Delegates also shed light on Beijing’s intentions for Tibet and revealed for the first time that U.S. sanctions on companies in Xinjiang using Uyghur forced labor are hurting business.

Here are five takeaways:

China aims to spur consumer spending amid looming trade war with US

In his March 5 work report, Premier Li Qiang pledged to boost domestic consumption as the driving force for economic growth, which he set at 5% for the coming year -- a target experts say is highly questionable and likely concocted for political reasons.

For years, exports have driven China’s growth. But leaders have tried to shift the focus to consumer spending after three years of COVID-19 restrictions and a slew of U.S. tariffs prompted manufacturers to move away from China and spooked foreign investors. And now President Donald Trump has imposed additional tariffs on Chinese exports to America.

To shore up the economy, the government plans to boost fiscal spending by 1.2 trillion yuan (US$165 billion) to 29.7 trillion yuan (US$4.16 billion), Li said -- but gave few details of how that money would be spent.

He also pledged to implement “an appropriately accommodative monetary policy” in the coming year.

“The impact of this National People’s Congress on the Chinese people is that their economy is now moving from strength to weakness, and this weakness will be long term,” social economist Ji Rong told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview.

(Pedro Pardo/AFP)

One proposal discussed by delegates to the 10-day National People’s Congress in Beijing was shortening the working week to four-and-a-half days to give people more leisure time.

The government will also further cut the personal income tax rate in a bid to boost purchasing power among middle- and low-earners.

An economic commentator who gave only the surname Hong for fear of reprisals said changes to the working week could prove effective, but that Li’s work report contained few other practical measures.

AI and high-tech seen as key sources of growth

Li Qiang also vowed to “unleash the creativity of the digital economy,” particularly through the use of AI.

“We will support the extensive application of large-scale AI models and vigorously develop new-generation intelligent terminals and smart manufacturing equipment, including intelligent connected new-energy vehicles, AI-enabled phones and computers, and intelligent robots,” he told delegates.

(Wang Zhao/AFP)

Li was speaking weeks after China’s launched its DeepSeek AI model, in what some called a “Sputnik moment” for the country.

Li also promised increased funding for AI, biomanufacturing, quantum technology and 6G, without giving further details.

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But experts said China will continue to be hampered by U.S. export and high-tech bans, including for cutting-edge semiconductors.

China’s increasingly powerful AI surveillance systems use facial recognition and combine data streams to create sophisticated “city brains” that can track events in real time, and are increasingly being exported around the world, according to a recent report.

The technology is also raising concerns about its use to treat patients by medical professionals, as well as to aid cheating in competitions (in Chinese).

Tibetan officials vow to expand ideological education and Sinicize Tibetan Buddhism

The Tibet Autonomous Region delegation vowed to strengthen efforts to fight “separatism” and prioritize “long-term stability” by expanding ideological education, as well as accelerate the Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism, which they said was key to “changing the face of Tibet.”

The delegates emphasized their commitment to ideological education guided by the “Three Consciousnesses,” a phrase used in Chinese propaganda to refer to national -- or Han Chinese -- consciousness, civic duties and the rule of law.

(Greg Baker/AFP)

“I believe this kind of education is highly effective,” said Karma Tseten, deputy head of the delegation and Chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, or TAR. “Despite its value, it is constantly smeared and disrupted by the Dalai Lama and his group. But we will not be swayed.”

The rhetoric was a clear sign, experts said, that Beijing intends to continue to impose its repressive policies in Tibet under the guise of maintaining stability and combating separatism.

“Regardless of what policies China implements in Tibet, their stated goal of ‘maintaining stability’ fundamentally reveals that Tibetans do not trust the Chinese government,” Dawa Tsering, director at the Tibet Policy Institute, told Radio Free Asia.

Delegates said at a media briefing on Thursday that more than 90 percent of community leaders in Tibet now had basic knowledge of Mandarin.

They also emphasized that they will continue to focus on promoting in Tibet what China calls the “four major events” -– border security, environment, stability and economic and social development.

Top official from Uyghur region admits US sanctions are hurting businesses

During the congress, the Chinese government acknowledged for the first time that U.S. sanctions over the use of Uyghur forced labor have affected more than 100 companies in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous region, or XUAR, proving that international sanctions do have bite.

Ma Xingrui, the XUAR party secretary, told delegates that “the United States, relying on fabricated evidence, has imposed sanctions on Xinjiang businesses based on allegations of genocide and forced labor, affected more than 144 companies,“ according to the China Daily.

Sanctions “over accusations of ‘forced labor’ have become one of the biggest challenges in the region’s development,” Ma said during a panel discussion Friday at the NPC, according to the report.

While Ma didn’t elaborate on which companies were affected, this marks the first time the region’s highest party official admitted the sanctions were hurting businesses.

The United States and nearly a dozen Western parliaments have accused China of committing genocide and crimes against humanity against the 13 million Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples living in Xinjiang.

In 2021, the U.S. government has passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which bans U.S. companies from doing business with Chinese businesses judged to be using Uyghur forced labor. Since then, some 144 companies have been blacklisted.

These sanctions are undermining the economic development of Xinjiang, which is a chief way that Beijing “wants to extend the legitimacy of its rule,” said Raymond Kuo, a China expert at Rand Corporation, a Washington think tank.

“Ultimately, the economic benefits that come from [Beijing’s] rule are going to be the key thing to increase the legitimacy of its rule as well as win over the population,” he said. “Western sanctions inhibit that.”

The sanctions are “particularly politically important for Xinjiang,” Kuo added. “They’re clearly having some impact, right?”

China to boost military spending by 7.2%

China is increasing its 2025 defense budget by 7.2% to US$246 billion amid growing rivalry with the United States and tensions over Taiwan, marking the fourth consecutive year of more than 7% growth in defense spending.

Li said Beijing would continue to “resolutely oppose separatist activities” in democratic Taiwan, as well as what he termed “external interference.”

China has ramped up military activities around Taiwan, conducting frequent air and naval incursions into the island’s air defense identification zone and staging large-scale drills near its waters. Beijing views Taiwan as an inseparable part of its territory and insists on eventual unification, by force if necessary.

(Pedro Pardo/AFP)

Yet Li also vowed a soft power charm offensive to push for what Beijing calls “peaceful unification.”

“We will improve institutions and policies for promoting economic and cultural exchanges and cooperation across the Taiwan Strait and advance integrated cross-Strait development,” he said. “We will firmly advance the cause of China’s unification.”

Military expert Pang Xinhua said China’s neighbors in the region are also worried about escalating military tensions.

“As China increases its military activities in the South China Sea, East China Sea and other regions, neighboring countries may worry about rising regional tensions leading to an escalating arms race,” Pang told RFA Mandarin.

“That could in turn lead to an escalation of the situation in the Taiwan Strait, as China’s continued strengthening of its military capabilities is interpreted as pressure on Taiwan,” he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Qian Lang for RFA Mandarin, Yitong Wu and Ha Syut for RFA Cantonese.

Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed a meeting of leaders at the BRICS Summit in Kazan on Wednesday. In his speech, he focused on the growing role and prospects of the economic group, and warned about the risks to the global economy from Western sanctions and protectionist policies.

Putin also announced Russia’s initiatives within the BRICS framework, including the formation of a grain exchange and a new investment platform.

Here are the key takeaways from the president’s address.

Multipolar world order being formed

World trade and the global economy as a whole are undergoing significant changes, the Russian president told the extended-format BRICS meeting. The center of business activity is gradually shifting towards developing markets, he added. “A multipolar model is being formed, which is launching a new wave of growth, primarily due to the countries of the Global South and East – and, naturally, the BRICS countries.”

Leading role of BRICS

The BRICS countries’ share of global GDP in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) will amount to 36.7% by the end of 2024 and will continue to expand, Putin predicted. Meanwhile, the share of the Group of Seven (G7) leading Western economies is projected to account for slightly above 30%.

“The trend for the BRICS’ leading role in the global economy will only strengthen,” Putin said, citing population growth, capital accumulation, urbanization, and increased labor productivity, accompanied by technological innovations as key factors.

West’s unilateral sanctions and debt burden

The Russian president warned of a potential new global crisis, citing the growing debt burden in developed countries, unilateral sanctions, and protectionist policies as key threats. “These factors are fragmenting international trade and foreign investment, particularly in developing nations,” Putin said.

He also pointed to high commodity price volatility and rising inflation, which are eroding incomes and corporate profits in many countries. Putin’s remarks also highlighted concerns over escalating geopolitical tensions and their impact on global economic stability.

New BRICS investment platform as a powerful tool

The Russian leader said that to fully realize the potential of the BRICS countries’ growing economies, the member states should intensify cooperation in areas such as technology, education, resources, trade and logistics, finance, and insurance, as well as increasing the volume of capital investment many times over.

“In this regard, we propose creating a new BRICS investment platform, which would become a powerful tool for supporting our national economies and would also provide financial resources to the countries of the Global South and East,” Putin said.

BRICS-based grain exchange

The Russian leader proposed a common BRICS grain exchange to protect trade between members from excessive price volatility. BRICS countries are “among the world’s largest producers of grain, vegetables, and oilseeds,” he noted. Such a bourse could be expanded to trade in other major commodities such as oil, gas and precious metals, Putin said.

The initiative is aimed at protecting national markets from negative external interference, speculation and attempts to cause artificial shortages of food products, according to Putin.

AI alliance of BRICS

Putin also proposed a BRICS AI alliance to regulate the technology and prevent its illegal deployment. “In Russia, the business community has adopted a code of ethics in this area, which our BRICS partners and other countries could join,” Putin noted.

Other proposals

The president also spoke about increasing transport connectivity between BRICS countries, saying this could provide additional opportunities for growth and diversification of mutual trade.

“Such promising projects as the formation of a permanent BRICS logistics platform, preparation of a review of transport routes, opening of an electronic communications platform for transport, and establishment of a reinsurance pool are being discussed,” Putin said.

The issues related to the transition of the global economy to low-emission development models are very important, according to the Russian president. The BRICS contact group on climate and sustainable development is closely involved in this work and will continue to counteract attempts by some countries to use the climate agenda to eliminate competitors from the market, he said. “We consider the initiatives on the BRICS partnership on carbon markets and the climate research platform to be promising,” Putin concluded.

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

Powered by publicly available data, this new investigation identifies the state institutions benefiting from these lands, and provides information on many of the individuals and companies that lease them. In the second, major story in our series on state trust lands, we continue to detangle the ways in which Indigenous lands and resources bankroll public institutions, often at the expense of tribal citizens, Indigenous land management practices, and tribal sovereignty and self-determination. 

Here are five takeaways from our investigation, which you can read in full here: 

1 79 reservations in 15 states are pockmarked by more than 2 million acres of state trust lands.

State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, make up millions of acres across the Western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, jails, hospitals, and other public institutions. Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other underground resources, and distributed $62 million for public institutions in 2023 with the majority going to K-12 schools — institutions serving primarily non-Indigenous people. Approximately 161,000 acres are contained on six reservations. 

2 In at least four states, five tribal nations are themselves paying to lease land inside their own reservations — almost 58,000 collective acres.

Of all the Indigenous nations in the U.S. we identified that pay states to utilize their own lands, the Ute Tribe leases back the highest number of acres. And while not all states have publicly accessible lessee information with land-use records, of the ones that did, Grist and High Country News found that at least four other tribes also lease nearly 11,000 acres, combined, on their own reservations: the Southern Ute Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Laguna, and Zuni Tribe. According to state records, the vast majority of these tribally leased lands — 99.5 percent — are used for agriculture and grazing.

3 Fossil fuel infrastructure or activity is present on roughly a sixth of on-reservation trust lands nationwide. 

Beneficiaries, including public schools, receive revenue generated from a variety of activities, including leases for roads and infrastructure, solar panel installations and commercial projects. On reservations where states manage subsurface rights, land ownership can be split — if a tribe, for instance, owns the surface rights while an oil company owns the subsurface rights — the subsurface owner can access its resources regardless of what the surface owner wants. 

4 Of the 79 reservations that have state trust lands within their boundaries, tribes living on 49 of them have received federal Tribal Climate Resilience awards since 2011. 

Tribal Climate Resilience awards are designed to fund and assist tribes in creating adaptation plans and conducting vulnerability and risk assessments as climate change increasingly threatens their homes. But with the existence of state trust lands inside reservation boundaries, coupled with state-driven resource extraction, many tribal governments face hard limits when trying to enact climate mitigation policies — regardless of how much money the federal government puts toward the problem.

5 Some states are attempting to create systems for returning trust lands to Indigenous control and in other states, land exchanges have already occurred or are in-progress.

State agencies can exchange trust lands on reservations for federal lands off-reservation, but the process is complicated by the state’s obligation to produce as much money as possible from trust lands for its beneficiaries. At the forefront are Washington, which is currently implementing legislation to return lands, and North Dakota, which is moving new legislation through Congress for the same purpose. But because of the lands’ value and the states’ financial obligations, it’s difficult to transfer complete jurisdiction back to Indigenous nations. Trust lands must be swapped for land of equal or greater value, which tends to mean that a transfer is only possible if the land in question doesn’t produce much revenue. 

Read the full story here.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Top 5 takeaways of our investigation into state trust lands on reservations on Sep 16, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tristan Ahtone.

The Guardian reported this week a source from within the Foreign Office confirming what anyone paying close attention already knew.

By last February, according to the source, Britain’s then Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, had received official advice that Israel was using British arms components to commit war crimes in Gaza. Cameron sat on that information for many months, concealing it from the House of Commons and the British public, while Israel continued to butcher tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Several points need making about the information provided to the Guardian:

1. The source says that the advice to Cameron on Israeli war crimes was “so obvious” it could not have been misunderstood by him or anyone else in the previous government. Given that the new Labour government has been similarly advised, forcing it to partially suspend arms sales, one conclusion only is possible: Cameron is complicit in Israel’s war crimes. The International Criminal Court must immediately investigate him. Its British chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, needs to issue an arrest warrant for Cameron as soon as possible. No ifs or buts.

