18 July 22
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1859 is on the phone, they want their politics back.
Let us consider, then, the case of David Shinn, the director of Arizona's Department of Corrections. In Arizona, most inmates have to work 40 hours a week for a pittance. Shinn explained the system this way:
"Yes. The department does more than just incarcerate folks," Shinn replied. "There are services that this department provides to city, county, local jurisdictions, that simply can't be quantified at a rate that most jurisdictions could ever afford. If you were to remove these folks from that equation, things would collapse in many of your counties, for your constituents."
I don't think I've read a more open argument for forced labor as an economic driver since the death of Jefferson Davis. But Shinn was undaunted.
Defending the choice to keep state and private prisons open despite dwindling populations, Shinn told the legislators "while it doesn't necessarily serve the department in the best interest to have these places open, we have to do it to support Arizona." "Without the ability to have these folks at far flung places like Apache, like Globe, like Fort Grant, even like Florence West, communities wouldn't have access to these resources or services, and literally would have to spend more to be able to provide that to their constituents," Shinn said.
Hello, I’m 1859. Have we met?
There are a lot of reasons why private prisons are a terrible idea, but I never considered the possibility that someone would defend them on the grounds that, without the prisons and the inmates therein, towns would have to pay for their own streets and sewer systems.
Of course, I was born too late for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. I always regretted that.
The president, with the Hurrah-Me-Boys-For-Freedom moment in East Jerusalem on Friday:
"…the background of my family is Irish American. And we have a long history not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people, with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish Catholics over the years for 400 years."
Any reminder to Irish Americans that most of us are the children of revolutionary aspirations is a good one; but I guarantee you, the president's statement will be parsed to a fine pulp until eventually you'd think he'd sung a cover version of the Sex Pistols' “God Save The Queen."
I applaud Olivia Nuzzi for scoring the big sit-down with El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago for New York this week. But I still think his public musing about when to announce his next 'Tantrums Over America' Tour is a dare aimed at Merrick Garland: Bet you won't indict a presidential candidate.
The man’s predator’s instinct for weakness remains somewhat intact.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Mama Don’t Allow” (George Lewis) — Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1960, some citizens of Puerto Rico object to meddling by the island's Catholic bishops in the upcoming gubernatorial election. The bishops issued a pastoral letter forbidding the island's Catholics from voting to re-elect the Popular Democratic Party of incumbent Luis Munoz Martin.
William Dorvillier, the editor of the San Juan Star, wrote a string of editorials critical of the what the bishops had done and won himself a 1961 Pulitzer Prize. Dorvillier wrote:
The bishops have sinned against their country by making Puerto Rico the helpless pawn for bigots to use for their political ends, and to injure the Catholic Church in the national campaign. They have sinned against the Church by making it a temporary synonym for bitterness and hatred, instead of love, among a people who know how to keep their worship and their politics separated. The bishops have all the rights of citizens to express political opinions and to urge support for their chosen candidates. But they have no right to use their religion and the weight of spiritual sanctions to intimidate faithful Catholics in the exercise of their franchise at the polls. This pastoral letter is more than an indiscretion. It is an action devoid of any virtue because it so obviously is a result of long and thoughtful premeditation.
Dorvillier, a proper son of western Massachusetts, died almost 20 years too soon to deal with our current Supreme Court. Pity. History is so cool.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Australian ABC? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!!!
New research on 17 curved teeth that were unearthed at a dig site near Winton in 2019 has shed light on sauropod Diamantinasaurus matildae's role in its prehistoric ecosystem… "They are between 98 and 95 million years old, we haven't got an exact date on them yet, but that's the boundary that we're working with at the moment." He said the teeth showed the dinosaur was probably feeding at least one metre above the ground, not really ingesting much soil or grit, and probably up to 10m above the ground. "Imagine a three-story building," he said.
One simply does not ingest much soil and grit. It simply is…not…done. Not if one wished to live then to make us happy now.
Steve Bannon goes on trial next week, so there’s entertainment a'plenty on the horizon.
Be well and play nice, ya bastions. Stay above the snake-line, wear the damn mask, take the damn shots (especially the damn boosters), light a candle for all the women whom the Supreme Court has wounded, and spare a thought for the people of Ukraine.
President Vladimir V. Putin’s calculus is likely shifting as he weighs the risks of an invasion against what he believes he could gain through negotiations, according to a U.S. official. (photo: Sputnik/Reuters)
Moscow has long objected to foreign tech platforms' distribution of content that falls foul of its restrictions. But the simmering dispute has erupted into a full-on battle since Moscow assembled its armed forces before sending them into Ukraine in February.
Alphabet's YouTube has been a particular target of the state's ire but, unlike Twitter and Meta Platforms' Facebook and Instagram, it has not been blocked.
The regulator, Roskomnadzor, said the Tagansky District Court had fined Google 21.1 billion roubles for repeatedly failing to restrict access promptly to banned materials, and singled out YouTube for particular criticism.
It said YouTube had not deleted "fakes about the course of the special military operation in Ukraine, discrediting the armed forces of the Russian Federation".
