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Last week, under its Biden-appointed chair, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a new rule banning non-compete agreements – and it’s a big deal
About 30 million Americans are trapped by contracts that say if they leave their current job, they can’t take a job with a rival company or start a new business of their own.
These clauses deprive workers of higher wages and better working conditions. In effect, they’re a form of involuntary servitude.
Last week, while America was fixated on Kevin McCarthy’s travails, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proposed a sweeping new rule that would ban these non-compete agreements.
This is a big deal. The FTC estimates that such a ban could increase wages by nearly $300bn a year (about $2,000 a worker, on average) by allowing workers to pursue better job opportunities.
Non-competes also harm the economy, depriving growing businesses of talent and experience they need to build and expand. California’s ban on non-competes has been a major reason for Silicon Valley’s success.
The rule isn’t a sure thing. House Republicans will try to kill it. Corporate America will appeal it up to the supreme court, which is hostile to independent regulatory agencies such as the FTC.
For decades, non-compete agreements have been cropping up all over the economy – not just in high-paying fields like banking and tech but as standard boilerplate for employment contracts in many low-wage sectors such as construction, hospitality and retail.
A recent study found one in five workers without a college education subject to them, disproportionately women and people of color.
Employers say they need non-compete agreements to protect trade secrets and investments they put into growing their businesses, including training workers.
Rubbish. Employers in the states that already ban them (such as California) show no sign of being more reluctant to invest in their businesses or train workers.
The real purpose of non-competes is to make it harder (or impossible) for workers to bargain with rival employers for better pay or working conditions.
As we learn again and again, capitalism needs guardrails to survive. Unfettered greed leads to monopolies that charge high prices, suppress wages and corrupt politics.
As Adam Smith, the putative godfather of conservative economics, put it in The Wealth of Nations: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
America once understood the importance of fighting monopolies.
The presidential election of 1912 was dominated by the question. Once elected, Woodrow Wilson created the FTC to save capitalism from the depredations of powerful corporations and “robber barons” that had turned the economy of the Gilded Age into vast monopolies, fueling unprecedented inequality and political corruption.
But as the FTC began prosecuting giant corporations, the robber barons saw the agency as a major threat – and did what they could to strip it of its powers. Within a few years, the FTC was derided as the “little old lady of Pennsylvania Avenue”.
In 1976, when I ran the policy planning staff of the FTC, the agency again began cracking down on corporations under its aggressive chairman, Michael Pertschuk. (Pertschuk died just weeks ago.)
Big corporations were so unhappy with the FTC under Pertschuk that they tried to choke off the agency’s appropriation, briefly closing it down in 1978. But Pertschuk didn’t relent.
He (and I) left the agency when Ronald Reagan appointed a new chairman, who promptly defanged it.
Now, under its new Biden-appointed chair, Lina M Khan, the FTC is back to being the activist agency that progressives sought in 1914 and Pertschuk resurrected in 1976.
The FTC’s new proposed rule banning non-compete agreements marks the first time since Pertschuk headed the FTC that the agency has issued a rule prohibiting an unfair method of competition.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the new radical-right Republicans now in control of the House tried to pull off a stunt similar to what the House tried in 1978.
In the meantime, kudos to Biden, Lina Khan (and her fellow FTC commissioners Rebecca Kelley-Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya), and to the FTC staff for protecting American workers and economic competition – and thereby protecting American capitalism from the depredations of untrammeled greed.
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The 58-story Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan is headquarters for the Trump Organization, as well as containing Donald Trump's penthouse condominium residence. (photo: Beata Zawrzel/Getty)
The amount, the maximum allowed under state sentencing guidelines, is due within 14 days of Friday's sentencing.
"This conviction was consequential, the first time ever for a criminal conviction of former President Trump's companies," said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Bragg said he thinks the financial penalty for decades of fraudulent behavior wasn't severe enough.
"Our laws in this state need to change in order to capture this type of decade-plus systemic and egregious fraud," he said.
Kimberly Benza, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, issued a statement describing the prosecution as political and saying the company plans to appeal.
"New York has become the crime and murder capital of the world, yet these politically motivated prosecutors will stop at nothing to get President Trump and continue the never ending witch-hunt which began the day he announced his presidency," the statement read.
The sentence comes after a Manhattan jury found Donald Trump's family enterprise guilty of all charges last month in a long-running tax-fraud scheme.
Trump himself was not charged, though his name was mentioned frequently at trial, and his signature appeared on some of the documents at the heart of the case.
Earlier this week, the long-time chief financial officer to Trump's various business entities, Allen Weisselberg, was sentenced to five months behind bars for his role in the criminal scheme.
Trump's family business is known as the Trump Organization, but in fact consists of hundreds of business entities, including the Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corporation.