2. Now in government, Labour has a legal duty to make clear the timeline of the advice Cameron received – and who else received it – to help the ICC in its prosecution of the former Foreign Secretary and other British officials for complicity in Israel’s atrocities.

3. The current furore being kicked up over Labour’s suspension of a tiny fraction of arm sales to Israel needs to be put firmly in context. David Lammy, Cameron’s successor, is keen to evade any risk of complicity charges himself. Leaders of the previous government are denouncing his decision on arms sales only because it exposes their own complicity in war crimes. Their outrage is desperate arse-covering – something the media ought to be highlighting but isn’t.

4. Labour needs to explain why, according to the source, the advice it has published has apparently been watered down from the advice Cameron received. As a result, Lammy has suspended 30 of 350 arms contracts with Israel – or 8 per cent of the total. He has avoided suspending the British components most likely to be assisting Israel in its war crimes: those used in Israel’s F-35 jets, made in the US.

Why? Because that would incur the full wrath of the Biden administration. He and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, dare not take on Washington.

In other words, Lammy’s decision has not only exposed the complicity of Cameron and the previous Tory leadership in Israeli war crimes. It also exposes Lammy and Starmer’s complicity. Put bluntly, following this week’s announcement, they are now 8 per cent less complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity than Cameron and the Tories were.

5. There has been lots of fake indignation from Israel and its lobbyists, especially in Britain’s Jewish community, about how offensive it is that the government should announce its suspension of a small fraction of arms sales to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza the day six Israeli hostages were buried.

The chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, for example, is incensed that the UK is limiting its arming of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, saying it “beggars belief”. He is thereby calling for the UK to trash international law, and ignore its own officials’ advice that Israel risks using British weapons to commit war crimes. He is demanding that the UK facilitate genocide.

The British Board of Deputies, which claims to represent British Jews, has retweeted Mirvis’ comment. The Board’s president has been all over the airwaves similarly decryingLammy’s decision.

Israel would, of course, have always found some reason to be appalled at the timing. There is an obviously far more important consideration than the bogus “sensitivities” of Israel and genocide apologists like Rabbi Mirvis. Each day the UK government delays banning all arms to Israel – not just a small percentage – more Palestinians in Gaza die and the more Britain contributes to Israel’s crimes against humanity.

But equally to the point: according to the rules Starmer imposed on the Labour party – that Britain’s Jewish leaders get to define what offends Jews and what amounts to antisemitism, especially on issues concerning Israel – the Labour government is now, judged by those standards, antisemitic. You can’t have one set of rules for Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left, and another for Starmer and the Labour right.

Or rather you can. That is precisely the game the entire British establishment has been playing for the past seven years. A game that has facilitated Israel’s genocide in Gaza even more than the sales of British weapons to Israel.

6. Many have dismissed the significance of recent rulings against Israel from the International Court of Justice – that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza and that its decades of occupation are illegal and a form of apartheid – as well as moves from the International Criminal Court to arrest Netanyahu as a war criminal.

Here we see how mistaken that approach is. Those legal decisions have set the two wings of the British establishment – the Tories and the Starmerite Labour right – at loggerheads. Both are now desperate in their different ways to distance themselves from charges of complicity.

The rulings have also opened up a potential rift with Washington. The State Department spokesman has been shown having to frantically justify why the US is not banning its own arms sales.

Journalist Humeyra Pamuk questioned State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on why the US has not followed the UK's decision to suspend arms sales to Israel over concerns about potential violations of international law. pic.twitter.com/mujwDyblgZ

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) September 4, 2024

Admittedly, these are only small fissures in the western system of oligarchy. But those fissures are weaknesses – weaknesses that those who care about human rights, care about international law, care about stopping a genocide, and care about saving their own humanity can exploit. We have few opportunities. We need to grasp every single one of them.

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

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After Russian hackers exploited a flaw in a widely used Microsoft product during one of the largest cyberattacks in U.S. history, the software giant downplayed its culpability. However, a recent ProPublica investigation revealed that a whistleblower within Microsoft’s ranks had repeatedly attempted to convince the company to address the weakness years before the hack — and that the company rebuffed his concerns at every step.

Here are the key things you need to know about that whistleblower’s efforts and Microsoft’s inaction.

In 2016, while researching an attack on a major tech company, Microsoft engineer Andrew Harris said he discovered a flaw in the company’s Active Directory Federation Services, a product that allowed users to sign on a single time for nearly everything they needed. As a result of the weakness, millions of users — including federal employees — were left exposed to hackers.

The Microsoft Security Response Center determines which reported security flaws need to be addressed. Harris said he told the MRSC about the flaw, but it decided to take no action. The MSRC argued that, because hackers would already need access to an organization’s on-premises servers before they could take advantage of the flaw, it didn’t cross a so-called “security boundary.” Former MSRC members told ProPublica that the center routinely rejected reports of weaknesses using this term, even though it had no formal definition at the time.

Following the MSRC’s decision, Harris escalated the issue to Microsoft product leaders who, he said, “violently agreed with me that this is a huge issue.” But, at the same time, they “violently disagreed with me that we should move quickly to fix it.”

Harris had proposed the temporary solution of suggesting that customers turn off the seamless single sign-on function. That move would eliminate the threat but result in users needing to log on twice instead of once. A product manager argued that it wasn’t a viable option because it risked alienating federal government customers and undermined Microsoft’s strategy to marginalize a top competitor.

At the time Harris was trying to convince Microsoft product leaders to address the flaw, the federal government was preparing to make a massive investment in cloud computing, and Microsoft wanted the business. Acknowledging this security flaw could jeopardize the company’s chances, Harris recalled one product leader telling him.

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In 2018, a colleague of Harris’ pointed out how hackers could also bypass a common security feature called multifactor authentication, which requires users to perform one or more additional steps to verify their identity, such as entering a code sent via text message.

Their discovery meant that, no matter how many additional security steps a company puts in place, a hacker could bypass them all.

When the colleagues brought this new information to the MSRC, “it was a nonstarter,” Harris said.

In November 2017, cybersecurity firm CyberArk published a blog post detailing the same flaw Harris had identified.

Microsoft would later claim this blog post was the first time it had learned of the issue, but researchers at CyberArk told ProPublica they had reached out to Microsoft staff at least twice before publication.

Later, in 2019, cybersecurity firm Mandiant would publicly demonstrate at a cybersecurity conference how hackers could exploit the flaw to gain access to victims’ cloud services. The firm said it had given Microsoft advance notice of its findings.

Within months of Harris leaving Microsoft in 2020, his fears became reality. U.S. officials confirmed reports that a state-sponsored team of Russian hackers used the flaw in the SolarWinds hack. Exploiting the weakness, hackers vacuumed up sensitive data from a number of federal agencies, including, ProPublica learned, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile. The Russians also used the weakness to compromise dozens of email accounts in the Treasury Department, including those of its highest-ranking officials.

