My mom actually took singing lessons when she was pregnant with me. I don’t have a scientific basis for how that might’ve affected me, but come on, to live in the sort of resonating chamber of her body… I can only imagine that that left its impression. [Growing up in that kind of household] felt so comforting. There’s something about practicing that I love. Whether my dad was practicing a piece on the piano, and my mom was going through vocal exercises, whatever, I find that one of the most reassuring sounds in the world.

Did you think that you would be a musician? Was that an expectation?

I wanted to maybe go into law, medicine, Russian, or piano, or maybe dance. I was very obsessed with ballet. My mom actually said an interesting thing. She was like, “If you love your art form, don’t do it.” Because when you make it your profession, all the bullshit that comes with professions will be a part of your love of music or love of dance, and you will have to deal with egos, and you will have to deal with favoritism and worries about money and… you’ll have to do things or play games that kind of diminish the pleasure. So I really took that to heart, and went and studied Russian and Russian literature. A very practical degree. [laughs]

Was that her kind of admitting that she felt that way?

Oh, yeah. She told me that even when she would go to a concert, she would just be listening technically, like how is this person shaping their mouth? How are they projecting? And she just said, “I can’t turn that off anymore.”

I’m so interested in what drives someone’s creative practice and what proximity does. Sometimes when you’re too technical, you’re too close. It gets rid of this kind of spaciousness that you need for it to feel really imaginative.

I’ve always wanted to do so many things [but] was always very confused about, what should I actually focus on? Dance, writing, and music…I realized at some point that even though I loved all three an outrageous amount, there was none of them really, but writing most of all, that I liked the unglamorous part of actually doing it. Actually learning it, not just the result. I love music so much that I feel sometimes, “I would die for music,” if that was a thing. But I don’t want to do the exercises. I don’t want to. That’s so boring to me. With audio [production], that’s when I knew I’d found my thing. I love every bloody minutiae of it.

I started to realize a few years ago that, though there are lots of great podcasts in this world, some of them, especially post-podcast-boom, followed a very typical pattern or arc. Whereas in the Paris Review Podcast, you keep elements, like the set-up to an interview or a bird in the background, that in other shows would be removed and considered unnecessary. You’re using the world to score the world. It really transports me. Like in the [“Scenes from Open Marriage” episode, an essay written and read by Jean Garnett], where you hear her taking breaks and the tension between her performative “reading” voice and her sitting-back voice.

In a way, for me, it always feels like love. You might not really pay attention to that when you are around and about in the world and there’s a bird, “Okay, whatever, I’ve heard birds before.” But all of a sudden in this context, where it is carefully edited, and kind of curated, it serves a sort of a purpose. You are there with [Jean] as she drinks her tea and then puts the mug on the table. All of a sudden everything is sort of imbued with a shimmer. It’s elevated in some way. And so to me it’s almost like an ode to banal stuff of the world.

It reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich, [a Belarusian oral historian who documented the Soviet and post-Soviet period], whose work I know you love, and something you’ve said about how “history is in the heart.” I was reading more about her work and it being composed of so many interviews, and it strikes me that there’s a difference between “these are a bunch of facts” and “this is the felt experience of someone in this situation at this time.” And that felt experience is this really particular chemistry each time.

That’s why I love her so much. You don’t hear it. You don’t get to hear the tea mug, but you hear the effects of it. You hear the fact that someone is comfortable at their kitchen table, not speaking from the position of an expert who has studied the thing, but just like someone who’s remembering falling in love or gathering strawberries and their mom slapping them because they did something and their dad being carted off to the Gulag [under Stalin]. And then it’s so different… than when you just read a book written about the Gulag. [In the latter] it always feels like these people had no lives before or after or outside of that.

When did you encounter her work for the first time?

I don’t remember exactly when, but… I think I just saw the book at a bookstore.…Now I’ve read pretty much everything by her. I mean, I get very emotional when I think about her. I don’t know why there are not thousands of people doing what she does. I mean, not that anyone can do it as she does, everyone would do it in their different way, exactly as you’re talking about, this specific alchemy.

But I am so interested in history because history is nothing but life, right? It’s not different from now, it’s just life that happened a little bit ago or a lot ago. And when people are able to capture that life with all of its texture, it’s like an ode… It makes me appreciate actual life more, the one I’m living. I don’t need a big arc. I don’t need to do something important… And meaning is everywhere, if only you care to look or notice, pay attention.

Did reading her inform your approach to interviewing people?

I want to say yes, but I can’t be sure that that’s the correct cause and effect. I never thought about it practically. [Though] in the past few years I’ve been exchanging a lot of voice messages with friends. Some of them just because they don’t live in New York and I can’t see them. And when you have to come up with a time to call like, “Oh my god, no, I’m busy, and actually it’s not a good time anymore,” blah, blah. So we just record voice messages and send them and [they] are routinely like 30, 40 minutes long. And the beautiful thing about these is that you can notice the movements of someone’s mind because you’re not interrupting them, you’re not asking follow-up questions. So they get to just jump from thing to thing. You can hear them free-associate. It’s very moving because you get to know your friends in such a different way than if you would actually be with them and talk and interact. And that reminds me of [Svetlana]. She does ask questions, 100 percent, but I think she is silent a lot. I think she does do that thing where she asks one question and then just listens. And that is something that I’m learning to do. It’s awkward. We don’t like silence. Nobody likes silence, but they will fill it because they don’t like it. So just zip it.

What else have you noticed over time, doing interviews?

The main thing that has changed is I have willed myself to be less afraid to ask really difficult questions. I was so terrified. Aren’t we all? Because an interview is very much not like a normal conversation. You do things you would never do in a normal conversation, that would be considered rude and overstepping. And in an interview that is not out of the bounds of the expected or accepted.

I found it really hard, but I learned by listening to interviews that I’d done because I was transcribing them and editing them and being like, “Man, I left that on the table. Why did I decide for them that they probably wouldn’t want to go there? Why?” And it made me think, how often do people get the gift of being listened to? Especially say, when a loved one died? People are so awkward around death that if your loved one died, people will be like, “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s sad,” for a few months. And then they expect you to get over it, and then they will not ask you about it anymore. To the extent that they ever did.

I remember I interviewed a poet [for Poetry Off The Shelf] whose dad died when she was really young, maybe she was seven or eight… And she has written so many books about the death of her father. So she’s also interviewed about that a lot. And I asked her, “What was your dad like?” And she took a beat and she was like, “Nobody has ever asked me that.” Can you believe it? This is not a very spectacular question. This is not my genius coming up with the smartest thing to say, but people do not ask each other the most basic stuff because they’re afraid.

Now I know that I have to do it, and they want it, and I want it, and the listener wants it. And I tell them every time before the interview, “When I’m about to ask something hard, you are in charge. If you don’t want to answer, you’re good. If you want to… I have other questions.” And I can’t think of a single time where people have been like, “Can you take it out?” Sometimes they’re like, “Can you leave out that one comment that I made about my dad?” But [not] the whole thing, no.

What to you is the purpose of creativity, or maybe your particular questions when it comes to it? It seems like in this case it’s, “What is it like to be this person in this particular moment in time?” And maybe documenting something that would otherwise go unnoticed.

I’m less interested in the record-keeping part of it where it’s like if you don’t write it down, it will be gone forever. That of course is a big part of it. But what I’m interested in or what drives my curiosity is how does the world, the facts of the world, filter through each individual consciousness? What are the things that you specifically notice and get irritated about and get swoony about that [other people] don’t notice and get obsessed about? And how do you metabolize it? That is what I’m interested in.

I am working on a kind of memoir project right now. It’s the first time that I’ve done anything that is focused on me. It’s very uncomfortable. I am so curious about other people, and I cannot do the same thing for me. So I have had friends interview me. I’ve done that so that I can sidestep that problem.

Is this Creation Myth?

Yes.

Are you done with the show?

Oh no. Oh man… It’s going, but it’s very, I don’t want to say laborious. It’s way too fun for that. I don’t think I’ve ever had this much fun in my life.

What has made it so different?

One part of it is, you know how there’s things that you always feel like you should or want to be doing, but for some reason you’re not doing that? Because you don’t feel ready. Because you feel like nobody’s waiting for that or wants that. Because yeah, something about it intimidates you, because you don’t have the time, because any number of things. But it’s the thing that you want to make. It’s the thing that is resting on your heart like a brick and whatever you do and however many cool projects you do, you’re always like, “I’m not doing that thing. And when am I ever going to do it? And can I even? Is this for me? Am I busy because then I have the valid excuse to not do the thing?”

And for me, doing the thing was always having my own project, a project that nobody asked for. Now I’m doing that.

[Something else] that is so much fun is I have an editor. I’ve never worked with an editor so the first meeting where I was supposed to share a thing, I was terrified. Like sweaty hands, racing heart. I felt like, “Now it’s going to come out. Now she will know that all of the stuff that she thinks that I’m good at, I’m not. I’m a fraud.” I was so terrified. And of course it was great. I trust her completely. I know that we both want the same thing, for the show to be good. And having someone who’s not you but likes what you’re doing, help you is such a relief for how my brain works. [She] looks at it and she’s like, “This is great. This part was confusing. I think maybe we can start right there and cut that perfect part.”[Or]“This is great. We can work with it.” Whereas if I would be on my own, I would be like, “This is shit. I feel so ashamed that I did this. Why am I even bothering?” So that’s another really, really, really fun thing that makes me feel more free to play.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Alesandra C. Tejeda.

My mom actually took singing lessons when she was pregnant with me. I don’t have a scientific basis for how that might’ve affected me, but come on, to live in the sort of resonating chamber of her body… I can only imagine that that left its impression. [Growing up in that kind of household] felt so comforting. There’s something about practicing that I love. Whether my dad was practicing a piece on the piano, and my mom was going through vocal exercises, whatever, I find that one of the most reassuring sounds in the world.

Did you think that you would be a musician? Was that an expectation?

I wanted to maybe go into law, medicine, Russian, or piano, or maybe dance. I was very obsessed with ballet. My mom actually said an interesting thing. She was like, “If you love your art form, don’t do it.” Because when you make it your profession, all the bullshit that comes with professions will be a part of your love of music or love of dance, and you will have to deal with egos, and you will have to deal with favoritism and worries about money and… you’ll have to do things or play games that kind of diminish the pleasure. So I really took that to heart, and went and studied Russian and Russian literature. A very practical degree. [laughs]

Was that her kind of admitting that she felt that way?

Oh, yeah. She told me that even when she would go to a concert, she would just be listening technically, like how is this person shaping their mouth? How are they projecting? And she just said, “I can’t turn that off anymore.”

I’m so interested in what drives someone’s creative practice and what proximity does. Sometimes when you’re too technical, you’re too close. It gets rid of this kind of spaciousness that you need for it to feel really imaginative.

I’ve always wanted to do so many things [but] was always very confused about, what should I actually focus on? Dance, writing, and music…I realized at some point that even though I loved all three an outrageous amount, there was none of them really, but writing most of all, that I liked the unglamorous part of actually doing it. Actually learning it, not just the result. I love music so much that I feel sometimes, “I would die for music,” if that was a thing. But I don’t want to do the exercises. I don’t want to. That’s so boring to me. With audio [production], that’s when I knew I’d found my thing. I love every bloody minutiae of it.

I started to realize a few years ago that, though there are lots of great podcasts in this world, some of them, especially post-podcast-boom, followed a very typical pattern or arc. Whereas in the Paris Review Podcast, you keep elements, like the set-up to an interview or a bird in the background, that in other shows would be removed and considered unnecessary. You’re using the world to score the world. It really transports me. Like in the [“Scenes from Open Marriage” episode, an essay written and read by Jean Garnett], where you hear her taking breaks and the tension between her performative “reading” voice and her sitting-back voice.

In a way, for me, it always feels like love. You might not really pay attention to that when you are around and about in the world and there’s a bird, “Okay, whatever, I’ve heard birds before.” But all of a sudden in this context, where it is carefully edited, and kind of curated, it serves a sort of a purpose. You are there with [Jean] as she drinks her tea and then puts the mug on the table. All of a sudden everything is sort of imbued with a shimmer. It’s elevated in some way. And so to me it’s almost like an ode to banal stuff of the world.

It reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich, [a Belarusian oral historian who documented the Soviet and post-Soviet period], whose work I know you love, and something you’ve said about how “history is in the heart.” I was reading more about her work and it being composed of so many interviews, and it strikes me that there’s a difference between “these are a bunch of facts” and “this is the felt experience of someone in this situation at this time.” And that felt experience is this really particular chemistry each time.

That’s why I love her so much. You don’t hear it. You don’t get to hear the tea mug, but you hear the effects of it. You hear the fact that someone is comfortable at their kitchen table, not speaking from the position of an expert who has studied the thing, but just like someone who’s remembering falling in love or gathering strawberries and their mom slapping them because they did something and their dad being carted off to the Gulag [under Stalin]. And then it’s so different… than when you just read a book written about the Gulag. [In the latter] it always feels like these people had no lives before or after or outside of that.

When did you encounter her work for the first time?

I don’t remember exactly when, but… I think I just saw the book at a bookstore.…Now I’ve read pretty much everything by her. I mean, I get very emotional when I think about her. I don’t know why there are not thousands of people doing what she does. I mean, not that anyone can do it as she does, everyone would do it in their different way, exactly as you’re talking about, this specific alchemy.

