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19 October 20
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Masha Gessen | Alexey Navalny Has the Proof of His Poisoning
Masha Gessen, The New Yorker
Gessen writes: "The Russian anti-corruption activist, who nearly died in August, talks about his recovery and his future."
lexey Navalny is the biggest thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side. A decade ago, Navalny, as a young lawyer in Moscow, started piecing together publicly available information to document corruption and abuse of power in the Russian government. At first, he used his blog to document inflated prices in government contracts, suggesting kickbacks; he moved on to documenting real-estate holdings, luxury cars, and cash reserves that government officials had registered in the names of relatives. Navalny’s one-man project grew into the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a multimedia production company with dozens of investigators whose tools have ranged from data mining to sending drones to film the estates of highly placed bureaucrats. One of Navalny’s biggest hits is a series of films about the then Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s sneaker-collecting habits and estate, which included three helopads, a ski slope, cascading swimming pools, a hotel-style dormitory for staff, and a little lake house for ducks, which became an Internet meme. Russian authorities have been fighting to have the films removed from YouTube, where one of them has been viewed more than thirty-six million times.
Navalny was one of the leaders of the mass protests against rigged elections that erupted in Russia in 2011 and 2012. Many of his fellow-members of the protest coördinating council are either living in exile, like the chess champion Garry Kasparov or the prisoners’-rights activist Olga Romanova, or dead, like the politician Boris Nemtsov. The Kremlin has tried to shut down Navalny and his organization through a series of court cases and arrests. But when Navalny was jailed in 2013, sentenced to five years on flagrantly trumped-up embezzlement charges, thousands of Muscovites protested and secured his release. When he was sentenced to house arrest, Navalny refused to comply, because the Russian penal code does not allow for such a punishment; after a few months, the authorities gave up, although his brother, Oleg, remained behind bars for years on spurious charges.
Navalny’s activism and reach kept expanding—he even attempted to run for President—and for a few years he seemed invincible. (In a piece for this magazine in 2016, I wrote, “The strangest thing about Alexey Navalny is that he is walking around Moscow, still.”) But, on August 20th, Navalny fell ill when returning to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk. He was in a coma for twenty-six days, most of them in a hospital in Berlin. Analysis performed by multiple European labs shows that he was poisoned with a previously unknown version of Novichok, a deadly Russian-developed chemical agent. Navalny regained his ability to speak, write, and make jokes within ten days of coming out of the coma, but he has continued to experience significant physical effects owing to the poisoning. He spoke with me, over Zoom, from an apartment in Berlin, on October 8th; through the screen, it was obvious that Navalny had lost a great deal of weight, but otherwise he looked and sounded as I’d always remembered him. Our conversation has been translated from Russian and condensed.
How did you know what had happened to you?
This is the hardest part. The moment I knew that I’d been poisoned was the moment I realized my life was ending. What I was experiencing up until then was a kind of incomprehension. We can understand a heart attack or a stroke, but we cannot understand the effects of cholinesterase inhibitors—evolution does not prepare us for this. You are in this strange state of losing focus, and the strangeness keeps growing. I’ve compared it to being touched by a Dementor in a Harry Potter novel—you feel that life is leaving you. Let’s say I touch my own hand with my finger. My brain can perceive that signal and then cancel it out. But Novichok makes it not get cancelled out, so it feels like I’m touching my own hand a million times a second, and every cell in my body goes berserk, and the brain understands that this is the end.
Let’s go back a second. You have boarded a plane from Tomsk to Moscow. You’ve opened up your laptop and started watching “Rick and Morty,” as is your habit. And then—
I started losing focus. Say, right now, I see you on the screen. I understand that Kira is here in the room. [Kira Yarmysh, who is Navalny’s spokeswoman, was present during our interview; she was also seated next to him on the Tomsk-Moscow flight.] I understand this, but I cannot see it and focus on it. I have the strength to point at the screen. I see the cat who has entered the frame. But I can’t grasp the concept of “cat,” and if someone asked me to point at the cat on screen, I’d have a very hard time. On the airplane, I went to the bathroom and I realized that I would not be able to leave the bathroom on my own, and this was when I knew I’d been poisoned. It was so difficult to open the door. I could see the door, I could understand everything, and I was plenty physically strong enough—I would have been able to do pushups, if only, at that moment, I had been able to grasp the concept of pushups. I guess if I’d had sudden heart pain or abdominal pain, I would have realized even faster that I was dying, because this physical experience would have been familiar to me. But this was worse than pain.
I’m trying to understand what you are describing, using my own experience. Have you ever been sedated with opiates?
Sure, I had my appendix removed. And last month, too, I had the experience of coming out of sedation. This was nothing like it. Some people have compared it to a panic attack. But I think I understand what a panic attack feels like: a sense of growing anxiety. Anxiety is a feeling you can ultimately comprehend.
