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21 February 21
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Nine Texans on How They Survived a Frozen Week
Arya Sundaram, Irene Vázquez, Pauly Denetclaw, and Megan Kimble, Texas Observer
As a winter storm sent temperatures plummeting across Texas this week and the state’s power grid approached total failure, millions of people were left freezing in their homes without heat. Crises have compounded crises as residents are forced to contend with single digit temperatures, icy roads, non-potable or non-existent water sources, and food shortages—all amid an ongoing pandemic. We spoke with people around the state about their experiences and how they made do during this long, cold week.
ichael Gienger
Pastor at Galveston Central Church
Location: Galveston
At 2 a.m. on Monday morning, the power went out at Galveston Central Church. “Well shit,” thought Michael Gienger, a 32-year-old pastor there. “What are we going to do?”
Over the weekend, Gienger had gathered food donations and cots from the Salvation Army in advance of the looming polar vortex, transforming the church into a makeshift shelter that volunteers dubbed “Hotel Central.” He began sleeping there himself on Sunday evening, and was woken in the middle of the night by volunteers after the main hallway light went black. Luckily the stove and oven were gas-powered, but the building temperature soon dipped into the 40s. By Monday night, the power hadn’t returned. Then late Tuesday night, the water shut off. They started using buckets filled with garbage bags to dispose of waste. Now, they fill up coffee pots with a neighbor’s pool water to flush the toilets.
Many who are staying at the shelter are homeless people that the church serves meals to every Sunday. Among them are a man who lives in a parking garage downtown, a man who works in the church’s bike repair shop, and a man nicknamed “preacher” whose ceiling caved in from a busted pipe on Tuesday.
“It’s life or death,” Gienger says of the conditions in Galveston, where beaches are covered in snow and people have frozen to death. On Tuesday, the Galveston county medical examiner’s office asked for a refrigerated truck to store the bodies of at least 20 people who died during the power outages and below-freezing weather. “Hotel Central” will likely come to a close on Friday, Gienger says, after the freezing temperatures subside. Gienger is grateful his church could respond to the crisis, but he thinks, “What choice do we have?” Gienger is frustrated by what he says are failures of the housing system for homeless people. “Why do people not have affordable housing?” he says. “What would happen if people simply had roofs over their heads?” —Arya Sundaram
Arthur White
Incarcerated
Location: Harris County Jail
For the last few days, Arthur White, 32, has held his bowel movements. The toilets in the Harris County Jail, where he’s incarcerated, are overflowing with feces and urine, according to White and multiple other people jailed inside. White says the toilets have been clogged for three days. “People are crapping on top of more crap,” he says. “It’s horrendous.”
Without showers, he says he feels “close to despair.” The jail has no hand sanitizer or running water, he says. On top of the storm conditions, getting masks has been an issue throughout the pandemic. White says the guards refuse to give them fresh masks, suggesting they keep masks on for a week or as many days as possible.
White says the power has been turning on and off, and estimates that the temperature inside is around 40 degrees. Some people eat their meals with blankets on, to fend off the cold. When they sleep, he says they have only a sheet to put over their mats, and a thin blanket. The only way he can stay warm is in his bunk. But, he says, a vent above him pulls in cold air, which is constantly blowing.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office posted on Twitter that the jail ran on a backup generator power for much of Monday, but “during that time… the people entrusted into our care received 3 cold meals on schedule and extra blankets.” But White says he received no additional blankets. “They’re not doing anything extra,” he says. “It’s way, way below minimum.” White says he hasn’t received enough bottled water or food. On Monday night, he says they had no dinner because, according to a guard, the man in charge of feeding them left.
The Observer also spoke with A.D. Wooten, a man living in a separate building from White, on Wednesday night. At that time, he said he had only received two approximately 16-ounce bottles of water in the past 16 hours. Because they lack running water, some men have used this water to wash their hands and faces and brush their teeth. Wooten also complained of clogged toilets and “reeking” air, and he also says guards are sleeping on blow-up mattresses because they haven’t been able to leave.
“Does [Mayor Sylvester] know about this?” Wooten says. “If all hands are on deck, why are our feet and hands still tied inside of here?”
On Wednesday, Krish Gundu, the executive director of Texas Jail Project received dozens of calls from people held in the Harris County Jail, awaiting trial, including White and Wooten. “We could have prevented this mounting public health crisis by taking a smart approach to depopulating our jails,” says Gundu. “But we chose not to. Now we have to pay the price.” White and Wooten have yet to be convicted of a crime, like most people stuck in Texas jails.
During the pandemic, a major issue in Texas jails has been lack of soap, Gundu says. During the storm, an incarcerated man she’s been talking to for over a year told her that he had “good news”: Because no one’s using running water, there’s finally enough soap. —Arya Sundaram
Lisa Seger
Dairy farmer
Location: Fields Store
Lisa Seger has weathered an onslaught of climate catastrophes in the last several years. She’s seen wildfires, floods, and hurricanes wreak havoc on the goat farm and dairy she runs with her husband in Waller County, 45 miles northwest of Houston. The farm survived the Riley Road Fire, one of thousands of fires in 2011 that burned 4 million acres across the state. After the Memorial Day and Tax Day floods hit in 2015 and 2016, Seger, 50, prepared for Hurricane Harvey in 2017 by digging ditches on their property to divert water from the animals’ barn. But the Icepocalypse, as she refers to the current winter storm, is her first multi-day hard freeze.
