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Lyle Jeremy Rubin’s book on Afghanistan wrestles with how to write about war without encouraging readers to follow his footsteps into battle.
The 9/11 wars have yielded a bumper crop of books and films about U.S. soldiers that often have the effect of glorifying combat. Some of these works are blunt odes to violence and chauvinism, such as “American Sniper,” the memoir by Navy SEAL Chris Kyle that was turned into a blockbuster film by Clint Eastwood. While many memoirs and movies are more honest and complex, there’s a dilemma that even the best war literature has a hard time avoiding. No matter how much a writer might emphasize the dehumanization of boot camp or the dreadfulness of killing, there’s usually enough of a heroic glint in their tales to make young Americans want to get some of the action themselves.
Lyle Jeremy Rubin deals with this conundrum in his thoughtful new memoir, published by Bold Type Books, about being a Marine in the time of the forever wars. “If there is one thing most agree on, it is that to die at war as an American is to be a hero,” he writes. “To almost die at war as an American is to be a hero. To go to war at all as an American is to be a hero. … American war is American heroism.” Anyone who might wish to write an anti-war book about soldiers in combat winds up staring into the smoking barrel of the quandary Rubin faces: How can he leave no pathway for readers to emerge from his book with a desire to get their own taste of that heroism?
Rubin chose as his title a Marine motto that would seem to promise his readers nothing but dumb machismo: “Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body.” But the subtitle – “A Marine’s Unbecoming” – gets at the real business he undertakes, which is to subvert the traditional thrall and scope of war memoirs.
The book opens with a requisite combat scene from Afghanistan, though it’s just a few pages long. The reader must then leaf through nearly 200 pages before Rubin’s narrative settles back into Afghanistan. He charts how his slow epiphany began during a pre-deployment stint at the National Security Agency — the electronic spy agency where he saw how America could “eradicate anyone holding an earmarked SIM card” and used that power with insufficient restraint. He realizes that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not innocent mistakes by a well-meaning superpower that happened to overreach. “Now I was prepared to accept the obvious – that U.S. militarism counted as a principal part of this problem,” he writes.
His book includes lengthy passages on how American militarism oppresses not just foreigners, but Americans too, and how he morphed from an eager college Republican before joining the military to a supporter of Occupy Wall Street after his service. It is, in many ways, a bildungsroman of the 9/11 generation, about his Jewish upbringing, his early political and sexual experiences, his initiation into a military culture that breaks down and reconstructs identity, and his unsuccessful efforts to remain connected to a civilian girlfriend. He is struggling, as so many young people do, to understand who he is and what he believes.
By the time he gets to Afghanistan in 2010, Rubin is already skeptical about his line of work. The Afghan war section of his memoir is less than 40 pages and is printed in a different font, creating a book within a book. It’s not so much to accentuate his front-line experiences, I think, but to separate them out, as though to tell us with a bit of distaste, “OK, the war genre requires that I provide some ‘bang bang,’ so here it is.” As combat material goes, it’s pretty mild. Rubin was a signals intelligence officer, so his exposure to bullets and bombs mostly occurred during visits to members of his unit who were on outlying bases.
Typical soldier narratives have once-innocent men and women waking up to the horror of war; picture in your mind Charlie Sheen in “Platoon.” In Rubin’s book, the horror that would gradually reveal itself is the condition and purpose of his homeland. Yet as he set off for Afghanistan, he still didn’t see everything. “I was not ready to fess up to the most wretched ramifications of my slow-going disillusionment,” he writes. “I was not yet equipped, mentally or intellectually, to see the empire, but I was becoming more sensitive to my own status as both its product and its guarantor, a crossroads fraught with conflicting excuses, self-deceptions, and escalations.”
In Afghanistan, he finds that despite his new political consciousness, he is nonetheless susceptible to the brute attractions of inflicting violence on strangers. Just before going out on a patrol to hunt down insurgents, he gathers with other Marines for a chaplain-led prayer that, he writes, “includes phrases like ‘Please, Lord, allow us to track down and kill those cowardly little pricks.’” When the patrol is called off at the last minute, he is deflated: “The fact is, I want to get some like everyone else. And so I’m disappointed as fuck.”
