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Every single criminal investigation and civil lawsuit the ex-president is currently facing, including the ones you’ve probably never heard about.
Unfortunately, for the rest of the public, it’s not as easy to keep track, and you might find yourself confused between, say, the New York attorney general’s investigation into the Trump Organization and the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal probe, the latter of which is expected to lead to a guilty plea from the company’s longtime CFO, Allen Weisselberg. You might also struggle to keep straight the subjects of the various federal investigations, which range from Trump’s plot to overturn the election to Trump’s decision to take classified government documents to his home.
Which is why, as a public service, we’ve put together this handy-dandy guide.
The Classified-Documents Investigation
Though you presumably don’t need reminding, on August 8, 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s residence at his for-profit Florida club, where they removed 11 boxes of classified documents, including some marked top secret. Trump’s defenders lost their minds over this, insisting that the government should have simply subpoenaed him or just asked him nicely to return what wasn’t his to keep. Of course, that’s exactly what the feds had initially tried to do. Back in January, the National Archives had removed 15 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago, which also included those of the top secret variety. Several months later, the Justice Department, believing that Trump hadn’t actually turned over everything he was supposed to, issued a subpoena for the additional documents. In June, a lawyer for the former president said in a written statement that all classified material had been returned to the government. Which, of course, turned out to be a lie, hence the need for the raid.
Then, after a judge unsealed the search warrant, we learned that the government wasn’t looking for West Wing tchotchkes and pilfered office supplies, but rather had probable cause to believe that the 45th president had engaged in obstruction of justice, mishandled government records, and violated the Espionage Act. The night before the warrant was unsealed, The Washington Post reported that “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence.” The New York Times revealed this week that the FBI had interviewed Trump’s White House counsel and deputy counsel concerning the documents. While it’s not clear what will happen next, an indictment is obviously a strong possibility. If found guilty of violating the statutes cited in the warrant, Trump could go to prison for decades.
Naturally, he’s insisted he did nothing wrong and that people take classified documents all the time.
The Justice Department’s Criminal Investigation of January 6 and the Plot to Overturn the Election
With all the hubbub surrounding the raid on Trump’s home and the revelation that he refused to return top secret documents related to grave matters of national security, it’s easy to forget that Trump tried extremely hard to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and, when that didn’t go his way, incited a violent insurrection that left multiple people dead. But he did! In July, we learned that, according to The Washington Post, the Justice Department was investigating Trump’s actions as part of its criminal probe and that prosecutors interviewing witnesses before a grand jury had asked “hours of detailed questions about meetings Trump led in December 2020 and January 2021; his pressure campaign on [Mike] Pence to overturn the election; and what instructions Trump gave his lawyers and advisers about fake electors and sending electors back to the states.”
Crucial witnesses whom we know about have thus far included Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short and his former chief legal counsel Greg Jacob, both of whom have significant insight into Trump’s plot to overturn the election. (Earlier this month, in what ABC News called a “dramatic escalation in the Justice Department’s investigation” of the plot to overturn the 2020 election and the riot that followed, the department subpoenaed Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel, who attended several meetings in the run-up to January 6 in which the ex-president and his goons discussed how to keep Trump in power. Cipollone also knew of Trump’s desire to seize voting machines, which he described as “a terrible idea for the country,” “not how we do things in the United States,” and something the administration had “no legal authority” to do.)
While Trump has—you guessed it—claimed he did nothing wrong, his lawyers are reportedly “planning for criminal charges.” According to Rolling Stone, the fear of prosecution ramped up after former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified publicly before the January 6 committee, at which point she told the panel that Trump had been informed that some of his supporters who’d gathered in DC on the day of the riot were armed, but demanded they be allowed in to hear his “Stop the Steal” speech anyway; that Trump assaulted a Secret Service agent after being told he couldn’t march to the Capitol himself; and that the 45th president apparently believed VP Pence “deserved” the chants calling for his hanging.
The Georgia Criminal Investigation
Remember when, as part of his plot to overturn the election, Trump made a call to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger and demanded that Raffensperger “find” him the number of votes necessary to beat Joe Biden, saying, “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” before threatening the local official over refusing his request? Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis has been investigating that and more, impaneling a special grand jury to hear evidence and potentially issue indictments. On Monday, a lawyer for Rudy Giuliani said that he’d been informed that the former mayor turned Trump attorney was a target of the investigation, while longtime Trump defender Lindsey Graham, who called Raffensperger in November 2020 to ask if he had the power to throw out mail-in ballots in certain counties, was ordered by a judge to testify before the grand jury. Speaking to The New York Times, attorney Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for Trump’s first impeachment, said he believed the Giuliani news was extremely bad for Trump. “There is no way Giuliani is a target of the DA’s investigation and Trump does not end up as one,” Eisen said.