Intermittent electricity this week meant Seger had to plan ahead, as the farm’s milk machines and the well they get their water from both depend on electricity.
During the intervals without power, Seger made lists of the farm work to be done that needed electricity, “making sure that we were absolutely ready to go the second the power came on.”
She shared information about mutual aid funds on Twitter and posted photos of their goats in scarfs and sweaters in the guest room of their house. Concerned about the animals’ safety, Seger has kept the goats in her home on and off since Sunday—the longest they’ve ever stayed inside.
“We’re their caregivers, and if I’m cold, they’re cold,” Seger says. “You just worry. Theoretically, the animals are better at it than us. They are livestock and people keep goats in the Alps. But it’s really hard to believe it, because we’re so miserable, that they could be OK.”
The lack of power and cold temperatures doesn’t just mean discomfort. Other farmers lost their crops in the freeze and will be without a livelihood for months as crops regrow. Seger stands to lose a week of sales, since the cheesemaking process requires climate-control. To have cheese by Saturday, she has to start Wednesday. “I’m trying really hard not to feel sorry for myself,” she says. —Irene Vázquez
Megan Strahan
Science teacher
Location: Crowley
Megan Strahan, 31, counts herself as one of the lucky ones. She lost power in her home south of Fort Worth for a total of 24 hours over Monday and Tuesday. One of her fellow science teachers, who she’s been texting to check on, didn’t have power for 36 hours. Another teacher hasn’t had water since Sunday, so she’s been melting snow.
Strahan’s energy provider said her power would be back on at 9:30 p.m. on Monday, after hours of on-and-off outages. But 9:30 came and went, and the house was still dark. So, she pulled mattresses for her, her husband, and their two kids, 5 and 8 years old, into the living room and piled on blankets, praying that the heat would come back. Then her text messages stopped going through, and her calls wouldn’t connect. She watched the temperature fall on the thermostat after she set it to 67 degrees: 52 degrees at 4 a.m., then 49 degrees at 9 a.m. That’s when she and her husband decided to leave. They bundled up in multiple layers and blankets and drove to the house of a friend who posted that they had power on Facebook. They returned home on Tuesday, after she got an alert that their power was back on.
Strahan, who teaches at Southwest High School in Fort Worth, worries about her students, who have been traumatized not only by the fallout of this week’s storm, but also the pandemic, and the financial difficulties of this past year. A majority of her students are low-income, and most are Black or Latino.
She’s sent her students messages to check-in, and received a few short notes back from students who say they’re OK. What worries her the most are the students she hasn’t heard from. “I don’t know what I don’t know,” she says. “They’re cold, and there’s nothing they can do about it. I feel helpless as an adult. I can only imagine how they feel.”
Tuesday night, she was convinced that the power was going to go off again. So she kept an overnight bag packed and blankets tucked in the car. It wasn’t until around 10 p.m. that she finally felt comfortable tucking her kids into bed. “I could power the whole neighborhood with the amount of anxiety energy I am letting off into the universe,” she says. —Arya Sundaram
Cressandra Thibodeaux
Filmmaker
Location: Houston
After Cressandra Thibodeaux’s power went out early Monday morning, she got desperate to find a place to bring her elderly mother. So she started calling her ex boyfriends: “I was very fortunate to have all my exes live in Texas, literally,” she says with a laugh. Her most recent ex, who lives 12 blocks away, happened to be out of town and had a generator in his shed. As the sun started to go down, she bundled up her 87-year-old mother, Marilyn Thibodeaux, and made the trek to his house.
Her mother didn’t understand why they needed to go. She was recovering from a case of COVID-19 that had landed her in the emergency room and was suffering from temporary dementia brought on by the virus. “At points, she didn’t know who I was. She couldn’t talk,” Cressandra says.
Marilyn, who had been living with Cressandra, 54, for two years, had just begun to regain her memory. But the storm was too much. “My mom couldn’t grasp the severity of the situation.” She kept turning off the faucets that Cressandra had left dripping. She didn’t want to get out of the bed where she and Cressandra slept together, nestled between their two dogs, their faces covered by blankets to protect from the cold. “COVID left her exhausted,” Cressandra says. “You can imagine a lot of people who were 87 who did not want to leave the bed, who believed it would get better. That’s what my mom kept saying.”
Now that they’re relatively warm and safe, Cressandra’s spirits have buoyed. She’s offered up her ex’s house as a warming station for friends and neighbors without power, creating an unexpected community during the disaster. “I just got back from the grocery store and I just want to say, in this whole year of isolation, in that grocery store, there were the hottest guys. Houston! Who knew?” she says. “It’s funny to imagine you’re flirting during the apocalypse.” —Megan Kimble
Lupe Garcia
Resident Council President
Location: Austin
Lupe Garcia only had four blankets in her apartment when the power went out, but she knew her neighbors needed them more than she did. When she called her 89-year-old neighbor to check in and found out her neighbor’s son was there, she had him come pick up the blankets to distribute, fearful of walking on the icy pathways of the apartment complex herself.