It also said YouTube was permitting content promoting extremist views and calls for children to participate in unauthorised protests.
Google, which can appeal, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The fine was calculated as a share of Google's annual turnover in Russia. It had been handed a similar 7.2 billion rouble penalty late last year.
Google's Russian unit's bank account has been seized, prompting the subsidiary to file for bankruptcy and making it impossible to pay staff and vendors.
Russia says it is conducting a "special military operation" in Ukraine to defuse a threat to its security and protect Russian speakers from persecution.
Ukraine and its Western allies dismiss such allegations as baseless pretexts for an illegal land grab.
Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the parliamentary committee on information policy, said Google was showing a demonstrative disregard for Russian law.
"It is not hard to predict what this attitude will lead to: Google risks losing the Russian market altogether," he wrote on Telegram. ($1 = 56.4650 roubles)
Robb Elementary School on June 9, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
“Law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety,” investigators in the Texas House of Representatives wrote
The report detailed issues with school security, including locked exterior doors habitually left propped open by staff; a faulty lock on the door to one of the classroom where the shooter was holed up; and “poor Wi-Fi connectivity” that delayed alerting teachers of an active shooter lockdown. As for police, the investigators concluded that “law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.”
The report states that “an unacceptably long period of time” — approximately 73 minutes — passed before officers confronted and killed the shooter. The investigators partially blame the chief of police, who they say, “failed to perform or to transfer to another person the role of incident commander” and did not establish an incident command post as was outlined in the school district’s active shooter plan.
“The void of leadership could have contributed to the loss of life as injured victims waited over an hour for help, and the attacker continued to sporadically fire his weapon,” the report said. Further, the investigators found that no one ensured that information was shared with those in charge that some students and teachers “survived the initial burst of gunfire, were trapped… and had called out for help.”
But the committee emphasized that the series of failures went far beyond local law enforcement. “In this crisis, no responder seized the initiative to establish an incident command post,” the report said, faulting state and federal officials as well. “An effective incident commander located away from the drama unfolding inside the building” would have been able to ascertain that radios were not functioning inside the building and may have been able to locate a key to the classroom sooner. Earlier reports indicated that the door to the classroom where the shooter was located was left unlocked, even as officers scrambled to find a key, causing prolonged delays. During the incident, some 376 members of law enforcement flocked to the school, yet more than an hour passed between when police entered the west building of the school and when they neutralized the gunman.
“In this sense, the entirety of law enforcement and its training, preparation, and response shares systemic responsibility for many missed opportunities on that tragic day,” the report said.
Most of the responders on the scene were U.S. Border Patrol (149 officers) and state police (91). Another 25 were Uvalde police officers along with 16 sheriff’s deputies and a handful of school police officers. The remaining members of law enforcement were U.S. Marshals, Drug Enforcement Agency officers and police from nearby counties.
“Local officials were not the only ones expected to supply the leadership needed during this tragedy,” the report stated. “Hundreds of responders from numerous law enforcement agencies — many of whom were better trained and better equipped than the school district police — quickly arrived on the scene.”
The report also details how the gunman’s family members failed to realize the warning signs of impending violence. According to the committee’s findings, the attacker showed suicidal ideation and “developed sociopathic and violent tendencies, but he received no mental health assistance.” Some of the gunman’s family members were also aware that he was attempting to purchase guns through illegal straw purchases, though they “uniformly refused” his requests for help in acquiring weapons. The perpetrator also shared his intent to “do something they would hear about in the news” with friends on social media and “even referr[ed] to attacking a school.”
“Reports suggest that some social-media users may have reported the attacker’s threatening behavior to the relevant social media platforms. The social media platforms appear to have not done anything in response to restrict the attacker’s social media access or report his behavior to law enforcement authorities,” the report said.
But the investigators’ main focus was law enforcement’s response, and they concluded that while most of the deceased victims “perished immediately during the attacker’s initial barrage of gunfire,” it is still “plausible that some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait 73 additional minutes for rescue.”
According to CNN, family members of the shooting victims met with members of the investigative committee shortly after they received the report. One CNN source described the meeting as “brutal … a lot of emotion.”
Members of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice held a rally outside the Supreme Court in June 2016 for Whole Woman's Health v. Hellersted. (photo: National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice)
From language to travel barriers, immigrants are left with few options.
But for one patient, that wasn't possible.
Due to her pending immigration case, the patient could not travel more than 70 miles or would risk jeopardizing both her ability to remain in the country and the security of her two children, he said.
"I didn't know what to say. I was speechless because I had nothing else left," Kumar, who himself is an immigrant and was undocumented for 11 years, told ABC News. "At that point, it felt like medicine was no longer the issue."
He never learned what happened to this patient. Kumar, who tried helping her navigate a law he called "so heavy and looming and intense and insurmountable," said he thinks about her often, fearing she was ultimately forced to carry her pregnancy to term.
Now, with a near-total abortion ban in Texas and trigger bans going into effect across the country following the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, many more pregnant individuals could find themselves in situations like Kumar's patient.
Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights (COLOR) has seen a recent uptick in the volume of frantic out-of-state calls they've received, especially from Spanish speaking immigrants, according to Aurea Bolaños Perea, COLOR's strategic communications director. Some callers have sought clarity from COLOR on how their immigration status would impact their ability to access abortions.
Residents of states with abortion bans have resorted to interstate travel to obtain care, increasingly discussed as a go-to solution. States like Colorado, where abortion is still legal, have become havens for people seeking abortions, particularly across the restrictive regions of the South and Midwest.
But this option provides little comfort to immigrants navigating the complex maze of reproductive health care. Organizers and physicians say barriers to accessing abortions -- an already convoluted process in a post-Roe world -- are exacerbated by limited English proficiency and immigration status, which may hinder or completely bar immigrants from traveling across state lines, leaving them to slip through the cracks.
"Our immigrant community, our monolingual communities are disproportionately impacted in ways that I don't think any of us are prepared to fully manage just three weeks into this decision being made," Bolaños Perea told ABC News.
A maze of care
With the power to decide abortion's legality in states' hands, people seeking abortions must now confront a rapidly evolving landscape of care made more confusing by state-specific technicalities, including limits on gestational age and mandatory ultrasounds.
Difficult enough to comprehend for native English speakers, this esoteric legal and medical terminology is often unintelligible for those with limited English proficiency, assuming they are aware these laws exist in the first place, according to Nancy Cárdenas Peña, Texas director for policy and advocacy at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice.
Information coming out of the Texas Legislature, for example, is rarely if ever offered in Spanish, Cárdenas Peña said.
Without access to accurate information in their own language, immigrants can become misled by dubious sources on the safety of medication abortion or controversial pregnancy crisis centers that aim to steer people away from abortions, for example, according to Seri Lee, national campaign and membership director at the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum (NAPAWF).
"That's something that is prevalent in every community, but particularly in the [Asian American and Pacific Islander] community with misinformation and false news that gets really easily disseminated through social media channels like WhatsApp or WeChat," Lee told ABC News.
Understanding the legality and availability of resources is only the first of many steps in the labyrinthine process of getting to an appointment, according to Dr. Kristyn Brandi, an abortion provider in New Jersey who serves as board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health.
"Information that people are seeking in order to make an appointment may all be in English, and so they may not be able to make an appointment or have difficulty finding the place that they're going to access care," she told ABC News. "They may not know what kind of care is available to them."
Then there is travel, which can be financially prohibitive for immigrants, who are disproportionately low-income, and which presents further logistical hurdles.
With abortion now illegal in Texas, Kumar said he often directs patients to travel elsewhere to seek care -- only to learn they had never previously left the state, let alone been on a plane.
"If you think about somebody who has low English proficiency -- or zero English proficiency -- and having to navigate traveling and the airport, and finding childcare, if they don't already have it, and taking time off of work, if they're working, getting to another state where they're checking into a hotel and they don't speak English," he said. "They need to have somebody with them that can help them navigate that."
"That's not always an option," he added.
Assuming an individual successfully makes it to their appointment, they run up against the final obstacle of communicating with a physician and staff regarding their needs and treatment plan.
Kumar and Cárdenas Peña said it was standard for abortion clinics in Texas to have translation services and a bilingual staff, given the state's ethnic and linguistic diversity.
"People from the Rio Grande Valley are used to this cultural component of their health care that they probably wouldn't be able to find elsewhere," Cárdenas Peña said.
When they travel across state lines to access care, there is no guarantee patients will receive the same accommodations after leaving their familiar communities.
Bolaños Perea said in Colorado, there is not always a Spanish-speaking physician or translator at every clinic in the state, despite recently seeing an influx of Hispanic patients from Texas. Clinics also do not always have available resources to capture the diversity of languages represented in their patient base, including Vietnamese, Arabic, Somali and Amharic speakers in Colorado.
Lee noted that language access is especially complicated for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, who speak more than 100 distinct languages or dialects. As the only English speaker in her family growing up, she said she often shouldered the burden of translating complicated medical jargon to her parents.
While interpreters and translator phone lines are becoming more commonplace in clinics, Brandi said it's still extremely rare to find abortion providers fluent in the languages spoken in their communities, which can be critical to developing trust with patients who can be in vulnerable situations.
"Unfortunately, there are a lot of barriers to people that may have backgrounds that are representative of the communities that we serve. There are barriers to those people becoming doctors and becoming health care providers," Brandi, who is Puerto Rican and Panamanian, said.
"I'm really fortunate to be able to talk to my patients in Spanish," she added. "It's hard to have that conversation if you don't speak the same language."
Problems with travel
Before the June Supreme Court decision, reproductive health care could be difficult to access for immigrants, who are more likely to be uninsured given residency and immigration status restrictions on Medicaid eligibility.
Now, given increasing reliance on crossing state lines to obtain abortions, undocumented immigrants are left with few to no options.
Some people cannot travel to receive abortions as they are stuck in immigration detention or immigration proceedings. Undocumented immigrants confront further daily obstacles hampering their ability to travel.
