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Hanick, 71, appears to have been a close ally of former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, according to his LinkedIn page. Prior to Ailes’s launching of the right-wing-news channel in 1996, Hanick directed Straight Forward With Roger Ailes at CNBC during the future Fox boss’s brief stint at the business-news network. He later was among the first employees at Fox. According to the indictment, Hanick met Malofeyev at a business conference in Russia and later moved there in 2013 to help Malofeyev create a network, called Tsargrad TV, on the premise that they could create a Russian version of Rupert Murdoch’s channel. “In many ways Tsargrad is similar to what Fox News has done. We started from the idea that there are many people who adhere to traditional values and they absolutely need a voice,” Malofeyev told the Financial Times in 2015.
Malofeyev is suspected of helping to fund private groups of Russian soldiers to try in 2014 to take the Donetsk region of Ukraine — one of the areas Russian president Vladimir Putin is now using as a pretext to invade the country. The oligarch has denied funding any paramilitary groups, but he has been sanctioned by the U.S. and Europe since 2014.
According to the indictment, prosecutors got information about the former Fox director’s involvement in the Russian station from an unpublished memoir that “was discovered by investigators through a judiciously authorized search of Hanick’s email account.” Other emails show he was at one point the chairman of the television station and principally in charge of operations. According to Right Wing Watch, Hanick was one of the executives who told Russian investors that “God called on this country” to stop the spread of gay rights and embrace traditional values.
Hanick was arrested on February 3 in London and is awaiting extradition. He faces as many as 25 years in federal prison for violating the sanctions and making false statements to federal agents. The case appears to have been in the works for some time — court filings show that the indictment was filed under seal in November — and predates Putin’s war in Ukraine.
“You came to support fascists?” the officer responded, a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justification for the war.
“What fascists?” the crowd asked.
The officer then gave an order: “Arrest everyone.”
Authorities on Sunday arrested at least 4,640 people across 56 cities in Russia, reported OVD-Info, which was declared a foreign agent by Russian authorities last year during Putin’s sweeping suppression of activists, rights groups and opposition figures. The group reported multiple instances of excessive force against protesters, including beatings and use of stun guns. Among those detained were 13 journalists and 113 juveniles.
Russia’s interior ministry said earlier Sunday that police had arrested more than 3,500 people “for taking part in unauthorized rallies” in Moscow, St. Petersburg and elsewhere. The agency warned protesters that authorities would continue to target demonstrations and their organizers.
Footage from reporters in Russia showed a large police presence at demonstrations across the country, many clad in riot gear or driving armored trucks. Journalists with Western outlets — citing Russia’s newly-passed law restricting discussion of the invasion — spoke elliptically about the “situation” in Ukraine as they narrated protesters’ arrests.
Some videos showed police beating demonstrators. In one, several officers wearing body armor surrounded a person who was flailing on the ground. One officer struck the person with a baton and kicked the person before another shooed away the camera filming the encounter.
In another, posted to Twitter by the student media outlet DOXA, three officers kicked and detained someone lying on the ground outside a children’s department store.
Brian Taylor, a Syracuse University political scientist who studies Russia, said in a tweet that the clip showed a “Dystopian Moscow.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, antiwar protests have occurred daily, OVD-Info reported. Russia has detained at least 13,000 protesters in 147 cities.
Spontaneous mass demonstrations are illegal in Russia, with protesters facing the possibility of fines and jail time.
The Kremlin’s crackdown on free expression has only intensified in recent days, with Putin signing into law a new measure that criminalizes the “dissemination of falsehoods about the use of Russia’s armed forces” — a broad provision that makes public displays of dissent dangerous and difficult. Violation of the new law is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
Despite the risks involved, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has appealed directly to Russians to speak out against their government’s actions. In a Sunday video address, he switched from Ukrainian to Russian and said the citizens of the two countries were part of the same fight.
“It’s a fight for your country too,” he said. “If you’re silent now then only your poverty will speak later — and it will be answered by repression.”
A woman carried by Ukrainian soldiers crosses an improvised path while fleeing the town of Irpin, on the outskirts of Kyiv. (photo: Oleksandr Ratushniak/AP)
The United Nations refugee agency said that 1.5 million people had fled Ukraine in the 10 days since Russia’s invasion began, making it the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
In southern Ukraine, the unexpected Ukrainian success of defending the critical port city of Mykolaiv after three days of intense fighting underscores two emerging trends in the war.
