Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
The ocean, the storms, the droughts—none of that cares about your political prowess.
A decade or so ago, I spent a week in Shishmaref, the barrier island in Alaska that is slowly being eroded into an inlet or bay in the Chukchi Sea. There are famous pictures of buildings there that are hanging over the edge of cliffs that were not cliffs 50 years ago.
The ocean doesn't give a damn, and that village of indigenous subsistence hunters are finding it difficult to…well, subsist amid what the climate crisis is doing to them. In that, there is no difference in the fishing shacks of Shishmaref and the luxurious vacation homes along Cape Hatteras. The ocean doesn't care. From the Washington Post:
Wave after wave, the ocean had clawed away at the beach until the stilted homes finally gave way. The collapses spread debris — and anxiety — for more than a dozen miles along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. A video that captured one house surrendering to the surf in May went viral, bringing national attention to the urgency of the problem along this scenic stretch of coast[...]At least a dozen more houses in Rodanthe remain in serious danger of falling into the ocean. Faced with shrinking options, numerous homeowners are scrambling to move their homes — at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars — further from the tides that seem to creep ever closer. They have filed permits, lined up contractors and teamed up with neighbors, all in a bid to buy more time from the encroaching sea.
Good luck with that. The beach in Shishmaref is littered with the wreckage of generations of failed seawalls, like military equipment abandoned in the field by a retreating army. The pictures that accompany the Post story look exactly like the famous pictures from Shishmaref, except the imperiled houses are bigger and fancier. The ocean doesn't care.
There is one reason—and one reason alone—why all this is occurring: our continued reliance on fossil fuels. Which is why the president's latest energy tradeoff bill seems so predictably awful. From The New York Times:
The Biden administration gave formal approval Monday for a huge oil drilling project in Alaska known as Willow, despite widespread opposition because of its likely environmental and climate impacts. The president is also expected to announce sweeping restrictions on offshore oil leasing in the Arctic Ocean and across Alaska’s North Slope in an apparent effort to temper criticism over the Willow decision and, as one administration official put it, to form a “firewall” to limit future oil leases in the region. The Interior Department said it would issue new rules to block oil and gas leases on more than 13 million of the 23 million acres that form the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
I'm sure this is a shrewd political maneuver, and more than a few folks in the White House Office of Political Affairs have earned their pay this week. The problem is that the magnitude of the crisis makes political skill completely irrelevant. I increasingly wonder if our political system can handle what's coming. Because the ocean doesn't care.
READ MORE 
The report found that banks are not repaying the vast majority of cases where customers were tricked into making fraudulent transactions over Zelle. (photo: Charles Krupa/AP)
The banks, Warren argued in an op-ed for The New York Times, "suffered from a toxic mix of risky management and weak supervision," allowing executives to take advantage of Trump-era rollbacks in banking regulations to the detriment of depositors who trusted the institution's stability.
Greg Becker, the chief executive of SVB, "took home $9.9 million in compensation last year, including a $1.5 million bonus for boosting bank profitability — and its riskiness. Joseph DePaolo of Signature got $8.6 million," Warren writes, taking aim at the executives of the collapsed banks. "We should claw all of that back, along with bonuses for other executives at these banks."
She added: "Where needed, Congress should empower regulators to recover pay and bonuses. Prosecutors and regulators should investigate whether any executives engaged in insider trading or broke other civil or criminal laws."
Representatives for Warren did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Executives from companies from Goldman Sachs to Apple, have taken pay cuts amid the current economic slowdown. CEO pay had surged in recent years, contributing to a widening economic gap. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has become the country's largest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis.
Justina Wydrzynska at ADT's office in Warsaw. (photo: Nina Zabicka)
Justyna Wydrzynska is the first activist to be convicted under Poland's anti-abortion laws, which are some of the strictest in Europe.
Justyna Wydrzyńska is one of the four founders of Abortion Dream Team, an activist collective that campaigns against abortion stigma in Poland.
She was sentenced to eight months of “restriction of freedom” by performing unpaid community service, working 30 hours a month.
While it is not a crime to take abortion pills in the country, helping somebody access abortion pills is criminalised, and that is what Wydrzyńska was charged with.
Mara Clarke, the co-founder of Supporting Abortions for Everyone (SAFE), told VICE World News: “This verdict is an enraging and yet unsurprising to this miscarriage of justice and waste of public funds. Justyna should have been absolved of all charges.”
VICE World News interviewed Wydrzyńska in Warsaw last year, where she told the story of a woman who had an abusive husband who would not let her leave the country to have an abortion. Wydrzyńska sent her abortion pills, that she had been keeping for personal use, to the woman who has been anonymised in the case as “Ania”.