But I am so interested in history because history is nothing but life, right? It’s not different from now, it’s just life that happened a little bit ago or a lot ago. And when people are able to capture that life with all of its texture, it’s like an ode… It makes me appreciate actual life more, the one I’m living. I don’t need a big arc. I don’t need to do something important… And meaning is everywhere, if only you care to look or notice, pay attention.

Did reading her inform your approach to interviewing people?

I want to say yes, but I can’t be sure that that’s the correct cause and effect. I never thought about it practically. [Though] in the past few years I’ve been exchanging a lot of voice messages with friends. Some of them just because they don’t live in New York and I can’t see them. And when you have to come up with a time to call like, “Oh my god, no, I’m busy, and actually it’s not a good time anymore,” blah, blah. So we just record voice messages and send them and [they] are routinely like 30, 40 minutes long. And the beautiful thing about these is that you can notice the movements of someone’s mind because you’re not interrupting them, you’re not asking follow-up questions. So they get to just jump from thing to thing. You can hear them free-associate. It’s very moving because you get to know your friends in such a different way than if you would actually be with them and talk and interact. And that reminds me of [Svetlana]. She does ask questions, 100 percent, but I think she is silent a lot. I think she does do that thing where she asks one question and then just listens. And that is something that I’m learning to do. It’s awkward. We don’t like silence. Nobody likes silence, but they will fill it because they don’t like it. So just zip it.

What else have you noticed over time, doing interviews?

The main thing that has changed is I have willed myself to be less afraid to ask really difficult questions. I was so terrified. Aren’t we all? Because an interview is very much not like a normal conversation. You do things you would never do in a normal conversation, that would be considered rude and overstepping. And in an interview that is not out of the bounds of the expected or accepted.

I found it really hard, but I learned by listening to interviews that I’d done because I was transcribing them and editing them and being like, “Man, I left that on the table. Why did I decide for them that they probably wouldn’t want to go there? Why?” And it made me think, how often do people get the gift of being listened to? Especially say, when a loved one died? People are so awkward around death that if your loved one died, people will be like, “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s sad,” for a few months. And then they expect you to get over it, and then they will not ask you about it anymore. To the extent that they ever did.

I remember I interviewed a poet [for Poetry Off The Shelf] whose dad died when she was really young, maybe she was seven or eight… And she has written so many books about the death of her father. So she’s also interviewed about that a lot. And I asked her, “What was your dad like?” And she took a beat and she was like, “Nobody has ever asked me that.” Can you believe it? This is not a very spectacular question. This is not my genius coming up with the smartest thing to say, but people do not ask each other the most basic stuff because they’re afraid.

Now I know that I have to do it, and they want it, and I want it, and the listener wants it. And I tell them every time before the interview, “When I’m about to ask something hard, you are in charge. If you don’t want to answer, you’re good. If you want to… I have other questions.” And I can’t think of a single time where people have been like, “Can you take it out?” Sometimes they’re like, “Can you leave out that one comment that I made about my dad?” But [not] the whole thing, no.

What to you is the purpose of creativity, or maybe your particular questions when it comes to it? It seems like in this case it’s, “What is it like to be this person in this particular moment in time?” And maybe documenting something that would otherwise go unnoticed.

I’m less interested in the record-keeping part of it where it’s like if you don’t write it down, it will be gone forever. That of course is a big part of it. But what I’m interested in or what drives my curiosity is how does the world, the facts of the world, filter through each individual consciousness? What are the things that you specifically notice and get irritated about and get swoony about that [other people] don’t notice and get obsessed about? And how do you metabolize it? That is what I’m interested in.

I am working on a kind of memoir project right now. It’s the first time that I’ve done anything that is focused on me. It’s very uncomfortable. I am so curious about other people, and I cannot do the same thing for me. So I have had friends interview me. I’ve done that so that I can sidestep that problem.

Is this Creation Myth?

Yes.

Are you done with the show?

Oh no. Oh man… It’s going, but it’s very, I don’t want to say laborious. It’s way too fun for that. I don’t think I’ve ever had this much fun in my life.

What has made it so different?

One part of it is, you know how there’s things that you always feel like you should or want to be doing, but for some reason you’re not doing that? Because you don’t feel ready. Because you feel like nobody’s waiting for that or wants that. Because yeah, something about it intimidates you, because you don’t have the time, because any number of things. But it’s the thing that you want to make. It’s the thing that is resting on your heart like a brick and whatever you do and however many cool projects you do, you’re always like, “I’m not doing that thing. And when am I ever going to do it? And can I even? Is this for me? Am I busy because then I have the valid excuse to not do the thing?”

And for me, doing the thing was always having my own project, a project that nobody asked for. Now I’m doing that.

[Something else] that is so much fun is I have an editor. I’ve never worked with an editor so the first meeting where I was supposed to share a thing, I was terrified. Like sweaty hands, racing heart. I felt like, “Now it’s going to come out. Now she will know that all of the stuff that she thinks that I’m good at, I’m not. I’m a fraud.” I was so terrified. And of course it was great. I trust her completely. I know that we both want the same thing, for the show to be good. And having someone who’s not you but likes what you’re doing, help you is such a relief for how my brain works. [She] looks at it and she’s like, “This is great. This part was confusing. I think maybe we can start right there and cut that perfect part.”[Or]“This is great. We can work with it.” Whereas if I would be on my own, I would be like, “This is shit. I feel so ashamed that I did this. Why am I even bothering?” So that’s another really, really, really fun thing that makes me feel more free to play.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Alesandra C. Tejeda.

Photo by Jorge César

President Trump is blowing up the global economy with threats of extortionate tariffs being placed on imports from foreign countries to the US. He sometimes makes the ludicrous claim as in the case of Canada, that it is because Canada “isn’t doing anything” to stop the fentanyl that is allegedly “pouring across the border” into the US with no effort made to stop it. More often, he accuses Canada of unfair trade policies.

The post Why US Automakers Make Vehicles and Source Parts in Canada appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dave Lindorff.

Lordy. Our apocalyptic circus of bigots, morons, loudmouths and clowns has stayed in town too long. To wit: a ceaseless GOP House "shit show," racists freaking out at too-tanned NCAA players "invading," pastors cancelling autism awareness as "demonic," Klan Mom decrying black market harvesting of baby organs - thanks Dr. Fauci! - and now, from God or the Gazpacho police, an earthquake and end-of-the-world eclipse telling us to "repent." First, maybe repent for an electoral college that gave us this lunacy.

The seedy grandstand for the mayhem is the (barely) GOP-controlled House, which for a while has been "imploding in plain sight." After skipping town for Easter, they left behind yet more flops earning yet more declarations of "Republicans in disarray." Amidst a "Great Resignation" that's seen the highest number of lawmakers quitting in 40 years, two more Reps - Gallagher and Buck - are bowing out, leaving the GOP a paltry one-seat majority. The showboats of what Raskin calls the "chaos-and- cannibalism caucus" still don't like their Speaker for (five months late) keeping the government open with a $1.2 trillion spending bill, Comer's Biden impeachment effort has crashed and burned like his other "investigations," the sole accomplishments of the shortest and least productive House session since the Great Depression are re-naming some Veterans Affairs clinics and authorizing a coin to mark the Marine Corps' 250th anniversary, and even George Santos says he's (inexplicably) running again as an Independent 'cause the GOP is too "embarrassing."

For once, he has a point. Self-righteous blowhards venting ignorance and hate, they seem to do nothing but voice imaginary grievances when grownups do things they don't like. When the effort to remove Fani Willis from Trump's election interference case failed, they shrieked, "It's all rigged!" and "There is no justice in America today." When Kamala Harris touted an effort to keep guns away from dangerous people, yahoos who send out Christmas cards of their kids cradling AR-15's bayed, "What the hell is this evil?" When a Transgender Day of Visibility coincidentally fell on Easter, they ranted it was part of a "years-long assault on the Christian faith" and the Catholic Biden - to Trump, one of "MANY PEOPLE THAT I COMPLETELY & TOTALLY DESPISE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA," would now "commandeer" Christmas with a Trans-Siberian Orchestra playing and say what? When a Florida school planned Autism Awareness Week, the pastor cancelled it as "demonic" (like "Santa Clause") because "anything that exalts itself above the name of Christ should be brought down."

And when racist moron and Michigan state rep Matt Maddock - who boasts he's America's "Most Conservative" pol, tried to imprison "war criminal" Gretchen Whitmer for requiring masks during COVID, got kicked out of the House GOP Caucus as too conspiracy-y even for them, posts things like "the left hates farmers," "government controls your air conditioning," "bail reform kills people," "communists are lonely, bitter, angry cowards with sad kids," and whose wife is under indictment as one of Michigan's fake electors - saw three buses at Detroit Airport and some scary dark guys alight, squawked they were "illegal invaders" and "everyone knows" Whitmer is "bussing in illegals and asking (us) to shack them up in their homes for $6,000 a year." Except they were the Gonzaga Bulldogs basketball team there to play in the NCAA Mens Sweet 16 March Madness against Purdue. Confronted with his "spectacular stupidity" and the facts, even by supporters, he snarled back - “Sure kommie. Good talking point" - and doubled down with replacement theory: "How long till the #HostileMedia calls the invaders homesteaders?" He seems nice.

The implausible queen of this GOP rabble is grandstanding, hate-mongering, self-promoting "purveyor of political pageantry" Marjorie Taylor Greene, a useless, performative troll most recently appointed to chair the "useless, performative impeachment" of Homeland Security's Alejandro Mayorkas by Mike Johnson in hopes of shutting her up as she tries to oust him for keeping the government running, or something. Among other memorable ventures since her Jewish Space Laser and school-shooting-survivor-harassing days: Inventing an Antifa plan for a "Trans Day of Vengeance," arguing 8-to-10-year-old Uvalde victims should've been armed with JR-15 rifles, spreading a replacement theory video about "the Democrat (sic) open border plan to entrench single party rule," and after Mexico's president proposed several U.S. actions to ease border crossings, refuting them with a "Declaration of War" against Mexican cartels for fentanyl trafficking, even though it's mostly produced in China and smuggled into this country not by migrants but U.S. citizens or other legal visitors.

Last month she also hosted, with live stream, a "Hearing Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting" to explore "the "aborrent (sic) truth of the industrial abortion complex (to) profit off the murder of unborn babies." She'd announced the event, based on repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories that Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue for profit - including grafting "the scalps of unborn babies onto the backs of rodents in a study funded by Anthony Fauci under the NIH" - with a beaming photo of herself that, noted one observer, "looked oddly bubbly for a hearing on dead babies." Her two speakers were David Daleiden, who in 2015 released heavily edited videos of himself as a fake biomedical researcher trying to buy fetal tissue, after which Planned Parenthood successfully sued him for $2 million; and Terrisa Bukovinac, who in 2022 was convicted with another anti-abortion activist of blocking access to a health clinic, stealing 115 aborted fetuses from a medical waste truck, burying most of them, and keeping five they claimed without evidence were "born alive and then murdered."

Greene said she wanted the hearing, attended by five people though she invited every member of Congress, to be a graphic, gory, in-your-face rebuttal to genteel talk of "women's health care." And so it was, with her use of pointedly incendiary language and images: "abortionists," not doctors, "babies sucked out while still alive" by an instrument "more powerful than a household vacuum," "tiny brains and hearts," "over 63 million people murdered in the womb" - misinformation so prevalent House Dems created a website to refute it - and no mention of vital medical advances facilitated by fetal tissue research. Still, wise-acres weren't buying it: "Baby Organ Harvesting is my Norwegian Death Metal cover band," "Marge hungry," "Do you know how many fetus livers it would take to make a single kabob?", "Curious how she'll tie it into Hunter's dick pics," "She should do her genealogy - she would have led lots of witch trials if she was alive back then," and, "This is absolutely ridiculous. No one harvests baby organs. Infants are only run through hydraulic presses to make baby oil, and THAT'S IT!"

But not even abortion, or terrorists collapsing Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, or earthquakes in what Rudy Giuliani called "the communist states" of New York and New Jersey - with its epicenter at Trump's Bedminster golf course deemed "Ivana's revenge" -come close to the "Super Bowl for Conspiracists" that is an eclipse. Marge was on it: "God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent." So was her squinty-eyed, right-wing boyfriend Brian Glenn - Wonkette calls him "the dude she has been having what we assume is very sweaty, pale, Godly white-person sex with" - who very scientifically "explains astronomy" and eclipses with, “I think we're going to see where the largest kind of a spiritual awakening in this country that people are realizing how much evil has creeped (sic) into (our) lives." He also warned of its fallout, "combined with earthquakes, and this infestation of locusts that have been dormant for years that all of a sudden will attack mankind, and oh then throw in Joe Biden trying to get into a war with eye-ran." He seems nice too, also smart.

— (@)

There are about three, mathematically predictable solar eclipses a year, and many unpredictable earthquakes caused by shifting tectonic plates, not God being mad about gay marriage; both have occurred since creation, and you can read about them here and here. Regardless, news of these events made the right wing lose whatever's left of their minds. Alex Jones - not much left there - called the eclipse "a dress rehearsal" for declaring martial law if Trump wins the election. He cited “Major Events" like "Masonic rituals (to) usher in a New World Order," noting the eclipse trajectory in the U.S. forms an “Aleph” and “Tav,” the first and last Hebrew letters, signaling end times. Another genius saw a "perfect cover story if our terrorist government wanted to take down the power grid and cause mass chaos while blocking citizen communications (to) unleash a dictatorship" before Trump can win. And to ensure "no Satanic forces come through" during the eclipse, Steve Bannon hosted a live Mass with newly fired, financially sketchy, MAGA Bishop Joseph Strickland "in prayer and penance for our country."