Russia’s failure to seize Mykolaiv and other cities quickly, as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appears to have intended, is largely a function of its military’s faltering performance. Russian forces have suffered from logistical snafus, baffling tactical decisions and low morale.
But it is the fierce and, according to many analysts, unexpectedly capable defense by Ukrainian forces, who are significantly outgunned, that has largely stalled the Russian advance and, for now, prevented Mykolaiv from falling into Russian hands.
Here are the latest developments:
- A Russian force advancing on Kyiv fired mortar shells on Sunday at a battered bridge used by evacuees fleeing the fighting, sending panicked civilians running and killing four: a mother and her two children and a family friend traveling with them.
- A planned evacuation of Mariupol — a port city of a half-million people that has become a key battleground in Russia’s objective to capture Ukraine’s entire southern coast — was halted for a second consecutive day amid “intense shelling” by Russian forces that have encircled the city, the mayor’s office said. Residents are facing increasingly dire conditions in the city, which has been cut off from food, heat and electricity for days.
- Amid antiwar rallies across Russia, the police said more than 3,000 people were arrested, the highest nationwide total in any single day of protest in recent memory. An activist group that tracks arrests, OVD-Info, reported detentions in 49 different Russian cities.
- The Biden administration is studying how to supply Russian-made Polish fighter jets to Ukraine, U.S. officials say. President Volodymyr Zelensky is asking for more lethal military aid, especially Russian-made aircraft that Ukrainian pilots know how to fly. Russia threatened countries that allow the Ukrainian military to use their airfields.
- Hundreds of thousands of homes across eastern and southern Ukraine had their gas turned off on Sunday as the areas faced heavy fighting, according to Ukraine’s Gas Transmission System Operator.
Riot police at a demonstration in Moscow on Sunday. (photo: EPA)
“You came to support fascists?” the officer responded, a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justification for the war.
“What fascists?” the crowd asked.
The officer then gave an order: “Arrest everyone.”
Authorities on Sunday arrested at least 4,640 people across 56 cities in Russia, reported OVD-Info, which was declared a foreign agent by Russian authorities last year during Putin’s sweeping suppression of activists, rights groups and opposition figures. The group reported multiple instances of excessive force against protesters, including beatings and use of stun guns. Among those detained were 13 journalists and 113 juveniles.
Russia’s interior ministry said earlier Sunday that police had arrested more than 3,500 people “for taking part in unauthorized rallies” in Moscow, St. Petersburg and elsewhere. The agency warned protesters that authorities would continue to target demonstrations and their organizers.
Footage from reporters in Russia showed a large police presence at demonstrations across the country, many clad in riot gear or driving armored trucks. Journalists with Western outlets — citing Russia’s newly-passed law restricting discussion of the invasion — spoke elliptically about the “situation” in Ukraine as they narrated protesters’ arrests.
Some videos showed police beating demonstrators. In one, several officers wearing body armor surrounded a person who was flailing on the ground. One officer struck the person with a baton and kicked the person before another shooed away the camera filming the encounter.
In another, posted to Twitter by the student media outlet DOXA, three officers kicked and detained someone lying on the ground outside a children’s department store.
Brian Taylor, a Syracuse University political scientist who studies Russia, said in a tweet that the clip showed a “Dystopian Moscow.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, antiwar protests have occurred daily, OVD-Info reported. Russia has detained at least 13,000 protesters in 147 cities.
Spontaneous mass demonstrations are illegal in Russia, with protesters facing the possibility of fines and jail time.
The Kremlin’s crackdown on free expression has only intensified in recent days, with Putin signing into law a new measure that criminalizes the “dissemination of falsehoods about the use of Russia’s armed forces” — a broad provision that makes public displays of dissent dangerous and difficult. Violation of the new law is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
Despite the risks involved, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has appealed directly to Russians to speak out against their government’s actions. In a Sunday video address, he switched from Ukrainian to Russian and said the citizens of the two countries were part of the same fight.
“It’s a fight for your country too,” he said. “If you’re silent now then only your poverty will speak later — and it will be answered by repression.”
