declaration or we need to be put on the national priority list because people shouldn’t still be sick. People shouldn’t feel uncomfortable in their home. Home is where you feel safe and comfortable and no one’s feeling safe and comfortable. If you’re questioning, is this from that health insurance, great, we could do that. But when you treat those things and you put those people right back into those places, how much good is that going to do? I mean, some of us are still displaced. I feel like we need help for those people that are struggling. I don’t know how to do that. I mean, there are some great people that are doing food drives for people that are less fortunate and really put everything out there for the people in town. I mean, this is a little bit bigger than what we could even anticipate.

I don’t think it’s safe. If I get sick in my house, if I go into my house, I’m sick. I mean, I’d love to move forward. Our animals get sick. They stayed in there for a day, they’d come back vomiting, they come back with excessive bowel movements, almost like when you change a dog’s dog food or they’re really sick. I mean, these are serious issues. We’re seeing serious things go on and for where we were in the beginning to now, it’s just progressing. I mean, we need some things. Looked at again and looked at more thoroughly and looked into these residents homes because we are a part of the environment. No matter what disaster you’re in, no matter how long time has passed, we are a part of that environment. We make the impact. And these people need to live there. We need to live there. And if you can’t, it’s not an environment anymore for humans.

Hannah, how about you?

Hannah Loyd:

That was pretty powerful. So I mean, like I said, I mean they earlier, they’re just kind of there and they’re not, they briefly address things. They have never ever even said they’re sorry or hold accountability or any of that. So that’s out the window, whatever. I just think that the county, the company, everyone just needs to take accountability for what happened. This isn’t the first time, it’s the fourth time people are there that are deathly sick. I mean, they’re sick and they have no other choice but to stay there unless someone just comes and rescues. I mean, we we’re almost like silence. Now it’s not really a big topic anymore. Nobody’s really talking about it. When I had to meet with a new doctor because I’m having new issues with my liver, which is very, very scary. And he said, oh yeah, I remember when that happened. My eyes were burning and all this. And I said, yeah, imagine being three years old and that happening. No one is understanding or taking accountability. They just want us almost to

Speaker 4:

Be quiet. Quit talking about it. But I mean, honestly, I think

Hannah Loyd:

That the citizens there now that are still there, they don’t know what to do. They don’t know where to go. They don’t know how to even seek legal counsel with getting out because a lot of people are elderly people. They have nothing but their little social security check. And these are people that I grew up knowing and to see them so sick, it’s just heartbreaking and knowing I got up and left my house. So it’s almost like we just need help somewhere for these people that can’t get the help or have the means or anything. I mean, there’s a couple little different groups that are having meetings and going to churches and meetings and all this, but I mean, I don’t think that anyone is really hearing them, if that makes sense. So we just need to be heard. Again, doctors need to be guided in what and how to treat the patients because they’re the ER doctor to know that day how to treat me. And then all these other doctors don’t know what’s going on. Something doesn’t make sense. So the doctors need to know how to do the care. They need to know how to treat people. They need to know what to help people get out. Like me, my kid, get out.

So we just need to and know what’s going on. Don’t tell us that we can’t talk about it because the county’s suing and we can’t tell you why or any kind of progress. Just give us an update. Y’all did that in the beginning. Why can’t we have it now? What happened to where we can’t know anything, if that makes sense.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It does. It makes grim necessary sense, right? I mean, it’s the bare minimum of what people should expect. And we can’t even get,

Hannah Loyd:

I say, like I said at the first show with you, max, even just, I’m sorry, still haven’t even gotten that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And again, by all appearances, it looks like we’re heading in the exact opposite direction of where we need to go in because when we use the term sacrifice zone, which is a horrible ghoulish term in a just world, that term would not exist. But when we’re saying that, what we mean is what you’ve just heard Ashley and Hannah describe it is an area where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself and have been left to flounder there to either move if they have the ability to or stay, wait and die. And that is unacceptable, and that is how we are treating more and more of our communities, whether they be in the path of toxic industrial pollution or like in intensifying weather events through manmade climate change.

The thing that is consistent is that working class communities, working people just living their lives are having their lives obliterated and having no help when they need it most. And we as a people, as a class, as humanity need to do something to band together and say, enough is enough. In the final minute or two that I have you guys, I wanted to just go around the table and ask if you had any final messages on that front to people listening to this and watching this, whether they live in a sacrifice zone or not. What do you want folks to take away from this conversation? How can we fight back and what’s going to happen if we don’t? So I guess, Ashley, let’s start with you, Hannah, and then Christina, please close us out.

Ashley McCollom:

It doesn’t hurt people that are sitting there and do not have a disaster or aren’t aware of a superfund around you. It would be good to be knowledgeable of those things. It would be good to get your water tested, your well tested, get your house tested, make sure that your heirs clean because if this happens, there’s no basis for you to have a guideline to refer back to. There’s nothing that helped us. Now, if we would’ve had our soil tested, who does that? But maybe it might not be a bad idea to spend that little extra money to have that safeguard. If this does, and it more than likely will, depending on how close you live to a rail site, a big factory, any truck could be driving down the road and spill and your normal evening could be like mine, and one minute it was there and the next it’s gone.

And as much as I like the connections I’ve made, I don’t want someone to have to reach out to me and be another Hannah. I appreciate these relationships I’ve made and I’d like to make more, but not on these circumstances. And I don’t want to see anyone else suffer and be confused and lost and be two years in a camper, not knowing where you’re going to go. This should not be anyone’s lives. Prepare yourself if you can do it, it doesn’t hurt. And be considerate of other people. Understand we’re not all going through the same things. Be kind to your neighbors because one day everything could change.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I mean, just

Hannah Loyd:

What she said, just be kind. We live in this world full of hate and it’s just getting worse, unfortunately. But yeah, just don’t ever hesitate to do things that you may think if you’re a mama, trust your mama gut because it’s always going to be right. If you think you’re crazy, you’re not. It’s real. It’s very real and it’s very scary. And I don’t wish this on anyone ever. I don’t wish this on any kid. I don’t wish this on any animal. I don’t wish this on anyone. But unfortunately it happens due to the negligence of people that are either not trained correctly or being short-staffed or other things that can have accidents, but just do your research if you’re going to move. Ashley helped me when I was moving. She’s like, make sure you look so you search Superfund sites, stuff like that. Make sure you know where you’re going because you don’t want to move from one disaster zone to another disaster zone. Well, who would’ve that? Because I didn’t. I just was trying to get out. So I mean, yeah, she said just connect with people, make friends be nice. Everyone is going through something you don’t know what someone’s going through. Just be nice. And there’s people out there that have gone through it or are going through it and can help you and will be there for you. I will.

Kristina Baehr:

I think that there’s a role for the law here too. I still believe in the rule of law. I still believe in our American jury system and American juries are entrusted with enforcing the safety rules. But the system only works if the people are brave enough if to bring the claims. And so I hope that one way we can help these communities is to show up and help them bring the claims because the law is about compensation for people who have been victims of negligence or worse of fraud. There’s more than just negligence here and deterrence of the bad conduct in the first place, prevention, and you can’t have one without the other. I hope that the law can be one tool in these communities for people to come together and demand change and demand truth, and demand accountability and demand the compensation that they need to get out of the contamination.

Because if you are in a contaminated house, I promise you, please make plans to leave. Do whatever you can to leave. And I know some of you think you can’t afford to leave, but you can’t afford to stay. I’ve had clients who have died in the house is I told them to leave. So one of my firm is called just well, because I truly want people to be well. And my hope and prayer for all of you who are affected from exposures is that you would get well enough to get help and to help others and to get out.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week, and I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to our three incredible guests today, Ashley McCollum, Hannah Lloyd, and Christina Bear. We’re going to see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the other great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for our newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

I just felt it. I used to feel very fulfilled at the library, where I worked as a full-time photographer, but then I was waking up and dreading going in. I felt like I wasn’t giving 100 percent and instead looking forward to doing more things on my own. But I wasn’t doing anything to leave my job because I was so scared. But then I just thought, “What do I really want to show for my life?” That’s what pushed me forward. Because for a long time I was happy and content at my job. But then I felt like, “I’ve done everything here. What can my next thing be?” It was after I won employee of the year. I was like, “I can’t be here anymore. I can’t keep doing the same thing over and over and over again.” When I was, I don’t know, 15, 16, I thought I’d never do creative photography as my full time job. I thought, have to have a “real job.” That was a mindset I had for a long time. And then it was like, “No, but you can. You can do this.”

What ultimately helped you decide to take that leap and get past that very understandable resistance towards making such a big life change?

It’s been years and years of me doing this on the side, on the weekends, and being drained from that and getting frustrated that I couldn’t put a hundred percent in either of them. I guess I thought it would just come to me and I’d be like, “Okay, now it’s time.” But I just had to push myself. And turning 30 was a big milestone; like, I’m going to be 30 now–what’s next? I do have one memory: I was just vacuuming, and I thought, “What if I quit over the summer?”

I had also just done the [Colorpop] Workshop and that was a big eye opening thing. I went to Utah with this group of women from around the world. We did stylized shoots, but we also got to talk to each other. And hearing from other women who were able to do this full time was inspiring as well. That gave me the final push to be like, “Okay, I can’t go back to the library after doing this workshop and being this creative.”

Why do you think teenage you didn’t think being a full-time professional photographer was possible?

At the time I couldn’t understand what avenues there were in photography, and I thought it was just taking pictures for newspapers or magazines. I couldn’t understand there was a whole world, and I’m still learning all the ways people use photography and [might] need my services. I think I kind of halted a little bit right out of college. I got an internship at the library and was there for eight years. So I feel now very much like I’m going back to before-college Amanda, high-school Amanda, where what I did for fun was just take pictures and edit them on and put them on Flickr and Tumblr.

What does it feel like now to be a full-time freelance photographer compared to being a photographer for an organization?

It’s a lot harder. I realized early on I’m really going to have to work for this now, instead of just showing up to an office every day. I was very good at the library and it was [relatively] easy in comparison. And it was nice to have someone to report to, and I do miss being on a team. I miss my coworkers. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do this year, find more community in Orlando.

I’ve been doing this for over 10 years officially, since the very first person paid me for pictures in 2012, but I still feel like it’s only been like six months of “Okay let me try to do this for real.”

One of my favorite things is seeing how you play with the self-timer setting in your garage. What is your process for playing and experimenting with your art?

I have been taking pictures of myself for years. My sister’s a lot younger than me so I couldn’t really use her as a model, so I relied on myself. I spent a lot of time in my room with my camera. And that’s the best and easiest and best way I know how. I wish I was a painter. I wish I could draw. I cannot, I’m not artistic in that way, but my form of self expression is my self portraits. But I kind of abandoned that for a little while and it’s been fun to get back.

And I love how confident you feel right after you create something. I always feel so much better about myself. Creating for myself is a learning opportunity as well. If it’s something I want to try on a client, I’m like, let me try it out on myself first.

From the outside, it also seems like you’re accessing this sense of play and creativity in your self-portraits that inspire me. Where does that sense of play come from for you?

Other photographers and other photos I see inspire me. I’ve always been like that from Tumblr, just seeing other photos and thinking, “I want to do something like that,” and of course make it my own. Listening to music also inspires me. I feel like your music choices can manifest in the art you create.

When you’re not shooting for a client or shooting self portraits in your garage, what are you typically drawn to capture and why?

I love architecture a lot. I definitely love trying to make art out of the abstract architect pieces and look at it in a different way. And when going for a walk [I’m] drawn to the way the sun sets, the grass and the water and the trees at the lake. And flowers. I love flowers.

Why do you think you’re drawn to these things in particular?

I don’t know how to make it not sound cheesy like capturing a moment in time, but it is about capturing something, capturing the way you see it and creating something new. It’s a moment in time and it’ll never be like that again. The next day it’s not going to look like that anymore.

Even thinking about flowers, you’re capturing something that really won’t be exactly like that tomorrow. There will be other flowers, sure. But that flower, at that moment, will change tomorrow. That hits me differently in my late thirties, and with these recent horrific LA fires; this idea of how ephemeral things are. How temporary.

Yes, and that idea of what’s lost is a huge part of my life. I love going down memory lane. I love looking at old photos. There’s been so many times I’ve regretted not bringing my camera or thought I should have taken that photo. Because it’ll never look like that again. I’ll never look like this again.

I love how vocal you have been about having a big dream to photograph Ariana Grande one day. You said that to me the first time we met, and I was so delighted because as I told you then I’ve always had a big dream to profile Taylor Swift. I don’t meet a lot of people who say big dreams like that out loud. What does dreaming big as an artist do for you?

We’ll see if it ever happens, but when I was younger I didn’t really have a lot of goals. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do for a while. But I learned a lesson back in college where I was like, I really want to study abroad. And then I ended up finding some information about how my community college actually had study abroad programs. I’m like 19 and for the first time I realized, “Oh if I want to do something and want to be inspired by something, I can do it.”

And I think having a goal that’s not too crazy is important as well, but a big goal kind of pushes you and inspires you. I would love to photograph Ariana Grande. I love her as a model and her brand, her essence, her style. And looking at all her pictures and seeing what other photographers do, I just get this feeling like, “I can do that.” Because I think the worst thing that I do and that people can do is [say] “I can’t; I could never do that; that’s so far out of my reach.”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Isa Adney.

An undocumented Venezuelan mother and two of her children were deported to Mexico earlier this month — just hours after a minor traffic stop, reports John Washington, who has covered the case for the Tucson-based independent outlet Arizona Luminaria. Arizona Public Safety troopers claimed the mother was driving under the speed limit. The mother, whom Democracy Now! is not identifying at the request of the family, described being handcuffed in front of her children, aged 6 and 9. The troopers called Border Patrol agents, who apprehended the woman and her two children and later turned them over to Mexican immigration officials in the border city of Nogales before they were put on a bus and driven about 2,000 miles away to the southern Mexican state of Tabasco. The woman suffered a “night of interrogation,” says Washington. The woman’s family was unable to reach the mother for days, until she was finally able to call her family letting them know of her whereabouts. Her two other children, who are 8 and 14 years old, are still in Tucson. We also speak with immigrant rights activist Greisa Martínez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream Action, who says Democrats share the blame for harmful immigration policies now reaching new heights under the Trump administration. “We need a true opposition power and party,” she says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

In the second half of the program, Marine corps veteran Matthew Hoh comes back on the show to talk about his recent trip to occupied Palestine / Israel. Matt describes the parallel phases of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as Israeli culture that makes entertainment out of genocide while simultaneously denying that genocide

The post Reporting Under Fire: Gaza, Genocide, and the Truth Behind the Headlines appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

In a highly anticipated session of the Tongan Parliament to debate and vote on the second vote of no confidence (VONC) scheduled for last Monday, December 9, in Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni Hu’akavameiliku and the Cabinet, Hu’akavameiliku surprised everyone by announcing his resignation — even before the actual debate had begun.

The session began with the Speaker, Lord Fakafanua, announcing the procedure for the day which was to have each of the seven grounds of the VONC read out, followed by the Cabinet’s responses, after which each member of Parliament would be allowed 10 minutes to make a statement for or against.

Before parliamentary staff started reading out the documents, Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) Samiu Vaipulu moved that the VONC be declared null and void as it did not have the 10 valid signatures that the house rules stipulated.

• READ MORE: Other Tongan PM reports

He claimed that two of the 10 signatures were added on October 10, whereas an event included in VONC did not begin until October 21, thus making those signatures invalid. That event was the 2024 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting which was held in Samoa, October 21-26, and the VONC cited it in relation to alleged Cabinet overspending on overseas travel.

After an hour and half of debate on the DPM’s motion, the Speaker ruled that despite the technical shortcoming, he would proceed with the VONC at 2pm after the lunch break. Hu’akavameiliku immediately asked for a break, as only 10 minutes remained before the lunch break, but the Speaker sided with VONC supporters and ruled that the debate begin straight away.

That is when Hu’akavameiliku asked for the floor and proceeded to thank everyone from the King to the nobles and his Cabinet members and the movers of the VONC before announcing his resignation.

The second VONC had been tabled on November 25. The Speaker instructed the parliamentary committee responsible to scrutinise it for compliance with parliamentary rules and determine whether additional information was needed before making it available to the Prime Minister and Cabinet by November 29.

More time request granted
Hu’akavameiliku was initially required to submit his response by December 3 for debate and ballot. But on November 28 the Speaker granted his request for more time, rescheduling the debate to December 9. The movers of the VONC were not happy, particularly given that the first one submitted in August 2023 had contained 46 grounds (compared with seven in the second), to which the Prime Minister and Cabinet had responded to in detail within five days.

There is reason to suspect that there was more to the request for extension than meets the eye. The inaugural graduation ceremony for the Tonga National University, which opened in January 2023, was held over three days beginning December 4, with the University’s Chancellor, King Tupou VI, officiating. Hu’akavameiliku, as Pro-Chancellor and chair of the University Council and Minister for Education and Training, facilitated the first day’s ceremony.

That date, December 4, marked the 1845 coronation of King Siaosi Tupou I, the founder of modern Tonga. Notably, King Tupou VI was absent on the second and third days, with Lord Fakafanua and Hu’akavameiliku stepping in to play the Chancellor’s role.

In a media conference on November 25 after the VONC was tabled, Hu’akavameiliku defended the VONC movers’ constitutional right to introduce it, but also said that since he only had a year left of his four-year term, he would have preferred a dialogue about their concerns.

He gave the impression to the media that he had the numbers to defeat this second VONC. However, his numbers were tight.

As of November 10, his Cabinet had nine members, reduced from 10 after his Minister for Lands and Survey, Lord Tu’i’afitu, resigned after receiving a letter from the Palace Office saying King Tupou VI had withdrawn his confidence and trust in him as minister.

Of the nine remaining members, four were People’s Representatives (PRs), including the Prime Minister, two were Nobles’ Representatives (NRs) and three were Non-Elected Representatives who could not vote on the VONC.

Question mark over allegiance
o, with six votes in hand, Hu’akavameiliku needed eight more to beat the VONC. He could usually count on five PRs — Tevita Puloka, Dulcie Tei, Sione Taione, Veivosa Taka and Mo’ale ‘Otunuku — and possibly three NRs that could have sided with him, Lord Tuiha’angana, Lord Fakafanua and Prince Kalaniuvalu.

But there was a question mark over Prince Kalaniavalu’s allegiance as he had voted in favour of the first VONC in September 2023.

The movers of the second VONC were confident they had the numbers this time round. Lord Tu’ilakepa, who had voted against the VONC in 2023, was one of the signatories this time around. Previously, Lord Tu’ileakepa had almost always voted with the Prime Minister and was loathe to be associated with members of Parliament who had any pro-democracy inclinations.

The seven PR signatories were Dr Langi Fasi, Mateni Tapueleuelu, Dr ‘Aisake Eke, Piveni Piukala, Kapeli Lanumata, Mo’ale Finau and Vatau Hui. They were also guaranteed the vote of Dr Tanieta Fusmalohi, still making his way back from COP29.

So, they had 11 guaranteed votes, and 13 if the recently resigned Minister, Lord Tu’I’afitu, and Prince Kalaniuvalu sided with them. As with the first VONC, the NRs would play a crucial role, controlling nine of the 26 seats (more than 33 percent of the Parliament) despite representing less than 1 percent of the country’s population.

Since King Tupou VI withdrew his confidence and trust in Hu’akavameiliku as Minister for Defence and Fekita ‘Utoikamanu as Minister for Foreign Affairs early in 2024, the Prime Minister continued as Acting Minister in those two portfolios.

There was hope that substantive Ministers would have been appointed (from the Royal Family) by the time of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders Meeting in Nuku’alofa in August 24, but it was not to be.

Relations remained strained
In spite of the hulouifi (traditional reconciliation ceremony) performed in February, relations between the King and Hu’akavameiliku remained strained. One cannot help but think that the Palace Office was at least supportive of the VONC, if not among the instigators.

As PIF chair until next year’s leaders’ summit in Solomon Islands, Hu’akavameiliku reportedly felt let down by King Tupou VI’s absence from the country during the Leaders’ Meeting — not least because his father, King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, and his brother, Prince Tuipelehake, were instrumental in setting up the PIF (South Pacific Forum, at that time) in 1972.

Together with Fiji’s Ratu Kamisese Mara, Cook Islands’ Sir Albert Henry, Nauru’s Hammer De Roburt, Samoa’s Malietoa and Niue’s Robert Rex, they walked out of the then South Pacific Commission (SPC) when they could no longer stand being treated like children by the colonial powers (US, France, UK, the Netherlands, Australia, and NZ) at the annual SPC meetings and their refusal to include decolonisation and nuclear testing on SPC’s agenda.

The Speaker immediately recessed parliament after Hu’akavameiliku’s announcement. By the time it reconvened at 2pm he had a letter from the Palace Office saying they had received the PM’s resignation in writing.

In spite of vociferous opposition from some of the VONC movers, he announced that, under section 18 of the Government Act, DPM Samiu Vaipulu would be Acting Prime Minister (in an interim Cabinet of existing members) until December 24, when Parliament is scheduled to elect a new Prime Minister from its existing membership of the house.

Lopeti Senituli is a law practitioner in Tonga and is the immediate past president of the Tonga Law Society. He was Political and Media Adviser to Prime Ministers Dr Feleti Vaka’uta Sevele (2006-2010) and Samuela ‘Akilisi Pohiva (2018-2019). This article was first published by Devpolicy Blog and is republished with the author’s permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In the latest case, Xue Jian, the Chinese consul general in Osaka, Japan, faced sharp criticism from the Japanese government for a post on his X account in which he openly advocated for specific candidates in recent elections. Japan deemed his comment “highly inappropriate.”

Although Xue removed the post at Japan’s insistence, other posts in which he weighs in on U.S. politics – written in Japanese – remain online, fueling the debate over China’s diplomatic boundaries.

Targeting the US

Xue is not alone. Many Chinese diplomats have increasingly focused their attention on U.S. politics, even if some of them have no official responsibilities related to that country.

Both Xue and Zhang Heping, China’s cultural counselor in Pakistan, for instance, have often been seen spreading rumors online about ballot machine malfunctions and widespread voter fraud in the U.S. election.

And some of their posts have gone viral.

Data from the Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard – an online initiative tracking social media narratives linked to China, Russia, and Iran – shows a post by Zhang about the U.S. election became the sixth most popular post from an official Chinese source on X in the week of the election.

Some Chinese diplomats have gone beyond reposting misleading content, frequently employing AI-generated material to spread disinformation.

“I think the goal is to make U.S. democracy look unappealing so that the PRC is seen as a viable alternative,” said the dashboard’s creator and manager, Bret Schafer, referring to China by its official name, the People’s Republic of China.

“While I don’t think this particular video is going to help them achieve that goal, pointing to real or perceived flaws in the U.S. system has proven to be a successful propaganda strategy over time,” he told AFCL.

Changes in Chinese diplomacy

Since 2019, Chinese diplomats have shifted from refuting criticism of China to actively disseminating disinformation on global platforms such as X, Facebook, and Google.

This marks a significant departure from the restraint that once defined Chinese foreign policy, encapsulated by the late statesman Deng Xiaoping’s principle of “hide your strength, bide your time” and former state councilor Dai Bingguo’s approach of “speaking big words in a soft voice.”

Such a change also aligns with the broader trend of “wolf warrior” diplomacy promoted by President Xi Jinping, who urges diplomats to “rouse oneself to action.”

As well as Xue and Zhang, another official, Zhang Meifang, former consul general in Belfast, has adopted a similarly combative and assertive style, signaling a profound shift in China’s diplomatic posture.

Stirring chaos

David Bandurski, director of the China Media Project, believes that Chinese diplomats have intentionally set out to “add to the confusion” within the media landscape over the U.S. over the past five years.

“China is working to flood the social media space with a range of messages. Some may find viral impact, others fizzle,” he said. “But they understand that they can take advantage of the deeply disrupted information world.”

But Schafer from the Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard said he had observed a trend of some Chinese diplomats “significantly” toning down their messages lately, although many of them still spread conspiracy theories.

Schafer suggested this could be due to China’s “realization” that their aggressive posture on social media was hurting their reputation.

“So they have reverted back to focusing on trying to build a positive image of China,” Schafer noted.

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Taejun Kang.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Rita Cheng for Asia Fact Check Lab.

The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater is many things. It is:

• A family history
• A social history
• A history of the left-wing in Aotearoa
• A chilling reminder of the origin and continuation of the surveillance state in New Zealand, and
• A damn good read.

The book is a great example of citizen or activist authorship. The author, Maire Leadbeater, and her family are front and centre of the dark cloud of the surveillance state that has hung and still hangs over New Zealand’s “democracy”.

What better place to begin the book than the author noting that she had been spied on by the security services from the age of 10. What better place to begin than describing the role of the Locke family — Elsie, Jack, Maire, Keith and their siblings — have played in Aotearoa society over the last few decades.

And what a fitting way to end the book than with the final chapter entitled, “Person of Interest: Keith Locke”; Maire’s much-loved brother and our much-loved friend and comrade.

In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country.

The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.

I have often deprecatingly called myself a mere footnote of history as that is all I seem to appear as in many books written about recent progressive history in New Zealand. But it was without false modesty that when Maire gave me a copy of the book a couple of weeks back, I immediately went to the index, looked up my name and found that this time I was a bit more than a footnote, but had a section of a chapter written on my interaction with the spooks.

But it was after reading this, dipping into a couple of other “person of interest” stories of people I knew such as Keith, Mike Treen, the Rosenbergs, Murray Horton and then starting the book again from the beginning did it become clear on what issues the state was paranoid about that led it to build an apparatus to spy on its own citizens.

These were issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, de-colonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought. These are the issues that come up time and time again; essentially it was seditious or subversive to be part of any of these campaigns or ideologies.

Client state spying
The other common theme through the book is the role that the UK and more latterly the US has played in ensuring that their NZ client settler state plays by their rules, makes enemies of their enemies and spies on its own people for their “benefit”.

It was interesting to read how the “5 Eyes”, although not using that name, has been in operation as long as NZ has had a spying apparatus. In fact, the book shows that 3 of the 5 eyes forced NZ to establish its surveillance apparatus in the first place.

Maire, and her editor have arranged this book in a very reader friendly way. It is mostly chronological showing the rise of the surveillance state from the beginning of the 19th century, in dispersed with a series of vignettes of “Persons of Interest”.

Maire would probably acknowledge that this book could not have been written without the decision of the SIS to start releasing files (all beit they were heavily redacted with many missing parts) of many of us who have been spied on by the SIS over the years. So, on behalf of Maire, thank you SIS.

Maire has painstakingly gone through pages and pages of these primary source files and incorporated them into the historical narrative of the book showing what was happening in society while this surveillance was taking place.

I was especially delighted to read the history of the anti-war and conscientious objectors movement. Two years ago, almost to the day, we held the 50th anniversary of the Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS); an organisation that I founded and was under heavy surveillance in 1972.

We knew a bit about previous anti-conscription struggles but Maire has provided much more context and information that we knew. It was good to read about people like John Charters, Ormand Burton and Archie Barrington as well more known resisters such as my great uncle Archibald Baxter.

Within living memory
Many of the events covered take place within my living memory. But it was wonderful to be reminded of some things I had forgotten about or to find some new gems of information about our past.

Stories around Bill Sutch, Shirley Smith, Ann and Wolfgang Rosenberg, Jack and Mary Woodward, Gerald O’Brien, Allan Brash (yes, Don’s dad), Cecil Holmes, Jack Lewin are documented as well as my contemporaries such as Don Carson, David Small, Aziz Choudry, Trevor Richards, Jane Kelsey, Nicky Hager, Owen Wilkes, Tame Iti in addition to Maire, Keith and Mike Treen.

The book finishes with a more recent history of NZ again aping the US’s so-called war on terror with the introduction of an anti and counter-terrorism mandate for the SIS and its sister agencies

The book traverses events such as the detention of Ahmed Zaoui, the raid on the Kim Dotcom mansion, the privatisation of spying to firms such as Thomson and Clark, the Urewera raids, “Hit and Run” in Afghanistan. Missing the cut was the recent police raid and removal of the computer of octogenarian, Peter Wilson for holding money earmarked for a development project in DPRK (North Korea).

When we come to the end of the book we are reminded of the horrific Christchurch mosque attack and massacre and prior to that of the bombing of Wellington Trades Hall and the Rainbow Warrior. Also, the failure of the SIS to discover Mossad agents operating in NZ on fake passports.

We cannot but ask the question of why multi-millions of dollars have been spent spying on, surveilling and monitoring peace activists, trade unionists, communists, Māori and more latterly Muslims, when the terrorism that NZ has faced has been that perpetrated on these people not by these people.

Maire notes in the book that the SIS budget for 2021 was around $100 million with around 400 FTEs employed. This does not include GCSB or other parts of the security apparatus.

Seeking subversives in wrong places
This level of money has been spent for well over 100 years looking for subversives and terrorists in the wrong place!

Finally, although dealing with the human cost of the surveillance state, the book touches on some of the lighter sides of the SIS spying. Those of us under surveillance in the 1970s and 1980s remember the amateurish phone tapping that went on at that time.

Also, the men in cars with cameras sitting outside our flats for days on end. Not in the book, but I have one memory of such a man with a camera in a car outside our flat in Wallace Street, Wellington.

After a few days some of my flatmates took pity on him and made him a batch of scones which they passed through the window of his car. He stayed for a bit longer that day but we never saw him or an alternate again.

Another issue the book picks up is the obsession that the SIS and its foreign counterparts had with counting communists in NZ. I remember that the CIA used to put out a Communist Yearbook that described and attempted to count how many members were in each of the communist parties all around the world.

In NZ, my party, the Workers Communist League, was smaller than the SUP, CPNZ and SAL, but one year near the end of our existence we were pleasantly surprised to see that the CIA had almost to a person, doubled our membership.

We could not work out why, until we realised that we all had code names as well as real names and we were getting more and more slack at using the correct one in the correct place. Anyone surveilling us, counting names, would have counted double the names that we had as members! We took the compliment.

Thank you, Maire, for this great book. Thank you and your family for your great contribution to Aotearoa society.

Hopefully the hardships and human cost that you have shown in this book will commit or recommit the rest of us to struggle for a decolonised and socialist Aotearoa within a peaceful and multi-polar world.

And as one of Jack Locke’s political guides said: “the road may be long and torturous, but the future is bright.”

Robert Reid has more than 40 years’ experience in trade unions and in community employment development in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a former general secretary the president of FIRST Union. Much of his work has been with disadvantaged groups and this has included work with Māori, Pacific peoples and migrant communities. This was his address tonight for the launch of The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa New Zealand, by Maire Leadbeater.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

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For months, Venezuelan migrants had been arriving in Denver with nowhere to go. At first, they came in groups small enough to escape notice by most. A few immigrant aid groups with connections on the U.S.-Mexico border warned city officials to prepare for more but were ignored.

Then, in December 2022, a busload of about 90 migrants stepped into the freezing night, bound for Denver Rescue Mission. The shelter, which serves the city’s growing unhoused community, was full.

City officials and local aid organizations scrambled, filling a recreation center with beds to keep migrants from sleeping on the streets. A week later, their growing numbers prompted an emergency declaration, freeing up state and federal resources to help. The city filled a second recreation center with beds and transformed a third into an intake center. By the end of the month, city shelters housed nearly 500 migrants.

It was just the beginning.

Most of the migrants crossed into the U.S. in El Paso, Texas, which is an easy bus ride away from Denver compared with Chicago or New York. Through the winter and early spring, they arrived in the high-plains city largely on their own accord, drawn by word of mouth that Denver had jobs.

Then in May 2023, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending busloads of migrants to Denver, seeking to score political points by forcing liberal cities to share in what he saw as a burden being foisted on border states.

Mike Johnston became Denver’s mayor two months later. An ambitious politician with big ideas and a flair for poignant speeches, Johnston was a fluent Spanish speaker who had been principal of a high school with mostly immigrant students. He was determined to do right by the people arriving in his city, the “newcomers,” as the city took to calling them. If Abbott thought he was sending a “plague” to “somehow destroy” Denver, Johnston said, the city would prove the migrants’ arrival to be the opposite. He believed that with a little help getting settled, they would fuel Denver’s economy and enrich its culture as generations of immigrants had before.

As Johnston mobilized the city to care for the newcomers, he was also grappling with a growing unhoused population. More than 5,800 people were experiencing homelessness; many lived in downtown encampments. Johnston had declared a state of emergency on his first day in office, and promised to house 1,000 people by the end of 2023.

But by the following January, Denver was feeling the full weight of being a welcoming city. More than 300 migrants a day were rolling into Denver, just over 4,000 were living in shelters and hundreds more were sleeping on the street. The city had spent $42 million to help them, with no sign of meaningful alternatives from the federal government. And with record numbers of asylum seekers arriving at the border, it seemed likely more would make their way to Denver. Local newscasters called it a crisis. Aid workers reported flaring tensions between migrants and the unhoused at food banks and shelters.

This was the moment that Monica Navarro and her family arrived.

She and her partner, Miker Silva, had just $10 between them. But because Denver wasn’t leaving migrants without support, the couple and their two children, ages 13 and 9, were quickly given a free room at the Comfort Inn. They could stay for six weeks. The city hoped that would be enough for the family to find their own housing, either in Denver or elsewhere. Navarro and Silva had no idea how they would support themselves, but they were grateful for the help and determined to make it on their own.

“We came here to make a new life, not so much for ourselves but for our daughters,” Navarro said.

Tim Rogers, a Denver native, was riveted by media coverage of the arriving migrants. The stories focused not just on what the mayor was spending, but on how the community was rallying to support newcomers. Residents delivered food, knitted winter hats and even opened spare bedrooms to them.

Watching these families shuttled into hotels and shelters, Rogers couldn’t help but think about his own decade-long battle with homelessness. He had nothing against the migrants and grasped their plight in a way only someone who’s lived on the streets can. But he had spent years on a waiting list for housing assistance. He still had friends living on the streets. And he couldn’t reconcile how the city would spend so heavily on the newcomers when its homeless population had long been desperate for that kind of help.

“It ain’t fair,” he said. “We got guys doing what they’re supposed to do, seeing their case managers and trying to get housing. If they ask to get a pair of shoes they get a big runaround.”

Even Johnston wondered how long the city could keep it up. At the end of 2023, hundreds of migrants who had timed out of the shelters had erected a sprawling tent encampment, where families with small children were living in the dead of winter. Under mounting political and humanitarian pressure, he organized a city effort to disband the camp and in one day got all of the migrants sheltered again.

But as Johnston touted the city’s accomplishment to reporters, two more buses pulled up with more newcomers in need of help.

“‘It was like, ‘Will there ever be an end?’” Johnston told ProPublica. “That was a moment where, even when we were creating heroic solutions, we weren’t sure how sustainable they would be.”

Colorado was once openly hostile to immigrants. English-only and show-me-your-papers laws were strictly enforced. Businesses faced stiff penalties for hiring undocumented workers, and immigration officers routinely raided restaurants, farms and factories across the state.

Then, about 15 years ago, immigrant rights activists pushed back, organizing campaigns to shield migrants from the raids and galvanizing support to repeal the anti-immigration laws. The state’s Latino population grew by 25% in the last decade. Activists organized immigrants and residents alike to support pro-immigration policies. Over the next decade, Denver adopted some of the most progressive protections in the country. Local police are barred from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on civil deportations or detainers, and undocumented migrants can’t be arrested based on their status. During the Trump administration, churches and community aid groups formed networks to host refugees and protect people from deportation.

Both the community and Denver’s largely Democratic elected leaders were proud of its reputation as a sanctuary city (they prefer the term “welcoming city”). When Abbott began busing migrants to Denver, they weren’t about to be cowed.

But the newcomers weren’t like past immigrants, who typically chose a destination based on the advice of family or friends who had established lives in the U.S. and could help with a job and place to stay. Such people arrived in immigrant neighborhoods and agricultural towns without drawing much attention and with most everything they needed.

The Venezuelans had instead been driven from their country in overwhelming numbers by the almost complete collapse of the economy, arriving conspicuously by the busload and without a network to put them on a path to self-sufficiency. The Biden administration lifted pandemic-era restrictions on border crossings for such asylum-seekers with no federal plan for their resettlement during the years-long wait to have their cases heard.

As a result, they ended up concentrating in a few cities. Denver was one of a handful of places where the number of new migrants commanded an exceptional and visible government response. Taxpayers had to step in for missing family and federal government support, a dynamic that seemed to harden public opinion against immigration in other Colorado cities and the rest of the country.

And in many ways, Denver was in no position to take in thousands of new residents. Rents are high; housing prices have soared; and the job market is tighter than in many U.S. cities. The newcomers needed far more than the city had set aside to help its existing residents contend with those realities.

Since Denver opened the first emergency shelter, it has provided assistance — from a bus ticket to another city, to six months of free rent — to nearly 43,000 migrants at a cost of $76 million. That’s in addition to the $155 million the city is projected to spend on Johnston’s program to shelter the unhoused swept from downtown encampments.

“Cities have now had to air their dirty laundry, that they've never figured out how to deal with their unhoused population. They've never figured out how to properly serve their undocumented population,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “It's unfortunate that these communities end up sort of pitted against each other, rather than us having the bigger conversation of ‘how do we make sure that housing is accessible for all people and affordable for all people?’”

Navarro and Silva met years ago at a party in the Venezuelan state of Miranda. They fell in love and built a life together but never married. Their hometown of Cua wasn’t far from the beach, where they would picnic and wade in the warm Caribbean Sea. She did promotions for well-known brands and he worked as a bricklayer. Their first child died as an infant. They had two more daughters — whose names are tattooed over Navarro’s heart — before the country’s economy collapsed. Once it did, everything they needed to do to raise their girls became impossible. Hyperinflation put buying food, diapers and medicine out of reach. When a clinic offered free sterilization to women, Navarro decided to go even though she still wanted a son.

“It was very difficult to sustain a child in Venezuela,” said Navarro, whose dark eyes and warm smile are framed by a cloud of curly hair. “There were no diapers. There was no milk. The little children got too sick. So I decided not to have any more babies.”

In 2018, they left for Peru, but after five years the economy there also turned sour. They decided to follow the millions of others on the journey to seek asylum in the United States: making the treacherous hike through the Darién jungle, encountering militias who stole everything, clinging to the roof of a train through Mexico. Penniless at points along the way, Navarro sold candy on the streets. She watched over her daughters as they slept on the ground outside gas stations. But Navarro knew they were among the lucky ones. She had passed the bodies of migrants, including children, who had died attempting to reach America.