The strength of this book is that its passages on his yearning for violence, and his embarrassment at that yearning, are not the endpoints of his exploration, as they might be in the hands of other veterans. Yes, he is soul-searching, but the soul he examines most intensely is America’s, not his own. I think you could put 100 war memoirs on a shelf and they would not contain as many references to Western intellectuals as Rubin’s 290-page book, which mentions Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Simone Weil, Joan Didion, Dwight Macdonald, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, Samuel Freeman, Sigmund Freud, H.L. Mencken, and Guy Debord, as well as the poets Sylvia Plath and Czesław Miłosz, among many others.
This is also a weakness, however. One of the reasons war memoirs tend not to stray from the battlefield or boot camp is that it’s easier to write a compelling narrative when you keep your readers anchored in these crazy and violent places. I’ve written about war before, perhaps too much, and one of the reasons might be that it’s relatively easy; how could I not find a way to entrap readers when there was so much gore and drama to draw upon? Rubin resists this easier path, while acknowledging that whatever approach he takes, “there is no way I can speak about my past or my politics without risking the encouragement and benefits of America’s cheap yet profitable obsession with war … to unveil the treachery of my service, I must first capitalize on it.” Yet by capitalizing as little as he can get away with, and trying to educate his readers, he is doing the literary equivalent of rowing upstream; instead of “bang bang,” he offers his readers Frantz Fanon.
Rubin’s narrative can at times feel choppy and baggy, the hallmarks of a too-indulgent editor, perhaps. But if Rubin does not produce Pulitzer-ready material on every page, he recognizes other writers who are masters of the word. One of the quotations in his book comes from James Baldwin, and though Baldwin wasn’t describing empire and war, his words fit perfectly into the final pages of Rubin’s memoir: “One of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
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Brazil’s national congress shows the scars of a protest by supporters of Jair Bolsonaro against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in Brasília. (photo: Adriano Machado/Reuters)
Army and riot police clear Bolsonaro supporters from Brasília as US, Mexico and Canada say they ‘stand by’ democratic institutions
A day after the would-be insurrectionists attacked all three branches of government in a brazen effort to topple the democratically elected government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fred Arruda, Brazil’s ambassador in London told the Guardian: “What happened in Brasília yesterday was a grotesque and failed assault on our institutions. As President Lula put it, democracy requires people to respect the institutions.”
He warned that members of the mob would feel the full force of the law, adding: “And they will witness an unintended consequence of their actions: Brazilian democracy emerging even stronger from those dark episodes,” he said.
The justice minister, Flávio Dino, said that around 1500 had been arrested during and after the unrest, said police had started tracking those who paid for dozens of buses that transported protesters. Forensic evidence including fingerprints and photographs would be used to hold people to account, he said.
“They will not succeed in destroying Brazilian democracy. We need to say that fully, with all firmness and conviction,” Dino said. “We will not accept criminal methods to carry out political fights in Brazil.”
Bolsonaro lost to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a tight-fought election in October but his supporters have refused to accept the result and camped out near military facilities, alleging the election was stolen, even though there is no evidence to back up their claim.
A significant number have appealed for the military to overthrow the elected government and thousands of them marched on the capital on Sunday, storming into the presidential palace, the congress building, and the supreme court.
They smashed windows, furniture and equipment, destroyed works of art and official documents, and occupied the buildings before law enforcement officials moved in to end the chaos. At least 1,200 people were arrested, according to the Folha de S Paulo newspaper.
The lawlessness was condemned by politicians, world leaders and most Brazilians. On Monday, Joe Biden, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Justin Trudeau issued a joint statement deploring the attempted insurrection, saying that they “stand with Brazil as it safeguards its democratic institutions”.
But hardcore Bolsonaro fanatics – described by Lula as “vandals and neo-fascists” – were unbowed on Monday morning.
“He’s a corrupt thief,” Carla Coutinho, said of Lula as she looked on from her makeshift camp outside the army’s cultural centre.
