While investigators uncover the remains of civilians, heartbroken families wait nearby to reclaim their loved ones
Sometimes the dead have more to say than the living. Those lying beneath the soft, yellow earth in the grounds of the church of Andrew the Apostle, in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, have many terrible stories to tell.
In a deep mass grave, a forearm and hand, the fingertips turning black, lay under a foot at a sickening angle; another man’s arm looked like it was clawing its way out of the disturbed soil in an attempt to escape his fate.
On Friday morning a team of forensic investigators from Kyiv arrived at the site to begin documenting the terror inflicted on civilians by Russian troops during Moscow’s six-week-old invasion. They strapped a door to a municipal digger to create a makeshift gurney, and got to work.
All of the people they uncovered had died violently. One man was missing a large chunk of his skull; another body was so badly burned only his head and half of his torso remained, the whites of his eyes subsumed by charred flesh. One person appeared to have been beheaded.
As each new cadaver was laid in front of him, the lead investigator knelt over it and softly murmured an inventory while a colleague wrote it down: leather jacket, mobile phone, no ID. He checked inside decaying mouths, the range of motion of broken limbs, and documented burns, bullet wounds and injuries caused by shrapnel, before volunteers from the town helped put each corpse into a fresh body bag.
Their pink and blue plastic gloves were soon slick with blood. Between bodies, the workers plunged their hands into the metre-high pile of dirt taken out of the grave so far, rubbing clumps of it between their palms to restore their grip.
Heavy rain stopped work. At the end of the day, the team had exhumed 18 corpses. But many more missing people of Bucha are waiting to be found.
A wealthy northwest Kyiv commuter town before the conflict began, the name of Bucha is now synonymous with Russian war crimes. After a month of fighting, its soldiers embrangled at positions about 40km northeast and northwest of the capital and unable to advance, Bucha was one of the first places that Moscow pulled back from to reconcentrate its forces on Ukraine’s east. The scale of the violence against civilians which took place here – murders, rapes, torture, looting – is horrifying.
“The morgue had no electricity and it quickly became full. There were still so many bodies on the streets,” said Serhiy Kaplychnyy, who oversees funerals and death registrations for the Bucha municipality.
“We had to beg the Russians to let us bury them. They told us it was still cold, so it didn’t matter, they could lie there. But the dogs were starting to eat them. In the end we convinced them it was a sanitary issue and they let us dig the grave at the church of Andrew the Apostle since it was near both their military position and the morgue and hospital.”
The first tranche of bodies numbered around 70, several locals said. Then there was a second mass burial of another 33 people. In total, around 150 civilians are believed to be lying in the church site.
A group of around two dozen Bucha residents were waiting on the other side of the church on Friday for the bodies of their loved ones to be unearthed.
Ludmyla Skakalova, a paramedic with a drawn, exhausted face, said she was one of only four people left working at the town’s hospital after their last doctor was injured, and that they had opened the doors to wounded Russians, too.
“The soldiers also targeted us,” she said. “Once the Russians called and said there was an emergency, to lure out one of the ambulance drivers and someone from the territorial defence. Then a sniper shot them. The driver died.” Snipers shot civilians in the legs as they tried to get water at a well, killing at least one woman, said Tatyana Lipinska, a volunteer at the Bucha city council helpline, and soldiers abducted at least one volunteer delivering medicine to elderly people.
Kukharenko Vyacheslav, a large man of 47 with a gentle voice and bright blue eyes, spent most of the day crying quietly next to the grave. He was not looking for a loved one. He felt guilty, he said, tortured by what he described as his own “cowardice” in the face of the invasion, and felt the need to bear witness.
“Volunteers from a nearby village tried to come help us, and the Russians shot them in the street. Then my neighbour went out to help, and they killed him too,” he said. “We were 11 children and 10 adults all hiding in a basement, and I was so afraid the youngest baby would cry and let the Russians know where we were.”
