13 March 23
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Dominion gave us a peek into the Fox hosts’ group chat.
The court documents contain private text messages, emails and links to Fox News footage that seem to show the networks’ anchors, reporters and executives urgently trying to hold on to their base by airing false allegations against Dominion while privately acknowledging they were unsubstantiated and harmful. In the words of Bill Sammon, head of Fox News’ Washington bureau, “It’s remarkable how weak ratings can make good journalists do bad things.”
Fox has said that Dominion “mischaracterized the record” and “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context.” The case is headed for a jury trial on April 17.
There’s a lot going on here! But how exactly were the most prominent Fox News hosts involved? We’re here to catch you up.
Maria Bartiromo
While the votes in the November 2020 election were being counted, Bartiromo hosted former Trump advisor Steve Bannon on her show and allowed him to perpetuate falsehoods about the 2020 election without any pushback. When Bannon said the election had been stolen during a Nov. 5, 2020 show, Bartiromo simply responded, “okay” and “I understand” and “you made a great case.”
Days after the election, she began posting “unfounded allegations of vote ‘dumps’” on social media, Dominion wrote in its legal brief.
Around the same time, as the Fox News host prepared to have Sidney Powell on her show—the infamous attorney who worked alongside Donald Trump’s legal team to try and subvert the 2020 election results—Powell sent along an email that she claimed to have received from a source detailing claims of election fraud. That email—Powell’s only corroborating evidence—was “nonsense” and “kooky,” in Bartiromo’s own words. It included the claim that Justice Antonin Scalia “was purposefully killed at the annual Bohemian Grove camp during a weeklong human hunting expedition.” How did the author of Powell’s smoking gun email have access to this information? The author explained: “Who am I? And how do I know all of this? … I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl. … l was internally decapitated, and yet, I live. … The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.” What did Bartiromo do with this information? She invited Powell on her show to air her claims unchallenged.
On that program, Powell described Dominion as “one common thread” in voting irregularities across several states. Bartiromo proceeded to interview Powell on-air and entertain her unfounded allegations.
Dominion alleges that Bartiromo’s interview with Powell opened the floodgates for false allegations about the company and became “a focal point of discussion within multiple shows at Fox.” The company says it tried to refute the charges Bartiromo was making in direct response to the Powell interview, sending regular “Setting the Record Straight” emails starting on Nov. 12.
Tucker Carlson
Two days after Fox News correctly called Arizona for President Joe Biden on Nov. 3, 2020, Carlson said to his producer that calling the race against Trump was dangerous for Fox News’ viewership. “What [Trump]’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong,” Carlson wrote, according to court documents.
Dominion alleges that from that point on, Carlson continued to internally flag problematic claims his fellow coworkers and Fox guests were making on-air. Following Bartiromo’s interview with Powell, Carlson privately told his producer, “Sidney Powell is lying. Fucking bitch.”
Carlson ended up bringing Powell on to his show a few weeks later on Nov. 17, and did push back on her unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. “You keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you will prove that very soon…if you don’t have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale, it’s a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying.”
But that didn’t keep Carlson from having guests on-air making similar claims. Weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Carlson invited Mike Lindell, MyPillow CEO and known conspiracy theorist, to his show. He proceeded to allow Lindell to make false claims of voter fraud, but this time with no pushback. The interview also appears to contradict Fox News chairman Rupert Murdoch’s guidance—he claimed in his deposition that he suggested on Jan. 5 that Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham should say that the election is over and Biden had legitimately won.
Sean Hannity
Dominion alleges that Hannity believed in the early weeks of November 2020 that playing up a narrative about election fraud would be critical in winning back Fox News viewers after the Arizona call. He criticized the Fox decision desk in a private group text message to Carlson and Ingraham, according to the court documents. “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable,” he wrote. (Tucker Carlson replied: “It’s vandalism.”)
Hannity proceeded to lean into the subject of election fraud—after Fox News conducted an analysis that showed its viewers were tuning in to Powell whenever she was on-air. In late November, Hannity hosted Powell on his show, where she claimed that Dominion voting machines “shaved votes from Trump” and “used the machines to trash large batches of votes that should have been awarded to President Trump.”
Hannity later testified that he did not believe Powell’s allegations “for one second.”