“She was really begging [and] was telling me that she would do everything that to stop the pregnancy,” Wydrzyńska said at the time. “This is why I decided to send the pills, because I also have experience with domestic violence. My husband was also an abuser and a very controlling person.”
“I knew exactly what she was feeling, and what probably she had in her mind,” she adds. “I knew that she is so desperate that she will do even unsafe things, so I really had no choice, no other choice than just share the pills.”
Ania never took the pills (she would go on to miscarry according to Wydrzyńska), but they were found by her husband, who called the police citing Wydrzyńska’s contact information which had been left on the packaging.
Although Wydrzyńska admitted to police that she did send the pills to the woman, her lawyers have argued that this does not mean she aided an abortion – wording designed to restrict medical professionals from giving abortions.
In May 2021, the prosecutor in Warszawa-Praga issued a warrant to confiscate items from the activist’s home and pills containing mifepristone and misoprostol were found, which the prosecutor argues do not have authorisation in Poland.
In October 2020, Poland’s abortion law became one of the strictest in Europe, eliminating one of the very few remaining legal grounds for abortion, that of “severe and irreversible foetal defect or incurable illness that threatens the foetus’ life.”
The law now only forbids abortion unless pregnancy threatens the pregnant person’s life or health, or is the result of rape or incest. But significant barriers remain even for these circumstances; many medical professionals are conscientious objectors, and there is a requirement to show proof of rape.
Poland has been watching the case closely; today, four parliamentarians came to view the hearing in court as final pieces of evidence from the prosecution were heard, including a recent speech Wydrzyńska gave in Parliament as well as a press video from the ADT.
Abortion rights supporters also attended, and showed solidarity after the prosecutor mentioned in his speech that providing a telephone number to Abortion Without Borders constitutes as helping somebody get an abortion.
The case had been repeatedly delayed due to key witnesses not appearing in court.
READ MORE 
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russian forces must be stopped in Bakhmut and other towns in the east. (photo: Ukraine Presidential Office)
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russian forces must be stopped in Bakhmut and other towns in the east.
“It is very tough in the east, very painful. We need to destroy the enemy’s military might, and we will,” Zelenskyy said in his regular night-time address on Monday.
“Bilohorivka and Marinka, Avdiivka and Bakhmut, Vuhledar and Kamyanka,” he added, naming the key battlegrounds in the war against Russian forces, “and all other places where our future is being decided. Where our future, the future of all Ukrainians, is being fought for.”
Zelenskyy said he was “grateful to each and every one who is now in combat … to everyone who never lets down those who are next to them on the frontline.”
Russia has said that capturing Bakhmut opens a path to taking control of the entire Donetsk region, one of its central war aims.
After weeks of grinding and bloody fighting, the Ukrainian military says it is intent on staying to fight in Bakhmut in order to inflict severe losses on the Russian assault force, which is said to have thrown a huge number of troops into what has become the war’s longest and most hard-fought battle without regards for casualties.
Russian forces led by the Wagner mercenary army have captured Bakhmut’s east but have so far failed to encircle the city despite making announcements over recent weeks that a Ukrainian defeat was imminent.
NATO also warned last week that Bakhmut could fall within a matter of days.
Ukraine’s forces in continuing to fight have depleted and worn down Russian forces in Bakhmut, which has also diverted Russia’s focus and its firepower from launching a planned counterattack in the spring, Ukrainian officials say.
A Ukrainian counterattack to relieve Bakhmut is increasingly expected.
According to Russian reports, several Ukrainian brigades were massed between the cities of Sloviansk and Kostyantynivka for this purpose. So far, however, the mud that is typical for this time of year as winter snow melts in Ukraine has not allowed for quick advances off paved roads.
Ukrainian soldiers deployed near Kreminna, north of Bakhmut, said on Monday they were repelling intensified Russian attacks.
In a forested area some 8km (5 miles) from the front in Bakhmut, Ukrainian artillery boomed, firing at Russian positions to the northeast while explosions rumbled constantly in the distance as the heavy fighting ground on.
Mykhailo Anest, a 35-year-old Ukrainian medic, told the Reuters news agency that there was still lots of artillery and mortar fire but that the fighting had lessened compared with last month.
“Two or three weeks ago the fighting was at its peak but it has calmed down a bit,” he said.
The battle for Bakhmut is also being fought out on social media as Russia spreads disinformation, Kyiv has claimed.
The Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications said on Monday that Russia was spreading advertisements on Facebook about alleged successes of Russian troops through anonymous channels.
