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South Korea’s military detected the two launches from the North’s eastern coastal Tongchon area around midday on Friday, Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. It said both missiles flew about 230 kilometers (140 miles) at a maximum altitude of 24 kilometers (15 miles).
The statement said South Korea strongly condemns the launches, calling them “a grave provocation” that undermines regional peace and violates U.N. Security Council resolutions banning any ballistic activities by North Korea.
The U.S. Indo Pacific Command said the launches highlighted the “destabilizing impact” of North Korea’s illicit nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. The Japanese Defense Ministry said it also detected the launches and that the type of missiles used and their flight information were still being analyzed.
South Korea's Foreign Ministry said its top nuclear envoy held separate phone talks with his U.S. and Japanese counterparts soon after the launches. It said the three agreed to strengthen trilateral coordination on North Korea while repeating their calls for the North to stop weapons tests and return to talks.
The back-to-back launches, the North’s first ballistic missile tests since Oct. 14, came on the final day of South Korea’s annual 12-day “Hoguk” field exercises, which also involved an unspecified number of U.S. troops this year. Next week, South Korean and U.S. air forces plan to conduct a large-scale training as well.
North Korea sees such regular drills by Seoul and Washington as practice for launching an attack on the North, though the allies say their exercises are defensive in nature.
Next week’s “Vigilant Storm” aerial drills are to run from Monday to Friday and involve about 140 South Korean warplanes and about 100 U.S. aircraft. The planes include sophisticated fighter jets like F-35 from both nations, South Korea’s Defense Ministry said in a statement earlier Friday.
Since late September, North Korea has launched a barrage of missiles toward the sea in what it called simulated tests of tactical nuclear weapons systems designed to attack South Korean and U.S. targets. North Korea says its testing activities were meant to issue a warning amid a series of South Korea-U.S. military drills. But some experts say Pyongyang has also used its rivals’ drills as a chance to test new weapons systems, boost its nuclear capability and increase its leverage in future dealings with Washington and Seoul.
Tongchon, the launch site for the North’s Friday launches, is about 60 kilometers (37 miles) away from the inter-Korean land border. The area was closer to South Korean territory than any other missile launch site North Korea has used so far this year, according to South Korea’s Defense Ministry.
South Korea and the United States have strongly warned North Korea against using its nuclear weapons preemptively.
The Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy report issued on Thursday stated that any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies and partners “will result in the end of that regime.”
“There is no scenario in which the Kim regime could employ nuclear weapons and survive,” the report said. The Pentagon said it will continue to deter North Korean attacks through “forward posture,” including nuclear deterrence, integrated air and missile defenses, and close coordination and interoperability with South Korea.
During a visit to Tokyo on Tuesday, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman reiterated that the United States would fully use its military capabilities, “including nuclear,” to defend its allies South Korea and Japan.
Last month, South Korea’s Defense Ministry warned North Korea that using its nuclear weapons would put it on a “path of self-destruction.”
There are concerns that the North could up the ante in the coming weeks by conducting its first nuclear test since 2017.
Rafael Grossi, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Thursday that a new nuclear test explosion by North Korea “would be yet another confirmation of a program which is moving full steam ahead in a way that is incredibly concerning.”
He said the U.N. agency has been observing preparations for a new test, which would be the North’s seventh overall, but gave no indication of whether an atomic blast is imminent.
In recent days, North Korea has also fired hundreds of shells in inter-Korean maritime buffer zones that the two Koreas established in 2018 to reduce frontline military tensions. North Korea has said the artillery firings were in reaction to South Korean live-fire exercises at land border areas.
On Monday, the rival Koreas exchanged warning shots along their disputed western sea boundary, a scene of past bloodshed and naval battles, as they accused each other of violating the boundary.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (photo: AP)
“How can Russia be among the G-20 if it is deliberately working for starvation on several continents?” the Ukrainian president said.
“How can Russia be among the G-20 if it is deliberately working for starvation on several continents?” Zelenskyy said during an address on Ukrainian television.
“This is nonsense,” he said before suggesting that Russia should have “no place” in the Group of 20 nations, which comprises the world’s largest economies and works to address such issues as sustainable development, the global economy and climate change.
He also said that Russia was “doing everything to ensure that millions of Africans, millions of residents of the Middle East and South Asia find themselves in conditions of artificial famine or at least a severe price crisis.”
His comments came after the Kremlin said Saturday that it was going to pull out of the U.N.-brokered grain export agreement to allow safe passage for ships carrying grain in and out of the city of Odesa and two other Ukrainian ports.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Ukraine’s military targeted its naval ships near the port city of Sevastopol on the Russian-annexed Crimean Peninsula on Saturday.
Accusing British navy “specialists” of helping to coordinate what it called a “terrorist” attack, it said the attack had been carried out with 16 drones.
The Ukrainian government has denied it was behind the attack and Britain's Defense Ministry has not responded to NBC News' requests for comment.
Russia faced international condemnation over the decision. President Joe Biden warned that global hunger could increase because of Russia’s decision to suspend the deal.
“It’s really outrageous,” said Biden, speaking in Wilmington, Delaware, on Saturday, as reported by The Associated Press. “There’s no merit to what they’re doing. The U.N. negotiated that deal and that should be the end of it.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken also accused Russia of weaponizing food. “Any act by Russia to disrupt these critical grain exports is essentially a statement that people and families around the world should pay more for food or go hungry,” he said in a statement Saturday.