Nurse Marie-Laure Satta pauses during her New Year's Eve shift in the COVID-19 intensive care unit at the la Timone hospital in Marseille, southern France, on Dec. 31, 2021. (photo: Daniel Cole/AP)
The milestone, recorded by Johns Hopkins University, is the latest tragic reminder of the unrelenting nature of the pandemic even as people are shedding masks, travel is resuming and businesses are reopening around the globe.
Remote Pacific islands, whose isolation had protected them for more than two years, are just now grappling with their first outbreaks and deaths, fueled by the highly contagious omicron variant.
Hong Kong, which is seeing deaths soar, is testing its entire population of 7.5 million three times this month as it clings to mainland China's "zero-COVID" strategy.
As death rates remain high in Poland, Hungary, Romania and other Eastern European countries, the region has seen more than 1 million refugees arrive from war-torn Ukraine, a country with poor vaccination coverage and high rates of cases and deaths.
And despite its wealth and vaccine availability, the United States is nearing 1 million reported deaths on its own.
Death rates worldwide are still highest among people unvaccinated against the virus, said Tikki Pang, a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore's medical school and co-Chair of the Asia Pacific Immunization Coalition.
"This is a disease of the unvaccinated — look what is happening in Hong Kong right now, the health system is being overwhelmed," said Pang, the former director of research policy and cooperation with the World Health Organization. "The large majority of the deaths and the severe cases are in the unvaccinated, vulnerable segment of the population."
It took the world seven months to record its first million deaths from the virus after the pandemic began in early 2020. Four months later another million people had died, and 1 million have died every three months since, until the death toll hit 5 million at the end of October. Now it has reached 6 million — more than the populations of Berlin and Brussels combined, or the entire state of Maryland.
But despite the enormity of the figure, the world undoubtedly hit its 6 millionth death some time ago. Poor record-keeping and testing in many parts of the world has led to an undercount in coronavirus deaths, in addition to excess deaths related to the pandemic but not from actual COVID-19 infections, like people who died from preventable causes but could not receive treatment because hospitals were full.
Edouard Mathieu, head of data for the Our World in Data portal, said that — when countries' excess mortality figures are studied — as many as nearly four times the reported death toll have likely died because of the pandemic.
An analysis of excess deaths by a team at The Economist estimates that the number of COVID-19 deaths is between 14 million and 23.5 million.
"Confirmed deaths represent a fraction of the true number of deaths due to COVID, mostly because of limited testing, and challenges in the attribution of the cause of death," Mathieu told The Associated Press. "In some, mostly rich, countries that fraction is high and the official tally can be considered to be fairly accurate, but in others it is highly underestimated."
The United States has the biggest official death toll in the world, but the numbers have been trending downward over the last month.
Lonnie Bailey lost his 17-year-old nephew, Carlos Nunez Jr., who contracted COVID-19 last April — the same month Kentucky opened his age group to vaccinations. The Louisville resident said the family is still suffering, including Carlos' younger sibling, who had to be hospitalized himself and still has lingering symptoms. The aggressive reopening of the country has been jarring for them to witness.
"For us it is hard to let our guard down; it's going to take a while for us to adjust," Bailey said.
The world has seen more than 445 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, and new weekly cases have been declining recently in all regions except for the Western Pacific, which includes China, Japan and South Korea, among others, the World Health Organization reported this week.
Although the overall figures in the Pacific islands seeing their first outbreaks are small compared to larger countries, they are significant among their tiny populations and threaten to overwhelm fragile health care systems.
"Given what we know about COVID ... it's likely to hit them for the next year or so at least," said Katie Greenwood, head of the Red Cross Pacific delegation.
Tonga reported its first outbreak after the virus arrived with international aid vessels following the Jan. 15 eruption of a massive volcano, followed by a tsunami. It now has several hundred cases, but — with 66% of its population fully vaccinated — it has so far reported people suffering mostly mild symptoms and no deaths.
The Solomon Islands saw the first outbreak in January and now has thousands of cases and more than 100 deaths. The actual death toll is likely much higher, with the capital's hospital overwhelmed and many dying at home, Greenwood said.
Only 12% of Solomon Islanders are fully vaccinated, though the outbreak has provided new impetus to the country's vaccination campaign and 29% now have at least one shot.
Global vaccine disparity continues, with only 6.95% of people in low-income countries fully vaccinated, compared to more than 73% in high-income nations, according to Our World in Data.
In a good sign, at the end of last month Africa surpassed Europe in the number of doses administered daily, but only about 12.5% of its population has received two shots.
