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03 December 20
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Christopher Krebs | Trump Fired Me for Saying This, but I'll Say It Again: The Election Wasn't Rigged
Christopher Krebs, The Washington Post
Krebs writes: "On Nov. 17, I was dismissed as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a Senate-confirmed post, in a tweet from President Trump after my team and other election security experts rebutted claims of hacking in the 2020 election."
On Monday, a lawyer for the president’s campaign plainly stated that I should be executed. I am not going to be intimidated by these threats from telling the truth to the American people.Three years ago, I left a comfortable private-sector job to join, in the spirit of public service, the Department of Homeland Security. At the time, the national security community was reeling from the fallout of the brazen Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. I wanted to help.
Across the nation’s security agencies, there was universal acknowledgment that such foreign election interference could not be allowed to happen again. The mission was clear: Defend democracy and protect U.S. elections from threats foreign and domestic.
With the advantage of time to prepare for the 2020 election, we got to work. My team at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, had primary responsibility for working with state and local election officials and the private sector to secure their election infrastructure — including the machines, equipment and systems supporting elections — from hacking. (Other agencies handle fraud or other criminal election-related activity.) The Russian assault in 2016 had not included hacking voting machines, but we couldn’t be sure that Moscow or some other bad actor wouldn’t try it in 2020.
States are constitutionally responsible for conducting the nation’s elections. At CISA, we were there to help them do it securely. Our first job was to improve CISA’s relationships with state and local officials, building trust where there was none. We also worked closely with representatives from across the election-security community, public and private, in groups called coordinating councils. A key development was the establishment of the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center to share security-related information with people who can act on it for defensive purposes. By the 2018 midterm elections, all 50 states and thousands of jurisdictions had joined the center.
We offered a range of cybersecurity services, such as scanning systems for vulnerable software or equipment, and conducting penetration tests on networks. Election officials across the country responded by markedly improving cybersecurity, including upgrading to more modern systems, hardening user accounts through additional log-on measures and being quicker to share suspicious-event information.
But there was a critical weak spot. Voting machines known as Direct Recording Electronic machines, or DREs, do not generate paper records for individual votes. And paper ballots are essential pieces of evidence for checking a count’s accuracy. With DREs, the vote is recorded on the machine and combined with voting data from other machines during the tabulation process. If those machines were compromised, state officials would not have the benefit of back-up paper ballots to conduct an audit.
In 2016, five states used DREs statewide, including Georgia and Pennsylvania, with a handful of others using DREs in multiple jurisdictions. Fortunately, by 2020, Louisiana was the last one with statewide DRE usage. Congress provided grant funding in 2018, 2019 and 2020 to states to help them retire the paperless machines and roll out auditable systems. As the 2020 election season began, Delaware, Georgia, Pennsylvania and South Carolina all swapped over to paper-based systems. Then the emergence of the pandemic prompted a nationwide surge toward the use of voting by mail.
The combined efforts over the past three years moved the total number of expected votes cast with a paper ballot above 90 percent, including the traditional battleground states. While I no longer regularly speak to election officials, my understanding is that in the 2020 results no significant discrepancies attributed to manipulation have been discovered in the post-election canvassing, audit and recount processes.
This point cannot be emphasized enough: The secretaries of state in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania, as well officials in Wisconsin, all worked overtime to ensure there was a paper trail that could be audited or recounted by hand, independent of any allegedly hacked software or hardware.
That’s why Americans’ confidence in the security of the 2020 election is entirely justified. Paper ballots and post-election checks ensured the accuracy of the count. Consider Georgia: The state conducted a full hand recount of the presidential election, a first of its kind, and the outcome of the manual count was consistent with the computer-based count. Clearly, the Georgia count was not manipulated, resoundingly debunking claims by the president and his allies about the involvement of CIA supercomputers, malicious software programs or corporate rigging aided by long-gone foreign dictators.
The 2020 election was the most secure in U.S. history. This success should be celebrated by all Americans, not undermined in the service of a profoundly un-American goal.
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Retired Army lt. gen. Flynn. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
'When the Bombs Go Off, the Blood Is on Mike Flynn's Hands': Retired Officers Blast His Calls for Martial Law
Spencer Ackerman and Kelly Weill, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "Less than a week after receiving a presidential pardon for lying to the FBI, Mike Flynn is pushing a call for martial law-and drawing sharp denunciation from other retired senior military officers."