Among other things, it claims that the battle for Bakhmut is “lost from the Ukrainian point of view” and that “the West does not believe in Ukraine”.
Other posts include the US being said to reduce its arms supplies because “Ukrainian authorities have been caught stealing”.
“The occupiers want to undermine Ukrainian society’s trust in the government by claiming that the battle for Bakhmut is lost and that our allies have left us to fend for ourselves,” the communications authority wrote.
Bakhmut officials said on Monday that there were still more than 4,000 people, including 33 children, living in the city, which had a pre-war population of about 75,000.
LGBTQ activists and supporters hold a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., Oct. 8, 2019. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
And it arrives at the Supreme Court at an absolutely horrible time.
West Virginia v. B.P.J. asks the Supreme Court to address whether any government discrimination against transgender people is inherently suspect under the Constitution, and thus must be subject to “heightened scrutiny” by the courts. If the Supreme Court reaches this question, it will be the justices’ first decision on whether the Constitution provides broad protection against anti-trans discrimination (although the Court has held that a federal statute prohibits such discrimination by employers).
The determination that a marginalized group is protected by this heightened scrutiny is one of the most consequential decisions the Supreme Court can make. While trans advocates could still lobby Congress and their state legislatures to pass trans rights legislation even if they lose the B.P.J. case, winning it would offer the immense power of being able to invoke the Constitution as a shield. B.P.J. could determine whether transgender people may demand equal treatment from each of the 50 states, even if those states are governed by anti-trans officials who enact discriminatory laws.
B.P.J. arises on the Court’s seemingly ever-growing shadow docket, a process that allows the Court to resolve cases on a very tight time frame — sometimes handing down a decision in days, and forgoing the months of briefing, argument, and deliberation that normally proceed a Supreme Court decision.
And that tight time frame could matter.
By sheer coincidence, another (hopefully less consequential) story involving the legal community’s approach to trans rights played out on the other side of the country the same day B.P.J. arrived at the Court.
Judge Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee to a federal appeals court and an unusually outspoken opponent of transgender rights, delivered a talk at Stanford Law School where he was repeatedly heckled by students. The story has played out more or less the same way a zillion other debates about campus protests have played out, with Duncan demanding an apology (and receiving one from Stanford), and his allies claiming that “free speech is dead” and calling for a Stanford official to be fired.
Given the insularity of the elite legal world, it’s more than possible this incident will be on many of the justices’ minds as they read through the briefing in the B.P.J. case. Duncan was at Stanford as a guest of the campus chapter of the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative legal organization with close ties to most of the justices. And Duncan is a sitting federal judge, a profession that has historically been treated with obsequious regard by law schools, and one that the justices themselves belong to.
Duncan has also given at least two interviews to conservative media outlets, and the right-wing press provided sympathetic coverage of him all weekend.
So it’s easy to see why, in this moment when the Court is considering this high-stakes trans rights case, some of the justices could feel sympathy for a leading opponent of transgender rights. And why they might be inclined to view trans rights activists with suspicion.
There’s no reason why a minor story about a campus protest needs to impact the fate of transgender rights in the Supreme Court. The justices could simply decide to wave away the shadow docket motion that is currently before them, and wait to decide a case like B.P.J. until after it arrives on the Court’s regular docket through the ordinary, more deliberative process.
That wouldn’t guarantee the plaintiff in B.P.J. a win. It’s likely any trans rights plaintiff would already face an uphill battle in the current, very conservative Supreme Court. Republican appointees have a supermajority in this Court, at the same time that Republicans throughout the country are pushing legislation attacking transgender people.
Nevertheless, if one of the most consequential transgender rights cases that will ever be decided by the Supreme Court were decided hastily, that could be bad news for trans people. It is rarely a good thing if the Court races to decide an important issue, but it’s even worse if they do so because people in the justices’ own social and professional circles are busy ginning up a moral panic.
The B.P.J. case, briefly explained
The plaintiff in B.P.J. was a sixth grade student when she filed this lawsuit. She hoped to join the girls’ cross country and track teams at her school, but because she is transgender, she was not allowed to under a West Virginia law, which provides that school athletes must play for the team that corresponds with their “biological sex.” She sued to challenge this law.
The case has bounced around the lower courts since 2021, which have issued a series of contradictory rulings. A federal trial court temporarily blocked the law in 2021, but then it issued a final ruling last January holding that West Virginia’s law is “constitutionally permissible.” In February, a federal appeals court temporarily blocked the law once again, but this order will only remain in effect while the case is on appeal.
In its latest court filing, the state asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the law, at least temporarily while the case is litigated.
So what are the stakes in the case?