As the family traveled, Navarro searched social media for a good place in the United States to settle, using terms such as “jobs,” “good apartments,” “good economy.” She watched TikTok videos from migrants who had successfully settled in Denver and decided that’s where her family would go.

Instead of attempting to slip across the border illegally, the family followed the Biden administration’s guidance to use a smartphone app called CBP One to make an appointment to enter the United States and file an asylum claim. They crossed the border at Calexico, California, and were immediately eligible for Social Security cards and work authorization because they had used CBP One. Other asylum-seekers who didn’t use CBP One typically have to wait six months.

The couple didn’t have friends or relatives to turn to for help as past immigrants had, but they received critical assistance from an array of other sources. An immigrant aid group paid to fly the family to Denver, where the city set them up in a shelter and paid the fees for their work authorization cards. Volunteers helped them fill out the seven-page applications written in English.

They were in a safe and stable place for the moment. But they only had six weeks to find work, otherwise they would end up on the streets as they’d seen happen to so many others. “Many of them ran out of time and slept in the cars, or you saw them leaving the hotel and looking for a tent to sleep,” Navarro said.

After a week at the shelter, Silva met a construction worker at Popeye’s who threw the family a lifeline: a spot for Silva on his crew. It wasn’t a steady job but it delivered something as important as income. Local nonprofits were providing rent assistance to migrants who had a proof-of-employment letter. Silva got one from the lead contractor, ensuring his family’s rent would be covered for six weeks.

In March, the family moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a sprawling complex of 1970s low-rise buildings in Aurora, a suburb just outside Denver. The lawns were well kept, and the managers were diligent about the rules. They once fined Navarro for putting a grill on her porch. Most of the neighbors were immigrants. Navarro’s daughters had good schools to attend. The rent was $1,800 a month.

The quiet apartment complex in Aurora bore no resemblance to the fabricated picture Donald Trump would paint of their new hometown. During the presidential debate in September, the Republican presidential nominee described Aurora as overrun by Venezuelan prison gangs, making the city a focus of anti-immigrant furor. Local officials described Venezuelan gang crime in the city as concerning but isolated. The most excitement Navarro had seen at her complex was when a neighbor accidentally set her kitchen on fire.

Once settled, she tapped into a network of community members who were helping migrants. Through Facebook, she found free furniture for the apartment: a charcoal sofa, a beanbag chair, an oversized mirror in the living room and bookshelves that hold brightly colored flowers. She also befriended two women – members of the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church — from the Facebook groups. Janice Paul would send odd jobs their way. Susie Pappas would drive Navarro to food banks when Silva’s checks didn’t cover the bills.

“They are my angels,” Navarro said.

When the six weeks of rent assistance ran out, the couple had difficulty meeting their expenses. Silva had fairly steady work with the man he had met at Popeye’s, but Navarro’s work authorization card had been lost in the mail. Even with Pappas’ help battling the federal agency in charge of replacing it, the process was dragging on. Navarro grew anxious over her inability to help support her family.

Then, the man stopped paying Silva. He looked for a new job but finding one wasn’t as easy as TikTok had led them to believe.

Silva networked with their immigrant neighbors and stood outside hardware stores hoping to be picked up. Paul helped him write a resume and submit job applications. The family fell behind on their electricity bill. And then their rent. In August, Paul lent the couple $1,000.

Johnston insisted that expediting work authorization and matching migrants with employers was key to moving newcomers off city assistance. On paper, jobs abound: The region’s employment website lists 4,800 more openings than applicants. But Silva’s experience didn’t reflect Johnston’s rhetoric.

Silva also wasn’t having much luck in Denver’s “shadow economy” of cash jobs, which had supported immigrants before the newcomers’ arrival. It seemed saturated by the sheer number of new arrivals. Migrants without work authorization huddled in Home Depot parking lots and stood at intersections washing windshields for tips. Abbott’s buses exacerbated this. He only sent migrants who weren’t yet eligible for work cards.

Navarro was grateful for “the support and the love” she found in Denver, but she didn’t migrate to the city to rely on the government or the kindness of strangers.

“We migrants did not come to be a burden for you,” she said.

In August, the family caught a break. Three weeks after Pappas wrote U.S. Rep. Jason Crow’s office asking for help with Navarro’s work authorization, a new card landed in her mailbox.

A blue canvas fishing chair in the corner of Rogers’ sunny apartment is a reminder of his old life on the streets of Denver. A reminder to keep doing the hard work of staying sober.

Since becoming housed, Rogers has built new routines. He still rises early, but now he makes coffee in his own kitchen and from the couch organizes his day with local TV news playing in the background. Sometimes he visits his mother. Other days, he’s with his daughter and grandson — relationships built anew after his drinking put them on pause.

Rogers, a slight man with wiry muscles built over decades of manual labor, moved into the apartment just before migrants from Venezuela began rolling into Denver. He watched the city mobilize to keep migrants sheltered and fed in a way it never had for him or his friends.

“I’m sorry to say it, I know we’re all human, but to me it ain’t fair,” he said.

“Back in our day, you’d go up to a cop and he’d say, ‘We got a place for you,’” meaning jail, Rogers said. “They never threw us on a bus and took us to a motel.”

Rogers grew up with well-to-do parents, who divorced when he was young. His drinking started early. But he almost always held down a job — at a lube shop or as a machinist making rifle scopes. He lived with his mother for a long time, but his drinking was hard on her and he felt it was best to leave.

Rogers’ time on the street runs together in his mind and he has difficulty putting dates to significant events in his life. But he estimates he spent more than a decade living outside. For a long while, he slept in what he called “the cubby” — a concrete entryway on the side of a historic mansion turned office building near City Park. To avoid bothering the office workers, he left before sunup and returned after sundown. But the owner of the building turned out to be kind, leaving food and plastic bags to keep Rogers’ belongings dry.

The cubby was near his “office,” Ready Man day labor on Colfax Avenue.

“I built that hospital — well, helped build it,” he said, pointing to St. Joseph’s, which was under construction from 2012 to 2014. Rogers ran a jackhammer, cutting down concrete floors and carrying the pieces out in a wheelbarrow. After a day of hard labor, he’d return to his bed on a sidewalk.

Rogers was well known to downtown outreach workers, one of whom put him on the waiting list for a housing voucher. He spent years going to required check-ins, but according to eligibility assessments, Rogers was never quite vulnerable enough to qualify.

In February 2022, his caseworker presented a different option: an ice fishing tent at a safe camp run by a nonprofit. There, he became friends with Ian Stitt, the camp manager, who would help put him on the road to sobriety.

Rogers kept working. He also kept drinking — often with his buddies sitting around in canvas fishing chairs — until Stitt found him in such a stupor he called paramedics to take him to a detox center. Rogers blew a .40, a blood alcohol level that could kill a person less accustomed to drinking.

This was Rogers’ rock bottom. His sobriety didn’t happen all at once, but he took medication to reduce cravings and talked to a therapist regularly. Unexpectedly, other doors opened.

“Come on, you’ve got a meeting,” Stitt told Rogers one morning at the camp.

“Well, I’m getting kicked out, I guess,” he thought as he followed Stitt.

It wasn’t bad news. Federal pandemic relief money had funded more vouchers than usual, and Rogers was getting one. His excitement was mixed with self-doubt.

“I thought, ‘Knowing me, I’ll screw this up, too,’” he said.

Housed and sober, Rogers volunteers on Friday nights at the Network Coffee House, where Stitt is now the executive director. He serves hot brew to people living on the streets, including some of his old “sidekicks” from his unhoused days. There’s Patrick, who Rogers worked with at Ready Man and who still lives outside. Another friend has an apartment but can’t afford food on his disability checks.

“Did you check in on Jimmy?” Rogers asks Stitt as he changes a coffee filter. Jimmy is one of Rogers’ “sidekicks” from the safe camp. He, too, got a voucher and beat an addiction, but had started using again, Rogers heard. Stitt says he hasn’t had a chance to catch up with Jimmy.

It’s tough for Rogers to see his friends still in need.

“I wish I was the mayor,” he said. “I’d switch it all around.”

As the staggering number of buses rolled into Denver last winter, nearly overwhelming the city’s shelters, Johnston put his hope for more resources in an immigration and border security reform bill in Congress. He wanted three things: faster work authorization so migrants could be self-sufficient; more money for cities responding to the crisis; and a system that would distribute asylum-seekers across the country, instead of concentrating them in a few cities.

But Trump, hoping to campaign on the crisis, successfully pressured GOP lawmakers to kill the measure. Denver was on its own.

Johnston called a news conference to announce that in order to afford his migrant resettlement efforts, he’d have to make significant budget cuts: reduced hours at recreation centers, closed motor-vehicle offices, cuts to recreation programming and elimination of the city’s flower-planting program. Fighting back tears, Johnston implored the community not to blame the newcomers for the budget cuts.

“I want it to be clear to Denverites who is not responsible for this crisis that we’re in: the folks who have walked 3,000 miles to get to this city,” he said. “They have asked for nothing but the ability to work and support themselves.”

But Denver was about to roll up its welcome mat. In March, a video surfaced of Johnston’s political director imploring a group of migrants at the city’s intake center to leave Denver. The city would pay for bus tickets. “The opportunities are over,” the staffer said.

About a week later, Johnston announced that arriving migrants would get a bus ticket to a new city or 72 hours in a shelter. Gone was the 42-day stay in a hotel. City representatives traveled to El Paso to spread the word: Denver was no longer offering long-term shelter and housing. The city had already begun closing its hotel shelters.

“We were to the point where we are out of shelters. We are out of space. We are out of staff. We are burning through cash to keep the shelters open and running. And it was not sustainable,” city spokesperson Jon Ewing said.

Johnston was acknowledging the city couldn’t continue to house thousands of people indefinitely. But he wasn’t abandoning the effort entirely. Instead, he came up with a plan to provide more services to a smaller number of migrants. The 850 in this new program would have their rent and living expenses covered for six months — not six weeks. They’d also get English classes and job training.

He didn’t call it a surrender, though some of his critics did. Instead, he framed it as an evolution to a more sustainable program — one that other cities could replicate.

“We can't solve this for the whole country” by taking in more newcomers than the city is able to support, Johnston told ProPublica. “But we can help figure out a system that could work for the whole country if we all adopted it.”

By summer, it was still too early to tell whether Johnston’s new resettlement program was any better than the city’s initial approach. Participants were just starting their English classes and job training. And now migrants arriving in the city for the first time had much less support. Outside city hall, there were signs that while Johnston was supporting a small number of people, the burden of aiding new arrivals shifted to others in the community.

On Mondays, aid workers like Amy Beck would gather on the lawn outside city hall to serve food and provide clothing to the unsheltered. Migrants would show up, too. Some would try to snag produce or baked goods without standing in line. Shoving matches had ensued over bags of donated clothes. The tensions worried Beck.

“I spend a lot of time peace-making because it is so important to me that Denver remain peaceful over this topic,” Beck said.

But as the city dialed back its resources for migrants, Beck was left to catch those who fell through the gaps — both newcomers and the unhoused. Migrant families no longer eligible for shelter space called her looking for a place to sleep. She has unhoused friends who just missed a shot at moving inside with the city’s help because they weren’t in a camp about to be swept.

“Everybody wants off the street,” she said.

At the end of July, Johnston invited more than 100 people to a luncheon at city hall to thank them for supporting the newcomer response. Some had fed and housed migrants. Some had put on legal clinics for work authorization and asylum applications. Some had raised money for rental assistance. As the mayor celebrated their hard work, he had the bearing of someone taking a victory lap. Invitations to the event claimed incorrectly that “none” of the newcomers were living on the streets. But some advocates felt painting a “perfect picture of things” ignored the people who still needed help.

The number of migrants arriving in Denver has slowed to a trickle since the Biden administration cracked down on the number of asylum seekers entering the country. Those who do arrive have no dedicated shelter. The city closed the last one in September. Others trying to establish roots in Denver were facing eviction after rental assistance had run out. More than 1,700 people have moved out of encampments and into shelter or housing thanks to Johnston’s program for the unhoused, but nearly four times that number still need help.

Johnston acknowledged that some of the unhoused who had struggled on the city’s streets for far longer had reason to feel forgotten amid Denver’s migrant response. “There is a very fair outcry from folks to say, ‘There are many of us suffering in this condition and we need to fix all of it.’ And we agree with that,” he said.

“Of course the work is far from over,” Johnston said. “We have families here that are scraping through every day to pay the rent and get their kids into school. But I feel like we are meeting the challenge. And for that I’m incredibly proud.”

Rogers and Navarro are among those “scraping through.”

Rogers continues the hard work of maintaining his sobriety, visiting a therapist and staying connected with family. He’d like to return to work eventually, but the day labor he used to rely on isn’t an option. Under the terms of his voucher, if he earns money, he must contribute a percentage toward rent. Day labor isn’t stable enough to hold up his end of the bargain. Although he sometimes wonders whether he’s competing with migrants for work, he doesn’t resent anyone’s hustle for a job.

“We’re all human,” he said. “It’ll get better.”

Less than three weeks after she got her work card, Navarro landed a job through an employment agency that caters to immigrants. She works the night shift at a dessert factory. The agency takes about 30% of her wage. She comes home in the morning exhausted and sore in time to get her girls off to school. But she is finally earning money to support her family. Within a month, Silva also had a job at the factory.

“It’s going to be better next year,” she said.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Anjeanette Damon, photography by Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica.

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For months, Venezuelan migrants had been arriving in Denver with nowhere to go. At first, they came in groups small enough to escape notice by most. A few immigrant aid groups with connections on the U.S.-Mexico border warned city officials to prepare for more but were ignored.

Then, in December 2022, a busload of about 90 migrants stepped into the freezing night, bound for Denver Rescue Mission. The shelter, which serves the city’s growing unhoused community, was full.

City officials and local aid organizations scrambled, filling a recreation center with beds to keep migrants from sleeping on the streets. A week later, their growing numbers prompted an emergency declaration, freeing up state and federal resources to help. The city filled a second recreation center with beds and transformed a third into an intake center. By the end of the month, city shelters housed nearly 500 migrants.

It was just the beginning.

Most of the migrants crossed into the U.S. in El Paso, Texas, which is an easy bus ride away from Denver compared with Chicago or New York. Through the winter and early spring, they arrived in the high-plains city largely on their own accord, drawn by word of mouth that Denver had jobs.

Then in May 2023, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending busloads of migrants to Denver, seeking to score political points by forcing liberal cities to share in what he saw as a burden being foisted on border states.

Mike Johnston became Denver’s mayor two months later. An ambitious politician with big ideas and a flair for poignant speeches, Johnston was a fluent Spanish speaker who had been principal of a high school with mostly immigrant students. He was determined to do right by the people arriving in his city, the “newcomers,” as the city took to calling them. If Abbott thought he was sending a “plague” to “somehow destroy” Denver, Johnston said, the city would prove the migrants’ arrival to be the opposite. He believed that with a little help getting settled, they would fuel Denver’s economy and enrich its culture as generations of immigrants had before.

As Johnston mobilized the city to care for the newcomers, he was also grappling with a growing unhoused population. More than 5,800 people were experiencing homelessness; many lived in downtown encampments. Johnston had declared a state of emergency on his first day in office, and promised to house 1,000 people by the end of 2023.

But by the following January, Denver was feeling the full weight of being a welcoming city. More than 300 migrants a day were rolling into Denver, just over 4,000 were living in shelters and hundreds more were sleeping on the street. The city had spent $42 million to help them, with no sign of meaningful alternatives from the federal government. And with record numbers of asylum seekers arriving at the border, it seemed likely more would make their way to Denver. Local newscasters called it a crisis. Aid workers reported flaring tensions between migrants and the unhoused at food banks and shelters.

This was the moment that Monica Navarro and her family arrived.

She and her partner, Miker Silva, had just $10 between them. But because Denver wasn’t leaving migrants without support, the couple and their two children, ages 13 and 9, were quickly given a free room at the Comfort Inn. They could stay for six weeks. The city hoped that would be enough for the family to find their own housing, either in Denver or elsewhere. Navarro and Silva had no idea how they would support themselves, but they were grateful for the help and determined to make it on their own.

“We came here to make a new life, not so much for ourselves but for our daughters,” Navarro said.

Tim Rogers, a Denver native, was riveted by media coverage of the arriving migrants. The stories focused not just on what the mayor was spending, but on how the community was rallying to support newcomers. Residents delivered food, knitted winter hats and even opened spare bedrooms to them.

Watching these families shuttled into hotels and shelters, Rogers couldn’t help but think about his own decade-long battle with homelessness. He had nothing against the migrants and grasped their plight in a way only someone who’s lived on the streets can. But he had spent years on a waiting list for housing assistance. He still had friends living on the streets. And he couldn’t reconcile how the city would spend so heavily on the newcomers when its homeless population had long been desperate for that kind of help.

“It ain’t fair,” he said. “We got guys doing what they’re supposed to do, seeing their case managers and trying to get housing. If they ask to get a pair of shoes they get a big runaround.”

Even Johnston wondered how long the city could keep it up. At the end of 2023, hundreds of migrants who had timed out of the shelters had erected a sprawling tent encampment, where families with small children were living in the dead of winter. Under mounting political and humanitarian pressure, he organized a city effort to disband the camp and in one day got all of the migrants sheltered again.

But as Johnston touted the city’s accomplishment to reporters, two more buses pulled up with more newcomers in need of help.

“‘It was like, ‘Will there ever be an end?’” Johnston told ProPublica. “That was a moment where, even when we were creating heroic solutions, we weren’t sure how sustainable they would be.”

Colorado was once openly hostile to immigrants. English-only and show-me-your-papers laws were strictly enforced. Businesses faced stiff penalties for hiring undocumented workers, and immigration officers routinely raided restaurants, farms and factories across the state.

Then, about 15 years ago, immigrant rights activists pushed back, organizing campaigns to shield migrants from the raids and galvanizing support to repeal the anti-immigration laws. The state’s Latino population grew by 25% in the last decade. Activists organized immigrants and residents alike to support pro-immigration policies. Over the next decade, Denver adopted some of the most progressive protections in the country. Local police are barred from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on civil deportations or detainers, and undocumented migrants can’t be arrested based on their status. During the Trump administration, churches and community aid groups formed networks to host refugees and protect people from deportation.

Both the community and Denver’s largely Democratic elected leaders were proud of its reputation as a sanctuary city (they prefer the term “welcoming city”). When Abbott began busing migrants to Denver, they weren’t about to be cowed.

But the newcomers weren’t like past immigrants, who typically chose a destination based on the advice of family or friends who had established lives in the U.S. and could help with a job and place to stay. Such people arrived in immigrant neighborhoods and agricultural towns without drawing much attention and with most everything they needed.

The Venezuelans had instead been driven from their country in overwhelming numbers by the almost complete collapse of the economy, arriving conspicuously by the busload and without a network to put them on a path to self-sufficiency. The Biden administration lifted pandemic-era restrictions on border crossings for such asylum-seekers with no federal plan for their resettlement during the years-long wait to have their cases heard.

As a result, they ended up concentrating in a few cities. Denver was one of a handful of places where the number of new migrants commanded an exceptional and visible government response. Taxpayers had to step in for missing family and federal government support, a dynamic that seemed to harden public opinion against immigration in other Colorado cities and the rest of the country.

And in many ways, Denver was in no position to take in thousands of new residents. Rents are high; housing prices have soared; and the job market is tighter than in many U.S. cities. The newcomers needed far more than the city had set aside to help its existing residents contend with those realities.

Since Denver opened the first emergency shelter, it has provided assistance — from a bus ticket to another city, to six months of free rent — to nearly 43,000 migrants at a cost of $76 million. That’s in addition to the $155 million the city is projected to spend on Johnston’s program to shelter the unhoused swept from downtown encampments.

“Cities have now had to air their dirty laundry, that they've never figured out how to deal with their unhoused population. They've never figured out how to properly serve their undocumented population,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “It's unfortunate that these communities end up sort of pitted against each other, rather than us having the bigger conversation of ‘how do we make sure that housing is accessible for all people and affordable for all people?’”

Navarro and Silva met years ago at a party in the Venezuelan state of Miranda. They fell in love and built a life together but never married. Their hometown of Cua wasn’t far from the beach, where they would picnic and wade in the warm Caribbean Sea. She did promotions for well-known brands and he worked as a bricklayer. Their first child died as an infant. They had two more daughters — whose names are tattooed over Navarro’s heart — before the country’s economy collapsed. Once it did, everything they needed to do to raise their girls became impossible. Hyperinflation put buying food, diapers and medicine out of reach. When a clinic offered free sterilization to women, Navarro decided to go even though she still wanted a son.

“It was very difficult to sustain a child in Venezuela,” said Navarro, whose dark eyes and warm smile are framed by a cloud of curly hair. “There were no diapers. There was no milk. The little children got too sick. So I decided not to have any more babies.”

In 2018, they left for Peru, but after five years the economy there also turned sour. They decided to follow the millions of others on the journey to seek asylum in the United States: making the treacherous hike through the Darién jungle, encountering militias who stole everything, clinging to the roof of a train through Mexico. Penniless at points along the way, Navarro sold candy on the streets. She watched over her daughters as they slept on the ground outside gas stations. But Navarro knew they were among the lucky ones. She had passed the bodies of migrants, including children, who had died attempting to reach America.

As the family traveled, Navarro searched social media for a good place in the United States to settle, using terms such as “jobs,” “good apartments,” “good economy.” She watched TikTok videos from migrants who had successfully settled in Denver and decided that’s where her family would go.

Instead of attempting to slip across the border illegally, the family followed the Biden administration’s guidance to use a smartphone app called CBP One to make an appointment to enter the United States and file an asylum claim. They crossed the border at Calexico, California, and were immediately eligible for Social Security cards and work authorization because they had used CBP One. Other asylum-seekers who didn’t use CBP One typically have to wait six months.

The couple didn’t have friends or relatives to turn to for help as past immigrants had, but they received critical assistance from an array of other sources. An immigrant aid group paid to fly the family to Denver, where the city set them up in a shelter and paid the fees for their work authorization cards. Volunteers helped them fill out the seven-page applications written in English.

They were in a safe and stable place for the moment. But they only had six weeks to find work, otherwise they would end up on the streets as they’d seen happen to so many others. “Many of them ran out of time and slept in the cars, or you saw them leaving the hotel and looking for a tent to sleep,” Navarro said.

After a week at the shelter, Silva met a construction worker at Popeye’s who threw the family a lifeline: a spot for Silva on his crew. It wasn’t a steady job but it delivered something as important as income. Local nonprofits were providing rent assistance to migrants who had a proof-of-employment letter. Silva got one from the lead contractor, ensuring his family’s rent would be covered for six weeks.

In March, the family moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a sprawling complex of 1970s low-rise buildings in Aurora, a suburb just outside Denver. The lawns were well kept, and the managers were diligent about the rules. They once fined Navarro for putting a grill on her porch. Most of the neighbors were immigrants. Navarro’s daughters had good schools to attend. The rent was $1,800 a month.

The quiet apartment complex in Aurora bore no resemblance to the fabricated picture Donald Trump would paint of their new hometown. During the presidential debate in September, the Republican presidential nominee described Aurora as overrun by Venezuelan prison gangs, making the city a focus of anti-immigrant furor. Local officials described Venezuelan gang crime in the city as concerning but isolated. The most excitement Navarro had seen at her complex was when a neighbor accidentally set her kitchen on fire.

Once settled, she tapped into a network of community members who were helping migrants. Through Facebook, she found free furniture for the apartment: a charcoal sofa, a beanbag chair, an oversized mirror in the living room and bookshelves that hold brightly colored flowers. She also befriended two women – members of the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church — from the Facebook groups. Janice Paul would send odd jobs their way. Susie Pappas would drive Navarro to food banks when Silva’s checks didn’t cover the bills.

“They are my angels,” Navarro said.

When the six weeks of rent assistance ran out, the couple had difficulty meeting their expenses. Silva had fairly steady work with the man he had met at Popeye’s, but Navarro’s work authorization card had been lost in the mail. Even with Pappas’ help battling the federal agency in charge of replacing it, the process was dragging on. Navarro grew anxious over her inability to help support her family.

Then, the man stopped paying Silva. He looked for a new job but finding one wasn’t as easy as TikTok had led them to believe.

Silva networked with their immigrant neighbors and stood outside hardware stores hoping to be picked up. Paul helped him write a resume and submit job applications. The family fell behind on their electricity bill. And then their rent. In August, Paul lent the couple $1,000.

Johnston insisted that expediting work authorization and matching migrants with employers was key to moving newcomers off city assistance. On paper, jobs abound: The region’s employment website lists 4,800 more openings than applicants. But Silva’s experience didn’t reflect Johnston’s rhetoric.

Silva also wasn’t having much luck in Denver’s “shadow economy” of cash jobs, which had supported immigrants before the newcomers’ arrival. It seemed saturated by the sheer number of new arrivals. Migrants without work authorization huddled in Home Depot parking lots and stood at intersections washing windshields for tips. Abbott’s buses exacerbated this. He only sent migrants who weren’t yet eligible for work cards.

Navarro was grateful for “the support and the love” she found in Denver, but she didn’t migrate to the city to rely on the government or the kindness of strangers.

“We migrants did not come to be a burden for you,” she said.

In August, the family caught a break. Three weeks after Pappas wrote U.S. Rep. Jason Crow’s office asking for help with Navarro’s work authorization, a new card landed in her mailbox.

A blue canvas fishing chair in the corner of Rogers’ sunny apartment is a reminder of his old life on the streets of Denver. A reminder to keep doing the hard work of staying sober.

Since becoming housed, Rogers has built new routines. He still rises early, but now he makes coffee in his own kitchen and from the couch organizes his day with local TV news playing in the background. Sometimes he visits his mother. Other days, he’s with his daughter and grandson — relationships built anew after his drinking put them on pause.

Rogers, a slight man with wiry muscles built over decades of manual labor, moved into the apartment just before migrants from Venezuela began rolling into Denver. He watched the city mobilize to keep migrants sheltered and fed in a way it never had for him or his friends.

“I’m sorry to say it, I know we’re all human, but to me it ain’t fair,” he said.

“Back in our day, you’d go up to a cop and he’d say, ‘We got a place for you,’” meaning jail, Rogers said. “They never threw us on a bus and took us to a motel.”

Rogers grew up with well-to-do parents, who divorced when he was young. His drinking started early. But he almost always held down a job — at a lube shop or as a machinist making rifle scopes. He lived with his mother for a long time, but his drinking was hard on her and he felt it was best to leave.

Rogers’ time on the street runs together in his mind and he has difficulty putting dates to significant events in his life. But he estimates he spent more than a decade living outside. For a long while, he slept in what he called “the cubby” — a concrete entryway on the side of a historic mansion turned office building near City Park. To avoid bothering the office workers, he left before sunup and returned after sundown. But the owner of the building turned out to be kind, leaving food and plastic bags to keep Rogers’ belongings dry.

The cubby was near his “office,” Ready Man day labor on Colfax Avenue.

“I built that hospital — well, helped build it,” he said, pointing to St. Joseph’s, which was under construction from 2012 to 2014. Rogers ran a jackhammer, cutting down concrete floors and carrying the pieces out in a wheelbarrow. After a day of hard labor, he’d return to his bed on a sidewalk.

Rogers was well known to downtown outreach workers, one of whom put him on the waiting list for a housing voucher. He spent years going to required check-ins, but according to eligibility assessments, Rogers was never quite vulnerable enough to qualify.

In February 2022, his caseworker presented a different option: an ice fishing tent at a safe camp run by a nonprofit. There, he became friends with Ian Stitt, the camp manager, who would help put him on the road to sobriety.

Rogers kept working. He also kept drinking — often with his buddies sitting around in canvas fishing chairs — until Stitt found him in such a stupor he called paramedics to take him to a detox center. Rogers blew a .40, a blood alcohol level that could kill a person less accustomed to drinking.

This was Rogers’ rock bottom. His sobriety didn’t happen all at once, but he took medication to reduce cravings and talked to a therapist regularly. Unexpectedly, other doors opened.

“Come on, you’ve got a meeting,” Stitt told Rogers one morning at the camp.

“Well, I’m getting kicked out, I guess,” he thought as he followed Stitt.

It wasn’t bad news. Federal pandemic relief money had funded more vouchers than usual, and Rogers was getting one. His excitement was mixed with self-doubt.

“I thought, ‘Knowing me, I’ll screw this up, too,’” he said.

Housed and sober, Rogers volunteers on Friday nights at the Network Coffee House, where Stitt is now the executive director. He serves hot brew to people living on the streets, including some of his old “sidekicks” from his unhoused days. There’s Patrick, who Rogers worked with at Ready Man and who still lives outside. Another friend has an apartment but can’t afford food on his disability checks.

“Did you check in on Jimmy?” Rogers asks Stitt as he changes a coffee filter. Jimmy is one of Rogers’ “sidekicks” from the safe camp. He, too, got a voucher and beat an addiction, but had started using again, Rogers heard. Stitt says he hasn’t had a chance to catch up with Jimmy.

It’s tough for Rogers to see his friends still in need.

“I wish I was the mayor,” he said. “I’d switch it all around.”

As the staggering number of buses rolled into Denver last winter, nearly overwhelming the city’s shelters, Johnston put his hope for more resources in an immigration and border security reform bill in Congress. He wanted three things: faster work authorization so migrants could be self-sufficient; more money for cities responding to the crisis; and a system that would distribute asylum-seekers across the country, instead of concentrating them in a few cities.

But Trump, hoping to campaign on the crisis, successfully pressured GOP lawmakers to kill the measure. Denver was on its own.

Johnston called a news conference to announce that in order to afford his migrant resettlement efforts, he’d have to make significant budget cuts: reduced hours at recreation centers, closed motor-vehicle offices, cuts to recreation programming and elimination of the city’s flower-planting program. Fighting back tears, Johnston implored the community not to blame the newcomers for the budget cuts.

“I want it to be clear to Denverites who is not responsible for this crisis that we’re in: the folks who have walked 3,000 miles to get to this city,” he said. “They have asked for nothing but the ability to work and support themselves.”

But Denver was about to roll up its welcome mat. In March, a video surfaced of Johnston’s political director imploring a group of migrants at the city’s intake center to leave Denver. The city would pay for bus tickets. “The opportunities are over,” the staffer said.

About a week later, Johnston announced that arriving migrants would get a bus ticket to a new city or 72 hours in a shelter. Gone was the 42-day stay in a hotel. City representatives traveled to El Paso to spread the word: Denver was no longer offering long-term shelter and housing. The city had already begun closing its hotel shelters.

“We were to the point where we are out of shelters. We are out of space. We are out of staff. We are burning through cash to keep the shelters open and running. And it was not sustainable,” city spokesperson Jon Ewing said.

Johnston was acknowledging the city couldn’t continue to house thousands of people indefinitely. But he wasn’t abandoning the effort entirely. Instead, he came up with a plan to provide more services to a smaller number of migrants. The 850 in this new program would have their rent and living expenses covered for six months — not six weeks. They’d also get English classes and job training.

He didn’t call it a surrender, though some of his critics did. Instead, he framed it as an evolution to a more sustainable program — one that other cities could replicate.

“We can't solve this for the whole country” by taking in more newcomers than the city is able to support, Johnston told ProPublica. “But we can help figure out a system that could work for the whole country if we all adopted it.”

By summer, it was still too early to tell whether Johnston’s new resettlement program was any better than the city’s initial approach. Participants were just starting their English classes and job training. And now migrants arriving in the city for the first time had much less support. Outside city hall, there were signs that while Johnston was supporting a small number of people, the burden of aiding new arrivals shifted to others in the community.

On Mondays, aid workers like Amy Beck would gather on the lawn outside city hall to serve food and provide clothing to the unsheltered. Migrants would show up, too. Some would try to snag produce or baked goods without standing in line. Shoving matches had ensued over bags of donated clothes. The tensions worried Beck.

“I spend a lot of time peace-making because it is so important to me that Denver remain peaceful over this topic,” Beck said.

But as the city dialed back its resources for migrants, Beck was left to catch those who fell through the gaps — both newcomers and the unhoused. Migrant families no longer eligible for shelter space called her looking for a place to sleep. She has unhoused friends who just missed a shot at moving inside with the city’s help because they weren’t in a camp about to be swept.

“Everybody wants off the street,” she said.

At the end of July, Johnston invited more than 100 people to a luncheon at city hall to thank them for supporting the newcomer response. Some had fed and housed migrants. Some had put on legal clinics for work authorization and asylum applications. Some had raised money for rental assistance. As the mayor celebrated their hard work, he had the bearing of someone taking a victory lap. Invitations to the event claimed incorrectly that “none” of the newcomers were living on the streets. But some advocates felt painting a “perfect picture of things” ignored the people who still needed help.

The number of migrants arriving in Denver has slowed to a trickle since the Biden administration cracked down on the number of asylum seekers entering the country. Those who do arrive have no dedicated shelter. The city closed the last one in September. Others trying to establish roots in Denver were facing eviction after rental assistance had run out. More than 1,700 people have moved out of encampments and into shelter or housing thanks to Johnston’s program for the unhoused, but nearly four times that number still need help.

Johnston acknowledged that some of the unhoused who had struggled on the city’s streets for far longer had reason to feel forgotten amid Denver’s migrant response. “There is a very fair outcry from folks to say, ‘There are many of us suffering in this condition and we need to fix all of it.’ And we agree with that,” he said.

“Of course the work is far from over,” Johnston said. “We have families here that are scraping through every day to pay the rent and get their kids into school. But I feel like we are meeting the challenge. And for that I’m incredibly proud.”

Rogers and Navarro are among those “scraping through.”

Rogers continues the hard work of maintaining his sobriety, visiting a therapist and staying connected with family. He’d like to return to work eventually, but the day labor he used to rely on isn’t an option. Under the terms of his voucher, if he earns money, he must contribute a percentage toward rent. Day labor isn’t stable enough to hold up his end of the bargain. Although he sometimes wonders whether he’s competing with migrants for work, he doesn’t resent anyone’s hustle for a job.

“We’re all human,” he said. “It’ll get better.”

Less than three weeks after she got her work card, Navarro landed a job through an employment agency that caters to immigrants. She works the night shift at a dessert factory. The agency takes about 30% of her wage. She comes home in the morning exhausted and sore in time to get her girls off to school. But she is finally earning money to support her family. Within a month, Silva also had a job at the factory.

“It’s going to be better next year,” she said.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Anjeanette Damon, photography by Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica.

Before the formation of the Israel Defence Forces in 1948, there were three underground Zionist militias — The Haganah, the Irgun and the Lehi.

Their methods and tactics have been unpacked in a new Middle East Eye “The Big Picture” podcast this week by New Zealand journalist Mohamed Hassan.

The IDF, which critics brand as the IOF (“Israel Offensive Forces”), claims to be the “most moral army in the world”, but it has killed almost 43,000 Palestinians — mostly women and children — in a year-long war on Gaza and now more than 3000 people in the deadly attacks on Lebanon.

• READ MORE: At least 55 people killed in Gaza as Israel resumes attacks on health workers in Lebanon
• Other Israeli War in Gaza reports

It has also been widely accused of committing atrocities, war crimes, and genocide.

The three Zionist militias differed in tactics and beliefs, and at times fought with each other — but together they terrorised Palestinian villages and executed attacks and bombings against the British to force them to give up control of the land.

They blew up hotels in Jerusalem, embassies in Europe and assassinated a UN mediator in the lead up to what is called the Nakba — the “Catastrophe” — in 1948 when 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly evicted from their towns, villages and countryside.

After Israel declared its independence as a state — the three militias would combine to create the IDF, called Tzahal in the Hebrew-language acronym. The militia leaders would go on to form Israel’s government, become politicians, ambassadors and prime ministers.

And their dark history would be forgotten.

This week “The Big Picture” unpacks that history.

The untold history of the Israel Defence Forces.  Podcast: Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

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This article is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times.

When Hurricane Helene, the 420-mile-wide, slow-spinning conveyor belt of wind and water, drowned part of Florida’s coastline and then barged its path northward through North Carolina last week, it destroyed more than homes and bridges. It shook people’s faith in the safety of living in the South, where the tolls of extreme heat, storms and sea level rise are quickly adding up.

Helene was just the latest in a new generation of storms that are intensifying faster, and dumping more rainfall, as the climate warms. It is also precisely the kind of event that is expected to drive more Americans to relocate as climate change gets worse and the costs of disaster recovery increase.

Researchers now estimate tens of millions of Americans may ultimately move away from extreme heat and drought, storms and wildfires. While many Americans are still moving into areas considered high risk, lured by air conditioning and sunny weather, the economic and physical vulnerabilities they face are becoming more apparent.

One study by the First Street Foundation, a research firm that studies climate threats to housing, found that roughly 3.2 million Americans have already migrated, many over short distances, out of flood zones, such as low-lying parts of Staten Island, Miami and Galveston, Texas. Over the next 30 years, 7.5 million more are projected to leave those perennially flooded zones, according to the study.

All of this suggests a possible boom for inland and Northern cities. But it also will leave behind large swaths of coastal and other vulnerable land where seniors and the poor are very likely to disproportionately remain.

The Southern United States stands to be especially transformed. Extreme heat, storms and coastal flooding will weigh heavily on the bottom third of this country, making the environment less comfortable and life within it more expensive and less prosperous.

The young, mobile and middle class will be more likely to leave to chase opportunity and physical and economic safety. That means government — from local to federal — must now recognize its responsibility to support the communities in climate migration’s wake. Even as an aging population left behind will require greater services, medical attention and physical accommodation, the residents who remain will reside in states that may also face diminished representation in Congress — because their communities are shrinking. Local governments could be left to fend alone, but with an evaporating tax base to work with.

In December, the First Street Foundation created one of the first clear pictures of how this demographic change is unfolding. It looked at flood risk and migration patterns down to the census tract, across the country, and identified hundreds of thousands of so-called abandonment zones where the out-migration of residents in response to rising risk had already passed a tipping point, and people were making small, local moves to higher ground.

The research contains plenty of nuance ⎯ cities like Miami may continue to grow overall even as their low-lying sections hollow out. And the abandonment areas it identified were scattered widely, including across large parts of the inland Northeast and the upper Midwest. But many of them also fall in some of the very places most susceptible to storm surges from weather events like Helene: Parts of low-lying coastal Florida and Texas are already seeing population declines, for instance.