Weisselberg, 75, worked side-by-side with Trump for decades, and was described by Trump's attorneys as being like a member of the family.
Last summer, he agreed to plead guilty and serve as the star witness.
In the statement, Trump Organization spokeswoman Benza suggested Weisselberg had been coerced into turning against the company.
"Allen Weisselberg is a victim. He was threatened, intimidated and terrorized. He was given a choice of pleading guilty and serving 90 days in prison or serving the rest of his life in jail — all of this over a corporate car and standard employee benefits," the statement read.
At the heart of the case were a variety of maneuvers that allowed Weisselberg and other top executives to avoid paying taxes on their income from the Trump businesses.
The Trump businesses also benefited.
For example, the Trump Corporation gave yearly bonuses to some staffers (signed and distributed by Trump) as if they were independent contractors.
Weisselberg acknowledged on the stand that the move enabled the Trump business to avoid Medicare and payroll taxes.
Weisselberg also improperly took part in a tax-advantaged retirement plan that is only supposed to be open to true freelancers.
While the size of the fine is too small to significantly harm the overall Trump business, there are other implications.
Being designated a convicted felon could make it harder for the Trump Organization to obtain loans or work with insurers.
And the legal peril for the Trump business does not end here.
According to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, this chapter of the criminal investigation of Trump and his businesses is over but a wider investigation of Trump's business practices is ongoing.
A sprawling civil suit from New York Attorney General Letitia James is also scheduled to go to trial in the fall.
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Graves of people who died during a Russian occupation are seen at the city's cemetery after Russia's retreat Kherson, Ukraine, November 17, 2022. (photo: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)
Her husband, a Ukrainian soldier, died defending Kherson’s Antonivskyi bridge on the first day of full-scale war, she said. During several interrogations in the spring, Russian forces submerged her hands in boiling water, pulled out her fingernails and beat her in the face with rifle butts so badly she needed plastic surgery, according to Minenko.
“One pain grew into another,” said Minenko, speaking while at an improvised humanitarian aid centre in early December with scarring visible around her eyes from what she said was an operation to repair the damage. “I was a living corpse.”
The methods of the alleged physical torture administered by occupying Russian forces have included electric shocks to genitals and other parts of the body, beatings and various forms of suffocation, according to interviews with more than a dozen alleged victims, members of Ukrainian law enforcement and international prosecutors assisting Ukraine.
Prisoners were also held in overcrowded cells without sanitation or sufficient food or water for periods of up to two months, some of the people said.
Reuters wasn’t able to independently corroborate individual accounts shared by Minenko and other Kherson residents but they fit with what Ukrainian authorities and international human rights specialists have said about conditions and treatment during detention, including detainees being blindfolded and bound, subject to beatings and electric shocks and injuries, including severe bruising and broken bones, forced nudity and other forms of sexual violence.
“This was done systematically, exhaustingly” to obtain information about the Ukrainian military and suspected collaborators or to punish those critical of the Russian occupation, according to Andriy Kovalenko, the Kherson region’s chief war crimes prosecutor.
The Kremlin and Russia’s defence ministry didn’t respond to Reuters’ questions, including about alleged torture and unlawful detentions. Moscow, which has said it is conducting a “special military operation" in Ukraine, has denied committing war crimes or targeting civilians.
According to the most comprehensive figures to date on the scale of alleged torture and detentions, shared exclusively with Reuters by Ukraine’s top war crimes prosecutor, the country’s authorities have opened pre-trial investigations involving more than a thousand people in the Kherson region who were allegedly abducted and illegally detained by Russian forces during their months-long occupation.
The scale of alleged crimes in the Kherson region now emerging appears to be much greater than around the capital of Kyiv, say members of Ukrainian law enforcement, which they attribute to the fact that it was occupied for so much longer.
Ukraine’s top war crimes prosecutor, Yuriy Belousov, said authorities have identified ten sites in the Kherson region used by Russian forces for unlawful detentions. Around 200 people who were allegedly tortured or physically assaulted while held at those sites and about another 400 people were illegally held there, he said. Ukrainian authorities say they expect the figures to grow as the investigation continues following Russia’s mid-November withdrawal from Kherson city, the only regional Ukrainian capital it captured during its nearly year-long war against its Western neighbour.
Nationwide, authorities have opened pre-trial investigations into alleged unlawful detentions of more than 13,200 people, Belousov said. They have launched 1,900 probes into allegations of ill-treatment and illegal detention, he said.
Russia has accused Ukraine of carrying out war crimes and the West of ignoring them, including alleging that Ukrainian soldiers had executed Russian prisoners of war. The United Nations in November said it had found evidence that both sides had tortured prisoners of war, with a U.N. official saying Russian abuse was “fairly systematic.” Kyiv has previously said it would investigate any alleged abuses by its armed forces.