Since Garcia, 71, retired and moved to Santa Rita Courts five years ago, she’s become a sort of community organizer at the public housing complex. An East Austin native, she is constantly on the phone with her neighbors to find out what they need and how she can help. “I work to give everybody a little bit of something, a little bit of hope, a little bit of comfort,” she says. “I want to make them feel like they’re not forgotten.”
She’s organized back-to-school backpack and shoe drives for the 100 or so kids who live at the courts. She regularly fundraises to help seniors buy food and cleaning supplies. She started an annual women’s conference for residents, hosting motivational speakers and educational courses.
On Wednesday, after nearly three days straight without power, when her feet had become icicles on the concrete floors, she knew she needed to do more to help her neighbors. She started calling the people who had sponsored her other community drives, asking for donations. By Thursday morning, she was handing out blankets, diapers, and bottles of water.
Garcia is frustrated by state leaders who have focused on deflecting blame rather than getting help to those who need it. “You know, we got another storm coming in. Let’s figure out how we’re going to do this.” She says her organizing efforts are “a lot of work, but I enjoy it. I try not to keep myself, you know, in the negative mode. Because that doesn’t help.” —Megan Kimble
Jana Brewer
Retired therapist
Location: Pottsboro
On Tuesday evening, Jana Brewer, a member of the Cherokee Nation, began to panic when she realized that she wouldn’t have enough candles to last until the weather began to warm later in the week. The next morning, she grabbed an empty tuna can, string, and olive oil to make an oil lamp that she hoped would work for a few days. It was all she had left to make a light source.
“I think it’s a pretty cruel thing that the government officials don’t have the wherewithal to serve the community and didn’t anticipate the needs of the community,” Brewer says.
Brewer, 65, lives near the small, rural town of Pottsboro, off Lake Texoma on the Texas-Oklahoma border. When she bought her home, the neighbors told her that the one-way road out, a steep hill to Pottsboro, wouldn’t be a problem because they “don’t get winter like that here.” But on Sunday, it snowed and the temperature dropped to 4 degrees. Then the power started going on and off. For four days, she would be alone in her home without electricity. The snow storm made it impossible for her car to make it up the steep, slick hill—known by locals as “suicide hill”—and out of her neighborhood.
During the day, she wore three shirts, a pair of jeans, three pairs of socks, gloves, a hat, and a scarf to keep warm. At night, Brewer slept under five quilts. On Monday, the low was minus 1. She happened to have reflectix, a double reflective insulation roll, for an upcoming camping trip, which she used to insulate the windows in her room. After the water pipes in her guest bathroom and laundry room froze, she used a tiny tea light to thaw the pipes in the bathroom. A day and a half later, the water began to flow again.
“It takes a lot of time and energy to monitor all these different types of fuel to heat your home: Candles, oil lamps, those are all fire hazards, left unintended,” Brewer says. “Most of my day was just spent monitoring candles and oil lamps.”
With no help from state or local agencies, her neighbors came together to help each other. One would call every day to check on her. Another brought her a butane camp stove to cook on. And another drove to her home in a utility terrain vehicle to see if she needed anything. Eventually, the neighborhood of 15 homes created a list of things people needed, to share what resources they had.
The power returned on Wednesday. Brewer says her survival was due to her optimism that everything would be alright. —Pauly Denetclaw
Anna Maria
Organizer with Mutual Aid Houston
Location: Pearland
After almost a year of distributing financial assistance and providing jail support during the Black Lives Matter protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers at Mutual Aid Houston (MAH) were in the middle of a much-needed break. Then the storm hit this week. When organizer Anna Maria, 23, lost power at 3:30 a.m. on Monday, all she could think about was how the city should have warned residents about what was coming. The group snapped back into action.
Power losses across the city knocked out necessary services like heat alongside the communication channels that mutual aid groups rely on. Without the internet, it was difficult to centralize and disseminate information. Icy roads locked organizers and those in need in their houses without the experience or equipment to navigate their neighborhoods.
“I think even we did not fully grasp how bad it was,” Anna Maria says. “We don’t have a frame of reference for this kind of weather or what it does physically. So once it hit we had a much more intimate understanding of just how woefully unprepared we all are.”
Organizers started calling people one by one and sent texts whenever they could get a signal. Neighbors walked on foot to deliver supplies. Anna Maria stayed up until 5 a.m. on Thursday morning helping people access food and water drop offs and other resources.
“We know exactly what people need, we literally can’t get it to them,” Anna Maria says. “Even during hurricanes, which are just so destructive and horrifying, there is some infrastructure in place: Let’s hop in a boat and go help people. But nobody has winter tires and nobody has experience driving on icy roads. We understand that we can raise money, but right now people need food, water, and heat, and the roads are a death trap.”