The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still pressing for more vaccines, though it has been a challenge. Some shipments arrive with little warning for countries' health systems and others near the expiration date — forcing doses to be destroyed.
Eastern Europe has been particularly hard hit by the omicron variant, and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a new risk has emerged as hundreds of thousands of people flee to places like Poland on crowded trains. Health officials there have been offering free vaccinations to all refugees, but have not been making them test upon arrival or quarantine.
"This is really tragic because great stress has a very negative effect on natural immunity and increases the risk of infections," said Anna Boron-Kaczmarska, a Polish infectious disease specialist. "They are in very high stress, being afraid for their lives, the lives of their children, they family members."
Mexico has reported 300,000 deaths, but with little testing, a government analysis of death certificates puts the real number closer to 500,000. Still, four weeks of falling infection rates have left health officials optimistic.
In India, where the world was shocked by images of open-air pyres of bodies burned as crematoria were overwhelmed, the scars are fading as the number of new cases and deaths has slowed.
India has recorded more than 500,000 deaths, but experts believe its true toll is in the millions, primarily from the delta variant. Migrants from India's vast hinterland are now returning to its megacities in search of jobs, and the streets are packed with traffic. Shopping malls have customers, albeit still masked, while schools and universities are welcoming students after a months-long gap.
In Britain, infections have fallen since an omicron-driven surge in December, but remain high. England has now lifted all restrictions, including mask mandates and the requirement that all who test positive isolate at home.
With about 250,000 reported deaths, the African continent's smaller death toll is thought to stem from underreporting, as well as a generally younger and less mobile population.
"Africa is a big question mark for me, because it has been relatively spared from the worst so far, but it could just be a time bomb," Pang said, noting its low vaccination rates.
In South Africa, Soweto resident Thoko Dube said she received news of the deaths of two family members on the same day in January 2021 — a month before the country received its first vaccines.
It has been difficult, but "the family is coping," she said. "We have accepted it because it has been happening to other families."
Truckers and their supporters make their way to drive around the Washington DC beltway on Sunday. (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
The ‘people’s convoy’ of around 1,000 vehicles threaten a week of traffic disruptions around US capital
From its temporary base at a speedway vehicle racing site in Hagerstown, 80 miles north-west in Maryland, organizers of what they term the “People’s Convoy” of about 1,000 vehicles have said they plan to welcome the new work week by driving slowly around Washington on the already notoriously congested Beltway, or ring road, at the minimum legal speed in an attempt to get their message across to national politicians.
The convoy, a spin-off of trucker protests further north that have snarled Ottawa and disrupted Canadian transport arteries to the US, began assembling in California last week.
As it has made its way east, it has picked up similarly mobile, ideologically aligned, fellow travelers along the way.
But America is already rapidly releasing its citizens from a patchwork of pandemic restrictions and Covid mandates as the most recent surge of infections subsides in many states and officials and the public begin talking of the waning pandemic.
The changing circumstances is now prompting convoy organizers to adapt their demands to a more free-ranging basket of aspirations and motives.
Some participants said the destination was reason enough to make the trek. At the speedway on Friday night, one participant who described himself as the lead trucker told a cheering crowd he would drive his truck into the heart of the American capital.
But it remained unclear if the convoy plans to drive into the small area occupied by Washington DC, itself, or snarl masses of government workers and lawmakers on their morning and evening Beltway road commutes across the states immediately neighboring the District of Columbia as they head for their offices where they run the nation’s affairs of state.
US law enforcement agencies are paying attention. A previous mobile protest called Stop the Tires [denoting the US spelling of tyres] morphed into a “Stop the Steal” demonstration supporting Donald Trump’s false claim that he had been fraudulently denied victory in the November 2020 election.
And that in turn became part of the January 6 insurrection riot at the US Capitol by extremist supporters of Trump, the then Republican president, as they tried to overturn the official certification by the US Congress of Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
“I decided to create a Facebook page where me and my buddies could gather to shoot the s**t about the policies that will be implemented if Trump is no longer the president,” StoptheTires2020 founder Jeremy Rewoldt told The Trucker publication in November 2020.
At the speedway site, the drivers said their frustrations included workplace vaccine mandates and other pandemic measures. The crowds chanted anti-Biden slogans and displayed support for Trump.
