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Michael Isikoff | Newly Released JFK Documents Point to What the CIA Was Hiding
Michael Isikoff, yahoo! news
Isikoff writes: "Just seven weeks before the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA intercepted a curious phone call to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. 'My name is Oswald,' said the caller, speaking in broken Russian, seeking information about his request for a visa to return to Russia."
Just seven weeks before the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA intercepted a curious phone call to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. “My name is Oswald,” said the caller, speaking in broken Russian, seeking information about his request for a visa to return to Russia. It was indeed Lee Harvey Oswald, the Marxist misfit soon to be identified as Kennedy’s accused assassin. In this instance, Oswald didn’t get very far. Seeking an update on his visa request, the Soviet official who answered the phone told Oswald he had no update to give and then hung up on him.
Most of a 23-page internal CIA memo documenting that phone call and other details of Oswald’s pre-assassination trip to Mexico City — a visit that has been the subject of endless speculation — was released years ago. But a few previously classified portions of that memo were finally released this week, a small part of the more than 13,173 newly unredacted documents disclosed by the National Archives under a 1992 law requiring the release of all government material relating to what was arguably the most shocking and consequential crime in American history.
So what was the CIA hiding all these years? The long-concealed section speaks for itself. “This piece of information was produced from a telephone tap center which we operate jointly with the office of the President of Mexico,” the memo reads, explaining how the CIA intercepted Oswald’s call to the Soviets. “It is highly secret and not known to Mexican security and law enforcement officials, who have their own center.”
In short, like much of the newly disclosed JFK papers, the memo didn’t contain any bombshells that prove an elaborate conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Instead, it was the CIA trying to hide how it does its business — in this case, forging a relationship with a foreign official to operate a secret listening center on Mexican soil.
The Kennedy assassination remains to this today the mother of all conspiracy theories, giving rise to countless books and movies arguing — take your pick — that the Mafia or the Cubans or the Russians or the CIA itself played a hidden role in the president’s murder. And there is little doubt that the agency’s failure to release all of its records relating to the assassination has fueled the idea of a massive government cover-up. “What are they hiding?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son and namesake of Kennedy’s brother and, to many, a notorious conspiracy theorist himself, asked two months ago when a new lawsuit was filed to force the release of the remaining material.
But the latest release only underscores the point that what has been hidden from the public is largely about highly sensitive agency collection activities and exotic plans for operations that, while in some instances highly embarrassing and by today’s standards indefensible, bear little if any relevance to the crime itself. A prime example is one of the newly disclosed documents — a seven-page Aug. 31, 1962, Defense Department memo about Operation Mongoose, the secret operation to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government that had been authorized by Kennedy (and overseen by his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy) after the disastrous failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Written more than a year before Kennedy’s assassination, the memo tells us nothing about that event. But it does reveal the extraordinary lengths to which the officials running Operation Mongoose were prepared to go to achieve Kennedy’s desired result: “Arrange for caches of limited Soviet-Czech arms to be ‘discovered’ in selected Latin American countries, ostensibly smuggled in from Cuba,” one section of the memo reads. In short, it was a plan to frame the Cubans by linking them to a gun-smuggling operation that the U.S. itself would conduct.
In that sense, the document meshes perfectly with the guiding thinking behind Operation Northwoods, the Pentagon plan to stage a so-called false flag terror attack on the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay that could be used as an excuse to launch a U.S. invasion of the island. “We could blow up a ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” read one previously released memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (The idea was rejected by Kennedy.)
But the newly released August 1962 Pentagon memo shows that the idea of launching covert U.S. military operations against Cuba didn’t disappear. The memo mentions apparent proposals to dispatch saboteurs to blow up oil refineries, electrical plants and a paper mill in Cuba. It is far from clear how much, if any of this, was actually carried out. As the memo itself notes: “Each operation entails risk, not only physical risk for the saboteurs, but also risk of attribution to the U.S. in case of capture. Care will be taken to give these the appearance of being done by internal resistance groups, and in isolating team members from press sources upon return.”
Like the CIA’s previous attempt to assassinate Castro using notorious Mafia figures, all of this was unquestionably unsavory — and as details have emerged over the years, it has given the Cubans no shortage of talking points to hammer the U.S. government.
But what, if anything, does it tell us about Oswald himself — and whether he had any secret contacts with anybody in the U.S. government in the months before the assassination? He was, of course, on the FBI’s radar screen. An agent in Dallas was assigned to keep tabs on him given that he had previously defected to the Soviet Union) and the agent’s brief, testy dealings with Oswald — in particular an angry letter Oswald wrote the agent after he had tried to interview his wife — was destroyed and hidden from the Warren Commission, a panel appointed by President Lyndon Johnson that investigated the assassination. But it has been an article of faith among many JFK conspiracy theorists that something far more sinister was going on — that CIA operatives working to overthrow Castro had some sort of “operational relationship” with Oswald and, using anti-Castro Cubans in the United States, were somehow manipulating them.
