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ALSO SEE: We Spoke to 'Stop Cop City' Activists Facing Terrorism Charges
Manuel Paez Terán’s family say incident reports reveal that Georgia officials ‘planned and led the operation’ that resulted in the activist’s death
Armed police in tactical gear killed the 26-year-old Paez Terán on the morning of 18 January as they swept through an Atlanta forest to clear activists who were camping there to prevent construction on a $90m police and fire department training facility known as “Cop City”.
The death of Paez Terán – the first time an environmental protester has been killed by police in US history – created headlines around the US and the world and further galvanised a protest movement against the huge project amid accusations of heavy-handed police action and some local Georgia politicians eager to depict activists as “terrorists”.
The incident reports reveal that officers were first to discharge a weapon – they fired a pepperball gun into Paez Terán’s tent, which was followed by gunshots they believed were coming from inside the tent, leading officers to fire a barrage of shots blindly into the tent, killing Paez Terán inside. It also reveals that, while they rendered medical assistance to an injured officer, they did not immediately do the same for Paez Terán.
Until now, the police agencies involved in the operation have released few records detailing what happened that day, but have claimed that officers shot Paez Terán in self-defense.
There are nine mentions of the phrase “domestic terrorist” or “domestic terrorists” used by officers in the 20-page police incident report, which Paez Terán’s family said showed the attitude they took towards anyone they encountered in the forest during an operation that resulted in the death of the activist, who went by “Tortuguita” and used they/them pronouns.
The new records sent to the Guardian through a public records request by the Georgia department of public safety reveal the previously unreleased written narratives of the officers involved, including the lead-up to the police clearing of the forest, what happened during the shooting and the immediate aftermath. The officers’ names are redacted.
In a statement to the Guardian responding to the release of the documents, Paez Terán’s family said the reports “reveal that officers were fed a steady supply of hearsay and vague generalities about ‘domestic terrorists’ before entering the forest. It is clear that all law enforcement regarded any person in the forest as guilty of being a domestic terrorist.”
Through their lawyers, the family said: “The officer narratives released today by the department of public safety were drafted weeks or, in some cases, months after the incident. When officers drafted these statements, each had the opportunity to review the publicly available video and the press releases issued by the GBI [Georgia bureau of investigation]. As the GBI has acknowledged, ‘memory and perception are fragile’, and outside factors can influence witness statements.” Brian Spears, a lawyer for the family, said the records show the officers prepared their narratives in February and March, long after the shooting.
“We are withholding judgement on how much stock can be placed in the reports because of the continued refusal on the part of the Georgia bureau of investigation to release their investigation,” Spears said. He added that the bureau interviewed the involved officers right after the shooting, but had not released those interviews, or ballistics reports, and records describing the condition of Terán’s tent.
Lead-up to the shooting
Officers wrote that the bureau had conducted an investigation ahead of the operation, and briefed them before they entered the forest.
According to the written narrative of an officer who held the title of tactical commander on the Swat team, the bureau gave officers an operational order packet that detailed the organizational structure of Defend the Atlanta Forest, that alleged the group had nationwide reach, citing solidarity actions in Portland in late 2022, and had committed crimes that fell under domestic terrorism.
The bureau told them of various weapons the demonstrators might possess and tactics they could use. The Georgia bureau said the protesters were armed with rifles, pistols, improvised explosive devices and molotov cocktails. It said protesters had set “booby traps” in the forest, including trip wires and sharp nails and stakes that officers might step on, that “were designed and employed to seriously injure or kill them”. One officer wrote in his report: “I remember thinking that this group was organized and very dangerous.”
The bureau also said that protesters in the trees might throw feces and urine on officers, and “it was known that some trespassers carried STDs” and this tactic might infect officers with STDs.
The bureau said the strategy that day was “to remove the criminal trespassers from Cop City”, according to the Swat team tactical commander. When they encountered a demonstrator who identified themselves and cooperated, the bureau instructed them to order them to leave, and they would be allowed to leave without arrest.
