03 December 22
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The booming railroad industry has delivered multimillion dollar payouts to CEOs and shareholders in recent years. The industry has also shoveled millions of dollars into campaign contributions — no wonder Congress knocked down pro–rail worker legislation.
The cost of paid sick days for this year — roughly $321 million — would be less than half the amount that a single railroad tycoon, Warren Buffett, funneled to his family foundations last week.
Buffett’s railroad firm BNSF scored a huge win when forty-three senators blocked paid sick leave for exhausted railroad workers, and passed legislation preventing workers from striking. The Senate vote followed the Biden White House effectively pouring cold water on efforts to tie paid sick leave to the bill shutting down the rail strike, declaring in a press briefing that the president “does not support any bill or amendment that will delay a bill that’s getting to his desk by Saturday.”
Rail workers were asking for the same amount of paid sick days that Biden in 2020 promised he would grant to all workers in America if he was elected president. Biden has not committed to signing an executive order requiring railroads and other government contractors to provide paid sick days.
$7 Billion of Profit in Ninety Days
While opposing a plan that would have required them to spend $321 million to give workers seven paid sick days, the main railroad companies raked in more than $7 billion in profits and paid out over $1.8 billion in dividends, in a year where they and their lobbying groups have spent more than $13 million lobbying Congress — after railroad CEOs pocketed more than $200 million in compensation.
The railroad industry delivered more than $3.3 million in campaign contributions to Congress in the 2021–2022 cycle, according to data collected by OpenSecrets.
The railroad workers — constrained by an outdated labor law, the Railway Labor Act, which severely limits their right to strike — have been outgunned this time by powerful corporate titans bearing little difference from the railroads’ robber baron founders.
In August, a federal report prepared by the Biden administration stated that the railroads contend that their enormous profits do not reflect “any contributions by labor.” The railroads, meanwhile, have waged a full-court press to have Congress implement an agreement negotiated by the Biden administration that only includes one day of paid sick leave, after refusing to agree to any paid sick days in three years of talks with unions.
Buffett’s BNSF, a wholly-owned subsidiary of his nearly $700 billion conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, raked in $1.4 billion in the last quarter. For the nine months ending on September 30, the company’s profits exploded to $4.5 billion — a $172 million increase from the prior year’s haul. Buffett himself is worth an estimated $110 billion, according to Bloomberg. The press regularly fawns over the so-called “Oracle of Omaha” for his supposed frugality, even though he travels in a $6.7 million private jet.
Another major rail operation, the Atlanta-based Norfolk Southern, reported $958 million in profits in the quarter ending September 30. On October 25, the company announced it was spending $290 million on shareholder dividends, boasting, “The company has paid a dividend on its common stock for 161 consecutive quarters since its formation in 1982.” Norfolk Southern’s dividend payouts have increased 15 percent year-over-year. Norfolk Southern’s CEO, James Squires, made more than $14 million in 2021 — 140 times the median salary of a Norfolk Southern worker.
Union Pacific, based in Omaha, Nebraska, brought in $1.9 billion in profits in the quarter, up $200 million from the same period a year ago. The carrier announced $882 million in dividends in July. Union Pacific CEO Lance Fritz took home $14.5 million in income in 2021, which was 162 times the median Union Pacific worker’s pay. Union Pacific increased its dividend payouts by 10 percent this year.
Jacksonville, Florida-headquartered CSX generated $1.1 billion in profits in the quarter ending on September 30, up $143 million from the same period the year before. On December 15, the company will pay out $213 million in dividends. CSX CEO James Foote brought home nearly $17 million in 2021. CSX increased its dividend 7.5 percent this year.
Canadian Pacific brought in $664 million in profits in the quarter — double the haul from the same period last year. On October 26, the Calgary, Alberta carrier announced that it was handing out $177 million in dividends to its shareholders. Canada Pacific CEO Keith Creel got a 58 percent wage increase in 2021, bringing his total compensation package to nearly $19 million.