We probably don’t have to tell you that Trump swears he did nothing wrong here, having described his Raffensperger call as absolutely “PERFECT” in May.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Criminal Case Against the Trump Organization, Etc.
In February, Trump got a rare bit of good news on the legal front when the veteran prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of the former president’s business practices abruptly resigned, reportedly because their new boss, Alvin Bragg, had doubts about taking the case to court. Of course, according to one of those attorneys, Mark Pomerantz, that shouldn’t be taken as a sign that Trump didn’t engage in criminal activity, as Pomerantz believes he most certainly did, writing in his resignation letter that the former president was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was a major “failure of justice” not to hold him accountable. (In his letter addressed to Bragg, Pomerantz added that “no case is perfect,” saying that a fear of losing a trial is not a valid reason to forgo indicting a criminal.)
Still, while the DA’s case against Trump has seemingly been put on the back burner, that doesn’t mean the guy should rest easy. In July 2021, both the Trump Organization and its longtime CFO, Allen Weisselberg, were charged with numerous crimes related to alleged tax evasion. On Monday, we learned that Weisselberg is expected to plead guilty. According to The New York Times, the Trump Organization “will not join Mr. Weisselberg in pleading guilty.”
Meanwhile, Bragg says his investigation into Trump—who swears he’s totally innocent—is still active. The Trump Organization has, like its namesake, claimed it is innocent of any wrongdoing.
The New York Attorney General’s Civil Investigation Into the Trump Organization
Last week, when Trump announced that he would be taking the Fifth as part of a previously planned, under-oath deposition, you might have wondered which investigation it involved, given that there are a comical number of them. In this civil investigation, Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right to not answer questions being posed to him by the New York attorney general’s office, which has been investigating the Trump Organization for several years. Attorney General Letitia James said earlier this year that she’d uncovered “significant evidence” of fraud during the process. (In court filings, James’s office has alleged that the Trump Organization inflated the value of its assets when seeking loans and trying to impress people, only to deflate them when it came time to pay taxes.) Unlike in a criminal case, in a civil case a jury could use the fact that Trump pleaded the Fifth against him and infer that he has something to hide. While James’s case would not result in jail time, it could mean “steep financial penalties” for the business. James has also signaled, according to Insider, that she will “seek the dissolution of the business itself under New York’s so-called corporate death penalty—a law that allows the AG to seek to dissolve businesses that operate ‘in a persistently fraudulent or illegal manner.’”
The Westchester Criminal Investigation of the Trump Organization
The Trump Organization is also facing a criminal investigation by the Westchester County district attorney’s office, which is reportedly focused in part on whether Trump’s family business misled local officials about the Trump National Golf Club’s value with the express purpose of lowering its tax bill. (The Trump Organization has said that any suggestion it acted inappropriately is “completely false and incredibly irresponsible.”)
The DC Attorney General’s Criminal Investigation of January 6
DC AG Karl Racine is currently conducting a criminal investigation into the events surrounding the January 6 attack. In January, he said in an interview: “I think the story is clear. Donald Trump was the ringleader.”
The E. Jean Carroll Defamation Suit
Author E. Jean Carroll sued Trump for defamation in 2019 after he accused her of lying when she alleged he raped her in a New York City department store dressing room in the ’90s. Trump has shamelessly claimed that when he called Carroll a liar, he was doing so in his official capacity as president, thus making him immune from the suit.
The Mary Trump Lawsuit
Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, is currently suing him (and his sister Maryanne, and the estate of their late brother Robert) for allegedly defrauding her out of millions of dollars. Lawyers for Trump and company have claimed that, basically, she should have sued them earlier, and in September 2021, the ex-president sued his niece and The New York Times—which had previously exposed him for committing “outright fraud”—alleging they were “engaged in an insidious plot” as part of a “personal vendetta” against him. Mary responded by calling the suit an act of “desperation,” adding, of her uncle: “I think he is a fucking loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can.”
The House of Representatives’ January 6 Lawsuit
Represented by the NAACP, 10 House lawmakers are suing Trump, Giuliani, and two right-wing militia groups for attempting to prevent Congress from certifying the Electoral College votes on January 6.