Microsoft President Brad Smith assured Congress in 2021 that “there was no vulnerability in any Microsoft product or service that was exploited” in SolarWinds, and he said customers could have taken more steps to secure their systems.

When asked what Microsoft had done to address the flaw in the years before the attack, Smith responded by listing a handful of steps that customers could have taken to protect themselves. His suggestions included purchasing an antivirus product like Microsoft Defender and securing devices with another Microsoft product called Intune.

Hours after the ProPublica investigation was published, Microsoft’s Smith appeared before the House Homeland Security Committee to discuss his company’s cybersecurity failures.

Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., asked Smith about his prior congressional testimony, in which he said that Microsoft had first learned about this weakness in November 2017 from the CyberArk blog post. ProPublica’s investigation, Magaziner noted, found that Harris had raised it even earlier, only to be ignored. The lawmaker asked Smith if his prior testimony was incorrect.

Smith demurred, saying he hadn’t read the story. “I was at the White House this morning,” he told the panel.

He also complained that ProPublica’s investigation was published the day of the hearing and said that he’d know more about it “a week from now.”

However, ProPublica had sent detailed questions to Microsoft nearly two weeks before the story was published and had requested an interview with Smith. The company declined to make him available. Instead, Microsoft had issued a statement in response. “Protecting customers is always our highest priority,” a spokesperson said. “Our security response team takes all security issues seriously and gives every case due diligence with a thorough manual assessment, as well as cross-confirming with engineering and security partners. Our assessment of this issue received multiple reviews and was aligned with the industry consensus.”

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

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This story is exempt from our Creative Commons license until July 19.

After years of reporting on forever chemicals, ProPublica reporter Sharon Lerner had one question that still nagged at her. She knew that a handful of 3M scientists and lawyers had learned in the 1970s that the chemical PFOS had seeped into the blood of people around the country and that company experiments around that time had shown that PFOS was toxic. But the company kept making the compound until 2000. How, she wondered, had 3M kept its dark secret for decades? For years, no one who knew what had happened inside the company had spoken publicly. Then last year, a former 3M chemist reached out to Lerner. Here are nine takeaways from the investigation published by ProPublica and The New Yorker.

In the late 1990s, 3M chemist Kris Hansen tested samples from dozens of blood banks around the country and found PFOS in every sample. For decades, the company had used chemicals that break down into PFOS in its top-selling fabric coating, Scotchgard, and in a grease-proof coating for food packaging. It also sold PFOS and firefighting foam that contained it. The only blood that didn’t contain PFOS, Hansen found, had been collected either before 3M began selling these products or in rural China, where items containing the fluorochemicals weren’t widely used.

Hansen said her managers tried to convince her there was something wrong with the testing. Some suggested that her equipment was tainted. Rather than accept her results, they purchased more scientific equipment — machines that each cost more than a car — and even had Hansen repeat her tests at the offices of the company that made the machines. Her managers’ skepticism caused Hansen to sometimes doubt her own work.

In the late 1990s, Hansen learned that two academic researchers had contacted 3M more than two decades earlier; they’d found a fluorochemical in human blood and wondered whether Scotchgard might be the source. A 3M scientist named Richard Newmark confirmed their suspicions, but Newmark told Hansen that 3M lawyers had urged his lab not to admit it, according to notes that Hansen took at a meeting with Newmark.

In 1999, Hansen was invited to present her PFOS research to top 3M executives, including CEO Livio D. DeSimone. She said that she was immediately pelted with skeptical questions from those in attendance: Why did she do this research? Who directed her to do it? Whom did she inform of the results? Meanwhile, she said, DeSimone appeared to have fallen asleep during her presentation.

Soon after, she learned her job would be changing: A different scientist was going to lead 3M’s PFOS research, she recalled her boss telling her, and she was to spend most of her time analyzing samples for other scientists and not ask questions about the results. She felt like she was being punished.

The company’s medical director told The New York Times in May 2000 that the presence of the chemical in human blood “isn’t a health issue now, and it won’t be a health issue.” 3M stopped making PFOS by 2002 but replaced it with PFBS, another forever chemical that persists in the environment and accumulates in people.

What Hansen’s bosses didn’t tell her or the public was that 3M had conducted animal studies on PFOS in the 1970s and that those tests had shown PFOS was toxic. The results had remained secret, even to many at the company. In one animal study, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose of PFOS (4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight) could kill a monkey within weeks. While that daily dose was orders of magnitude greater than the amount a typical person would ingest, the results show the chemical would currently fall into the highest of five toxicity levels recognized by the United Nations.

Jim Johnson, Hansen’s former boss, said in an interview that he knew “within 20 minutes” that PFOS wouldn’t break down in nature and that he had identified the chemical in a sample he obtained from a blood bank in the 1970s. He also determined back then that the chemical binds to proteins in the body, causing it to accumulate, and found it in the livers of animals that were exposed to the company’s products. Yet he didn’t disclose this information to Hansen before he gave her the assignment that led her to find PFOS in the blood of the general public almost 20 years later. Johnson told Lerner that he knew that Hansen would discover — and thoroughly document — the presence of PFOS in the blood of the general public. “It was time,” he said.

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency set drinking water limits for six forever chemicals, including PFOS and PFBS. The agency noted that PFOS is “likely to cause cancer” and that no level of the chemical is considered safe.

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3M produced tens of millions of pounds of PFOS and compounds that degrade into it after learning that PFOS was toxic and accumulating in people. In 2022, 3M said that it would stop making the broader group of forever chemicals known as PFAS and would “work to discontinue the use of PFAS across its product portfolio” by the end of 2025. (PFOS and PFBS are PFAS compounds.) In a written statement, a 3M spokesperson said that the company “is proactively managing PFAS” and that its approach to the chemicals has evolved along with “the science and technology of PFAS, societal and regulatory expectations, and our expectations of ourselves.”

Recent studies have linked PFAS to an increased risk of some cancers, developmental effects in children, reduced immune function, interference with hormones and other health harms. Virtually everyone now has at least one PFAS compound in their blood, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because of their ubiquity, the chemicals are “reducing public health on an incredibly large scale,” according to an environmental chemist from Harvard University.

Read the complete investigation into how 3M executives convinced a scientist that the forever chemicals she found in human blood samples were safe.

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

Jean-Marie Tjibaou, a revered Kanak visionary, was inspirational to indigenous Pacific political activists across Oceania, just like Tongan anthropologist and writer Epeli Hao’ofa was to cultural advocates.

Tragically, he was assassinated in 1989 by an opponent within the independence movement during the so-called “les événements” in New Caledonia, the last time the “French” Pacific territory was engulfed in a political upheaval such as experienced this week.

His memory and legacy as poet, cultural icon and peaceful political agitator live on with the impressive Tjibaou Cultural Centre on the outskirts of the capital Nouméa as a benchmark for how far New Caledonia had progressed in the last 35 years.

