24 February 22
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The attacks confirmed that a real war is coming, one that will result in a horrific and bloody toll.
For much of the winter, one could imagine, as I naïvely allowed myself to, that the looming threat of a Russian invasion was all some elaborate mechanism for creating pressure on the West; in the end, it turned out to be a very real, carefully plotted campaign, and one driven by nothing more elaborate or complicated than Vladimir Putin’s animus for Ukraine—an affliction that has metastasized with time. “I will start with the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia,” Putin said in a rambling address, sulfuric in its palpable anger, on February 21st. The country’s leaders, he said, “began by building their statehood on the negation of everything that united us”; he went on to cite obscure bits of twisted history. On Twitter, the Guardian journalist Shaun Walker captured the grim irony of the situation: “When it comes to assessing the impact of Covid on the world, leaving Vladimir Putin isolated in a bunker with a library of books about Ukraine is probably going to be one of the major ones.”
I had travelled to the Donbas that same day, shortly after the Kremlin formally recognized the borders of Donetsk and Luhansk, the two would-be statelets in the region. Only a third of the Donbas comprises territories held by Russian-backed rebels; the remaining two-thirds is under the control of Kyiv. Nevertheless, late on Wednesday evening, the leaders of Russia’s proxy territories in Donetsk and Luhansk appealed for Russia’s assistance in “repelling the aggression of the Ukrainian armed forces.” That’s when a journalist friend wrote to share a tip that soon spread widely: the bombing starts at four. I didn’t sleep. The information ended up being off by only an hour.
At daybreak, we left with our fixer and driver to pick up some of his personal documents at his apartment on the edge of Kramatorsk. On the highway, we passed a dark plume of smoke coming from a faraway collection of buildings that hissed and popped in spark-fuelled bursts—an ammunition depot, we surmised. Putin, in an address aired just before 6 A.M., couched the invasion as a “special military operation,” seemingly unable to bring himself to say aloud that he was, in fact, starting a war. Russian state television presented the strikes as retribution for various atrocities—“genocide” is the word of choice—committed by Ukraine in the Donbas.
But even that falsehood contained yet another. As we saw in the course of the morning, strikes hit everywhere, with terrifying abandon. A civilian was killed in Uman, a pilgrimage site for Orthodox Jews in central Ukraine; missiles landed in Ivano-Frankivsk, in western Ukraine, close to the Polish border, a region that most people thought Russia wouldn’t think worth attacking even in the more expansive invasion scenarios.
In Kramatorsk, the early-morning streets had a frenetic, confused energy, but also one tinged with a kind of helpless normalcy. Not everyone has a place to flee; not everyone, having survived one war, is ready to flee again. In 2014, Kramatorsk was held by Russian proxy forces from Donetsk for four months; it’s now forty miles from the front lines, but that border is sure to move in coming days.
A line of nearly a hundred cars waited to fill up with gas. Nearly as many people waited by a bank machine, before it was announced that it had run out of cash. In the courtyard of our driver’s building, I saw half a dozen families come out holding kids’ toys and overstuffed duffelbags and cannisters of fuel. I asked some of them where they were headed. No one knew for sure—they all said a version of “away from here.” “And you?” someone asked me. I had no idea, either.
By noon, it became possible to make sense of the scale of the Russian invasion. Tanks were spotted on the outskirts of Kharkiv. Russian armor rolled out of Crimea and into mainland Ukraine. Although the very idea of this war being a limited operation was a laughable fiction on its face, these strikes suggest something quite ambitious, and thus horrendous, in their purported goals. Perhaps Russia will seek to partition the country and force its own puppet government into power; what’s clear is that this will not be a case of Kosovo-style air strikes as a way of achieving regime change at a distance. A real war is coming, one that will result in a horrific and bloody toll for Ukraine.
For now, Kramatorsk is quiet. There have been no explosions since the early morning. The power works, as does mobile service. But no one expects that to last for long. I don’t expect to sleep any better this night than the last.
President Biden met virtually with his G7 counterparts and agreed on "devastating" sanctions against Russia over its war against Ukraine, Thursday, Feb. 24, 2022. (photo: White House)
The president was expected to lay out "further consequences" for Moscow in remarks on Thursday, including additional sanctions.
As explosions erupted in cities across Ukraine, Biden accused Russian President Vladimir Putin in a statement Wednesday night of choosing “a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering.”
“Russia alone is responsible for the death and destruction this attack will bring, and the United States and its Allies and partners will respond in a united and decisive way. The world will hold Russia accountable,” Biden said.
Biden announced a narrow round of sanctions against Russia on Tuesday after Putin moved troops into Moscow-backed breakaway regions in the eastern part of Ukraine, hoping to deter the Russian leader from launching a large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The president warned then that more severe actions would be taken against Russia if Putin were to escalate the situation.
“Russia will pay an even steeper price if it continues its aggression, including additional sanctions,” Biden said Tuesday.
The initial tranche of sanctions include penalties against two Russian banks and Russian elites with close ties to Putin, and prohibited Russia from trading debt in American or European markets. The Biden administration on Wednesday also moved ahead with sanctions against the company in charge of constructing the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
Biden spoke to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and updated him on the steps that the U.S. and its partners were taking to “rally international condemnation.”
“He asked me to call on the leaders of the world to speak out clearly against President Putin’s flagrant aggression, and to stand with the people of Ukraine,” Biden said.
Biden met with his National Security Council Thursday morning in the Situation Room. He was also scheduled to meet virtually with Group of Seven leaders to discuss the situation in Ukraine.
'A planet ever more battered by climate change will be one in which neither an American nor a Chinese
We’re in a time of growing belligerence of a kind unknown since the Cold War. It’s already taken us to the edge of conflict with nuclear-armed great powers, whether in Ukraine or Taiwan and the South China Sea. Meanwhile, here at home (and in other countries globally), internal divisions, flaring anger, and violence are growing. And yet the true violence, the true war, the one those aggressive great powers are already waging in a major way goes largely unnoticed and remarkably undealt with, perhaps because it’s a genuine world war on humanity and the planet itself.
Just in case, like Washington and much of our media, you’ve been preoccupied by the dangers this country faces in Ukraine or by vaccination and masking mandates, internal violence, or who knows what else here or elsewhere, note that the bad news just keeps coming in. And, no, as far as that bad news goes, I’m not thinking about any of the subjects I’ve just mentioned. If you’re an American, just consider two recently reported studies with all-too-devastating long-term implications.
In case you’re not living in the American Southwest, that region has been experiencing “megadrought” conditions. (The whole west is, in fact, drought-stricken right now.) And that would be bad enough, but a new study by climate scientists indicates that the Southwest has been going through “the driest two decades in the region in at least 1,200 years” and, no surprise, climate change is significantly to blame. We’re talking about a catastrophe — one that, as yet, shows no signs of abating and that in the long run is only going to get worse.
If lack of water is a problem in the Southwest, here’s the “good” — actually, terrible — news: this country’s coasts are going to be anything but short of water. According to another new study, sea levels around this country are going to rise by something like a foot in the next three decades (more even than the global average). In other words, while parts of the U.S. broil, other parts will functionally drown, with ever more disastrous flooding occurring ever more often. Again, this is due to the never-ending burning of fossil fuels (and toss in as well phenomena like the melting of Russia’s permafrost, potentially releasing vast amounts of the potent greenhouse-gas methane into the atmosphere).
Under such circumstances, you might think that the possibility of war in Ukraine would take a backseat to the disaster truly at hand. You might imagine that the great powers producing and burning the fossil fuels so crucial to the broiling of this planet might, in fact, begin to genuinely work together to bring the phenomenon under control. But as TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author most recently of that new history of empire, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, points out today, if imperial history is allowed to play out as it has over the past four centuries, then consider us all to be digging humanity’s grave.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
After leading the world for the past 75 years, the United States is ever so fitfully losing its grip on global hegemony. As Washington’s power begins to fade, the liberal international system it created by founding the United Nations in 1945 is facing potentially fatal challenges.