The Eric Swalwell Suit
The California representative is suing Trump, Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr., and Rep. Mo Brooks over the January 6 insurrection, alleging that the group violated a federal civil rights law in attempting to block the Electoral College count. Swalwell also wants the defendants held liable for encouraging violent conduct and inflicting emotional distress on the lawmakers present.
The Capitol Police January 6 lawsuits
Three separate suits by Capitol police officers have been filed against Trump for the emotional and physical injuries the officers sustained during the January 6 attack.
The Metropolitan Police January 6 lawsuit
Two members of the Metropolitan police have also sued Trump for injuries they suffered as a result of the insurrection, alleging—reasonably!—that Trump incited the riot.
The Michael Cohen lawsuit
Trump’s former “fixer,” Michael Cohen, is suing Trump (as well as the US government and various other officials) for allegedly retaliating against him after he said he was writing a tell-all about his years working for Trump.
The Class Action Lawsuit Against the Trump Biz and the Trumps
In October 2018, the Trump Organization, Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, Don Jr., and Eric Trump were sued as part of a class action suit that alleged, per Just Security, “that the defendants used their brand name to defraud thousands of working-class individuals by promoting numerous businesses in exchange for ’secret payments.’” The suit also alleged that the defendants were “liable for a ‘pattern of racketeering activity’ violating the RICO Act,” in addition to violating “numerous state consumer protection laws concerning fair business practices and competition.”
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund Voting Rights Lawsuit
The Legal Defense Fund is currently suing Trump, the Trump campaign, and the RNC for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election, alleging that in doing so, they violated the Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act.
The Trump Tower Assault Lawsuit
Five individuals are suing Trump and others over the allegation that the Trump Organization’s then chief of security, Keith Schiller, hit one of them on the head when they were protesting outside of the company’s Manhattan headquarters in 2015. Last October, Trump was deposed under oath about the incident, and it was during this deposition that we learned he’s terrified of being killed by a piece of fruit.
A voter leaves after casting her ballot in a special congressional election on Jan. 11 in Miramar, Fla. (photo: Rebecca Blackwell/AP)
A combination of new election laws and congressional redistricting has made it harder for Black communities in Florida to organize and vote, activists say.
Ben Frazier and his small civil rights organization, the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, recently spent an afternoon in the city helping a group of older Black voters update their voter registration.
That way, Frazier said, there are no issues when they go to vote.
"We don't want your voter registration form to be thrown out for any reason," he said. "They are doing a lot of different things to suppress the Black vote in this city and in this state."
Last year, Republican lawmakers in Florida passed Senate Bill 90, a sweeping law requiring people to apply to vote by mail more often. It also set new limits on drop boxes. And this year, legislators passed Senate Bill 524, which creates new and harsher penalties for voter registration organizations for things like turning in forms late.
And notably, Frazier said, the latter law created a new policing unit focused on voting crimes.
"I think all of that has a chilling effect. People are afraid of the police," he said. "We know that this is one of many attempts to suppress the Black vote."
On Thursday, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis announced this new policing unit is charging 20 people with voting illegally in 2020. He said those individuals had felony convictions that prevent them from getting their voting rights back. Several details were not made public at the time, though, including that some of those charged have told the Tampa Bay Times and the Miami Herald that they weren't told they couldn't vote. Their races were also not disclosed.
DeSantis said in a press conference that the charges and the investigation carried out by the new agency mark the beginning of the state getting serious about combating alleged voter fraud.
"Before we proposed this [unit] there were just examples of this stuff seeming to fall through the cracks," he said. "So this is just the opening salvo, this is not the sum total of 2020." Experts have found voter fraud to be exceedingly rare.
Black activists say the reaction to the 2020 election from Republicans leaders in the state is part of a larger effort to diminish Black voting power.
Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that SB 90, in particular, is part of the state's long and "grotesque" history of racial discrimination. Soon after the ruling, an appeals court ordered that the law stay in place while legal challenges worked their way through the courts. The Justice Department in recent days agreed that the law is intentionally discriminatory.
Driving change in Duval County
Reginald Gundy, the pastor at Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in Jacksonville, says all these new rules in Florida feel deeply personal.
Gundy has spent a lot of his time registering voters in communities of color — mostly Black voters — in North Florida. Since 2018, Gundy estimates he's registered more than 80,000 people in Duval County alone, which is the county encompassing Jacksonville.
Gundy also works to get the vote out, making sure that the people his group registers actually go to the polls during elections.
"If they don't go to polls, we would be like, 'Hey, look you are registered to vote, you haven't voted, you need to go vote,' " he said. "We can't tell people who to vote for, but we've been very good at that. So, as a result of that it has brought about a change in Duval County."