But there is nothing in any of the CIA material that was released this week, not to mention the thousands of pages of documents that were previously disclosed, that points to that. In fact, the CIA memo on Oswald’s trip to Cuba suggests otherwise. The memo establishes that, of course, the CIA was aware of Oswald and had a file on him. But here is how the news of Oswald’s arrest went down inside a clearly chaotic CIA headquarters.
“When word of the shooting of President Kennedy reached the offices of our operating divisions and staffs on the afternoon of Friday 22 November 1963, transistor radios were turned on everywhere to follow the tragedy,” the memo reads. “When the name of Lee OSWALD was heard, the effect was electric. A phone message from the FBI came at about the same time, naming OSWALD as the possible assassin and asking for traces.”
At that point, here is what happened, per the memo: James Jesus Angleton, the chief of CIA counter-intelligence, passed the FBI’s message on to something called the Special Investigations Unit. Another operative, a woman named Betty Egerter, “immediately recognized” Oswald’s name and “went for his file.” The Mexico desk chief called in to remind his colleagues “that we had something on Oswald.” A cable was dispatched to Mexico City asking “for more information on OSWALD.” At that very moment, the CIA station in Mexico City sent its own cable as a “reminder of the information the Station had sent in on him.”
What emerges from this account is not so much a portrait of CIA officials horror-struck that their role in the president’s murder might be exposed but of government bureaucrats scrambling to find details about the accused assassin and cover themselves, no doubt worried that they might be blamed for not paying more attention to him before the murder.
Will the new release settle anything? Of course not. Even with this week’s release, the CIA acknowledged in a letter to the White House just made public that the agency is still withholding “limited” material that might reveal, among other things, the names of particular CIA employees, “intelligence assets and sources, specific tradecraft and intelligence methods still in use, specific operational details, foreign intelligence liaison relationships, certain CIA installations” and, perhaps most intriguing, “still-classified covert action programs still in effect.”
On the Yahoo News “Skullduggery” podcast, Jefferson Morley — a former Washington Post reporter and prolific author who runs a website dedicated to the assassination — argued that the CIA is playing a “shell game” and concealing documents that will ultimately reveal Kennedy was “killed by enemies in his own government who had the ability to make it look like something else.” But how did that work? “That’s shrouded in secrecy and so I can’t explain the mechanics of a conspiracy,” he said.
Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter who wrote his own book on the assassination entitled “A Cruel and Shocking Act,” offered a different perspective. Oswald — who had purchased the Italian-made rifle that was used to kill Kennedy and then left it behind when he fled the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository after the assassination — was too erratic and unstable to have been part of any conspiracy, he said.
Still, Shenon acknowledged, the new release of material won’t settle the matter. “This is the ultimate rabbit hole,” he said on “Skullduggery.” He then cited the view of then-Sen. Richard Russell, the Georgia Democrat who Johnson had named to the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination. When it was all over and the commission released its report naming Oswald as the lone gunman, Russell was quoted as saying “people will still be debating these conspiracy theories a thousand years from now.”
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Iranian actor Taraneh Alidoosti, who starred in the film The Salesman, is shown at the Cannes film festival, in southern France, in May 2016. (photo: Joel Ryan/AP)
Taraneh Alidoosti, Iranian Star of Oscar-Winning the Salesman, Arrested for Pro-Protester Post
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Iranian authorities arrested one of the country's most famous actors on charges of spreading falsehoods about nationwide protests that grip the country, state media said Saturday."
Iran state media say other celebrities detained for 'publishing provocative content'
Iranian authorities arrested one of the country's most famous actors on charges of spreading falsehoods about nationwide protests that grip the country, state media said Saturday.
The report by IRNA said Taraneh Alidoosti, star of the Oscar-winning movie The Salesman, was detained a week after she made a post on Instagram expressing solidarity with the first man recently executed for crimes allegedly committed during the nationwide protests.
IRNA also said several other Iranian celebrities had "been summoned by the judiciary body over publishing provocative content." It did not say how many or provide further details.
According to the report published on the state media's official Telegram channel, Alidoosti was arrested because she did not provide "any documents in line with her claims."
In her post, the 38-year-old actor said: "His name was Mohsen Shekari. Every international organization who is watching this bloodshed and not taking action, is a disgrace to humanity."
Shekari was executed on Dec. 9 after being charged by an Iranian court with blocking a street in Tehran and attacking a member of the country's security forces with a machete.
Last Week, Iran executed a second prisoner, Majidreza Rahnavard, in connection with the protests. Rahnavard's body was left hanging from a construction crane as a gruesome warning to others. Iranian authorities alleged Rahnavard stabbed two members of its paramilitary force.
Both men were executed less than a month after they were charged, underscoring the speed at which Iran now carries out death sentences imposed for alleged crimes related to the demonstrations. Activists say at least a dozen people have been sentenced to death in closed-door hearings.
Alidoosti has made at least three posts on her Instagram account expressing solidarity with protesters since the demonstrations broke out in September. Her account, which had some eight million followers, has been suspended.
Iran has been rocked by protests since the Sept. 16 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died after being detained by the morality police, allegedly for not wearing her hijab properly. The protests have since morphed into one of the most serious challenges to Iran's theocracy installed by the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Alidoosti has previously criticized the Iranian government and its police force.
