Trump said Wednesday he would impose an extra 50% tariff on Chinese goods if Beijing doesn’t drop the retaliatory 34% tariff it placed on U.S. products last week.

China and the U.S. are waging a tit-for-tat trade battle, which threatens to stunt the global economy, after Trump announced new tariffs on most countries last week, including a 34% tariff on Chinese goods. That was on top of an earlier 20% tariff on China in response to fentanyl trafficking.

“The US threat to escalate tariffs against China is a mistake on top of a mistake, which once again exposes the US’s blackmailing nature,” China’s commerce ministry said in a statement Tuesday.

“China will never accept this. If the US insists on going its own way, China will fight it to the end,” the ministry said. “If the US escalates its tariff measures, China will resolutely take countermeasures to safeguard its own rights and interests.”

​Trump upended the global trade status quo on April 2, imposing a universal 10% tariff on all imports, effective April 5, and additional tariffs on dozens of countries deemed to have unfair trade practices, effective April 9.

In this announcement, Trump singled out China as one of the “nations that treat us badly.” America’s trade deficit – the amount that imports exceed exports – with China was US$295.4 billion last year, the largest of any country.

Trump’s tariffs sent shockwaves through world markets. Japan’s Nikkei 225 plunged nearly 8% on Monday, triggering a temporary trading halt, before rebounding 5.5% later in the day. The S&P 500 index is down nearly 10% over five days.

Analysts warned that export-driven Asian economies are likely to be among the hardest hit by the U.S. tariff hikes.

With the April 9 deadline approaching, some countries are urgently seeking trade agreements with the Trump administration in an effort to minimize the damage to their economies.

Japan ‘getting priority’

Japan is sending a team to Washington to negotiate on trade, according to Trump, who said that he spoke on Monday with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. Separately, Shigeru said he told Trump to rethink tariffs.

Trump has put Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in charge of trade negotiations with Japan, Bessent said on social media.

Bessent, in a Fox News interview, said that he had not yet seen any proposals from Tokyo, but that he expected to have successful negotiations to reduce Japan’s non-tariff trade barriers.

Japan is among 50 to 70 countries that have approached the Trump administration so far about negotiations, Bessent said.

“Japan is a very important military ally. They’re a very important economic ally, and the U.S. has a lot of history with them,” he said. “So I would expect that Japan is going to get priority just because they came forward very quickly.”

In South Korea, Finance Minister Choi Sang-mok and other policymakers reviewed their strategy ahead of the trade minister’s visit to the U.S. this week, according to the finance ministry.

During the visit from Tuesday to Wednesday, Cheong In-kyo, the South’s minister for trade, plans to meet with Greer and make a request to lower the 25% rate, the trade ministry said.

Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te has said that Taiwan has no plans to retaliate with tariffs of its own against the U.S.

Taiwanese companies’ investment commitments to the U.S. would not change as long as they are in line with the democratic island’s national interests, Lai has said.

In Hong Kong, whose special trading privileges were removed by a Trump executive order in 2020, Financial Secretary Paul Chan said the city won’t impose countermeasures on the U.S., public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong reported.

“Hong Kong should remain free and open,” he said.

Vietnamese appeal

Meanwhile, Vietnam’s offer to lower its trade barriers to delay the implementation of U.S. tariffs has been rejected by a White House adviser.

Deputy Prime Minister Bui Thanh Son met with the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Marc E. Knapper, on Sunday and reiterated his country’s willingness to lower the import tariff rate on U.S. products to zero in hope of postponing the onset of the new tariffs.

“Vietnam is ready to negotiate to bring the import tariff rate to 0% for US goods, increase procurement of US products that are strong and in demand by Vietnam, and at the same time create more favorable conditions for US enterprises to do business and invest in Vietnam,” said Son, cited by the government’s official information channel.

However, U.S. senior trade counselor Peter Navarro rejected this possibility later that day.

“This is not a negotiation, this is a national emergency based on a trade deficit that’s gotten out of control because of cheating,” Navarro told Fox News.

Even if both sides lowered tariffs to zero, the U.S. would still have a U$120 billion annual trade deficit with Vietnam, he said.

Vietnam consistently rebrands Chinese exports as its own products before shipping these to the U.S., Navarro said.

It also utilizes export subsidies, currency manipulation and “fake standards” which prevent U.S. manufacturers from making headway in Asian markets, he said.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet wrote a letter dated Friday seeking negotiations and for the U.S. to delay the 49% tariff to be imposed from April 9.

Hun Manet said that Cambodia would immediately reduce its top 35% tariff on American goods to 5% percent in 19 product categories, including American whiskey and beef.

In Thailand, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra announced on Sunday that Thailand will enter into talks with the U.S. following the imposition of tariffs on Thai goods.

Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Pichai Chunhavajira will travel to the U.S. for discussions with key stakeholders.

“Thailand has been a long-term, reliable economic partner and ally of the U.S., not merely an exporter,” Shinawatra said in a statement.

Edited by Stephen Wright.

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

They had prepared for this exact moment, having created a list of 250 online resources widely expected to be taken down during Trump’s second term. The Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool, a platform created to help federal agencies, states, and community organizations identify neighborhoods heavily burdened by pollution, topped the list. The team worked quickly to re-create the tool using previously archived data and host it on a new website. Two days later, the webpage was up and running.

In the two weeks since Trump’s inauguration, his administration moved swiftly to scrub government websites of information it objects to. Federal agencies have taken down critical environmental and public health datasets. The U.S. Global Change Research Program ended the National Nature Assessment, a sweeping review of the nation’s flora and fauna and its benefits to humanity. Departments throughout the executive branch have altered websites to eliminate any reference to the inequities women, people of color, and other marginalized communities face. 

Researchers and advocates whose work revolves around addressing these inequities and mitigating the impacts of climate change told Grist they find these changes troubling. 

“One of the things that’s worrisome is when you start to take down resources like this, you start to construct a knowledge sphere that doesn’t acknowledge that environmental or climate injustices exist,” said Eric Nost, a geographer and assistant professor at the University of Guelph. Nost, who studies the role of data technology in environmental policymaking, is part of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, one of several organizations tracking the Trump administration’s changes to federal websites and resources.

Many of these changes are a direct response to executive orders the president issued within hours of taking office to end “Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” and defend “Women From Gender Ideology Extremism.” Many of them dovetail with his rescinding a Clinton-era executive order requiring federal agencies to consider the impact of their policies on areas with high poverty rates and large minority populations. Trump also revoked Justice40, President Biden’s policy of ensuring so-called “disadvantaged” communities receive 40 percent of the benefits of climate and energy spending. Some of the resources dismantled in the past two weeks, including the Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool, were created to help achieve these goals.

The Environmental Protection Agency deleted pages showcasing the work of African American employees. It also removed an equity action plan, the “Diversity and Inclusion” section on its careers page, and scrubbed “Environmental Justice” and “Climate Change” from its homepage menu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took down data and resources related to trans people, HIV, and environmental justice. The Department of Energy eliminated online resources for anyone struggling with energy bills. The webpage previously listed government assistance programs like the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps low-income households pay for electricity. The agency also killed its own version of the environmental justice screening tool.