Elsewhere, the European Union's foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, wrote on Twitter that Moscow's move could affect the delivery of much needed grain, while Britain's foreign secretary, James Cleverly, said on Twitter that Russia should allow the exports to “reach the world’s hungry.”
Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, scolded the U.S. on Sunday for making what he said were false assertions about Moscow’s decision to suspend its participation.
“Washington’s reaction to the terrorist attack on the port of Sevastopol is truly outrageous,” Antonov said on Telegram. “We have not seen any signs of condemnation of the reckless actions by the Kyiv regime.”
Russia's announcement came one day after António Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, urged Moscow and Ukraine to renew the export deal, which was scheduled to expire on Nov. 19.
Guterres said Friday that the deal — brokered by the U.N. and Turkey — had helped “to cushion the suffering that this global cost-of-living crisis is inflicting on billions of people.”
After Russia’s announcement, Guterres' spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, said it was “vital that all parties refrain from any action that would imperil” the initiative.
Ukraine is one of the world’s biggest agricultural producers and exporters and plays a critical role in supplying grains to the global market.
In May, the U.N. World Food Program said some 47 million people were at risk of “acute hunger,” as Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February halted grain shipments, with the steepest rises predicted in sub-Saharan Africa.
The grain deal had restarted shipments from Ukraine, allowing sales on world markets, targeting the prewar level of 5 million metric tons exported from Ukraine each month.
More than 9 million tons of corn, wheat, sunflower products, barley, rapeseed and soya have been exported since the deal was made.
Moscow's departure from the grain deal marks a new development in a war that has recently been dominated by Russian retreats in the face of a Ukrainian counteroffensive that has recaptured large areas of territory from Moscow's forces in the east of the country.
Demonstrators rally for reproductive freedom and voting rights on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, earlier this month. (photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images)
Campaigners feel groundswell of support for proposal to stop a 1931 abortion ban from going into effect
“Who wants to be a dad?” he yelled. Like a park-goer throwing bread to pigeons, he chucked the forms around the room and watched as dozens of young men swarmed to sign them.
The campaign to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution was already under way here even before Roe fell, and it has become an embittered battle in Michigan – to keep a 90-year-old abortion ban off the books. Campaigners fear that ban would criminalise doctors and pregnant people and deny essential medical care, such as miscarriage medication, now that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists in the US.
The battle in Michigan has brought death threats and vandalism from pro-choice militants. On the anti-choice side, it has involved dirty tactics from the Republican party, which tried to block a petition brought by nearly 800,000 Michiganders over formatting errors, and has peddled a wide campaign of misinformation.
Julie Falbaum, a campaigner for the yes campaign on Proposal 3, which would establish reproductive rights, believes her son’s story – that he managed to collect so many signatures at a frat party without a campaign plan - is reflective of a broad coalition of support for “Prop 3”, which is supported by men and women, young people and older people, Republicans and Democrats.
“I see Michigan as pivotal to the future of democracy in the United States,” says Deirdre Roney, 60, who travelled from Los Angeles to campaign for the ballot in Detroit, where she grew up. Explaining that Detroit is the biggest voting bloc in Michigan, and that Michigan is one of the swingiest states in the country, she adds: “This is a blueprint. If this passes in Michigan, other states can use it.”
Indeed, Michigan’s elections are at the center of a national abortion debate that has spiraled to extremes. Since the constitutional right to abortion fell on 24 June, almost half of US states have banned it, or tried to.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more votes for [Proposal] 3 than for the governor’s race,” says Jeff Timmer, a senior adviser for the Lincoln Project, a coalition of Republicans and former Republicans who campaign to keep Trump out of office.
Timmer, who was a Republican party strategist for more than 30 years, says statewide abortion bans are turning people off the party.
“The Republicans have used abortion for decades as a means to motivate their pro-life religious base. And for most everybody who was engaged in that rhetoric, it was always theoretical. They never really had to worry about real-life consequences – and now they do,” Timmer says.
“It’s a simple question of: how long should my daughter, my sister, my wife, my granddaughter go to prison? Should my doctor go to prison? Quite honestly, that’s crazy. Most rational people would say no to that.”
Alisha Mcneeli, 44, a lifelong Republican who lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, will be voting for the proposal, which also enshrines contraception rights and IVF.
“I have always been a pro-choice Republican,” says Mcneeli, 44, a community outreach director for the Michigan child protection registry.
“Since I’ve become a mother, I’m more pro-choice than ever. Being a parent is the hardest thing – physically, emotionally and financially - that I’ve ever done in my life. I wholeheartedly believe that if a woman is not ready, she should not be forced to.”
A 2016 Trump voter, Mcneeli will also vote Democratic for her national representatives in the midterms. She says Lindsey Graham touting a national 15-week ban on abortion – a proposal that didn’t pass in the Senate – could be enough to turn her away from the party for ever.
“I feel like I’m slowly already doing that. He promised this was not going to even be talked about at the federal level. He completely lied. That makes me sick – I’m so angry about it,” she said.
Falbaum says the biggest change in attitude she has seen since she started working on the petition earlier this year is the gender split.
“In the past, it was a woman’s issue. It was: ‘Talk to my wife, my girlfriend, I don’t know about those things.’ And now I hear men not only understanding that it’s not a woman’s issue, but actively supporting it,” says Falbaum.
Jeff Bolanger, 69, is one of them. He lives in downtown Ann Arbor, a small and relatively liberal city near Detroit that is home to the University of Michigan. “I don’t really think it’s appropriate to control people’s choices about that,” Bolanger said.