I came out of the bathroom. I could still stand upright. I saw my seat and realized I would probably never make it that far. I thought I should probably ask for help, but I also thought that, by this point, it would be useless. So I informed the flight attendant that I was about to die, right there on their plane, and I lay down.
On the floor. And then they tried to keep you awake, right?
They were saying, “Sir, stay with us, please don’t lose consciousness. . . .” But I did.
Did you have a sense of the passage of time?
I just felt indifference. It was clear that this was the end. I imagine that a person, when they are dying, thinks about important things, like, This is what I haven’t completed, or, What will happen to my children, or, What will my wife say? But I was finding it so difficult to think at all.
So those awful screams that someone recorded—
I don’t remember those. I might have been hallucinating.
And the next thing you remember was nearly a month later?
For a while, I was convinced that I was in the hospital and I’d lost my legs and was waiting for new legs to be made for me. And my wife, Yulia, and Leonid Volkov [Navalny’s closest associate in his political work] and the doctors kept telling me that I’d been in an accident and they’d make me new legs, and I shouldn’t worry. Obviously, there were no such conversations. Gradually, I started making contact with reality, in which there was Yulia and I waited for her to come every day and adjust my pillow. But I was still missing legs. And I had these awful hallucinations that really got to me, like I’m in a jail cell and the cops won’t let me sleep, and they keep asking me to recite the rules for being in jail, interspersed with lyrics by the [Russian rap group] Krovostok.
Yulia and Volkov told me that there was a prolonged period when they would sit me up, and I would just stare, and they couldn’t tell whether I recognized them. As I recall, I was having mind-blowing conversations with them in my imagination. Yulia hung up a small flip chart and marked every day I spent in the hospital with a heart in magic marker. I reacted to that flip chart and looked at it, but I don’t remember any of that. I do remember the horrible feeling when you can’t speak or write.
What do you mean?
The doctor says, “Do you understand that you are Alexey Navalny?” I do. “Do you remember your age?” I do. “Do you understand that you are currently in Berlin?” I knew this, though I wasn’t particularly interested in why I was here. “Can you say a word?” I know I have a tongue, and I have lots of words floating around in my head. But that part of the brain where a word takes shape and you pronounce it—that wasn’t processing. I couldn’t say a word. This was torture. I probably looked like the cat in that scene in “Shrek,” with intelligent eyes but speechless. I can’t say anything and I can’t even get angry, because I can’t remember how emotions work, either. But this didn’t last long—about a week. I don’t remember this, either, but Yulia and Volkov have told me that when I did start talking, I addressed everyone in English.
Then I discovered that I couldn’t write. They’d give me a piece of paper, and I realized that I couldn’t place letters in a line in the correct order. Say, “Masha.” I remember what the word looks like. I know that the first letter is “M,” followed by an “A.” I start writing—the first letter that comes out is “S.” Then I place the second letter below it—I’m writing in a column. I can see that this is totally wrong. I cross it out. I start over, and the same thing happens. This scared me, so I kept practicing, and I didn’t calm down until I was sure that I could put letters in a line and that I could write out the word I’m asked to write. I don’t remember being unable to read—they would sometimes turn on the TV to keep me entertained, and I understood the subtitles.
What was the first word you tried to write?
I wanted to ask for water, but I couldn’t come up with the word. I asked my doctor later—after all, many people have been in a coma—did they have the same experiences? He said that, first of all, my coma was unusually long. Also, it was overlaid with the poisoning by Novichok, and there is nothing to compare that to. They say the same thing about my rehabilitation: they can’t tell me anything, because, as far as we know, there are barely any known cases of people who survived Novichok. [They include the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who were poisoned in England two years ago.] Plus, I was poisoned with a different kind of Novichok.
Even the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons classifies its reports, because no one wants to publish the formula. This is a thing from hell. Chemical weapons are rightly banned. Conventional weapons can be used to kill people, but also to protect them; these substances are intended solely for making people die a painful death.
How would you describe your condition now?
I’m like a little old man. I was in the I.C.U. for twenty-six days, so I figured I’d be back to normal after twenty-six more. It hasn’t been that long yet, but I notice strange things. For example, I’ve lost all flexibility. I’m like the Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz.” I’m doing a lot of physical therapy. My first physical-therapy sessions involved two glasses of water. I had to use a tablespoon to scoop up water from one glass and pour it into the other. It was so fucking difficult. It was unbearable torment. The first time they threw a ball at me, there was no way I could have caught it. I couldn’t walk across a room. My hands were shaking. In my mind, I felt like I did before, but then I’d try to get into a car with my hands and feet shaking.
I can take long walks, up to three hours. I’m sitting as I talk to you, and it’s all right. It’s hard to concentrate for a long time, and it can get tiring to keep track of the questions and think about my answers. But that’s all right. Now, pulling a T-shirt off—that’s truly difficult. Strength is coming back faster than coördination and balance. I can now use the phone again, despite shaky hands.
By the time you came to, all the information was there, right?