The pardoned Army three-star promoted a call to suspend the Constitution for an election do-over. “Grant and Lincoln are rolling over in their graves,” said one retired general.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Flynn, who was Trump’s first national security adviser and before that his most important military validator, circulated a petition for martial law in a Tuesday tweet. “Freedom never kneels except for God,” Flynn commented.
The petition, from a Tea Party affiliate named Tom Zawistowski, implored Trump to proclaim “limited martial law” and order the military to conduct a do-over of the presidential election so as to reflect what it claims is “the true will of the people.” It explicitly envisioned “temporarily suspend[ing] the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections.” And it also reflects a recent rise in desperation from MAGA now that Trump’s efforts at overturning the election have fallen apart in multiple courtrooms.
The petition even compared America’s bloodiest conflict to the current Trumpist inability to cope with an election loss. “Today, the current threat to our United States by the international and domestic socialist/communist left is much more serious than anything Lincoln or our nation has faced in its history—including the civil war,” it reads.
But the petition suggested that unless Trump is installed for another term, his supporters would engage in violence. “Without a fair vote, we fear, with good reason, the threat of a shooting civil war is imminent,” it asserted.
One of Flynn’s colleagues in Army special-operations, retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who recently ran for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire as a Republican, said he hadn’t seen the petition. But as a matter of principle, Bolduc called it irresponsible.
“I respect Mike Flynn, and a lot of people respect Mike Flynn, and with that respect comes a tremendous responsibility to be extremely careful with what you say,” Bolduc, who until recently commanded U.S. special operations forces in Africa, told The Daily Beast. “We are nowhere near suspending the Constitution and using the military to redo the election. That would be a colossal mistake. Grant and Lincoln are rolling over in their graves at what the hell is going on.”
Paul Yingling, a retired Army colonel, put it more bluntly. “Flynn's anti-election propaganda is an essential precursor to violent terrorist attacks on legitimate electoral outcomes,” Yingling told The Daily Beast. “When the bombs go off, the blood is on Mike Flynn's hands.”
There was no significant election fraud in the 2020 election. That was established by the Department of Homeland Security election-protection chief Christopher Krebs, who lost his job for saying it publicly. Even Attorney General William Barr, who has promoted suggestions of voting “irregularities,” said on Tuesday that the Justice Department has found no evidence of fraud that could impact the outcome of the election.
That’s left Trump and his most feverish and shellshocked supporters scrambling for increasingly untenable conspiracies to explain his loss. Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force three-star general and Trump loyalist, has spun a complicated fiction about an Army Special Forces raid to capture a CIA server in Germany supposedly implicated in changing vote tallies. When Military Times asked McInerney to explain the Army saying the raid never happened, the general answered, “President Trump won in a landslide and the Dems left so many footprints that this TREASON must be stopped!!!”
Flynn, appearing before McInerney on a fringe internet show this weekend, rambled off an evidence-free claim that China might have executed a cyberattack to change the vote totals.
Lin Wood, an attorney attempting to overturn Trump’s election loss, shared the same petition as Flynn on Twitter. “Our country is headed to civil war,” Wood wrote, falsely claiming that China was behind the looming conflict. “@realDonaldTrump should declare martial law.”
Trumpworld attorney Sidney Powell, who represented Flynn in his criminal prosecution, also joined the calls for a putsch, retweeting various Twitter users who called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and to suspend the election and establish “military tribunals.” Powell, who is currently attempting to overturn the presidential election in court, represented Trump until recently, when his campaign disavowed her following a disastrous press conference.
During a Wednesday afternoon press conference in Georgia, Wood and Powell promoted multiple conspiracy theories about voter fraud, with Wood implying that Trump followers should participate in a pro-Trump insurrection. Specifically, he called on followers to “encircle” the Georgia governor’s mansion until Republican Governor Brian Kemp agreed to hold a special session on the state’s election results and then resign. “It’s 1776 in America again,” Wood told the crowd, some 24 hours after calling for martial law. “You’re not going to take our freedom again.”
The martial law calls rippled out to a broader network of right-wing media personalities. Joey Saladino, a YouTuber-turned-failed congressional candidate most famous for dressing in a Nazi costume as a “prank” and peeing in his own mouth (separate incidents), took to the social media site Parler to spread word of the coup.
