15 May 22
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ALSO SEE: Coup to Remove Cancer-Stricken Putin Underway in Russia,
Ukrainian Intelligence Chief Says
Major General Kyrylo Budanov spoke exclusively to Sky News and predicted the war will reach a turning point in August. He correctly predicted when Russia would invade earlier this year.
It is the most precise and optimistic prediction by a senior Ukrainian official so far.
In an exclusive interview with Sky News, Major General Kyrylo Budanov also said a coup to remove Vladimir Putin is already under way in Russia and the Russian leader is seriously ill with cancer.
The general's office is dark and stuffed with the paraphernalia of war and espionage, sandbags stacked on its windows, machine guns piled on the floor, and a spare rifle magazine on his desk used as a paperweight.
He is remarkably young to lead his country's military intelligence agency at just 36 years and speaks with the dry precision of his trade.
He showed little emotion, smiling only once as he said in English: "I'm optimistic."
General Budanov correctly predicted when the Russian invasion would happen when others in his government were publicly sceptical and now says he is confident about predicting its conclusion.
"The breaking point will be in the second part of August.
"Most of the active combat actions will have finished by the end of this year.
"As a result, we will renew Ukrainian power in all our territories that we have lost including Donbas and the Crimea."
Russia's tactics have not changed despite its shift to the east he says, and Russia is suffering huge losses though he would not be drawn on Ukrainian casualties.
Russia just a 'horde of people with weapons'
He said he was not surprised by Russia's setbacks in the war.
"We know everything about our enemy. We know about their plans almost as they're being made.
"Europe sees Russia as a big threat. They are afraid of its aggression.
"We have been fighting Russia for eight years and we can say that this highly publicised Russian power is a myth.
"It is not as powerful as this. It is a horde of people with weapons."
Russian forces have been pushed back almost to the border around Kharkiv, he says, and a recent attack on forces further south trying to cross the Siverskyy Donets caused considerable damage.
Its aftermath has been caught in dramatic aerial pictures.
"I can confirm that they suffered heavy losses in manpower and armour and I can say that when the artillery strikes happened many of the crews abandoned their equipment," General Budanov said.
'Impossible to stop coup'
General Budanov also told Sky News defeat in Ukraine would lead to the removal of Russia's leader and the country's disintegration.
"It will eventually lead to the change of leadership of the Russian Federation. This process has already been launched and they are moving into that way."
Does that mean a coup is under way?
"Yes," he responded.
"They are moving in this way and it is impossible to stop it."
He claimed Mr Putin is in a "very bad psychological and physical condition and he is very sick".
The Russian leader has cancer and other illnesses, he says.
He dismissed suggestions he was spreading propaganda as part of the information war and was certain of his claims.
"It's my job, it's my work, if not me who will know this?"
Ukrainian officials have cast doubts about Mr Putin's mental and physical well-being before and declared their certainty about eventually winning, but until this interview, none have been so specific and laid out a timeline for victory, a sign of their increasing confidence on the battlefield.
Police investigate after a shooting at a supermarket on Saturday, May 14, 2022, in Buffalo, N.Y. (photo: Joshua Bessex/AP)
ALSO SEE: 'He Saved Some Lives': Cop-Turned-Guard Killed in
Battle With Buffalo Gunman
18-year-old white shooter Payton Gendron charged with first-degree murder after targeting Black shoppers in what the FBI called a “case of racially motivated violent extremism”
The gunman — identified by the Associated Press as 18-year-old Payton Gendron from Conklin, New York — was taken into custody by police after the shooting rampage at the Tops Friendly Market, where Gendron fired approximately 60 shots from a military-grade weapon.
Gendron was wearing military-style clothing, body armor and a helmet and was armed with a high-powered rifle. He had apparently traveled more than 200 miles to attack the supermarket, located in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Eleven out of the 13 people shot were Black, officials said, while the other two were white.
“The shooter was not from this community,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said Saturday. “In fact, the shooter traveled hours from outside this community to perpetrate this crime on the people of Buffalo.”
The Associated Press reports that the supermarket was located in a predominately black neighborhood outside downtown Buffalo. Three of the victims were shot and killed in the parking lot outside the store, the Buffalo News reported, before Gendron entered Tops and opened fire. After exiting the supermarket, he encountered officers.
When police arrived, Gendron first threatened to shoot himself. “He was standing there in his military gear with his weapon to his chin, looking like he was going to blow his head off,” witness Braedyn Kaphart told the Buffalo News. “We weren’t sure what was happening. As he continued to do that, he dropped to his knees still appearing as if he might shoot himself.” Police ultimately handcuffed Gendron and was being questioned by FBI as of Saturday night.
Gendron allegedly published a manifesto online that is ugly and unhinged, even for a suspected mass murderer. In it, he talks about becoming radicalized after reading a 4chan forum in his “extreme boredom” during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. “I was not born racist nor grew up to be racist. I simply became racist after I learned the truth.”
The document touts earlier racist rampage killings, and pushes the conspiracy theory that white people are facing extinction and are being “replaced” by immigrants and people of color. It’s a baseless notion that’s been widely promoted on the far-right fringes, from the neo-Nazi marchers of Charlottesville to the Fox News broadcasts of Tucker Carlson.
“This was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said at a press conference. “It was [a] straight-up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community … coming into our community and trying to inflict that evil upon us.”
The New York Times reports that Gendron pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and was ordered held without bail in a brief arraignment Saturday night. “I understand my charges,” he said. The next court proceeding is set for Thursday, May 19.
“Our hearts are with the community and all who have been impacted by this terrible tragedy,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement. “Hate and racism have no place in America. We are shattered, extremely angered and praying for the victims’ families and loved ones.”
“I am closely monitoring the shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo native, tweeted Saturday. “We have offered assistance to local officials. If you are in Buffalo, please avoid the area and follow guidance from law enforcement and local officials.
President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland were also briefed on the shooting, the New York Times reported, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were at the location of the shooting.
“Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America,” Biden said in a statement released Saturday night. “Hate must have no safe harbor.”
Garland said the Justice Department is investigating the attack as a hate crime “and an act of racially-motivated violent extremism.”
Tops Friendly Markets said in a statement, “We are shocked and deeply saddened by this senseless act of violence and our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.”