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports
• Kanaky – put a stop (really) to the time of colonies!
• Blood on their Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific – David Robie

However, the wave of pro-independence protests that descended into urban rioting this week invoked more than Tjibaou’s memory. Many of the martyrs — such as schoolteacher turned security minister Elöi Machoro, murdered by French snipers during the upheaval of the 1980s — have been remembered and honoured for their exploits over the last few days with countless memes being shared on social media.

Among many memorable quotes by Tjibaou, this one comes to mind:

“White people consider that the Kanaks are part of the fauna, of the local fauna, of the primitive fauna. It’s a bit like rats, ants or mosquitoes,” he once said.

“Non-recognition and absence of cultural dialogue can only lead to suicide or revolt.”

And that is exactly what has come to pass this week in spite of all the warnings in recent years and months. A revolt.

Among the warnings were one by me in December 2021 after a failed third and “final” independence referendum. I wrote at the time about the French betrayal:

“After three decades of frustratingly slow progress but with a measure of quiet optimism over the decolonisation process unfolding under the Nouméa Accord, Kanaky New Caledonia is again poised on the edge of a precipice.”

As Paris once again reacts with a heavy-handed security crackdown, it appears to have not learned from history. It will never stifle the desire for independence by colonised peoples.

New Caledonia was annexed as a colony in 1853 and was a penal colony for convicts and political prisoners — mainly from Algeria — for much of the 19th century before gaining a degree of autonomy in 1946.

Here are my five takeaways from this week’s violence and mayhem:

1 Global failure of neocolonialism – Palestine, Kanaky and West Papua
Just as we have witnessed a massive outpouring of protest on global streets for justice, self-determination and freedom for the people of Palestine as they struggle for independence after 76 years of Israeli settler colonialism, and also Melanesian West Papuans fighting for 61 years against Indonesian settler colonialism, Kanak independence aspirations are back on the world stage.

Neocolonialism has failed. French President Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to reverse the progress towards decolonisation over the past three decades has backfired in his face.

2 French deafness and loss of social capital
The predictions were already long there. Failure to listen to the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) leadership and to be prepared to be patient and negotiate towards a consensus has meant much of the crosscultural goodwill that been developed in the wake of the Nouméa Accord of 1998 has disappeared in a puff of smoke from the protest fires of the capital.

The immediate problem lies in the way the French government has railroaded the indigenous Kanak people who make up 42 percent pf the 270,000 population into a constitutional bill that “unfreezes” the electoral roll pegging voters to those living in New Caledonia at the time of the 1998 Nouméa Accord. Under the draft bill all those living in the territory for the past 10 years could vote.

This would add some 25,000 extra French voters in local elections, which would further marginalise Kanaks at a time when they hold the territorial presidency and a majority in the Congress in spite of their demographic disadvantage.

Under the Nouméa Accord, there was provision for three referendums on independence in 2018, 2020 and 2021. The first two recorded narrow (and reducing) votes against independence, but the third was effectively boycotted by Kanaks because they had suffered so severely in the 2021 delta covid pandemic and needed a year to mourn culturally.

The FLNKS and the groups called for a further referendum but the Macron administration and a court refused.

3 Devastating economic and social loss
New Caledonia was already struggling economically with the nickel mining industry in crisis – the territory is the world’s third-largest producer. And now four days of rioting and protesting have left a trail of devastation in their wake.

At least five people have died in the rioting — three Kanaks, and two French police, apparently as a result of a barracks accident. A state of emergency was declared for at least 12 days.

But as economists and officials consider the dire consequences of the unrest, it will take many years to recover. According to Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI) president David Guyenne, between 80 and 90 percent of the grocery distribution network in Nouméa had been “wiped out”. The chamber estimated damage at about 200 million euros (NZ$350 million).

4. A new generation of youth leadership
As we have seen with Generation Z in the forefront of stunning pro-Palestinian protests across more than 50 universities in the United States (and in many other countries as well, notably France, Ireland, Germany, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom), and a youthful generation of journalists in Gaza bearing witness to Israeli atrocities, youth has played a critical role in the Kanaky insurrection.

Australian peace studies professor Dr Nicole George notes that “the highly visible wealth disparities” in the territory “fuel resentment and the profound racial inequalities that deprive Kanak youths of opportunity and contribute to their alienation”.

A feature is the “unpredictability” of the current crisis compared with the 1980s “les événements”.

“In the 1980s, violent campaigns were coordinated by Kanak leaders . . . They were organised. They were controlled.

“In contrast, today it is the youth taking the lead and using violence because they feel they have no other choice. There is no coordination. They are acting through frustration and because they feel they have ‘no other means’ to be recognised.”

According to another academic, Dr Évelyne Barthou, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Pau, who researched Kanak youth in a field study last year: “Many young people see opportunities slipping away from them to people from mainland France.

“This is just one example of the neocolonial logic to which New Caledonia remains prone today.”

5. Policy rethink needed by Australia, New Zealand
Ironically, as the turbulence struck across New Caledonia this week, especially the white enclave of Nouméa, a whistlestop four-country New Zealand tour of Melanesia headed by Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, who also has the foreign affairs portfolio, was underway.

The first casualty of this tour was the scheduled visit to New Caledonia and photo ops demonstrating the limited diversity of the political entourage showed how out of depth New Zealand’s Pacific diplomacy had become with the current rightwing coalition government at the helm.

Heading home, Peters thanked the people and governments of Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Tuvalu for “working with New Zealand towards a more secure, more prosperous and more resilient tomorrow”.

The delegation is now heading home

Many thanks to the people and governments of Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu & Tuvalu for their kind hospitality – and for working with New Zealand towards a more secure, more prosperous & more resilient tomorrow.

pic.twitter.com/ZciN70cNP6

— Winston Peters (@NewZealandMFA) May 16, 2024

His tweet came as New Caledonian officials and politicians were coming to terms with at least five deaths and the sheer scale of devastation in the capital which will rock New Caledonia for years to come.

News media in both Australia and New Zealand hardly covered themselves in glory either, with the commercial media either treating the crisis through the prism of threats to tourists and a superficial brush over the issues. Only the public media did a creditable job, New Zealand’s RNZ Pacific and Australia’s ABC Pacific and SBS.

In the case of New Zealand’s largest daily newspaper, The New Zealand Herald, it barely noticed the crisis. On Wednesday, morning there was not a word in the paper.

Thursday was not much better, with an “afterthought” report provided by a partnership with RNZ. As I reported it:

“Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest newspaper, the New Zealand Herald, finally catches up with the Pacific’s biggest news story after three days of crisis — the independence insurrection in #KanakyNewCaledonia.

“But unlike global news services such as Al Jazeera, which have featured it as headline news, the Herald tucked it at the bottom of page 2. Even then it wasn’t its own story, it was relying on a partnership report from RNZ.”

