16 January 23
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On January 8, far-right supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the seat of Brazil’s government in a scene reminiscent of the US Capitol riot. But President Lula, unlike the US government, is swiftly cracking down on the perpetrators.
The similarities between their actions and those of Donald Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021, are inescapable, with both events involving motley crews of right-wing protesters storming federal buildings in a show of support for their losing candidate. But unlike US opponents of Trump, Brazil under President Lula is handling its response to the Plaza invasion very well so far.
The day’s protests began at the nearby army headquarters building, a site of near-continuous demonstrations since Bolsonaro’s loss to Lula as right-wing Brazilians seek to pressure the military to stage a coup on their behalf. The crowd then stormed through barricades and military police who were guarding the Plaza and made their way in through tear gas and pepper spray. After entering the Plaza, they stormed and vandalized the three buildings.
Investigations by the police and journalists into the Brasília Plaza invasion are still ongoing but currently show that the events of January 8 were planned starting last week on WhatsApp and Telegram group chats. This planning enabled the crowd to develop a plan of attack, avoid police intervention until the last minute, and coordinate travel to Brasília — most of the nearly four thousand people who invaded the Plaza arrived in over a hundred chartered buses from around the country, joining several hundred locals who had already been camped at the capitol.
The protesters’ apparent plan was to secure a military intervention in Brazilian politics, and they hoped that their actions would inspire this. (Some of the protesters carried banners reading “military intervention now.”) Early clashes with the police notwithstanding, in the first hours of the invasion it seemed that the police on the Plaza grounds might be sympathetic to the protesters. Video has surfaced of some military police chatting and taking selfies with protesters on the outskirts of the crowd, and some police seemed to act as a kind of escort to the Plaza. President Lula has criticized the Plaza security teams for their early inaction.
Lula Cracks Down
By early evening, however, things had changed. Lula signed off on federal security intervention in the Plaza invasion, putting the federal government in charge of the crackdown. Shortly thereafter, the military police moved in en masse and began to remove the protesters from the buildings, immediately detaining them and transporting them to centers where they are currently being processed and charged with crimes. As of today, over twelve hundred people are to be charged for invading the capitol and property destruction, with the government saying more arrests are likely.
Though the ill-prepared protesters were removed from the scene within a few hours of their invasion, right-wing activity continued on the streets of Brazil. In major cities such as São Paulo, right-wingers blockaded major streets. Protesters were taken to regular detention centers, which right-wing complainers have rather pathetically dubbed “Lulags,” a portmanteau of “gulag” and Lula. Alexandre de Moraes, leader of Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal, has responded that protesters shouldn’t have expected to be held at a “summer camp” after their arrest. Brazil has also begun investigating and prosecuting the bus and transport companies that arranged for protesters to be bused to the Plaza.
These protests follow months of right-wing backlash by the Right over Lula’s victory and two previous attempted coups by Bolsonaro. The first occurred on September 7, 2021, when Bolsonaro led a group of supporters to invade the Brazilian Supreme Tribunal to seek a change in electoral law that would have boosted his chances of winning the 2022 election. The second attempt occurred on Election Day, as the Highway Police blockaded neighborhoods and detained buses transporting Lula voters in an effort to rig a close election.
The key difference between those events and the capitol invasion this Sunday is that the two earlier efforts stood a chance of succeeding — either could conceivably have kept Bolsonaro in power. This weekend’s Plaza invasion, by comparison, was more an amateurish expression of resentment than a strategic move to change the course of Brazilian politics. Any success in toppling the Lula government would have relied on the cooperation of the security forces in Brasília itself, which Lula quickly federalized.
Bolsonaro Absent
The riot’s failure is in no small part due to Bolsonaro being absent on Sunday. Not only was he not with the protesters — he wasn’t even in the country. Bolsonaro had left Brazil on December 31 for Florida, skipping his successor’s inauguration and likely avoiding arrest, as no longer holding office means that he was vulnerable to prosecution for the first time in his adult life. (He is currently under federal investigation for conspiring with the police to shield his sons from prosecution and spreading lies about Brazil’s elections.)
So, while his overzealous supporters were plotting an attempt to reinstall him as president in absentia, Bolsonaro was enjoying an American vacation, wandering around a Publix grocery store and chowing down on KFC. On Sunday, the former president criticized the rioters for their “destruction and invasion of public buildings.”
The official response to this weekend’s outburst was quick and decisive. The near-unanimous reaction from the federal government recognized the danger posed by the protesters. Lula and his government have emphasized that they aren’t fighting these protesters because of their right-wing politics but because of their attempt to undermine democracy, drawing on the legacy of Brazil’s transition from its long military dictatorship and reminding everyone of the serious threat posed by anyone who advocates for an end to democratic rule. “The coup plotters who promoted the destruction of public property in Brasilia are being identified and will be punished,” Lula tweeted the night after the riots. “Tomorrow we resume work at the Planalto Palace. Democracy always. Goodnight.”