The labs—one in Sweden and one in France—had already determined that it was Novichok. They’d done the testing while I was still in a coma, with Yulia’s permission. The only thing that’s happened since is the Russian authorities making crazy claims about me being a C.I.A. agent and all that.
Who was the person who gave you the information that you had been poisoned with Novichok?
Yulia. I had to be told multiple times; it took me a while to grasp. It still sounds bizarre. But the lab results—you can’t argue with those. Of course, this completely changes our understanding of how the Russian authorities work. We used to think we knew that Putin divides people up into different categories. There are the secret agents and former secret agents, and they can kill one another, poison one another, spray one another with polonium or Novichok, because they have their own rules. Then there are the politicians and other civilians. The instruments they use against politicians are arrests, fabricated criminal charges, defamation campaigns.
But to kill so blatantly, using Novichok—that sends a very strong message. A mysterious death, especially of a relatively young person, scares people. Their plan was that no medical examiner, not even the most conscientious one, would be able to find traces of Novichok. There are, maybe, only seventeen laboratories in the world that can find it. You need a super-powerful mass spectrometer. They made sure to wait forty-eight hours [before Navalny was allowed to be evacuated to Germany], and after that, they were convinced that no one would be able to find anything on me. It would have been recorded as a suspicious death. That is a stunningly effective intimidation method: “He didn’t know his place, he exposed corrupt officials, he called Putin a thief—and what do you know, he is dead at forty-four. Could be his heart gave out. Could be something else.”
You say that you thought they reserved poison for secret agents, but we know that Pyotr Verzilov, a Pussy Riot activist, was poisoned, and so was the journalist and activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was poisoned twice—
That’s true. It was obvious to me that they were both poisoned. They were both very healthy, and Kara-Murza, like me, turned into an old man who had to use a cane. But still—and this is the tricky thing—even though I knew both of them, and I had no doubt that they were poisoned, there is always this little voice, this bit of doubt. Like, really, did they poison them? But why didn’t they die? Maybe they really did take too much medicine? My wife went through the same thing. On the one hand, it was obvious that I’d been poisoned. On the other hand, there were all these doctors, at the hospital in Omsk, wearing their white coats, saying, “Of course, he wasn’t poisoned, of course, it’s a case of pancreatitis.” It’s hard to argue with that. They are doctors! And we are not. And Yulia and Volkov both told me that even as they were making arrangements to have me airlifted to Germany, they were thinking, What if it is pancreatitis and tomorrow he comes to in Germany, furious? When Kira was with me in the ambulance, the medics told her I had clearly O.D.’d. “Tomorrow he’ll be walking around and talking,” they said.
Novichok was apparently on something I touched. They say that if you inhale it, you die very quickly. If you ingest it with food, you are dead within an hour. If you touch it, it takes about three hours. But no one knows where it was. No one knows how this new version of Novichok acts. This scares people very effectively. You can decide not to fear being arrested or being shot. But when you are just walking around, and the next thing you know, your lifeless body is lying in the street, and a normal pathologist will never find anything?
My case is unusual because, thanks to a series of happy accidents—the pilot who decided to make an emergency landing, the ambulance staff who acted on the assumption I’d overdosed and tried to revive me, and the fact that some traces of Novichok remained even after forty-eight hours—they actually found Novichok. We got evidence. And the thing about Novichok is you can’t just go and use it. If I give you some Novichok and tell you to go kill someone with it, you are going to kill yourself and the people around you and probably not the person you are targeting. You have to be trained to use it. This definitively changes our picture of what happens inside the Kremlin, and now we have proof.
Every interviewer used to ask you, “Why haven’t you been killed yet?” So you have this understanding that you should have been killed by now, and you have people you know who nearly died from being poisoned, and yet somehow your mind tells you, This won’t happen to me, because—why?
Because you think rationally. There are a million ways to isolate someone or kill them, but this is like some trashy thriller. I find myself living inside of a James Bond movie. If you told me that they planned to kill me using Novichok and administer it in such a way that I would die on an airplane, I would say that’s a crazy plan, because there are so many ways for it to fail. It’s like if someone asked me if I believe that I’m at risk for being beheaded with a lightsabre. I’d say no, even if I saw that someone I know is missing an arm and it looks to have been lasered off.
Did you have any personal safety protocols? I know that when Garry Kasparov was still living in Russia, he never drank water except from his own supply, he didn’t eat in restaurants—
I remember the first time he was in jail [sentenced to five days in 2007 for an unsanctioned protest] he didn’t eat a thing because he was afraid that they’d poison him. And we all laughed at him! We thought he was paranoid. He is the only person I know who took any security measures. But what can you do? The poison wasn’t in my food. A person can leave their apartment, open the car door, and be a goner—the door handle can serve as the contact surface. You can eat only the food you cooked yourself and drink only water you poured yourself, and still there is nothing that can keep you safe from surface contact.