Swat team encounters Paez Terán
According to body cam footage previously released by the Atlanta police department, the clearing operation began before 9am on 18 January.
There were three search teams of officers deployed into the forest, the incident report says. Team 2 was a Swat team that included bureau agents, officers from Atlanta police department, and rangers from the department of natural resources who had police dogs.
Team 2 planned to enter their “area of operation” from Constitution Road, moving from south to north on the west side of the forested property. The Swat team adopted a line formation to move through the forest.
The officers encountered several demonstrators in tents, but said they were not aggressive.
They then approached a larger encampment. As they approached one tent from behind, one officer said he could see movement inside the tent. The door flap to the tent was closed.
Officers said they identified themselves as police and ordered Paez Terán to exit the tent, but they stayed put. One officer said he told Paez Terán they did not want to cause Paez Terán harm and would guarantee Terán’s safety if they complied.
The officer narratives conflict on exactly what happened before the pepperball gun was deployed.
One officer wrote that officers told Paez Terán they were under arrest for criminal trespass, and Paez Terán told them, “No, I want you to leave.” Then officers told Paez Terán that chemical weapons would be deployed, and Paez Terán asked what they were being arrested for. Officers said Paez Terán was trespassing, then Paez Terán unzipped a small section of the tent door, looked out, and zipped the tent up again. The officer wrote that Paez Terán looked “angry”. When Paez Terán zipped up the tent, the officer said he gave the order to fire the pepperball gun.
Another officer wrote that Paez Terán responded to orders by zipping up the tent completely, indicating that Paez Terán was “resisting orders”. After Paez Terán zipped up the tent, this officer said he requested by radio that he needed a teammate with a pepperball gun “for a suspect refusing to comply”. Then the officer said he told Paez Terán they were under arrest for criminal trespass. The officer said they would deploy chemical agents if Paez Terán did not comply. Then Paez Terán partly unzipped the tent and looked out. Officers repeated that Paez Terán was under arrest and chemical agents would be deployed, and then Paez Terán responded, “No, I want you to leave.” The officer said he told Paez Terán they were not leaving. When Paez Terán did not comply, an officer shot a volley of pepperballs into the tent.
The officer reports agree that after the pepperball gun was fired, the gunfire started. They believed the shots were coming from inside the tent. Officers could hear the rounds “cracking” as they passed.
One officer pulled another out of the way, causing the other to lose his balance and fall to the ground. Another officer wrote that he believed the fallen officer had been shot.
The officers returned fire into the tent, the report says. Officers wrote that they feared Paez Terán was trying to injure or kill them.
Officers said they heard a bang and saw a white cloud of smoke, which they believed to be an explosive device detonated by Paez Terán. They believed Paez Terán “was still an active threat”.
One officer wrote that when they believed they were no longer in danger, they stopped shooting into the tent. Another officer wrote that he heard a voice call “cease fire, cease fire” and then heard a voice from his left side say, “I’m hit, I’m hit.”
Another officer wrote that he heard an officer call out that he was shot. Officers wrote that they believed Paez Terán shot the officer.
Officers and medics immediately provided medical care to the injured officer, but medical care was not immediately provided to Paez Terán, the records state.
The team notified medical personnel and used a ballistic shield and deployed a diversionary device as they opened Paez Terán’s tent, the records show. “Inside, Terán was located suffering from multiple gunshot wounds and was unquestionably deceased from [their] wounds,” an officer wrote.
An independent autopsy released by Paez Terán’s family showed they were shot at least 13 times.
At 9.01am, officers at a different location in the forest heard shots in the distance, according to body cam footage previously released by the Atlanta police department and reviewed by the Guardian. Four shots rang out followed by a flurry of shots. The shooting lasted about 11 seconds. At 9.02am, officers heard on their radios: “Officer down.”