According to Twitch, Gendron live-streamed the mass shooting on the platform — police said that he had a camera affixed to his helmet during the attack — and left behind a “manifesto” touting white supremacist conspiracy theories. Buffalo police did not confirm those reports, but said they were investigating to see if the attack was racially motivated. Twitch said in a statement that Gendron’s alleged “user” account has been suspended, and that they’re working to ensure the livestream isn’t rebroadcast.
“Twitch has a zero-tolerance policy against violence of any kind and works swiftly to respond to all incidents,” the company said.
The Buffalo shooting is the latest racially motivated mass killing inspired by white supremacy theories. In November 2018, 46-year-old Robert Gregory Bowers entered Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, killing 11 people. In March 2019, Brenton Tarrant visited two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, gunning down 51 people and injuring 40 more. Like Gendron, Tarrant livestreamed the massacre and wrote a white supremacy-themed manifesto. The 74-page document was called The Great Replacement, a reference to the right-wing conspiracy theory that non-European populations are replacing white people. Five months later, a 21-year-old far-right gunman named Patrick Wood Crusius killed 23 people and injured 23 more at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
Among the “deplorable” set — those for whom this “great replacement theory” has true cultural currency —Saturday’s mass shooting is drawing a mix of defensiveness, denial and deflection.
Nick Fuentes — the young white supremacist who bemoans “white genocide”; leads the Groyper movement online; and organizes the annual America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) — took to his Telegram channel as news of the killings broke to immediately (and without evidence) insisted it was a “false flag” attack.
Laura Loomer — the alt-right troll who is running for congress from Florida — first tenuously tried to link the shooting to current abortion politics, writing on Telegram, “Planned Parenthood has still targeted and killed more black people than the Buffalo supermarket shooter. Facts matter.”
In a later post, Loomer, who is Jewish, then attempted to grapple with the shooter’s apparent anti-semitism: “Anyone who hates Jews just to hate Jews is stupid and low IQ,” she wrote. “There is no reason to blindly hate Jews.” With that disclaimer out of the way, Loomer then launched into a defense of the great-replacement panic that allegedly motivated the shooter. “Being worried about replacement theory is also not a radical stance,” Loomer wrote, insisting: “The war on White people is VERY REAL.”
VDARE, the virulently anti-immigrant outfit designated as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, didn’t directly respond to the shooting, but posted to its Telegram account an article plainly intended as deflection, headlined: “Whites Responsible For Less Than 3% Of All Mass Shootings In 2022 So Far—But Black Attacks Skyrocket,” replete with a picture of Brooklyn subway shooting suspect Frank James.
Protesters in Dublin demanded legislation on abortion after the death of Savita Halappanavar, who'd died after complications with her pregnancy. (photo: Niall Carson/PA Images/Getty Images)
“We are going to see more deaths and more injuries,” Ghazaleh Moayedi, an ob-gyn in Dallas, said. “I don’t have to speculate about that at all.”
If, as expected, the Supreme Court abolishes the constitutional right to abortion in its forthcoming decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, scenarios such as the one that killed Savita Halappanavar will become more likely to occur in the United States. Twenty-six states are likely to ban or criminalize abortion if Roe is overturned, including thirteen with “trigger bans.” These typically include a “life of the mother” exception, but the language of these exceptions varies in its scope and specifics state to state. Texas’s current six-week ban—its proponents call it the “heartbeat bill”—allows exceptions for “a medical emergency.” North Dakota would permit abortion “to prevent the pregnant female’s death.” Louisiana invokes “death or substantial risk of death,” or “permanent impairment of a life-sustaining organ,” but also requires “reasonable medical efforts under the circumstances to preserve both the life of the mother and the life of her unborn child.”
The questions implicit in these phrases—What constitutes an “emergency”? How does one define “substantial” or “reasonable”?—are left unanswered. “These laws presume a certainty that doesn’t exist in medicine,” Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal-medicine physician in Salt Lake City, said. “How ‘life-threatening’ the situation has to be—I don’t know what that means.”
“In states where abortion becomes illegal, and particularly in states where there are criminal penalties for doctors or anyone who assists in an abortion, I fear that it will send a chill through the entire medical community,” Audrey Lance, an ob-gyn in Michigan, said. “People are going to be scared to intervene until the last minute or perhaps until it’s too late.” According to the Guttmacher Institute, the reproductive-rights think tank, as many as twenty-two states are likely or certain to enforce felony bans on abortion, with potential penalties including jail time and fines. A doctor who is inclined to provide an emergency termination would have to weigh her medical judgment against the possibility of criminal charges, losing her license, and never being able to practice medicine again. “There’s a very real fear: Will they force people to prove that they really had a miscarriage?” Heuser said.
Roughly ten to twenty per cent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. Yet none of the state bans overtly differentiate between the management of miscarriage and abortion, which share the same objective: to empty the uterus. The two procedures also employ the same tools and techniques, depending on the stage of the pregnancy and the health of the pregnant person: medication or dilation and curettage (D. … C.) for early abortions; and dilation and evacuation (D. … E.) or induced labor for later abortions. (In his draft opinion reversing Roe, Justice Samuel Alito refers to D. … E. as “a barbaric practice.”) Although the two sets of care are near-identical in their mechanics, “when someone is starting to bleed, their cervix is open, their water breaks—that’s not an induced abortion,” Ghazaleh Moayedi, an ob-gyn and complex family-planning specialist in Dallas, said. “This is not a person who comes to you and says, ‘I want to end this pregnancy.’ This is a person who is saying, ‘I am having a pregnancy complication, and I need you to help me.’ ”
That cry for help often goes unheeded in the presence of a fetal heartbeat, even if the demise of the pregnancy is inevitable. In 2015, the A.C.L.U. filed suit on behalf of a Michigan woman, Tamesha Means, against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the body that writes the religious and ethical directives that must be followed by Catholic hospitals, which, as of 2016, accounted for about fifteen per cent of acute-care hospitals nationwide. The directives state that abortion is “never permitted,” barring “a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman.” Means’s water broke at eighteen weeks, but she was sent home from a Catholic hospital, Mercy Health Partners, mid-miscarriage—twice—despite excruciating pain and possible infection. (The suit was dismissed on appeal, in 2016, partly for reasons of jurisdiction, although the court acknowledged that Means “suffered physical and mental pain, emotional injuries, a riskier delivery, [and] shock and emotional trauma.”) A report found that Means was one of five women in a seventeen-month period who suffered prolonged, dangerous miscarriages while under the care of doctors at Mercy Health Partners.
