20 February 22
These Disastrously Poor Fundraising Numbers
These numbers are — far — below what we normally can depend on. We have to confront this head-on.
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The situation is quite bad.
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19 February 22
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PBS estimates that roughly 1,100,000 Americans have died in all US wars in history.
That is, the death toll from COVID-19 is just about as great as the toll of all our wars combined, from the time of George Washington to the present.
Excess deaths is a technical term in public health and a much more accurate way of measuring the impact of a phenomenon like a pandemic or a war than depending on reports from e.g. hospitals. Melody Schreiber at the Guardian explains that in 2019 there were “2.8m deaths in the US; in 2020, it was approximately 3.3m.” The pandemic is the only way to explain this huge jump in deaths.
University of Minnesota historian J. David Hacker used the “excess deaths” method to demonstrate that the death toll in the US Civil War was more likely 750,000 than the standard 620,000 usually cited.
It is inescapable, though, that COVID took even more lives than the Civil War.
Moreover, the novel coronavirus pandemic provoked a sort of Civil War in the United States that probably cost more lives than any American conflict since the 1860s. As with the 1860s, the South lost again.
Mississippi, Arizona, Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Tennessee saw the most deaths per capita, with only New Jersey being in their league. Republican-led states did the very worst. Moreover, if we break down deaths per capita by county, heavily Republican counties did substantially worse than ones where people voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. That is, if we look at Michigan, which also had a high per capita death rate, though not in Mississippi’s league, we find that the deaths clustered in Republican-leaning counties.
An NPR analysis this winter found that “Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who live in areas that went for now-President Biden.” The discrepancy holds even if the mean age of county residents is taken into account.
The study demonstrated that the higher death rate in pro-Trump counties was owing to a refusal to get vaccinated. That refusal, in turn, derived from misinformation about vaccinations that was spread around by far right media like Fox, OAN, Newsmax, etc., and by Republican politicians.
Tucker Carlson compared vaccine mandates to “Nazi experiments” and also decried mask-wearing. Getting vaccinated and masking are the best proven way to avoid getting sick with COVID-19. When President Biden tried to use the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to require companies with 100 workers or more to implement vaccine mandates, some 12 Republican governors sued over it and got their Republican buddies on the Supreme Court to strike the policy down.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott banned vaccine mandates for covid, even though his state has made schoolchildren get vaccinated against deadly diseases for decades. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis badmouthed COVID vaccines while pushing medically unproven treatments.
This, even though in spring of 2021, the Biden administration’s vaccine drive saved nearly a quarter of a million lives. The refusal of the red states to get vaccinated caused far more people to die in 2021 and early 2022 than needed to, as the delta variant swept through the population, followed by the highly transmissible omicron variant.
The Biden administration’s successful vaccination drive is estimated to have saved a million lives all told in 2021.
So since the US Right Wing has started liking Nazi analogies so much, they should look in the mirror. By discouraging vaccinations and masking, they are the Dr. Josef Mengeles doing deadly experiments on people. They have mown down hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people in a genocide of quackery.
Donald Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT/Redux)
The agency "has identified items marked as classified national security information within the boxes" that Trump stored at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach. Fla., the National Archives and Records Administration said in a letter to Rep, Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y.
The letter – signed by David S. Ferriero, the national archivist – also said that "because NARA identified classified information in the boxes, NARA staff has been in communication with the Department of Justice."
The Archives did not detail its contacts with Justice Department officials or the nature of the classified documents that Trump stored in Florida.
Maloney, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, and other lawmakers have asked the National Archives and the Justice Department to investigate whether Trump violated the Presidential Records Act. That law requires chief executives to turn over all official records when they leave office.
After receiving the response from the Archives, Maloney said "these new revelations deepen my concern about former President Trump’s flagrant disregard for federal records laws and the potential impact on our historical record."
The Justice Department had no comment on the Archives' disclosures.
Last month, the National Archives recovered 15 boxes of documents that Trump moved to Mar-a-Lago when he left the White House on Jan. 20, 2021.
Trump said the recovery of the boxes followed "collaborative and respectful discussions" with National Archives, and he denied any wrongdoing in retaining some of his records.
"It was viewed as routine and 'no big deal,'" Trump said in a statement last week. "In actuality, I have been told I was under no obligation to give this material based on various legal rulings that have been made over the years."
While the letter said the Archives "is in the process of inventorying the contents of the boxes," it also said officials are still trying to recover more Trump administration records.
That includes some "non-official electronic messaging accounts" used by some staff members that "were not copied or forwarded into their official electronic messaging accounts.”
Trump and allies had criticized 2016 election opponent Hillary Clinton for her use of private email during her time as secretary of State.
The National Archives also announced that it has "identified certain social media records that were not captured and preserved by the Trump Administration."
In its letter to Congress, the Archives confirmed that documents recovered from Trump included papers that had been ripped up by the president and taped back together.
The letter added that "a number of other torn-up records that were transferred had not been reconstructed by the White House."