In 2020, Joe Biden won Duval County. It was the first time in decades a Democratic presidential nominee won there.
Gundy says this change is not something that went unnoticed by Republican leaders in Florida. In fact, he thinks it's why DeSantis recently redrew the state's congressional lines in a way that cut the number of opportunity districts for Black voters in half.
Before redistricting, the state had four seats where Black voters had enough votes to elect the candidate of their choice. Now the state only has two seats like this. One of those lost seats included Black communities in Jacksonville.
"The way they have reconfigured — redrawn the district in Duval County — has taken away the right for Blacks to vote and have a representative in Congress," Gundy said. "We will have a congressional leader without proper representation for who we are."
Gundy says Black voting power and organizational power is the weakest it's been in decades.
"It's sad and we've got to figure out how to fix it," he said.
In a statement, DeSantis' office said his redistricting decision had nothing to do with politics. A spokesperson said the governor's priority was to "make sure that the congressional maps would be constitutional and withstand anticipated legal challenges."
The argument DeSantis made to the state legislature when he vetoed their maps and submitted his own is that he thought the majority-minority district that included Jacksonville is unconstitutional. In a letter to lawmakers, he said the district wasn't compact and "didn't conform to usual political or geographic boundaries." He argued the district was written to favor one race over another, which DeSantis said violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Michael Sampson II, with the Jacksonville Community Action Committee, says he does not buy that DeSantis — who's thought to be considering a presidential run — didn't make a political calculation here.
"It's a clear choice to dilute the Black voting power, the Black political power in D.C., especially as the governor is planning his run for president," he said.
Sampson adds that what is happening in Florida amounts to a "white blacklash" reacting to a summer of civil rights protest following the murder of George Floyd.
Christina Kittle with Florida For All agrees.
"There's been just a clear attack on organizers and protesters within the Black community, especially since 2020," she said. "When there are clear attacks like that it does make it difficult for us to move. But I don't think ... it hasn't stopped us. We are still out there doing the work. I see other people are too. It's just more difficult."
Meanwhile the state has big elections on the horizon this fall. DeSantis is up for reelection. And Rep. Val Demings is vying to oust Sen. Marco Rubio. If she wins the uphill battle, Demings would be the state's first Black U.S. senator.
Amazon acquired iRobot. (photo: Joanne Imperio/The Atlantic)
The company’s purchase of iRobot, the maker of the Roomba, likely has little to do with cleaning floors.
But my suspicion is that, for Amazon, the deal has nothing to do with cleaning your floors. What it seems to be about—expanding the company’s reach further into people’s lives—should trouble everyone.
Amazon’s monopoly power looks like this: Sales on Amazon account for at least half of all online commerce in the U.S. Three out of every four product searches begin on the site. Amazon’s shipping and warehousing service delivers about a quarter of all e-commerce packages in America and is on pace to overtake UPS as the second-largest consumer package-delivery company after the U.S. Postal Service. Amazon Web Services is by far the largest cloud-computing company in the country. Amazon Echo accounts for two-thirds of all smart speakers. This is by no means a complete accounting.
The iRobot deal follows a known Amazon strategy, one that Jeff Bezos has admitted to in the past: using mergers to buy its way to dominance. (I asked Amazon if this is what it’s doing with Roomba, but the company did not comment.) Several companies make and sell robotic vacuums, including brands like Shark and others. But Roomba is the household name, so ubiquitous that it’s shorthand for every other robot vacuum available. By simply taking over the company that makes the most popular product in the industry, Amazon can grow its monopoly without actually having to out-innovate and out-compete its rivals.
David Dayen: America’s monopoly problem goes way beyond the tech giants
Amazon can then use its gatekeeper power by pairing Roomba with its monopoly online marketplace and Prime subscription program, leaving other vacuum brands to wither and atrophy, unable to gain the attention and prominence held by Roomba on the country’s most popular shopping site.
Amazon has used a range of anti-competitive tactics to secure a commanding position across a variety of home-tech products, all designed to further its dominance of the smart home. The company often sells its Echo smart speakers at a loss, mirroring the predatory pricing strategy it used to sell diapers, its Kindle, and even its Prime Video service in order to drive out rivals and expand its primacy. Amazon might very well employ the same strategy with Roomba. Combine its monopoly retail power with below-cost pricing, and the deal becomes a competition killer.