In replies to the post, Trump supporters called for “military tribunals, public executions,” and more. “I SAY DO WHATEVER IS NEEDED TO STOP THIS ELECTION FRAUD BY SATAN AND HIS MINNONS!!!” another replied.
The far-right conspiracy site Infowars republished the petition in full. The approving article came one week after Infowars published a panicked headline that claimed: “Democrats Declare Martial Law.”
Some Republicans have openly repudiated those calls. “This ad, though protected by the First Amendment, is utterly irresponsible, ahistorical and without precedent or legal rationale,” Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost tweeted of the petition. (The document’s author, Zawistowski, is a fixture of Ohio politics.)
Several retired officers who served with Flynn have opted to keep silent over the past five years about his erratic, inflammatory, and provocative behavior. That’s continued through Flynn’s prosecution by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team for lying to the FBI, an act for which Flynn pleaded guilty before reversing himself. And it’s continued as Flynn has embraced the QAnon cult, which the FBI considers a potential feeder for terrorism, that portrays him as a martyr.
But Paul Yingling, who was the deputy commander of future Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster’s cavalry regiment in Iraq, said Flynn was now issuing an incitement to violence.
“Calling for unlawful new elections is an explicit call for violence to overturn lawful elections. Worse still, Flynn knows that he is calling for violence,” Yingling said.
“Flynn has fought enough terrorist networks to understand this pattern: before terrorists detonate, or emplace, or build bombs, a propagandist radicalizes that bomb-making network,” he continued. “Flynn is that propagandist.”
Flynn did not respond to a request for comment.
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People wear face masks outside the Sarpy County administration building, on June 18, 2020, in Papillion, Neb., where face covering is recommended but not mandatory. (photo: Nati Harnik/AP
Health Officials Face Death Threats From Coronavirus Deniers
Aaron Calvin, The Intercept
Calvin writes: "Dr. Megan Srinivas was attending a virtual American Medical Association discussion around the 'Mask Up' initiative one evening in July when she began to receive frantic messages from her parents begging her to confirm to them that she was all right."
As people across the country refuse mask mandates, public health officials are fighting an uphill battle with little government support.
“Somebody obtained my father’s unlisted cell phone number and spoofed him, making it look like it was a phone call coming from my phone,” she told Des Moines’s Business Record for a November profile. “Essentially they insinuated that they had harmed me and were on the way to their house to harm them.”
This malicious hoax, made possible by doxxing Srinivas’s private information, was only the most severe instance of abuse and harassment she had endured since she became a more visible proponent of mask-wearing and other mitigation measures at the beginning of Covid-19 pandemic. A Harvard-educated infectious disease physician and public health researcher on the faculty of the University of North Carolina, Srinivas currently lives and works in Fort Dodge, her hometown of 24,000 situated in the agricultural heart of northwest Iowa.
Srinivas is not just a national delegate for the AMA, but a prominent face of Covid-19 spread prevention locally, appearing on panels and local news segments. Fort Dodge itself is situated deep within Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, a staunchly conservative area that simply replaced white supremacist Rep. Steve King with a more palatable Republican.
Basic health measures promoted by Srinivas in Iowa since the beginning of the pandemic have been politicized along the same fault lines as they have across the rest of the country. Some remain in the middle ground, indifferent to health guidelines out deep attachment to “normal” pre-pandemic life. Others have either embraced spread-prevention strategies like mask-wearing or refused to acknowledge the existence of the virus at all. In a red state like Iowa, an eager audience for President Donald Trump’s misinformation about the dangers of the coronavirus has made the latter far more common, which has made Srinivas’s job more difficult and more dangerous.
“It was startling at first, the volume at which [these threats were] happening,” Srinivas told The Intercept. “I know people get very heated about politics and the issues that people advocate for in general, but especially on something like this where it’s merely trying to provide a public service, a way people can protect themselves and their loved ones and community based on medical objective facts. That’s surprising that this is the reaction people have.”
“I have trolls like other people, I’ve been doxxed, I’ve gotten death threats,” she said. “When you say anything people don’t want to hear, there will be trolls and there will be people who will try to argue against you. The death threats were something I wish I could say were new, but when I’ve done things like this in the past, I’ve had people say not-so-nice things in the past when I’ve had advocacy issues.”
