12 March 21
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Greg Palast | Fukushima: They Knew
Greg Palast, Greg Palast's Website
Palast writes: "A nuclear plant is built with steel and cement and lies and fraud - and that's the take-a-way for today."
oday is the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima tsunami and meltdown.
A nuclear plant is built with steel and cement and lies and fraud — and that’s the take-a-way for today.
Stacey Abrams has shown REAL courage in Georgia in her opposition to the Vogtle nuclear power plant — the last and only nuclear plant under construction in the USA. As the building trades are behind this multi-billion dollar project, alongside thousands of small Georgia suppliers, this has cost her. But she won’t back charging Georgians ruinous electric bills to finish it.
(The only other plant under construction was South Texas — a plant stopped when its builder, Tokyo Electric Power, pulled the plug in 2011 after its Fukushima plant went down. They were chosen because they had, supposedly, the world’s best safety record.)
As the federal and state lead investigator in the nuclear industry racketeering case Suffolk v. LILCO, I dug into the Fukushima meltdown. They were required to harden the plant against an earthquake the size that hit on March 11 — but never did. And the back-up generators were NEVER flooded — their shafts snapped, as happened again and again in emergencies in the US.
This is part of my chapter from Vultures’ Picnic on Fukushima, if you’re curious about such stuff.
“Completely and Utterly Fail in an Earthquake”
The Fukushima story you didn’t hear on CNN
I’ve seen a lot of sick stuff in my career, but this was sick on a new level. Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power plant:
Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. . . . In fact, the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earthquake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could “completely and utterly fail” during an earthquake.
“Utterly fail during an earthquake.” And here in Japan was the quake and here is the utter failure.
The warning was in what the investigations team called The Notebook, which I’m not supposed to have. Good thing I’ve kept a copy anyway, because the file cabinets went down with my office building ….
WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR, NEW YORK, 1986
Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York, power station.
The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything. They did. That’s what happens. Have a nice day.
On March 12, 2011, as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew: the “SQ” had been faked. Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK. He’d flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit. The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0.
Anderson must have been in the gym when they handed out the facts. The 9.0 shake was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away. It was barely a tenth of that power at Fukushima.
I called the US Geological Survey. (Yes, Anderson, journalists are allowed to check out facts.) The plant took a hit of 550 galileos. (The “Richter scale” is TV talk — “galileos” measure ground movement at the danger point). I contacted my network of engineers. Turns out, Tokyo power promised government regulators they would raise seismic (earthquake) protection to 600 galileos. They promised. That was 2006, five years before the meltdown. So there you have it. If TEPCO had not played the regulators, Japan would not be suffering a slow-motion Hiroshima.
I was ready to vomit. Because I knew even more. I knew who had designed the plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it: Shaw Construction. Shaw Construction-the latest alias of Stone & Webster, the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.
But I had The Notebook, the diaries of the earthquake inspector for the company. I’d squirreled it out sometime before the Trade Center went down. I shouldn’t have done that. Too bad.
All field engineers keep a diary. Gordon Dick, a supervisor, wasn’t supposed to show his to us. I asked him to show it to us and, reluctantly, he directed me to these notes about the “SQ” tests.
SQ is nuclear-speak for “Seismic Qualification.” A seismically qualified nuclear plant won’t melt down if you shake it. A “seismic event” can be an earthquake or a Christmas present from Al Qaeda. You can’t run a nuclear reactor in the USA or Europe or Japan without certified SQ.
This much is clear from his notebook: This nuclear plant will melt down in an earthquake. The plant dismally failed to meet the Seismic I (shaking) standards required by US and international rules.
Here’s what we learned: Dick’s subordinate at the nuclear plant, Robert Wiesel, conducted the standard seismic review. Wiesel flunked his company. No good. Dick then ordered Wiesel to change his report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, change it from failed to passed. Dick didn’t want to make Wiesel do it, but Dick was under the gun himself, acting on direct command from corporate chiefs. From The Notebook:
Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. [He said,] “I believe these are bad results and I believe it’s reportable,” and then he took the volume of federal regulations from the shelf and went to section 50.55(e), which describes reportable deficiencies at a nuclear plant and [they] read the section together, with Wiesel pointing to the appropriate paragraphs that federal law clearly required [them and the company] to report the Category II, Seismic I deficiencies.
Wiesel then expressed his concern that he was afraid that if he [Wiesel] reported the deficiencies, he would be fired, but that if he didn’t report the deficiencies, he would be breaking a federal law. . . .
The law is clear. It is a crime not to report a safety failure. I could imagine Wiesel standing there with that big, thick rule book in his hands, The Law. It must have been heavy. So was his paycheck. He weighed the choices: Break the law, possibly a jail-time crime, or keep his job.
What did Wiesel do? What would you do?