A few days later, Vyacheslav talked to a group of soldiers for an hour when they came to check the household’s passports. “I asked them, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and they replied that it was just orders. They knew that other units were killing civilians, but said it wasn’t them,” he said.
“They said we are brothers. What kind of brother arrives at your home on a tank and shoots your neighbour?” he said. “I think they were even afraid of each other.”
Haylena Fiaktistava, 70, was among those hoping to find answers in the mass grave. She spent the occupation sheltering at home with her two sons, Dmitro and Andrei, but one day Dmitro left the house to find bread, and never came back. During a respite in the shelling three days later, Haylena and Andrei went out and found him lying face down in the middle of the road a few streets away, bullet holes in his back.
Another relative helped Andrei to take Dmitro’s body to the morgue, but it was full. Not sure what else to do, they left him under the small white building’s awning. Later, they heard that all of the bodies at the morgue had been buried in the church grounds.
“We wrote his name and address on a piece of paper and put it inside one of his socks so we can find him again,” she said. “I just want to give him a proper funeral.”
When satellite pictures of the mass grave at the church of Andrew the Apostle emerged earlier this week, before Ukrainian troops reentered the town, Russia was quick to deny the atrocities committed here. Footage and photographs of dead civilians had been “ordered” by the US to sully Moscow’s reputation, Russia’s foreign ministry said.
Events at the Bucha church on Friday gave an irrefutable truth to the Kremlin’s lies.
A military chaplain arrived soon after the exhumation of the mass grave began. He put a stole on over his fatigues and held a wooden cross while he blessed the pit with holy water and sang an Orthodox memorial service.
Anna Stefaniuk, along with her husband Volodymyr and mother Natalia Lukyanenko, silently watched the investigators work. Stefaniuk was missing her brother, Lukyanenko’s son; Volodymyr was also missing a brother. The family were simultaneously desperate for answers, and afraid of what the grave might tell them.
As the fourth body bag was unzipped and shown to the mourners, Volodymyr let out a harrowing cry and collapsed on the ground. The grave had given up one of its many secrets: his brother’s remains were among the tangle of tortured limbs and bloodied faces.
A biting wind blew as he covered his face and sobbed. Anna leaned over him, touching her head to his.
Springtime birdsong echoed down from the church’s tall arches. Not far from the church gate, blue and yellow crocus buds were beginning to force their way up through the soil, the first blooms of a Ukrainian spring like no other.
While the war in Ukraine is far from over, from a pure battlefield assessment perspective the Ukrainian defenders have far out-preformed the Russian invaders. In the war’s first major pivotal battle, the Battle of Kiev the far larger Russian force was routed and those who were not slaughtered fled for their lives. Another major engagement looms in the Donbas and its story is yet to be told but the Russians will have to preform at a far higher level if they are to prevail there or anywhere else in the land of the Ukrainians. Nonetheless after retreating the Russians would say that they had, “Achieved all of their objectives.” It seemed laughable, until the world saw Bucha.
The scenes are apocalyptic, villages, towns and entire cities reduced to rubble. Innocent, unarmed civilians deliberately targeted and executed en masse. Not just shot and killed but violated in a manner reminiscent of the world's most deranged and heinous serial killers, with a quantity multiplied by thousands.
The destruction rather than random or indiscriminate is chillingly calculated and purposeful. Precisely targeted are social support institutions. Schools, nurseries, hospitals, transportation hubs are systematically destroyed. It is madness with a most diabolical methodology. The purpose is to destroy Ukraine’s infrastructure, to make the entire country uninhabitable. The damage wrought in six short weeks will take generations to repair and rebuild. But the targeting of civilians has an even darker more cynical purpose.