The plaintiff in B.P.J., who is identified by her initials because she is a minor, makes several legal arguments against the West Virginia law, including an argument that the law violates constitutional and statutory prohibitions on sex discrimination. One of her most significant arguments is that the Constitution casts an exceedingly skeptical eye on any law that discriminates against transgender people.
The mere fact that this law discriminates is not enough for B.P.J. to prevail, as the Constitution permits the government to engage in discrimination all the time. The government discriminates against people under the age of 65, for example, in deciding who is eligible for Medicare. Discrimination — that is, deciding who receives government benefits and who doesn’t, and who must go to jail and who must not — is an essential part of governance.
But certain kinds of discrimination are not allowed, and the Supreme Court has developed a rich jurisprudence laying out what types of discrimination are odious to the Constitution. As the Court held in Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center (1985), groups that have experienced a “history of purposeful unequal treatment” which “frequently bears no relation to ability to perform or contribute to society,” should enjoy enhanced protections against discrimination. These enhanced protections are known as “heightened scrutiny.”
Discrimination on the basis of race or sex, for example, is subject to heightened scrutiny.
When a civil rights plaintiff benefits from heightened scrutiny (which comes in two forms: a stronger “strict” form and a somewhat weaker “intermediate” form) they arrive at court with a presumption that any governmental discrimination against them is unconstitutional. The state can potentially rebut this presumption. But, at a bare minimum, such a discrimination “fails unless it is substantially related to a sufficiently important governmental interest.”
Indeed, if the Court uses the B.P.J. case to resolve whether heightened scrutiny applies to anti-trans discrimination, it could prove to be the most consequential trans rights case the Supreme Court will ever decide. Heightened scrutiny is not an absolute shield against discrimination — the trial judge in this very case applied intermediate scrutiny and still upheld the West Virginia law — but the decision whether a marginalized group can invoke the protections of heightened scrutiny has monumental consequences.
Again, it will determine whether, every time an anti-trans law is challenged in court, the judge must start with a presumption that the law is unconstitutional.
In the best-case scenario for trans litigants, B.P.J. could set a baseline for transgender rights in much the same way that cases like Brown v. Board of Education (1954) established a legal baseline protecting against race discrimination. Brown did not end racism any more than B.P.J. can end transphobia. But a big victory for trans rights in B.P.J. would enlist the entire federal judiciary into the fight for transgender justice.
What does it mean that this case arose on the shadow docket?
Historically, the Supreme Court was very reluctant to issue orders second-guessing a lower court before an appeals court had issued its final decision on the case. Justices used to be so hostile to these sorts of requests that lawyers were reluctant to even make them. According to a November 2019 paper by University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck, “during the sixteen years of the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, the Solicitor General filed a total of eight” Supreme Court applications seeking to stay a lower court’s decision — “averaging one every other Term.”
The Trump administration, however, abandoned this traditional reticence. As Vladeck wrote in his 2019 paper, Trump’s “Solicitor General has filed at least twenty-one applications for stays in the Supreme Court (including ten during the October 2018 Term alone).” And the conservative Court rewarded this behavior. Vladeck found that the Trump administration achieved a full or partial victory in about two-thirds of these cases.
This alternative pathway, where the justices sometimes express their views on a case much sooner than they would under the ordinary appellate process, was named the shadow docket by University of Chicago law professor William Baude in 2015.
Other conservative litigants have also had great success on the shadow docket, sometimes scoring major, precedent-setting decisions. In Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020), for example, the Court handed down a decision on its shadow docket that effectively gutted 30 years of precedent establishing that people who object to a state law on religious grounds must follow it if it is a “neutral law of general applicability” — meaning that the law applies on equal terms to religious and non-religious people.
So the Court will have to decide just how quickly it wants to move in B.P.J. It could simply deny the state’s request (which was the ordinary practice in the pre-Trump years). It could signal to lower court judges that it is skeptical that B.P.J. will prevail by granting the request without much of an explanation. And there’s at least some chance that the Court could issue a major precedent-setting decision right away.
There are no rules guiding which path the justices have to take. And the justices abandoned their old norms warning against overuse of the shadow docket during the Trump administration. So, if the justices are currently in an unusually ungenerous mood toward transgender rights activists, nothing but their own consciences prevent them from handing down a sweeping opinion after mere days of deliberation.
So what does any of this have to do with Stanford?
Kyle Duncan may be the most outspoken opponent of transgender rights within the federal government. He previously worked as general counsel to a leading Christian right law firm, and he litigated multiple cases seeking to restrict LGBTQ rights — including a case where he represented a school district seeking to prohibit a trans student from using the bathroom that aligns with his gender identity.