Why the hell would his company make this man walk the line? Why did they put the gun to his head, to make him conceal mortal danger? It was the money. It’s always the money. Fixing the seismic problem would have cost the plant’s owner half a billion dollars easy. A guy from corporate told Dick, “Bob is a good man. He’ll do what’s right. Don’t worry about Bob.”
That is, they thought Bob would save his job and career rather than rat out the company to the feds.
But I think we should all worry about Bob. The company he worked for, Stone & Webster Engineering, built or designed about a third of the nuclear plants in the United States.
From the fifty-second floor we could look at the Statue of Liberty. She didn’t look back.
President Biden speaks the nation about Covid-19 pandemic during a primetime address from the East Room of the White House on March 11. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
ALSO SEE: Biden Directs States to Make All Adults Eligible
for COVID Vaccines by May 1
Biden Charts a Path to a Post-Pandemic Normal, With July 4 as His Target
Ella Nilsen, Vox
Nilsen writes:
Biden marked a grim anniversary but has hope for the future in his first primetime address.
resident Joe Biden said he sees life in America returning to some semblance of a post-pandemic normal by July 4, predicting that Americans will be able to safely gather in small groups to celebrate Independence Day.
“After this long, hard year, that will make this Independence Day something truly special,” he said during his first major primetime public address as president on Thursday night. “Where we not only mark our independence as a nation but we begin to mark our independence from this virus.”
The president’s speech marked the anniversary of a grim year: Nearly 30 million Americans have been infected with Covid-19, and more than 530,000 have died from it, exceeding the death toll of World Wars I and II, plus the Vietnam War and 9/11. Biden said he carries a card updated with the nation’s death toll on the back of his schedule.
“While it was different for everyone, we all lost something,” Biden said, speaking about families who lost loved ones and couldn’t say goodbye in person, those who lost their jobs, and millions living in isolation for months. “A collective suffering. A collective sacrifice. A year filled with the loss of life and the loss of living for all of us.”
Halfway through his first 100 days, and hours after he signed the American Rescue Plan — a $1.9 trillion bill that puts money towards vaccine distribution, stimulus checks, testing, school reopening, unemployment, and more — into law, Biden was ready to promise better days ahead.
“Finding light in the darkness is a very American thing to do. In fact, it may be the most American thing we do,” he said.
The president laid out a detailed plan to get more vaccines into arms; Biden is using his presidential authority through the Department of Health and Human Services to direct states, tribes, and territories to make all adults eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine no later than May 1, “months ahead of schedule.” Biden’s plan doesn’t yet have a date for vaccinating children.
Administration officials announced they’d increase the number of places where Americans could get a shot, as well as the number of people who could administer shots. Dentists, veterinarians, medical school students, and paramedics would all be considered vaccinators. The administration will also launch a website to help Americans find vaccines near them. Biden’s White House will also put its focus on reopening schools, aided by the $130 billion in the recently passed stimulus bill.
Biden is making a big bet that Americans have been hungering for the government to be more involved in their lives amid the pandemic, not less. His vision is government as a force of good, rather than the everyone-for-themselves era of government that has prevailed since the 1980s.
“Look, we know what we need to do to beat this virus,” Biden said. “Tell the truth. Follow the scientists — the science. Work together. Put trust and faith in our government to fulfill its most important function, which is protecting the American people.”
The White House has often described the fight against the virus as a “wartime” effort, as Covid-19 has taken a tremendous toll on the American public — disproportionately impacting Black and brown communities. Biden echoed that on Thursday night.
“It’s truly a national effort, just like we saw during World War II,” he said, pleading with Americans to get vaccinated and continue to wear masks. “I will not relent until we beat this virus, but I need you. I need every American to do their part.”
Biden’s July 4 date isn’t a full reopening
July 4 is somewhat of a soft opening date for the White House; administration officials stressed they don’t consider that date as when the country should be fully reopened, with people returning to offices or large events like concerts or sporting events being held at full capacity. Senior administration officials also emphasized that the public would have to do their part to curb the spread of variants, continuing to mask and social distance throughout the spring and part of the summer.
“The president will talk about small gatherings like a barbecue in your backyard in your neighborhood. He will be clear that does not mean large events where lots of people gather,” a senior administration official told reporters, adding, “This depends on the progress we make on vaccinations.”
As of mid-March, over 33 million people have been fully vaccinated, and over 64 million people have gotten at least one dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Administration officials have revised their projections of getting every adult vaccinated from the end of summer to the end of May. Around 2.2 million people are being vaccinated per day; if that pace continues, the US could see life return to a pre-Covid normal by summer, Dr. Anthony Fauci told McClatchy recently.
Paired with the passage of the American Rescue Plan, the Biden administration is also putting a large emphasis on reopening schools safely. The Covid relief bill contained $130 billion to get supplies to meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines for reopening, as well as implementing regular screening.