Lula has also been clear that, even though he wasn’t there and didn’t plan Sunday’s Plaza invasion, Bolsonaro was responsible for it. His years of fearmongering, his denial of the election’s results, and his open calls for an end to Brazilian democracy mean that he is culpable for the actions of his supporters. “There are several speeches by the former president of the republic encouraging this,” Lula said. “He encouraged encroachment on the Three Powers whenever he could. And this is also his responsibility and the parties that supported him.”
The Brazilian government is seeking to freeze Bolsonaro’s assets in connection with the attack.
Parallels
Coverage of the Plaza invasion in the United States and other countries’ press made the obvious comparisons between what happened in Brasília this weekend and the invasion of the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Both attacks featured the ragtag supporters of a recently ousted right-wing president claiming that they’d had an electoral victory stolen from them, and both involved the destruction of federal property. Both were planned in advance and widely condemned by the international community.
But these comparisons are somewhat shallow. The recent events in Brazil were more a manifestation of inchoate rage than a serious attempt to overthrow the government. The US Capitol invasion was timed and orchestrated to prevent Congress from recognizing Joe Biden’s victory, the last step before his inauguration on January 20. Targeting the Capitol at that moment, and specific politicians vital to the process like former vice president Mike Pence and anti-Trump Republican senator Mitt Romney, made it undeniable that protesters were attempting a coup, even if it was a pitiful attempt. On the other hand, Sunday’s events in Brazil occurred when no politicians were in the building. And while Trump was present in DC on January 6 urging his supporters on, Bolsonaro was thousands of miles away, taking selfies with his American fans.
The biggest difference, though, is in the Brazilian government’s response to the Plaza invasion. Whereas the Brazilian protesters have already been detained, with hundreds of arrests and more to come, in the United States, security forces escorted the rioters out of the building on January 6 and waited before beginning any formal prosecution of the Capitol invaders, even relying on online researchers to identify many of those responsible after allowing them to leave the scene of their crimes.
The Brazilian government isn’t limiting its efforts to the protesters who invaded the Plaza either. For example, a warrant has been issued for Anderson Torres, a former Bolsonaro official who was head of security for the Federal District of Brasília at the time of the Plaza invasion. By contrast, the US government has not addressed the egregious failures of security forces in its own Capitol riot.
This means that many observers have drawn exactly the wrong conclusion, saying that Brazil is a warning for the United States. It’s the opposite — Brazil is swiftly and seriously prosecuting its amateur coup-plotters. Brazil’s major cities saw major street protests condemning the Plaza invasion almost immediately. Meanwhile, the United States has dragged its feet, waiting months to investigate and years to prosecute and only now beginning to grapple with the connection between those who invaded the Capitol on January 6 and the politicians egging them on. The United States, not Brazil, is the cautionary tale of what can happen if a country fails to stand up to threats to democracy.
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Protesters gather outside the state Capitol building in Madison, Wis., Friday, June 24, 2022. (photo: Harm Venhuizen/AP)
A spring state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin has serious implications for abortion policy, voting rights and more in the perennial battleground.
Should a more liberal-leaning jurist win the job in the April election, it would flip the balance of the state’s highest court for at least two years.
There are significant policy outcomes hanging on the result. The court chose the state’s political maps for the decade after the Democratic governor and Republican Legislature deadlocked, and it’s likely to hear a case challenging Wisconsin’s 19th-century law banning almost all abortions in the near future. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court also decided major cases on election laws and voting rights before and after the 2020 presidential election.
“The 2023 Wisconsin state Supreme Court race is the most important election that nobody’s ever heard of,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the state Democratic Party. “It has implications that will affect national politics for years to come, really at every level of government.”
Party organizations and ideological outside groups — both sides of abortion debate, for example, as well as labor groups — are planning to spend millions on advertising and activating extensive field networks. It will be the latest multimillion-dollar judicial race in recent years, which reflects both the outsize importance of the outcome and the increasing focus on contests further down the ticket — and away from Washington.
The court currently has a 4-3 conservative majority. But one of the conservative-held seats is open after Justice Patience Roggensack decided not to seek another term. Further scrambling the politics, another conservative justice — Brian Hagedorn, who was elected in 2019 — has sided with the liberal justices in the past on some high-profile cases.
“It is becoming clear the Democrats want to use the Supreme Court as a vehicle to circumvent legislators who actually make policy decisions,” said Mark Jefferson, executive director of the state Republican Party, ticking through a range of additional issues that could be in play at the court, from school choice to photo ID for voting and gun control measures. “If the liberals pick up another seat, they will have a rock-solid majority that never deviates from liberal activism.”
Voters must first navigate an unusual primary before choosing the new justice. There are four judges running for the position, which is technically nonpartisan, with two on either side of the ideological divide.
Former state Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly, who was appointed to a spot on the court by then-Gov. Scott Walker in 2016 before losing a 2020 election for a full term, and Waukesha County Judge Jennifer Dorow, who rose to prominence for her handling of the trial of the Waukesha Christmas 2021 parade attack, are running on the right. On the left, the candidates are Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell and Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz.
The top two finishers in the Feb. 21 primary will face off in the April 4 general election. The split field raises the possibility that two ideologically similar candidates advance to the general election, as has happened in some recent congressional elections with all-party, top-two primaries. But most observers don’t think that is likely.