Several physicians told me that hesitation to provide emergency-miscarriage care is not peculiar to Catholic or other religious institutions. Even in states where abortion rights are broadly intact, many hospital systems do not permit terminations for any reason; patients in need must be transferred elsewhere. Heuser, who serves as a consultant for general ob-gyns across her hospital system in Salt Lake City, told me, “I have got calls from the E.R., saying, ‘This patient is bleeding, but there’s still a heartbeat—I don’t know what to do.’ And I have had to say, ‘You are allowed to treat the patient. You need to save the patient. This is a medical emergency.’ If you hem and haw because you aren’t sure about the law or the rules—that’s dangerous for patients.”
Leilah Zahedi, a maternal-fetal-medicine physician in Tennessee, told me about a recent referral. “The patient was eighteen or nineteen weeks pregnant. She came in almost fully dilated and bleeding heavily, but the fetus still had a heart rate. The provider who transferred her was prohibited from giving her care, per the statutes of the hospital—it would have been considered an abortion. She transferred her to us because I am the only provider who is trained to do D. … E.s” in the area, Zahedi said. “When the patient reached us, within two minutes she lost 500 cc.s of blood. I said, ‘We’re done.’ I took her to the O.R. Her case was done in five minutes. She ultimately lost 2,500 cc.s of blood and needed a blood transfusion.”
Tennessee’s trigger ban would criminalize abortions “except in extreme cases where it is necessary to prevent death or serious and permanent bodily injury to the mother.” Zahedi asked, “What if this same situation happens then? Do I have to watch the patient bleed to death? Do I have to call a lawyer before I save her life?”
The United States has the highest maternal-mortality rate among industrialized nations, at about twenty-four deaths per a hundred thousand live births; the numbers for Black women alone are more than twice as high. A study published last year in the journal Contraception found an association between restrictions on abortion access and increased rates of maternal mortality, particularly for Black and Native American women. “Women of color may be disproportionately affected by abortion restrictions because they already experience higher structural barriers to healthcare,” the study’s authors wrote.
All of the ob-gyn practitioners I spoke to are haunted by post-Roe nightmares to come, and these are not limited to life-or-death scenarios. “People really focus just on imminent death,” Moayedi told me. “What we don’t always capture is morbidity—the actual sustainable harm that people also experience from pregnancy complications.” A miscarriage-related infection known as a septic embolus can restrict blood flow to the extremities and cause necrosis; vasopressors, which are medications used to stabilize blood pressure during sepsis, can also choke off blood flow in this way. Moayedi told me about patients she has treated who have had to have limbs amputated, “because physicians refused to intervene in a timely fashion in their miscarriages.”
Nikki Zite is an ob-gyn in Knoxville, where an arsonist burned down the local Planned Parenthood clinic on New Year’s Eve. Zite told me about one of her patients, a mother who had a terminal health condition and who elected to have an abortion. “The pregnancy was not going to kill her, but it would accelerate her death,” Zite said. “She and her husband and her physician reached out to me because she had decided that she did not want to bring a child into the world when she was going to die shortly, and also because she wanted to be around as long as possible for her current children.” It is difficult to imagine even a hard-line pro-lifer quibbling with a dying mother’s wishes for herself and her family. Yet her dilemma may not count as a “medical emergency” under Tennessee’s trigger ban.
Likewise, most abortion bans do not make exceptions for catastrophic fetal anomalies that cannot be detected until late in pregnancy, such as anencephaly and certain cardiac and renal malformations. Depending on the situation, these are pregnancy losses by another name. Zahedi, who for a time was one of only a handful of providers nationwide who performs later abortions, said that state legislators “don’t understand the nuances of situations in which a fetus has major anomalies that are not consistent with life. How long do we wait? Do you have to carry the pregnancy to term?” In these cases, she went on, patients are “taking a risk to their life, to continue a pregnancy to term or to stillbirth, with the knowledge that they won’t go home with a live child at the end of the day.”
At one point, Moayedi told me, she was the only physician living in Dallas, which has a metropolitan area of seven million, providing later abortions. For the last two years, owing to the increasingly hostile landscape for abortion care in Texas, she has been meeting these patients in Oklahoma—a state with a trigger ban in place.
The maternal-fetal-medicine community “is trying to figure out what comes next,” Zahedi said, but all attempts at planning are wracked with uncertainty. Zahedi hopes that she and her colleagues will be permitted to transfer patients in need of abortion care out of state, but the legal implications of doing so are not yet clear. “And how would that work monetarily? How does it work insurance-wise? It’s not like we’re transferring within a city. We’re talking about multiple states,” she said. Tennessee is virtually landlocked by states that will either ban or heavily restrict abortion access after the Supreme Court decision is handed down.
Several ob-gyns told me that they have seen a recent uptick in medical students and residents who are interested in receiving advanced training in abortion care, including the D. … E. procedure, through initiatives such as the Ryan Program. “We’re being proactive to figure out where we can offer training to our residents,” Zite said. “It may mean setting up a rotation in which they can travel to another state and get that experience.” A spokesperson for the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which sets standards for residency programs across the U.S., told me via e-mail, “Should it become illegal in some states to perform aspects of family planning, the ACGME is exploring alternative pathways for completing this training. At this time, the ACGME requirements remain the same” for ob-gyn residents.
To determine that ob-gyn training is not complete without abortion training is not simply an ideological stance, and ob-gyns have no end of anecdotes to support this. “I was on call years ago with a resident who had opted out of any abortion training—she had not done any D. … E.s,” Zite said. “On one of her nights on call, a pregnant patient came in after a motor-vehicle accident with a fractured pelvis and a uterus full of blood. She was between sixteen and eighteen weeks pregnant, and there was still a heartbeat.” In consultation with the orthopedic surgeon on call, Zite determined that she had to empty the patient’s uterus to save her life. Zite asked the resident to return to the labor-and-delivery ward while she performed the D. … E. “She said, ‘No, I’m coming with you. In two months, I’m going to be by myself somewhere. What if something like this happens?’ ” Zite felt that it was too late in the residency for her colleague to attain any lasting skills. “Still,” she said, “I was grateful that she had had this realization.” Zite asked her to tell other residents why they needed abortion-care training.
“We are training more people every day,” Moayedi said. “But where those skills are concentrated is not equitable.” What’s more, in states where abortion is banned, the diminishing number of trained abortion providers will have fewer opportunities to maintain their expertise for when emergency situations demand it. “I haven’t been able to provide later-abortion care in Texas since September, and any skilled surgeon will tell you that if you don’t use it you lose it,” Moayedi said. “You have to continually practice surgical skills to remain at the top of your game.” She mentioned that several of her colleagues have already moved out of state. “It is completely understandable. They have trained for so long, and for what?”