Biden also took time in his speech to push back against a wave of harassment and, in some cases, violence, against Asian Americans after then-President Donald Trump spent months using racist names for the virus and associating it with Asian Americans, as Vox’s Li Zhou reported.
“Too often we’ve turned against one another. A mask, the easiest thing to do to save lives. Sometimes it divides us,” Biden said. “States pitted against one another. Instead of working with each other. Vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans who have been attacked, harassed, blamed and scapegoated.”
“It’s wrong. It’s un-American. And it must stop,” he added.
The coronavirus shaped Biden’s agenda
Returning the country to normalcy has always been Biden’s guiding principle. When he announced he was running for president in May 2019, he framed his candidacy as a return to a post-Trump normalcy. But when the Covid-19 pandemic hit the US in March 2020, and into the following months, Biden and his aides realized that their biggest challenge wasn’t getting the country back to where it was before Trump — it was to leave the country fundamentally stronger and more equal than they found it.
“It wasn’t enough to go back to the normal pre-pandemic and pre-Trump,” Biden’s campaign pollster John Anzalone told me. “We had to do better in terms of the equality of these things. [It] was a different set of challenges than we’ve got a president that isn’t presidential.”
Biden and his aides were betting that the public wanted a quietly capable government — one that wasn’t governed by erratic tweets, and one that the American people could even forget about every once in a while. But throughout his presidential campaign, the Covid-19 pandemic and Trump’s bungled response to it convinced Biden that his presidency needed to make a profound mark.
“Biden’s been very clear: To get back to where we were sets the bar way too low,” Jared Bernstein, who now serves on the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told Vox. “Much like FDR faced a structural crisis of economic insecurity, we’re at a similar place. The vice president recognizes that the extent of market failure here is not something you can fix with a Band-Aid and that structural reforms are necessary.”
What could take more time — and what the Biden administration will turn to next — is getting the nation’s economy fully back on track. Biden’s administration views the just-passed major stimulus bill as their opening salvo to get the country back to full employment as soon as possible, and to open up the nation’s schools.
The Biden White House and lawmakers are already starting to sketch out the parameters of what will come next in the president’s Build Back Better agenda, which will likely include a green infrastructure package among many other items.
But until then, they will be focused on vaccinating millions more Americans.
“We’ve made so much progress,” Biden said. “This is not the time to let up.”
NYPD officers use batons against protesters at East 149th Street and Third Avenue in the Bronx on June 4, 2020. (photo: Gregory Berg)
ALSO SEE: Independent Review Criticizes LA Police for
Handling of George Floyd Protests
Over 700 Complaints About NYPD Officers Abusing Black Lives Matter Protesters, Then Silence
Eric Umansky, ProPublica
Emails show New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board leaders discouraged staff from confronting the NYPD about a lack of cooperation on abuse investigations. The agency declined to disclose how many officers are facing misconduct charges.
t was one of the most brutal police responses to last year’s Black Lives Matter protests.
As hundreds of demonstrators were marching peacefully in the Bronx on the evening of June 4, New York Police Department officers blocked their way from in front and then behind, trapping the protesters in an ever-tightening space that footage shows ultimately spanned about three car-lengths.
Officers soon waded into the crowd, pepper-spraying, kicking, punching and swinging their batons. “People were being stampeded, they would try to get up and they’d get hit again,” recalled Conrad Blackburn, a criminal defense lawyer who was there as a legal observer. “People were bleeding from their heads, with cuts all over their bodies. People couldn’t breathe. They couldn’t see.”
About 60 protesters and bystanders were injured, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. Video footage the organization compiled captures the terror in people’s voices. “We’re being crushed!” one person screams. Another voice pleads, “Mommy!”
At the demonstration, overseeing the NYPD’s response, was the top uniformed officer, Chief of Department Terence Monahan.
A recent federal lawsuit by New York State Attorney General Letitia James says that Monahan “actively encouraged and participated in this unlawful behavior.” Other reports on the protests have also offered scathing criticisms of the NYPD’s response.
But one voice has been conspicuously quiet: The agency whose sole responsibility is to investigate NYPD abuse of civilians.
The New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, or CCRB, received about 750 complaints of officers abusing Black Lives Matter protesters across the city last year. But it has not yet released any findings from investigations into those complaints.
The CCRB declined ProPublica’s request for an accounting of the status of its investigations. It won’t say how many investigations have been closed and how many are still open. Most critically, it won’t disclose how many officers have been charged with misconduct.
The NYPD also did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about any discipline stemming from abuse of protesters.
The lack of disclosure comes as New York City has moved toward more transparency in police discipline. A federal court recently cleared the way for the city to make NYPD officers’ disciplinary records public. Both the CCRB and NYPD have now published officers’ disciplinary records, though critics have noted the limitations of the databases.