The mood was tense as the camp was surrounded by riot police carrying shields and truncheons. Some radicals had fled after Sunday’s chaos and soldiers removed what remained, leaving scores of tents and plastic sheeting blowing in the wind.
Brazil flags and placards fluttered in the trees and blew along the ground, beside pallets and other debris. Some stragglers hauled backpacks away under the watchful eye of troops.
At the same time, left-leaning organisations in cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were preparing to march in support of Lula and democracy.
Demonstrations were also planned at universities.
Lula met with the defence minister on Monday morning and called a meeting of state governors for 6pm.
Leaders of all three branches of government issued a joint statement expressing their united front against the threats to the democratic order.
“We call on society to remain calm in defence of peace and democracy,” the letter said. “The country needs normality, respect and social justice.”
Lula was in São Paulo overseeing flood relief at the time of the insurrection but returned to the capital on Sunday night after ordering federal officials to assume control of public security decisions in Brasília.
He promised to use the full force of the law to bring those responsible to justice, as well as those who financed the camps and their occupants.
The justice ministry set up an anonymous email to receive “information about the terrorists who invaded and destroyed” government buildings and independent sources set up image searches to identify those who appeared on camera.
Around the same time, Anderson Torres, the Federal District’s police chief, was relieved of his duties and shortly afterwards, the capital’s governor was also removed.
The supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes said Governor Ibaneis Rocha had ignored requests from federal authorities to prepare an appropriate security plan ahead of Sunday’s protests. The pro-Bolsonaro governor had also defended what he called “free political manifestations”, Moraes said.
“Absolutely nothing justifies the omission and connivance of the Federal District’s public security secretary and the Federal District’s governor with the criminals who announced ahead of time that they were going to practice violent acts,” Moraes said in a statement.
Bolsonaro criticised what he called the “depredations and invasions” but in keeping with his strategy since losing the election he did not unequivocally ask his supporters to stop their protests.
The former president fled to the United States on the eve of Lula’s inauguration and with US leaders vocally supporting Lula, intrigue mounted over his status there.
The O Globo columnist Guga Chacra suggested that Bolsonaro, who arrived in Florida while still president, may have done so on a diplomatic passport.
However, after leaving power on 1 January he could be considered a tourist and so might need to change his visa status.
On Tuesday the former leader was reported to have been admitted to a hospital in Florida after complaining of stomach pains.
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Former President Donald Trump pauses as he speaks at a rally Jan. 15, 2022, in Florence, Ariz. (photo: Ross D. Franklin/AP)
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who was overseeing the panel, issued a two-page order Monday dissolving the special grand jury, saying it had completed its work and submitted a final report. The lengthy investigation has been one of several around the country that threaten legal peril for Trump as he mounts a third bid for the White House.
The decision whether to seek an indictment from a regular grand jury will be up to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Willis spokesperson Jeff DiSantis said the office had no comment on the completion of the panel’s work.
McBurney wrote in his order that the special grand jury recommended that its report be made public. He scheduled a hearing for Jan. 24 to determine whether all or part of the report should be released and said the district attorney’s office and news outlets would be given an opportunity to make arguments at that hearing.
Since June, the special grand jury has heard testimony from dozens of witnesses, including numerous close Trump associates such as the former New York mayor and Trump attorney, Rudy Giuliani, andSen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Assorted high-ranking Georgia officials have also testified, among them Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Last month, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection asserted in its final report that Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol. The report concluded an extraordinary 18-month investigation into the former president and the violent attack.
Special grand juries in Georgia cannot issue indictments but instead can issue a final report recommending actions to be taken.
Willis opened the investigation in early 2021, shortly after a recording surfaced of a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call between Trump and Raffensperger. During that call, the president suggested the state’s top elections official could “find” the votes needed to overturn his loss in the state.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump had said. “Because we won the state.”
Since then it has become clear that Willis has been focusing on several different areas: phone calls made to Georgia officials by Trump and his allies; false statements made by Trump associates before Georgia legislative committees; a panel of 16 Republicans who signed a certificate falsely stating that Trump had won the state and that they were the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors; the abrupt resignation of the U.S. attorney in Atlanta in January 2021; alleged attempts to pressure a Fulton County election worker; and a breach of election equipment in a rural south Georgia county.