Police body cam footage also shows officers discussing the shooting minutes later, with one officer asking, “Did they shoot their own man?” In response to the video, the bureau said the officer was speculating that the officer was shot by another officer in crossfire. “Speculation is not evidence,” the bureau said. “Our investigation does not support that statement.”
Aftermath of the shooting
According to the report, officers involved in the shooting were escorted out of the woods by a bureau agent, and then met with investigators from the Georgia state patrol’s office of professional standards and investigating agents from the bureau.
Paez Terán’s family said the records “reveal that the Georgia bureau of investigation conceived of, planned, and led the operation that resulted in the death of Manuel Paez Terán. The GBI is investigating its own tragic operation. The family calls upon the GBI to explain what steps it has taken to preserve the integrity of its investigation of its own operation.
“… The family calls on all law enforcement agencies to produce the evidence relied upon to broadly designate those who oppose Cop City as domestic terrorists. The public must be reassured that the designation of domestic terrorist is not being abused as a means of stifling dissent and chilling protected speech.”
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Hope Carrasquilla and David statue. (photo: Yahoo News)
Tallahassee Classical school’s governing board heard complaints after sixth-graders were shown classical sculpture
Hope Carrasquilla resigned Monday as principal of the Tallahassee Classical school after the campus’s governing board told her to either step down or be fired over parental complaints that came in after sixth-grade students were shown the 16th-century sculpture, one of the Renaissance’s most famous pieces of art.
While not directly related to the legislation, Carrasquilla made her decision to resign as far-right Florida governor Ron DeSantis pushes to expand a law prohibiting public schools from teaching sex education and gender identity. That law is part of a broader conservative movement advocating for so-called parents’ rights, which purport to give parents more of a say in their children’s education but – according to critics – is really a guise to advance a rightwing ideological agenda in schools.
The Tallahassee Democrat reported that one of the school’s parents called the image of Michelangelo’s David “pornographic”. Carrasquilla told HuffPost that the school’s usual protocol is to notify parents by letter when students are to be shown “potentially controversial” classical artwork. However, as a result of a “series of miscommunications”, the letter was not sent out to the sixth-graders’ parents before they were shown the David sculpture.
One parent “felt her child should not be viewing those pieces” and described being “point-blank upset”, Carrasquilla told the outlet.
Tallahassee Classical school is affiliated with Hillsdale College, a Michigan-based private conservative Christian institution. According to its website, the school aims to “train the minds and improve the hearts of young people through a content-rich classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue”.
In an interview with Slate, Tallahassee Classical school’s board chairperson Barney Bishop III said that the issue was not that Renaissance art was shown to students but rather that parents were not notified beforehand. The Washington Post reported that the lesson plan which featured the statue of David also included pictures of Michelangelo’s fresco painting The Creation of Adam and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, which both depict nudity.
“We have a practice,” Bishop said. “Last year, the school sent out an advance notice about it. Parents should know: in class, students are going to see or hear or talk about this. This year, we didn’t send out that notice.”
He added: “This year, we made an egregious mistake. We didn’t send that notice. Look, we’re not a public school. We’re a public charter. Parents, after they saw all the crap that’s being taught in public schools during [the Covid-19 pandemic] decided on their own that they didn’t want their children to be taught that.
“The rights of parents, that trumps the rights of kids.”
Last month, as part of his culture war against BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities, DeSantis announced plans to prevent state colleges from having diversity, equity and inclusion programs, as well as programs on critical race theory.
The announcement follows the governor’s ban on African American Advanced Placement studies classes in January as well as all discussions of sexuality and gender identity in public schools.
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Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant speaks during a joint statement with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin following a meeting at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv on March 9. (photo: Maya Alleruzzo/AP)
Israeli Defense Minister Calls on Netanyahu to Halt Overhaul of Courts
Steve Hendrix, The Washington Post
Hendrix writes: "Israel's defense minister, a senior ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, called Saturday for a freeze on the government's controversial attempt to remake the country's judicial system, saying the massive backlash it has sparked was becoming a threat to the country's security."
