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If you have information about cases or investigations paused or dropped by either the Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission, contact Corey G. Johnson at corey.johnson@propublica.org or 917-512-0287.

The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes.

The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had failed to fix violations despite years of warnings.

Louisiana’s prison system has kept thousands of incarcerated people behind bars for weeks, months or sometimes more than a year after they were supposed to be released, records show. And the DOJ accused South Carolina of institutionalizing thousands of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses — sometimes for decades — rather than provide services that would allow them to live in less restricted settings, as is their right under federal law.

Federal judges temporarily suspended the lawsuits in February at the request of the states and with the support of the DOJ.

Civil rights lawyers who have monitored the cases said the move is another sign of the Trump administration’s retreat from the department’s mission of protecting the rights of vulnerable groups. Since January, President Donald Trump’s DOJ has dropped racial discrimination lawsuits, abandoned investigations of police misconduct and canceled oversight of troubled law enforcement agencies.

“This administration has been very aggressive in rolling back any kind of civil rights reforms or advancements,” said Anya Bidwell, senior attorney at the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice. “It’s unquestionably disappointing.”

The cases against Louisiana and South Carolina were brought by a unit of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division tasked with enforcing laws that guarantee religious freedom, access to reproductive health services, constitutional policing, and the rights of people in state and local institutions, including jails, prisons and health care facilities for people with disabilities.

The unit, the Special Litigation Section, has seen a dramatic reduction in lawyers since Trump took office in January. Court records show at least seven attorneys working on the lawsuits against Louisiana and South Carolina are no longer with the DOJ.

The section had more than 90 employees at the start of the year, including about 60 front-line attorneys. By June, it had about 25, including around 15 front-line lawyers, according to a source familiar with its operation. Sources said some were reassigned to other areas of the department while others quit in protest against the direction of the office under Trump, found new jobs or took early retirement.

Similar departures have been seen throughout the DOJ.

The exodus will hamper its ability to carry out essential functions, such as battling sexual harassment in housing, discrimination against disabled people, and the improper use of restraints and seclusions against students in schools, said Omar Noureldin, a former senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division and President Joe Biden appointee who left in January.

“Regardless of your political leanings, I think most people would agree these are the kind of bad situations that should be addressed by the nation’s top civil rights enforcer,” Noureldin said.

A department spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica about the Louisiana and South Carolina cases. Sources familiar with the lawsuits said Trump appointees have told DOJ lawyers handling the cases that they want to resolve matters out of court.

The federal government has used settlement talks in the past to hammer out consent decrees, agreements that set a list of requirements to fix civil rights violations and are overseen by an outside monitor and federal judge to ensure compliance. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s appointee to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, has made no secret of her distaste for such measures.

In May, Dhillon announced she was moving to dismiss efforts to impose consent decrees on the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis police departments. She complained that consent decrees turn local control of policing over to “unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.”

A DOJ investigation in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer accused the department of excessive force, unjustified shootings, and discrimination against Black and Native American people. The agency issued similar findings against the Louisville Metro Police Department after the high-profile killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot in 2020 when officers forced their way into her home to execute a search warrant.

Noureldin, now a senior vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said consent decrees provide an important level of oversight by an independent judge. By contrast, out-of-court settlements can be subject to the political whims of a new administration, which can decide to drop a case or end an agreement despite evidence of continuing constitutional violations.

“When you have a consent decree or a court-enforced settlement, the Justice Department can’t unilaterally just withdraw from the agreement,” Noureldin said. “A federal judge would have to agree that the public interest is served by terminating that settlement.”

In the case of Louisiana, the Justice Department issued a scathing report in January 2023 about the state confining prisoners beyond their sentences. The problems dated back more than a decade and remained widespread, the report said. Between January and April 2022 alone, more than a quarter of everyone released from prison custody was held past their release dates. Of those, 24% spent an additional 90 days or more behind bars, the DOJ found.

Among those held longer than they should have been was Robert Parker, a disc jockey known as “DJ Rob” in New Orleans, where he played R&B and hip-hop music at weddings and private parties. Parker, 55, was arrested in late 2016 after violating a restraining order brought by a former girlfriend.

He was supposed to be released in October 2017, but a prison staffer mistakenly classified him as a sex offender. That meant he was required to provide prison authorities with two addresses where he could stay that complied with sex offender registry rules.

Prison documents show Parker repeatedly told authorities that he wasn’t a sex offender and pleaded to speak to the warden to clear up the mistake. But nobody acted until a deputy public defender contacted state officials months later to complain. By the time he walked out, Parker had spent 337 extra days behind bars. During that period, he said, his car was repossessed, his mother died and his reputation was ruined.

“I lost everything,” he told ProPublica in an interview from a nursing home, where he was recovering from a stroke. “I’m ready to get away from Louisiana.”

Louisiana’s detention system is complex. Unlike other jurisdictions, where the convicted are housed in state facilities, inmates in Louisiana can be held in local jails overseen by sheriffs. A major contributor to the so-called over-detentions was poor communication among Louisiana’s court clerks, sheriff’s offices and the state department of corrections, according to interviews with attorneys, depositions of state officials, and reports from state and federal reviews of the prison system.

Until recently, the agencies shared prisoner sentencing information by shuttling stacks of paperwork by van or truck from the court to the sheriff’s office for the parish holding the prisoner, then to corrections officials. The document transfers, which often crisscrossed the state, typically happened only once a week. When the records finally arrived, it could take staff a month or longer to enter the data into computers, creating more delays. In addition, staff made data errors when calculating release dates.