Lawyers for Giuliani confirmed in August that prosecutors told them he could possibly face criminal charges in the case. The 16 Republican fake electors have also been told they are targets of the investigation, according to public court filings. It is possible that others have also been notified they are targets of the investigation.
Trump and his allies have consistently denied any wrongdoing, with the former president repeatedly describing his call with Raffensperger as “perfect” and dismissing Willis’ investigation as a “strictly political Witch Hunt!”
Willis took the unusual step in January 2022 of requesting that a special grand jury be seated to aid the investigation. She noted that a special grand jury would have subpoena power which would help compel testimony from witnesses who were otherwise unwilling to participate in the investigation.
In a letter asking the court to impanel the special grand jury, Willis wrote that her office had received information indicating a “reasonable probability” that Georgia’s 2020 election, including the presidential race, “was subject to possible criminal disruptions.” Her request was granted and the special grand jury was seated in May.
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Venezuelan migrants at a camp in front of the US Border Patrol post at the Rio Bravo River, Mexico, 14 November 2022. (photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
The Biden administration criticizes conservatives as anti-immigrant – yet pursues policies not so different from Trump’s
You know that, despite its long history of meddling in your country, the United States also has laws and traditions that enable people in your position to seek asylum. It may be far away, but the US is also the closest country where you believe you can truly feel safe. You must find a way there – any way at all – and it has to be quick.
Now, according to new rules just announced by the Biden administration, up to 30,000 Nicaraguans, Cubans and Haitians may soon be able to apply for “humanitarian parole” to the US, expanding a program that had previously been directed solely at Venezuelans. What a relief! you might think, until you discover more about the proposed program, which requires: a valid passport, a plane ticket, the ability and permission to travel to the US by plane, a US-based sponsor, a cell phone that can download a specific app that requires two-factor authentication, and a host of other requirements.
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. As Human Rights Watch explains, Biden’s proposed program is “contrary to international refugee law and international human rights law which prohibits discrimination in accessing asylum, including based on financial means”. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has also stated that the new measures are “not in line with international standards”.
Yet this problematic humanitarian parole provision is in fact the proverbial carrot of Biden’s proposed border program. The dreaded stick, found in how the administration now plans on processing asylum claims made at the border, is much worse. The opportunity to have your asylum claim heard if you’re a citizen from one of these four countries – all countries with deep legacies of American political interference, it should be pointed out – will now be severely curtailed, according to the proposed rules.
For one thing, the administration will require these asylum seekers to request refuge in the first country they cross into, similar to Trump-era “transit ban” policies which led to widespread human rights abuses in countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador.
If these asylum seekers somehow make it to the US’s southern border, they must claim asylum at an official port of entry at a previously scheduled time, even though, per US law, “you may apply for asylum regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status”, as the US Citizenship and Immigration Services website states. Those who try to cross the border would also be subject to “expedited removal”, with Mexico accepting 30,000 of them each month, and be subject to a five-year ban from re-entry to the US.
The plan also expands the Biden administration’s use of Title 42, a rarely used clause of the 1944 Public Health Services Law that allows the government to take emergency action “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries.” Through their own anti-immigrant hocus-pocus, the Trump administration conjured Title 42 as a quick and easy way to deport people at the US’s southern border.
Though Biden, as recently as last Thursday, has said that he doesn’t “like Title 42,” his administration continues to use the code to prevent people from entering the US. Since March 2020, almost 2.5 million people have been expelled, most of them during the Biden administration. And the new rules will translate into many more expulsions for asylum seekers from these four countries.
Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey got it right. “The Biden administration’s decision to expand Title 42, a disastrous and inhumane relic of the Trump Administration’s racist immigration agenda, is an affront to restoring rule of law at the border,” he said in a statement. “Ultimately, this use of the parole authority is merely an attempt to replace our asylum laws, and thousands of asylum seekers waiting to present their cases will be hurt as a result.”