A woman uses her phone. (photo: Getty Images)
The company formerly known as X-Mode is now part of a federal government contractor that sells location data quietly harvested from apps.
Federal contracting records show that both the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security are among the federal agencies that have recently contracted with X-Mode’s parent company, Digital Envoy. Previous reporting showed X-Mode, which recently rebranded as Outlogic, has also been used by various branches of the military.
While information on users from data brokers is primarily used for targeted ads, government and law enforcement agencies also purchase and use it for identification and tracking. The IRS, in particular, has come under increased scrutiny for its adoption of surveillance and high-tech solutions. Last year, members of Congress called for an inquiry into the IRS’s use of mass location data for its criminal investigation division, and the IRS recently abandoned a plan to use facial recognition to verify new accounts.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has investigated warrantless location tracking and surveillance technology used by the government, expressed concern about the use of the company.
“I’m looking into Digital Envoy’s contracts with the government and have asked for a briefing to understand how these contracts impact Americans’ privacy,” said Wyden, in a statement to The Intercept. “I strongly believe the government should not be able to use its credit card to get around the Constitution and purchase sensitive information without a warrant. That’s why I introduced the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act to close this loophole for good.”
The Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, and Digital Envoy did not provide comment after multiple requests from The Intercept.
In 2020, the IRS signed a contract with Digital Envoy for an archive database subscription to NetAcuity, a product used to “pinpoint users’ geographic location.” Last October, following its acquisition of X-Mode, Digital Envoy was contracted by the IRS enforcement division for another contract for services that extends through September of this year.
The current contract with the IRS is part of the IRS’s Identity Theft Tax Refund Fraud Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a special project that utilizes private sector data to identify tax fraud.
Homeland Security currently contracts with Digital Envoy, via the department’s science and technology wing, for $129,960, according to federal records.
Digital Envoy also contracts with the Pentagon’s logistics arm. In a statement, the Defense Logistics Agency, which coordinates the movement of troops, fuel, and other services for the military, confirmed that “DLA contracted with Digital Elements, a division of Digital Envoy, for commercial subscription services.”
X-Mode has previously contracted with the Air Force, according to public records. The company entered into an Air Force contract for $283,125 in 2019 and entered into another contract for $140,000 in 2020.
X-Mode is now an integrated part of Digital Envoy’s tools sold to clients. The company advertises a department called “Digital Element” that uses “precise, real-time geolocation data” which “compliments data from our sister company, Outlogic,” the rebranded name for X-Mode.
Last August, Digital Envoy purchased X-Mode for an undisclosed amount. The deal followed a string of controversies in the media about X-Mode’s practices. Many of the apps cataloged by The Markup may have included sensitive information about users, including the LGBTQ-friendly Bro App and buzzArab dating platform. Following the story, some of the apps, including the Bro App, discontinued sale of location data to the firm.
In a press release, Digital Envoy claimed that they instituted a code of ethics, created a data ethics review panel, and implemented a sensitive app policy. The firm announced that it has “taken additional care by shutting off all U.S. location data going to defense contractors.”
But the deal also stressed that the X-Mode, now known as Outlogic, would continue to serve government clients, claiming that collecting and selling location data “has been integral in confronting the COVID-19 pandemic, the fight against human trafficking, and the optimization of emergency vehicle and evacuation routes during natural disasters, among powering many other essential social services.”
The IRS has previously tapped location data brokers. In an attempt to identify and track potential criminals, the agency purchased access to mass location data in 2017 and 2018 from Venntel, another data broker, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Other federal agencies, including the FBI, have contracted with Venntel.
Venntel, as a data broker, operates similarly to X-Mode. The company sourced precise location data from a variety of unassuming apps, including apps used for gaming and weather. That data was stored and sold to a number of clients, including government agencies.
In response, Wyden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called for an internal audit of the agency’s use of the location tracking technology. “The IRS is not above the law and the agency’s lawyers should never provide IRS-CI investigators with permission to bypass the courts and engage in warrantless surveillance of Americans,” Wyden and Warren wrote to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
The inspector general responded with a report that found Venntel location data was not useful for IRS investigations but asserted that the IRS’s use of location data rested on sound legal ground. The IRS lawyers claimed that “data obtained from marketers of information like Venntel is not subject to a warrant because the data is collected by apps loaded on cellphones to which the phone users voluntarily granted access.” This claim has not been tested in court.
Jack Poulson, an activist and co-founder of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, said he is concerned that government agencies are increasingly deploying surveillance technology with little oversight.
Poulson called the government’s use of cellphone location tracking data “an abusive violation of privacy for vulnerable populations.” In previous reports, he has identified how X-Mode has transferred location data to a number of government and media clients. The change in brand and acquisition by Digital Envoy, he added, is a “corporate shell game” to “obscure these egregious practices.”
"The study's authors say that the data it has reviewed so far is 'just the tip of the iceberg' of the problem across the school district of almost 200,000 students." (photo: FCPP)
The Philadelphia school board disputes the findings of the study by PennPirg (Pennsylvania public interest research group), insisting that systems are in place to prevent students and staff drinking contaminated water, and that any outlet found with lead in excess of acceptable limits is immediately shut down.
