05 July 22
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Ukrainians say their towns and villages are full of fear and short on essential supplies.
Taras opened the door of his two-bedroom apartment in Kreminna, a town in Ukraine’s southeastern Luhansk region that was taken over by Russia in late April, to see three gun-toting soldiers in camouflage.
“Do you have a garage on the corner?” the oldest of them, a redhead in his late 20s, asked Taras imperatively.
Without waiting for his answer, the soldier continued: “Open it up.”
He was talking about a group of three dozen garages built in the early 1980s, an area which had become an informal club, where men could have a drink, crack a joke and play backgammon or chess.
But to the Russian occupiers, the garages were a source of danger, a younger, less strict soldier told 53-year-old Taras on the way, and they needed to check each for arms and explosives.
“They looked inside, checked the basement and left without saying a word,” Taras, who requested his last name be withheld because he “doesn’t want to be shot”, told Al Jazeera.
They only thing of interest they saw and took away was a three-litre jar with cucumbers that Taras’s wife had pickled in vinegar and tomato juice.
Taras got lucky.
His neighbour had his sky-blue Lada Priora “confiscated” and was beaten and left bruised after he hesitated to hand over the car key for a split second.
On Monday, after the capture of the Luhansk region, media outlets in Russia aired interviews with residents of Lysychansk who thanked Moscow for “liberating” them and claimed Kyiv’s forces were inhumane.
But people Al Jazeera spoke to had rather different views.
They said Moscow appoints new officials from among Ukrainian turncoats or pro-Moscow separatists. Tens of thousands are deported to Russia, and those who remain are subjected to humiliation, torture, robbery – or arbitrary, extrajudicial killing. And it is only in the areas that Moscow plans to rule directly that occupying forces and officials are instructed to treat locals with at least a shred of respect.
“They don’t treat us like humans. They say they came to liberate us – from what? From our property? From our lives?” Taras told Al Jazeera via a messaging app.
“Liberation” is the key word the Kremlin uses when describing what it calls the “special operation in Ukraine”.
In Kremlin-speak, Ukraine had to be “liberated” from its “neo-Nazi” regime, and the eastern and southern Ukrainian regions where the majority of the population speaks Russian needed a “liberation” from “Ukrainian nationalists”.
In reality, in the occupied areas of Ukraine, Russia pursues three different policies.
The first one is being implemented in places such as Kreminna in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, known collectively as the Donbas, that had already been partially controlled by separatists since 2014, says Kyiv-based political analyst Aleksey Kushch.
“They use the scorched earth tactic here, a big population is seen as an unnecessary social burden,” he told Al Jazeera.
Moscow prefers to send younger residents of the Donbas to Russia to repopulate its regions with low birthrates, bad local economies, and excessive alcoholism and crime.
More than a million Ukrainians have been “deported” to Russia from the Donbas, including the city of Mariupol, Ukrainian officials said.
The restoration of plants and factories in occupied Donbas, Ukraine’s former industrial pillar, is of no interest to Moscow. Russia simply needs to declare the “liberation” of areas that would later become part of the separatist statelets – the so-called “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk known as DPR and LNR – that are fully dependent on Russia economically and politically, Kushch said.
A stark example of this strategy is the way Russia operates in Mariupol, a former industrial hub on the Sea of Azov that had a population of more than 400,000 before the war.
After merciless, incessant pummelling between late February and April, it is now home to tens of thousands, mostly the elderly who live without electricity, running water and healthcare.
They “cook, look for firewood, collect water and live” outdoors because their shelling-damaged apartment buildings may collapse any minute and bury them alive, said Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor Vadym Boychenko, who left the city before Russia’s takeover.
“The worst thing is that people are getting used to it. They compare [their living conditions] not to what was before the war but to [what happened] in February – April. With their lives in the cold basements under fire,” Andryushchenko said in a Telegram post in mid-June.
The second strategy is used in the areas Russia plans to hold on to directly – namely, the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhia, and in parts of the northeastern Kharkiv region adjacent to the Russian border.
“There are attempts to create loyalty … they plan fictional ‘referendums’” to declare their residents’ “determination” to join Russia, analyst Kushch said.
In Kherson, despite hundreds of alleged abductions of pro-Ukrainian activists, most in the area are being cajoled into submission with food handouts and the promises of tax breaks, higher pensions and other perks.
Even critics of their policies admit that their efforts are aimed at appeasing the masses.
“They quietly, calmly help people. One can take as much flour, grain, sugar, all in sacks. If it wasn’t for them, there would have been famine,” Halyna, a pro-Kyiv resident of Kherson, told Al Jazeera.
Last Wednesday, Kremlin-appointed officials in Kherson said they were preparing a “referendum” to join Russia.
Meanwhile, a third strategy is being used in areas where Russia did not try to create loyalists and relied on “terror and mass crimes towards civilians,” Kushch said.