Two years ago, The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Parker could pursue a lawsuit against the former head of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, James LeBlanc. That lawsuit is ongoing, said Parker’s attorney, Jonathan Rhodes. LeBlanc, who resigned last year, could not be reached for comment, and his attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill acknowledged that the state’s process to determine release dates was unreliable but said the issue had been overblown by the Justice Department’s investigation, which she called “factually incorrect.”

“There were simply parts of it that are outside state control, such as clerks & courts,” Murrill stated.

Murrill said correction officials have been working with local officials to ensure prisoner releases are computed in a “timely and correct fashion.” Louisiana officials point to a new website that allows electronic sharing of information among the various agencies.

“The system has been overhauled. That has dramatically diminished, if not completely eliminated this problem,” Murrill stated. She did not address questions from ProPublica asking if prisoners were being held longer than their release dates this year.

Local attorneys who are handling lawsuits against the state expressed skepticism about Murrill’s claims.

William Most, an attorney who filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated people who had been detained past their release dates, noted that as late as May 2024, 141 people who were released that month had been kept longer than they should have been, 120 of them for more than 30 days.

“I have seen no evidence suggesting the problem in Louisiana is fixed,” Most said. “And it seems unwise to dismiss any cases while that’s the situation.”

South Carolina’s mentally ill population is grappling with similar challenges.

After years of lawsuits and complaints, a DOJ investigation determined that officials illegally denied community-based services — required by the Americans with Disabilities Act and a 1999 Supreme Court decision — to over 1,000 people diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. Instead, the state placed them in group homes that failed to provide adequate care and were overly restrictive, the department alleged.

The DOJ report didn’t address why the state relied so heavily on group homes. It noted that South Carolina’s own goals and plans called for increasing community-based services to help more people live independently. But the investigation concluded that the availability of community-based services varied widely across the state, leaving people in some areas with no access. And the DOJ said the state’s rules for deciding when someone could leave were too stringent.

South Carolina funds and oversees more than 400 facilities that serve people with serious mental illness, according to a state affidavit.

Kimberly Tissot, president of the disability rights group Able South Carolina, said it was common for disabled adults who were living successfully on their own to be involuntarily committed to an adult group home simply because they visited a hospital to pick up medicine.

Tissot, who has inspected hundreds of the adult facilities, said they often are roach-infested, soaked in urine, lacking in adequate medicine and staffed by untrained employees. Her description mirrors the findings of several state and independent investigations. In some group homes, patients weren’t allowed to leave or freely move around. Subsequently, their mental health would deteriorate, Tissot said.

“We have had people die in these facilities because of the conditions,” said Tissot, who worked closely with the DOJ investigators. Scores of sexual abuse incidents, assaults and deaths in such group homes have been reported to the state, according to a 2022 federal report that faulted South Carolina’s oversight.

South Carolina has been on notice about the difficulties since 2016 but didn’t make sufficient progress, the DOJ alleged in its lawsuit filed in December.

After two years of failed attempts, state lawmakers passed a law in April that consolidated services for disabled people into a new agency responsible for expanding access to home and community-based treatments and for ensuring compliance with federal laws.

South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, has argued in the DOJ’s lawsuit that the state has been providing necessary services and has not been violating people’s constitutional rights. In January, his office asked the court for a delay in the case to give the Trump administration enough time to determine how to proceed.

His office and a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities declined to comment, citing the ongoing DOJ lawsuit.

Tissot credits the federal attention with creating a sense of urgency among state lawmakers to make improvements. While she said she is pleased with the latest progress, she warned that if the DOJ dropped the case, it would undermine the enforcement of disabled people’s civil rights and allow state abuses to continue.

“It would signal that systemic discrimination will go unchecked and embolden institutional providers to resist change,” Tissot said. “Most importantly, it abandons the people directly impacted.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Corey G. Johnson.

RFA informed listeners on Thursday that shortwave radio broadcasts for its Mandarin, Tibetan and Lao language services have stopped entirely. The broadcaster, which is funded by the U.S. Congress, said a heavily reduced schedule remains in place for RFA Burmese, Khmer, Korean and Uyghur language services.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, which oversees RFA, abruptly terminated its federal grant on March 14. RFA has since been forced to furlough most of its staff, and filed a lawsuit last week, seeking to restore the funding on the grounds that the termination violated federal laws.

The Trump administration has moved to slash news organizations funded by the U.S. Congress, including Voice of America and those funded through federal grants like RFA and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as part of its drive to reduce government spending.

With its reducing staffing, RFA is still providing limited news updates on its website and social media in all nine languages it serves. The broadcaster was established in 1996, and sends news to countries and regions across Asia that have little or no press freedom, such as North Korea, China, Myanmar and Vietnam.

Monitoring of radio frequencies previously used by RFA indicates that transmissions from shortwave and mediumwave relay stations owned or leased by USAGM have halted in the past week, meaning the hours of radio broadcasts have been slashed from 63 hours in March to just seven hours now.

That is based on review of an online Remote Monitoring System that is maintained by USAGM that provides short audio samples of radio frequencies in regions served by the broadcasters it oversees.

In late 2023, RFA had 126 hours of transmissions per day, before an earlier slew of shortwave cuts.

The few remaining broadcast hours are based on transmissions from relay stations not owned or leased by the U.S. government.

‘Lost a lifeline to the truth’

Audience research and anecdotal reporting by RFA suggests that over the past decade or more, use of shortwave and mediumwave radio has reduced but it remains an important option in regions where internet access is poor or subject to official censorship and scrutiny.