Finally, Montreal-based Canadian National brought in more than $1 billion in profits in the quarter, a 44 percent increase over the same period last year. On October 25, the railroad announced a $373 million dividend to shareholders. Former CEO Jean-Jacques Ruest brought in a comparatively modest $9.2 million in 2021. Railroad workers will return to the bargaining table again in 2025. Railway union sources told the Intercept Thursday that their next step would be to push for sick leave in an anticipated Biden executive order mandating a week of paid sick days for federal contract workers.
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Donald Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT/Redux)
After telling jurors on Thursday that Trump “knew exactly what was going on” with the scheme, Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Joshua Steinglass followed up by citing trial evidence and testimony that he said made clear “Mr. Trump is explicitly sanctioning tax fraud.”
Steinglass, speaking on the last day before deliberations at the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud, showed jurors a lease Trump signed for one executive’s Manhattan apartment and a memo the former president initialed authorizing a pay cut for another executive who got perks.
He also cited Weisselberg’s claim, during his three days of testimony, that he told Trump he would pay him back after Trump agreed to cover his grandchildren’s hefty private school tuition cost. Weisselberg then adjusted his payroll records to cut his pre-tax salary by the cost of the tuition.
“I mention this all to show that this whole narrative that Mr. Trump was blissfully ignorant is just not real,” Steinglass said.
Trump himself is not on trial, as Steinglass reminded jurors, but Judge Juan Manuel Merchan gave him the green light to talk about Trump’s possible awareness of the scheme after the company’s lawyers, in their summations, claimed that Trump knew nothing about it.
Trump has denied knowing that Weisselberg and other executives were dodging taxes, writing on his Truth Social platform this week: “There was no gain for ‘Trump,’ and we had no knowledge of it.”
After Steinglass finished Friday, Trump Organization lawyer Michael van der Veen asked Merchan to declare a mistrial, arguing that the prosecutor had irreparably harmed the defense by effectively portraying Trump as a co-conspirator in the tax fraud scheme.
“I don’t believe it’s necessary to declare a mistrial. That’s not really even a thought,” Merchan said, agreeing to instead caution jurors about Steinglass’ remarks.
But Steinglass’ sudden focus on Trump’s knowledge of the scheme, right as the Trump company’s trial was ambling to a conclusion, begged the question: Why wasn’t he charged, too?
The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined comment, citing the ongoing trial. District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who inherited the case when he took office in January, has said that an investigation of Trump is “active and ongoing,” and that no decision has been made on whether to charge him.
The Trump Organization, the entity through which Trump manages his golf courses, hotels and other ventures, is charged with helping some top executives avoid paying income taxes on non-monetary compensation. The company’s case is the only trial to arise from the Manhattan district attorney’s office’s three-year investigation of Trump and his business practices.
Prosecutors argue that the company is liable because Weisselberg and an underling he worked with on the scheme, controller Jeffrey McConney, were “high managerial” agents entrusted to act on behalf of the company and its various entities. If convicted, the company could be fined more than $1 million.
The defense has alleged that Weisselberg came up with the tax dodge scheme on his own, without Trump or the Trump family knowing, and that the company didn’t benefit from his actions.
“We are here today for one reason and one reason only: the greed of Allen Weisselberg,” Trump Organization lawyer Susan Necheles said Thursday.
Weisselberg testified that Trump didn’t know, but that the Trump Organization did derive some benefit because it didn’t have to pay him as much in actual salary. Van der Veen peppered his summation Thursday with the defense’s mantra: “Weisselberg did it for Weisselberg.”
“Their entire theory of the case is a fraud,” Steinglass said Friday morning before the jury entered the courtroom, as company lawyers were seeking to temper his rhetoric.
One company-paid Manhattan apartment even went to Weisselberg’s son, Barry, ostensibly so he could respond quickly to emergencies at the Central Park ice rink the company managed.