Let’s summarize what preceded this poisoning, just to make sure the reader understands how you were being silenced by a thousand cuts. Give me the highlights, perhaps starting with the first case against you and ending with all your bank accounts being frozen.
Back in 2009 and 2010, my anti-corruption activities started getting people’s attention. I was filing court claims against giants like [the state-backed gas monopoly] Gazprom, and I even won a couple of times—the courts ordered them to release certain reports. In 2010, I was a World Fellow at Yale, and just when I was supposed to come back, there was a news item that I could be facing criminal charges. This was meant to keep me from coming back to Russia. I returned anyway, and they just started escalating, first by planting news stories about me, then there was the first trumped-up case against me [in 2011]. They made a mistake that I think they regret, when they let me run for mayor of Moscow. I would have won in the runoff if they hadn’t rigged the vote. So this was when they got scared enough to conjure another criminal prosecution against me, and that’s when they arrested my brother, taking him hostage.
In the last two years, the pressure has really ramped up. Our offices have been raided by law enforcement repeatedly. There have been a number of criminal prosecutions. They tried to crush our nationwide structure, which they perceive as the biggest threat to their power. We are the victims of our own success. They saw that the organization can’t be beaten down, so they decided to seek a final solution. They imagined that if they removed me from the organization, the organization would break. They were wrong.
The last two years is when you’ve promoted a strategy you call “intelligent voting.” Can you explain it?
It’s tactical voting. It’s when we convince voters to back the No. 2 candidate—we may not like him, but he has a chance to knock out the representative of the ruling party. Usually all the candidates outside of United Russia get more than fifty per cent of the vote taken together, but it’s dispersed, so United Russia always wins. We used to think we’d never convince liberal voters to back a Communist, often even a Stalinist, or vice versa—convince Communists to back a liberal candidate—but we’ve succeeded in doing that to various extents in different places. Of course, Putin and the rest of them see this as a major threat. For Putin, United Russia is a foundational political structure. Yes, he controls the courts and dominates all the other parties, but in any autocratic regime, the ruling party is the key structure. This was true in the U.S.S.R. and East Germany, and is now true in Belarus, in Russia, and in Syria. There is always a ruling political party, and its ability to reliably take elections is what gives the regime its stability.
Where has your approach worked?
In Tomsk, United Russia no longer has a majority in the city legislature, for the first time in twenty years. In Moscow, we didn’t manage to do that, but we got a bunch of very active people into the city legislature. Same in Novosibirsk.
All these years you’ve been fighting corruption. Do you think this is Putin’s most important quality—that he is corrupt?
He is obsessed with power as a way of amassing wealth. He is obsessed with money. He is personally involved in apportioning money—he decides how much he gets, how much each of his people get. Gradually, of course, power became more important. Now he is, without a doubt, the most powerful man on the planet, because nothing keeps him in check. Sure, the U.S. President leads a stronger country, but he is constrained by the courts, by Congress, by the media, by the opposing party. Putin leads a country that’s not particularly strong, but there are no constraints on him at all. He could be using this power in different ways, but to him it’s just a giant money pump. He wants more: more palaces, more money, more billions. So I have been fighting corruption, because corruption is the political foundation of this regime.
So you think that “Putin is corrupt” is a more important or precise statement than “Putin is a murderer”?
Yes. Because he murders in order to be able to perpetuate the corruption. He is different from someone like Lukashenka, for example—Lukashenka is very corrupt as well, but he doesn’t have this bottomless thirst for goatskin sofas, gold handguns, and giant palaces.
What are the palaces for? Putin can’t live in them while he is President, and he won’t be able to live with them if he ever stops being President, because if he ever loses power, he’ll end up in prison or in exile.
Why do people collect stamps or baseball cards? They die, and their descendants sell them off. Why do you accumulate as much gold as you can in a computer game? That’s how people work—they always want more. And he wants to take all the money in part so that other people don’t have it and can’t influence him.
I understand you are going back to Russia after you recover?
Of course I’m going back. If I don’t, that will be the ideal outcome for them. They’d love to have me as just another political émigré.
You have given one interview so far to a Russian journalist, the very popular YouTube talk show host Yury Dud. I found it hard to watch, because he says you are wrong to think that you were poisoned and accuses you of having delusions of grandeur. And this is a journalist who supports you politically! Yet he refuses to believe that it’s all so simple, so crude, and so cruel. What was that like for you?
I don’t mind. The news sounds so crazy that it’s hard to believe. I can afford to be O.K. with it, because the facts speak for themselves. It’s not me people are arguing with but chemistry and independent labs. Anyway, my entire political life consists of having arguments with people who believe in nothing or believe in conspiracies, or who are just dumb. So having to argue my case is nothing new. I like doing it. I’m not going to be able to persuade everyone, but I will persuade some people, simply because I stand on the facts and the truth.
Hunter Biden speaks during the online broadcast of the Democratic National Convention in August. (photo: Democratic National Convention/AFP/Via Getty)
New York Post Published Hunter Biden Report Amid Newsroom Doubts
Katie Robertson, The New York Times
Robertson writes: "The New York Post's front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said."