As a judge, Duncan authored a 2020 opinion where, after a transgender litigant requested that Duncan’s court refer to her using her proper pronouns, Duncan explained, at length, why he refuses to do so. Among other things, Duncan warned that, if he honored this litigant’s request, then he might also have to refer to some hypothetical future litigant using a more non-traditional pronoun. He even included a chart.
Duncan appears to have arrived on Stanford’s campus spoiling for a fight. One source told legal journalist David Lat that Duncan “walked into the law school filming protestors on his phone, looking more like a YouTuber storming the Capitol, than a federal judge coming to speak.” When students started to protest Duncan, “he started heckling back.”
Moreover, a brief video clip of the event shows Duncan berating law students who asked him to explain his opinion misgendering a litigant during the Q&A portion of the Stanford event.
That said, there’s little doubt that many Stanford students rudely confronted this singularly rude judge. According to Lat, protesters started to boo and heckle Duncan as soon as he took the podium.
But what does any of this have to do with the B.P.J. case? The answer is that, if you tried to engineer a controversy in a lab with the goal of outraging a Court dominated by Federalist Society stalwarts, you would come up with something like this confrontation.
The Federalist Society is the linchpin of the conservative legal movement — a professional society where right-wing lawyers and judges can share ideas, stew in common grievances, and work to promote each others’ careers. It played an enormous role in shaping former President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments, including his Supreme Court justices.
The five most conservative members of the Supreme Court are all regular speakers at Federalist Society events, including at a banquet the Federalist Society hosts every year as part of its annual lawyer’s convention. Last fall, four justices attended that banquet — even though two of them weren’t even on the speakers’ list.
Yet, while the Federalist Society is arguably the most powerful political organization in the United States, the organization’s gatherings frequently dwell on the insecurities of its members. The society’s most recent conference devoted all four of its plenary sessions to complaints that members of the Federalist Society often feel unwelcome within their own profession — and especially by law schools.
“Something momentous is happening” on law school campuses, one speaker told the society at a panel focused on “The Mission of Law Schools,” claiming that these schools have lost their commitment to “open inquiry based on argument and evidence” and are shunning conservative voices.
So, when a truncated video of the Stanford event featuring Judge Duncan was posted online Friday by conservative activist Ed Whelan, it’s easy to see how that video must have validated many Federalist Society members’ darkest fears.
That video, which doesn’t actually depict Duncan’s remarks, shows Stanford associate dean Tirien Steinbach addressing the audience at Duncan’s event after Duncan requested that a law school administrator intervene to quiet the protesting students.
In her remarks to the protesters, Steinbach states the university’s position that Duncan should be allowed to deliver his remarks, telling Duncan that “it is my job to say you are invited into this space,” and she encourages students who are offended by Duncan to leave the room, telling them that “you do not need to stay here if this is not where you want to be.”
But Steinbach also spends at least as much time trying to explain to Duncan why much of her community finds his presence hurtful. And she also implied that whatever benefit the Federalist Society hoped to gain from inviting Duncan to speak was not worth the divisions his presence created on campus, twice asking whether “the juice [is] worth the squeeze.”
It is easy to see, in other words, why this incident appeared to confirm many Federalist Society members’ deepest fears. A representative of one of the nation’s leading law schools seemed to be telling a prominent member of the Federalist Society — a sitting federal judge! — that his ideas will only be begrudgingly tolerated on Stanford’s campus.
Notably, the university has since disavowed Steinbach’s remarks. In an apology letter to Duncan signed by the university’s president and the law school’s dean, the two senior administrators tell Duncan that “staff members ... intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.”
Even so, it’s doubtful this apology will mollify Federalist Society members who have spent years listening to warnings at Federalist Society events that gains for progressive causes, like LGBTQ rights, will come at the expense of social conservatives being excluded from institutions like universities.
If that resentment and fear percolates up to the Court’s justices as they consider whether to rule in B.P.J. immediately, that could be bad news.
We should all hope that the nine justices prove more capable than Duncan of separating their personal feelings from their role as jurists. And we should certainly hope that they won’t draw grand conclusions about how to interpret the Constitution from the rude behavior of some university students. But judges are people. And they are as capable of being influenced by the outrage they hear from people in their social and professional circles as anyone else.
All of which is a long way of saying that supporters of transgender rights should hope that the Supreme Court decides to wait for a little while before it decides the B.P.J. case. That won’t guarantee a good outcome for trans people, but such an important case should be decided with full briefing and oral argument. And it should be decided with months of deliberation, not mere days.
