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The Post reported last month that Thomas sent emails to two Arizona House members, in November and December 2020, urging them to help overturn Biden’s win by selecting presidential electors — a responsibility that belongs to Arizona voters under state law. Thomas sent the messages using FreeRoots, an online platform intended to make it easy to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials.
New documents show that Thomas indeed used the platform to reach many lawmakers simultaneously. On Nov. 9, she sent identical emails to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven Arizona state senators. That represents more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time.
The message, just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, urged lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure” and claimed that the responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone.” They had “power to fight back against fraud” and “ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen,” the email said.
Among the lawmakers who received the email was then-Rep. Anthony Kern, a Stop the Steal supporter who lost his reelection bid in November 2020 and then joined U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and others as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence, a last-ditch effort to overturn Biden’s victory. Kern was photographed outside the Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6 but has said he did not enter the building, according to local media reports.
Kern did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. He is seeking his party’s nomination for a seat in the Arizona state Senate and has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump.
On Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college were slated to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory, Thomas emailed 22 House members and one senator. “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said. It linked to a video of a man urging swing-state lawmakers to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”
Speaker of the House Russell “Rusty” Bowers and Rep. Shawnna Bolick, the two recipients previously identified, told The Post in May that the outreach from Thomas had no bearing on their decisions about how to handle claims of election fraud.
But the revelation that Ginni Thomas was directly involved in pressing them to override the popular vote — an act that would have been without precedent in the modern era — intensified questions about whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 presidential election and attempts to subvert it. Ginni Thomas’s status as a leading conservative political activist has set her apart from other spouses of Supreme Court justices.
Ginni Thomas did not respond to requests seeking comment for this report. She has long insisted that she and her husband operate in separate professional lanes.
A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to questions for Clarence Thomas.
The Post obtained the emails under Arizona’s public records law, which — unlike the laws in some other key 2020 swing states — allows the public to access emails, text messages and other written communications to and from state lawmakers.
In March, The Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Ginni Thomas sent in the weeks after the 2020 election to Mark Meadows, then Trump’s chief of staff. The messages showed Thomas spreading false claims and urging Meadows to keep fighting for Trump to remain in the White House.
“That conflict of interest just screams at you,” said Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who serves on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, on MSNBC in response to The Post’s May report revealing the emails to Bolick and Bowers.
Schiff pointed to Clarence Thomas’s decision not to recuse when Trump went to the Supreme Court to try to block the House committee from getting access to his White House records. The high court declined to block the release of those documents. Thomas, siding with Trump, was the only justice to dissent.
“Here you have the wife of a Supreme Court justice,” Schiff said, trying to “get Arizona to improperly cast aside the votes of millions. And also, to add to it, her husband on the Supreme Court, writing a dissent in a case arguing against providing records to Congress that might have revealed some of these same e-mails.”
After the May article, Mark Paoletta — a longtime ally of the Thomases who, as a member of the George H.W. Bush administration, played a role in the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court — confirmed that Ginni Thomas signed the emails, but he sought to minimize her role.
“Ginni signed her name to a pre-written form letter that was signed by thousands of citizens and sent to state legislators across the country,” Paoletta wrote on Twitter on May 20. He described Thomas’s activities as “a private citizen joining a letter writing campaign” and added, sarcastically, “How disturbing, what a threat!”
The letter-writing campaigns were organized on FreeRoots.com, which advertised itself as a platform to amplify grass-roots advocacy across the political spectrum. A Post review of its archived webpages shows that it was heavily used in late 2020 by groups seeking to overturn the presidential election results.
One of those groups was Every Legal Vote, which organized the campaign to send the message that Ginni Thomas sent on Nov. 9. In those first days after the Nov. 3 election, Every Legal Vote described itself online as a “labor of love by American citizens, in partnership” with the nonprofit United in Purpose, according to webpages preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. United in Purpose, which harnesses data to galvanize conservative Christian voters, in recent years hosted luncheons where Thomas presented her Impact Awards to right-wing leaders.
On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden electors in Arizona cast their votes, after the election results were certified by Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) and Gov. Doug Ducey (R).