Some reporters withheld their bylines and questioned the credibility of an article that made the tabloid’s front page on Wednesday.
Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
Coming late in a heated presidential campaign, the article suggested that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had used his position to enrich his son Hunter when he was vice president. The Post based the story on photos and documents the paper said it had taken from the hard drive of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden.
Dr. Anthony Fauci in Washington DC on 30 June. (photo: Reuters)
Fauci Says He Was 'Absolutely Not' Surprised Trump Got Coronavirus After Rose Garden Event
John Bowden, The Hill
Bowden writes: "Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House's COVID-19 response team, said in a new interview that he was not surprised that President Trump was sickened with coronavirus after seeing him and others maskless at a White House event for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett."
Fauci, who is the nation's top infectious disease expert, told CBS News in an interview that images he saw of the event alarmed him even before it was revealed that numerous attendees had tested positive for the virus. He worried that numerous people would be infected, he said.
"Were you surprised that President Trump got sick?" asked CBS's Dr. Jon LaPook.
"Absolutely not," Fauci responded. "I was worried that he was going to get sick when I saw him in a completely precarious situation of crowded, no separation between people, and almost nobody wearing a mask."
"When I saw that on TV, I said, 'Oh my goodness. Nothing good can come out of that, that's got to be a problem.' And then sure enough, it turned out to be a superspreader event," Fauci continued.
At least 11 people who attended the Sept. 26 event, including both Trump and first lady Melania Trump, as well as numerous journalists and lawmakers tested positive for COVID-19 following their attendance. Photos of the ceremony, at which Trump announced his intent to nominated Barrett to the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, showed few attendees wearing masks or following social distancing guidelines recommended by Washington D.C. health officials and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Trump's diagnosis resulted in a multi-day hospitalization at Walter Reed Medical Center, where the president was treated with a steroid regimen as well as an experimental antibody cocktail.
Wichita mayor Brandon Whipple. (photo: Wichita.gov)
Man Arrested in Connection to Threat to Kidnap the Mayor of Wichita Over Face Mask Ordinance
Zack Linly, The Root
Linly writes: "On Friday, police in Wichita, Kansas, arrested a man for threatening to kidnap and kill Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple."
hat’s it: America officially produces the weirdest terrorists.
On Friday, police in Wichita, Ks., arrested a man for threatening to kidnap and kill Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple. In case you’re wondering to yourself, “What egregious acts of oppression are leadership in Wichita imposing on their citizens to prompt such passionate contempt for the city’s mayor?”—don’t worry because it isn’t actual oppression, it’s wypipo oppression, so: “oppression.”
According to KSHB 41, 59-year-old Meredith Dowty is accused of being yet another deranged anti-masker who thinks he’s the Rosa Parks of John Waynes rising up against tyrannical governments and their...mask mandates put in place to keep the public as safe as possible during an ongoing global health crisis.
From KSHB
Meredith Dowty was arrested Friday and charged with making a criminal threat after officials were “alerted to threatening statements directed toward city of Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple,” according to a news release from the Wichita Police Department.
Dowty was booked at 6:05 p.m. on Friday with no bail amount set, according to Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office booking details.
Whipple told CNN he gets threats periodically, but the details of “this one seemed different.” He said a detective called him and read the text messages that were “sent to someone else who knew this person but also knew me.”
The Wichita Police Department said the investigation is ongoing and will be presented to the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office.
“Obviously, the person was very angry, but also very detailed in what it sounded like they wanted to do,” Whipple said. “They wanted the address, my address. ... And also, this threat was more specific about kidnapping me and cutting my throat. Those were what was read to me. They were graphic. Luckily, our police force was able to track this person down and interview them and apparently they have arrested them.”
He also mentioned that he hopes the threat against him isn’t part of an organized attack and that it’s “just a single person who is a little deranged.”
Whipple might have been thinking about the band of Vanilla ISIS morons whose alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was thwarted by the FBI recently. That weird-ass Die Hard sequel plot was also at least in part over Michigan’s COVID-19 ordinances, according to an FBI affidavit.
As for Dowty a.k.a. No-Sama bin Whining, according to the Wichita Eagle, turns out he’s a local musician and a cop-saving local hero.
From the Eagle:
The suspect is a well-known local musician who performs under the name “Cathead” and has played numerous gigs in the Wichita bar and nightclub scene, said Joe Stumpe, a musician and former Eagle reporter.
He plays guitar and harmonica, Stumpe said.
Dowty is a retired Wichita city firefighter who was honored by the Wichita City Council in 2008 for his role in saving the life of a Wichita police officer who was shot in the line of duty.
He was also one of the first rescuers on the scene at the 1998 explosion of the DeBruce Grain Elevator south of Wichita, which killed seven and injured 10 employees. Dowty was lifted to the top of the damaged elevator and helped remove four people who had suffered serious burns.