In all, the First Street report identified 818,000 U.S. census blocks as having passed tipping points for abandonment ⎯ areas with a combined population of more than 16 million people. A related peer-reviewed component of the organization’s research forecasts that soon, whole counties across Florida and Central Texas could begin to see their total populations decline, suggesting a sharp reversal of the persistent growth that Florida has maintained as climate pressures rise, by the middle of this century.

Such projections could turn out to be wrong ⎯ the more geographically specific such modeling gets, the greater its margin of error. But the mere fact that climate research firms are now identifying American communities that people might have to retreat from is significant. Retreat has not until recently been a part of this country’s climate change vernacular.

Other research is putting a finer point on which Americans will be most affected. Early this year Mathew Hauer, a demographer at Florida State University who has estimated that 13 million Americans will be displaced by rising sea levels, was among the authors of a study that broke out what this climate-driven migration could mean for the demographics of the United States, examining what it might look like by age.

Hauer and his fellow researchers found that as some people migrate away from vulnerable regions, the population that remains grows significantly older. In coastal Florida and along other parts of the Gulf Coast, for example, the median age could increase by 10 years this century — far faster than it would without climate migration.

This aging means that older adults — particularly women, who tend to live longer — are very likely to face the greatest physical danger. In fact, there is notable overlap between the places that Hauer’s research suggests will age and the places that the First Street Foundation has identified as the zones people are abandoning.

The exodus of the young means these towns could enter a population death spiral. Older residents are also more likely to be retired, which means they will contribute less to their local tax base, which will erode funding for schools and infrastructure, and leave less money available to meet the costs of environmental change even as those costs rise. All of that is very likely to perpetuate further out-migration.

The older these communities get, the more new challenges emerge. In many coastal areas, for example, one solution under consideration for rising seas is to raise the height of coastal homes. But, as Hauer told me, “adding steps might not be the best adaptation in places with an elderly population.” In other places older residents will be less able and independent, relying ever more on emergency services. This week many of Helene’s victims have simply been cut off, revealing the dangerous gaps left by broken infrastructure, and a mistaken belief that many people can take care of themselves.

In the future authorities will have to adapt the ways they keep their services online, and the vehicles and boats they use, in order to keep flooded and dangerous places connected. Such implications are worrisome. But so is the larger warning inherent in Hauer’s findings: Many of the effects of climate change on American life will be subtle and unexpected. The future demographics of this country might look entirely unfamiliar. It’s past time to give real thought to who might get left behind.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Abrahm Lustgarten.

“It’s like a climate change alarm,” said Stephen Hicks, a seismologist at University College London. Hicks is part of an international team of researchers who finally sleuthed out the source of the vibrations that had been a source of bafflement ever since earthquake monitoring stations recorded the signal. Unraveling the mystery and mapping out the tsunami took the team of 68 scientists, from a wide range of disciplines, a full year.

The resulting paper, recently published in Science, blames man-made global warming for the collapse. A century of greenhouse gasses heating up the atmosphere have eroded swaths of the Greenland ice sheet — frozen freshwater that holds back 23 feet of potential sea level rise. Hicks said this kind of landslide-tsunami has never been seen in East Greenland, an area that tends to experience less melt than the country’s Western perimeter. It could be a one-off, random event, or a sign of spreading instability. “We can maybe expect more of these events in the future,” Hicks said. 

Another group of researchers, from the University of Barcelona, recently confirmed the ice sheet’s trajectory. Their study, published in the Journal of Climate by the American Meteorological Society, found that days of extreme melt, linked to periods of hot, stagnant air in the summer, have doubled in frequency and also intensified since 1950. Roughly 40 percent of the ice Greenland loses in a year occurs during these extreme melting events.

“Each episode of melting is becoming more intense and frequent than in the past,” said Josep Bonsoms, a geography researcher at the University of Barcelona and the study’s lead author. For instance, an extreme melting event in 2012 led to the loss of 610 gigatons of ice, enough to fill Lake Eerie, and then some. 

According to the University of Barcelona researchers, even days of average melt, often influenced by the same weather conditions as extreme days, contribute to worsening melt in the future. Although their study did not make predictions, Bonsoms says the pattern will likely continue to accelerate as the planet heats up.

Take this summer. Greenland experienced above average melt, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, but not enough to be considered extreme. In July, two heatwaves ate away at the snowfall in the Western area of the ice sheet, depleting its ability to reflect sunlight, known as albedo. When the darker, glacial ice beneath it became exposed, the land absorbed more heat, intensifying the melt. 

On a bigger scale, this type of feedback loop is one of the reasons that the region is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. Tyler Jones, an arctic researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said that among the many catalysts driving Arctic amplification, “the most important is the loss of sea ice.” Unlike Greenland’s land-bound ice, these floating patches of sea ice don’t directly contribute to sea level rise when they melt, but their albedo acts like a giant mirror reflecting the sun’s heat. 

“If you remove that giant mirror, all of a sudden that incoming solar energy gets absorbed by the ocean,” Jones said. Because the ocean can trap and store so much heat, this means the entire region becomes warmer even in the winter. The amount of sea ice remaining in September, the end of the annual melt season, has almost halved since the 1980s — with hardly any older than 4 years surviving. This year, global sea ice levels neared record lows. 

“We’re in a new climate regime. We are seeing extremes that just weren’t in our records of climate ever, just now appearing before us,” Jones said. Because the melting is self-perpetuating, he says, the ice sheet will continue to destabilize until the damage is irreversible. And as sea levels continue to rise, coastal communities around the world will have to adapt to a new world of extremes their cities weren’t built for.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What was behind the seismic boom that wrapped Earth for 9 days? on Sep 25, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sachi Kitajima Mulkey.

“This year ‘Anonymous 64’ has frequently launched cyberattacks against mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, trying to obtain control rights to relevant websites, outdoor electronic screens, and online televisions, and afterwards illegally upload content disparaging the mainland's political system and major policies,” the ministry said in a statement on WeChat.

The ministry, which is responsible for counterintelligence and political security, said that it launched an in-depth investigation into the hacking group’s activities and found that Anonymous 64 was “not a normal hackers’ group but a cyber-army supported by Taiwan independence forces.”

“Taiwan independence forces” is a term often used by Chinese officials to describe the Taiwanese government and military.

The Chinese state security ministry said it had filed a case against three active members of the Taiwanese military’s cyberwarfare command, known as the Information, Communications, and Electronic Force, or ICEFCOM, who are directly involved with Anonymous 64.

ICEFCOM’s spokesperson, Col. Hu Jin-long, denied the accusation and instead accused China of endangering regional peace and security.

Hu said in a statement that the command’s main responsibilities were to maintain the military’s online networks and communications.

“The current hostile situation and cyber threats are serious,” he said.

It was the Chinese military and other forces that “continue to use aircraft, ships and cyberattacks to harass Taiwan and are the originators of undermining regional peace," Hu added.

China considers Taiwan a Chinese province that should be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary. 

What is Anonymous 64?

The group called Anonymous is generally known as a decentralized international hacker-activist movement. Its members have been reportedly involved in a number of cyberattacks on governments and large corporations.

RFA is not able to verify whether Anonymous 64 is a member of the Anonymous movement.

RELATED STORIES

China-backed hackers step up spying on Taiwan: security firm

China steps up cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns targeting Taiwan

Pacific Islands Forum investigating cyberattack on networks

Anonymous 64  has an account on X, formerly known as Twitter, that was set up in June last year, showing screenshots of its campaigns to broadcast videos commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and pictures criticizing President Xi Jinping on websites of various Chinese media and universities, as well as public TV screens.

It also reposted several links to reports by Radio Free Asia and for some Chinese activists.

Edited by Mike Firn

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.

Supporters of Leonard Peltier are calling on President Biden to grant clemency to the Indigenous leader and activist, who marked his 80th birthday behind bars on Thursday after nearly a half-century in prison for a crime he says he did not commit. The ailing Peltier, who uses a walker and has serious health conditions, including diabetes, has always maintained his innocence over the 1975 killing of two FBI agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation. His conviction was riddled with irregularities and prosecutorial misconduct, and he is considered to be the longest-serving political prisoner in the United States. For much of the last four years, Peltier has been held under near-total lockdown. For more on Peltier and the campaign to free him, we speak with Nick Tilsen, president of the NDN Collective, and two attorneys on Peltier’s legal defense team, Jenipher Jones and Moira Meltzer-Cohen.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Kim was speaking after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met for talks in Seoul that included ways to deepen cooperation, even as Kishida prepares to step down at the end of the month.

Kishida arrived for a two-day visit and talks with Yoon, their 12th summit in about two years. It was their last summit, as Kishida will not seek reelection as prime minister and leader of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party after three years in the job.

During the summit, Kishida called for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula through a “unification doctrine” that Yoon announced last month, which focuses on expanding North Koreans’ access to external information and proposes establishing an official dialogue channel between the two Koreas to discuss various issues.

Yoon, in his opening remarks at Friday’s summit, said it was important to maintain the positive momentum in relations with Japan.

He added that the two countries have a chance to raise their relations to another level when they mark next year’s 60th anniversary of diplomatic ties and that working with Kishida on improving relations was the most meaningful development since he became president.

Relations between the two U.S. allies have been fraught for years because of South Korea resentment of Japan’s behavior during its occupation of Korea before and during World War II.

But Yoon and Kishida have been able to build a close relationship as a result of Yoon’s decision last year to resolve a long-standing dispute regarding Japan’s wartime mobilization of Koreans for forced labor by compensating victims without contributions from Japanese firms.

The two leaders have since resumed a “shuttle diplomacy” of holding meetings on the fringes of international conferences and visiting each other as needed.

Their restored relations have also substantially enhanced trilateral security cooperation with the United States, as all three of the allies warily watch North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and the missiles to carry them. 

RELATED STORIES

Seoul, Beijing, Tokyo reaffirm Korean Peninsula denuclearization commitment

Tokyo, Seoul target North Korea-Russia arms deal with sanctions

Yoon, Kishida aim for better ties; island issues may constrain

South Korea has been trying to bolster cooperation with regional partners in response to deepening military ties between North Korea and Russia. 

On Wednesday, Yoon met New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. They condemned North Korea’s nuclear weapons development and its military cooperation with Russia, including the North’s export of ballistic missiles to Russia in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Yoon and Luxon denounced Russia’s war against Ukraine, while pledging to support Ukrainian sovereignty and its efforts to secure a just and lasting peace, according to a joint statement.

Edited by Mike Firn. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

Historian and journalist Betsy Phillips discusses her new book, Dynamite Nashville: Unmasking the FBI, the KKK, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control, which chronicles three bombings in 1957, 1958 and 1960 aimed at supporters of the civil rights movement in Nashville. The book has sparked a reopening of the formerly cold cases, the likely perpetrators of which Phillips names in her book. Phillips details what she uncovered through her research about the connections between the white supremacist terror campaign of the previous century and ongoing neo-Nazi activity in Nashville and the U.S. today.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

According to a new report from RMI, which Corvidae co-authored, that race is off to a slow start. Corvidae and his team estimate that, for the nation to meet its clean energy goals, the federal government would need to invest around $1 trillion into local economies by 2031 via tax incentives. So far, through June 2024, the feds have distributed $66 billion — or around 6 percent of the full spending that our climate commitments demand.

There is no upper limit on the amount of IRA tax credits that the government can dole out each year, so the federal money going back to states each year in tax incentives is largely reflective of the amount of private clean energy investments in their economies. It also means that far more money has been invested into the clean energy transition than $66 billion dollars — in fact, that figure has been matched and multiplied five-fold by private investments.

The RMI report looked specifically at how well each state has captured federal tax incentives, compared to estimates of their full funding potential. On average, states in the contiguous U.S. have received 7 percent of the total funding they would need to reach their full potential by 2031, but that number varies widely. California and Texas are leading the nation in the volume of tax benefits received to date — California has claimed $13 billion and Texas $9 billion. Both states have emerged as leaders in the clean energy economy. But, according to the RMI estimates, both are also still far from their full potential, with Texas capturing only 6 percent of its full potential for funding, despite its clean energy growth. At 11 percent, California is at the higher end for the nation.

Some of the states that have received the least federal funding through IRA tax incentives include West Virginia, at less than 1 percent of its potential and just over $120 million, and Louisiana, also under 1 percent at just under $400 million. Idaho, Delaware, and Vermont have each yet to claim even $100 million in IRA incentives, at 2 percent, 2 percent, and 6 percent respectively.

Covidae attributes the slow start to a necessary and expected period of ramping up. The report notes, “Use of the tax credits is just getting started, so it makes sense that these numbers are (for almost all states) low right now.” Although, it also clarifies that most states are not on track to achieve their full potential of federal funding. Businesses and families are still figuring out how to take advantage of what exists, so the states that have best been able to quickly seize the opportunities are those (California, for instance) that had a head start, with markets for solar and electric vehicles that had already begun to mature — or, like Georgia, where they’ve been able to attract major industrial investments. 

However, while overall funding through tax incentives is lower than expected, individual households are trending above predictions, according to IRS data cited in the report. Four times as many families as expected are taking advantage of the residential tax credits.

For Covidae and the report’s co-authors, the point of tracking this information is to help states understand where their potential lies, and how to encourage clean energy adoption and investments in those key areas. For example, Covidae said, states can create policies that increase demand for clean tech, develop one-stop-shop platforms that provide clear guidance on how to navigate the incentive landscape, and convene stakeholders in target sectors where the state can maximize the environmental and economic benefits of a given incentive. 

He pointed to South Carolina, and its Special Committee on South Carolina’s Energy Future as an example. The state Senate committee recently began meetings with the goal of creating a comprehensive bill for the state’s energy policy. (South Carolina is currently at 7 percent of its funding potential, per the RMI analysis.) Initiatives like that, Corvidae said, can help states think about the possibilities that will allow them to answer one key question: “How do we organize the state to make sure we’re capturing these dollars?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline States are falling behind in using IRA funding to advance climate action on Aug 30, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Syris Valentine.

Hanford’s tanks. Image courtesy of Dept. of Energy.

Last week, the Department of Energy, which oversees the aging nuclear site in Hanford, Washington, reported that a tank containing high-level radioactive waste was leaking.  This is currently the third tank we know of that’s releasing deadly nuclear waste into the soil above the groundwater that feeds the nearby Columbia River. This is not a new problem for Hanford, which has 177 of these huge underground tanks that contain 55 million gallons of radioactive leftovers from the US’s nuclear weapons operation. These waste tanks were only supposed to hold up twenty-thirty years, and we’re now going on six decades. Below is an excerpt from my book Atomic Days, which details the site’s sordid history and its extremely problematic future. Sadly, leaks at Hanford are nothing new, nor are the lies surrounding them. It’s a looming nuclear danger that’s bubbling in our own backyard, and I’m scared. You should be too.  – Joshua Frank

+++

The first sign of legitimate danger at Hanford, at least when it came to the US public’s attention, occurred in June 1973, when a massive storage unit called 106-T at the complex’s tank farm was confirmed to have leaked 115,000 gallons of boiling radioactive goop into the sandy soil surrounding its underground hull. An investigation by the contractor Atlantic Richfield tried to calm nerves by asserting the atomically charged liquid did not make it into the groundwater supply. “It was predicted that the leaked waste would be retained by the dry sediment above the water table,” the report stated. “The greatest depth to which this liquid waste penetrated is about twenty-five meters below the ground surface, or about thirty-seven meters above the water table.” While the science indicated the contaminants did not leak into the groundwater or into the nearby Columbia River, the incident showed that another such accident, and one of an even greater magnitude, could happen at one of Hanford’s other storage tanks.

What was perhaps most alarming about the 1973 event was that not a single person could say exactly how long 106-T had been leaking or what had caused the tank to crack in the first place. In fact, when administrators eventually realized what was going on, they weren’t even sure what was inside 106-T. There was no panic. No major alert to workers, and not even a pithy press release warning the community about what administrators did or did not know. The secretive culture at Hanford was still alive and flourishing.

Workers had first noticed the problem on a Friday, June 8, 1973. But it wasn’t until Saturday, June 9, that administrators began thumbing through their reports and read-outs in an attempt to uncover what was actually missing from 106-T. Even though pages and entire sections were nowhere to be found, the investigating team was able to piece together what they believed had occurred. For a full fifty-one days, an average of 2,100 gallons of gunk had seeped out of 106-T every twenty-four hours.

In total, 151,000 gallons emptied into the soil, which included forty thousand curies of cesium-137, four curies of plutonium, fourteen curies of strontium-90 and other, slightly less toxic sludge. There had also been numerous leaks at Hanford in the early years. In 1958, fifteen different tanks leaked some 422,000 gallons of a similar nuclear waste by-product. Yet the 106-T was an entirely different animal. The 1973 accident was the largest single radioactive waste disaster in the history of Hanford, if not the United States, and unlike the incidents recorded in 1958, newspapers were finally covering it.

MOUNTING PUBLIC CONCERN

The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which oversaw overseeing operations in 1973, came under scrutiny in the press for the alleged mismanagement of Hanford’s tank farm. “The scope of the problem is staggering,” read a Los Angeles Times investigative piece. “It has been estimated, for example, that there is more radioactivity stored at the single Washington (Hanford) reservation than would be released during an entire nuclear war.”

The 106-T disaster also impacted public perception of the safety of the United States’ nuclear technology. AEC commissioner Clarence E. Larson tried to downplay the accident and his agency’s role in the mess, as well as the “implications that large masses of people are endangered.” Larson, and a governmental report that followed, laid much of the blame on the contractor Atlantic Richfield and a few bad apples inside the AEC.

“The bungling attributed to Atlantic Richfield (which has declined to comment on the report) would be unbecoming for a municipal sewage plant, to say the least of the nation’s main repository for nuclear waste,” wrote nuke critic Robert Gillette in an August 1973 issue of Science, two months after the leak was discovered. He continued:

The problem, according to the report, was that the operators who took the readings did not know how to interpret them; and a day shift supervisor in charge of half of Hanford’s tanks … let six weeks worth of charts and graphs pile up on his desk because of “the press of other duties” he said later, and never got around to reviewing them; and consequently a “process control” technician elsewhere at Hanford, who was supposed to be reviewing the tank readings for “longterm trends” received no data for more than a month. The technician … waited until 30 May to complain about the delays, but he nevertheless emerges as the hero in this dismal story. Fragmentary readings of fluid levels in 106-T arrived in his hands on Thursday 7 June, but it was enough to show that something was amiss. The technician put out the alarm, the supervisor confirmed the leak the next morning after checking his records and promptly resigned. All of this, the report says, led to the discovery that AEC officials had previously failed to notice or fully appreciate.

It was the first time the public became starkly aware of how Hanford’s tank farms were a tragedy in waiting, not only because the tanks were old and unfit to store massive amounts of toxic waste, but because the agency and the contractors assigned to monitor them had failed to do their job. But it wasn’t just humans who had failed. The tanks themselves were unsettling and foreboding. One hundred and fifty of these gigantic underground silos were built on a dusty plateau just seven miles from the Columbia River and only a few feet below ground. Hanford’s early history and conceptions around nuclear power, waste, and safety is imperative to understanding the disaster that lay ahead. A 1948 AEC report foresaw a future fraught with problems associated with these tanks, the way they were built, and their location:

Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent and are currently being spent for providing holding tanks for so-called “hot wastes,” for which no other method of disposal has yet been developed. This procedure … certainly provides no solution to a continuing and overwhelming problem. The business of constructing more and more containers for more and more objectionable material has already reached the point both of extravagance and of concern.

In other words, the tanks were a short-term fix to a problem with no long-term solution. They knew they couldn’t just dump the waste into the Columbia River, so piping the stuff into hulking underground tanks seemed the obvious choice to the engineers of the 1940s. The waste was so hot it would boil, not for hours or days or even months, but for decades to come. Engineers hoped a better remedy would reveal itself down the road. Such are the pitfalls of nuclear waste, and over the years Hanford’s reactors produced unfathomable amounts of this steaming radioactive soup.

When the AEC took control of Hanford after the end of World War II, they knew they had to do something to curtail a potential tank waste fiasco, so they developed a system that would keep the tank contents cool, designing contraptions to stir the waste so the hot gunk wouldn’t settle and end up leaking out the bottom. This workaround was imperfect at best. The public first learned of the 1958 tank malfunction in 1968 after a secret Joint Committee on Atomic Energy report was released. But the government knew there had been plenty more. From 1958 to 1965, administrators recorded mishaps at nine different units, and these tanks would continue to spring leaks throughout the 1970s. Some leaks were small, but others were quite large: in total, upwards of 55,000 to 115,000 gallons of scalding atomic waste escaped, followed by the 106-T incident. The tanks were also emptied on occasion to make room for new waste. Between 1946 and 1958, nearly 130 million gallons of waste had been discharged into the soil. Much of this waste went untreated, leaving behind an estimated 275,000 metric tons of chemicals and sixty thousand curies of radioactivity, a portion of which polluted local aquifers.

Image courtesy Dept. of Energy.

In retrospect, the ongoing pattern of leaks, workarounds, and government secrecy ought to have been alarming to anyone who understood the risks. Hanford’s storage tanks were not constructed to last forever, or even a fraction of the lifespan of their contents, and Hanford contractors were well aware of this fact. They knew all too well that an accident did not have to happen immediately. A leak could occur at any moment in the extensive life of the atomic waste the tanks were tasked with holding.

Let’s put it all in perspective. An isotope of plutonium (Pu-239), for example, has a half-life of over twenty-four thousand years. This means that after twenty-four thousand years, half of all the plutonium that leaks out of one of these shoddy tanks will still be as virulent as the day it was first released. Hanford had another big problem. They didn’t have enough tanks to hold all the already existing waste, or the waste they would continue producing. Yet in 1959, despite the lack of storage, the AEC denied a request to build new storage units. It was not until 1964, after additional pleas, that the AEC finally gave the go-ahead to construct new tanks.

Before these new tanks were finally approved, more and more waste was pumped into the older units, creating a host of problems, the most serious of which was that more nuke waste meant more heat and an increased risk of a serious accident. There were no new tanks to which to transfer existing waste had one of the tanks failed. This could have led to a disaster—a narrowly avoided catastrophic event.

By the mid-1960s, Hanford’s lack of tank storage had become a serious conundrum. In the fall of 1963, a nine-year-old unit known as 105-A began to ooze radioactive sludge from a split seam, which stopped leaking when salt was added to its internal mixture. The AEC continued to utilize the tanks even after identifying the cause of the leak, because they didn’t have any extra tanks to house its contents. They subsequently added more waste to 105-A, to a dangerous 10 percent over its recommended capacity. No single tank had ever been filled with so much radioactive effluent. In January 1965, as a result of too much waste, steam began to pour out of 105-A, and the ground surrounding the tank began to quake. It must have been a shocking development, but without new tank construction there was nothing to be done but wait and watch.

Fortunately, the rumbling wasn’t catastrophic and 105-A held. A 1968 comptroller general report noted that only a small amount of radioactivity bubbled out and into the soil. 105-A wasn’t the only case of a leaky tank at Hanford in the 1960s. A contractor report from 1967 disclosed that ten more tanks were leaking and fourteen others were struggling from “structural stress and corrosion.” By the time the public learned about the problem with 106-T, twenty-five additional tanks were decommissioned by the AEC due to suspected leaking. Reports on the storage tanks’ various issues had long been classified due to the secrecy of the Manhattan Project. One such report by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), completed in 1953 and not released for another twenty years, warned that Hanford would have major problems if a better solution wasn’t found for the disposal of toxic processing materials. The study noted the tanks were a “potential hazard” and that their structural lifespan was not known. Hanford supervisors brushed aside such concerns. In a 1959 Congressional testimony, Herbert M. Parker, who served as a manager of the tank farm, said he had no reason to believe the underground storage units would not hold up for many “decades” to come. When asked if there had ever been a problem in the past, Parker replied, “We are persuaded that none has ever leaked.”

It was nonsense, of course. A secret Government Accounting Office (GAO) report from 1968 revealed Parker had lied, and that for years officials had withheld information from the public about potentially disastrous issues with Hanford’s tanks. The GAO report noted that at least 227,000 gallons of waste had bled into the soil from ten different units, the first of which, an alarming thirty-five thousand gallons, occurred six months prior to Parker’s congressional testimony. It was a leak he most certainly knew about. While the AEC was in the habit of dismissing such incidents, they were also keen on ignoring unsavory advice from independent observers. Outside experts continually alerted the AEC that the tanks were not up to snuff. “Current analysis by the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) have revealed that the self-boiling tank structures are being stressed beyond accepted design limits,” read one such report. It also put the life expectancy of the tanks at two decades and, in some cases, even less. Yet the AEC ignored these distress signals in the name of anti-communism. Instead of being reevaluated, Hanford’s processing plants ran nonstop, churning out thousands of gallons of atomic waste every single day to challenge the United States’ Soviet nemesis. The waste had to go somewhere. A crisis as volatile as the scalding sludge itself was cooking at Hanford.

WIND, WATER, AND SHAKY GROUND

While leaks during this period had the potential to be fatal, administrators continued to downplay risks, particularly those posed to the area’s freshwater supply. Hanford operation manager Thomas A. Nemzek told the Los Angeles Times in a 1973 interview that not only had none of the leaked waste made it into the groundwater, but that even if it did, it would take upward of one thousand years to reach the Columbia River, by which time its effects would be inconsequential. Essentially, Nemzek asserted, stop worrying so damn much. But not everyone bought Nemzek’s dismissive rationale. A study by the National Academy of Sciences, the aforementioned comptroller general’s report and other geological surveys all countered Nemzek’s claim. These reports further noted that aside from the groundwater issue and depending on the scale of the leak, radioactive particles could go airborne, which would result in immediate and potentially nationwide impacts.

Aside from radioactivity blowing in the wind, there was another big issue: Hanford sat on shaky ground. As early as 1955, the National Academy of Sciences’ National Resource Council put together a committee, Geological Aspects of Radioactive Waste Disposal, to look into AEC operations. What they found was startling. The committee was not convinced that leaving radioactive waste to sit in the dirt was a particularly bright idea. When looking at two of the United States’ nuclear weapon sites, Hanford and the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS) in southeastern Idaho, the committee noted that “at both sites it seemed to be assumed that no water from the surface precipitation percolates downward to the water table, whereas there appears to be as yet no conclusive evidence that this is the case.”

Like the tanks releasing waste into Hanford’s soil, shallow underground pipes at Idaho’s NRTS had released nuke waste into the ground, and as with Hanford, the AEC assured everyone that it wasn’t worth the worry. In their echoes of Herbert M. Parker’s congressional testimony, the AEC was either lying or belligerently naive. Later a 1970 report by the Federal Water Quality Administration proved as much, noting that a leak had indeed sprung from pipes at NRTS, and nuclear waste had made its way into Idaho’s groundwater supplies. Another accident at NRTS, in 1972, discharged 18,600 gallons of “sodium-bearing waste” during a transfer from one holding tank to another. In this instance, an estimated 15,900 curies of strontium-90, a radioactive isotope, also leaked. As of 2006, the accident was still having a negative impact, and groundwater near the site exceeded drinking water standards for strontium-90 (twenty-eight-year half-life), iodine-129 (sixteen-million-year half-life), and technetium-99 (211,000-year half-life), along with other radioactive particles. To make things worse, the DOE’s Idaho branch released a startling report in April 2006 warning that groundwater in the Snake River Plain would “exceed drinking water standards for strontium-90 until the year 2095.” In addition, the DOE cautioned, soil that was used as backfill around NRTS’s tank farm was so laced with cesium-137 that it posed a severe risk to workers as well as the environment. Could the same happen with Hanford’s tank waste?

While not publicly admitting these obvious, well-documented dangers, by 1973, the AEC recognized the long-term necessity of properly disposing of Hanford’s tank waste. The initiated a program to turn the radioactive muck into a solid substance in as little as three years, and according to the AEC, the program appeared promising. The tanks would be emptied and the waste would be solidified and safely stored, not unlike filling up a liquid ice tray, placing it into the freezer, and forgetting about it. At least how the AEC portrayed it to a naive public. Yet there were two big hurdles. One was funding; the other was that converting the tanks’ contents into a stable substance was a hell of a lot more difficult than making ice. In fact, doing so proved virtually impossible, which is why the tanks were filled up in the first place. By 1985, despite $7 billion spent over the previous ten years, no progress had been made in ridding the aging tanks of their contents. Even  so, the storage tank mess was just one of several atomic troubles facing the remote nuclear site.

The post Of Leaks and Lies: A Looming Nuclear Catastrophe Threatens the Pacific Northwest appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by The Grayzone.

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In January 2023, a group of about 15 people gathered for three days at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank a few blocks from the Capitol. Their aim was ambitious and farsighted: to start building the next Republican administration, two years before a Republican president might again take office.

The group’s leaders originally cast the initiative as candidate-agnostic, intended to assist the 2024 Republican nominee, whoever that might be. But there was no real doubt who the envisioned beneficiary was. The team included several former members of the Trump administration, and the whole effort was geared to address a perceived shortcoming of that White House: its failure to fill enough key government positions with Trump loyalists. So few had expected Trump to win in 2016 that hiring had been left mostly to GOP veterans, who brought in establishment figures and never managed to fill some slots at all, leaving the president exposed to the bureaucratic resistance that his acolytes believe undermined him at every step: the dreaded “deep state.”

They were determined not to let this happen again. This time, Trump would take office with a fully staffed, carefully selected administration ready to roll. Thus the name of this new effort at Heritage, Project 2025. It would consist of four “pillars”: an 887-page policy plan, a database of conservatives willing to serve in the administration, training seminars for potential new appointees on the functions of government and a battle plan for each agency.

In recent months, Project 2025 has gotten attention for some of the more radical proposals in its policy plan — such as reinstating more stringent rules for the use of the abortion pill mifepristone and abolishing some federal agencies. On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made the project the centerpiece of their case against a Trump restoration. Their attacks were so effective that Trump has publicly disavowed the effort (while selecting a running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who is closely allied with Heritage).

This week, as Project 2025 faced denunciations from the Trump campaign, the project’s director, Paul Dans, stepped down from his role. Trump’s campaign co-managers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, said in a statement that “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed, and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.” For Dans, it was a sudden end — or at least a pause — in a remarkable ascent from obscurity.

But then again, his resignation was at least partly symbolic: The work of Project 2025 is largely done. Under Dans, the project has assembled a database of more than 10,000 names — job candidates vetted for loyalty to Trump’s cause — who will be ready to deploy into federal agencies should he win the 2024 election. Project 2025 has delivered a toolkit, ready for use, to create a second Trump administration that would be decidedly more MAGA than the first.

The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs. To that end, the plan’s most pertinent proposal is reinstating Schedule F — a provision unveiled near the very end of Trump’s term, then repealed by the Biden administration — which would shift as many as 50,000 career employees in policy-shaping positions into a new job category that would make them much easier to fire.

This was the mission that brought people together at Heritage for those three days, with the task of designing the personnel database that would populate the next administration, all under the supervision of Dans, a tall, broad-shouldered guy with a slow, jut-chinned way of speaking and traces of a Baltimore accent.

Not long ago, Dans, 55, would have seemed an unlikely person for the role. The son of a liberal Johns Hopkins University professor, Dans was a New York lawyer who before Trump’s election had never served in government. For years following that election, he had tried and failed to find a place in the administration, seemingly in spite of a celebrity connection: His wife was a fitness coach for Karlie Kloss, the supermodel sister-in-law of Jared Kushner. Finally, in 2019, Dans got in the door, at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Some four years later, here he was, hoping to build the next administration. Dans envisioned the personnel database that he wanted to create as a “conservative LinkedIn.” To help explain it, he displayed sketches he had made. They depicted the online file for a sample applicant — “Betsy Ross.” One page would show her occupation, which of the conservative organizations supporting Project 2025 had suggested her and which agencies she was being considered for. Another would show the findings of an internal review of her application, her progress on the training sessions (one of which Dans called “Deep State 101”) and any “red flags.” Yet another would show additional vetting: a “webcrawl” report; her performance on the Project 2025 questionnaire, which would ask detailed questions about ideological and policy beliefs; and more. The database would allow administration officials to search for candidates of a certain profile to fit a certain role.

This was what Dans wanted the Heritage staffers gathered in the room and the tech engineers they’d contracted from Oracle to build: the engine of Trump 2.0. It would be a personnel machine not only far beyond what the first Trump administration had at its disposal, but beyond what any other administration had enjoyed, either. According to one person in attendance, the database would take several months to build and would cost upward of $2 million. It would reach outside the usual channels to draw in MAGA believers from across the country. And Dans was at the helm. “There was no one who had a better idea of it than he did,” the person in attendance told me. “He was driving the whole thing.”

As the database development progressed in the months that followed, Dans stressed a detail that made it even more far-reaching. He did not want the positions being filled to be limited to the 4,000 or so slots that are reserved for political appointments. He also wanted it to suggest people for roles that are currently assigned to career employees, in keeping with the plans for Schedule F.

Propelling the project has been a worldview that can be easily overlooked amid Trump’s talk about restoring the halcyon days of his first term. The people preparing for his return to the White House emphatically do not view his first term as a success. Rather, they view it as a missed opportunity to implement the MAGA vision. For Dans, Trump’s first term was an object lesson in how difficult it could be to reach Trump’s goals without a captive bureaucracy.

The former president’s supporters are determined that a second Trump administration would be much more organized than the first, stocked with foot soldiers who are both loyal and capable of moving policy forward. Dans declined to be interviewed for this article or to respond on the record to a detailed list of questions, but he has been laying out his thinking in interviews with conservative media outlets. “We’re going to get this done right on the next go-round,” he told Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, on her podcast last winter. And in essence, that will mean cleaning house, he said. “If a person can’t get in and fire people right away, what good is political management?”

Paul Dans was raised, in the 1970s and ’80s, in a family that embodied liberal idealism. Peter Dans was a professor of medicine who had enlisted in the Public Health Service; started an STD clinic and a migrant health clinic while on faculty at the University of Colorado; and served in the office of Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin Democrat who founded Earth Day. Paul’s mom, Colette Lizotte, was a French teacher who had previously worked as a chemist at the National Institutes of Health.

The family lived in a hilly, verdant stretch north of Baltimore. Paul and his twin brother, Tom, hung out with the other smart kids at Dulaney High School; they played sports and were on the debate team. “Both were very bright kids, very well behaved,” recalled Phil Sporer, who attended school with them from early on. “The Dans boys were everybody’s perfect child.”

The first hints of Dans’ political orientation emerged in college. He went to MIT, where he majored in economics, joined a frat, played on the lacrosse team and, as classmate Juan Latasa told me, stood apart from the “political correctness” that was rising at elite campuses around 1990. “It wasn’t always easy for such students. It was a very liberal place,” Latasa said. “It was tough.”

Dans stayed on at MIT to get his master’s in city planning. His thesis on the redevelopment of industrial parks, like the Brooklyn Navy Yard, showed him still wrestling with competing impulses. There was Reagan-style optimism: “The myriad crises which America must grapple with in coming years pale in magnitude to the nation’s gifted legacy.” But there was also a hint of resigned declinism, with Dans addressing an “age of diminished expectations.”

At the University of Virginia School of Law, which Dans attended next, his transformation became explicit: He joined the campus branch of the Federalist Society, the conservative network founded by law students at Yale and the University of Chicago in the 1980s, and he rose to become chapter president. “I was always attracted with the Federalist Society message about how some daring students stood up at Yale Law School and challenged the hegemony there and really was trying to speak truth to power,” he told hosts Saurabh Sharma and Nick Solheim last year on “Moment of Truth,” a podcast produced by American Moment, a conservative organization now aligned with Project 2025.

Still, Dans left little mark on his law school classmates, perhaps partly because he took a year off to study in Paris. I reached out to a couple dozen of his peers, and an email from a lawyer in Dallas was representative: “I wish I could help but I do not remember any details about Paul Dans.”

Dans’ fixation on the federal bureaucracy began at home. The idealism of the 1960s brought his parents to Washington, where they met while working at the National Institutes of Health. “They had basically come up through the JFK, Kennedy-esque, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’” era, he told Sharma and Solheim.

Dans didn’t seriously consider following his parents into public service — law school debt precluded that option, he said — but he would ultimately become wrapped up in a debate that had first inspired them. They went to Washington during the federal government’s great post-World War II expansion, when the ranks of career employees began swelling and when more job protections started accruing to them, sparking a decadeslong argument that has carried on to this day. To federal employee unions and other defenders of the bureaucracy, such protections were in the spirit of the Pendleton Act, the 1883 law that created the modern federal workforce, along with mechanisms for employment based on merit. But to many conservative critics, and some good-government liberals, the job protections that federal workers gained in the 1960s undermined the “merit based” nature of the civil service by making it difficult to remove ineffectual workers.

After law school, Dans chose a different meritocracy, joining a wave of young attorneys in the New York corporate legal world in the late ’90s. But Dans stood out. He was much more conservative than most of his colleagues. He prided himself on being one of very few in his Upper West Side building to get the New York Post. He admired Donald Trump for bringing a “can-do spirit back … building on the skyline again.”

Some colleagues kept their distance, but not Julio Ramos, a fellow junior associate at the law firm LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae. Dans kidded Ramos about his lefty politics and regaled him with talk of supply-side economics and Reagan. It was all very civil. “Even though he was from the right,” Ramos told me, “he didn’t have any hatred toward the left.”

Dans left after three years to become an associate at another large firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, and after two years there eventually landed at a less prestigious firm, where his cases included a lawsuit between Yves Saint Laurent’s beauty line and Costco over perfume labeling. By 2009, having not made partner anywhere, and two years into his marriage to Mary Helen Bowers, a former New York City Ballet dancer, Dans went into solo practice.

Dans has criticized the legal field for what he perceives to be anti-conservative discrimination. “We are, as a profession, really getting snowed under right now,” he said on the “Moment of Truth” podcast. “Republicans and conservatives have not stood up in the face of, kind of, cancel culture, and [these] Marxist, Saul Alinsky attacks.”

Even the moment he has often framed as his biggest triumph affirmed Dans’ alienation from liberal lawyers. In 2009, he was one of hundreds of attorneys hired to defend Chevron and its employees against a multibillion-dollar lawsuit for oil pollution in Ecuador. According to the journalist Michael Goldhaber, Dans was hired at $100 an hour — less than 5% of the top rate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which was leading Chevron’s defense.

As Dans later told Goldhaber, he had an epiphany: While watching the documentary film “Crude,” an exposé of Chevron in Ecuador that was done in collaboration with the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer on the case, Steven Donziger, Dans realized that the outtakes from the film should be subpoenaed, to see if the filmmaker captured any legal malfeasance by Donziger. Dans put the suggestion in a memo.