Beyond making it harder for taxpayers to access information that could reduce their bills and navigate some of the effects of climate change, these steps make it harder to govern effectively. “Policymakers and the public and communities need good information to make the best policy decision, whatever that is,” said Carrie Jenks, the executive director of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard University. “To the extent that any administration is not using data or not giving access to data, that will always be of concern to us.”

The law program has been tracking the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental rules and environmental justice policies since his first term. A handful of other groups consisting of academics, archivists, students, and environmental organizations are pursuing similar efforts and have launched an initiative called The Public Environmental Data Project. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative is part of the effort, as is the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that has since 1996 been archiving webpages, and End of Term, a group that has since 2008 archived federal websites at the end of each presidential administration. 

Other environmental groups are archiving taxpayer-funded datasets at a smaller scale. For instance, the Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank that helps coastal communities design climate and ocean policy, began collating research and data on climate change in a dedicated section of its website last summer. The group started a “Resource Hub” to help cities easily identify the best available climate science. When Trump won the election in November, it realized that dozens of datasets and research hosted on government websites could disappear and began archiving additional policy papers and data. Those resources were especially relevant because the lab found many cities use outdated information to make planning decisions. 

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“We remember what had happened during the last Trump administration, where a huge amount of relevant environmental information was taken down or altered, and we wanted to make sure that the resources that we had posted to our own website would continue to live on,” said Alex Miller, an analyst there. 

What’s happening now is in many ways a repetition of the efforts the Trump administration made during his first term, when as much as 20 percent of the EPA’s website became inaccessible to the public. The use of the term “climate change” decreased by more than a third. The first Trump administration also tried to derail work on the National Climate Assessment, an important synthesis of the state of climate science that shapes federal policy. 

This time around, Trump officials are attempting to more tightly control how the assessment is compiled and want to lower the scientific standards it employs, according to reporting by E&E News. While the document is likely to be published in some form within two years, the administration did axe another environmental review. 

Last year, the Biden administration announced the National Nature Assessment, a comprehensive literature review of the state of nature in the United States. It was modeled after the climate assessment and enlisted dozens of researchers to calculate all the ways nature is valuable. Last week, the administration told researchers who had spent nearly a year working on the report that it was shutting down the effort. Alessandro Rigolon, an architect and planner who teaches at the University of Utah and studies the benefits of green spaces, was working with other researchers to outline the effects of nature on physical and mental well-being. Rigolon said he was informed about the administration’s decision just a few days after a meeting in Vermont with those colleagues. 

Because those working on the report were volunteers, Rigolon said they trying to find a way to continue their work. 

“We are committed to writing this one way or another,” said Rigolon. “I almost see a resurgence in pride in this work and willingness to get it done after the work was terminated without explanation.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The scramble to save critical climate data from Trump’s war on DEI on Feb 5, 2025.

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

Manzanita, with its peeling red bark and delicate pitcher-shaped blossoms, thrives on the dry, rocky ridges of Northern California. The small, evergreen tree or shrub is famously drought-tolerant, with some varieties capable of enduring more than 200 days between waterings. And yet here I was, gently lowering an 18-inch variety named for botanist Howard McMinn into the damp soil of Tacoma, a city in Washington known for its towering Douglas firs, bigleaf maples, and an average of 152 rainy days per year.

It’s not that I’m a thoughtless gardener. Some studies suggest that the Seattle area’s climate will more closely resemble Northern California’s by 2050, so I’m planting that region’s trees, too.

Climate change is scrambling the seasons, wreaking havoc on trees. Some temperate and high-altitude regions will grow more humid, which can lead to lethal rot. In other temperate zones, drier springs and hotter summers are disrupting annual cycles of growth, damaging root systems, and rendering any survivors more vulnerable to pests.

The victims of these shifts include treasured species from around the globe, including certain varietials of the Texas pecan, the towering baobabs found in Senegal, and the expansive fig trees native to Sydney. In the Pacific Northwest, I’ve seen summer heat domes turn our region’s beloved conifers into skeletons and prolonged dry spells wither the crowns of maples until the leaves die off in chunks.

The world is warming too quickly for arboreal adaptation, said Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, an ecologist at Western Sydney University who researches the impact of climate change on trees. That’s especially true of native trees. “They are the first ones to suffer,” he said.

Urban arborists say planting for the future is urgently needed and could prevent a decline in leafy cover just when the world needs it most. Trees play a crucial role in keeping cities cool. A study published in 2022 found that a roughly 30 percent increase in the metropolitan canopy could prevent nearly 40 percent of heat-related deaths in Europe. The need is particularly acute in marginalized communities, where residents — often people of color — live among treeless expanses where temperatures can go much higher than in more affluent neighborhoods.

While the best solution would be to stop emitting greenhouse gases, the world is locked into some degree of warming, and many regional governments have begun focusing on building resilience into the places we live. Urban botanists and other experts warn that cities are well behind where they should be to avoid overall tree loss. The full impact of climate change may be decades away, but oaks, maples, and other popular species can take 10 or more years to mature (and show they can tolerate a new climate), making the search for the right varieties for each region a frantic race against time. 

In response, scientists and urban foresters are trying to speed up the process, thinking strategically about where to source new trees and using experiments to predict the hardiness of new species. Beyond that, many places are moving past the idea that native species are the most sustainable choice by default. 

“Everybody is looking for the magic tree,” said Mac Martin, who leads the urban and community forestry program at Texas A&M’s Forest Service. He went on to say that one kind of tree isn’t enough. We need “a high number of diverse trees that can survive.”

In other words, a whole new urban forest.

In late 2023, that quest took Kevin Martin, no relation to Mac, to the arid forests of Romania. As the head of tree collections at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, he spent a week hiking through pine-scented forests to gather beech acorns. He brought seeds from seven species back to the U.K. and planted them in individual pots at the botanical garden’s nursery. Now, he waits.

He hopes the trees will thrive in London’s drier springtime soils, which are making it hard for old standbys like the English oak to survive the hotter summers that follow. The research is part of a bigger change for the botanical garden, Martin said, which historically focused on collecting rare plant specimens. “We’re flipping that on its head and looking at what we want to grow,” he said. “We want a good outcome for humanity.”

Under normal conditions, trees are among the best defenses against heat, and not just because they provide a shady place to rest. As their leaves transform sunlight into energy, trees give off water vapor through tiny holes called stomata, cooling the air around them with “nature’s own air conditioning,” Martin said. 

But increasingly hot temperatures can shut down this process. In extreme dry heat, the cells slacken and the stomata close, stopping water from escaping. The point at which this happens is called the turgor loss point, and it’s like the leaves on a houseplant wilting. If a stressed tree doesn’t get water, its leaves will overheat and die before the fall, sometimes across entire sections of the crown. In highly humid conditions, the air holds too much water vapor to absorb any more, leaving leaves waterlogged and beckoning rot. Even if a tree in this condition looks healthy, it can’t cool cities as well as it used to. Making matters worse, distressed plants are more vulnerable to pests like the borer beetle.