Ukrainian officials say that more than 1,000 people have been killed in the towns and villages northwest, north and northeast of Kyiv between late February and early April, after Moscow retreated from the area after realising it would not risk street fights to seize the capital.
Many civilians were reportedly tortured, raped and shot dead in the back of their heads.
Some were killed just for fun, said a survivor who was beaten and doused with diesel fuel in late March.
“They said: ‘Let’s set him on fire and send [him] back to his people,’” Viktor, a resident of Bucha, where most of the killings had taken place, told Al Jazeera in early April.
He survived only because shelling from the Ukrainian side forced his tormentors into a bomb shelter while he managed to escape.
Another reason why atrocities were so widespread, cruel and arbitrary is because of the narrative on Kremlin-controlled television networks that has for years portrayed Ukrainians as “neo-Nazis” who approve of the alleged “genocide” of Russian-speaking residents of the Donbas.
Another survivor described the look on the faces of three Russian soldiers who stormed into her house in the village of Myrotske 40 kilometres (25 miles) northwest of Kyiv.
“They seemed full of hatred to Ukraine since they had been born,” child psychologist Rivil Kofman told Al Jazeera in mid-March.
Kofman and her son David managed to leave the village after hiding for days in their ice-cold basement, observing the duels between Russian tanks and Ukrainian artillery – and witnessing the killing of their escaping neighbours in their cars.
Unsurprisingly, residents of Russia-occupied areas meet Ukrainian servicemen as their true “liberators”.
“They cried, they hugged us, saying, ‘Oh, my dearest ones, thank you,’” said Maksim Butkevych, a Ukrainian human rights advocate who volunteered to join the Ukrainian army, and took part in the battles to retake Kyiv suburbs.
“One old-timer even offered me moonshine, and I had to tell him, ‘Daddy, I am on duty!’” Butkevych, who was taken prisoner in the Donbas last week, told Al Jazeera in mid-May.
Demonstrators outside the Louisiana Supreme Court protest the state's proposed 'heartbeat' bill in May 2019. (photo: Emily KASK/AFP/Getty Images)
In the wake of Roe v. Wade, providers are challenging abortion bans based on expansive rights protected in state constitutions.
But exactly which trigger law Landry was referencing wasn’t clear. Louisiana has passed several such laws over the years, all of which remain on the books, variously overlap, prohibit different conduct, offer different exceptions, and impose different punishments. In its zeal to ban abortion, Louisiana has created a mess of contradictions.
That prompted the Center for Reproductive Rights to file suit in state court on behalf of several plaintiffs, including Shreveport’s Hope Medical Group for Women, arguing that the bans outlawing abortion in Louisiana violated the state’s constitution. “Louisiana’s rushed and poorly conceived trigger laws are unconstitutionally vague and violate due process,” said Joanna Wright, an attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner LLP and lead counsel on the case. “The Louisiana Constitution does not tolerate such a state of affairs and this lawsuit requires Louisiana to comport with the rule of law as required by its own constitution.”
On June 27, a state judge in New Orleans issued a temporary restraining order that blocked the laws from taking effect pending a hearing slated for July 8, thereby restoring abortion services. “We are committed to this monumental legal challenge,” Kathaleen Pitmann, administrator for the Hope clinic, said in a statement, “to ensure our patients’ wellbeing and so that they may draw strength from our dedication to this fight.”
Louisiana is among 13 states with trigger laws on the books; another nine have ostensibly retained pre-Roe laws banning abortion. Together, they constitute a group of zombie laws that have lain dormant waiting for a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which the court did on June 24 in the Mississippi case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In all, 22 states are poised to ban all or most abortions, while four more will likely try to do so in the coming weeks or months. But many of the states with anti-abortion statutes on the books have multiple, often competing laws, leading to confusion over which of the laws is actually controlling.
Anti-abortion actors have long claimed that overturning Roe — and sending the question of whether individuals should enjoy reproductive freedom back to state politicians — would simplify the legal landscape. But legal scholars say the opposite is true, as The Intercept has previously reported. The lack of a single standard regarding the legality of abortion is unleashing a flood of litigation as restrictions are challenged against individual state constitutions, and competing visions about reproductive freedom give rise to new interstate battles.
By striking down Roe, the Supreme Court gave “a green light to anti-abortion legislators to be as invasive as they possibly can,” said David Cohen, a professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law and co-author of “The New Abortion Battleground,” a forthcoming article in the Columbia Law Review. The looming legal fights, he said, will include an increased focus on state constitutional challenges. “People are going to be looking to the state court cases as the places where there can possibly be a win.”