Full military strikes on civilians cause widespread terror and panic. It is the worst, most illegal kind of warfare. The result is that fleeing populations themselves become a weapon of war. Evacuating communities, providing humanitarian aid compromising defensive military strategies to avoid further civilian suffering all are an advantage to the aggressors. The weaponization of human slaughter is not necessarily confined to the immediate region of conflict. It creates an assault on secondary regions and nations as the terrorized and wounded stream across international boarders. In this way Putin’s war on Ukraine is exported to all of Europe and soon far beyond. It is no longer just a proxy war with Europe, all of Europe is now the war zone.
Putin’s War Goes Worldwide
Andriivka, Ukraine, April 6, 2022: A cat sits amid live artillery ammunition left behind by hastily retreating Russian soldiers. (photo: Vadim Ghirda/AP)
The calamity spiraling out of control in Ukraine is far too big to be contained by its boarders nor will it be confined to NATO territory. The effects and impacts of Putin’s war are moving around the world as efficiently as the Coronavirus. No continent or country is exempt from the economic shrapnel. Ukraine is a global supplier of agricultural food products, particularly wheat. While the direct impact on food security for Western nations would probably be limited the resulting food shortages in the Middle East and Africa should the conflict drag on have the potential to be catastrophic, literally millions might die from famine.
While food shortages may not directly threaten more affluent Western nations, global financial instability likely will, possibly in extreme ways. Prices can spike, markets can crash, credit ratings can be downgraded and entire economies can contract significantly. By the time this is over Putin’s war on the West may do more economic harm to Western nations than their sanctions do to Russia.
The Price of Western Timidity
Politicians and bureaucrats do not make war well. It’s not something they believe in, practice for or instinctively understand how to cope with. Within the NATO alliance there are 30 heads of state and 30 legislative bodies, not counting sub categories. It is not impossible to efficiently organize a military strategy within such a complex organizational structure, but decisive action is often difficult to achieve even when critical threats arise.
Regardless of what NATO leaders say to reporters they are dreading the prospect of a direct confrontation with Putin’s army. An army that appears to be as deranged as he is. But as dangerous as Putin’s army is the threat to Western nations posed by their own inaction is actually significantly greater. With each, executed civilian, each raped woman, each murdered child, each destroyed village Putin’s campaign of terror and horror metastases anew growing stronger through its very ability to continue.
Each day NATO nations chose not to use their superior military capabilities to end this war and they surely can, is a day that Putin grows stronger, the position of Western nations becomes weaker and the threat to global security becomes greater. Putin cannot win this war militarily but through inaction the West can win it for him. The West is hesitating and Putin is acting. So even though his army is performing very poorly Putin is winning, on a global scale. The inaction actually encourages a furtherance of the violence. The only meaningful deterrent is a sufficient counterforce.
More dead Ukrainian civilians won’t make the West more secure, it will make Putin more confident and aggressive. The West can confront this threat now or later. Now is by far the better option. This is a war Western nations insist they are not engaged in. In reality is is a war they dare not lose.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News. On Twitter: @MarcAshRSN
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Two women from Texas talk to each other about their travel to Okalahoma as they wait in the recovery room following their abortions at Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City, December 6, 2021. Picture taken December 6, 2021. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
Police in Starr County on the Texas-Mexico border have arrested and charged a woman with murder for allegedly performing what they called a “self-induced abortion.”
The Starr County Sheriff's Office arrested 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera on Thursday. TPR confirmed Friday night that Herrera was in the custody of the Starr County Sheriff’s Office with bond set at $500,000. By Saturday night, Herrera was released from custody.
The Starr County grand jury's indictment, dated March 30, stated that Herrera "did then and there intentionally and knowingly cause the death of an individual J.A.H. by a self-induced abortion."
“This is a developing story and we don’t yet know all the details surrounding this tragic event," said Rockie Gonzalez, founder and board chair of Frontera Fund. "What we do know is that criminalizing pregnant people’s choices or pregnancy outcomes, which the State of Texas has done, takes away people’s autonomy over their own bodies, and leaves them with no safe options when they choose not to become a parent."
Members of the Rio Grande Valley-based abortion assistance fund protested Saturday morning outside the Starr County Jail.