Joaquin Gabaldon, 30, also says he’s voting yes when Falbaum and Roney knock his door.
“I mean, it’s healthcare, it’s rather straightforward,” he said.
In Wayne county’s Grosse Point, a wealthy, mostly white, mostly Democratic area that has recently seen more election deniers and Trump supporters, several people on the doorstep said they hadn’t heard of Proposal 3, but would support it in theory. In suburban Sterling Heights, in the divided Macomb county, Ed Bristow, 60, who works in human resources, opposes Proposal 3: “It just cuts into the sovereignty of the family unit.”
Democrats in Michigan joke that the signage of the no campaign – “Vote no. Too confusing. Too extreme” – makes them look silly: absent a real critique of the ballot initiative, instead they focus on making voters feel they can’t understand for themselves. But a lot of emotive misinformation is circulating, including materials from the Catholic church that suggest a number of policies could arise from voting yes, including child sterilisation and abortion without parental consent – none of which has been proposed.
Darci McConnell, the communications director for the yes campaign, cites recent polling showing 64% of Michiganders support Proposal 3. “They’re very invested in misinformation, because they know people don’t want to ban abortion – that a 1931 law has no support,” she says of the no campaign.
“There’s been a lot of misinformation,” says Pastor John Duckworth of Wayne county. “People have been saying you don’t have to be a doctor to perform an abortion [under Proposal] 3. They’re talking about gender reassignment surgery. None of that is true.”
Referring to African Americans, he said: “There weren’t many laws from 1931 that benefited my community.
“Now of course, [black voters] are not a monolith,” he added. “But alongside Roe came protections for gay marriage, for interracial marriage, for contraception … This is about civil rights. For people who have had their bodies controlled for hundreds of years, this is very scary.”
Falbaum described a middle-aged man she saw on the day the supreme court decision leaked. She went out to set up her petition stand to get abortion on the ballot at a farmer’s market in downtown Ann Arbor – only someone had gotten there before her.
“I said, ‘You’re first in line for the concert tickets!’” jokes Falbaum. “And he tells me his mom died in a back alley abortion, protecting him and his siblings before Roe was passed – because she knew she could not support another child. To honour her memory, he wanted to be first to sign the petition.”
How will she feel if Michigan votes yes on 8 November, as the polls suggest?
“It feels like a culmination of my life’s work,” says Falbaum, tearing up. “It just makes me feel safe.”
Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot, right, thanks Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, second from left, for his support and bringing in shipping containers to fill gaps in the border wall on Sept. 8, 2022, in Yuma, Ariz. (photo: Randy Hoeft/The Yuma Sun/AP)
On Monday, Gov. Doug Ducey began dropping the first of thousands of shipping containers along a 10-mile stretch of national forest in open defiance of federal authorities. In the days since, the Republican governor has transformed a remote section of rugged desert into what looks like a junkyard. Along the way, he has set the stage for an unprecedented legal showdown with the feds — all just in time for a critical midterm election in Arizona.
The battle is over a 60-foot-wide swath known as the “Roosevelt Reservation” — named for the president and conservative icon that created it 115 years ago — that cuts through the Coronado National Memorial, running parallel to the border. During a visit Wednesday, The Intercept observed a fleet of trucks and construction vehicles stacking 8,000-pound shipping containers one by one on the dirt road, which has historically fallen under federal jurisdiction. In a lawsuit he filed three days before the installation began, Ducey admitted he had not received authorization for the project but was proceeding anyway.
The governor’s actions create precisely the sort of state’s rights and border security confrontation the Biden administration would be inclined to avoid less than two weeks from the midterms. The situation has left environmental advocates racing to stop the project, which cuts through a corridor that is designated as critical for endangered jaguars. The environmentalists’ options, however, are limited.
Before the installation began, the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity separately filed a notice of intent to sue Ducey if he placed containers in the jaguar corridor. Under the Endangered Species Act, however, the governor has 60 days to change course before a court can issue an injunction. Based on the pace of installation observed this week, that could be enough time for Ducey to finish the project.
“That’s the tragedy of this whole scene and Ducey knows it,” Robin Silver, co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Intercept. Silver said federal action, specifically from the National Forest Service, was needed stop Ducey. So far, there’s been no sign of that happening. “The feds are silent,” Silver said. “Where are they?”
Ducey’s press secretary, C.J. Karamargin, rejected the notion that the governor was courting a standoff with federal officials. “It is the responsibility of the federal government to secure our country’s borders,” Karamargin told The Intercept. “That’s the goal here. The goal is not to clash, to use your word, with the Forest Service or the Bureau of Reclamation, or any of the federal agencies that have jurisdiction over land on the border. The goal is for them to live up to their responsibility and protecting Arizonans is a responsibility Gov. Ducey takes seriously.” He added that Ducey was aiming to finish the project “as soon as possible.”
When asked this week about Ducey’s rogue container drop, a spokesperson for Coronado National Forest forwarded The Intercept’s questions to a U.S. Forest Service official in Washington. The official in D.C. directed questions to the Department of Justice, which did not respond. For Silver, the silence and inaction are inexcusable.
“This is public lands that are being trashed, and they’re being trashed illegally,” he said. “They’re supposed to go through the process. They need to get a permit to do what they’re doing, but they’re just flaunting the fact that the feds are derelict in protecting our public lands, and that’s Ducey’s plan.”