Moayedi and other providers told me they are optimistic that the availability of abortion pills will help people who are early in pregnancy obtain clandestine abortions. (Multiple states, however, are drafting legislation to criminalize distribution of these medications.) “But that is very different from people with desired pregnancies who have later-pregnancy complications,” Moayedi said—there is no mail-order pill for that. “We are going to see more deaths and more injuries. I don’t have to speculate about that at all.”
If Roe falls, Zahedi said, “then I might have to look at a patient who has something catastrophic going on and say, ‘You can seek abortion, but I can’t do anything about it here in the state of Tennessee. You need to go three states out to someone you completely do not know.’ ” She went on, “When lawmakers place themselves between my patient and me, it removes the component of trust in the relationship. They can’t trust me to take care of them, because I can’t.”
U.S. president Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un inside the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating South and North Korea on June 30, 2019 in Panmunjom, South Korea. (photo: Dong-A Ilbo/Getty Images/Getty Images)
A new book by Trump’s defense secretary tells the story of North Korea and Trump’s potential “doomsday tweet.”
Musk added that under his ownership, if users say something “destructive to the world, then there should be perhaps a timeout, a temporary suspension, or that particular tweet should be made invisible. … I think if there are tweets that are wrong and bad, those should be either deleted or made invisible, and a suspension, a temporary suspension, is appropriate, but not a permanent ban.”
This standard, of course, is incredibly vague — everything and nothing could be deemed “destructive to the world” or “wrong and bad.” As Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer at Facebook, pointed out, Musk’s words suggest that he’s given no thought to why the question of content moderation on Twitter is so vexed:
The scary fact is that no one knows what to do about the dangerous chain reaction that can happen when Twitter collides with world leaders generally, and Trump specifically.
Given the fact that Trump could plausibly be elected president again in 2024, we have to hope that someone at Twitter will consider this, rather than, as Musk does now, just blithely advocate “free speech” with some ad hoc, unpredictable restrictions.
That’s particularly true because Mark Esper, Trump’s defense secretary toward the end of his term, has confirmed in his new book “A Sacred Oath” that Trump and Twitter could have combined to end human civilization in January 2018.
While it’s largely been forgotten now, there was a significant chance that the U.S. and North Korea would go to war during the first year of the Trump administration. Retired military and diplomatic experts at the time estimated the odds as being 20, 30, or even 50 percent.
Such a war might easily have become, as Trump ally Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, said during the period of greatest danger, “one of the worst catastrophic events in the history of our civilization. It is going to be very, very brief. The end of it is going to see mass casualties the likes of which the planet has never seen. It will be of biblical proportions.”
When Trump took office in January 2017, U.S. intelligence believed that North Korea had manufactured dozens of nuclear devices. In July 2017, the North Korean government successfully tested intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the U.S.
It was this — the possibility that the U.S. was vulnerable to the nuclear sword of Damocles that we had dangled over North Korea’s head for decades — that caused Trump to proclaim in August that “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” The next month at the United Nations, Trump similarly said the U.S. might be forced “to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man [i.e., North Korean leader Kim Jong Un] is on a suicide mission.”
Trump then jumped on Twitter that month to proclaim that Kim was “obviously a madman” who “will be tested like never before!” He followed it up the same day by tweeting, “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U. N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!”
Such berserk bellicosity from a U.S. president would be alarming under any circumstances but was especially so involving North Korea. Jeffrey Lewis, a longtime North Korea observer and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, was so worried about Trump’s behavior that he wrote an entire speculative novel imagining how the president might accidentally start a nuclear war via tweet.
“North Korea,” Lewis told me recently via Twitter direct message, “has a nuclear strategy that relies on preemptively using nuclear weapons to repel a US invasion. If North Korean leaders think an invasion is imminent, their plan — at least on paper — is to use nuclear weapons against US forces in South Korea and Japan to destroy any invasion forces and shock the United States.”
And the North Korean government, Lewis said, doesn’t “have the kind of global hi-tech monitoring system the United States does. Instead they have to rely on signs and indicators. We don’t really know what indicators they use, but we think one of the most important indicators that the North Koreans rely on is the presence of military families in South Korea. The North Koreans think the U.S. would evacuate those families to safety before any invasion.”
This was the situation on January 3, 2018, when Trump tweeted, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ … I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger … more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
Esper, then serving as secretary of the Army, learned later that month that Trump was about to order all U.S. military dependents out of South Korea — announcing it on Twitter. “Kim would probably view a U.S. evacuation as a prelude to a conflict,” Esper writes in his book, echoing Lewis’s fears. “Would he strike first, targeting Seoul? … Would this be like the beginning of World War I? … This was a dangerous game of chicken, and with nuclear roosters no less.”
Thankfully for all humanity, someone — Esper still has no idea who — “talked the president out of sending the tweet. … War averted.”
Esper understandably remained anxious throughout the rest of his tenure in the Trump administration, with war with North Korea always at the top of his mind. “Who knew when another doomsday tweet might come?” he asks. “We had to be ready.”
However, Twitter was not and is not ready. What Twitter should do if Trump is again president is an extraordinary conundrum. World leaders obviously have many ways to communicate with the world and the right to do so. But Twitter is unique in that it allows them — at least those who want to — to issue proclamations with no intermediaries or counsel, just by getting their phone out of their pocket. And Trump is uniquely erratic and foolhardy.
It would be nice if there was a universal Twitter policy that dealt with the danger of Trump and Twitter — possibly no presidents and prime ministers, especially ones that lead nuclear powers, should be permitted to have Twitter accounts. They could still deal death and destruction upon the world on purpose, but this kind of circuit breaker might make them less likely to do so by accident.
Or perhaps Trump should be dealt with specifically, if he ever claws his way back to the Oval Office. That wouldn’t be ideal, but then again, neither is global thermonuclear war.
At the very least, it would be nice to imagine that the people running Twitter, whether that’s Musk or anyone else, have spent a great deal of time pondering the existential danger created by their bird app. But as of now, there’s little sign of this on the horizon. (Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether he is aware of this history.)
Alabama. (photo: Julie Bennett/Getty Images)
An Alabama judge’s injunction means doctors and parents can still provide gender-affirming care for trans teenagers, but school staff remain required to tell on trans students.