“This is all part of the Trump executive compensation package: free cars for you, free cars for your wife, free apartments for you, free apartments for your kids,” Steinglass said. Barry Weisselberg, he quipped, “wasn’t living on a Zamboni in Wollman Rink. He was living in an apartment on Central Park South.”
At the outset of the trial, Merchan cautioned the defense and prosecution to avoid talking about Trump so as to not give jurors the impression that longtime real estate honcho was, or should have been, sitting at the defense table.
But the judge noted Friday that the tenor of the trial changed after defense lawyers and prosecutors frequently mentioned Trump during arguments and testimony, even though he did not testify and did not attend the trial.
Steinglass, wrapping his summation, told jurors that Trump was “the elephant that’s not in the room.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Getty Images)
What is art? The Christian right wants that question to be decided by the Supreme Court in 303 Creative v. Elenis.
The case is also a complete mess. Indeed, it’s hard to pin down what, exactly, the two parties to this case actually disagree on.
Lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian-identified, anti-LGBTQ organization, represent Lorie Smith, a web designer who wants to sell custom wedding websites to opposite-sex couples — but not to same-sex couples. They argue that Smith should be exempt from a Colorado law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
ADF’s lawyers make an uncharacteristically strong argument. “It is bedrock law that the First Amendment protects an artist’s right to choose what to say and when to remain silent,” ADF writes in its brief. It follows that no law can force a web designer, someone who is literally in the business of publishing words that can be read by the general public, to create a website that they find fundamentally objectionable.
This is a very strong First Amendment argument. Indeed, it is such a strong argument that the defendants in this case — the seven members of Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission and that state’s Democratic attorney general — agree with ADF. Colorado law, they write in their brief, permits web designers “to decide what design services to offer and whether to communicate its vision of marriage through biblical quotes on its wedding websites.” It allows them to refuse to design websites that celebrate same-sex marriage, or to refuse to make a website that conveys any other message that they find objectionable.
The main thing that Colorado’s law requires, according to the state, is that once a web designer agrees to sell a particular web design to the public, it must provide the same service to people of all sexual orientations. If Lorie Smith would sell a website denouncing same-sex marriage to a straight customer, then she must sell that same website to a gay customer, if such a customer should request one.
Yet, while it is hard to pin down what, exactly, is the real controversy between Smith and the state of Colorado, the stakes in 303 Creative are still quite high.
303 Creative is a sequel to another high-profile Supreme Court case brought by ADF lawyers, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), which claimed that the First Amendment permitted a Colorado baker to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because the baker’s cakes were a form of “artistic expression.”
But if certain businesses are exempt from civil rights laws because they make products that require a spark of creativity, then it is far from clear which businesses should still be required to follow the law — after all, lots of jobs require at least some artistry. As Justice Elena Kagan noted during oral arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop, if cake bakers qualify as “artists” who can defy civil rights laws, then what about jewelers? Or hairstylists? Or makeup artists?
What about a conservative Christian restaurateur who claims that their food is an expression of their most sincere religious values, and therefore must not be served to gay customers? And does it matter if this restaurateur is a classically trained chef who completed years of artistic instruction, or someone who sells simple hamburgers?
The Masterpiece Cakeshop decision didn’t really engage with these questions — although ADF prevailed in that case, it did so on narrow grounds that have few implications for future cases.
Now, 303 Creative is a poor vehicle for the Supreme Court to resolve these disputes. The case was brought prematurely, and for that reason, the most important issues in the case should be dismissed.
But the Court’s GOP-appointed majority is very eager to decide cases brought by religious conservatives, so there is no guarantee that they will dismiss the case. It is entirely possible that they will, instead, use the 303 Creative case to rule that at least some self-identified “artists” are immune from civil rights laws.
This case should be dismissed
The First Amendment’s free speech clause forbids nearly all forms of government censorship. It also prohibits the government from forcing someone to convey a message — whether through spoken or published words — that they do not wish to convey.