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About two dozen Yanomami people emerged from the rainforest, carrying machetes and six-foot bows and arrows. (photo: Victor Moriyama/NYT)
Illegal mines have fueled a humanitarian crisis for the Yanomami Indigenous group. Brazil’s new president is trying to fight back.
So when three mysterious helicopters suddenly hovered overhead, unannounced, the miners living there scrambled into the forest.
By the time Brazil’s environmental special forces team piled out, the miners were out of sight, but the mine’s two large pumps were still vibrating in the mud. The federal agents began dousing the machines in diesel fuel.
As they were set to ignite them, about two-dozen Indigenous people came jogging out of the forest, carrying bows and arrows taller than them. They were from the Yanomami tribe, and the miners had been destroying their land — and their tribe — for years.
But as the Yanomami arrived, they realized these new visitors were there to help. The agents were dismantling the mine and then promised to give the Yanomamis the miners’ supplies.
“Friends are not miners, no,” said the only Yanomami man who spoke basic Portuguese, with other men crowding around.
An explosion of illegal mining in this vast swath of the Amazon has created a humanitarian crisis for the Yanomami people, cutting their food supplies, spreading malaria and, in some cases, threatening the Yanomamis with violence, according to government scientists and officials.
The miners use mercury to separate gold from mud, and recent analyses show that Yanomami rivers contain mercury levels 8,600 percent higher than what is considered safe. Mercury poisoning can cause birth defects and neurological damage.
The infant mortality rate among the 31,000 Yanomamis in Brazil now exceeds those of war-torn and famine-stricken countries, with one in 10 infants dying, compared with about one in 100 in the rest of the country, according to government data. Many of those deaths are avoidable, caused by malnutrition, malaria, pneumonia, and other illnesses.
“Lots of diarrhea, vomiting,” said the Yanomami man at the mine, who would not give a name. “No health, no help, nothing.”
But now Brazil’s new leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has made saving the Yanomamis his top priority in his push to halt the Amazon’s destruction. The government declared a state of emergency in January and has airlifted severely malnourished people out of villages, set up a checkpoint at a major waterway into the territory and hunted and destroyed active mines.
While the miners began arriving in 2016, the crisis erupted under the right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro, who after being elected in 2018, cut staffing and funding for the agencies tasked with protecting the forest.
The area illegally mined in the lush Yanomami territory quadrupled during his tenure to nearly 20 square miles, or roughly the size of Manhattan, according to satellite data.
“On the one hand, you’re happy because you’re fighting environmental crimes again,” said Felipe Finger, the head of Brazil’s environmental special forces team, who led the operation at the tin mine. “On the other hand, it’s sad, because it’s been four years since the forest began bleeding — and it bled a lot.”
The government is fighting a literal gold rush. Thousands of prospectors have invaded the land for gold and other precious metals, with a productive dig site yielding roughly 11 pounds of pure gold a week, or about $300,000 on the local black market. Researchers estimate that there are hundreds of active mines in Yanomami land.
For their part, the Yanomamis at the mine had never heard of Mr. Lula or Mr. Bolsonaro, but they were clear that the miners had brought hardship. “People is hungry,” the Yanomami man said, as Mr. Finger lit the rumbling pumps on fire.
Nearby, other agents were searching the miners’ shelter, a wood-plank cabin with a refrigerator, stove and two satellite-internet dishes from Brazil’s state telecom company. (Agents had recently discovered other miners using devices from Starlink, a satellite-internet service run by Elon Musk.)
At the cabin, they also discovered a miner who had lingered too long.
Edmilson Dias said he had been working at the mine for two months, originally arriving via helicopter, and made $1,000 a week. Now he was sitting on a stump, his hands behind his back, two camouflaged agents with long rifles at his side.
Yet he remained defiant.
“To tell you the truth, I’ll leave here and go to another mine,” he said, saying the money was too good to stop.