After more than 180 years of Western global dominion, leadership is beginning to move from West to East, where Beijing is likely to become the epicenter of a new world order that could indeed rupture longstanding Western traditions of law and human rights.
More crucially, however, after two centuries of propelling the world economy to unprecedented prosperity, the use of fossil fuels — especially coal and oil — will undoubtedly fade away within the next couple of decades. Meanwhile, for the first time since the last Ice Age ended 11,000 years ago, thanks to the greenhouse gases those fossil fuels are emitting into the atmosphere, the world’s climate is changing in ways that will, by the middle of this century, start to render significant parts of the planet uninhabitable for a quarter, even possibly half, of humanity.
For the first time in 800,000 years, the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has blown past earlier highs of 280 parts per million to reach 410 parts. That, in turn, is unleashing climate feedback loops that, by century’s end, if not well before, will aridify the globe’s middle latitudes, partly melt the polar ice caps, and raise sea levels drastically. (Don’t even think about a future Miami or Shanghai!)
In trying to imagine how such changes will affect an evolving world order, is it possible to chart the future with something better than mere guesswork? My own field, history, generally performs poorly when trying to track the past into the future, while social sciences like economics and political science are loath to project much beyond medium-term trends (say, the next recession or election). Uniquely among the disciplines, however, environmental science has developed diverse analytical tools for predicting the effects of climate change all the way to this century’s end.
Those predictions have become so sophisticated that world leaders in finance, politics, and science are now beginning to think about how to reorganize whole societies and their economies to accommodate the projected disastrous upheavals to come. Yet surprisingly few of us have started to think about the likely impact of climate change upon global power. By combining political projections with already carefully plotted trajectories for climate change, it may, however, be possible to see something of the likely course of governance for the next half century or so.
To begin with the most immediate changes, social-science analysis has long predicted the end of U.S. global power. Using economic projections, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, for instance, stated that, by 2030, “Asia will have surpassed North America and Europe combined in terms of global power,” while “China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030.” Using similar methods, the accounting firm PwC calculated that China’s economy would become 60% larger than that of the United States by 2030.
If climate science proves accurate, however, the hegemony Beijing could achieve by perhaps 2030 will last, at best, only a couple of decades or less before unchecked global warming ensures that the very concept of world dominance, as we’ve known it historically since the sixteenth century, may be relegated to a past age like so much else in our world.
Considering that likelihood as we peer dimly into the decades between 2030 and 2050 and beyond, the international community will surely have good reason to forge a new kind of world order — one made for a planet truly in danger and unlike any that has come before.
The Rise of Chinese Global Hegemony
China’s rise to world power could be considered not just the result of its own initiative but also of American inattention. While Washington was mired in endless wars in the Greater Middle East in the decade following the September 2001 terrorist attacks, Beijing began using a trillion dollars of its swelling dollar reserves to build a tricontinental economic infrastructure it called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that would shake the foundations of Washington’s world order. Not only has this scheme already gone a long way toward incorporating much of Africa and Asia into Beijing’s version of the world economy, but it has simultaneously lifted many millions out of poverty.
During the early years of the Cold War, Washington funded the reconstruction of a ravaged Europe and the development of 100 new nations emerging from colonial rule. But as the Cold War ended in 1991, more than a third of humanity was still living in extreme poverty, abandoned by Washington’s then-reigning neo-liberal ideology that consigned social change to the whims of the free market. By 2018, nearly half the world’s population, or about 3.4 billion people, were simply struggling to survive on the equivalent of five dollars a day, creating a vast global constituency for Beijing’s economic leadership.
For China, social change began at home. Starting in the 1980s, the Communist Party presided over the transformation of an impoverished agricultural society into an urban industrial powerhouse. Propelled by the greatest mass migration in history, as millions moved from country to city, its economy grew nearly 10% annually for 40 years and lifted 800 million people out of poverty — the fastest sustained rate ever recorded by any country. Meanwhile, between 2006 and 2016 alone, its industrial output increased from $1.2 trillion to $3.2 trillion, leaving the U.S. in the dust at $2.2 trillion and making China the workshop of the world.
By the time Washington awoke to China’s challenge and tried to respond with what President Barack Obama called a “strategic pivot” to Asia, it was too late. With foreign reserves already at $4 trillion in 2014, Beijing launched its Belt and Road Initiative, while establishing an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, with 56 member nations and an impressive $100 billion in capital. When a Belt and Road Forum of 29 world leaders convened in Beijing in May 2017, President Xi Jinping hailed the initiative as the “project of the century,” aimed both at promoting growth and improving “people’s well-being” through “poverty alleviation.” Indeed, two years later a World Bank study found that BRI transportation projects had already increased the gross domestic product in 55 recipient nations by a solid 3.4%.
Amid this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, Beijing seems to have an underlying design for transcending the vast distances that have historically separated Asia from Europe. Its goal: to forge a unitary market that will soon cover the vast Eurasian land mass. This scheme will consolidate China’s control over a continent that is home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. In the end, it could also break the U.S. geopolitical grip over a region that has long been the core of, and key to, its global power. The foundation for such an ambitious transnational scheme is a monumental construction effort that, in just two decades, has already covered China and much of Central Asia with a massive triad of energy pipelines, high-speed rail lines, and highways.
To break that down, start with this: Beijing is building a transcontinental network of natural gas and oil pipelines that will, in alliance with Russia, extend for 6,000 miles from the North Atlantic Ocean to the South China Sea.
For the second arm in that triad, Beijing has built the world’s largest high-speed rail system, with more than 15,000 miles already operational in 2018 and plans for a network of nearly 24,000 miles by 2025. All this, in turn, is just a partial step toward what’s expected to be a full-scale transcontinental rail system that started with the “Eurasian Land Bridge” track running from China through Kazakhstan to Europe. In addition to its transcontinental trunk lines, Beijing plans branch-lines heading due south toward Singapore, southwest through Pakistan, and then from Pakistan through Iran to Turkey.
To complete its transport triad, China has also constructed an impressive set of highways, representing (like those pipelines) a problematic continuation of Washington’s current petrol-powered world order. In 1990, that country lacked a single expressway. By 2017, it had built 87,000 miles of highways, nearly double the size of the U.S. interstate system. Even that breathtaking number can’t begin to capture the extraordinary engineering feats necessary — the tunneling through steep mountains, the spanning of wide rivers, the crossing of deep gorges on towering pillars, and the spinning of concrete webs around massive cities.
Simultaneously, China was also becoming the world’s largest auto manufacturer as the number of vehicles on its roads soared to 340 million in 2019, exceeding America’s 276 million. However, all of this impressive news is depressing news as well. After all, by clinging to coal production on a major scale, while reaching for a bigger slice of the world’s oil imports for its transportation triad, China’s greenhouse-gas emissions doubled from just 14% of the world’s total in 2000 to 30% in 2019, far surpassing that of the United States, previously the planet’s leading emitter. With only 150 vehicles per thousand people, compared to 850 in America, its auto industry still has ample growth potential — good news for its economy, but terrible news for the global climate (even if China remains in the forefront of the development and use of electric cars).
To power such headlong development, China has, in fact, raised its domestic coal production more than a thousand-fold, from just 32 million metric tons in 1949 to a mind-boggling record of 4.1 billion tons by 2021. Even if you take into account those massive natural-gas pipelines it is building, its enormous hydropower dams, and its world leadership in wind power, as of 2020 China still depended on coal for a startling 57% of its total energy use, even as its share of total global coal-fired power climbed relentlessly to a record 53%. In other words, nothing, it seems, can break that country’s leadership of its insatiable hunger for the dirtiest of all fossil fuels.