Trump electors met in Arizona that day and signed a document declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified Electors.” One of them was Kern, the outgoing state representative.
Kern was among more than a dozen lawmakers who signed on to a letter to Congress that same day calling for the state’s electoral votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”
The lawmakers’ letter was an exhibit in Kern and Gohmert’s lawsuit asking a federal court to rule that Pence had the “exclusive authority and sole discretion” in deciding which electoral votes to count for a given state. The plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to intervene after the case was dismissed in lower courts. The day after the Jan. 6 insurrection, the court declined in an unsigned order.
Emergency management specialists transport the body of a person killed in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, May 20, 2022. (photo: Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
The Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, all but destroyed by weeks of shelling and now under Russian control, is at risk of a major cholera outbreak, the UK defence ministry says.
Cholera is usually caught by eating or drinking contaminated food or water and is closely linked to poor sanitation.
Uncollected dead bodies and rubbish add to the unsanitary conditions.
There have been outbreaks of the disease in Mariupol before, and isolated cases have been reported in the past month.
The city's Ukrainian mayor, Vadym Boychenko told BBC Ukrainian that "cholera, dysentery and other infectious diseases are already in the city", and that the city has been closed off to avoid a larger outbreak.
The claims cannot be verified by the BBC, and the Russian-appointed mayor says regular testing takes place and no cases of cholera have been recorded.
Ukraine's health ministry said it has limited access to information from Mariupol, but has conducted testing in Ukraine-held territory and not uncovered any cases.
Earlier this week, the UN said that water had mixed with sewage in Mariupol, increasing the risk of a cholera outbreak. The Red Cross has warned that the destruction to sanitation infrastructure had set the ground for the spread of water-borne diseases.
Cholera can 'kill within hours'
Cholera can be a very serious illness. In the most severe cases, if left untreated, the disease can kill within hours.
It is caused by a bacterium called Vibrio cholerae and people tend to catch it by eating food or drinking water contaminated with the bug.
The spread of cholera is closely linked to poor sanitation facilities and unsafe drinking water where the bug can thrive and spread.
It is a disease that often adds to the suffering in humanitarian crises - when there is disruption of water and sanitation supplies and people shelter in crowded spaces, with extra pressure on water systems.
Once infected, some people get watery diarrhoea and become severely dehydrated. This needs rapid treatment with fluids and antibiotics.
Others get mild to moderate symptoms and many with the disease do not have symptoms at all, but they can still carry the bug in their faeces.
Vaccines and improved sanitation can help get cholera outbreaks under control.
In addition, sanitary conditions in the city are said to be extremely poor, with piles of rubbish on the streets and bodies still lying under the rubble.
"Many corpses are lying on the ground and inside the buildings... bodies are rotting there. Lots of cockroaches, flies. A pile of dirt. Garbage that no one takes out," Kyiv resident Anastasiia Zolotarova, whose mother left Mariupol last week, told the BBC.
Mariupol fell into Russian hands in May after a brutal assault lasting nearly three months, which left the city in ruins.
In April, the Ukrainian mayor said more than 10,000 civilians had already died. The battle raged for several more weeks after that, suggesting the death toll could be far higher.
Makeshift cemeteries have been built around the city to deal with the huge number of bodies, and many more are buried in back yards, parks and squares, according to Mr Boychenko.
Earlier this week, the Mariupol city council warned that a cholera outbreak could kill tens of thousands of people, listing a number of factors that could lead to an "explosive" epidemic, including a lack of medicine and medical facilities.
"They (the Russians) destroyed our infectious diseases hospital with all the equipment, killed the doctors," Mr Boychenko told the BBC.
Another Ukrainian Mariupol official recently claimed there was a "catastrophic" shortage of medics in the city, adding that the Russian-appointed authorities were trying to persuade retired doctors, even those over the age of 80, to return to work.
Bodies lying under piles of rubble and mountains of uncollected rubbish is not the image of Mariupol the Russian-appointed authorities want to portray.
They prefer to describe it as a city returning to normal life, posting pictures on social media of children returning to classrooms and lorries collecting rubbish.