On Friday, Whipple took to Twitter to thank people for keeping him and his family in their thoughts as well as the “brave men & women of the @WichitaPolice who protect not just us, but our entire community.”
He also had a message for Dowty and anyone else who might turn violent over his face mask ordinance.
“Violence is never a way to settle disagreements,” Whipple tweeted. “We’re always stronger together as a City even when times are at their toughest. Tensions [may be] high, but we will get through this together as Wichitans.”
Omar Mediavilla, who urges his brother Jerick in Florida to exercise the right to vote that Puerto Rico residents do not have. (photo: Carlos Giusti/AP)
Puerto Rico, Unable to Vote, Becomes Crucial to US Election
Dánica Coto and Adriana Gomez Licon, Associated Press
Excerpt: "The campaigns of President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are rallying people in a place where U.S. citizens cannot cast ballots but have the ear of hundreds of thousands of potential voters in the battleground state of Florida."
The candidates are targeting Puerto Rico in a way never before seen, with the U.S. territory suddenly finding itself in the crosshairs of a high-stakes race even though Puerto Ricans on the island cannot vote in presidential elections despite being U.S. citizens since 1917.
Campaigners know this, but they hope those on the island will push relatives and friends on the U.S. mainland to vote for them in a strategy that capitalizes on the close ties they share.
It’s a novel role that plays off the sentiment that Puerto Ricans in Florida feel they are voting by proxy for those back home left out of U.S. democracy. And a growing number find this role appealing, especially since many on the island are struggling to recover from hurricanes Irma and Maria, a string of strong earthquakes, a deep economic crisis and the pandemic.
“I'm voting for 3 million Puerto Ricans on the island, including my entire family,” said Jerick Mediavilla, who is from the mountain town of Corozal and is voting in a U.S. presidential election for the first time after moving to Orlando four years ago. “Puerto Rico doesn’t have a voice. Our voice is via the United States.”
It’s people like Mediavilla that Democrats and Republicans are trying to target as they court Latinos in Florida, which has the largest population of Puerto Ricans in the U.S., with nearly 1.2 million. Trump won Florida in 2016 and has virtually no path to the White House if he doesn't do so again. Polls are tight, and as the Trump campaign worries of support slipping among suburban and older voters, Latinos in Florida have become crucial.
Puerto Ricans represent 27% of Hispanics of voting age in Florida, trailing only Cuban-Americans. While it's unclear how many are Democrats or Republicans, Democrats have widened the gap of Hispanic voters registered for this election over the GOP compared with 2016. The gains were in counties with a high number of Puerto Ricans including Orange County, home to Orlando, and Hillsborough, home to Tampa. Polk County, where the Puerto Rican population has more than doubled since 2013, saw the fastest growth of Latino registered voters, with Democrats registering 21,000 more voters than Republicans. The gap in 2016 was 15,000. But those same counties also have a very high number of voters registered without party affiliation.
“Puerto Ricans will play a very crucial role in this election,” said Yadira Sánchez, co-executive director of Poder Latinx, a U.S.-based non-profit group that aims to mobilize Latino voters.
Election observers, however, note Puerto Ricans have weaker voter turnout rates than other Hispanic groups that favor Republican candidates.
Trump recently secured an endorsement from Puerto Rico's governor and promised nearly $13 billion in additional aid last month to help the island rebuild from Hurricane Maria. During a recent rally in Florida, Trump declared: “I’m not gonna say the best, but I’m just about the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico. You better vote for me, Puerto Rico.” Many were quick to note that those living on the island don’t have that right.
Meanwhile, Biden granted an exclusive interview to Puerto Rico's main newspaper that for the first time in its 50 years endorsed a U.S. presidential candidate and asked those in the U.S. mainland to support Biden: “We ask that you, with the great power of your vote, especially in key electoral states, help open the way to the transformation effort that will honor the dignity and promote the progress of every person.”
Biden recently launched digital and print ads on the island with the hashtag “HazloXMi,” or DoItForMe, urging Puerto Ricans to tell their friends and family on the U.S. mainland to participate: “With your vote over there, you help us here.”
“Both campaigns are doing it thinking this will bounce back to Florida,” said Carlos Suárez, a political science professor at the University of Florida.
It’s unclear whether the indirect campaign strategy will work, but Luis Gutiérrez, a former U.S. representative who served 26 years in Congress and now lives in Puerto Rico, called it a smart move.
Puerto Ricans "are always in contact. Why? Because whether you’re one of 3 million on the island or 5 million somewhere else, you’re part of one community,” the Democrat said. “If you are born in Puerto Rico, it will be part of your life until the last day.”
As the election draws near, pressure keeps growing on Puerto Ricans on the island and on the mainland.