As it turned out, the subpoenaed outtakes did prove to be damning. Chevron sued Donziger in U.S. federal court, ultimately resulting in a ruling that the company did not have to pay the $9.5 billion judgment. Dans took full credit: “I came up with a theory that we could get documentary film outtakes, basically caught them doing their nefarious acts on video,” he told Martin on her podcast.

According to other lawyers on the case, the story is more complicated: Although Dans wrote a memo suggesting the outtakes be targeted, others started the push for subpoenas — and came up with the necessary legal basis for seeking the crucial outtakes — independently of Dans raising the idea.

When the Chevron case was over, Dans was back on his own, handling motley litigation, including a patent fight between two manufacturers of sheet-pile wall systems and a class action against Frito-Lay regarding its claims that some of its products were made with all-natural ingredients. The address for Dans’ solo practice was a mail drop at the New York City Bar Association.

Toward the end of the aughts, as President Barack Obama’s first term wore on, Dans’ conservatism began to take on a new shape. He spent a lot of time online. “I’m one of the people sitting at his kitchen counter, you know, on the bench there, on the stool kind of going, How can that be? That’s crazy,” he told Martin. “You’re clicking … you know, refreshing the Drudge Report like 100 times a day.”

One thing he clicked on was Trump’s conspiracist claims about Obama’s origins: “I had some serious academic questioning about the birthplace of a former president, if you will,” he told Sharma and Solheim. Dans got excited when rumors spread in 2011 that Trump would be going to New Hampshire to announce a run for president. Alas, it didn’t happen.

Early in the 2016 primary season, Dans attended a dinner of the steering committee for the New York City Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society. As he later recalled to Sharma and Solheim, someone asked whom people were supporting for president, and around the table it went: “I like Jeb.” “I like Marco.” “I like Jeb.”

Dans watched in bewilderment. Here were all these New York Republicans, and no one had yet mentioned the man who lived a few blocks away, who had decided to run for president this time. Finally, it was Dans’ turn. “Well, I like Trump, and I think he’s going to win,” he later told Sharma and Solheim. “I like him because I’m sick of losing.”

That fall, Dans headed to the Pittsburgh area to volunteer for Trump. He had worked on other campaigns, but none had ever felt like this. “There was no passion,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “We were hungry for a candidate who could really speak to Americans. … Donald Trump delivered.”

Trump’s appeal to Dans verged on the tribal: He came to see himself as “a pure-blooded deplorable mix,” as he told Sharma and Solheim, citing the working-class, ethnic Catholic roots of his ancestors — his paternal grandfather was born to Spanish immigrant parents and had been a merchant mariner, and his mother hailed from French Canadian mill workers in Rhode Island. Never mind that his father was a medical professor who had raised Dans in an affluent suburb.

When Trump won, Dans eagerly sent off his resume. “Next stop, you know, Department of Justice, right?” he said to Martin years later, recalling his confidence. But no. As he also told Sharma and Solheim, the response was “crickets.”

His explanation? He was too MAGA. “There were so many people getting sandbagged because somebody thought that they were too ‘America First’-y or too Trumpist,” he told Martin. He was advised to instead slip in “under the radar” as “just your milquetoast Republican appointee.” Watching his accounts of this disappointment, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Dans, whose affect in interviews can come off as both genial and awkward, like the chatty, perhaps too chatty, guy at the airport bar.

Finally, late in 2018, Dans came to Washington for a Federalist Society meeting and connected with James Bacon, a college student who was working as confidential assistant to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. With Bacon’s help, and with the benefit of his master’s in city planning, Dans finally broke in, in July 2019, as a senior adviser in HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development.

Career staff at HUD didn’t know what to make of Dans. “We tried to figure out what his role was,” one of them told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “He kind of wandered in,” the career employee said. “He was fairly disdainful of the career staff and did not have a lot of respect for why things were the way they were.” For Dans, his arrival was a “real baptism” in how the government actually works. “You don’t realize that the federal government is just an avalanche of money shooting out of various agencies,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “It’s trying to tame this spew of money and direct in the right way, is what you’re doing when you get to an agency.”

As Dans saw it, the career employees were the problem. They were biased against conservatives, and they disregarded changes sought by the duly elected administration. Dans also blamed fellow appointees, too many of whom were clueless about the actual work and thus willing to cede decision-making to career employees. “You came and you went to cocktail parties, and you had your birthday cakes around the office and, you know, maybe a couple of ribbon cuttings, and you got to go on a little international junket,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “And meanwhile, everything else is kind of going at the same level.”

By late 2019, the White House was coming to share Dans’ diagnosis. James Sherk, then a special assistant on the Domestic Policy Council, began compiling purported examples of what they viewed as deep-state obstinacy that Trump should have been able to discipline with dismissals, including anonymous reports about Environmental Protection Agency employees withholding information about legal cases from political appointees and about Department of Justice lawyers refusing to investigate discrimination against Asian Americans at Yale.

The ultimate example of perceived perfidy came in December 2019, when the House used the testimony of federal employees to approve two articles of impeachment against Trump: for using the levers of powers to pressure Ukraine into discrediting Biden and for obstructing Congress. This gave Trump and his remaining White House coterie new resolve to take more control of hiring.

Trump turned the Presidential Personnel Office over to John McEntee, his 29-year-old former personal assistant who had left the White House in 2018 after a background check found that he posed a security risk due to his frequent gambling. (McEntee, now an adviser for Project 2025, has declined to comment about the background check in the past.) McEntee recruited Bacon, the college student, to assist him in overhauling personnel, and, looking for someone to join in the effort, they settled on Paul Dans. The person who had barely made it into the administration had impressed them with his critiques of the status quo.

In February 2020, the White House installed Dans at Office of Personnel Management as “White House liaison and senior adviser to the director” — its eyes and ears there.

Dans, encouraged by McEntee, wasted no time. He quickly ordered the removal of the agency’s chief of staff, Jonathan Blyth, and asserted so much authority across the agency that its director, Dale Cabaniss, who had spent years as a Republican staff member in the Senate, decided to leave as well. Cabaniss was replaced by an interim director, Michael Rigas, but people at the agency told me that Dans was the de facto director for the remainder of the year; late in 2020, he was named chief of staff. (Rigas and Blyth did not respond to requests for comment; Cabaniss declined to comment on the record.) So total was the takeover of the personnel process that Dans’ colleagues took to referring to him, McEntee and their allies as “the coup group.”

One of Dans’ first assertions of authority came at a senior staff meeting after Cabaniss’ departure, amid the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. According to another Trump appointee, some 20 people were present in the conference room at OPM’s headquarters near the National Mall when the agency’s then-chief information officer, Clare Martorana, said that, like most other agencies, it would use Zoom for online meetings.

Dans erupted, declaring that Zoom, which was founded by a Chinese immigrant to the U.S., posed the risk of spying by China. Martorana took in his outburst with “a combination of anger, amusement and just dumbstruck awe,” the Trump appointee recalled. She then tried to explain that Zoom was on the government’s approved list of vendors and that many other agencies were using it. This did not mollify Dans.

As 2020 went on, Dans’ colleagues became accustomed to his insistent demands, which, coupled with his large frame, could make him an intimidating presence. Dans wanted to hire as many appointees as possible in the final year of Trump’s term in office, and he wanted the agency’s processes to move faster. “He would just throw bombs into senior staff meetings,” said the appointee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, “and they would say: ‘What are we supposed to do with this? He can’t be serious with this.’”

In October 2020, less than two weeks before the election, Trump signed an executive order creating Schedule F, the new category of career employees in key positions who would now be easier to remove.

Over at OPM, Dans was busy with a related effort, seeking to recategorize positions in the Senior Executive Service — higher-ranking managerial slots across the government that are mostly filled with career employees — into a general category that would allow the president to appoint more of them. He was also engaged in another aspect of the administration’s new emphasis on personnel: making sure that OPM appointees answered long ideological questionnaires and met for interviews with staffers to assess their fitness for staying on in a second Trump term.

Those who dealt with Dans at OPM told me that they tried to respond to his demands as best they could, but that he often grew agitated when told that OPM did not have the ability to do what he wanted. He seemed to take such explanations as a personal affront. “He questioned everything from the point of view that there was a conspiracy against him and the president,” the appointee said.

Colleagues chalked up his outbursts to insecurity born of his not understanding how the government worked and being broadly out of his depth. “He reminded me of some of the people who show up at Republican conventions,” said a second Republican appointee at the agency, who, like the first, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “Those people usually show up and then go home. They show up and are vocal, but they’re not like, ‘Now I’m going to go do the boring work of the sausage-making of government.’”

Donald Devine, who led OPM during the Reagan administration and whom the Trump administration had brought on as an adviser during this period, scoffs at such critiques. “If you do anything, people aren’t going to like it, and that’s why he’s so different,” Devine told me. “Most of the other people in the executive office of OPM weren’t doing much, so people didn’t care about them. He’s a serious person trying to do a serious job. You don’t see a lot of that, and that’s why I like him so much.”

Dans’ only problem, Devine said, was that he ran out of time. “The major things were going to be done the next term,” he said. “It was too late to do anything before they figured out how to run personnel.”

After the election, Dans stayed hard at work at OPM, even as other appointees started to vanish in the final weeks of the Trump administration. Since then, Dans has criticized prosecutions of those involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “The unfortunate thing is it does send a message to people that you shouldn’t criticize the government,” he said in a C-SPAN interview last year.

A year and a half after arriving in Washington, Dans left for his new home in South Carolina, near his wife’s hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, while she was expecting their fourth child. “I went home kind of in this Cincinnatus sort of spirit: return to the farm. Our farm being in Fort Mill, South Carolina, in a subdivision,” he quipped to Sharma and Solheim.

But then he turned serious: “We’re ‘God, country and family.’ And now is the time to go put a little more emphasis on the God and family part of that. But we’ll be back for the country thing.”

With the 2024 election approaching, with Trump leading Biden and then Harris in most national polls and with Dans’ vision of reshaping the bureaucracy heavily influencing the Trump campaign, it finally seemed like Dans’ moment might actually be arriving. On Tuesday’s episode of the “War Room” podcast — founded by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who is now in prison — Dans sometimes sounded triumphant. “In order to take this back, the swamp isn’t going to drain itself,” he said. “We need outsiders coming in committed to doing this. … With Project 2025, we built a pathway to encourage folks to do this.”

But in that same “War Room” episode on Tuesday, Dans decried the “great disinformation campaign” underway against Project 2025, “almost a hoax.” He listed some of the mistruths that Democrats had voiced about the project’s proposals, including a claim by Harris that it would eliminate Social Security. “Just completely fallacious stuff,” he said. “It’s just one big bald-faced lie.”

It was plain that he was taking the attacks very personally, and with good reason. The Democrats’ campaign to turn Project 2025 into an albatross around Trump’s neck was succeeding, to the point where some sort of dramatic break was needed. Just hours after that episode aired came word that Dans would be stepping down. “We are extremely grateful for [Dans’] and everyone’s work on Project 2025 and dedication to saving America,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said.

In a note to Heritage staff, obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Dans himself suggested that his mission was, essentially, complete. “The work of this project was due to wrap up with the nominating conventions of the political parties,” he wrote. “Our work is presently winding down, and I plan later in August to leave Heritage.”

It was face-saving, but it was also largely true. The database was built; the training seminars had been taught. This time, the foot soldiers were ready to go, just waiting to be called on. “From the president’s lips to God’s ears that change is going to happen? It really happens below” the president, Dans said on “War Room.” “That’s the importance of recognizing: Personnel is really the cornerstone of the change.”

Disavowals or not, the logic of Project 2025 is embedded in the DNA of Trump’s plan to overhaul the government. Reinstating Schedule F is still a top-level agenda item. Jacqueline Simon, the public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, told me that the agencies could end up defining the new employment category so broadly that it could encompass far more than 50,000 positions. “It will be a purge,” she said.

Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at Georgetown University, does not expect Trump to fire tens of thousands. Jettisoning just a couple of thousand, to make an example of them, may be enough. “They can fire 1,000 and put their heads on pikes, and then everyone else quickly falls into line,” he told me. “That way you have a terrified bureaucracy that still has institutional knowledge. That’s the more strategic way to use Schedule F, to scare the bejesus out of 49,000 people and force them into line.” Sherk, the author of Schedule F, suggested as much to me. “The notion we’re going to can 50,000 people is just insane,” he said. “Why would you do that? That would kneecap the ability to implement your agenda. You use it to go after bad actors and rank incompetents.”

That would still leave the challenge of finding people to fill the 4,000 slots for appointees and however many hundreds or thousands of openings are created by firings. Many Republicans who served in the first Trump administration are leery of serving in a second. “The last administration was a joke, and they had a real problem recruiting,” a Washington attorney who served in the George W. Bush administration, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution against his firm, told me. “Who the hell would jump into this clown car driving toward a cliff? Are people going to come forward, quality people? Not a fucking chance.”

This was precisely Dans’ mission with Project 2025: to find a whole new corps of people willing to come to the capital and do the work of implementing the Trump agenda that the usual D.C. fixtures refuse to do. How many will be suited to the task? “We have to recruit the talent to get to Washington,” Dans told Martin. “Ultimately, what Project 2025 is is a call to action for patriots to come serve in Washington.”

Will Dans himself be among that number? As Devine sees it, Dans’ current defenestration is political, and temporary. “Paul is too bright and intelligent not to,” he said. “They’ll pick him up somewhere.” Devine said that he’s spoken with Dans since his decision to resign. “He’s doing well,” Devine said. “He’s ready to go on to fight. The memorandum he sent [to Heritage colleagues] ends with that: ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’” Dans still sees himself as a field general for a new class of Trump bureaucrats, one that will come to power if Trump wins, whether the effort is called Project 2025 or not.

There is a paradox at the core of this. Dans was never looking for the proverbial farmers with pitchforks, because he is aware of how complex the work of the federal government is. Dans was looking for people who are both angry enough about the state of the country to want to commit four years to serving Donald Trump in Washington to fix it, and yet sufficiently versed in the mechanisms of government to be able to restrain it. “We need many more eyes and ears, many more technicians on the ground,” he told Sharma and Solheim.

It is idealistic, in its way, the conception of an aggrieved, underappreciated elite that is ready to be summoned to Washington. It sounds a lot like, well, Paul Dans. The question is, how many others like him have been out there all along, just waiting for this?

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Doris Burke contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Alec MacGillis.

“For two years now, José Rubén Zamora has been behind bars in horrific conditions, despite a court order for a retrial,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator. “This disgraceful travesty of justice suggests a breakdown in the country’s rule of law and punitive retaliation against independent journalists. Zamora must be freed immediately.”  

Zamora, 67, remains in pretrial isolation in conditions at Mariscal Zavala military jail in Guatemala City that his lawyers say amount to torture. Their urgent appeal to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment said that this included deprivation of light and water, aggressive and humiliating treatment, unsanitary conditions, and limited access to medical care.

The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has declared his imprisonment to be in violation of international law, and a February report by TrialWatch concluded that there were breaches of both international and regional fair-trial standards, and that Zamora’s prosecution and conviction are likely retaliation for his journalism.

Zamora, president of the now defunct elPeriódico newspaper, received a six-year prison sentence on money laundering charges in June 2023. An appeals court overturned his conviction in October 2023, but numerous delays have prevented the start of the court-ordered retrial.

On May 15, 2024, a Guatemalan court ordered that the journalist be released to house arrest to await trial. However, authorities kept him in jail, as bail applications remained pending in two other cases. On June 26, an appeals court revoked the lower court’s order for his conditional release.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The vision

“When you lose it, you’ve lost a record of climate on Earth that can never be recovered. There’s a lot of scientists who realize this, and have realized it for decades, who are making heroic efforts to recover this ice before it disappears forever.”

— Ice core scientist Tyler Jones

The spotlight

The first time Tyler Jones visited the National Science Foundation’s Ice Core Facility in Colorado’s Jefferson County, he felt like he’d stepped into an episode of The X Files. “It was like I was in some secret government installation,” he said. Jones, an ice core scientist from the University of Colorado Boulder, equated the facility to a “giant walk-in freezer” nestled inside an old concrete building, where scientists are preserving cylinders of glacial ice that essentially act as time capsules of information.

The coldest chamber of this immense freezer is filled with shelves bearing the weight of ice cores from both poles, stored in protective metal tubes, dating back decades. “It’s basically a giant library of ice cores,” Jones said — a library that includes some of the first ice cores ever taken.

Portions of samples from as far back as the 1950s are preserved at the facility, because scientists have long known that, as technology advanced, it would allow future generations to analyze old samples in new ways. “We always try to save some ice to give those future scientists a chance to do something better than we’re doing right now,” Jones said.

This desire to preserve ice cores has taken on a new urgency, given how fast glaciers around the world are melting. When the average person thinks about this problem, they may picture icebergs falling into the sea and mountainsides left barren as the ice retreats upslope. But glacial melt is also having an invisible impact within the ice itself, rapidly erasing the data that glaciologists and climate scientists rely on to learn about planetary changes.

A piece of an ice core extracted by a research team in Svalbard, Norway. Riccardo Selvatico for CNR and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Around 10 years ago, Carlo Barbante, a chemist at the University of Venice in Italy, and his glaciologist colleague Jérôme Chappellaz from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology had the idea for an initiative that would complement the work of the Ice Core Facility in Colorado and similar facilities in other countries: an international Ice Memory Sanctuary, focused on preserving cores extracted from endangered glaciers.

The sanctuary was built last year as a cave on the High Antarctic Plateau, where the average temperature is -54 degrees Celsuis (-65 degrees Fahrenheit). So far Barbante, Chappellaz, and their colleagues have collected cores from seven glaciers across Europe and one in Bolivia that will eventually be stored there, and they have plans underway for more international collaborations to add cores to the sanctuary from other parts of the world.

[Read more about the Ice Memory Foundation, and how glacial melt is impacting other areas of scientific study, here.]

“We don’t want to lose these important archives,” Barbante said. “They give us a lot of information about, of course, the past, but also the present and the future.”

Andrea Spolaor remembers how far out the front of a tidewater glacier reached when he first visited the world’s northernmost research station in Svalbard, Norway, more than 10 years ago. He estimated that it may have retreated by nearly 2 miles since then. In April 2023, when Spolaor, a snow chemist with the Italian Research Council, led an expedition to take a core from an ice field 25 miles away from Ny-Alesund station, melting already posed a problem.

When he and his team reached their chosen location, they set up their drill and got to work carrying out their plans to extract two 400-foot-long ice cores. But after about 80 feet, they pulled up water. At first, they tried to drain what they thought was a small pocket of melt. “After, I don’t know, five or six hours,” Spolaor said, “I think we took out three or four hundred liters of water.” They’d struck an aquifer. In 2005, a research team had drilled through solid ice in that same spot.

Spolaor and company moved uphill to try again. It meant thinner ice, but they still managed to take three roughly 240-foot cores without striking water again.

Then time came to pack up the samples, strap them onto sleds behind their snowmobiles, and head back to the research station. As they neared the coast, they discovered that a river of meltwater had formed while they were draining aquifers and taking cores. They had no choice but to wade through 100 yards of ice-cold, waist-high water to carry each box out. “It was a bit annoying,” Spolaor said. “We spent four hours in the water to take out the samples.”

Spolaor’s team’s research camp on an expedition on Svalbard. Riccardo Selvatico for CNR and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Spolaor and his team plan to use a portion of the samples for their immediate research needs, building on studies they’ve done in the past to understand what the future holds for Svalbard and other places in the Arctic. They’re hoping that the lower portion of their ice core will cover an era of unexpected warming that took place around 1,000 years ago, which has the potential to tell us something about how the poles respond to abrupt warming. The samples they don’t use for research today will head to the Ice Memory Sanctuary for other research teams in the years and decades ahead with questions of their own.

As snow accumulates on a glacier, it slowly crushes and compacts what lies below it. The snow transitions first into a porous substance called firn, before getting squeezed all the way into ice. But the pores don’t disappear. The ice is full of tiny air bubbles. “This makes the ice an absolutely unique archive,” said Margit Schwikowsi, an environmental chemist and chair of the scientific committee for the Ice Memory Foundation, the organization that was established in 2021 to create the sanctuary. The bubbles offer a glimpse of ancient atmospheres. “There’s no other archive, to my knowledge,” Schwikowski said, “where you have this direct preservation of old air.”

The archives they carry allow ice cores to serve as historical records printed in the form of molecules and aerosols. The cores are filled with stories of eruptions, wildfires, storms, plastics, and, of course, climates. Oxygen isotopes tell scientists about global temperatures at the time the ice formed, while the air pockets reveal what greenhouse gases were present in the past. But, as Spolaor and Schwikowski have both encountered in their own investigations, runoff from melting glaciers can erode or entirely erase some of those climate signals as meltwater trickles through the ice crystals. And it can happen quite suddenly.

This past January, both Spolaor and Schwikowski published studies independent of each other that had similar conclusions for different glaciers: In just a few years, melting had eroded a substantial portion of the climate record the glaciers had once contained.

Though the papers by Spolaor and Schwikowski are among the first to document this loss as it happens, scientists have long known this was a possibility. Glaciers have been melting rapidly for decades, and there’s a chance we’ve already hit a tipping point that would cause them to continue to disappear even if aggressive climate action is taken.

With those concerns growing, some experts are also considering more targeted measures to protect the world’s glaciers. Earlier this month, a group of scientists released a first-of-its-kind report calling for a “major initiative” over the coming decades to study techniques that could slow, halt, or even reverse the melting of glaciers and mitigate the associated rise in sea levels. One example is some form of underwater curtains that would insulate ice shelves from warmer ocean water. Scientists and advocates still have hope that these types of interventions won’t be necessary — but, as with the Ice Memory Sanctuary, it’s a form of insurance to at least investigate these possibilities now.

A lot of work remains to be done for Barbante, Schwikowski, and their colleagues, including finalizing a scientific steering committee to evaluate proposals for using ice cores from the sanctuary, with an eye toward one day handing the foundation over to a large international body like UNESCO that has the resources to manage this scientific treasure trove.

The more immediate challenge is finding funds to conduct the expeditions, and convincing their international colleagues to take on the logistical complications of gathering an extra sample or two to send to Antarctica — which can mean increasing the risks of expeditions that are already complex and hazardous. But many researchers are willing to take on the risk for the sake of ensuring future generations will have access to the same crucial information that fuels their own studies.

“When you lose it, you’ve lost a record of climate on Earth that can never be recovered,” Jones said. “There’s a lot of scientists who realize this, and have realized it for decades, who are making heroic efforts to recover this ice before it disappears forever.”

— Syris Valentine

More exposure

• Read: more about the latest science on glacial tipping points (Grist)
• Read: a personal essay about what it meant for Venezuela to lose its last glacier (The Washington Post)
• Read: more about the underwater curtain method that could protect glaciers from hotter oceans (The Guardian)
• Watch: a short video explaining how the ice cave was designed and built to house the sanctuary in Antarctica (Ice Memory Foundation)

A parting shot

A photo of how ice samples are extracted. Here, glaciologist Tobias Erhardt drills a shallow ice core at the East Greenland Ice-core Project camp.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Riccardo Selvatico for CNR and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Parting shot: Dr. Tyler R. Jones, Assistant Research Professor, INSTAAR, University of Colorado

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Meet the scientists behind the ice sanctuary — a memory vault for dying glaciers on Jul 24, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Syris Valentine.

It is only right that we all take a moment to celebrate the victory of Julian Assange’s release from 14 years of detention, in varying forms, to be united, finally, with his wife and children – two boys who have been denied the chance to ever properly know their father.

His last five years were spent in Belmarsh high-security prison as the United States sought to extradite him to face a 175-year jail sentence for publishing details of its state crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

For seven years before that he was confined to a small room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after Quito awarded him political asylum to evade the clutches of a law-breaking US empire determined to make an example of him.

His seizure by UK police from the embassy on Washington’s behalf in 2019, after a more US-aligned government came to power in Ecuador, proved how clearly misguided, or malicious, had been those who accused him of “evading justice”.

Everything Assange had warned the US wanted to do to him was proved correct over the next five years, as he languished in Belmarsh entirely cut off from the outside world.

No one in our political or media class appeared to notice, or could afford to admit, that events were playing out exactly as the founder of Wikileaks had for so many years predicted they would – and for which he was, at the time, so roundly ridiculed.

Nor was that same political-media class prepared to factor in other vital context showing that the US was not trying to enforce some kind of legal process, but that the extradition case against Assange was entirely about wreaking vengeance – and making an example of the Wikileaks founder to deter others from following him in shedding light on US state crimes.

That included revelations that, true to form, the CIA, which was exposed as a rogue foreign intelligence agency in 250,000 embassy cables published by Wikileaks in 2010, had variously plotted to assassinate him and kidnap him off the streets of London.

Other evidence came to light that the CIA had been carrying out extensive spying operations on the embassy, recording Assange’s every move, including his meetings with his doctors and lawyers.

That fact alone should have seen the US case thrown out by the British courts. But the UK judiciary was looking over its shoulder, towards Washington, far more than it was abiding by its own statute books.

Media no watchdog

Western governments, politicians, the judiciary, and the media all failed Assange. Or rather, they did what they are actually there to do: keep the rabble – that is, you and me – from knowing what they are really up to.

Their job is to build narratives suggesting that they know best, that we must trust them, that their crimes, such as those they are supporting right now in Gaza, are actually not what they look like, but are, in fact, efforts in very difficult circumstances to uphold the moral order, to protect civilisation.

For this reason, there is a special need to identify the critical role played by the media in keeping Assange locked up for so long.

The truth is, with a properly adversarial media playing the role it declares for itself, as a watchdog on power, Assange could never have been disappeared for so long. He would have been freed years ago. It was the media that kept him behind bars.

The establishment media acted as a willing tool in the demonising narrative the US and British governments carefully crafted against Assange.

Even now, as he is reunited with his family, the BBC and others are peddling the same long-discredited lies.

Those include the constantly repeated claim by journalists that he faced “rape charges” in Sweden that were finally withdrawn. Here is the BBC making this error once again in its reporting this week.

In fact, Assange never faced more than a “preliminary investigation”, one the Swedish prosecutors repeatedly dropped for lack of evidence. The investigation, we now know, was revived and sustained for so long not because of Sweden but chiefly because the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, then led by Sir Keir Starmer (now the leader of the Labour party), insisted on it dragging on.

Starmer made repeated trips to Washington during this period, when the US was trying to find a pretext to lock Assange away for political crimes, not sexual ones. But as happened so often in the Assange case, all the records of those meetings were destroyed by the British authorities.

The media’s other favourite deception – still being promoted – is the claim that Wikileaks’ releases put US informants in danger.

That is utter nonsense, as any journalist who has even cursorily studied the background to the case knows.

More than a decade ago, the Pentagon set up a review to identify any US agents killed or harmed as a result of the leaks. They did so precisely to help soften up public opinion against Assange.

And yet a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers could not find a single such case, as the head of the team, Brigadier-General Robert Carr, conceded in court in 2013.

Despite having a newsroom stuffed with hundreds of correspondents, including those claiming to specialise in defence, security and disinformation, the BBC still cannot get this basic fact about the case right.

That’s not an accident. It’s what happens when journalists allow themselves to be spoon-fed information from those they are supposedly watching over. That is what happens when journalists and intelligence officials live in a permanent, incestuous relationship.

Character assassination

It was impossible to post on social media about the Assange case without dozens of interlocutors popping up to tell you how deeply unpleasant he was, how much of a narcissist, how he had abused his cat or smeared his walls in the embassy with faeces. None of these individuals, of course, had ever met him.

It also never occurred to such people that, even were all of this true, it would still not have excused stripping Assange of his basic legal rights, as all too clearly happened. And even more so, it could not possibly justify eroding the public-interest duty of journalists to expose state crimes.

What was ultimately at stake in the protracted extradition hearings was the US government’s determination to equate investigative national-security journalism with “espionage”. Whether Assange was a narcissist had precisely no bearing on that matter.

Why were so many people persuaded Assange’s supposed character flaws were crucially important to the case? Because the establishment media – our supposed arbiters of truth – were agreed on the matter.

The smears might not have stuck so well had they been thrown only by the rightwing tabloids. But life was breathed into these claims from their endless repetition by journalists supposedly on the other side of the aisle, particularly at the Guardian.

Liberals and left-wingers were exposed to a steady flow of articles and tweets belittling Assange and his desperate, lonely struggle against the world’s sole superpower to stop him being locked away for the rest of his life for doing journalism.

The Guardian – which had benefited by initially allying with Wikileaks in publishing its revelations – showed him precisely zero solidarity when the US establishment came knocking, determined to destroy the Wikileaks platform, and its founder, for making those revelations possible.

For the record, so we do not forget, these are a few examples of how the Guardian made him – and not the law-breaking US security state – the villain.

Marina Hyde in the Guardian in February 2016 – four years into his captivity in the embassy – casually dismissed as “gullible” the concerns of a United Nations panel of world-renowned legal experts that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained” because Washington had refused to issue guarantees that it would not seek his extradition for political crimes:

BBC legal affairs correspondent Joshua Rozenberg was given space in the Guardian on the same day to get it so wrong in claiming Assange was simply “hiding away” in the embassy, under no threat of extradition (Note: Though his analytic grasp of the case has proven feeble, the BBC allowed him to opine further this week on the Assange case).

Two years later, the Guardian was still peddling the same line that, despite the UK spending many millions ringing the embassy with police officers to prevent Assange from “fleeing justice”, it was only “pride” that kept him detained in the embassy.

Or how about this one from Hadley Freeman, published by the Guardian in 2019, just as Assange was being disappeared for the next five years into the nearest Britain has to a gulag, on the “intense happiness” she presumed the embassy’s cleaning staff must be feeling.

Anyone who didn’t understand quite how personally hostile so many Guardian writers were to Assange needs to examine their tweets, where they felt freer to take the gloves off. Hyde described him as “possibly even the biggest arsehole in Knightsbridge”, while Suzanne Moore said he was “the most massive turd.”

The constant demeaning of Assange and the sneering at his plight was not confined to the Guardian’s opinion pages. The paper even colluded in a false report – presumably supplied by the intelligence services, but easily disproved – designed to antagonise the paper’s readers by smearing him as a stooge of Donald Trump and the Russians.

This notorious news hoax – falsely claiming that in 2018 Assange repeatedly met with a Trump aide and “unnamed Russians”, unrecorded by any of the dozens of CCTV cameras surveilling every approach to the embassy – is still on the Guardian’s website.

This campaign of demonisation smoothed the path to Assange being dragged by British police out of the embassy in early 2019.

It also, helpfully, kept the Guardian out of the spotlight. For it was errors made by the newspaper, not Assange, that led to the supposed “crime” at the heart of the US extradition case – that Wikileaks had hurriedly released a cache of files unredacted – as I have explained in detail before.

Too little too late

The establishment media that collaborated with Assange 14 years ago in publishing the revelations of US and UK state crimes only began to tentatively change its tune in late 2022 – more than a decade too late.

That was when five of his former media partners issued a joint letter to the Biden administration saying that it should “end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets”.

But even as he was released this week, the BBC was still continuing the drip-drip of character assassination.

A proper BBC headline, were it not simply a stenographer for the British government, might read: “Tony Blair: Multi-millionaire or war criminal?”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

At the beginning of the year, climate scientists at four organizations  — Berkeley Earth, NASA, the U.K. Met Office, and Carbon Brief — forecasted that 2023 would be marginally hotter than the year before, with the consensus falling around 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures. But it blew past those projections to become the hottest year on record, reaching an estimated 1.5 C (2.7 F). “We were really far off, and we don’t know why,” said Zeke Hausfather, one of the scientists at Berkeley Earth who worked on the predictions.

The first sign that something was amiss came in March 2023, when the world’s oceans spiked to the hottest temperatures seen in modern history. Then the heat came for the land, too. It led to the hottest June ever recorded, followed by the hottest July, and the hottest every month since. On Wednesday, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed that last month was the hottest May in history, making for one year straight of record-shattering global temperatures, averaging 1.63 degrees C over preindustrial times. The report was released in tandem with World Meteorological Organization’s updated prediction that one of the next five years is likely to beat 2023 as the warmest year on record. 

The two reports came as a heat wave sizzled through the Western U.S., with 29 million Americans under heat alerts and warnings from Wednesday into the weekend. “If we choose to continue to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, then 2023/4 will soon look like a cool year,” said Samantha Burgess, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, in a statement.

Much of this warming over the past year is well within the range of what scientists have long predicted would be the result of burning fossil fuels with abandon. The heat dialed up even more when a recurring climate pattern known as El Niño took hold last summer. But scientists say these two factors alone can’t account for the surging temperatures the world has seen recently, particularly in the second half of 2023. Was that extra warming a blip they can brush off, explained away by natural variability or randomly coinciding events, or was it a sign that climate change has begun to veer off predictable tracks? 

“It’s not just some obscure quirk that nobody really cares about,” said Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. “I mean, it really matters, and it has implications for the future, how this gets resolved.” Schmidt and other scientists are examining different theories that could explain the elevated temperatures, from a reduction in global aerosol pollution to underwater volcanic explosions. “Everything is on the table,” he said. 

Here’s what scientists know so far: Climate change has warmed the planet by 1.3 degrees C compared to preindustrial times. But the last 12 months have been about 1.6 degrees C hotter, according to the latest data. Some of that heat — around 0.1 or 0.2 degree C — can be attributed to El Niño warming up the Pacific Ocean. That still leaves as much as 0.2 C unexplained.

Scientists have a solid explanation for maybe 0.1 degree C of that extra heat: It could be a side effect of global efforts to reduce pollution. Starting in January 2020, the International Maritime Organization began enforcing a mandatory reduction of sulfur oxide emissions from shipping fuel. These airborne particles can be harmful to human lungs, contribute to acid rain, and inhibit plant growth. However, they also increase cloud cover and help reflect heat back into space. A paper published in Nature last week found that when some of these aerosol particles abruptly vanished, the Earth began to absorb more heat. 

The search is still on for other puzzle pieces. A 2022 volcanic eruption might have added warmth by sending a huge amount of heat-trapping water vapor into the atmosphere. Shifting weather patterns might have limited the Saharan sands that usually travels over the Atlantic Ocean, allowing more sunlight to heat ocean waters. An upswing in solar activity might have begun sooner than expected, trapping radiation within the atmosphere. Or, perhaps China has been cleaning up its air pollution faster than expected, and there are even less aerosols bouncing heat off the planet. 

Read Next

The pollution paradox: How cleaning up smog drives ocean warming

Fred Pearce, Yale Environment 360

More ominously, some scientists argue that the planet is more sensitive to climate change than previously thought. “The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks,” the geochemist Wallace Broecker, who died in 2019, often said. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks it might be time to update that metaphor. “We’re getting closer to the beast, and we’re aggravating it with ever greater frequency and magnitude,” he said. “So at some point, there may be surprises out there.”

According to Swain, solar activity and other suspects are unlikely explanations for the “wild card” that caused so much warming in 2023. He wonders whether it’s even possible to solve the puzzle. Schmidt, on the other hand, hopes scientists will have solved the X-factor by the end of this year.

Even as this year’s temperatures continue to shatter records, scientists have been less surprised than they were in 2023. The last several months of heat align more closely with what they expected from El Niño. And this summer, El Niño’s twin, a cooling pattern called La Niña, is expected to take over. If temperatures don’t fall as predicted two or three months from now, Hausfather said, “I think it’s an indication that you know something is happening that we don’t expect and don’t really have a good explanation for.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The mysterious X factor behind a year of unbelievable heat on Jun 6, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

On a clear spring day, the pitter-patter of spongy moth caterpillars eating their way through oak, maple, crab apple, basswood, and aspen trees can be heard over the sound of birds singing. Bits of green leaves litter the ground like confetti — evidence of the insatiable chewing taking place in the canopy above. Hundreds of caterpillars bob on long, wispy silk threads, waiting for a breeze to carry them to a new tree. 

The Northeast and Midwest are enduring what is, in some places, the worst outbreak of spongy moths on record. One of the factors driving the proliferation of very hungry caterpillars is climate change-spurred drought, which allows spongy moths to breed with abandon, producing up to a million caterpillars per acre. Trees are resilient, but this outbreak has been especially long and damaging. After two consecutive years of intensive spongy moth feeding, up to 80 percent of trees in a hardwood forest that has been defoliated, or stripped of its leaves, will die. The current spongy moth epidemic has lasted five years in some parts of the U.S. 

“When trees are defoliated like this right at this time of year, they are using reserves that are in the trunk and in the roots to put out a second flush of growth,” said Brian Eshenaur, a plant pathologist at Cornell University’s Integrated Pest Management Program. “If the tree has to do that two years in a row, it’s really tapping all the reserves it has.” 

The caterpillars aren’t the only forest pests benefiting from climate change. Many invasive species in the U.S. are expanding, generally thanks to milder winters brought on by warmer-than-average global temperatures. Insects like the hemlock woolly adelgid, the emerald ash borer, the Japanese beetle, and the spotted lanternfly are chewing their way through the country’s trees at record paces — leading to widespread tree mortality and stressed forests that are susceptible to drought and more disease. No one species is capable of taking down the nation’s forests, which collectively store some 60 billion metric tons of carbon, but the rising tide of invasive species is doing serious cumulative damage. 

Spongy moths have been in the United States since 1869, when a French artist and amateur entomologist named Etienne Leopold Trouvelot imported some from Europe and began raising them in netting in his backyard near Boston. Trouvelot was hoping to breed a silkworm suited to American climes that could be used for commercial textile production. Spongy moths, known as gypsy moths at the time, float from leaf to leaf and tree to tree on long, durable lines of silky thread. But the moths soon escaped from captivity, perhaps because a heavy storm tore through Trouvelot’s netting, and some of the bugs decamped to the Massachusetts woods. 

Two decades later, in the midst of the first spongy moth infestation on record, one resident of the town in which Trouvelot lived described a world carpeted with black, hairy caterpillars. “I do not exaggerate when I say that there was not a place on the outside of the house where you could put your hand without touching caterpillars,” the resident told the Boston Post in 1889. (The caterpillars don’t bite humans, but coming into contact with their spiky hairs causes some people to develop an itchy and painful rash.)

For more than a century after that initial outbreak, spongy moths spread at a rate of about 13 miles per year through New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, and parts of the South, feasting on 300 species of leafy trees and shrubs and leaving entire stretches of forest bare in their wake. The moths defoliated 81 million acres cumulatively between 1970 and 2013. Because of the toll they take on trees, keeping spongy moth populations in check has become one of the U.S. Forest Service’s highest priorities. The economic cost of managing spongy moths has averaged $30 million per year for the past 20 years. 