For example, only 16 states and the District of Columbia currently permit undocumented immigrants to obtain driver's licenses, excluding many of the states where abortion is banned and interstate travel is necessary.
Furthermore, border regions with large immigrant populations like the Rio Grande Valley, where Cárdenas Peña lives, are peppered with internal Border Control checkpoints 100 miles in, meant to identify people in the U.S. unlawfully.
"In order to leave these communities, they must pass through the checkpoints and answer questions about their immigration status," Lee said. "If they lie about their immigration status, they can put themselves in danger and at risk of detainment and deportation."
With the legality of abortion in flux across the country, the risk of encountering law enforcement authorities may also frighten undocumented immigrants into avoiding seeking care, Lee said.
These fears are made worse by rumors about the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at abortion clinics, according to Brandi.
Lee noted that states where law enforcement has "considerable discretion" to target immigrants are often the same states that are "hostile to abortion access," with Texas as a prime example. The state has recently come under fire for its Operation Lone Star initiative, which has authorized the detainment of thousands of migrants on misdemeanor trespassing charges.
"Every single time there is an immigration law that gets passed in Texas or at the federal level, we receive so many calls from the community members who are scared to go to simple health care appointments because of that fear that they would be placed in deportation proceedings," Cárdenas Peña, who grew up in a mixed-status family, said.
"We would definitely be naïve to believe that immigration enforcement -- DHS, Border Patrol, ICE, the surveillance and the capacity of surveillance under all of these agencies -- would not affect access to reproductive health care," she added.
An ICE spokesperson said in a statement to ABC News in response to Wall Street Journal reporting last week that the agency will "continue to comply with federal law and abide by current detention standards which ensure that pregnant detainees in custody have access to pregnancy services, including routine and/or specialized prenatal care, pregnancy testing, comprehensive counseling and assistance, postpartum follow up, lactation services and abortion services."
Last week, President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at protecting access to abortion nationwide, including instructions to the Justice Department to ensure people can travel out-of-state for abortion care.
A patchwork of solutions
Kumar said he has stopped providing abortions in Texas. But given his deep roots in the state and longstanding ties to its communities, he currently has no plans to leave.
"These are folks that have a difficult time accessing this care because it's so marginalized, and me moving is not going to make it any easier for them," he said.
Kumar continues to provide other reproductive health services and offers support to local patients traveling out of state. He has traveled in the past to provide abortion care and is exploring continuing that work.
While continuing to endorse legal battles against state abortion bans, many organizers have also ramped up efforts to assist immigrants in obtaining care.
NAPAWF's Texas chapter created a guide on its website to explain new and existing abortion laws in Texas, offering the guide in six different Asian languages, including Korean, Tamil, Telugu, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Chinese.
COLOR hosts a Spanish radio show, Mujeres de COLOR, to provide essential information on reproductive health care and continues to field phone calls and questions from within and outside Colorado. The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice in Texas continues to translate all materials that come out of the Texas Legislature, as well as host public education meetings.
NAPAWF and the Latina Institute's members are also educating their communities on medication abortion, especially for individuals who may be undocumented and for whom out-of-state in-office procedures are not an option.
Brandi noted that abortion funds can also help overcome some of the barriers immigrants face by footing the hefty bill for procedures not covered by insurance as well as coordinating logistics on patients' behalf, like booking travel and scheduling appointments.
But there's no silver bullet that will promise broad access to abortions for all individuals in this new environment, short of a federal protection, according to Lee.
"We're not just talking about one angle of, 'Oh, it's a matter of immigration status, or it's a matter of limited English proficiency,'" Lee said. "Oftentimes, those are compounded."
"It's a really layered issue," she said.
Somali soldiers on patrol at a military base, south of Mogadishu, Somalia, on June 13, 2018. An American special operations soldier had been killed by a mortar attack there earlier that month, on June 8. (photo: Mohamed Abdiwahab/AFP/Getty Images)
US military personnel’s return to Somalia, briefly explained.
But the rhetorical contortion of no “U.S. troops engaged in a combat mission” is a little different from being able to simply say that there is no American military presence. That’s because the US still has troops in Iraq and in Syria. In Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Yemen, the US military is, among other things, advising on counterterrorism, and the Pentagon keeps more than 700 personnel in Niger and thousands in Djibouti. The US also deploys drone strikes and special operations forces against targets across the Middle East and Africa without much accountability or oversight.
And in May 2022, Biden agreed to send about 500 US troops to Somalia.
Those troops will return to Somalia soon to fight the extremist group al-Shabaab as the resurrected government of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (HSM) deepens ties to Washington and seeks the support and legitimacy provided by the American military. But on a deeper level, this US deployment represents the continuity of the so-called war on terrorism in spite of Biden’s best efforts to end it.
Congress has not approved a new resolution for the use of military force abroad, and the Biden administration says it is sending troops to Somalia under the 2001 authorization that Congress passed after the September 11, 2001, attacks to target al-Qaeda — and that has been used in 85 countries as the basis for military activities.