A Florida political group recently created a song set to the tune of “Rakatá” by Wisin y Yandel, a renowned Puerto Rican reggaeton duo who first became popular in the early 2000s. The song encourages Puerto Ricans who moved to Florida to use their new voting power and hurl a “chancleta” or flip-flop at Trump to help those living on the island: “He doesn’t care one bit for Boricuas.”
Trump’s campaign has countered with ads highlighting the billions of dollars his administration has pledged to help Puerto Rico recover from Maria, a Category 4 storm that caused an estimated $100 billion in damage and killed an estimated 2,975 people in its aftermath. However, the administration withheld billions of dollars in emergency aid for months, saying it worried about mismanagement and corruption on the island.
Wyneska Méndez, who moved to Miami from Puerto Rico eight years ago, said she would not let fellow Puerto Ricans influence her decision, adding that Trump is the only choice to protect the economy. She especially likes that Trump feels strongly against abortion because of her Christian faith, and she believes Puerto Rico needed to get its affairs in order to receive the same kind of relief offered to U.S. states.
“I don’t let others get in my head,” Méndez said as she waited for a speech by Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday in Miami.
Dozens of Trump supporters who gathered Sunday in Puerto Rico for a rally shared her sentiment, saying the president has sent billions of dollars to help with hurricane reconstruction as they praised his pro-life stance.
Dr. Miriam Ramírez de Ferrer, a former senator and member of Puerto Rico's pro-statehood party, said that Trump's personality can be misinterpreted and that she believes he was joking when making comments about the island that critics have found offensive.
“There have been many erroneous messages from certain Puerto Ricans toward Trump, and we don't want people to think that all Puerto Ricans are the same,” Ramírez said as she pulled down the face mask of a fellow Trump supporter decorated with bald eagles and U.S. flags.
Despite the aid Puerto Rico has received under the Trump administration, Mediavilla and his brother, Omar, who lives in Puerto Rico, remain unswayed.
“It's a great help, but really, in the end, I see it as a political strategy,” said Omar Mediavilla, adding that he is grateful his brother was motivated by the aftermath of Maria to support Biden. “They’re our voice carrying our complaints ... It’s important that Puerto Ricans over there give us this opportunity.”
Some who live on the island remain wary of the campaigning to influence Puerto Ricans on the mainland.
Omar Soto, a production supervisor whose brother lives in Lakeland, Florida, said the strategies are pointless.
“It seems like there’s a tone of despair,” he said, adding that he believes it could backfire. “I think it’s disrespectful. We should have the option to vote for president.”
Tens of thousands took to the streets in Chile on Sunday, but the rallies descended into violence. (photo: Ivan Alvarado/Reuters)
Chile Rallies Turn Violent, Raising Concern About Referendum Vote
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Tens of thousands of Chileans gathered in the central square of Santiago to mark the one-year anniversary of mass protests that left more than 30 people dead and thousands injured, but the mostly peaceful rally deteriorated into riots and looting after night fell."
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A flock of birds in Oakland, California, where smoke from wildfires turned the sky blood orange this autumn. (photo: MediaNews Group/The Mercury News/Getty Images)
Dying Birds and the Fires: Scientists Work to Unravel a Great Mystery
Kari Paul, Guardian UK
Paul writes: "Nobody knows precisely how wildfire smoke affects birds' health and migratory patterns. Now, citizen birdwatchers are stepping in."
he yellow Townsend Warbler lay lifeless on the gravel ground near Grant county, New Mexico, the eyes in its yellow-striped head closed, its black feathery underbelly exposed.
Just days before, the migrating bird – weighing 10 grams, or the equivalent of two nickels – might have been as far north as Alaska. But it met an untimely demise in the American south-west, with thousands of miles still to go before reaching Central America, its destination for the winter.
The warbler is one of hundreds of thousands of birds that have recently turned up disoriented or dead across the region, where ornithologists have described birds “falling from the sky”.
The mass die-off has been tentatively attributed to the historic wildfires across California, Oregon and Washington in recent months, which may have forced birds to rush their migration. But scientists do not know for sure – in part because nobody knows precisely how wildfire smoke affects birds.
A photo of the dead warbler was uploaded to iNaturalist, a crowd-sourced app used to identify plants and animals, as part of the Southwest Avian Mortality Project, a collaboration between New Mexico State University and others that invited users to crowd-source information about the die-off. The project has now logged more than 1,000 observed dead birds, encompassing 194 species – data that is being shared with the researchers to better understand what led to such a major mortality event.
“For really solid science, it is good to have long-term data trends,” said Allison Salas, a researcher who helped establish the project. “But with increasing changes to climate and rising temperatures, we do not have enough time to collect the data – things are changing faster than we can keep up with.”
This sort of platform, and the citizen birdwatchers who populate them, have become a critical tool for scientists trying to unravel the mysteries at the intersection of birds, wildfires and climate change.
“There are many more citizen scientists distributed in diverse arrays than there are professional scientists or wildlife rehabilitators,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a senior research associate at Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the institute that runs eBird, a popular app for logging bird sightings.
“The power of eyes in many places is huge.”