This merger isn’t just about controlling the robot-vacuum industry, or even about smart-home devices. Owning Roomba would give the world’s most dominant spy-tech maker yet another portal into our homes and lives. It could map where we live, what we own, and what it should be selling to its hundreds of millions of captured customers.
Amazon got its towering place in home tech the same way it is expanding it now—by buying other companies. It bought the voice-assistant start-up Evi Technologies in 2013 to help create what would eventually become Alexa, the voice of Echo and by far the leading smart-speaker voice assistant. Then, to extend its eyes and ears into people’s homes, Amazon bought two start-ups: the camera maker Blink in 2017 and a doorbell company called Ring in 2018. Today, Ring accounts for an estimated 40 percent of all video doorbells installed in America.
These devices have given Amazon incredible access to people’s daily lives. The company has a documented history of leveraging the data its vast home-tech network captures in order to grow—and to expand its monopoly power. For example, Amazon has for years used Alexa’s algorithm to steer customers toward Amazon’s own products. Ring monitors and records every interaction with a customer's doorbell, including every doorbell buzz and every movement in proximity to the outside of the door, and congressional investigators found that “acquiring Ring and Blink was in part to expand and reinforce [Amazon’s] market power for its other business lines.”
Amazon’s quest for consumer data comes with deep and real concerns about the way the company uses the images and sounds its home-tech products capture. It has partnered with police departments across America to get its Ring doorbell installed in neighborhoods, where it is used to surveil communities unknowingly and without consent. Amazon then shares the video footage its doorbells capture with police without a warrant or permission. Its Echo speakers have captured private conversations and shared those with Amazon without the permission of the eavesdropped. (On its website, Amazon says, “On some occasions Alexa may accidentally wake up when the wake word wasn’t spoken, but your Echo device thought it was” and that the company is “constantly improving our wake word detection technology.”)
Read: How to fight Amazon (before you turn 29)
The latest Roomba models capture information that Amazon, at the moment, doesn’t have access to. iRobot’s new operating system maps the floor plan and contents of the spaces in which it operates. The vacuums are now equipped with a camera so it can respond to commands like “Clean in front of the couch.” But that means it knows what kind of couch you have—and crib, and dog bed, and so on. If the deal goes through, Amazon will too, whether or not you wanted Amazon to know that stuff. (Amazon did not comment on how it would use data collected by Roombas.)
If this deal feels bad and intrusive, that’s because it is. People buy a Roomba because they want something that will clean their floors. Most folks don’t want a spinning, camera-equipped data vacuum taking stock of their home and its contents, then beaming that information back to the most powerful retail monopoly on Earth.
And Amazon’s data sweeps are more than creepy; they’re a roadblock to other companies that might want to jump into the smart-home market. Through its acquisition of Whole Foods, its attempted purchase of One Medical, and other deals, Amazon is positioned to crush new rivals. Every piece of information Amazon collects about people’s lives—what they most want to buy, what questions they most commonly ask, what they keep inside their homes—raises the barrier to fair competition even higher.
Regulators will look at this deal closely, as they should. The direction of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is changing under the leadership of Lina Khan, a critic of monopoly power and Amazon specifically. If the agency sees this deal as I do, Amazon may have to leave the floor-cleaning to someone else.
Nancy Davis. Lawyer Benjamin Crump said Louisiana’s abortion ban was clearly confusing to interpret. (photo: WAFB Baton Rouge)
Nancy Davis, denied abortion in home state despite fetus being diagnosed with fatal skull condition, forced to travel for procedure
Nancy Davis, 36, has retained lawyer Ben Crump as she becomes the latest to embody the gut-wrenching decisions some women are being forced to make after the US supreme court’s decision in June to strip away nationwide abortion rights, according to a statement from the attorney’s office.
Davis’s home state is among those that have outlawed abortion with very few exceptions. Davis, from Baton Rouge, said publicly that she tried to have her pregnancy aborted after a 10-week ultrasound revealed that her fetus was missing the top of its skull – a condition known as acrania, which kills babies within minutes or hours of birth.
But because acrania was not explicitly included on Louisiana’s list of conditions justifying an exception from the state’s abortion ban, the hospital that treated Davis turned down terminating her pregnancy, which, as of Friday, was in its 13th week.
The medical center, Woman’s Hospital in Baton Rouge, directed her to an abortion clinic, saying her Medicaid insurance wouldn’t cover the procedure. But Louisiana’s abortion clinics have announced plans to leave the state amid legal battles over the ban’s enforcement, the New Orleans news outlet Gambit reported.