But the study’s authors say that the data it has reviewed so far is “just the tip of the iceberg” of the problem across the school district of almost 200,000 students, and is calling for the replacement of every drinking fountain with water bottle filling stations, and filtration systems to be installed in kitchens and other facilities where water is used for consumption.
“Philadelphia’s children deserve safe drinking water, especially at the schools where they go each day to learn and play. As this data shows, it is critical that Philadelphia decision-makers take immediate action to get the lead out,” the study says.
PennPirg reviewed data reported by the school district under a 2017 law that requires lead testing on every campus at least every five years, and for the results to be made publicly available.
But the group said that by the start of this month, four years into the cycle, only 29% of the district’s 323 schools had posted information online, covering drinking fountains, kitchen faucets, hydration stations and sinks in classrooms and bathrooms.
From a review of that data, the study found, 61% of the 1,932 outlets tested showed lead contamination greater than one part per billion, and that of the 65 schools for which data was available, 98% had at least one outlet with contamination in excess of that level.
One outlet at the Tanner G Duckrey public school, a pre-K to 8th grade campus in north Philadelphia, showed levels of lead at 8,768ppb.
The long-running dirty water crisis in Flint, Michigan, brought new scrutiny of levels of water contamination nationwide, and Joe Biden’s administration has promised to make the issue a priority, announcing ambitious plans in December to replace 100% of lead pipes in homes across the country.
“The science on lead is settled – there is no safe level of exposure and it is time to remove this risk to support thriving people and vibrant communities,” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, Michael S Regan, said in a statement at the time.
But critics noted there was no plan to reduce the existing “acceptable” level of lead in water from a Donald Trump-era rule of 15ppb, and that no timeline was announced for the pipe replacement. Additionally, they feared that economically deprived areas and those with high populations of racial minorities would be overlooked.
“Children, especially those in the pre-K to seven-year-old age range, and particularly children of color and those from low-wealth communities, are among those most vulnerable to environmental toxins and exposures of all kinds,’” said Jerry Roseman, director of environmental science and occupational safety and health for the Philadelphia federation of teachers.
“Substandard conditions in many school spaces continue to exist and to present health risks to students, as well as staff; ensuring that adequate, accessible and lead-free drinking water is readily available to all students and other school occupants is an absolute bottom line requirement for every school in Philadelphia.”
In a statement to ABC News, the Philadelphia school district said the study was “not an accurate reflection of the water quality that students and staff in our district are accessing each and every day.
“In the event that a water outlet tests at or above 10ppb, the city of Philadelphia’s required threshold for school drinking water, the outlet is immediately shut down.
“The district closes these outlets, both because it is required under city and EPA regulations, and to prevent students or staff from using or ingesting contaminated water.”
African American men transferring cargo from a horse-drawn wagon to the Belle of the Bends steamboat on the Mississippi River in Memphis; the Belle of Calhoun is docked behind it, circa 1906. (photo: Library of Congress)
The Senate voted 25 to 9 on Feb. 20, 1922, to ask the federal government to trade some of the World War I debts owed by European countries for a piece of colonial Africa — any part would do — where the government would then ship Mississippi’s Black residents, creating “a final home for the American negro.”
The act is a reminder of just how long after the end of slavery some White Southerners were pushing not just to strip African Americans of their political rights but also to remove them from the land of their birth.
What opposition there was to the proposal in the all-White Mississippi legislature came not from people who believed in racial equality but from plantation owners who feared losing their cheap, brutalized labor force. And remarkably, the proposal had a few Black supporters: Black separatists who preferred a move to Africa over the violence and abuse that African Americans faced in Jim Crow Mississippi.
Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 21 was written by Sen. Torrey George McCallum, a former mayor of Laurel in Jones County. The county has achieved some measure of Hollywood fame as the “Free State of Jones,” a pocket of Unionist sentiment during the Civil War, but the McCallums were deeply engaged in the institution of slavery. Torrey’s grandfather Archibald enslaved 51 people on his plantation in 1860 and had a net worth of $80,000, about $2.5 million today.
McCallum’s proposal came in the aftermath of World War I. The relatively late entry of the United States into the war and the devastation of the conflict left many of its European allies deep in debt to Washington. In all, European countries owed $10.35 billion, the equivalent of $174 billion today.
Although short on cash, those countries had plenty of colonial territory — particularly in Africa, where the major European powers had scrambled to divvy up the continent’s land and resources. McCallum saw the makings of a deal.
His resolution argued in flowery language that “the spirit of race consciousness” had grown with a postwar increase in nationalistic feelings worldwide and that it was “our most earnest desire to reach a just, fair, amicable, and final settlement” to what some White people then called “the Negro question.”
It concluded with a request that President Warren G. Harding “acquire by treaty, negotiation or otherwise from our late war allies sufficient territory on the continent of Africa to make a suitable, proper and final home for the American Negro, where under the tutelage of the American government he can develop for himself a great republic, to become in time a free and sovereign state and take its place at the council board of the nations of the world.”