Native trees are particularly at risk for climate stress, and in many cities, they make up a significant chunk of urban tree cover. Eighty-seven percent of the trees in Plano, Texas, are native species, for example. That number is 66 percent in Santa Rosa, California, and 30 percent in Providence, Rhode Island. 

To be sure, non-native trees have been a part of human settlements for a long time. Plants often spread with human migration, and European colonists brought many species to other continents. Many of these newcomers grow faster than the indigenous varieties, and some have proven better suited to urban areas. 

However, flora introduced from far away can also experience climate shock. Currently, non-native trees typically come from climates similar to those trees they now stand alongside. Until the seasons started going haywire, this made them well-suited to their adopted homes. For example, the London plane, a cross between an American sycamore and a plane tree from western Asia, lines streets in temperate zones around the world. Now, scientists are worried about the tree’s future in its namesake city as dry springs and hot summers leave them weak and susceptible to pests. 

To find solutions, researchers are studying which trees could do better than those currently struggling in rapidly warming cities, with an eye toward species that have already adapted to drier regions hundreds or even thousands of miles away. In Canada, for example, scientists have matched trees from the northern United States with the expected climates in cities including Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Ottawa. Urban foresters in Sydney are considering the trees in Grafton, an Australian city about 290 miles closer to the equator. 

Thinking of a future U.K., Kevin Martin started evaluating trees from the steppes of Romania more than 1,000 miles away. To find the right places to collect acorns, Martin looked at both temperature and the amount of water available in the soils of Romanian forests, explaining that trees in moist soils in tropical rainforests or near rivers will keep going even in hot conditions.

He will have to wait two years for the acorns to sprout and grow into saplings. Only then can he begin stress-testing the specimens to see if the trees are a good fit for the growing conditions of London in 2050 and beyond. Martin plans to study at what point the trees’ leaves hit turgor loss in dry, hot conditions. But crucially, the trees must also be able to adapt to London’s cold winters, which are expected to stay freezing even as drought and heat waves increase. 

Examining leaf turgor loss can’t be used to assess trees for every neighborhood in a city. Parts of Sydney are facing increasingly humid summers in an otherwise temperate climate. With this in mind, the municipal forestry department used a database that matches a far-off location’s current humidity with what experts expect for the city in 2050. In addition to considering temperature, officials hope to increase tree canopy to cover 27 percent of the city in the next quarter century. They are also mindful that the climate will change gradually and have laid out a phased planting plan. Trees that thrive in the Sydney of 2060 may struggle in 2100. 

Such factors are on Mac Martin’s mind as his department updates Texas A&M’s online tree selector, a statewide database that recommends species, to include varieties that are likely to flourish in the future.

Texas is slated to experience a triple climate whammy of hotter summers, colder winters, and changing humidity, with some places becoming intolerably dry and others getting more muggy. It’s a complex weather pattern to plant for — and that’s assuming cities are prepared to adapt once the right species are identified.

As risky as it may seem to hold on to endemic species in the face of climate change, some governments continue to create policies that favor native trees over non-natives. Canada, for example, has funded the planting of thousands of native trees in urban areas through its 2 Billion Trees project.

Botanists like Henrik Sjöman, who oversees collections at the Gothenburg Botanical Gardens in Sweden, say native-only thinking can leave cities unprepared to adapt to climate change. But he doesn’t believe cities must completely abandon native species. He hopes that some species can be saved with a process he calls “upgrading.” The idea is to find trees from the same species that are already growing in harsher conditions, and propagate seeds from those plants. To grow more resilient English oaks in the U.K., for example, scientists could grow them from acorns sourced from western Asia, where the tree also grows. These acorns would come from trees thriving in a more arid region, so they could potentially yield hardier varietals that will one day thrive in a drier London.

Additionally, locale-adapted native species might continue thriving in woodlands like large city parks or green spaces. Sjöman said it’s possible that trees in undeveloped areas will have more time to adapt to climate change, because rainfall more easily soaks into the ground and fills the water table. That’s not the case in highly paved and built-up neighborhoods, where decreasing rainfall hurts trees more.

“Everything’s pushed to its limit in urban environments,” Sjöman said.

That reality has many locales taking a “block-by-block” approach to planting guidelines. Toronto, for example, plants trees from the region’s ecosystem whenever possible, said Kristjan Vitols, the city’s supervisor of forest health care and management. That’s especially true of its iconic ravines, where newly planted trees must be endemic — and raised from locally sourced seeds when possible. But the city is also open to non-native species where plants face harsh conditions along streets.

The rules for Toronto’s ravines are based on the idea that a species will develop traits specific to a location as they grow over many generations. As a result, trees grown from seeds gathered in Toronto may be more likely to blossom when native pollinators are active than seeds from the same species grown at a lower latitude.

Foresters say there’s another valid argument for trying to keep as many native trees as possible. For some First Nations and Indigenous people with deep ties to particular varieties, phasing them out could add to the long history of cultural and physical dispossession. 

In the Pacific Northwest, for example, the Western redcedar (written as one word because it’s not a true cedar) is central to Native American cultural practices for many local tribes. Some groups refer to themselves as the “people of the cedar tree,” using the logs for canoes, basketry, and medicine.

But drying soils mean the tree is no longer thriving in many parts of Portland, Oregon, said Jenn Cairo, the city’s urban forestry manager. The city has faced deadly heat domes and drier conditions in recent years. As a result, Portland only recommends planting the species in optimal conditions in its list of approved street trees. “We’re not eliminating them,” she said, “but we’re being careful about where we’re planting them.”

A similar tactic is being used in Sydney, where the Port Jackson fig tree is struggling, but a close relative, the Moreton Bay fig, is thriving. Head of urban forestry Karen Sweeney said the city is looking at irrigated parklands as potential homes for native species that are dying elsewhere in the city. “We often say we’re happy to do it where we can find a location,” she said.

When introducing new tree species to supplement the urban canopy, they must be sure any newcomers won’t spread invasively — dominating their new habitats and causing damage to native species.  

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There are plenty of examples of what to avoid. The Norway maple, native to Europe and western Asia, has escaped the bounds of North American cities, creating excessive shade and crowding out understory plants — they’re one of the invasive species pushing out natives in the ravines of Toronto. Tree of heaven, native to China, deposits chemicals into the soil that damage nearby plants, letting it establish dense thickets and drive out native species; it is illegal to plant in parts of the U.S., including Indiana, where residents are urged to pull it up wherever they see it. The highly flammable eucalyptus, native to Australia, has put down roots all over the world, bringing increased wildfire danger along with it. 

Urban tree experts don’t expect introduced species to cause major disruptions to native wildlife. Done right, adding some variety to cities dominated by one kind of tree could reduce the problems caused by waves of pests or disease. A patchwork of species could create a buffer against tree-to-tree infection among the same species. While it’s possible that new plant species displace plants used by animals that depend on one kind of plant to survive, those cases are the exception, Esperon-Rodriguez, the ecologist at Western Sydney University, said. 