Laura Ingraham
Ingraham doesn’t come up in the available documents nearly as often as her fellow Fox News anchors, but she did text Carlson on Nov. 18 saying that Powell was a “complete nut,” according to the court filings. She also testified that she had no reason to believe that Dominion committed election fraud or that it is owned by a company founded in Venezuela to rig elections for Hugo Chavez. She said that she would want to make sure they “had some type of factual trail that we could trace and unpack,” before making those kinds of claims, according to court documents.
Ingraham hosted Powell on-air on Nov. 10, 2020, but tried to refute her claims about Dominion’s voting software being influenced by China and flipping people’s votes. During the interview, Ingraham pointed out that Powell’s accusations had been fact-checked by the AP and found to be false.
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Caribou and geese at Teshekpuk Lake in North Slope Borough, Alaska, in 2019. The lake is the largest in Arctic Alaska. It is a significant location for geese to molt and for caribou to migrate and calf. (photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/WP)
The administration will approve three pads for the Willow drilling project, according to people familiar with the matter. The move comes after announcing a new ban on U.S. oil and gas leasing in the Arctic Ocean.
Opponents hoped Biden would reject energy giant ConocoPhillips’s multibillion-dollar drilling project, called Willow, on Alaska’s North Slope. But facing the prospect of having such a decision overturned in court, the administration plans to let the oil company build just three pads in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), the nation’s largest expanse of public land, these three individuals said.
The decision shrinks the project from the five pads that ConocoPhillips originally proposed but allows what company officials have described as a site large enough for them to move forward and start construction within days.
Seeking to offset concern about the development, Biden will also declare the Arctic Ocean off limits to U.S. oil and gas leasing, the Interior Department announced Sunday. The department will also write new regulations protecting nearly 13 million acres in the NPR-A, including ecologically sensitive areas that provide habitat for thousands of caribou and shorebirds.
Biden’s effort to close off the spigot to future drilling in the region, even as he prepares to approve an operation that could produce between 576 million and 614 million barrels of oil over the next 30 years, highlights the challenge the president faces in delivering on his much-touted climate goals.
The conservation measures appear intended as an olive branch to environmentalists and young voters who have blasted the approval of Willow, calling it incompatible with the president’s ambitious climate goals. The approval of the project near the city of Nuiqsut would allow the construction of hundreds of miles of roads and pipelines, airstrips, a gravel mine and a processing facility.
The White House would not confirm Sunday its decision on ConocoPhillips’s plan to construct a project that would cost between $8 billion and $10 billion. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stressed on Friday that a final decision on the project had not been made.
Instead, administration officials emphasized it would take steps to limit future development. Biden would use his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to withdraw roughly 2.8 million acres of the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean from future oil and gas leasing, the statement said. The withdrawal would build on President Barack Obama’s decision to put a temporary end to exploration in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off the Alaskan coast.
The Interior Department has also negotiated an agreement with ConocoPhillips for the company to relinquish nearly 68,000 acres of oil rights for future development from another project in the area, the three people said. Most of that, 60,000 acres, is in the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area, one of the most ecologically important areas in the reserve.
The new protections on land will extend to Teshekpuk Lake as well as the Utukok Uplands, the Colville River, the Kasegaluk Lagoon and the Peard Bay Special Areas, according to an administration official. They will also cover more than 3 million acres in the Arctic Ocean.
A ConocoPhillips spokesman said the company would not comment until it sees a final record of decision, which the administration has yet to make public.
Willow marks the culmination of years of debate over the future of drilling in the Arctic, and environmentalists have made fighting it a top priority. During the 2020 campaign, Biden had pledged to ban “new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters,” and environmental activists argued that the project would undercut his lofty climate pledges.
“It’s a place that is critically important for the wildlife,” John D. Podesta, a top White House climate adviser, said to reporters last week at the annual Houston energy conference CERAWeek. “From the president’s perspective, conserving the natural resources, particularly in the special areas for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, are top-of-mind issues.”
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which includes hundreds of top climate and energy experts, has said that the world must zero out greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century to have a hope of meeting its climate goals. Any newly built fossil fuel infrastructure will have to be decommissioned before the end of its useful lifetime, the panel said, or risk pushing the planet past the threshold of catastrophic warming.