“For millions living in North Korea and China’s Tibetan and Uyghur regions, RFA’s exclusive news and content can only be accessed through shortwave transmissions. Now those populations are being cut off, as are people in Myanmar who are reeling in the wake of a devastating earthquake when radio is a crucial medium,” said Rohit Mahajan, RFA’s chief communications officer.

“They have lost a lifeline to the truth precisely at a moment when it’s needed most,” Mahajan said.

RFA Burmese has received growing requests since the March 28 earthquake in central Myanmar for more radio broadcasts because of disruptions to the internet since the 7.7 magnitude temblor that killed more than 3,000 people.

Kyaw Kyaw Aung, director of RFA Burmese, said that in the aftermath of the earthquake, the service had received requests for more shortwave broadcasts in Rakhine state, a conflict-hit area of western Myanmar which largely escaped the quake but has poor internet access.

“Only a few people with access to the military-run, state-owned MRTV shortwave radio knew about the disaster after it happened, and the reporting was heavily censored,” said Kyaw Kyaw Aung, who has been anchoring a 15-minute RFA daily news broadcast since the earthquake. “Our followers were strongly requesting RFA radio.”

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

The Pallisades. Photo: Michael Hoyt,

Thanks to our threat to sue the Forest Service over using a categorical exclusion to avoid analyzing impacts on bull trout, grizzly bears, and lynx, a massive deforestation project in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley has been halted.

The Forest Service’s Eastside Project authorized 15,000-45,000 acres of tree cutting and burning per year for 20 years and the 500,000-acre project covers almost the entire east side of the Bitterroot National Forest from Stevensville to over 50 miles south in the Sapphire Mountains.

The Forest Service illegally authorized this massive project through the use of a categorical exclusion, which was intended for projects that would have no impact on the environment such as painting an outhouse or building a shed at a Ranger station.

But now the project has been halted since the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Center for Biological Diversity, Fiends of the Bitterroot and other conservation groups sent the government a 60-day Notice of Intent to Sue for violating the Endangered Species Act. We notified the Forest Service that they failed comply with the Endangered Species act in a number of ways including failing consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the project’s effect on bull trout and grizzly bears — both of which are listed as threatened species — in violation of the Endangered Species Act.

Congress included the 60-day notice requirement in the citizens’ enforcement provision of the Endangered Species Act specifically to give the government that much time to correct their illegal activity before facing a lawsuit.

Normally the Forest Service responds to our 60-day notices with a letter telling us to go jump in a lake. Then we sue the agency — and have won in court over 80 percent of the time. But this time, undoubtedly realizing they were fighting a losing battle, the Forest Service agreed to halt actions to implement the tree cutting and burning until they followed the law.

It would be great to think the Forest Service has all of a sudden became a law-abiding agency, but unfortunately, they are still violating other laws with this project, including by authorizing half a million acres of tree cutting and burning without environmental review.

Despite the vast landscape the project will impact, the Forest Service did not disclose where the tree cutting and burning will occur. That’s a clear violation of the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the federal government — and anyone who does a project using federal money — to notify the public of what they plan to do, where they plan to do it, and how it will affect the environment.

In the case of the Eastside project, the Forest Service claims that the precise location, timing, and scope of the treatments will be decided immediately prior to implementation, but without further analysis or public input which is a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.

The law also requires the Forest Service to take a “hard look” at potential impacts to wildlife, including wolverines which are particularly important since scientists have discovered a lactating female wolverine in the project area, and there have been multiple instances of confirmed grizzly bear presence in the Sapphire Mountains over the past year. Grizzly bears, lynx, wolverines, bull trout and bull trout critical habitat are all protected under the Endangered Species Act.

American citizens are required to follow the law every single day. It is time for the Forest Service to start following the law and quit destroying habitat for threatened and endangered species.

During the last Trump administration, our small, gritty organization, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, sued 18 times to protect our planet and we won 16 times.

Please help the Alliance for the Wild Rockies fight to make the Trump Administration’s Forest Service follow the law and help Counterpunch spread the word.

The post Massive Deforestation Project That Threatens Grizzlies, Lynx and Wolverine Halted appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mike Garrity.

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In mid-February, Trump administration leaders received a desperate warning from their diplomats posted in Vietnam, one of the most important American partners in Asia.

Workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange, which the American military sprayed across large swaths of the country during the Vietnam War. After Rubio’s orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind.

And even more pressing, the officials warned in a Feb. 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies.

Hundreds of thousands of people live around the Bien Hoa air base, and some of their homes abut the site’s perimeter fence, just yards from the contaminated areas. And less than 1,500 feet away is a major river that flows into Ho Chi Minh City, population 9 million.

“Simply put,” the officials added, “we are quickly heading toward an environmental and life-threatening catastrophe.”

They received no response from Washington, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Instead, Rubio and Peter Marocco, another top Trump appointee, have not only ordered the work to stop, but they also have frozen more than $1 million in payments for work already completed by the contractors the U.S. hired. The company overseeing the project is Tetra Tech, a publicly traded consulting and engineering firm based in the U.S., and a Vietnamese construction firm has been tasked with the excavation work.

Then, on Feb. 26, Rubio and Marocco canceled both companies’ contracts altogether before apparently reversing that decision about a week later, agency records show. As of Thursday, the companies had not been paid.

The Trump administration has told the courts repeatedly that its process to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which manages the project’s funds, has been careful and considered. But the botched situation at Bien Hoa is a stark example of the whiplash, conflicting messages and dire consequences that aid organizations worldwide have faced since early February.