Since the Dobbs ruling, 10 states have announced enforcement of their abortion bans: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio (which has a six-week ban), Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee (also a six-week ban), Texas, and Utah. But just as swiftly came the lawsuits challenging those restrictions. To date, legal challenges in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Utah have been successful — at least for now.
As in Louisiana, Texas’s various laws banning abortion have created a legal quagmire. Abortion access in Texas was already obstructed by the notorious sue-they-neighbor law, Senate Bill 8, which allows private citizens to sue anyone they imagine has violated the state’s six-week ban. Last year lawmakers also passed a trigger ban slated to take effect 30 days after the Supreme Court issues its official judgment in the Dobbs case — a final order that follows the roughly monthlong window during which a litigant can ask the court to reconsider.
In the meantime, however, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that the state could enforce a pre-Roe ban codified in 1925. In a legal advisory released just after the Dobbs opinion, Paxton encouraged state prosecutors to “immediately pursue” criminal charges against providers based on the old law. “Although these statutes were unenforceable while Roe was on the books, they are still Texas law,” he wrote. “Under these pre-Roe statutes, abortion providers could be criminally liable for providing abortions starting today.”
On June 27, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed suit on behalf of a handful of Texas abortion providers, arguing that the pre-Roe ban had been scrubbed from statute after 1973 and that its provisions conflicted with the newer trigger ban. The pre-Roe ban “cannot be harmonized with the trigger ban,” which establishes “an entirely different and irreconcilable range of penalties for the same offense” and “cannot be enforced consistent with due process,” the lawsuit reads. The following morning, a state judge in Houston issued a temporary restraining order and set a hearing on the matter. Paxton, however, rushed to the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, which lifted the order on Friday without addressing any of the problems raised in the lower court.
“These laws are confusing, unnecessary, and cruel,” said Marc Hearron, senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Texas’s trigger ban is not scheduled to take effect for another two months, if not longer. This law from nearly 100 years ago is banning essential health care prematurely, despite clearly being long repealed.”
According to the Guttmacher Institute, only four states have constitutions that explicitly do not protect abortion rights. A majority of the first wave of lawsuits seeking to block bans are based on state constitutional protections that lawyers argue are more expansive than those provided in the U.S. Constitution. Lawsuits pending in Idaho, Ohio, and Utah, for example, cite broad privacy rights and liberty interests, arguing that abortion bans discriminate against women and violate equal protection guarantees. A suit in Oklahoma contends that the state’s competing abortion bans violate due process as well as a constitutional “right to personal autonomy and bodily integrity.” The Kentucky lawsuit argues that the state’s two abortion bans (a trigger ban and a six-week ban) violate state constitutional rights of privacy and self-determination.
A suit in Mississippi, meanwhile, filed on behalf of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, argues that the state’s Supreme Court already concluded in 1998 that the constitution explicitly protected abortion. “As confirmed by the Mississippi Supreme Court … the decision about whether and when to have children belongs to individuals and families, not to the state’s politicians,” said Rob McDuff, a lawyer with the Mississippi Center for Justice, which is among the groups representing the state’s lone abortion provider.
And in Florida, a suit challenging a new 15-week ban notes that in 1980, voters amended the state constitution to provide robust individual privacy rights, which were designed to include the right to abortion; in 2012, voters rejected an attempt to repeal that right. Protecting the right to abortion in Florida is considered crucial to maintaining access in the South.
On Thursday, a state district judge said he would block the law from taking effect. “Florida passed into its constitution an explicit right of privacy that is not contained in the U.S. Constitution,” state judge John Cooper said. “The Florida Supreme Court has determined, in its words, ‘Florida’s privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman’s decision on whether or not to continue her pregnancy.’” The state is expected to appeal, which could imperil the injunction, said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director for reproductive freedom at the American Civil Liberties Union. “But we intend to continue to fight for that injunction to remain in effect at every level of the court system in Florida.”
During a joint press call with the ACLU and Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which argued the Dobbs case, called the Supreme Court’s ruling a “crushing blow” that “upended the idea that a constitutional right is one that can be relied on.” But she noted that the three groups were longtime partners in the fight for reproductive freedom and would continue to press for equal rights. “We were, and are, ready,” she said. And the lawsuits that have been filed so far are just the beginning. “You can expect more cases to be coming,” she promised. “Every additional day and every additional hour that we can block a ban is making a huge difference for the patients in the waiting rooms.”
Donald Trump appears on a video screen as Cassidy Hutchinson testifies before the January 6 panel. (photo: Eric Lee/EPA)
Rumors are swirling that the ex-president could make an announcement soon, as January 6 revelations continue
Irrespective of Trump’s chances of winning a second term, another presidential campaign under consideration – as reported by the New York Times, CBS and other US outlets – could give the former president a multi-year shield to deflect the attention of prosecutors.