This is why, for example, recently enacted Texas and Florida laws that effectively order social media websites to publish content against their will are unconstitutional. Web publishers, like any other publisher, have a nearly absolute right to refuse to publish anything they do not wish to appear on their website.
The same rule applies to Lorie Smith. If Colorado actually attempted to force her to design a website that she finds objectionable, then that would violate the First Amendment. Colorado cannot make Smith produce a website that expresses approval of same-sex marriage, regardless of whether she is an amateur web designer or a professional who offers her services to paying customers. As the Supreme Court said in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006), “freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.”
At the same time, the Court has repeatedly emphasized that anti-discrimination laws do not, “as a general matter, violate the First or Fourteenth Amendments.” Indeed, the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision insisted that protections against discrimination should remain strong. Though the Court said in Masterpiece Cakeshop that “philosophical objections” to same-sex marriage may sometimes carry some legal weight, it also declared that “it is a general rule that such objections do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law.”
Colorado’s law threads this needle, because it guarantees “equal access to goods and services” without requiring Smith to actually produce a website she finds objectionable.
The main thrust of Colorado’s brief is that the state has no actual desire to make Smith say anything. Nor does the text of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law require her to design a website she does not wish to make. Instead, that law provides that a business cannot deny someone “the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations” that the business sells to the public, because of a customer’s sexual orientation.
As Colorado explains in its brief, this law “does not turn on what a business chooses to sell. It simply requires that, once a business offers a product or service to the public, the business sells it to all without regard to a customer’s protected characteristic.” That is, Smith has an absolute right to say that she is not in the business of making websites that celebrate same-sex marriage. What she cannot do is sell a particular website to straight customers and then refuse to sell it to queer customers.
Think of it this way: Suppose an author writes a book called Lesbians Are Immoral. The First Amendment protects nearly all forms of speech, including hate speech, so this book is protected by the Constitution and the government may not pass a law seeking to alter its content or banning its sale.
Now suppose that Brenda, who is a lesbian, goes to a Colorado bookstore and attempts to purchase a copy of Lesbians Are Immoral. If the bookstore refuses to sell the book to Brenda because of her sexual orientation, that would violate Colorado’s civil rights law, and the bookstore would not be protected by the First Amendment. The First Amendment forbids the government from changing the content of a book, but once that book exists, the government may prohibit anyone who would sell it from discriminating.
The same rule applies to any other form of expression — whether it is a website, a painting, or a cake with a pro-LGBTQ message written on it in icing. The government cannot force Smith to design any website she finds objectionable. But it can require her to sell the same web design to all customers, regardless of their sexual orientation.
Which brings us to the reason the 303 Creative case should be dismissed: Lorie Smith has never actually refused to design a wedding website for a customer who wishes to buy one from her. As Colorado says in its brief, Smith’s company “has yet to build any custom wedding website, serve a customer, refuse work for a same-sex wedding, or have the [state’s civil rights law] enforced against it in any way.”
Federal courts are not in the business of deciding hypothetical cases. As a unanimous Supreme Court held in Texas v. United States (1998), “a claim is not ripe for adjudication if it rests upon ‘contingent future events that may not occur as anticipated, or indeed may not occur at all.’“ If, at some point in the future, a customer asks Smith to design a particular website, she refuses, and then Colorado attempts to sanction her for that refusal, then she may very well have a valid First Amendment claim.
But it is impossible for the Supreme Court to determine whether this hypothetical chain of events might play out in the future.
ADF wants to relitigate Masterpiece Cakeshop — and a bunch of other cases, too
The reason the Court historically has stayed away from hypothetical cases is fairly simple. As the Court said in Texas, “the operation of the statute is better grasped when viewed in light of a particular application.”
Colorado’s civil rights law, for example, turns on a very fine distinction between refusing to sell a particular product (which is permitted) and refusing to sell a product to a particular customer (which often is not allowed). It is difficult to know whether a particular litigant intends to violate this law until they’ve actually refused to make a particular sale.