It didn't help that a nerdy NASA project in Virginia measuring changes in electric and magnetic fields - Project APEP, short for Atmospheric Perturbations Around the Eclipse Path, referencing the snake god of darkness - planned to shoot rockets at the moon during the eclipse. To one wise wingnut, that meant there would be "rituals performed by Masonic, Satanic, Esoteric, Gnostic, Brotherhood of the Snake and other occult-like groups." And because if it's Monday, it must be the frog-raining end of days, several red states, Oklahoma and Texas among them, issued various disaster warnings and executive orders because when in doubt or fear just go totalitarian. In Arkansas, "out of an abundance of caution," lying Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency over a possible "backlog of deliveries by commercial vehicles transporting essential items of commerce" during maybe four minutes of darkness. In truth, noted one of her constituents, "The real emergency is that "the governor of an entire state is a fucking moron."

In honor of the fraught occasion, Fox News took its usual, balanced, erudite approach and went with racist paranoia on the subject of the dangers of an eclipse at the border even though it was so cloudy it wouldn't have much effect. Host Dana Perino: "A rare celestial event collides with a policy failure on the ground." Host Bill Hemmer: Officials bracing for higher traffic under cover of darkness "means a real opportunity for smugglers and cartels and migrants to come right in..." Vile correspondent Bill Melugin: "While everybody is gonna be looking up, if you're looking down here at the border, here's some of what you're gonna see." He offers video of "a surge of illegal alien evaders" (two poor guys scrambling through brush) with, "You'll see illegal immigrants dressed in dark clothing, sometimes camouflage...And you'll see outnumbered border agents trying to respond as these guys flood in" (one sad guy gets caught) "as they're trying to sneak into the United States." Cruelty, as usual, is the point here, and the eclipse gives us one more ugly, feckless chance to flaunt it.

Four years ago, amidst a pandemic needlessly killing hundreds of thousands, the "leader" of all these loathsome, inept people was showing them how it's done, sputtering nobody's thanking him for the great job he's doing, yet more tests bring more cases: "So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.'" Somehow, now it's worse. For the eclipse, he released a deeply weird, insanely narcissistic ad declaring, to the soaring music of 2001, "The Most Important Moment In Human History." As awe-struck crowds watch, we see the sun slowly eclipsed by....his wattled, blubbery, grotesque silhouette. Comments: "The most accidentally honest ad Trump's team ever put out," "this fucking moron won't even let himself be upstaged by the solar system," "what a freak," "not a cult," "how can I make this about me?," "going all in with the anti-Christ thing," "Stephen Miller is no Leni Riefenstahl," "fat boy ate the sun," "total eclipse of the brain," "dark side of the buffoon," "totalitarian eclipse." For a laugh, someone added light passing ear to ear. Not a laugh: "So, Trump will bring darkness to us. Got it."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

KXAS (3/19/24)

This week on CounterSpin: 2023 was the warmest year on record. The World Meteorological Organization announced records once again broken, “in some cases smashed” (their words), for greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea-level rise, Antarctic sea ice and glacier retreat.

Climate disruption is the prime mover of a cascade of interrelated crises. At the same time, we’re told that basic journalism says that when it comes to problems that people need solved, yet somehow aren’t solved, rule No. 1 is “follow the money.” Yet even as elite media talk about the climate crisis they still…can’t… quite…connect images of floods or fires to the triumphant shareholder meetings of the fossil fuel companies.

Narrating the nightmare is not enough. We’ll talk about the latest research on climate coverage with Evlondo Cooper, senior writer at Media Matters.

Also on the show: Part of what FAIR’s been saying since our start in 1986—when it was a fringe idea, that meant you were either alarmist or benighted or both—is that there is an inescapable conflict between media as a business and journalism as a public service. For a while, it was mainly about “fear and favor”—the ways corporate owners and sponsors influence the content of coverage.  It’s more bare-knuckled now: Mass layoffs and takeovers force us to see how what you may think of as your local newspaper is really just an “asset” in a megacorporation’s portfolio, and will be treated that way—with zero evidence that a source of vital news and information is any different from a soap factory.

Rick Goldsmith’s new film is called Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. We’ll hear from him about the film and the change it hopes to part of.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent coverage of Israel’s flour massacre.

The post Evlondo Cooper on Climate Coverage, Rick Goldsmith on Stripped for Parts appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

David Slater entered the plea in federal court in Nebraska on March 5 in the latest in a series of embarrassing disclosures and leaks of classified U.S. intelligence, some of it concerning Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine and U.S. support for Kyiv.

The federal public defender who represented Slater at the hearing didn't comment on the case, but the judge ordered Slater to hire his own attorney after reviewing financial documents indicating he owns several rental homes in Nebraska and a property in Germany.

The judge also confirmed during the hearing that Slater no longer has access to classified information, but it was not clear if that mean he lost his job.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

U.S. prosecutors said on March 4 that Slater, a retired lieutenant colonel, was working as a civilian employee at U.S. Strategic Command, when he allegedly began an online relationship with a woman on a “foreign dating platform.” U.S. Strategic Command oversees U.S. nuclear arsenals, among other things.

It’s unclear whether Slater, 63, ever physically met the woman, who prosecutors said identified herself as Ukrainian.

In a series of e-mails and chats on the unnamed dating site between February and April 2022, the woman sent messages asking Slater specific questions about U.S. intelligence on Russia’s invasion.

"Dear, what is shown on the screens in the special room?? It is very interesting," the woman texted Slater around March 11, 2022, according to the unsealed indictment.

“By the way, you were the first to tell me that NATO members are traveling by train and only now (already evening) this was announced on our news. You are my secret informant, love! How were your meetings? Successfully?” the woman texted Slater days later.

"Beloved Dave, do NATO and Biden have a secret plan to help us?" the woman wrote on March 18.

“You are my secret agent. With love,” the woman allegedly wrote a week later.

The indictment does not quote any e-mails or messages authored by Slater, who was expected to be released on March 6 on the condition that he surrenders his passport, submits to GPS monitoring, and remains in Nebraska.

If convicted at trial, Slater faces up to 10 years in federal prison on each of the three counts laid out in the indictment.

A series of leaks of classified U.S. data on Ukraine and other issues have embarrassed the U.S. intelligence community and stirred doubts among U.S. allies sharing closely held information.

On March 4, a man who served in the U.S. Air National Guard unit pleaded guilty to leaking highly classified military documents about the Ukraine war and other U.S. national security secrets.

Jack Teixeira, 22, admitted to obtaining the information while he worked as an information technology specialist, and then sharing it with other users on Discord, a social media platform popular with online gamers.

The leaks, which included information about troop movements in Ukraine and the provision of U.S. equipment to Ukrainian troops, were seen as highly embarrassing for the Pentagon; more than a dozen military personnel were reprimanded in the subsequent investigation.

With reporting by AP

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

In the United States, a valiant effort was made in the US District Court for the Northern District of California to restrain the Biden administration from aiding Israel’s war efforts.  The application, filed by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, argued that President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, had made genocidal conditions possible “because of unconditional support given [to Israel] by the named official-capacity defendants in this case”.

The troubled judge, while citing the convention that foreign policy could not be the subject of a court’s jurisdiction, nonetheless implored President Biden and his officials to observe the obligations of the UN Genocide Convention.  As justice Jeffrey S. White declared, “the undisputed evidence before this Court comports with the finding of the ICJ and indicates that the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law.”

A Dutch appeals court in The Hague has further added its name to this growing list of interventions.  Judge Bas Boele, in siding with the human rights groups making the application including Oxfam Novib, had no such quibbles with questioning government policy towards Israel and the shipping of parts vital for the F-35 fighter. While the Netherlands does not assemble or produce the F-35, it houses at least one storage facility at Woensdrecht, where US-made components are stored for shipping to various countries.

Despite the ongoing conflict in Gaza, which commenced after the attacks by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023 on Israel, the Dutch government had not discontinued deliveries under a permit granted in 2016.  This is despite the monumentally lethal nature of a war that has left 28,100 Palestinians dead, and the decision by the ICJ.

The lower court had, in a similar vein to their US counterparts, adopted the position that decisions regarding export permits of weapon components tended to be of a political and policy nature, warranting wide executive latitude.  The judge duly held that the Minister of Foreign Trade and Cooperation had weighed up the relevant interests in the case in deciding to continue with the exports.

Such an artificial distinction – one that finds political acts that may lead to complicity in genocide armoured, if not above legal challenge – was not persuasive to the higher court.  “It is undeniable that there is a clear risk that the exported F-35 parts are used in serious violations of international humanitarian law,” the appeals court found. “Israel does not take sufficient account of the consequences for the civilian population when conducting its attacks.”  Such attacks had “resulted in a disproportionate number of civilian casualties [in Gaza].”

It followed that, “The Netherlands is obliged to prohibit the export of military goods if there is a clear risk of serious violations of international humanitarian law.”  The export and transit of all F-35 parts with Israel as their final destination would cease within seven days.

In responding to the ruling, Oxfam Novib Executive Director Michiel Servaes called it “an important step to force the Dutch government to adhere to international law, which the Netherlands has strongly advocated for in the past.  Israel has just launched an attack against the city of Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population are sheltering, the Netherlands must take immediate steps.”

Immediate steps have been duly taken, but not along the lines advocated by Oxfam; the Dutch government is appealing to the country’s Supreme Court to return to the status quo.  It was always likely to happen and was timed with the February 12 visit by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to Israel and the Palestinian territories.  “In the government’s view,” went the official statement, “the distribution of American F-35 parts is not unlawful.  The government believes it is up to the State to its [sic] determine foreign policy.”

The statement also goes on to reveal the sheer scope of the F-35 supply program and its relevance to the Dutch defence industry.  Whatever the humanitarian considerations about the devastation caused by Israel’s F-35 fighters, no participant wants to miss out.  “The government will do everything it can to convince allies and partners that the Netherlands remains a reliable partner in the F-35 project and in European and international defence cooperation.”

Being part of the program was also vital to the country’s own security, and that of Israel’s “in particular with regard to threats emanating from the region, for instance from Iran, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon.”

The Palestinian civilians hardly figure in these considerations, though Gaza warrants the briefest of mentions.  “The Netherlands continues to call for an immediate temporary humanitarian ceasefire, and for as much humanitarian aid as possible to be allowed to reach the suffering people of Gaza.  The situation is extremely serious.  It is clear that international humanitarian law applies in full and Israel, too, must abide by it.”  As, indeed, Israel implausibly claims to be doing so, even as the starving continues and the graves fill.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Daniel Boguslaw.

More than a decade ago, two climate scientists defined what they considered at the time to be the upper limit of human survivability: 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, at 100 percent humidity, also known as the wet-bulb threshold. In those conditions, a person, no matter who they are or where they live, cannot shed enough heat to stay alive for more than a few hours. The scientists’ operating assumption was that carbon emissions would need to warm the planet 5 to 7 degrees C (9 to 12.6 degrees F) before the world exceeded the wet-bulb threshold every year. Since then, more advanced work has demonstrated the world only needs to warm by about 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) before heat waves in the hottest parts of the world first cross that survivability line.

But just looking at the survivability threshold doesn’t paint the full picture of heat-related risk. The theoretical experiment underpinning that threshold was based on two assumptions: that humans are fully adapted to heat, or used to hot conditions, and that people do everything in their power — seek out shade, fan themselves, and douse themselves with water — to stay cool during an extreme heat event. The reality is that death can occur long before wet-bulb conditions are eclipsed for a variety of reasons that have to do with age, health, adaptation, and access. 

A study published in Science Advances this week used a more realistic threshold to determine when and where the world will become dangerously hot for humans. The researchers, from the University of Oxford and the Woodwell Climate Research Center, used a framework called the “noncompensable heat threshold,” the conditions under which a human being can no longer maintain a healthy core temperature without taking action to cool off. Six hours of unmitigated exposure to these temperatures would be sufficient to cause death. This threshold can be reached under different combinations of air temperature and humidity — the hotter the temperature, the less humidity needed to cross the limit. At 40 degrees C (104 degrees F), for example, you need about 50 percent relative humidity to cross the noncompensable threshold.

The researchers found that parts of the world have already surpassed this threshold. They identified 21 weather stations that clocked conditions exceeding the noncompensable threshold between 1970 and 2020, mainly along coastlines in the hottest regions of the planet such as the Persian Gulf and South Asia. Even more people will face such conditions as the planet continues to warm from fossil fuel combustion.    

Christopher W. Callahan, an earth systems scientist at Dartmouth University who researches health and heat and was not involved in the research, called the study’s results “striking.” “Some locations are already experiencing these critically hot conditions,” he said. “They’re not just a forecast from a climate model, they’re directly observable using quality-controlled weather station observations.”

As more countries experience abnormally high temperatures every summer, using pure “survivability” as the metric for when heat-related mortality will occur is a dangerous proposition. Death can occur much sooner than that. 

At the wet-bulb threshold, “no matter what you do short of air conditioning, you face lethal risk,” said Carter Powis, a researcher at the University of Oxford and the study’s lead author. “The threshold we looked at, noncompensable heat, is you face lethal heat risk unless you do something. Meaning there are still ways you can survive above this threshold such as using a fan, drinking cold water.” Any conditions between these two definitions are what the study’s authors call the “danger zone.” Whether someone dies when they’re in that zone depends on what cooling strategies are available to them and how well adapted they are. 