At the same time, as an Iowa native, Srinivas has been able to gain some trust through tapping into local networks like Facebook. Though she has encountered a great deal of anger, she’s also seen success in the form of a son who’s managed to convince his diabetic father, a priest, to hold off on reopening his church thanks to her advice, and through someone who’s been allowed to work from home based on recommendations Srinivas made on a panel.
“At this point, almost everyone knows at least one person that’s been infected. Unfortunately, it leads to a higher proportion of the population who knows someone who’s not just been infected, but who’s had serious ramification driven by the disease,” Srinivas said. “So it’s come to the point where, as people are experiencing the impact of the disease closer to home, they’re starting to understand the true impact and starting to be willing to listen to recommendations.”
Without cooperation and support at the state level, however, what Srinivas can accomplish on her own is limited. Even as the number of Covid-19 cases grew and put an increasing strain on Iowa’s hospitals over the past few months, it took until after the November election for Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds to tighten Iowa’s mask guidance. And board members in Webster County, where Srinivas lives, only admitted in November that she had been right to advocate for a mask mandate all along. Though Trump lost the election nationally, he won Iowa by a considerable margin, which Reynolds has claimed as a vindication of her “open for business” attitude and has continued downplaying the pandemic’s severity.
“The issue with her messaging is it creates a leader in the state that should be trusted who’s giving out misinformation,” Srinivas said. “Naturally, people who don’t necessarily realize that this is misinformation because it’s not their area of expertise want to follow what their leader is saying. That’s a huge issue under the entire public health world right now, where we have a governor that is spreading falsehood like this.”
The embattled situation in which Srinivas has found herself is the new normal for public health officials attempting to stem the tide of a deadly viral outbreak, particularly in the middle of country where the pandemic winter is already deepening. Advocating for simple, potentially lifesaving measures has become a politically significant act, working to inform the public means navigating conflicting regulatory bodies, and doing your job means making yourself publicly vulnerable to an endless stream of vitriol and even death threats. The result across the board is that an untenable pressure has been placed on public health workers thrust in a politicized health crisis — and that pressure only appears to be worsening.
Despite the fact that Wisconsin’s stay-at-home order was nullified by the state’s Supreme Court in May, the Dane County Health Department has used its ability to exercise local control in an attempt to install mitigation measures that go beyond those statewide. By issuing a mask mandate ahead of a statewide rule and advocating for education and compliance efforts, the department currently considers itself in a good place regarding health guideline compliance.
These actions have drawn a lot of ire from those unhappy with the regulations, however. According to a communications representative for the department, anti-maskers have held a protest on a health officer’s front lawn, a staff member was “verbally assaulted” in a gas station parking lot (an incident that prompted the department to advise its employees to only wear official clothing to testing sites), and employees performing compliance checks on businesses have been told to never perform these checks alone after “instances of business owners get a little too close for comfort.” They’ve also received a number of emails accusing health workers of being “Nazis,” “liars,” “political pawns,” and purely “evil.”
In Kansas’s Sedgwick County, Wichita — the largest city in the state — has been considering new lockdown measures after a November surge in coronavirus cases has threatened to overwhelm its hospitals. Though Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly attempted to instate a mask mandate in July, 90 of the state’s 105 counties rejected it, including Sedgwick, though the health board issued its own directive and Wichita had installed its own at the city level.
Now, with cases surging again, just as Srinivas saw the number of believers rising as more got sick, counties in Kansas that previously resisted mask mandates are changing their tune after Kelly announced a new mandate. But Sedgwick County health officials see an intractable line in the sand when it comes to who’s on board with mitigation measures and are focused more on what those who are already on board need to be told.
“It seems like a lot of the naysayers are naysayers and the supporters are supporters,” Adrienne Byrne, director of Sedgwick County Health Department, said. “There’s some people that are just kind of whatever about it. We just remind people to wear masks, it does make a difference. As we’ve gone on, studies have shown that it works.”
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Senior advisors to the president Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump arrive at the White House aboard Marine One on November 29, 2020. (photo: AP)
Donald Trump and Jared Kushner Receive $3.65 Million in PPP Loan Money Intended for Small Businesses, Report Says
Danielle Zoellner, Independent
Zoellner writes: "Real estate properties owned by President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner received .65m of loan money through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), according to an analysis by NBC News."
