 23 February 20
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22 February 20
Bill McKibben | A Very Hot Year
Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books
McKibben writes: "This year began with huge bushfires in southeastern Australia that drove one community after another into temporary exile, killed an estimated billion animals, and turned Canberra's air into the dirtiest on the planet."
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Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books
McKibben writes: "This year began with huge bushfires in southeastern Australia that drove one community after another into temporary exile, killed an estimated billion animals, and turned Canberra's air into the dirtiest on the planet."
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Justice Sonia Sotomayor. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Justice Sotomayor Warns the Supreme Court Is Doing Special Favors for the Trump Administration
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "The Supreme Court voted along party-lines Friday evening to allow a Trump administration rule restricting low-income immigrants' ability to enter the US to take full effect. All four of the Court's Democratic appointees dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing a sharply worded dissenting opinion accusing her Court of 'putting a thumb on the scale in favor of' the Trump administration."
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Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "The Supreme Court voted along party-lines Friday evening to allow a Trump administration rule restricting low-income immigrants' ability to enter the US to take full effect. All four of the Court's Democratic appointees dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing a sharply worded dissenting opinion accusing her Court of 'putting a thumb on the scale in favor of' the Trump administration."
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Nevada voters at a caucus site. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Nevada Democratic Party Moves to Muzzle Nevada Caucus Workers
Reed Albergotti, Isaac Stanley-Becker and James Pace-Cornsilk, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The Democratic Party of Nevada wants to avoid the kind of embarrassments that plagued the Iowa caucuses. One way it hopes to accomplish that goal: Non-disclosure agreements that prohibit election volunteers from saying anything that might harm the party's reputation."
Reed Albergotti, Isaac Stanley-Becker and James Pace-Cornsilk, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The Democratic Party of Nevada wants to avoid the kind of embarrassments that plagued the Iowa caucuses. One way it hopes to accomplish that goal: Non-disclosure agreements that prohibit election volunteers from saying anything that might harm the party's reputation."
The Democratic Party of Nevada is asking volunteers to sign nondisparagement agreements.
As election volunteers stream into party headquarters near the Las Vegas Strip to pick up their election materials, including iPads that have been programmed to tally the caucus results, they’re being asked to sign a lengthy legal document prohibiting them from saying anything that might “impair or otherwise adversely affect the goodwill or reputation” of the party, according to the document viewed by The Washington Post. The agreement also prevents volunteers from speaking to the press and requires them to report any run-ins with reporters to higher ups, threatening legal action for any lack of compliance.
The unusual move to muzzle election workers has already caused at least three volunteers who spoke to The Post to quit in protest.
“I think it’s shady,” said Ziad Doumani, a retired firefighter and student who lives in Henderson, Nev., and volunteered to run one of the caucuses. While Doumani himself has not been asked to sign the NDA — so far, it has been reserved for “site leaders” who have shown up to pick up the materials — he said the lack of transparency is disturbing. “Why can’t we talk about it? Why are they being so secretive?”
According to one of the volunteers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, state party officials refused to allow a site leader to walk out with his election materials unless he signed the NDA. At first, after the site leader complained, he was told by a staff member that signing the NDA was optional. But when the site leader said he did not intend to sign the document, a Democratic supervisor prohibited the person from picking up the materials he needed to conduct the caucus.
Molly Forgey, spokeswoman for the Nevada Democrats, said the NDAs are voluntary and said it was “standard practice to request staff and volunteers to sign an NDA because they are privy to strategic information.” Forgey declined to say why the agreement also included a nondisparagement clause.
A Democratic official with another state party, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue, said it was not standard practice to ask volunteers to sign nondisclosure agreements.
Another site leader who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of upsetting the Nevada Democratic Party signed the NDA on Thursday but had not read it and was not given a copy by the party.
The six-page document shared with The Post by another election volunteer requires them to stay mum about their election activities.
The Nevada caucuses have come under intense scrutiny after the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses turned into a debacle when a mobile app developed by a company called Shadow failed to properly tally the results. Nevada had planned to use a mobile app developed by the same company but scrapped that plan after the Iowa mishap.
In the weeks that followed, the Nevada Democratic Party, which is responsible for the caucuses here, has been scrambling to come up with a technological solution to a complicated process.
Nevada held early voting, and the caucus workers will have to incorporate those early votes with the in-person votes on Saturday.
The Democratic Party here had hoped to use technology to make that process less tedious. It’s in the process of distributing iPads equipped with software from Cisco Systems. Volunteers will use a Google Forms web app programmed to calculate the caucus math, including how many delegates should be awarded to each candidate.