The reports have come after committee hearings into the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot that could see the congressional panel itself recommend Trump face criminal charges for his role in an attempt to thwart the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral win. Or the justice department could charge Trump via its own investigation of the scheme.
In testimony to the panel last week, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, strengthened a potential criminal case when she alleged that Trump knew his supporters were armed when he encouraged them to march on the Capitol.
But if Trump were to run for a second stint in the White House, most experts believe it would – at the very least – complicate any decision to criminally charge him. It would also be likely to bolster his support in the Republican party, which has begun to ebb slightly in the wake of the January 6 revelations.
It would also, perhaps, stem the rise of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who has emerged in recent months as a genuine potential rival to Trump with the promise of pursuing the same rightwing agenda but with more traditional political skills and style.
A former House Republican aide told MSNBC on Saturday that Trump would probably announce his intentions soon.
“Well, we all know from past experience that Donald Trump doesn’t care about anybody else but Donald Trump,” said Kurt Bardella. “So it doesn’t surprise me that when faced with the criticism that’s been mounting right now, following the January 6 hearings, he’s thinking about pulling the trigger.”
At recent rallies, Trump has been relatively explicit about his designs. “This is the year we’re going to take back the House, we’re going to take back the Senate, and we’re going to take back America,” he said at a recent rally in Illinois. “And in 2024, most importantly, we are going to take back our magnificent White House.”
“The advantages of declaring now are that potential rivals could be dissuaded from running against him,” said Carl Tobias, Williams chair in law at the University of Richmond. “Meanwhile, the pressure will build for the January 6 committee to move quickly to find as much damning information as it can and refer it over to the attorney general.”
Carly Cooperman at Schoen Cooperman Research said Trump could be attempting to change the narrative because the January 6 hearings have painted him in a bad light. Cooperman also cautioned that the speculation could be just that – rumors – and that some Republican officials might try to stave it off.
“I’m skeptical Trump will actually make an announcement before the midterms. Republicans would rather have the conversation be about the economy, inflation and a referendum on Biden. An early announcement from Trump would change the midterm elections to become a referendum on Trump and his claims of election fraud in 2020,” Cooperman said.
On Sunday, Trump’s Republican party nemesis, Congresswoman Liz Cheney, told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that the party could not survive if Trump were the nominee in 2024. “Those of us who believe in Republican principles and ideals have a responsibility to try to lead the party back to what it can be,” Cheney said.
Trump has reportedly told advisers that declaring a run for the White House now would allow him to strengthen his argument that other criminal investigations against him in New York and Georgia are politically motivated.
According to a CBS report on Sunday, Trump’s deliberations are fluid and no decision has been made on a bid or the time of an announcement. As with other media reports, sources said to be close to Trump requested anonymity.
Typically, a presidential candidate waits until after the midterms in November, but the presidential cycle has been stretching longer and now begins as early as two years before the general election. A declaration now could upend both parties’ midterm strategies.
Trump told Newsmax last week that he thought “a lot of” the committee hearings were about trying to prevent him from running in 2024.
“I am leading in all the polls – against Republicans and Democrats. I am leading in the Republican polls in numbers that no one has ever even seen before. And against Biden, and anyone else they run, I am leading against them.
“At the right time, I will be saying what I want to do,” Trump added. But in comments to the New Yorker last month, Trump said he was “very close to making a decision” about whether to run.
First responders work the scene of a shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois. (photo: Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
The factors that lead to tragedies like those in Highland Park, Tulsa and Uvalde are deeply ingrained in US politics, culture, and law.
The shooter is still at large, according to police.
The shooting in a Chicago suburb — which some attending the parade initially mistook for fireworks, according to the New York Times — has brought American exceptionalism on gun violence into stark relief as it marks its most patriotic holiday.
No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, more than 110 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 40,620 per year. Since 2009, there has been an annual average of 19 mass shootings, when defined as shootings in which at least four people are killed. The US gun homicide rate is as much as 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate is nearly 12 times higher.
Gun control opponents have typically framed the gun violence epidemic in the US as a symptom of a broader mental health crisis.
But every country has people with mental health issues and extremists; those problems aren’t unique. What is unique is the US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership, ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding, and a national political process that has so far proved incapable of changing that norm.
“America is unique in that guns have always been present, there is wide civilian ownership, and the government hasn’t claimed more of a monopoly on them,” said David Yamane, a professor at Wake Forest University who studies American gun culture.
Congress recently reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years. But the shooting in Highland Park shows just how embedded gun violence is in the US.
The US has a lot of guns, and more guns means more gun deaths
It’s hard to estimate the number of privately owned guns in America since there is no countrywide database where people register whether they own guns, and there is a thriving black market for them in the absence of strong federal gun trafficking laws.
One estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based research project, found that there were approximately 390 million guns in circulation in the US in 2018, or about 120.5 firearms per 100 residents. That number has likely climbed in the years since, given that one in five households purchased a gun during the pandemic. But even without accounting for that increase, US gun ownership is still well above any other country: Yemen, which has the world’s second-highest level of gun ownership, has only 52.8 guns per 100 residents; in Iceland, it’s 31.7.
American guns are concentrated in a tiny minority of households: just 3 percent own about half the nation’s guns, according to a 2016 Harvard and Northeastern University study. They’re called “super owners” who have an average of 17 guns each. Gallup, using a different methodology, found that 42 percent of American households overall owned guns in 2021.
Researchers have found a clear link between gun ownership in the US and gun violence, and some argue that it’s causal. One 2013 Boston University-led study, for instance, found that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership at the household level, the state firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9 percent. And states with weaker gun laws have higher rates of gun-related homicides and suicides, according to a January study by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
The link between gun deaths and gun ownership is much stronger than the link between violence and mental health issues. If it were possible to cure all schizophrenia, bipolar, and depressive disorders, violent crime in the US would fall by only 4 percent, according to a study from Duke University professor Jeffrey Swanson, who examines policies to reduce gun violence.
There’s still a pervasive idea, pushed by gun manufacturers and gun rights organizations like the National Rifle Association, that further arming America is the answer to preventing gun violence — the “good guy with a gun” theory. But a 2021 study from Hamline University and Metropolitan State University found that the rate of deaths in 133 mass school shootings between 1980 and 2019 was 2.83 times greater in cases where there was an armed guard present.
“The idea that the solution to mass shootings is that we need more guns in the hands of more people in more places so that we’ll be able to protect ourselves — there’s no evidence that that’s true,” Swanson said.
The prevalence of the self-defense narrative is part of what sets apart the gun rights movement in the US from similar movements in places like Canada and Australia, according to Robert Spitzer, a professor at SUNY Cortland who studies the politics of gun control.
Self-defense has become by far the most prominent reason for gun ownership in the US today, eclipsing hunting, recreation, or owning guns because they’re antiques, heirlooms, or work-related. That’s also reflected in ballooning handgun sales, since the primary purpose of those guns isn’t recreational, but self-defense.
American gun culture “brings together the hunting-sporting tradition with the militia-frontier tradition, but in modern times the hunting element has been eclipsed by a heavily politicized notion that gun carrying is an expression of freedom, individuality, hostility to government, and personal self-protection,” Spitzer said.
That culture of gun ownership in the US has made it all the more difficult to explore serious policy solutions to gun violence after mass shootings. In high-income countries lacking that culture, mass shootings have historically galvanized public support behind gun control measures that would seem extreme by US standards.
Canada banned military-style assault weapons two weeks after a 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia. In 2019, less than a month after the Christchurch massacre, New Zealand lawmakers passed a gun buyback scheme, as well as restrictions on AR-15s and other semiautomatic weapons, and they later established a firearms registry. The 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Australia spurred the government to buy back 650,000 firearms within a year, and murders and suicides plummeted as a result.
By contrast, nearly a decade passed after the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, before Congress passed a new gun control law. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the law passed in June 2022, was relatively limited: it did not ban any types of weapons, instead incentivizing states to enact new measures meant to limit who can access guns.
“Other countries look at this problem and say, ‘People walking around in the community with handguns is just way too dangerous, so we’re going to broadly limit legal access to that and make exceptions on the margins for people who might have a good reason to have a gun,’” Swanson said. “Here we do just the opposite: We say that, because of the way that the Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment, everybody has the right to a gun for personal protection, and then we tried to make exceptions for really dangerous people, but we can’t figure out who they are.”
While the majority of Americans support more gun control restrictions, including universal background checks, a vocal Republican minority unequivocally opposes such laws — and is willing to put pressure on GOP lawmakers to do the same. Alongside the NRA, and a well-funded gun lobby, this contingent of voters sees gun control as a deciding issue, and one that could warrant a primary challenge for a lawmaker who votes for it.
The gun lobby has the advantage of enthusiasm. “ Despite being outnumbered, Americans who oppose gun control are more likely to contact public officials about it and to base their votes on it,” Barnard College’s Matthew Lacombe explained in 2020. “As a result, many politicians believe that supporting gun regulation is more likely to lose them votes than to gain them votes.”
Congress in June passed a bipartisan gun safety bill for the first time since the 1990s. But the new law — which incentivized states to pass red flag laws, enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21, and closed the “boyfriend loophole” which allowed some people with domestic violence convictions to purchase guns — is not sufficient to fully address the causes of mass shootings. Certain studies suggest that even truly universal background checks may have limited effects on gun violence.
The Supreme Court has made it impossible to cure America’s gun violence epidemic
In 2008, the Supreme Court effectively wrote NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s “good guy with a gun” theory into the Constitution. The Court’s 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first Supreme Court decision in American history to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. But it also went much further than that.