Minenko believes her alleged tormentors targeted her because her husband had been a soldier. During his burial a week after his death, Russian forces turned up at the cemetery and made Minenko kneel next to his grave, firing their automatic weapons in mock execution, she said.
According to Minenko, on three occasions in March and April men in Russian military uniforms with their faces covered by balaclavas came to her home at night, interrogated her and took her into detention. On one occasion, the men forced her to undress and then beat her while her hands were tied to the chair and her head was covered.
“When you have a bag on your head and you’re being beaten, there is such a vacuum, you cannot breathe, you cannot do anything, you cannot defend yourself,” Minenko said.
‘WIDESPREAD’ CRIMES
Moscow's February invasion of Ukraine plunged Europe into its biggest land war since World War Two. Having begun its occupation of Kherson city in March, Russia withdrew its forces in November saying it was futile to waste more Russian blood there.
Of more than 50,000 reports of war crimes that have been registered with Ukrainian authorities, Belousov said more than 7,700 have come from the Kherson region. More than 540 civilians remain missing from the region, he added. Some people have been taken to Russian-held territory in apparent forced deportations, including children, according to Kovalenko, the regional prosecutor.
Belousov said authorities have found more than 80 bodies, the majority of whom were civilians, with more than 50 of those people having died as a result of gunshot wounds or artillery shelling. Belousov added that hundreds of bodies of civilians had been found in other areas that Russian forces had withdrawn from. That includes more than 800 civilians in the Kharkiv region, where investigators have had longer to probe after Ukraine retook a vast tract of territory in September.
Ukrainian authorities have also identified 25 locations in the Kharkiv region they described as “torture camps,” according to a Jan. 2 Facebook post by Kharkiv’s regional police chief, Volodymyr Tymoshko.
Some of the thousands of alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces could be escalated to overseas tribunals if they are deemed sufficiently serious. The Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened an investigation into alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
The numbers that are emerging on the scale of alleged detentions and torture, “point to widespread and grave criminality in Russian-occupied territory,” said British lawyer Nigel Povoas, lead prosecutor with a Western-backed team of legal specialists assisting Kyiv’s efforts to prosecute war crimes.
Povoas said there appears to have been a pattern to inflict terror and suffering across Ukraine, which reinforces “the impression of a wider, criminal policy, emanating from the leadership” to target the country’s civilian population.
ALLEGED BEATINGS, ELECTRIC SHOCKS
One 35-year-old man from Kherson city said that during a five-day detention in August, Russian forces beat him, made him undress and administered electric shocks to his genitals and ears. When the current hits “it’s like a ball flying into your head and you pass out,” said the man, who asked to be identified only by his first name Andriy due to fear of reprisals.
He said his captors interrogated him about Ukraine’s military efforts, including the storage of weapons and explosives, because they suspected him of having links to the resistance movement. Andriy told Reuters he knew people who served in the Ukrainian military and territorial defence forces but wasn’t a member himself.
One of the largest detention facilities in the region was an office building in Kherson city, according to Ukrainian authorities. They say more than 30 people are known to have been held in just one of the rooms in the warren-like basement that was used for detention and torture during the Russian occupation. An investigation to establish the total number of people held is ongoing, authorities said.
During a December visit to the building’s basement, the smell of human excrement filled the air, bricked-up windows blocked the light and lying visible were signs of what Ukrainian authorities say were tools of torture by Russian forces such as metal pipes, plastic ties for ligatures and a wire hanging from the ceiling allegedly used to administer electric shocks. Scratched on the wall were notches, which authorities said were made by detainees possibly to count the number of days held, as well as messages. One read: “For Her I Live.”
Another location in the city where people were allegedly interrogated and tortured was a police building that locals have referred to as “the hole,” according to Ukrainian authorities and more than half a dozen Kherson residents Reuters spoke to.
Liudmyla Shumkova, 47, said she and her 53-year old sister were held captive at the site, on No. 3 Energy Workers’ Street, for most of the more than fifty days they spent in detention this summer. She said the Russians asked them about her sister’s son because they believed he was involved in the resistance movement.
Shumkova, who works as a lawyer in the health sector, said about half a dozen people packed into a cell with just a small window for light and as little food as one meal a day. She said she wasn’t physically tortured but fellow detainees were, including a female police officer she shared a cell with. Men received particularly harsh torture, she said. “They screamed, it was constant, every day. It could last for 2 or 3 hours.”
INVESTIGATION CONTINUES
Investigators continue to try to identify those responsible for the alleged war crimes, including the possible role of senior military leadership. When asked whether authorities had initiated criminal proceedings against alleged perpetrators of torture, Belousov, the war crimes chief, said more than 70 people had been identified as suspects and 30 people had been indicted.