Like many, Anna Maria is angry with those in power who didn’t act to help their communities. But she’s fiercely proud of those people who did. “Any kind of mutual aid work proves again and again that American individualism has not, in fact, been enough to stamp out human beings’ innate instinct to have each other’s backs in every catastrophe, in every state.” —Irene Vázquez
Neri Curiel
Organizer with LUPE
Location: Donna
Neri Curiel’s 3-year-old daughter likes to sleep with the bathroom light on because she’s scared of the dark. Early Monday morning, Curiel, 39, heard a noise; when she got up, she realized the bathroom light was out. They’d lost power. Curiel packed her family into her bed, stacking blankets on top of them as they piled together for warmth.
Like many in the Rio Grande Valley, Curiel and her husband and four kids, lost electricity, gas, and water, all at once. Many of Curiel’s neighbors in Donna, a small colonia, are undocumented, or in families with mixed immigration statuses, and the vast majority are poor. After her neighborhood lost power, she could tell that the neighborhoods closer to McAllen were still lit up.
On Tuesday, her husband waited for two hours in line to buy a gas tank so they could turn on their stove to cook. Since they didn’t have power, she and the kids ate dinner early in the evenings while it was still light out. Her husband, who works in a bodega, had to brave the icy roads to go to work; he didn’t get home until dark and ate by candlelight. Curiel struggled to explain to her two younger kids who are disabled, why the lights were off, why there was no heat, why they couldn’t turn on the television.
As a community organizer with La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), Curiel tried to help however she could: distributing money or finding out who had gas through a WhatsApp group. Community members helped one another, businesses offered hot food, and churches set up food pantries. “The wealthy have a more organized infrastructure,” she says. “The communities here are always left for last.”
Curiel was at a food pantry when her 21-year-old daughter called her on Wednesday to exclaim, “The light’s back!” As of Thursday, her power was still going in and out throughout the day.
Curiel worries the lights will go out again, and the water too. And she worries about the future: Colonias in the Valley have for years been ravaged by flooding, and climate change is only making conditions worse. Curiel believes structural changes are long overdue. “We were just emerging into the light from this pandemic. And now this came and threw us into chaos,” she says. —Arya Sundaram and Irene Vázquez
Merrick Garland speaks in Wilmington, Delaware, in January. (photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Merrick Garland Vows to Target White Supremacists as Attorney General
Martin Pengelly, Guardian UK
Pengelly writes:
t his Senate hearing on Monday, attorney general nominee Merrick Garland will pledge to prosecute “white supremacists and others” who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January, in support of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his election defeat.The pledge was contained in Garland’s opening testimony for the session before the Senate judiciary committee, released on Saturday night.
“If confirmed,” Garland said, ‘I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on 6 January – a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”
Five people including a police officer died as a direct result of the attack on the Capitol, before which Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” against the result of the presidential election. Trump lost to Joe Biden by 306-232 in the electoral college and by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote.
More than 250 participants in the Capitol riot have been charged. As NPR reported, “the defendants are predominantly white and male, though there were exceptions.
“Federal prosecutors say a former member of the Latin Kings gang joined the mob, as did two Virginia police officers. A man in a ‘Camp Auschwitz’ sweatshirt took part, as did a Messianic Rabbi. Far-right militia members decked out in tactical gear rioted next to a county commissioner, a New York City sanitation worker, and a two-time Olympic gold medalist.”
In his testimony, Garland made reference to his role from 1995 to 1997 in supervising the prosecution of the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City Bombing, a white supremacist atrocity in which 168 people including 19 children were killed.
Trump was impeached for a second time on a charge of inciting an insurrection but was acquitted after only seven Republicans joined Democrats in the Senate in voting to convict, 10 short of the majority needed.
“It is a fitting time,” Garland said, “to reaffirm that the role of the attorney general is to serve the rule of law and to ensure equal justice under the law.”
The 68-year-old federal appeals judge was famously denied even a hearing in 2016 when Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell blocked him as Barack Obama’s third pick for the supreme court.
Biden’s selection of Garland for attorney general is seen as a conciliatory move in a capital controlled by Democrats but only by slim margins, the Senate split 50-50 with Vice-President Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote.
In his testimony, Garland said he would be independent from Biden, being sure to “strictly regulate communication with the White House” and working as “the lawyer … for the people of the United States”.
Trump pressured his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to do his bidding, then saw his second, William Barr, largely do so, running interference on the investigation of Russian election interference and ties between Trump and Moscow.
If confirmed, Garland will face sensitive decisions over matters including Trump, now exposed to criminal and civil investigation, and Hunter Biden, the new president’s son whose tax affairs are in question as he remains a target for much of the right.
Some on the left have expressed concern that Garland might be too politically moderate.
Black Lives Matter founder LaTosha Brown, for example, told the Guardian: “My concern is that he does not have a strong civil rights history … even when Obama nominated him, one of the critiques was that he was making a compromise with what he thought was a ‘clean’ candidate to get through.”