McCallum made clear that “the spirit of race consciousness” he cared about belonged to White people. The goal, he wrote, was “that our country may become one in blood as it is in spirit, and that the dream of our forefathers may be realized in the final colonization of the American Negro on his native soil.” The resolution does not specifically state whether the proposed mass migration would be voluntary. But its use of language like a “final settlement,” “the final colonization,” and the United States becoming “one in blood” makes clear the aim was total removal.
Not consulted in this process: Mississippi’s Black residents, who in the 1920 Census made up 52 percent of the state’s population. During Reconstruction, Mississippi’s Black majority had sent three African Americans to Congress and more than 60 to the state legislature. That had all ended, though, first with rampant White violence in the 1870s and 1880s, then with the passage of a new state constitution in 1890 that effectively disenfranchised Black people.
In some ways, it felt like the post-Reconstruction era was returning: Another spike in anti-Black violence had followed World War I, especially during the Red Summer of 1919, and the Ku Klux Klan was suddenly reborn.
Black newspapers nationwide mocked McCallum’s proposal, just as African Americans had generally resisted the previous century’s attempts at colonization. “Only one thing seems to have been overlooked by the Hon. Senator, and that is, how even the Mississippi colored people will be induced or enabled by the Mississippi Legislature to go to Africa,” wrote the Broad Ax, a Black Chicago newspaper. After generations of rape of enslaved women by White men, it wrote, “the intervening shades are so numerous and various, it may be a question to determine who is a colored person. Of course, such things don’t bother McCallum.”
“We see that representatives in Mississippi would colonize the American Negro in Africa,” wrote the Southern Indicator of Columbia, S.C. “Poor fools.”
The one exception was Negro World, the national newspaper published by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which embraced McCallum’s proposal. Garvey believed that members of the African diaspora would never be treated fairly in a White-controlled country and that the solution was a new African homeland.
“Hurrah for Senator McCallum,” its headline blared. “Work of Universal Negro Improvement Assn. Bearing Fruit.”
Garvey gave a speech at Liberty Hall in New York endorsing McCallum’s plan: “The Negro should not delude himself … by the belief that the future will mean happiness and contentment for him in this country, since it is the undoubted spirit and intention of the white man that this shall in truth be white man’s country.”
Garvey was becoming known for seeking strange bedfellows in his quest for Black autonomy abroad. A few months later, he went to the offices of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta for a cordial meeting with Imperial Wizard Edward Young Clarke, sparking outrage from Black leaders and newspapers. (Garvey was under indictment on charges of mail fraud at the time, so he also may have been motivated to curry favor with White officials.)
Mississippi’s largest newspaper, the Clarion Ledger — once called “the most racist newspaper in the nation” — happily ran the full text of a telegram Garvey sent McCallum offering his “congratulations” for “the splendid move” he had made.
But Garvey seemed aware of who he was teaming up with. McCallum, he said in a speech, “is the same Southern senator who would object and stand behind the objection, with his whole life and with the last drop of his blood, for a Negro in the United States of America to dine with the President of the United States at the White House.”
McCallum was far from the only racist White leader interested in sending Black people “back” to an Africa they had never seen.
The impulse dates to well before the Civil War, to the early days of state colonization societies, which built colonies in what is today Liberia. The Mississippi Colonization Society created Mississippi-in-Africa on the Pepper Coast, sending several hundred freed slaves there to face what became the highest mortality rates of any society in recorded human history. Some advocates of colonization considered it a more humane option than slavery, but more viewed it as a way to rid their states of free Blacks who might encourage rebellions among enslaved people.
As the Civil War approached, debates over slavery were not limited to the two extremes — continuing and expanding slavery on one hand, and making African Americans free and full political citizens on the other.
Some White people argued for freeing the enslaved but still denying them the vote, just as it was then denied to most free Blacks in North and South alike. Others wanted to create a limited class of Black voters, restricted only to the educated or to those who had fought for the Union. And many thought the only solution to the “Negro question” was to send them away — either voluntarily or by force — to a new colony in the Caribbean or “back” to Africa.
Hinton Rowan Helper, the most prominent anti-slavery activist in the South, was nonetheless a virulent racist and advocate of expulsion. As he wrote in the early weeks of the war: “Death to Slavery! Down with the Slaveholders! Away with the Negroes!”
Among those interested in colonization was Abraham Lincoln, who was drawn repeatedly to the idea. In 1862, Congress passed a bill allocating $600,000 for the colonization of formerly enslaved people living in the District of Columbia. Lincoln sent a young free Black man named John Willis Menard to British Honduras (now Belize) to scout it as a potential location; the Danish Virgin Islands, British Guiana, and Dutch Surinam also were considered.