Belousov, who didn’t name the individuals, said most of the suspects are lower-ranking military officials but some are "senior officers, in particular colonels and lieutenant colonels” as well as senior figures in pro-Russian Luhansk and Donetsk military-civilian administrations. Representatives of the pro-Russian Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic didn’t respond to questions about whether their forces were involved in unlawful detentions or torture.
The Kremlin and Russian defence ministry didn’t respond to questions about alleged perpetrators.
On a cold December day in the village of Bilozerka in the Kherson region, war crimes investigators pored over a courthouse Ukrainian authorities say was used by Russian forces to detain and torture individuals as well as a nearby school that was turned into a barracks for around 300 Russian soldiers. The now deserted school building, where walls were painted with the “Z” symbol that has become an emblem of support for Russia in the war, was littered with debris including gas masks and medical kits, Russian literature and bullets fired into a brick wall.
At the courthouse, a small team of investigators dusted for fingerprints and collected DNA samples. In an adjacent garage, they had placed numbered yellow markers to identify evidence. A desk chair lay upturned and nearby lay plastic ties littered as well as a gas mask attached to a tube and pouch for liquid, which two prosecutors said resembles improvised torture devices allegedly used by occupying Russians to create a sensation of drowning.
The Kremlin and Russian defence ministry didn’t respond to questions about methods of alleged torture.
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Protesters, supporters of Brazil's former president Jair Bolsonaro, stand on the roof of the National Congress building after they stormed it, in BrasÃlia, Brazil, on Sunday. (photo: Eraldo Peres/AP)
Now his government is widening its investigation of how thousands of supporters of the former far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, rampaged through the Congress, presidential palace and Supreme Court buildings on Sunday in BrasÃlia.
Echoing the ex-leader's false claims, the rioters accused Lula of stealing the election and hoped to create enough chaos that the military would intervene and reinstate Bolsonaro, which did not happen. There's no evidence of fraud in last year's two rounds of election won by Lula.
Since the weekend, demonstrations have sprung up in parts of the country sending a message of support for the Lula government. The authorities have braced for the possibility of another "mega-protest" against the government that hasn't materialized.
Here are some of the latest developments and what could happen next.
What's happening to those detained after the riots?
Officials say more than 1,000 people detained since Sunday's riots by Bolsonaro supporters remain in custody. Hundreds are held at a gym on federal police grounds in BrasÃlia. Detainees, who were allowed to keep their cellphones, have posted videos complaining about the conditions and overcrowding in the gym. More than 600 people were released for humanitarian reasons, most of them older people, parents with children and people with poor health conditions. Hundreds of others were formally charged and sent to jail. According to officials, those arrested could face charges ranging from trespassing to damaging national patrimony to insurrection.
Pro-Lula demonstrators in São Paulo and other cities in Brazil have taken to the streets, many chanting "no amnesty" for the rioters.
Are any officials held responsible?
The authorities have arrested one ex-security official, Col. Fábio Augusto Vieira, who was fired as the head of the military police in BrasÃlia. And they issued an arrest warrant for another: the former head of BrasÃlia's police force, Anderson Torres.
A close ally of the former leader, Torres was Bolsonaro's justice minister before being appointed to lead the police. Torres wasn't in Brazil on Sunday — but vacationing in Florida. Ricardo Cappelli, the federal official appointed head of security since Sunday, told CNN's Portuguese-language affiliate in Brazil that Torres allegedly sabotaged BrasÃlia's police force by gutting its leadership before leaving the country. Torres has called the accusations of collusion "absurd." In a tweet on Tuesday, he said he'll return to Brazil and face justice.
President Lula fumed during a meeting this week with governors at the damaged presidential building that the state police acted negligently — even accusing some officials of colluding with the rioters.
Now federal prosecutors are seeking investigation of three congressional allies of Bolsonaro for allegedly helping incite Sunday's assault in the capital, Reuters reports.
Authorities also say they have identified businessmen around the country who allegedly helped finance the attacks, specifically by chartering buses to bring rioters into BrasÃlia. More than 100 buses went to the capital over the weekend packed with Bolsonaro supporters.
Did authorities know the mob was coming?
Since Bolsonaro's Oct. 30 election defeat, many of his ardent supporters have staged protests, blocking highways and camping out in front of army compounds around the country, calling for the military to take control. Analysts who monitor right-wing extremism say their coded messages online made it clear what was coming.
Natalia Viana, of the investigative journalism group Agência Pública, says Bolsonaro followers widely discussed calls to mobilize in the capital in private group chats and openly on social media. Officials had to have seen the communications, she says.
For example, organizers urged people to head to the capital for "Selma's party" — a play on words in Portuguese for a military call to action — among other coded messages in the lead-up to Sunday.