What’s going on here? There’s no question that the current situation presents all kinds of challenges at the border. The US government recorded almost 2.4m encounters with migrants at the border last fiscal year, a record number. Extreme climate events, political corruption, and economic instability all play a role, and the US shares some responsibility in all those arenas. But it’s also clear that Biden feels compelled to get in front of the border issue ahead of Republican fearmongering (hence his visit Sunday to the border).
“Immigration is a political issue that extreme Republicans are always going to run on,” the president said. “But now they have a choice: They can keep using immigration to try to score political points or they can help solve the problem.”
But, in this terrible move rightward on the issue of border enforcement, Biden has proposed solutions that seem devised more to quell Republican objections (which, let’s face it, can never be mollified) rather than to take humanitarian and legal concerns to heart and turn them into workable policy. The proposed changes are also certain to bring greater chaos, confusion, and misery to the border.
I’m all in favor of foregrounding Republican obstructionism when necessary, and Republicans halted Biden’s proposed comprehensive immigration reforms from the moment they were announced, almost two years ago. But Biden can’t accuse his Republican opponents of exploiting immigration and then turn around and lean on their misbegotten policies. Not only is that playing politics with people’s lives, but it’s also playing with fire. If Biden’s proposed rule changes go through, we should worry for all those – Biden included – who are about to get burned.
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Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., took the key steps that led to new legislation on conservation easements. (photo: Tom Williams-Pool/Getty Images)
The recently signed $1.7 trillion spending bill could accomplish what six years of IRS audits and DOJ prosecutions could not: shutting down “syndicated conservation easements” that exploit a charitable tax break meant to preserve open land.
Under standard conservation easements, landowners give up development rights for their acreage, often an appealing, bucolic space. In return, they receive a charitable deduction equal to the property’s development value, and the public benefits by the preservation of the land, which in some cases is made available as a park.
But as ProPublica first described in 2017, aggressive promoters built a lucrative industry through “syndicated” deals. These promoters snatched up idle land (a long-vacant golf course near a trailer park, in one example examined by ProPublica) and hired an appraiser willing to claim that it had huge, previously unrecognized development value — perhaps for luxury vacation homes or a solar farm — which they contended made it worth many times its purchase price. The promoters then sold stakes in a massive conservation easement deduction to rich investors, who made a quick profit by claiming charitable write-offs that were four to six times their investment. The promoters reaped millions in fees.
The new measure will limit taxpayers’ deduction to two and a half times their investment. That will effectively eliminate the profits that drive syndicated deals while allowing traditional conservation easements to continue. “I don’t know how the industry moves forward after the new law,” said Sean Akins, an attorney with Covington … Burling who represents multiple syndication promoters.
The path to the new law was lengthy and winding. For years, syndicated easements seemed impervious to attempts to rein them in. Since late 2016, the IRS has attempted to stymie the deals, branding them as “abusive” and among “the worst of the worst tax scams.” The agency has challenged $21 billion in deductions claimed by 28,000 syndicated-easement investors, pursued scores of tax court cases and collaborated with the Justice Department in targeting top promoters with criminal charges and civil lawsuits.
Prominent lawmakers from both parties weighed in against the abuse and, starting in 2017, introduced legislation, called the Charitable Conservation Easement Program Integrity Act, to halt the practice. According to estimates by Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation, applying these limits to deals struck since December 2016, when the IRS first branded the practice improper, would generate an additional $12.5 billion for the U.S. Treasury through 2031.
The syndicators fought back so furiously and so effectively over multiple years that ProPublica published not one, but two stories describing how bulletproof the industry seemed. The promoters and their investors were undaunted by IRS threats. Syndication partnerships were so profitable that they set aside special “audit reserves” of as much as $1 million to do battle with the agency in tax court. Syndication firms and their newly formed Washington trade group, called the Partnership for Conservation, or P4C, spent more than $11 million, by ProPublica’s calculations, on lobbyists to protect their business before Congress. At one point, they went on the attack, seeking to strip the IRS of funds used to enforce the December 2016 notice that flagged profit-making syndicated deals as abusive and required participants to file forms reporting their involvement to the IRS.