Melissa Arjona, who co-founded South Texans for Reproductive Justice, was also at the protest. She said the arrest is a consequence of Senate Bill 8, which criminalized abortion as early as five weeks and deputized private citizens to sue anyone who provides an abortion or “aids and abets” a procedure.
“I mean, they they criminalized pregnancy, basically, and abortion access," she said. "And so we knew something like this was bound to happen eventually.”
“We want people to know that this type of legislation impacts low-income people of color communities the most when state legislators put restrictions on our reproductive rights,” Gonzalez told TPR.
By Saturday evening, the specific details of Herrera's case — and the strength of the case against her — were still not clear.
"So there's a question of whether this actually qualifies as a murder?" said Jessica Brand, founder of the WREN Collective, a research firm that specializes in criminal justice issues. "I would say no. Everybody who's ever looked at a case like this, has has decided to say 'no' in the end. That's why these prosecutions haven't worked in states like Tennessee or Indiana, where they've been tried before."
Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, said Texas law actually exempts her from a criminal homicide charge.
"When Texas law explicitly says that their murder statutes that do include the unborn child do not apply to the death of an unborn child if the conduct charged is 'conduct committed by the mother of the unborn child,'" she explained. "So this person who's been arrested has been arrested based on a law that does not permit exactly this kind of prosecution."
At least 71 death row inmates in China had their vital organs removed, to be used for transplants, before they were officially declared dead, according to a study published in the American Journal of Transplantation.
"We found that the physicians became the executioners on behalf of the state, and that the method of execution was heart removal," an author of the study, Matthew P. Robertson, said in a statement to Al Jazeera.
For decades, per the study, Chinese surgeons have broken a crucial transplant donor rule: Don't remove organs from a live body.
The authors of the study, Australian National University researcher Matthew P. Robertson and cardiac surgeon Jacob Lavee, reviewed 2,838 cases to determine that 348 "surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and other medical workers or researchers" who participated in the executions of inmates between 1980 and 2015 had removed the organs of death row inmates prior to "legitimate determination of brain death."
The World Medical Association, which maintains ethical guidelines for physicians in more than 100 countries, specifies that organ removal should not be the cause of death for transplant donors.
"The dead donor rule is fundamental to transplant ethics," the study reads. "The rule states that organ procurement must not commence until the donor is both dead and formally pronounced so, and by the same token, that procurement of organs must not cause the death of the donor."
The cases showed that medics did not accurately check that inmates were brain dead — unable to be brought back by ventilation or other means. The study authors were able to determine this by manually reviewing 310 papers that mentioned the word "donor."
"If the reports we examine are accurate, they indicate that heart and lung procurement by the surgeon was the proximate cause of the prisoner's death, thus directly implicating the surgeon in the execution," the study reads.
"This was one of the strongest pieces of evidence of failure to adhere to the dead donor rule because ventilation via intubation is a key step in being able to diagnose brain death," Lavee said in a statement to Newsweek.
"There were several other problematic features of these clinical case reports. For instance, the donors did not have intravenous lines established until moments before surgery, and several papers referred to acute brain death. This evidence suggests that the donors' organs were procured before they could have been properly diagnosed as brain dead," Lavee added.
Dr. Frank Montgomery, Chair of Council of the WMA, told Insider via email that it "has always denounced organ harvesting from executed prisoners as unethical," adding that their interventions helped China outlaw the organ harvesting of inmates in 2015.
"We are now awaiting a clear commitment of our Chinese member organization that this unethical practice is no longer performed in China," Montgomery added.
Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Humans Right Watch, is also seemingly skeptical about whether the country has ceased the practice.
"The Chinese authorities have a history of dubious claims with regard to organ transplantation: They said they had taken organs from executed prisoners but insisted the prisoners had always had consented, despite evidence to the contrary," Wang said in an email to Insider.