Officials said Wednesday they were blocking access to the main plaza in BrasÃlia where government buildings are as a precaution after a flyer promoting a "mega-protest to retake power" was circulating on social media.
Is Bolsonaro heading back to Brazil?
Bolsonaro left Brazil for the United States just days before the Jan. 1 presidential inauguration for Lula. He is reported to be staying at a condo belonging to a supporter near Orlando, Florida. He condemned the "invasions of public buildings" on Twitter hours after the riots began Sunday, and rejected accusations that he had encouraged supporters to carry them out. But this week he reposted a message on Facebook again saying Lula wasn't legitimately elected, then the post was taken down.
On Tuesday, Bolsonaro told the CNN Brazil affiliate that he would return home from Florida earlier than planned but did not say when.
Pressure's growing for him to go soon. More than 40 Democratic lawmakers signed a letter sent to President Biden Thursday, urging the administration to revoke any visa granted to Bolsonaro. The letter also said federal agents should investigate possible financing and organizing that may have occurred on U.S. soil to help carry out the attack on Brazil's government. While the State Department would not confirmed it, the lawmakers and many news reports speculate that Bolsonaro entered the U.S. on a visa for foreign officials.
Bolsonaro narrowly lost his bid for reelection. He still has backing from his conservative party, as well as from some right-wingers in the U.S., including Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, the ex-adviser to former President Donald Trump.
But analysts say Bolsonaro's political future, and that of his far-right movement, was greatly hurt by the BrasÃlia assault. And Lula's immediate political outlook may get a boost as politicians from many sides — and countries — express solidarity in the aftermath of the riots.
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Workers excavate a mound at the Moundville Archaeological Park in Moundville, Alabama, in 1975. (photo: The University of Alabama Libraries Special Collections)
“We never ceded or relinquished our dead. They were stolen,” James Riding In, then an Arizona State University professor who is Pawnee, said of the unreturned remains.
ProPublica this year is investigating the failure of NAGPRA to bring about the expeditious return of human remains by federally funded universities and museums. Our reporting, in partnership with NBC News, has found that a small group of institutions and government bodies has played an outsized role in the law’s failure.
Ten institutions hold about half of the Native American remains that have not been returned to tribes. These include old and prestigious museums with collections taken from ancestral lands not long after the U.S. government forcibly removed Native Americans from them, as well as state-run institutions that amassed their collections from earthen burial mounds that had protected the dead for hundreds of years. Two are arms of the U.S. government: the Interior Department, which administers the law, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest federally owned utility.
An Interior Department spokesperson said it complies with its legal obligations and that its bureaus (such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Land Management) are not required to begin the repatriation of “culturally unidentifiable human remains” unless a tribe or Native Hawaiian organization makes a formal request.
Tennessee Valley Authority Archaeologist and Tribal Liaison Marianne Shuler said the agency is committed to “partnering with federally recognized tribes as we work through the NAGPRA process.”
The law required institutions to publicly report their holdings and to consult with federally recognized tribes to determine which tribes human remains and objects should be repatriated to. Institutions were meant to consider cultural connections, including oral traditions as well as geographical, biological and archaeological links.
Yet many institutions have interpreted the definition of “cultural affiliation” so narrowly that they’ve been able to dismiss tribes’ connections to ancestors and keep remains and funerary objects. Throughout the 1990s, institutions including the Ohio History Connection and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville thwarted the repatriation process by categorizing everything in their collections that might be subject to the law as “culturally unidentifiable.”
Ohio History Connection’s director of American Indian relations, Alex Wesaw, who is also a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, said that the institution’s original designation of so many collections as culturally unidentifiable may have “been used as a means to keep people on shelves for research and for other things that our institution just doesn’t allow anymore.”
In a statement provided to ProPublica, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville spokesperson said that the university is “actively building relationships with and consulting with Tribal communities.”
ProPublica found that the American Museum of Natural History has not returned some human remains taken from the Southwest, arguing that they are too old to determine which tribes — among dozens in the region — would be the correct ones to repatriate to. In the Midwest, the Illinois State Museum for decades refused to establish a cultural affiliation for Native American human remains that predated the arrival of Europeans in the region in 1673, citing no reliable written records during what archaeologists called the “pre-contact” or “prehistoric” period.
The American Museum of Natural History declined to comment for this story.
In a statement, Illinois State Museum Curator of Anthropology Brooke Morgan said that “archaeological and historical lines of evidence were privileged in determining cultural affiliation” in the mid-1990s, and that “a theoretical line was drawn in 1673.” Morgan attributed the museum’s past approach to a weakness of the law that she said did not encourage multiple tribes to collectively claim cultural affiliation, a practice she said is common today.
As of last month, about 200 institutions — including the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology and the nonprofit Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, Illinois — had repatriated none of the remains of more than 14,000 Native Americans in their collections. Some institutions with no recorded repatriations possess the remains of a single individual; others have as many as a couple thousand.