While some in the administration wanted to block the development, ConocoPhillips’s control of federal leases on the NPR-A since 1999 gives it a strong position to challenge any federal decision that impedes its ability to develop, legal experts said. The trick, experts said, will be finding the right balance.
“They have lease rights — and that can’t be ignored,” said John Leshy, a professor at University of California Hastings College of Law who served as Interior’s solicitor under President Bill Clinton. “That’s a big finger on the scale in favor of development. But they don’t have the right to do whatever they want.”
The region around Nuiqsut (pronounced noo-IK-sut) is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth. Its average temperature has risen 4 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — more than three times the global average, according to a Washington Post analysis of temperature data.
The area is also home to Teshekpuk Lake, a 22-mile-wide reservoir that lies nearly 70 miles west of Nuiqsut. The lake is home to thousands of migrating caribou and roughly 600,000 shorebirds and more than 78,000 molting geese, along with polar bears and other species.
The move to bar drilling in the Arctic Ocean comes despite little industry interest in the area. Several major oil companies have exited the region in recent years, citing economic head winds.
In September 2015, Royal Dutch Shell announced it would indefinitely suspend its drilling in the Alaskan Arctic after finding insufficient oil and gas in one of its exploratory wells to justify the costly venture. Two months later, the Norwegian oil major Statoil said it would exit 16 leases in the area under its own operation, as well as its stake in 50 leases under the operation of ConocoPhillips.
Dan Pickering, founder and chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners, said that while the administration is saying it will take Arctic drilling off the table, “I don’t know how much of these things were realistically on the table in the first place.”
Still, the oil industry’s top advocate in Washington said last week that oil companies would be concerned if Biden banned drilling in the Arctic, even if he approved Willow.
“We’re not going to be for … a one-for-one exchange here,” Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said in an interview at the CERAWeek energy conference. “I mean, we want to be able to continue to develop in Alaska. And by the way, Alaskans want that too, including the Native communities.”
In recent weeks, Biden administration officials had suggested to environmentalists that they might pair approval of the Willow project with new conservation measures in Alaska, but their proposals largely failed to win over leading green groups. On Sunday, the leaders of at least two environmental groups told The Washington Post the new protections were not an acceptable compromise.
“It’s tinkering around the edges,” said Abigail Dillen, president of the environmental law firm Earthjustice.
“It’s lipstick on a pig,” said Jamal Raad, co-founder and senior adviser of the climate group Evergreen Action. “This does not negate or discount the climate impacts of the Willow project in any way, shape or form.”
While environmentalists have urged the administration to reject Willow, Alaska lawmakers and oil industry groups have pressured officials to approve the project, saying it would provide desperately needed oil and cash for the region. Alaska’s economy remains heavily dependent on revenue from drilling, they said, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has squeezed global oil markets.
Kevin Book, managing director at the research firm ClearView Energy Partners, said the war in Ukraine has forced Biden to make tough choices about the future of fossil fuels, despite his pledge on the campaign trail to “transition from the oil industry.”
“It’s a very uncomfortable place to be pinned between campaign promises and an energy war,” he said.
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Yevhen Bas, a Ukrainian airborne paratrooper who has been fighting since he was 17 and suffers from nightmares, reaches out to a stray cat near a hospital in the Dnipropetrovsk region, where he receives treatment. Bas, 26, tried to take his own life six years ago. (photo: Heidi Levine/WP)
Mykyta Ivanov, 22, dreams that his tank commander — who burned alive in May — returns with his skin charred, shouting: “Come on! We have to do something!”
Yevhen Bas, 26, an airborne paratrooper, jolts awake in a cold sweat, believing he is “completely split in two.”
Andriy Dobrovolskyi, 47, an infantry soldier, imagines he has just stepped on another mine. He wakes searching for his feet, then remembers he only has one left.
After more than a year of war, Ukrainian soldiers are experiencing intense symptoms of psychological stress, including nightmares, poor sleep, guilt, anxiety and panic attacks, according to interviews with troops across Ukraine and psychologists treating them. Some soldiers have turned their weapons on themselves, dying by suicide. Others are suffering quietly in hospitals and on military bases, during visits home and on the front lines, where they face a constant threat of Russian attacks even as their symptoms are triggered or worsened by concussions from artillery shelling.