In his testimony, Garland said justice department civil rights work must be improved.
“Communities of colour and other minorities still face discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system,” he said, “and bear the brunt of the harm caused by pandemic, pollution, and climate change.”
Garland is expected to be confirmed.
Erik Prince arrives for the New York Young Republican Club Gala at The Yale Club of New York City in Manhattan in New York City, New York, U.S., November 7, 2019. (photo: Jeenah Moon/Reuters)
Blackwater Founder Erik Prince Accused of Helping Evade UN Libya Sanctions
Michelle Nichols, Reuters
Nichols writes:
rik Prince, the private security executive and supporter of former U.S. President Donald Trump, “at the very least” helped evade an arms embargo on Libya, according to excerpts from a United Nations report seen by Reuters.
Independent U.N. sanctions monitors accused Prince of proposing a private military operation - known as ‘Project Opus’ - to Libya’s eastern-based commander Khalifa Haftar in April 2019 and helping procure three aircraft for it.
A spokesperson for Prince denied the accusations in the annual U.N. report, which was submitted on Thursday to the Security Council Libya sanctions committee and is due to be made public next month.
“Erik Prince had absolutely nothing to do with any operation in Libya in 2019, or at any other time,” the spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters.
The U.N. monitors wrote in the report that they had “identified that Erik Prince made a proposal for the operation to Khalifa Haftar in Cairo, Egypt on, or about, 14 April 2019.” Haftar was in Cairo at the time to meet Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
The report described Prince’s proposal as “a well-funded private military company operation” designed to provide Haftar with armed assault helicopters, intelligence surveillance aircraft, maritime interdiction, drones and cyber, intelligence and targeting capabilities.
“The Project Opus plan also included a component to kidnap or terminate individuals regarded as high value targets in Libya,” the monitors wrote.
Libya initially descended into chaos after the NATO-backed overthrow of leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 when the U.N. Security Council imposed an arms embargo. The country has been divided since 2014 between the internationally recognized government in its west and Haftar’s eastern-based forces.
PROJECT FAILURES
The U.N. monitors reported that the air and maritime component of ‘Project Opus’ had to be aborted in June 2019 after Haftar was unimpressed with the aircraft procured for the operations and “made threats against the team management.”
A South African team leader evacuated 20 private military operatives to Malta on inflatable boats, the monitors said.
“Project Opus private military operatives were deployed to Libya for a second time in April and May 2020 in order to locate and destroy high value targets,” said the U.N. monitors, but the operation again had to be aborted due to security concerns.
The rival Libyan administrations agreed a ceasefire in October, but have not pulled back their forces. Haftar is supported by the United Arab Emirates and Russia, while the government is backed by Turkey. Egypt had backed Haftar, but Sisi last week offered his country’s support to Libya’s interim government.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has demanded an end to foreign interference in Libya.
Prince - the brother of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos - founded the private security firm Blackwater and was a pioneer in private military contracting after U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003.
Blackwater sparked international outrage in 2007 when its employees shot and killed more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. One of the employees was convicted of murder in December 2018 and three others were convicted of manslaughter. Trump pardoned the four men in December last year.
A police car. (photo: OFC Pictures/Shutterstock)
Newly Released Video: Homeless Black Man Fatally Shot by Sheriff's Deputy After Jaywalking
Zack Linly, The Root
Linly writes:
ime and time again, police officers across America prove that they are utterly useless when it comes to dealing with conflicts involving the most vulnerable among us. It doesn’t have to be all cops; there have been enough instances where officers arrived on scenes where no real potential for violence was evident—particularly situations involving Black children or Black people struggling with mental illness and/or addiction—and failed to deescalate things during incidents that ended violently because cops either “feared for their lives,” or couldn’t handle their authority being challenged.
On Sept. 23, last year, 42-year-old Kurt Andras Reinhold—a homeless man who struggled with mental illness, according to his family—was fatally shot after an altercation with sheriff’s deputies in San Clemente, California. On Wednesday, new video and audio footage of the incident—which was also recorded by bystander’s cellphone—was released by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, according to Vice News.
Vice reports that the newly released footage was taken from police dash-cam and a surveillance camera from a nearby motel. The footage shows that the deputies assigned to the homeless outreach team—who stopped Reinhold for jaywalking—weren’t even quite sure if Reinhold had done anything illegal.
From Vice:
At the beginning of the dashboard camera video released Wednesday, one deputy can be heard saying of Reinhold, “Okey-doke, he’s seen you. He’s seen you, copper.”
“Watch this—he’s going to jaywalk,” a second deputy responded before Reinhold crossed the street.
The deputies then seemingly questioned whether Reinhold’s actions were illegal, with the second deputy noting, “It’s controlled, man,” meaning there are traffic lights at the intersection.
“I don’t know, dude,” the first deputy said.
“It is,” the second deputy responded.
“Don’t make case law,” the deputy added.
“It’s not case law,” the first deputy said as he drove the police cruiser out of a parking lot and toward Reinhold, who stood waiting on a sidewalk. Once the car reached Reinhold, he walked toward the back of the cruiser and could no longer be seen on the dashboard camera. The deputies are also not visible.