"Authorities also claimed that they have ended the practice of using organs of executed prisoners, but there is a lack of evidence on that. The Chinese government's organ donation registry also lacks transparency and there have been reported data discrepancies," Wang added.
China's death row is shrouded in secrecy. It keeps its figures on executions secret, but Amnesty International estimates that it killed thousands of prisoners from 2016 to 2020. The US government, conversely, killed 13 prisoners during that time period following a 17-year hiatus that former President Trump ended.
"The findings are disturbing, and the Chinese government should respond to these new allegations," Wang said.
The Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the United States of America, Amnesty International, and Lavee did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
CNN reports Trump’s eldest son texted chief of staff two days after 2020 election to say ‘we have multiple paths … we control them all’
Two days after the 2020 election, Donald Trump Jr texted the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with strategies for overturning the result, CNN reported.
“This is what we need to do please read it and please get it to everyone that needs to see it because I’m not sure we’re doing it,” Trump Jr reportedly wrote, adding: “It’s very simple … We have multiple paths[.] We control them all.”
One leading legal authority called the text “a smoking rifle”.
CNN said the text was sent on 5 November 2020, two days before Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election and the next president.
Two months after 5 November, on 6 January 2021, supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” in his cause attacked the US Capitol. A bipartisan Senate report connected seven deaths to the riot.
According to CNN, in his texts to Meadows, Trump Jr laid out strategies the Trump team went on to pursue as they disseminated lies about election fraud and pressured state and federal officials.
Such tactics included lawsuits in swing states, the overwhelming majority of which were rejected, and “having a handful of Republican state houses put forward slates of fake ‘Trump electors’”.
CNN also said Trump Jr suggested that if such measures didn’t work, lawmakers in Congress could dismiss the electoral results and vote to keep Trump in office.
In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, 147 Republicans in Congress voted to object to results in key states.
Trump Jr’s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, told CNN: “After the election, Don received numerous messages from supporters and others. Given the date, this message likely originated from someone else and was forwarded.”
CNN said the Trump Jr text had been obtained by the House committee investigating the Capitol attack. This week, the committee interviewed Trump Jr’s sister, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, both former senior White House advisers. Their testimonies are the closest lawmakers have come to the former president.
Spokespeople for Meadows and the House January 6 committee did not comment to CNN.
In political circles, the subject of criminal culpability for both the attempt to overturn the election and the assault on the Capitol is a raw one.
Around 800 people have been charged over the Capitol attack but so far only Steve Bannon among close Trump advisers has faced a criminal charge.
The former White House strategist pleaded not guilty to criminal contempt of Congress, after refusing to co-operate with the January 6 committee. This week, the House voted to recommend the same charge for Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media aide, and Peter Navarro, a trade adviser who became the president’s bulldog on election subversion, describing the scheme in detail.
Last month, a federal judge said Trump appeared to have committed multiple felonies.
“Based on the evidence the court finds that it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr [John] Eastman [a law professor who advised Trump] dishonestly conspired to obstruct the joint session of Congress on January 6 2021,” Judge David Carter ruled.
Carter also described Trump’s scheme as “coup in search of a legal theory”.
Responding to news of Donald Trump Jr’s communication with Meadows, Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, said on Twitter: “This text is a smoking rifle.”
Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor now an analyst for NBC, went further.
“The ‘subject’ line of Don Jr’s email might as well have been, ‘I’m a member of my father’s criminal conspiracy to overturn the election.’ How long do we have to endure this open, treasonous criminality by Trump and company before someone gets indicted?”
Georgia gubernatorial Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams talks to the media after qualifying for the 2022 election on Tuesday, March 8, 2022, in Atlanta. (photo: Brynn Anderson/AP)
When she ended her first bid to become Georgia governor in 2018, Stacey Abrams announced plans to sue over the way the state’s elections were managed. More than three years later, as she makes another run at the governor’s mansion, the lawsuit is going to trial.