Lincoln struck a deal to set up a colony in the Chiriquí Province of what is now Panama, but strenuous objections from Central American countries led him to scuttle the plan. He eventually signed off on a disastrous experiment that sent 453 free Virginia Blacks to the Haitian island of Île-à-Vache. High rates of disease and a mutiny led to its collapse and 350 survivors sailing back to Virginia less than a year later.
During Reconstruction and afterward, a trickle of Black people continued to leave the South for various promised lands: Liberia, Haiti, Kansas, California. But it took until World War I for the Great Migration of African Americans to Northern and Western cities to start in earnest, driven by job opportunities and the desire to escape Jim Crow.
Still, that was not the end of the idea of colonization, in the minds of either White racists of Black separatists. U.S. Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan, carried colonization forward to a new generation, proposing in 1939 what he called the Greater Liberia Act. It was modeled on McCullum’s 1922 resolution, offering France and the U.K. relief for their war debt in exchange for 400,000 square miles adjoining Liberia’s borders. Greater Liberia was to be run by a U.S. military governor.
A statue of the late Gov. Theodore Gilmore Bilbo stands out from the back of a first floor conference room at the Capitol on Jan. 22, 2009, in Jackson, Miss. The statue was subsequently quietly moved out of sight. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)
The bill went nowhere — but it again drew the support of an aging Marcus Garvey, as well as the vocal support of Black separatists including Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, the founder of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia.
The Mississippi Senate vote 100 years ago was as far as the state’s attempt to exile its African Americans would go. After passing the Senate, the resolution went to the state House of Representatives. Its Committee on Federal Relations reported the resolution out favorably on March 1, 1922. On March 10, McCallum went to the House floor to advocate for passage.
“He wanted it understood that it was not written, nor was it intended as a reflection in the least on the negro,” a Biloxi newspaper reported, “but was intended to settle him in a country of his own and where he could make himself a home under laws of own making. He said he simply wanted to settle for all time to come a great problem confronting this country and in the interest of the negro.”
But the speech wasn’t enough, and the House voted the resolution down, 40 to 32.
Most of the chamber’s debate over the bill has been lost to history, but a newspaper reporter did record a representative named John Holmes Sherard explaining his opposition: “He did not like any such propaganda as this meant the loss of labor of his part of the state, the Delta, where the negro was needed. … He asserted that he had 500 negroes on his plantation in Coahoma County, and had never had a quarrel with them.”
One of the regulars at Sherard’s plantation commissary in Coahoma County was a young man named McKinley Morganfield, who picked cotton at a neighboring plantation. At Sherard’s and elsewhere around Coahoma, men like Robert Johnson and Son House were playing what would become known as the Delta blues. In 1941, Morganfield found his own escape from Mississippi — not to Africa, but to Chicago, where he became known as Muddy Waters.
Waters’s songs sometimes romanticized the simpler life back in the Delta, but when asked directly if he ever planned on moving back, his response was clear: “I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way, man. Go back? What I want to go back for?”
A man is arrested by police in Ottawa on Thursday as demonstrators and supporters gather in a protest against COVID-19 measures that has grown into a broader anti-government protest. (photo: Cole Burston/AP)
ALSO SEE: Ottawa: Police Use Pepper Spray and
Stun Grenades to Clear Trucker Protest
By evening, at least 100 people had been arrested, mostly on mischief charges, and nearly two dozen vehicles had been towed, including all of those blocking one of the city's major streets, authorities said. One officer had a minor injury, but no protesters were hurt, interim Ottawa Police Chief Steve Bell said.
Police "continue to push forward to take control of our streets," he said, adding: "We will work day and night until this is completed."
Those arrested included four protest leaders. One received bail while the others remained jailed.
The crackdown on the self-styled Freedom Convoy began in the morning, when hundreds of police, some in riot gear and some carrying automatic weapons, descended into the protest zone and began leading demonstrators away in handcuffs through the snowy streets as holdout truckers blared their horns.
Tow truck operators — wearing neon-green ski masks, with their companies' decals taped over on their trucks to conceal their identities — arrived under police escort and started removing the hundreds of big rigs, campers and other vehicles parked shoulder-to-shoulder near Parliament. Police smashed through the door of at least one RV camper before hauling it away.
Scuffles broke out in places, and police repeatedly went nose-to-nose with the protesters and pushed the crowd back amid cries of "Freedom!" and the singing of the national anthem, "O Canada." Later police on horses were used to push back the crowd for a time.
Police said late in the afternoon that protesters had assaulted officers and tried to take their weapons. Some began dismantling equipment at a stage where they had played music for weeks, saying they didn't want it to get destroyed.
Many protesters stood their ground in the face of one of the biggest police enforcement actions in Canada's history, with officers drawn from around the country.
"Freedom was never free," said trucker Kevin Homaund, of Montreal. "So what if they put the handcuffs on us and they put us in jail?"
But a steady procession of trucks began leaving Parliament Hill in the afternoon.
"There are indications we are now starting to see progress," Ontario Premier Doug Ford said.
Police would not disclose how many protesters or vehicles remained downtown. All indications were that police would be working into the weekend to clear the area.