The study shows that, under current climate change conditions, 8 percent of the globe by land area experiences conditions that are in the danger zone once every decade. At 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of warming, a climate change benchmark the world is currently on track to exceed, more than a quarter of the world will experience these conditions at least once a decade. The percentage of the planet that will experience potentially fatal heat continues to grow the more climate change accelerates. 

It’s not just the hottest regions of the planet that are at risk. In the U.S., the Midwest and East Coast could see rapid increases in noncompensable heat exposure. The same is true for the Mediterranean region up north through Europe. These are areas that are not used to extreme heat. 

“While prior research has indicated that fatal wet bulb temperatures will occur more often in the most populated and poor regions of the planet, this research suggests that wealthier countries in North America and Europe will also face increasingly dire heat waves,” Cascade Tuholske, a geographer at Montana State University who was also not involved in the study, told Grist. 

For Powis, the biggest takeaway is that communities need to be aware that past heat-related mortality events are not a good way to gauge future risk. As the planet warms, the past will become an increasingly poor metric for looking at the future. “The danger is, in the near term, in the next decade or two decades, you have one of these extreme heat waves that departs from the historical maximum by a substantial amount, crosses this threshold, and causes wide-scale mortality,” Powis said. “Everything is fine until suddenly it’s not.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Parts of the world have already grown too hot for human survival on Sep 8, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

June 2023 may be remembered as the start of a big change in the climate system, with many key global indicators flashing red warning lights amid signs that some systems are tipping toward a new state from which they may not recover.

Earth’s critical reflective polar ice caps are at their lowest extent on record in the satellite era, with the sea ice around Antarctica at a record-low extent by far, spurring worried scientists to share dramatic charts of the missing ice repeatedly. In the Arctic, the month ended with the Greenland Ice Sheet experiencing one of the largest June melt events ever recorded, and with scientists reporting that June 2023 was the hottest June ever measured, breaking the 2019 record by a “staggering” 0.16 degrees Celsius.

“With the record warmth in June, 2023 as a whole is now the odds-on favorite to be the warmest year on record,” climate scientist Zeke Hausfather wrote on Twitter. 

Globally, the oceans set records for warmth on the surface and down to more than 6,000 feet deep throughout the month, with temperatures so far above the norm that the conditions elicited more graphs showing the anomaly. They’ve been shared thousands of times by scientists, policymakers, and the public. And in Canada, forest areas about the size of Kentucky have burned, choking huge swaths of central and eastern North America with acrid wildfire smoke, with some of the haze even reaching Europe. 

There was record-breaking heat on nearly every continent during the month, according to independent climate statistician Maximilian Herrera. Along with the deadly late June heat in Mexico and the South-central United States, extreme readings have been widespread in remote Siberia, with hundreds of daily heat records, including readings higher than 95 degrees Celsius close to the Arctic Circle. “The heat will just get worse,” he posted on Twitter.

Herrera also tracks notable regional extremes, like a historic mountain heatwave in Iran, where temperatures in late June spiked to between 100 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit at elevations between 1,500 and 5,000 feet above sea level that are normally far cooler.  During the first week of July, temperatures in Iraq are forecast to breach 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

“These extraordinary extremes could be an early warning of tipping points towards different weather or sea ice or fire regimes,” said University of Exeter climate researcher Tim Lenton. “We call it ‘flickering’ when a complex system starts to briefly sample a new regime before tipping into it. Let’s hope I’m wrong on that.”

In the meantime, the tropical Pacific Ocean is shifting into the warm El Niño phase of a two- to seven-year Pacific Ocean cycle that can boost the average global temperature by 0.2 degrees Celsius, enough to stoke the planet’s fever to a dangerous new high.

“The onset of El Niño will greatly increase the likelihood of breaking temperature records and triggering more extreme heat in many parts of the world and in the ocean,” said World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. “Early warnings and anticipatory action of extreme weather events associated with this major climate phenomenon are vital to save lives and livelihoods.”

“I expect a step change to higher global mean temperatures starting this year,” said atmospheric scientist Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and honorary faculty at the University of Auckland. “And next year will be the warmest on record, either 1.4 or 1.5C above pre-industrial.”

The higher of those levels is the amount to which the United Nations’ 2015 Paris Agreement aspired to limit climate change, but the continued upward trajectory of global temperatures could make that goal impossible to reach. 

“I expect it then to oscillate about that value and not come down again,” he said. 

The El Niño temperature nudge comes against a backdrop of record-high carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, he said, adding that the rate of increase is as high as it has ever been and continues to accelerate.

“In other words, there is no bending down of the CO2 record, as should happen with all the new actions being taken in the U.S. and elsewhere,” he said. “The problem is that China and India are accelerating their coal-fired power stations and overwhelming all other cuts.”

Antarctic sea ice decline has a cascade of impacts

The persistence of the startling Antarctic sea ice decline may be one of the most puzzling and worrisome of the recent cluster of climate extremes. Until recently, researchers expected less sudden changes in Antarctica, because it’s such a vast reservoir of coldness, and surrounded by a continual swirl of ocean currents and winds that have buffered the continent to some degree.

But at the end of June, getting into the heart of the Southern Hemisphere winter, an area of ice about the size of Texas and Alaska, nearly 1 million square miles, was missing. As the Southern Hemisphere’s winter set in, the sea ice grew more slowly than ever observed in the satellite era.

Sometimes, anomalies are just a one-time regional snapshot, but the Antarctic sea ice extent has been far below average at least since January, when Antarctic climate expert Ted Scambos, a senior scientist with Earth Science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, called the conditions extreme. “Frankly, we are still working to understand it,” he said.

But nearly every new study implicates human-caused warming, as measurements of winds and ocean currents show how the global temperature increase has pushed the Antarctic wind belt poleward, which also shifted relatively warmer water closer to the icy edges of the frozen continent.

Other recent research shows that the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica and extending northward to 60 degrees south latitude, stored a disproportionately large percentage of the heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases and then absorbed by the world’s oceans between 2005 and 2017. The study showed the Southern Ocean took up 45 to 62 percent of the heat absorbed by the world’s oceans, even though it makes up only 6.25 percent of the global ocean surface area.

In the absence of its reflective sea ice cover, the darker-colored ocean can absorb even more heat, potentially leading to earlier and more extensive melting during the next Austral summer. And as the fringe of ice around Antarctica gets smaller, warmer ocean water can more easily flow toward the floating ice shelves that buttress vast areas of inland ice that could start flowing into the sea faster to speed sea level rise.

There are also ecosystem impacts. The abundance of certain types of plankton and krill, at the base of the ocean food chain, is linked with the Antarctic sea ice. A disruption to those organisms ripples up through the ecosystem, because the feeding and breeding cycles of many other species, including seals and seabirds, is closely linked with sea ice.

A heat dome settles on North America

Climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, said there is probably a global warming fingerprint on the deadly dome of stagnant, hot air that is baking large parts of Mexico, the Southwestern and central United States and Canada. 

“Also playing a role in the extreme weather we’re seeing, including the (south-central U.S. heat dome and the Canadian wildfires) is what appears to be another resonance event,” he said, referencing research that shows how the warming climate favors planetary atmospheric wave patterns that “can give rise to persistent summer weather extremes. In this case, it is likely behind many of the extreme conditions we’re seeing right now in North America and Eurasia.”

Another part of the heat dome settled over Canada, where wildfires had released 160 million tons of carbon by the end of June, the highest annual total estimated emissions for Canada since satellite monitoring began in 2003, scientists with the EU’s Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service reported. And there’s also new research suggesting links between vanishing ice and snow in the planet’s polar reaches and climate extremes in the mid-latitudes, where most people live. 

“The pile of evidence linking a rapidly warming Arctic with extreme summer weather events continues to grow,” climate scientist Jennifer Francis wrote on Twitter on June 30, sharing a link to a new peer-reviewed study in Nature Communications that solidifies the hypothesis that changes in the Arctic can lead to a wavier jet stream that can trap heat domes in place.

In recent years, those patterns have sometimes persisted for months with only short pauses, including last summer, when a heat dome over Europe lasted several months and fueled that continent’s hottest summer on record.

Earth’s energy imbalance disrupts the climate system

At the top of the planet, scientists have been watching an extreme ocean heat wave in the North Atlantic just as carefully, because it could be a symptom of disruption to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a critical part of the global climate system that transports cold and warm ocean water between the poles. Sea surface temperatures about 9 degrees Fahrenheit above average in the region could also contribute to heatwaves over adjacent land areas.

Record-breaking ocean temperatures in regions around the globe are not surprising Trenberth, who specializes in analyzing deep ocean heat content, down to more than 6,000 feet below sea level, where more than 90 percent of all the heat trapped in the atmosphere by carbon pollution has been absorbed.

That heat is measured as energy rather than as a temperature value, and it’s equivalent at this point to the energy of five nuclear bombs exploding in the ocean each second, or about 100 times more energy than all the electricity produced in 2021 globally.

For Trenberth, that global energy imbalance, building steadily since the start of the fossil-fueled industrial age, is the best measure of how humans have affected the climate, because the energy balance isn’t affected by seasonal or annual variations, or by shifts in regional climate patterns.

And if the heat building that energy imbalance in the oceans was to stop, many of its impacts would rapidly decrease, even though the water is warmer.

“It is not global temperature that matters but Earth’s energy imbalance. If you have a pot of water on the stove, while heating, convection occurs,” he said. “Ultimately it boils off water as steam. But as soon as you turn off the heat source, all that behavior stops. The temperature is the same, but the heating is no more.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Parts of the climate system are reaching tipping points, June extremes suggest on Jul 9, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News.

Preliminary findings of a yet-to-be released Transparency International survey has found sextortion — demanding sexual favours in return for public services — is a major issue in parts of the Pacific.

Papua New Guinea, the Federated States of Micronesia and Solomon Islands have higher rates of sexual extortion, according to the research.

Transparency International New Zealand Pacific advisor Mariam Mathew told RNZ Pacific women reported corruption was on the rise and sextortion was widespread.

“Sextortion is a term we refer to when a person is asked for sexual favours in exchange for them accessing public services,” Mathew said.

“It’s a form of currency and in order to access it they [women] have no other option, but to actually offer this sexual favour.”

She said initial findings show women in the Pacific were “significantly impacted” by sextortion, adding Transparency International has found the issue could be more prevalent than in other part of the world.

“This is the first time we’re getting this sort of data,” she said.

‘Need conversations’
“We need to have conversations with stakeholders [working] in this space to understand what the issue is, what is being done about it, what needs to be done about it?” she added.

Transparency International will use the initial analysis from the survey to conduct focus group discussions with key stakeholders.

Mathew said these discussions would be held at the national and regional levels by working with groups in the field of gender to validate the findings but also provide more context to it.

She added that the final report was expected to come out later this year.

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.

Junta soldiers have set up security gates along the Yangon-Sittwe highway to block traffic between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Donor organizations and humanitarian groups have been sending supplies to Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine, said Khaing Kaung San, secretary of the Sittwe-based Wan Lark Foundation.

“It needs to be open 24 hours a day,” Khaing Kaung San told Radio Free Asia. “If the transport has to pause for a night due to the military’s restriction of traffic, the relief supplies cannot reach the affected areas in time.”

In northern Rakhine, more than 90 percent of houses and buildings were damaged by the May 14 storm. A resident of Rathedaung township who refused to be named told RFA that his village hasn’t received any assistance and villagers have been living under tarpaulin sheets.

“I can’t describe how much we have lost. We don’t even have a place to stay in our village,” the resident said. “We have to stay in the rain even at night. We have to stay under a tarpaulin sheet while it's raining. But some people here don’t even have the tarpaulins.”

Several Rakhine humanitarian organizations issued a joint statement on Monday urging junta authorities to speed up relief efforts and not to restrict the work of civil society groups.

Even though the World Food Program, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international humanitarian organizations have sent aid, there are still many areas in Rakhine that haven’t received any help, the organizations said.

The military council has been making daily announcements through state media about aid shipments to Rakhine. Junta spokesman Hla Thein didn’t answer on Tuesday when RFA called to get a response to the Rakhine civil society statement.

‘I can’t keep up’

Because construction materials such as tin roof sheets and nails have been hard to find, only about 10 percent of homes damaged by the storm have been repaired, said Soe Lwin, an official of the Rakhine-based Lin Yaung Chi aid association.

“Electric cables and poles are still lying around there. Rescue groups have not been able to cover all areas,” he said. “Some houses have collapsed. Some had their roofs damaged.”

Additionally, prices for construction materials have skyrocketed, said Ali, a Buthidaung township resident whose real name isn’t being disclosed for security reasons. He said he has been unable to repair his house before the impending start of the rainy season.

“I can’t keep up with these new prices,” he said. “I don’t have the money. I am facing a really difficult situation. Some families split to stay in other houses. But some just have to stay out in the open as they don’t have anywhere to go.”

Lin Myat of Pauktaw township told RFA that communication and electricity were still not back to normal service.

“Even if the relief supplies cannot reach us, it would be good if we can buy them at regular prices,” he said. “But the shortage of electricity is the major problem here.

“If the authorities cannot supply electricity like before, it would be good if we can get it by neighborhood,” he said. “That way, we will be able to pump water and recharge our electrical products.”

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

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

The trench, which is 26,000 feet below sea level, is one of several ocean trenches at that depth and a new study is shedding light on the presence of PCBs, or Poly-Chlorinated Biphenyls, in that area. 