Now, after losing several weeks because of the administration’s orders, the companies are scrambling — at their own expense — to secure the Bien Hoa site before it starts raining, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica and several people familiar with the current situation.

The USAID officials who would typically travel to the air base to provide oversight have been placed on administrative leave or prevented from traveling to check on the work. They’ve also been forbidden from communicating with the Vietnamese government or the companies working at the base, sources say, though they believe that directive was lifted after the contracts were recently reinstated. The confusion has left many at both the embassy and in Washington in the dark about where the situation stands.

To ascertain the current status of the work, ProPublica hired a reporter to visit the air base on Friday.

Workers are laboring in 95 degree heat, surrounded by toxic soil. The site has a skeleton crew of less than half of what they previously had, according to workers and documents reviewed by ProPublica. Some staffers found new jobs during the suspension. People working at the site told the reporter they are worried about completing the work before the rainy season descends and are terrified the U.S. will pause the work again.

Since 2019, the U.S. government has collaborated with Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense to clean up the Bien Hoa air base and agreed to spend more than $430 million for the project. Unlike other foreign aid programs, addressing Agent Orange is more akin to restitution than charity because the U.S. brought the deadly substance there in the first place. “The dioxin remediation program is one of the core reasons why we have an extraordinary relationship with Vietnam today,” a State Department official told ProPublica, “a country that should by all rights hate us.”

With enough contaminated soil to fill about 40,000 dump trucks, the Bien Hoa air base is the largest deposit of postwar pesticides remaining in Vietnam after a decadeslong cleanup campaign. Human rights groups, environmentalists and diplomats consider the cleanup work — along with disability assistance that the U.S. has provided to Agent Orange victims across the country — to be one of the most successful foreign aid initiatives of all time.

All of that was now in peril, the officials wrote in their Feb. 14 letter to USAID officials in Washington. “What immediate actions can be taken to avert a potential life-threatening incident while still maintaining compliance with the Executive Order and the suspension directives?” the officials wrote.

U.S. officials in Vietnam grew increasingly panicked. The ambassador sent a diplomatic cable to Washington, and Congress and USAID’s inspector general each received a whistleblower complaint, multiple people told ProPublica.

“Halting a project like that in the middle of the work, that’s an environmental crime,” said Jan Haemers, CEO of another organization that previously worked in Vietnam to clean up Agent Orange in the soil. “If you stop in the middle, it’s worse than if you never started.”

The State Department said in a statement that the contracts at Bien Hoa are “active and running” but did not respond to detailed follow-up questions. Tetra Tech and the Vietnamese construction firm did not respond to questions for this story. The Vietnamese Embassy and Ministry of Defense did not return requests for comment. But the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a statement on Feb. 13 that it was “deeply concerned” about USAID program suspensions, specifically mentioning the Bien Hoa project.

Trump’s aides, including billionaire Elon Musk, began dismantling the U.S. foreign assistance system almost immediately after the inauguration. They dismissed USAID staff en masse, issued sweeping stop-work orders, froze funds and eventually canceled most of the agency’s contracts with aid organizations around the world, leaving countless children, refugees and other desperately vulnerable people without critical services.

On Monday, Rubio boasted on X that they had cut 83% of USAID’s programs because they didn’t align with Trump’s agenda.

After terminating the contracts, Rubio, Musk and Marocco reversed several of their decisions in Vietnam, designating the Bien Hoa project as one of the few programs to survive, at least for now.

Every president since George W. Bush — including Trump — has made good on the American promise to repair relations with Vietnam by cleaning up Agent Orange and helping those sick or disabled from dioxin poisoning. In 2017, Trump landed at Danang Airport, a prior cleanup site, ahead of a free-trade meeting with Asia-Pacific countries. The U.S. now conducts $160 billion in annual commerce with Vietnam, which has also become a key partner against China’s growing influence in the South China Sea. The Pentagon and Vietnamese military now work together as well, including efforts to locate the remains of soldiers missing in action from the war 50 years ago.

“All of this is underpinned by the cooperation on Agent Orange,” said Charles Bailey, a former Ford Foundation representative in Vietnam who co-wrote a book on the country’s relations with the U.S. in the wake of the war. “It’s like pulling out one or two legs of the stool.”

The Bien Hoa project was formally launched and initial contracts signed during Trump’s first presidency. In another example of the administration’s confusing stance toward the project, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told his Vietnamese counterpart on a Feb. 7 phone call that Trump wanted to enhance defense ties by addressing war legacy issues, which include Agent Orange remediation. About half of the project’s funding comes from the Pentagon’s budget, though it’s funneled through USAID, so it was also caught up in the foreign aid freeze.

Environmental consultants, foreign policy experts and government officials said the episode in Bien Hoa shows the administration did not do a thoughtful audit. “One might imagine a less reckless government looking at what we’re doing carefully and then deciding what’s in our interest,” David Shear, a former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam under Barack Obama, told ProPublica.

“But,” he said, “this is government reform by meat cleaver.”

The mixture known as Agent Orange is a combination of two herbicides that the U.S. brought to Vietnam in huge volumes to kill off jungles and mangroves that hid opposition forces during the Vietnam war. The mixture contained dioxin, a deadly substance that not only causes a range of cancers and other illnesses, but is also linked to birth defects for babies exposed in utero. During the war, the U.S. sprayed more than 10 million gallons of the herbicides across vast swaths of the country, exposing U.S. soldiers as well as millions of Vietnamese people and their future children to the deadly toxic substance.