But much of the city still lies in ruins, and an outbreak of cholera or any other infectious disease would be a further huge challenge for the estimated 100,000 people still living there after the horror of the last few months.
French president Emmanuel Macron. (photo: Michel Euler/AP)
President Emmanuel Macron has been criticised by Ukraine and eastern European allies after published interviews on Saturday quoting him as saying it was vital not to "humiliate" Russia so that when the fighting ends there could be a diplomatic solution.
"As the president has said, we want a Ukrainian victory. We want Ukraine's territorial integrity to be restored," the official told reporters when asked about Macron's humiliation comments.
Macron has spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin regularly since the Feb. 24 invasion as part of efforts to achieve a ceasefire and begin a credible negotiation between Kyiv and Moscow, although he has had no tangible success to show for it.
"There is no spirit of concession towards Putin or Russia in what the president says. When he speaks to him directly, it is not compromise, but to say how we see things," the official said.
France is also ready to help on allowing access to the port of Odesa, where some of Ukraine's grain stocks are ready to be exported, the official said.
"We're at the disposal of the parties so that an operation can be set up which would allow access to the port of Odesa in complete safety," the official said.
The official didn't elaborate on what that help would be.
The Black Sea, where Odesa is located, is crucial for shipment of grain, oil and oil products. Its waters are shared by Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia and Turkey, as well as Ukraine and Russia.
Ukrainian government officials estimate 20 million tonnes of grain are unable to travel from what was the world's fourth largest exporter before Russia's invasion.
Defending Macron's position, the official said there would have to be a negotiated solution to the war. He added that Paris was a key backer of sanctions and provided strong military support to Ukraine.
Some eastern and Baltic partners in Europe see Macron keeping a dialogue open with Putin as undermining efforts to push Putin to the negotiating table.
Macron will travel to Romania and Moldova on June 14-15 to show France's support for two of the countries most exposed to events in Ukraine.
France has about 500 soldiers on the ground in Romania and deployed a surface-to air- missile system as part of a NATO battle group it heads up there. The official said Macron would visit French troops to underscore Paris' commitment to the alliance.
Macron has not been to Kyiv to offer symbolic political support as other EU leaders have and Ukraine has wanted him to. The presidential official did not rule out a Macron visit.
Members of the United Auto Workers strike outside of a John Deere plant in Ankeny, Iowa. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)
Study shows unionized workers earn 10.2% more than non-union peers, amid wave of organizing at some of largest US employers
Joe Biden has pledged to be the most pro-union president in generations, and the report outlining the economic benefits of union membership was released as his administration pushes for legislative and executive-action efforts to support workers’ rights to organize.
According to the report, by the joint economic committee of Congress and the House education and labor committee, unionized workers are also 18.3% more likely to receive employer-sponsored health insurance, and employers pay 77.4% more per hour worked toward the cost of health insurance for unionized workers compared with non-unionized workers.
Labor unions have also contributed to narrowing racial and gender pay disparities; unionization correlates to pay premiums of 17.3% for Black workers, 23.1% for Latino workers and 14.7% for Asian workers, compared with 10.1% for white workers. Overall, female union workers receive 4.7% higher hourly wages than their non-union peers and in female dominated service industries, union workers are paid 52.1% more than non-union workers.
“Unions are the foundation of America’s middle class,” said congressman Don Beyer, chair of the Joint Economic Committee. “For too long, the wealthy have captured an increasing share of the economic pie. As this report makes clear, unions help address economic inequality and ensure workers actually see the benefits when the economy grows.”
The Biden administration’s drive to increase union membership comes amid a wave of organizing among workers at some of America’s largest employers, including Amazon and Starbucks.
But despite the recent uptick in organizing, union membership has declined markedly in recent decades, from 34.8% of all US wage and salary workers in 1954 to 10.3% in 2021. According to several studies the decline has contributed significantly to increasing wage inequality and stagnation.
Corporate practices and legal changes have also eroded workers’ bargaining power, particularly from the 1970s, as employers increasingly attempted to break union organizing efforts and were issued only weak penalties for violating labor laws.
The report cites the recent resurgence of the US labor movement, and strong public support for labor unions, as a call to action to improve wages and working conditions and support worker organizing.