In his lawsuit, Ducey argued that the claim of exclusive federal jurisdiction over the Roosevelt Reservation could be illegitimate, that the courts should figure that out. Until they did, he said, Arizona would keep dropping shipping containers in the national forest because the state is experiencing an invasion. The defendants targeted in Ducey’s suit included Randy Moore, Chief of the U.S. Forest Service; Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and their respective agencies; as well as Tom Vilsack, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.
“Throughout the lawsuit, Arizona repeatedly acknowledges that it is not authorized under current federal law to do what it’s doing and is, in essence, asking a judge to find some kind of loophole,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told The Intercept. “This is pretty unprecedented.”
“Invasion” Justification
Heading into the midterms, Republicans have leaned hard on a narrative of embattled states facing off against the federal government.
On the border, Ducey and his party have pointed to record-setting apprehension figures as proof of lawlessness. Many of those apprehensions, however, reflect people making repeat crossings after being rapidly expelled under a Trump-era policy that severely restricts asylum-seekers at ports of entry. Despite Republican claims of inaction, President Joe Biden has presided over the removal of nearly 2 million people, and migrants continue to die in record numbers crossing his supposedly open border.
Ducey’s suit — filed in federal court by a team of private lawyers with Phoenix-based firm Snell … Wilmer — pointed to an “unprecedented crisis” in the state. “Rather than cooperate and work together with Arizona, the federal government has taken a bureaucratic and adversarial role,” the lawsuit said.
The alleged federal obstruction revolves around roughly two dozen gaps in the border wall that were left unfinished when President Donald Trump left office. Despite a vow Biden made not to add another foot to the wall, the Department of Homeland Security said last month that it would soon begin filling some of those gaps. That work, however, has not yet started. Ducey’s suit argued that the slow pace forced his hand and petitioned the court to declare that his extraordinary measures — already being undertaken despite federal objections — were legal.
The “invasion” described in Ducey’s complaint consisted of illegal immigration and public safety threats, particularly around the issue of fentanyl seizures. Many of the claims failed to connect the alleged harms to gaps in the border wall, such as the fact that nearly all fentanyl seizures occur at ports of entry, not between them.
Ducey’s suit is part of a wider Republican effort to leverage a border “invasion” as a legal justification to take drastic, unilateral steps at the state level. “They want to assert some kind of a constitutional authority for the states to be supreme over the federal government in certain circumstances,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “That’s just not how the Constitution works.”
Ducey began using shipping containers as ad hoc border barriers in August. He pointed to two Biden-era policy decisions as justification. The first was the pause on border wall construction. The second was the end of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program, which forced tens of thousands asylum seekers to wait out their cases in some of the world’s most dangerous cities, leading to thousands of reports of extortion, kidnapping, rape and, in some cases, murder, of migrant men, women, and children.
Outraged by the cancellation, Ducey issued an executive order to fill gaps in the border wall in Yuma, Arizona, in August. The border town has become an immigration flashpoint in recent years. In 2019, while Trump’s Remain in Mexico program was in full swing, Mayor Doug Nicholls declared a state of emergency after an influx of asylum-seekers. In 2021, he did the same under Biden. Ducey highlighted the second instance but did not mention the first when he announced his shipping container deployment.
“Arizona has had enough,” he said. “We can’t wait any longer. The Biden administration’s lack of urgency on border security is a dereliction of duty.”
Cash for the installation comes from the “Arizona Border Security Fund,” a $335 million investment that Ducey describes as “the most meaningful border security legislation in Arizona history.”
On its website, Ducey’s office said the Yuma project would cost taxpayers $6 million. Local TV station KWTX, however, obtained the contract for the construction, which put the total at $13 million — enough to pay for 130,000 new textbooks for Arizona students or more than 3.4 million school lunches. The much larger project underway in Coronado is expected to cost $95 million.
At Ducey’s direction, Arizona contracted AshBritt, a Florida-based disaster recovery firm, for the Yuma project — the politically-connected company would later be rehired for Coronado. In Yuma, AshBritt’s 25-person crew stacked and welded pairs of metal shipping containers more than 20 feet high and topped them with concertina wire. Following the first day of construction, two of the containers toppled into the dirt.
Within two weeks, the governor’s project had “3,820 feet of previously open border closed with 130 shipping containers.” Border Patrol encounters, however, increased in Yuma after the installation. In his lawsuit, Ducey cited a news article with the title: “Migrants at Arizona Border Unhindered by Shipping Container Wall.”
There were jurisdictional issues as well, with Ducey placing dozens of containers on land belonging to the Cocopah Indian Tribe despite the tribe’s demand that he not do so.
The project was an example of “the state fighting the feds,” Santa Cruz County, Arizona, Sheriff David Hathaway said in an interview, adding that the “ridiculous” moves were “not a good precedent for the future.”
Open Defiance
Environmental advocates were anticipating a container deployment on Coronado weeks before it finally happened. Last month, Erick Meza, a borderlands coordinator with the Sierra Club, got a tip that scores of containers were piling up at a disused National Guard armory in Nogales, on the edge of the national forest. Unlike the paneled walls and vehicle barriers that stand along much of the border, the solid containers cut off virtually all animal migration and heighten flood risks.
“This is definitely a technique that we don’t support at all,” Meza told The Intercept in mid-September. “The wall is bad enough, but these are even worse.”
In an interview later that day, Ducey’s press secretary, Karamargin, said Ducey had yet to decide where the Nogales containers would go. He avoided giving a direct answer when asked if Ducey had sought clearance from the U.S. Forest Service to place the boxes on national forest land.