Some native animals do surprisingly well alongside their new plant neighbors. Introducing trees that are closely related to what’s already there could provide additional food and shelter for the local fauna. Animals might already be eating fruit from a new tree that grows somewhere else in their range.

If it thrives, my Howard McMinn manzanita could attract Anna’s hummingbird with its pale blossoms in the Pacific Northwest, just as it would in its native California hills. 

For now, my manzanita is a small bush. (Manzanita straddles the line between shrub and tree, which is not clear-cut distinction. The definition of a tree is something that ornithologist David Allen Sibley said “one could quibble endlessly over.”) The plant made it through a cold snap this winter, and I was happy to see the bright green new leaves growing at the tips of its little branches after temperatures warmed.

Eager for a sign of spring, I leaned in close and found what I was looking for: clusters of tiny, unopened flower buds.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As the climate changes, cities scramble to find trees that will survive on Apr 24, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Laura Hautala.

The states and tribes within the Colorado River basin have been fighting over the waterway for more than a century, but these three forces have come to a head over the past few years. As a severe drought shriveled the 1,450-mile river in 2022, negotiators from the seven states crisscrossed the country haggling over who should have to cut their water usage, and how much. As the arguments dragged on, the Biden administration chastised states for letting the water levels in the river’s two main reservoirs fall to perilous lows. The Navajo Nation, the largest tribe on the river, went before the Supreme Court to argue for more water access.

These issues are all converging ahead of this fall’s presidential election, which could upend negotiations by ushering in a new Congress and new leadership at the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which controls the river. With the clock running out, two major deals are now taking shape. They could fundamentally alter the way states and tribes use the river, bringing about a fairer and more sustainable era on the waterway — if they don’t fall apart by November.

The first deal would see the states of the river’s so-called Lower Basin commit to lowering their water usage by as much as 20 percent even during wetter years, addressing a decades-old water deficit driven by Arizona and California. There are still questions about how much water the states of the Upper Basin, led by Colorado and Utah, will agree to cut, but state leaders expressed optimism that a final agreement between all seven states will come together in the next few months. 

“This is not a problem that is caused by one sector, by one state, or by one basin,” said John Entsminger, the lead river negotiator for Nevada, in a press conference announcing the Lower Basin’s plan to cut water usage. “It is a basin-wide problem and requires a basin-wide solution.” 

The second deal would deliver enough new river water to the Navajo Nation to supply tens of thousands of homes, ending a decades-long legal fight on a reservation where many residents rely on deliveries of hauled water. 

If both of these deals come to fruition, they would represent a sea change in the management of a river that supplies 40 million people with water. But neither one is guaranteed to come together, and the clock is ticking as the election nears. 

The last time the seven river states drafted rules for how to deal with droughts and shortages was in 2007, long before the current megadrought reached its peak, and these rules are set to expire at the end of 2026. This deadline has triggered a flurry of talks among state negotiators, who are trying to reach a deal on new drought rules this spring. This would give the Biden administration time to codify the new rules before the presidential election in November, which states fear could tank the negotiations by thrusting a new administration into power.

The furious pace of negotiation is nothing new, but states have until now only managed to agree on short-term rules that protect the river over the next three years. Last summer, the states agreed to slash water usage in farms and suburbs across the Southwest in exchange for more than a billion dollars of compensation from the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress. That agreement helped stave off a total collapse of the river system, but it never represented a permanent solution to the river’s water shortage.

As the states turn their attention to a long-term fix, the political coalitions on the river have shifted. The marquee conflict last year was between California and Arizona, the two largest users, who disagreed over how to spread out painful water cuts. California argued that its older, more senior rights to the river meant that Arizona should absorb all the cuts even if it meant drying out areas around Phoenix. Arizona argued in turn that California’s prosperous farmers needed to bear some of the pain. In the end, the money from the Inflation Reduction Act helped paper over those tensions, as did a wetter-than-average winter that restored reservoir levels.

But now California and Arizona are on the same side. The two states, which along with Nevada make up the river’s “Lower Basin,” have pledged to cut water usage by as much as 1.5 million acre-feet even when reservoir levels are high, without federal compensation like that provided by the Inflation Reduction Act. The details still need to be hashed out, but these cuts would likely mean far less cotton and alfalfa farming in the region around Phoenix, tighter water budgets in many Arizona suburbs, and a decline in winter vegetable production in California’s Imperial Valley, an agricultural hub that is considered the nation’s “salad bowl.” 

This cut would free up enough water to supply almost 3 million households annually and would address the longstanding issues in the river’s century-old legal framework, which relied on faulty measurements of the river’s flow and thus guaranteed too much total water to the states. Experts have estimated the overdraft to be around 1.5 million acre-feet, the same amount that the Lower Basin is now signaling that it’s willing to give up, even before drought measures kick in.

The harder question is what to do during the driest years. The Lower Basin states are arguing that the seven states of the river should reduce their water usage by almost 3.9 million acre feet during the driest years, equivalent to about a third of the river’s total average flow. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico have a very different view: in a competing plan also released on Wednesday, they argued that the Lower Basin states should absorb the entirety of that 3.9 million acre-feet cut.

“If we want to protect the system and ensure certainty for the 40 million people who rely on this water source, then we need to address the existing imbalance between supply and demand,” said Becky Mitchell, the lead Colorado River negotiator for the state of Colorado, in a press release following the release of the Upper Basin’s plan. “That means using the best available science to work within reality.”

A representative from Colorado said the Upper Basin would keep investing in voluntary programs that pay farmers to use less water, but insisted that Arizona and California should bear the brunt of drought response.

Disagreement between the two regions is nothing new. The Upper Basin has often argued during past dry spells that, since it’s the Lower Basin that pulls water from Lake Powell and Lake Mead, it’s the Lower Basin that should cut usage when those reservoirs run low. 

But the commitment by Arizona and California to slash their water consumption for good even during wet years represents a significant breakthrough from previous talks, according to John Fleck, a professor at the University of New Mexico who has studied the Colorado River for decades. Fleck believes the Upper Basin states should make a voluntary commitment in turn, even though they have never used their full share of the river’s water.

“The idea behind what the Lower Basin is proposing is, ‘We recognize that we have to forever and permanently fix the structural deficit,’” he said. “That’s huge. My concern is that the Upper Basin’s approach to these negotiations is passing up an opportunity for a really useful compromise.”

Entsminger, the Nevada negotiator, conceded that wide gaps remain between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin proposals, but expressed optimism that the states would find an agreement.

“I know the sexy headline is going to be, ‘four versus three, states on the brink,’ but we are at one step in this process,” he said.

The other major water deal coming into focus would also rectify a longstanding issue in the river’s legal framework: its exclusion of Native American tribes. The dozens of tribal nations along the Colorado River have theoretical rights to river water, but they must sue the federal government to realize those rights, under a precedent known as the Winters doctrine. Some of those tribes, like Arizona’s Gila River Indian Community, have settled with the government for huge volumes of water, but others have been tied up in court for years.