The agency’s efforts did little to slow the volume of syndicated deals, according to congressional testimony by then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig in May 2022. He sounded a bit desperate when he told lawmakers: “We need congressional help.”
As Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chair of the Senate Finance Committee, told ProPublica last June, “There is a tax shelter gold mine here, and they’re fighting very hard to protect it.” He added, “This is a textbook case of the power of lobbyists.”
By that point, the legislation targeting syndicated deals had been introduced, in one legislative chamber or another, eight times. A late-2021 strategy to include the syndication-killer language in Biden’s Build Back Better bill had unraveled at the hands of Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, then a Democrat, who demanded that it be stripped out as a condition of her critical vote to win passage of the larger measure. (Sinema did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment at the time.)
The tide finally turned last summer — without attracting much notice at the time. During a June 22 Senate Finance Committee markup on retirement legislation, Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., a longtime sponsor of the Integrity Act, identified the projected windfall from a clampdown on syndicated easements as a way to pay for a popular proposal enhancing benefits for disabled police, firefighters, paramedics and EMTs. That bipartisan legislation, months later, got added to the massive, must-pass government funding bill, where no single lawmaker had the power to strip it out.
A big concession sealed support for the deal: Daines and other backers agreed not to apply the law to transactions that date back to when the IRS flagged syndicated easements as abusive in 2016 (though the IRS can still pursue cases from back then). Instead the new limits apply only to transactions that occur after the law’s enactment. Along with a much smaller change exempting the measure from applying to historic buildings, this reduced the projected Treasury windfall to about $6.4 billion.
As the measure neared final passage in late December, Daines issued a statement: “It’s about time — for too long bad actors have abused the conservation easement program and ripped off the American people, but this fraud will now come to an end. I’m glad to have worked with my colleagues across the aisle to stop scam artists, promote true conservation, and save taxpayers billions of dollars.”
In an email to ProPublica, Rettig, whose term as IRS commissioner expired in November, called the new legislation “critical to the ongoing efforts of the IRS to stem the tide of abusive syndicated conservation easements.” He said the measure, combined with $80 billion in new funding for the resource-starved agency, “will hopefully allow the IRS compliance and taxpayer education efforts to catch up on abusive syndicated conservation easement transactions as well as other similarly important service and compliance functions.”
The IRS, in a separate statement to ProPublica, said “we are working to implement the recent legislation aimed at some of the most egregious syndication conservation easement transactions” as part of the agency’s “commitment and efforts to combat abusive conservation easement transactions and all other abusive transactions.”
P4C President Robert Ramsay, who has said the profit motive produces “tremendous opportunities” for conservation, attributed the measure’s passage to the IRS’ “ability to win a war of attrition.” Ramsay told ProPublica that the new limits will have “a broad chilling effect” on all land conservation, even though it targets only syndicated deals. He also said its “broad brush” provisions would do nothing to stop inflated easement deductions by wealthy individuals and family partnerships. Ramsay added that he expects the measure to prompt “a number” of syndication promoters to exit the business entirely.
Efforts to shut down the syndication business had been pushed by the Land Trust Alliance, a Washington trade association whose 950 members administer traditional conservation easements. Fearful that exploitation of the charitable tax break by “brazen” profiteers could jeopardize the conservation deduction altogether, the group had prodded the IRS to undertake its crackdown and spent more than $2.5 million on lobbyists since 2017. “We kept this about ending the abuse, rather than discard the incentive,” said Andrew Bowman, the organization’s CEO. “We were relentless in trying to defend the integrity of a very important tax incentive.”
Bowman marveled that none of the IRS’ traditional measures to combat abusive tax transactions had worked. “All that just wasn’t stopping it,” he told ProPublica. “Congress could see it had to act. No one else was going to be able to fix this problem. The incentive to do the deals is now gone.” He praised Daines for masterminding the strategy to pass the legislation, calling him “a true hero for private conservation.” (He also said ProPublica’s coverage “put out there for the public how egregious this abuse was.”) Bowman added: “It’s a great victory for conservation. It took longer than it should have, but we’re certainly thrilled with the outcome.”