Filed in November 2018 by Abrams’ Fair Fight Action organization, the suit alleged that state officials “grossly mismanaged” the election, depriving some citizens, particularly low-income people and people of color, of their right to vote. The lawsuit originally called for a sweeping overhaul of the state’s elections, but its scope was considerably narrowed after the state made changes that addressed some allegations and others were dismissed by the court. The trial is set to begin Monday.
Even if U.S. District Judge Steve Jones sides with the plaintiffs, it’s unclear whether that will affect elections this year. Jones and other federal judges have been reluctant to order last-minute changes, noting that the Supreme Court has repeatedly said federal judges shouldn’t alter rules “on the eve of an election.”
In the months preceding the 2018 election, Abrams, a Democrat, accused her Republican opponent in the governor’s race, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, of using his position as Georgia’s chief elections officer to promote voter suppression, an allegation Kemp has vehemently denied.
In the more than three years since that fiercely fought contest captured national attention, the focus on Georgia’s elections has only intensified. Problems during the 2020 primary drew sharp criticism. Later that year, former President Donald Trump hurled insults at state officials who declined to overturn his narrow general election loss in the state. And the nation watched closely in January 2021 as a pair of Democrats unseated the state’s two incumbent Republican U.S. senators.
Numerous GOP-led state legislatures passed election bills last year after Trump stoked false claims that widespread fraud led to his 2020 defeat. Georgia’s bill, which Kemp signed into law a year ago, was one of the broadest. Among other things, the state’s measure reduced the window to request an absentee ballot, stripped power from the secretary of state and sharply curtailed the use of absentee ballot drop boxes in populous and Democratic-voting metro Atlanta counties. Voting rights groups and the U.S. Department of Justice promptly sued; those lawsuits are pending.
Republicans in Georgia this year passed legislation to let the Georgia Bureau of Investigation initiate probes into alleged election wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, Abrams, a state lawmaker who was little known outside Georgia when she ran four years ago, has become a household nameand Democratic Party star. The only Democrat running for governor, she’ll face Kemp again in November if he fends off a primary challenge from former U.S. Sen. David Perdue.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger accused Abrams and her allies of trying to undermine the integrity of Georgia elections.
“Her 3-year ‘stolen election’ campaign has been nothing more than a political stunt to keep her in the national spotlight, and it’s a disservice to Georgia voters,” he said in an emailed statement.
Fair Fight says it works to promote voting rights and support progressive candidates around the country, and its PAC has raised more than $100 million since its founding. It filed the lawsuit along with Care in Action, a nonprofit that advocates for domestic workers. Several churches have also joined as plaintiffs.
Fair Fight collected statements from people who said they had problems voting. The lawsuit cited multiple alleged problems, including the purging of eligible voters from voter rolls under a “use it or lose it” policy; the state’s so-called exact match voter registration rules; an insufficient number of voting machines at some precincts; and a lack of sufficient training for election officials. It asked a federal judge to find that Georgia’s elections processes violated the U.S. Constitution and federal law.
“Since the start of this lawsuit, we have highlighted real voters and their challenges because we believe that is one of the most effective ways to demonstrate the barriers in Georgia’s elections system,” Fair Fight executive director Cianti Stewart-Reid said in an emailed statement. She added that voters from around the state will testify at trial about obstacles faced while trying to vote.
Some of the alleged problems were addressed by changes in state law. For example, a 2019 law called for replacing the state’s outdated voting machines. The new system was implemented statewide in 2020.
In February 2021, Jones threw out parts of the lawsuit, saying some allegations were made irrelevant by changes in state law or the plaintiffs’ lack of standing. Among them were some of the claims about voting machines and election technology, as well as the security of voter lists and polling place issues. The following month, Jones dismissed claims targeting the “use it or lose it” policy and some allegations of inadequate training of poll workers. He also dismissed some claims relating to provisional and absentee ballots.
The issues remaining for the trial have to do with the “exact match” policy, the statewide voter registration list and in-person cancellation of absentee ballots. The plaintiffs claim that Georgia’s secretary of state and State Election Board members are “denying and abridging Georgians’ right to vote” in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the U.S. Constitution.