The state senator who authored Louisiana’s abortion ban, Katrina Jackson, insisted to Baton Rouge TV station WAFB that the hospital should have authorized the termination of Davis’s pregnancy, because the statute contains exceptions for fetuses which are not viable outside a mother’s womb.
Nonetheless, in his office’s statement about working with Davis, Crump said Louisiana’s abortion ban was clearly confusing to interpret and producing negative consequences, and he accused its authors of “inflicting profound emotional and physical trauma” on his client, along with other similarly situated women.
Davis as of Sunday was planning to travel to North Carolina – which has an abortion ban that she qualifies to be exempt from – rather than give birth to what would be her second child, which she would lose virtually immediately.
“It’s hard knowing that … I’m carrying it to bury it,” Davis told WAFB earlier this month.
The statement about Crump’s office working with Davis stopped short of saying what their side’s legal plans are, other than noting that she planned to raise money for her out-of-state abortion trip through an online GoFundMe campaign whose stated goal is $20,000.
But Davis told WAFB she hoped state lawmakers consider additional medical conditions to serve as exceptions to the abortion ban, which threatens providers with criminal prosecution and forfeiting their medical licenses.
“This is one that needs to be in that list [of exceptions],” Davis said of acrania.
The statement from Crump’s office added: “Ms Nancy Davis was put in a horrifically cruel position.
“Ms Davis has had to endure unthinkable emotional pain and mounting physical risk.”
A Woman’s Hospital spokesperson declined comment when asked by CNN, citing medical privacy requirements. But the spokesperson did say unviable pregnancies were complex to navigate.
Other clients of Crump have included relatives of George Floyd, who was murdered by Minneapolis police; Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teen who was shot dead by a neighborhood watch captain; and Breonna Taylor, who was killed by Kentucky police while they searched her home. Crump’s office helped the families of Floyd, Martin and Taylor secure tens of millions of dollars in settlement money.
Word of Davis’s plight emerged almost at the same time that a Florida court blocked a pregnant 16-year-old girl from having an abortion. The court found the girl was too immature to decide whether or not she should have an abortion and therefore must instead give birth to a child.
Meanwhile, earlier in the summer, a 10-year-old Ohio girl who was raped and impregnated had to travel to neighboring Indiana to terminate her pregnancy because of her state’s ban on most abortions. Though some media outlets and rightwing politicians baselessly questioned whether the girl existed or was instead a liberal hoax to stoke support for abortion rights, authorities have since charged a man in connection with the girl’s rape, a crime to which he has purportedly confessed.
Section 377A of Singapore's Penal Code was promulgated in 1938 by the British colonial government when Singapore was a British colony. (photo: AFP/Getty Images/CNN)
"Sex between consenting men should not be criminalized. There is no justification to prosecute people for it, nor to make it a crime," he said at his annual policy address, the National Day Rally, carried live on television.
"I believe (repeal) is the right thing to do, and something that most Singaporeans will now accept. This will bring the law into line with current social mores, and I hope, provide some relief to gay Singaporeans," said the Prime Minister.
"Like every human society, we also have gay people in our midst. They are our fellow Singaporeans. They are our colleagues, our friends, our family members. They too want to live their own lives, participate in our community, and contribute fully to Singapore," he added.
However, the government will not change the country's legal definition of marriage, as being between a man and a woman, Lee said, implying that laws will be strengthened to protect that definition.
"We will protect the definition of marriage, as contained in the Interpretation Act and the Women's Charter, from being challenged constitutionally in the courts. We have to amend the constitution to protect it, and we will do so," he said, according to his official Twitter account.
A community statement by more than 20 LGBTQ groups in Singapore called the planned decriminalization of sex between men as "long overdue" and "a significant milestone and a powerful statement that state-sanctioned discrimination has no place in Singapore."
As to the definition of marriage, the statement stressed that "any move by the government to introduce further legislation or constitutional amendments that signal LGBTQ+ people as unequal citizens is disappointing. We urge the government not to heed recent calls from religious conservatives to enshrine the definition of marriage into the constitution."
Colonial-era law
Section 377A of Singapore's Penal Code was promulgated in 1938 by the British colonial government when Singapore was a British colony. It punishes gay sex -- even if it is consensual, between adults, and takes place privately -- for up to two years of imprisonment.
Similar laws were imposed in territories ruled by the British empire, such as India, and some of these countries have since revoked such laws over the years.
LGBTQ activists in Singapore have long called for the law to be scrapped.
In 2007, the Singaporean government repealed parts of Section 377 of its criminal law after a comprehensive review but retained 377A.