In June 2020, she was given a suspended five-month prison sentence after she criticized the police on Twitter in 2018 for assaulting a woman who had removed her headscarf.
Other movies Alidoosti has starred in include The Beautiful City and About Elly.
Hengameh Ghaziani and Katayoun Riahi, two other famous actors in Iran, were arrested by authorities for expressing solidarity with protesters on social media. Both women have been released.
At least 495 people have been killed in the demonstrations amid a harsh security crackdown, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that has been monitoring the protests since they began. More than 18,200 people have been detained by authorities.
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OxyContin is the powerful narcotic pill that kickstarted the US’s opioid epidemic. (photo: George Frey/Reuters)
Opioids Crisis: CDC Accused of Bowing to Drug Industry With New Opioid Guidance
Chris McGreal, Guardian UK
McGreal writes: "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been accused of bowing to drug industry pressure after releasing new guidelines that doctors say put lives at risk by rowing back on warnings about the dangers of opioid prescribing."
Doctors say CDC’s softer guidelines ‘tossing aside’ safety limits put lives at risk as opioid epidemic continues to rage in the country
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been accused of bowing to drug industry pressure after releasing new guidelines that doctors say put lives at risk by rowing back on warnings about the dangers of opioid prescribing.
The latest CDC guidelines have caused controversy after dropping specific limits on dosages and lengths of prescribing from a key summary of recommendations used by physicians.
Dr Kenneth Scheppke, Florida’s deputy health secretary, was so disturbed he issued a public statement accusing the CDC of “tossing aside” the limits used in the previous guidelines released six years ago. Scheppke told the Guardian he is concerned that the move could cost lives as the US continues to grapple with the worst drug epidemic in its history, driven by opioids.
“It’s pretty clear to me that they soften some really good, strong recommendations that they had in 2016 warning prescribers against over prescribing these opioids, and I don’t really see a good reason for removing those two warnings,” he said.
“The United States already has the highest per capita opioid prescriptions in the world, and our overdose numbers certainly reflect that. My concern is the apparent softening of the warning to my colleagues across the nation of the dangers of prescribing either for too many days or to a higher dose. That doesn’t really help the pain but raises dramatically the risk of overdose and death.”
Dr Andrew Kolodny, president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, sees the drug industry’s hand behind the change. Kolodny has testified against opioid makers in legal actions over their part in driving the opioid epidemic by pushing sales with false claims about their safety and effectiveness.
They include Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of OxyContin, a powerful narcotic pill that kickstarted the US’s opioid epidemic alongside the company’s marketing strategy to see the drugs widely prescribed.
Kolody said court documents show that the drug industry calculated how much the 2016 CDC guidelines would cost it if doctors followed the recommendations to limit prescribing of high dosage pills.
“The highest dosage products have had the highest profit margin. It only costs a few extra pennies to make the higher dosage pill, but retail it’s almost double what they get per pill or prescription. So the industry fought very hard to block the release of the 2016 guideline and when that failed they did everything they could to make the guidelines appear controversial. And that worked,” he said.
The latest CDC guidelines, released last month, come as the US continues to grapple with tens of thousands of opioid overdose deaths every year, as well as the consequences of addiction for others hooked on the drugs and their families.
The biggest killer today is an illegal drug, the potent artificial opioid, fentanyl. It was linked to the deaths of more than 70,000 Americans last year. More American adults under the age of 45 die from drug overdoses than in the combined toll of car accidents and suicide.
But prescription opioids drove the US opioid epidemic for more than a decade, and continue to claim lives.
The CDC’s 2016 guidelines were intended to prevent more Americans from becoming addicted to prescription drugs and to stem the flow toward illicit opioids such as heroin and fentanyl. They set recommended limits for dosages and how long opioids should be prescribed for.
Those limits remain deep in the body of the latest guidelines but are excluded from what are known as the “box three recommendations”, a summary of the guidance which Scheppke said is all most doctors read.
“They won’t get all that great background information buried in the text that points out the scientific realities that dosage above a certain level provides minimal benefit, but much higher risk of overdose and death,” he said.
“The 2016 guidelines gave physicians recommendations saying that if you are prescribing for acute pain for less than three days that’s generally reasonable. Rarely will you need more than seven days.”
That direct warning is absent from the recommendations in the latest document.
Scheppke also took issue with the latest warning that opioids “carry considerable potential risk”.
“There is nothing potential about it,” he said, noting that the earlier guidelines stated flatly that the risk existed.
Kolodny said that from the beginning the drug industry resisted official curbs on opioid prescribing.
“In 2016, it was especially important because the drug industry marketing disguised as medical education for many years had pushed this notion that there’s no upper dose limit on opioids, that you should just go as high as anybody needs. So it was really needed,” said Kolodny.
“That upper dosage limit in the 2016 guideline was what was most concerning to industry.”
In 2018, Senator Claire McCaskill released a report detailing how opioid manufacturers spent millions of dollars funding front groups, including to oppose the original CDC guidelines. Purdue Pharma gave $500,000 to the Washington Legal Foundation, which previously defended the tobacco industry, to launch a court challenge to them.