It’s almost as if the officers, who weren’t even sure if the minor traffic violation was being committed, had the option of leaving Reinhold the fuck alone. Seems like the worst thing that would have happened is a man would have gotten away with jaywalking, but no one would have died in that instance. Instead, this happened:
“What’s going on, man?” one of the deputies—it’s unclear which one—can be heard asking. “How you doing?”
“Hey, hey—you need to stop,” the first deputy told Reinhold.
The deputy added, “Are you going to stop, or are we going to have to make you stop?”
“For what?” Reinhold said.
“For jaywalking,” the first deputy responded.
“What are you talking about?” Reinhold shouted. “I’m walking.”
After that, Reinhold—who is still not visible on the dashboard camera—began to yell, “Get off,” repeatedly asking the deputies, “For what?”
The first deputy asked that Reinhold get on the sidewalk and out of the street, according to the dashboard camera footage. Reinhold can be heard yelling in the video, “Stop touching me.” Bystander cellphone video taken around this time shows that Reinhold repeatedly swatted one of the deputy’s hands away during a confrontation in the middle of the road.
So, a struggle ensued as the deputies—identified as Eduardo Duran and Jonathan Israel, according to the Los Angeles Times—tackled Reinhold to the ground. One officer can be heard shouting that Reinhold had his gun and that’s when the shots are fired.
John Taylor, an attorney who represents Reinhold’s family, said that the video doesn’t show Reinhold going for an officer’s gun. He said Reinhold, who was in a chokehold at the time, was “trying to get a hold of something on the officer to get away from him,” and that he was “ grabbing onto whatever he can to push himself away.”
He also said that he and the family wonder why the officers felt the need to approach Reinhold at all.
“We were always wondering—why did they stop him?” Taylor said. “This man is in no distress, he is not a threat of danger to himself or others.”
In a “critical incident video,” Sgt. Dennis Breckner justified the actions of the deputies by saying that Reinhold was “refusing to obey the deputies’ commands to go back to the sidewalk, and is actively resisting the deputies’ attempt to detain him.”
“During the use of force, one deputy is heard on the witness’s cellphone video saying, ‘he’s got my gun’ multiple times,” Breckner said later in the video. He said that two shots were fired after which the deputies “gained control of the man, assessed his condition and performed CPR.” Reinhold was later pronounced dead at the scene.
A spokesperson for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department told Vice that investigations that are being conducted internally and by the Orange County District Attorney’s Office are ongoing and that “no decisions regarding discipline [of the deputies] will be made until the investigations are complete.”
VIDEO ADDED:
'Our people are born with a spiritual connection to the land that we all feel and we all know and our elders teach us about,' said Willa Powless, Klamath Tribes' council member at large. (photo: Gillian Flaccus/AP)
'Piecing Together a Broken Heart': Native Americans Rebuild Territories They Lost
Hallie Golden, Guardian UK
Golden writes: "Tribes across the US are buying back land lost during and after the colonization period on the open market."
ore than six decades after a 1,705-acre patchwork of meadows, wetlands and timberland in southern Oregon was taken from the Klamath Tribes, the Native American community has found its way back to the territory – by way of the real estate market.
Over the summer, the tribes discovered the land was up for sale, so as part of their large-scale effort to reacquire territory that was historically theirs, they prepared an offer. Although another buyer nearly swooped in, the tribes’ purchase more than doubles their current holdings, and extends their territory to the base of Yamsay Mountain, an important site for prayer and spiritual journeys for the community.
Willa Powless, Klamath Tribes’ council member at large, said it was major step toward piecing together a “broken heart”.
“Our people are born with a spiritual connection to the land that we all feel and we all know and our elders teach us about,” she said. Getting back that “big of a piece of land, especially undeveloped land, is really powerful. And it’s probably one of the most healing processes we’ve gone through in a long time.”
The Klamath purchase is just the latest example of tribes across the US buying back land lost during and after the colonization period on the open market.
Sarah Krakoff, a law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and an expert on Native American law, said she has noticed the rise in such acquisitions over the last several decades after tribes were able to rebuild their governmental functions and obtain funds.“The 70s were the starting point, but then it takes a while to develop all the kinds of infrastructure – you need legal expertise, management savvy and expertise, and ways to acquire or arrange for transactions,” she said.
The Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, for example, has managed to buy back two-thirds of its original 65,432-acre reservation, much of which was lost through “deceit and trickery”, said Bobbi Webster, the tribe’s public relations director. They have been able to get the majority of it back within just the last 20 years, purchasing it through individuals who put it up for sale and real estate companies who put it on the market.
The Oneida “really began to flourish or expand our economic development with the onset of gaming in the 1980s, so generating revenues from our gaming operations, we were able to identify set-asides throughout the years to purchase land”, said Webster.
The Yurok Tribe in California has purchased about 80,000 acres in just the past decade. Frankie Myers, vice-chairperson, said the tribe is fortunate that most of its ancestral territory is owned by one logging company, so it only has to negotiate with one seller.