The gathering appeared much like a Trump rally, with a giant American flag slung between cranes attached to the beds of semi-articulated trucks.
Many vehicles bore license plates from across the US; many drivers were honking their horns, a tactic that drove Ottawa residents to near distraction and caused an Ontario superior court to issue a 10-day ban on horn blowing.
The US Department of Homeland Security has said it is coordinating with local authorities to prepare for the convoy’s arrival and warning that the truckers could hinder emergency services.
At their Hagerstown meeting point, an estimated 1,000 protesters gathered on Sunday to hear details of the plan. Kicking off with a prayer service during which a pastor told them they were “heroes”, the truckers heard from organizer Brian Brase who instructed them to drive between 45 and 55 miles per hour and stay in one line on the roads to and around Washington in order to best show the size of the convoy.
They raised their morning coffees in salute before setting off for the capital, reported The Washington Post.
Brase said the drivers planned to circle the capitol’s ring-road twice on Sunday and repeat that pattern on successive days. “We don’t want to shut DC down,” Brase told the newspaper.
“We’re not anti-vaxxers. We’re not. We just want freedom, freedom. We want to choose. We just want the choice. So tomorrow is a basically a show of just how big we are and how serious we are.” Brase added that it was not clear how long the protest convoy would last.
But he told the drivers, who are mostly white, middle-aged men, to celebrate the distance they had traveled, without instructions about what to do at their destination or what that destination might be.
Without a destination or denouement in mind, the truckers on Sunday appeared destined to circle until further notice.
Above the blare of horns, Brase described the situation as “very fluid”.
Militia members wait inside the Senate chamber at the Capitol building during the 'American Patriot Rally on Capitol Lawn' protest in Lansing, Mich., Thursday April 30, 2020, during the coronavirus outbreak. (photo: Nicole Hester/AP)
Yet historian JoEllen Vinyard says the “citizen militia" activists she got to know in the 1990s didn't seem like the types who would abduct a governor or stage a coup.
“I don't think they were dangerous," said Vinyard, an Eastern Michigan University professor emeritus and author of a book about far-right movements in the state. “They reminded me of the good old boys I knew growing up in Nebraska."
But as four men charged with conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer go on trial Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids, Vinyard and other political extremism scholars say things have changed in recent years. Their arrests came about three months before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that led to charges against many right-wing extremists and militants.
In contrast to militants from before, who mostly avoided bloodshed with the horrific exception of the Oklahoma City bombing, some modern successors have taken a more radical and potentially violent turn.
“This is a different type of domestic terrorism phenomenon than we've faced in previous decades — completely different from anything I've observed,” said Javed Ali, a University of Michigan professor who served with the FBI and intelligence agencies.
“You've got all these points on a very diverse threat spectrum — not centralized in any one corner, no single groups, no national leadership, completely disorganized and disaggregated,” Ali said. “It's difficult for law enforcement to spot these threats. The Whitmer plot is a case in point."
The alleged kidnapping conspiracy involved members of a little-known cell called the “Wolverine Watchmen” and others who attended a July 2020 meeting in Ohio of self-styled “militia” leaders from several states, according to court documents.
They were angry about pandemic lockdowns and other policies they considered dictatorial, investigators said. Some had joined a protest months earlier at the Michigan Capitol in Lansing, where armed demonstrators faced off with police and some carried guns into the Senate gallery.
Federal prosecutors in October 2020 charged six suspects in the alleged plot, including Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, who have pleaded guilty. Garbin received a six-year prison term; Franks will be sentenced later.
The other four defendants are Adam Fox, Daniel Harris, Brandon Caserta and Barry Croft Jr. All are Michigan residents except Croft, who is from Delaware.
Eight other men accused of aiding the conspiracy have been charged in state court.
The Wolverine Watchmen are among the small, secretive groups that have appeared in Michigan since the initial burst of paramilitary activism faded, Ali said.
They began recruiting members on Facebook in November 2019 and communicated through an encrypted messaging platform, according to a state police affidavit. It said they held firearms training and tactical drills to prepare for “the boogaloo,“ an anticipated "uprising against the government or impending politically motivated civil war.”
The scheme against Whitmer was hatched the following summer during a meeting at which Watchmen discussed invading the statehouse and using explosives to distract law enforcement, Garbin acknowledged in his plea agreement.