“With Vice-President Biden’s election win, there is a real opportunity to re-imagine U.S. policy toward Africa,” Judd Devermont, a prominent Africa expert in Washington, said in 2020. Now, Devermont is the White House’s top Africa adviser, and there are fears that the US is continuing an old approach that over-emphasizes security policies and doesn’t meet the political moment in Somalia, Africa, or the Middle East.
“This was an opportunity in which the administration could have reset its security relationship with the federal government of Somalia,” Jason Hartwig, a former Army officer who served in the US embassy in Somalia from 2016 to 2018, told me. “We’re just gonna go back to what we were doing, literally, at the end of the last HSM regime, which is incredibly frustrating and disappointing.”
Why is the US in Somalia?
The US has been involved in Somalia for decades. It’s there now because the Biden administration says the Somalia-based extremist group al-Shabaab poses a threat to the US homeland. Al-Shabaab has continued to attack the African Union’s forces and use tactics of terror as part of what the International Crisis Group describes as “an endless cycle of war.” But security experts dispute the extent of the threat to Americans.
“The threat to the homeland is extremely attenuated and possibly nonexistent,” Katherine Ebright of the Brennan Center for Justice told me.
That hasn’t stopped US administrations from engaging militarily there. Troops have been in Somalia since around 2007. The Trump administration increased airstrikes in Somalia to an average of almost 50 per year, and changed a requirement established under President Barack Obama so that the Pentagon could pursue strikes without getting the president’s personal sign-off each time. In 2020, Trump withdrew most (but not all) of the more than 700 US forces in the country.
Biden has now reversed that, approving the troop transfer at Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s request, and they’ll “train, advise, and assist regional forces, including Somali and African Union Mission in Somalia forces, during counterterrorism operations” and conduct “a small number of airstrikes against al-Shabaab,” according to a letter Biden is mandated to send annually to Congress.
Lt. Cmdr. Timothy Pietrack, spokesperson for US African Command, said in a statement that the military is “in the planning stages to return a small persistent US military presence to Somalia” and declined to provide more details.
This is easier and safer, the White House says, than flying back and forth to Somalia from Kenya and Djibouti to carry out operations, which the US had been doing after Trump withdrew most of the forces. “The decision to reintroduce a small but persistent presence was made, first and foremost, to maximize the safety and effectiveness of our force and enable them to provide better support of our partners,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said. (Which presupposes that US troops should be in East Africa in the first place.)
Above all, the White House emphasizes that US forces are in Somalia because the Somalis want the US to be there. When Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was elected as Somalia’s president in May 2022, the US immediately announced that it was sending troops there. The timing suggested that this plan was long in the works, and that the US wants to support his government.
For the Biden administration, success would mean keeping al-Shabaab’s threat within Somalia’s borders. “Simultaneously, we are working toward continued progress on the political side, where we start seeing greater cooperation, less corruption, an effort toward more inclusive politics,” a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told me. “We’re listening to Hassan Sheikh’s agenda and having a conversation with him, and with other Somali actors, about how do they best bring stability to the country.”
Pushing toward political reconciliation will be difficult, as many Somalis see the government as corrupt; they “seek justice and an equitable way of resolving these things,” Samira Gaid, the director of the Hiraal Institute in Mogadishu, told me. “That’s what’s absent. And that’s what al-Shabaab offers.”
By putting US troops in Somalia, the US is back to where it was under Trump and Obama, according to analyst Abukar Arman. “I don’t think it is a good idea if the Biden administration’s objective is to pursue that same failed counterterrorism policy,” the former Somali diplomat wrote by email. “Somalis — save the political elite — consider the return of American troops and Biden’s policy toward Somalia business as usual: more drone strikes, more provocation of al-Shabaab, and more recruitment for the latter.”
Altogether, there have been 268 drone strikes on Somalia over the past two decades, killing up to 120 civilians, according to the think tank New America. Trump presided over 202 of those strikes in Somalia, and even though Biden has markedly decreased them, drone strikes continue. Gathering this data is a challenge, especially because of the risky security situation in Somalia, and the number of victims may be significantly higher.
Research and reporting suggest that such strikes cause blowback. “It’s difficult to argue that they have been effective in keeping America safe,” Priyanka Motaparthy, who directs a project on human rights and armed conflict at Columbia Law School, told me.
What’s the legal justification for US troops in Somalia?
Congress passed the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to combat al-Qaeda in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks — the longest-running AUMF in US history.
And it is the legal justification for US involvement in Somalia. “The 2001 AUMF provides sufficient authority to use military force against certain organizations,” another senior Biden administration official wrote in an email statement.
Al-Shabaab has been affiliated with al-Qaeda since 2012, but it’s better understood as a domestic political movement that grew out of the Somali Council of Islamic Courts. Legal experts I spoke with think the ties to al-Qaeda are flimsy because of al-Shabaab’s local roots. One expert described the way al-Shabaab operates as analogous to a junior varsity version of the Taliban: Al-Shabaab operates courts and social services, and it collects taxes.