A University of Kentucky spokesperson told ProPublica the William S. Webb Museum “is committed to repatriating all Native American ancestral remains and funerary belongings, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony to Native nations” and that the institution has recently committed $800,000 toward future efforts.
Jason L. King, the executive director of the Center for American Archeology, said that the institution has complied with the law: “To date, no tribes have requested repatriation of remains or objects from the CAA.”
When the federal repatriation law passed in 1990, the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would take 10 years to repatriate all covered objects and remains to Native American tribes. Today, many tribal historic preservation officers and NAGPRA professionals characterize that estimate as laughable, given that Congress has never fully funded the federal office tasked with overseeing the law and administering consultation and repatriation grants. Author Chip Colwell, a former curator at the Denver Museum of Nature … Science, estimates repatriation will take at least another 70 years to complete. But the Interior Department, now led by the first Native American to serve in a cabinet position, is seeking changes to regulations that would push institutions to complete repatriation within three years. Some who work on repatriation for institutions and tribes have raised concerns about the feasibility of this timeline.
Our investigation included an analysis of records from more than 600 institutions; interviews with more than 100 tribal leaders, museum professionals and others; and the review of nearly 30 years of transcripts from the federal committee that hears disputes related to the law.
D. Rae Gould, executive director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University and a member of the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmucs of Massachusetts, said institutions that don’t want to repatriate often claim there’s inadequate evidence to link ancestral human remains to any living people.
Gould said “one of the faults with the law” is that institutions, and not tribes, have the final say on whether their collections are considered culturally related to the tribes seeking repatriation. “Institutions take advantage of it,” she said.
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A group of Syrians arrives on Lesvos after sailing on an inflatable raft from Turkey. (photo: Andrew Mcconnell/Panos)
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
The United Nations, European Parliament and many leading human rights groups are condemning Greece for putting on trial 24 volunteer rescue workers who helped save thousands of migrants fleeing violence, poverty and persecution. The Greek government has accused 24 individuals connected to the group Emergency Response Centre International of smuggling — for giving life-saving assistance to migrants who were trying to reach Europe.
A spokesperson for the U.N. high commissioner for human rights said, quote, “Trials like this are deeply concerning because they criminalize life-saving work and set a dangerous precedent. Indeed, there has already been a chilling effect, with human rights defenders and humanitarian organisations forced to halt their human rights work in Greece and other EU countries,” unquote.
A European Parliament report described the trial as Europe’s, quote, “largest case of criminalization of solidarity.”
This comes as a new article in The New Yorker has just been published, titled “The Crisis of Missing Migrants,” which examines what’s become of the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared on the way to Europe. It’s written by staff writer Alexis Okeowo. She’s joining us now.
Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Alexis. If you could start off by talking about the significance of this trial?
ALEXIS OKEOWO: Yeah. I mean, the trial reminded me a lot of what’s happening in Italy, which is mostly where I reported this article, where Italy has criminalized aid ships who have wanted to rescue migrants in the sea. It’s also encouraged Italian naval authorities, Coast Guard, not to rescue people, to the point that Italian naval officials have been charged for not rescuing migrants in the sea. And it’s just, as you said, part of this disturbing trend of criminalizing life-saving actions to vulnerable people and making even it more risky for people trying to make it over the sea to Europe, and increasing the likelihood that they will die.
AMY GOODMAN: Alexis, in your article, you write, “[Over] the past decade, the Mediterranean Sea and the shores of Italy, Malta, Cyprus, and Greece have become a vast graveyard. … At least twenty-five thousand have disappeared in the crossing and are presumed dead.” Can you lay out the scope of this problem? And tell us the story of how it impacts people like the woman you spoke to named Alme, and her son, Yafet. These are such poignant, powerful stories.
ALEXIS OKEOWO: Absolutely. I mean, 25,000, which is the estimate of the amount of people, the number of people who have disappeared on their way to Europe, is actually a very conservative estimate. It’s likely much more. But, I mean, over the last decade, at least 25,000 people have disappeared on their way to Europe, mostly while crossing the Mediterranean. Now, a lot of those bodies are at the bottom of the sea. They drowned. But some do turn up on the shores of southern Europe, of northern Africa. And usually they’re just buried in unmarked graves. They’re not named, they’re not identified, and their families don’t really know what happened to them. They can guess, but they don’t know.