“As chair of the education and labor committee, I am committed to addressing the decades of anti-worker attacks that have eroded workers’ collective bargaining rights,” said education and labor committee chair congressman Bobby Scott.
“With the release of this report, I once again call on the Senate to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would take historic steps to strengthen workers’ right to organize, rebuild our middle class, and improve the lives of workers and their families.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stage a raid to arrest an undocumented immigrant in New York City. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
LexisNexis usage logs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement for seven months totaled 1,211,643 searches and 302,431 “reports.”
The Intercept first reported last year that ICE had purchased access to LexisNexis Risk Solutions databases for $16.8 million, unlocking an oceanic volume of personal information on American citizens and noncitizens alike that spans hundreds of millions of individuals, totaling billions of records drawn from 10,000 different sources. Becoming a LexisNexis customer not only provides law enforcement with instant, easy access to a wealth of easily searchable data points on hundreds of millions of people, but also lets them essentially purchase data rather than having to formally request it or seek a court order.
Internal documents now show that this unfathomably large quantity of data is being searched with a regularity that is itself vast. LexisNexis usage logs between March and September 2021 totaled 1,211,643 searches and 302,431 “reports,” information packages that provide an exhaustive rundown of an individual’s location, work history, family relationships, and many other data points aggregated by LexisNexis, a data broker better known for its legal research resources. Although the names were redacted, the logs show that a single user conducted over 26,000 searches in that period.
Most of the queries were conducted through Accurint, a powerful LexisNexis tool that promises “cutting-edge analytics and data linking,” and touts its ability to provide a firehose of “investigative intelligence” to police on a national scale. “Criminals have no boundaries,” reads the Accurint homepage. “So neither can you when it comes to critical investigative intelligence and crime reporting. That’s why Accurint Virtual Crime Center gives you visibility beyond your own jurisdictions into regional and nationwide crime data.”
The new documents, obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request by the immigrant advocacy organization Just Futures Law and shared with The Intercept, cast doubt on earlier assurances from LexisNexis that its sprawling database would be used only narrowly to target people with “serious criminal backgrounds.” In 2021, following widespread criticism of the ICE contract, LexisNexis published a brief FAQ attempting to downplay the gravity of the collaboration and dispel concerns their databases would facilitate dragnet surveillance and deportations. “The tool promotes public safety and is not used to prevent legal immigration,” reads the document, “nor is it used to remove individuals from the United States unless they pose a serious threat to public safety including child trafficking, drug smuggling and other serious criminal activity.”
However, the logs show that a sizable share of the usage — over 260,000 searches and reports — were conducted by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, a branch explicitly tasked with finding and deporting immigrants, often for minor infractions or no offense at all. An internal ERO memo obtained through the FOIA request and also shared with The Intercept contradicts the idea that Accurint’s use was to be narrowly focused on only the most dangerous criminal elements. In an email sent June 30, 2021, ERO’s assistant director of enforcement wrote, “Please note this additional valuable resource should be widely utilized by ERO personnel as an integral part of our mission to protect the homeland through the identification, location, arrest, and removal of noncitizens who undermine the safety of our communities and the integrity of our immigration laws.” The email noted that LexisNexis would be directly providing ICE with educational seminars on how to most effectively use the data.
ICE’s long documented history of rounding up immigrants with no criminal history or those with only nonviolent offenses like traffic violations further undermines the notion that these hundreds of thousands of ERO searches all pertained to hardened, dangerous criminals. A breakdown of LexisNexis usage by individual ICE office shows that the single highest generator of searches and reports, with a total of 56,467, was ERO’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, a division tasked with locating immigrants who are merely deemed “amenable to removal,” according to agency documents. Though ICE and LexisNexis are both keen to couch these investigations as a bulwark against dangerous transnational terrorists and criminal syndicates, an analysis of 2019 ICE arrest data conducted by Syracuse University found that “exceedingly few detainees” had committed grave national security-related offenses like terrorism or election fraud, and that “the growth in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the past four years has been fueled by a steady increase in the number of detainees with no criminal history.”