Several caucus volunteers said the idea that some information should be kept secret is not unreasonable. Kevin Standlee, a volunteer in Reno, said he thinks the Democrats should keep secret hotline telephone numbers, for instance. Hotline phone numbers in Iowa were abused by pranksters after they were made public during the caucus, jamming the lines and preventing election results from being transmitted. He does not think an NDA is appropriate, however.
“I’m not planning on signing unless it’s made an absolute condition of continuing to chair my precinct,” he said in an email.
A security contractor frisks a detainee ahead of a deportation flight to Honduras. (photo: Getty Images)
Deporting Immigrants to Their Death Is Unconscionable
Belen Fernandez, Jacobin
Fernandez writes: "When the United States sends Salvadoran immigrants back to their home country, it's sending them back to the very violence they were trying to flee - and that the United States itself helped create."
Belen Fernandez, Jacobin
Fernandez writes: "When the United States sends Salvadoran immigrants back to their home country, it's sending them back to the very violence they were trying to flee - and that the United States itself helped create."
EXCERPTS:
Lest anyone feel too sorry for the Salvadoran security forces, recall that these very forces have for over thirty years done more than their fair share to sustain the violent landscape in El Salvador — from the US-backed right-wing slaughter of the civil war (1980–1992) up to the present era. Consider, for example, Human Rights Watch (HRW)’s recent reminder that “Salvadoran security forces have…committed extrajudicial executions, sexual assaults, enforced disappearances, and torture” — all within a context of essentially institutionalized impunity.
The reminder incidentally appears — speaking of Salvadoran migration to the United States — in a report titled “Deported to Danger: United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse,” which shows how, for many deportees (among other sectors of Salvadoran society), the country is still a place of “unchecked violence.”
The paper draws on 138 cases, between 2013 and 2019, of Salvadorans killed following their expulsion from the United States, as well as more than seventy cases in which deportees were disappeared, sexually assaulted, tortured, or otherwise harmed by gangs, security forces, or other actors. But given El Salvador’s position as one of the homicide capitals of the world — where crimes frequently go unreported — the problem is undoubtedly more vast.
Often, Salvadorans are sent from the United States back to the very violent threats they were trying to get away from in the first place. There’s the case of Camila DÃaz Córdova, a transgender woman slain by police in 2019 after unsuccessfully seeking asylum in the States. There’s “Angelina N.,” who fled abuse by her husband and threats from a gang member — the same gang member who raped her after she was deported and who threatened to murder her father and daughter. And there’s “Javier B.,” who fled gang recruitment in El Salvador only to be found dead shortly after his forced return.
Deportees can face lethal risks for something as simple as having tattoos — which in El Salvador can get you into trouble with both the gangs and the police, even if the marks aren’t gang-related. There’s also a threat from death squads or “extermination groups,” which, the report notes, have traditionally been “deeply rooted in the country’s security forces.” Meanwhile, deportees who have lived in the United States for a long time can be “easy and lucrative targets for extortion or abuse” and can “run afoul of the many unspoken rules Salvadorans must follow in their daily lives in order to avoid being harmed.” In a country saturated with invisible borders delineating the respective territories of rival gangs, an act as mundane as crossing the street can literally get you murdered.
As for the United States’ criminalization of migration and punitive deportations, it’s worth recalling that much of the violence Salvadorans are fleeing is the result of a former US deportation scheme in the 1990s, when gang members were sent en masse back to El Salvador. And why, pray tell, had these gangs formed in the United States? As a means of self-defense for Salvadoran communities that had left because of the civil war — another instance of US-bound Salvadoran migration fueled by violence in which the United States was hugely complicit.
HRW observes that the United States “is repeatedly violating its obligations to protect Salvadorans from return to serious risk of harm,” and that “in several key respects, US immigration law and policy violate international human rights and refugee law.” Donald Trump, of course, has bumped it all up to another level of inhumanity by working to effectively eradicate asylum options.
In light of the rampant violence in El Salvador — and the fact that many Salvadorans escape the country precisely because there is a “serious risk of harm” — it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that deported Salvadorans will often be put once again in harm’s way. And yet they are preemptively criminalized by an imperial power that valiantly defends the sacrosanctity of its own borders while violating everybody else’s.
Bukele, meanwhile, is of the opinion that “President Trump is very nice and cool, and I’m nice and cool, too.” But as the United States deports people to death in a country where it has long abetted lethal human rights abuses, it’s time to kill deportations and criminalize a system that is totally uncool.