Kolodny said that when that didn’t work, the opioid industry attacked the CDC guidelines by saying they were driving patients to suicide because doctors were depriving patients of opioids and forcing them to live with unbearable pain.
Both Scheppke and Kolodny question that claim while acknowledging that there is a very real problem of patients who were dependent on high dosages of opioids who require treatment for dependency and withdrawal. Kolodny said that drove some in withdrawal to kill themselves but the drug industry has used front groups to overstate the number of deaths and to spin them as a result of lack of pain treatment in a bid to pressure the CDC to relax its guidelines.
“This is a really serious issue. But what the opioid advocates, many with industry ties, disclosed or undisclosed, pushed was this false narrative about an epidemic of suicide and so there was a manufactured backlash against the CDC guidelines,” he said.
“The notion that there are patients losing access to an effective treatment, and therefore they have no choice but to kill themselves because they’re in so much pain now, that’s a hoax. But the idea that someone in the context of acute withdrawal would kill themselves, that certainly could be real because it’s so excruciating.”
Scheppke said that what is required is not weakened prescribing guidelines but better treatment for people dependent on opioids.
The CDC has been contacted for comment.
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Grant Wahl, who died unexpectedly, in December, 2022, understood the way that politics and economics, power and culture intersect in the beautiful game. (photo: Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated/Getty Image)
Louisa Thomas | How Grant Wahl Changed the Place of Soccer in America
Louisa Thomas, The New Yorker
Thomas writes: "Wahl had a terrific sense not only for what the story was but for what it would be. He knew that the big story S.I. had been missing was the story of soccer, the global game—and the women's game."
The indefatigable sportswriter from Kansas knew that the power of the global game extended far beyond the field of play.
When Grant Wahl was a sophomore at Princeton, in 1994, he received funding to spend a summer studying the culture of fútbol in Argentina. Wahl was from eastern Kansas; he’d never left the United States. He asked the coach of the Princeton soccer team, Bob Bradley, whom he’d met while reporting for the Daily Princetonian, where he might be able to practice his Spanish. Bradley suggested Boca Juniors, the legendary sports club in Buenos Aires, best known for its beloved fútbol team.
Wahl watched games standing in the terraces of Boca’s stadium, called La Bombonera, and was caught in the surge that swelled toward the fence every time Boca scored. He drank Quilmes beers with locals, including one of Boca’s most prominent and notorious fans, Quique Ocampo, who had a grocery and was known as the Butcher. Wahl travelled on a bus with Boca Juniors fans to Rosario for a weekend. He fell in love with the songs, with the old stadium in Buenos Aires, with the tidal movements of the crowds. And, of course, there was the beautiful game itself.
Wahl returned to Argentina the following year, this time to research a senior thesis on democratic practices, civic society, and Argentinean soccer clubs. One of his professors called it a “silly idea,” but Wahl was undeterred. He interviewed leading journalists, club directors, politicians; he pored over maps and demographic and economic data. He went to games, too, sitting in general admission, so that he could present an “accurate rendition of associational life.” In his thesis, he provided nuanced arguments about the development of democratic attitudes in Argentina and the ways that soccer clubs there both supported and undermined civic engagement. He was alive to the romance of fútbol culture, but also to the degradation of women, the oppression of the poor, and the pattern of violence, all of which he addressed directly. He reported and wrote with rigor but not with detachment. He brought his social conscience to his understanding of the sport.
After college, he got a job as a fact checker at Sports Illustrated, where he had wanted to work since he was in high school. In his early years at S.I., he wrote mostly about college basketball; later, he would write the magazine’s famous cover story about a sixteen-year-old prospect named LeBron James. Wahl had a terrific sense not only for what the story was but for what it would be. He knew that the big story S.I. had been missing was the story of soccer, the global game—and the women’s game. This was not an easy argument to make, at the time, in mainstream American sports media. S.I. had published its share of essays suggesting that soccer was for sissies. “Someone at Sports Illustrated said once, ‘Soccer is for kids who couldn’t make the football team,’ ” Jon Wertheim, who shared an office with Wahl at S.I. and who became a close friend, told me. Wahl “took it as a challenge,” he said. Wahl pushed to write about soccer, and got his first break in December, 1997, covering the University of North Carolina women’s team’s national championship.
He went to the World Cup in 1998, in France, as the magazine’s third-string soccer writer. But the first went home after the U.S. tumbled out of the tournament, and the second left for a wedding, so, after Les Bleus won the final, Wahl was the one who walked back to the hotel along the Champs-Élysées, by the Seine, through a million French fans thronging the streets, and filed a twenty-five-hundred-word dispatch. He understood before anyone else that S.I. should cover the Women’s World Cup in the United States the following year with similar resources and attention—perhaps more. He knew that, in the United States, the women’s national team had the potential to be a supernova. And he was on hand to write an iconic cover story after Brandi Chastain ripped off her shirt when the U.S. clinched the title.