Late Friday night, U.S. District Judge Liles Burke issued a temporary injunction on a new Alabama law that made it a felony for doctors and parents in the state to provide gender-affirming medical treatment to transgender youth under 19, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Judge Burke left in place a provision banning gender-affirming surgeries on trans minors. Another part of the law left intact by Judge Burke insists that teachers and school officials tell parents if a child discloses to that official or staff member that they feel they are transgender.
On Saturday, trans teenagers, their parents, and doctors were both celebrating, while also eyeing the injunction cautiously as a momentary reprieve; Governor Kay Ivey said it was a “temporary legal roadblock,” while the state attorney general indicated he would appeal.
For now, trans teens, their doctors, and their supporters are celebrating a rare moment of victory. The so-called Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act officially came into force last weekend, after being signed into law by Ivey in April, leading to deep worry and concern for trans teenagers on medication and receiving gender-affirming care, their parents, and the doctors who care for them who suddenly found themselves criminalized.
Harleigh Walker, who lives with her family in East Alabama, told The Daily Beast her dad had woken her up at 6 a.m. to tell her about the injunction.
“I felt it was such a release of stress,” Harleigh said. “The past three weeks have been a constant battle with stress and anxiety regarding my transition and this legislation. Trying to balance just being a 15-year-old and fighting for my constitutional rights isn’t ideal. Now that this injunction is granted and the fight is on hold for now, and I can focus on moving forward with my transition, it makes me so happy. I can go back to being Harleigh, the 15-year-old girl from Auburn, Alabama who is just living life how I was meant to live it.”
Jeff told The Daily Beast: “We are ecstatic at the results. We really feel like this had lifted a huge weight off our shoulder. Not only do we get to continue the care, but we also can continue with the doctors that have been with us since the beginning.”
In a strongly worded ruling, Judge Liles wrote that most major medical associations had endorsed “transitioning medications as well-established, evidence-based treatments for gender dysphoria in minors,” adding it was in the “enduring American tradition,” that it was parents, not the states or federal courts, who played “the primary role in caring and nurturing for their children.”
Judge Liles reserved special scorn for one expert witness called by the state, clinical psychologist Dr. James Cantor, who admitted to having little experience in treating young trans people. “Accordingly, the Court gave his testimony regarding the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors very little weight,” Judge Liles wrote.
Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, who oversees the care of “several hundred kids” aged from 5 to 20 from Alabama, southern Tennessee, the Florida Panhandle, and the western edge of Georgia, told The Daily Beast: “I’m thrilled by the outcome of the decision. This is a huge relief for transgender children and their families. The Court’s decision recognizes this is well-established care that has been endorsed by 22 major medical associations.
“This decision will ensure transgender children can continue to receive this life-saving care—not just in Alabama, but hopefully the entire nation. I am also relieved for my physician colleagues nationwide. The untenable placement of physicians in a space to breach our Hippocratic Oath or face a felony conviction, is abhorrent. This fear weighed heavily throughout these weeks. I'm elated to see it put to rest.”
Dr. Ladinsky told The Daily Beast it was “strange” for the judge to keep the provision forbidding gender-affirming surgeries on minors, as at her institution no such surgeries are performed on minors.
“It is a colossal reprieve,” Dr. Ladinsky said, in relation to her continuing to be able to provide gender-affirming care, and prescribing hormone treatments and puberty blockers to patients. “We now return to providing 100% of our services.” The judge’s injunction will not only hold for the duration of the appellate process as it continues, but its emphatic wording, Dr. Ladinsky feels, will make it hard for the 11th Circuit to grant an appeal to the state.
“There is a sense of relief, elation, and peace—at least for a while, knowing that the health care and medication our patients and future patients hoped to receive is not going away.” Dr. Ladinsky told The Daily Beast. “There just aren’t words. Tears of fear have become tears of joy across the state. Parents and kids haven’t slept for weeks. They finally now have the peace they need to get the sleep they need.”
The granting of the injunction “means that parents of transgender children in Alabama will continue to be able to make the healthcare decisions that are best for their families. It is an extraordinary relief. Parents should not be punished for wanting to do what’s best for their kids,” said Jennifer Levi, director of the transgender rights project for GLBTQ Legal Advocates … Defenders.
A father of a trans son, who requested anonymity, told The Daily Beast: “Each morning, I quickly scan my emails, in hope of finding a Google alert that might have some news that wasn’t already repeated in other emails or the same story in other outlets. To my surprise, there it was—an alert about the Judge making his decision, late last night. I read with glee, then saw an email from one of our doctors, sent at 11:15pm last night, joyfully exclaiming the news. I was in the bathroom, which has double doors to the bedroom. I burst through them both, yelling, ‘WE WON!!!’ My wife jumped up in bed. ‘WHAT!!!’
“So, where are we now, right? So, WE won, meaning our kid and kids like our kid. There are three components to SB 184 (the bill that was passed into law). Judge Burke wisely struck down the part regarding medical care, HRT, etc., due to insufficient evidence that these treatments were ‘experimental.’ WOOT! Assuming that goes unchallenged, we get a win for that part. Regardless, for now, my son, wife, and I can continue to work with his team of doctors on his therapy, as can all of the other kids like him.”
“So many trans kids and LGBTQ kids are going to lose their safe space”
Ivey has signed into law another bill that prevents trans kids from using the bathroom of their choice at their K-12 schools, and—echoing Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill—preventing “classroom instruction or discussion on sexual orientation or gender identity” for grades K-5.
“Adults are free to do what they want to do, but this is to protect children,” Rep. Wes Allen, the Republican sponsor of the original bill outlawing gender-affirming health care, said.
In a previous interview with The Daily Beast, Republican Representative Andrew Sorrell said he “rejected the premise” that his and other legislators’ actions amounted to bullying an already marginalized group for political gain, and went on to blame trans youth and their families for the need for legislation.
“We’re not the ones who made the decision to have transgender surgery,” Rep. Sorrell said. “They’re the ones who put us in this position, not the reverse. They’re the instigators, we’re responding.” He appeared to advocate for conversion therapy for trans youth, who he said should have counseling to be told, “they are what God created them to be, not confuse them by encouraging them to have surgery and puberty blockers.”
“I don’t believe people are transgender at all, I believe you are born with the gender you really are,” Rep. Sorrell told The Daily Beast. “You can do things to yourself, but that’s not really changing you.”