They considered executing the Democratic governor or putting her on trial, eventually deciding to abduct her at her family’s vacation home in northern Michigan, the document said. Informants and undercover agents helped foil the alleged plot.
Vinyard, who attended meetings of self-described militia groups in southeastern Michigan for her research during the 1990s, said threatening language was rare then.
Members had long lists of grievances, some targeting the United Nations and a federal government they believed had exceeded its constitutional authority, she said. But others involved local law enforcement and courts.
“People talked about police harassment, truckers getting stopped by cops, fathers who had not been treated fairly when they got divorced and couldn't see their kids,” she said.
Norman Olson, an Air Force veteran, gun shop owner and Baptist preacher who initially led the Michigan Militia, said then its members were outraged by deadly sieges involving federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas.
The militia drew international attention after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, which killed 168 people. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, convicted in the case, had attended meetings in Michigan. Olson said they'd been kicked out for advocating violence.
By the early 2000s the movement appeared to lose steam, experts said, perhaps because of public revulsion over the bombing, internal strife, the presidency of gun-friendly George W. Bush and a crackdown on terrorism after the 9/11 attacks.
Following President Barack Obama's election, it resurfaced on a wave of right-wing populism embodied by the Tea Party movement and Donald Trump that crested amid fury at COVID-19 restrictions.
In 2010, the FBI charged nine members of a fundamentalist Christian sect in southeastern Michigan called Hutaree with conspiring to rebel against the government. The judge dismissed most of the case, but it signaled what some observers describe as the rise of a more incendiary segment of the far right.
Even other paramilitary groups were uneasy with the Hutaree and notified authorities, according to a paper by Vanderbilt University sociologist Amy Cooter, who studies right-wing militancy.
Lee Miracle, a longtime leader of the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia, urged restraint in a statement on the group's website after the Wolverine Watchmen arrests in 2020.
“Our capacity for violence, as a free people, should always be well maintained, and kept within reach, but it should always be the LAST option," said Miracle, who did not return an email seeking additional comment.
But organizations that track the more belligerent groups say they've made inroads in Michigan, which has an extensive history as a far-right breeding ground.
The nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project says among the most active are newcomers such as the Boogaloo Boys and the Proud Boys, a self-described “Western chauvinist” association. Another is the Michigan Liberty Militia, which had a visible presence at the state Capitol protest.
The movement has splintered into many factions over the years because of leadership rivalries and ideological differences, said retired FBI agent Greg Stejskal, who dealt with the Michigan Militia in its early days. Still, it has remained overwhelmingly white, male and rooted in conspiratorial fear of losing guns and freedom.
“They feel like they're subjugated, and this is their way of fighting back," he said.
They've kept a somewhat lower profile since the kidnapping arrests and the invasion of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the 2020 election, said Rachel Goldwasser, a research analyst with the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.
The outcome of the Michigan conspiracy trial, she said, may “indicate whether they stay in their foxholes or come out as a force in public again."
Insects. (photo: Getty Images/Mint Images)
A world without bugs is a world we don’t want to live in.
Perhaps you don’t think much about the value of dung beetles. But without them crawling around farms, stables, and wild savannas today, the world would be pretty, er, shitty. What about the importance of small, mosquito-like flies called midges? Without them, there’d be no chocolate and likely no ice cream because they pollinate both cacao and the plants that feed dairy cows.
“There are lots of tiny little things in this world that hold aloft everything that we value,” said Oliver Milman, an environmental journalist at the Guardian and author of a new book called The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World.
A world without insects is a world we don’t want to live in, Milman told Vox. Yet we don’t seem to pay these critters much attention — even as many of them slip toward extinction. Science is increasingly showing that insects, on the whole, are declining quickly, he said. Some populations have fallen by more than 70 percent in just a few decades.
Averting an insect apocalypse starts with understanding why these famously uncharismatic critters matter — that’s one lesson he hopes his book can convey. Then there’s the question of how to help them. Fortunately, he writes, it’s pretty simple: We don’t need an action plan, we need an inaction plan. Insects love overgrown lawns, empty lots, and other untended spaces.
“Perhaps it’s time to sit back and see what could blossom in front of us if we just give it the chance,” Milman writes.
Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
The dramatic collapse of insect populations
Benji Jones
People tend to equate insects with so-called pests like cockroaches and mosquitoes. How small of a sliver of the insect world do pests represent?