In 2001, Frank Deford, one of S.I.’s most famous writers, wrote that soccer would “never thrive” in the United States, calling the sport “un-American.” And yet soccer began to slip into mainstream coverage, and Deford’s colleague Wahl was one of the main reasons. He did cover stories on Mario Balotelli, Abby Wambach, David Beckham—but he was also persistent in his pursuit of smaller stories, for covering the sport with a steady rhythm and depth. “He had a huge part in growing and building the game and legitimizing it,” Julie Foudy, a midfielder for the 1999 U.S. World Cup title team, and now an analyst for ESPN, told me.
Wahl regarded women’s soccer as a priority long before the team’s own federation—and perhaps even some of its players—recognized that the women deserved the same kind of coverage as the men. “There was this sense when Grant showed up at events in his little page-boy cap, ‘O.K., this matters,’ ” Foudy said. Wahl wanted to elevate soccer in the United States, but he was not a cheerleader; he wrote about the players, and particularly the institutions around them, not only with respect but with critical scrutiny. His mentor at Princeton had been Gloria Emerson, the war reporter; at S.I., he told Wertheim that he wanted to emulate Nicholas Kristof—to travel the world, asking questions.
Soccer was Wahl’s “way of experiencing the world,” Wahl’s wife, Céline Gounder, told me. “A way of experiencing different cultures, different countries.” It was a way of writing about people—their passions, their triumphs, their failings. While Wahl was pushing to do more and more soccer stories, Gounder was getting her M.D. and becoming a leading expert in epidemiology. In 2007, she told her husband that she would be spending much of the next year doing research in South Africa; he decided to take a leave from Sports Illustrated and come with her, and used the year to write a book about Major League Soccer and David Beckham called “The Beckham Experiment.” It was characteristically intelligent and rich with detail and intrigue, and it became a best-seller. When Wahl returned to S.I., he did it as a full-time soccer writer—a position that did not seem like a silly idea to anyone anymore.
From the age of twenty, when Wahl first went to Argentina, he had understood the way that politics and economics, power and culture intersect in the beautiful game. (When he was researching his senior thesis, he interviewed Mauricio Macri, who was running for president of the Boca Juniors club; two decades later, Macri became the President of Argentina.) He saw these dynamics play out when women fought for equal pay from the U.S. Soccer Federation and when activists and journalists worked to expose corruption within FIFA, the global game’s governing body. Wahl even ran for FIFA president, in 2011, in what he described as only half a stunt. He really did care.
He also understood how the game could connect people, and he sought to build those connections himself. He had some good fortune in the contacts he made—Bradley, the Princeton coach, became the coach of the U.S. men’s national team, in 2006—but he also had a talent for it. “He was comfortable in so many different environments,” Wertheim told me. The salient thing about him, from all accounts, was his generosity, particularly with younger soccer writers. He helped them find jobs. He promoted their work. Having set the path, he made sure there were others with him on it.
When a company called Maven took over Sports Illustrated in 2019, and began cutting jobs, Wahl wrote to editors at other outlets telling them about the young writers they had to hire. After he protested pay cuts that Maven made during the pandemic, Wahl was fired, too. What his new bosses didn’t understand, and he did, was that he didn’t need them. He made documentaries. He started a podcast, “Fútbol with Grant Wahl.” (As always, he saw where the game was going: his first guest was Tyler Adams, who, this year, became the first Black solo captain of the U.S. men’s national team at a World Cup.) He started his own site and a newsletter. He became, in many ways, synonymous with soccer journalism in the United States.
Before the start of the 2022 World Cup, in Qatar, FIFA pleaded with journalists to keep politics out of it. Instead, last winter, Wahl travelled to Qatar and interviewed migrant workers for long pieces about human-rights abuses, carefully reporting on a topic that many were simply speculating about. Shortly before he left for the World Cup, Gounder told me, Wahl was reminiscing about Gloria Emerson, his mentor, who covered the Vietnam War for the Times. He pulled out of his files a profile of Emerson that he had written for a Princeton writing class nearly twenty years ago. The instructor of the class was David Remnick, who would later become the editor of this magazine. There was a note from Remnick on the first page: “This is splendid, among the very best student papers I’ve ever seen.” (When I asked Remnick about Wahl, he immediately remembered having him as a student, and, like so many others, the first thing he mentioned was how kind Wahl had been.)
Wahl arrived in Qatar in mid-November and got to work. There were podcasts to record, blog posts to write, interviews to do, teams to analyze, old friends from around the world to see. He became worldwide news after he wore a T-shirt bearing an L.G.B.T.Q.-pride rainbow to a World Cup game, in silent but pointed protest of Qatari laws against same-sex relationships. Security detained him for twenty-five minutes before he was allowed to enter the stadium. On December 2nd, Wahl celebrated his forty-ninth birthday. A few days later, he attended an event honoring eighty-two journalists, including himself, who had covered eight or more men’s World Cups. In a post for his site, he described seeing Ezequiel Fernández Moores, “probably the most thoughtful sportswriter in Argentina,” whom he’d met in 1995 while working on his thesis; they shared a hug.