The legality of the AUMF is also tenuous. The idea of applying it to al-Qaeda’s associated forces — though no such wording is included in the authorization itself — was advanced by former George W. Bush administration official Jack Goldsmith, who testified to Congress last year that it’s not entirely clear which groups can be considered affiliated with al-Qaeda and suggested reforms to the AUMF that “specify the enemy.”
Now, Biden is following in Obama’s path. “The Obama administration determined and notified Congress in 2016 that al-Shabaab is covered by the 2001 AUMF as an associated force of al-Qa’ida,” according to the senior Biden official’s email. “Direct counterterrorism action in Somalia under the current administration is proceeding under a more rigorous approach established by this administration,” the official continued, but did not go into further detail about how Biden’s rules differ from Trump’s.
Major al-Shabaab attacks on US targets, like the 2020 siege on US forces at an airbase in Manda Bay, Kenya, where three Americans died, relate to the US presence there. “I don’t think that there’s a real threat to US territory, to US persons, US property,” Ebright said; the threat is “only really to US forces who are out there already pursuing al-Shabaab.”
And if it’s so important that US forces are there, why not get the buy-in of Congress? “We shouldn’t be actively involved in the war in Somalia without some form of authorization saying why we’re there, who our enemy is, and what we’re allowed to do,” said Elizabeth Shackelford, a former diplomat now at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “That should be basic, but nobody cares.”
It’s part of a theme I picked up on in conversations with former and current officials about US policy toward Somalia: There just isn’t that much attention from policymakers given to this country, even though US troops sent there may be in harm’s way.
Can the US go beyond a militarized approach to Somalia?
The government of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was in office from 2012 to 2017, and its return presents the opportunity of creating political reconciliation in a country that is fractured, divided along federated states and by clans and tribes.
Hassan Sheikh’s government gains legitimacy from the US troop presence, according to Gaid. But she is concerned that the US’s top priority has been the war on terrorism in Somalia, outweighing other goals. “It’s more military-centric, and it should really be people-centric, it should look at reconciliation, at peace-building and all these other aspects,” she told me.
The US does do more than security there. It’s also the largest humanitarian donor to Somalia and is advancing food security initiatives amid a massive famine, given the unprecedented drought there, compounded by the Ukraine grain crisis. Senior State Department official Victoria Nuland traveled last month to Somalia and met President Hassan Sheikh “to offer U.S. support for his security, reconciliation, and reform agenda.”
But for broader political and development policies to succeed, the main priority needs to be addressing al-Shabaab’s deadly 15-year-long insurgency. Everyone knows that insurgencies end with political dialogue, not more military strikes.
In a recent interview, Hassan Sheikh said that ultimately Somalia will need to negotiate with al-Shabaab. Arman, the former Somali diplomat, told me he has been advocating for negotiations with al-Shabaab for over a decade and that subsequent Somali leaders have missed the opportunity to leverage talks.
“There’s no purely military solution,” a State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told me. “It’s really political factors that are driving this, and the governance challenges that are at the root of this. I don’t think it’s for us to decide whether the Somalis should negotiate with al-Shabaab. That’s a decision that they need to make.”
Though right now might not be the optimal moment to craft a deal with al-Shabaab, it can take years of table-setting to make such complex talks happen. “You want to have the mechanisms for talks in place when the timing is right,” Tricia Bacon, an American University professor and former State Department official, told me. “One of the mistakes of US-Taliban negotiations is that we negotiated when we were ready to leave.”
In the meantime, the US priority appears to be security in the strictest sense, as troops deploy there. Former US ambassador to Somalia Donald Yamamoto reflected in a recent interview on the fact that his two children serve in the US military. “I am not going to have them be deployed to Somalia to fight your wars,” he recalled telling the Somali president when he was ambassador about five years ago. “You have to fight this war yourself.”
Sri Lankan protesters outside the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo. (photo: Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters)
The mainly youth-led movement over the island’s worst-ever economic crisis completes 100 days, with people saying the struggle is not yet over.
During the period, the protesters forced a president and a prime minister – both brothers from the powerful but now-unpopular Rajapaksa clan – to resign, with President Gotabaya Rajapaksa even fleeing the country last week to escape the uprising.
It was the first time in Sri Lanka’s history that a serving head of state had resigned.
Gotabaya’s elder brother and patriarch of the clan, Mahinda Rajapaksa, was forced to quit as prime minister in May after an attack on the main protest site in the capital Colombo by his supporters led to violence throughout the island.
A third brother, former Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa, also resigned from his parliamentary seat and tried unsuccessfully to leave the country earlier this month.
The protesters blame the Rajapaksas, who dominated the island nation’s politics for more than two decades, for the economic crisis which saw people queueing, sometimes for days, for fuel, medicines and other essentials.
The anger came to a boil earlier this month when tens of thousands of people hit the streets in Colombo, occupying important government buildings, including the official residences of the president and the prime minister.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who had replaced Mahinda Rajapaksa, was declared acting president, tasked with the formation of a new government.
Anger against Wickremesinghe
While there were celebrations on Sunday at GotaGoGama – the sea-facing protest camp in Colombo – to mark the 100 days of protest, some people said they were aware their journey is not over yet.