READ MORE 
A woman wears a T-shirt designed with an image of slain councilwoman Marielle Franco during a memorial mass on 14 March 2019, the first anniversary of her murder. (photo: Silvia Izquierdo/AP)
Brazilian activist and politician Marielle Franco was assassinated five years ago by killers connected to the country’s military and police. Those likely behind her death were part of a reactionary mafia with close ties to the right-wing establishment.
On March 12, 2019, two days before the first anniversary of the assassination of Franco and her driver Andersom Gomes, the Rio de Janeiro Civil Police announced the arrests of Élcio Vieira de Queiroz and Ronnie Lessa. Queiroz, a police officer before he was expelled from the force in 2016 for working private security at an illegal gambling house, drove the Chevy Cobalt that followed Franco four kilometers from the neighborhood of Lapa, where she had gone to attend an event celebrating black women activists. Queiroz followed Franco from the event to the spot of her execution on Rua Joaquim Palhares in Estácio. Lessa, a retired member of the Rio de Janeiro State Military Police Reserves who was only discharged from the corps this year, is accused of firing at the car thirteen times, killing Franco and Gomes. Franco’s assistant Fernanda Chaves was the lone survivor.
The bullets used in the murder cannot be sold to civilians. The investigating Civil Police have confirmed that they belonged to an allotment sold to the Brasília Military Police in 2006. This same allotment is also tied to the São Paulo Military Police’s massacre of seventeen people in the working-class municipalities of Barueri and Osasco of metropolitan São Paulo. Police believe that another Cobalt, also with cloned license plates, was involved in Franco’s assassination.
In four years, very little has come to light beyond these basic facts of the case. Lessa and Queiroz are still awaiting a jury trial for the political killing. Judges have, however, already sentenced Lessa to more than thirteen years for the sale of illegal firearms. In the same operation that led to the pair’s arrests, police found 117 dismantled firearms — one of the largest gun busts in the history of Rio’s Civil Police — in the home of one of Lessa’s friends. Queiroz was sentenced in 2020 to five years for illegally carrying a restricted firearm. He had previously been investigated by Brazilian Federal Police in 2011 for working with Rio’s militias and drug cartels.
Since the morning after the assassination, those knowledgeable of Rio’s political economy of death have suspected that Franco’s assassination was carried out by militia members. These gangs of former and current police officers, soldiers, and even firefighters have, since the end of the military dictatorship, profited from Rio’s chronic public insecurity through protection rackets, arms sales, and monopolies on basic goods like gas and transportation throughout metropolitan Rio. They have become especially prominent in the city’s West Zone and in the municipalities of the Baixada Fluminense.
Militias, as the work of sociologist Jóse Cláudio Souza Alves has documented, also have deep ties to political machines throughout Rio and its surrounding municipalities. They have even successfully run candidates for office. Indeed, there are many credible links with the Bolsonaro family, which has often garnered political support through the rank-and-file members of the military and police, and, by extension, Rio’s violent militias.
Franco began her political career in 2007 as a member of the Socialism and Liberty Party (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade–PSOL). There she served as a human rights aid to then state representative Marcelo Freixo, who led a state-level parliamentary inquiry into militias in 2008. This inquiry resulted in the arrests of over two hundred police officers and public officials. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, militias have only expanded since. According to a study carried out by researchers at the Federal Fluminense University and the violence tracker Fogo Cruzado, the square footage of urban space that militias control has grown 387 percent since 2006, with over four million people in Greater Rio living under their coercive political control.
As Franco herself pointed out in her 2014 master’s thesis, the expansion of militias must be understood in relation to the occupation and militarization of favelas through Pacifying Police Units. In the early 2000s, ahead of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, “lawmakers began to administer the city like a business . . . turning urban space into a good.”
In her thesis Franco wrote that the state
[did] not prioritize military occupation operations to the same degree throughout the city. The best example of this is the West Zone, as an exception. Eliminating militias, especially in these areas of considerable concentration of agents of the state acting illegally and in continual confrontation, did not warrant a massive occupation of the city, with the military occupation of these territories. Instead, in the valorized areas of the city in the center and south and those considered for Pacifying Police Units, you have an occupation of territories with “acoustic barriers” and the National Army, both of which were implemented in Maré.
Favelas — like Maré, where Franco was born and raised — have long been the “laboratories” of public security campaigns that target Brazil’s black and brown working-class residents while turning a blind eye to the web of violence and extraction that exists between the state and the criminal para-state of militias. Reflecting on Franco’s lifework critiquing the violent, racist Brazilian state from within, Gizele Martins (activist, community journalist, fellow resident of Maré, and author of the book Militarização e censura: a luta por liberdade de expressão na favela da Maré) underscored that:
[Franco] was always in front of these issues. I remember in 2018, when all of Rio de Janeiro suffered the military intervention, she was the rapporteur for the city council. It’s not an accident what happened to her. A super critical person, who fought for the right to life of favelas and favelados, of the black population. They tried to silence a significant voice that represented us.