But, he said, “it’s still a daunting task to come up with these huge amounts of money to pay for it and how you pay it back”.
The process of reacquiring this land stands in sharp contrast to how they lost it in the first place.
About 150 years ago, the Klamath Tribes ceded more than 23m acres of traditional lands to the US, signing a treaty to ultimately establish a reservation of about 1.8m acres. But those acres were steadily whittled down and by 1954, the federal government forcibly terminated their tribal recognition and the community lost its remaining thousands of acres.
Now, with their federal recognition back intact, the Klamath Tribes are working to reacquire much more of this lost land in order to protect the environment and enhance their fishing, hunting and foraging rights.
“I hear elders say, ‘The land doesn’t belong to us, we belong to it.’ And I think that’s true,” said Clayton Dumont, Klamath council member at large. “The more of it we get back, the more we can care for it, the healthier the land will be and the healthier we will be.”
Once the land is bought, it is an arduous process to obtain full governing authority over it, including being able to make laws and also impose taxes while typically being immune from state taxes. To do so, tribes must convert the parcel into trust land, by which the federal government holds it in trust on the tribe’s behalf.
According to the US Department of Interior, about 56m acres of Native lands have been put into trust.
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, in North Carolina, currently has two applications in the middle of this process, said the tribe’s principal chief, Richard Sneed. One includes Kituwah, a town he described as the birthplace of the Cherokee and “the most sacred piece of Cherokee land to all Cherokees everywhere”.
It has been about three years since the application process was initiated, and Sneed said just a couple of weeks ago, he received a letter from the Bureau of Indian Affairs saying they had only reached step eight of the 16-step process.
The Klamath Tribes could be in for a long wait with their latest purchase. But even just purchasing this piece of land is a key accomplishment for them. In the past, they say, they have dealt with instances of racism and negativity from the broader local community when it comes to them getting more land.
As they maneuvered their way through this latest deal, they have kept the reacquisition extremely quiet, even delaying any interviews with the local paper about it and not publicly releasing the price they paid. But now that it has been finalized, the community is planning a celebration for the summer, and also already looking toward their next land acquisition.
“For me it’s super significant, but I don’t want to be complacent and be satisfied,” Jared Hall, the Klamath Tribes planning director.
“I want to stay hungry in the land acquisition effort. I think if you stay complacent and you don’t want to wake up and try to fight for more land,” and instead a tribe is “happy with what you got … I think that’s what you’ll get”.
A vigil in Myanmar. (photo: Stringer/Reuters)
Huge Crowds in Myanmar Undeterred by Worst Day of Violence Following Coup
Reuters
Excerpt: "Huge crowds marched in Myanmar on Sunday to denounce a Feb. 1 military coup in a show of defiance after the bloodiest episode of the campaign for democracy the previous day, when security forces fired on protesters, killing two."
The military has been unable to quell the demonstrations and a civil disobedience campaign of strikes against the coup and the detention of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and others, even with a promise of new elections and stern warnings against dissent.
Tens of thousands of people massed peacefully in the second city of Mandalay, where Saturday’s killings took place, witnesses said.
“They aimed at the heads of unarmed civilians. They aimed at our future,” a young protester told the crowd.
The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that despite “unlawful demonstrations, incitements of unrest and violence, the authorities concerned are exercising utmost restraint through minimum use of force to address the disturbances”, adding they were maintaining public safety in line with domestic laws and international practices.
In the main city of Yangon, thousands of mostly young people gathered at different sites to chant slogans and sing.
“Us young people have our dreams but this military coup has created so many obstacles,” said Ko Pay in Yangon. “That’s why we come out to the front of the protests.”
In Myitkyina in the north, people laid flowers for the dead protesters. Big crowds marched in the central towns of Monywa and Bagan, in Dawei and Myeik in the south, Myawaddy in the east and Lashio in the northeast, posted pictures showed.
At the tourist spot of Inle Lake, people including Buddhist monks took to a flotilla of boats holding aloft portraits of Suu Kyi and signs saying “military coup - end”.
The more than two weeks of protests had been largely peaceful until Saturday, unlike previous episodes of opposition during nearly half a century of direct military rule to 2011.
The violence looked unlikely to end the agitation.
“The number of people will increase ... We won’t stop,” protester Yin Nyein Hmway said in Yangon.
Several Western countries that have condemned the coup decried the violence against protesters.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said the United States was “deeply concerned”. France, Singapore, Britain and Germany also condemned the violence and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said lethal force was unacceptable.
Sunday’s Foreign Ministry statement reiterated the junta’s stance that the takeover was constitutional and said remarks by some embassies and foreign countries “are tantamount to flagrant interference in internal affairs of Myanmar”.
Military spokesman Zaw Min Tun has not responded to attempts by Reuters to contact him by telephone for comment.
‘AGGRESSIVE PROTESTERS’
The trouble in Mandalay began with confrontations between the security forces and striking shipyard workers.
Video clips on social media showed members of the security forces firing at protesters and witnesses said they found the spent cartridges of live rounds.