The problem is debilitating, widespread and excruciatingly difficult to treat in a country that — even away from its battlefields — is under constant threat of attack. Although often invisible, widespread fatigue and mental trauma among soldiers is yet another difficult challenge Ukraine’s military must confront as it tries to defend the country against the continuing Russian onslaught.
Like the number of its dead and wounded, which is classified, the military does not reveal how many soldiers are suffering, but it is also not clear that anyone has tried to count. The toll, however, is undoubtedly worsening as Ukraine remains entrenched in the bloodiest battle of the war in the eastern city of Bakhmut, where Russia has sent waves of mercenaries and both sides are suffering enormous losses.
Across the country’s eastern front lines, some panicked Ukrainian soldiers have abandoned their positions. Others suffering from severe stress said they are reluctant to ask for time to recuperate, knowing Russia — with a population more than three times that of Ukraine — has more available reinforcements. Even those who have had mental health treatment said they were sent back almost immediately into combat.
In Ukraine, as in many places, openly discussing mental health is still considered taboo — especially for men and more so for soldiers. And with high numbers of troops physically wounded and killed each day, many soldiers say they are reluctant to speak up about the war’s mental toll.
“It’s a pain and a suffering you bestow upon someone else,” said Dobrovolskyi, who was having nightmares even before losing his left foot on a mine outside the northeastern city of Izyum in December while on a mission to retrieve dead soldiers’ bodies. He does not remember ever openly sharing details of his dreams — so vivid he could at times feel the heat of imaginary weapons whooshing by — with his fellow troops. “You don’t know how they’ll process it,” he said, “or if they’ll want to go back to war with you by their side.”
Ukrainian troops say they are reconciling with the ways combat has changed them. Some are experiencing moral injury, which occurs when forced to witness or participate in actions that go against personal values, including ethically disagreeing with orders or being unable to save colleagues who are then killed or taken prisoner.
Yehor Firsov, 34, lost 16 people in his brigade in recent weeks — including two by suicide. Most of the soldiers he knows, he said, are exhibiting symptoms of extreme stress.
“I always have tension. I am waiting for shelling,” he said. After surviving his first shelling attack, he said, he experienced such an adrenaline rush that he felt happy. He didn’t sleep for three days. “Then it overtakes you,” he said. He has heard one friend — who always appears calm under shelling — screaming in his sleep about Grad rockets.
Even on breaks, Firsov said, he can never disconnect from the war. “If it’s raining, I will think about water in the trenches,” he said. When photos from before the war pop up on his phone, he hardly recognizes himself.
With limited army psychologists available, some civilian psychologists, like Oleksandr Fedorets, 62, are treating Ukrainian soldiers, in his case at a hospital in the Dnipropetrovsk region, away from the front.
A crisis psychologist, Fedorets treats soldiers for acute stress reaction, a condition that causes nausea, fast heart rates and headaches.
Some of his patients leap to the ground or hide under their beds when they hear loud sounds. Many cannot sleep. They are suspicious of silence or of civilians who they worry are Russian collaborators. Their fears are both immediate and long-term.
“They’re afraid to fall asleep because they’ll lose control, and they’re used to shelling at any moment,” Fedorets said. “They’re scared they’ll be psychologically damaged and unable to return to civilian life.”
Concussions can compound their symptoms, causing headaches, ear pain, and loss of memory and attention span.
His therapy sessions include distraction and breathing techniques. He often performs spontaneous group therapy, moderating conversations between wounded soldiers that allow them to share their worries with one another. Often, after a week of mediation, soldiers will feel good enough to return to the fight, he said.
On the front line, some Ukrainian soldiers are trained to play a similar role.
Ivanov, who serves as his company’s deputy commander for moral and psychological support, is responsible for launching artillery attacks on Russian troops and has regularly come under fire. He is also in charge of discreetly monitoring his fellow soldiers’ mental health.
Last fall, he came across a drunk soldier holding a grenade and threatening to kill himself. It took four hours to talk him down. “At the end, he started crying,” Ivanov recalled. “He handed me the grenade and went to bed.”
Ivanov’s experience helping others has helped him recognize his own symptoms. “It’s easier to live through PTSD when you understand what’s happening with you,” he said.
After his commander died in the city of Lyman last spring, Ivanov recalled thinking, “Why wasn’t I there? I could have tried to do something to help him.” It took weeks — and anti-anxiety medication — to shake a feeling of “intense apathy,” he said.