“LexisNexis is using the same type of scare tactics ICE tries to use to justify the brutality of their deportation mission,” said Just Futures Law attorney Dinesh McCoy, who worked on the FOIA request. “There’s no indication, based on the huge number of searches conducted, nor from the records that we’ve seen, that ICE uses LexisNexis technology in a confined way to target ‘serious’ criminal activity. We know thousands of ICE employees are empowered to use this tech, and we know that officers are given significant discretion to make investigative and strategy decisions about how they locate immigrants.”
Though ICE arrests have fallen under the Biden administration, experts say they remain concerned by Accurint’s use and potential to snare people who’ve committed no crime beyond fleeing their home country. “We’re seeing a continuation of harmful surveillance practices under this administration,” McCoy wrote via email. “We need real opposition to the constant expansion of ICE’s power and infrastructure, but by providing the agency with invasive tools like Accurint, the Biden Administration is just strengthening ICE’s institutional position for the future.” The marked decline in post-Trump ICE arrests presents an odd context for the massive scale of ICE’s searches: During roughly the same period tracked by the LexisNexis logs, ERO made 72,000 arrests after conducting over three times as many individual searches.
Over 630,000 of the searches and reports were run by Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE division tasked with investigating an expansive array of “threats,” from human trafficking and terrorism to “scams” and identity theft. But along with HSI’s broad mandate have come allegations of dragnet spy tactics and indiscriminate policing. In a letter to Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari in March, Sen. Ron Wyden wrote that he’d learned HSI had “abused” its federal authority and “was operating an indiscriminate and bulk surveillance program that swept up millions of financial records about Americans.”
HSI also regularly assists with ERO’s mass detention and deportation operations, including a 2018 workplace raid in Tennessee that separated children from their parents and left hundreds of students too afraid to return to school. In a March article for Just Security, Mary Pat Dwyer of the Brennan Center wrote that HSI “often uses its transnational crime mission to investigate immigrants of color who are not suspected of criminal activity,” including investigations into naturalized citizens “looking for inconsistencies in their documents or old deportation orders as grounds to strip them of citizenship.”
The logs provide a greater understanding of how ICE is making use of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which provides a varied suite of search tools to navigate the company’s voluminous store of government records and commercial data. The overwhelming majority of the searches, over 700,000 in total, were conducted using Accurint’s “Advanced Person Search,” which lets users enter fragments of data they might have on an individual — a relative, a former job, a nickname — and match it against a pool of millions of identities. Over 200,000 other searches were run against Accurint’s database of phone provider records, more than 63,000 vehicle record searches, and nearly 10,000 different queries hunting for social media profiles. The logs also show nearly 6,000 searches for Accurint’s index of jail booking activity, an ICE tactic recently reported by The Guardian as an explicit means of skirting “sanctuary city” laws that block local police from sharing such information with immigration agencies. With LexisNexis access, it is now trivial for an agency to essentially buy its way around such restrictions.
Neither ICE nor LexisNexis responded to a request for comment.
Used in concert, these searches grant ICE, an agency already charged with brutal and indiscriminate tactics against some of American society’s most vulnerable members, with an immense technological advantage when seeking its targets. It’s difficult to overstate the enormity of LexisNexis’s databases, and equally difficult to imagine avoiding being absorbed into them. Financial records, property records, past jobs, former marriages, phone subscriptions, cable TV bills, car registrations — critics of LexisNexis’s government work note that it’s near impossible to exist today without leaving behind traces that are quickly vacuumed up into the company’s colossal trove of public and proprietary data points, continuously indexed and rendered instantly searchable. Put in the hands of agencies like ICE, the mountains of digital paperwork one accumulates during ordinary civic and consumer lives can be easily turned against us. A 2021 report by the Washington Post found that ICE had previously tapped a database of utility records while searching for immigration offenses, leaving those who fear detention or deportation with a grim choice between the basic amenities of modern life and the perpetual risk of data broker-enabled arrest.