“No one would expect to find pollutants in such a place,” said Professor Ronnie N. Glud, a co-author of the study and a professor of biology at the University of Southern Denmark.

PCBs are a group of substances that were first manufactured in 1930. The compounds were mainly used for building construction and electrical equipment but their health impacts only became clear decades after they were originally manufactured. Much like “forever chemicals,” the group of chemicals are man-made compounds that don’t break down over time. 

The toxins are also carcinogenic and known to cause reproductive issues, which led to their ban in the U.S. in 1979 and eventually worldwide in 2001. Today, they linger in the soil and cause problems when people are exposed to the compounds.

The fact that PCBs are still present, 50 years after the ban took place, in one of the more remote areas of the world is intriguing to researchers. 

“It is thought-provoking that we find traces of human activity at the bottom of a deep-sea trench, a place that most people probably perceive as distant and isolated from our society,” Glud said in a press release. 

In the ocean, as on land, they still pose a threat to living organisms. A 2018 study found that half of the world’s killer whale population is threatened by PCBs. 

While PCBs have been found in other places in the ocean, they have not been found as deep as the Atacama trench. Other toxic substances like mercury and black carbon, which is made of soot and smog, had also been found in trenches–– but those other compounds are still being manufactured unlike PCBs which have been out of production for decades. 

PCBs, like other pollutants, are not water-soluble, which means they don’t break down in water. The researchers found that the PCBs reached the ocean’s underground through multiple routes, including through plankton that had ingested the PCBs and then died, sinking to the bottom of the trench.

After contaminants like PCBs have made their way into the ocean, often they become a part of the sedimentation cycle through which rocks are formed and broken down. This complex geological cycle might explain why a contaminant from over 50 years ago which was banned 20 years ago is not only present in the deepest layers of the ocean, but is actually increasing in concentration. 

PCBs have only recently reached the deepest trenches, according to Glud. “Concentrations have not yet peaked,” he said. “We may see higher concentrations in a few years.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A toxin banned decades ago is found in one of the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean on Apr 18, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Siri Chilukuri.

Phenologists — people who study biological life cycles — use two metrics to delineate the change in seasons: First bloom, when plants begin to flower, and first leaf-out, when leaves unfurl. This year, first bloom and first leaf-out started creeping up the East Coast between three and four weeks ahead of schedule. That’s not entirely unusual; natural variation in seasons results in an early spring every few years. But, in some places, spring arrived extremely early — earlier than any time in the past four decades. 

Parts of central Texas and the Louisiana coast, southern Arkansas, southern Ohio, the D.C. area, New York City, and the New Jersey coastline all clocked their earliest spring on record, said Theresa Crimmins, director of the National Phenology Network, a group that collects data on seasons and other natural cycles. The organization uses mathematical models that combine historical observations of first leaf and first bloom with temperature and weather data to predict when lilacs and honeysuckles, typically the first plants to turn green each year, will start becoming active. The group then compares that first growth to an average baseline from the three decades between 1991 and 2020. The network’s models show that spring arrived a full 20 days ahead of schedule in spots across the eastern U.S. The trend was particularly vivid in the mid-Atlantic region.  

Warmth has everything to do with when trees start budding and leaves begin opening. This year, an especially mild winter in the eastern U.S., plus a string of very warm days in recent weeks, created ideal conditions for an early-onset spring. “That’s really what caused things to get so far ahead of schedule,” Crimmins said. 

It’s tough to peg climate change to a particular early leaf-out in any one place, but evidence of anthropogenic warming is obvious in how the timing of seasons in the U.S. has changed in the past several decades. “There is a clear underlying trend over the long term toward progressively earlier starts to the spring season in much of the country, much of the eastern U.S. in particular,” Crimmins said. “That is the result of steadily increasing global average temperatures.” 

Earlier springs are associated with a host of problems for human health. Recent research shows that the lengthening growing season has led to an allergy season that is 21 percent more intense and 20 days longer, on average, in North America. Shortened winters allow insects that carry disease, such as ticks and mosquitos, to get active earlier and spread pathogens to other animals and humans. 

“There’s a good chance that if you’re a sufferer of seasonal allergies and live in the eastern two-thirds of the U.S., you’re already feeling the effects of an early bloom,” Ben Noll, a meteorologist who tracks weather in New York’s Hudson Valley, told Grist.  

And early spring is a nightmare for farmers across the country who are already struggling to adapt to rapidly shifting environmental conditions. Mississippi’s blueberry crop was imperiled a couple of weeks ago when a hard frost descended on the state after a spate of abnormally warm days caused blueberry bushes to bloom early. One farmer in the state estimated that the frost wrecked 80 percent of his crop. 

“These seasonal changes can make life particularly tough for farmers whose livelihoods depend on the weather and ultimately produce the food that we consume,” Noll said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Warming temperatures trigger earliest spring on record in parts of eastern US on Apr 5, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

The armadillo-like anteaters, also known as scaly anteaters because of their protective scales, are about the size of a house cat or small dog, and are a threat to no one except to ants and termites, which they lap up with a long, sticky tongue.

Many citizens in China, Vietnam and Hong Kong believe that pangolin scales have medical uses. But experts, even including some of China’s traditional medicine practitioners, say that no scientific evidence supports this belief.

Laos, a popular transit hub for the illegal wildlife trade of animals and their parts or products, is one of the top countries worldwide for the illegal pangolin trade.

“Most of us are middlemen who buy pangolins and their scales from other countries then sell them to China and Vietnam,” said one pangolin scale trader in northern Laos, who like all other sources in this report requested anonymity for safety reasons.

Because Laos has captured and sold most of its pangolins, traders in the country mostly buy their scales from Thailand and Myanmar, the trader said. But there is still a small market for live pangolins in Laos.

A kilogram worth of pangolin scales has risen to between 6,000 and 8,000 Thai baht (U.S.$173 and $230), the trader said.

Markets in China and Vietnam

There are two markets. Buyers in China want mostly live pangolins while those in Vietnam want only scales, according to another trader who is located in Vientiane province. A live pangolin is worth about a half million kip (U.S.$30), he said. 

“Right now, we mostly buy and sell pangolins and their scales online like on Facebook,” he said. “We’d negotiate the prices then transfer money to each other. The sellers would send the products through the post office.”

A statement on the U.S. Embassy’s Facebook page on Feb. 18 – World Pangolin Day – called pangolins the most trafficked mammal in the world. 

Laos is a party to the international Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, a multilateral treaty protecting endangered plants and animals, and has a domestic aquatic and wildlife law. In 2018, the prime minister directed provincial governors across Laos to take firm action concerning the enforcement of both CITES and the national wildlife law.

An official from the Agriculture and Forestry Department of Oudomxay Province in northern Laos, near China said that they sometimes arrest pangolin smugglers.

“Oudomxay Province is a transit point. The smugglers pass our province before going to Luang Namtha Province and then to China,” the official said. “But pangolin smuggling has been down since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Illegal trade is now conducted online.” 

An official of the Agriculture and Forestry Department of Khammouane Province in southern Laos said the government is in the process of setting up a task force to crack down on the online wildlife trade. 

Translated by Max Avary. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

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

The armadillo-like anteaters, also known as scaly anteaters because of their protective scales, are about the size of a house cat or small dog, and are a threat to no one except to ants and termites, which they lap up with a long, sticky tongue.

Many citizens in China, Vietnam and Hong Kong believe that pangolin scales have medical uses. But experts, even including some of China’s traditional medicine practitioners, say that no scientific evidence supports this belief.

Laos, a popular transit hub for the illegal wildlife trade of animals and their parts or products, is one of the top countries worldwide for the illegal pangolin trade.

“Most of us are middlemen who buy pangolins and their scales from other countries then sell them to China and Vietnam,” said one pangolin scale trader in northern Laos, who like all other sources in this report requested anonymity for safety reasons.

Because Laos has captured and sold most of its pangolins, traders in the country mostly buy their scales from Thailand and Myanmar, the trader said. But there is still a small market for live pangolins in Laos.

A kilogram worth of pangolin scales has risen to between 6,000 and 8,000 Thai baht (U.S.$173 and $230), the trader said.

Markets in China and Vietnam

There are two markets. Buyers in China want mostly live pangolins while those in Vietnam want only scales, according to another trader who is located in Vientiane province. A live pangolin is worth about a half million kip (U.S.$30), he said. 

“Right now, we mostly buy and sell pangolins and their scales online like on Facebook,” he said. “We’d negotiate the prices then transfer money to each other. The sellers would send the products through the post office.”

A statement on the U.S. Embassy’s Facebook page on Feb. 18 – World Pangolin Day – called pangolins the most trafficked mammal in the world. 

Laos is a party to the international Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, a multilateral treaty protecting endangered plants and animals, and has a domestic aquatic and wildlife law. In 2018, the prime minister directed provincial governors across Laos to take firm action concerning the enforcement of both CITES and the national wildlife law.

An official from the Agriculture and Forestry Department of Oudomxay Province in northern Laos, near China said that they sometimes arrest pangolin smugglers.

“Oudomxay Province is a transit point. The smugglers pass our province before going to Luang Namtha Province and then to China,” the official said. “But pangolin smuggling has been down since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Illegal trade is now conducted online.” 

An official of the Agriculture and Forestry Department of Khammouane Province in southern Laos said the government is in the process of setting up a task force to crack down on the online wildlife trade. 

Translated by Max Avary. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

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

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The public has largely stopped paying attention to what’s happening inside shelters and other facilities that house immigrant children since President Donald Trump left office, and particularly since the end of his administration’s zero tolerance policy, which separated families at the southern border.

But the shelter system remains in place under President Joe Biden. The numbers can fluctuate but, as of earlier this week, more than 9,000 unaccompanied immigrant children were in custody, according to data from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the privately run shelters.

The vast majority are children and teens from Central America who entered the country through the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or legal guardian. The shelter system is designed to house these children temporarily — the average length of stay is about a month — until they can be placed with a relative or family friend or, in some cases, in foster care.

Last fall, ProPublica reported on one Chicago shelter’s failure to meet the language and mental health needs of dozens of traumatized Afghan children and teens who’d been brought to the country without family by the U.S. during its widely criticized military pullout from Afghanistan. Many of them had no one who could take them in; some tried to kill themselves, harmed others or ran away.

Months later, we saw those problems repeat themselves as the youths were transferred to other facilities. Office of Refugee Resettlement officials have said they’re doing their best to support the Afghan children by providing interpreters, mental health services and additional staffing. As of this week, some 84 unaccompanied Afghan minors remain in ORR custody, federal officials said. Some have been in custody for a year.

Another issue we’ve come across in our reporting is ORR’s system of “significant incident reports.” Shelter staff are required to report to ORR any “significant incidents” that affect children’s health, well-being or safety.

The system is intended to elevate serious concerns and protect children, but over the years, dozens of shelter staffers, advocates and children have told ProPublica that it has been overused and negatively affects children. For example, Afghan youth have expressed “extreme distress around how SIRs will be used against them,” said Neha Desai, senior director of immigration for the National Center for Youth Law, which is authorized to interview children in U.S. immigration custody.

“They’ve asked whether these reports will impact if or when their parents are evacuated” from Afghanistan, Desai said in an email. Some children “have been told by staff that SIRs will delay their release from custody.”

Last month, two prominent immigrant rights organizations that work with children in ORR custody issued a report calling for an overhaul of the incident reporting system. The report, “Punishing trauma: Incident Reporting and Immigrant Children in Government Custody,” is based on surveys last year of staff at ORR facilities and of attorneys and social workers who work with unaccompanied children.

An ORR official did not respond to the report’s specific findings. But, in a statement, the official said significant incident reports are primarily meant as internal records to document and communicate incidents for the agency’s awareness and follow-up. Last year, ORR revised its policies to limit the sharing and misuse of confidential and mental health information contained in SIRs. (For example, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was previously using notes taken during therapy sessions inside shelters against children in immigation court, The Washington Post reported.)

“ORR continues to clarify through technical assistance to care providers and ongoing policy development that SIRs should never be used by care provider staff as a form of discipline or punishment of the child,” the ORR official said.

I spoke with the primary authors of the report that calls for the overhaul of the incident reporting system. Jane Liu is senior litigation attorney for the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, and Azadeh Erfani is a senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center. We discussed how significant incident reports are used inside shelters and the authors’ ideas for reform.

This is a condensed, edited version of that conversation.

Jane Liu: Children do best in a family-based setting, but the large majority of the children in government custody are in large congregate care settings, where they often face a lot of restrictions on their movement, monitoring and supervision. They’ve also likely just navigated a very difficult migration journey that may have included exposure to violence and traumatic experiences. They may have suffered traumatic experiences in their home country. They may have been separated from their families at the border. Then they go into custody and they’re navigating this completely unfamiliar environment in a large-scale setting where they often aren’t receiving the individualized care that they need. They may also be facing language barriers. And so it’s extremely stressful for them and disorienting.

Azadeh Erfani: They have been on both of our radars for some time now. They are a really central facet for children’s legal cases. A child’s placement level — where they end up within the security hierarchy of ORR — is greatly impacted by the number and the type of SIRs that they have.

On a personal level, I’ve represented kids with dozens of SIRs. I’ve seen up close how they really have widespread impact for kids who end up being branded as “problem children” and basically are stuck in the system with very little recourse.

Erfani: It could be sharing food. It could be getting up and going to the bathroom at the wrong time. It can also be a child acting out, testing boundaries. It could be a child simply disclosing something about their past. If they disclose that they’ve survived trafficking, abuse or neglect, or have been preyed upon by gangs in their home country, those kinds of things can trigger an SIR. So the scope is really broad, which really leads to overreporting.