Months later, when Ukrainian forces retook Lyman, Ivanov found his commander’s burned-out tank among the wreckage left behind. “I nearly started to weep,” he said.
Kyryl, 24, a tank unit commander in the same brigade as Ivanov who only gave his first name, said he has “very vivid nightmares where I wake up screaming.” Oleksandr, 34, another tank unit commander in their brigade, described the war as “morally very difficult.”
“There’s constant stress. A fact is a fact: the bad dreams are there,” Oleksandr said.
Many troops have gone all year with only a few days’ break at home.
At a field hospital in the Donetsk region, combat medic Vesna, 48, who spoke on the condition that she be identified only by her call sign, which means “spring,” said the soldiers she treats are often “bad sleepers, nervous, anxious, morally sick, worn out and their backs hurt.”
Some have symptoms such as headaches and mood swings, which are also commonly caused by concussions. But the soldiers rarely rest long enough to recover before returning to the front. “All some need is for someone to sit next to them and talk to them. But we don’t have time for that,” Vesna said.
Another medic in the hospital, who goes by the call sign Thirteen, said resources are so limited that “if we have two soldiers coming to us, one with physical trauma versus one with mental trauma — even if he just saw his friend killed in front of him — he won’t get the same aid, even if he needs it.”
Thirteen is 24 years old, and her only sibling — a 22-year-old brother — was killed on the front line last month. She took just five days off. Talking about it, she said, feels like pressing on a bruise instead of letting it heal. “If I fall apart now, I won’t be able to give what I need,” she said.
Roman, 38, a military doctor who asked to use only his first name to avoid retaliation, said he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2015 while tormented by nightmares on a brief break from the front.
He redeployed after the Feb. 24 invasion, but deserted last spring, alleging his higher-ups asked him to sell donated medical supplies for cash. Instead, he has continued as a volunteer doctor traveling into the most intense fighting zones to treat and evacuate patients — most recently from Bakhmut.
Roman said he still experiences nightmares and intense mood swings. He cannot ride on public transit because he fears overhearing people discuss the war. “A week ago I shoved a gun into my mouth,” he said.
He has, at times, resorted to alcohol to deal with the stress. After a fellow soldier died in an explosion, he searched a radius of one kilometer for her leg and couldn’t find it. At her burial, her son asked where the leg was. “One beer and a vodka was not enough to get over that,” he said. “Slavic nations are taught to hang in there, especially Ukraine.”
Army psychologist Andriy Kozinchuk, 38, said the pressure for soldiers to be the country’s “heroes” adds to their stress. Two men have died by suicide in his battalion since Feb. 24, including one who shot himself when he couldn’t find painkillers. “We have a big problem asking for help,” Kozinchuk said.
Psychologists like him, he said, “exist like a little bridge” between military and civilian life.
Oleksandr Vasylkovskyi, 43, deployed to the country’s east in 2014, where he witnessed soldiers’ stress firsthand. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion last February, he feared Ukraine would once again fail to adequately support returning troops and “repeat the same mistakes.”
Using donations, he established a new retreat facility in the Kharkiv region for active duty troops.
Since June, about 100 soldiers have convened in a converted medical facility each week, many coming straight from the country’s harshest front lines.
For seven days, they can set aside their immediate fears. They relax in salt chambers and participate in aromatherapy and meditation sessions. They swim in a heated pool. Their families are invited to stay with them — offering a rare chance to reconnect after months apart.
Maksym Bayda, 34, an army psychologist who has deployed to the front line, is treating soldiers at this facility. About 2,500 have completed the week-long program since last summer. More than 10 percent arrive with some suicidal thoughts, he said. Half are now coming from fierce battles in the area around Bakhmut.
What they fear most, Bayda said, “is the repeating of past trauma.”
“They are going to go back and they fear they will be shelled again or lose friends again,” he said. “The tiredness adds to their anxiety.”
“One guy said ‘I’ve killed 35 people. I can’t forgive myself. I can’t live like this,’” Bayda recalled.
After the war, he hopes to spend more time helping traumatized troops recover. But with the country under attack, he tries only to “stabilize them so they can return back to their unit to execute commands.”
Outside, a soldier who goes by the call sign Katran took a walk with his wife and two young daughters. Until this brief retreat, they had only 10 days together in the past year.