New Zealand Herald finally catches up with the Pacific’s biggest news story after 3 days of crisis #CafePacific #kanaky #newcaledonia #nzherald #media #insurrection #stateofemergency #franceinpacific @KanakySuport @cpcflnkspt @westpapuamedia @anaisduongp https://t.co/TZZ2JDE6nr pic.twitter.com/52bJDECU2g

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) May 16, 2024

Also, New Zealand media reports largely focused too heavily on the “frustrations and fears” of more than 200 tourists and residents said to be in the territory this week, and provided very slim coverage of the core issues of the upheaval.

With all the warning signs in the Pacific over recent years — a series of riots in New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga and Vanuatu — Australia and New Zealand need to wake up to the yawning gap in social indicators between the affluent and the impoverished, and the worsening climate crisis.

These are the real issues of the Pacific, not some fantasy about AUKUS and a perceived China threat in an unconvincing arena called “Indo-Pacific”.

Dr David Robie covered “Les Événements” in New Caledonia in the 1980s and penned the book Blood on their Banner about the turmoil. He also covered the 2018 independence referendum.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by David Robie.

Using publicly available data, our investigation locates millions of acres taken from more than a hundred Indigenous nations to provide ongoing sources of revenue for educational institutions. Our reporting reveals how Indigenous lands and resources bankroll land-grant universities, historically and today, and provides insight into the relationship between colonialism, higher education, and climate change.

Here are five takeaways from our investigation: 

1 Fourteen land-grant universities generate revenue from 8.2 million surface and subsurface acres of Indigenous land.

State trust lands just might be one of the best kept public secrets in America: They exist in 21 Western and Midwestern states, totaling more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres. They are held and managed by state agencies and primarily exist to subsidize education. Using data from these state agencies, Grist located trust lands associated with specific land-grant institutions to determine where they are located and how they are used to benefit those colleges. “A perpetual, multigenerational land trust for the support of the beneficiaries and future generations” is how the Arizona State Land Department describes them.

2 Those 8.2 million acres were taken from at least 123 Indigenous nations through more than 150 land cessions, a legal term for the surrendering of territory.  

Grist was able to compare state trust land data with federal data known as the Schedule of Indian Land Cessions, which documents Indigenous land cessions in the continental United States using extensive information on treaties and other land seizures. By joining these different datasets, we were able to get a glimpse of just how many Indigenous nations were impacted by the creation of these institutions. 

3 Indigenous nations were paid approximately $4.3 million in 2023 dollars for these lands. In many cases, however, nothing was paid at all.

Based on accounting of historical payments to Indigenous nations by the Indian Claims Commission and the Court of Claims, Grist was able to identify the price paid per acre for each land cession and calculate the total amount paid to tribes for trust lands that benefit universities today. It’s important to note that in many cases, Indigenous nations were never compensated for the taking of their territory, and as our reporting reveals, those lands have continued to provide steady revenue streams to land-grant institutions. “Universities continue to benefit from colonization,” said Sharon Stein, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of British Columbia. “It’s not just a historical fact; the actual income of the institution is subsidized by this ongoing dispossession.”

4 Nearly 25 percent of land-grant university trust lands are designated for either fossil fuel production or the mining of minerals like coal and iron-rich taconite. 

Utilizing datasets from state land agencies, we were able to determine what activities generated revenue for land-grant universities. While much of our focus is on the energy industry due to its massive climate impact, we found that grazing is permitted on about a third of the land, or approximately 2.8 million surface acres. Timber, agriculture, and infrastructure leases — for roads or pipelines, for instance — make up much of the remaining acreage. However, despite the somewhat smaller footprint that timberlands represent in our dataset, they are still significant sources of revenue: From statehood in 1889 to 2022, timber sales on trust lands in Washington provided Washington State University with at least $1.1 billion in revenue when adjusted for inflation.

5 In 2022, state trust lands generated more than $2.2 billion in revenue. Between 2018 and 2022: approximately $6.6 billion.

Trust land activities provide significant streams of income to land-grant schools, but most importantly, they subsidize higher education so citizens don’t have to. “Every dollar earned by the land office,” Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard of New Mexico said when revenues broke the billion-dollar barrier, “is a dollar taxpayers do not have to pay to support public institutions.” 

Read our story, Misplaced Trust, or download the data.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Top 5 takeaways of our investigation into state trust lands on Feb 7, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tristan Ahtone.

This article was produced in partnership with Mississippi Today, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2023. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

For many people in Mississippi, the path to treatment for a serious mental illness may run through the local jail — even though they haven’t been charged with a crime.

In 2023, Mississippi Today and ProPublica investigated the practice of jailing people solely because they were waiting for mental health treatment provided through a legal process called civil commitment.

We found that people awaiting treatment were jailed without criminal charges at least 2,000 times from 2019 to 2022 in just 19 counties, meaning the statewide figure is almost certainly higher. Most of the jail stays we tallied lasted longer than three days, and about 130 were longer than 30 days.

Some people have died after being jailed purportedly for their own safety.

Every state has a civil commitment process in which a court can order someone to be hospitalized for psychiatric treatment, generally if they are deemed dangerous to themselves or others. But it is rare for people going through that process to be held in jail without criminal charges for days or weeks — except in Mississippi.

If you’d like to share your experiences or perspective, contact Isabelle Taft at itaft@mississippitoday.org or 601-691-4756.

In Mississippi, the process starts when someone files paperwork with a county office alleging that another person’s mental illness or substance abuse is so serious that they are a danger to themselves or others. That person is taken into custody by sheriff’s deputies until they can be evaluated and go before a judge. Although people may wait at a medical facility, if no publicly funded bed is available, they can sit in a jail cell until a treatment bed opens up.

We have spoken with people who were jailed solely on the basis of mental illness, family members of people who went through the commitment process, sheriffs and jail administrators, county officials, lawmakers, the head of the state Department of Mental Health, and experts in mental health and disability law. We have filed more than 100 public records requests and reviewed lawsuits and Mississippi Bureau of Investigation reports on jail deaths.

Here are five key findings from our reporting so far.

We spoke to more than a dozen Mississippians who were jailed without criminal charges as they went through the civil commitment process. They wore jail scrubs and were often shackled as they moved through the jail. They were frequently unable to access prescribed psychiatric medications, much less therapy or other treatment. They had no idea how long they would be jailed, because they could get out only when a treatment bed became available. They were often housed alongside people facing criminal charges. One jail doctor told us that people going through the commitment process were vulnerable to assault and theft of their snacks and personal items.

“They become a prisoner just like the average person coming in that’s charged with a crime,” said Ed Hargett, a former superintendent of Parchman state penitentiary and a corrections consultant who has worked with about 20 Mississippi county jails. “Some of the staff that works in the jail, they don’t really know why they’re there. … Then when they start acting out, naturally they deal with them just like they would with a violent offender.”

At least 14 people have died after being jailed during the commitment process since 2006, according to our review of lawsuits and records from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. Nine died by suicide, and three died after receiving medical care that experts called substandard. Most recently, 37-year-old Lacey Handjis, a Natchez hospice-care consultant and mother of two, died in a padded cell in the Adams County jail in late August. Her death was not a suicide and is still under investigation.