More than 25 PPP loans were given to businesses under either the Trump Organisation or Kushner Companies
The news organisation analysed what businesses benefited from pandemic relief programs put in place by the federal government. Data from the Small Business Administration (SBA) found that the Trump Organisation as well as the Kushner Companies, which is owned by Mr Kushner’s family, received funding.
More than 25 PPP loans were given to one of these businesses owned either by the Trump Organisation or Kushner Companies, NBC News reports.
The SBA released data on Tuesday night about every small business that received either PPP loans or Economic Injury Disaster (EIDL) loans after months of litigation.
These loans, created by the federal government, were intended to give small businesses emergency relief in order to pay employees, rent, and mortgage expenses.
The loans to the president and his family companies included one to Triomphe Restaurant Corp., at the Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York City for the sum of $2.14m. Additionally, two tenants in Trump Tower in NYC received $100,000 each but only kept three jobs, which went against the requirements of receiving a PPP loan.
Four tenants at a Manhattan building owned by Mr Kushner each received more than $204,000, but they only kept six jobs.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and her family also benefited from the program. Her parent’s Florida roofing company received $2m from the program. It was previously disclosed in July that the company was one of the PPP recipients.
The SBA argued that 87 per cent of loans went to small businesses prior to the data release, but a majority of the loans actually went to larger corporations, The Washington Post reports.
More than half of the $522bn given out went to large businesses and corporations, and only 28 per cent of toast funds issued to businesses were for $150,000 or less. About 600 large corporations, including the parent company of Boston Market and dozens of other large chains, received the maximum loan amount of $10m from the program.
Also, more than 100 loans given out to were made with no business name listed. Instead the information showed up as “no name available” or should potential data entry errors, NBC News reports.
“Many months and broken promises later, the court-ordered release of this crucial data while the Trump administration is one foot out the door is a shameful dereliction of duty and flagrant mismanagement of a program that millions of workers and small businesses needed to get through this pandemic,” Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, an accountability watchdog, said in a statement to the news organisation.
The initial premise of the PPP loans were to provide financial relief to small businesses amid the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns. Companies with 500 employees or fewer were allowed to apply, but that requirement was loosened for restaurants and hotel establishments.
This program drew criticism from the start when it was revealed that large organisations like Harvard University and Shake Shack, among others, applied for the funding. Both companies returned the money under the scrutiny.
But now further information from the program shows many other large corporations benefited, including ones owned by the president.
The SBA was required to disclose the data after several news organisations filed a federal lawsuit against the organisation over its refusal to follow the Freedom of Information Act. A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that SBA had to release the data, and the organisation did not appeal the ruling.
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Democrats are introducing a resolution to remove language enshrining slavery from the Constitution. (photo: AP)
US Lawmakers Unveil Anti-Slavery Constitutional Amendment
Aaron Morrison, Associated Press
Morrison writes: "National lawmakers introduced a joint resolution Wednesday aimed at striking language from the U.S. Constitution that enshrines a form of slavery in America's foundational documents."
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Saudi Arabia's deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman escorts White House senior advisor Jared Kushner and his wife White House senior advisor Ivanka Trump at the Global Center for Combatting Extremist Ideology in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on May 21, 2017. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Trump and the West's Enabling of Saudi Arabia Enables the Torture of Loujain al-Hathloul
Nina Burleigh, NBC News
Burleigh writes: "Last week, Loujain al-Hathloul, a young activist who fought for women to be allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, appeared in court to hear that her crime has been deemed equivalent to national security and terrorism cases."
Al-Hathloul’s fate is another reminder of the harrowing plight of women in the Gulf region — and the underbelly of the empowerment feminism myth pushed by women like Ivanka Trump.
Al-Hathloul, 31, hadn’t been seen in person for over a year, while reports trickled out about torture and threats of rape and being “thrown in the sewer.” Her parents, in court, reported that she looked weak, exhausted and shaking. So Saudi authorities have already reduced this vibrant, healthy woman to a quivering sick shell of her former self — but apparently that is still not punishment enough.