In February 2022, Singapore's Court of Appeal ruled that the section would remain in the law, but it cannot be enforced to prosecute men for having gay sex.
The trilingual Prime Minister made his address in Malay, Mandarin and English, a speech reflecting the diverse demographics in Singapore.
During his speech, Lee addressed long-standing concerns voiced by conservative religious groups and leaders on other related issues like same-sex marriage, which is not currently legal in the country.
Lee said: "We need to find the right way to reconcile and accommodate both the traditional mores of our society, and the aspiration of gay Singaporeans to be respected and accepted.
"Most Singaporeans would like to keep our society like this. This is the Government's position too," he said. "We have upheld and reinforced the importance of families through many national policies, and we will continue to do so," he said.
While societal attitudes in Singapore are still largely conservative, activists say it is changing, and the government was "considering the best way forward" on the issues.
Some corners of Asia have seen recent progress on the issue of same-sex marriage. In 2019, the self-ruled island of Taiwan became the first place in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. In June, Thailand edged closer to becoming the first place in Southeast Asia to legalize same-sex unions when lawmakers passed four different bills aiming to provide greater rights to gay couples, such as the ability to adopt children and manage assets jointly.
Hogeweyk awards a level of independence and a sense of normality that is unknown to the traditional model of the nursing home. (photo: ut)
Can miniature towns make dementia care more humane?
Inside, nurses and doctors don’t wear uniforms, meals are cooked inside the home with groceries from the village store, and other Weesp residents are free to dine at the on-site restaurant. These design choices aim to deinstitutionalize senior living, blurring the lines between what typically happens in front of residents and what happens out of sight.
The style of care this facility pioneered has been nicknamed the “dementia village,” and it has been emulated across the world. It’s architecturally organized around choice: By giving residents a high level of freedom, its designers hope to minimize issues associated with dementia like aggression, confusion, and wandering.
Jeffrey Jackson, left, and Leo Tuiasosopo, center, maneuver a crab pot while Ashlan Prout prepares to send nonlegal crabs down a discard chute in October 2020. (photo: Gabriel Prout)
Scientists blame climate change as consumers mourn the potential loss of a seafood delicacy
Okay, not that last one. But everyone agrees on one point: The disappearance of Alaska’s snow crabs probably is connected to climate change. Marine biologists and those in the fishing industry fear the precipitous and unexpected crash of this luxury seafood item is a harbinger, a warning about how quickly a fishery can be wiped out in this new, volatile world.
Gabriel Prout and his brothers Sterling and Ashlan were blindsided. Harvests of Alaskan king crab — the bigger, craggier species that was the star of the television show “Deadliest Catch” — have been on a slow decline for over a decade. But in 2018 and 2019, scientists had seemingly great news about Alaska’s snow crabs: Record numbers of juvenile crabs were zooming around the ocean bottom, suggesting a massive haul for subsequent fishing seasons.
Prout, 32, and his brothers bought out their father’s partner, becoming part owners of the 116-foot Silver Spray. They took out loans and bought $4 million in rights to harvest a huge number of crabs. It was a year that many young commercial fishers in the Bering Sea bought into the fishery, going from deckhands to owners. Everyone was convinced the 2021 snow crab season was going to be huge.
Scientists, despite earlier optimistic signs, found that snow crab stocks were down 90 percent. The season opened and the total allowable harvest went from 45 million pounds to 5.5 million pounds. Commercial fishers couldn’t even catch that quantity.
In October 2021, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game closed the king crab season entirely to harvesting, for the first time since the 1990s.
“It was a struggle,” Prout said. “We were pulling up close to blank pots. We’d be searching several miles of ocean floor and not even pulling up 100 crabs. We were grinding away and barely caught what we were allowed to catch.”
King crabs are massive, up to 20 pounds each, with thick, spiky shells that diners need tools to crack. Snow crabs are between 2 and 4 pounds and have thinner shells that can be cracked with your hands. Snow crabs are the biggest crab industry in Alaska and, while still a splurge (in a normal year around $25 per pound), they tend to be much less expensive than kings. Both have sweet, briny white meat that pulls out in long pieces.
Go to Joe’s Stone Crab in D.C. for an order of those sweet, luxurious crab legs and you’re likely to have palpitations: $199.95 for 1½ pounds of king crab. King crab is served chilled with drawn butter and is cracked tableside. But still, that price tag is startling.