Adams County Sheriff Travis Patten said he asked the state Bureau of Investigation to review Handjis’ death. “It just hurt me because I just know that people who are suffering from those type of conditions shouldn’t be in jail,” he said in September.

Mental health providers we spoke with said jail can exacerbate symptoms when someone is in crisis, increasing their risk of suicide. Jail staff with limited medical training may interpret signs of medical distress as manifestations of mental illness and fail to call for additional care.

After three men awaiting treatment died by suicide in the Quitman County jail in 2006, 2007 and 2019, chancery clerk Butch Scipper no longer jails people going through the commitment process. His advice to other county officials: “Do not put them in your jail. Jails are not safe places. We think they are, but they’re definitely not” for people who are mentally ill.

Mississippi Today and ProPublica surveyed disability rights advocates and state behavioral health agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Nowhere else did respondents say people are routinely jailed for days or weeks without criminal charges while going through the involuntary commitment process. In three states where respondents said people are sometimes jailed to await psychiatric evaluations, it happens to fewer people and for shorter periods. At least a dozen states ban the practice altogether; Mississippi law allows it when there is “no reasonable alternative.” In Alabama, a federal judge ruled it unconstitutional in 1984.

Disability rights advocates in other states and experts on civil commitment or mental health care used words like “horrifying,” “breaks my heart” and “speechless” when they learned how many Mississippians are jailed without criminal charges while they wait for mental health care every year.

Wendy Bailey, head of the Mississippi Department of Mental Health, has said it’s “unacceptable” to jail people simply because they may need behavioral health treatment, and staff have encouraged chancery clerks to steer families toward outpatient treatment instead of the civil commitment process when appropriate.

The Department of Mental Health says it prioritizes people waiting in jail when making admissions to state hospitals, and the average wait time in jail after a hearing has dropped. The state has expanded the number of crisis unit beds and plans to add more. And it has increased funding for local services in recent years in an effort to reduce commitments.

In early January, Bailey said the agency has been reviewing commitment statutes in other states that restrict jailing people during the process. During the current legislative session, she said, the agency will support “changes to the commitment process that we hope will divert Mississippians from unnecessary commitments.”

In 2009, the Mississippi Legislature passed a law requiring any county facility that holds people awaiting psychiatric treatment through the commitment process to be certified by the Department of Mental Health. The department developed certification standards requiring suicide prevention training, access to medications and treatment, safe housing and more. But the law provides no funding to help counties comply and has no penalties if they don’t. Only a handful of counties got certified, and after 2013 the department’s efforts to enforce the law apparently petered out.

As of late last year, only one jail — out of 71 that had recently held people awaiting court-ordered treatment — was still certified. There is no statewide oversight or inspection of county jails.

After we asked about the law, the Department of Mental Health sought an opinion from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office, which opined that it is a “mandatory requirement” that the agency certify the county facilities, including jails, where people wait for treatment. In October, the department sent letters to counties informing them of the attorney general’s opinion and encouraging them to get certified. Department officials are waiting for counties to initiate the certification process, though they know which jails have held people after their hearings. Department leaders, including Bailey, have emphasized that they have limited authority over counties and can’t force them to do anything.

According to data from the Mississippi Department of Mental Health, 71 of the state’s 82 counties held a total of 812 people prior to their admission to a state hospital during the fiscal year ending in June. According to state data and our analysis of jail dockets, the two counties that jail the most people during the commitment process are DeSoto and Lauderdale — together home to three of the state’s 10 largest cities. DeSoto has one of the highest per capita incomes in the state, and Lauderdale’s is above average. (Those counties’ chancery clerks, who handle the civil commitment process, and officials with the boards of supervisors, which handle county finances, haven’t responded to questions about why they jail so many people going through the commitment process.)

Meanwhile, some smaller, rural counties don’t jail people or do so rarely. Guy Nowell, who served as chancery clerk of Neshoba County until the end of 2023, said the county arranged each person’s commitment evaluations and hearing to take place on the same day to eliminate waits between appointments. If no publicly funded bed is available after the hearing, the county pays for people to receive treatment at a private psychiatric hospital.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Isabelle Taft, Mississippi Today.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In late February, a smuggling boat carrying dozens of Haitians bound for the U.S. was intercepted so close to Florida’s shore that those aboard could see the lights of hotels and passing cars. But although they were in U.S. waters, they have few rights compared to people who arrive at land borders. That’s even true of the three young children traveling alone on that boat, a 10-year-old boy and two sisters, 8 and 4.

I spent months reporting on this group of people, the children in particular, and on the hidden world of immigration enforcement at sea, a border where different rules apply. These are five key findings of the investigation, published last week in partnership with The New York Times Magazine.

Since the summer of 2021, the Coast Guard has detained more than 27,000 people aboard its fleet of cutters in the Caribbean and straits of Florida, more than in any similar period in nearly three decades.

“We are in extremis,” a senior Coast Guard official wrote to colleagues in an email, part of a trove of internal records and data that I obtained. Most of the 27,000 are Haitian and Cuban, people who in recent years have faced extraordinary levels of violence and political unrest. But even people fleeing violence, rape, the threat of death — who on land would be likely to pass an initial asylum screening, according to legal experts — are routinely sent back to the countries they’ve fled when they try to arrive by sea.

The U.S. government has a separate system for people detained at sea to ask for protection. But it is nearly impossible to get through. Of the 27,000 people detained since July 2021, the Coast Guard logged 1,900 such claims, according to an internal Coast Guard database I obtained. Only about 60 of them had those claims approved by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials.

Yet even the people whose “fear” claims are approved are not allowed into the U.S. Instead they can agree to be sent to an immigration detention facility on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they’re told they should be prepared to wait for two years or more, until another country agrees to take them as refugees. Only 36 of the people with approved claims since July 2021 agreed to be sent to Guantánamo.

Since July of 2021, the Coast Guard has detained about 500 unaccompanied minors, mostly Haitians. Nearly every one of them was sent back.

On land, unaccompanied minors from countries other than Mexico and Canada cannot simply be turned back. But at sea, children are treated much like adults. Of the 500, only about 1% were allowed into the U.S. because officials determined they would likely be persecuted or tortured if sent back to the countries they fled.

The Coast Guard says that its crew members screen children to identify “human-trafficking indicators and protection concerns including fear of return.” A spokesperson told me that “migrants who indicate a fear of return receive further screening” by Homeland Security officials.

No U.S. agency would explain what, if any, precautions the U.S. government takes to protect children, beyond an initial screening conducted aboard cutters.

Our reporting centered on the experience of a 10-year-old boy named Tcherry who, after he was delivered to Haiti by the Coast Guard, left the port with a man he’d met only weeks before at a smuggler’s house. No U.S. or Haitian officials spoke with Tcherry’s mother, who is in Canada, before the man was allowed to leave with the boy. The man himself was surprised how easy it had been.