Storage sites like the air bases of Danang and Bien Hoa were heavily contaminated as barrels leaked, broke or were otherwise mishandled. Over the decades, dust has blown the contaminated soil off the bases and abundant rains have pushed the dioxin into waterways and the densely packed surrounding neighborhoods, contaminating fish as well as ducks and chicken that people raise for food. Soil samples at the Bien Hoa base have shown dioxin at levels as high as 800 times the allowed amount in Vietnam.

For decades since the war, and despite extensive documentation of higher rates of cancers and birth defects among people who had been exposed to the chemicals, the U.S. denied the mass toll Agent Orange had taken on Vietnamese people — as well as on American veterans, as ProPublica has previously reported. But starting in the mid-2000s under President George W. Bush, the U.S. began earmarking federal dollars for dioxin remediation in Vietnam to clean up the contamination sites and the two nations’ troubled relationship.

The cleanup work is dangerous and laborious. People hired by the contractors wear extensive protective equipment in the sweltering humidity and must have their blood tested regularly for dioxin. When levels get too high, they are no longer allowed to work at the site. There are supposed to be extensive safety checks in place to ensure the dirt doesn’t poison military officials or the surrounding community.

The plan at Bien Hoa is to excavate a half-million cubic meters of the most contaminated soil and enclose it underground or cook it in an enormous furnace, which hasn’t been built yet, until the dioxin no longer poses a threat. The work requires extensive pumping and management of dioxin-contaminated water. Contractors are halfway through a 10-year project set to happen in stages, and the bulk of the excavation work must be done between December and April when there is less rain.

After Rubio first issued sweeping stop-work orders to aid organizations and contractors around the world in late January, workers from the site were told to stay home for weeks. The companies stopped receiving money to cover payroll and their past invoices. Huge mounds of tarp-covered dirt dotted sections of the base.

USAID and State Department staff scrambled to get the project back online through the State Department’s confusing waiver process and appealed to counterparts in the U.S. A group of Democratic senators sent a letter to Hegseth and Rubio urging them to pay the contractors. “It would be difficult to overstate the damage to the relationship that would result if the U.S were to walk away from these war legacy programs,” they wrote. They got no response.

One of the senators who signed the letter, Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., told ProPublica that abandoning the Bien Hoa cleanup is “a betrayal of the goodwill our two nations built over 30 years” and a “gift to our adversaries.”

Even off-season rains pushed the sites to the brink, two sources said, with water pooling up to the edge of protective aprons, threatening to spill out onto an active military runway after recent rainstorms.

Heavier rains typically start in April before the downpours of the rainy season in May.

The contractors are desperately trying to secure the contaminated dirt and pits before then, according to interviews this week with several people working there. But they are two months behind schedule.

“The problem is that the Trump administration has destroyed USAID, so it’s very unclear how we’re going to complete this project,” said Tim Rieser, a longtime aide to former Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who led a bipartisan delegation to break ground in Bien Hoa in 2019. “The people making the decisions probably know the least.”

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy, ProPublica, and Le Van for ProPublica.

A key part of the 2022 bipartisan infrastructure law, all 50 states have federally approved plans to build these fast chargers, which will allow more drivers to access fast, convenient charging when they are on long trips.

The highway department said existing state plans would be scrapped, and that it would take months to review and restart the process. Consequently, the deployment of the federally funded electric vehicle charging network will be paused indefinitely.

The following is a comment from Beth Hammon, a senior vehicle charging advocate at NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council):

"On a bipartisan basis, Congress funded this program to build a new vehicle charging network nationwide. The Trump administration does not have the authority to halt it capriciously.

“Stopping funding midstream will result in chaos and delays in states across the nation. It will throw state efforts into turmoil, wreak havoc with the companies that install the chargers and risk the jobs of their workers. The only winner from this chaos is the oil industry.

“This should not stand. Courts have already blocked the Trump administration’s other illegal attempts to halt legally mandated funding.

“Congress needs to stand up for itself: This move and many others from the Trump administration steals away its Constitutionally established spending authority."

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

• The United Nations Security Council gathered to discuss an Israeli airstrike over the weekend that hit a U.N. school-turned-shelter in Gaza, which Palestinian health authorities said killed nearly 100 people and wounded roughly 50 others.
• The Russian Defense Ministry says its forces have halted an effort by Kyiv’s troops to expand a weeklong incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.
• Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz made his first solo campaign appearance Tuesday, just a week after being selected as Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket.
• As students return to schools across the state this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond are urging public school districts to follow the lead of the Los Angeles Unified School District in restricting cell phone use in classrooms.
• Santa Clara County residents, medical workers, and healthcare advocates continue to protest changes being made to the county’s regional medical center this week, saying the changes are putting the community’s health at risk.
• The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office said this week that the city’s district attorney should drop charges against 26 protesters who took over the Golden Gate Bridge in April to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The post The Russian Defense Ministry says its forces have halted an effort by Kyiv’s troops to expand a weeklong incursion into Russia’s Kursk region – August 13, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Since the Arakan Army, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army. launched Operation 1027 – named after the Oct. 27 military actions that started it – as part of the “Three Brotherhood Alliance,” junta troops have been on the retreat in many areas, leading junta chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing in late November to issue a rare acknowledgement of the rebel’s successes.

After fighting began, merchants told RFA Burmese, trade ceased at Muse and Chinshwehaw – two key border towns positioned across from southwest China’s Yunnan province.