Rep. Sorrell, who co-sponsored the bathroom bill, told The Daily Beast: “If you’re an adult in America and you want to have transgender surgery, have at it. It’s a free country. What you don’t have the right to do is infringe on my daughter’s right to privacy in a bathroom.”
Given how focused Ivey and Republican legislators are on passing anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation into law, there remains much concern over the provision insisting educators and officials tell on trans students who may have confided in them.
Harleigh Walker told The Daily Beast, “I remember when I was early on in my transition I would look to my teachers and counselors for advice. They would always be there for me if I needed them or had questions or just needed a safe space. But with this legislation in place, it would force teachers to out so many trans and LGBTQ children and that’s not OK. I know so many teachers that would hate to abide by these laws, but they would risk their job and that’s not a good line to cross. So many trans kids and LGBTQ kids are going to lose their safe space—and that’s extremely dangerous for the kid and everyone else involved.”
“This one does still stick in my craw, because this is way too heavy a burden to put upon these people,” the father of the trans son told The Daily Beast about the teachers-telling-on-trans kids provision staying intact. “Not only that, this can literally put these kids in danger—either from disapproving parents or by their own actions, feeling outed against their will. In my mind, I can easily imagine kids going to school and changing clothes and being themselves during the day, then going home as their parents expect them.
“What could happen from abusive parents to these kids scares me the most. I always imagine the drunken dad at home burning a cigarette into a kid’s arm or something awful like that. Or, just kicking them out. Whatever. My imagination runs wild. So, while those who backed the law probably can’t even imagine the damage this could cause to a kid, that one is still on the books for the moment.”
Maria, mom to a trans son, Rhydian, told The Daily Beast: “I am very happy for our doctors and for us to be able to continue with treatment, it’s definitely positive. But Rhydian really needs top surgery to finish his transition, and to feel good with his own body. Dysphoria is real. And that is on hold right now. I don’t understand why you can go fight for our country and even vote at 18, and yet trans teens are treated as children when it comes to making a decision to have their much-needed surgery until 19. This still puts us on a limbo again. But we will take the positives.”
Her voice breaking with emotion, Maria said she wanted Rhydian to be happy. Rhydian himself wants to know if the Alabama legislators pushing the anti-trans legislation “feel like they’re doing something productive. What do they see their mission as? Do they see the damage they’re doing to trans kids, their families, and the community?”
“What if it was your kid?” Maria wants to ask the legislators. “Do you want them to live their fullest lives, and be happy—to thrive?”
The trans teens, their families, and physicians like Dr. Ladinsky are poised for the battle to go on.
“Our hope is that the first part around gender-affirming medical care is over with and won’t be challenged,” the father of the trans son told The Daily Beast. “Just strike it out and set a precedent for other states. I don’t doubt that there will be appeals and/or other attempts to reword bills and try again. For now, my boy is safe. I have no doubt that the other components will be challenged, and I hope the ratting-on-trans kids part takes plenty long enough that the powers-that-be have the wisdom to realize that it is not an underpaid teacher’s responsibility to put a kid into harm’s way.”
The father also noted that Judge Burke was appointed by President Trump. “His decision gives me hope that there really are people out there in positions of power who are willing to make the hard decisions and stick their necks out to do what’s right—not just by conscience, but by the laws of the land; and for all of us—not just for the people who voted for or appointed them.
“This could very well kill Burke’s career, especially around this part of the country,” the father noted. “Today, I’m proud of him and overjoyed by his decision. There’s still hope that there are people like him and our amazing doctors who don’t just take the easy way out. They do what’s right. I’m sure there are plenty of other jobs available to our doctors, where they could just walk in and see patients and be done for the day. But they don’t. They stick it out and do what’s hard, because they believe in their calling. That’s pretty rare these days.”
“We will never stop fighting this fight,” 15-year-old Harleigh Walker told The Daily Beast. “As long as trans youth are being attacked by the state I will not stand down. It is a step in the right direction and now there is finally time to breathe. However, we are far from done.”
A poster of Mohamed Morsi at a supporters camp destroyed by the army during the Rabaa massacre in August 2013 (AFP).
In an exclusive extract from his new book, Peter Oborne explains how the opponents of repressive regimes are often portrayed as a mortal threat to the West
Perhaps the most stark example of this Western complicity with state terror concerns the military coup that deposed Salvador Allende, the first Marxist to be voted into power in a South American liberal democracy when he became president of Chile in 1970. For Cold War Latin America, read today’s Middle East. For Salvador Allende, read Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected president of Egypt who was ousted in a military coup in 2013, just over a year after he was sworn in as president.
When I visited Cairo a few months after the coup, it was like attending a funeral. The atmosphere in the city was subdued, the streets were quiet. Protest was punishable by jail, torture was routine, and the acting president was a puppet while his defence minister General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ran the country. Sisi’s picture was everywhere: in shops, in cafes, on street corners, often placed meaningfully alongside those of Nasser and Sadat, the country’s two previous strongmen. Sisi was rumoured to have told friends of a series of visions, some dating back decades, in which it was divulged to him that he was destined to emerge as Egypt’s saviour. And yet, to this day, not one British Foreign Secretary has uttered the phrase coup d’etat in relation to the events in Egypt. In a surreal interview on Pakistani TV, US Secretary of State John Kerry hailed General Sisi for "restoring democracy" and praised him for averting violence.
There are differences between Egypt and Chile. The political opposition to Morsi’s socially conservative Muslim Brotherhood presidency came from the country’s liberal left, while the hostility towards Allende came from the right. While Allende died by suicide on the day of the Chilean coup, Morsi died in prison six years after he was ousted from power. Also, the CIA was probably not a prime mover in the Egyptian coup, which was supported by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with widespread support from neighbouring dictatorships.
The similarities are nevertheless striking. In both Egypt and Chile revolutionary movements sought peaceful political transformation. In Egypt, the United States and the West offered little more than formal protests when the new Egyptian dictator went on to hunt down and kill more than a thousand political activists at Rabaa Square and al-Nahda Square in Cairo. This was around the same number as are thought to have been killed by the Chinese government in Tiananmen Square, although the media coverage was far more restrained, as is so often the case when reporting atrocities committed by a Western ally. The UK never protested about the conditions in which President Morsi was held in jail. President Sisi was in fact warmly received in Downing Street by David Cameron. The sale of British arms to Egypt continues.