Oliver Milman
“Pest” is such a subjective term. Certainly, you can find a lot of people who consider every insect to be either irrelevant or a pest — other than bees, because they’re nice, buzzy things that make honey and provide us with food, and butterflies, because they’re pretty. That’s part of the problem: We’re not starting from a baseline of fondness for these animals.
Three-quarters of all the known animals in the world are insects. There’s roughly 1 million named species — but there might be 5 million or maybe 10 million, or even up to 30 million species. In peoples’ day-to-day interactions, they might see an ant or a bee if they're lucky and that’s not really representative of the insects that are out there.
As one scientist put it, you’ve got one researcher studying 50,000 insects and 50,000 researchers studying one monkey. That’s the kind of imbalance you have in the scientific world when it comes to insects.
Benji Jones
How universal is the decline? Does it include the ones that we encounter in our homes, like cockroaches and mosquitoes?
Oliver Milman
We don’t know the full picture of the declines. In some places, insects are actually increasing. The range of mosquitoes, for example, is expanding — an extra billion people could be exposed to disease-carrying mosquitoes, which like warm and damp conditions.
But there are so many studies showing these startling declines [in many species] — these eye-watering numbers that you just wouldn’t normally see in scientific studies. We should also be thinking about the composition of what’s out there. We are stripping away a world of bees, butterflies, and beetles, which we rely on for many things including food, medicines, and so on. And we’re replacing them with insects that can adapt to the changes we’ve set in motion. We are creating a world of mosquitoes and cockroaches, just like we’re creating a world of rats and crows and raccoons.
The natural world doesn’t care if the world is populated with lions and butterflies. If the conditions are ripe for cockroaches and mosquitoes, that’s what we’re gonna get.
Benji Jones
How severe is the decline of insects compared to other animal groups?
Oliver Milman
There was a big study in Germany in 2017, which found that the annual average weight of flying insects caught in traps was down 76 percent since 1989 in protected nature reserves. There was also an incredible study by the scientist Anders Pape Møller who’s been driving up and down the same stretch of road in Denmark each summer since 1997 and counting the bugs that get smushed on his windshield. They had declined by as much as 97 percent. You don’t see those kinds of figures normally in conservation biology.
Over a long time, we’ve wiped out a good chunk of tigers, for example, but in just a short period of time — we’re talking just a few decades — we’ve wiped out an enormous range of insects from seemingly stable, well-protected, well-regulated parts of the world. One meta study from 2019 found that 40 percent of insect species are declining around the world. They compared that to other creatures and found that the extinction rate for insects is eight times faster than it is for mammals or birds.
Benji Jones
Are there ways to sample insects without killing them?
Oliver Milman
All the methods that I learned about involve killing them — trapping them in sticky traps or these funnel-like tents that push them into alcohol. The traditional way was to go up to the bottom of a tree and fog it with insecticide. The insects would fall down and you would catch them on the forest floor.
Pesticides have become more, not less, harmful
Benji
What is the single largest reason for these declines?
Oliver
Habitat loss is an enormous one. We’ve removed about a third of all the world’s forested areas in the industrialized era. We’ve changed much of the planet into monocultural farmland. We’ve expanded highways, urban areas, and so on, creating a landscape that’s very hostile to insects.
We’ve dominated the world in a very boring way. Insects like diversity and color and a range of different plants and we tend to like uniformity and tidiness. Culturally, we like very neatly trimmed lawns. We like fields of crops that are not diversified and have tidy edges. We dislike weeds in general. We’ve created a monotonous world that isn’t favorable to insects.
Benji Jones
What does an abandoned plot of land that might not look very nice to us mean for these critters?
Oliver Milman
If you start to let things go a little bit — stop tending your backyard, leave a building abandoned — it may look terrible to us but it’s a joyful place for insects. They can feed upon the weeds and use them for shelter.
During pandemic lockdowns in various countries, insects actually came back because of the lack of traffic, the lack of people. A lot of local authorities stopped cutting grass and insects really benefited from that. Plants sprung up that we hadn’t seen in years. Then the insects came back. And once the insects come back, the birds come back. So you start having these mini-ecosystems springing up.
That’s one of the more hopeful things I think about — you just need to give insects a bit of a chance and they can bounce back. One scientist compared what’s happening to insects to a log in water that we’re pushing down with our foot. If we just take our foot off it, the log will rise up. That’s what insects can do if we give them a chance.