On the global stage, Beijing has been similarly obsessed with economic growth above all else. Despite its promises to curb greenhouse-gas emissions at recent U.N. climate conferences, China is still promoting coal-fired power at home and abroad. In 2020, the Institute of International Finance reported that 85% of all projects under Beijing’s BRI entailed high greenhouse-gas emissions, particularly the 63 coal-fired electrical plants the project was financing worldwide.
When the 2019 U.N. climate conference opened, China itself was actively constructing new coal-fueled electrical plants with a combined capacity of 121 gigawatts — substantially more than the 105 gigawatts being built by the rest of the world combined. By 2019, China was the largest single source of pollution on the planet, accounting for nearly one-third of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres was warning that such emissions were “putting billions of people at immediate risk.” With an impassioned urgency, he demanded “a death knell for coal and fossil fuels before they destroy our planet” by banning all new coal-fired power plants and phasing them out of developed nations by 2030.
Together, the planet’s two great imperial powers, China and the United States, accounted for 44% of total CO2 emissions in 2019 and so far both have made painfully slow progress toward renewable energy. In a joint declaration at the November 2021 Glasgow climate conference, the U.S. agreed “to reach 100% carbon-pollution-free electricity by 2035,” while China promised to “phase down” (but note, not “phase out”) coal starting with its “15th Five-Year Plan.”
The U.S. commitment soon died a quiet death in Congress, where President Biden’s own party killed his green-energy initiative. Amid all the applause at Glasgow, nobody paid much attention to the fact that China’s next five-year plan doesn’t even start until 2026, just as President Xi Jinping’s promise of carbon neutrality by 2060 is a perfect formula for not averting the climate disaster that awaits us all.
In its hell-bent drive for development, in other words, China is digging its own grave (and ours as well).
Climate Catastrophe Circa 2050
Even if China were to become the preeminent world power around 2030, the accelerating pace of climate change will likely curtail its hegemony within decades. As global warming batters the country by mid-century, Beijing will be forced to retreat from its projection of global power to address urgent domestic concerns.
In 2017, scientists at the nonprofit group Climate Central calculated, for instance, that rising seas and storm surges could, by 2060 or 2070, flood areas inhabited by 275 million people worldwide, with Shanghai deemed “the most vulnerable major city in the world to serious flooding.” In that sprawling metropolis, 17.5 million people are likely to be displaced as most of the city “could eventually be submerged in water, including much of the downtown area.”
Advancing the date of this disaster by at least a decade, a 2019 report on rising sea levels in Nature Communications found that 150 million people worldwide are now living on land that will be submerged by 2050 and Shanghai was, once again, found to be facing serious risk. There, rising waters “threaten to consume the heart” of the metropolis and its surrounding cities, crippling one of China’s main economic engines. Dredged from sea and swamp since the fifteenth century, much of that city is likely to return to the waters from whence it came in the next three decades.
Simultaneously, soaring temperatures are expected to devastate the North China Plain between Beijing and Shanghai, one of that country’s prime agricultural regions currently inhabited by 400 million people, nearly a third of that country’s population. It could, in fact, potentially become one of the most lethal places on the planet.
“This spot is going to be the hottest spot for deadly heat waves in the future,” said Professor Elfatih Eltahir, a climate specialist at MIT who published his findings in the journal Nature Communications. Between 2070 and 2100, he estimates, the region could face hundreds of periods of “extreme danger” and perhaps five lethal periods of 35° Wet Bulb Temperature (where a combination of heat and high humidity prevents the evaporation of the sweat that cools the human body). After just six hours under such conditions, a healthy person at rest will die.
Rather than sudden and catastrophic, the impact of climate change in North China is likely to be incremental and cumulative, escalating relentlessly with each passing decade. If the “Chinese century” does indeed start around 2030, it’s unlikely to last long once its main financial center at Shanghai is flooded out and its agricultural heartland is baking in insufferable heat.
A Democratic World Order
After 2050, the international community will face a growing contradiction, even a head-on collision, between the two foundational principles of the current world order: national sovereignty and human rights. As long as nations have the sovereign right to seal their borders, the world will have no way of protecting the human rights of the 200 million to 1.2 billion climate-change refugees expected to be created by 2050, both within their own borders and beyond. Faced with such extreme disorder, it is just possible that the nations of this planet might agree to cede some small portion of their sovereignty to a global government set up to cope with the climate crisis.
To meet the extraordinary mid-century challenges to come, a supranational body like the U.N. would need sovereign authority over at least three significant priorities — emission controls, refugee resettlement, and environmental reconstruction. First, a reformed U.N. would need the power to compel nations to end their emissions if the transition to renewable energy is still not complete by, at the latest, 2050. Second, an empowered U.N. high commissioner for refugees would have to be authorized to supersede national sovereignty by requiring temperate northern countries to deal with the tidal flows of humanity from the tropical and subtropical regions most impacted and made least inhabitable by climate change. Finally, the voluntary transfer of funds like the $100 billion promised poor nations at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference would have to become mandatory to keep afflicted communities, and especially the world’s poor, relatively safe.
In the crisis to come, such initiatives would by their very nature change the idea of what constitutes a world order from the amorphous imperial ethos of the past five centuries to a new form of global governance. To exercise effective sovereignty over the global commons, the U.N. would have to enact some long overdue reforms, notably by creating an elective Security Council without either permanent members or the present great-power prerogative of unilaterally vetoing measures. Instead of superpower strength serving as the ultimate guarantor for U.N. decisions, a democratized Security Council could reach climate decisions by majority vote and enforce them through the moral authority, as well as the self-interest, of a more representative international body.
If a U.N. of this sort were indeed in existence by at least 2050, such a framework of democratic world governance could well be complemented by a globally decentralized system of energy. For five centuries now, energy and imperial hegemony have been deeply intertwined. In the transition to alternative energy, however, households will, sooner or later, be able to control their own solar power everywhere the sun shines, while communities will be able to supplement that variable source with a mix of wind turbines, biomass, hydro, and mini-reactors.
Just as the demands of petroleum production shaped the steep hierarchy of Washington’s world order, so decentralized access to energy could foster a more inclusive global governance. After five centuries of Iberian, British, American, and Chinese hegemony, it’s at least possible that humanity, even under the increasingly stressful conditions of climate change, could finally experience a more democratic world order.
The question, of course, is: How do we get from here to there? As in ages past, civil society will be critical to such changes. For the past five centuries, social reformers have struggled against powerful empires to advance the principle of human rights. In the sixteenth century, Dominican friars, then the embodiment of civil society, pressed the Spanish empire to recognize the humanity of Amerindians and end their enslavement. Similarly, in the mid-twentieth century activists lobbied diplomats drafting the U.N. charter to change it from a closed imperial club into the far more open organization we have today.
Just as reformers moderated the harshness of Spanish, British, and U.S. imperial hegemony, so, on a climate-pressured planet of an almost unimaginable sort, civil society will certainly play an essential role in finally putting in place the sort of limitations on national sovereignty (and imperial ambitions) that the U.N. will need to cope with our endangered world. Perhaps the key force in this change will be a growing environmental movement that, in the future, will expand its agenda from capping and radically reducing emissions to pressuring powers, including an increasingly devastated China, to reform the very structure of world governance.
A planet ever more battered by climate change, one in which neither an American nor a Chinese “century” will have any meaning, will certainly need a newly empowered world order that can supersede national sovereignty to protect the most fundamental and transcendent of all human rights: survival. The environmental changes in the offing are so profound that anything less than a new form of democratic global governance will mean not just incessant conflicts but, in all likelihood, disaster of an almost-unimaginable kind. And no surprise there, since we’ll be dealing with a planet all too literally on the brink.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books). His new book, just published, is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.