The Navajo Nation, whose reservation stretches across much of Arizona and New Mexico, is among the largest tribes with so-called un-settled rights. The tribe has been suing the federal government for decades to obtain rights to the Colorado River as well as other waterways. Last year, the Supreme Court appeared to deal the Nation a serious setback when it ruled that the Biden administration didn’t have an obligation to study the Nation’s potential rights to the Colorado River.

In the aftermath of that Supreme Court defeat, tribal leaders set to work hashing out a landmark settlement that covers not only the Colorado River but also several of its tributaries, working with federal and state governments to resolve decades of litigation across numerous different court cases. 

The work has now culminated in a sprawling legal agreement between the Navajo, the neighboring Hopi and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribes, the Biden administration, Arizona, and more than a dozen other water users in the Southwest. The agreement would deliver at least 179,000 acre-feet of fresh water to parts of the reservation that currently rely on depleted aquifers or bottled water deliveries, enough to supply almost half a million average homes annually. This new water would come from entities like the state of Arizona and the Salt River Project water utility, who are voluntarily giving up their water to the Navajo to avoid the threat of further litigation. (The average Navajo Nation household uses around 7 gallons of water per day, less than a tenth of the national average.)

Not only would the settlement revolutionize water access on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, it will also resolve a huge uncertainty for Lower Basin states. A trial victory for the Navajo Nation would likely have slashed Arizona’s water supply, potentially reallocating much of Phoenix’s water system to the tribe.

“Given the background of climate change and the [seven-state] negotiations, just knowing what rights everyone has is really good,” said Heather Tanana (Diné), a law professor at the University of Utah who studies tribal water rights. “There’s this certainty now.”

But the success of this deal is far from a foregone conclusion, Tanana added. The settlement needs to be ratified by Congress and signed by the president. Congress must also provide billions of dollars for infrastructure that would pipe water from the Colorado River and its tributaries across the reservation. Tribal leaders are optimistic that the current Congress will support the deal, but they’re anxious that lawmakers won’t push it through before the November election. Past water settlements on the reservation have taken years to secure congressional approval and decades to actually construct.

The outlines of a potential solution are visible in both the interstate negotiations and the Navajo settlement, but both deals are a long way from being finalized. Time is of the essence; many observers are concerned that a second Trump administration would take a more lax approach to water management on the Colorado River than the Biden administration has, and that a shift in the control of Congress could scramble support for the Navajo deal.

The political jockeying of the next few months will go a long way toward determining the river’s future, said Elizabeth Koebele, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, who studies water negotiations.

“These decisions now are very consequential for whether we’re going to pivot toward long-term sustainability in the basin,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline States and tribes scramble to reach Colorado River deals before election on Mar 6, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

AFRICOM is the brainchild of Dick Cheney who, after his energy task force identified African oil as ripe for the picking, conspired with Donald Rumsfeld to create Africa Command. (1) However, African governments wanted nothing to do with AFRICOM. South African officials in particular criticized the US for attempting to impose AFRICOM to undermine China’s growing influence on the continent. (2) Mao Zedong deserves credit for masterminding China’s original “pivot to Africa” in the sixties, sending engineers and guerrilla warfare instructors to coach aspiring revolutionaries in Zambia, Rhodesia, and Zanzibar. (3) Following the Berlin Wall’s fall in 1989 and the USSR’s dissolution in 1991, China’s engagement with Africa focused strictly on trade. By 2006, Sino-African trade skyrocketed to $55.5 billion—a very worrying development for Washington policymakers anxious about China’s rapid  ascendency to superpower status. The US was getting “lapped” (to borrow athlete Samantha Power’s phrase) by the Asian Dragon in Africa and AFRICOM seemed like a solution. But American foreign policy was a public relations catastrophe due to the Iraqi and Afghan quagmires. Everyone knew why the US courted Africa and it had little to do with disaster relief. Material benefits tempted poorer African nations to welcome AFRICOM bases, but Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi quickly cajoled them back into line. (4)

Whether you admire or despise him, Ghaddafi was nothing if not consistent in his anti-imperialist foreign policy. Within a year of ousting the British-backed King Idris during the 1969 Libyan Revolution, Ghaddafi dismantled the US Wheelus Air Base and expelled all foreign military personnel. The US never forgave this defiance and endeavoured to destroy Libya via protracted proxy wars. In 1978, a nearly decade long conflict erupted between Libya and Chad’s rulers. One of whom, Hissène Habré, “the creation of the Americans in no small measure”, was convicted of war crimes in 2015 for murdering 40,000 people. (5) While Cuban troops inflicted humiliating defeats on US-backed South African apartheid armies in Namibia and Angola, the Libyans, after a string of victories in the early eighties, were eventually booted out of northern Chad by 1987, outmatched by combined US and French firepower. Yet Ghaddafi ‘s regime lived to fight another day, and he sprang into action once again as the spectre of American imperialism returned to haunt Africa in the form of AFRICOM.

By 2008, the US offered massive sums of money to African governments in return for hosting US military bases. In response, Ghaddafi doubled the money so that African nations withdrew from the bargain —a tactic which paid-off handsomely when the African Union rejected AFRICOM. Moreover, Ghaddafi was a staunch pan-Africanist who aimed to terminate Africa’s reliance on Western finance. The African Investment Bank based in Libya, whose goal was to fund African development at no interest, could have posed a serious challenge to the IMF’s domination if the regime had survived. In short, as Dan Glazebrook argues, Ghaddafi’s Libya, for all its faults, represented the last line of defence for Africa’s political and economic independence. Libya’s descent into anarchy, piracy, terrorism, and modern-day slavery in the wake of Ghaddafi’s execution cleared the way for AFRICOM’s stealth invasion of Africa. (6)

Shortly after NATO’s destruction of Libya left the continent exposed to unprecedented levels of US meddling, the Obama administration ignored African hostility to AFRICOM and imposed a US military hardware “superhighway” in the Horn of Africa. As Nick Turse observed, “operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the limited interventions of the Bush years”. (7) From Chabelley base in Djibouti to Camp Gilbert in Ethiopia, the latter replete with modern gyms and video game parlours, AFRICOM’s tentacles slithered deeper into the continent by 2012. The US hired mercenaries or contractors to man surveillance-aircraft jetting out of Entebbe in Uganda as hundreds of US commandos shared bases with Kenyan soldiers in Manda Bay. US marines trained recruits in the Burundi National Defence Force, while AFRICOM oversaw fourteen major joint-training exercises with armed forces in Morocco, Botswana, Lesotho, Senegal, and South Africa in a single year. Before drones took headlines by storm, cumbersome reconnaissance planes flying out of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso dotted the skies above Mali and Mauritania like parched vultures scouring for prey. A new era of colonial misadventure and exploitation was well and truly underway in Africa. (8)

Less than a year before she purportedly saved the world from Ebola, Samantha Power set her sights lower and saved the civil-war ridden Central African Republic in December 2013. Dreading that another Rwandan genocide was in the offing as Muslim Seleka insurgents and Christian militias threatened to hack each other to pieces, Power begged the international community and the US in particular to intervene before it was too late. (9) By April 2014, Power got her wish. The UN Security Council authorized the deployment of thousands of US-backed African Union peacekeeping troops into the CAR. (10) Within three years, the US “provided more than $800 million to fund humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping operations, peacebuilding and reconciliation programs”. (11)

AFRICOM already established a foothold in the CAR before Power’s intervention, nominally hot on the heels of the deranged Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony lurking in the thick jungles straddling the border between Uganda and the CAR. (12) Curiously, according to the Washington Post, US advisors tasked with bringing Kony to the ICC (International Criminal Court) weren’t keen on completing their mission. Locals in the southern CAR region of Obo grew fearful of their new American visitors, while Ugandan and Congolese officers wondered why US Special forces soldiers, equipped with the latest high-tech gadgets and satellite imagery, never bothered to pursue Kony into the forests. (13) In fact, Kony, the Osama Bin Laden of sub-Saharan Africa, is still on the run today.