Heller held that one of the primary purposes of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individuals — good guys with a gun, in LaPierre’s framework — to use firearms to stop bad guys with guns. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in Heller, an “inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”
As a matter of textual interpretation, this holding makes no sense. The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
We don’t need to guess why the Second Amendment protects a right to firearms because it is right there in the Constitution. The Second Amendment’s purpose is to preserve “a well-regulated Militia,” not to allow individuals to use their weapons for personal self-defense.
For many years, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of the Second Amendment seriously. As the Court said in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. And thus the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Heller abandoned that approach.
Heller also reached another important policy conclusion. Handguns, according to Scalia, are “overwhelmingly chosen” by gun owners who wish to carry a firearm for self-defense. For this reason, he wrote, handguns enjoy a kind of super-legal status. Lawmakers are not allowed to ban what Scalia described as “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family.”
This declaration regarding handguns matters because this easily concealed weapon is responsible for far more deaths than any other weapon in the United States — and it isn’t close. In 2019, for example, a total of 13,927 people were murdered in the US, according to the FBI. Of these murder victims, at least 6,368 — just over 45 percent — were killed by handguns.
The Supreme Court recently made it even harder for federal and state lawmakers to combat gun violence. In its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it massively expanded the scope of the Second Amendment, abandons more than a decade of case law governing which gun laws are permitted by the Constitution, and replaces this case law with a new legal framework that, as Justice Stephen Breyer writes in dissent, “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.”
The immediate impact of Bruen is that handguns — which are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun murders in the United States — could proliferate on many American streets. That’s because Bruen strikes the types of laws that limit who can legally carry handguns in public, holding that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”
One silver lining for proponents of gun regulation is that the majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, embraces language that first appeared in Heller, which permits some gun laws such as prohibitions on “dangerous and unusual weapons.” Nevertheless, it placed an emphasis on historical analogies that could endanger many laws that enjoy broad bipartisan support. The future of firearm regulation looks grim for anyone who believes that the government should help protect us from gun violence.
Four in ten Americans say they are having difficulty paying their bills. (photo: Getty Images)
New government data show that after the Biden administration terminated pandemic relief programs, millions more Americans began struggling to survive.
In all, roughly four in ten Americans say they are having difficulty paying their bills — a nearly 50 percent increase since last spring, according to a Lever review of data from the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.
As the suffering has increased, Washington policymakers, Beltway economists, and corporate media personalities have started pressing an austerity agenda, demanding even more pain in the name of taming inflation — even though data suggest inflation is largely being driven by corporate profiteering and supply chain blockages rather than wages or consumer spending.
The new numbers bolster those pressing President Joe Biden to fulfill his campaign promises to expand Social Security and cancel student debt. They show that such direct aid almost immediately improves Americans’ economic prospects.
Indeed, the number of Americans experiencing financial difficulties dropped substantially in the first half of 2021, thanks to pandemic relief measures that added $300-weekly federal unemployment benefits, sent out two stimulus checks totaling $2,000, and expanded the child tax credit to provide most American parents with payments of $250 or $300 per month per kid.
Benefits Were Cut Off
While the federal pandemic aid has ended, inflation has drastically increased. As a result, since last April, there has been a staggering 49 percent increase in the number of Americans reporting that it’s very or somewhat difficult to pay typical household expenses.
Matters appear to be getting substantially worse now — and rapidly. The percentage of Americans reporting financial stress jumped more than 13 percent between May and June. This figure is the highest it’s been since the Census Bureau started asking this question in August 2020.
The overall increase in financial hardship can be clearly traced to the end of pandemic aid programs. Most Republican-led states moved to cut off the federal unemployment benefits last spring, and Congress allowed the expanded unemployment programs to expire last September.
In December, Congress let the expanded child tax credit expire, too. They’ve also stopped sending out stimulus checks.
To make matters worse, inflation has accelerated since the federal aid was cut off, and Americans are having to contend with record price increases in their daily lives.
Making the Situation Worse
The federal government’s response to inflation has been to raise interest rates — a move that will likely put downward pressure on wages, cause job losses, reduce worker bargaining power, and exacerbate the housing crisis.
Financial hardship could continue to climb even further thanks to congressional inaction: Americans on individual health insurance plans will see their premiums spike next year if Democrats fail to extend the subsidies they passed last year. Without an extension, people on these plans will receive notices about new premium increases in October, just before the November midterm elections.
When the Biden administration formally ends the public health emergency the federal government declared at the start of the COVID pandemic — a move that could come as early as October — up to fourteen million Americans could lose their Medicaid coverage, since states will be incentivized to start throwing millions of Americans off of their Medicaid rolls.