Created nearly 70 years ago, originally as a part of the NYPD, the CCRB has long been cautious about crossing the department it is charged with investigating. It is currently overseen by a 15-member board, with members appointed by the mayor, city council, public advocate and police commissioner.
Internal CCRB communications about its investigations into the NYPD response to the protests give a glimpse of the dynamics involved: They show progress on the investigations has been slowed in part because of the NYPD’s recurrent lack of cooperation — which ProPublica has previously detailed — and the CCRB leadership’s own caution about confronting it.
In October, the then-deputy chief of the CCRB’s investigative unit, Dane Buchanan, emailed the agency’s executive director, Jonathan Darche, to say that investigators were “ready to schedule Chief Monahan for an interview.” Buchanan asked Darche whether he’d like to discuss it first “or should we just have an investigator reach out to his office to get his availability?”
Darche, who reports to the board, responded that he would handle it himself and raise it in a meeting with the NYPD the next day.
Buchanan continued to check in, but the issue went unresolved for months. Monahan was reportedly finally scheduled for an interview to be conducted last Friday, just after he had announced he was retiring from the NYPD after 39 years. The move means Monahan would no longer be subject to departmental discipline.
As Monahan said he was retiring, Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed him to help run New York’s COVID-19 response. At a press conference, de Blasio deflected a question about choosing an officer under investigation, saying, “I think the message this sends is that we’re moving the recovery forward.”
In a statement, the CCRB told ProPublica it was “not prepared to interview Chief Monahan in October” and that “it intends to release a report detailing the factors that complicated its investigations into the police response to last summer’s protests.” The CCRB said it will share the results of investigations once they are closed and once federal litigation, such as the attorney general’s suit, is over.
Emails show CCRB staffers had repeatedly raised red flags about the NYPD’s failure to produce evidence. “We continue to be plagued with false negatives in protest cases,” one staffer emailed in the fall, referring to instances where the NYPD claimed it had no body-worn camera footage of an incident only for the CCRB to later discover footage exists.
Another email cited an example where an officer mentioned in an interview she had activated her body cam during a confrontation with a protester. The NYPD had told the CCRB that no such footage existed.
“Allegations of us not providing BWC footage is false,” the NYPD said in a statement, referring to body-worn cameras. “We have spoken with senior executives at the CCRB who state they do not have any complaints and are pleased with the Departments response to providing BWC video.”
Other records were also matters of contention. “We are hitting a critical point with the protest case documents,” Buchanan wrote in October, referring to police records that could help the CCRB identify both officers and civilians. “Many of them have been outstanding for a long time.”
The CCRB did decide to go public about one roadblock. Officers had been refusing to do interviews by video, which the agency was using because of the pandemic. Hundreds of cases were stalled as a result. After the CCRB announced an emergency hearing about it in August, the NYPD ordered officers to participate in video interviews.
But the CCRB stayed quiet on other impediments, and staff were sometimes discouraged from raising them even with the NYPD itself. The agency’s then-head of policy, Nicole Napolitano, wrote in a September email that she had been barred from asking the NYPD about its policies for retention of protest footage. “I just spoke with Matt, and he’s not a fan of me asking TARU any questions,” Napolitano wrote, referring to the CCRB’s general counsel, Matthew Kadushin, and the NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit.
In the same email, Napolitano noted that she had proposed writing a public report on the NYPD’s response to the summer protests but that Kadushin had instructed her not to, saying it was too early.
Napolitano, Buchanan and two other senior staffers, who together had more than 50 years of experience at the agency, were abruptly laid off in November in what the CCRB has described as a needed cost-saving restructuring. (The four staffers declined to comment for this article.)
Emails show Buchanan had continued to follow up about the status of interviewing Monahan until the day he and the others were let go.
The four former staffers filed a lawsuit in January claiming that they were fired in part for “demanding greater accountability and transparency with respect to the handling of complaints of police misconduct against NYPD officers.” The suit, which asserts the four were illegally retaliated against for raising concerns, says Darche “often skewed CCRB policies with a view towards currying favor with the NYPD and/or the Mayor’s Office.”
In one example from 2019 described in the suit, Darche objected to the term “bias based policing” and warned that any employees who used the phrase would be disciplined or fired.
The CCRB declined to comment on the former employees’ lawsuit and did not make Darche or Kadushin available for interviews. The agency pointed to a previous statement by the chair of the CCRB, who was jointly appointed by the mayor and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson. “The difficult but necessary restructuring the CCRB went through last year was motivated by a need for change during this difficult financial time for the City,” said the chair, the Rev. Fred Davie.
A City Hall spokesperson also said at the time that the mayor “supports that step forward.”
The CCRB’s lack of independence has long stirred friction within the agency and with City Hall and the NYPD. Its powers have expanded over the years, most notably when it was given subpoena power in the early 1990s. But the agency, which has about 215 staffers and a $20 million budget, does not have direct access to body camera footage and other NYPD records. Instead, it effectively has to rely on the cooperation of the NYPD, which has a budget of nearly $6 billion and is the most powerful agency in city government.