A physiological mystery
Rodney Siegel is the executive director of the Institute for Bird Populations, a non-profit group that works with professional scientists and amateur naturalists to monitor bird populations for conservation. He said that while scientists believe that birds, like humans and other animals, are susceptible to the effects of smoke, “there is still a lot we don’t know”.
“We don’t have a ton of information on the immediate, direct effects of smoke and wildfire on individuals,” he said.
It may seem unbelievable that this question about one of the most ancient creatures on Earth remains unanswered, but there are several good reasons, Siegel said. For one, it is difficult to properly survey the before and after effects of fire when we rarely know in advance where the next wildfire will emerge. And, of course, because birds can fly, they are not trapped in smoke-filled areas as often as other species.
“It probably hasn’t been addressed a whole lot by scientists yet because, unlike a lot of other wildlife, birds can escape fire and smoke relatively readily,” Siegel said.
But the ability to escape is diminishing. In the case of the recent fires on the west coast, there were few places birds could have traveled without smoke. Hazardous air quality choked the majority of the west for weeks, with smoke rising thousands of feet into the atmosphere, turning the skies orange. In early September, the growing plume from historic wildfires could be seen from space and eventually made its way to the skies over the east coast.
“These enormous smoke plumes are harder to escape than those from smaller fires that have been more typical for the last century,” Siegel said. “This is a really unusual phenomenon without a lot of precedent – and it is unknown how that might affect birds.”
It’s important to note that not all fire is bad for birds, he added. California is home to more than 400 species of birds, making it one of the country’s most diverse states in terms of wildlife. Many ecological systems and the birds that inhabit them thrive in the aftermath of small fires. Some like the lazuli bunting, known as a “fire-following” species, have even evolved to thrive in the aftermath of fire events. This bolsters the theory that smaller, less severe fires could be good for wildlife long-term.
Some theories
A leading theory behind the south-west die-off is that widespread smoke pollution may have forced birds to start migration sooner than expected, said Roger J Lederer, who taught ornithology and ecology at the California State University, Chico, and has written several books about birds and their behavior.
“Most of the birds we saw dying were migratory; migration had just started and they were trying to flee the smoke-filled areas but couldn’t find any food,” he said. “It wasn’t the physiological effects of smoke necessarily, they just starved to death.”
Beyond the effects of smoke on migration patterns, the rise of megafires is also drawing unprecedented attention to the effects smoke may have on a bird’s delicate breathing.
Birds and their lungs are certainly affected by smoke, Lederer said, even if we don’t know exactly how. Most of us have heard the phrase “canary in a coalmine”, which comes from the fact that birds are particularly sensitive to toxins in the air. Lederer has also heard many reports of pet birds dying due to different kinds of fumes in the home.
The sensitivity could have something to do with birds’ unique respiratory system. While humans and other mammals use their diaphragm to inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, birds possess a far more efficient system, essentially inhaling and exhaling at the same time. This allows them to get enough oxygen to fuel near-constant activity and to breathe at much higher altitudes than mammals.
To do this, birds have tube-like structures called parabronchi, similar to human alveoli in the lungs, which are covered with sacs and capillaries for gas exchange. And as in humans, smoke damage can burst those bubbles, creating less surface area to exchange oxygen and making it more difficult to breathe.
“This is unprecedented – there have been fires for years and years but this is the first year everyone is paying attention to the impact on birds,” Lederer said.
Community scientists fill in the gaps
As scientists at New Mexico State University began to recognize the size and scale of the mass bird die off this year, they invited members of the public to log bird deaths on iNaturalist.
The format is collaborative: one person can upload a photo of a flower or animal, and more experienced naturalists can comment to confirm what it is. The data is all geotagged when uploaded, giving scientists details about locations.
“There are limitations in science – we can’t be in every place all the time,” Salas said. “Being able to incorporate a standardized way of collecting data from everybody across the country or the world is extremely helpful.”
Researchers are increasingly relying on data collected by citizen scientists and birdwatchers to better understand the effects of climate change, including intensifying wildfires, on bird populations, Salas said.
“Citizen science or community projects are great because they are real time, they are happening in the moment, and it allows us to kind of keep up with everything that’s going on and still be able to document it over time,” she said.
One of the most popular tools for the average birder is eBird, an app created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology alongside the National Audubon society, to crowdsource data on the locations and numbers of bird populations globally.
In recent years it has recorded as many as 100m bird observations per year. Citizen data is “invaluable” for tracking where, when, what, and how many birds are present in a particular area, said Andrew Farnsworth, who works there. “Leveraging many sources of information is critical.”
Birding is particularly amenable to new and amateur naturalists, said Lederer. Crowdsourced data from people of all skill levels is helpful to scientists who “just don’t have enough manpower”, he said, especially as climate change and its effects become more widespread.
“People are paying attention now more than ever, which is a good thing. Until we know what is happening, I’m not sure we can do anything about it.”
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