“When we have custodial protection of those children, we want to make sure that the necessary steps are taken,” a Coast Guard spokesperson said, “to ensure that when we repatriate those migrants, they don’t end up in some nefarious actor’s custody or something.”

But one official from an agency involved in processing people delivered by the U.S. Coast Guard to Haiti told me, “Children leave the port, and what happens to them after they leave, no one knows.”

As more and more people have taken to the sea, and their desperation has grown, an increasing number of migrants and refugees have harmed themselves in hopes that they will be rushed to hospitals on land, where they believe they can make asylum claims.

People detained on cutters have swallowed jagged metal cotter pins pulled from the rigging and stabbed themselves with smuggled blades, apparently trying to cause such severe injury that they’d be taken to a hospital. In January, a man plunged a five-inch buck-style knife that he’d carried onto a cutter into the side of his torso and slashed it down his rib cage. Crewmembers now start every leg at sea by scouring the decks for anything that people might use to harm themselves. According to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, “medical evacuations do not mean that migrants have a greater chance of remaining in the United States.” But without the ability to claim asylum on cutters, more people are trying anyway.

Coast Guard crew members described to me their distress at having to reject desperate person after desperate person. Several people I talked to said that the worst part of the job was turning away the children who were traveling alone. “The hardest ones for me are the unaccompanied minors,” one crew member told me. “They’re put on this boat to try to come to America, and they have no one.”

Crew members were seeing so much suffering, including encountering the bodies of people whose boats had capsized in the sea, that it was not uncommon for them to find each other sobbing. Some were struggling with what one former crew member called a “moral dilemma” because they had begun to understand that the job required them to inflict suffering on others. “We hear their stories, people who say they’d rather we shoot them right here than send them back to what they’re running from,” another Coast Guard member told me. “And then we send them all back.”

The Coast Guard leadership was getting worried: “I don’t see how the current level of operations is sustainable,” the commander of U.S. Coast Guard Sector Miami wrote to colleagues, “without the breaking of several of our people.”

Jason Kao contributed data reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Seth Freed Wessler.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Nationwide, rent was up by 9% in September compared to the previous year. That’s the first time in 2022 that rent increases were in the single digits, down from an 18% increase in March, according to an analysis by the real estate company Redfin.

While supply and demand, high mortgage interest rates and other economic factors are certainly at play in rising rents, an investigation by ProPublica found another key factor: a rental pricing software owned by real estate tech firm RealPage. Here’s what we learned.

The software collects tons of data from its clients, many of whom price tens of thousands of units. All together, RealPage says its rent-setting algorithm holds lease transaction data for more than 13 million units across the country.

Each day, the software recommends a new price for every available unit. To determine the new rate, it draws from competitor data on the actual rent tenants paid, as opposed to the publicly advertised rent.

The use of private competitor data — though it is aggregated and anonymized — to set prices is one of the concerns experts raised. The practice could allow RealPage to stifle rental competition, they said, driving up rents across the country and, potentially, even violating antitrust laws. Experts said that RealPage also sponsors meetings that gather competitors together to talk about pricing, which could also be a warning sign of collusion.

1. Landlords use RealPage to make more money. RealPage boasts that it helps landlords outperform the market by up to 7% — that is, its software users can expect better-than-market-average revenues, even in weak markets. Greystar, the largest property manager in the U.S., outperformed its markets by 4.8% in one downturn, according to RealPage materials.

RealPage promises streamlined apartment pricing and flexible options for renters, but the true benefit for landlords is just how far the software will push rents up — far beyond what most property managers are willing to do manually.

2. RealPage believes it is driving rents higher across the country. A now-deleted video showed a RealPage executive saying in 2021 that the company’s software was a driver of double-digit rent increases across the country. Another executive said most property managers would be hesitant to raise rents by double digits without the assistance of the software.

Take this example from Seattle: In a RealPage-priced building in a downtown Seattle ZIP code, rent rose by 33% in one year for a couple living in a one-bedroom apartment. In a non-algorithm-priced building in the same ZIP code, rent for another tenant’s studio rose by just 3.9% over a similar period.

Property managers don’t have to accept the software’s recommendations — they are free to reject the algorithm’s price if they feel it’s too high or low. But overall, about 90% of recommendations are implemented, former employees said.

3. RealPage discourages landlords from bargaining with tenants over rents. One of the developers of RealPage’s price-setting software said leasing agents have “too much empathy” with renters, which can lead them to hesitate to seek the highest rents. The software automates rent-setting calculations, leading to more revenue for landlords and property management companies.

This may be why RealPage discourages bargaining with tenants about rent. When you take the human element out of the equation, profits seem to soar.

4. Critics say RealPage may encourage pricing collusion among landlords. When RealPage acquired LRO, its main pricing competitor, in 2017, the Department of Justice’s antitrust division investigated the deal. The merger ultimately proceeded, doubling the number of units RealPage priced — and expanding its cache of data.

Legal experts have raised concerns that RealPage’s software could be facilitating collusion among clients in places where many of them use it to set rents. In particular, the company’s User Group — a forum for clients to work together and suggest software improvements — could be an “antitrust red flag,” they said. The group has more than 1,000 members and two subcommittees on pricing, which meet in private at annual conferences.

Days after ProPublica released its investigation into RealPage, a group of renters filed a lawsuit alleging that nine of the largest property management firms in the U.S. are working together to artificially inflate rents, violating federal law.

5. RealPage says it uses data in a “legally compliant” way. The company told ProPublica that it “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”

RealPage noted that landlords who use employees to manually set prices “typically” conduct phone surveys to check competitors’ rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior.

“RealPage’s revenue management solutions prioritize a property’s own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors’ rents,” a company statement said, “and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing.”

The statement said RealPage’s software also helps prevent rents from reaching unaffordable levels because it detects drops in demand, like those that happen seasonally, and can respond to them by lowering rents.

Although RealPage’s software is affecting rental prices in markets across the country, it’s far from the only factor in increasing rents. Here are some other things that help explain why rent is so high.

1. Private equity-owned rentals: Since 2011, there’s been a steady increase in the number of rental units owned by private equity-backed firms, according to reporting by ProPublica. These property management firms aim to increase short-term profits by increasing rents, cutting costs, or both. By 2021, more than half of the top 35 apartment building owners were backed by private equity, likely contributing to higher rents around the country.

2. High cost of homebuying: Property values in many markets escalated steeply in the years after the Great Recession. More recently, average interest rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages in the U.S. have soared, now surpassing 7% — nearly double what they were this time last year. Both trends have slowed homebuying, pushing rental demand and prices higher.

3. Slow, expensive construction: Supply chain issues have slowed housing construction, reducing the rental supply as demand increases. As inflation affects every sector of the economy, the costs of labor and materials go up, making it hard to build housing people can afford. The nation has lagged in constructing the new housing units needed in most years since the Great Recession.

4. Supply and demand: With more people forced to rent, there simply aren’t enough rental units to go around — especially in some markets that saw an influx of new renters during the pandemic. Higher competition for rentals drives prices up.

Heather Vogell contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Sophia Kovatch.