Kaia Rolle, 8, watches TV in her bedroom. Rolle was arrested after throwing a tantrum at school when she was 6. Two years and three schools later, Rolle is searching for the life she had before the incident, while dealing with extreme post traumatic stress disorder, separation anxiety and new phobias. (photo: Harrison Hill/USA TODAY)
A 5-year-old took center stage, dancing to upbeat music, legs kicking in white tights and shiny white shoes.
“When Jesus says yes, nobody can say no,” she sang as her aunt recorded the moment. “When Jesus says …”
Her dark eyes shone. Her black curls bounced. This was Kaia Rolle. A diva who hugged strangers.
Barely a year later, the world would meet Kaia as a wailing first-grader, forced from her school in zip ties by two Orlando, Florida, police officers and charged with battery. Police body cam footage captured her cries — “Don’t put handcuffs on me! Help me! Help me!” — and stirred outrage around the world, bolstering calls to remove cops from schools and impose a minimum age children can be arrested in Florida.
Now, dancing Kaia lives only on her aunt’s cell phone. In her place is an 8-year-old with extreme post-traumatic stress disorder, separation anxiety, oppositional defiance disorder and phobias of simple things like bugs. She rarely smiles. Strangers get a wary look. Police officers terrify her.
“We know she’s in there,” said her grandmother, Meralyn Kirkland. “We just don’t know how to bring her out.”
It seems inconceivable: Educators calling cops on elementary school kids for typical child behavior. Temper tantrums. Fighting with other students. Stealing spare change and crayons.
Sometimes they’re arrested. Sometimes they’re not. No one knows exactly how many young children are arrested each year in school. Incomplete federal databases, differing definitions of “arrest” by states, and national records that mix multiple types of law enforcement action against kids make it impossible to parse an accurate count.
But a USA TODAY analysis of federal crime reports identified more than 2,600 arrests in schools involving kids ages 5 to 9 between 2000 and 2019. That’s an average of 130 children a year and surely a vast undercount. The newspaper culled 28 million arrest records from more than 8,000 law enforcement agencies that participated in the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System over two decades. Reporters talked to dozens of criminologists, psychologists and attorneys to interpret the results.
Among agencies consistently contributing data to the FBI, arrests dropped from about 165 a year in 2000-2009 to 78 a year in the following decade. The decline may have been driven in part by the growing body of research that shows harsh punishments can do more harm than good and are often applied unfairly to Black children and those with disabilities.
Even so, cases like Kaia’s continue to pop up as schools turn to law enforcement officers to deal with discipline issues.
No one has studied what life looks like in the years after very young children are arrested, experts say. Because of the nature of trauma, it can be hard to say how one incident plays out over the course of a life.
USA TODAY spent time getting to know Kaia and two others who faced police action in school as young children. What was clear was that their experiences left an indelible imprint on their lives.
Kaia’s grandmother said she is watching her grandbaby die “bit by bit, day after day.”
Malachi Pryor, who was 7 when he was handcuffed and dragged across a hallway in his Denver school after a shoving match with another child, went to therapy because he was convinced he was a bad kid.
Evelyn Towry, who was pinned in a chair and arrested at age 8 in Idaho after hitting her teacher, was scared to go back to school, became terrified of police officers and clung to her mother in public.
The incidents that trigger such arrests are often minor.
Evelyn wanted to wear a cow hoodie. Malachi’s classmate mocked a drawing of Sonic the Hedgehog.
And Kaia? Kaia wanted to wear sunglasses.
‘She looks like a baby’
When Kaia was born, she nearly died. Her skin turned blue. Doctors lost her heartbeat. The emergency team went to work and Kirkland began to pray.
God, if you let my grandbaby live, I will raise her in your faith and always be there for her.
Within seconds, Kaia let out a squeak like a mewling kitten. Then she took a big breath and wailed.
Kaia’s problems at school started in kindergarten. By then, she had developed severe sleep apnea due to enlarged tonsils and adenoids. She woke up frequently. Sometimes she stopped breathing. She slept two or three hours a night.
During the day, she fell asleep while drawing, watching television or riding in the car.
“She’d be talking and she’d go totally quiet,” Kirkland said. “You’d be waiting for the next sentence and look in the rearview mirror and she’d be snoring.”
In school, the sleep deprivation took its toll. She’d throw tantrums, kicking and crying. Kaia’s teachers learned to let it play out until she calmed down.
That didn’t work on Sept. 19, 2019, when Kaia was a first-grader at Lucious … Emma Nixon Academy, a charter school in west Orlando. Following a bad night, she’d come to school bleary-eyed and cranky.
Early that morning, her teacher told Kaia she could not wear her sunglasses in class and took them away. Kaia started screaming, kicking and hitting staffers, including school employee Beverly Stoute. Kaia tried to run away when a teacher’s aide led Kaia to an office. Staffers blocked the doors.
School resource officer Dennis Turner witnessed some of Kaia’s outburst, according to police documents. But by the time he moved to arrest her, Kaia was calm. Video from Turner’s body camera shows Kaia quietly sitting in an office with a staffer.
Orlando police officer Sergio Ramos arrived to take Kaia to the Juvenile Assessment Center. He brought zip ties because handcuffs were too big.
But once Ramos saw the little girl, he called his sergeant and objected.
“Sarge, this girl is tiny,” he told his boss. “She looks like a baby.”
Turner insisted the arrest continue. On the body cam footage, one staffer seems to be wiping away tears.
“The restraints, are they necessary?” another staffer asks.
“Yes,” Turner answers. “And if she was bigger, she’d have been wearing regular handcuffs.”
In his arrest affidavit Turner wrote: “Victim Beverly H. Stoute stated both verbally (and) in a sworn written statement that Def. Rolle kicked her on the legs several times and punched her several times on both arms without permission. Stoute further stated she wanted to press charges and would testify in court.”
The defendant stood 3 feet, 10 inches.
The body cam video shows Kaia, wearing a red shirt and a red barrette on her braids, warily eyeing the zip ties being held off camera.
“What are those for?” she asked.
“It’s for you,” one of the officers answered.
Ramos turned Kaia around and secured the girl’s hands behind her back. Kaia began to wail.
The officers led her out of the school, passing blue slides on the playground as they approached the black and white SUV.
“I don’t want to go in the police car,” Kaia cried.
“You don’t want to?” Ramos said.
“No, please.”
“You have to.”
“No, please,” Kaia begged. “Give me a second chance.”
Kaia was taken to the county Juvenile Assessment Center, where officials took her fingerprints and tried to take her mugshot. But Kaia was too short to fit into the frame. So officials got a stool, snapped her photo and ultimately released her to her horrified grandmother. Uniformed officials at the center warned Kaia that if she didn’t appear for a scheduled court hearing, she would be arrested, Kirkland said.
“She didn’t know what a court hearing was,” she said.
Experts don’t dispute that there may be cases in which police involvement is necessary. Sometimes young kids come to school with knives or guns.
But cops and schools need to think about why they’re arresting kids before they do it, said Tracie Keesee, senior vice president of Justice Initiatives at the Center for Policing Equity. Is the goal punishment? Public safety? Retribution?
“What are we trying to solve?” she said.
An internal affairs investigation into Kaia’s arrest by the Orlando Police Department provided Turner’s explanation for arresting the child.
“It’s extreme,” Turner said of Kaia’s behavior in a call to a sergeant before the arrest. “I don’t want to do this. I have to.”
“You know, you could always file or do something else,” the sergeant suggested.
“Trust me, I don’t want to do this, I have to,” Turner answered.