Still, the unusual primary dynamics have left many major players on both sides on the sidelines for now. Both state political parties are remaining neutral between their ideologically aligned candidates in the primary, and so is Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.
One notable exception there is Fair Courts America, a group supported by GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein. It has pledged its support — and “millions of dollars” — to Kelly.
Assuming two judges on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum advance in the primary, the general election is expected to revolve around clear differences on redistricting and abortion policy.
On redistricting, the court ultimately selected a congressional map drawn by Evers. But it was one that leaned Republican anyway, after the court called for a new map that hewed as closely as possible to the old one. A similar and more protracted fight also broke out over legislative lines — and more challenges to the maps could arise in future years, especially if the balance of the court flips.
“I think it is huge,” Evers said in an interview on the sidelines of the Democratic Governors Association winter meeting last month, specifically citing the redistricting battle. “The Supreme Court has leaned conservative on almost all of the issues. So yes, this is a big deal.”
National party groups that are heavily involved in the redistricting fight — such as the Republican State Leadership Committee and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee — are also planning to play in the race.
The NDRC, Democrats’ main national redistricting organization, is remaining neutral in the primary but has started to reactivate its network in the state ahead of the general election. Former Attorney General Eric Holder, the organization’s chair, is likely to travel to the state for the general election.
Wisconsin’s race has also taken on increased importance for pro- and anti-abortion rights groups in the wake of two decisions this month from the Idaho and South Carolina state Supreme Courts, which recently heard cases on the states’ abortion restrictions. A near-total ban was upheld in Idaho, but a law preventing the procedure after about six weeks of pregnancy was thrown out in South Carolina.
The issue could come in front of the Wisconsin court soon. State Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, has sued to overturn the state’s 1849 law that makes abortion illegal in almost all circumstances. While that case is winding its way through the courts, abortion providers have stopped performing the procedure because of ambiguity around enforcement of the law.
Stephen Billy, vice president of state affairs at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an anti-abortion group that spent $600,000 on North Carolina state Supreme Court races in the fall, said his organization is also planning to invest in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. It’s part of the group’s growing spending on state-level races in the post-Roe era, he said, “to make sure that Wisconsin doesn’t end up with a fabricated right to abortion decided by activist judges.”
Democrats, in particular, are likely to focus on the issue to drive voters to the polls. Wikler, the state party chair, called the contest a de facto ballot initiative on a “statewide abortion ban,” citing the likelihood of court arguments on the 1849 law.
Planned Parenthood, the pro-abortion rights mainstay, is planning to spend six figures on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, between national and local affiliate investments. The organization, in conjunction with other partner groups, is planning voter education campaigns, a GOTV drive and independent expenditure advertising for the general election.
Both sides say the issue is expected to become much more prominent in the general election. Ahead of the primary, Wisconsin Right to Life, another anti-abortion group, is working to educate its members on the importance of the race. But Gracie Skogman, the group’s legislative and PAC director, said the group will be “much more focused” on the general election.
“The unfortunate news is the majority of voters that we have interacted with are not aware of the stakes of the election, the candidates who are on the ballot, the views of the candidate, or the tie between our current pro-life statutes and the results of the election,” Skogman said. “From our perspective, there’s a long way to go.”
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Tributes are left at the site where an apartment block was heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike in Dnipro. (photo: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters)
Rescue workers continue to look for survivors from Saturday’s strike on apartment building
At least 30 people are still missing and a further 75 injured, according to local authorities, after the building was split in two with its middle reduced to rubble.
One of the dead was boxing coach Mykhailo Korenovskyi, the only member of his family who had been home at the time. A family friend posted a video of the family celebrating a child’s birthday in their apartment alongside a picture from after the attack of the kitchen, which is missing an entire wall.
According to a CNN report, the last rescue took place shortly after midnight on Saturday. It took nine hours to reach the person and they had severe hypothermia.
Andriy Ivanyutin, who owns one of the apartments that was destroyed in the attack, said his tenants were a couple who had fled fighting in the eastern Donetsk province, their children, and one of their mothers. “The family go to church on Sundays but this time they went on Saturday … thankfully they were not home … but their mother was,” said Ivanyutin. He said the mother was still missing.
Among the survivors was a husband and wife who had fled Kherson for Dnipro. The husband used a flashlight to draw rescuers’ attention while applying pressure to his wife’s wounds.
The attack has prompted an outpouring of support from Dnipro’s residents. The nearby village of Voloske, outside Dnipro city, has said it is willing to shelter those made homeless “for as long as necessary”, offering to pay for taxi fares on arrival.
Ukraine’s deputy minister of defence, Hanna Maliar, said an X-22 Russian anti-ship missile hit the building. At about 11 metres long, almost 1 metre in diameter and weighing 5,600kg, the X-22 missile is a ballistic missile with an arch-like trajectory.
Ukraine’s air defence forces said in a statement after the Dnipro attack that they do not have the equipment to detect or shoot down ballistic missiles.