Al-Hathloul’s brief court appearance and terrible fate is another reminder of the harrowing plight of women and girls in the Gulf region that is the bleak underbelly of the empowerment feminism myth that prominent women like Ivanka Trump and Hillary Clinton, from opposite political camps, both promote. It is one of millions of otherwise unseen reasons why the World Economic Forum estimates that global gender parity is at still nearly a century away.
Until June 2018, Saudia Arabia was the only country left in the world that forbade women from driving. The religious authorities had long argued that male guardianship laws should prevent women from driving themselves.
Women had been testing that rule since at least 2007 and were routinely arrested. In 2011, inspired by the Arab Spring, Manal Al-Sharif led another wave of protest. Al-Hathloul belonged to a third wave of activists, who were ordered by the Saudi authorities not to talk to the media and arrested for doing so, even after the kingdom had relented and started issuing driver's licenses.
But Al-Hathloul has been in prison since December 2018, while others have been released. It is highly possible she is being singled out for especially harsh treatment because of her celebrity. In 2015, CEO Middle East, a regional business magazine, ranked her as one of the 100 most powerful women in the Middle East, and she has been honored by PEN America and named one of Time magzine's 100 most influential people while in prison.
Saudi Arabia kidnapped Al-Hathloul in the United Arab Emirates in March 2018 before throwing her in jail later that year. Kidnapping women is not uncommon among Gulf state leaders. Besides the occasional stories of adult women being snatched out of airports for leaving unhappy family situations, two princesses of Dubai are famously languishing behind palace walls, after their father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum of Dubai, sent security men to pluck one off a street in Britain 20 years ago, and to drag another off a yacht near the coast of India in 2018.
I used to write that I didn’t understand why more leaders in the West don’t stand up to such obvious human rights abuses. After all, when nations have abused other identities group recently — the Rohinga in Myanmar, the Uighurs in China — international condemnation descends.
But the truth is, I do understand what motivates the Western enablement of systematic female disempowerment in the Arabian Gulf monarchies. Ever since these desert kingdoms struck oil and tribal leaders consolidated power, everyone from bankers to weapons manufacturers to liberal institutions like the Sorbonne and NYU to celebrities like Katy Perry, Eva Longoria, Ryan Philippe and others have been attracted to the region’s multitrillion-dollar sovereign wealth funds, all of which are controlled by a few thousand men.
Western men — and women — helped create and now maintain these tiny, fearsomely armed nations with ultra-modern facades, almost never asking, in return, for a modicum of modernity for women or minority groups. As a result, women like Al-Hathloul can be arrested for showing up unmarried and pregnant at hospitals and in Saudi Arabia are under lifetime male guardianship, while in other regional monarchies women must seek male permission to marry and remarry.
The combined values of the sovereign wealth funds of Kuwait, Dubai and Abu Dhabi Saudi Arabia is estimated to be in the trillions of dollars. Almost no one in the world is immune to the power of such concentrated money.
It is maybe a little bit surprising — or rather, disappointing — that elected officials and legal authorities appear similarly impressed. But money works on so many who should be above — the presidents of great Western institutions renowned for tolerance and secular humanism and science have taken their money, including Harvard, Georgetown, Yale and MIT.
Throwing a woman into terrorism court for agitating for the right to drive is a slap in the face to all women. Kidnapping, torturing and jailing with impunity women simply for asking for basic rights has the same effect on women globally that the religious police who beat and harass women have in their home countries. Global silence in response to it is a reminder of all the dark corners everywhere where women can be not just insulted and harassed, but assaulted, locked at home, left uneducated, raped — all because women are, in 2020, still second-class citizens in many countries, including those the U.S. considers friends.
No amount of liberation for women in the West can paper over this fact, as these activities occur over and over again, without objection or economic sanction. For four years, the Trump administration dispensed with asking for anything from Saudi Arabia besides its purchase power for trillions of dollars’ worth of American-made weapons. Will the Biden administration at the least take a public stand for the universal human rights of women like Loujain Al-Hathloul? It is perhaps a naïve hope — but a hope nonetheless.
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Great Barrier Reef. (photo: iStock
Great Barrier Reef Outlook 'Critical' as Climate Change Called Number One Threat to World Heritage
Lisa Cox, Guardian UK
Cox writes: "The outlook for five Australian world heritage sites including the Great Barrier Reef, the Blue Mountains and the Gondwana rainforests, has deteriorated, according to a global report that finds climate change is now the number one threat to the planet's natural world heritage."