Last week, a Bloomberg News house editorial — which typically expresses the views of its billionaire owner, former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg — called on the federal government to set a firm date to end the public health emergency and limit funding so that states start trimming their Medicaid rosters.
“Lawmakers can rarely resist too much of a good thing,” said the editorial. “But with the COVID crisis ebbing, the country needs to start getting back to normal. Ending these emergency programs — while easing the transition — is the right thing to do.”
A Russian soldier gets his weapon ready while patrolling a destroyed part of the Illich Iron & Steel Works Metallurgical Plant in Mariupol, in territory under the government of the Donetsk People's Republic, eastern Ukraine, Wednesday, May 18, 2022. (photo: AP)
According to Ukrainian officials, Moscow’s troops have used the weapons several times throughout the war.
Most recently, on Friday, Ukraine’s army accused Russia of dropping munitions on Snake Island after Moscow withdrew its troops from the Black Sea outpost.
Anton Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian official, said they were used in Mariupol in May, a city now fully under Russian control.
And a month after the invasion began, on March 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an address to NATO that “Russian phosphorus bombs” had been used that morning – and had killed adults and children – but did not provide further details.
Restricted but not illegal under international law, the alleged use of white phosphorus bombs marks a disturbing dimension to Russia’s war on its neighbour.
While they can be used on battlefields, they cannot be used in civilian areas.
Phosphorus bombs contain a mixture of white phosphorus – which is not banned as a chemical weapon under international conventions – and rubber and can either be used as incendiary weapons or to create smoke screens.
The United States, Israel, Syria and Turkey are among the nations that have previously caused controversy with their alleged use.
“Phosphorus bombs is a largely a popular term applied to the use of white phosphorus as either intentional part of an incendiary munition (rocket, shell, mortar) or an unintentional part of munition intended to use to generate smoke or illuminate an area,” Margaret E Kosal, an associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told Al Jazeera.
The mixture of white phosphorus and rubber ignites on contact with oxygen in the air. A flame of up to 1,300 degrees Celsius (2,372 degrees Fahrenheit) is generated, accompanied by dense, white smoke.
According to Dan Kaszeta, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, this is why phosphor remains “one of the fastest ways to make highly dense and effective smoke screens.”
White phosphorus munitions have been in the “arsenal of most major armies over the last century”, he said.
But when used on civilians, phosphorus bombs can have a devastating effect.
“White phosphorus can burn people to the bone, smoulder inside the body, and reignite when bandages are removed,” according to Human Rights Watch. “Toxic to humans, white phosphorus can seep into the bloodstream through the skin, poisoning the kidneys, liver, and heart and causing multiple organ failure. People can die simply from inhaling white phosphorus.”
The fumes released in white phosphorus attacks can also injure or severely irritate the eyes and make them highly sensitive to light, the group says on its website, adding: “Finally, exposure to white phosphorus can result in facial paralysis, seizures, and fatal heartbeat irregularities.”
Fires started by phosphorus bombs cannot be extinguished with water but can only be smothered by means such as sand.
“The issue with white phosphorous is that it makes its smoke through burning. They burn extremely hot, and are difficult to extinguish,” said Kaszeta.
What is particularly cruel is that the mixture of white phosphorus and rubber contained in the bombs sticks to the victims’ skin. Once in contact with phosphorus, the individual will attempt to knock out the burning spots. However, since phosphorus bombs are mixed with rubber gelatine, the viscous mass sticks to the skin worsening the effect.
“If some white phosphorus remains embedded in the body, it can re-ignite if re-exposed to air (such as during medical care). It is incredibly nasty, causing debilitatingly painful burns if a person comes into contact with it,” Kosal noted.
White phosphorus usually produces third-degree burns, sometimes to the bone. Victims of an attack are likely to either die slowly from their burns or inhalation of the toxic fumes. Those who survive usually have to struggle with severe impairments for the rest of their lives, such as liver, heart or kidney damage, warns The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR).
“Depending on how they are used and under what conditions the potential harm from white phosphorus munitions can be minimised or eliminated … or if they are intentionally misused, it can do significant harm,” said Kosal
Whether Russia has actually used phosphorus bombs can be neither confirmed nor disproved at this stage. However, there are various pictures and videos that reportedly show its use.
One video in question, tweeted in March by the head of the prosecutor’s office of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, Igor Ponochovnyi, reportedly shows a phosphorus bomb exploding.
Moreover, Russian troops are said to have used phosphorus bombs in eastern Ukraine.
Police chief Oleksij Bilochyzky posted on Facebook that the bombs were recently used in the village of Pospana – about 100km (62 miles) west of Luhansk.
Emina Dzheppar, Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, tweeted a video in March showing a rain of lights in a dark sky.
“Invaders used phosphorus bombs. When it explodes, it disperses a substance with a more than 800 degrees combustion temperature,” Dzheppar wrote.