The investigation gave no explanation as to why Turner felt he had to arrest Kaia, but it was clearly not something he was loath to do. Later that same day, Turner arrested another 6-year-old student at the same school for kicking his teacher. However, police supervisors stopped the arrest before it went through the full process.
Arresting young children does nothing to change their behavior, experts say. Their brains are so undeveloped that most don’t understand the concept of criminal intent.
At 5 years old, children are just recognizing most letters of the alphabet. At 6, Kaia’s age when she was arrested, children still fear monsters. At 7, they have difficulty with basic spelling. At 8, they are still losing baby teeth.
It may even be unconstitutional to arrest children too young to understand what’s happening to them, said William Lassiter, the deputy secretary for juvenile justice in North Carolina.
“It just makes no sense to involve law enforcement in a case against a 6- or 7-year-old,” Lassiter told USA TODAY. “The fundamental belief of our constitutional system is that if you’re standing trial, you need to understand what your rights are and how to participate in your defense. There’s just no way that a 6- or 7-year-old can do that.”
When children act out, there’s something else going on. Maybe they’re being affected by family problems, medical troubles, disabilities, abuse or violence. In Kaia’s case, her family says, it was her sleep disorder.
The charges against Kaia were dropped, but her story blew up in the media.
Nixon Academy officials did not respond to multiple calls and emails from USA TODAY requesting information about the incident. At the time of the arrest, the school released a statement saying they never wanted to press charges, contrary to Turner’s report. Stoute said the same thing to police internal affairs investigators who scrutinized the case.
“No I did not,” Stoute said, according to police documents. “I did not verbally say, ‘Hey, Reserve Officer Turner, I want to charge this little person with battery.’ No I did not.”
Turner, who could not be reached for comment, was fired for not following protocol. Ramos was cleared of wrongdoing.
But Kaia and her grandmother weren’t finished fighting. Kirkland knew all about the school-to-prison pipeline, a national trend in which students of color are disproportionately arrested and sentenced to prison. It rattled her.
The reasons Black youth are criminalized so young has been vastly studied, and the explanations vary: implicit bias, failure to recognize trauma in Black children, a tendency to view them as older than they are, a failure to identify learning disabilities and mental health problems.
Kirkland knew she couldn’t change everything. But the arrests of kids like Kaia?
An analysis of federal data by USA TODAY showed that of the 5- to 9-year-olds arrested between 2000 and 2019, Black children comprised 43%, even though they make up only 15% of kids that age. That discrepancy among young children is even greater than the rate at which Black teens face police action at high schools.
It has to stop, Kirkland told herself. I have to help.
‘Mommy, what are batteries?’
Ten years before Kaia was arrested, Evelyn Towry, now 21, faced her own criminal charges.
Back then, school was a war zone for Evelyn, who has a form of high-functioning autism called Asperger’s syndrome. While attending elementary school in the late 2000s, the sounds of other children chewing, students shifting in their seats, paper shuffling, fans whirring – all of it assaulted her senses. She loved dogs and cats and cows and liked to dress in animal costumes her mother made for her because she thought animals were treated better than people.
In her kindergarten class at Kootenai Elementary School in Kootenai, Idaho, she screamed and cried. She tore up papers and refused to listen to teachers. She struggled to recognize emotions. She felt bullied by her classmates.
Before first grade, Evelyn had been suspended numerous times.
Many children with disabilities have similar stories. Some have learning disabilities or emotional problems. Some have poor social skills. Others fail to pick up on cues that a teacher is angry or struggle to relate to their fellow students. Evelyn had so much trouble recognizing emotions that her therapist taped pictures of teddy bears with explicitly named expressions on the child’s shirt to help her learn. Her teachers made her take them off, deeming them distracting, Evelyn said.
Give those types of challenges to under-trained teachers, add in easy access to school resource officers who don’t know each child’s educational plan, mix in frustration, confusion and tension on all sides, and the concoction can be explosive. It happens a lot, said Joe Ryan, a professor of special education at Clemson University.
“It’s very depressing when this happens again and again and again,” Ryan said.
An analysis of federal data last year by the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, in partnership with USA TODAY, showed that the rate at which students with disabilities were referred to law enforcement was disproportionately high in every state.
Evelyn’s teachers tried to work with her, according to a lawsuit her family later settled with the school district. They gave her snacks. They worked with her one-on-one at times and played soft guitar music. Good behavior earned her free time or popcorn.
On Jan. 9, 2009, Evelyn arrived at school excited about a class party. Even though she wasn’t supposed to wear it to school, Evelyn, then 8 and in third grade, arrived in a cow hoodie her mother had decorated with black spots, ears, a tail and a peach glove for the udders. The school had previously banned Evelyn from wearing animal outfits, saying they were too distracting.
The day of the party, Evelyn’s teacher told her she couldn’t partake in the festivities unless she tucked in the tail and ears of her hoodie, according to court documents. Evelyn says she complied, but her teacher still refused to let her go to the party. Evelyn eventually bolted and ran toward the portable classroom where the celebration was underway. Her teacher called staffers and told them to stop Evelyn at the door.
Soon Evelyn was screaming, crying and clinging to a nearby railing. Two teacher’s aides pried her hands loose and carried the 54-pound child back to class.
“Anytime you go hands-on with children with autism or on the spectrum, it’s going to escalate quickly,” said Lauren Gardner, administrative director of the autism program at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in Florida. “We have to be able to take a step back, take a deep breath and say, ‘What is the real issue now?’ and, ‘What are we willing to go to battle over?’”
Evelyn was forced into a chair by staffers. She kicked, yelled, spit and hit. She pinched her teacher’s breast, hard. On it went, until the principal called the police.
Evelyn was in fight-or-flight mode, the clinic director of a children’s mental health center told the court during the Towry family’s lawsuit. Asperger’s children believe that these kinds of scenarios are life-and-death situations.
“When this child left the room, she was carried back by two teachers, and it was already too late,” he wrote in his report.
After about 30 minutes, Evelyn began to calm down.
It didn’t matter. In the police report, the sheriff’s deputy wrote that Evelyn’s teacher and principal “wanted to have charges pressed because they were not getting their point across to Evelyn or Evelyn’s parents.”
Policies on calling police vary from school to school or even child to child. Some teachers feel arresting children is the wrong call. But other educators, be it due to frustration, safety concerns or an easy access to law enforcement in schools, call on cops to intervene.
In Layton, Utah, a principal called police to report that a group of second-graders had stolen items including $25 in change, a Rubik’s cube, a stapler and crayons.
In Boise, Idaho, a principal demanded police file charges against an elementary school child who broke a school window with a rock.
In Memphis, Tennessee, an elementary school boy was charged with simple assault for scratching another child on the nose.
The deputies told Evelyn she was being arrested because of the batteries that had occurred. As they led her to a patrol car with handcuffs locked around her wrists, Evelyn saw her mother in the parking lot.
“Mommy, mommy,” she cried through sudden tears. “What are batteries? What are batteries?”
The charges were quickly dropped. Evelyn transferred to another school and improved, she said, because the teachers better understood how to work with her.
And, according to court documents in the Towry lawsuit, at least one teacher at Kootenai Elementary was happy to see Evelyn go. On her Jan. 9, 2009 planner, the teacher wrote “handcuffs — Last Day ET. Phew!” The entry was followed by a smiley face symbol.
More than a decade later, Evelyn doesn’t think her arrest caused post traumatic stress disorder or lasting mental health problems.
Today, she works part-time bussing tables at a restaurant. She supplements that with Social Security, rents her own apartment, has a boyfriend, maintains a close relationship with her mother and dotes on her 13-year-old cat, Hazel. She hopes someday to do voice-over work for animated television and film.