ADF’s brief, however, doesn’t just ask the Court to adjudicate a hypothetical future dispute between Smith and the state of Colorado; it spends a surprising amount of time discussing superficially similar cases involving wedding vendors who refuse to serve same-sex couples:
Government officials are using their power to coerce those who hold views those officials disfavor. The consequences are often severe. Barronelle Stutzman was forced to retire and hand over her company after Washington prohibited her from creating floral art for weddings. Elane Photography and Sweet Cakes went out of business entirely. Emilee Carpenter is facing six-figure fines and jail. Chelsey Nelson and Bob Updegrove are in litigation. And Jack Phillips has been in court for 10 years—despite prevailing in this Court.
Even assuming that ADF is not mischaracterizing the facts of any of these lawsuits, none of these cases are before the Court in 303 Creative. All of them involve different facts than Lorie Smith’s case, and many of them took place in different states, where the relevant anti-discrimination law may not draw the same distinction — between refusing to sell a product and refusing to serve a particular customer — that Colorado’s law draws. It’s hard to think of a valid legal reason ADF would include this paragraph in their brief, except that they hope it might goad the conservative majority on the Court into handing down a sweeping decision to end what ADF describes as a widespread problem.
We should hope that the Supreme Court will resist the temptation to do so. The question of how the First Amendment should apply to creative workers and business owners is not easy, and it typically turns on the nuanced facts of each particular case.
Because Smith is in the business of writing words and publishing them online, for example, she actually has a very strong case that her business is protected by the First Amendment — and that Colorado may not, if such a case should arise in the future, compel her to produce a particular website against her will.
But the same cannot be said about a florist or a cake baker. Sure, a florist may have a First Amendment right not to arrange a bunch of roses to spell out the words “GAY MARRIAGE IS AWESOME!” But the First Amendment does not permit a florist to refuse to sell a particular flower arrangement to a straight couple and not sell that identical arrangement to a gay couple. And it would be a constitutional earthquake if the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment does protect such a florist, because it would mean that anyone whose work requires some degree of artisanship could potentially seek an exemption from civil rights laws.
Again, there may well be valid cases where the First Amendment overcomes a civil rights law. But these cases are nuanced and fact-specific, and they often turn on the very particular wording of state civil rights statutes. We can only hope that this Supreme Court resists the temptation to hand down a sweeping decision in 303 Creative, and instead tells Smith — and people similar to Smith — to wait until she has a real case.
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Alex Jones. (photo: CNN)
Infowars host and conspiracy theorist ordered to pay $473m in damages on top of nearly $1bn verdict handed down in October
Jones was ordered by a Connecticut court last month to pay $473m in punitive damages on top of a nearly $1bn verdict handed down in October for his defamatory lies that the shooting was faked.
A court filing showed Jones filed for chapter 11 protection from creditors with the US bankruptcy court in Houston. The filing said Jones has between $1m and $10m of assets and between $1bn and $10bn of liabilities. It also refers to Free Speech Systems, a Jones affiliate and Infowars’ parent, as having filed for bankruptcy in July.
In October, a Connecticut jury in a case brought by relatives of more than a dozen Sandy Hook victims ordered Jones and Free Speech Systems to pay nearly $1bn in damages.
In a separate case in Texas, a jury in August decided Jones must pay the parents of a six-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook massacre $45.2m in punitive damages, on top of $4.1m in compensatory damages.
Jones claimed for years that the 2012 killing of 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was staged with actors as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns. He has since acknowledged the shooting occurred.
An attorney representing Jones in the bankruptcy case did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
The bankruptcy filing temporarily halted all proceedings in the Connecticut case and forced a judge to cancel a hearing scheduled on Friday morning on the Sandy Hook families’ request to attach the assets of Jones and his company to secure money for the nearly $1.4bn in damages awarded there.
Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Sandy Hook families in the Connecticut case, criticized the bankruptcy filing on Friday.