The NYPD has repeatedly been cited for overly aggressive responses to large protests. “It is deja vu all over again in some ways,” said the head of New York City’s Department of Investigation after issuing a scathing report on the NYPD’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests.
During the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, an NYPD commander on the scene told hundreds of peaceful protesters, “Have a safe march,” then a few minutes later ordered them arrested.
A federal judge later ruled there was “not even arguable probable cause to make those arrests.” The city eventually settled a lawsuit over the NYPD’s RNC response for $18 million.
The commander at that scene? Terence Monahan.
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
Recording Reveals Details of Trump Call to Georgia's Chief Elections Investigator
Amy Gardner, The Washington Post
Gardner writes:
resident Donald Trump encouraged Georgia’s chief elections investigator in a December phone call to uncover “dishonesty” in her investigation of absentee ballot signatures in an effort to reverse his defeat against Joe Biden in the state, according to a recording of the call released this week by the Georgia secretary of state’s office.
“The people of Georgia are so angry at what happened to me,” Trump told Frances Watson, the chief investigator for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, according to the recording. “They know I won, won by hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn’t close.”
He added, “When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised.” Later on the call, he said, “You have the most important job in the country right now.”
The Washington Post reported on the substance of Trump’s Dec. 23 call in January, describing him saying that Watson should “find the fraud” and that she would be a “national hero,” based on an account from Jordan Fuchs, the deputy secretary of state, whom Watson briefed on his comments.
In fact, he did not use those precise words.
Rather, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize Fulton County, where she would find “dishonesty,” he said.
He also said, “whatever you can do, Frances, it would be — it’s a great thing. It’s an important thing for the country. So important. You’ve no idea. So important. And I very much appreciate it.”
When The Post first reported on the call, state officials said they did not believe that a recording existed. Officials located the recording on a trash folder on Watson’s device while responding to a public records request, according to a person familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal process.
Watson has not responded to requests for comment. The Post originally withheld her name because of the risk of threats and harassment directed at election officials. In an interview with WSB-TV, she said she was “shocked” by Trump’s call but did not feel pressured by his outreach.
A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
The recording was first reported Wednesday by the Wall Street Journal.
At the time Trump called her, Watson was leading an audit of mail ballot signatures in Cobb County, a suburb of Atlanta. Legal experts have said the president’s outreach — and another call he placed directly to Raffensperger on Jan. 2 — may have amounted to obstruction of a criminal investigation.
The Fulton County district attorney’s office has launched a probe into the efforts by Trump and his allies to subvert the results in Georgia.
On the call, Watson sounds surprised and flattered to find herself on the telephone with the U.S. president — but also careful to reveal little about the investigation she was conducting in partnership with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
“Well, Mr. President, I appreciate your comments,” she said. “And I can assure you that our team and the GBI, that we’re only interested in the truth and finding, you know, finding the information that’s based on the facts.”
She added: “I know that you’re a very, very busy, very important man. And I’m very honored that you called. Quite, quite frankly, I’m shocked that you, that you would take time to do that. But I am very appreciative.”
Trump said he called on the suggestion of his chief of staff at the time, Mark Meadows — who had returned from a visit to Georgia the previous day to see the signature investigation in action.
Raffensperger had called for the audit after Trump and his allies claimed without evidence that thousands of absentee ballots with forged signatures on their envelopes had been improperly accepted by local election officials.
In November, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) called Raffensperger directly to inquire about the feasibility of rechecking ballot signatures and discarding all absentee ballots in counties with high mismatching rates, Raffensperger told The Post last year. Graham denied that he was trying to toss votes, saying he was merely seeking information to better understand how the state verified mail ballots. It would be impossible to discard the ballots associated with individual ballot envelopes, as they are separated early in the tabulation process to protect voter privacy.
On the call with Watson, Trump urged her to check the envelope signatures against older signatures on file rather than a current file — an apparent attempt to inflate the numbers of nonmatching signatures.
In Georgia and Florida in 2018, thousands of eligible voters saw their ballots rejected because officials checked their signatures against one on file that was older, and the voters’ signatures had evolved in the intervening time.
“I hope you’re going back two years as opposed to just checking, you know, one against the other because that would just be sort of a signature check that didn’t mean anything,” Trump said. “But if you go back two years, and if you can get to Fulton, you’re going to find things that are going to be unbelievable, the dishonesty that we’ve heard from, just good sources, really good sources.”
“But Fulton is the mother lode, you know, as the expression goes. Fulton County,” he added.
Trump also urged Watson to continue investigating past the Christmas holiday “because, you know, we have the date, which is a very important date” — an apparent reference to Jan. 6, the day a joint session of Congress was scheduled to formalize the electoral college results.