Under the “exact match” policy, information from voter registration applications is checked against information held by the state Department of Driver Services or the federal Social Security Administration. If there’s a discrepancy, the would-be voter must show identification to county officials before being able to cast a regular ballot.
The plaintiffs say data entry errors or differences as minor as a missing hyphen or apostrophe can trigger a non-match and that naturalized citizens can also be wrongly flagged as noncitizens if records are outdated. These problems disproportionately affect people of color and can depend on where a person lives because counties do things differently, the plaintiffs say.
The statewide voter registration database is “error-ridden,” the plaintiffs say, resulting in the erroneous deletion of eligible voters’ registration or critical information being incorrect. That can prevent eligible voters from being able to vote or force them to overcome undue burdens to do so, the plaintiffs say.
The plaintiffs also say election officials aren’t sufficiently trained on canceling an absentee ballot if someone chooses to vote in person instead, which can cause voters to be turned away or forced to cast a provisional ballot.
Lawyers for the state argue the claims in the lawsuit “are not supported by the evidence.” The number, geographic scope and severity of the alleged problems experienced by voters identified by the plaintiffs “do not rise to a level sufficient to demonstrate an unconstitutional burden on voting in Georgia,” state lawyers wrote in a filing. Additionally, they argue, the alleged problems cited are not the responsibility of the state officials named in the lawsuit.
Lyrics Zombie by The Cranberries from the 1994 album, No Need to Argue
Another head hangs lowly Child is slowly taken And the violence, caused such silence Who are we mistaken?
But you see, it's not me It's not my family
In your head, in your head, they are fighting With their tanks, and their bombs And their bombs, and their guns In your head, in your head they are crying In your head, in your head Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie What's in your head, in your head Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie, oh
Du, du, du, du Du, du, du, du Du, du, du, du Du, du, du, du
Another mother's breaking Heart is taking over When the violence causes silence We must be mistaken
It's the same old theme Since nineteen-sixteen In your head, in your head, they're still fighting With their tanks, and their bombs And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head, they are dying In your head, in your head Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie What's in your head, in your head Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh, ay, oh, ya ya
Rendering of the Wallis Annenberg wildlife crossing, which will span a busy section of highway near Los Angeles, allowing animals to pass safely. (photo: Living Habitats and National Wildlife Federation)
Unprecedented overpass will allow fauna of the Santa Monica mountains to safely cross a dangerous 10-lane stretch
Imagine cruising down a 10-lane highway and knowing that, high above your head, a mountain lion is quietly going along its way. This remarkable image could soon be reality for drivers on one of California’s busiest roads, as the world’s largest wildlife overpass begins construction this month.
The history-making project will comprise a green bridge built across the 101 highway near Los Angeles, creating a corridor between two parts of the Santa Monica mountains. Stretching 210ft long and 165ft wide, the overpass will allow safe passage for lizards, snakes, toads and mountain lions, with an acre of local plants on either side and vegetated sound walls to dampen light and noise for nocturnal animals as they slip across.
The project, nearly a decade in the making, comes at a crucial time. Highways in this car-heavy landscape crisscross critical habitat for the protected mountain lions and other animals, forcing them to make what can be deadly crossings. At least 25 of the big cats have been killed on Los Angeles freeways since 2002. The latest death was just weeks ago, on 23 March, when a young lion was struck and killed on the Pacific Coast highway.
Beth Pratt, an urban ecologist with the National Wildlife Federation, feels as if she is running the last mile of a marathon. Pratt has spent most of the last decade planning the project, persuading transportation officials of its importance, and bringing together stakeholders and donors to fund it. “I’m a little dizzy still, but I feel relieved: we have the chance to give these mountain lions a shot at a future.”