“We are reaching out to all stakeholders and have reached out and we’ll continue to do so about where shipping containers might be the most effective,” Karamargin told The Intercept. “So is the Forest Service among them, perhaps? I’m not sure. I don’t know if the people we have reached out to them.”
Arizona’s Division of Emergency Management, which answers to the governor, had in fact sought authorization from Coronado National Forest 10 days before Karamargin spoke to The Intercept.
The lawsuit Ducey filed this month included state-level correspondence with federal officials regarding shipping containers and Coronado National Memorial. The Intercept obtained additional communications between federal entities and the state.
The documents show that on September 17 officials from Ducey’s emergency management office — known by the acronym AZDEMA — emailed Coronado National Forest seeking “authorization to place barriers on National Forest land in all areas that currently have gaps in the federal wall.”
On October 6, Kerwin S. Dewberry, Coronado’s forest supervisor, sent a letter to the director AZDEMA, stating that over the course of two weeks he and his staff had verbally explained to AZDEMA officials that large-scale construction projects of the kind the governor wanted required participation in a federal regulatory approval process.
Though that process had not taken place, Dewberry wrote, Forest Service officials had nonetheless observed dozens of shipping containers, associated construction equipment, and private security personal on federal land for two consecutive days. “The Forest Service did not authorize this occupancy and use,” Dewberry wrote.
Maj. Gen. Kerry L. Muehlenbeck of AZDEMA fired back the following day. “Although your agency has participated in some calls with Arizona officials, no action has been taken to address the state’s concerns,” he wrote. “Due to the lack of response and pursuant to the directive by Governor Ducey, work will commence to close the referenced gap to ensure the safety of Arizona citizens.”
The response prompted an escalation from the Forest Service, with Michiko J. Martin, forester for the agency’s southwest region, reiterating the need for participation in a federal approval process. “To date, the State of Arizona has not pursued that process,” Martin wrote in an October 7 letter of his own. “As such, all state activities on National Forest land related to the shipping container project are occurring without the permits and authorization required.”
Two weeks later, Ducey filed his lawsuit. Three days after that, a caravan of pickup trucks dragging scores of hulking metal containers came rumbling into Coronado National Forest.
The Real Federal Inaction
Up to this point, legal challenges Biden has faced on his immigration policies were rooted in claims of his alleged lawbreaking. Ducey’s lawsuit is something different, Reichlin-Melnick argued. “Here, Arizona is saying, ‘We want you to declare that the law doesn’t apply to us,’” he said. “That is a pretty radical difference, and it’s the first state to my knowledge that’s brought this kind of immigration relief challenge.”
Ironically, he noted, success in his lawsuit could undermine the core objective Ducey purports to seek. The argument is that the federal government is taking too long fill gaps in the wall. If Ducey’s claim succeeded and a court determined that the Roosevelt Reservation was not under federal jurisdiction, that could mean no federal gap filling at all — and no Border Patrol operations on the line either.
While Ducey’s lawsuit contends that Biden’s border security agents are failing to uphold the law in Southern Arizona, advocates on the ground say it’s the president’s land managers who are being held back.
Unlike the Center for Biological Diversity, the federal government’s most powerful tool for dealing with lawbreakers on its lands is not filing notices of intent that take weeks to process; it’s arresting them. “They should have already sent the officers out because there’s destruction of property,” said Silver, of the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s physical destruction with no permit.”
The governor’s motivation is no mystery, Silver argued. “It’s a racist message and it’s designed purely to foment or promote more fearfulness among Ducey’s racist followers so more of them will show up and vote because they’re afraid of the invasion from the south by brown people,” he said. “That’s what this is all about.”
Conservative talk show host Dan Proft speaks to Tea Party supporters at a Tax Day rally in the Daley Center Plaza on April 18, 2011, in Chicago. Proft runs a political action committee and a network of news sites in Illinois to aid Republican candidates and causes. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Each paper bears a clear-cut tagline: Real data, real news.
And each publication that shows up in driveways and mailboxes carries a partisan punch that's blatant, but not formally disclosed.
"They present a strongly one-sided view of things," said Bernard Schoenburg, who covered Illinois as a journalist for decades.
Schoenburg retired as a columnist for The State Journal-Register in Springfield in December 2020, 44 years after walking into his first job out of college at the Bloomington Pantagraph. In the intervening decades, traditional newsrooms throughout the state have withered, from the Pantagraph right up to the once-mighty Chicago Tribune. Some have shut down.
That erosion of local news has created an opening for these newer publications, which lie dormant and then spring up at election time. They look a lot like hometown newspapers — nothing flashy, just long, printed broadsheet pages with color photos and graphics — but without any real interest in local news.
"You get these glaring headlines of ... what's so terrible about our tax system right now or what's bad about a Democratic governor," Schoenburg said.
All signs point in one direction
The coverage all points in a single political direction: hard right.
Schoenburg first noticed these papers several election cycles ago, born out of the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, which crusaded against greater taxation and regulation. Since then, they have spread across the state, presenting themselves as down-home newspapers in multiple communities with names that hark back to times before people relied on social media to find out out about developments in their communities.
"In this age, with so many kinds of media that hit people," Schoenburg said, "people don't know, necessarily, what's real, if they're not sophisticated in this way."
This fall, readers encountering the Sangamon Sun or Chicago City Wire or the Dupage Policy Journal or their sister publications will find coverage uniformly beating up on the policies and persona of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat who happens to be up for reelection.
The West Cook News splashed an incendiary quote across the top of its front page recently: "It's going to be literally the end of days."