“I feel better,” he said. “But I’m not ready to go back [to the front].”
Inside, Ivan Hrebin, 57, splashed around in the heated pool. After just five days in the facility, he said, he was starting to feel recharged. He was sleeping better. His stress had lifted. His headaches had dissipated. He wished he could stay longer.
He expected soon to be back under shelling and to feel the fear come back in waves. But his short break left him feeling recharged enough to believe he could handle it.
“Being fearless would make you a good warrior,” he said. “But having fear is what keeps you alive.”
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Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen in Washington last week. On Sunday morning she said the U.S. banking system was 'safe and well capitalized' despite the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. (photo: Valerie Plesch/NYT)
ALSO SEE: Risky Bet on Crypto and a Run on Deposits Tank Signature Bank
The Treasury, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation unveiled a plan to contain fallout from Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, and said taxpayers would not bear the costs.
The Federal Reserve, Treasury and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced in a joint statement that “depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13.” In an attempt to assuage concerns about who would bear the costs, the agencies said that “no losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer.”
The agencies also said that they would make whole depositors at Signature Bank, which the government disclosed was shut down on Sunday by New York bank regulators. The state officials said the move came “in light of market events, monitoring market trends, and collaborating closely with other state and federal regulators” to protect consumers and the financial system.
President Biden said on Sunday evening that the actions were taken at his direction and that he would deliver remarks about the banking system on Monday morning.
“I am pleased that they reached a prompt solution that protects American workers and small businesses, and keeps our financial system safe,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “The solution also ensures that taxpayer dollars are not put at risk.”
He added: “I am firmly committed to holding those responsible for this mess fully accountable and to continuing our efforts to strengthen oversight and regulation of larger banks so that we are not in this position again.”
The collapse of Signature marks the third significant bank failure within a week. Silvergate, a California-based bank that made loans to cryptocurrency companies, announced last Wednesday that it would cease operations and liquidate its assets.
Amid the wreckage, the Fed also announced that it would set up an emergency lending program, with approval from the Treasury, to funnel funding to eligible banks and help ensure that they are able to “meet the needs of all their depositors.”
Concern over wide-reaching problems in the banking sector started in earnest after the F.D.I.C. took over Silicon Valley Bank on Friday, putting nearly $175 billion in customer deposits under the regulator’s control. The bank’s failure was the largest since the depths of the financial crisis in 2008. While its customers with deposits of up to $250,000 were insured by the F.D.I.C., the bank had a large number of accounts over that limit — and there was no guarantee that those clients, which included small businesses, would receive their money in full.
That reality sent tremors through the banking industry over the weekend. Officials and economists worried that people with uninsured accounts at other regional banks might begin to fear for the safety of their own deposits — which could prompt them to pull their money out and move it to bigger banks in a hunt for safety. That, some warned, could turn what might otherwise be a one-off bank failure into a full-blown financial crisis.
For example, Signature, like Silicon Valley Bank, had a big share of large and uninsured deposits — the kind that onlookers worried about. It had experienced heavy outflows of deposits on Friday, a person familiar with the matter said, though by Sunday the situation appeared to have stabilized.
Fear of contagion and the speed of the unfolding problems prompted the dramatic Sunday night announcement. The government had scrambled to try and sell Silicon Valley Bank to a private company and finding a purchaser is still a possibility. But a Treasury official said Sunday that regulators ultimately decided to move forward with the plan to make depositors whole, in part because it was proving to be challenging for a potential buyer to vet the bank’s books by Monday.
The Treasury official emphasized that the actions should not be considered to be a “bailout,” because the company’s shareholders and those who own its debt would be wiped out.
The aggressive actions to save the failed bank’s depositors from pain and to prop up the banking sector as a whole demonstrated that officials had become worried that the cracks that surfaced at Silicon Valley Bank earlier this week — ones that tied back to a recent and rapid rise in interest rates as the Fed fights inflation — could morph into a systemwide crisis if not halted.
The F.D.I.C. is usually supposed to clean up a failed bank in the cheapest way possible, but regulators agreed that the situation posed a risk to the financial system, which allowed them to invoke an exception to that rule. The regulator will tap the Deposit Insurance Fund, which comes from fees paid by the banking industry, to make sure it can pay back depositors.