The capital and its paralyzed streets represented the movement's last stronghold after weeks of demonstrations and blockades that shut down border crossings into the U.S. and created one of the most serious tests yet for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They also shook Canada's reputation for civility, with some blaming America's influence.
Authorities had hesitated to move against the protests, in part because of fears of violence. The demonstrations have drawn right-wing extremists and veterans, some of them armed.
With police and the government facing accusations that they let the protests get out of hand, Trudeau on Monday invoked Canada's Emergencies Act. That gave law enforcement extraordinary authority to declare the blockades illegal, tow away trucks, arrest the drivers, suspend their licenses and freeze their bank accounts.
Ottawa police made their first move to end the occupation late Thursday with the arrest of two key protest leaders. They also sealed off much of the downtown area to outsiders to prevent them from coming to the aid of the protesters.
The emergency act enabled law enforcement authorities to compel tow truck companies to assist. Ottawa police said earlier that they couldn't find tow truck drivers willing to help because they either sympathized with the movement or feared retaliation.
As police worked to dismantle the siege, Pat King, one of the protest leaders, told truckers, "Please stay peaceful," while also threatening the livelihoods of the tow truck operators.
"You are committing career suicide," King warned on Facebook. "We know where the trucks came from."
King himself was later arrested by officers who surrounded him in his car.
Ottawa police had made it clear for days that they were preparing to retake the streets. On Friday, even as the operation was underway, police issued another round of warnings via social media and loudspeaker, offering protesters one more chance to leave and avoid arrest.
Some locked arms instead as officers formed a line to push them back.
Dan Holland, a protester from London, Ontario, packed up his car as police closed in. "I don't want to get beat up by this police," he said.
Children bundled up in coats and hats stood amid the crowd. Police said the protesters had put the youngsters in the middle in the confrontation.
The Freedom Convoy demonstrations initially focused on Canada's vaccine requirement for truckers entering the country but soon morphed into a broad attack on COVID-19 precautions and Trudeau's government.
Ottawa residents complained of being harassed and intimidated by the truckers and obtained a court injunction to stop their incessant honking.
Trudeau portrayed the protesters as members of a "fringe" element. Canadians have largely embraced the country's COVID-19 restrictions, with the vast majority vaccinated, including an estimated 90% of the nation's truckers. Some of the vaccine and mask mandates imposed by the provinces are already falling away rapidly.
The biggest border blockade, at the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, disrupted the flow of auto parts between the two countries and forced the industry to curtail production. Authorities lifted the siege last weekend after arresting dozens of protesters.
The final border blockade, in Manitoba, across from North Dakota, ended peacefully on Wednesday.
The protests have been cheered on and received donations from conservatives in the U.S.
Scattered across diverse ecosystems around the world, the small cats are overshadowed by their charismatic cousins, the big cats of the Panthera genus. (photo: Mongabay)
Scattered across diverse ecosystems around the world, the small cats are overshadowed by their charismatic cousins, the big cats of the Panthera genus. But they face similar deepening threats from biodiversity loss, land-system change, pollution, and climate change — four planetary boundaries that humanity has dangerously overshot, putting our world’s “safe operating space” in peril.
Small cats are often habitat specialists, ideally adapted to where they live, which puts them at particular risk. They are also experts at evading researchers, leaving much to be discovered about them, and often frustrating conservation efforts. Currently, 14 of the 33 small cat species are listed as vulnerable or endangered on the IUCN Red List. Seven of them are found in Asia.
Small cats under pressure from Asia to Latin America
Following an international Small Wild Cat Conservation Summit in 2019, researchers and conservationists delineated the primary threats to small cats: habitat loss and degradation, human-small wild cat conflict, hunting and poaching, and vehicle collisions topped the list. Little has changed since then.
“In Asia, the biggest threats facing small cats would be direct killing, whether that’s through human-wildlife conflicts, or poaching, as well as habitat loss, habitat degradation and land use change,” says Wai-Ming Wong, small cats program director for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization.
Habitat change and loss are diminishing territory, bringing cats into closer contact with humans, giving access to poachers, or heightening risk of human-cat conflict, he adds. Continued expansion of monoculture agriculture, including tree plantations that produce palm oil or paper, are among the major drivers of land-use change.
Wong cites a case in point: Agarwood, also known as gaharu wood, in Sabah, Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. Trade in this fragrant wood, used to make incense and perfumes, has pushed some species of the Aquilaria family of trees from which it’s sourced to the point of extinction. But that trade, and the loss of those trees, is also threatening the island’s small cats.
“What we’re finding is that we have groups of people going into the forest to harvest gaharu,” Wong says. And while the major threat to Sabah’s small cats is bycatch and prey depletion, “If they see a wild cat they’ll kill it.”
Between 2004 and 2017, Borneo lost around 5.8 million hectares (14.3 million acres) of forest, according to a report by WWF, putting felids at serious risk. The island is home to five species of small cat. Two of those — the flat-headed cat (Prionailurus planiceps) and the bay cat (Catopuma badia) — are listed as endangered by the IUCN. The former, a wetland specialist, is already believed to have lost around 70% of its historically suitable habitat across its range, which extends across Southeast Asia.