Michael Bloomberg. (photo: Getty Images)
Twitter Is Suspending 70 Pro-Bloomberg Accounts, Citing 'Platform Manipulation'
Suhauna Hussain and Jeff Bercovici, Los Angeles Times
Excerpt: "Michael R. Bloomberg's presidential campaign has been experimenting with novel tactics to cultivate an online following, or at least the appearance of one."
Suhauna Hussain and Jeff Bercovici, Los Angeles Times
Excerpt: "Michael R. Bloomberg's presidential campaign has been experimenting with novel tactics to cultivate an online following, or at least the appearance of one."
But one of the strategies — deploying a large number of Twitter accounts to push out identical messages — has backfired. On Friday, Twitter began suspending 70 accounts posting pro-Bloomberg content in a pattern that violates company rules.
“We have taken enforcement action on a group of accounts for violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam,” a Twitter spokesman said. Some of the suspensions will be permanent, while in other cases account owners will have to verify they have control of their accounts.
As part of a far-reaching social media strategy, the Bloomberg campaign has hired hundreds of temporary employees to pump out campaign messages through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These “deputy field organizers” receive $2,500 per month to promote the former New York mayor’s candidacy within their personal social circles, in addition to other, more conventional duties. They receive campaign-approved language that they can opt to post.
In posts reviewed by The Times, organizers often used identical text, images, links and hashtags. Many accounts used were created only in the last two months. Bloomberg officially entered the presidential race on Nov. 24.
After The Times inquired about this pattern, Twitter determined it ran afoul of its “Platform Manipulation and Spam Policy.” Laid out in September 2019 in response to the activities of Russian-sponsored troll networks in the 2016 presidential election, the policy prohibits practices such as artificially boosting engagement on tweets and using deliberately misleading profile information.
By sponsoring hundreds of new accounts that post copy-pasted content, Twitter said the campaign violated its rules against “creating multiple accounts to post duplicative content,” “posting identical or substantially similar Tweets or hashtags from multiple accounts you operate” and “coordinating with or compensating others to engage in artificial engagement or amplification, even if the people involved use only one account.”
The suspensions may sweep up accounts belonging to unpaid Bloomberg supporters or campaign volunteers. While the Bloomberg’s campaign’s practice of paying Twitter users was a factor in the suspensions, a company spokesman said accounts behaving in substantially the same manner will receive the same treatment, regardless of who controls them.
In a statement, Sabrina Singh, a spokesperson for the Bloomberg campaign, said: “We ask that all of our deputy field organizers identify themselves as working on behalf of the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign on their social media accounts. Through Outvote [a voter-engagement app], content is shared by staffers and volunteers to their network of friends and family and was not intended to mislead anyone.”
Facebook’s response to the Bloomberg campaign’s novel social strategy has also been evolving. The social network views the campaign’s activity as falling under its rules for branded content, not the rules against “coordinated inauthentic behavior” devised largely in response to Russian election meddling.
Facebook’s rules for branded content “require disclosure of paid partnerships anytime there has been an exchange of value between a creator or publisher and a business partner.” In 2018, the company began to require more detailed disclosure for political ads to discourage state-sponsored influence operations.
The software tool created for buying political ads on Facebook did not allow for branded content campaigns by influencers. Earlier this month, after the Bloomberg campaign bypassed the tool entirely to mount a large-scale paid influencer campaign, Facebook lifted that ban.
According to leaked European Union documents, the EU could soon be creating a network of national police facial recognition databases. (photo: Yotam Hadar/The Intercept)
Leaked Reports Show EU Police Are Planning a Pan-European Network of Facial Recognition Databases
Zach Campbell and Chris Jones, The Intercept
Excerpt: "According to leaked internal European Union documents, the EU could soon be creating a network of national police facial recognition databases."
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Zach Campbell and Chris Jones, The Intercept
Excerpt: "According to leaked internal European Union documents, the EU could soon be creating a network of national police facial recognition databases."
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Fireflies in a cedar forest in Tamba, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. (photo: Nori Yuasa/Getty Images)
Why the Lights Are Going Out for Fireflies
Michael Marshall, Guardian UK
Marshall writes: "At dusk, graduate student Sara Lewis was sitting on her back porch in North Carolina with her dog. 'We were supposed to be mowing our grass, but we never did, so we had long grass in our yard,' she recalls. 'Suddenly this cloud of sparks rose up out of the grass and started flying around me.'"
Michael Marshall, Guardian UK
Marshall writes: "At dusk, graduate student Sara Lewis was sitting on her back porch in North Carolina with her dog. 'We were supposed to be mowing our grass, but we never did, so we had long grass in our yard,' she recalls. 'Suddenly this cloud of sparks rose up out of the grass and started flying around me.'"