While upsetting, not every arrest of a child is clinically traumatizing, said Steven Marans, co-director of the Yale Center for Traumatic Stress and Recovery. So much depends on the child’s life experiences before the incident, the way the arrest is conducted and the support they receive afterward.
Evelyn is still angry about what happened. She hated police officers for a long time and, while that fury has faded, she still panics when she sees them.
“Just because someone has a disability doesn’t mean they don’t have the ability to understand things,” she said.
Evelyn is appalled that schools are still arresting young school children. Since her arrest 13 years ago, USA TODAY documented 1,061 arrests of children ages 5 to 9 at elementary schools across the country, and, again, that number is surely an undercount.
“I feel quite alarmed and disgusted by how kids are being arrested,” Evelyn said. “It doesn’t matter what they do, they are children.”
‘Right-wrong family’ pushes back
Brandon Pryor paced in front of Florida Pitt Waller school in Denver, angry, anxious and blasting out his disbelief on Facebook Live.
It was April 19, 2019. A school staffer had called Pryor to say his 7-year-old son, Malachi, had been handcuffed after “an altercation” with another second-grader. But when Pryor arrived, the school wouldn’t let him see his son. At least four police officers stood behind the purple front door to make sure Pryor didn’t get in.
And Pryor was seething.
“This is egregious,” he said on the Facebook video, which has been viewed 30,000 times. “This is completely unacceptable, and I am pissed off right now.”
Pryor knew he had to stay calm. The Black, 6-foot, 2-inch former linebacker for the Oklahoma Sooners knew losing his cool in front of the cops could land him behind bars — or worse. So he didn’t shout. He firmly spoke his piece into the camera.
“I’m trying to keep it together guys, because I’m no good to anybody locked up and in jail,” he said.
He also accused the school of discriminating against young children of color.
“You all are criminalizing our children inside these schools and then you want to lock me out,” he said. “Bring me my damn son!”
Eventually, Malachi’s parents learned the whole story.
Malachi was in art class, drawing Sonic the Hedgehog when, as Malachi remembers it, another kid came over and said his drawings “sucked.”
The boys started shoving, and their teacher called security. Malachi’s parents, who reviewed surveillance footage of the incident, said their son was led outside the classroom. When he resisted by sitting down, he was restrained by the security officer, dragged down the hallway in front of other students and eventually handcuffed.
Malachi, scared and confused, prayed to God for help.
“Please let me out.”
No charges were filed. The Pryors grabbed Malachi and his younger brother, drove away from the school and went to Uno Pizzeria. Anything to ease the misery of that day.
The incident drew fierce outcry in the community because Malachi’s parents were Brandon and Samantha Pryor, co-founders of Warriors For High Quality Schools, a community organization demanding racial justice within the Denver public schools system.
The Denver school board unanimously passed a resolution to eliminate the use of handcuffs with elementary school students in most cases and reduce the use of handcuffs with middle and high school students.
The school district agreed to a confidential settlement with the family before a lawsuit was even filed.
School resource officers and private security companies have come under fire for years, with advocates insisting that they are heavy-handed, don’t always know how to handle children and give overburdened teachers an easy way to deal with discipline. Then those discipline problems can become criminal problems.
Adding police to the equation doesn’t work because many have no idea how to deal with kids and are doing what they were trained to do — arrest people, said Leona Lee with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“You bring in the police and security elements and demand absolute obedience,” she said. “The only way for them to deal with problems is to arrest people. No negotiating.”
Meanwhile, many children of color feel unsafe around police because they’ve seen friends or relatives targeted by law enforcement. They’re also well aware of the police killings of Black people like George Floyd, Tamir Rice or Philando Castile, said Andrew Hairston with Texas Appleseed, a criminal justice nonprofit.
Still, many teachers support cops in schools. A June 2020 Education Week survey showed that just 23% of educators supported removing armed officers from campuses. And they point to school resource officers like Pamela Revels to show how effective they can be.
Revels — who is on the board of the directors of the National Association of School Resource Officers — has been a school resource officer for all school ages in Lee County, Alabama, for 17 years. When a child acts out, she lowers her voice, lets the child know they’re safe and tries to get to the root of the problem, she said.
In one case, a boy was frustrated because he was frequently late for class. Revels stepped in and discovered the child was too short to see the combination on his top locker. That day, Revels helped him move all his stuff into a bottom locker.
“Not another tardy, not another problem,” she said.
USA TODAY’s analysis goes much further than a 2007 FBI report scrutinizing the arrests of America’s youngest students. The newspaper’s analysis brings available numbers up to date and provides more detail. It shows that small children arrested at schools are disproportionately male. Nearly two-thirds of the arrests were for assault, and most of the victims in those cases were adult females, presumably teachers and other school staffers.
Meanwhile, Black children were arrested at far higher rates than their numbers in the general population.
Many blame the arrests of small children on the proliferation of cops in schools. There are more than 50,000 full and part-time school resource officers in schools around the country, according to 2015-2016 data from the National Center for Education Statistics. And schools with police reported 3.5 times more arrests than schools without them, according to a 2019 report from the American Civil Liberties Union.
At the same time, millions of students attend schools without counselors, nurses, social workers or psychologists.
But Revels has had extensive training on working with children, while many school resource officers do not. Thirty-eight states and territories either require school officers to have specialized training, encourage it or have policies not compelled by law, according to 2019 numbers compiled by the National Association of State Boards of Education. The remaining states don’t address it.
Staci Adams, a fourth-grade math teacher at Smothers Elementary School in Washington, D.C., adamantly opposes child arrests but supports police in schools. She’s been through a lot over the years. She went to the hospital once for a shoulder injury after blocking a desktop a child threw at other students. A second-grader who tried to strangle a principal with a lanyard is still in her school two years later.
Neither of those children was arrested.
Adams trains other teachers how to handle challenging behavior, and she can deal with most situations herself. But she is not allowed to break up fights. She can’t restrain children. For a long time, she worried that a child might escape her classroom, run down the nearby stairs and race outside.
In December, it happened. That day, a child attacked Adams and destroyed a radio, then sprinted out of the classroom, down the stairs and through a door leading outside. Then he ran into traffic.
The school security officers chased him down, kept traffic at bay and were eventually able to get him back into school.
“They were able to keep the boy from getting hurt in oncoming traffic,” Adams said. “They were able to keep him from harming me or any other students.”
When the police were called, they offered Adams the chance to press charges. She refused, knowing that putting a little Black boy into the criminal justice system would hurt more than help. Instead, Adams and the family came up with a plan to control the child’s behavior.
The boy later returned to school with a tearful apology, a card, a CD player and a promise to never act out again.
“Heal, learn and move on,” Adams said of her philosophy.
Malachi’s mother, a lawyer who worked on the handcuffs policy with the district, said the incident traumatized the whole family. In the months that followed, she watched Malachi start to believe he was a bad kid. Good kids, he thought, didn’t get handcuffed.
It took therapy and numerous conversations with Malachi for the truth to sink in: You’re not bad. They should not have done that to you.
Brandon Pryor, who had already been a thorn in the side of the district with his activism, took his passion to the next level. He, Samantha and their friend, Gabe Lindsay, designed a district school founded on the values of Historically Black Colleges and Universities: The Robert F. Smith STEAM Academy. The vision is to empower, educate and inspire children of color instead of making them vulnerable to discrimination and arrest.
The Pryors’ advocacy is among many efforts underway to do away with the arrests or criminalization of young children.
In 2020, Virginia became the first state to prohibit police from charging students with disorderly conduct at school or school-sponsored events.
Some school districts, including Oakland and Los Angeles, have eliminated or reduced the use of law enforcement in schools. Milwaukee canceled its contract with the city police, but continues to call in officers to handle problems.