And climate change is making things worse. Outbreaks typically occur every eight to 12 years, and each surge lasts one to three years. The current outbreak has lasted longer than usual, said Tom Coleman, a Forest Service entomologist who manages the agency’s Slow the Spread spongy moth program, in part because of drought in some of the areas that the moths inhabit. 

Drought affects the spread of a fungal pathogen called Entomophaga maimaiga that curbs spongy moth populations. The fungal pathogen, originally found in Japan, was introduced by researchers to the U.S. as a spongy moth control measure in the early 1900s. The pathogen can be incredibly effective at killing the moths in their caterpillar stage, but it needs a cool, wet spring in order to proliferate. Cyclical outbreaks of spongy moths often follow years that are drier than average, when the pathogen is not as prevalent in the environment. “Without that fungal pathogen keeping the populations in control, we get these large outbreaks,” Coleman said.

In the eastern portions of the country where spongy moth outbreaks occur, climate change is making weather patterns more erratic. Much of the eastern U.S. is projected to become wetter, on average, as the planet warms. But climate change also fuels pockets of drought in these regions during warm months. Drought in 2023 and the beginning of 2024 in northern Virginia, southern Pennsylvania, and parts of Wisconsin and Michigan helped fuel this year’s outbreak. Drought at the huge scale often seen in the American West isn’t a prerequisite for  spongy moth outbreaks in the east. “It doesn’t have to be a whole annual drought,” Coleman said. “It can just be a rather warmer, dry spring.” 

It’s unclear whether rising temperatures will cause spongy moths to emerge more frequently, but it is safe to assume that a warmer, drier environment will cause cyclical outbreaks to become more intense over time. Luckily, the Forest Service has had some luck deploying more than 100,000 pheromone-laced traps to catch the bugs as they try to push west. The agency has also treated 10 million acres of forest with a biological insecticide that kills the caterpillars, preventing the bugs from establishing in new places.

Still, experts worry about the multipronged threats America’s trees face from pests and climate change, and the intersection of those two dangers. “Not only can climate change affect insects, it can also make trees that are native to a certain area less suited,” Eshenaur said. “A lot of our trees in the Northeast can’t tolerate high temperatures and sustained drought. That can make them more susceptible to these new pests that are coming in.”

Correction: A photo caption in this story originally misidentified a different type of moth as a spongy moth.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What’s behind the record outbreak of spongy moths in the eastern US? on Jun 6, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

Right-Wing influencer and BJP supporter Roshan Sinha (@MrSinha_) posted this image, claiming that the picture on the wall was of Jesus.

Similarly, Right-Wing influencer Ajit Datta tweeted this image, stating that it depicted Jesus Christ.

BJP supporter Jitendra Pratap Singh also tweeted the image, calling it a picture of Jesus.

Fact Check

Alt News cropped the relevant part of the viral image and performed a reverse image search on Google. Due to the photo being blurry, we could not find any relevant information. We then uploaded it to the Yandex search engine and found a higher resolution version of the image. Searching this version on Google led us to several related articles.

One of these was on the website “Rethinking The Future“, which contained information about the art gallery of Nicholas Roerich and the viral image. According to the site, the image is titled ‘Madonna Oriflamma’, and it was created by Nicholas Roerich in 1932. The painting depicts a peace banner featuring three red dots inside a circle, which is a symbol of the Roerich Pact. The peace flag is associated with the first international conference dedicated to the protection of artistic, scientific, and historical institutions and monuments.

Investigating further, we checked the website of the Nicholas Roerich Museum. According to information on one of its pages, the devastation of World War I and the Russian Revolution led Roerich to realise that each nation’s cultural heritage was essentially a world treasure. He maintained that besides the physical remains of past cultures, the creative activities associated with universities, libraries, hospitals, concert halls, and theatres should be protected from the ravages of war. Roerich understood the need for an international effort and, with the help of international legal experts, crafted a treaty known as the Roerich Pact. The flag with a red circle and three dots is called the Banner of Peace. This pact stipulates that all sites of cultural value should be declared neutral and protected, similar to how hospitals marked with the Red Cross flag are protected to prevent attacks. The painting seen in the viral image is also seen on this page.

To sum it up, the image in question is not of Jesus Christ but rather a painting by Nicholas Roerich titled “Madonna Oriflamma,” created in 1932. The painting features the “Banner of Peace” with three red dots inside a red circle, symbolising the Roerich Pact.

The post Jesus Christ photo behind Rahul and Sonia Gandhi’s inked selfie? No, false claim by Right Wing appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

Columbia University, image by Hany Osman.

There’s something happening here . . .

Consider, for instance, the recent announcement by Union Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with Columbia University, that it is divesting from “companies profiting from war in Palestine/Israel” – and, not only that, fully supports the student encampments (at Columbia and all across the country) and condemns the arrests and police violence wreaking havoc on the peaceful, culturally diverse protests.

Indeed, the seminary released a statement that scrambles the quiet certainty of those in power – i.e., that money matters more than anything else: “Over the decades, we have developed what are called ‘socially responsible investment screens’ to express our values and not financially support damaging and immoral investments.”

Values over profit? Over the years, the seminary has pulled its investments away from such industries as weapons manufacturers, for-profit prisons, and fossil fuels. But not only that . . . apparently it understands, and values, education itself – a remarkable phenomenon indeed.

Seminary president Serene Jones, in an interview with Democracy Now!, pointed out that the school has opened up its campus “to all the surrounding campuses when students were being expelled, events weren’t allowed to happen. . . . Our doors are wide open, which is what a university should be in times like this.”

She also said: “We support students learning what it means to find their voices, to speak out for justice and freedom.”

Those are the words that stunned me the most. This is what education is, for God’s sake! It’s not just a matter of attending lectures, taking notes, absorbing data. It means finding your voice – finding your deepest values and expressing them in real life, putting them forward not as abstractions but as principles to live by. Entering the world as a grown woman, a grown man, means more than simply finding your place. It means challenging that world as you enter it and, by God, creating it – creating the future.

I certainly don’t mean this simplistically. I speak as an aging boomer, who entered adulthood as the civil rights movement was shaking and shattering the national norms, and as the Vietnam war was bursting into our consciousness. What an injured and deeply flawed world! Something was wrong. Growing up meant finding our voices and addressing – challenging – this flawed world.

In October 1967, for instance, I boarded a bus, along with many of my friends, and participated in the first antiwar march on the Pentagon, which included pushing the edges of social and legal propriety. We did more than listen to speeches. We determined to occupy the Pentagon, thousands of us walking across the grass, coming face to face with the soldiers guarding it. At one point, out of the blue, it seemed, a contingent of soldiers came rushing toward us; I wound up getting clobbered in the head with a rifle butt. I was knocked down but wasn’t hurt and stayed with the protest for several more hours, eventually leaving the Pentagon sit-in shortly before the arrests started happening.

My friends and I made it back to our school – Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo – with a sense that our lives were no longer the same. We immediately took matters into our own hands. We dropped out.

I wound up delaying my eventual graduation by a number of years, and no, I didn’t “change the world” in some idealistically imagined way, but I have no doubt whatsoever that this period of my life – full of protests, drugs, a few arrests, a lot of mistakes – was at the core of my college learning experience. At the same time as all this was going on, I was also finding myself as a writer and, eventually, a journalist. I value the support – indeed, the mentorship – of a significant number of professors at Western. Continually creating the world isn’t simply a matter of us vs. them: young vs. old. It’s a multigenerational effort.

All of which brings me back to the present moment, and the words of Serene Jones, who has not abandoned – or grown cynical about – the values emanating from the student encampments across the country. Much of the mainstream coverage of the protests simply defines the phenomenon in us-vs.-them terms. The protests are “pro-Palestine,” seeming to imply there are two equal (equally brutal) sides in this war, and being pro-Palestine means being anti-Israel, which can easily morph into anti-Semitic. But the protests aren’t simply pro-Palestine; they’re pro-humanity (and anti-genocide).

And the participants are culturally and religiously, but not spiritually, diverse. As Jones writes at Religion News Service:

“First and foremost, these encampments are filled with students from different religious traditions — Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, unaffiliated as well as spiritual but not religious students. They are finding solace and courage among themselves. . . .

“It is simply who these protesters are: a community bound by a greater common cause to stop the mass killing of besieged Palestinians.”

Jones’s essay is called “What we have to learn from students leading the charge for justice” – which is itself compelling. The university system – the financial system, the political system – has something to learn from the protesters? Love thy enemy or whatever?

The world these protesters are entering is a world hardened by cynicism. In such a world, a.k.a., the real world, “love” and other values are appropriate to be uttered in a religious setting with pews and fancy windows, but they’re hardly relevant in the day-to-day world of win-and-lose, gain-and-loss. That’s why the cops are barging in, beating and arresting the protesters and tearing down the encampments.

But Jones is daring to tell us that this is not the real world – simply the current one, which is still under construction.

The post A World Under Spiritual Construction appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Koehler.

On high-end restaurant menus, the once-humble bread-and-butter course snowballed into $38 tableside “butter service,” and 14-inch cylinders of creamy, imported carved-to-order butter earned prominent placement in restaurants’ open kitchens. By early March, New York Magazine could declare that “butter has become the main character.”

What accounts for butter’s spectacular renaissance in American cuisine? According to the U.S. dairy lobby, it’s their own public relations campaign that started the spread. The industry marketing group Dairy Management Inc., has claimed credit for the butter board in industry press, because it paid Doiron as a sponsor at the time of her video. While Doiron’s original butter board video did not include an advertising disclosure — and, according to Dairy Management, was not itself technically part of the partnership — the chef posted a Dairy Management ad two days before her viral post and was part of the industry group’s “Dairy Dream Team” of paid influencers at the time. (Doiron did not respond to an interview request, but Dairy Management told Grist that her contract has since expired.)

Dairy Management, whose funding largely consists of legally mandated fees collected from farmers, is one of a constellation of government-supported dairy marketing groups that also includes the Fluid Milk Board, a beverage-focused entity whose promotion arm has paid Emily Ratajkowski, Kelly Ripa, Amanda Gorman, and more than 200 others to promote milk on social media. (The milk board also recently sponsored a section in New York Magazine’s The Cut, focused on women in sports.) In recent years, Dairy Management has partnered with mega-influencer MrBeast at least twice, filming him as he toured a dairy farm and paying him to promote a dairy-focused competition in the video game Minecraft.

In perhaps the dairy lobby’s biggest coup of last year, the limited-run McDonald’s Grimace shake went viral after TikTok users began crafting miniature horror films featuring the bright purple beverage. Dairy Management has a longstanding partnership with McDonald’s; beginning in 2009, it placed two dairy scientists at the fast food chain to help incorporate more dairy into the menu. Less than a decade later, 4 in 5 McDonald’s menu items contained dairy, according to a Dairy Management board member. Dairy Management has even funded research to help improve McDonald’s notoriously glitchy milkshake machines.

“My hope is that farmers, when they see a new milkshake or a new McFlurry at McDonald’s, that they know that it’s their new product,” Dairy Management CEO Barb O’Brien said on a podcast in December.

A spokesperson for McDonald’s told Grist that they could not independently confirm the proportion of their offerings that contain dairy due to variations in local menus, but added that the fast food chain makes its own menu decisions. “Our partnership with [Dairy Management] helps McDonald’s ensure the quality and great taste of the dairy-based items on our menu, and deepen relationships with the thousands of dairy farmers who supply milk, cream, butter, and cheese to restaurants across the U.S.,” the company said in an emailed statement to Grist. 

Partnering with food companies to roll out products that contain ever-escalating quantities of dairy is one of the industry group’s tried-and-true strategies. In the last couple of years, Dairy Management has partnered with Taco Bell to launch a frozen drink mixing dairy with Mountain Dew and a burrito with ten times the cheese of a typical taco. The organization also assisted with last year’s rollout of pepperoni-stuffed cheesy bread at Domino’s and supported marketing efforts for General Mills’ Oui line of yogurts. 

Thirty years after the era-defining “Got Milk?” campaign — itself a project of the California Milk Processor Board — the U.S. dairy lobby’s PR machine appears to be getting a second wind. The point of all these efforts is straightforward: The dairy promotion boards’ mission is to increase demand for their products. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars, collected from farmers and milk processors, on annual research and advertising in hopes of growing the market for dairy domestically and abroad.

However, as dairy consumption and production continue to grow, so too does the industry’s environmental footprint. In 2019, the EPA estimated that U.S. dairy cattle emitted 1,729,000 tons of methane each year, pollution roughly equivalent to 11.5 million gasoline-powered cars being driven over the same period. A United Nations report found that the dairy sector’s global greenhouse gas emissions rose by 18 percent between 2005 and 2015. 

Meanwhile, it’s not entirely clear that all these efforts are helping the average dairy farmer. The number of U.S. dairy farms has fallen by three quarters in the last 30 years, as farmers’ costs rise and milk prices fluctuate. Many small and mid-sized dairy farms have been driven out of business and farmers’ net returns fall below zero year after year. In 2000, farms with more than 2,000 cattle produced less than 10 percent of milk, but by 2016 farms of this size were responsible for more than 30 percent of U.S. production. The diverging trend lines have prompted some farmers to question whether the focus on market growth above all else — which has been accompanied by increasing climate pollution and the collapse of small dairy herds — is still the best policy.

Ever since Congress passed the Dairy Act in the 1980s, farmers have been required to pay 15 cents per hundred-weight of milk (equivalent to a little less than 12 gallons) toward industry promotion programs overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA. Ten cents is sent to local promotion entities and the remaining five cents go to the national Dairy Board, which promotes all dairy products. (Eggs have their own $20 million program.) Farmer contributions to the national program totaled $124.5 million in 2021. 

The Dairy Board in turn sends money to Dairy Management Inc. Milk processors work under a similar structure, paying their own assessments to the Fluid Milk Board, which works exclusively on promoting a category that includes milk, flavored milk, buttermilk, and eggnog. The Fluid Milk Board received $82.4 million in processor fees in 2021. Its marketing arm is called MilkPEP.

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In an emailed statement, a Dairy Management spokesperson told Grist that “all dairy research, promotion content and information not only complies with all regulations and standards, but also seeks to help consumers make informed decisions about the foods they choose for themselves and their families, including nutritious, sustainably produced dairy.” 

The financial structure of these efforts is complicated, but the end result is that these programs, which are known to farmers as “checkoffs,” bring in more than $200 million each year in the dairy industry alone. As a result, the lobby takes care to note its accomplishments. For instance, in the first eight years the checkoff of partnered with Domino’s Pizza, the average store increased its cheese use by 43 percent.

Other promotional efforts, however, have amounted to slickly-produced flops. Last year, the Fluid Milk Board hired actor Aubrey Plaza to hawk “wood milk” in an apparent effort to lampoon plant-based milk alternatives, which resulted in a formal complaint filed by a group of physicians who advocate for plant-based diets. Another effort involved a Board-funded website featuring Queen Latifah, which was devoted to combating the seemingly fictional phenomenon of “milk shaming.”

Some recent industry-funded persuasion campaigns have been more subtle. In 2021, the fluid milk checkoff sponsored a wellness weekend for top editors from Bustle, New York Magazine, Marie Claire, and others at a $750-per-night Hamptons resort where they participated in workouts led by a celebrity trainer and “partook in milk-forward meals.” Congressional disclosures indicate that the Fluid Milk Board held USDA-approved advertising and marketing contracts with Vice Media and Food52 in 2021. A spokesperson for MilkPEP told Grist that these were branded editorial contracts to develop milk-inclusive recipe content. 

There’s some evidence that all this marketing has worked. A recent USDA report delivered to Congress claimed that farmers earn $1.91 for every dollar spent on “demand-enhancing activities” for fluid milk, $3.27 for every dollar spent promoting cheese, and $24.11 for every dollar spent boosting butter. An independent evaluation by the Government Accountability Office in 2017 likewise found that, between 1995 and 2012, the fluid milk program returned $2.14 for every dollar spent.

After decades of growth, per-capita U.S. dairy consumption reached an all-time high in 2021, though fluid milk consumption has been steadily declining since the 1970s. This presents formidable challenges for climate action: Meat and dairy consumption is responsible for a full 75 percent of the country’s diet-related greenhouse gas emissions, even though animal products account for only 18 percent of calories consumed. 

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And even setting aside climate concerns, small-scale farmers worry that this emphasis on demand growth might actually end up edging them out of the market. They say that the checkoffs have unfairly benefited a few big producers, supercharging their growth while driving others out of the industry.

“[The checkoff is] set up to be entirely demand-side,” said Wisconsin farmer and former Dairy Board member Rose Lloyd. “You’re not allowed to talk about price, you’re not allowed to talk about supply. It’s a wasted effort.”

Lloyd and her family maintain a herd of 350 cows, and while checkoff assessments represent less than 1 percent of her revenue, she says she feels like she’s paying to reinforce a structure that’s working against her farm and her community. For example, she’s watched a neighboring dairy farm quadruple in size to supply mozzarella to a nearby factory that produces frozen pizzas. The local infrastructure has struggled to contend with the waste produced by all those additional cows.

“We have massive water quality issues,” she told Grist. “It’s a real crisis right now on all the legs of sustainability: ecologically, socially, economically.” 

Some farm groups are holding out hope that they can persuade Congress to pass a form of supply-management legislation that limits total milk production, which they are pitching as a win-win for small-scale farmers and the environment. If the government placed a cap on the amount of dairy produced in the United States, the idea goes, such a policy could theoretically ensure that a market exists for all the dairy produced. 

A similar model has functioned in Canada for decades. Each year, annual dairy demand is forecasted based on the previous year’s sales figures. The resulting estimate is divided among provincial boards, which in turn distribute production quotas to individual farmers. In exchange for promising not to market more milk than the quotas allow, farmers are guaranteed minimum prices for their products — meaning they’re somewhat insulated from the seasonal price fluctuations and rising costs that plague their U.S. counterparts. 

To maintain this delicate balance, Canada prevents an influx of cheap imported milk using high tariffs. In part for this reason, the system is not without controversy. Critics argue that the policy pushes up dairy prices, and the quota licensing system can make it hard for new producers to enter the market.

Still, the system has enough admirers that some are hoping it will be adopted in the U.S. Earlier this year, representatives from the National Family Farmers Coalition, or NFFC, flew to Washington, D.C., to try to persuade legislators to adopt supply-management legislation through their proposed “Milk from Family Dairies Act” in the next Farm Bill. The bill would establish price minimums and quota-like “production bases” for farmers. Farmers would have to pay additional fees to export their product, and the policy would raise import fees where possible.

Antonio Tovar, senior policy associate at NFFC, said the proposal has garnered support from environmental groups who see supply management as a means of reducing emissions from feed and trucking. 

Nevertheless, Tovar is clear-eyed about the bill’s likelihood of passage, at least in the near term. “I have to be honest with you, I’m a little bit pessimistic about these proposals being included in the next Farm Bill,” he said, citing Congressional gridlock and limited political will to pursue the change.  

In the meantime, the dairy checkoff has set its sights on the export market. Specifically, it’s promoting pizza — which one executive called “a strong carrier for U.S. cheese” — in the Middle East and Asia. In Japan, the checkoff and Domino’s launched a “New Yorker” pizza topped with a full kilogram of cheese and served with a packet of seaweed and maple syrup. The New Yorker was subsequently rolled out in Taiwan. 

Domestically, there are still some fast-food menu items that haven’t yet been topped with a slice of American cheese or shaken with milk. In a 2022 blog post, Dairy Management Inc., chair Marilyn Hershey pointed out that 80 percent of the 2 billion chicken sandwiches sold in the U.S. each year do not contain a slice of cheese. 

The checkoff, she wrote, was engaging with Chick-fil-A, Raising Cane’s, and McDonald’s to change that.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Behind the ‘butter board’: How the dairy lobby took over your feed on May 10, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by H. Claire Brown.

Estela Aranha, former Secretary of Digital Rights in the Brazilian Justice Ministry.

On April 3, Michael Shellenberger tweeted a series of excerpts from emails by X executives dubbed, “Twitter Files Brazil”, which alleged to expose crimes by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Moraes, he claimed, had pressed criminal charges against Twitter Brasil’s lawyer for its refusal to turn over personal information on political enemies. Elon Musk quickly shared the tweets and they viralized and were embraced by the international far right, to the joy of former President Bolsonaro and his supporters. A week later, Estela Aranha, former Secretary of Digital Rights in the Brazilian Justice Ministry, revealed rot at the heart of Shellenberger’s narrative. The only criminal charge filed against Twitter Brazil referenced in the leaked emails was made by the São Paulo District Attorney’s Office, after the company refused to turn over personal data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine trafficking organization, the PCC. Shellenberger had cut the section of an email about a São Paulo criminal investigation and mixed it with communications complaining about Moraes on unrelated issues. Pressed by Brazilian reporters, Shellenberger wrote, “I regret my mistake and apologize for it. I don’t have evidence that Moraes threatened to file criminal charges against Twitter’s Brazilian lawyer.”

The following interview with Estela Aranha was conducted on April 13, 2024.

What was your role in Brazil’s Ministry of Justice? Please give an example of a project you worked on.

I started as Special Advisor to the Minister of Justice for digital affairs. Later, I was appointed Secretary of Digital Rights. One project that I helped coordinate, along with other departments in the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Police, was called Operation Safe Schools, which was created to prevent school massacres. In March, 2023, a series of attacks and random child murders began in schools across the country and thousands of school massacre threats vitalized in the social media. This created a generalized mood of panic and hysteria. Users were spreading images of school attackers with the goal of spreading terror. Consequently increasing numbers of panicked parents pulled their children out of school. In addition to spreading images of school killings, people were working online to encourage others to commit similar attacks. We began to monitor this phenomenon on the social media networks, and our initial analysis showed that Neo-Nazi groups were encouraging attacks on April 20th because it was the anniversary of Columbine, and the Columbine massacre was committed on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. They were contacting children and teenagers online and trying to encourage them to attack other children in schools. It was a national issue that paralyzed the country. In some cities during the week before April 20th, only 20% of children were attending school because of the generalized sense of panic.

Operation Safe Schools worked in partnership with social media companies so that content inciting school killings would be properly moderated. We created a reporting channel. All reports were analyzed. The operation was huge, in terms of the number of people involved and the intelligence deployed. We had very significant results, including 360 arrests. Not all, but the vast majority of people who were involved in these threats and these attacks, and who we had evidence would commit this type of crime – people who were arrested with detailed plans, weapons, masks, everything – were affiliated with clandestine Neo-Nazi groups. Everyone who advocated Nazism was also reported to the police and these individuals were detained and charged, according to due process, because advocating for Nazism is a crime in Brazil.

Did you ask social media companies to remove user profiles during this operation?

Yes. We met with representatives from all the social media companies – we spoke with all of them. The only one that didn’t engage in dialogue was Telegram. During our the first meeting, Twitter initially resisted. It didn’t want to remove them. We were talking about profiles that were promoting very realistic attacks on schools.

I said, “I’m talking to you because there are profiles of actual terrorist personas. They are fake profiles using the names and faces of school massacre terrorists that post videos with songs that say, ‘I’m going to get you kids, you can’t run faster than my gun.’ There are video clips that show the terrorist’s picture and then show real school massacres.”

The Twitter representative said that this did not violate their terms of use. After strong push-back from the Minister of Justice and social pressure, including from users of its own platform, Twitter changed its policy and collaborated with the investigation.

Do you think there was a positive effect in de-platforming those people? Did it reduce the risk for children?

Of course. These were people sharing videos promoting and glorifying the perpetrators of school massacres. Imagine a teenager who already has issues and suffers from bullying, who is bombarded with images glorifying school massacres and messages like, “look, this guy is awesome. Look what he did!”

Some kids will say, “Great. Nobody respects me, I don’t know what to do so I’ll to do this to be respected.”

All the guys who were arrested who left letters or made statements, summed it up like this, “I was despised, nobody cared about me. I’m going to do this to show that I’m tough, that I’m somebody.”

They thought they were doing it to get revenge, to be glorified, to be seen differently. Any material that glorifies terrorism, whether it’s a school attack or any kind of terrorist attack, leads some people to think it’s good to commit a terrorist act. This is scientifically proven, by the way.

The other thing about this wave of school massacre threats is that it created an atmosphere of fear. If you logged onto Twitter or any social network at the time, started seeing these crimes, these scenes, how were you going to send your children to school? We had many parents who kept their children out of school during the whole three weeks of the crisis. Imagine the impact on people’s lives without being able to send their children to school. Imagine the mothers who depend on sending their children to school in order to work, to have a normal life. There were thousands of testimonies of children crying, saying, “I’m going to be stabbed at school.”

Imagine the psychological impact – school should be a safe place for children, right? Imagine a parent who browses on any social network like Twitter and sees a bunch of people promoting terrorism in schools. What parent would send their child to school after that? What child would feel comfortable and want to go to school? This created an impact on the entire Brazilian society. Mothers couldn’t work and daughters were terrified to go to school. School ceased to be a place where children felt safe – they started to be afraid of it.

How did you discover that Michael Shellenberger was lying in the so-called Twitter Files?

I am lawyer and digital rights specialist and I began working in the Justice Ministry shortly after the period from which the emails used in Twitter Files Brazil were selected. I am familiar all of those cases and decisions. I am familiar with all the rulings in my field that are in circulation. As a lawyer who is part of a group who specializes in this area – and they’re aren’t many of us – we obviously share, discuss and debate all of these cases and rulings. I remember the case filed by the São Paulo Public Prosecutor’s Office against Twitter because we all talked about it when it happened. So when I read the email excerpts that Michael Shellenberger posted I immediately saw that they had been manipulated. I immediately knew what decision each email fragment referred to. I am familiar with all the important rulings on social media networks that happened during the time period of the emails. The moment I saw it I thought, ‘no, that never happened’, because I follow this very closely – it’s my job. When I read it I said to myself, “this is wrong.” He was speaking incorrectly and this is why I complained about it online. I knew they had fabricated a false narrative because I know all of the cases that they cherry-picked their text fragments from. They stitched together excerpts. Anyone who doesn’t know what they’re referring to could believe them. But I know about all the cases because I am a dedicated lawyer. There is no case in my area that I don’t study, in order to understand what is happening. There is nothing they presented in the Twitter Files that I hadn’t been closely following.

Musk and Shellenberger are alleging that the Brazilian government is violating the right to freedom of expression. But it seems that the arguments they make are based on US law. What are some differences in freedom of expression laws between Brazil and the US?

There are several universal rights in each country or region and in each legal tradition. I will speak about Brazil. Both legislation and doctrinal legal tradition – the interpretation of doctrine, as well as jurisprudence – are very different here. The right to freedom of expression in the United States is a right that is held above other rights – it is broader. My colleagues who know more about American law than me tell me that, for example, the United States has never managed to criminalize revenge porn: when you expose intimate data of a former partner from whom you separated. This speaks legions about the breadth of freedom of expression that exists in the United States. It is not absolute but it is a very broad right. In Brazil, as in Europe, freedom of expression is an essential right that is equal to other essential rights. If you try to use one right to infringe upon another right, you will face limitations. All rights are weighed side by side, and there is proportionality in the scope of how much you can interfere. For example, advocating for Nazism is illegal in Brazil because it is considered to be such a harmful discourse that it must be preemptively prohibited. That doesn’t exist in the United States. Racist insults are crimes, as is discrimination against the LGBTQ+ population. There are several forms of speech that are illegal. And there are some types of speech that are not inherently illegal but can lead to lawsuits for moral damages in certain cases. This gradation obviously depends on the legal good that we are protecting. For example, advocacy for a crime, in general, is considered a form of criminal speech. So it is prohibited, it has to be taken out of circulation. Also, you cannot make threats. Shellenberger mixes all kinds of unrelated things together in his Twitter files. He mixes things from criminal cases, things from the São Paulo public prosecutors office, electoral crime investigations, and inquiries from the the Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court.

Freedom of expression has many restrictions in our electoral law framework because we have other values that take precedent, for example the equilibrium of an election. We have laws guaranteeing balanced elections and integrity of the electoral system itself. The practice that is common in the United States, of a candidate paying for a lot of campaign advertising, is not allowed in Brazil. There is a system of free electoral advertising space. It is pre-divided among the candidates. Candidates cannot take out any advertisements over their established time limits even if they can pay for it. The circulation of all campaign materials is highly regulated. There are spending caps on election campaigns. TV stations cannot give more airtime to favor one candidate over another. There always has to be equivalence. It is clear that a tightly regulated election system like ours has rules to protect it. During our election seasons, which typically last for less than 4 months, governmental agencies pull information down from their websites, leaving nothing but emergency or public utility information because otherwise it could interfere with the electoral process by favoring government officials who are running for office. This could interfere with the balance of the election. It is also illegal to run negative campaign adds. There are a lot of rules that are very different from the United States. You cannot, for example, use knowingly false information in election campaigns. This is a crime in Brazil. If candidates make patently false statements, the media cannot replicate the information. This always leads to a lot of electoral court rulings and during 2022, they weren’t only made in favor of President Lula. Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign successfully petitioned the court to remove several of Lula’s campaign adds and numerous social media posts by Lula supporters. There are thousands of court rulings demanding removal of advertising materials in every election campaign in Brazil. This is absolutely normal here. But Micheal Shellenberger has decided to use US laws regarding freedom of expression to criticize decisions based on Brazilian law, made by our electoral courts.

Shellenberger is using a totally different concept, which he even mentioned when he testified in a hearing in the Brazilian Senate this week. Advocacy for Nazism is tolerated in the United States. In Brazil, it is not. We have a very different system. He cannot use American legislation as a measuring rod to claim that a Brazilian court ruling is wrong. There is a lot of deliberate confusion in Twitter Files Brazil. He grabs a lot of things and mixes them to create his narrative and arguments. He claimed that Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes threatened to arrest Twitter’s lawyer and then he was forced to admit that it wasn’t true. It’s obvious that he mixed different things together on purpose. It makes no sense to say that Moraes is breaking the law – he isn’t. His rulings are legal according to Brazilian law.

The other thing that I think is relevant to mention is that in Brazilian Law, Judges can order precautionary measures that we call “atypical” to prevent further threats to rights from materializing. This is what Alexandre de Moraes has used in some of his rulings. This institution of Brazilian law is called the General Precautionary Power of the Judge.

What do you think is the real goal of these attacks made by Elon Musk and Michael Shellenberger and their allies?

Shellenberger and Musk are working hand in hand and I’m sure their goal is to be players in the US elections and that’s why they have joined the international far right. Obviously they have chosen Brazil because it is also an important player in the international far right. They have taken advantage of all this discourse about regulating social media, which Musk obviously opposes. But I think their immediate goal is to attack the established powers in Brazil. Our far right was completely isolated because its main leader is Bolsonaro and he couldn’t lead because he was cornered the criminal investigations against him for crimes that have been proven, thanks to very robust investigations by the Federal Police. He was powerless because the whole coup plot has been uncovered by the Federal Police. He really tried to implement a coup d’état, together with military leaders, and there were direct actions like the attack on the Federal Police headquarters the day Lula arrived in Brasilia to sign documents in preparation for his inauguration. This attack was very serious but some people seem to have already forgotten it. I was there. I personally witnessed a car full of Jerry cans filled with gasoline parked in front of a gas station, and later Jerry cans full of gasoline were found in the hotel where Lula was staying. There was an attempted bombing in Brasilia airport on Christmas, which only failed to explode because the detonator didn’t work. Then we had the attack on January 8th which was also very serious. So at the moment when were were managing to finally hold the main leaders of this attempted coup accountable, Elon Musk and Michael Shellenberger came onto the scene to attack the institutions that are prosecuting them, to usurp their power so they can’t convict them anymore. That was clearly their short-term goal and in the long run Elon Musk obviously wants to be a player in the international far right and interfere in elections around the world, especially in the US.

Do you think they are trying to implement a coup?

That’s part of it. The far right tried and never gave up on it. I was in the Ministry of Justice at the time and we worked hard to contain the subversive elements that continued after January 8th, 2023. After they began being held accountable their activities decreased. But they want to reignite that flame by preventing Bolsonaro from being held accountable by delegitimizing our court system. Of course, that’s part of the coup movement. I think their first goal is to strengthen the far-right leadership again because today they are weakened, they have no firepower to carry out this coup. That’s why they stepped in. They want to strengthen these leaders who are cornered because they are being held responsible for the coup attempt.

The post Behind the Musk/GOP Lying Campaign Against Brazil’s Judiciary appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brian Mier.

On Wednesday, a court in the Russian capital, Moscow, gave Kuznetsov, a reporter with the independent news website RusNews who has been in detention since September 2021, a suspended sentence, rather than the four-and-a-half-year prison sentence that prosecutors had requested, according to media reports and his outlet.

But the journalist will remain behind bars because he is also being tried for allegedly inciting mass disturbances in group chats on Telegram, for which a prosecutor in December requested a nine-year jail sentence, those sources said.

“Russian authorities have held journalist Igor Kuznetsov for over two-and-a-half-years on a range of spurious charges aimed at silencing him and his outlet. Correspondents of RusNews are some of the last remaining independent reporters in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Authorities should drop all the charges against Kuznetsov, release him immediately, and stop jailing independent voices.”

The court also banned Kuznetsov from managing websites, working in media, and organizing mass and public events for four years, and sentenced him to one year of restricted freedom, those sources said.

Restriction of freedom involves not being allowed to leave home at certain times of day, not visiting certain places, not participating in certain activities, not leaving the territory of a specific municipality, and not changing your place of residence.

Russian authorities accused Kuznetsov of being connected to the Left Resistance, an anti-war movement created in 2017, which authorities have labeled as extremist. RusNews chief editor Sergey Aynbinder told CPJ that Kuznetsov denied being an “extremist.”

In addition to Kuznetsov, Russia has jailed two other RusNews journalists.

Maria Ponomarenko was given a six-year sentence in 2023 for spreading “fake” information about the Russian army and could face an additional five years in jail in a second criminal case where she is being tried on allegations of using violence against prison staff.

In March, Roman Ivanov was sentenced to seven years in jail on the same charge of spreading fake information about the army.

Russia was the world’s fourth worst jailer of journalists—with 22 behind bars, including Kuznetsov, Ponomarenko, and Ivanov—on December 1, 2023, when CPJ conducted its latest annual prison census.

CPJ’s email to Moscow’s Meshansky District Court requesting comment on Kuznetsov’s sentence did not receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The image of Amna Ali telling her five-year-old son that his father is in heaven will forever be etched in my memory.

Mohammad was six months old when his dad Syed Jahandad Ali was killed at Al-Noor mosque.

As Amna sat there bravely telling me her story, a little voice said “Mama”.

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Her son had been upstairs playing with his granddad while his mother talked to the strange lady who he’d never met before.

Clearly, his patience had run out.

She wanted to tell him to be quiet, but I asked her to bring her son down instead.

I had never met Syed, but had seen pictures of him.

Spitting image
Mohammad is a spitting image of his father.

He sat in Amna’s lap as she explained to him she was telling me about his “Baba”.

And then she told him is Baba is in heaven, “he’s in the best place” she told him to repeat.

Since Syed’s death Amna has completed two diplomas, travelled alone with her three children and is planning to start an IT career.

Ironically, her graduation ceremony is on March 15, and she planned to receive her diploma in person.

Even as she looked back at the most painful years of her life she didn’t shed a single tear.

On the other hand, I found it hard to fight the lump in my throat.

He was a foodie
After the interview, she had an elaborate morning tea on the kitchen counter — I was surprised how this mum of three young children found the time to prepare so much beautiful food.

Syed was a foodie she told me, he loved her cooking.

Just hours earlier I had left Auckland, like every other year it was time to do a story about the mosque attacks.

But this anniversary was going to be different I told myself. I had planned to meet survivors and families and talk about their achievements.

I had no idea their resilience and strength would be so overwhelming.

Most of the people in the mosques on the day of the attacks came from countries where terrorism isn’t rare.

Over the past five years many people have asked me, with no malice at all, why the Christchurch attacks left such a deep impact on the survivors and families.

Best answer?
Perhaps, survivor Faisal Abbas has the best answer.

He was in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2014 when terrorists gunned down hundreds of teachers and students at the Army Public School massacre.

It was his school and he wanted to send his children there.

The principal who died saving her students had been his teacher.

To him, it was a final nail in the coffin. He told me he did not want to be where even his school wasn’t safe, so he picked the safest country he could find and moved to New Zealand.

For Faisal, he says, it’s his first hand experience of terrorism and choosing to get away from it that made the Christchurch attacks even harder to process.

‘Going with the flow’
Before the attacks, he said, he meticulously planned everything, but now he prefers to “go with the flow”.

He trusts in Allah’s plan and he knows whatever will happen is for the best.

And then he repeated a verse from the Quran where God tells Prophet Mohammad “Verily with hardship comes ease”.

I share the same religion as the survivors, but I pray my faith in God becomes as strong as theirs.

One of the toughest thing as a journalist is to decide what makes the final cut.

Farid Ahmed made headlines around the world for choosing to forgive the attacker who killed his wife.

When I interviewed him for my story on this trip he was in hospital fighting an infection — a detail that I didn’t put in the story.

Message of love, forgiveness
Being in a wheelchair hasn’t stopped him from spreading the message of love and forgiveness.

I told him perhaps now would be a good time to slow down and rest. He just smiled and said there was no time, otherwise it would be a disservice to his wife who died saving others.

One of my favourite parts of the trip was visiting Temel Atacocugu. Despite nine bullets and some 30 surgeries, his sense of humour is intact.

He has three pet goldfish all of whom he’s given Turkish names. Pakize — the pure one, Serafettin — the good boy and Abuziddin, Temel says that’s just a traditional name.

I didn’t imagine I would come back feeling so moved.

Five years ago, the survivors and families I met told me they would rebuild their lives. Every year they inched closer to that goal.

This time they seemed to have delivered on that promise.

I can only marvel at the miracle of their strength and resilience which is beyond my understanding.

And the only words that help me make any sense of it all are: “Verily with hardship comes ease”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Anat Schwartz had a problem. The Israeli filmmaker and former air force intelligence official had been assigned by the New York Times to work with her nephew Adam Sella and veteran Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman on an investigation into sexual violence by Hamas on October 7 that could reshape the way the world understood Israel’s ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. By November, global opposition was mounting against Israel’s military campaign, which had already killed thousands of children, women, and the elderly. On her social media feed, which the Times has since said it is reviewing, Schwartz liked a tweet saying that Israel needed to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse.”