A groundbreaking ceremony to mark the start of construction for the $90m crossing – called the Wallis Annenberg wildlife crossing – will take place on Earth Day, 22 April. Construction will mostly happen at night and the project isn’t expected to be complete until early 2025.
The bridge’s price tag will be covered by about 60% private donations, with the rest coming from public funds set aside for conservation purposes. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom has called the project an “inspiring example” of public-private partnership.
‘A symbol of connection’
The project is breaking the mold in many ways: not only is it the largest crossing in the world, stretching over 10 lanes of one of the busiest roadways in the country, but it’s also an engineering marvel. The crossing is designed to seamlessly integrate into the mountains, offering big cats, coyotes, deer, lizards, snakes and other creatures a safe way to travel to different parts of open territory in the Santa Monica mountains recreation area – a 150,000-acre space.
Robert Rock, a landscape architect with Living Futures in Chicago who led the design, says this nature-centered type of construction makes it unusual among other wildlife bridges and underpasses around the world, which are typically made of cement and steel. This one is designed to seamlessly glide into the environment on both sides – and send a message to the people driving below.
His team includes a soil scientist – who collected samples nearby that are specific to the local trees – and a mycologist, who is studying the fungi of the area and how they can help the seamless flow of plants and animals across the overpass. Docents will be posted nearby to discourage people from exploring the overpass. (Pratt says that planting poison oak and posting signs about rattlesnakes are also effective tools to keep humans off the bridge.)
Rock says he is optimistic that the investment could serve as a precedent for how design can play a restorative role in the natural world. “As both a tool for and a symbol of connection, it will stand as an alluring challenge to future generations to pick up the mantle of design to bridge the gaps elsewhere in our world,” he says.
Approximately 300,000 cars pass through this area each day, and Pratt calls it an opportunity for millions of Angelenos to see how humans can live more harmoniously with nature. “Someone could be in rush-hour traffic, and there could be a mountain lion right above them,” she says. “I think that’s such a hopeful image, and one that inspires me that we can right some of these great wrongs.”
Pratt says the plight of the region’s mountain lions caught the eye of donors from around the world. People sent money from London. A couple from Kansas who had visited the city only once donated $675,000. Leonardo DiCaprio’s foundation chipped in $300,000. Pratt points to the local celebrity mountain lion P22, whose exploits around the city have captured headlines, as a catalyst for it all. “People really took his plight to heart, and this is not just a California story: the world has come together around his cause.”
P22 won’t actually be the intended user of this crossing, since he lives in a part of Los Angeles far east of the mountain range. But his symbol helped raise the money that will fund the bridge. And most of the area’s 100 mountain lions live in the area that the bridge will span.
The scientists say there is a learning curve for animals, and they will slowly begin to explore the bridge. For wary creatures, it may take up to five years to use the crossing successfully. Cats will follow smaller prey species, who generally more quickly adapt to the new territory.
“It’s not just a solution for P22 to get across the road, as much as P22 is the face of the campaign,” says Rock. “This is restoring a piece of lost habitat, putting it back across the mountains.”
More projects in the future
Wildlife crossings are picking up speed across the country, and the world. They make economic sense – most pay for themselves in a decade or two, and a study in Banff, Canada, whose national park has more than 40 wildlife underpasses and overpasses, found a 90% decrease in wildlife-vehicle collisions, which saved the park money.
But it’s only recently that the wildlife science and infrastructure communities have come together to understand the problem deeply. Joe Biden’s $1.2tn infrastructure bill earmarked $350m for animal-friendly infrastructure like bridges, underpasses and roadside fences.
Pratt says the project struggled to raise money in the early days of planning. Luckily the team was able to find some people who recognized the importanceof this project.
But perhaps the bigger challenge was philosophical: naysayers told her the project shouldn’t or couldn’t be done – “that we shouldn’t waste money on saving mountain lions in an urban area, that we would never be able to raise the funds.” She was undeterred. “I wasn’t going to take no for an answer, not when a population of mountain lions was at stake.”