Despite the vastness of LexisNexis’s data and the advertised sophistication of the tools it provides law enforcement to comb through that data, the company itself quietly warns that it may be providing inaccurate information, the consequences of which could upend a life or entire family. “Due to the nature of the origin of public record information, the public records and commercially available data sources used in reports may contain errors. Source data is sometimes reported or entered inaccurately, processed poorly or incorrectly, and is generally not free from defect,” reads a small warning at the bottom of a marketing page for Accurint Virtual Crime Center, a tool used heavily by ICE according to the search logs. “Before relying on any data, it should be independently verified.”
It’s not just those individuals in ICE’s crosshairs who need to fear being implicated by a LexisNexis search. Accurint promotional and training materials make frequent mention of the software’s ability to not only locate people via the records they leave in their wake, but also trace real-life social networks, potentially drawing friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers under federal scrutiny. An Accurint training manual marked “Confidential and Proprietary” but publicly accessible via a LexisNexis website shows how users can obtain “information about a subject’s relatives, neighbors, and associates,” including “possible relative phones” two degrees removed from the target. The fact that a single search can yield results about multiple people or entire families suggests that the number of people subjected to LexisNexis-based surveillance could be far more than the already large 1.2 million figure might indicate. “We’re seeing that ICE is running a system of mass surveillance,” said Cinthya Rodriguez, a national organizer with the immigrant rights group Mijente. “What we’re really talking about is possibly upwards of three times that 1.2 million, perhaps upwards of 3 million searches happening in that period of time. … What we’re saying is, perhaps 1 percent of the U.S. population was under ICE surveillance.”
That something as mundane as having heat or running water at home could draw the attention of the federal deportation machine, and that this machine could then turn its sights on one’s personal support network, has left immigrant communities in a state of perpetual fear, said Rodriguez. “Immigrants are forced to face impossible choices about what kind of services they need and the information they have to turn over in order to access those services, everything ranging from their electric bills to buying a car, to information about their children’s schools,” Rodriguez explained in an interview. “Everything we touch can have serious implications for building out ICE’s digital dragnet.”
Jeanine Áñez served as Bolivia's president in 2019-2020. (photo: Reuters)
Court finds rightwinger defied constitution during chaotic exit of Evo Morales, from whom she took over presidency
She was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Áñez, 54, was convicted on Friday of making “decisions contrary to the constitution” and of “dereliction of duty”.
The prosecution said Áñez, then a rightwing senator, violated norms that guarantee the constitutional and democratic order after Bolivia’s 2019 presidential elections.
Bolivia has been split over whether a coup occurred when then-president Evo Morales resigned in 2019, with Áñez ascending to the presidency amid a leadership vacuum. Morales’ departure followed mass protests over a disputed election in which he claimed to win a controversial fourth consecutive term in office.
Áñez maintains she is innocent. The contentious case has further exposed the fault lines in a deeply divided country while also fuelling concerns about its judicial process.
“We are concerned about how this case has been pursued and we call on superior courts to examine how the proceedings were conducted,” said Cesar Munoz, a senior researcher for the Americas at Human Rights Watch.
Áñez was not allowed to attend the trial in person, instead following the hearing and participating from prison. She has been detained since her arrest in March 2021 on initial charges of terrorism, sedition and conspiracy.
Members and supporters of Morales’ Movement to Socialism (MAS) party, which returned to power in 2020, say Áñez played a key role in what it says was a coup against Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, who oversaw a dramatic reduction in poverty as president from 2005 to 2019.
As president, Áñez drew criticisms of political score-settling when her administration prosecuted former MAS officials.
Áñez’s supporters say her trial was illegitimate and political. In the trial, Áñez said she was the product of circumstance and that her ascension to the top office helped calm a tense nation and lay the groundwork for elections in October 2020.
“I didn’t lift a finger to become president, but I did what I had to do,” Áñez said in her final statement to the judge. “I assumed the presidency out of obligation, according to what is established in the constitution.”
This was the LITHIUM COUP, confirmed by the arrogant Elon Musk and with US support!
Elon Musk Confesses to Lithium Coup in Bolivia
The billionaire CEO of Tesla and lithium-exploiting capitalist has admitted his role in the November coup.
The CEO of the U.S.-based Telsa car manufacturer has admitted to involvement in what President Morales has referred to as a “Lithium Coup.”