The other, the bay cat, is perhaps the world’s most endangered small cat, according to Wong. In part, this is because it remains so enigmatic. “We just know nothing about this species,” he adds. “It’s a wild cat that is facing a lot of threats. But at the same time, it’s very difficult to study in the wild.” Facing such limited knowledge, formulating effective conservation strategies proves challenging.
Another habitat specialist, Southeast Asia’s Felis chaus fulvidina, a subspecies of the jungle cat, is imperiled by regional extinction. It’s a specialist of the tropical lowland deciduous and dipterocarp forest, one of Southeast Asia’s most threatened forest types.
F. c. fulvidina is one of the rarest of all felids and could probably qualify as endangered, says Susana Rostro-García of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) at the University of Oxford. But, as with other small cats, not enough is known to pinpoint threats across the cat’s range, she says, though habitat loss and an ongoing snaring crisis are considered primary threats.
“Without urgent and increased protection of this habitat, which is subject to forest loss and poaching, the species could soon be extirpated from the region,” says Rostro-García. “The status of the jungle cat in the Southeast Asian region is becoming increasingly bleak.”
On the other side of the globe, human encroachment is bringing new threats to Mexico’s small cats, especially the ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) and margay (Leopardus wiedii), both nationally endangered. A pervasive yet under recognized danger in protected areas are dogs, says Mariam Weston Flores, co-leader of the Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation’s Ocelot Working Group and project coordinator at Animal Karma Foundation, an NGO.
Dogs disturb the small cats, causing them to abandon their territories; canines also can spread disease. Whether dogs are killing Mexico’s cats has not been fully confirmed, she adds, but “I feel like we should highlight the fact that invasive species, especially dogs, are a recurrent threat in several protected areas, and are not acknowledged at all.”
Losing wetland and mountain habitat
Wetlands are one of the world’s most threatened ecosystems, with 35% lost globally since 1970; they’re disappearing three times faster than forests, posing escalating risks for cat species that specialize there. In Nepal, the wetlands-loving fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus) is endangered. Confined to the western Terai region, it’s thought to exist in only five protected areas, maybe numbering 200 mature individuals — fewer than the estimated number of tigers in Nepal.
“I think for the fishing cat, humans are the main threat,” says Rama Mishra, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Antwerp and co-founder of the Wildlife Conservation Association Nepal.
Mishra was part of a team that mapped suitable fishing cat habitat in the country. They found approximately 668,000 hectares (1.65 million acres) — 4.4% of Nepal’s land — to be suitable. But nearly two-thirds of this 4.4% lies outside conserved areas; though encouragingly, a portion of “highly suitable” habitat falls inside conserved areas.
Conversion of Nepali wetlands into croplands and fishponds has brought the fishing cat into conflict with both farmers and fishers. “When the fishing cat is [discovered] moving around the ponds, there is always a threat from the fish farmers,” Mishra says. “They think the fishing cat will kill and consume their fish.”
However, some cats are adapting to their rapidly changing environment. In Sri Lanka, for example, fishing cats are spending more time in cities, says Anya Ratnayaka of the Urban Fishing Cat Conservation Project. “We have some cats that have their home ranges within [Colombo] city limits,” she explains. While the adaptability of these cats sounds positive, it raises concerns they could find themselves in what Ratnayaka describes as an “ecological trap.”
“The negative impacts [of living among humans] — disease, persecution, roadkill — far outweigh the ‘positive’ impacts,” she explains. “We aren’t sure how long our cats will survive in Colombo’s urban landscape, especially if urban wetlands are not properly maintained, and the city’s green spaces are cleared for concrete.” According to some estimates, Colombo is losing its urban wetlands at a rate of 1.2% per year; 40% of its wetlands were lost in the past 30 years alone.
Muddying the waters
While conservationists are familiar with imminent small cat threats such as hunting, new perils loom that are poorly understood. This year, for example, the Stockholm Resilience Centre announced that the world has surpassed the safe Earth operating space for the release of “novel entities” into the environment. Urban and industrial wastewater pollution and agricultural runoff are among the sources of a spreading toxic cocktail of chemicals and other contaminants such as nitrogen and phosphorous into rivers, lakes and coastal waters, presenting threats to biodiversity.
For example, because Borneo’s flat-headed cat lives on a diet of fish, crustaceans and frogs, the pollution of freshwater sources is likely having some impact on the species, says Wong. A 2014 study found that oil palm plantations can severely degrade nearby freshwater system quality, introducing chemicals, raising temperatures and increasing sedimentation. Illegal gold mining has led to mercury poisoning in Borneo’s rivers, polluting drinking water and leading to bioaccumulation in fish. No study has measured these toxic impacts specifically on small cat species, says Susan Cheyne, co-director of the Borneo Nature Foundation. But since fish-consuming humans are already being adversely affected, “if the cats are consuming the same fish, there has to be some sort of similar impact.”