After months of pleas from the Ukrainians, the US agreed to deliver the powerful Patriot air defence systems which, although not foolproof, are capable of shooting down ballistic missiles. The US had been reluctant to do so as it feared Russia would see the delivery as an escalation. It will also take time for Ukrainian soldiers to learn how to use the systems.
Ukrainian officials acknowledged little hope of finding anyone alive in the rubble, but the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said rescue efforts in the central Ukrainian city would go on “as long as there is even the slightest chance to save lives”.
Zelenskiy also thanked public figures who spoke out about the attack and “did not remain indifferent”.
Sweden, holder of the EU presidency, on Monday described the attack as a war crime.
“The Swedish government condemns in the strongest terms Russia’s continuing systemic attacks against civilians … in Ukraine, including Saturday’s missile strike on an apartment block in Dnipro,” Ulf Kristersson, the Swedish prime minister, told reporters, calling it a “horrific attack”.
“Intentional attacks against civilians are war crimes. Those responsible will be held to account,” he said, speaking at a joint press conference in Stockholm with the European Council president, Charles Michel.
The Kremlin has denied responsibility for the attack, and has pointed to an unsubstantiated theory circulating on social media that Ukrainian air defence systems had caused the damage.
“The Russian armed forces do not strike residential buildings or social infrastructure. They strike military targets,” the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
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Activists urge for equitable, global COVID vaccine access at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on May 5, 2021. (photo: Caroline Brehman/Getty Images)
The social media pressure campaign was just a part of the pharmaceutical industry’s successful lobbying blitz to retain patents — and make record profits.
“The authorities are warning about ‘serious consequences’ of the action, i.e. posts and a flood of comments ‘that may violate TOS’ as well as the ‘takeover of user accounts’ are to be expected,” wrote Morschhaeuser. “Especially the personal accounts of the management of the vaccine manufacturers are said to be targeted. Accordingly, fake accounts could also be set up.”
The campaign they were concerned about was the launch of an international push to force the drug industry to share the intellectual property and patents associated with coronavirus vaccine development. Making the patents available, in turn, would allow countries across the world to swiftly manufacture generic vaccines and other low-cost therapeutics to deal with the ongoing pandemic.
Morschhaeuser, while alerting several site integrity and safety teams at Twitter, forwarded on an email from BioNTech spokesperson Jasmina Alatovic, who asked Twitter to “hide” activist tweets targeting her company’s account over a period of two days.
Morschhaeuser flagged the corporate accounts of Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca for her colleagues to monitor and shield from activists. Morschhaeuser also asked colleagues to monitor the hashtags #PeoplesVaccine and #JoinCTAP, a reference to the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, a program promoted by developing countries to accelerate the development of vaccines through the equitable sharing of research and manufacturing capacity. She noted that the group Global Justice Now was spearheading the action with an online sign-up form.
It is not clear to what extent Twitter took any action on BioNTech’s request. In response to Morschhaeuser’s inquiry, several Twitter officials chimed in, debating what action could or could not be taken. Su Fern Teo, a member of the company’s safety team, noted that a quick scan of the activist campaign showed nothing that violated the company’s terms of service, and asked for more examples to “get a better sense of the content that may violate our policies.”
But it shows the extent to which pharmaceutical giants engaged in a global lobbying blitz to ensure corporate dominance over the medical products that became central to combatting the pandemic. Ultimately, the campaign to share Covid vaccine recipes around the world failed.
The Intercept accessed Twitter’s emails after the company’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, granted access to several reporters in December. This is the second story I have reported through access to these files. The first centered on the Pentagon’s network of fake Twitter accounts used to spread U.S. narratives in the Middle East.
In reporting this story, as with the last, Twitter did not provide unfettered access to company information; rather, they allowed me to make requests without restriction that were then fulfilled on my behalf by an attorney, meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive. I did not agree to any conditions governing the use of the documents, and I made efforts to authenticate and contextualize the documents through further reporting. The redactions in the embedded documents in this story were done by The Intercept to protect privacy, not Twitter.
Twitter and the German Federal Office for Information Security, the cybersecurity agency that Morschhaeuser said contacted Twitter on behalf of BioNTech, did not respond to a request for comment. BioNTech’s Alatovic, in response to a request for comment, stressed that the firm “takes its societal responsibility seriously and is investing in solutions to improve the health of people regardless of their income.”
In November, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published a lengthy report showing that pharmaceutical companies went to great lengths to stifle efforts to share pandemic-related patents and IP, including threats to the leadership of Belgium, Colombia, and Indonesia. The Intercept has also detailed the domestic lobbying push to block support for a special World Trade Organization waiver necessary for the rapid creation of generic pandemic medicine. German media has similarly reported on the aggressive effort by BioNTech to build support from the German government in opposing the waiver at the WTO.
In May 2021, the Biden administration reversed its earlier position and that of the Trump administration and voiced support for the WTO waiver, making the U.S. one of the largest wealthy countries to support the idea, backed by a coalition led by India and South Africa. But infighting at the international trade body, along with staunch opposition from other wealthy countries, prevented any effective progress on the issue.