A two-page spread inside presented a vivid display of photographs of 36 men who were charged with violent crimes — but had not been convicted. They would all be released to Cook County's neighborhoods, the accompanying headline said, under legislation signed into law by Pritzker last year that eliminates cash bail. (Actually, judges will retain discretion to determine whether people facing serious charges pose a threat, according to reporting by WBEZ and other news outlets.)
All but four of the 36 men in the photos were people of color.
"This is Republican propaganda and, in some instances, just outright lies," said Pritzker campaign spokeswoman Natalie Edelstein. "The information being presented is intentionally being set up to mislead people. It looks like it's independent, local news. But in reality, when you read the content, it's playing on people's emotions and fear."
A GOP candidate says papers are filled with "fact and truth"
Among the people quoted in that front-page story in West Cook News: conservative talk show host Dan Proft.
Proft runs a political action committee called People Who Play By the Rules PAC that has spent millions aiding Pritzker's Republican opponent, state Sen. Darren Bailey.
"These newspapers that are circulating the state are full of fact and truth — and Gov. Pritzker has the gall to call it a lie," Bailey said on Proft's radio show in early September.
Proft's PAC also helps to underwrite the papers, which he conceded on the air recently.
Yet nowhere in the publications themselves is there any disclosure of the papers' pro-Republican agenda, its source of funding, or even its point of view — except, of course, in the relentless punching of hot-button issues for the right, including trans rights, COVID restrictions and taxes.
Proft did not respond to NPR's efforts to seek comment, nor did cardboard shipping magnate Dick Uihlein, a major party activist who falsely argues that the 2020 presidential race was fixed and who has financed the PAC with more than $40 million this year, according to the Center for Illinois Politics. He did speak to the Chicago-based NewsNation television broadcast, telling anchor Leland Vittert that his readers do not trust mainstream news organizations.
"We provide angles to stories and information that you don't get from left leaning or left — or not so leaning, just hard left — news outlets," Proft said on NewsNation. "They're all sharing a brain and we're providing a different perspective on some of the issues that are salient in people's lives."
In Proft's recounting, the Illinois papers put out by the Local Government Informational Services -- their publisher — sound like a throwback to an earlier age, when papers were openly partisan and ideological on their news pages as well as their opinion section. And there's a school of thought that that's a more intellectually honest way than reporters saying they shelve their own points of view.
What and how those issues are presented in these papers, however, constitutes a sharp departure on the way journalists at more mainstream news outlets, even point-of-view journalists, have covered the news for decades. For one thing, at least in the hard copy editions reviewed by NPR, the papers make no such clear and overt disclosures about their agenda in print, other than the overwhelming thrust of their articles.
The 7,251st top high school tennis player, and other weird facts dressed up as stories
There's a second element to the papers that garners less attention. By contemporary newspaper lights, they are weird.
"There is other information in the publication that makes it look local, like what employees in government agencies are making a lot of money, what homes sold for a lot of money, and it's just things you can pick up off the internet," Schoenburg said.
It's unclear who's scooping up those facts.
Take The Sangamon Sun, based in the county where Springfield, the state capital, can be found. It published a story about an athlete based on his national ranking. David Lu was, the paper reported in mid-September, the 7,251st highest ranked player in the country under the age of 18.
The article was eight sentences long and had no byline. It said nothing about Lu as a player or person. Instead, it offered a rote explanation of how such rankings were made and offered a single quotation pulled from a tennis instructor's 3-year-old essay in New York Tennis Magazine about the fierceness of competition.
The Sangamon Sun did versions of the same story for weeks, each citing slightly lower or higher rankings for Lu, all with the same tennis pro quote.
At least twice, the article was presented below a photograph of a young white boy, no older than 9 or 10, holding a tennis racket. A photograph of Lu during a tennis match taken by the Springfield State Journal-Register, however, shows him to be an Asian American high schooler.
Other papers picked other high school athletes to highlight, equally without any personal touches.
We've seen this before.
New bottles, old wine
The man behind that reporting model of mashing together details into something resembling a news story is a former reporter and political operative named Brian Timpone, who later became Dan Proft's business partner and ultimately helped to expand the Illinois paper model to other states.
Back in 2012, Timpone created a service called Journatic, used briefly by mainstream newspapers, that relied upon a core of reporters and an army of freelancers to try to report on real estate sales, school lunches, city council meetings, high school sports and other events. Timpone also promised state-of-the art artificial intelligence. The service's credibility was dinged when This American Life revealed not just its use of bots but content mill workers far from the regions the newspapers served. They were often based in Asia, writing under fake bylines.
"Really what they're doing is assembling and copy editing a bunch of facts, right?" Timpone told This American Life's Sarah Koenig in 2014. "So they write the lead. If there's a paragraph about a person, the paragraph is technically written by someone in the Philippines, but not [really] written."
Timpone sold Journatic to two newspaper chains several years ago and didn't respond to efforts to reach him for comment for this story. Despite the conclusions of media researchers that the papers are propping up candidates and causes, Timpone denied that his current firm, Metric Media, takes money to run content in the papers.
"Agenda-driven writers asserted this slur without a shred of evidence because our existence makes them feel insecure," he told the tech website Gizmodo.
Looking for the people behind the bylines
For what it's worth, I also haven't been able to reach a single person identified as writing directly for the Illinois papers.
Not the writer whose byline is the same as a former social media manager and writer who works for an outsourcing company in Manila. Not the one who shares the same name as a byline on stories for UrbanReform.org — a conservative Texas-based site that has been part of the same larger network.