Benji Jones
People know that pesticides are a problem for insects — by design. What did you learn about pesticides through your reporting that surprised you?
Oliver Milman
I had a general understanding of pesticide use and believed the trend was getting better — new chemicals and techniques were coming that were a little less harmful to wildlife and a little bit more effective. But what you find is an absolute mess.
Think about the days of Silent Spring by Rachael Carson. It was a seminal book on the dangers of the pesticide DDT, which was pushing bald eagles toward extinction in the US. It helped rally support to ban DDT. But neonicotinoids, a widespread insecticide used now by US farmers, is 7,000 times more toxic to bees than DDT. So we’ve actually substituted this infamous chemical for one that’s far worse for bees. A single teaspoon of the stuff is enough to kill as many honeybees as there are people in India. It’s just deadly.
Benji Jones
That really shows how little value we have for insects compared to charismatic animals like eagles.
Oliver Milman
That’s right. Insects have been allowed to slip into this silent catastrophe that we’re only just waking up to now.
Benji Jones
Climate change affects the environment in very complicated ways. How is it impacting insects?
Oliver Milman
Climate change is generally pretty good for mosquitoes. Cockroaches don’t really care that much either. But for lots of other types of insects, it’s pretty disastrous.
There was an assumption a few years ago that insects would fare better than other kinds of animals because they have these huge populations that can rebound quickly. They’ve managed to get through five mass extinctions relatively unscathed. But there is research showing that the range of insects is going to shrink quite dramatically. Insects are more restricted in terms of their movement. They exist in fairly stable bands of temperature, and once that’s pushed beyond their limits, they are in big trouble.
Climate change is also scrambling the seasons. Spring is arriving much earlier now. In the UK, moths and butterflies are emerging from their cocoons about six days earlier, per decade, on average. In the US, spring is arriving 20 days earlier in some places compared to 50 or 60 years ago. You have plants not aligned with insects, which are then not aligned with birds. So you have this whole cascade of problems going through the ecosystem.
To save ourselves, we must save insects
Benji Jones
It’s hard to win people over with insects. What is your best argument for why we need them?
Oliver Milman
Selfishly, to save ourselves it would be a good idea to save insects. As much as it would be a terrible shame if we lost rhinos or elephants or orangutans — these big charismatic creatures — it wouldn’t trigger a food security crisis. It wouldn’t cause the loss of potential medicines that could save us from antibiotic resistance. It wouldn’t cause whole ecosystems to collapse. That is what would happen if we lost insects.
We are heading toward a world where there are far more mouths to feed at a time when insect pollination is under severe strain. Some parts of the world are either going to have far more expensive food or no nutritious food at all.
Insects also have intrinsic value. Butterflies are beautiful, for example. A garden filled with insects is alive, and it’s a place you want to be.
Benji Jones
Is there one particular insect that you found especially fascinating?
Oliver Milman
I love this water beetle [called Regimbartia attenuata] that’s a superhero. It can survive being eaten by a frog because it can ... jump out of its ass.
Bees’ abilities amaze me. You can teach a bee how to play soccer. They can add and subtract. They can recognize each other by their faces. They almost have a sense of consciousness.
Cockroaches are incredible. Anything that can survive two weeks after being beheaded is a pretty formidable creature. As much we hate them, we’ve got to at least tip our hats to them.
Benji Jones
It doesn’t give me a ton of hope that we struggle to save even some of the most charismatic species. Tell me there’s a relatively easy way to avert catastrophe for insects.
Oliver Milman
Unlike solving a pandemic, where you need a new vaccine, or climate change, where you might need new technologies, we don’t really need to invent anything new or do anything radically innovative to save insects. One scientist told me that we need more of an inaction plan rather than an action plan. It’s about just letting things slide a little bit. Maybe don’t rake the leaves in your yard, or don’t apply as much or as many insecticides. Maybe let the grass grow a little bit — because insects love that.
Fixing the larger agricultural machine [expansive monocultures, pesticides, and so on] requires more systemic change. But there are signs of optimism. Farmers are looking at establishing corridors of wildflowers at the edge of their fields, for example, because they realize the importance of insects in helping their crops grow. There is a model we can follow to bring them back, but we need to start doing it quickly because the pressures on insects are only growing.
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