The largely successful assault against the creation of generic vaccines resulted in an unprecedented explosion in profit for a few select biopharmaceutical drug interests. Pfizer and BioNTech generated a staggering $37 billion in revenue from its shared mRNA vaccine in 2021 alone, making it one of the most lucrative drug products of all time.
Moderna, which made $17.7 billion from vaccine sales in 2021, recently announced its plan to hike the price of its Covid shot by about 400 percent.
The high cost of vaccines and concentrated ownership meant supplies in 2021 were hoarded in the European Union, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Japan, and other wealthy countries, while much of the developing world was forced to wait for excess vaccines the following year.
“For more than two years, a global movement has been speaking out against pharmaceutical greed and demanding that everyone, everywhere has the tools to combat pandemics,” said Maaza Seyoum, a campaigner for the People’s Vaccine Alliance.
“Whatever nasty tricks companies and governments pull,” she added, “we cannot and will not be silenced.”
Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, noted that at the time of BioNTech’s censorship request, much of the world was under various lockdown orders, making digital forms of protest all the more vital for influencing public policy.
“To try and stifle digital dissent during a pandemic, when tweets and emails are some of the only forms of protest available to those locked in their homes, is deeply sinister,” he said.
The BioNTech request was not the only channel through which vaccine-makers sought to shape content moderation actions at Twitter.
Stronger, a campaign run by Public Good Projects, a public health nonprofit specializing in large-scale media monitoring programs, regularly communicated with Twitter on regulating content related to the pandemic. The firm worked closely with the San Francisco social media giant to help develop bots to censor vaccine misinformation and, at times, sent direct requests to Twitter with lists of accounts to censor and verify.
Internal Twitter emails show regular correspondence between an account manager at Public Good Projects, and various Twitter officials, including Todd O’Boyle, lobbyist with the company who served as a point of contact with the Biden administration. The content moderation requests were sent throughout 2021 and early 2022.
The entire campaign, newly available tax documents and other disclosures show, was entirely funded by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a vaccine industry lobbying group. BIO, which is financed by companies such as Moderna and Pfizer, provided Stronger with $1,275,000 in funding for the effort, which included tools for the public to flag content on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for moderation.
Many of the tweets flagged by Stronger contained absolute falsehoods, including claims that vaccines contained microchips and were designed to intentionally kill people. But others hinged on a gray area of vaccine policy through which there is reasonable debate, such as requests to label or take down content critical of vaccine passports and government mandates to require vaccination.
One tweet flagged by the BIO-backed moderation effort read, “if a vaccinated person and an unvaccinated person have roughly the same capacity to carry, shed and transmit the virus, particularly in its Delta form, what difference does implementing a vaccination passport actually make to the spread of the virus?”
Public health experts and civil libertarians strongly debated the constitutionality of such passports, an idea that was eventually discarded by U.S. policymakers.
Joe Smyser, the chief executive of Public Good Projects in charge of the Stronger campaign, said his organization’s work was a good-faith effort to battle disinformation. “BIO contributed money and said, ‘You guys are planning on running a pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine misinformation effort and we will give you $500,000 [per year] no questions asked,’” said Smyser.
Many pharmaceutical lobby groups made exaggerated claims about the danger of sharing vaccine technology. PhRMA, another drug industry lobby group, falsely claimed on Twitter that any effort to allow the creation of a generic Covid vaccine would result in placing all 4.4 million jobs supported by the entire American drug industry at risk.
I asked Smyser whether his group ever flagged any content distributed by the pharmaceutical lobby as “misinformation.”
Smyser agreed that policy debate was important, and if misinformation was spread by pharmaceutical companies, any global citizen “should be aware of it,” but that his organization never flagged or focused on any drug industry content.
“I understand why someone would be skeptical, because as a researcher, it matters where your money comes from,” Smyser said. But, he argued, “my job is, how do people figure out where to go get vaccinated? And how do I encourage them to get the vaccine? That was it.”
In a December 2020 email thread further discussing how to monitor BioNTech and respond to the vaccine equity campaign engaging in “spammy behavior” potentially in violation of the social media company’s policies, Holger Kersting, a Twitter spokesperson in Germany, offered several links to tweets in potential violation of the policy.
Two of the tweets were from an account owned by Terry Brough, a retired bricklayer in a small town outside of Liverpool. The messages called on the chief executives of Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca to share vaccine technology with “poor countries.”
Reached for comment, Brough reacted with surprise that his messages were being monitored for possible fake content.
“I’m actually 74 and still living,” said Brough with a chuckle. “I was a bricklayer all my life just like my dad. I’m no Che Guevara, but I’ve been an activist, a trade unionist, and a socialist. And all I did was sign a tweet. I wish I could’ve done more, really.”
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A boat left along the shoreline in Key West, Florida, this month. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Biden shifts toward political center as likely presidential rival Ron DeSantis calls out national guard
Local US residents on jet skis have been helping some of the migrants who attempted to swim ashore after making arduous and life-threatening, days-long journeys in makeshift vessels.