Justifying the slaughter at Rabaa Square in 2013, an Egyptian army spokesman stated that "when dealing with terrorism, the consideration of civil and human rights is not applicable". Note the use of the term "terrorism" here. It was being used on behalf of an illegal military regime, which seized power in a military coup, to describe hundreds of pro-democracy protesters who had been shot down in cold blood. There were, once again, no complaints from the US or the UK. All this is familiar across the Muslim world: US and Western involvement in, or tolerance of, state terror and military coups.
Mohamed Ali Harrath: 'I was vilified'
The West’s often misplaced involvement in foreign regimes has shaped global politics over recent decades, but no less important is the impact it has had on the lives of individuals.
Mohammed Ali Harrath was born in 1963, close to the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, where Mohamed Bouazizi would later set himself on fire on 17 December 2010, the desperate act which literally ignited the Arab Spring. Harrath came from an upper-middle-class family, which dispatched him to what he describes as a "rigidly conservative boarding school’"
Harrath became politically active at the age of 13. His first experience involved the preparation of news sheets to be pinned up on the wall of the local mosque. Of course, I asked: why the mosque? One of the central criticisms made in the secular West against so- called Islamists is their failure to distinguish between religion and politics. He gently explained that his local mosque was the only place you could agitate in the Western-backed dictatorship of Tunisia. There were no free newspapers, no political parties, no freedom, no democracy.
“I was fascinated by the power of the word,” Harrath told me. “I always believe the word is stronger than the bullet. Sometimes the bullet can silence the word, but then the word prevails.” He was arrested for the first time at the age of 18, while a student of textile engineering in Tunis, for “degrading the status of the president”. He became a founder of the Front Islamique Tunisien (FIT), formed in opposition to the Habib Bourguiba regime.
He spent most of his twenties on the run, in and out of jail. He told me that “the prison is not the problem. As bad as it is, it cannot be compared to when you go through investigation.” That meant being sodomised with sticks and bottles, with faeces being shoved into your mouth. Victims suffered mock-drowning and electric shocks. Amnesty International has described how some victims were tied to a chair for a week with an apparatus that pierced their neck with a needle whenever their head dropped through exhaustion. “We were unable to go to the toilet on our own,” Harrath remembered, “so we were carried by four or five friends.” He knows of 30 people who died under Tunisian government torture. When Bourguiba was removed from power in a coup in 1987, Harrath was on death row, facing execution.
Bourguiba’s successor, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, promised reforms. Rather than being executed, Harrath was freed. But that moment of hope proved a false dawn. Ben Ali turned out to be even more oppressive than his predecessor.
Harrath told me that at this point, after a decade of struggle, he reassessed his life. He said there came a moment when he realised there was no point fighting the regime in Tunis because Bourguiba and Ben Ali were just puppet rulers. The real enemy, he realised, was France, the former imperial power that provided security assistance and (in part through the European Union) diplomatic and economic backing to keep the dictatorship in power. This was the same insight which famously occurred to Osama bin Laden on his journey from Saudi dissident to terrorist chief. Bin Laden recognised that his real opponent was the "far enemy"– the United States. Rather than copy Bin Laden’s bloodthirsty logic, Harrath abandoned the political struggle and left Tunisia for good.
For five years, Harrath wandered the globe using false documents, “with a new name and personality every week”. When he arrived in London in 1995, he studied for a degree in politics at the University of Westminster, writing his undergraduate dissertation on Karl Marx (“good on the analysis but bad on the solutions” was Harrath’s verdict), and started to dabble in business. “I was working here and there, buying and selling – I did everything.” This nomadic period was to be used against him by critics who repeated Tunisian government claims – as usual with no evidence – that he worked with al-Qaeda.
For 15 years, Harrath lived the life of a political exile. Then, in 2004, he set up Islam Channel, a British TV station aimed at Muslims. It was then, he says, that the harassment began: “I was vilified.” First to visit, he told me, was the Inland Revenue. “They came here and stayed for nearly a month going through every single receipt, every single paper. What astonished me is that they were asking politically motivated questions. They are asking about our content, they are asking about programmes. They are the taxman, they have to see whether we are paying our taxes or not. But they went further than that.”
Then the press attacks started. The British media had an easy task. When Harrath fled Tunisia, the Ben Ali regime had accused him of “counterfeiting, forgery, crimes involving the use of weapons/explosives, and terrorism”. His torturers asked for him to be added to Interpol’s Red Notice list, a system of international alerts aimed at detecting suspected criminals or terrorists. The international police agency obliged.
This meant there was no legal risk for journalists in connecting Harrath with terror. Interpol, such a respected international law enforcement organisation, had done the job for them. And no journalist took the trouble to look behind the Interpol designation to the regime that had demanded it. From this moment on, Harrath was fighting battles on two fronts. The Tunisian government and the London media shared a common interest in labelling him an extremist. In 2009, he spoke at a City Hall-sponsored event in London. The Sunday Express responded with a story headlined: “Boris terror link”.
The Times launched an innuendo-filled campaign, opening itself up to the charge of doing Tunisian dictator Ben Ali’s job by highlighting Harrath’s alleged links to terrorism, while asserting that he was an adviser to the Metropolitan Police. “[It] was part of the vilification,” he says. “It was aimed at damaging me within the community.” Harrath insists he was never a police adviser and the claim was based on his having spoken from time to time, like many other Muslims, to the Muslim Contact Unit of the Metropolitan Police. This did not stop the Conservative Party’s shadow security minister Baroness Neville-Jones demanding in 2008 that he should be sacked from his non-existent post. In deference to the Ben Ali regime, Neville-Jones declared that “the Tunisian government, an ally in the fight against terrorism, has asked for extradition of this man”. The Tories, then in opposition, were displaying a shocking readiness to operate within parameters set for them by a North African dictatorship. Ben Ali was then one of the most notorious rulers in Africa. Harrath had fled the country to escape him.
Apparatus of repression
In April 2011, remarkably soon after the fall of Ben Ali, Interpol removed its Red Notice, telling Harrath that, “after re-examining all the information in the file”, the organisation “considered that the proceedings against you were primarily political in nature”. Interpol has questions to answer. For almost two decades, its system of Red Notices had been used by Tunisia’s Ben Ali to harass and torment a leading dissident. Within a few months of the fall of Ben Ali, the Red Notice was removed. The agency’s purpose should be to help national police hunt down criminals, not to help round up opponents of dictatorship.
There were some powerful grounds for criticising Harrath. His channel broke Ofcom’s impartiality rules, and one employee won an appeal for unfair dismissal and gender discrimination. More seriously, it broke the broadcasting code by allowing a presenter to condone marital rape and violence against women.