Erfani: ICE has the authority to review every single child’s case when they are about to turn 18. They make a decision to either take them into adult custody or release them on their own recognizance. At that juncture, SIRs play a pivotal role.

We’ve also seen SIRs getting used in immigration court or in asylum interviews to basically put the child on the spot to defend something that was written up about them that they may not even have known was written up.

Liu: It can create all sorts of barriers to release. It can lead to children getting “stepped up” [to more secure, restrictive facilities] and then it’s harder to step back down. Often a long-term foster care provider won’t accept a child unless they’ve had a period without behavioral SIRs. But even if a child has a potential sponsor, we’ve seen it lead to requirements for home studies where ORR will say that “These SIRs indicate that the child may have a need, and we need to investigate whether the sponsor can fill that need.” Ultimately, what that means is that it delays the release of the child to a family member.

Liu: It’s a much bigger problem than the public may be aware of. Often those children are not getting the services that they need, such as mental health support. And by that I mean holistic services tailored to the unique experiences of each child. They’re also usually facing prolonged periods of custody, so they’re also experiencing detention fatigue. And it’s not surprising that they can act out and that there can be these sorts of behavioral challenges. But what is extremely troubling is that when these behaviors are documented in SIRs, they can sometimes prompt ORR facilities to report the incident to police, leading to unnecessary interactions for children with law enforcement and even arrests.

Erfani: One of our recommendations to ORR is to actually train staff in crisis prevention. For the most part, there’s a very passive approach to incidents. There’s not a lot of scrutiny with respect to how to prevent these crises from erupting in the first place.

SIRs very much lack the context of the child. Being in a congregate setting indefinitely can be incredibly, incredibly aggravating. And of course, they are bringing tons of trauma because of their backgrounds. So oftentimes these triggers, this background, if they receive bad news from the home country, those kinds of things are absent from the SIR and make it look like this child is incredibly erratic. That’s also really alarming from a trauma-informed perspective.

Erfani: The Afghan kids walked into a really terribly broken system right after escaping a war zone. The fact that they may not have had a sponsor lined up meant that they had to spend more time in custody. And every day they kept seeing kids leaving while they had to stay. That’s heartbreaking. Then you pile on the language barriers, the cultural competency barriers. A lot of their behavior is a manifestation of trauma that staff isn’t equipped to understand. And it was much easier to write up reports, or call law enforcement, than it was to try to put the system on trial itself, to see what’s really missing within the facility and address those needs on a systemic level.

Erfani: I think it’s really hard on staff. The SIR system is incredibly time-consuming. They have to dedicate tons and tons of resources into it. The rules are really intricate. When there’s turnover, for the new staff a compliance mindset can settle in, where it becomes less about that child’s needs, less about these child welfare principles, and instead about, “Well, I should probably be writing this report.”

Liu: It’s really critical that the government provides more support for facility staff, whether it be ongoing training or more funding for more staff with expertise in child welfare, mental health and the needs of immigrant children. I think it’s really up to the government to understand that children’s time in custody can be very difficult for them and figure out ways to prevent situations from escalating and being extremely harmful for children.

Liu: We have shared the report with the government. It is not a new revelation to ORR that this is something of huge concern for those of us who advocate for children. We have been raising concerns about SIRs in particular with greater frequency in the last couple of years.

Erfani: We strongly believe that nothing short of a complete transformation of incident reporting is going to meet their duty to these children.

Erfani: That’s a tough one. We’re just trying to really put this problem on the map and then try to address it. And it’s not a Republican problem. It’s not a Democrat problem. It’s really something that’s in the system.

Liu: We know incident reporting is not a sexy topic. It’s not something flashy. It doesn’t involve Gov. Greg Abbott or Gov. Ron DeSantis. And so it’s hard to get people to see the urgency. But I think it sort of goes to the whole family separation thing. When that occurred, I think people could understand the humanity involved. That children are not being treated as children, and children are being traumatized by government actions.

I think a lot of people think of their own children. How would they want their own children to be treated? If your child was acting out or talking back to you, would you want a report written up and for that report to be used against your child for all sorts of purposes? The reality is that immigrant kids, particularly those in custody, are not treated like other kids. And that should be a concern to all of us. That’s a failure on all our parts.

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This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

This story was co-published with The Baltimore Banner and Reno Gazette Journal.

As Nevada lawmakers heard public comment last year on a bill to ban ghost guns and the parts used to make them, a resident of the rural town of Dayton called into the hearing to offer his opinion. The privately made firearms are virtually untraceable because they lack a serial number and can be easily purchased online and assembled by people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to legally buy a gun.

“I do not care if this bill passes or not,” said the man, who identified himself only as Loran Kelley. “I am just informing you that we, as Americans, just will not comply with it no matter what you do.”

What he didn’t mention to the committee is that he owns a company called Polymer80, one of the country’s most prolific manufacturers of ghost gun kits and parts. His vow to defy such regulations is as much about principle as profit, even as thousands of untraceable guns bearing the P80 stamp have turned up at crime scenes from Los Angeles to Baltimore.

According to court documents, the vast majority of ghost guns recovered by law enforcement nationwide are built from Polymer80 parts. That’s why Nevada lawmakers were debating the bill: Anti-gun violence advocates saw a unique opportunity to shut down the flow of ghost gun parts to the rest of the country by going after the source.

“You can say you can’t possess an unserialized gun, but you need to be able to go up the supply chain if you want to stop this problem,” said David Pucino, deputy chief counsel for Giffords Law Center, who helped draft the Nevada legislation.

Nevada’s effort came as big city mayors across the country were beginning to grapple with an increase in crimes committed with Polymer80 guns. A handful of states had passed legislation restricting ghost guns. Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles had sued Polymer80, claiming the company was selling a product that violated their local gun control laws. And an additional four cities had sued the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, seeking to compel the agency to require manufacturers like Polymer80 to put serial numbers on core ghost gun components.

Advocates viewed the Nevada law as a potentially more effective tactic than the patchwork of efforts brought to bear so far.

And it almost worked.

The Legislature passed Assembly Bill 286 on a party-line vote in May 2021. In seven months, when the new law took effect, Polymer80 would be out of the ghost gun kit-making business. At least in Nevada.

But thanks to a strategically chosen court venue in rural Nevada and with the help of the New York law firm Greenspoon Marder, Polymer80 won a decision vacating the section of law that would have halted its ghost gun business. While it is now illegal to assemble or possess a ghost gun in Nevada, it remains legal to possess and transport the components of a ghost gun.

As a result, the parts that some use to evade gun-control laws and others use to pursue their hobby of homemade gunmaking continue to flow from Polymer80 to the rest of the country.

Anti-gun violence advocates say their court defeat in Nevada underlines the weakness of a state-by-state approach to closing the ghost gun loophole. They also noted that the bipartisan federal gun bill signed into law in June in response to a spate of mass shootings does nothing to address the problem of ghost guns.

“The state level laws are really important but can only go so far,” Pucino said. “Really we need a federal solution.”

Kelley, who doesn’t trust the news media, rarely talks to reporters, despite his company’s increasingly high profile. But in an hourlong interview with ProPublica, Kelley described his remarks to lawmakers last year as “political grandstanding” and not a promise to break the ghost gun law. Still, it was a moment that portended Kelley’s victory in court.

“I was pointing out a simple fact, ‘You can do whatever you want, but it’s not going to work,’” Kelley said. “And I was proven to be right.”

But Polymer80’s victory in the Nevada court does not obviate the legal threat it faces elsewhere, including lawsuits from big-city mayors trying to stem gun violence on their streets and a pair of deputies ambushed in their patrol car by an assailant wielding a Polymer80 ghost gun.

It’s a position that Kelley both relishes and resents. If it were up to him, he said, he’d focus on building his business and looking after his 50 or so employees. But he doesn’t shy away from a fight over his principles.

“Polymer80 is on the front lines of protecting the Second Amendment rights of all Americans right now,” Kelley told ProPublica. “That’s not a brag. It’s just the reality because we’ve become the whipping boy for emotionally driven government policy.”

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott is one of the city leaders who has sued Polymer80. The lawsuit is intended to hold the company accountable for the street violence perpetrated by people using Polymer80 kits to circumvent federal and state gun laws that require a background check to purchase a firearm and a license to own a handgun. Maryland law also prohibits the sale and manufacture of guns that aren’t included on the state’s handgun roster, which does not list those built with Polymer80 parts.

Scott said he first heard about ghost guns in 2018, when, as a City Council member, he was chair of the Public Safety Committee. That year, law enforcement confiscated nine unserialized firearms. Within three years, police were confiscating hundreds of the illegal weapons annually.

“Once they arrived, they became a huge problem for us,” Scott told ProPublica. “They’ve been used in shootings, robberies, carjackings, murder. We’re seeing them run the gamut.”

Baltimore police recently busted a ghost gun-making operation, arresting a man who had dozens of Polymer80 kits, Scott said. The man was a childhood friend of Scott’s.

But another incident made the issue even more personal for Scott. In January 2021, Dante Barksdale, an anti-violence activist beloved in Baltimore was shot nine times with a Polymer80 ghost gun. He died in the courtyard of an apartment building where he had a few weeks earlier delivered winter coats to families who live there.

“Dante was like a brother to me,” Scott said. “His death really impacts everything that I do in the realm of public safety. If he were here today — he’s probably in the room with me right now — he would say, ‘You gotta go after the gun companies, too.’”

The rise of ghost gun crimes on Baltimore’s streets coincides with the growth of Polymer80’s business.

Kelley founded Polymer80 in 2013 with his father, Loran Kelley Sr., and their business partner David Borges, who recently retired from the company. Kelley’s father died in January. Polymer80 got its start in Vacaville, California. But Nevada, with its low taxes and friendly regulatory environment, beckoned, and the company moved here a year later.

In 2016, Polymer80 became a licensed firearm manufacturer, allowing it to produce traditional firearms that comply with the Federal Gun Control Act. But the larger part of its business is the production of so-called unfinished frames, the lower part of a handgun, including the pistol grip and trigger guard, onto which the firing mechanism and related components are fitted. The company also makes unfinished receivers, the base component of a rifle, such as an AR-15.

Federal law requires completed frames and receivers to be stamped with serial numbers. To avoid that requirement, Polymer80 designed “unfinished” frames, which are about 80% complete. The frame and remaining components can easily be assembled into a functioning firearm. In 2015, Polymer80 began sending samples of its unfinished frames to the ATF, which agreed the part did not require a serial number.

“Our strategy always has been to be very open and candid with the ATF and the government,” Kelley said. “We’ve always been proactive with sending the ATF information on our products and we just operate above board.”

Business took off. Between January 2019 and October 2020, for example, Polymer80 shipped nearly 52,000 items to customers across the country, according to court documents.

But as Polymer80 grew, so did the number of privately assembled firearms police were recovering at crime scenes. Just as Baltimore experienced an increase in ghost gun recoveries starting in 2016, so too did Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Nationally, according to ATF published numbers, the number of ghost guns recovered by law enforcement jumped to 19,344 in 2021 from 1,758 in 2016. The vast majority of those guns were assembled with Polymer80 parts, according to court documents.

Ghost guns haven’t been involved in the latest high profile mass shootings, such as in Uvalde, Texas; Highland Park, Illinois; or Buffalo, New York, which each involved legally obtained AR-15-style weapons. But mayors in the cities that have either sued Polymer80 or asked the ATF to close its ghost gun loophole — Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York — argue they’re increasingly common in street violence. Ghost guns have been used in school shootings by teenagers too young to legally buy firearms in New Mexico, Arizona, Maryland and California. In 2020, two Los Angeles County deputies sitting in their patrol car were shot — one in the face, one in the arm — by a man with a ghost gun. Both survived but sustained grievous injuries. A lawsuit they filed against Polymer80 is pending in Los Angeles County Superior Court, as is the lawsuit filed by the city of Los Angeles on behalf of the people of California.

Although the ATF gave Polymer80 the go-ahead to sell unfinished frames without serial numbers, the company started to market a kit — called Buy, Build, Shoot — that included both the unfinished frame and other parts needed to quickly assemble a complete firearm. The ATF never gave Polymer80 explicit approval to sell these complete kits without complying with serial number and background check requirements.

Pucino, the deputy chief counsel for Giffords Law Center, said Polymer80 is exploiting loopholes to enable its customers to evade gun control laws, including age requirements for gun purchases.

“Their whole business model, which makes them different from, say, Glock, is they evade restrictions,” he said.

In late 2020, investigators with the ATF concluded that Polymer80’s kits likely violated the Federal Gun Control Act and launched a raid on the Dayton manufacturing plant in December 2020. According to the search warrant affidavit, investigators found evidence Polymer80 shipped gun parts to individuals whose criminal backgrounds prohibit them from owning firearms and to individuals in foreign countries. (Polymer80’s website previously said the company has “a strict policy against selling 80% lower receivers to persons known to us to be convicted felons or otherwise prohibited persons.” That language was recently removed.)

Although the affidavit was made public, the federal court has resealed the case, meaning the results of the raid and any subsequent actions aren’t public. ATF spokesperson Ginger Colbrun said she couldn’t comment on the case because the investigation remains active.

Kelley wouldn’t comment on the specifics of the ATF investigation, but he pointed to the fact no one from his company has been arrested following the raid as an indication Polymer80 hasn’t broken the law.