It underscored that the government and Yanomamis’ fight against the miners had only just begun.
“Mining is a fever,” he said. “You can’t end it.”
‘Worse Than It Ever Was’
Instead of months, the Yanomamis count moons, and instead of years, they track the harvests of the pupunha fruit. Evidence suggests they have lived in the Amazon for thousands of harvests. And unlike many other Indigenous groups, their way of life still bears some resemblance to that of their ancestors.
Across 370 remote forest villages, multiple families share large domed huts, but tend their own plots of cassava, bananas and papaya. The men hunt and the women farm. And they do not interact much with the outside world.
Their first sustained contact with white people, American missionaries, came in the 1960s. Shortly after, more Brazilians arrived, carried deeper into the Amazon by new roads and an appetite for gold. With contact came new diseases, and thousands of Yanomamis died.
Things got worse in the 1980s when a gold rush brought more illness and violence. In response, in 1992, the Brazilian government protected about 37,000 square miles of the forest along the border with Venezuela for the Yanomamis, creating Brazil’s largest Indigenous territory, an expanse larger than Portugal.
But by 2018, as Mr. Bolsonaro ran for president, prospectors were already rushing in again, driven by rising gold prices. Illegal mining soared — and Mr. Bolsonaro’s administration largely watched.
“In the last four years, we have seen apathy, perhaps intentional,” said Alisson Marugal, a federal prosecutor investigating the Bolsonaro administration’s handling of the Yanomami territory. “They failed to act, aware that they were allowing a humanitarian crisis to happen.”
Mr. Marugal’s office accuses Mr. Bolsonaro’s government of weakening the Indigenous health care system, exacerbating the crisis. Health workers were sometimes blocked from buying food for the Yanomamis, his office said in a complaint in November 2021. The government had previously decided it should provide 23 doctors for the Yanomamis, but by late 2021, there were 12.
Mr. Bolsonaro has said his government carried out 20 operations to aid Indigenous groups, helping 449,000 people. “Never has a government given so much attention and means to the Indigenous people as Jair Bolsonaro,” he wrote on Twitter in January.
Today, the plight of many Yanomami children is unmistakable: They are starving. Their skeletons are visible through their skin, their faces gaunt and their bellies swollen, a telltale sign of malnourishment. A recent government study found that 80 percent of Yanomami children were below average height and 50 percent were underweight.
Dr. Paulo Basta, a government physician who has studied the Yanomamis for 25 years, said malnutrition among Yanomami children “is worse than it ever was.’’
During the Bolsonaro administration, 570 Yanomami children died of avoidable causes, such as malnutrition, diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria, up from 441 in the previous four years, according to data compiled by a Brazilian environmental-news site, Sumaúma. (The government has not kept consistent, accurate records.)
Scientists and researchers say the health crisis has a clear cause. The mining clears trees, disrupts waterways and transforms the landscape, scaring away prey and hurting crops. The mines’ standing water breeds mosquitoes, which help spread malaria that the miners bring in from the cities. The disease had once been largely rooted out among the Yanomamis. In recent years, virtually every member of the tribe has had it. And then there is the mercury seeping into the ground and the rivers.
At a children’s hospital in Boa Vista, Brazil, a city outside the Yanomami territory, Yanomami families crowded into a room with 12 hammocks strung from the ceiling. Some children were being treated for severe malnourishment, others for malaria.
A young mother in a hammock breastfed her 8-month-old daughter, who weighed just six pounds. The girl was receiving a blood transfusion and a feeding tube. Crops in the village were failing, her father said. “It’s difficult to get them to sprout,” a translator relayed. “He said he doesn’t know why.”
‘I Sell It to Whomever’
At a nearby restaurant, Eric Silva reached over a table with a nearly half-pound chunk of solid gold. Mr. Silva, a gold trader, had bought it that day for roughly $10,000. The government, he said, would never be able to stop the hunt for such wealth.