And so, when I met this young woman, Alme, who’s from Eritrea, it really brought into stark relief what this means on a human level. She had left the repressive regime in Eritrea, and then again in Sudan, and took a boat from Libya, risked her life to get to Europe and then settled in Germany. And she had left her young son behind. You know, he was only 8 years old. She didn’t want him to risk his life across the sea. And she assumed that she would be able to bring him to Germany once she settled. But because the father of her son had died in a shipwreck in 2013, also making his way from Libya to Italy — he died in a shipwreck in Lampedusa, but no one knows where his body is. It hasn’t been identified. She was told that because she can’t prove the father of her son died, she can’t bring her son to Europe.
And this is a common problem. Migrants whose partners have passed find it hard to remarry, because they can’t get a death certificate. They find it hard to inherit property. They find it hard to bring their children to join them. And this is often because, you know, the parents of the child are in the sea or they’ve turned up in places like Italy and have just been buried unnamed. And while there are some efforts to identify these bodies, like a lab that I spent time with in Milan, these efforts aren’t really funded, they’re not really supported, and they’re not really coordinated on a continent-wide level in Europe.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, tell us what happens with Alme and her son. For years she didn’t see him, though they —
ALEXIS OKEOWO: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — talked on Facetime almost every day.
ALEXIS OKEOWO: Yeah, absolutely. So, Alme, after almost nearly a decade, she got in touch with the lab in Milan where I spent time, and they have been working on identifying hundreds of bodies from a few shipwrecks in Italy. Alme believed that the father of her son was in one of those shipwrecks. And so, for almost a year, they were coordinating to get the DNA from her son, to see if it matched any of the samples that had been taken from the shipwrecks. Unfortunately, it didn’t. So, that can mean he was in another shipwreck, or he was at the bottom of the sea.
But now because it’s been almost a decade since the father of her son disappeared, she can try to apply with a claim of presumed death and hopefully get him to come that way. You know, now he’s a teenager. But it’s just a heartbreaking situation. You know, she’s been in Germany for almost a decade, hasn’t seen her son in person, only through Facetime. And she told me, you know, “I know the father of my son has died, but no one will believe me, and no one will give me an answer as to what happened to him.”
And this is something — you know, the scientists at the lab I spent with in Milan told me every person deserves to know whether their loved one is alive or dead. But it seems like some people are more deserving than others, because when bodies do turn up in southern Europe, there’s no effort by the state or the police or any authority to give a name to these people and to give them some humanity so their families know what happened.
AMY GOODMAN: You write, “Thirteen per cent of the bodies of migrants who died on journeys between 2014 and 2019 have been recovered, according to estimates. The rest are still at the bottom of the Mediterranean or decomposing in North African deserts.” What needs to happen to not only recover these bodies, but to prevent people from dying? And talk about how large some of these ships are, containing, what, sometimes between 500 and a thousand people.
ALEXIS OKEOWO: Absolutely. So, there are two lines of thought. One is that for those 13% of bodies that we do have, we can have Malta, Greece, Italy, the places where most of the bodies turn up, actually take DNA samples, take photographs, put this in a database that all European countries can access, so that there’s a way for families to identify their loved ones, and then, like Italy has done once before, you know, recover the boats from the sea. You know, it can be expensive, but it is doable. So many boats just drop to the bottom of the sea, and that’s it, you know? It’s like they’re forgotten. And there is a way to deal with that.
And then, you know, as I talked with the International Committee of the Red Cross, for the people who we don’t have bodies, there is a way to interview survivors, interview smugglers, reach out to the communities from which the passengers came, in order to devise a probable passenger manifest, so that you can at least let families know this is probably what happened. Someone saw or knew that your loved one was on this boat, and they didn’t make it. You know, there is a way to do that, and there have been efforts to do that, but with not much support.
Because, you know, for example, some of these shipwrecks have just been atrocious. You know, there was one in 2015 where it was basically like a large fishing boat, like 20 meters, crammed with a thousand people. There were people under the floorboards, young people under the floorboards, people under the hull. You know, the scientist working on it later said it reminded her of a slave ship, you know, the way people were packed on there. People had to pay extra for life jackets, after already paying some $2,000 just to board the boat.
So, it’s so inhumane, the way people are being forced to cross to Europe. And that is, by the way, because there are not safer migrant crossings. There are not more open migrant routes. You know, we are forcing migrants to do this, to flee oppression and to flee so many circumstances in this inhumane way. Then a lot of them don’t survive, and then there’s not even the dignity given to their dead bodies, given to their families to identify who they were.
AMY GOODMAN: And do any countries keep databases?
ALEXIS OKEOWO: Not really. I mean, the country that has done the most, again, is Italy, because they have this lab. But it’s not really enough. It’s a very — you know, it’s a university lab, but staffed by a lot of volunteers doing this on their own time. These southern European countries have vowed to — you know, they promised. They said, “We’re going to do a database.” But none of them have submitted any info yet.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, when you talk about the reason migrants come, try to leave, as they flee persecution, violence, poverty?