But as the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Kosal noted, “there is no way to currently verify” such videos.
“White phosphorous was prolifically used in dozens if not hundreds of conflicts in the modern era,” said Kaszeta. “Its use as a smoke-producing agent was reduced but not eliminated by the advent of chemical smokes such as hexachloroethane.”
The US used phosphorus bombs during the Iraq war which lasted from 2003 to 2011.
During the 2006 Lebanon War and in the 2009 Gaza War, Israel dropped phosphorus bombs, according to its own statement, for immediate smoke generation.
“In and of themselves, [phosphorus bombs] are not banned as long as they are primarily used for creating smoke. Contrary to folklore and urban legend, they are not ‘chemical weapons’ because they do not work as poisons. They cause damage by being hot, making their place in international law less prominent than chemical weapons. The use of incendiary weapons is covered by a different international treaty – the so-called Protocol 3, but few countries have signed or ratified that treaty,” Kaszeta noted.
While the use of phosphorus bombs, in general, is allowed under international law, the use of incendiary weapons against civilians or in a manner in which so-called “collateral damage” could easily occur, as reportedly happened in Ukraine, is prohibited, in line with the prohibition on indiscriminate attacks in the 1977 Protocols Additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
“Intentionally targeting civilians with any lethal military weapon is prohibited by international law,” said Kosal.
However, in the fog of war, proving intent is complicated, if not impossible, she added.
Plastic pollution. (photo: Getty Images)
Experts say the bill could prevent 23 million tons of plastic pollution by 2032.
The Plastic Pollution Producer Responsibility Act, widely considered the “strongest” plastic reduction policy in the nation, requires a 25 percent reduction of single-use plastic packaging and foodware — both by weight and by the number of items — within the next 10 years. The bill zoomed through the California Legislature this week, passing the state Assembly by 66 to 1 on Wednesday evening before clearing the Senate without opposition on Thursday morning.
“This was an example of the legislature doing its work, coming together, forging a meaningful strong compromise that will put California at the forefront of addressing a major global problem,” Senator Ben Allen, a Democrat and the bill’s primary sponsor, said from the Senate floor on Thursday.
Four years of negotiations shaped the final version of the California bill, which was released earlier this month. It gained momentum thanks to a proposed ballot initiative that California residents were slated to vote on in November. Although some environmental groups preferred the ballot measure — including its stronger language to phase out expanded polystyrene foam — state lawmakers believed a legislative approach could avoid an expensive and drawn-out process to tighten some of the broader language included in the ballot measure.
In a deal with the Legislature, the three petitioners responsible for the ballot initiative agreed to withdraw it if the plastics bill passed by June 30, the last day this year that a ballot measure could be withdrawn.
Anja Brandon, U.S. plastics policy analyst for the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy — which supported both the bill and the ballot initiative — said she was “beyond excited” by the bill’s passage. She applauded it for requiring plastic companies to actually eliminate much of their packaging and foodware — not just replace it with single-use items made out of non-plastic materials. According to her analysis, the bill will prevent nearly 23 million tons of plastic waste from being generated in California over the next 10 years — a “mind-boggling” amount that’s equivalent to more than 26 times the weight of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Other parts of the bill mandate that California achieve a 65 percent recycling rate for plastics by 2032 — a huge jump from the U.S.’s current rate of roughly 5 percent — and that companies make all of their single-use packaging and foodware recyclable or compostable by the same year, even if it isn’t made of plastic. In an effort to address environmental justice issues associated with plastic production and disposal, the bill also requires plastic companies to contribute $500 million to a pollution mitigation fund every year for the next 10 years. Sixty percent of this money will be used to benefit “disadvantaged or low-income communities or rural areas.”
Although many other states have attempted to pass legislation to address the plastic pollution crisis, success has been elusive. Only three states — Colorado, Maine, and Oregon — have enacted so-called “extended producer responsibility” laws to place the economic burden of waste management onto companies that make and use plastic, and none of those states’ laws include plastic reduction requirements on par with California’s. A New York state bill proposed in May would require a 50 percent reduction in packaging waste over the next 10 years, but it hasn’t yet moved forward.
Brandon called the California bill a welcome sign of progress, especially following years of stalled attempts to bring the Golden State’s plastic pollution crisis under control. Poll after poll shows that a majority of California voters want their representatives to address plastics, she said, and the state’s newly passed plastic pollution bill is a strong first step in that direction. Next up could be an update to the state’s bottle bill, which allows consumers to claim a refund for returning empty beverage containers, or a policy to address the proliferation of microplastics, which are associated with a number of concerning health problems.
“The Legislature is highly aware and motivated to do something,” Brandon said, “and we’re excited to work with them moving forward.”
Special Coverage: Ukraine, A Historic Resistance
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