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Activists say Mohammad Ghobadlou (L) and Mohammad Boroughani (R) were sentenced to death after sham trials. (photo: Twitter/BBC)
Dozens of people demonstrated outside a prison in Iran overnight amid reports authorities were preparing to execute another two anti-government protesters.
The mother of Mohammad Ghobadlou, one of the two men at risk of execution, appealed for clemency at the gathering.
Two protesters were hanged on Saturday, prompting international condemnation.
The UN human rights office deplored the "shocking" executions of Mohammad Mahdi Karami and Seyed Mohammad Hosseini, which it said followed "unfair trials based on forced confessions".
A Revolutionary Court found the men guilty of "corruption on Earth" over their alleged involvement in the killing of a member of the paramilitary Basij force in Karaj in November. Both denied the charge and said they were tortured.
They were the third and fourth people to be executed in connection with the protests that erupted in September following the death in custody of a woman detained by morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab "improperly".
Authorities have portrayed them as "riots" and responded with lethal force.
So far, at least 519 protesters and 68 security personnel have been killed in the unrest, according to the Human Rights Activists' News Agency (HRANA).
It says that another 19,290 protesters have been arrested and that 111 of them are believed to "under the impending threat of a death sentence", having been convicted of, or charged with, capital offences.
People gathered outside Rajai Shahr prison on Sunday night after activists warned that Mohammad Ghobadlou and Mohammad Boroughani had been transferred to solitary confinement in preparation for execution.
Opposition activist collective 1500 Tasvir published videos showing a crowd chanting slogans warning authorities against proceeding with the executions. Shouts included "I will kill who has killed my brother" and "This is the last warning. If you execute [them] there will be an uprising/revolt."
About an hour ago, in front of Rajai Shahr Prison to save the lives of #MohamadBroghani and #MohammadGhobadlu
— 1500tasvir_en (@1500tasvir_en) January 9, 2023
“Until Mullahs are removed,
This motherland will not be ours”pic.twitter.com/JjEcJcgfR9
Ghobadlou's mother, who has previously said her son has bipolar disorder, was filmed telling the crowd that 50 doctors had signed a petition calling on the judiciary chief to establish a committee to review her son's mental health.
"If he believed in God, he would have responded to these 50 doctors," she said, asserting that her son is "ill".
She also claimed that the policeman who he is accused of killing was "martyred somewhere else".
1500 Tasvir also posted videos purportedly from the area around the prison in which gunshots could be heard.
The activist collective declared later on Monday that the protest had stopped the executions "at least up to this moment".
Ghobadlou, 22, had his death sentence upheld by the Supreme Court on 24 December. He was convicted of "enmity against God" after being accused of driving into a group of policemen during a protest in Tehran in September, killing one of them and injuring others.
He stood trial without his chosen lawyer, who said the prosecution had relied other flawed evidence. Amnesty International also said it was concerned that he was subjected to torture or ill-treatment in custody, citing a forensic report that pointed to bruising and injuries on his arm, elbow and shoulder blade.
Mohammad Boroughani, 19, was tried alongside Ghobadlou and was also convicted of "enmity against God".
He was accused of allegedly wielding a machete, setting fire to a provincial government building and injuring a security officer. He was also accused of "encouraging" others to participate in protests via social media.
Amnesty International said he was found guilty after proceedings that "bore no resemblance to a meaningful judicial trial".
In a separate development on Monday, the judiciary announced that a court in Isfahan had sentenced to death three people over an attack during protests in the city on 16 November in which three security personnel were shot dead.
Saleh Mirbasheri Boltaqi, Majid Kazemi Sheikh-Shabani, and Saeed Yaqoubi Kordsofla were convicted of "enmity against God".
Two other defendants were sentenced to prison over their alleged involvement in the attack, including professional footballer Amir Nasr-Azadani. Nasr-Azadani, 26, was jailed for 16 years after being found guilty of three charges including "assisting in enmity against God".