He wasn’t feeling well. He said on social media that he was suffering from a bad cold, maybe bronchitis. Still, he pressed on. He was at the quarterfinal game between Argentina and the Netherlands. Eleven minutes into stoppage time of a tense, dramatic game, the Dutch tied the score. “Just an incredible designed set-piece goal by the Netherlands,” Wahl tweeted. Moments later, he collapsed, and fell out of his seat. As his family later reported, he had suffered what an autopsy revealed to be a catastrophic rupture in the ascending aorta; essentially, a blood vessel leading from his heart had burst open. As Argentina won the game on penalties, medics performed chest compressions and took him to the hospital, but there was nothing they could do to save him.
He did not have a chance to see Argentina take the field for the World Cup final, led by Lionel Messi, who, nearly three decades before, had been a child playing with a soccer ball in the streets, while Wahl was singing inside of La Bombonera.
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Student loan-servicing company MOHELA has been drawn into the fight against student debt relief by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, one of the lead plaintiffs in the multi-state lawsuit, even though the company is not a party to the case. (photo: Jeff Roberson/AP)
The Student Loan Company That Could Topple Biden's Debt Relief Plan
Michael Stratford, Politico
Stratford writes: "The fate of President Joe Biden’s multibillion-dollar student debt relief plan could hinge on an obscure financial services company just outside of St. Louis."
The fate of President Joe Biden’s multibillion-dollar student debt relief plan could hinge on an obscure financial services company just outside of St. Louis.
The Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, a state-created loan company known as MOHELA, is at the center of a legal challenge from six Republican states trying to stop Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt for more than 40 million Americans.
The lawsuit, which is set to go before the Supreme Court next year, will decide the future of one of Biden’s biggest and most contentious domestic policy programs. But it’s also shining a spotlight on MOHELA, which has quietly emerged as one of the nation’s largest student loan servicers while deepening its ties to the Education Department over the past decade.
MOHELA now manages the accounts of nearly 7 million federal student loan borrowers, more than double what it had two years ago. Last yea,r it brought in more than $130 million in revenue, the bulk of which came from its federal contract to service student loans.
MOHELA, like the Education Department’s other loan servicers, had been moving ahead with implementing the Biden administration’s debt relief until it was halted by the courts in November. The company had gone so far as to finalize a letter — co-branded with both MOHELA and federal logos — notifying borrowers that their debt relief request had been completed, according to documents obtained by POLITICO under a public records request.
But, at the same time, MOHELA has been drawn into the fight against student debt relief by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, one of the lead plaintiffs in the multi-state lawsuit, even though the company is not a party to the case.
The other states pursuing the legal challenge include Nebraska, Iowa, South Carolina, Kansas and Arkansas. They claim Biden’s debt relief plan will harm them in a range of ways, such as lowering tax revenue or diminishing the value of investments tied to student loans.
But it’s Missouri's portion of the case, asserting financial harm to MOHELA, that has occupied much of the attention from legal observers and lower courts.
Missouri argues that MOHELA will lose money under Biden’s relief plan because it’ll have fewer accounts to manage. Less revenue for the company, Missouri says, will make it more difficult for MOHELA to make required payments to a state fund that helps its public colleges and universities.
Seizing on the harm to loan servicers that work for the Education Department, like MOHELA, was “the best opportunity to bring a successful lawsuit,” said Phil Kerpen, a conservative political organizer who leads American Commitment and was an early proponent of the strategy and circulated the idea in conservative circles.
All of the loan servicers hired by the Education Department decided against suing over the debt relief plan. MOHELA presented a different situation, Kerpen noted, because of the company's relationship to a state with a Republican attorney general who could take action on its behalf.
When Biden first announced his plan to forgive student debt in August, Republicans and conservative groups vowed to bring legal challenges to the policy. But finding a plaintiff who would have a concrete injury that allows them to bring a lawsuit was a major challenge.
MOHELA’s role in the case has brought fresh criticism from some Democrats and consumer advocacy groups.
Rep. Cori Bush, the progressive Democrat whose district neighbors the company’s Chesterfield, Mo. headquarters, for instance, blasted MOHELA for what she called an “unconscionable” effort to stop debt relief. MOHELA, she added in a statement to POLITICO, is “a proxy for the six conservative attorneys general” to challenge the administration’s debt relief program and “would profit off this challenge’s success.”
MOHELA responded to Bush’s criticism last month by appearing to distance itself from the lawsuit. The company explained in a letter to Bush that its “executives were not involved” with the Missouri attorney general’s decision to file a lawsuit.
With much at stake for the company’s federal loan servicing business, MOHELA officials from the company have also sought to reassure Democratic congressional aides and Biden administration officials that they were not involved in the Missouri attorney general’s lawsuit seeking to block debt relief, according to people familiar with the conversations.
MOHELA did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Company executives haven’t detailed publicly — in court or otherwise — how they expect Biden’s debt relief would affect the company. Some of their competitors in the industry have forecast some type of financial hit if the plan moves ahead.
Progressives object to the idea that the interests of any Education Department contractor would be used to overturn an administration’s student loan policy.
“It’s not just that this could derail debt cancellation, but it sets up a dynamic where the legal status of these contractors creates veto points in the student loan system that allows it to become even more partisan and more dysfunctional,” said Mike Pierce, the executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center. “Ultimately borrowers are going to pay the price for that.”