Trump was fixated on that date as a last opportunity to overturn the election results, encouraging thousands of his supporters to descend on Washington and protest the vote. The ensuing riot at the U.S. Capitol left five people dead, including one police officer. Dozens of officers were injured. In the aftermath of the violence, Congress formally recognized President Biden’s win that night.
Border Patrol agents conduct intake of illegal border crossers at the Central Processing Center on June 17, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. (photo: Getty)
Children Spend Days in Crude Facilities as US Border Resources Overwhelmed Again
Franco Ordoñez and John Burnett, NPR
Excerpt: "A record number of migrant children and teenagers are being held in warehouse-like detention facilities run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection near the southern border."
READ MORE
A child in Yemen is treated for malnutrition. (photo: CNN)
Saudi-Led Blockade Is Causing Famine in Yemen
Nima Elbagir, Barbara Arvanitidis, Angela Dewan, Nada Bashir and Yousef Mawry, CNN
hen 10-month-old Hassan Ali arrived at the hospital, doctors were hopeful they could save him. So many children in northern Yemen, after all, don't even get this far, starved not only of food but also the fuel needed just to reach medical help.
CNN watched overstretched doctors and nurses as they tried to give oxygen to Hassan, who had arrived six days earlier but wasn't putting on any weight, and was struggling to breathe. Just hours later, Hassan died.
"He is just one of many cases," said Dr. Osman Salah. The ward is full of children suffering from malnutrition, including babies just weeks old.
Every month, this hospital's pediatric ward takes in more patients than its capacity of 50, sometimes twice as many. Around 12 children die there each month, Salah said. He and his staff are running on empty -- they haven't been paid for more than half a year.
Yemen has stepped up to the precipice of famine, and back again, many times over its six years of war. Now, famine conditions not seen in the country for two years have returned to pockets of the country.
An estimated 47,000 people are likely to be living with "catastrophic" levels of food insecurity -- or famine-like conditions -- according to an analysis by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the world's authority on food security. A further 16 million are living in either "crisis" or "emergency" food security conditions, the analysis shows. That's more than half of Yemen's population.
The rapidly deteriorating situation is the result mostly of funding cuts that have battered activities by agencies like the World Food Programme, which is struggling now to meet the most basic of needs for millions of Yemenis, particularly in the country's north.
But it has also been exacerbated by a mounting fuel crisis. Staff at the hospital in Abs, where baby Hassan lost his life, say they will have to shut in less than three weeks if they don't receive more funding and fuel to keep their generators going. It's the same story all over the north.
"If fuel were easily available on the market, the number of cases we are seeing in the hospital would be much higher, because at the moment, there are patients who are staying at home, because of the challenges and expenses of traveling to the hospital," Dr. Salah said.
As a result, said Dr. Salah, children are simply dying in their homes.
A bitter blockade
Fuel typically comes into the country's north via the port of Hodeidah, usually bustling with economic activity at the best of times. Even during Yemen's ongoing civil war, it has been a lively gateway for the conflict economy, where food and other aid that Yemenis rely on arrive.
But the port is now a ghost town. Hundreds of food aid trucks sit parked in a line stretching for miles along a dusty road. A cavernous tank that usually stores some 2,500 metric tons of oil sits empty at the port. It lets off an echoey clang with the softest touch.
Saudi warships have not allowed any oil tankers to berth at Hodeidah since the start of the year, the Houthis say, an assertion backed by the World Food Programme. The practice is starving the north of much-needed fuel. Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has been militarily supporting the internationally recognized Yemeni government, which is now operating in exile from Riyadh.
The Saudi vessels that patrol the waters of Hodeidah have control over which commercial ships can dock and unload their cargo. Some goods are getting through -- CNN witnessed aid being loaded on to trucks at the port after being delivered by ship -- but not any fuel to deliver them.
CNN obtained documents from the port's arrival log showing that 14 vessels had been cleared by the UN's verification and inspection body to carry fuel to the country. The tracking website MarineTraffic.com shows those vessels are now sitting in the Red Sea between the Saudi-Yemen border and Eritrea, unable to unload their fuel.
The UN has previously accused the Houthis of siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel taxes earmarked to pay civil servants. Nonetheless, the UN has reiterated that agencies still need to operate in the north, where the need is greatest.
Houthi officials tell CNN that they are being fined millions of dollars by the companies that own the ships while they are unable to dock.
Nearly three years ago the UN Security Council criminalized "intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare," and demanded that "access to supplies that are necessary for food preparation, including water and fuel" be kept intact in northern Yemen.
Prince Abdullah bin Khaled bin Sultan Al Saud, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the UN in Vienna, blamed the Houthis for the issue while speaking to CNN on Thursday.