Joe Biden’s turn to the center over immigration comes as Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, attempts to plot his own strategy for handling a sensitive situation in the south of his state, calling out national guard troops in a hardline approach.
Last Thursday, the US Coast Guard returned another 177 Cuban migrants to their island nation, while scores of Haitians who swam ashore in Miami were taken into custody by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The coastguard says that since 1 October, it has intercepted and returned more than 4,900 Cubans at sea, compared with about 6,100 in the 12 months to 30 September.
DeSantis, seen as a likely contender for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination, has taken swipes at the White House for what he claims are Biden’s “lawless” immigration policies and perceived open borders.
The Biden administration has hit back, accusing DeSantis of “making a mockery” of the immigration system by staging his own series of political stunts, including an episode last year in which he sent a planeload of mostly Venezuelan migrants to Massachusetts, flying them from Texas at Florida taxpayers’ expense.
The governor is under criminal investigation in Texas and defending a separate lawsuit over the flight, and another to Biden’s home state of Delaware that was canceled, which reports said involved covert operatives linked to DeSantis recruiting migrants at a San Antonio motel with false promises of housing and jobs.
In the latest incidents of migrants attempting to land in south Florida, the TV station WPLG spotted city of Miami marine patrol jet skis rescuing at least two people found swimming in the ocean, and a CBP spokesperson, Michael Selva, said beachgoers on Virginia Key had helped others ashore on Thursday using small boats and jet skis.
Two days earlier, another group of about 25 people made landfall near Fort Lauderdale. Authorities arrested 12, while others ran away.
Increasing numbers of people are risking their lives to reach the US despite stricter policies from the Biden administration intended to deter irregular immigration and increase humanitarian visa numbers for Cubans, and others, to enter legally – but with a high bar to entry unattainable to many of the thousands fleeing existential threats including extreme violence, political oppression, severe poverty and hardships exacerbated by the climate crisis or failed states.
Biden has responded to conservative voices inside the Democratic party and Republicans calling for a tougher stance. But critics say the president’s new “carrot and stick” approach, cracking down on undocumented immigration while appearing to offer an olive branch of more visas, presents obstacles that most migrants would struggle to overcome.
The White House says up to 30,000 people a month from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela will be admitted to the US, but only if they apply online, can pay their own airfare and find a financial sponsor.
Writing in the Guardian last week, Moustafa Bayoumi, immigration author and professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, said Biden was “throwing migrants under the bus”.
“This is a program obviously designed to favor those with means and pre-established connections in the US, and it’s hard to imagine it as anything but meaningless for those forced to flee for their lives without money or planning,” he said.
DeSantis, seeking to build political capital from a president many expect him to challenge for the White House in 2024, accused Biden of under-resourcing the federal response to the Florida arrivals and placing a burden on local law enforcement.
Meanwhile, the impact of the recent increase in migrant landing attempts continues to be felt in south Florida. The Dry Tortugas national park, off the Florida Keys, has only just reopened after being turned into a makeshift processing center for hundreds of people earlier this month.
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Mursal Navizada (L) in black tweeted this picture on March 6, 2021 with fellow female legislators at the Afgan parliament six months before the Taliban take over. (photo: Vice)
Mursal Nabizada, a vocal Taliban critic, is the first legislator with the previous US-backed government to have been killed under the Taliban regime.
At just 30 years old, her death marks the first time a politician from the previous US-backed government has been killed under the Taliban regime. There was no mention of Nabizada’s killing or condolence message on the official Taliban government website.
Nabizada’s brother and another security guard were injured in the attack early Sunday morning. The police are investigating the motive and claim a third guard ran away with money and jewellery from her home. Her family has spoken to local media and said she had no personal enemies.
“There was no personal hostility. I don't know if it could have been a political issue, but there was no personal enmity,” her sister told Afghan outlet ToloNews.
A fierce peace advocate and critic of the Taliban, she was only 27-years-old when she was elected in 2019 as a member of parliament to represent Kabul, and was a member of the parliamentary defence commission. She was one of a handful of female legislators who chose to stay back in Kabul after the Taliban takeover.
Nabizada’s Twitter feed went silent right after her government was deposed by the Taliban in August 2021. Her last tweet is a group photo posted on Aug. 19, 2021 with former Afghan cabinet members, including president Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah. The photo’s caption reads, “I am trying with my people to establish peace and stability in this country and to fulfil the desire of the oppressed nation for peace.”
Before the Taliban takeover, Nabizada’s socials were a stream of images and posts showing a dedicated legislator speaking at male-dominated security meetings, planting trees in Kabul, and listening to her constituents in intimate yet traditional town hall-like settings, cross-legged on the floor. One photo caption reads, “I call it my duty to see my people continuously and listen to their problems.”
د بهسود ولسوالی میدان وردک ولایت د علپیور موضوع د څیړنی ویدیوی راپور pic.twitter.com/GFnmvfsGaV
— Mursal Nabizada (@NabizadaMursal) April 8, 2021
After the Taliban takeover, her Facebook feed continued with mostly condolence and condemnation posts against attacks on minorities and women.