Nor The Kane County Reporter's Laurie A. Luebbert. Fifteen years ago, a reporter wrote at The Virginian-Pilot under the same byline. Luebbert has no account on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook — unusual for a reporter in this day and age.
Laurie — if you're out there — feel free to be in touch.
And here's where it gets byzantine. Luebbert's byline doesn't just surface in other Illinois sister papers under Dan Proft. Her work also appears in Old North News in North Carolina, the New Mexico Sun, The Louisiana Record. The Lansing (Mich.) Sun, and Keystone Today in Pennsylvania, published by Metric Media or affiliated companies. The list goes on and on.
"Laundering advocacy" instead of an interest in news
Pri Bengani, a senior researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, counted more than 1,200 conservative local news outlets connected around the country in Timpone's network.
She considers them AstroTurf sites "laundering advocacy," driven by the interests of their funders, not an interest in news or in making money from the conventional news business. And she says the Illinois papers served as a model for what's mushroomed nationally. She first issued a study on the proliferation of the sites in 2019.
In a new report, released Monday by the Tow Center in the Columbia Journalism Review, Bengani concluded that the sites are providing services even beyond the publications.
"This network acts as a convergence of special interests for free market advocates, multiple political action committees, the fossil fuel industry, a politically motivated Catholic group, and a group propagating the notions of election fraud," Bengani writes.
She documented instances in which the sites and the larger network provided advertising, SMS messages, robocalls and websites as well as consulting and production costs. Timpone is not the only key figure in the system. Bengani also found links to a huge Texas PAC and a major Republican donor who is an oil-and gas-billionaire. In Texas, articles blamed wind power for the failure of the electrical grid there last year. (That has been discredited by multiple mainstream news outlets.)
Stories in Arizona pushed Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters. In Ohio, it was his counterpart, J.D. Vance. And in Kansas, The Catholic Tribune surfaced almost exclusively to serve up anti-abortion rhetoric in advance of the August vote on the proposed state constitutional amendment that would have banned abortion there.
Bengani writes that the political action committees and media operators of the sites often share information. Some contributors to pro-Trump causes who share their emails or mobile numbers find themselves automatically sent the outlets' content.
She hastens to add that those who say that this kind of covert news advocacy happens on both sides have a point.
"If we are to be completely blunt about it, we are seeing folks on the left adopt this tactic as well," Bengani says.
One group, Courier Newsroom, was created by a former Obama administration official. Another, American Independent, is championed by David Brock, the liberal activist and founder of the left-of-center watchdog Media Matters.
Yet Bengani notes the difference in scale. She counts 64 such pro-Democratic newspapers and news sites. That's equal to about 5% of the right-wing publications she has been monitoring.
"You end up with this surround-sound effect," Bengani says. "If people are hearing the same thing in multiple places, are they then more likely to believe it?"
Bengani says she can't measure how influential this echo chamber will prove to be. But she says the partisan papers are blanketing people who want to read local news and have fewer choices than ever.
Rescuers use boats to search the Machhu River after a cable suspension bridge collapsed in the Indian town of Morbi, Gujarat. (photo: Ajit Solanki/AP)
At least 134 people are killed and 170 rescued after a bridge collapsed in the western Indian state during Diwali celebrations.
Inspector General of Police Ashok Yadav said criminal investigations have been opened into people involved in the renovation and maintenance of the colonial-era bridge. He did not release the identities of the detainees.
Here are the main developments so far.
What happened?
The tourist attraction in the Morbi district of Gujarat is 1.25 metres (4 feet) wide and 233 metres (764 feet) long. It is known locally as the “Swinging Bridge” and was first opened in 1879 during British rule. It is located in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state.
On Sunday evening, a crowd was sightseeing and taking pictures at the bridge. Some were holding its side cables when it crashed, plunging them about 10 metres (33 feet) into the Machhu River, videos from the scene showed.
Officials said at least 134 people died and 170 people were rescued, many of whom have been admitted to hospitals with injuries.
Sunday was the last day of the Hindu Diwali festival, and authorities estimated that about 500 people had gathered on the bridge to enjoy the festivities. Officials say the bridge had the capacity to hold 100 to 150 people at a time.
The bridge had been reopened on Wednesday after seven months of repairs by a private company.
What safety concerns have been raised?
Some people are questioning whether the company that carried out the renovation, the Gujarat-based electrical appliances and clock maker Oreva group, flouted safety rules.
Morbi’s municipality chief, Sandeepsinh Zala, said Oreva was under contract to maintain the bridge for 15 years. India’s NDTV news reported that the company had opened the bridge ahead of schedule.
“They did not give us any information that they were reopening the bridge,” Zala told Indian Express. “We have not issued any [safety] certificate to them.”
Indian Express also quoted an Oreva company official as saying: “While we are waiting for more information, prima facie, the bridge collapsed as too many people in the midsection of the bridge were trying to sway it from one way to the other.”
How has the government responded?
Modi, who is campaigning in the state for his Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), is scheduled to visit Morbi on Tuesday. Modi was chief minister of Gujarat for 12 years, and elections in the state are likely to take place this year.
The BJP-run state government has formed a five-member team of police officials and bureaucrats to investigate the bridge collapse.
Haresh Jhala, a journalist based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city, questioned why local authorities allowed the bridge to be reopened to the public.
“Four days have passed, and the local authorities were sleeping for so many days,” Jhala told Al Jazeera. “It seems the contractor was in a hurry to make money. … Whether the renovation was really completed or it was a trial, that is a matter of investigation.”