"Saudi Arabia has always looked for political solution in Yemen. Saudi Arabia has been committed to the ceasefire in the past year. Unfortunately, the Houthis have not," the ambassador said while talking to CNN's Becky Anderson.
The World Health Organization, which provides critical funding to hospitals and clinics, says it has been left with no funding at all to secure fuel to carry out its services across Yemen.
"From March 2021, WHO will have to stop distributing fuel to 206 facilities across the country, over 60 percent are hospitals providing services not available at the already fragile primary level. This will lead to the stoppage of life-saving services, such as emergency rooms and intensive care units, including COVID-19 ICUs. Over 9 million people will be affected," it said in a document, shared with CNN.
The Saudi-backed Yemeni government has repeatedly denied CNN visas to enter the country's north after coverage last year that exposed Saudi Arabia's dramatic drop in humanitarian funding for the war. CNN traveled at night by boat from east Africa to reach the Houthi-controlled north, where a Saudi blockade has contributed to widescale suffering and enormous food security challenges.
Saudi Arabia has been targeting Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen since 2015, with the support of the US and other Western allies. It had hoped to stem the Houthis' spread of power and influence in the country by backing the internationally-recognized government under President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi.
The Houthis continue to hit Saudi targets with missiles from within Yemen and drone attacks.
Can Biden turn the war?
The dynamics of the conflict, however, appear to be rapidly changing. In February, US President Joe Biden announced a new Yemen strategy, giving momentum to the search for a ceasefire and eventual political solution.
There are few concrete details yet of his policy, but central to his announcement was the US' withdrawal of offensive support for Saudi Arabia.
"The US historically has not viewed Yemen as an independent sovereign nation in its own right. The US has treated Yemen as an extension of either the US-Saudi policy or the US-Iranian crisis," said Munir Saeed, former president of a Yemeni pro-democracy group TAWQ, at a Yemen briefing held by Fair Observer last week.
He welcomed the change in direction, saying the Biden strategy was the first from the US to put Yemen's interests at its center.
"Dealing with Yemen as a country by itself that has its own problems, and cutting it away from the problems of Saudi-Iranian problems ... is very important to lead to peace."
The Obama administration was supportive of Saudi Arabia's intervention in Yemen in 2015 and offered the Kingdom arms deals worth more than $115 billion total, more than any other US administration in the history of US-Saudi relations, according to a report by the Center for International Policy.
It later imposed restrictions on the sale of certain arms to Riyadh, including precision-guided munitions, after reports of civilian casualties in several Saudi-led airstrikes. The Trump administration reversed some of those restrictions, though he faced constant challenges in Congress.
As part of his new approach, Biden also appointed a special envoy for Yemen, Tim Lenderking, who is wrapping up a two-week visit to region, trying to engage different parties and give mediation efforts a reboot.
There will be limitations to how much the Biden administration can achieve, and ultimately, a ceasefire will depend on Yemeni actors on the ground.
And the Houthis are showing little appetite of slowing down, still launching missiles and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, which has been responding with airstrikes. The Houthis said last week they had also seized control of 10 out of 14 districts of the strategic northern city of Marib.
On the back of his Gulf trip, Lenderking told CNN that Saudi Arabia and its allied Yemeni government were ready to agree to a ceasefire, and called on the Houthis to end their cross-border strikes and assault on Marib.
"They are ready to sit down to negotiate an end to the conflict with all relevant parties, including Ansarallah, sometimes referred to as the Houthis, during which access to ports and other issues could be addressed and resolved quickly," he said, using the group's formal name, in an emailed response to CNN's questions.
When asked about US support for Saudi Arabia while the country was blocking fuel deliveries to Hodeidah, Lenderking said the situation was "complex."
"On fuel, we need to be clear where the problem lies," he said, pointing to a UN accusation against the Houthis that they had siphoned fuel taxes earmarked to pay Yemeni civil servants to fund its war effort as the main reason the fuel tankers have been barred from docking.
"Instead, Ansarallah diverted them to their war effort, which they continue to fund with revenues from diverted imports and port revenues."
Lenderking said the US was urging the Yemeni government to work with the UN around the impasse to ensure that aid continues to flow where it's needed and that a fuel shortage doesn't worsen the situation.
In Yemen, CNN met with Mohammed Ali Al-Houthi, a senior Houthi leader, who said his group was willing to come to the negotiating table but wanted to see more action from the US first before it put trust in Biden.
"First of all, President Biden was a partner of President Obama, and during that time they declared that they would join the coalition against our country. They also agreed about and gave the green light for the coalition to continue perpetuating the killing in our country," he said.
"Trust is created by actions not words. Trust must come about by decisions. So far, we have not seen any concrete decisions being made."
Aid agency's plead for action now
A political solution, or at least an initial ceasefire, would go a long way in addressing the country's food security problems.
"Ultimately, until there's an end to the war, we are doing what we can to save lives. But Yemen needs peace," said the World Food Programme's Yemen spokesperson Annabel Symington.