In Sri Lanka, the fishing cat is also being exposed to pollution from wastewater, agricultural runoff, along with plastics. “We see countless freshwater wetland bird species ingesting plastics. You’ve got fishing cats who are eating all of these,” Ratnayaka explains. Mishra in Nepal says she has found glass and plastic in the scat of fishing cats.
Ratnayaka notes a study carried out in South Africa that found bioaccumulation of anticoagulant rodenticides in caracals (Caracal caracal), a medium sized wild cat, along with other carnivores living in the Greater Cape Town region. How similar pollution is impacting fishing cat populations, particularly those close to urban areas, hasn’t been studied. “But I do think there has to be some negative effect going on, whether it’s a physiological thing or something a bit more obvious,” Ratnayaka says.
New threat on the horizon
Experts say climate change is a looming threat for the small cats — especially wetland specialist species. “As the [coastal] water level increases, a lot of the habitat for them is going to disappear,” says Wong. Species living at higher elevation are also expected to suffer habitat reductions as the world warms and mountain-adapted species move to ever higher altitudes.
The Pallas’s cat (Otocolobus manul), also known as the manul, is a widely dispersed small cat ranging over semi-arid grasslands and mountainous steppe from Mongolia to Iran. Currently considered as being of least concern on the IUCN Red List, its habitat is already highly fragmented, raising the possibility of future local or regional extinctions.
How climate change may impact the Pallas’s cat is still unclear, says Emma Nygren, project coordinator of the Pallas’s Cat International Conservation Alliance (PICA). But it could lead to further fragmentation, reductions in prey, and increased land-use change, compounding species threats. “We don’t know the effects climate change will have, we can only assume certain things,” Nygren states.
In Latin America, a changing climate threatens the survival of the endangered Andean mountain cat (Leopardus jacobita). Rocio Palacios, project leader of the Andean Cat Alliance (AGA), describes this species (with its long bushy tail to help it traverse steep rocky slopes), as the “snow leopard of the Andes.” Found in mountainous Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Chile, it potentially faces a drastic reduction in habitat due to a warming world.
A 2017 paper estimated that the Andean cat could lose up to 30% of its range by 2080. But the issue with that study, says Palacios, is it didn’t fully account for changes in climate across the whole species range, particularly in Patagonia, which was seen as a new potential habitat in which the cat could thrive. “The [climate] projections are bad in all the distribution of the species,” she warns.
“We need to understand how climate change will really affect [the Andean cat] to see if there’s anything we can do, so we can start doing it now,” she adds. “For us, the action part is even more important than the scientific part at this particular point.”
Currently, Palacios and her team are working to reduce more imminent pressures — a storm of threats that includes retaliatory killings, extractive industry habitat degradation, and predation by dogs.
Know a cat, conserve a cat
Cat conservationists and researchers interviewed for this article raised common concerns across the globe: a lack of funding, low public awareness, and limited knowledge of the species themselves. Last year, small cats received a boost as Panthera announced plans to prioritize small cat research and conservation, backed by funding. But while spending on small cats is increasing, they still garner a meager amount compared to their larger cousins. That funding gap is especially challenging for species with lower global threat level statuses, but which are endangered at the national or regional level.
Despite the lack of money, small cat advocates continue focusing on multiple immediate threats. The Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation (SWCCF) has set up working groups for several small cat species (among them the Fishing Cat Conservation Alliance), with more planned. Such platforms give small cat experts a place to collaborate, share information and resources, and find solutions.
“There are existential threats [such as climate change] that we can’t do very much about, and we know that,” says Jim Sanderson, founder and director of the SWCCF. “But those threats we can do something about are the ones we’re attacking.”
A central SWCCF strategy, one common to other small cat organizations, is community outreach: raising public awareness to foster understanding and cooperation, while limiting human-wildlife conflict and retaliatory killings.
“Community engagement is key for conservation, because without having [local people] on [our] side, conservation is never going to work,” says Wong. Building community partnerships and awareness — especially engaging children — is a strategy that can be practiced on a tight budget with good results.
Emphasizing this point, Mishra tells the story of Gulabi and Gulabi, who both live on the border of Nepal’s Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve. The former Gulabi is a fish farmer, the latter a fishing cat — the first female collared as part of Mishra’s research project. The scientist named the cat after fish farmer Gulabi to help soften community opinion toward these small predators and to build public interest.
But the radio-collared animal, instead of returning to the reserve as expected, moved between communities, and Mishra feared the fishing cat would end up dead. “I had heard that in Thailand … most of the cats were killed by the community,” she recalls.
But two months later, when Gulabi the cat was cornered in a rice paddy water pipe, the community mobilized to help: “A fisherman saw the fishing cat trapped. The person informed my team and within two hours it was rescued,” she says. “It’s the knowledge of our awareness campaign that protected the fishing cat.
“When people [get to] know this species, then they are positive toward its conservation,” Mishra concludes.
This article was originally published on Mongabay
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