But not one of the newspapers that so eagerly played up Harrath’s alleged terrorist past apologised – or even reported that Interpol had lifted him off the Red Notice list. Like the Conservative Party, they were happy to act within the parameters set for them by a dictatorship. Here was a man who arrived in the UK as a refugee from tyranny. Instead of being welcomed, he was treated like a criminal. For years, he has been unable to travel without risk of arrest and extradition. After he set up Islam Channel, a television station popular among the UK’s two million Muslims, Harrath’s fugitive status was ruthlessly used against him by a new set of persecutors: critics of Islam within the British political and media establishment.
Harrath, who sported a dark, bushy beard, joked: “I have been called an extremist, an Islamist, a terrorist – all the ists.” It wasn’t really a joke. Millions of innocent Muslims (and many non-Muslims) are categorised in the same way. Across much of the world, it is actually hard for any supporter of political freedom to avoid being labelled a terrorist. Even if they protest peacefully, they risk arrest and torture, or being shot down by armed police in the streets. If they flee their country, they can find themselves listed as terrorists or hunted down.
I have talked to scores of such ‘Islamists’ in the near two decades I’ve spent researching this book. They are brave and principled in a self-sacrificial way that nowadays we rarely encounter in the West, with high standards of personal integrity and public conduct. Otherwise they would not be able to endure torture and enforced exile for their beliefs. But, according to normal discourse in the West, these Islamists are single-minded fanatics hell-bent on the destruction of (to use the phrase much loved of British and American leaders) "everything that we stand for’" This is false, insulting and, above all, ignorant.
I have found again and again that supporters of political Islam revere the UK and even more so our institutions: Parliament, the rule of law, freedom of the press. Indeed, they admire them all the more keenly for the powerful reason that such institutions can scarcely be said to exist in their own countries and they understand rather better than we do how much they matter. It is true that they criticise the UK (and the West), but this is not because they want to destroy our values, despite what politicians and opinion-formers have repeatedly asserted. They criticise us mainly because we don’t cherish our values enough. Our newspapers spread lies and act as propaganda tools. Our governments break the law. Western intelligence services encourage illegal detention and torture. Our armed forces maim and kill with impunity and, in an especially cowardly way, through the use of drones and air power.
Worst of all, the UK is part of the apparatus of repression in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere. We supply arms and provide advice and training for the police and security forces in regimes dedicated to the suppression of democracy and freedom. This means that their opposition becomes our opposition as well.
This explains one reason for hostility towards Islam in the UK. Regimes in Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE devote time, influence and, above all, money to discrediting political movements that challenge them. In particular, they have been successful at portraying Islamism as a mortal threat to the West, often defining Islamists as terrorists, thus tying their Western allies closer through a shared enemy.
A grizzly bear catches salmon in Cook Inlet, Alaska. (photo: Enrique Aguirre Aves/The Image Bank/Getty Images)
Two of the lease sales would have taken place in the Gulf of Mexico and a third would have taken place off the coast of Alaska in Cook’s Inlet, The Washington Post reported.
“Due to lack of industry interest in leasing in the area, the Department will not move forward with the proposed Cook Inlet OCS oil and gas lease sale 258,” the Interior Department wrote in a statement shared by journalist Sara Cook on Twitter. “The Department also will not move forward with lease sales 259 and 261 in the Gulf of Mexico region, as a result of delays due to factors including conflicting court rulings that impacted work on those proposed lease sales.”
Environmentalists celebrated the news. Climate and wildlife advocates have long opposed the Cook Inlet sale because it would have impacted endangered species like beluga whales and Native and local communities who rely on the ocean, as National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) senior attorney Irene Gutierrez noted in a blog post shared with EcoWatch. Further, it would have contributed more to the climate crisis, which is already making Alaska the fastest warming state in the nation.
“The climate is Code Red and it’s beyond time to stop issuing new oil and gas leases,” Pacific Environment Arctic policy director Kay Brown said in a statement emailed to EcoWatch. “Interior Secretary Haaland made the right choice to cancel the Lower Cook Inlet oil lease sale. Now, it’s time for the federal government to consider permanent protections for Lower Cook Inlet – and to halt new oil and gas leasing on all federal public lands.”
Environmental groups also oppose further drilling in the Gulf of Mexico because it threatens the health of human communities, endangered species like Rice’s whale and the region’s important fisheries.
“It is time to stop treating the Gulf of Mexico as a sacrifice zone for the country’s dirty and dangerous oil and gas addiction, and to accelerate the shift to clean energy,” Gutierrez said.
The department’s decision prompted backlash from the oil and gas industry and Republican lawmakers, however, because it comes at a time when oil and gas prices are surging, partly due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Gas prices have reached a record $4.40 a gallon, $1.40 per gallon more than last year, AP News reported.
“I can’t imagine a more tone-deaf, shortsighted decision that jeopardizes our economic and energy security without doing a single thing to help the environment or the American people,” Rep. Bruce Westerman (Ark.), who is the leading Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement reported by The Washington Post.
Climate advocates, however, have pushed back against the argument that more leasing will boost supply and lower prices. Gutierrez pointed out that the oil and gas industry has collectively leased 11 million acres of ocean and is using less than a quarter of it. Further, it would take a decade for oil companies to develop any acreage leased this year.
The cancellation comes as the near future of oil and gas leasing on public lands is unclear. President Biden promised to stop leasing on public lands and followed through with a moratorium shortly after taking office, The Washington Post reported. However, a Louisiana judge struck down the temporary ban, and the administration then said it had to continue to hold lease sales. However, the current five-year offshore drilling program is set to expire at the end of June, and the Interior Department has not yet released a replacement plan. Even if it did so in the next few weeks, oil and gas companies likely still wouldn’t know when or where new lease sales would be held until 2023.
The energy industry has called on the administration to end the delay.
“As geopolitical volatility and global energy prices continue to rise, we again urge the administration to end the uncertainty and immediately act on a new five-year program for federal offshore leasing,” American Petroleum Institute senior vice president Frank Macchiarola said in a statement reported by CBS News.
Environmentalists, on the other hand, want the administration to take an even stronger stance against fossil fuels.
“To save imperiled marine life and protect coastal communities and our climate from pollution, we need to end new leasing and phase out existing drilling,” Center for Biological Diversity oceans legal director Kristen Monsell told AP News.
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