ALEXIS OKEOWO: Yeah. I mean, so, yeah, a lot of them are fleeing repression, violence, economic circumstances, poverty, and also climate change — drought, extreme weather. Their ways of life have just become unlivable in a lot of the places they’re leaving. And, you know, no one really —
AMY GOODMAN: So often caused by the countries they are fleeing to —
ALEXIS OKEOWO: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: — that are trying to prevent them from coming in.
ALEXIS OKEOWO: Exactly. Exactly. And a lot of them don’t want to leave. You know, they don’t want to leave their communities, their homes, their parents, their children. And yet they do. It’s astounding to me, you know, the extent to which people risk their lives to get to Europe, only to die or be turned away.
AMY GOODMAN: Alexis Okeowo, I want to thank you so much for being with us, staff writer for The New Yorker and author. Their latest piece for The New Yorker is headlined, “The Crisis of Missing Migrants: What Has Become of the Tens of Thousands of People Who Have Disappeared on Their Way to Europe?” We’ll link to it at democracynow.org.
And a fond farewell to our remarkable video fellow, Mary Conlon. Thank you for all you’ve contributed to at Democracy Now! It’s always been an honor to work with you. Now you are forever a part of our DNA — that’s Democracy Now! Alumni.
And that does it for our show. Democracy Now! produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, MarÃa Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran. I’m Amy Goodman. Thank you so much.
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A brown mouse lemur, Microcebus rufus, which is unique to Madagascar and threatened with extinction. (photo: Chien C Lee)
Study suggests 23m years of evolutionary history could be wiped out if the island’s endangered mammals go extinct
It would already take 3m years to recover the diversity of mammal species driven to extinction since humans settled on the island 2,500 years ago. But much more is at risk in the coming decades: if threatened mammal species on Madagascar go extinct, life forms created by 23m years of evolutionary history will be destroyed.
“Our results suggest that an extinction wave with deep evolutionary impact is imminent on Madagascar unless immediate conservation actions are taken,” researchers wrote in a paper published in Nature Communications. Madagascar is one of the planet’s biodiversity hotspots with 90% of its species found nowhere else on the planet, yet more than half of its mammal species are threatened with extinction.
So much is on the line because the island is relatively pristine and is home to wildlife that has evolved nowhere else, having split from greater India around 88m years ago. It is the world’s fourth largest island, about the size of Ukraine, and much of its diversity has been built on species coming from Africa and then diversifying over millions of years.
“It’s about putting things in perspective – we’re losing unique species traits that will probably never evolve again,” said lead researcher Dr Luis Valente from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, and the University of Groningen. “Every species is valuable in its own right; it’s like destroying a piece of art, so what is happening is very shocking.” His team collaborated with researchers from the US and the conservation organisation Association Vahatra in Madagascar.
The island is particularly known for its ring-tailed lemurs, members of a unique lineage of primates found nowhere else. Other well-known inhabitants include the fossa, a carnivorous cat-like animal, and the panther chameleon, as well as a vast array of unique butterflies, orchids, baobabs and many other species.
Biologists and palaeontologists created a dataset that showed all the mammal species currently present on the island, those that were alive when humans arrived, and those known only from fossil records. Of the 249 species identified, 30 are extinct. More than 120 of the 219 mammal species alive today on the island are threatened with extinction.
Lost species can never return, and so the study looked at how long it would take to recover the same levels of biodiversity through new species colonising and evolving on the island.
Valente said: “Lots of these species could be going extinct in the next 10 or 20 years – they cannot wait much longer. You can quickly reach a point where a species isn’t viable any more. The main message is that biodiversity is not going to recover quickly. Even the places we think are pristine and really untouched can be pushed to the point of collapse quite quickly.”
The loss of mammals would have significant impacts on other species of plant and insect that depend on them. Valente said: “It’s a cascading effect – losing these mammals would likely cause a collapse of the ecosystem more broadly. In total, it is likely to be more than 23m years at stake.”
The main threats are human-induced habitat destruction, climate change and hunting. During the past decade, the number of mammal species threatened with extinction on Madagascar has more than doubled, from 56 in 2010 to 128 in 2021. Conservation programmes are needed to create livelihoods for local people, to stop forests being converted into farmland, and to limit the exploitation of resources such as hardwood trees and animals used for bushmeat, the paper’s authors said.
Yadvinder Malhi, a professor of ecosystem science at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the research, said: “This fascinating study shows it would take millions of years for natural processes to rebuild the levels of biodiversity already lost, and tens of millions of years if currently threatened species are also lost. While this study looked at Madagascar, similar analyses could be done for other islands and continents, and I think would tell a similar story.
He added: “The impact humanity has already had on Earth’s biodiversity will last for millions of years, but the next few decades are hugely important for avoiding large-scale extinction that could have much deeper and longer consequences.”
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