“Trade has totally stopped there – only hand couriers are seen at the border gates, carrying traditional foods,” said a merchant in Muse who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke to RFA on condition of anonymity due to security concerns. 

There were no civil servants to process cross-border trade left in the trade zone, he said. “Fighting breaks out every once and a while, lasting for 10-15 minutes each time.”

Prior to the offensive, the value of bilateral trade at the two border towns was more than US$10 million per day, according to junta’s Ministry of Commerce data. So in the 50 days since the start of “Operation 1027,” that would amount to more than US$500 million in losses.

Corn, rice, cotton, machinery

There are two major border gates — Muse-Mang Wein and Kyin San Kyawt — used for bilateral trade at the two border towns, but neither is open amid the clashes. The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, or MNDAA, now controls Kyin Sang Kyawt, where nearly 100 trucks were destroyed by military shelling on Nov. 23.

Myanmar exports agricultural goods to China through the Kyin San Kyawt border gate in Chinshwehaw that include corn, rice, rubber, black sesame, dried elephant foot yam, green gram and groundnuts, and imports cotton, raw plastic, machinery, chemical fertilizers and medicine.

Myanmar’s exports through the Muse-Mang Wein border gate in Muse include eel, crab, prawns, cotton, rubber, corn, peanut, groundnuts, rice, broken rice and turmeric, while imports consist mainly of fuel and machinery.

Area aid workers said at least 10 civilians, including children, have been killed in the fighting during the offensive.

A merchant at Chinshwehaw told RFA that commodities are stranded at the border gate.

“Commodities from the Chinese side were sent back as they blocked the border gate,” she said. “But Chinese goods on our side have sat stranded in the fields and warehouses. We are waiting to pay taxes.”

The costs associated with the transportation of goods have skyrocketed during the conflict, a third merchant told RFA.

“The cost of transporting goods on a 17-ton truck on the route from [Shan state’s] Mongla township to Mandalay [800 kilometers, or 500 miles to the east] was 7 million kyat (US$3,330),” he said. “In Chinshwehaw, the cost has increased by more than four fold. Fuel prices have also increased.”

Both merchants and farmers have suffered losses, and more than 1,000 common laborers have lost their jobs at the trade zones, said residents and merchants.

No end in sight

Li Kyarwen, the spokesperson of the MNDAA, said that it isn’t possible to restore bilateral trade in northern Shan state anytime soon.

“During the ‘revolutionary period,’ due to the lack of peace and security, business can’t be resumed immediately,” he said.

But merchants warned that if the border gates don’t reopen by the end of December, there will be a shortage of Chinese commodities, “and prices will surely soar.”

Attempts by RFA to contact the junta’s Ministry of Commerce for comment on the halt to border trade went unanswered.

Reports of the closed checkpoints came a week after junta Foreign Affairs Minister Than Shwe met with Shi Yugang, the deputy secretary of the Yunnan Provincial Party Committee during a visit to China, at which the two discussed border trade issues.

While the junta’s peace negotiation committee has held talks with the Three Brotherhood Alliance to end all conflict in Shan state near the border, little progress has been made and fighting continues daily.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

Hagari responded: "I think it's an opportunity for me to say here that we are very sorry of [sic] the death of the late Shireen Abu Akleh. She was a journalist—a very established journalist—and in Israel, we are a democracy, and in democracy, we see high value in journalism and in free press. And we want journalists to feel safe in Israel, especially in wartime, and even if they criticize us, we want them to feel safe. It's all about democracy and we are a liberal democracy."

Bloomberg Government reporter Emily Wilkins tweeted that the Israel Defense Forces' apology is "the smallest of steps forward—more must be done to protect working journalists, and the IDF must stop murdering reporters. #JusticeforShireen."

Others were even more critical. Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns at Medical Aid for Palestinians, declared that "you don't get to intentionally kill a journalist, then just say, 'oops, sorry,' and hope everyone will just move on. This apology on the anniversary of her killing, without any steps towards accountability, is an insult to her family. Justice must be done."

"Also: Where's the apology for the lies, the smears, the obfuscations, the delays, the gaslighting, the brutal attacks on her funeral?" Talbot added, calling out the IDF for "the most hollow of PR apologies in a naked attempt to draw a line under an open wound."

Israel initially said that Abu Akleh—who wore a helmet and bulletproof vest labeled "PRESS"—was caught in the crossfire between the IDF and Palestinians, but firsthand accounts and multiple investigations over the past year have debunked that claim.

As CNNnoted Friday:

A CNN investigation in May last year unearthed evidence—including two videos of the scene of the shooting—that there was no active combat, nor any Palestinian militants, near Abu Akleh in the moments leading up to her death.

Footage obtained by CNN, corroborated by testimony from eight eyewitnesses, an audio forensic analyst, and an explosive weapons expert, suggested that Israeli forces took aim at the journalist.

While the IDF admitted for the first time last September that there was a "high possibility" Abu Akleh was "accidentally" shot and killed by Israeli fire, its Military Advocate General's Office said in a statement that it did not intend to pursue criminal charges or prosecutions of any of the soldiers involved.

Hagari's CNN interview came after the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) earlier this week released a report which reveals that the IDF shooting Abu Akleh in the head with impunity "is part of a deadly, decadeslong pattern" that goes back to at least 2001.

"The killing of Shireen Abu Akleh and the failure of the army's investigative process to hold anyone responsible is not a one-off event," said Robert Mahoney, CPJ's director of special projects and one of the report's editors, in a statement. "It is part of a pattern of response that seems designed to evade responsibility. Not one member of the IDF has been held accountable in the deaths of 20 journalists from Israeli military fire over the last 22 years."