“It’s a cultural thing,” he said. “Since Brazil’s founding, ore has been extracted.”
Mr. Silva spent 22 years as a miner, until the government burned his machinery, costing him $115,000. But now he has reinvented himself, and buys and sells about nine pounds of gold a month, or about $230,000 on the black market.
“I sell it to whomever arrives and pays the best price,” he said. “I’ve sold gold to the Americans, to the French. I don’t know where they take it, but I know I sell it.”
While Yanomamis are dying, the gold industry is thriving. All mining is illegal in Roraima, the state that includes much of the Yanomami land, but the streets of Boa Vista are lined with gold shops.
At the start of the government’s operation against miners in January, officials estimated there were up to 20,000 people connected to illegal mining inside the Yanomami territory, including miners, cooks, pilots and prostitutes. During the gold rush in the same land 30 years ago, it took the government years to extract all the miners.
Mr. Finger’s special forces team now leads the battle to run illegal miners off Indigenous land. On the recent trip into the forest, they found a recently abandoned gold mine and the active mine harvesting cassiterite, the main ore to make tin. At both, the main goal was to destroy the expensive machinery.
They also were looking for mercury, and at the miners’ cabin, Mr. Finger found it. He emerged angry, holding a small bottle of the shiny liquid. Mr. Dias, the miner who had lingered, was nonchalant. “That’s not much, sir,” he said.
The agents instructed the Yanomami people, who had been watching, to help clear the cabin. They piled bags of flour, rice and beans alongside clothes, pillows and cookware. Then they carried everything, including a large speaker, back to their huts.
The agents lit the cabin on fire, boarded the helicopters and took off. Mr. Dias was left behind, without supplies.
On the ride out, spirals of smoke rose from below. It then quickly became clear that the mine was part of a much longer string of destruction, open pit after open pit. On each side was thick forest — cleared in some spots to make room for a Yanomami shelter.
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Starbucks interim CEO Howard Schultz stepped down on Monday, days before the company's shareholder meeting. (photo: Melina Mara/WP)
Howard Schultz has yet again left the top executive position at Starbucks. He’s carefully cultivated an image as a progressive CEO. In reality, he has spent his tenure viciously trying to destroy the Starbucks workers’ union.
Schultz bought the company in 1987 for $3.8 million, with $400,000 of his own money and the rest borrowed from investors like Bill Gates Sr. Indeed, while he previously worked there and no doubt played a very important role in the rise of Starbucks, he is not its founder, as much of mainstream media and even Sanders himself have mistakenly stated.
But Schultz has helped craft this portrait. As with so many other figures like him, his image as the founder of Starbucks is part of a narrative of scrappy entrepreneurialism, propagated in multiple books, fawning media coverage, and a foundation, culminating in his consideration to be Hillary Clinton’s secretary of labor had she won.
It’s not hard to see why Democratic Party leadership is so comfortable with Schultz. Bill Clinton was far from a labor-friendly Democrat, preferring instead to cozy up with business tycoons in the mold of Schultz while passing anti-labor legislation like the North American Free Trade Agreement. (Bill and Hillary actually crossed a picket line on their first date.) If it were up to Democrats like the Clintons, figures like Schultz would make up the party’s leadership — even when they threaten to run as centrist independents and throw an election to the hard right.
Schultz portrays himself as a working-class kid from the Brooklyn projects who grew up to found a $100-billion-plus company and become a billionaire himself. He lived the American dream, and he did it while supposedly maintaining progressive values at the company, like LGBTQ friendliness, health insurance for part-timers, fair treatment for people of color, and more. He even wants you to know that he cares deeply about his company’s workers.
“I’ve talked to thousands of our Starbucks partners,” he said to CNN in February. “I was shocked, stunned to hear the loneliness, the anxiety, the fracturing of trust in government, fracturing of trust in companies, fracturing of trust in families, the lack of hope in terms of opportunity.”