“Violate any norm, on the way to victory,” read another post she liked. “Those in front of us are human animals who do not hesitate to violate minimal rules.”

The New York Times, however, does have rules and norms. Schwartz had no prior reporting experience. Her reporting partner Gettleman explained the basics to her, Schwartz said in a podcastinterview on January 3, produced by Israel’s Channel 12 and conducted in Hebrew.

Gettleman, she said, was concerned they “get at least two sources for every detail we put into the article, cross-check information. Do we have forensic evidence? Do we have visual evidence? Apart from telling our reader ‘this happened,’ what can we say? Can we tell what happened to whom?”

Schwartz said she was initially reluctant to take the assignment because she did not want to look at visual images of potential assaults and because she lacked the expertise to conduct such an investigation.

“Victims of sexual assault are women who have experienced something, and then to come and sit in front of such a woman — who am I anyway?” she said. “I have no qualifications.”

Nonetheless, she began working with Gettleman on the story, she explained in the podcast interview. Gettleman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is an international correspondent, and when he is sent to a bureau, he works with news assistants and freelancers on stories. In this case, several newsroom sources familiar with the process said, Schwartz and Sella did the vast majority of the ground reporting, while Gettleman focused on the framing and writing.

The resulting report, published in late December, was headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” It was a bombshell and galvanized the Israeli war effort at a time when even some of Israel’s allies were expressing concern over its large-scale killing of civilians in Gaza. Inside the newsroom, the article was met with praise from editorial leaders but skepticism from other Times journalists. The paper’s flagship podcast “The Daily” attempted to turn the article into an episode, but it didn’t manage to get through a fact check, as The Intercept previously reported.

The fear among Times staffers who have been critical of the paper’s Gaza coverage is that Schwartz will become a scapegoat for what is a much deeper failure. She may harbor animosity toward Palestinians, lack the experience with investigative journalism, and feel conflicting pressures between being a supporter of Israel’s war effort and a Times reporter, but Schwartz did not commission herself and her nephew to report one of the most consequential stories of the war. Senior leadership at the New York Times did.

Schwartz said as much in an interview with Israeli Army Radio on December 31. “The New York Times said, ‘Let’s do an investigation into sexual violence’ — it was more a case of them having to convince me,” she said. Her host cut her off: “It was a proposal of The New York Times, the entire thing?”

“Unequivocally. Unequivocally. Obviously. Of course,” she said. “The paper stood behind us 200 percent and gave us the time, the investment, the resources to go in-depth with this investigation as much as needed.”

Shortly after the war broke out, some editors and reporters complained that Times standards barred them from referring to Hamas as “terrorists.” The rationale from the standards department, run for 14 years by Philip Corbett, had long been that Hamas was the de facto administrator of a specific territory, rather than a stateless terror group. Deliberately killing civilians, went the argument, was not enough to label a group terrorists, as that label could apply quite broadly.

Corbett, after October 7, defended the policy in the face of pressure, newsroom sources said, but he lost. On October 19, an email went out on behalf of Executive Editor Joe Kahn saying that Corbett had asked to step back from his position. “After 14 years as the embodiment of Times standards, Phil Corbett has told us he’d like to step back a bit and let someone else take the leading role in this crucial effort,” Times leadership explained. Three newsroom sources said the move was tied to the pressure he was under to soften coverage in Israel’s favor. One of the social media posts that Schwartz liked, triggering the Times review, made the case that, for Israeli propaganda purposes, Hamas should be likened at all times to the Islamic State. A Times spokesperson told The Intercept, “Your understanding about Phil Corbett is flatly untrue.”

Since the revelations regarding Schwartz’s recent social media activity, her byline has not appeared in the paper and she has not attended editorial meetings. The paper said that a review into her social media “likes” is ongoing. “Those ‘likes’’ are unacceptable violations of our company policy,” said a Times spokesperson.

The bigger scandal may be the reporting itself, the process that allowed it into print, and the life-altering impact the reporting had for thousands of Palestinians whose deaths were justified by the alleged systematic sexual violence orchestrated by Hamas the paper claimed to have exposed.

Another frustrated Times reporter who has also worked as an editor there said, “A lot of focus will understandably, rightfully, be directed at Schwartz but this is most clearly poor editorial decision making that undermines all the other great work being tirelessly done across the paper — both related and completely unrelated to the war — that manages to challenge our readers and meet our standards.”

“A lot of focus will understandably, rightfully, be directed at Schwartz but this is most clearly poor editorial decision.”

The Channel 12 podcast interview with Schwartz, which The Intercept translated from Hebrew, opens a window into the reporting process on the controversial story and suggests that The New York Times’s mission was to bolster a predetermined narrative.

In a response to The Intercept’s questions about Schwartz’s podcast interview, a spokesperson for the New York Times walked back the blockbuster article’s framing that evidence shows Hamas had weaponized sexual violence to a softer claim that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.”

Times International editor Phil Pan said in a statement that he stands by the work. “Ms. Schwartz was part of a rigorous reporting and editing process,” he said. “She made valuable contributions and we saw no evidence of bias in her work. We remain confident in the accuracy of our reporting and stand by the team’s investigation. But as we have said, her ‘likes’ of offensive and opinionated social media posts, predating her work with us, are unacceptable.”

In the interview, Schwartz, who did not respond to requests for comment, details her extensive efforts to get confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery facilities, and sex assault hotlines in Israel, as well as her inability to get a single confirmation from any of them. “She was told there had been no complaints made of sexual assaults,” the Times spokesperson acknowledged after The Intercept brought the Channel 12 podcast episode to the paper’s attention. “This however was just the very first step of her research. She then describes the unfolding of evidence, testimonies, and eventual evidence that there may have been systematic use of sexual assault,” the spokesperson asserted. “She details her research steps and emphasizes the Times’s strict standards to corroborate evidence, and meetings with reporters and editors to discuss probing questions and think critically about the story.”

The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on October 7. Rape is not uncommon in war, and there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day in a “second wave,” contributing to and participating in the mayhem and violence. The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence to support its claim that there were newly reported details “establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7” — a claim stated in the headline that Hamas deliberately deployed sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Schwartz began her work on the violence of October 7 where one would expect, by calling around to the designated “Room 4” facilities in 11 Israeli hospitals that examine and treat potential victims of sexual violence, including rape. “First thing I called them all, and they told me, ‘No, no complaint of sexual assault was received,’” she recalled in the podcast interview. “I had a lot of interviews which didn’t lead anywhere. Like, I would go to all kinds of psychiatric hospitals, sit in front of the staff, all of them are fully committed to the mission and no one had met a victim of sexual assault.”

The next step was to call the manager of the sexual assault hotline in Israel’s south, which proved equally fruitless. The manager told her they had no reports of sexual violence. She described the call as a “crazy in-depth conversation” where she pressed for specific cases. “Did anyone call you? Did you hear anything?” she recalled asking. “How could it be that you didn’t?”

As Schwartz began her own efforts to find evidence of sexual assault, the first specific allegations of rape began to emerge. A person identified in anonymous media interviews as a paramedic from the Israeli Air Force medical unit 669 claimed he saw evidence that two teenage girls at Kibbutz Nahal Oz had been raped and murdered in their bedroom. The man made other outrageous claims, however, that called his report into question. He claimed another rescuer “pulled out of the garbage” a baby who’d been stabbed multiple times. He also said he had seen “Arabic sentences that were written on entrances to houses … with the blood of the people that were living in the houses.” No such messages exist, and the story of the baby in the trashcan has been debunked. The bigger problem was that no two girls at the kibbutz fit the source’s description. In future interviews, he changed the location to Kibbutz Be’eri. But no victims killed there matched the description either, as Mondoweiss reported.

After seeing these interviews, Schwartz started calling people at Kibbutz Be’eri and other kibbutzim that were targeted on October 7 in an effort to track down the story. “Nothing. There was nothing,” she said. “No one saw or heard anything.” She then reached the unit 669 paramedic who relayed to Schwartz the same story he had told other media outlets, which she says convinced her there was a systematic nature to the sexual violence. “I say, ‘OK, so it happened, one person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random,” Schwartz concluded on the podcast.

Schwartz said she then began a series of extensive conversations with Israeli officials from Zaka, a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organization that has been documented to have mishandled evidence and spread multiple false stories about the events of October 7, including debunked allegations of Hamas operatives beheading babies and cutting the fetus from a pregnant woman’s body. Its workers are not trained forensic scientists or crime scene experts. “When we go into a house, we use our imagination,” said Yossi Landau, a senior Zaka official, describing the group’s work at the October 7 attack sites. “The bodies were telling us what happened, that’s what happened.” Landau is featured in the Times report, though no mention is made of his well-documented track record of disseminating sensational stories of atrocities that were later proven false. Schwartz said that in her initial interviews, Zaka members did not make any specific allegations of rape, but described the general condition of bodies they said they saw. “They told me, ‘Yes, we saw naked women,’ or ‘We saw a woman without underwear.’ Both naked without underwear, and tied with zip ties. And sometimes not zip ties, sometimes a rope or a string of a hoodie.”

Schwartz continued to look for evidence at various sites of attack and found no witnesses to corroborate stories of rape. “And so I searched a lot in the kibbutzim, and apart from this testimony of [the Israeli military paramedic] and additionally, here and there, Zaka people — the stories, like, didn’t emerge from there,” she said.

As she continued to work the phones with rescue officials, Schwartz then saw interviews that international news channels began airing with Shari Mendes, an American architect who serves in a rabbinical unit of the Israel Defense Forces. Mendes, who was deployed to a morgue to prepare bodies for burial after the October 7 attacks, claimed to have seen voluminous evidence of sexual assaults.

“We saw evidence of rape,” Mendes stated in oneinterview. “Pelvises were broken, and it probably takes a lot to break a pelvis … and this was also among grandmothers down to small children. This is not just something we saw on the internet, we saw these bodies with our own eyes.” Mendes has been a ubiquitous figure in the Israeligovernment and major media narratives on sexual violence on October 7, despite the fact that she hasno medical or forensic credentials to legally determine rape. She had also spoken about other violence on October 7, telling the Daily Mail in October, “A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded.” No pregnant woman died that day, according to the official Israeli list of those killed in the attacks, and the independent research collective October 7 Fact Check said Mendes’s story was false.

“I kept wondering all the time, whether if I just hear about rape and see rape and think about it, whether that’s just because I’m leading toward that.”

After Schwartz saw interviews with Mendes, she was further convinced that the systematic rape narrative was true. “I’m like — wow, what is this?” she recalled. “And it feels to me like it’s starting to approach a plurality, even if you don’t know which numbers to put on it yet.”

At the same time, Schwartz said that she felt conflicted at times, wondering if she was becoming convinced of the truth of the overarching story precisely because she was looking for evidence to support the claim. “I kept wondering all the time, whether if I just hear about rape and see rape and think about it, whether that’s just because I’m leading toward that,” she said. She pushed those doubts aside. By the time Schwartz interviewed Mendes, the IDF reservist’s story had ricocheted around the world and been conclusively debunked: No baby was cut from a mother and beheaded. Yet Schwartz and the New York Times would go on to rely on Mendes’s testimony, as well as those of other witnesses with track records of making unreliable claims and lacking forensic credentials. No mention was made of questions about Mendes’s credibility.

How Schwartz landed in such an extraordinary position at a crucial moment in the war is not entirely clear. Prior to joining the Times as a stringer last fall, her nephew, Sella, was a freelance journalist covering stories on issues ranging from “food, photography, and culture to peace efforts, economics, and the occupation,” according to his LinkedIn profile. Sella’s first collaboration with Gettleman, published on October 14, was a look at the trauma experienced by students at a university in southern Israel. For Schwartz, her first byline landed on November 14.

“Israeli police officials shared more evidence on Tuesday of atrocities committed during the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks, saying they had collected testimonies from more than a thousand witnesses and survivors about sexual violence and other abuses,” Schwartz reported. The story went on to quote Israel’s police chief, Kobi Shabtai, explaining a litany of evidence of gruesome killings and sexual assaults on October 7.

“This is the most extensive investigation the State of Israel has ever known,” Shabtai said in the Schwartz article, promising ample evidence would soon be provided.

When the Times later produced its definitive “Screams Without Words” investigation, however, Schwartz and her partners reported that, contrary to Shabtai’s claim, forensic evidence of sexual violence was non-existent. Without acknowledging the past statements by Shabtai in the Times, the paper reported that quick funerals in accordance with Jewish tradition meant evidence was not preserved. Unnamed experts told the Times that sexual violence in wars often leaves “limited forensic evidence.”

On the podcast, Schwartz said her next step was to go to a new holistic therapy facility established to address the trauma of October 7 victims, particularly those who endured the carnage at the Nova music festival. Opened a week after the attacks, the facilitybegan welcoming hundreds of survivors where they could seek counseling, do yoga, and receive alternative medicine, as well as acupuncture, sound healing, and reflexology treatments. They called it Merhav Marpe, or Healing Space.

In multiple visits to Merhav Marpe, Schwartz again said in the podcast interview that she found no direct evidence of rapes or sexual violence. She expressed frustration with the therapists and counselors at the facility, saying they engaged in “a conspiracy of silence.” “Everyone, even those who heard these kinds of things from people, they felt very committed to their patients, or even just to people who assisted their patients, not to reveal things,” she said.

In the end, Schwartz came away with only innuendo and general statements from the therapists about how people process trauma, including sexual violence and rape. She said potential victims might be ashamed to speak out, experiencing survivors’ guilt, or were still in shock. “Perhaps also because Israeli society is conservative, there was some inclination to keep silent about this issue of sexual abuse,” Schwartz speculated. “On top of this, there is probably the added dimension of the religious-national aspect, that this was done by a terrorist, by someone from Hamas,” she added. “There were lots and lots of layers that made it so that they didn’t speak.”

According to the published Times article, “Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.”

Schwartz said she had focused on the kibbutzim because she had initially determined it was unlikely sexual assaults had occurred at the Nova music festival. “I was very skeptical that it happened at the area of the party, because everyone I spoke to among the survivors told me about a chase, a race, like, about moving from place to place,” she recalled. “How would they [have had the time] to mess with a woman, like — it is impossible. Either you hide, or you — or you die. Also it’s public, the Nova … such an open space.”

Schwartz watched interviews given to international media outlets by Raz Cohen, who attended the Nova festival. A veteran of Israel’s special forces, Cohen did multiple interviews about a rape he claimed to have witnessed. A few days after the attacks, he told PBS NewsHour that he had witnessed multiple rapes. “The terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them, murdered them with knives, or the opposite, killed — and after they raped, they — they did that,” he said. At an appearance on CNN on January 4, he described seeing one rape and said the assailants were “five guys — five civilians from Gaza, normal guys, not soldiers, not Nukhba,” referring to Hamas’s elite commando force. “It was regular people from Gaza with normal clothes.”

In Cohen’s interview with Schwartz for the Times:

He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.

‘They all gather around her,’ Mr. Cohen said. ‘She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”

It was this interview that gave the Times its title: “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” That Cohen had described alleged assailants as not being members of Hamas undermines the headline, but it remains unchanged. The Times did not address Cohen’s earlier claims that he witnessed multiple rapes.

Schwartz said in the podcast interview that, since the Times insisted on at least two sources, she asked Cohen to give her the contact information of the other people he was hiding with in the bush, so she could corroborate his story of the rape. She recalled, “Raz hides. In the bush next to him lies his friend Shoam. They get to this bush. There are two other people on the other side looking to the other direction, and another, fifth, person. Five people in the same bush. Only Raz sees all the things he sees, everyone else is looking in a different direction.”

Despite saying on the podcast that only Cohen witnessed the event and the others were looking in different directions, in the Times story Shoam Gueta is presented as a corroborating witness to the rape: “He said he saw at least four men step out of the van and attack the woman, who ended up ‘between their legs.’ He said that they were ‘talking, giggling and shouting,’ and that one of them stabbed her with a knife repeatedly, ‘literally butchering her.’” Gueta did not mention witnessing a rape in aninterview he did with NBC News on October 8, a day after the attack, but he did describe seeing a woman murdered with a knife. “We saw terrorists killing people, burning cars, shouting everywhere,” Gueta told NBC. “If you just say something, if you make any noise, you’ll be murdered.” Gueta subsequently deployed to Gaza with the IDF and has posted many videos on TikTok of himself rummaging through Palestinian homes. Cohen and Gueta did not respond to requests for comment.

The independent site October 7 Fact Check, Mondoweiss, and journalists Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada and Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone have flagged numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in the stories told in the Times report, including the account of Cohen, who had initially said “he chose not to look, but he could hear them laughing constantly.”

Under pressure internally to defend the veracity of the story, the Times reassigned Gettleman, Schwartz, and Sella to effectively re-report the story, resulting in an article published on January 29. Cohen declined to speak to them, they reported: “Asked this month why he had not mentioned rape at first, Mr. Cohen cited the stress of his experience, and said in a text message that he had not realized then that he was one of the few surviving witnesses. He declined to be interviewed again, saying he was working to recover from the trauma he suffered.”

In addition to Cohen’s testimony, Schwartz said on the Channel 12 podcast that she also watched video of an interrogation of a Palestinian prisoner taken by the IDF whom she said described “girls” being dragged by Palestinian attackers into the woods near the Nova festival. She was also moved, she said, by a clip of an interview she watched in November at a press conference hosted by Israeli officials, the one that became the focus of her first Times article.

An accountant named Sapir described a lurid scene of rape and mutilation, and Schwartz said she became fully convinced there was a systematic program of sexual violence by Hamas. “Her testimony is crazy, and hair-raising, and huge, and barbaric,” Schwartz said. “And it’s not just rape — it’s rape, and amputation, and … and I realize it’s a bigger story than I imagined, [with] many locations, and then the picture starts to emerge, What is going on here?”

The Times report states they interviewed Sapir for two hours at a cafe in southern Israel, and she described witnessing multiple rapes, including an incident where one attacker rapes a woman as another cuts off her breastwith a box cutter.

At the press conference in November, Israeli authorities said they were collecting and examining forensic materials that would confirm Sapir’s specifically detailed accounts. “Police say they are still gathering evidence (DNA etc) from rape victims in addition to eyewitnesses to build the strongest case possible,” said a correspondent who covered the press event. Such a scene would produce significant amounts of physical evidence, yet Israeli officials have, to date, been unable to provide it. “I have circumstantial evidence, but in the end, it’s my duty to find supporting evidence for her story and discover the victims’ identities,” said Superintendent Adi Edri, the Israeli official leading the investigation into sexual violence on October 7, a week after the Times report went online. “At this stage, I have no specific bodies.”

In the Channel 12 podcast, Schwartz is asked if firsthand testimonies of women who survived rape on October 7 exist. “I can’t really speak about this, but the vast majority of women who have been sexually assaulted on October 7 were shot immediately after, and that’s [where] the big numbers [are],” she replied. “The majority are corpses. Some women managed to escape and survive.” She added, “I do know that there is a very significant element of dissociation when it comes to sexual assault. So a lot of times they don’t remember. They don’t remember everything. They remember fragments of the events, and they can’t always describe how they ended up on the road and [how they were] rescued.”

In early December, Israeli officials launched an intensive public campaign, accusing the international community and specifically feminist leaders of standing silent in the face of the widespread, systemic sexual violence of Hamas’s October 7 attack. The PR effort was rolled out at the United Nations on December 4, with an event hosted by the Israeli ambassador and the former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg. The feminist organizations targeted by the pro-Israel figures were caught flat-footed, as charges of sexual violence had not yet circulated widely.

Sandberg was also quoted attacking women’s rights organizations in a December 4 New York Times article, headlined “What We Know About Sexual Violence During the Oct. 7 Attacks on Israel” and whose publication coincided with the launch of the PR campaign at the U.N. The article, also reported by Gettleman, Schwartz, and Sella, relied on claims made by Israeli officials and acknowledged the Times had not yet been able to corroborate the allegations. A revealing correction was subsequently appended to the story: “An earlier version of this article misstated the kind of evidence Israeli police have gathered in investigating accusations of sexual violence committed on Oct. 7 in the attack by Hamas against Israel. The police are relying mainly on witness testimony, not on autopsies or forensic evidence.”

Israel promised it had extraordinary amounts of eyewitness testimony. “Investigators have gathered ‘tens of thousands’ of testimonies of sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, according to the Israeli police, including at the site of a music festival that was attacked,” Schwartz, Gettleman, and Stella reported on December 4. Those testimonies never materialized.

I’m also an Israeli, but I also work for New York Times. So all the time I’m like in this place between the hammer and the anvil.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hammered on the theme in a December 5 speech in Tel Aviv. “I say to the women’s rights organizations, to the human rights organizations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation? Where the hell are you?” The same day, President Joe Biden gave a speech in which hesaid, “The world can’t just look away — what’s going on. It’s on all of us — the government, international organizations, civil society, individual citizens — to forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation — without equivocation, without exception.”

The two-month-long Times investigation was still being edited and revised, Schwartz said in the podcast, when she started to feel concerned about the timing. “So I said, ‘We’re missing momentum. Maybe the U.N. isn’t addressing sexual assault because no [media outlet] will come out with a declaration about what happened there.’” If the Times story doesn’t publish soon, she said, “it may no longer be interesting.” Schwartz said the delay was explained to her internally as, “We don’t want to make people sad before Christmas.”

She also said that Israeli police sources were pressuring her to move quickly to publish. She said they asked her, “What, does the New York Times not believe there were sexual assaults here?” Schwartz felt like she was in the middle.

“I’m also in this place, I’m also an Israeli, but I also work for New York Times,” she said. “So all the time I’m like in this place between the hammer and the anvil.”

The December 28 article “Screams Without Words” opened with the story of Gal Abdush, described by the Times as “the woman in the black dress.” Video of her charred body appeared to show her bottomless. “Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped,” the Times reported. The article labeled Abdush “a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the October 7 attacks.” The Times report mentions WhatsApp messages from Abdush and her husband to their family, but doesn’t mention that some family members believe that the crucial messages make the Israeli officials’ claims implausible. As Mondoweiss later reported, Abdush texted the family at 6:51 a.m., saying they were in trouble at the border. At 7:00, her husband messaged to say she’d been killed. Her family said the charring came from a grenade.

“It doesn’t make any sense,”said Abdush’s sister, that in a short timespan “they raped her, slaughtered her, and burned her?” Speaking about the rape allegation, her brother-in-law said: “The media invented it.”

Another relative suggested the family was pressured, under false pretenses, to speak with the reporters. Abdush’s sister wrote on Instagram that the Times reporters “mentioned they want to write a report in memory of Gal, and that’s it. If we knew that the title would be about rape and butchery, we’d never accept that.” In its follow-up story, the Times sought to discredit her initial comment, quoting Abdush’s sister as saying she “had been ‘confused about what happened’ and was trying to ‘protect my sister.’”

The woman who filmed Abdush on October 7 told the Israeli site YNet that Schwartz and Sella had pressured her into giving the paper access to her photos and videos for the purposes of serving Israeli propaganda. “They called me again and again and explained how important it is to Israeli hasbara,” she recalled, using the term for public diplomacy, which in practice refers to Israeli propaganda efforts directed at international audiences.

At every turn, when the New York Times reporters ran into obstacles confirming tips, they turned to anonymous Israeli officials or witnesses who’d already been interviewed repeatedly in the press. Months after setting off on their assignment, the reporters found themselves exactly where they had begun, relying overwhelmingly on the word of Israeli officials, soldiers, and Zaka workers to substantiate their claim that more than 30 bodies of women and girls were discovered with signs of sexual abuse. On the Channel 12 podcast, Schwartz said the last remaining piece she needed for the story was a solid number from the Israeli authorities about any possible survivors of sexual violence. “We have four and we can stand behind that number,” she said she was told by the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. No details were provided. The Times story ultimately reported there were “at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived.”

When the story was finally published on December 28 Schwartz described the flood of emotions and reactions online and in Israel. “First of all, in the paper, we gave it a very, very prominent place, which is, apropos all my fears — there is no greater show of confidence than being put on the front page,” she said. “In Israel, the reactions are amazing. Here I think I was given closure, seeing that all the media treat the article and treat it as something of [a] thank you for putting a number on it. Thank you for saying there were many cases, that it was a pattern. Thank you for giving it a title which suggests that maybe there is some organizing logic behind it, that this is not some isolated act of some person acting on his own initiative.”

Times staffers who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal described the “Screams Without Words” article as the product of the same mistakes that led to the disastrous editor’s note and retraction on Rukmini Callimachi’s podcast “Caliphate” and print series on the Islamic State group. Kahn, the current executive editor, was widely known as a promoter and protector of Callimachi. The reporting, which the Times determined in an internal review was not subjected to sufficient scrutiny by top editors and fell short of the paper’s standards on ensuring accuracy, had been a finalist for a 2019 Pulitzer Prize. That honor, along with other prestigious awards, was rescinded in the wake of the scandal.

Margaret Sullivan, the last public editor for the New York Times before the paper discarded the position in 2017, said that she hopes such an investigation will be launched into the “Screams Without Words” story. “I sometimes joke ‘it’s another good day not to be the New York Times public editor’ but the organization could *really* use one right now to investigate on behalf of the readers,” she wrote.

At some story meetings, Schwartz said on the Channel 12 podcast, guests with Middle East expertise were there to offer probing questions. “We had a weekly meeting, and you bring out the status of your work on your project,” she said. “And Times writers and guests who are concerned with Middle Eastern affairs coming from all kinds of places in the world, they ask you questions that challenge you, and it’s excellent that they do that, because you yourself, all the time, like — you don’t believe yourself for a moment.”

Those questions were challenging to answer, she said: “One of the questions you get asked — and it’s the hardest ones to not be able to answer — if this has happened in so many places, how can it be that there is no forensic evidence? How can it be that there is no documentation? How can it be that there are no records? A report? An Excel spreadsheet? You are telling me about Shari [Mendes]? That’s someone who saw with her own eyes, and is now speaking to you — is there no [written] report to make what she’s saying authoritative?”

The host interjected. “And you went at that stage to those official Israeli authorities, and asked that they give you — something, anything. And how did they respond?”

“‘There is nothing,’” Schwartz said she was told. “‘There was no collection of evidence from the scene.’”

But broadly, she said, the editors were fully behind the project. “There was no skepticism on their part, ever,” she claimed. “It still doesn’t mean I had [the story], because I didn’t have a ‘second source’ for many things.”

A Times spokesperson pointed to this portion of the interview as evidence of the paper’s rigorous process: “We have reviewed the wider transcript and it’s clear you’re persisting in taking quotes out of context. In the portion of the interview you refer to, Anat describes being encouraged by editors to corroborate evidence and sources before we’d publish the investigation. Later, she discusses regular meetings with editors where they would ask ‘hard’ and ‘challenging’ questions, and the time it took to undertake the second and third stages of sourcing. This is all part of a rigorous reporting process and one which we continue to stand behind.”

In her interview with the Channel 12 podcast, Schwartz said she began working with Gettleman soon after October 7. “My job was to help him. He had all kinds of thoughts about things, about articles he wanted to do,” she recalled. “On the first day, there were already three things on [his] lineup, and then I saw that at number three was ‘Sexual Violence.’” Schwartz said that in the initial aftermath of the October 7 attacks, there was not much focus on sexual assaults, but by the time she began working for Gettleman, rumors began spreading that such acts had taken place, most of it based on the commentary of Zaka workers and IDF officials and soldiers.

After the article was published, Gettleman was invited to speak on a panel about sexual violence at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. His efforts were lauded by the panel and its host, Sandberg, the former Facebook executive. Instead of doubling down on reporting that helped win the New York Times a prestigious Polk Award, Gettleman dismissed the need for reporters to provide “evidence.”

“What we found — I don’t want to even use the word ‘evidence,’ because evidence is almost like a legal term that suggests you’re trying to prove an allegation or prove a case in court,” Gettleman told Sandberg. “That’s not my role. We all have our roles. And my role is to document, is to present information, is to give people a voice. And we found information along the entire chain of violence, so of sexual violence.”

Gettleman said his mission was to move people. “It’s really difficult to get this information and then to shape it,” he said. “That’s our job as journalists: to get the information and to share the story in a way that makes people care. Not just to inform, but to move people. And that’s what I’ve been doing for a long time.”

One Times reporter said colleagues are wondering what a balanced approach might look like: “I am waiting to see if the paper will report in depth, deploying the same kind of resources and means, on the United Nations’ report that documented the horrors committed against Palestinian women.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jeremy Scahill.

In August 2020, Maria do Espirito Santo was returning from her family’s field in the savanna of northeast Brazil when she saw smoke billowing from her thatched hut.

Do Espirito Santo raced back to find that her home and those of her neighbors had been burnt to the ground by a group of armed men, some of them local police. They felled fruit trees, ripped up crops with tractors, and forced the small community of Bom Acerto from the lands where they had grown cassava, corn, and beans for generations. Afterward the families found out a businessman from Tocantins, the state she lives in, had laid claim to 10,872 acres of public land abutting 9,884 acres of land he had purchased, which includes the land that her family has been living on for generations. They suspect that he hired the men and bribed the police to come and terrorize the families so that they would leave. 

“When we arrived, we found several dozen people, mainly women and children, huddling under the one remaining structure that cast any shade,” said Maciana Veira, president of the Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais de Balsas, the local rural workers association. Veira, in her decades of work for the association, has more accounts of land being stolen from rural communities than she can count.

Brazil possesses vast tracts of lands which exist in the public domain. Traditional peoples, small-scale farmers, quilombolas, and other homesteaders have the legal right to lay claim to these lands, but in rural Brazil, many communities like Bom Acerto still lack formal deeds. Those seeking to claim that land — often business owners or corporations — reportedly hire armed men to intimidate and run off residents. They then clear the land of trees or native vegetation, either seeding pasture for cows or preparing it to grow crops like soy, cotton, or corn. Eventually, they gain formal ownership through legal maneuvers or by forging land titles, sometimes by leaving falsified titles in a box with crickets, whose excreta makes the papers seem older than they are. It’s such a common practice that it’s picked up its own noun: grilagem, derived from the Portuguese for cricket, grilo.

Land grabbing is not a new phenomenon in Brazil, but it’s especially rampant in the 337 municipalities in the northern Cerrado that make up an area known as Matopiba (a portmanteau of the states Maranhao, Tocantins, Piaui, and Bahia.) The Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse savanna, stretches 1.2 million square miles up the spine of Brazil, covering a fifth of the country. Squished between the Amazon rainforest on one side and the Atlantic rainforest on the other, it has been dubbed “the underground forest” because so much of its biomass is found in the long, thick roots that funnel water down into aquifers and store impressive amounts of carbon. Deforestation and land use change is Brazil’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, so conserving the Cerrado, and its role as a carbon sink, is crucial for Brazil to meet its Paris Agreement goals. Much of the biome’s last remaining tracks of native Cerrado vegetation are in Matopiba, the country’s last agricultural frontier.

In Matopiba, some 1.7 million acres of native vegetation were ripped up and turned into soy plantations between 2013 and 2021, helping to turn Brazil into the world’s largest producer and exporter of soybeans. Most of the beans are used to fatten livestock in Europe and China, the two biggest buyers of Brazil’s crop. The usual narrative is that the destruction of the Cerrado is closely linked to the growing demand for meat and dairy. The full story, however, is more tangled and wider in scope: Behind this rapid and widespread transformation are some of the world’s largest investment funds that have put billions into buying farmland in the Cerrado, including pension funds in Sweden and Germany, Harvard University’s endowment, and the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, better known as TIAA, the $1.2 trillion pension fund for 5 million people across the United States. 

Thanks in part to its investments in Brazilian farmland, TIAA has become one of the largest farmland investors in the world. Through its wholly owned subsidiary, Nuveen Natural Capital, the fund has accumulated some 3 million acres across 10 countries. It owns stakes in water-hungry almond and pistachio orchards in drought-stricken California, Macadamia nut farms and row crops in Australia, and vast swaths around the Mississippi Delta. But its investments in Brazil, where it manages 1 million acres, are some of its most controversial holdings.

Around the time of the financial crisis in 2008, TIAA and other investment funds started buying up farmland in Brazil, eventually honing in on the northern Cerrado, specifically Matopiba, where environmental protections are thin and land ownership is often in disputed. According to environmental organizations, academic researchers, satellite images, and media reports, many of the farms TIAA acquired are connected to land grabbing and deforestation. TIAA has regularly denied any knowledge of these practices, but emails and other leaked documents obtained from a data breach last year reportedly showed that as far back as 2010, TIAA was aware that some of the land it purchased was bought from people publicly accused of stealing it — groups like those that destroyed do Espirito Santo’s village of Bom Acerto. Despite an almost decades-long campaign by the Brazilian nonprofit The Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, along with environmental advocacy groups like ActionAid and Friends of the Earth, to get TIAA and other foreign funds to divest from their Brazilian landholdings, TIAA continues to raise money to invest in the region.

Connecting specific farms to specific investment funds is a complicated task, said Lucas Seghezzo, a professor of environmental sociology at the National University of Salta, Argentina, who studies large-scale land acquisitions. Investment funds often keep their assets private when they aren’t stocks and bonds, and following the money can lead to a maze of shell companies and chains of subsidiaries. Researchers wind up stuck in dead ends. Deforestation and land clearing is a complex process, and not every instance is directly connected to pension funds or investors. But experts have traced the massive influx of foreign capital in Matopiba to skyrocketing land prices in the region, which, in turn, has fueled land grabbing, deforestation, and violent conflicts, all with devastating consequences for local communities and the land itself. 

“There’s a lot of evidence that investors who buy land in Latin America, for instance, but also in Southeast Asia, are responsible for deforestation — directly or indirectly,” said Seghezzo, who is also a scientific advisor to the Land Matrix Initiative, an independent monitoring initiative. “There is a clear correlation between land acquisitions and deforestation, especially those for agriculture.”

Bom Acerto is a two-hour drive from Balsas, an agricultural town in the heart of Matopiba. The route there is largely unpaved, passing over hills and through miles of scraggly shrubs and waving golden grass. The road dips occasionally from flat stretches of savanna into lush forests wedged into tiny riverine valleys. Far less known than the Amazon rainforest that borders the savanna to the north and west, the Cerrado is Brazil’s second-largest biome, covering an area larger than Germany, France, England, Italy, and Spain combined. It’s one of the oldest and richest ecosystems on Earth, with 5 percent of the planet’s biodiversity.

Much of the Cerrado has been plowed under for agriculture, especially in the southern and central parts of the savanna, which are closer to large urban centers like Sao Paulo and Brasilia, the country’s capital. Some of the last remaining swaths of intact Cerrado vegetation remain in the north, around places like Bom Acerto, which until the beginning of the 20th century had been largely occupied by peasant, Afro-Brazilian, and Indigenous communities.

Fabio Pitta has been studying the expansion of agriculture in the Cerrado since he was a university student researching sugarcane companies in the mid-2000s. Rising oil and gas prices and fossil fuel companies’ desire to appear “green” had stoked investments in sugarcane, which could be turned into ethanol when gas prices were high and used as sugar when they were low. The size of farms in the region was steadily growing, as were the number of laborers literally working themselves to death. Pitta set out to study this dynamic, focusing on Cosan, Brazil’s largest producer of sugarcane. He was puzzled to find that the company had started buying up large tracts of land in the Cerrado around 2008, thousands of miles from its home base near Sao Paulo in the southern Cerrado, through an investment arm it created called Radar Propriedades Agrícolas, or simply Radar. 

More puzzling still was the identity of Radar’s second-largest shareholder, an investment fund run by what was then known as TIAA-CREF, the pension giant in New York City that manages retirement funds for millions of American teachers and professors. 

Pitta was witnessing the convergence of two global crises. The U.S. financial crisis that started in 2007 sent big investors scrambling to find assets that weren’t tied to American real estate. Farmland, once considered a backwater and risky investment, gained overnight appeal. The surge in prices of basic staples that had started in 2005 had, by 2008, led to a fully fledged global food crisis. The commodities that could be grown on farmland suddenly became much more valuable, too. “Buying farmland was like buying gold with yield,” said Roman Herre, an agricultural expert at FIAN Germany, a human rights organization that advocates for the right to food. And global investors, Herre said, rushed to buy up whatever farmland they could.

More than 100 new investment funds specializing in food and agriculture were created between 2005 and 2008, and agricultural investment magazines and conferences ballooned. Famous investors like George Soros wanted in. Whereas in 2008, the annual expansion of farmland hovered around 9.9 million acres a year, by the middle of 2009, around 138 million acres worth of large-scale farmland deals had been announced, many of them larger than 500,000 acres, or two and a half times the size of New York City. It was dubbed “a new global land rush.”

“In the beginning, it was really more like a Wild West story,” Herre said. And one of the biggest players was TIAA, which went from having virtually no farmland in 2007 to holding just shy of 2 million acres worldwide within a decade.

But it wasn’t just teachers in the United States whose savings were providing the capital for the land rush. Dutch, Canadian, and Swedish public employees, along with German physicians, were also funding it. In 2012, TIAA launched its first international farmland fund called TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture LLC with $2 billion primarily from pension funds to invest in farmland, primarily in Brazil, Australia, and the U.S. The roster included Swedish AP2, then one of the largest pension funds in northern Europe, Germany’s Ärzteversorgung Westfalen-Lippe, a pension fund for physicians, and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, a public and private pension fund manager with around $176 billion in assets at the time. TIAA launched a second fund in 2015, the $3 billion TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture II LLC.

Figuring out exactly where these investments were located was difficult. Pension funds and other private investors don’t have to disclose precisely where their farmland holdings are, and investors often use complex business structures to buy farmland — particularly in places like Brazil, where foreign land ownership is legally restricted. Much of the data on TIAA’s investments comes from organizations like The Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, which Pitta now works for, that have traced the money through a messy web of subsidiaries and land acquisition companies, of which TIAA owns more than seven in Brazil, according to TIAA’s 2021 statements.

In 2016, the investment data company Preqin estimated that since 2006, more than 100 unlisted funds had raised approximately $22 billion in capital globally to invest in agriculture and farmland. TIAA’s investments, by far the biggest of any investor, made up almost a quarter of those. 

“TIAA is really the vanguard of pension funds making this type of investment,” said Gustavo Oliveira, an assistant professor of geography at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, who has been studying foreign investments in Brazil. “The important role that TIAA plays is not just on its own, because it’s got deep pockets and it invests in a lot of land. It is that once TIAA has ventured deep, it then becomes possible for smaller pension funds and other investors to follow in its wake.”