For decades after it was created by Missouri lawmakers in 1981, MOHELA made student loans that were guaranteed by the federal government. That changed when President Barack Obama in 2010 signed legislation to scrap the program, which Democrats viewed as a wasteful giveaway to lenders. In response to concerns state entities like MOHELA would go out of business, Congress required the Education Department to set aside new loan servicing contracts for those companies.
“I think no one thought through the politics of that, and here we are 12 years later and the cost of that patronage may kill debt cancellation for tens of millions of people,” Pierce said.
MOHELA has drastically expanded its loan-servicing business since it received an initial Education Department contract in 2011 to service about 100,000 federal student loans, winning additional contracts and new business from the agency. As of August, MOHELA managed the accounts of 6.7 million borrowers on behalf of the Education Department. It also services the accounts of an additional 330,000 borrowers of private loans.
The large expansion followed the company’s effort to beef up its Washington presence. Over the past decade or so, the company began hiring an outside firm to lobby Congress and the Education Department. And it established a D.C. office in the same building complex that houses the Education Department's Office of Federal Student Aid.
On Capitol Hill, MOHELA has benefited from having Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt as the top GOP appropriator overseeing education funding. Senate appropriators have repeatedly added language to government funding bills that effectively require the Education Department to keep companies like MOHELA in the mix as the agency has tried to overhaul its student loan servicing contracts over the past several years.
MOHELA has also managed to stay relatively clear of controversy as Democrats and progressives sharply criticized the student loan servicing industry in recent years. It avoided the fate of some larger companies, like Navient and FedLoan Servicing, which were dogged by federal and state lawsuits and investigations into their loan servicing practices.
The Biden administration last year renewed MOHELA’s loan servicing contract through 2023. It also awarded the company millions of new accounts by designating it the new exclusive contractor to manage the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which cancels the debt of public service employees after 10 years. Fixing the long-troubled program, which had previously been operated by FedLoan Servicing, has been a major priority of Democrats.
MOHELA’s role in the debt relief lawsuit so far has been mixed for the GOP states pursuing the case. In October, a federal judge in St. Louis tossed out the GOP states’ lawsuit, finding that MOHELA was too far removed from the state of Missouri for the attorney general to sue on its behalf. The judge ruled that the other states also lacked standing.
But a federal appeals court in November took a different approach. “Due to MOHELA’s financial obligations to the State treasury, the challenged student loan debt cancellation presents a threatened financial harm to the State of Missouri,” a three-judge panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously concluded.
The Supreme Court will now consider whether the states have standing to bring their lawsuit when it hears the case in February or March. That will determine whether the justices end up reaching a decision on the legality of the administration’s plan under the emergency authority the Education Department claims it has to cancel debt for millions as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The justices have also agreed to hear a second case that’s based on whether two borrowers are able to sue because they were deprived of the opportunity to submit public comments on the policy.
Advocates for debt relief, though, acknowledge that the battle to defend the administration’s program extend beyond MOHELA. A loss at the Supreme Court is also likely to spur new calls for Biden to try another legal authority to cancel student debt.
“Ultimately, MOHELA is not a plaintiff in this case,” Bush said. “The pressure should be applied on the attorneys general to drop the case, the Supreme Court to rule in favor of the people who stand to benefit from this relief, and the Biden Administration to continue using its legal authority to ensure student debt relief is swiftly delivered to borrowers.”
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The journalist Ciro Gomez Leyva, and a photo he shared of his armored car window. (photo: Agencia el Universal/German Espinosa/EELF/GDA/AP)
Renowned Mexican Journalist Survives Shooting
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "A prominent Mexican radio and television reporter says two gunmen tried to kill him near his home in Mexico City, renewing concerns for the safety of journalists in the Central American country."
Ciro Gomez Leyva says he was saved by his armoured vehicle after gunmen shot at him near his home in Mexico City.
Aprominent Mexican radio and television reporter says two gunmen tried to kill him near his home in Mexico City, renewing concerns for the safety of journalists in the Central American country.
Ciro Gomez Leyva, one of Mexico’s best-known journalists, said in a social media post early on Friday that the attack occurred shortly before midnight.
“Two hundred metres [650 feet] from my house, two people on a motorcycle shot at me, apparently with the clear intention of killing me,” Gomez Leyva wrote. “The armour of my truck that I was driving saved me, and I have reported the matter to the authorities.”
He shared photos of the impact of several bullets on his car. The bullets appear to have failed to penetrate the window of his vehicle.
Mexico has seen an uptick of deadly violence against media professionals this year. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a US-based watchdog, 13 journalists have been killed in the country so far in 2022, including three who were targetted in “retaliation for their reporting”.
Mexico also leads the world in the number of missing journalists – 15 cases since 2005, the committee said this year.
Mexico is now the deadliest country for reporters outside war zones. In its year-end report, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said 20 percent of journalists killed worldwide were slain in Mexico. That, along with killings in Haiti and Brazil, helped make the Americas the “world’s most dangerous region for media” in 2022, according to the report.