“We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” was Elon Musk’s response to an accusation on twitter that the U.S. government organized a coup against President Evo Morales, so that Musk could obtain Bolivia’s lithium.
Foreign plunder of Bolivia’s lithium, in a country with the world’s largest known reserves, is widely believed to be among the main motives behind the November 10, 2019 coup.
Lithium, a critical component of the batteries used in Tesla vehicles, is set to become one of the world’s most important natural resources as manufacturers seek to obtain it for use in batteries for electric cars, computers, and industrial equipment.
The defacto administration of Jeanine Añez has already announced its plan to invite numerous multinationals into the Salar de Uyuni, the vast salt flats in Potosi, which holds the precious soft metal.
Right-wing Vice Presidential candidate and running mate to Añez, Samuel Doria Medina, proposed a Brazilian-Bolivian project which would use lithium from the town of Uyuni.
Meanwhile, letter from the coup regime’s Foreign Minister Karen Longaric to Elon Musk, dated march 31st, says “any corporation that you or your company can provide to our country will be gratefully welcomed.”
Social movements have repeatedly warned that lithium and natural resources would be surrendered to foreign capital by coup authorities, in a reversal of plans by Evo Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) administration to process the lithium within Bolivia rather than exporting the raw material to the global north.
The project represented a rejection of the neocolonial relationship Latin American countries have often had with the imperialist cores.
Bolivia’s former MAS government oversaw the production of batteries and its first electric car by the Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB) state company, in partnership with German company ACISA. In the deal, the Bolivian state kept majority control.
With the agreement now scrapped along with countless other state projects, and with elections now thrice delayed by the illegitimate defacto authorities, the people of Uyuni and social movements around the country say they’ll continue to oppose the ongoing privatization and are organizing against the return of looting of Bolivia’s natural resources by ruthless and exploitative foreign capital.
A green sea turtle. (photo: Ali Bayless/NOAA/PIFSC/PSD)
The Hudson Canyon is the largest underwater canyon in the U.S. side of the Atlantic Ocean, reaching about 2 miles deep and over 7 miles wide in some spots. It is rich in biodiversity, being home to coral reefs, sponges, sea turtles, sperm whales, and more unique marine life.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) explains that Hudson Canyon’s structure, which resembles the Grand Canyon and features steep slopes, outcrops, and diverse nutrients, allows it to host a wide variety of organisms.
The area is historically and culturally important. There are shipwrecks dating back to the 19th century in the underwater canyon. Indigenous communities have also relied on the region’s natural resources for thousands of years.
The Wildlife Conservation Society first nominated the Hudson Canyon to become a marine sanctuary in 2016. The goals for the designation are to “1) support conservation of the area’s marine wildlife, habitats, and maritime cultural resources, 2) work closely with Indigenous Tribes and Nations to identify and raise awareness of Indigenous connections to the area, 3) highlight and promote sustainable uses of the area, 4) expand ocean science and monitoring in, and education and awareness of the area, and 5) provide a platform for collaborative and diverse partnerships that support effective and inclusive long-term management of the area,” NOAA says.
Hudson Canyon is also an important area for climate change monitoring, as marine canyons are particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification and deoxygenation. Further, Hudson Canyon was once the site for the world’s largest municipal sewage dumping into the deep sea from 1986 to 1992, and this has had lasting impacts on the marine life here.
The designation is not yet official, but the initiation process has officially begun and public commenting is available until August 8, 2022. Officials are seeking public comments on various factors, including potential names for the new sanctuary and proposed boundaries.
“A sanctuary near one of the most densely populated areas of the Northeast U.S. would connect diverse communities across the region to the ocean and the canyon in new and different ways,” Rick Spinrad, NOAA administrator, said in a statement. “It would also help advance the Administration’s commitment to conserve and restore special marine places, leaving a lasting legacy for future generations.”
In addition to Hudson Canyon, Alaĝum Kanuu (Heart of the Ocean) of the Pribilof Islands near Alaska has also been successfully nominated. The area is home to Steller sea lions, northern fur seals and other important species and is an important region to the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island Tribal Government. Although the nomination has been successful, the designation process for Alaĝum Kanuu has not been initiated.
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