The northern Cerrado is crisscrossed by a handful of paved highways, lined on all sides by soybeans, that connect large agricultural hubs in Matopiba. In the rainy season, it’s a sea of bright green as far as the eye can see. Trucks thunder down the highways to and from large grain silos, many of them owned by international agricultural giants such as Bunge and Cargill which, alongside a few other companies, control more than half of the soy trade in Brazil. In the dry season, the soil lies bare and dusty, large piles of stark white lime piled up to one side, applied liberally to coax the otherwise nutrient-poor, acidic soil into producing what is now one of Brazil’s most lucrative exports. Over the last two decades, soybean production in Brazil has more than quadrupled.

The farms are so large that their office complexes lie miles away from the highway, often on the iconic flat-top mountains called chapadas, ancient sandstone and quartzite formations formed tens of millions of years ago. While the rusty signs on the farms are largely in Portuguese, some of the owners are global. Between 2008 and 2020, Harvard Management Company, which manages Harvard University’s endowment fund, amassed more than 40 rural properties covering approximately 1 million acres, an area twice the size of all the farmland in the school’s home state of Massachusetts. BrasilAgro, whose shareholders include the Utah Retirement Systems, the Los Angeles City Employees Retirement System, and the Public School and Education Employee Retirement Systems of Missouri, owns a total of 741,000 acres in Matopiba. SLC Agrícola, one of the country’s largest soy producers and TIAA’s largest farm operator, and its sister organization SLC Landco, a joint venture with the British private equity fund Valiance, collectively bought up more than 450,000 acres of farms in Matopiba between 2011 and 2017.

While soybean farming has been expanding in the Cerrado for several decades, the relatively recent spread of soy into Matopiba, which has attracted the bulk of foreign farmland investment, stands out. “Matopiba is a relatively small portion of the Cerrado overall, but it is without a doubt the main expansion frontier for soy in the region,” said Lisa Rausch, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who for the last two decades has studied how agricultural production leads to forest loss in Brazil. 

Elsewhere in the Cerrado, soybeans tend to be grown on already converted land, often pasture. But in Matopiba, the vast majority of new farmland created since the turn of the century has been from previously intact Cerrado vegetation. According to Trase, a group that tracks global supply chains, three-quarters of all the deforestation from soybean production in the entire Cerrado from 2005 to 2016 happened in Matopiba alone. “One of the main features of soybean expansion in Matopiba has been its association with the clearing of native vegetation,” Rausch said.

Based on data obtained from the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights and Trase, Grist mapped the municipalities of farms that had significant investments from foreign pensions funds with information on which municipalities had the highest deforestation risk from soy farming. The results revealed that farms with significant foreign investment owned thousands to tens of thousands of acres in nine of the 10 municipalities that have experienced the most deforestation from soy from 2008 to 2020.

The loss of habitat threatens the region’s biodiversity, and consequently, the livelihoods of locals, many of whom depend on the forests and shrublands of the Cerrado for food and medicine. Alongside deforestation and foreign farmland investment, violent land conflicts in the region have also ballooned. Matopiba saw an overall 56 percent increase in reported land conflicts between 2012 and 2016, in contrast to a national increase of 21 percent. According to the Pastoral Land Commission, an organization affiliated with the Catholic Church that tracks conflicts in Brazil’s countryside, Bahia and Maranhao — both in Matopiba — ranked first and second among the states with the highest number of conflicts in 2022. 

To be sure, some funds have dropped their investments in companies that deal in soy in the Brazilian Cerrado, some citing deforestation risk, others based on what they claim are financial reasons. The Norwegian Government Pension Fund and the Danish insurer Danica Pension divested their shares from SLC Agricola in 2017 and 2021, respectively. And last year, Germany’s pension fund for physicians in Westphalia-Lippe divested its shares from TIAA’s Global Agriculture Funds. But others have jumped in: In 2022, the Board of the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association committed around $500 million to TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture Funds, which encompasses its Brazilian farms.

The rapid expansion of large farms, funded by an influx of foreign capital, has reshaped the Cerrado’s landscape. The long, thick roots of vegetation store billions of metric tons of carbon, and have long funneled the region’s rainwater into aquifers. Two-thirds of Brazil’s rivers originate here, and nine out of 10 Brazilians use electricity generated by water originating in the Cerrado, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Now, so many trees and shrubs have been ripped out for soy fields, cattle, and sugarcane plantations that nearly half of the biome is cropland or pasture. Scientists predict that if agricultural expansion continues unabated, the biome could collapse by 2030, threatening the region’s drinking water as well as the thousands of unique species native to the world’s most biodiverse tropical savanna. 

The soya boom is far from over. Brazil is expected to plant roughly 30 million more acres of soy between 2021 and 2050, according to one study. Of that, 27 million acres are destined for the Cerrado, and 86 percent of that is projected to be planted in Matopiba. But this is already coming at a cost. “The loss of native vegetation in the Cerrado has very serious consequences environmentally,” Rausch said. That loss has disrupted the region’s water cycle and has increased the frequency of extremely hot days in places like Matopiba, leading to more severe droughts. Climate change is likely to make all these problems worse.

TIAA has previously said it invests responsibly and always carries out thorough due diligence on land purchases. But last year, a hacker group obtained 100 gigabytes of files from Cosan, Brazil’s sugarcane giant, through a ransomware attack, a trove that included sales documents, land holding records, legal papers, and emails, which were then handed over to Distributed Denial of Secrets, an activist group. They reportedly revealed that both Cosan and TIAA ignored red flags when buying Brazilian farms — even purchasing land from people who had already been publicly accused of stealing it.

Grist reached out to TIAA and its subsidiary Nuveen to respond to the information uncovered in the data breach and asked how the pension fund incorporates sustainability into its investment decisions. A spokesperson replied that TIAA and Nuveen evaluate the impact of their investments on local communities, make sure that the land they acquire and hold meets all government requirements for forest and natural habitat protection, and also ensure that their investments comply with local rules and regulations. 

“Any suggestion that TIAA has engaged in improper business practices is without merit,” the spokesperson wrote. “In every country in which we operate, including Brazil, we follow the requirements of all laws and adhere to strong ethical guidelines in our investments. And we expect the government to investigate and prosecute instances of land-grabbing wherever it occurs.”

News of TIAA’s farmland holdings in Brazil first gained widespread attention in 2015 when a smattering of media reports began to lay out the extent of TIAA’s investments in the Cerrado. But it was a report in 2018 that detailed the scope and scale of Harvard endowment’s extensive landholdings in Brazil, written by the Network for Human Rights and Social Justice and the international nonprofit GRAIN, that gave the issue traction in the United States. The news spurred the growing fossil fuel divestment movement at Harvard to include land grabbing in its platform, forming the “Stop Harvard Land Grabs” campaign. Brazilian authorities were also starting to take notice, scrutinizing companies backed by Harvard’s endowment and TIAA. 

In 2020, a small activist group called TIAA Divest tapped Caroline Levine, an English professor at Cornell University, to help lead a campaign to urge TIAA to get rid of its investments in fossil fuels and other environmentally destructive industries. Earlier that year, Levine had successfully helped win the campaign to get Cornell to divest its own endowment from fossil fuels, and she was riled up by what she saw as the blatant disregard for the environment and human rights that accompanied many of the investment decisions universities were making.

“I had this idea that financiers were sort of unaware of what was happening, that there’s a kind of distance between the investment and what’s going on on the ground,” Levine said. “But the more I looked at it, the more it seemed like, ‘No, there’s a lot of conscious bad action happening.’”

Levine and a dozen other professors started researching TIAA’s investments, but were taken aback by the sheer number of shell companies and the opaque web of financial flows. “I’m a researcher, but this really wasn’t my ballpark,” she said. They brought on Tom Sanzillo, a former New York state comptroller then working with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, who talked them through the financial hurdles. After two years of gathering evidence, they filed an 87-page complaint in October 2022 to the United Nations-sponsored Principles for Responsible Investment against TIAA and its subsidiary, Nuveen. Nearly 300 academics, researchers, and TIAA account holders signed on, including the climate scientist Michael Mann, the American academic Judith Butler, and the writer and activist Bill McKibben. 

“TIAA/Nuveen’s climate commitments are contradicted by its substantial investments in fossil fuels and commodities linked to deforestation, which undermine the climate objectives established in the Paris Agreement,” the complaint states. “TIAA/Nuveen’s ongoing investments in coal, oil, and gas, as well as land-based investments linked to deforestation and illegality, are financially, morally, and socially irresponsible.”

TIAA was one of the founding signatories of Principles for Responsible Investment, or PRI, in 2006, which aimed to help investors make their funds more sustainable. The complaint argued that the $78 billion worth of investments in fossil fuels, as well as various environmental and human rights abuses connected to their large farm holdings in the Brazilian Cerrado, violated PRI’s principles, as well as TIAA’s own climate pledges. It charged that TIAA was misleading investors by advertising its funds as climate-friendly, making the case that many of its products marketed as being aligned with ESG principles — shorthand for environmentally and socially responsible — allegedly had higher exposure than non-ESG funds to fossil fuels and deforestation, the top two sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

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PRI signatories commit to six principles, including incorporating ESG matters into decision-making. While PRI has a serious violations policy, it is only sparingly applied, Levine said. In 2021, the Save the Dawson project in Australia filed a complaint to PRI about Liberty Mutual’s financing of a coal mine, which resulted in the global insurer canceling their financing. In October 2022, PRI said that it had reviewed Nuveen’s response to the allegations and “decided that the allegations do not constitute a breach of the policy. As such, there is no reason to change Nuveen’s status as a PRI signatory,” they wrote in an email response to Levine. 

“We knew it was a long shot,” Levine said. Still, she considered the result disappointing.

University students, professors, and pension holders aren’t the only ones attempting to highlight the connection between foreign investment funds, deforestation, and land grabbing. Traditional communities and peasant farmers in Matopiba have protested in front of government agencies and blocked roads to bring attention to the problem. Last June, a delegation of leaders from several rural communities in Piaui handed a letter to government authorities asking for the state to protect them from ongoing violence and violations of their rights.

“Human rights violations in Piaui caused by land grabbing, deforestation, fumigation with toxic agrochemicals and other pollutants, as well as physical and psychological violence against rural communities, have been widely documented and brought to the attention of state and federal authorities,” the letter said. “The perpetrators of the violence are usually individuals linked to local land grabbers and/or agribusinesses, but research has shown that international investors play a key role in encouraging human rights violations and environmental crimes in the region.”

Around 10 miles from Bom Acerto, piles of native shrubs and vegetation cook in the punishing sun, their long, thick roots a contrast to the bright blue sky and the flat-topped mountains in the distance. For generations, the tops of these mountains were common areas used by peasants and Afro-descendent communities to forage for food, firewood, and medicines. People preferred to live in the more lush valleys, where crystalline rivers flowed. Nowadays, many of these rivers are polluted with agricultural runoff, and plantation owners keep ripping out more native vegetation. Just over the border from Bom Acerto, in Piaui, 5,000 acres of land was cleared in 2021 from a large farm, called Kajubar. In all likelihood, Pitta and other researchers predict, it will be sold to the highest bidder.

Though not all the deforestation in Matopiba can be directly linked to foreign investors, researchers agree that the scale and speed of destruction would not be possible without the massive influx of foreign capital. “Even if they sold all the enterprises, they profited from them a lot, and the impacts are still there,” Pitta said. Last year, the Stop Harvard Land Grabs campaign published a petition demanding that Harvard “stop investing in new farmland, return the lands already acquired to affected communities, and pay reparations for the undeniable harm of Harvard’s global land business.”

Meanwhile, forests continue to be torn down in the Cerrado at a fast clip. Between July 2022 and August 2023, deforestation in the region rose almost 17 percent, eating up more than 1.5 million acres of Cerrado vegetation, an area almost twice as large as Yosemite National Park. Around three-quarters of that was in Matopiba. According to the Pastoral Land Commission, more than 20,000 families in the four states were involved in conflicts over land in 2022, a record number.

In Bom Acerto, all that remains of the former settlement are piles of ashes and empty trails. The community has tried to take the businessman who is claiming he owns their land to court, but the case is stalled. Despite the uncertainty, the community has begun to rebuild some of the stalls for animals, and replant the fields with cassava, beans, and rice. Most of the trails end at the edge of the dry forest, where native Cerrado vegetation still extends for acres and acres into the horizon.

Last January, do Espírito Santo stood on the site of her old house and looked toward the village that she and her old neighbors are slowly piecing back together. “My dream is to stay here,” she said. “My dream is that we have the right to stay here, that we have the right to have our land and our home.” 

At the end of August, four men in an unmarked pickup truck invaded Bom Acerto and set fire to a family’s house. Now, residents report that a drone constantly flies overhead. Most of the native Cerrado is still visible out beyond their fields, but for how long, do Espírito Santo doesn’t know.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who’s behind the destruction of Brazil’s Cerrado? on Feb 28, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sarah Sax.

New data released today by the Department of Agriculture show that smaller farms are falling further behind their larger neighbors.

The Census of Agriculture, which is released by the USDA every five years, found:

• The total number of farms fell(link is external), from 2 million in 2017 to 1.9 million in 2022.
• Many of the farms that failed(link is external) between 2017 and 2022 were those farms with farm sales between $100,000 and $500,000, or farms with farm sales less than $10,000.
• The number of farms with farm sales greater than $1 million increased(link is external) from 79,386 in 2017 to 107,742 in 2022.
• The number of farms with farm sales greater than $5 million nearly doubled(link is external) from 8.972 in 2017 to 16,226.
• While the cost of farming increased, the total value of farm products sold increased from $388 billion to $543 billion.

Increasing farm subsidies, as some members of Congress are proposing, would only widen the divide between small and large farmers.

Some members of Congress(link is external) are seeking to raise the government price floor for certain crops. Their proposals to increase the price guarantees in the USDA’s Price Loss Coverage, or PLC, program would mostly benefit fewer than 6,000 farmers growing peanuts, cotton and rice in just a few states.

Since PLC payments are linked to production, the largest producers get the lion’s share of the funding. In 2021, just 10 percent of farmers received more than 80 percent of all PLC payments.

“Increasing reference prices will only add more fuel to the fire,” said Jared Hayes, the Environmental Working Group’s senior policy analyst.

Most farmers do not grow the crops eligible for these subsidies. A rise in price guarantees will help only the largest producers and accelerate increases in the cost of buying and renting farmland.

Raising price guarantees is especially bad for young farmers, who are smaller and mostly do not grow cotton, rice and peanuts.

“Increasing subsidies for legacy farmers will supercharge land prices, making it even harder for young farmers to compete with their larger, subsidized neighbors,” Hayes said.

Net farm income(link is external) is forecast to be $121 billion in 2024, according to the USDA. That’s below recent record highs. But it’s above the level farmers earned in any year from 2015 to 2020 and close to the 20-year average income.

Despite the dip in profits from farming compared to last year, median farm household income(link is external) is expected to remain steady at nearly $100,000, significantly above the American(link is external) median household income of $75,000.

The largest farms will continue to reap extraordinary profits, according to the USDA. Large commercial farms with sales greater than $1 million are expected to enjoy farm-level net cash income of $571,000(link is external) in 2024.

Rice and peanut farmers are likely to enjoy(link is external) record highs for the prices they earn in 2024. Rice cash receipts are expected to climb to $3.8 billion, up from $3.3 billion, and peanut cash receipts will increase to $1.57 billion, up from $1.56 billion.

The price that cotton farmers earn is also expected to increase in 2024, to $6.96 billion, up from $6.85 billion in 2023.

“Some farmers are struggling, but it’s not the large rice, peanut and cotton farmers who would reap the benefits of higher reference prices,” Hayes said. “A farm bill that increases these price floors at the expense of programs that help farmers withstand extreme weather or produce renewable energy will simply expand a growing economic divide.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

When the administration announced that it would pause its approval of new LNG terminals late last month, the climate movement and its allies were largely credited with the victory. Bill McKibben, the renowned founder of 350.org (and a former Grist board member), began his blog post about the news by saying, “Um, I think we all just won.” The decision reportedly came about after senior administration officials, including White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi, learned that young activists on TikTok were drawing millions of views elevating LNG as a major climate issue.

As if to prove the president was listening, the White House has collected dozens of quotes from climate advocates praising the decision. (In some ways, the activists’ celebration belies the reality that the climate impact of constricting LNG exports is far from certain, and the devil is in the details: While a broader buildout certainly has the potential to promote unnecessary fossil fuel use, it may also speed other countries’ transition away from other, more harmful fossil fuels like coal.)

But a broader, less-climate-concerned coalition, representing thousands of manufacturers, chemical companies, and consumer advocates, has also been quietly pushing for the pause — and stands to benefit if Biden curbs LNG exports. The more American natural gas that’s available to be shipped overseas, they argue, the more unpredictable the price of the fuel will be stateside. If, for example, an unexpected gas shortage in another country means U.S. gas companies can make more money selling their product overseas than they can at home, prices will rise as the supply is stretched thin. This volatility would hurt not only households who heat and power their homes with natural gas, but also the profit margins of big companies that rely on the fuel.

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“LNG exports put pressure on domestic markets, which also result in higher energy costs,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the ​​National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, an organization representing state officials who administer federal energy assistance programs, which help low-income households pay energy bills. “There’s an impact on families that are benefiting from these lower prices. That needs to be taken into account.”

Wolfe said that home heating prices have risen more than 16 percent since March 2020, driven in large part by higher natural gas prices. (Hotter summers also mean utilities need more fuel to power a grid stretched thin by air conditioning in the summer, and therefore have less natural gas for heating in the winter.) The result is that one out of six households nationwide are behind on their energy bills.

“If the administration wants to approve these facilities, they should do it in the context of saying, ‘How do we help families pay their bills?’” Wolfe added. 

It’s not just cash-strapped families that might benefit if LNG exports are limited: The Industrial Energy Consumers of America, or IECA, a trade group representing more than 11,000 manufacturing facilities nationwide, has also been arguing against LNG exports. IECA’s members include fertilizer companies, aluminum smelters, and glass manufacturers, among others. These industries are heavily dependent on natural gas either as feedstock for production or to fuel their operations. As natural gas prices rose in 2022, heavy industries that require large amounts of natural gas or electricity — such as fertilizer production and aluminum smelting — saw their costs skyrocket. That year, multiple steel mills as well as the country’s second-largest aluminum smelter paused operations in the face of unsustainable costs. 

Paul Cicio, IECA’s president, has been imploring the federal government to curb natural gas exports since the Obama administration. The last three presidential administrations “have just ignored consumers’ interests,” Cicio told Grist. 

Biden’s team seems to hope to change this perception. In announcing the pause last month, senior administration officials said that the relationship between exports and domestic prices is one of the main topics they plan to study, in addition to climate and environmental impacts, as they consider whether to resume permitting more export terminals. 

In a call with reporters, Zaidi said that the decision reflected Biden’s “aggressive approach to cutting costs for consumers.” He noted that manufacturing groups like IECA had been pushing the administration for price relief, making common cause with climate advocates.

“You saw, even today, different manufacturers from around the country who represent a diversity of manufacturing interests here in the United States, raising concerns, asking the department to study the impact of expanded exports on reliability and on prices,” he said. 

In an interesting twist, many of the manufacturers who would benefit from a permanent halt to the LNG buildout have themselves been the target of campaigns by the very same Gulf Coast activists who pushed the pause. IECA member companies Mosaic and CF Industries operate some of the nation’s largest fertilizer plants in the polluted Louisiana region known as “Cancer Alley,” and they have been accused by environmental activists of harming nearby communities with toxic emissions. Natural gas is a key ingredient in fertilizer production, so these companies would take a direct hit if gas prices rise. As members of IECA, they’ve found themselves on the same side of the LNG debate as environmental groups like the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, which coordinated several protests against gas export terminals.

The United States has only been exporting LNG in large quantities for about eight years, but a growing body of data shows that these exports do influence domestic natural gas prices. The Energy Information Administration, for instance, has found that increasing LNG exports “results in upward pressure on U.S. natural gas prices.” The agency projected that, if additional LNG terminals are built and exports increase, domestic prices could increase by 25 percent by 2050. 

This has not always been the dominant point of view. In approving past LNG terminals, the Department of Energy assessed whether the facilities would promote the public interest. Over the years, the agency has commissioned a series of reports addressing the issue and repeatedly come to the conclusion that more exports would actually improve consumer welfare. An analysis conducted during the Trump administration found that, as exports increased, domestic production of natural gas also rose, mitigating the harm of supply shortages and ultimately resulting in more jobs and higher wages. The study also concluded that households that held shares of stock in LNG companies stood to benefit from their profits.

“These additional sources of income for U.S. consumers outweigh the income loss associated with higher energy prices,” the report noted.

That study, however, has been criticized for making faulty assumptions about families’ investments in natural gas exporters, and the Energy Department is expected to undertake a new round of analyses assessing both the climate and economic impacts of exporting LNG.

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To be sure, domestic prices won’t automatically and permanently increase as a result of U.S. exports. Rather, price trends in Europe and Asia will have a much stronger influence on prices stateside than they once did. This has always been the case in the oil market, which is why political decisions in the Middle East can cause gasoline prices to rise or fall in the United States — but it hasn’t been the case for natural gas until now. 

Tyson Slocum, an energy director at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, refers to this as “importing volatility.” By allowing gas producers to ship a substantial share of American supply overseas, the United States is signing up for a much more volatile and unpredictable energy market. If prices rise in Europe or Asia as a result of a war or political disruption, heating bills and manufacturing bills in the United States will rise as well.

“All it takes is one mishap, one outage, one issue, and you will experience significant price volatility during those moments,” said Slocum.

For example, when an explosion in the summer of 2022 shut down Freeport LNG, one of the nation’s largest export terminals, the loss of export capacity helped weigh down domestic gas prices and prevented high energy bills the following winter. Each time the company announced it was moving toward restarting the terminal, the cost of purchasing natural gas on the market rose; with every delay in the restart, it fell again.

Limited pipeline capacity is one reason for the price crunch. Large-scale natural gas buyers typically purchase capacity in a pipeline, locking in the transportation infrastructure needed to move natural gas from oil and gas fields to their facilities. As a result, utilities and manufacturing companies are often competing with LNG terminals for pipeline capacity. 

“LNG terminals have market power over us,” said Cicio, the manufacturers’ representative. “They get 20-year contracts from countries like China, and they lock in firm pipeline capacity for 20 years.”   

That means that even if natural gas production is at an all-time high, pipeline capacity can prove to be a bottleneck. With fewer pipelines being built, manufacturers are increasingly struggling to compete with LNG companies, Cicio added.  

These restrictions are leading to higher costs for consumers, analysts have found. Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank, looked at long-term natural gas prices and compared them against the prices since the pandemic. He found that U.S. consumers — including homeowners, utilities, and industrial customers — would have spent about $111 billion less on natural gas between September 2021 and December 2022 absent the price spikes that resulted from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when European countries abruptly ditched their Russia-provided gas and desperately sought it from elsewhere, including from U.S. exporters. 

“This is a way for the industry to siphon money out of consumers’ wallets and into the gas industry within the U.S.,” said Williams-Derry.

Critics of Biden’s pause argue the decision may affect international energy security, especially for America’s allies — like the NATO members who faced energy shortages after the sudden loss of Russian gas. “The Biden administration’s freeze on LNG projects is a gift to Putin,” Mike Sommers, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil and gas trade group in the U.S., wrote in a recent column. But the benefits of the LNG export industry’s growth to American national security, and international energy security, are growing outdated. 

For decades, Europe has imported cheap and abundant gas from Russia via pipeline. The energy relationship between the two geopolitical powers has given Russia political leverage over Europe — a dynamic that was thrown into particularly sharp relief when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Europe could only punish President Vladimir Putin so much for starting an unprovoked war, given that it continued to rely on Russian gas to heat its homes.

The LNG export industry, and even Biden himself, advocated for using natural gas exports as a bludgeon to beat back Russian influence in Europe. But since then Europe has been diversifying its gas resources, building out LNG import infrastructure, and stockpiling natural gas thanks to ever-larger imports of American gas. Its position now is far less precarious than it was in the early 2000s, or even than it was a couple of years ago. Last month, a long list of left-leaning European lawmakers signed an open letter to Biden, saying that Europe’s LNG demands are already being met by existing import infrastructure

“Europe should not be used as an excuse to expand exports that threaten our shared climate and have dire impacts on U.S. communities,” the European members wrote.

U.S. Representative Sean Casten, a Democrat from Illinois, is suspicious of industry claims, particularly as they apply to Europe in 2024. “We know that the forward contracts for the new gas that’s going in are primarily going to Asia, not to Europe,” he told Grist.

South Korea, Japan, India, and China are all growing gas markets for American LNG exporters. The industry’s chief focus isn’t international energy security — it’s making sure it has somewhere to sell its product, particularly as the U.S. continues to pivot to renewable sources of energy. (Representatives for the Natural Gas Supply Association and the Center for LNG, which represent LNG exporters, did not respond to a request for comment.)

“For the producing industry to survive, they have to export,” Casten said. “Their success depends on access to export markets.”  

While natural gas producers stand to benefit from more exports and price spikes, low-income American families bear the brunt of market expansion and volatility. Wolfe, the executive director of the ​​National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, said families signed up for energy assistance in record numbers over the last few years, and a record number are in debt to their utilities. In fiscal year 2023, 7.3 million households received some form of energy assistance — a 25 percent increase from the previous year.

“We’re worried,” said Wolfe. “The nation needs a better strategy to help families.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The unlikely coalition behind Biden’s liquefied natural gas pivot on Feb 8, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

But the “law” — in a plutocracy — protects some individuals far more than others. Take the top execs at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. Littlejohn had three separate stints working as an IRS contractor for Booz Allen, the last between 2017 and 2021. These execs would do their best, before Monday’s sentencing, to distance themselves from Littlejohn and his leaks.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the actions of this individual, who was active with the company years ago,” a Booz Allen spokesperson told the Washington Post. “We have zero tolerance for violations of the law and operate under the highest ethical and professional guidelines.”

But these professed law-abiding execs at Booz Allen, turns out, have themselves been playing exceptionally fast and loose with the law. Just last July, the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs announced that Booz Allen had “agreed to pay” Uncle Sam some $377.5 million “to resolve allegations” that the company had violated the False Claims Act and improperly billed “commercial and international costs to its government contracts.”

The difference between these Booz Allen misdeeds and the misdeeds of Charles Littlejohn? Booz Allen execs advanced their own private gain at public expense. Littlejohn did his leaking, his lawyers noted in their pre-sentencing filings, “out of a deep, moral belief that the American people had a right to know the information and sharing it was the only way to effect change.”

The Booz Allen settlement with the government does not require any prison time for any of the firm’s executives. Littlejohn, by contrast, now has to spend his next five years in prison, do another three years under probation, and perform 300 hours of community service. He also has to pay a $5,000 fine.

All this amounts to a perfectly justified penalty, federal prosecutors would have us believe, for Littlejohn’s heinous offense. The “extensive and ongoing” harm from his disclosures, they avow, remains “impossible to quantify.”

We can quantify, on the other hand, exactly how much our federal tax system’s current operations are costing the American public, thanks to the work that ProPublica has done with Littlejohn’s leaked disclosures.

One example: Since the start of this century, ProPublica reports, billionaire Jeff Bezos has had at least two years where he paid “not a penny in federal income taxes.” His fellow mega-billionaire Elon Musk enjoyed the same privileged status in 2018.

From 2014 through 2018, Bezos reported income of $4.22 billion and paid just 0.98 percent of his increased wealth during those years in federal taxes. Musk, for his part, paid just 3.27 percent of his wealth gains in taxes over the course of those years.

In those five years overall, ProPublica’s data crunching indicates, America’s 25 richest paid only 3.4 percent of what they added to their fortunes in federal tax.

Some perspective: Over those same years, 40-something Americans holding the “typical amount of wealth for people their age” paid almost as much in federal taxes — about $62,000 — as the $65,000 they added to their personal net worths.

How do we stop this pervasive perversion of tax justice? Simple. We could start by making basic data from tax returns available for public scrutiny. So argues Boston University’s Laurence Kotlikoff.

“Disclosure,” this economist notes, “could be an automatic enforcement device.”

And that disclosure doesn’t have to be particularly invasive. The information released need only be an individual’s income and tax liability, “figures that cannot be readily used to steal someone’s identity,” observes business journalist Anna Bernasek.

The United States, Bernasek points out, has actually had moments when the public could see just how much the richest among us were — and weren’t — paying in taxes. In 1923 and 1924, individual and corporate taxpayers had to reveal what they were paying out in federal income tax. Newspapers had “a field day,” notes Bernasek, publishing the tax liabilities of the famous and their corporations.

America’s rich would not be pleased. U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, himself one of the nation’s richest men, would flex his ample political muscles and soon get Congress to drop the disclosure mandate.

Today, a century later, we average taxpayers need to flex our own political muscles. Our wealthiest should no longer be able to keep private how precious little they’re paying at tax time.

Want to learn more about the Charles Littlejohn case and how you can help defray Littlejohn’s legal fees and expenses behind bars. Check the GoFundMe legal defense fund site that Littlejohn’s friends and supporters have just created online.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

The industry is poised for more massive growth: There are several other export projects awaiting approval from the Biden administration’s Department of Energy, and more in the pipeline beyond that. If approved, these facilities could almost double the nation’s export capacity by the end of the decade. The question of whether or not to approve this surge in exports has become one of the biggest climate issues President Biden faces as he begins his reelection campaign. 

The administration appeared to move toward answering that question this week. The Department of Energy announced on Friday that it would pause approvals for new LNG exports for several months while it reviews how it regulates them. The administration will develop a new approach over the coming year that will foreground the potential climate impacts of exporting natural gas, suspending approvals in the meantime. The decision doesn’t affect active export terminals.

“During this period, we will take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports,” said President Joe Biden in a statement about the measure. “This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time.” In a press call with reporters, senior administration officials noted that U.S. LNG export capacity has more than tripled since the Department of Energy first developed standards for deciding whether to ship gas overseas.

Environmental activists greeted the news of a pause as a victory for nearby residents and the climate. Roishetta Ozane, an activist in Louisiana who has organized to try to stop LNG terminals, said the news “shows that the government recognizes the need to protect the rights and well-being of [Gulf] communities.” Bill McKibben, the longtime climate activist who founded 350.org, said the decision meant Biden had “done more to check dirty energy … than any of his predecessors.”

But the ultimate outcome of the Biden administration’s pause on export approvals is far from certain. Gauging the public interest of new LNG exports is easier said than done, especially when it comes to how those exports affect the trajectory of global warming.

On the one hand, of course, natural gas is a fossil fuel, and burning it releases carbon dioxide. There’s no question that its use contributes to climate change — and that the raw emissions from U.S. LNG would be very large. Venture Global’s CP2 project in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, one of the largest proposed LNG terminals, could move enough gas to produce around 5.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide over its 30-year lifespan. That’s more than 20 times as much carbon as Alaska’s controversial Willow oil project, which Biden approved last year, according to an analysis by the Sierra Club.

However, each country that buys American LNG will be buying it to replace existing sources of energy. if the administration stops permitting new exports, the energy demand in Europe and Asia won’t go away—those countries will just use other sources to meet it. The ultimate impact of exporting gas on the world’s carbon budget — the fast-diminishing amount of carbon dioxide that can still be emitted if global warming is to be limited to internationally-agreed levels — depends on how exactly that substitution plays out. If, for example, the gas mostly replaces more carbon-intensive energy sources like coal, it might actually stretch that carbon budget further than it otherwise would have lasted.

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“The reason these export terminals are interesting is because it’s a way that the U.S. government can maybe have an effect on international emissions,” said Sean Smillie, an energy researcher who studied the global LNG market as part of a doctoral project at Carnegie Mellon University. “But we’re not really sure which direction that would go.”

In the case of Lake Charles LNG, one of the largest terminals awaiting approval from the Department of Energy, the exported gas would have a few different destinations. The company behind the project, Energy Transfer, has signed six long-term contracts to supply gas to various buyers. Four of those contracts would send gas to Asian countries including China, and two of them would sell it to oil traders like Shell, which would flip it to the highest bidder. Venture Global’s CP2 project, meanwhile, has inked three long-term supply contracts in Europe, three in Asia, and three with speculative traders. In order to determine the total climate impacts of exporting LNG, the Biden administration will have to calculate how all these contracts balance against each other. (Neither Venture Global nor Energy Transfer could be immediately reached for comment.)

“The question we’re trying to answer is just completely muddled,” said Arvind Ravikumar, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-director of a research group focusing on energy policy. “The answer is, ‘it depends.’ You have to carefully consider what’s happening in other countries. What are they doing with LNG?” 

This looks different in every country. Some buyers like China use LNG to replace coal for heating, which has a beneficial effect on the climate, since coal creates more carbon dioxide than natural gas does to produce the same amount of energy. India uses it as a feedstock for fertilizer production. Other countries like Germany are buying it to replace Russian gas that they stopped buying after Russia invaded Ukraine and to avoid having to restart shuttered coal plants. 

“The industry might say that that’s true everywhere,” said Ravikumar. “They’d say anyone who buys U.S. LNG replaces coal or dirtier gas. I don’t think that’s true.”

Ravikumar points out that countries such as South Korea and Japan buy LNG to generate electricity, which they could also theoretically get from carbon-free sources if they invested in solar or wind farms, or even built nuclear power plants. In those cases, there’s a solid argument that LNG exports slow down the energy transition.

Nowhere is this dilemma more vexing than in Europe. The continent has been the leading purchaser of LNG from the United States over the past two years, as countries such as Germany race to replace lost Russian gas. This export surge has helped the continent break its previous energy dependence and disentangle itself from Vladimir Putin’s regime. For this reason, gas industry groups in the U.S. say LNG exports are critical for ensuring global energy security.

“U.S. LNG provides energy security to our allies in Europe and around the globe and has helped minimize the largest European energy crisis in recent history,” said Charlie Riedl, the head of the Center for LNG, a liquefied gas trade association, in a November press release. “Limiting U.S. LNG exports will only cause higher energy costs at home and in Europe.” The statement came as Democrats in Congress pressured the Biden administration to reject new export applications.

But some experts say that Europe doesn’t need any more gas from the United States. The continent’s political leadership recently poured billions of dollars into heat pumps and renewable energy — mitigating the need for natural gas for both home heating and electricity. As a result, most analysts expect that European gas demand will fall over the coming years. By the time new gas shipments start flowing from proposed export terminals in 2026 or 2027, Germany might not even need them. Indeed, some argue the widespread availability of new cheap gas might encourage increased energy consumption, adding more emissions to the global carbon ledger.

“There is no reason to believe that Europe’s energy security depends on further expansion of LNG export capacity that would only come online towards the end of this decade,” said Felix Heilmann, a policy analyst at the German think tank Dezernat Zukunft who has studied the LNG industry.

This matches projections from the International Energy Agency, or IEA, a global energy research institution. The IEA said in its annual energy outlook last year that it expects global gas demand to peak by 2030, meaning “there is little headroom remaining for either pipeline or LNG trade to grow beyond then.” 

The question of timing is critical, since the climate impacts of new export terminals will extend far beyond the end of the decade. These terminals cost billions of dollars to build, and companies need to operate them for decades in order to reap back their initial investments. The same goes for the import terminals that countries such as South Korea and Pakistan are building to take American gas. Environmental groups argue that building more LNG infrastructure now will “lock in” a dependence on gas in many countries, forcing them to keep burning fossil fuels even as renewables expand. In the call with reporters, a senior Biden administration official said the potential for this dependence was one of the administration’s concerns in the pause.

This might not be as much of a concern in Europe, since countries like Germany have invested in cheaper and more flexible floating import terminals that don’t need to operate for decades. In other parts of the world, though, there is a risk that LNG might slow down the adoption of solar in countries like Pakistan.

“If you build an LNG terminal today, it’s not like it’s going to operate for five years and then shut down,” said Ravikumar. “Between now and 2030, at the global level, on average, LNG might reduce global emissions compared to a counterfactual scenario, but 20 years from now, it might not.”

For Smillie, the researcher who studied LNG at Carnegie Mellon, that uncertainty will make the Biden administration’s analysis very difficult. The export question has become a divisive issue in climate politics, but the effects of a U.S. policy in either direction won’t be clear for years — and they depend largely on decisions in other countries besides the United States.

“A huge part of the story is other countries’ climate policies and climate laws,” he said. “At the end of the day, that’s what will determine whether these LNG terminals have a positive or negative effect on the climate. That’s not really something we can predict.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The big question behind Biden’s liquefied natural gas pause on Jan 26, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The current high-pitched ideological battle over undocumented immigration at the US-Mexico border overlooks a deeper problem: the failure of the legal immigration system to provide enough visas for the large number of unskilled workers seeking jobs in the low-skill sectors of the US economy.  The jobs are clearly there, which is why so many workers are coming;  the question is:  why aren’t there enough visas for them?

The short answer is:  Because the legal immigration system tends to favor high-skilled workers in IT and engineering fields.  There is a plethora of visa programs available to accommodate these workers – either as full-time employees or as contract workers.  About 100,000 so-called “employment” visas (categories E1, E2 and E3) are available for the former category, but far more are available for those coming as temporary contract workers.  In fact, high-technology industries are aggressively recruiting these latter workers through a veritable alphabet soup of visa programs, including H-1B, O-1 and others – for a preliminary 3-year period that is easily renewable – and often, over time, leads to permanent residency or a “green card.”

But unskilled and semi-skilled workers – while badly needed in industries ranging from construction to landscaping to food service and family care – don’t have that option.  The legal immigration system offers them just 5,000 visas annually. So, with intense demand in the labor market, especially post-pandemic, and with a nod and a wink from many employers, they come anyway, hoping to gain entry, by hook or by crook.

And under Biden, unlike under his former boss, Barack Obama, they’ve been all but waived in – in record numbers. It’s become a huge problem for Democrats and left unchecked, could even cost Biden the election.

This visa issue has been debated for years – and was supposed to have been addressed during past immigration reform debates – and in some of the proposed legislation. that has nearly passed the US Congress – most notably, in 2007, under George W. Bush and again, in 2012, under Obama.  But the bills – and the carefully crafted compromises they reflect – never made it to the president’s desk, because one or both houses of Congress tend to nix them.

Democrats typically blame the Republicans and “nativism” for these breakdowns.  But the fact is, antipathy exists on both sides of the aisle toward bringing large numbers of unskilled into the US on a temporary contract basis – as basically. “guest” workers.  In theory, our immigration system could treat these workers the same way we treat the skilled ones – with 3-year renewable contracts without guaranteed residency rights. But both sides of the debate, for different reasons, object to the idea.