Militias were not a specific target of Franco’s human rights work — she spoke out much more against the violence of the state than the parastate — but her death shows how deeply the two conspire.
Because militias — like the drug trafficking gangs they purport to oppose but often supply and arm — are themselves divided into competing factions vying for territorial control of Rio, political assassinations like that of Franco are usually carried out by more specialized hitmen. Franco’s assassination is believed to have been the work of the Escritório do Crime (the Crime Office). This work is highly profitable, allowing Lessa to live in the same upscale condominium property in the nouveau-riche West Zone neighborhood of Barra de Tijuca that Bolsonaro himself calls home. But the connections go deeper. The former head of the Escritório do Crime was Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, who was killed in a shoot-out with police in Bahia while hiding from the authorities at the home of a councilperson affiliated with Bolsonaro’s former political party.
In fact, the Bolsonaro family has close ties to da Nóbrega. In 2005 as a congressman, Bolsonaro gave a speech to the Chamber of Deputies criticizing da Nóbrega’s arrest in relation to the death of a parking attendant. That same year, Bolsonaro’s eldest son, Flavio, used his position as a state senator to reward da Nóbrega one of the state of Rio’s highest honors, the Tiradentes Medal, while he was in jail. Flavio also employed da Nóbrega’s wife and mother as part of his congressional staff. Jair’s longtime friend, Fabricio Queiroz (no relation to Élcio) also worked as an aid for Flavio and hid in the militia-controlled favela of Rio de Pedras when he was evading arrest for money laundering.
Through his presidency, Boslonaro has nationalized the violent, gangster ideology of the militias. Lula’s presidency will have to contend with an extremely right-wing congress and with Bolsonarista governors like Rio’s own Claúdio Castro.
With Bolsonaro out of the presidency, there is some hope that progress will be made in Franco’s case. Lula’s minister of justice announced that Federal Police have begun their own investigation of the assassination. Previously, Franco’s family had opposed federalizing the case, citing then justice minister Sergio Moro’s indifference to the investigation. The state level investigation has been mired by false information and police interference. The lack of progress is, sadly, not very surprising. “We have a state,” explains Martins,
that kills us, that violates us, that does not give us the right to housing, that commits genocide against the black and indigenous populations, and that continues its historic impunity. So the fact that the assassination of Marielle does not have an answer is yet another representation of what we have historically suffered.
Time has done little to pierce through the depraved criminal-political network that enabled, carried out, and continues to cover up Franco’s assassination. A whole generation of political activists, especially black cis and trans women inspired by her example and disgusted by the injustice of her murder (commonly known as “Marielle’s seeds”), have sprung up in the years that have passed since Franco’s assassination.
Powerfully yet bittersweetly, Franco’s own sister, Anielle, has also entered the political arena. On January 11, in a historic joint inauguration with indigenous activist Sônia Guajajara (the minister of indigenous peoples), she became the minister of racial equality. Just as Marielle had done in an article written in 2017, in her inauguration speech, Anielle pointed to former president Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment as the beginning of Brazil’s recent authoritarian turn to a “policy of death.”
Franco and Guajajara’s joint inauguration also served as a repudiation of the January 8 attacks on the capital by Bolsonaro supporters: “The same project that permitted the destruction of this palace’s windows is the project that kills, every day, people like waste picker Dierson Gomes da Silva, from City of God, in Rio de Janeiro.” Invoking her sister and honoring their shared dreams for a better Brazil, Minister Franco put forth a new project for Brazil under Lula’s government:
We are here because we have a new national project: a project for a country where a black woman can access and participate in different decision-making positions of society, without being interrupted, violated or having her life torn away with five shots to the head. . . .
We have a national plan and hope to be able to count on you for its construction. And this is why I make this request to the entire Brazilian population: walk with us.
Whether such a nation can be constructed will depend on the strength of Brazil’s multiracial left and its ability to purge the state of authoritarianism.
READ MORE 
Michael Regan, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, at an event in 2021. The Biden administration is announcing a plan to regulate 'forever chemicals' in drinking water. (photo: Travis Long/AP)
The plan marks the first time the EPA has proposed regulating a toxic group of compounds that are widespread, dangerous and expensive to remove from water. PFAS, or per- and polyfluorinated substances, don't degrade in the environment and are linked to a broad range of health issues, including low birthweight babies and kidney cancer. The agency says drinking water is a significant source of PFAS exposure for people.