“We are still talking to them about that,” he said. “We have a positive set of conversations going on.”

Kelley vehemently disagrees with the assertion his company tries to exploit loopholes, saying the company does nothing but comply with the law. He describes his customers as hobbyists and homemade-gun enthusiasts engaging in a centuries-old practice of building their own firearms.

“Polymer80 has always been a law-abiding company and always will be,” he said, noting it hasn’t sold any ghost gun parts to Nevadans since the 2021 law — which still prohibits possessing a complete ghost gun. “What’s going on is people in power realizing people have always had a right to do this and they don’t like it.”

Polymer80 wants to succeed through legal means, Kelley said. That wouldn’t be possible if all his customers were criminals.

“It would be a really, really stupid business model to cater specifically to criminals, and I would find such a practice to be deplorable,” he said.

It’s not hobbyists using Polymer80 guns on the streets of Baltimore, Scott said.

“That is the most ludicrous thing and ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Scott said. “Their business model explicitly targets purchasers seeking to evade law enforcement or who can’t obtain a gun from a licensed dealer.”

After the 2021 ghost gun law passed in Nevada, Polymer80 hired the New York City law firm Greenspoon Marder to file the lawsuit in Yerington, an onion farming town that’s the seat of the county that’s home to Polymer80. One of the firm’s managing partners, James McGuire, traveled to Yerington to argue before Judge John Schlegelmilch that the law was written so vaguely it would be impossible to enforce and would be ripe for abuse.

McGuire said in an email he no longer represents Polymer80 and referred questions to another lawyer at the firm, who didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In court, McGuire argued the law failed to define key terms such as “receiver” and “frame,” and used “murky and undefined terms” to explain what an “unfinished receiver” is. He also argued the law doesn’t specify when in the manufacturing process an unfinished receiver actually becomes a receiver.

During two hearings on the lawsuit, Schlegelmilch seemed to have little patience with the state’s argument that the law relies on industry-specific terms that are well understood by Polymer80. Instead the judge agreed with McGuire that the law didn’t adequately define an unfinished receiver. At one point he asked whether his 5-year-old’s rubber band gun could be considered an unfinished receiver simply because it looks like a gun.

“What if I’m at home, and I’m machining a piece of wood. OK? And my 5-year-old wants a rubber band gun. OK? So, I take that piece of wood, I turn it, I make it into — you know, I take a band saw, and I cut out what looks like a firearm. And I put a couple of sticks on it so that you can put a rubber band on it when you push it up. You’ve seen a rubber band gun before, right? So, is that mostly completed?”

“I mean, a rubber band gun’s not a firearm,” responded the state’s attorney, Greg Zunino. “I don't think you would ever be prosecuted under that scenario because you still have to have an intent to turn something into a firearm.”

Schlegelmilch ruled in favor of Polymer80 and enjoined the state from enforcing the section of the law that prohibited the possession and sale of unfinished frames and receivers. Schlegelmilch let stand the rest of the law, which Polymer80 didn’t challenge and prohibits the possession of a completed ghost gun.

The state has appealed Schlegelmilch’s ruling to the Nevada Supreme Court.

Schlegelmilch declined an interview request because the appeal is pending.

Kelley declined to comment on the decision to file the lawsuit on his home turf in Lyon County.

Other courts have ruled differently.

A similar lawsuit filed in federal court in Reno the same month was quickly tossed by a judge who decided the law “is a valid exercise of the government’s police power.”

“What happened here, with the state court being more successful for them, indicates politics and ideology within the judiciary,” Pucino said.

This month, a judge in Washington, D.C., found Polymer80 sold illegal firearms in the district and ordered it to pay $4 million in penalties.

The ATF is also seeking to impose a new rule that would require unfinished receivers and frames to include a serial number — one of the federal strategies that Pucino said would be more effective than a state-by-state approach. The new rule, seen as a way to close the ghost gun loophole, is set to take effect on Aug. 24, but it faces at least three lawsuits from the ghost gun industry seeking to block its implementation.

McGuire, the lawyer who represented Polymer80, authored a 27-page public comment submission on the new rule arguing, in part, that it’s impermissibly vague, the same argument that he used successfully to stop the Nevada law.

To some, there’s an easy solution: Polymer80 could stamp serial numbers on the unfinished frames and receivers they sell.

Kelley said putting a serial number on his products wouldn’t hurt his company. But using those numbers to require background checks is a “critical threat” to his business, which he said relies on a growing market of individuals who “value their Fourth Amendment rights” to privacy.

“There’s a problem when people’s right to privacy is infringed and a government agency is looking at what you bought whenever they want,” he said.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Anjeanette Damon.

Most North Koreans do not own vehicles, but most of those who do drive cars made in China. 

Imports of Chinese auto parts stopped when Beijing and Pyongyang shut down the border and suspended all trade at the beginning of the pandemic in January 2020. 

As supplies inside North Korea dwindled, parts available for purchase have become rarer and rarer. Opportunistic thieves are looking to cash in on the shortage.

In some cases, car owners have to steal parts just to keep their own vehicles running, a resident of Chongjin in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“Thievery of auto parts is rampant downtown,” said the source. “New parts are almost impossible to find, and even used ones are hard to get, so the thieves steal other people’s auto parts to repair their own cars.” 

Sometimes the thieves steal the entire car.

“Last week in Sunam district, a car owner parked his car in front of his house. A short while later, while he was eating dinner, his car disappeared,” the source said. “The next day, the car was found … only the shell remained, with all the main components torn off.”

A black market of stolen auto parts has developed as the parts become more and more valuable, the source said.

“Car parts are as precious as food, and they can be sold to make money at any time. There are many cases where cars that are parked at night on the roadside or in villages are hauled to a remote place so the thieves can steal the parts,” he said. 

“The vicious cycle continues when the victims of theft steal parts from others to fix their own cars,” the source said.

Businesses have begun to ramp up security to protect the vehicles they depend on to make money, he said.

“This can disrupt production and business operations, so drivers are sleeping in their cars to protect them when they travel to other regions.”

Protecting cars has become a struggle in South Hamgyong province, a resident there told RFA, on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“Most companies that own cars do not have dedicated garages and they park their cars outside,” he said. 

“There are two security guards on a shift at night in my company. Even though the car was parked in front of the well-lit security office, auto parts were still stolen multiple times,” the second source said.

The second source’s company is holding drivers responsible for all vehicle expenses, so the drivers are getting creative to deter thieves.

“One driver built a garage out of plastic film in his yard at his own high-fenced house. He guards the car by sleeping in it at night with two ferocious dogs,” he said. 

“Due to the (COVID-19) pandemic, many thieves are active because there is not enough food to eat and clothes to wear. Nevertheless, the Workers’ Party has no interest in resolving the suffering of the people, and they are telling us to overcome economic difficulties, armed only with ideological training,” he said, referring to propaganda lessons that tell the people to solve their own problems in line with the country’s founding Juche ideology of self-reliance. 

Translated by Claire Shinyoung O. Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chang Gyu Ahn for RFA Korean.

After Florida's GOP governor on Thursday signed a 15-week abortion ban inspired by a contested Mississippi law that could soon reverse Roe v. Wade, pro-choice advocates warned of impacts across the region, given that the Sunshine State has long been "an oasis of reproductive care in the South."

With Gov. Ron DeSantis' support, Florida's law is set to take effect this summer. His signature came after Republican state legislators in Kentucky on Wednesday overrode their Democratic governor's veto of a similar bill and GOP Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt on Tuesday signed a near-total abortion ban.

In a tweet about the recent developments, the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute said the latest state-level bans "not only violate the rights and autonomy of people seeking essential care, but will devastate abortion access across large parts of the nation."

The Center for Reproductive Rights—which is helping challenge the Mississippi law—similarly pointed out that "Florida has been a critical haven for abortion access in the South, and this ban will decimate abortion access for Floridians and the entire region."

Florida "allows abortions up to 24 weeks, the limit defined in the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade," HuffPost explained as the measure moved through the Legislature earlier this year. "For hundreds of miles, other states have much more restrictive policies—if you headed west from Florida, you'd have to go all the way through the deep South and Texas to New Mexico to find a similar level of reproductive care and accessibility."

As HuffPost reported:

The legislation is modeled directly after the 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi that was debated in front of the Supreme Court last month in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The Mississippi law threatens to move the federal gestational limit allowed in Roe from 24 weeks to 15 weeks. Mississippi has also asked the conservative Supreme Court majority to overturn Roe altogether. Although the decision in the case is not expected until June, many experts and advocates believe that Roe will either be gutted or overturned.

The Florida ban would go into effect on July 1, 2022, likely weeks or even days after the Supreme Court rules in that case.

Highlighting that Florida joins not only Kentucky but also Arizona in recently banning abortions after 15 weeks, NARAL Pro-Choice America president Mini Timmaraju noted Thursday that "this is a shameless step towards what could be a terrifying new future for reproductive freedom in the country."

"Anti-choice politicians across the United States, emboldened by the Supreme Court's anti-choice supermajority, are clamoring at the opportunity to enact abortion bans like Mississippi's," she added. "No matter what kind of ban, let's be clear: They are all meant to take away people's freedom to make their own decisions about pregnancy and parenthood and impose one-size-fits-all restrictions."

Laura Goodhue, executive director of Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, was similarly critical, charging that "by signing this cruel piece of legislation, Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken away Floridians' freedom to control their own bodies."

"The so-called 'Free State of Florida' will never be truly free so long as politicians like DeSantis are able to impose their beliefs on the rest of us," she said. "This is a full-scale assault on patients and their healthcare providers."

Some critics emphasized that Florida's looming law—which has no exceptions for rape or incest and limits abortions to protect the life and health of the pregnant person—will disproportionately impact marginalized communities.

As Kara Gross, legislative director and senior policy counsel at the ACLU of Florida, put it: "Gov. DeSantis and the Florida Legislature's shameful abortion ban would push abortion care out of reach for countless Floridians."

"It is not always possible for people to obtain an abortion within the arbitrary timeframe provided in this bill, even if they've been trying to get one for weeks," she pointed out. "There are already so many barriers to abortion care, especially for young people, those with fewer resources, and those who live in rural areas."

"Make no mistake: If this abortion ban goes into effect, it would have devastating consequences for pregnant people, especially those who are not able to afford to travel out of state in search of the essential healthcare they need," Gross said, vowing that her group "will take swift legal action to protect Floridians' rights and defend against this cruel attack on our bodily autonomy."

State legislation resembling Mississippi's 15-week ban as well as a Texas measure that empowers anti-choice vigilantes to sue anyone who "aids or abets" an abortion after six weeks—before many people know they are pregnant—has bolstered calls for Congress to codify Roe into federal law.

The Women's Health Protection Act would do just that. Although all but one Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives passed the bill shortly after the Texas law took effect last year, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) in February joined with the upper chamber's Republicans to block it.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights tweeted Thursday that "restrictive abortion laws are yet another way in which healthcare access is denied to those who face systemic oppression in this country—and that is why we urgently need the Women's Health Protection Act."

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

The hedge fund Alden Global Capital is notorious for plundering newspapers, relentlessly creating “news deserts” and “ghost papers.” The news is disturbing to anyone who cares about journalism. Indeed, most journalists agree that Alden, the nation’s second-largest newspaper owner by circulation, is a major threat to the existence of good, strong, and enduring local journalism in America.

Journalists are our everyday heroes: exposing secrets, uncovering abuses and giving us better understanding of our communities, our cultures, our politics, our world.

I’ve been covering this hedge fund for four years, for a film-in-progress, Stripped for Parts: American Journalism at the Crossroads. This film is a cautionary tale: What is lost when billionaires with no background nor interest in a civic mission, who are only concerned with profiteering, take over our most influential news organizations? 

But the story we will tell is not only about the havoc wreaked by Alden daily, but about the journalists who have opposed them, and continue to do so. At the center is one reporter whose investigation, in more than 100 articles over six years, exposed Alden’s profiteering methods. It features several other journalists who became active, and activists—speaking out, informing the public or otherwise opposing their employer, often at great risk to their careers; some even created new, alternative news organizations.

Individually and together (with the support of the NewsGuild union), they are fighting for the preservation, and re-imagining, of vibrant local journalism in America. It is that notion that I want to highlight, above and beyond the devastation caused by the hedge fund.

‘Distressed investing’

I’ve been a news junkie all my life. My first feature film, begun in the late 1980s, was on the life and legacy of George Seldes—muckraker, press critic, maverick journalist. A later film, on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, documented the decision-making inside the New York Times that led to its publication, in the face of attempted government censorship, of a “top secret” government document. It was one of the mainstream press’s finest hours. So mine has been a love/hate relationship with the news media: adoring but critical.

I got into my current film in the spring of 2018, on the heels of an uprising at the Denver Post against the paper’s owner that went viral. But the story starts even earlier, when almost no one had ever heard of Alden Global Capital.

At the center of it all is Julie Reynolds, who, after covering gang members, drug lords and gun runners for two investigative organizations, came to the small-town Monterey County (Calif.) Herald, “where I became the night cops reporter—and I loved it!” Until Alden Global Capital bought the newspaper in 2011. Layoffs followed, morale plunged, and Reynolds took a buyout.

But in 2015, she began investigating the hedge fund, with the backing of her former union, the NewsGuild. “You’re an investigative reporter,” she told herself. “Why don’t you look into Alden, because people don’t know who they are or what they do.”