Fireflies face a dim future because of habitat loss and light pollution. How can conservationists help?
Each spark was a firefly: a beetle that glows in the dark. Hundreds of fireflies had gathered in Lewis’s back yard and were soaring around her. “It was this incredible spectacle,” says Lewis, “and I just sort of gasped.” Then she became fascinated. “I started wondering what the heck was going on here, what were these bugs doing, what were they talking about?” She has spent much of the past three decades studying fireflies.
In recent years Lewis’s work has taken on a new urgency. All around the world, the lights of fireflies are going out. The dazzling beetles are disappearing from long-established habitats. Often it is not clear why, but it seems likely that light pollution and the destruction of habitats are crucial factors. Biologists are racing to understand what is happening to fireflies so we can save them before their lights fade permanently.
There have been fireflies since the dinosaur era, says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Lower, an assistant professor of biology at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. “The estimates we have currently are that fireflies are over 100m years old,” she says. Early in their history, they split into two groups, one of which spread throughout the Americas while the other colonised Europe and Asia.
Fireflies all belong to a family of beetles called Lampyridae. In Europe they are often called glow-worms, while American fireflies with flashing lights are known as lightning bugs. All these terms are misleading, says Lower. “They are not flies. They are not bugs. They are not worms. They are beetles.”
Fireflies are not the only luminous insects: three other beetle families have luminescent members, as do fungus gnats. However, fireflies are the most prominent. There are approximately 2,000 species.
However, fireflies are in trouble. In 2019, the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation published a report on North American fireflies, warning that “populations appear to be in decline”. It was co-authored by Lewis, who is now professor of evolutionary and behavioural ecology at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and author of a book on fireflies, Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies.
The extent of the decrease is unclear because most firefly populations have not been tracked. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which monitors thousands of species, only created its Firefly Specialist Group in 2018. Fireflies are difficult to study: they are hard to find when not displaying.
“The best data we have is from the UK,” says Lewis. Citizen scientists have tracked the UK’s one firefly, the common glow-worm, Lampyris noctiluca, since the 1970s. For most species there are only anecdotes, but they all tell the same story, and biologists who study wild fireflies are convinced.
Earlier this month, Lewis and her colleagues published the first systematic review of threats to fireflies in the journal BioScience. They surveyed 49 firefly experts from around the world, asking them to rank 11 potential threats in order of importance. “These are people on the ground who have been working with fireflies and they see what’s going on,” says Lewis. According to the experts, the biggest threats to fireflies are habitat loss, pesticides and light pollution…
1. Homes destroyed
While some animals adapt to life in human environments such as cities, many fireflies need particular habitats, so are vulnerable if those habitats are destroyed.
The congregating fireflies of south-east Asia are an example. The males have flashing lights with which they attract females. They gather at night in a mangrove tree, and flash – whereupon the females fly in and choose mates. In some species the males synchronise their flashes, creating spectacular displays that tourists love.
Most such fireflies are in the genus Pteroptyx, and live only around riverbanks. After mating, the females lay their eggs in the mud of the riverbank. The larvae develop there and spend months feeding on snails, before becoming adults and returning to their display trees. “All the parts of their life-cycle depend on that habitat,” says Lewis. But humans are cutting it down and replacing it with oil palm plantations. “For that particular group of fireflies, habitat-loss is a really big thing.”
2. Too bright
The second biggest threat, according to the survey, is light pollution. This takes many forms, from bright and direct streetlights to the diffuse “skyglow” that means the sky is never truly dark. Most biodiversity studies have largely neglected light pollution, says Lewis. “But for fireflies it’s front and centre.”
In 2018, Lewis and Avalon Owens of the biology department at Tufts identified five ways in which nocturnal light pollution could affect fireflies, in a study published in Ecology and Evolution. The light can make them lose track of the time or their position. The fireflies may struggle to recognise important objects, such as their snail prey. In species where one sex is attracted to the glow of the other, artificial lights may disrupt mating. Finally, really bright lights may dazzle or even blind the fireflies.
Some species are more vulnerable to light pollution. In the eastern US, big dipper fireflies (Photinus pyralis) are thriving. They are not tied to a particular habitat and are common in New York City. “They’re in people’s back yards in Brooklyn,” says Lewis. “The adults fly in parking lots.” However, this reflects big dipper fireflies’ lifestyle. “Their courtship activity is actually just around sunset, so it’s already quite light,” says Lewis. “They don’t seem to be disturbed at all by the high light-levels in urban environments.”