The International Union for Conservation of Nature, the official advisory body on nature to the Unesco world heritage committee, has found in its world heritage outlook that climate change threatens a third of the world’s natural heritage sites. The outlook has been published every three years since 2014.
It finds the conservation outlook for the Great Barrier Reef has worsened from “significant concern” to “critical” – the most urgent status under the IUCN system. The reef suffered its third mass coral bleaching in five years during the 2019-20 summer.
In the aftermath of the 2019-20 bushfire disaster, the Gondwana rainforests – comprising 40 separate reserves between Newcastle and Brisbane – and the Greater Blue Mountains world heritage area have seen their outlook move to “significant concern” in 2020 from “good with some concerns” in 2017.
The fires affected more than 80% of the Blue Mountains world heritage area and more than 50% of the Gondwana rainforests, with the bushfire royal commission finding the disaster was just a glimpse of what climate change would deliver to the country in the future.
Western Australia’s Shark Bay and Ningaloo Coast world heritage sites have deteriorated in the IUCN outlook from “good” to “good with some concerns”.
Other Australian world heritage sites remained in the same categories from previous reports including the Kakadu National Park and Queensland’s wet tropics, which are both listed as “significant concern”.
The renowned coral reef scientist, Terry Hughes, said it was logical the IUCN had moved the Great Barrier Reef into the critical category after three bleaching events in five years.
But he said it didn’t make sense that others, such as the Ningaloo Reef that fringes the Ningaloo Coast, were not also considered critical given the scale of the threat climate change posed to coral reefs worldwide.
“It’s not really credible to say the Barrier Reef is now super vulnerable to climate change but other coral reefs around the world aren’t,” he said. “Unesco have actually made that case very clearly.”
Australia has 12 natural world heritage sites, four cultural world heritage sites and four mixed world heritage sites.
The report finds climate change is either a very high or high threat to 11 out of the 16 natural and mixed sites and that the “manifold” effects of the climate crisis – including increased frequency and severity of fires, droughts and coral bleaching – were often accompanied by other threats, leading to a poorer outlook overall.
K’gari/Fraser Island, which was ranked “good with some concerns”, is the latest world heritage area to suffer the effects of catastrophic fire, with half of the island burnt in a bushfire that has been alight for six weeks.
On Wednesday, the chair of the next major UN climate summit pointedly thanked Australia’s state and territory governments – but not the Morrison government – for committing to targets of net zero emissions by 2050.
Last month, the IUCN World Conservation Congress passed a motion moved by an alliance of Australian environment groups that called on the Morrison government to show leadership and ensure its planned reforms of Australia’s national environmental laws delivered more for the environment, including world heritage areas.
“Australia’s World Heritage sites are places of outstanding global significance and it is our privilege – and responsibility – to lead in protecting these values, including from the impacts of climate change,” said Rachel Lowry, WWF-Australia’s chief conservation officer.
Lowry said a stronger government plan to address the climate crisis and reduce emissions was “essential for these special places to remain”.
“There is no doubt that if we are to learn from the recent devastating bushfires, as well as the findings in this report, we must commit to regenerating Australia and setting our nation on a pathway where both people and nature benefit,” she said.
The Australian Marine Conservation Society’s Great Barrier Reef campaign manager, Dr Lissa Schindler, said: “The federal government’s refusal to act decisively on climate change is unforgivable when they know that global heating is so dangerous for our reef.
“We call on the federal government to take its role as custodians of our international icon seriously by committing to a pathway compatible with 1.5C of heating in a wide-ranging national climate change policy,” she said.
A spokesman for the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, said the report reflected the extreme weather events Australia had experience over the past 12 months.
He noted the IUCN had reviewed Australia’s protection and management of world heritage sites favourably, which he said was due to the “significant work” of federal, state and territory governments at those sites.
“Australia is committed to playing its role in a global response to climate change, it is investing unprecedented amounts protecting the reef, in bushfire wildlife and habitat recovery and in supporting our world heritage places,” the minister’s spokesman said.
The IUCN’s director general, Bruno Oberle, said countries owed it to future generations to protect the world’s “most precious places”.
He said the report showed “the damage climate change is wreaking on natural world heritage, from shrinking glaciers to coral bleaching to increasingly frequent and severe fires and droughts”.
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