The targeting of journalists in Mexico has often been blamed on organised crime, but press freedom advocates have criticised authorities and the country’s weak legal system for failing to adequately address the issue.
“While investigating attacks on journalists, CPJ has found that authorities are often slow to respond, fail to apply best practices to evidence gathering, and appear to prioritize presenting suspects as soon as possible, rather than conducting a thorough investigation,” the group said in a statement in August.
“Moreover, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether official investigations are trustworthy, as authorities allegedly collude with criminal gangs or are involved in the attacks themselves,” it said.
The attack on Gomez Leyva sparked condemnations across Mexico, including from President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who often verbally clashes with the reporter.
“He is a journalist, a human being, but what is more, he is a leader of public opinion, and injuries to a person like Ciro creates a lot of political instability,” Lopez Obrador said.
“We have differences,” the president admitted. “They are notorious and public. We are going to continue to have them, but it is completely reprehensible for anyone to be attacked.”
Gomez Leyva said he had no idea of who was behind the attack.
He said he had only received threats five years ago after publishing a story about extortion at a Mexico City prison. Following that 2017 threat, the media company he works for insisted he use a bullet-resistant Jeep Cherokee.
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An Amazon package wrapped in plastic film. (photo: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
Amazon's Plastic Packaging Problem Is Growing, Oceana Report Finds
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "Amazon produced enough plastic packaging in 2021 to wrap the Earth more than 800 times in air pillows."
A
mazon produced enough
plastic packaging in 2021 to wrap the Earth more than 800 times in air pillows.
That’s one of the alarming statistics from Oceana’s third annual report on the plastic packaging waste generated by the e-commerce giant.
“The science is clear, the type of plastic used by Amazon for its packaging is a threat to the oceans,” Oceana’s Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives Matt Littlejohn said in a press release emailed to EcoWatch. “Customers and shareholders are calling for the company to act. It’s time for Amazon to, as it has on climate, step up and commit to a global reduction in its use of plastic packaging.”
The report found that Amazon produced 709 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in 2021, up 18 percent from the 599 million pounds Oceana estimated it produced in 2020. What’s more, calculations based on a 2020 peer-reviewed study published in Science found that as much as 26 million pounds of that waste will end up in the oceans or other bodies of water.
This is particularly concerning because the leading type of plastic Amazon uses in its packaging is plastic film, which has been shown to harm marine life. A 2021 study cited by Oceana found that plastic film was the most common type of plastic found in nearshore ocean ecosystems and that film-based bags, wrappers and industrial packaging were the first, fourth and eighth most frequent plastics found in the environment overall.
The report comes two days after a blog post from Amazon about its plans to reduce plastic. In the post, Amazon said it had reduced its packaging weight per shipment by more than seven percent during 2021 and had therefore only used 97,222 metric tons (approximately 214 million pounds) of single-use plastic in shipping last year. That’s 495 pounds less than Oceana’s estimate.
Littlejohn explained the discrepancy in a statement.
“Oceana’s estimate includes all sales through Amazon’s e-commerce platforms globally, whereas Amazon’s figure only includes plastic packaging used for all orders sent through Amazon-owned and operated fulfillment centers across its global operations network,” he said. “This excludes orders made on Amazon’s e-commerce platforms and fulfilled through third-party sellers. It is unclear how much of Amazon’s total sales are sent through the company’s fulfillment centers. Amazon has declined to disclose this information to Oceana.”
He further noted that the company did not account for a 22 percent growth in sales between 2020 and 2021, which would inevitably increase its plastics footprint. That said, Oceana did credit the company for offering an estimate of its single-use plastic use, something it had not done before.
In the blog post, Amazon also promised to do more to reduce plastic packaging, such as reducing the size of packages to better fit products, using alternative materials like padded paper, increasing the recycled content ratio of its U.S. packaging film from 25 to 50 percent and working with the industry on plastic pollution solutions.
“While we are making progress, we’re not satisfied. We have work to do to continue to reduce packaging, particularly plastic packaging that’s harder to recycle, and we are undertaking a range of initiatives to do so,” Amazon said.
However, Oceana wants to see Amazon set specific plastic reduction targets, as it has for greenhouse gas emissions with its pledge to be net-zero by 2040.
“While Oceana acknowledges that the company has taken an important step towards increased transparency, it is disappointing that Amazon continues to deny that single-use plastic pollution is a problem that merits specific global reduction goals,” Littlejohn said in a statement.
Oceana is calling on Amazon to take three specific steps to reduce plastic packaging:
- Set a target of cutting plastic packaging by at least one third of 2022 levels by 2030.
- Publish a verified report on the plastic packaging used for all items shipped through its website.
- Publish a report on the climate impact of all products shipped on the website, including the plastic packaging.
Oceana is not alone in wanting action from Amazon. More than 740,000 Amazon customers want zero-plastic packaging options, according to The Hill. Further, nearly 49 percent of shares voted in favor of a plastic packaging reduction resolution at Amazon’s May 2022 Annual General Meeting, Oceana said in the press release. The meassure ultimately failed to pass.
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