This is unusual. Many fireflies display late at night, when it would naturally be very dark. “If there’s a lot of background illumination from streetlights or even skyglow, then their signals are going to be less visible,” says Lewis. These nocturnal species are most vulnerable to light pollution.
Fireflies’ eyes are particularly sensitive to certain kinds of artificial light, says Alan Stewart of the University of Sussex. His team studied the eyes of British common glow-worms, in which males are attracted to glowing females. The males’ eyes were tuned to the females’ green light, but when blue light was added, the males struggled to find the females. This means new LED streetlights, which are longer-lasting and thus environmentally beneficial, are likely to disrupt the fireflies more than old-fashioned sodium streetlights, due to their blueish light.
3. Chemicals and collectors
The third major threat is pesticides. This never occurs to most people, says Lewis, because they see fireflies only as displaying adults. “People don’t really think about the life cycle,” she says. Most of a firefly’s life is spent as a larva, on or under the ground, or underwater. There, they are exposed to pesticides. Firefly larvae are especially at risk because they are predators, normally hunting small snails, each of which may contain a dose of pesticide. “If people were aware of that, I think they would be a lot more hesitant to spray pesticides on their lawn,” says Lewis.
In parts of Asia, fireflies are taken from the wild in huge numbers. “They have big insect festivals and will hire local people to go out, catch a bunch of fireflies and release them at the festival,” says Lower. If the fireflies are habitat specialists, they will not survive. “That’s depleting populations in some places.” One conservation organisation estimated that over 17m were purchased in China in 2016.
Beyond these external factors, there are also risks tied to fireflies’ lifestyles. In a 2019 paper published in Biodiversity and Conservation, Lewis and her colleagues highlighted “numerous risk factors”. For instance, adults often cannot fly far – and in some species may not fly at all – so they struggle to move if their habitat is threatened. Many species also have specialised diets, so can starve if their food supply is lost.
The good news is, now we are getting a handle on what is happening to fireflies, we can do something. Some practices, such as the harvesting of fireflies, simply need to stop. Japan has achieved this. In the early 1900s, firefly shops collected the insects, packed them into bags and sent them by bicycle courier to big cities where they were released for people to enjoy. “That put a huge dent in firefly populations,” says Lewis. In the 1920s a young man named Kiichiro Minami figured out how to rear fireflies in captivity, with no scientific training. Minami started releasing the fireflies back into rivers, restoring the population. This is still happening. “Schoolchildren raise fireflies in class and release them into rivers,” says Lewis. While Japan’s fireflies have not been restored to their former glory, they are a conservation success story.
Beyond that, Lewis identifies three actions that should help every firefly species. First, she says, “if there’s a place with firefly biodiversity or abundance, try to preserve that habitat.” Not all of us can do that, but one thing anyone who lives near fireflies can do is reduce light pollution. “Turn off your lights during firefly season, or just turn off your lights in general. Have motion-detector lights that only come on when you need them.” And reduce the use of pesticides.
People can also help by reporting firefly sightings. Anyone in North America can do so by joining the organisation Firefly Watch, which has been running since 2010. There are similar “citizen science” schemes in many countries. You can also join iNaturalist, which allows you to submit photos of animals for identification.
“We just want people to go out and enjoy fireflies in their natural habitats as much as they can,” says Lewis. Stewart agrees, calling fireflies a “magical experience”.
With care, many of us may one day have fireflies sparkling in our back yards.
Lampyris Noctiluca: Britain’s only firefly
The UK has only one native firefly: the common glow-worm (Lampyris noctiluca). Lampyris is found also on mainland Europe. They are best seen in June and July evenings, when females glow green to attract males. The UK glow-worm survey website offers a wealth of information.
Common glow-worms live for two years. They hatch from eggs in late summer, grow a little by feeding on tiny snails, then hibernate through winter. They spend the next spring and summer growing, hibernate, then pupate in spring. They emerge as adults around June, mate, lay eggs and die. The long life cycle is a vulnerability, says Sussex University’s Alan Stewart: “A lot can happen in two years.”
They are partial to a mixture of woodland and grass or scrub, says conservationist John Tyler, who lives in Buckinghamshire. “The larvae feed on snails and like dense cover; the adults need open space to glow and for the males to find them.”
They are not officially endangered, because they have not been assessed by the IUCN. But there is evidence of decline. In a 2017 study in the journal Lampyrid, Tyler and his colleagues compiled data from 15 English sites and found sharp falls. “Even on nature reserves they’re declining,” he says.
Common glow-worms face many of the same threats as other fireflies, but are particularly vulnerable because adult females cannot fly. “They’re extremely bad at colonising new sites, or recolonising sites where they’ve been lost,” says Tyler.
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