Her friend and former lawmaker Mariam Solaimankhil said on Facebook, “As we grieve her loss, let us also raise our voices for the women of Afghanistan, who are facing unimaginable atrocities at the hands of the Taliban. We have lost a true sister, but her memory and mission must live on.”
Nabizada’s cousin Ahmed Wali also wrote on Facebook, “A truly empowered woman who tried to tell millions of Afghan girls that it’s gonna be OK. Make sure your daughter knows her name, I will be telling mine to aspire to be like her.”
Condemnations poured in from across the world. Member of the European Parliament Hannah Neumann tweeted, “She was killed in darkness, but the Taliban build their system of gender apartheid in full daylight.”
Member of the Canadian Parliament, Heather McPherson, said on Facebook, “For months, I have worked with Canadian MPs from all parties to bring Afghan women MPs still trapped in Afghanistan to safety to Canada. I can’t help but wonder if MP Nabizada would be alive today if the government had acted faster.”
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Boarded horses at Miller Ranch in Rio Verde Foothills. (photo: Caitlin O’Hara/WP)
John Hornewer picked up a quarter and put it in the slot. The lone water hose at a remote public filling station sputtered to life and splashed 73 gallons into the steel tank of Hornewer’s water hauling truck. After two minutes, it stopped. Hornewer, one of two main suppliers responsible for delivering water to a community of more than 2,000 homes known as Rio Verde Foothills, fished out another quarter.
“It so shouldn’t be like this,” Hornewer said.
Some living here amid the cactus and creosote bushes see themselves as the first domino to fall as the Colorado River tips further into crisis. On Jan. 1, the city of Scottsdale, which gets the majority of its water from the Colorado River, cut off Rio Verde Foothills from the municipal water supply that it has relied on for decades. The result is a disorienting and frightening lack of certainty about how residents will find enough water as their tanks run down in coming weeks, with a bitter political feud impacting possible solutions.
The city’s decision — and the failure to find a dependable alternative — has forced water haulers like Hornewer to scour distant towns for any available gallons. About a quarter of the homes in Rio Verde Foothills, a checkerboard of one-acre lots linked by dirt roads in an unincorporated part of Maricopa County, rely on water from a municipal pipe hauled by trucks. Since the cutoff, their water prices have nearly tripled. The others have wells, though many of these have gone dry as the water table has fallen by hundreds of feet in some places after years of drought.
“This is a real hard slap in the face to everybody,” said Hornewer, who has been hauling water to his neighbors for more than two decades. “It’s not sustainable. We’re not going to make it through a summer like this.”
The prolonged drought and shrinking reservoirs have already led to unprecedented restrictions in usage of the Colorado River, and the federal government is now pressing seven states to cut 2 to 4 million acre feet more, up to 30 percent of the river’s annual average flow. The heavy rain and snow pummeling California have not had much impact on the Colorado River Basin and major reservoirs Lake Powell and Lake Mead have fallen to dangerous levels.
This grim forecast prompted Scottsdale to warn Rio Verde Foothills more than a year ago that their water supply would be cut off. City officials stressed their priority was to their own residents and cast Rio Verde Foothills as a boomtown of irresponsible development, fed by noisy water trucks rumbling over city streets. “The city cannot be responsible for the water needs of a separate community especially given its unlimited and unregulated growth,” the city manager’s office wrote in December.
Scottsdale Mayor David Ortega was unmoved when his Rio Verde Foothills neighbors cried foul.
“There is no Santa Claus,” he said in a statement last month. “The megadrought tells us all — water is not a compassion game.”
With growing urgency, Rio Verde Foothills residents have pursued two main alternatives to find a new source of water, although bitter disagreements over the best solution have divided the community and pitted neighbors against each other.
For the past several years, some residents have sought to form their own water district that would allow the community to buy water from elsewhere in the state and import what they need, more than 100 acre-feet of water per year. Another group prefers enlisting a Canadian private utility company, Epcor, to supply the community, as it does with neighboring areas. But political disputes have so far foiled both approaches.
The water district plan — which supporters say would give them long-term access to a reliable source of water — was rejected in August by the Maricopa County supervisors. The supervisor for the area, Thomas Galvin, said he opposed adding a new layer of government to a community that prizes its freedom, particularly one run by neighbors with the authority to condemn property to build infrastructure.
Galvin preferred Epcor, a utility that, if approved, would be regulated by the Arizona Corporation Commission.
The water district “would be subject to the whims of five local lay people serving on its board. Whereas Epcor cannot assess anything on these folks unless the corporation commission approves it,” Galvin said in an interview. “To me, it was just a sensible plan all around.”
Scottsdale officials didn’t see it that way. To avoid an interruption of service to Rio Verde Foothills, Epcor needed Scottsdale to agree to treat the water it would provide — but the city has not agreed to do so.
Mayor Ortega’s office said he was not available for an interview.
That has left Rio Verde Foothills without any clear path to solve their water problem. Some homeowners have sued to challenge the Maricopa County decision to block the water district. And a larger group of residents filed a lawsuit Thursday in Maricopa County Superior Court seeking an injunction against Scottsdale to force the city to reopen its taps.