Specialists are teaching school resource officers how to recognize disabilities in children, how to read their behaviors and how to de-escalate outbursts.
“We were the right-wrong family who this happened to,” Samantha Pryor told USA TODAY. “It was terrible, but our child is strong and supported by two parents who know how to advocate for him. Some people just have to accept what the system does to them because they don’t have the resources to fight back.”
‘They move on. We can’t’
Kaia’s family refused to just accept what had happened.
Kaia’s mother, Jaime, moved from the Bahamas to Orlando shortly after the arrest to help care for Kaia. Her aunt, uncle and grandfather also help out. Kirkland, who raised Kaia for years before Jaime arrived in the United States, works at a bank to support the family.
After Kaia’s arrest, her grandmother became the public face of a movement to stop child arrests in Florida. She spoke to the media, to colleges and state legislators. She talked to other parents in similar situations. She filed a lawsuit against the school, which is ongoing.
In the meantime, the family is struggling.
They’re burning through Kirkland’s retirement savings. They have six open lines of credit and loans and set up a GoFundMe account. They’ve dealt with depression. They go to family therapy to deal with the constant stress of fighting to keep Kaia safe. Kirkland has been in the hospital multiple times, her medical problems agitated by stressors she can’t escape.
“Nobody thinks about how people’s lives have to go on after this,” Kirkland said. “They say, ‘Oh that’s terrible,’ and they go on with their lives. Everybody sweeps you under the rug, and they move on. We can’t.”
Kaia still gets violent when she’s angry and runs away when afraid. She sees a therapist and a psychiatrist. She takes medications to help her with her anxiety, phobias and PTSD. She is still terrified of police.
She has attended three different schools since her arrest. She first went to a private school, but that proved too expensive. Kaia started at a new public school in August 2021 but quickly withdrew after Kirkland said a police officer was summoned when the child threw a tantrum. Kaia was restrained, taken to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and let go that day, Kirkland said.
Now Kaia attends a public school in Orlando that specializes in children with mental, physical and developmental challenges.
Less than a week after starting there, Kaia felt so overwhelmed by her schoolwork that she ran out of the school screaming for her mother and grandmother. A half-dozen staffers gave chase but knew not to touch her. They just made sure she couldn’t get off campus while the school called Kirkland.
As soon as Kaia saw her grandmother, she dropped to the hot asphalt exhausted, heaving and panting in the sun. “She was still screaming and crying and yelling, ‘No, no, no,’” Kirkland said.
Welcome to Kaia’s amygdala — the part of the brain that regulates emotions. When a person feels threatened, the amygdala triggers an involuntary fight, flight or freeze response. Then, when that danger disappears, the brain regulates and the amygdala gets back to the business of controlling routine feelings.
But Kaia — like others who have experienced PTSD — is different. Her trauma has become stuck in the amygdala, creating emotional explosions. When something upsets her, her fight, flight or freeze response kicks in.
When she sees a cop, she hides, cries and shakes. If she feels attacked by a teacher, she’ll throw things or scream. When she broke her grandmother’s phone, she ran into a thunderstorm and raced through the streets, trying to find her aunt and buy a new phone.
This is what Kaia lives with two years after she was arrested at age 6. Her brain has physically changed, said her therapist, Nancy Langford.
“Arresting a child has the potential to create lasting, traumatizing stress,” Langford said. “The confusion of a young child being arrested may result in a lack of trust in people children are supposed to trust, such as teachers, police officers, even adults in general.”
At her new school, Kaia gets the specialized attention she needs.
“They are working wonders,” Kirkland said. “For the first time in two years, Kaia is excited to go to school.”
Another triumph came last year when Kaia’s family successfully pushed Florida lawmakers to pass the Kaia Rolle Act. It prohibits the arrest of any child under the age of 7 for anything other than a forcible felony. That’s still far too young, Kirkland said. She won’t be satisfied until legislators raise that age, preferably to 12.
Kaia knows about the law in her name and said she’s happy because her friends can’t get arrested.
“Everybody’s important, not just one person,” she said. The words were delivered without a smile or inflection, sounding more like a spokesperson accustomed to cameras and sound bites than a child.
Yet now and then signs of the old Kaia unexpectedly emerge.
One day while watching YouTube videos in the family room, Kaia overheard her grandmother and mother talking about her in the kitchen.
The old Kaia was a burst of sunshine. She owned the room, no matter where she went. Just look at these pictures of her. Look at that smile. Wasn’t she beautiful? Oh, there’s her with her keyboard. She sang and made up songs all the time, all the time.
Kaia poked her head around the corner. Slowly, she padded over to the kitchen bar and stared at the photos on her grandmother’s phone. Her mood visibly brightened while she commented on the changing images.
“Look at me with my long hair,” she said, clinging to her mom. Kaia has her own Facebook page, filled with scores of pictures of herself as an infant, a toddler and a schoolgirl. She seems especially fascinated with photos taken before her arrest.
“It’s like, I think she wants to return to that girl,” Kirkland said, “but she doesn’t know how.”
Indigenous voters turned out in record numbers for the 2020 election that put Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate and Joe Biden in the White House. (photo: Cayla Nimmo/AP)
The Arizona Democrat supports a filibuster that could kill legislation to counter assaults on voting rights
Sinema was elected in 2018, halfway through Trump’s term, amid growing alarm at the rollback of voting rights and environmental protections that disproportionately affect tribal communities. Sinema entered the Senate after six years in Congress, having beaten her Republican opponent with 50% of the vote, thanks in part to the large turnout among Indigenous Americans in Arizona.
Two years later, another record turnout among the state’s 22 tribes was crucial in flipping Arizona from red to blue and securing Biden’s path to the White House.
But Sinema’s record as a senator is under mounting scrutiny after she and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin sided with Republicans to keep the Senate filibuster rule in place, effectively killing legislation designed to counter an onslaught of voting rights restrictions in states across the country.
The sweeping voting rights reforms include the Native American Voting Rights Act (Navra) , which would allow tribes to determine the number and location of voter registration sites, polling places and ballot drop boxes on their reservations.
Navra is widely supported by tribal nations, but if the filibuster remains intact Democrats need 10 Republicans to vote in favor of the bill.
Sinema supports the voting rights legislation, but it has no chance of passing unless the filibuster – the Senate tradition designed to allow the minority party to prolong debate and delay or prevent a vote – is removed.
Jonathan Nez, president of the Navajo nation, the largest tribe in the US, told the Guardian: “We’re disappointed in the senator. She’s on the national stage due to the Native American vote and large turnout among Navajo people. If she doesn’t deliver on what’s important to us, I’m sure there’s another candidate who will.”
Nez added: “There is much frustration among voters, the Native American voting rights act is very important to us given the way the state of Arizona has been chipping away at our voting rights.”
Nationally, there are 574 federally recognized American Indian tribes and Alaska Native Villages, accounting for about 1.5% (4.5m) of the total population.
This includes 22 tribes in Arizona, including the Tohono O’odham nation, the Hopi tribe, three Apache tribes and the Navajo nation, whose territory extends into Utah and New Mexico. Just over 27% of Arizona is governed by tribal sovereignty.
The political culture varies from tribe to tribe – and some in Arizona have publicly voiced support for Sinema – but those in Indigenous communities are less likely to be registered to vote than other groups due to a number of historical barriers. Indigenous Americans did not have the right to vote until 1948. Longstanding structural obstacles, including poor roads, scarce public transit options and limited postal and translation services, have restricted their participation in elections.
In recent years, Arizona and several other states have passed laws and regulations that make voting even harder for Indigenous Americans – and other underserved communities who tend to vote Democrat. This includes restrictions on early-voter locations, mail-in ballots and ballot collection drives, which legal experts say disproportionately affect ruralIndigenous voters.