In a controversial move late on Sunday, Wickremesinghe once again declared a state of emergency in the country in a bid to prevent protests during a parliamentary vote later this week to elect a new president.
Rev Father Jeewantha Peiris, one of the protest leaders, said the sudden declaration of the state of emergency is aimed at intimidating the protesters.
“We have been protesting peacefully for 100 days but there was no state of emergency. Then why now?” he told Al Jazeera on Monday.
“We see that Ranil Wickremesinghe is getting ready for oppression but our struggle would not be oppressed by these actions. We have a democratic right to protest and we will continue our struggle till we achieve our last demand.”
Protesters say out of their six key demands in an Action Plan declared on July 5, only one has been achieved yet.
They are not happy about the prospect of Wickremesinghe being elected by the Parliament to serve the rest of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s term.
Wasantha Mudalige, convener of the Inter-University Student Union, has announced a demonstration on Tuesday to demand the immediate resignation of Wickremesinghe.
Many trade unions have also warned of a countrywide industrial strike if Wickremesinghe takes over as full-time president.
Melani Gunathilake, another leader of the protest movement, says the protesters managed to achieve remarkable victories which earlier generations might never have imagined.
“But what Ranil Wickremesinghe did by accepting the prime minister’s post was more of a betrayal of ‘aragalaya’ than a political ploy,” she told Al Jazeera.
“We need somebody who can find solutions to our burning issues, not someone who was rejected by the people.”
Gunathilake said Sri Lanka needs a new leader “at least below the age of 60”, who is not accused of corruption and other misdeeds.
“I am glad that Gotabaya Rajapaksa is gone but we can’t enjoy or celebrate it as long as Ranil Wickremesinghe is in power.”
‘Genuine freedom struggle’
Protest leader Peiris said the protests so far have been a “victory of the people”.
“The supreme power of people has overcome the power of an oppressive regime,” he told Al Jazeera.
The Catholic clergy has played a remarkable role in “Aragalaya”, the Sinhalese word for struggle, sometimes physically stepping up to protect the protesters whenever they were attacked by the security forces.
“We see this as the genuine freedom struggle of Sri Lanka because for the first time in post-independent Sri Lanka, every segment of the society – all the people – were united.”
United they were. Every time the protesters were arrested or faced legal threats, dozens of lawyers voluntarily appeared for them and even created human shields between the forces and the protesters during tense situations.
Medical professionals and trade unions representing many other professions have been marching or helping in whichever way possible.
“When we said ‘GotaGoHome’, it wasn’t just an individual but we wanted to remove the whole corrupt system he represents. Now that he is gone, we no longer want to worship personalities,” Peiris told Al Jazeera, referring to the main slogan of the protesters.
Women rights campaigner and environmentalist Caryll Tozer, who had been protesting for weeks before the GotaGoGoma occupation began, insists that peaceful protests are the only way forward to force people’s representatives to listen to the people.
“Most of the people sacrificed a lot and the aragalaya has achieved a lot. People in the world are also looking at Sri Lanka as an example of people’s power and peaceful protests,” Tozer told Al Jazeera.
She says it is disappointing, though, that people’s representatives are yet to understand the reality.
“While people have been suffering, the leaders have failed to do anything to ease that pain. People want their MPs to be their voice in the parliament, but sadly that is not happening. Politicians are using people’s suffering for their own advantage.”
Therefore, she said, the protesters would not give up until all their demands are met.
Key demands of July 5 Action Plan:
• Gotabaya Rajapaksha should immediately resign as president
• PM Ranil Wickremesinghe and his government should also quit immediately
• An interim government should be established for a maximum period of one year
• A new constitution that endorses people’s sovereignty be established through a referendum, hopefully within a year
• President’s executive powers should be reduced and democratic institutions strengthened until the new constitution is drafted
• The fundamental objective of the interim government should be to implement the above proposals
While journalist Ranhiru Subhawickrama, also a protester, is critical of the conduct of certain groups in the protest movement, he, like most Sri Lankans, is happy about its achievements.
“Those in power tried many different ways to disrupt the protest movement and create divisions. We knew from the beginning, for example, that there was a strong presence of the United National Party [UNP] within the protest movement,” Subhawikrama told Al Jazeera, referring to acting President Wickremesinghe’s party.
But when Wickremesinghe was appointed as the prime minister following Mahinda’s resignation, UNP supporters who funded the protests withdrew, he added.
‘Red signal to Rajapaksa family’
Insisting that the whole Sri Lankan society supported the youth-led Aragalaya, Subhawickrama says the need of the hour is to force political reforms.
Together with a group of protesters, he plans to form a new political party to contest the next general elections.
Chandana Wijekoon, political analyst and assistant editor of state-run Dinamina newspaper, told Al Jazeera the biggest achievement of the 100-day protests was that “we managed to give a red signal to Rajapaksa family’s authoritarian power and to any authoritarian politician”.
“Sri Lanka’s power structure has been built around certain families and everything is being handled in the country by those families. The protesters flashed a red light to that hegemonic system, asking for a more democratic way of governance,” he said.