The IDF said in response to the CPJ report that it "regrets any harm to civilians during operational activity and considers the protection of the freedom of the press and the professional work of journalists to be of great importance," adding that Israeli forces do "not intentionally target noncombatants, and live fire in combat is used only after all other options have been exhausted."

Sharif Abdel Kouddous—correspondent for the award-winning documentary The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, produced by Al Jazeera's program "Fault Lines"—pointed to the CPJ report during a Thursday Democracy Now! appearance.

After killing journalists, the IDF turns to a "standard playbook, which is preemptive denials of responsibility, pushing false narratives, discounting evidence in the case, and internal investigations that lack any kind of transparency and never lead to charges," he said. "This is exactly what happened in Shireen's case, and it shows that this is a pattern of impunity."

"This is one of the most prominent journalists of her generation, who was killed in broad daylight as she was wearing her press jacket and helmet with the word 'press' clearly visible on them, with much of it caught on camera, with her colleagues there to witness it, with the citizenship of a country that's the main backer of the Israeli military," Kouddous added. "If we can't find justice for Shireen, what chance does anyone in Palestine have?"

He also acknowledged a Thursday statement from Abu Akleh's family, which says in part: "Over the past year, our family has been forced to grieve while seeking justice and accountability for Israel's war crimes. From the beginning, we've called on the U.S. government to act in the same way it would if any other American citizen was killed abroad."

The family noted a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe announced in November—but as NBC Newsreported Thursday, the FBI has yet to contact Walid Al-Omari, Al Jazeera's regional bureau chief, or Palestinian journalist Shatha Hanaysha, who was with Abu Akleh when she was shot and told the outlet: "There is no serious investigation... It was just talking in the air to kill the story."

Al Jazeera's Ali Harb on Thursday highlighted frustrations that "the Biden administration has done next to nothing to push for accountability in the case," sharing remarks from critics including representatives of Amnesty International USA, Palestine in America magazine, and the think tanks Al-Shabaka and the Arab American Institute.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeerasaid in a statement Thursday that the Qatar-based media network "renews its appeal to international human rights and press freedom organizations to continue to support Shireen's case and help end impunity for crimes against journalists."

The network "remains committed to its pledge to Shireen's family and colleagues to seek justice for Shireen by pursuing all possible avenues to ensure her killers are held accountable," Al Jazeera added, "including through the International Criminal Court."

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

Lawyers representing Melissa Lucio vowed to "continue fighting" to prove her innocence after a Texas appeals court on Monday granted the mother of 14—who advocates say was wrongfully convicted of murdering her two-year-old daughter in 2007—a stay of execution, two days before she was scheduled to be killed by lethal injection. 

"All of the new evidence of her innocence has never before been considered by any court."

The Innocence Project reports that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals sent Lucio's case back to the Cameron County court where she was originally tried amid concerns that she did not killer her daughter, Mariah Alvarez, and that prosecutors presented false testimony at her trial and hid evidence from the defense.

Supporters have also cited Lucio's coerced confession—upon which the prosecution relied almost entirely—as grounds for a new trial.

"I am grateful the court has given me the chance to live and prove my innocence," Lucio said in a statement following her reprieve. "Mariah is in my heart today and always. I am grateful to have more days to be a mother to my children and a grandmother to my grandchildren."

Vanessa Potkin, director of special litigation at the Innocence Project and one of Lucio's lawyers, said that the appellate court "did the right thing by stopping Melissa's execution."

"Medical evidence shows that Mariah's death was consistent with an accident. But for the state's use of false testimony, no juror would have voted to convict Melissa of capital murder because no murder occurred," she continued. "It would have shocked the public's conscience for Melissa to be put to death based on false and incomplete medical evidence for a crime that never even happened."

"All of the new evidence of her innocence has never before been considered by any court," Potkin added. "The court's stay allows us to continue fighting alongside Melissa to overturn her wrongful conviction."

According to The Texas Tribune:

Questions over Mariah Alvarez's death and Lucio's role in it have lingered since the now 53-year-old mother was sentenced to death in 2008. In recent months, concerns about Lucio's possible innocence—greatest among them whether Mariah's fatal head trauma was caused by abuse or an accidental fall down the stairs—have only been amplified.

More than two-thirds of the Texas Senate and a majority of the Texas House of Representatives pleaded for the parole board and governor to halt Lucio's execution. The lawmakers have been joined by an ever-growing list of people, including at least five of Lucio's former jurors.

Republican state Rep. Jeff Leach, a death penalty supporter, on Monday described the case as "the most troubling I've ever seen, possibly the most troubling in the history of our state."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The world's nuclear order was essentially designed to mitigate nuclear dangers, to inhibit arms races, to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to additional states and, more importantly, to create conditions for their elimination.

All things considered, it seems that unless an abrupt reversal in the dangerous "West versus Russia/China" paradigm takes place, and soon, the nuclear disorder will persist and grow worse.

At the heart of this nuclear order lies the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which remains until today, for better or worse, the cornerstone of the global nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation regime.

However, February 24, 2022 marked a critical and deeply disturbing challenge to the current NPT regime and the fragile global nuclear order with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This ruthless act of war violated Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of another state. It also deepened the breach in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, in which Kyiv committed to give up the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet era in exchange for security assurances by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia against the use of force that would potentially compromise Ukraine's territorial integrity and political independence. Moscow had already grossly violated these assurances in 2014 when it occupied Crimea and Donbass.