The US Senate has also thwarted two bills Republicans had previously blocked four times with a filibuster – the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Navra, which does have some bipartisan support, would ban states from closing or merging polling sites on reservations without tribal consent, and would require states with voter identification laws to accept tribal ID.
Sinema’s support of the filibuster has undermined a mammoth effort by grassroots activists to mobilize Indigenous voters, according to Tara Benally, field director of the Utah Rural Project, a nonprofit that mobilizes underrepresented voters in rural Arizona and Utah.
Benally said: “Our community outreach workers spent hours upon hours registering and gaining the trust of voters in the run up to the 2018 and 2020 elections after decades of being pushed aside at the local, state and federal level.
“Senator Sinema has completely undermined what we did and betrayed her voters. I highly doubt people will vote for her again unless by some miracle she changes her values and stops working against those who elected her.”
About 10,000 new Indigenous voters were registeredin Arizona ahead of the last presidential election – which Biden won by just over 10,000 votes. In 2020, voter turnout on the reservations ranged from 41 to 71% compared to 29 to 57% in 2016.
Torey Dolan, an Indigenous fellow at the Indian Law Clinic at Arizona State University, said: “Sinema got the lion’s share of the votes on the reservations; they played a significant role in getting her and Biden elected. Her opposition to removing the filibuster means a death knell for Navra, and that has left a sour taste in a lot of people’s mouths here.”
She added: “[Going forward] it will be hard to encourage people to register when they don’t see their votes fulfilling the hopes and promises placed on them.”
Sinema voted with Donald Trump 63% of the time as a member of the House (2016 to 2018) and 26% of the time as a senator (2019 to 2021), according to FiveThirtyEight. Voting for the filibuster was the first time she voted against her party since Biden took office.
In addition to voting rights, Biden’s $1.75tn sweeping economic recovery and social welfare spending initiative is also in serious trouble.
The Build Back Better (BBB) bill includes funding for affordable housing, healthcare, nutrition, education grants and child support – basic services which are disproportionately lacking in tribal communities due to the US government’s failure to comply with treaty obligations. Unlike towns and cities, tribes cannot raise money through property taxes as reservation lands are held in trust by the federal government.
The BBB also includes $550bn to tackle greenhouse emissions, the country’s largest ever climate crisis investment. It builds on other major infrastructure investments, such as the American Rescue Plan, that have benefited tribal communities.
Unlike Manchin, who outright opposes the bill, Sinema has signaled support for the White House’s BBB framework but has not committed to voting for it in its current form.
Hannah Hurley, Sinema’s spokesperson, said: “Kyrsten remains laser-focused on delivering lasting solutions for tribal communities across Arizona, and thanks to strong partnerships with tribal leaders she’s delivered historic investments improving tribal roads and bridges, ensuring cleaner water, deploying broadband, helping tribes tackle climate change challenges, and strengthening health care resources. She will continue to work with tribal communities in Arizona expanding economic opportunities and ensuring the federal government honors its obligations.”
But Eric Descheenie, former Arizona state house representative for the district which includes the Navajo nation, said Sinema faces a major trust issue.
“The climate change agenda needs help from senators like Kyrsten Sinema, who represents some of the most influential tribes in the land, and needs to do a better job heeding the wisdom of our people … The problem is, no progressive can trust her,” Descheenie said.
A protester balances a rock on her head as a symbol of penance during a protest by factory workers demanding salary increases in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2022. (photo: Odelyn Joseph)
"What happened today is a heavy blow against the press, which has the right to perform its duties in peace as workers have the right to protest": outlet Rois des Infos Director Romane.
"What happened today is a heavy blow against the press, which has the right to perform its duties in peace as workers have the right to protest," outlet Rois des Infos Director Omeus Romane stated.
Prime Minister Ariel Henry condemned the violence that caused the death of Lazzare and offered his condolences to the journalist's family. The Police, however, have taken no position on this question so far.
Before the murder, the Haitian police had fired tear gas at a group of demonstrators who threw stones at them and used trucks to block the main avenue near Port-au-Prince Airport so that their demands would be heard.
Earlier this month, workers blocked an industrial park to protest against low wages, which were at the time around US$4.80 for a nine-hour workday.
In an attempt to suppress the demonstrations, Henry announced a US$1.80 increase to the minimum wage on Sunday. This policy, however, only angered the workers more.
"Nothing can be done with this miserable salary, which barely covers the costs of food and transportation. Haiti is experiencing unusual inflation. We will not accept less than US$14 a day," 39-year-old worker Jean Pierre told the Associated Press.
Each year, beekeepers from across the nation converge on California for almond season, and the bee thieves always follow. (photo: Boba Jaglicic/Unsplash)
Each year, beekeepers from across the nation converge on California for almond season, and the bee thieves always follow
As the Associated Press reports, while beehive theft occurs elsewhere—such as three hives containing 60,000 bees nicked from a Pennsylvania grocery outlet’s fields earlier this month—the problem reaches epidemic proportions in California, where it takes 90 percent of all the country’s honeybees to pollinate the almond crop. As the beekeepers converge on California for almond season around this time each year, the poachers come, too.
Just in the past few weeks, 1,036 beehives worth hundreds of thousands of dollars were stolen from orchards statewide. In the most brazen case, rustlers made off with 384 beehives from a field in Mendocino County. California’s beekeepers association offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to their recovery, in what has become the Lufthansa Heist of bee thefts.
To get the word out about the reward, Claire Tauzer of Tauzer Apiaries and Honey Bee Genetics said on Facebook, “It’s hard to articulate how it feels to care for your hives all year only to have them stolen from you.”
A day later, an anonymous tipster led authorities to recover most of the hive boxes and a stolen Tauzer family forklift at a rural property in Yolo County, 55 miles away—where one suspect was arrested. Cops also discovered honeycomb frames belonging to beekeeper Helio Medina, who lost 282 hives last year.
Hoping to prevent further looting of his apiary, Medina placed GPS trackers inside the boxes, strapped cable locks around them, and installed cameras nearby. He also began patrolling his orchards after dark, when the criminals usually strike because the bees have returned to their hives and the hives are left unprotected.
“We have do what we can to protect ourselves. Nobody can help us,” Medina told the AP.
The poachers are usually beekeepers themselves, and familiar with the transportation of bees, but with hive-rental prices skyrocketing from $50 a pop 20 years ago to $230 per hive this year, they don’t bother to safeguard the insects.
As Rowdy Jay Freeman—a Butte County sheriff’s detective who has been keeping track of hive thefts since 2013—tells AP, “More often than not, they steal to make money and leave the bees to die.”
Denise Qualls, a pollination broker who connects beekeepers with growers, has joined forces with a tech startup called Bee Hero to protect hive boxes with GPS-enabled sensors. Additionally, Rowdy Freeman advises beekeepers to use security cameras and put their names and phone numbers on the boxes. Some beekeepers, Detective Freeman said, have also tagged their boxes with SmartWater CSI, a clear liquid visible only under UV light that police use to trace stolen property.
Even without the annual beehive crimewave, rearing the insects for profit can be a gamble.
“For every $210 paid to rent a beehive, we put close to that much into it the whole year feeding the bees because of drought,” Tauzer told the AP. “We do all the health checks, which is labor intensive, and we pay our workers full benefits.”
Yet, while almonds are the state’s leading crop, producing the nuts is also perhaps the most wasteful agricultural endeavor on earth. As Bill Maher noted on Real Time last year, despite decades of drought, the number of almond growers have doubled in that time.
“Almond production alone uses more water than all the humans and businesses in San Francisco and Los Angeles combined,” Maher said. “Oranges, tomatoes and strawberries all take about 11 gallons [of water] to make one pound. Almonds? 1900 gallons.”
So how much do you really want that nut?
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