In a similar incident in 2011, 32 people were killed in Darjeeling in West Bengal when a crowded bridge collapsed. In the same state five years later, a flyover collapsed in West Bengal’s capital, Kolkata, killing 26 people.
An area of illegal logging in Para state, Brazil. (photo: Leo Correa/AP)
Lula has pledged to restore the Amazon. Will it be enough?
It was a historic defeat and a sensational comeback for Lula. After serving two terms as Brazil’s president, between 2003 and 2011, Lula went to jail for corruption, though he was later freed after the Supreme Court overturned his convictions. Bolsonaro, meanwhile, is the first president to lose reelection in the 34 years of the nation’s modern democracy. (He has yet to concede.)
The results also represent a historic moment for the Amazon rainforest.
Under President Bolsonaro, deforestation accelerated, threatening not only wildlife and Indigenous communities but also the global climate. But Lula has promised to give the forest a second chance. “Let’s fight for zero deforestation,” Lula said Sunday night after his victory. “Brazil is ready to resume its leading role in the fight against the climate crisis, protecting all our biomes, especially the Amazon forest.”
Lula often points to his track record to prove he can succeed: During his presidency, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell by more than 80 percent, meaning there was less forest loss. An analysis by the climate website Carbon Brief suggests that under Lula’s next administration, annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon could be down by nearly 90 percent by the end of the decade.
“Everything that Lula has said, and even his track record, would indicate that he’s going to undo the brutal regressions of the Bolsonaro regime,” Christian Poirier, program director at the nonprofit advocacy group Amazon Watch, told Vox in September.
Few political issues have higher global stakes than the conservation of the Amazon. Felling the rainforest not only erodes a critical carbon sink, which helps suck planet-warming gases out of the atmosphere, but also fuels climate change. Ongoing deforestation could also trigger a runaway reaction that may turn regions of the rainforest into a savanna-like ecosystem, stripping the forest of its many ecological benefits and natural wonders.
What Bolsonaro did to the Amazon rainforest, briefly explained
Brazil was once a poster child for conservation. For much of the past two decades, the nation protected Indigenous lands, cracked down on illegal logging, and began monitoring forest loss more carefully, resulting in a precipitous decline of deforestation.
In 2004, the Amazon lost a staggering 28,000 square kilometers (roughly 7 million acres), but by 2012, that figure had fallen to just 4,600 square km (1.1 million acres), according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, known as INPE. The destruction remained relatively low over the next few years.
Then, in 2019, Jair Bolsonaro came into power.
The right-wing leader stripped enforcement measures, cut spending for science and environmental agencies, fired environmental experts, and pushed to weaken Indigenous land rights, among other activities largely in support of the agribusiness industry. (A representative of the Brazilian government told Vox in September that it’s fully committed to reducing deforestation in the Amazon and is working to that end.)
Between August 1, 2019, and July 31, 2021 — a period that largely overlaps with Bolsonaro’s first three years in office — more than 34,000 square km (8.4 million acres) disappeared from the Amazon, not including many losses from natural forest fires. That’s an area larger than the entire nation of Belgium, and a 52 percent increase compared to the previous three years.
Now, about 17 percent of the Amazon rainforest is gone, according to a report from 2021. Scientists estimate that if that number reaches 20 to 25 percent, parts of the tropical ecosystem could dry out, further accelerating forest loss and threatening the millions of people and animals that depend on it.
The largest rainforest on Earth, the Amazon is home to a truly remarkable assemblage of species, including 14 percent of the world’s birds and 18 percent of its vascular plants. Many of them are found nowhere else. Losing organisms to deforestation erodes essential functions including the production of oxygen and storage of carbon, on which we all depend, and undermines scientific discovery. Many medicines are derived from Amazon plants, yet just a fraction of the forest’s species have been studied.
A second chance for the Amazon under Lula
An icon of the left and a leader of Brazil’s Workers Party, Lula has repeatedly pledged to protect the Amazon. Critically, Marina Silva, a prominent environmental advocate and former environmental minister, endorsed him earlier this fall, helping Lula beat Bolsonaro. That made Lula the “greenest” candidate in this year’s race, according to Observatório do Clima, an environmental coalition in Brazil.
But the best indicator of Lula’s ability to quell deforestation is what he’s done in the past, according to several environmental advocates. When he came into power in 2003, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon was at an eight-year high, at more than 25,000 square km (6.3 million acres). 2004 was even worse. “He inherited an environmental catastrophe,” Poirier said.
Then his administration — largely, at the direction of minister Silva — began implementing existing laws to safeguard the Amazon, including enforcing a law called the Forest Code, and getting various government agencies to work collaboratively to curb forest loss. As the chart above shows, deforestation fell dramatically between 2004 and 2012, and Lula was in power for most of that time.
“Let’s go back to doing what we’ve been doing,” Lula said in a June radio interview. “We have to take care of the forest and the Amazonian people.”
Deforestation is unlikely to stop altogether once Lula takes office. Bolsonaro’s party still dominates Congress and will likely continue supporting the cattle industry, which is behind nearly all forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon. The country also faces an economic crisis and fallout from mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s not clear exactly how Lula will prioritize these competing crises. There’s also a question of whether Bolsonaro will accept defeat.
Still, environmental advocates celebrated the win.
“The nightmare is due to end at last,” Observatório do Clima wrote in a statement Sunday. “The president-elect is remarkably well positioned to implement the socio-environmental turnaround the country so badly needs.”
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