U.N. Special Rapporteur for Myanmar Tom Andrews said he was horrified by the deaths of the two, one of them a teenaged boy.
“From water cannons to rubber bullets to tear gas and now hardened troops firing point blank at peaceful protesters. This madness must end, now,” he said on Twitter.
The state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper said the strikers sabotaged boats at the city’s river port and attacked police with sticks, knives and catapults. Eight policemen and several soldiers were injured, it said.
“Some of the aggressive protesters were also injured due to the security measures conducted by the security force in accordance with the law,” the newspaper said without mentioning the deaths.
Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) called the violence by security forces in Mandalay a crime against humanity.
In an announcement on state-owned media MRTV late on Sunday, authorities said that by planning a big demonstration on Monday, protesters were inciting anarchy and pushing young people towards a path of confrontation “where they will suffer the loss of life”.
FUNERAL FOR PROTESTER
A young woman protester, Mya Thwate Thwate Khaing, became the first death among the demonstrators on Friday. She was shot in the head on Feb. 9 in the capital Naypyitaw.
Hundreds of people attended her funeral on Sunday.
Military media said the bullet that killed her did not come from any gun used by police and so must have been fired by an “external weapon”.
The army says one policeman has died of injuries sustained in a protest.
The army seized power after alleging fraud in Nov. 8 elections that the NLD swept, detaining Suu Kyi and others. The electoral commission dismissed the fraud complaints.
Facebook deleted the military’s main page for repeated violations of its standards “prohibiting incitement of violence and coordinating harm”.
A rights group said 569 people have been detained in connection with the coup.
Air travel. (photo: Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
New Taxes on Flights Could Provide Poor Countries Money to Fight Climate Change
Fiona Harvey, Guardian UK
Harvey writes: "Taxes on international transport could provide new flows of finance to developing countries to help them reduce greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of climate breakdown, a group of climate finance experts have said."
Rich countries are failing on their pledge to provide $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the climate crisis, and the way in which climate finance is organized needs urgent reform, the six academics argue in an article in the journal Nature Climate Change.
They warn that the methods of accounting for climate finance are deeply flawed, and that failing to reform the system would undermine the trust of developing countries in the Paris Agreement.
Romain Weikmans, a co-author of the Nature comment and fellow of the Free University of Brussels, said: “There is not a clear accounting system. The definitions of what constitutes climate finance are vague, and there are many flaws and discrepancies. It is impossible for now to say whether the $100 billion pledge has been met or not. The parameters are so vague that it is impossible to give a definitive answer.”
The group of six experts — from the U.S., Europe, and Bangladesh — call for clear rules on what counts as climate finance. They also suggest that the needs of developing countries should be assessed and plans drawn up for how to meet them, through a global mechanism that would provide longer-term certainty than the current system of ad hoc allocations made each year by rich countries.
They say charging levies on international flights and on bunker fuels — high-carbon fuels used by ships — could provide a steady stream of climate finance to the countries that need it. Emissions from international aviation and shipping are excluded from countries’ emissions tallies under the Paris Agreement, so there are limited ways at present of encouraging their reduction.
The pledge that $100 billion from public and private sources would flow to poor countries each year from 2020 has been a keystone of international climate talks since 2009.
Last year marked the deadline for the pledge’s fulfillment, but because of a time lag in reporting finance, data on how much finance was provided in reality will not be available until next year. Multiple sources suggest the funding provided fell short of the pledge.
The U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, told the Guardian in December that failure to meet the pledge would be a serious stumbling block to success at COP26, the U.N. climate talks due to take place later this year. He urged developed countries to increase their efforts to meet the target this year and provide assurances for developing countries for the future.
No formal decisions on climate finance will be made at COP26, but countries are expected to take the first steps towards a renewed finance pledge to be made formally in 2025, which would increase the flows of investment to the poor world. Such a move is seen as essential to the continued back of the developing world for the Paris Agreement.
Weikmans said COP26 would provide an opportunity for governments to discuss better mechanisms for accounting for climate finance, which should be made clear and transparent.
He said the pledge on climate finance should be measured against the vast flows of finance each year that tend to increase greenhouse gas emissions, such as fossil fuel investments. “The vast majority of international finance is not climate-compatible,” he told the Guardian. “A big question is how much finance is not compatible with the Paris Agreement. That whole part of the investment landscape needs to be completely transformed.”
Climate finance serves two purposes: helping poor countries take action to cut their emissions, for instance through investing in renewable energy and phasing out fossil fuels; and helping them cope with the impacts of climate breakdown, which few have the infrastructure to withstand.
Global emissions were on a rising trend before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, so the former is essential to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, and if poor countries are not helped to adapt to climate change, decades of progress on lifting people from poverty will be reversed.
Guterres has said spending on both aims should be roughly equal, but spending on adaptation lags far behind. Adaptation measures are harder to fund, as private investors can gain a clear return from some emissions-cutting efforts, such as building wind turbines or solar energy, but the benefits to erecting flood barriers or restoring mangrove swamps are more diffuse.
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