In essence, the public image of Schultz is about how the neoliberal dream works. You can have it both ways, speaking to the interests of workers while owning a private jet, a yacht, and multiple homes.
But if that image reflected the reality for Starbucks baristas, large numbers of them wouldn’t be on Medicaid or without a living wage. And they wouldn’t be organizing unions in mass numbers, as they have been recently, and calling attention to Schultz’s own abuses and that of the company under his tenure.
In reality, Schultz is a CEO who fights unions and their first contract. He has opposed his workers’ attempts to secure their rights and well-being, with Starbucks illegally undermining its own workers’ rights hundreds of times for decades under his influence and leadership.
In the past year and a half alone, Starbucks has closed stores where workers were in the middle of union drives, closed stores that already had unionized, cut workers’ hours, offered benefits and raises to nonunion stores, held captive-audience meetings at which managers bully and intimidate workers with anti-union messages, and much more, creating a climate of retaliation.
Thankfully, in the last two years, Schultz’s actions have faced their most significant challenge. The Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) baristas and their parent union, Workers United, an SEIU affiliate, are seeking to unionize the approximately nine thousand company-run Starbucks in the United States. Upward of seven thousand baristas are now organized members of Workers United through the SBWU network.
Today alone, baristas held one-day strikes at about one hundred stores in advance of tomorrow’s shareholder meeting, according to Starbucks Workers United. Unlike Schultz’s self-portrayal, Seattle Starbucks worker Sarah Pappin describes him in a press release as a “law-breaking former CEO hell-bent on silencing us.”
Thus far, SBWU has unionized about three hundred stores. To Schultz, this is anathema. Last year he told CNN, “I don’t think a union has a place in Starbucks.”
Because of the work of SBWU and allies like other labor organizations and Senator Sanders, Schultz is now among the best known union-busters in the country. The idea of him heading the Department of Labor as a progressive choice wouldn’t pass the laugh test at this point. One hopes that other union-busting CEOs are similarly put through the ringer by the labor movement.
Starbucks workers’ principal goal at this point is negotiating a first contract. They say they want the company to stop pretending to be progressive while breaking labor laws left and right — something they never got under the supposedly liberal Schultz.
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Paul Rusesabagina in 2018. (photo: Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Paul Rusesabagina, a former hotel manager portrayed as a hero in the Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda, has been released from prison in Kigali.
A government spokesperson said Mr Rusesabagina's sentence had been "commuted by presidential order".
Mr Rusesabagina, 68, is credited with saving some 1,200 people during the 1994 genocide.
US President Joe Biden called the news of his release a "happy outcome".
"Paul's family is eager to welcome him back to the United States, and I share their joy at today's good news," he said in a statement.
It has taken years of diplomatic pressure and talks brokered by Qatar for Mr Rusesabagina to be released.
Much of that pressure came from the United States, where he had lived since 2009. The Biden administration has said he was "wrongfully detained".
Mr Rusesabagina's family say the Rwandan government lured him from Texas, where he had permanent residency, back to Rwanda in 2020.
He left Rwanda in 1996. His story remained largely unknown for a decade, while he worked as a taxi driver in the Belgian capital, Brussels.
It was featured in a section of journalist Philip Gourevitch's 1998 book about the genocide, but it was the 2004 Hollywood movie, where he was played by Don Cheadle, that brought him global attention.
The Rwandan genocide lasted 100 days from April 1994, when 800,000 people, mostly from the Tutsi ethnic group, were slaughtered by extremists from the Hutu community.
Mr Rusesabagina - a hotel manager at the time - protected some 1,200 people from the violence, after they sought shelter in the building.
The following year he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by then-US President George W Bush for his efforts. But he became a fierce critic of Rwanda's President Paul Kagame.
In a 2018 video message, Mr Rusesabagina called for a regime change, saying that "the time has come for us to use any means possible to bring about change in Rwanda".