This is pure speculation, but it is doubtful capturing Kony was the real reason why AFRICOM ventured into the CAR. It’s even harder to believe US officials claiming they were driven by the goodness of their hearts to prevent ethnic cleansing:  “I mean [CAR] is not a strategic target. Outside of “never again”, why else would we have gotten involved?” (14) Aside from the fact the CAR is renowned for harbouring vast diamond, gold, copper, uranium, and timber reserves, virtually all neighbouring states like Chad, Sudan, the DRC, and even South Africa took turns vying for control of the CAR’s resources for forty years by sponsoring violent coups and rebellions. (15) Was the US any nobler in its intentions? Evidence is scant at this time, but history and common sense suggest otherwise.

Samantha’s soft power posturing in the CAR, wittingly or not, was part and parcel of the Obama administration’s scramble for Africa. The old-fashioned, fire-and-fury, full-spectrum dominance-styled interventionism of the Bush/Cheney era was inconceivable and unpopular both at home and abroad. Therefore, Obama and Power looked elsewhere to legitimize US imperialism in Africa. They settled on a new doctrine centred around “human security”, a term borrowed from Global Health Governance lingo.

Maryam Deloffre defines this relatively novel doctrine thusly: “human security broadens the notion of security to focus on the individual and then considers things such as poverty, pandemics, and climate-change disasters…as security threats”. (16) This doctrine sounds reasonable in theory. Who can deny that deadly viruses like Ebola or Covid are a danger to our collective human security? But the practical application of this doctrine is problematic. As Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh argues, the developing world sees no noticeable difference between “human security” and traditional interventionist agendas like R2P (Responsibility to Protect- the thesis of Samantha Power’s book A Problem From Hell). For the Global South, “human security” policies are code for brutal interventions. (17) Nefarious actors like the US military are much too likely to instrumentalize “human security” to further the interests of corporations on the lookout for resources to plunder.

The weaponization of global health has been the bedrock of AFRICOM’s “human security” doctrine since the organisation’s inception. Stephen Harrow, former director of the Africa program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, stated in 2008 that AFRICOM would strive to gain a foothold on the continent via “rising commitments with respect to global health in Africa”. Dr Dan Henk at the US Air War College stressed that military planners in AFRICOM focused on health, infrastructural rehabilitation, environmental renewal, and human security to interfere in Africa nations. (18) In 2009, reports at the Department of Defence’s Global Health Engagement programme recommended the creation of “an overall global health security plan that combines civilian and military disease surveillance capabilities”. In February 2014, Assistant Secretary of Defence Jonathan Woodson emphasised once again that the US military had to expand its global health engagement strategy. (19) Clearly, AFRICOM planned to use “human security” crises as justifications to intervene in whatever natural disaster African nations will suffer next. The Ebola epidemic happened to be that opportunity.

By September 2014, both President Obama and Samantha Power spoke fluent “human security” parlance in speeches warning of the existential threat that Ebola posed to the world. Obama likened Ebola to ISIS terrorists and declared “ This is an epidemic that is not just a threat to regional security…it’s a potential threat to global security if these countries break down…” (20) At the UN Security Council Power echoed her boss and announced “…we have declared the current outbreak a threat to international peace and security”. (21) The rhetoric worked like a charm. Swept up by fear, confusion, and panic, 130 nations co-sponsored UN Resolution 2177 on Ebola Relief, guaranteeing the militarization of medical and humanitarian responses to the pandemic—much to the delight of AFRICOM. Power’s behind-the-scenes schmoozing at the UN, to get member states to back the bill, certainly was a “significant achievement”— it gave the West and the US military carte blanche to “intervene anywhere in the developing world”. (22) Power didn’t save the world from Ebola, but she definitely made it easier for the US to conquer it.

As Jacob Levich noted, “the Ebola crisis offered a useful cover for a substantial escalation in US military presence” in West Africa. The White House authorized the transfer of 3,000 troops to Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Senegal under AFRICOM command by September 2014. Another US military base was constructed in Monrovia during this deployment as well. (23) If the Bush administration spent years courting, flattering, and hosting dictators like Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea in return for oil, Obama jettisoned the pleasantries and let the military swoop right into West Africa. (24) Lest there be any lingering doubt about Washington’s true objectives in the region, consider this: war game simulations at the Pentagon imagined a terrorist attack in New York would be the perfect excuse to invade Mauritania. (25)

For West Africans on the ground, US military aid was no different to an occupation. Cartoon sketches in Monrovian newspapers joked that Liberians should prepare themselves for the day US soldiers come barging into homes with guns akimbo shouting “ KNOCK KNOCK !! HUMANITARIAN AID!! Alongside the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, France, and African Union states all sent troops to pacify the virus. China was the only nation to deploy mostly medical personnel. (26) Marouf Hasain Jr contends that the overwhelming militarization and securitization of social life in West Africa during the epidemic remains one of the most defining memories for survivors and witnesses today. (27) Medical anthropologist Adia Benton concedes that local armies and police were guilty of repressing certain segments of their own people, while foreign troops were generally well-behaved but indifferent to local populations. (28) As Mark Honigsbaum observed in his analysis of the WHO’s initial mismanagement of the Ebola pandemic, many Liberians, Guineans, and Sierra Leonians did not think highly of foreign medical or military staff, who often only treated Westerners airlifted to Europe or the US, while Africans were left to die in abysmal hospitals. (29)

This blatantly colonial conduct and rhetoric (Airforce Colonel Clint Hinote compared Ebola to ideological contamination and encouraged public health workers to employ counter-insurgency measures) is jarring, given that the CIA is largely responsible for ruining Liberia as a functioning democracy. (30) Three decades worth of CIA destabilization campaigns doomed Liberia’s healthcare system long before Ebola struck—an inconvenient truth everyone in mainstream media avoided like the plague.