“What Scottsdale has done is inhumane. Dangerous. They’ve left us without fire protection. They’ve left us without water for families,” said Christy Jackman, a resident who helped lead an effort to raise thousands of dollars to pay lawyers to seek the injunction. “Mostly what we have right now is palpable fear.”
Two days before the cut off, Stephen Coniaris, a retired emergency room physician, had his 5,000 gallon underground storage tank topped off. His solar-powered home overlooking the McDowell Mountains was already well-equipped to conserve through the worst drought in a millennium. He had a low-volume dishwasher; a toilet that consumed just 0.9 gallons per flush.
But this new dilemma has pushed Coniaris and his wife, Donna Rice, into more extreme territory. They joined a gym in Scottsdale to take showers. They haul dirty clothes to friends’ homes or a laundromat. Plastic buckets in the backyard collect the rainwater, however rare, that falls from spouts off the roof. This goes into 3.5 gallon plastic jugs stationed in the bathroom to flush the toilet — although they now usually make other arrangements.
“We pee outside,” Coniaris mentioned, as he ate his lunch of barbecued chicken off paper plates, to avoid doing dishes.
These measures have dropped the couple’s average water consumption from 200 gallons per day last year to 30 gallons per day in the first week of January, as they anxiously await a solution for their community. As the cutoff deadline approached last year, some neighbors sold their homes, and others have watched property values decline.
Rice said they are not planning to sell, but she couldn’t imagine much demand in any case.
“It would be crazy to buy our house at this point,” she said.
But staying will grow increasingly fraught the longer Rio Verde Foothills must rely on distant sources of hauled water.
Cody Reim, who works for a company that installs metal roofing, normally pays $380 a month for the roughly 10,000 gallons per month he consumes along with his wife and four young children. If his family continues to use water at the same pace, the new prices will put his next bill at $1,340 per month, he said, almost as much as his mortgage payment.
“That’s a life-changing amount of money for me,” he said.
Reim has called or emailed all of his state and federal representatives, with most ignoring his inquiries, he said, and visited the state legislature last month to try to speak with Arizona’s former governor. On Tuesday, he attended a protest at city hall in Scottsdale — the city where his children attend school, where his family does nearly all its shopping — to demand water for his community.
“I thought, this is the United States of America, we do so much in humanitarian aid to other countries that don’t have water, they’re not going to let taxpaying citizens of this county go without water,” he said.
“You don’t think this could happen,” he added. “You have this belief that there’s going to be help.”
‘You fill this whole thing up with water?’
The help, for now, is Hornewer, and the other water haulers who service Rio Verde Foothills.
Until this year, the six trucks in his family-run business, relied on the nearby Scottsdale filling station. It would take about 15 minutes, he said, to fill his 6,000 gallon tank, quickly punching a code into the automated system and receiving his torrent of water.
On Saturday, he spent an hour driving 45 miles to Apache Junction, one of the few towns in the vicinity with an available filling station, a small cinder block house with a single hose. It now takes 85 quarters — and nearly three hours — to fill up.
“I’ll do what I have to do for my people,” he said. “But wow, this is getting stupid.”
As Hornewer waited, other people with trailer-loaded personal water tanks drove up, impatiently eyeing his commercial hauler. One of those idling behind him, a man in a cowboy hat and a checked shirt, eventually got out of his pickup and sauntered over. He rapped his knuckles on Hornewer’s tank.
“You fill this whole thing up with water?” he asked. “Serious?”
The tedious process has reduced the number of possible water loads Hornewer’s company can make by 75 percent. Driving this far in a truck that consumes a gallon of diesel every 3.5 miles, has dramatically increased his costs. During hot summer months, when water usage spikes, the math on how he might satisfy the Rio Verde Foothills water demand simply does not add up, he said.
“We’ve got two months. And then we’re done,” he said. “In two months, it’s not going to matter how much money you have. In two months, it’s going to be: You’re going to get your allocation, your ration of water: use it wisely.”
Some of Hornewer’s customers require a large supply. The Miller Ranch, which attracts visitors from around the world to ride their collection of Missouri Fox Trotter horses, uses about 24,000 gallons a month to sustain some 40 horses and the people who visit and live on the 20-acre ranch.
“It’s certainly a problem,” said Sharon Yeagle, the ranch manager.
There is little alternative, however, if they want to keep their animals.
“It’s not like we can go buy bottled water for them,” she said.
Hornewer keeps a printout on his dashboard which shows how much water each customer has left. As their tanks decline, electronic monitors alert him so he can prioritize his deliveries. On Saturday, Britney Kellum was at the top of his list.
As he filled her underground tank, Kellum came out to thank him.
Kellum is a renter and her job in logistics for a trucking company gives her an appreciation for the new obstacles to find water. She also sympathizes with Hornewer, who has faced attacks on Rio Verde Foothills social media sites by residents angry about the higher prices and his support for the attempt to create a water district.
“It is getting very personal,” Kellum said.
“It’s unfortunate, I think, that it got to this point,” she added. “This could be make or break for us.”
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