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In downtown Baton Rouge this fall, a drought exposed the wreck of a ferry called the Brookhill that plied the shores of the Mississippi in the 19th century. (photo: Forte and Tablada)
Why it matters: Important cultural treasures and historical records are at stake as heirlooms from the past are damaged or curiosity-seekers grab souvenirs.
- "From Iran to Scotland, Florida to Rapa Nui and beyond, sites are currently being eroded at an increasing rate, often before scientists can record them and assess their value," according to a scholarly article in Antiquity magazine.
- At the same time, drought and low water levels have uncovered everything from 113-million-year-old dinosaur tracks in Texas to World War II-era boats in California's Lake Shasta and the Nevada portion of Lake Mead.
- Tourists who stumble on freshly unearthed relics are being asked to report them to authorities — and keep their distance.
Driving the news: As deadly storms pummel Northern California and record-shattering heat envelops Europe, archaeologists brace for more research sites to be washed away or degraded.
- Inundation can harm relics, but worse still is the yo-yo action of being repeatedly submerged and exposed.
- Artifacts can be damaged by many phenomena — coastal erosion, mudslides, shifting sands that bury ruins — depending on local topography.
- "Archeological sites are rapidly disappearing due to the effects of climate change such as sea level rise, as well as storm surge and modern development," per the U.S. National Park Service, which conducts archaeological research in the areas it supervises.
Of note: Native American history is at stake in particular in California, where ancient villages and settlements are being washed into the sea.
- "It’s the coastal maritime heritage of dozens of tribes, and it’s about to go away all at once," says Michael Newland, who leads the study of climate change for the Society for California Archaeology.
- The growing prevalence of massive wildfires has also reshaped the practice of archaeology in California, with more scientists dedicating their time to post-fire cleanup, Newland tells Axios.
Meanwhile: Widespread drought is revealing previously buried treasure, as last summer's global bonanza of fresh finds proved.
- Wondrous discoveries in 2022 included a "Spanish Stonehenge" of megalithic rocks, three 600-year-old Buddhist statues on the Yangtze River, and (perhaps less wondrously) dozens of explosives-laden German warships sunk in 1944 in the Danube.
- In the U.S., the catalog includes a 19th century wooden shipwreck dredged up by Hurricane Ian in Florida and a variety of vessels — both curious and mundane — in Lake Mead. (See a USA Today pictorial here.)
What they're saying: "In all of those places, whether it's Lake Mead or the Rhine River in Germany, people are seeing things that haven't been seen in a generation or more," says Charles "Chip" McGimsey, Louisiana's state archaeologist.
- "These are random opportunities for archaeologists," he told Axios. "You can’t plan on a drought."
How it works: This fall in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a ferry called the S.S. Brookhill that sank in 1915 became a major tourist attraction after a treasure-hunter stumbled upon it while looking for trinkets in the Mississippi River.
- As people flocked to see the skeleton of the 100-foot-long boat — which used to carry passengers and cargo between Baton Rouge and Port Allen, Louisiana — it thrust McGimsey and his colleagues into the spotlight.
- "Once the word got out, we had hundreds of people a day coming down to see her," McGimsey told Axios. "There were times when I'd be down there at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and there'd be 40 to 50 people."
- Because his office is small — and typically occupied with the more quotidian work of checking out cemeteries and oil spills — "it wasn't possible for us to have someone there 24/7 monitoring things and answering folks' questions," he said.
Once the waters of the Mississippi started to rise from their historic lows, the Brookhill disappeared — and so did the visitors.
- While the ferry wasn't that historically significant, "from a science and historical perspective, what we got was information on how she was built," McGimsey said.
- Nonetheless, people started stealing pieces of the boat.
The bottom line: It's illegal to toy with a relic on state or federal land.
- "Vandalism, graffiti and climbing on walls damage the resources," Mary Plumb of the National Park Service tells Axios.
- "Moving objects and creating 'collector’s piles,' which is where visitors pile up all the artifacts that they find into one place, destroy the original context of how the artifacts were arranged in the site, and thus information about the site is lost," Plumb adds.
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