Historian Jeremy Kuzmarov argues that, had the CIA never conspired to topple President William Tolbert in 1980, Liberia may have avoided the disastrous fate so many African nations now endure. Despite immense pressure from Jimmy Carter to relinquish Liberia’s sovereignty, Tolbert refused to allow another US base to deface his country. He liberalized Liberia’s political system, advocated for African economic independence, and introduced universal healthcare and free education. Much like Ghaddafi, Tolbert paid the ultimate price for his heresy. He was killed by US-backed rebels led by Samuel Doe, who allowed US embassy staff to dictate policy in every Liberian ministry. Doe embraced neoliberalism, worked closely with the IMF to privatize industries, and granted US military personnel unlimited access to local airports to funnel weapons to anti-communist “contras”.

The CIA tired of Doe as well and schemed to replace him with Charles Taylor, who plunged Liberia into a devastating civil war throughout the nineties. The US, hedging its bets, backed Taylor’s rebels who were “advised…on how to carry out the conflict in Liberia”, while President Bill Clinton helped fund the West-African peacekeeping force allied with Doe’s loyalists. Following years of atrocities, Taylor emerged victorious after winning elections in 1997. Clinton and, bizarrely, Jesse Jackson warmed up to Taylor until George Bush ruined the party. Taylor resigned as president of Liberia in 2003 after the ICC convicted him of war crimes, only to be succeeded by another US embassy favourite, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. (31) The Harvard-educated and Nobel Peace Prize-winning Sirleaf presided over a capital where none of its citizens could access running water for six years during her tenure as president. She surrendered the countryside to bands of rampaging warlords and paramilitaries, proved powerless to prevent Liberian death squads from collaborating with a French army that killed thousands in the Ivory Coast, and is the only leader on the continent to offer AFRICOM Liberian territory to build a base. (32)

With such a long record of unspeakable poverty, criminal leadership, and CIA wrongdoing, is it any wonder Liberia was ill-equipped to face Ebola? Western media hardly mentioned this history when lamenting woefully understaffed and ramshackle West African hospitals. Not a hint of sympathy for these public health systems can be found in the US press. Journalists from Medical Daily heaped praise on authoritarian corporate entities instead, like the Firestone Rubber company , whose innovative managers took it upon themselves to do the job governments and socialised healthcare proved incapable of doing. (33) We are told Firestone spared no expense to protect its approximately 80,000 strong workforce. Accomplishments included training medical personnel, using bribes and bullying to acquire resources, and the construction of makeshift quarantine shelters. Yet not a word about Firestone’s appalling human rights record and working conditions tantamount to “the modern equivalent of slavery”. (34)

None of this bothered the head honchos at AFRICOM. It didn’t matter that most Ebola Treatment Units (mainly large tents filled with cheap plastic mattresses) the US military erected in West Africa remained empty for the duration of the epidemic. It didn’t matter that even the Washington Post admitted Obama’s militarized aid intervention made little discernible impact on halting the spread of Ebola. The disease had already subsided before the ETUs were set-up. (35) What did matter was that the “human security” doctrine Obama trumpeted and Samantha Power legitimized at the UN had become reality. The White House kicked one nasty intervention habit, only to pick up a “healthier” one. AFRICOM solidified its stranglehold further via partnerships like APORA (African Partner Outbreak Response Alliance), which sees the US Armed Forces Health Surveillance Centre “help improve African militaries’ ability to effectively support civilian authorities to identify and respond to a disease outbreak”. (36) African nations like Rwanda are now cooperating with APORA in some capacity. (37) Mission accomplished.

Here is a summary of the numerous AFRICOM military installations and operations which proliferated throughout Africa since the Ebola epidemic:

• In 2014 the US built a gargantuan drone base in Agadez, Niger, to spy on or eliminate various Islamic groups, born out of the chaos of NATO’s disastrous regime change war in Libya, scattered across the Sahel region in Mauritania, Chad, and Sudan. (38)
• One of AFRICOM’s permanent bases at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti has exponentially grown in size as more drones and military hardware flood the Horn of Africa.
• Airports in Entebbe, Uganda, have been especially active since 2014, as the US military helps ship “equipment and soldiers to the Central African Republic in support of the African Union’s effort to confront destabilizing forces and violence”. (39) (referring to the ongoing civil war between Christians and Muslims in the CAR—a quagmire which Russia is now embroiled in)
• The US now frequently leads joint military exercises with the island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea—to keep a sharp eye on the safe passage of Nigerian oil tankers to the US. The “official” justification for this military presence is, according to Ghanaian socialist groups, to suppress the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria. (40)
• For over a decade, the US has trained the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo)’s army—a relationship which deepens with each passing year. A separatist Ugandan rebel group called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) is keeping US military advisors, along with their Congolese and Ugandan counterparts, extremely busy in the oil-rich Lake Albert region. (41)
• AFRICOM even acts as the European Union’s informal customs officer. Since EU nations have quietly moved their borders from the Mediterranean sea all the way down to the southern reaches of the Sahara Desert, US and French bases in Mauritania and Chad keep watch on masses of refugees desperately trying to escape uninhabitable weather conditions and incessant warfare. (42)
• In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was caught granting waivers for military aid to the South Sudanese military, despite its employ of child soldiers. (43)
• In 2018, geographer Adam Moore noted Air Forces Africa intended to construct 30 permanent or temporary bases in four African nations. Vice News alleged the US military set-up six new facilities in Somalia alone, while smaller “contingency” bases were present in Cameroon and Mali. A contingency outpost in Gabon was soon converted into a forward command centre. (44)
• In 2018, the US roped Ghana into its sphere of influence by persuading Plagiariser-in-chief Nana Akufo-Addo to sign a 20 million dollar “Status of Forces” agreement, which allows US military personnel to carry arms, grants them immunity if accused of crimes, and heavily implies a base will eventually be built on Ghanaian soil. The President lied to protesters opposing this capitulation, promising US bases would stay away from Ghana.
• In 2021, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari pleaded with the US to relocate AFRICOM from Stuttgart, Germany, to somewhere in Africa so as to coordinate attacks against Islamic militants. Once upon a time, Nigeria was one of AFRICOM’s most vociferous critics.
• Finally, AFRICOM is sending attachés and consultants to the African Union’s meetings, arousing fears that the AU’s security and response framework is being slowly co-opted to benefit American corporate and military interests at the expense of member states. (45)

Samantha Power served her purpose, intentionally or not, as an agent of US empire. One might file her actions under the heading ‘benevolent imperialism’. The US’ militarized response to the Ebola epidemic precipitated AFRICOM’s far from benign incursions into West Africa—and Power was there to see it through.

END NOTES

(1) Horace G. Campbell, “Obama in Africa”, (26/6/2013),

(2) Abel Esterhuyse, “The Iraqization of Africa? Looking at AFRICOM from a South African Perspective”, Strategic Studies Quarterly, (2008), pp. 111-115.

(3) Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (London,2019), pp. 185-223.

(4) A. Carl LeVan, “The Political Economy of African responses to the US Africa Command”, Africa Today (2010), p. 2.

(5) Jeremy Kuzmarov, “How the CIA Helped Ruin Liberia”, (30/7/2021).

(6) Dan Glazebrook, “NATO’s War on Libya is an Attack on African Development”, (6/9/2011).