"The science is clear that long-term exposure to PFAS is linked to significant health risks," Radhika Fox, assistant EPA administrator for water, said in an interview.
Fox called the federal proposal a "transformational change" for improving the safety of drinking water in the United States. The agency estimates the rule could reduce PFAS exposure for nearly 100 million Americans, decreasing rates of cancer, heart attacks and birth complications.
The chemicals had been used since the 1940s in consumer products and industry, including in nonstick pans, food packaging and firefighting foam. Their use is now mostly phased out in the U.S., but some still remain.
The proposal would set strict limits of 4 parts per trillion, the lowest level that can be reliably measured, for two common types of PFAS compounds called PFOA and PFOS. In addition, the EPA wants to regulate the combined amount of four other types of PFAS. Water providers will have to monitor for PFAS.
The public will have a chance to comment, and the agency can make changes before issuing a final rule, which is expected by the end of the year. Water providers will have time to adjust.
The Association of State Drinking Water Administrators said the proposal is "a step in the right direction" but compliance will be challenging. Despite available federal money, "significant rate increases will be required for most of the systems" that must remove PFAS, the group said Tuesday.
Environmental and public health advocates have called for federal regulation of PFAS chemicals for years. Over the last decade, the EPA has repeatedly strengthened its protective, voluntary health thresholds for the chemicals but has not imposed mandatory limits on water providers.
Public concern has increased in recent years as testing reveals PFAS chemicals in a growing list of communities that are often near manufacturing plants or Air Force bases.
Until now, only a handful of states have issued PFAS regulations, and none has set limits as strict as what the EPA is proposing. By regulating PFOA and PFOS at the minimum amounts that tests can detect, the EPA is proposing the tightest possible standards that are technically feasible, experts said.
"This is a really historic moment," said Melanie Benesh, vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. "There are many communities that have had PFAS in their water for decades who have been waiting for a long time for this announcement to come out."
The agency said its proposal will protect everyone, including vulnerable communities, and reduce illness on a massive scale. The EPA wants water providers to do testing, notify the public when PFAS are found and remove the compounds when levels are too high.
Utilities that have high levels of a contaminant are typically given time to fix problems, but they could face fines or loss of federal grants if problems persist.
The proposal would also regulate other types of PFAS like GenX Chemicals, which manufacturers used as a substitute when PFOA and PFOS were phased out of consumer products. The proposal would regulate the cumulative health threat of those compounds and mandate treatment if that threat is too high.
"Communities across this country have suffered far too long from the ever-present threat of PFAS pollution,″ EPA Administrator Michael Regan said. The EPA's proposal could prevent tens of thousands of PFAS-related illnesses, he said, "and marks a major step toward safeguarding all our communities from these dangerous contaminants."
Emily Donovan, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear, which advocates for cleaning up a PFAS-contaminated stretch of North Carolina, said it was important to make those who released the compounds into the environment pay cleanup costs.
"Today is a good step towards tackling our nation's massive PFAS public health crisis by including commercially relevant PFAS like GenX," she said.
The EPA recently made $2 billion available to states to get rid of contaminants such as PFAS and will release billions more in coming years. The agency also is providing technical support to smaller communities that will soon be forced to install treatments systems, and there's funding in the 2021 infrastructure law for water system upgrades.
But still, it will be expensive for utilities to install new equipment, and the burden will be especially tough for small towns with fewer resources.
"This is a problem that has been handed over to utilities through no fault of their own," said Sri Vedachalam, director of water equity and climate resilience at Environmental Consulting & Technology Inc.
Many communities will need to balance the new PFAS requirements with removing poisonous lead pipes and replacing aged water mains prone to rupturing, Vedachalam said.
Fox said there "isn't a one-size answer" to how communities will prioritize their needs. She said, however, that there are billions of dollars in federal resources available for water improvements.
The proposed rules are achievable and utilities have access to federal funds for drinking water upgrades, according to Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization that works to get toxic chemicals out of food, water, clothing and other items.
Several states have already imposed PFAS drinking water limits. Officials in Michigan, which has the tightest standards of any state, said costs to remove PFAS in communities where it was found were reasonable.
If the rules are finalized and imposed, many communities will learn they have been supplying drinking water with harmful compounds. When people learn of problems, they may stop using tap water altogether, distrusting its safety, and turn instead to bottled water. That's often a more expensive choice and one that can have negative health effects if people replace tap water with sugary drinks that cause cavities and contribute to obesity and other health problems.
"This," Fox said, "is such an issue of concern for people."
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.