Reynolds found a hedge fund shrouded in secrecy. From her home office, and using her investigative toolbox, she exposed Alden’s shell companies in the Cayman Islands. She explained the intricacies of “distressed investing”—how to make money off of failing businesses, by “stripping them for parts” and slashing payroll. She discovered a real estate scam that allowed Alden to make millions and siphon off the profits for private use.

Cascading events

Reynolds’ reporting triggered a series of cascading events. Her exposés reached the newsroom of the Denver Post, including editorial writer Chuck Plunkett. In April 2018, after another large layoff of 30 (out of 100) from the newsroom staff, Plunkett had had enough. Using Reynolds’ investigations as raw material, he wrote a blistering editorial (4/6/18), excoriating the “vulture capitalists” that owned the Denver Post. He demanded, “If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell the Post to owners who will.”

Plunkett’s editorial, in turn, sparked an uprising of journalists at the Post and elsewhere throughout the Alden chain. Usually reporting the news, now they were making it. Supported by the NewsGuild, they uncharacteristically joined picket lines at their local papers and in front of Alden’s headquarters in midtown New York’s Lipstick Building.

More cascading events: Alden’s top brass issued an edict not to mention Alden Global in the pages of their newspapers. Dave Krieger of the Boulder Daily Camera defied the edict and wrote about Plunkett’s editorial and the national wildfire it sparked. Krieger was instantly fired, Plunkett resigned due to censorship, and senior Post editor Larry Ryckman led eight reporters and editors out the door of the Denver Post, forming their own democratically run, ad-free, online news organization, the Colorado Sun.

Certain of the upper hand

For all the pushback, Alden remained undaunted. Its principals, Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, refused interviews, or any requests for comment, even by reporters from their own newspapers. They held themselves accountable to no one and were certain they held the upper hand. They were wrong.

Alden made a takeover attempt for the entire Gannett newspaper chain in early 2019. If successful, the new entity would have become the largest chain of newspapers in America. The stakes were huge.

The Gannett board knew its shareholders would be attracted by the lucrative stock offer by Alden. But the work of Julie Reynolds and the NewsGuild would turn the tide. A Gannett board member explained:

Julie Reynolds’ stories were devastating in their clarity about the motivations of the principals at Alden… [and] it was the NewsGuild rather than the corporation [Gannett] that stood for the careers, the professionalism, the sense of mission that these individual journalists brought to work every day. And so their speaking about the importance of journalism and their sense that this particular buyer was not a friend of journalism was at least as credible as any message that our board of directors could deliver.

The shareholders voted against Alden, and its takeover attempt of Gannett failed.

Tribune takeover

But the hedge fund re-grouped. In 2020, Alden went after the Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and Baltimore Sun, among others. Public opposition was fierce, led again by the journalists and the NewsGuild.

But Alden had other tricks up their sleeve. As an already-large stockholder, the hedge fund was able to put its founder, Randall Smith, on the Tribune board, where he helped write and manipulate the rules of a shareholder election. Despite public outcry about the hedge fund’s reputation as “destroyer of newspapers,” Alden won the shareholder vote, but under a cloud of election irregularities, including, as Julie Reynolds wrote in a detailed investigative article, confusion about the voting intentions of Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire surgeon and LA Times owner who held 24% of Tribune shares, and whose vote, even in abstention, was the key to the Alden victory.

The Tribune takeover made Alden the second-largest newspaper publisher in the country, and it appears to be determined to become the largest. In late 2021, Alden attempted the takeover of Lee Enterprises, owner of daily newspapers in 77 markets in 26 states. Again journalists and the NewsGuild took action, and the Lee Enterprises board, like the Gannett board before them, rode a wave of public outcry and key legal decisions to beat back, at least for now, the hedge fund’s designs, as Reynolds reported. The Alden/Lee battle is apparently not finished, and journalists and their union continue to stand at the ready.

Julie Reynolds went to Washington a couple of years ago, joining Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others, to push pending congressional legislation that would regulate hedge funds more strongly. Reynolds said at an event introducing the bill:

It is catastrophic when hedge funds systematically and intentionally destroy the sources of information that are so essential to society. It’s time to make hedge funds and private equity transparent and accountable.

History will not judge us kindly if one day we wake up to realize we failed to protect our community’s right to know and, in turn, our very democracy.

Lifeblood of democracy

My task in the months ahead is to finish constructing a narrative that is truthful, reflective of the realities of hedge fund ownership and the crisis in local journalism, but still projects the drive and dedication of the journalists who are in the forefront of change.

Journalism is all-important, especially today. It connects and unites communities. At its best it comforts the afflicted, afflicts the comfortable and tells truth to power. When robust, it is the lifeblood of democracy.

Journalists are our everyday heroes: exposing secrets, uncovering abuses and giving us better understanding of our communities, our cultures, our politics, our world. Vigorous journalism is essential to our lives. Let’s help save it.

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

Washington Post (12/26/19): “Rather than investing in a digital future for its newspapers…Alden-owned subsidiaries sell off the publications’ real estate and transfer pension savings into its own funds.”

The hedge fund Alden Global Capital is notorious for plundering newspapers, relentlessly creating “news deserts” and “ghost papers.” The news is disturbing to anyone who cares about journalism. Indeed, most journalists agree that Alden, the nation’s second-largest newspaper owner by circulation, is a major threat to the existence of good, strong and enduring local journalism in America.

I’ve been covering this hedge fund for four years, for a film-in-progress, Stripped for Parts: American Journalism at the Crossroads. This film is a cautionary tale: What is lost when billionaires with no background nor interest in a civic mission, who are only concerned with profiteering, take over our most influential news organizations? 

But the story we will tell is not only about the havoc wreaked by Alden daily, but about the journalists who have opposed them, and continue to do so. At the center is one reporter whose investigation, in more than 100 articles over six years, exposed Alden’s profiteering methods. It features several other journalists who became active, and activists—speaking out, informing the public or otherwise opposing their employer, often at great risk to their careers; some even created new, alternative news organizations.

Individually and together (with the support of the NewsGuild union), they are fighting for the preservation, and re-imagining, of vibrant local journalism in America. It is that notion that I want to highlight, above and beyond the devastation caused by the hedge fund.

‘Distressed investing’

Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press (1996)

I’ve been a news junkie all my life. My first feature film, begun in the late 1980s, was on the life and legacy of George Seldes—muckraker, press critic, maverick journalist. A later film, on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, documented the decision-making inside the New York Times that led to its publication, in the face of attempted government censorship, of a “top secret” government document. It was one of the mainstream press’s finest hours. So mine has been a love/hate relationship with the news media: adoring but critical.

I got into my current film in the spring of 2018, on the heels of an uprising at the Denver Post against the paper’s owner that went viral. But the story starts even earlier, when almost no one had ever heard of Alden Global Capital.

At the center of it all is Julie Reynolds, who, after covering gang members, drug lords and gun runners for two investigative organizations, came to the small-town Monterey County (Calif.) Herald, “where I became the night cops reporter—and I loved it!” Until Alden Global Capital bought the newspaper in 2011. Layoffs followed, morale plunged, and Reynolds took a buyout.

But in 2015, she began investigating the hedge fund, with the backing of her former union, the NewsGuild.  “You’re an investigative reporter,” she told herself. “Why don’t you look into Alden, because people don’t know who they are or what they do.”

Reynolds found a hedge fund shrouded in secrecy. From her home office, and using her investigative toolbox, she exposed Alden’s shell companies in the Cayman Islands. She explained the intricacies of “distressed investing”—how to make money off of failing businesses, by “stripping them for parts” and slashing payroll. She discovered a real estate scam that allowed Alden to make millions and siphon off the profits for private use.

Cascading events

A slider that accompanied the Denver Post‘s editorial (4/6/18) illustrated the dramatic reduction in the paper’s staff.

Reynolds’ reporting triggered a series of cascading events. Her exposés reached the newsroom of the Denver Post, including editorial writer Chuck Plunkett. In April 2018, after another large layoff of 30 (out of 100) from the newsroom staff, Plunkett had had enough. Using Reynolds’ investigations as raw material, he wrote a blistering editorial (4/6/18), excoriating the “vulture capitalists” that owned the Denver Post. He demanded, “If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell the Post to owners who will.”

Plunkett’s editorial, in turn, sparked an uprising of journalists at the Post and elsewhere throughout the Alden chain. Usually reporting the news, now they were making it. Supported by the NewsGuild, they uncharacteristically joined picket lines at their local papers and in front of Alden’s headquarters in midtown New York’s Lipstick Building.

More cascading events: Alden’s top brass issued an edict not to mention Alden Global in the pages of their newspapers. Dave Krieger of the Boulder Daily Camera defied the edict and wrote about Plunkett’s editorial and the national wildfire it sparked. Krieger was instantly fired, Plunkett resigned due to censorship, and senior Post editor Larry Ryckman led eight reporters and editors out the door of the Denver Post, forming their own democratically run, ad-free, online news organization, the Colorado Sun.

Certain of the upper hand

The New York Times (1/14/19) quoted Nieman Journalism Lab’s Joshua Benton: Alden‘s “Digital First is the worst owner of newspapers in America and they will do their best to draw blood from even Gannett’s already desiccated stone.”

For all the pushback, Alden remained undaunted. Its principals, Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, refused interviews, or any requests for comment, even by reporters from their own newspapers. They held themselves accountable to no one and were certain they held the upper hand. They were wrong.

Alden made a takeover attempt for the entire Gannett newspaper chain in early 2019. If successful, the new entity would have become the largest chain of newspapers in America. The stakes were huge.

The Gannett board knew its shareholders would be attracted by the lucrative stock offer by Alden. But the work of Julie Reynolds and the NewsGuild would turn the tide. A Gannett board member explained:

Julie Reynolds’ stories were devastating in their clarity about the motivations of the principals at Alden… [and] it was the NewsGuild rather than the corporation [Gannett] that stood for the careers, the professionalism, the sense of mission that these individual journalists brought to work every day. And so their speaking about the importance of journalism and their sense that this particular buyer was not a friend of journalism was at least as credible as any message that our board of directors could deliver.

The shareholders voted against Alden, and its takeover attempt of Gannett failed.

Tribune takeover

But the hedge fund re-grouped. In 2020, Alden went after the Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and Baltimore Sun, among others. Public opposition was fierce, led again by the journalists and the NewsGuild.

But Alden had other tricks up their sleeve. As an already-large stockholder, the hedge fund was able to put its founder, Randall Smith, on the Tribune board, where he helped write and manipulate the rules of a shareholder election. Despite public outcry about the hedge fund’s reputation as “destroyer of newspapers,” Alden won the shareholder vote, but under a cloud of election irregularities, including, as Julie Reynolds wrote in a detailed investigative article, confusion about the voting intentions of Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire surgeon and LA Times owner who held 24% of Tribune shares, and whose vote, even in abstention, was the key to the Alden victory.

Julie Reynolds Martinez (Voices of Monterey Bay, 7/18/19): “Alden Global Capital…is intentionally destroying the Monterey Herald, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the Mercury News and scores of other news sources around the country.”

The Tribune takeover made Alden the second-largest newspaper publisher in the country, and it appears to be determined to become the largest. In late 2021, Alden attempted the takeover of Lee Enterprises, owner of daily newspapers in 77 markets in 26 states.  Again journalists and the NewsGuild took action, and the Lee Enterprises board, like the Gannett board before them, rode a wave of public outcry and key legal decisions to beat back, at least for now, the hedge fund’s designs, as Reynolds reported. The Alden/Lee battle is apparently not finished, and journalists and their union continue to stand at the ready.

Julie Reynolds went to Washington a couple of years ago, joining Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others, to push pending congressional legislation that would regulate hedge funds more strongly. Reynolds said at an event introducing the bill:

It is catastrophic when hedge funds systematically and intentionally destroy the sources of information that are so essential to society. It’s time to make hedge funds and private equity transparent and accountable.

History will not judge us kindly if one day we wake up to realize we failed to protect our community’s right to know and, in turn, our very democracy.

Lifeblood of democracy

My task in the months ahead is to finish constructing a narrative that is truthful, reflective of the realities of hedge fund ownership and the crisis in local journalism, but still projects the drive and dedication of the journalists who are in the forefront of change.

Journalism is all-important, especially today. It connects and unites communities. At its best it comforts the afflicted, afflicts the comfortable and tells truth to power. When robust, it is the lifeblood of democracy.

Journalists are our everyday heroes: exposing secrets, uncovering abuses and giving us better understanding of our communities, our cultures, our politics, our world. Vigorous journalism is essential to our lives. Let’s help save it.

Visit strippedforpartsfilm.com to learn how you can support Rick Goldsmith’s current film-in-progress, Stripped for Parts: American Journalism at the Crossroads.

The post Documenting the Struggle Against a Hedge Fund Stripping Journalism for Parts appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Rick Goldsmith.

As the Russian assault on Ukraine continues, more videos are emerging that show evidence of Russian brutalities and possible war crimes, such as executions and torture. Russian officials have denied the accusations, calling them Ukrainian propaganda. We speak with Washington Post video journalist Jon Gerberg, who has been filing video reports from the war for the past six weeks, and see extended interviews from civilians he interviewed. As Russian forces retreat from Ukrainian cities, “we are pulling back the veil of the more active conflict that was keeping us as journalists from some of these areas,” says Gerberg. “This is a war that in over a month has had an unbelievable impact on both the men and women fighting it and the men and women who are stuck in the middle of it as civilians.”

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

The post US Reactors Dangerously Operating Using Counterfeit Parts appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Laforge.