(7) Nick Turse, “Obama’s Scramble for Africa”, (12/7/2012),

(8) Ibid.

(9) Bate Felix and Pascal Fletcher, “Ghost of Rwanda” haunts as US envoy visits Central African Republic”, (19/12/2013).

(10) Andrew Katz, “UN Authorizes Peacekeeping Mission to Central African Republic”, (9/4/2014).

(11) Charles J. Brown, “The Obama Administration and the struggle to prevent atrocities in the Central Republic December 2012-September 2014”, (November 2016), p. 7.

(12) Nick Turse, “Obama’s Scramble for Africa”, (12/7/2012).

(13) Sudarsan Raghavan, “In Africa, US troops moving slowly against Joseph Kony and his militia”, (16/4/2012).

(14) Brown, “The Obama Administration…”, p. 8.

(15) Henry Kam Kah, “History, External Influence, and Political Volatility in Central African Republic (CAR)”, (2014), pp. 18-20.

(16) Jacob Levich, “The Gates Foundation, Ebola, and Global Health Imperialism”, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology (September 2015), p. 726.

(17) Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh, “Human Security twenty years on”, (June 2014).

(18) Esterhuyse, “The Iraqization of Africa?…”, pp. 115-116.

(19) Thomas Cullison, Charles Beadling, Elizabeth Erickson, “Global Health Engagement: A Military Medicine Core Competency”, (1/1/2016).

(20) Cheryl Pellerin, “Obama: UN will Mobilize Countries to fight Ebola Outbreak”, (25/9/2014).

(21) Samantha Power, “Remarks by Ambassador Samantha Power at an Emergency Security Council Meeting on Ebola”, (18/9/2014).

(22)  Levich, Ibid, pp. 726-727.

(23) Ibid, pp. 724-725.  

(24) Vijay Prashad, “A New Cold War Over Oil”, (11/8/2007).

(25) Nick Turse, “The US will Invade West Africa in 2023 After an attack in New York—According to Pentagon War Game”, (22/10/2017).

(26) Adia Benton, “Whose Security?: Militarisation and Securitisation During West Africa’s Ebola Outbreak”, in The Politics of Fear: Médecins sans Frontières and the West African Ebola Epidemic, edited by Michiel Hofman and Sokhieng, (2017), pp. 28-30.

(27) Marouf Hasain Jr, Decolonizing Ebola Rhetorics Following the 2013-2016 West African Ebola Outbreak (2019).

(28) Benton, Ibid, pp. 26-27.

(29) Mark Honigsbaum, “Between Securitisation and Neglect: Managing Ebola at the Borders of Global Health”, Medical History Journal, (2017), p. 286.

(30) Levich, “The Gates Foundation…”, pp. 722-723.

(31) Kuzmarov, “How the CIA Helped Ruin Liberia”.

(32) Thomas Mountain, “Nobel for President, No Water for Citizens”, (12/10/2011).

(33) Levich, “The Gates Foundation..”, p. 723. See Susan Scutti, “Firestone keeping Ebola Away From Employers In Liberia through Low-tech Intervention program”, (13/10/2014).

(34) Levich, “The Gates Foundation…”, pp. 722-723.

(35) Ibid, p. 725.

(36) Thomas Cullison et al.

(37) MOD Updates, “RDF Hosts Seventh African Partner Outbreak Response Alliance (APORA 2019)”, (20/5/2019).

(38) Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group, “Defending Our Sovereignty: US military Bases in Africa and the Future of the African Union”, (8/7/2021).

(39) Captain Christine Guthrie, “Uganda troops support US airlift missions”, (22/1/2014).

(40) Socialist Movement of Ghana, Ibid.

(41) Ibid.

(42) Ibid.

(43) Nick Turse, “Hillary Clinton’s State Department Gave South Sudan’s Military a Pass for its Child Soldiers”, (9/6/2016).

(44) Nick Turse, “US military says it has a “light footprint in Africa. These documents show a vast network of bases”, (1/12/2018).

(45) Socialist Movement of Ghana, Ibid.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jean-Philippe Stone.

But the construction of the facility, along with a slew of videos from the region posted on social media, suggest a broader outbreak.

In the video below, for example, an animated Ma Zhijun, the Chinese Communist Party secretary in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, orders officials to send people who test positive for the virus and anyone they had contact with into quarantine.

"Tonight the venues that have water, electricity and heat are all fine,” Ma Zhijun says in the video, which was posted to Twitter and YouTube on Oct. 20. “There’s not any limitation on the conditions.”

He says he was acting on behalf of Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary Ma Xingrui, who at the time was in Beijing for China’s 20^th party congress, an event that was closely watched around the world. An outbreak may have embarrassed President Xi Jinping who continued to promote his zero-COVID policy as he was granted a precedent-breaking third term as party leader.

RFA was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the videos. 

Furtively shot clips have also surfaced online offering additional evidence of a rushed response to contain an outbreak.

The video below shows a quick scan of a dirty floor in what a woman’s voice describes as a middle school that had been turned into a makeshift quarantine facility.

“It has been three days already,” she says. “They have not given us any nuclei test. They bring food, shut the door and leave. Look at this filthy restroom.”

The following 15-second clip — uploaded onto Chinese social media app Duoyin after the clip of the secretary leaked — suggests rough quarantine conditions weren’t isolated. It shows at least nine people lying on the floor of what appears to be a bathroom.

The video was harvested online by Zumret Dawut, a Uyghur exile in the United States and activist who was imprisoned in a camp in Xinjiang, before it was removed from the app.

A fourth video obtained by RFA shows a man passing his camera over a large room in what he says is a local energy company’s building. He estimates there are as many as 1,000 people, which the clip shows are packed closely together on cots.

“No medicine is given out here,” he says.

China’s strategy for containing COVID has led to complaints of harsh treatment across the country, including in Shanghai, where after weeks of being confined to their homes, residents in April shouted out of their windows and banged pots in protest.

Last month, demonstrations in Tibet of Han Chinese migrants and native Tibetans over a lockdown resulted in Chinese authorities allowing the migrants to return to their homes. RFA reported that Chinese authorities detained around 200 Lhasa residents in the wake of the protest in the Tibetan regional capital.

In Xinjiang, Chinese officials imposed strict lockdowns in August and September. RFA reported that 600 Uyghurs from a village in Ghulja in the northern part of Xinjiang were detained after they protested a lockdown that, according to some locals, had resulted in the deaths from starvation of as many as a dozen residents.

Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in the region have also been subjected to a years-long crackdown as part of a broad “anti-terrorism” campaign. A U.N. report in August said China’s effort to Sinicize the region has included human rights abuses and potential crimes against humanity. China denounced the report, which it said was the result of pressure from western governments.

Prior to the September protest, state-run Xinjiang TV had warned residents that they would be arrested for separatism, a charge often used to detain Uyghurs, if they “spread rumors” about a COVID outbreak in the area.

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

Group-buying schemes

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Qiao Long and Fong Tak Ho.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Mia Ping-chieh Chen.