“It [protests] was led by a new generation. They showed the rulers that a country needs to be governed in a democratic manner and not according to the wishes of several families.”
However, Wijekoon doubts the protesters have a vision for the future beyond demonstrating on the streets.
“The protesters don’t have solutions to the country’s social, economic and political issues,” he said. “I think the best thing we need to do now is to form an all-party government and build the trust among the international community.”
Wijekoon even accuses certain groups within the protest movement of being “stooges of Western countries”.
“What certain left-wing groups handled by the West want is not to resolve our burning issues but to get into power. But none of these parties or protesters have any proper programme to resolve our issues.”
But priest Peiris says their programme has already been announced. “On July 5, we put forward an Action Plan so we want anybody who comes to power to abide by that plan,” he told Al Jazeera.
The protest movement is now determined to stop Wickremesinghe from becoming the next head of state.
“He is another face of the Rajapaksas. Sri Lanka has suffered a lot due to the economic crisis created by the Rajapaksas so we don’t need another Rajapaksa to ruin us,” Peiris said.
“Except him, anybody else can come but whoever becomes next president must establish a People’s Council in addition to the parliament.”
A hospital in Massachusetts. (photo: Erin Clark/Boston Globe)
Many emergency departments in the region began putting people in body bags filled with ice to help safely adjust their temperatures. But despite their lifesaving efforts, around 1,000 excess deaths occurred from the brutal heat.
The scramble to save lives paints the challenging reality that many hospitals and medical workers are facing again this year as severe weather-related health emergencies escalate because of extreme climate events.
“We unfortunately had a real live stress test here for the Pacific heat dome because the temperatures were so high and we had a 69-fold increase in hospital-related presentations,” said Kristie L. Ebi, the founder of the center for health and global environment at the University of Washington.
At the same time, the health care sector contributes significantly to the worsening climate crisis, representing nearly 8.5 percent of all U.S. emissions.
According to an analysis conducted by World Weather Attribution, that excessive heat wave was made at least 150 times more likely from human-induced climate change.
Last fall, the editors of over a dozen health journals from across the globe simultaneously published a joint editorial calling for urgent climate action to avert catastrophic warming. Without it, the editorial said, rising temperatures will lead to more deaths from heart and lung illness, allergies, kidney problems and pregnancy complications.
“The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5° C and to restore nature,” the authors wrote.
The New England Journal of Medicine went one step further this spring in launching a series focused on highlighting health hazards linked to planet-warming pollution, our colleague Sarah Kaplan reports.
Renee Salas, a researcher at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard University and contributor to the series, says that doctors have a moral obligation to speak out against fossil-fuel use and other planet-warming activities.
“The burning of fossil fuels, the root cause of both air pollution and climate change, threaten medicine's core mission. They harm health and threaten health care delivery, making our jobs not only harder, but sometimes impossible.”
Too heavy of a lift?
As The Climate 202 reported last month, 61 of the nation's largest hospital and health-sector companies have joined the Health Sector Climate Pledge to cut greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2030.
The commitment is meant to help advance President Biden’s target of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 and includes more than 650 hospitals and thousands of providers, including two of the five largest U.S. private hospital and health systems, Ascension and CommonSpirit Health.
“The health care industry has come to realize that traditional health care accounts for only about 20 percent of an individual's (or community's) overall health,” said Craig Cordola, Ascension’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. “Social determinants and one's physical environment play an even greater role. It’s imperative that we focus where we can have the greatest impact.”
But Ebi said that it's difficult to uproot the entire energy system of a health facility. For one, cost is a major factor. Depending on the institution's profit margin, switching to sustainable machines that leak fewer greenhouse gases might not be possible given their routine expenses.
There are also some things that hospitals can’t adjust, such as leaving the lights on overnight or being unable to reuse certain plastics for hygiene, to satisfy medical protocols.
What’s on the horizon for hospitals
Still, Ebi mentioned that there are smaller opportunities that hospitals can — and should — be pursuing to reduce their carbon footprints, whether that be through energy and waste management or by working to improve the well-being of patient communities.
Each of the organizations that signed onto the pledge — which included public hospitals, health-care centers, pharmaceutical companies, medical-device makers and suppliers — are expected to develop climate-resilience plans for their facilities, including plans to support individuals or communities most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
According to Ebi, any plan should mention what she called the “low-hanging fruit,” including:
- Understanding your patient base, and how it could shift with climate change
- Outlining community vulnerabilities to global warming (for example, care centers that are based in a flood plain)
- Planning personnel schedules around forecast weather events, or rescheduling surgeries to ensure anticipated surge capacity
- Providing opportunities for patients that benefit their health and the environment, such as a garden to supply fresh food for the cafeteria
As for Ascension, the system aims to reach net-zero carbon and waste by 2040. In its climate-resilience plans, Cordola said it will work closely with the individuals and communities most vulnerable to the impacts of a warming planet.
“Our focus is on creating healthier communities, including reducing the effects of climate change,” he said. “Leading health systems like Ascension have a role to play in demonstrating our commitment to this work not only to others in the health care industry, but to other industries as well.”
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