He was arrested in 2020, when, according to his supporters, a private jet he believed would take him to Burundi, instead landed in the Rwandan capital Kigali.
In September 2021 he was found guilty of backing a rebel group behind deadly attacks in 2018 and 2019 in Rwanda.
Mr Rusesabagina was freed alongside Callixte Nsabimana, spokesman of the Rwanda Movement for Democratic Change - an opposition political party.
A spokesperson for the Rwandan government said: "No-one should be under any illusion about what this means, as there is consensus that serious crimes were committed, for which they were convicted.
"Under Rwandan law, commutation of sentence does not extinguish the underlying conviction.
"Rwanda notes the constructive role of the US government in creating conditions for dialogue on this issue, as well as the facilitation provided by the state of Qatar."
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Just Stop Oil climate activists and supporters march in solidarity with friends and loved ones serving prison sentences for their part in peaceful climate protests, in London, UK on Dec. 10, 2022. (photo: Mark Kerrison/In Pictures)
The group of about 120 lawyers, who go by the name “Lawyers are Responsible,” will also refuse to represent those participating in new fossil fuel projects.
“Like big tobacco, the fossil fuel industry has known for decades what its activities mean. They mean the loss of human life and property – which the civil law should prevent but does not,” Director of the Good Law Project Jolyon Maugham, one of the key signatories of the declaration, wrote in The Guardian. “The scientific evidence is that global heating, the natural and inevitable consequence of its actions, will cause the deaths of huge numbers of people. The criminal law should punish this but it does not. Nor does the law recognise a crime of ecocide to deter the destruction of the planet. The law works for the fossil fuel industry – but it does not work for us.”
The Declaration of Conscience asks lawyers and the government “to act urgently to do whatever they can to address the causes and consequences of the climate and ecological crises and to advance a just transition to sustainability.”
“The IPCC has warned that continuing with implemented emissions policies will lead to projected global warming of 3.2°C this century. We are looking at a global catastrophe. The UK needs to divest from fossil fuels and invest in alternatives far more rapidly than we are. It is imperative that everyone, including lawyers, does what they can to make this happen,” said one of the drafters of the declaration Matt Hutchings in a press release from environmental law group Plan B.
The lawyers signing the declaration have been accused of undermining the legal principle that everyone is entitled to fair and impartial legal representation, reported The Guardian.
Acting on the principles of the document would mean breaking the “cab rank” rule, which obligates a lawyer to accept work in any field for which they are qualified and available.
“The cab rank rule does not prevent barristers from expressing their opinions or campaigning for causes they believe in,” said Gresham Professor of Law Leslie Thomas, as the Daily Mail reported. “Signing the [declaration] does not mean I reject the cab rank rule or that I would refuse to act for any client who instructs me in accordance with it. It simply means I support the right of lawyers to take a stand against new fossil fuel projects and to defend those who peacefully protest against them.”
Lawyers violating the rules can be fined, and junior lawyers can be blocked from being promoted to the judiciary or from receiving the king’s counsel “silk,” reported The Guardian.
“Young lawyers are being placed in an impossible position. We’re being told by our firms and regulators it’s a professional obligation to act for fossil fuel projects, knowing that doing so will poison our own future and all of life on Earth. That’s wrong on every level. It’s indefensible. If the profession doesn’t look out for my generation, how does it expect to survive?” said a junior lawyer who wished to remain anonymous, according to the press release.
Plan B and political nonprofit the Good Law Project coordinated the declaration, which is thought to be the first time lawyers have participated in a collective act of civil disobedience, The Guardian reported.
“Meanwhile, it’s the ordinary people of this country, taking a stand against this greed and destruction that the British legal system prosecutes and imprisons, jailing them just for talking about the climate crisis and fuel poverty. The rule of law has been turned on its head. Lawyers are responsible. It’s time to take a stand,” said Director of Plan B Tim Crosland in the press release.
Plan B said the declaration would be proclaimed outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London at 12.30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 29.
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