That event in itself inflicted a major wound on the nuclear order, which had already been under severe and growing pressure. Besides the violation of the Budapest Memorandum, the post-Cold War era saw the spread of nuclear weapons (horizontal proliferation) to at least three states: India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Like Israel, India, and Pakistan, of course, had never signed the NPT, but North Korea, which had been an NPT member since 1985, announced its withdrawal from the treaty in 2003 and became a state in possession of nuclear weapons as of 2006 when it tested its first device. 

Moreover, despite progress in reducing nuclear weapon arsenals since the Cold War, the number of warheads in global military stockpiles has been increasing once again. While the United States is still reducing its nuclear stockpile and France and Israel have relatively stable inventories, China, India, North Korea, Pakistan, and the UK, as well as possibly Russia, are all thought to be increasing their nuclear inventory (vertical proliferation). Thus, the NPT regime has not prevented nuclear proliferation in the post-Cold War era.

Second, states such as North Korea and Iran appear to have learned the lessons from regimes, notably in Iraq and Libya, which give up their nuclear weapon programs and whose regimes were later toppled by the U.S. and its allies. While no evidence that Iran intends to build a weapon has yet surfaced, its nuclear program has progressed to such an extent that it could quickly become a threshold state if it made such a decision. Meanwhile, Pyongyang is conducting new tests of ballistic missiles capable of carrying its growing arsenal on nuclear warheads.

Third, the current security environment has been deteriorating due to the growing perception of a great-power realignment that pits the existing U.S.-led, Western-dominated "liberal" international order against revisionist powers led by Beijing and Moscow. In this context, the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and Russia, have been essentially reversing their previous progress in building bilateral agreements and other measures intended to limit and reduce their nuclear arsenals.

Due to mutual accusations of non-compliance, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was celebrated for its elimination of an entire category of nuclear weapons rather than their simple limitation, collapsed in August 2019. Since then, both sides began developing weapons that were banned under the INF Treaty. In the absence of agreed limitations, there is now no obstacle to a descent into an arms race placing Europe as the most likely theater of operation.

As a result, the New START Treaty remains the only nuclear disarmament agreement between United States and Russian in effect. Following its extension in February 2021, however, it will expire in 2026. Barring any renewed détente between Washington and Moscow it too could also be at risk, particularly if the Russia-Ukraine conflict worsens or persists.

Fourth, while the risks of nuclear proliferation are likely to increase given the uncertain international security situation of this new era, expectations for progress at the multilateral level are low, including for the Tenth NPT Review Conference, which was already postponed twice due to the COVID-19 pandemic and will now take place  in August.

Specifically, obstacles that have bedeviled past progress to agreement on key issue, this includes the inability for states to agree on: 1) the rapid entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty; 2) the multilateral negotiations at Conference on Disarmament towards the signature and ratification of a fissile material cut-off treaty; and 3) the establishment of a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone and their means of delivery. In addition, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is symbolically important, but if nuclear-possessing states and NATO members don't come on board, it will remain ineffective as a tool for eliminating nuclear weapons.

Fifth, in a referendum on February 27, 2022, Belarussians renounced the wording of Article 18 of their Constitution, which had guaranteed the country's nuclear neutrality since its independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991. As a result, the number of countries that could host nuclear weapons has expanded, thus increasing the risk of their deployment in Europe. At the same time, Belarus's move challenges the strategic stability between NATO and Russia, and, more importantly, undermines the effectiveness of the NPT regime.

So, what kind of nuclear order does the world face now? The Russo-Ukrainian War has effectively confirmed the advent of a new nuclear disorder. First, the NPT regime was affected by both vertical and horizontal proliferation. Second, of the precedents of Iraq, Libya and now Ukraine, insecure states or regimes may have a new incentive for developing nuclear weapons. Third, there is a freeze in U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements. Fourth, despite efforts to promote the stigmatization, prohibition, and elimination of nuclear weapons under the TPNW, disarmament negotiations are stuck at a multilateral level.

What are the direct consequences of this nuclear disorder? One is the weakening of the NPT regime. As Sylvia Mishra of the European Leadership Network recently argued, Putin's aggression towards Ukraine sets a dangerous precedent by abrogating the Budapest Memorandum and undermining the wider framework of security assurances and guarantees that nuclear-weapons states offer to non-nuclear states. In addition, as an NPT signatory, Russia had pledged to disavow the use of negative security assurances . Thus, more non-nuclear states that do not have security guarantees with nuclear powers, such as Finland and Sweden in Europe, may be more willing to align themselves with one these powers or to pursue their own nuclear weapons to avoid a possible conventional confrontation with a nuclear power.

Another consequence is the likelihood of a nuclear war. The increase of this type of conflict has risen, either between two nuclear powers, or between one nuclear power and a non-nuclear power with any kind of security guarantee umbrella. That is perhaps the clearest outcome of the Russo-Ukraine war. Noted nuclear scholars such as Francesca Giovannini, Caitlin Talmadge, Joe Cirincione among others, recently warned of the possibility of Russia using tactical nuclear weapons to deter and, if necessary, tip the course of a large-scale conventional war in Ukraine. The likelihood of this event would shatter the most resilient norms — the non-use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The end of the nuclear taboo, in this context, could normalize the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states.

All things considered, it seems that unless an abrupt reversal in the dangerous "West versus Russia/China" paradigm takes place, and soon, the nuclear disorder will persist and grow worse.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Adérito Vicente.