“Like every other cowardly move Alex Jones has made, this bankruptcy will not work,” Mattei said in a statement.
“The bankruptcy system does not protect anyone who engages in intentional and egregious attacks on others, as Mr Jones did. The American judicial system will hold Alex Jones accountable, and we will never stop working to enforce the jury’s verdict.”
In the Texas and Connecticut cases, some relatives of the 20 children and six adults killed in the school shooting testified that they were threatened and harassed for years by people who believed the lies told on Jones’s show. One parent testified that conspiracy theorists urinated on his seven-year-old son’s grave and threatened to dig up the coffin.
Erica Lafferty, the daughter of the slain Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, testified that people mailed rape threats to her house.
Jones has laughed at the awards on his Infowars show, saying he has less than $2m to his name and won’t be able to pay such high amounts.
The comments contradicted the testimony of a forensic economist at the Texas trial, who said Jones and his company Free Speech Systems have a combined net worth as high as $270m. Free Speech Systems is also seeking bankruptcy protection.
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Haitian families walk through a gap in U.S.-Mexico border wall into Yuma, Arizona. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
The agency says it was an accident that happened during a routine website update.
An Excel spreadsheet containing the names and noncitizen identification numbers of 6,252 people who are seeking asylum was published around 9:45 a.m. EDT Monday. Though the agency said it usually publishes such information in aggregate and keeps the asylum seekers anonymous, this time, it was published with the inclusion of a tab that contained personal identifiable information.
The spreadsheet containing the information remained online for more than five hours before the nonprofit Human Rights First alerted ICE to it at 1:53 p.m. EDT. Eleven minutes later, the agency deleted the spreadsheet from its website, the agency said.
“Though unintentional, this release of information is a breach of policy and the agency is investigating the incident and taking all corrective actions necessary,” an ICE spokesperson said in a statement.
The migrants are seeking asylum by claiming the need for safety from governments, individuals, and organizations (such as gangs) that are threatening them. Those whose information appeared on the website include migrants from Russia and Iran, according to the Los Angeles Times.
ICE said that it’s notifying the asylum seekers or the lawyers representing them of the breach, monitoring the internet for re-posting of the document, and placing alerts on the cases of migrants so they aren’t deported while it’s determined whether the disclosure impacted their cases.
The agency also launched an internal investigation into the incident, saying it would identify IP addresses that downloaded the spreadsheet while it was online and send “clawback” letters requesting that people who downloaded the document destroy it.
When asked by VICE News how many IP addresses ICE had identified, or if the clawback letter was legally enforceable, an ICE spokesperson declined to comment further.
Immigration lawyers and human rights experts told the Los Angeles Times that the disclosure could have life or death consequences for the people whose information was divulged. National Immigrant Justice Center managing attorney Diana Rashid told the Times that a client of the organization who is originally from Mexico was on the list.
“We are deeply concerned about our client’s safety after ICE publicly shared this very sensitive information about her and thousands of others like her,” Rashid told the Times. “She is seeking protection from removal because she fears persecution if returned to her country of origin. Revealing this information makes her more vulnerable to the persecution and abuses she fears if deported.”
Though those on the list are currently in ICE detention centers, the disclosure also happened the same week that ICE’s parent agency issued a terrorism advisory bulletin warning of a “persistent and lethal threat” to migrants, LGBTQ+ people, and Jews.
“Potential changes in border security enforcement policy, an increase in noncitizens attempting to enter the U.S., or other immigration-related developments may heighten these calls for violence,” DHS said in the bulletin.
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Deforestation near Humaita, in Amazonas state, Brazil. (photo: Bruno Kelly/Reuters)
Environmentalist says outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro handing his successor, Lula da Silva, ‘an Amazon in flames’.
National space agency (INPE) data released on Wednesday showed 11,568sq km (4,466sq miles) of forest cover was destroyed in the Brazilian Amazon from August 2021 to July 2022 – an area larger than Qatar.