For restaurateurs seeking new sources to make up for Alaska’s shortfall, there’s an additional headache: The U.S. government in March banned imports of Russian fish and seafood products, along with other consumer items such as vodka and diamonds, as part of its expanding sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
At Klaw, a hot new restaurant in Miami, managing partner George Atterbury has worked with Troika Seafood, a Norwegian seafood wholesaler, to bring in live red king crab from Finnmark County, Norway’s northernmost county. They are flown overnight via Norse Atlantic Airways into Fort Lauderdale. Each of the prehistoric-looking animals, which can have a five-foot leg span, is tracked with a QR code.
“We house the live king crab in a separate facility within our restaurant in 2,000-gallon tanks,” Atterbury said. “The costs fluctuate aggressively, but we understand that we can only pass a small percentage to the customer as we are price-sensitive on what is reasonable.”
The collapse of two of three major crab stocks in Alaska — there’s a third, bairdi crab, also called tanner crab, which is doing fine, but is a much smaller industry — is more than a gastronomic inconvenience for the one-percenters. It is the main source of income for many of the 65 communities that make up the Western Alaska Community Development Quota Program, which allocates a portion of the annual fish harvest of certain commercial species directly to coalitions of villages that, because of geographic isolation and diminished access to sources of income, have had limited economic opportunities, says Heather McCarty, a fisheries consultant in Juneau.
The program was established to provide economic and social benefits for residents of western Alaska, alleviating poverty in what often are Indigenous communities.
“I work in the Pribilof Islands for an Aleut community of 450 people, which is heavily invested in the crab quota,” McCarty said. On the island of St. Paul, Trident Seafoods has one of the largest crab processing plants in the world, employing as many as 400 workers during peak snow crab season in February. This February, it was quiet.
“The whole community of St. Paul is run on the fish tax. It’s 85 percent of the revenue of the community,” she said. “They had some [financial] reserves last year, but it’s not going to go well in the future. King crab has been declining for a while, but snow crab had been quite successful and took a nosedive that nobody expected.”
She says what happened with snow crabs is an example of the kind of rapid changes in resource availability that climate change is making commonplace beneath the sea. In some cases, the abrupt changes are apparent when species flourish. “There’s been a record return of sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay,” she said. “It does seem that these rapid changes can have extreme consequences.”
But what happened to those snow crabs?
“We don’t have data to specifically say what happened,” said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Bob Foy, the science and research director of the agency’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “What we know is that we had extreme heat wave in 2019, and we had numerous fish and crab stocks moving into areas they hadn’t been historically. The fishery moved its effort toward the northwest.”
But movement alone doesn’t explain it. Crabs are a benthic species, meaning they crawl around on the ocean bottom and are not able to migrate as quickly as many finfish.
“The biomass of crabs up there at St. Lawrence Island [northwest of mainland Alaska in the Bering Sea] didn’t change much. What that suggests is there was a large mortality event or they moved into deeper water beyond our survey or into the Russian shelf,” Foy said, but he sounds skeptical about that last possibility. “The magnitude of biomass could not all have moved without us detecting it. We believe we had a very large mortality event, which points to an extreme event that we have never seen before in the Bering Sea.”
He said the crabs, perhaps because of heightened sensitivity to their ecosystem, are like the canary in a coal mine — for the climate and those who make their living from crabbing.
Crabbers are waiting to hear whether the state’s $200 million snow crab industry will be severely curtailed for the 2022-2023 season, and on Oct. 15, they find out if the king crab season is closed entirely for a second year.
Jamie Goen, the executive director of the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers trade association, said the crab collapse is affecting blue collar workers and small family businesses the most. For commercial fishers, nothing like farmers’ “crop insurance” is available, and although the U.S. Department of Commerce is directing nearly $132 million to Alaska for fishery disasters, it will take years for money to reach those affected, Goen said. And if reports of crab deaths are greatly exaggerated and the crustaceans have instead permanently migrated northward to colder waters, fishing farther north in the Bering Sea is too dangerous for Alaskan owner-operator vessels, in part because there are no Coast Guard services there to respond to medical emergencies or boat trouble.
The Prout family is diversifying by “tendering” cod and herring, essentially acting as a courier to transport caught fish to the canneries so the commercial fishers can keep fishing. They’re hauling other people’s catch to work off that $4 million loan.
“To recoup a 90 percent loss, there aren’t a lot of options,” Gabriel Prout said via satellite phone from aboard the Silver Spray, en route from Cordova to Kodiak to tender cod. “It’s a bleak time for the industry. A lot of people will sell their vessels or sell their quota to make ends meet. Dad is handling this remarkably well, but he’s always an optimistic person.”
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