For those on the left, it’s because they view guest workers as a throwback to the Mexican “bracero” program that brought hundreds of thousands of farmworkers to the US after World War II.  Despite a treaty agreement between the two nations, which supposedly guaranteed limited labor rights,  a large number of these braceros were ruthlessly exploited by their employers with harsh working conditions and low wages – and indeed, quite a few never even received their meager wages, as promised.

For the left, a “modern” guest worker program is just Bracero 2.0 – inherently exploitative, leaving workers captive to a single employer, without a path to residency and without political rights of any kind.

The right, on the other hand, thinks guest workers are just illegal workers in disguise.  They suspect that many will come and then refuse to leave once their contracts expire.  In practice, their departure won’t be enforced, just as it isn’t with hundreds of thousands of visa “overstayers” – those that come on legal visas, usually as tourists, and then refuse to go home each year.  In fact, about half of the “illegal” immigrants in the US today are visa overstayers, not people who crossed the US-Mexico border illegally.

So, for the right, unless some closely monitored enforcement is in place, a large share of guest workers might not leave, either, or will find a way to bleed out of the program, undetected.  We’ll just get another illegal immigration invasion, they fear.

This is largely hysteria.  In fact, there are already a number of smaller unskilled “guest” workers programs in place; they’re small and strictly seasonal, and workers do return home as expected.  The two most prominent programs – H-2A and H-2B – bring in about 25,000-40,000 workers annually as fruit and vegetable pickers, fishermen and tourist workers; there’s also the program, billed as a STEM student travel program that is also a disguised guest worker program; thousands more come in through this program, to work for about 10 months maximum; as contract workers, they’re also supposed to leave, and they do, in fact.

So, the right’s argument about temporary workers becoming illegal ones through non-enforcement is indeed highly exaggerated, but it’s also true that these programs are small and tend to be temporally limited and geographically concentrated, so managing them is fairly easy – far easier than a large-scale program might be.

But for the left, major objections to these programs, even the current smaller ones, remain.  Labor rights advocates have fought agricultural employers tooth-and-nail for years to ensure that H-2A workers get paid a decent wage – and are provided housing and other amenities.  Uneasy compromises have been worked out.  There’s also the issue of whether these programs depress wages for the larger labor market for native-born workers; the evidence suggests that they probably do, one reason, historically labor unions have opposed these smaller guest worker programs as well as proposals to set up one that might give a much larger number of workers coming illegally a temporary visa to stay and work.

Despite these recurring policy battles, there have been efforts to figure out a way for a guest worker program to become both less exploitative – and more enforceable – to satisfy possible objections on the left and right.

For example, guest workers might not be required to work for just one employer but could move from one to the next and be free to offer their services to the highest bidder; in effect, that would give them bargaining leverage.  On the other hand, through strict registration with their consulates, they might be carefully tracked and their movements monitored to ensure that they comply with requirements to leave after their last contract had expired.  And withholding a percentage of their wages until they do indeed return, has long been a feature of these programs.

To further sweeten the deal, however, these same workers might also be allowed to renew their visa, automatically, to extend their stay for another three years, just as skilled workers do.  In effect, we’d be harmonizing our treatment of all temporary contract workers, regardless of their skill level.

Progressive immigration advocates – and most Democrats – still don’t like the sound of this proposed “Z visa” program.  Why?  Because it’s not a ticket to permanent residency,  and eventual citizenship and the right to vote – and to vote for Democrats, presumably.  So, it may not have the long-term political benefit that Democrats hope to achieve with it.  But here’s the rub:  many undocumented immigrants, who currently must huddle in the shadows, living in constant fear of arrest and deportation, to say nothing of those stranded at the border, and left to anguish in detention, without work, very well might support the program – wholeheartedly – and in fact, there’s anecdotal evidence that they do – or would – if they actually had a voice in the matter.

It’s long overdue that both sides give them this voice.  While both sides are loath to admit it, the guest worker issue – not the more high-pitched debate over border security, or interior enforcement – has largely been responsible for sabotaging comprehensive immigration reform to date.  It’s the elephant in the room that everyone pretends doesn’t exist, when it could very well solve the entire controversy, if only the two sides could set aside some of their deeply held ideological beliefs and deal in a more practical way with the visa, labor rights and enforcement issues at stake.

The right needs to overcome its nativist opposition to more foreign born workers generally while the left needs to stop insisting that all temporary workers should be guaranteed – up front – permanent residency and a path to citizenship.  That doesn’t happen with skilled workers and there’s no inherent reason it should happen with the unskilled ones.  Right now, because neither side has the political will – and courage – to address these issues, without prejudice, the debate has become stuck on enforcement alone – and border enforcement, specially – because it’s an easier “sell.”

Trump’s “wall” – it actually long predates him, and the original funding for it was passed with bipartisan support back in 2006  – has become a powerful but thoroughly exaggerated  symbol of either “national security” or “xenophobia.”  It’s a vicious circle”  When the right continues to push enforcement at all costs, the left increasingly demands an open border.  But immigration is not fundamentally a police problem or even a civil rights issue.  All countries work to control their borders, and many countries in Europe and the Middle East, especially, have foreign guest worker programs in place to allow badly needed laborers into the country legally without necessarily insisting that native-born citizens shoulder an unlimit burden for them.  In the end, it’s a question of policy balance:  how to fulfill the interests of businesses and workers, governments and citizens, as fairly and humanely as possible.

It sounds commonsensical, doesn’t it?  It is, in fact, but without more thoughtful and creative leadership on both sides of the aisle, we may never actually get there.

The post Behind the Immigration Crisis:  No Visas for Unskilled Workers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stewart Lawrence.

Photograph Source: Michael Vadon – CC BY-SA 4.0

Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s longtime leader, plans to retire by the end of January 2024. He cited “health reasons” when he announced his departure three days before the organization’s civil fraud trial got underway in Manhattan.

New York authorities have accused the NRA, LaPierre and three of his current or former colleagues of squandering millions of dollars the gun group had obtained from its members.

As a nonprofit accounting scholar who has followed the NRA’s finances for years, I believe the organization is not only at a legal crossroads but also at a financial one.

NRA business model

To see why the NRA finds itself in this difficult spot, it helps to first see how its business model allows for only a small margin of error. Despite the nonprofit’s long history– it was founded in 1871 by Civil War veterans who fought for the Union – the NRA has never had enough money stowed away to inoculate it from financial problems.

Consider the NRA’s circumstances in terms of its unrestricted net assets, which reflect the money an organization has available to spend after accounting for its commitments to donors.

Comparing this with the scale of an organization’s annual budget can provide a sense of how much of a rainy day fund is on hand.

In 2015, the NRA had unrestricted net assets that constituted just 9% of its total expenses. In contrast, that same year, the AARP, another long-standing social welfare organization with millions of members, had unrestricted net assets that amounted to 87% of its expenses.

In other words, the NRA’s coffers reflected a circumstance more in line with an employee living paycheck to paycheck than an heir living off a trust fund. For this reason, the NRA has always relied on its members’ annual dues to cover its costs, and it is less able to weather financial storms that can last years.

The controversies over the NRA’s spending and the organization’s political entanglements that have swirled around since 2016 constitute that kind of turbulence.

Declining financial fortunes

Following its substantial spending spree during the 2016 election cycle, the NRA found itself needing to dig out of a hole, with a budget deficit of more than US$40 million.

Subsequent years saw fluctuations in spending along with ongoing challenges to generate sufficient revenues to keep up with spending.

In recent years, the organization’s approach to its budget shortfall has been to cut costs, or at least some of its costs.

Spending on programming went from nearly $176 million in 2017 to just $73 million in 2022, its most recent reporting year.

Its traditionally core programs have taken the biggest hit: Spending on education and training fell from $7.7 million to $3.2 million; law enforcement support dropped from $3.8 million to $1.8 million; recreational shooting slipped from $7.2 million to $5.1 million; and field services declined from $11.9 million to $1.3 million.

Back in the red

The NRA hasn’t cut all of its spending, however.

During the same time frame, the NRA’s budget for administrative legal costs ballooned, from $4 million in 2017 to over $40 million in each of the past three reporting years, with this amount hitting $43.7 million in 2022.

The organization’s shrinking programming budget helped eliminate its deficit, at least for a time.

Thanks to its reduced spending, the NRA was able to finish the year with a surplus in both 2020 and 2021. However, that surplus, which came from slashing costs – particularly those geared toward core programs for members – proved short-lived.

The organization has also seen the ranks of its members dwindle. Fewer members mean less revenue from dues. In 2022, revenues were down by more than $100 million from their 2017 levels, a drop of more than one-third.

The declining revenues meant that, despite its trimmed-down budget, the NRA was back in the red in 2022 and again facing a negative unrestricted balance in net assets.

What’s next?

The NRA, in short, is in a financial spiral. Its shrinking budget has begotten a shrinking member base, leading to an even smaller budget. It may be hard to stem.

The organization has pared what it spends on its programs to the bone.

While there are no easy answers for what the organization can do about its financial predicament, it’s not the only pressing question the organization faces.

How long will the NRA’s remaining members stay loyal to it? When will high legal costs subside enough to ease the budgetary pressures? What does a smaller NRA mean for its ability to flex its political muscle?

Despite its many challenges, the NRA’s imminent changing of the guard does offer an opportunity to make more drastic shifts in its priorities, spending approaches and the pitches it makes to members and donors.

Further, with its large legal budget being the last remaining area ripe for cost cutting, perhaps the NRA’s next generation of leaders will set the stage for the organization to rid itself of its oversized legal burdens and refocus on core programs.

What is clear, however, is that financial constraints will dictate much of whatever course the new leadership seeks to chart.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brian Mittendorf.

This migration won’t happen in a uniform manner, because migration never does. In large part this is because young adults move around much more than elderly people, since the former have better job prospects. It’s likely that this time-tested trend will hold true as Americans migrate away from climate disasters: The phenomenon has already been observed in places like New Orleans, where elderly residents were less likely to evacuate during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and in Puerto Rico, where the median age has jumped since 2017’s Hurricane Maria, as young people leave the U.S. territory for the mainland states.

A new paper published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a glimpse at the shape and scale of this demographic shift as climate change accelerates. Using sea-level rise models and migration data gleaned from the latest U.S. Census, the paper projects that outmigration from coastal areas could increase the median age in those places by as much as 10 years over the course of this century. That’s almost as much as the difference between the median age in the United States and the median age in Japan, which is among the world’s most elderly countries.

Climate-driven migration promises a generational realignment of U.S. states, as coastal parts of Florida and Georgia grow older and receiving states such as Texas and Tennessee see an influx of young people. It could also create a vicious cycle of decline in coastal communities, as investors and laborers relocate from vulnerable coasts to inland areas — and in doing so incentivize more and more working-age adults to follow in their footsteps.

“When we’re thinking about the effect of climate migration on population change, we have to think beyond just the migrants themselves and start thinking about the second order effects,” said Mathew Hauer, a professor of geography at Florida State University and the lead author of the paper.

In his previous research, Hauer has produced some of the only nationwide climate migration projections for the United States. His previous papers have modeled a slow shift away from coastlines and toward inland southern cities such as Atlanta, Georgia, and Dallas, Texas. Millions of people could end up joining this migratory movement by 2100. The new paper attempts to add a novel dimension to that demographic analysis.

“It’s a really large amount of aging in these extremely vulnerable areas,” said Hauer. “The people who are left behind are much older than we would expect them to be, and conversely, the areas that gain a lot of people, they get younger.”

The knock-on effects of this kind of demographic shift raise thorny problems for aging communities. A lower share of working-age adults in a given city means fewer people giving birth, which can sap future growth. It also means fewer construction workers, fewer doctors, fewer waiters, and a weaker labor force overall. Property values and tax revenue often decline as growth stalls, leading to an erosion of public services. All these factors in turn push more people to leave the coast — even those who aren’t themselves affected by flooding from sea-level rise.

“If Miami starts losing people, and there’s fewer people in Miami, then there’s a lower demand for every occupation, and the likelihood that somebody moves into Miami as opposed to moving to another location goes down as well,” said Hauer.  “Maybe like a retiree from Syracuse, New York … who before might have thought about retiring in Miami, now they decide they’re going to retire in Asheville.” 

This vicious cycle, which Hauer and his co-authors call “demographic amplification,” could supercharge climate migration patterns. The authors project that around 1.5 million people will move away from coastal areas under a future scenario with around 2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, but when they account for the domino effect of the age transition, that estimate jumps to 15 million. Hauer said that even he was surprised by the scale of the change.

The most-affected state will be Florida, which has long been one of the nation’s premier retirement destinations, as well as the coastlines of Georgia and South Carolina. Millions of people in these areas face significant risk from sea-level rise over the rest of the century, and even parts of fast-growing Florida will start to shrink as the population ages. Charleston County, South Carolina, alone could lose as many as 250,000 people by 2100, according to Hauer and his co-authors. 

The biggest winners under this age-based model, meanwhile, are inland cities such as Nashville and Orlando, which aren’t too far from vulnerable coastal regions but face far less danger from flooding. The county that includes Austin, Texas, could gain more than half a million people, equivalent to a population increase of almost 50 percent. Many of these places have already boomed in recent years. Austin, for instance, saw an influx of young newcomers from California during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new study offers welcome insight into the demographic consequences of climate migration, according to Jola Ajibade, an associate professor of environmental science at Emory University who was not involved in the new research. But she cautioned that there are other factors that might determine who leaves a coastal area, most notably how much money that area spends to adapt to sea-level rise and flooding.

“I give [the researchers] kudos for even leading us in this direction, for trying to bring demographic differentiation into the question of who might move, and where,” said Ajibade. “But exposure is not the only thing you have to model, you also have to model vulnerability and adaptive capacity, and those things were not necessarily modeled. That could change the result.”

The authors note that they can’t account for these adaptation investments, and neither can they track migrants who might move within one county rather than from one county to another. Even so, Hauer says, the paper offers a clear signal that the future scale of climate migration is a lot larger than just the people who are displaced from their homes by flooding. Both coastal and inland areas, he said, need to be prepared for much larger demographic changes than they might be expecting.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Study: Climate migration will leave the elderly behind on Jan 12, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

Figure One: Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers…throw them into darkness for a few hours and then you just sit back and watch the pattern. 

Figure Two: And this pattern is always the same? 

Figure One: With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find…and it’s themselves. And all we need do is sit back…and watch…and let them destroy themselves.

— “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Twilight Zone

Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it?

All the signs seem to point in this direction.

For years now, the government has been pushing us to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.

This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by—has manifested itself in the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today.

Why is the Deep State engineering this societal madness? What’s in it for the government?

What is playing out before us is a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps the populace fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of standing united in defense of our freedoms.

It’s not conspiratorial.

It’s a power play.

Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, understood the dynamics behind this power play.

In the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Serling imagined a world in which the powers-that-be carry out a social experiment to see how long it would take before the members of a small American neighborhood, frightened by a sudden loss of electric power and caught up in fears of the unknown, will transform into an irrational mob and turn on each other.

It doesn’t take long at all.

Likewise, in Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind (produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s studio), unexplained crises lead to a technological blackout that leaves the populace disconnected, disoriented, isolated, suspicious, and under attack from mysterious ailments and each other.

As one of Leave the World’s characters speculates, the culprit behind the escalating catastrophes, which range from WiFi outages and mysterious health ailments to cities under siege from rogue forces, may be the result of a military campaign intended to destabilize a nation by forcing people to turn against each other.

It’s really not so far-flung a scenario when you consider some of the many ways the government already has the ability to manufacture crises in order to sow fear, fuel hysteria, destabilize the nation and institute martial law.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture health crises. Long before COVID-19 locked down the nation, the U.S. government was creating lethal viruses and unleashing them on an unsuspecting public.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture civil unrest and political upheaval. Since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has been using agent provocateurs to infiltrate activist groups in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” them.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture economic instability. As the national debt continues to rise upwards of $34 trillion, with little attempt by federal agencies to curtail spending, it stands as the single-most pressing threat to the economy.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture environmental disasters. Deployed in 1947, Project Cirrus, an early precursor to HAARP, the government’s weather-altering agency, attempted to disable a hurricane as it was moving out to sea. Instead of weakening the storm, however, the government steered it straight into Georgia, resulting in millions of dollars in damaged properties.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture communications blackouts. Internet and cell phone kill switches enable the government to shut down communications at a moment’s notice. It’s a practice that has been used before in the U.S. In 2005, cell service was disabled in four major New York tunnels (reportedly to avert potential bomb detonations via cell phone). In 2009, those attending President Obama’s inauguration had their cell signals blocked (again, same rationale). And in 2011, San Francisco commuters had their cell phone signals shut down (this time, to thwart any possible protests over a police shooting of a homeless man).

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture terrorist attacks. Indeed, the FBI has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture propaganda aimed at mind control and psychological warfare. Not long ago, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation came in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military had been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users. Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare (or psy ops) can take many forms: mind control experiments, behavioral nudging, propaganda. In fact, the CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down.

We must never forget that the government no longer exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.

Rather, “we the people” are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Think about it: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, trap and control us.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms.

It’s telling that in Leave the World Behind, before disaster strikes, the main characters—on their way to a family vacation—are utterly oblivious, connected to their electronic devices and insulated from each other and the world around them. Adding to the disconnect, the family’s teen daughter, Rose, is fixated on binge-watching episodes of Friends, even as the world falls apart around them. As TV critic Jen Chaney explains, the sitcom’s presence in the story “underlines how human beings crave escapism at the expense of embracing the actual present, a different way of ‘leaving the world behind.’”

We’re in a similar escapist bubble, suffering from a “crisis of the now,” which keeps us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.

Professor Jacques Ellul studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.

“Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man’s capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandists, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks.”

Yet in addition to being distracted by our electronic devices and diverted by bread-and-circus entertainment spectacles, we are also being polarized by political theater, which aims to keep us divided and at war with each other.

This is the underlying cautionary tale of Leave the World Behind and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”: we are being manipulated by forces beyond our control.

A popular meme circulating a while back described it this way:

“If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government has never stopped shaking the jar.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Photo by Sean Ferigan

In 2024, former President Donald Trump will face some of his greatest challenges: criminal court cases, primary opponents and constitutional challenges to his eligibility to hold the office of president again. The Colorado Supreme Court has pushed that latter piece to the forefront, ruling on Dec. 19, 2023, that Trump cannot appear on Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot because of his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

The reason is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended. Section 3 of that amendment wrote into the Constitution the principle President Abraham Lincoln set out just three months after the first shots were fired in the Civil War. On July 4, 1861, he spoke to Congress, declaring that “when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”

The text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states, in full:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

To me as a scholar of constitutional law, each sentence and sentence fragment captures the commitment made by the nation in the wake of the Civil War to govern by constitutional politics. People seeking political and constitutional changes must play by the rules set out in the Constitution. In a democracy, people cannot substitute force, violence or intimidation for persuasion, coalition building and voting.

The power of the ballot

The first words of Section 3 describe various offices that people can only hold if they satisfy the constitutional rules for election or appointment. The Republicans who wrote the amendment repeatedly declared that Section 3 covered all offices established by the Constitution. That included the presidency, a point many participants in framing, ratifying and implementation debates over constitutional disqualification made explicitly, as documented in the records of debate in the 39th Congress, which wrote and passed the amendment.

Senators, representatives and presidential electors are spelled out because some doubt existed when the amendment was debated in 1866 as to whether they were officers of the United States, although they were frequently referred to as such in the course of congressional debates.

No one can hold any of the offices enumerated in Section 3 without the power of the ballot. They can only hold office if they are voted into it – or nominated and confirmed by people who have been voted into office. No office mentioned in the first clause of Section 3 may be achieved by force, violence or intimidation.

A required oath

The next words in Section 3 describe the oath “to support [the] Constitution” that Article 6 of the Constitution requires all office holders in the United States to take.

The people who wrote Section 3 insisted during congressional debates that anyone who took an oath of office, including the president, were subject to Section 3’s rules. The presidential oath’s wording is slightly different from that of other federal officers, but everyone in the federal government swears to uphold the Constitution before being allowed to take office.

These oaths bind officeholders to follow all the rules in the Constitution. The only legitimate government officers are those who hold their offices under the constitutional rules. Lawmakers must follow the Constitution’s rules for making laws. Officeholders can only recognize laws that were made by following the rules – and they must recognize all such laws as legitimate.

This provision of the amendment ensures that their oaths of office obligate officials to govern by voting rather than violence.

Defining disqualification

Section 3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Legal authorities from the American Revolution to the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred when two or more people resisted a federal law by force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose.

Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and other events were insurrections, even when the goal was not overturning the government.

What these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and intimidation.

These words in the amendment declare that those who turn to bullets when ballots fail to provide their desired result cannot be trusted as democratic officials. When applied specifically to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, the amendment declares that those who turn to violence when voting goes against them cannot hold office in a democratic nation.

A chance at clemency

The last sentence of Section 3 announces that forgiveness is possible. It says “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” – the ineligibility of individuals or categories of people to hold office because of having participated in an insurrection or rebellion.

For instance, Congress might remove the restriction on office-holding based on evidence that the insurrectionist was genuinely contrite. It did so for repentant former Confederate General James Longstreet .

Or Congress might conclude in retrospect that violence was appropriate, such as against particularly unjust laws. Given their powerful anti-slavery commitments and abolitionist roots, I believe that Republicans in the House and Senate in the late 1850s would almost certainly have allowed people who violently resisted the fugitive slave laws to hold office again. This provision of the amendment says that bullets may substitute for ballots and violence for voting only in very unusual circumstances.

A clear conclusion

Taken as a whole, the structure of Section 3 leads to the conclusion that Donald Trump is one of those past or present government officials who by violating his oath of allegiance to the constitutional rules has forfeited his right to present and future office.

Trump’s supporters say the president is neither an “officer under the United States” nor an “officer of the United States” as specified in Section 3. Therefore, they say, he is exempt from its provisions.

But in fact, both common sense and history demonstrate that Trump was an officer, an officer of the United States and an officer under the United States for constitutional purposes. Most people, even lawyers and constitutional scholars like me, do not distinguish between those specific phrases in ordinary discourse. The people who framed and ratified Section 3 saw no distinction. Exhaustive research by Trump supporters has yet to produce a single assertion to the contrary that was made in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Yet scholars John Vlahoplus and Gerard Magliocca are daily producing newspaper and other reports asserting that presidents are covered by Section 3.

Significant numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate agreed that Donald Trump violated his oath of office immediately before, during and immediately after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Most Republican senators who voted against his conviction did so on the grounds that they did not have the power to convict a president who was no longer in office. Most of them did not dispute that Trump participated in an insurrection. A judge in Colorado also found that Trump “engaged in insurrection,” which was the basis for the state’s Supreme Court ruling barring him from the ballot.

Constitutional democracy is rule by law. Those who have demonstrated their rejection of rule by law may not apply, no matter their popularity. Jefferson Davis participated in an insurrection against the United States in 1861. He was not eligible to become president of the U.S. four years later, or to hold any other state or federal office ever again. If Davis was barred from office, then the conclusion must be that Trump is too – as a man who participated in an insurrection against the United States in 2021.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Why 14th Amendment Bars Trump From Office: a Constitutional Law Scholar Explains Principle Behind Colorado Supreme Court Ruling appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mark A. Graber.

"Since his arrival at Prison No. 5, he has been held in cell block K1. It's not a solitary confinement area, but he has had to share the cell with two or sometimes three inmates, some of whom showed signs of mental illness,” his wife, Le Bich Vuong, told RFA Vietnamese shortly after visiting him. 

“They keep swearing, and they often scold him and insult him,” she said. Their behavior is seriously hurting his mental health, she said.

In April, the Hanoi People’s Court sentenced Nguyen Lan Thang, a long-time contributor of blog posts on politics and society to Radio Free Asia’s Vietnamese service, to six years in prison and two years of probation.

Authorities arrested him in July 2022 based on allegations that he posted videos on Facebook and YouTube that were said to “oppose” the Vietnamese Communist Party.

He did not appeal the verdict and was transferred to serve his jail term on June 15.

Vuong said that even when her husband is resting, inmates swear at him and incite him to fight with them or to file petitions to denounce prison guards,” she said. When he did not follow their request, these people insulted him with foul language.

Terrorizing other inmates

Vietnamese prison guards are known to use loyal inmates to terrorize others, especially political prisoners. The practice allows them to plausibly deny responsibility for a prisoner’s mistreatment.

After the visit, Thang’s family complained to the prison and requested that management take measures to improve the situation, including moving him to another cell. However, the management responded that he should deal with the situation because the prison has limited facilities.

According to two former prisoners who were held at Prison No. 5, cell block K1 is a temporary place for newly arrived male prisoners. These inmates are usually transferred to other divisions after a few days or a few weeks. Political prisoners are usually held in cell block K3 if they are men and cell block K4 if they are women.

Former political prisoner Nguyen Van Dien, who had been held in K1 for more than four years until his release at the end of February, told RFA that it had the best facilities among all the cell blocks. It even had sports facilities for inmates, he said.

However, not every inmate has access to K1 facilities.

Vuong said she did not understand why her husband had been held in K1 for the past six months.

He was allowed to leave his cell once a month to see his family and always had to stay in the cell at all other times, she said, adding that he hasn’t had access to the sports area.

Thang requested to be allowed to do prison labor to avoid staying in the stuffy cell all the time, but his request was rejected.

Denials

RFA contacted the prison by telephone and a staff member who refused to identify himself denied all of Thang’s claims, saying that his prison stay has been conducted according to regulations and the law. 

The staff member recommended contacting the Ministry of Public Security’s Department of Prison Management for detailed responses to questions.

The staff member also said that cell block K1 held prisoners with sentences ranging from eight months to life, and was not a transitory cell block as the previous prisoners claimed.

According to human rights lawyer Dang Dinh Manh, who fled Vietnam this year and currently resides in the United States, it is clear that Thang has been mistreated and retaliated against for his resilience. 

"There are no legal provisions that allow holding normal inmates with mentally ill inmates,” he said. “Banning prisoners who don't violate rules and regulations from coming out of their cells to do physical exercises and plant trees is also illegal. … These [practices] obviously violate not only regulations on prisoner management but also human rights. They should be condemned."

Thang’s treatment in prison was “no surprise” because he is being targeted as a political prisoner, Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at New York-based Human Rights Watch, told RFA.

“Guards' use of so-called trustee prisoners to terrorize political prisoners is particularly common since the prison officials will then claim they are not responsible,” he said. 

“In fact, everything that goes on inside the prison is strictly controlled by the warden and their guards, which means that what is happening to Nguyen Lan Thang is no doubt international harassment and abuse."

In addition, Thang has also been unable to access any outside information.

According to his family, Thang said that he had sent them some letters in July and August, but they had not received them yet. His family also sent him letters and books many times, but due to the prison's time-consuming censorship protocols, he was not updated on his family's information and he has no books to read.

Vuong said that her family was preparing to send a petition to the Prison Management Police Department, the Thanh Hoa Provincial People's Procuracy, and Prison No. 5, requesting an investigation into Thang's allegations.

His family also requested the prison to move him to cell block K3, where prisoners are allowed to carry out some activities, including physical exercise and planting trees.

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

Just months before the outbreak of the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza after the deadly assault on southern Israel by Hamas resistance fighters, Australian investigative journalist and researcher Anthony Loewenstein published an extraordinarily timely book, The Palestine Laboratory.

In it he warned that a worst-case scenario — “long feared but never realised, is ethnic cleansing against occupied Palestinians or population transfer, forcible expulsion under the guise of national security”.

Or the claimed fig leaf of “self defence”, the obscene justification offered by beleaguered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his two-month war of vengeance, death and destruction unleashed upon the people of Palestine, both in the Gaza Strip and the Occupied West Bank that has killed at least 14,850 Gazans — the majority of them women and children — and more than 218 West Bank Palestinians.

• READ MORE: Israel-Hamas war live: PM says 12 Thai captives released amid Gaza truce
• Prisoners, captives set to be released after Gaza truce takes hold

As Loewenstein had warned in his 265-page exposé on the Israeli armaments and surveillance industry and how the Zionist nation “exports the technology of occupation around the world”, a catastrophic war could trigger an overwhelming argument within Israel that Palestinians were “undermining the state’s integrity”.

That catastrophe has indeed arrived. But in the process as part of growing worldwide protests in support of an immediate ceasefire and calls for a “free Palestine” long-term solution, Israel has exposed itself as a cruel, ruthless and morally corrupt state prepared to slaughter women and children, attack hospital and medical workers, kill journalists and shun international norms of military conflict to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas, the elected government of Gaza.

Interviewed by Al Jazeera today after a four-day temporary truce between Israel and Hamas took effect, author Loewenstein described the conflict as “apocalyptic” and the most devastating in almost 80 years since the Second World War.

He also blamed the death and destruction on Western countries that had allowed the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to “get away with things that no other country could because of total global impunity”.

‘Genocide Joe’
The United States, led by a feeble and increasingly lame duck President Joe Biden – “genocide Joe”, as some US protesters have branded him — and several Western countries have lost credibility over any debate about global human rights.

As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan says, the US and the West have enabled the ethnic cleansing and displayed a double standard by condemning Hamas for its atrocities on October 7 while giving Israel a blank cheque for its crimes against humanity and war crimes in both Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.

In fact, as Erdoğan has increasingly condemned the Zionists, he has branded Israel as a “terror state” and says that Israeli leaders should be tried for war crimes at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

It has also been disturbing that President Biden has publicly repeated Israeli lies in the conflict and Western media has often disseminated these falsehoods.

Media analysts say there is systemic “bias in favour of Israel” which is “irreparably damaging” the credibility of some news agencies and outlets considered “mainstream” in the eyes of Arabs and others.

Loewenstein warned in his book before the conflict began that “an Israeli operation might be undertaken to ensure a mass exodus, with the prospect of Palestinians returning to their homes a remote possibility” (p. 211).

Many critics fear the bottom line for Israel’s war on Palestine, is not just the elimination of Hamas — which was elected the government of Gaza in 2006 — but the destruction of the enclave’s infrastructure, hence the savage assault on 25 of the Strip’s 32 hospitals (including the Indonesian Hospital) and bombing of 49 percent of the housing for 2.3 million people.

Loewenstein reports:

“In a 2016 poll conducted by [the] Pew Research Centre, nearly half of Israeli Jews supported the transfer or expulsion of Arabs. And some 60 percent of Israeli Jews backed complete separation from Arabs, according to a study in 2022 by the Israeli Democracy Institute. The majority of Israeli Jews polled online in 2022 supported the expulsion of people accused of disloyalty to the state, a policy advocated by popular far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir (p. 211).

Dangerous escalation
Loewenstein saw the reelection in November 2022 of Netanyahu as Prime Minister and as head of the most right-wing coalition in the Israel’s history as ushering in a dangerous escalation of existential threats facing Palestinians.

The author cites liberal Israeli columnist and journalist Gideon Levy in Haaretz reminding his readers of “an uncomfortable truth” after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Levy wrote that the long-held Israeli belief that military power “was all that matters to stay alive , was a lie” (p. 206). Levy wrote”

“The lesson Israel should be learning from Ukraine is the opposite. Military power is not enough, it is impossible to survive alone, we need true international support, which can’t be bought just be developing drones and drop bombs.”

Levy argued that the “age of the Jewish state paralysing the world when it cries “anti-semitism” was coming to a close.

The daily television scenes — especially on Al Jazeera and TRT World News, arguably offering the most balanced, comprehensive and nuanced coverage of the massacres — have borne witness to the rogue status of Israel.

Turkey’s President Erdoğan has been one of the strongest critics of Netanyahu’s war machine, warning that Israel’s leaders will be made accountable for their war crimes.

His condemnation has been paralleled by multiple petitions and actions seeking International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutions against Israeli leaders, including an arrest warrant for Netanyahu himself.

Toxic laboratory
According to Loewenstein, Israel’s “Palestine laboratory” and its toxic ideology thrives on global disruption and violence. As he says:

“The worsening climate crisis will benefit Israel’s defence sector in a future where nation-states do not respond with active measures to reduce the impacts of surging temperatures but instead ghetto-ise themselves, Israeli-style. What this means in practice is higher walls and tighter borders, greater surveillance of refugees, facial recognition, drones, smart fences, and biometric databases (p. 207).”

By 2025, Loewenstein points out, the border surveillance industrial complex is estimated to become worth US$68 billion, and Israeli companies such as Elbeit Systems are “guaranteed to be among the main beneficiaries.”

Three years ago Israel spent $US22 billion on its military and was is 12th biggest military supplier in the world with sales of more than $US345 million.

The potency of Palestine as a laboratory for methods of controlling “unwanted people” and a separation of populations is the primary focus of Loewenstein’s book. The many case studies of Israeli apartheid with corporations showcasing and profiting from the suppression and persecution of Palestinians are featured.

The book is divided into seven chapters, with a conclusion, headed “Selling weapons to anybody who wants them,” “September 11 was good for business,” “Preventing an outbreak of peace,” “Selling Israeli occupation to the world,” “The enduring appeal of Israeli domination,” “Israel mass surveillance in the brain of your phone,” and “Social media companies don’t like Palestinians.”

How Israel has such influence over Silicon Valley — along with many Western governments — is “both obvious and ominous for the future of marginalised groups, because it is not just the Jewish state that has discovered the Achilles heel of big tech”.

‘Real harm’ against minorities
Examples cited by Loewenstein include India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi successfully demanding that Facebook remove posts critical of his government’s handling of the covid pandemic of 2020, and evidence of Facebook posts causing “real harm against minorities” in Myanmar and Russia as well as India and Palestine.

The company’s global policy team argued that they risked having the platform shutdown completely if they did not comply with government requests. Profits before human rights.

Loewenstein refers to social media calls for genocide against the Muslim minority having “moved from the fringes to the mainstream”. Condemning this, Loewenstein remarks: “Leaving these comments up, which routinely happens, is deeply irresponsible” (p. 197).

He argues that his book is a warning that “despotism has never been so easily shareable with compact technology”. He explains:

“The ethnonationalist ideas behind it are appealing to millions of people because democratic leaders have failed to deliver. A Pew Research Centre survey across 34 countries in 2020 found only 44 percent of those polled were content with democracy, while 52 percent were not. Ethnonationalist ideology grows when accountable democracy withers, Israel is the ultimate model and goal” (p. 16).

The September 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington “turbocharged Israel’s defence sector and internationalised the war on terror that the Jewish state had been fighting for decades” (p. 49).

War against journalists
Along with health workers (200 killed and the total climbing), journalists have suffering a heavy price for reporting Israel’s relentless bombardment with at least 48 dead (including media workers in Lebanon, the death toll has topped 60).

The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters without Borders has accused Israel of seeking to “eradicate journalism in Gaza” by refusing to heed calls to protect media workers.

“The situation is dire for Palestinian journalists trapped in the enclave, where ten have been killed in the past three days, bringing the total media death toll in Gaza since the start of the war to 48. The past weekend was the deadliest for the media since the war between Israel and Hamas began.”

RSF also said Gaza from north to south had “become a cemetery for journalists”.

Of the 10 journalists killed between November 18-20, at least three were killed in the course of their work or because of it. They were: Hassouna Sleem, director of the Palestinian online news agency Quds News, and freelance photo-journalist Sary Mansour who were killed during an Israeli assault on the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on November 18.

According to RSF, they had received an online death threat in connection with their work 24 hours prior to them being killed.

Journalist Bilal Jadallah was killed by an Israeli strike that hit his car directly as he was trying to evacuate from Gaza City via the district of Zeitoun on the morning of November 19.

He was a prominent figure within the Palestinian media community and held several positions including chair of the board of Press House-Palestine, an organisation supporting independent media and journalists in Gaza.

Killed with family members
Most of the journalists were killed with family members when Israeli strikes hit their homes, reports RSF.

It is offensive that British and US news media should refer to Hamas “terrorists” in their news bulletins, regardless of the fact that the US and UK governments have declared them as such.

As a former journalist with British and French news agencies for several years, I wonder what has happened to the maxim that had applied since the post-Second World War anticolonialism struggles — one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. Thus “neutral” descriptions were generally used.

As President Erdoğan, has already pointed out, Hamas are nationalists fighting against 75 years of Zionist Israeli colonialism and apartheid. Palestine is the occupied territory; Israel is the illegal occupier.

Loewenstein argues in his book that Israel has sold so much defence equipment and surveillance technologies, such as the phone-hacking tool Pegasus, that it had hoped to “insulate itself” from any political backlash to its endless occupation.

However, the tide has turned with several countries such as South Africa and Turkey closing Israeli embassies and recalling their diplomats and as demonstrated by the UN General Assembly’s overwhelming vote last month for an immediate humanitarian truce.

There is a shift in global opinion in response to the massive price that the Palestinian people have been paying for Israeli apartheid and repression for 75 years. While Iran has long been portrayed by the West as a threat to regional peace, the relentless and ruthless bombardment of the Gaza Strip for seven weeks has demonstrated to the world that Israel is actually the threat.

However, Israel is on the wrong side of history. Whatever it does, the Palestinians will remain defiant and resilient.

Palestine will become a free, sovereign state. It is essential that international community pressure ensures that this happens for a just and lasting peace.

• The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world, by Antony Loewenstein. Scribe Publications, 2023. Reviewer Dr David Robie is editor and publisher of Asia Pacific Report.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by David Robie.

WHDH-TV reporter Grant Hermes was grabbed from behind by a passerby while setting up for a live shot outside the TD Garden arena in Boston, Massachusetts, on Nov. 18, 2023.

Hermes, who was preparing to report on a hockey game inside the arena, shared a video on Instagram of the assault. In the video, a man approaches him from behind as Hermes stands in front of the TV camera, shouts “Yeah, boy! Whoo!” and grabs Hermes around the shoulders. Hermes shakes the man off and chases him out of frame.

Hermes wrote in a comment that accompanied the video that he and his photographer were fine after the incident. “But I wanna be clear how not ok this is,” he wrote, adding, “The people you see on TV are at work, at a job where people make threats at us regularly. So we don’t know when you yell at us, run into our live shots or grab us, we don’t know what you’re there to do.”

Hermes told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker by email that he didn’t know what the man was going to do next. “Thankfully he just ran off,” Hermes said.

“Our job can come with inherent dangers because we need to be where the news happens and it’s a privilege to be in those places,” Hermes said. “But a routine live shot isn’t what we should mean when we talk about danger.”

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.