That was an 11 percent drop from the same period a year earlier, when deforestation hit a 15-year high under far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
“It’s better to have a lower number than a higher number, but it’s still a very high number – the second highest in 13 years,” said Marcio Astrini, head of the Climate Observatory, an environmental advocacy group.
Wednesday’s data closed out four years of what environmentalists call disastrous management of the Amazon under Bolsonaro, who was accused of weakening environmental and Indigenous protection agencies in favour of agri-business and mining interests.
Under the former army captain, average annual deforestation rose by 59.5 percent from the previous four years, and by 75.5 percent from the previous decade, according to INPE figures.
“The Bolsonaro government was a forest-destroying machine … The only good news is that it’s about to end,” Astrini said in a statement. “The devastation remains out of control. Jair Bolsonaro will hand his successor a filthy legacy of surging deforestation and an Amazon in flames.”
Lula, a left-wing leader who won tightly fought elections last month, has promised to work towards zero deforestation when he takes office on January 1.
“Brazil is ready to resume its leading role in the fight against the climate crisis,” he said shortly after being declared the winner of the October 30 presidential run-off.
Lula, who previously served as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, also attended the COP27 climate summit in Egypt earlier this month, where he told hundreds in attendance that “Brazil is back in the world”.
Brazilian Senator-elect Flavio Dino, who is acting as public security chief in Lula’s transition team, told the Reuters news agency on Wednesday that the incoming administration would create a new federal police unit focused on environmental crimes.
Dino said the proposed unit would take a broad view of crimes in the Amazon, where deforestation, illegal mining, drug trafficking, money laundering and gang violence are often interlinked.
“There is now a specific complexity of environmental crimes, in which there is, a kind of combo of crimes in the Amazon. We no longer have isolated environmental crimes,” he told the news agency.
“You have this sophistication and there is a transnationality, because it involves other countries in the Amazon. So the idea is a specialised unit for greater efficiency and greater articulation with neighbouring countries.”
Under Bolsonaro, Indigenous leaders had raised alarm about the threats their communities face in the Brazilian Amazon, especially in areas with little government oversight that farmers, miners and poachers are seeking to control and exploit.
The Indigenous Missionary Council recorded 305 cases of “invasions, illegal exploitation of resources and damage to property” on Indigenous territories last year that affected 226 Indigenous lands in 22 Brazilian states.
That was up from 109 such incidents in 2018, the year before Bolsonaro took office – a 180 percent increase.
Carbon Brief, a UK-based climate website, said in a report in September that a Lula election victory could see deforestation drop by 89 percent in the Brazilian Amazon over the next decade and would prevent the destruction of 75,960sq km (29,328sq miles) of rainforest by 2030.
Still, Lula could face tough political opposition in areas where Amazon deforestation is happening, and he also must deal with the difficulty of policing such vast, often remote areas.
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A traveler in the Russian high Arctic. (photo: Russia Discovery)
Ancient viruses are locked in Russia’s permafrost. We may soon get a peek.
The scientists found one virus that they estimated had been stranded under a lake more than 48,500 years ago, they said, highlighting a potential new danger from a warming planet: what they called “zombie” viruses.
The same team of French, Russian and German researchers previously isolated ancient viruses from the permafrost and published their findings in 2015. This concentration of fresh viruses suggests that such pathogens are probably more common in the tundra than previously believed, they suggest in a preprint study they published last month on the BioRxiv website, a portal where many scientists circulate their research before it is accepted in a scientific journal.
“Every time we look, we will find a virus,” said Jean-Michel Claverie, a co-author of the study and an emeritus professor of virology at Aix-Marseille Université in France, in a phone interview. “It’s a done deal. We know that every time we’re going to look for viruses, infectious viruses in permafrost, we are going to find some.”
Although the ones they studied were infectious only to amoebas, the researchers said that there was a risk that other viruses trapped in the permafrost for millennia could spread to humans and other animals.