In April last year, the WFP said it was forced to cut every second monthly food aid delivery to 8 million people in Yemen's north. It's now hoping to raise $1.9 billion, which will be enough just to avert widescale famine.
The WFP and most agencies don't know how much money they will get this year, but it isn't looking good. A pledging conference on March 1 garnered less than half the $3.85 billion the UN estimates it needs just to keep the country fed and running.
Philippe Duamelle, the Yemen representative for UNICEF, is making an urgent plea for donors to step up their pledges, warning that 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer acute malnutrition this year, up 16% from 2020.
"The children of Yemen cannot wait, we've got to be able to assist them and save them now. The situation has deteriorated significantly, and we need to reverse the trends now," he said.
But in all humanitarian disasters, there are glimmers of hope. In the district of Harf Soufian, which in January descended into the "catastrophic" famine-like category, another 10-month old baby, just like Hassan Ali, has been fighting for her life.
Zahra sat in her mother's arms, sucking her fingers, at the Rural Harf Soufian Hospital. All the staff here have been excited by her success story.
When she came to the hospital, her doctor said, she weighed just 5 kilograms, putting her in the bottom 5% for girls by weight, according to WHO growth standards. In just four days, she has put on 400 grams, no mean feat for a baby from a district starved of food.
"She is improving," said Dr. Adnan Abdul-Rahman, looking through a log of her weight gain.
"The hard thing is getting the children here. But when families can get them here, it makes a difference."
Mother and baby manatees at Three Sisters Springs in Crystal River, Florida. (photo: James R.D. Scott/Getty)
Spike in Florida Manatee Deaths Linked to Human Activity, Loss of Food Sources
Emily Denny, EcoWatch
Denny writes:
he first few months of 2021 have been extremely deadly for manatees as food sources in Florida have become increasingly limited, scientists say.
In the first six weeks of the new year, 317 manatee deaths were reported across Florida, CBSMiami reported. Since then, that number has risen to at least 432 deaths — about three times the normal amount of deaths in the state by this time of year, The Weather Channel reported. The five-year average for manatee deaths is 578.
"This is the worst that I've ever seen," Phil Stasik, who witnessed 13 manatee carcasses washed up on the shore of the Indian River Lagoon in Merritt Island while kayaking, said in an e-mail to Florida Today, according to The Weather Channel.
Due to limitations from the COVID-19 pandemic, the state has struggled to maintain its manatee research, usually performing necroscopies on as many manatees as possible. But over two-thirds of manatee carcasses this year have gone unrecovered, according to The Weather Channel. Until recently, this has left scientists without answers. But recent information shows that a combination of environmental conditions and human impacts may explain the tragic event, The Weather Channel reported.
"Preliminary information indicates that a reduction in food availability is a contributing factor," the FWC wrote in a statement. "While the investigation is ongoing, initial assessments indicate the high number of emaciated manatees is likely due to a decline in food availability. Seagrass and macro algae coverage in this region and specifically in the Indian River Lagoon has declined significantly."
Manatees gather in warm locales of water, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel. They then will swim to colder areas to feed on seagrass. The problem, however, is that seagrass is increasingly limited in these cold locales, forcing the manatees to swim back, hungry and malnourished.
"A manatee will choose starvation over freezing to death," Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director of the Center for Biological Diversity, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
But limited food sources are not the only explanation for the manatee die-off. "It's this combination we have of cold weather, we have a reduction of where manatees can go, and in the places where manatees can go, as a consequence of human development and other activities, we have poor water quality which has resulted in these grass die-offs," Lopez added, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Sewage spills and contaminated water canals have caused this decline in seagrass, according to Patrick Rose, an aquatic biologist and executive director of the Save the Manatee Club, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported.
In 1973, manatees were listed as "endangered" under the Endangered Species Act and only a few hundred remained. But after a dramatic recovery in 2017, where an estimated 6,620 manatees were swimming in Florida, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moved the species down to "threatened," spurring controversy, The Washington Post reported.
One group that fought the decision was the Save the Manatee Club, arguing it was premature as there were no plans to reduce watercraft-related manatee deaths, The Washington Post reported, which account for 20 percent of human-caused manatee deaths and are an ongoing risk to the manatee population in Florida, The Center for Biological Diversity wrote.
Despite this year's massive die-off, the FWC still expects the manatee population in Florida to stand at about 7,000 — higher than what it was 30 years ago, according to the Orlando Sentinel. But as climate change-related events, like cold snaps, become more frequent, and the species' habitat becomes increasingly threatened by human activity and pollution, the manatee's future may be grim without further protections.
"As with all species, future resiliency is associated with population size and distribution, growth rate, health and habitat quality," the FWC wrote in a statement. "Together these factors will impact the ability of manatees to cope with future changes and are the focus of conservation work."