Virologists who were not involved in the research said the specter of future pandemics being unleashed from the Siberian steppe ranks low on the list of current public health threats. Most new — or ancient — viruses are not dangerous, and the ones that survive the deep freeze for thousands of years tend not to be in the category of coronaviruses and other highly infectious viruses that lead to pandemics, they said.
The European team’s findings have not yet been peer-reviewed. But independent virologists said that their findings seemed plausible, and relied on the same techniques that have produced other, vetted results.
The risks from viruses pent up in the Arctic are worth monitoring, several scientists said. Smallpox, for example, has a genetic structure that can hold up under long-term freezing, and if people stumble upon the defrosted corpses of smallpox victims, there is a chance they could be infected anew. Other categories of virus — such as the coronaviruses that cause covid-19 — are more fragile and less likely to survive the deep freeze.
“In nature we have a big natural freezer, which is the Siberian permafrost,” said Paulo Verardi, a virologist who is the head of the Department of Pathobiology and Veterinary Science at the University of Connecticut. “And that can be a little bit concerning,” especially if pathogens are frozen inside animals or people, he said.
But, he said, “if you do the risk assessment, this is very low,” he added. “We have many more things to worry about right now.”
For the most recent research, the European team took samples from several sites in Siberia over a series of years starting in 2015. The viruses they found — of an unusually large type that infects amoebas — were last active thousands, and in some cases, tens of thousands of years ago. Some of the samples were in soil or rivers, although one of the amoeba-targeting viruses was found in the frozen intestinal remains of a Siberian wolf from at least 27,000 years ago, the team said.
The researchers used amoebas as “virus bait,” they said, because they thought it would be a good way to search for viruses without propagating ones that could spread to animals or humans. But they said that didn’t mean these viruses didn’t exist in the frozen tundra.
Siberia is warming at one of the fastest rates on Earth, about four times the global average. For many recent summers it has been plagued by wildfires and temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit. And its permafrost — soil that is so thoroughly cold that it remains frozen even through the summer — is rapidly thawing. That means that organisms that have been locked away for thousands of years are now being exposed, as longer periods of defrosting at the soil surface enables objects that had been trapped below to rise upward.
Researchers say the chance of humans stumbling upon the carcasses of humans or animals is increasing, especially in Russia, whose far-north reaches are more densely settled than Arctic regions in other countries. The team gathered some of their samples in Yakutsk, a regional capital and one of Russia’s fastest-growing cities due to a mining boom.
The warming permafrost has been blamed for outbreaks of infectious disease before. A 2016 outbreak of anthrax hit a remote Siberian village and was linked to a 75-year-old reindeer carcass that had emerged from the frozen ground. But anthrax, which is not a virus, isn’t unique to Siberia and is unlikely to cause widespread pandemics.
Many virologists say they are more worried by viruses that are currently circulating among humans than the risk of unusual ones from the permafrost.
New microbes emerge or reemerge all the time, Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told The Washington Post in 2015, when the permafrost researchers’ first findings came out.
“This is a fact of our planet and our existence,” he said. “The finding of new viruses in permafrost is not much different from all of this. Its relevance will be dependent on a sequence of unlikely events: The permafrost virus must be able to infect humans, it must then [cause disease], and it must be able to spread efficiently from human to human. This can happen, but it is very unlikely.”
More problematic, many virologists say, are modern-day viruses that infect people and lead to diseases that are sometimes hard to control, such as Ebola, cholera, Dengue and even the ordinary flu. Viruses that cause disease in humans are unlikely to survive the repeated defrosting and freezing cycle that happens at the surface level of the permafrost. And the spread in mosquitoes and ticks that has been linked to global warming is more likely to infect humans with pathogens, some experts say.
An extinct virus “seems like a low risk compared to the large numbers of viruses that are circulating among vertebrates around the world, and that have proven to be real threats in the past, and where similar events could happen in the future, as we still lack a framework for recognizing those ahead of time,” said Colin Parrish, a virologist at Cornell University who is also the president of the American Society for Virology.
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