The agencies said that “any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.”
And the Fed’s new lending program — backed by $25 billion in cash from the Treasury — could provide an even broader backstop to the banking industry.
The program will offer up to one-year loans to banks, savings associations, credit unions and other eligible depository institutions in exchange for collateral including U.S. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities. In doing so, it will create a workaround to financial institutions that have seen the market value of their long-term asset holdings fall as interest rates have risen.
Many banks are sitting on big “unrealized losses” because of the shift in rates over the past year: That is partly what brought Silicon Valley Bank down. Now, they will be able to borrow against the original value of their asset holdings at the Fed. That will give them bigger cash infusions, and prevent them from having to sell in desperation.
“This is a very aggressive package, at the maximal end of what one might’ve imagined,” Krishna Guha, an economist at Evercore ISI, said on Sunday.
Regulators had believed other “peer” banks were poised to face similar outflows of deposits, the Treasury official said, but hoped that the new facility will reduce the chances of runs on otherwise healthy financial institutions.
Signature Bank’s failure — newly unveiled in the Sunday announcement — occurred quickly. Executives believed they were well capitalized even if they took their realized losses, the person added, so the failure came as a surprise, according to the person familiar with the matter.
While the federal agencies painted their moves as necessary responses aimed at averting a broader meltdown, they quickly drew some backlash. Sheila Bair, the former chair of the F.D.I.C., said the move was puzzling.
“This is a $23 trillion banking system,” she said. “It just doesn’t make sense to me why banks this size, their failures, would cause systemic ramifications.”
The government held an auction over the weekend to try to sell off Silicon Valley Bank, according to a person familiar with the matter, and a private-sector solution like that might have stoked less controversy. But several executives at potential acquirers said privately that they had been waiting to see if the government would guarantee that Silicon Valley Bank’s uninsured clients would be made whole in the end.
Besides creating the potential for criticism, the rescue was not clearly a cure-all, at least as of Sunday night.
“Rationally, this should be enough to stop any contagion from spreading and taking down more banks, which can happen in the blink of an eye in the digital age,” Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a note to clients. “But contagion has always been more about irrational fear, so we would stress that there is no guarantee this will work.”
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Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders gives her acceptance speech on election night. (photo: Worth Sparkman/Axios)
Arkansas is leading the charge against laws that protect kids — despite revelations of dangerous child labor nationwide.
State GOP legislators have used the rhetoric of protecting children and giving parents more choice over their children’s lives to justify extreme policies such as Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s drag show ban and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ban on any instruction about gender identity or sexual orientation in elementary schools. Sanders’s spokesperson, Alexa Henning, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “The Governor believes protecting kids is most important, but doing so with arbitrary burdens on parents to get permission from the government for their child to get a job is burdensome and obsolete.”
The new law, called the Youth Hiring Act, will eliminate the requirement that children aged 14 and 15 seeking a job acquire a document issued by the director of the Division of Labor, which includes the child’s work schedule and a description of their work duties, as well as proof of age and parent or guardian consent.
Sanders signed the bill just weeks after the Department of Labor released the results of an investigation that found 102 children aged 13 to 17 illegally working dangerous jobs like cleaning meat processing equipment. Ten of those children were working at facilities in Arkansas, according to the investigation, and 25 were working in Minnesota, another state considering looser child labor laws.
Many children working in dangerous and illegal jobs are migrants from Central America trying to earn money to send home to their families who are struggling due to the economic downturn precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, a recent New York Times investigation found.
Removing the Arkansas documentation requirement “just seems to create a state of lawlessness,” Reid Maki, director of advocacy at the Child Labor Coalition, told the Washington Post. That’s on top of a labor and immigration system that has failed to protect migrant children from dangerous and exhausting jobs that impact their mental and physical health as well as their ability to attend school.
Republicans have long sought to erode labor protections, often by attacking labor unions and pushing right-to-work legislation that limits their power. The Arkansas law presents a new, troubling frontier in this trend; it erodes protections for some of the most vulnerable people in society under the guise of liberty.
The reality of child labor in the US is devastating
The child labor at the heart of the Labor Department’s investigation and the New York Times story is much more than just a summer gig lifeguarding at a local pool or bagging groceries at the supermarket after school. Those investigations uncovered migrant children working long, overnight shifts in factories cleaning meat butchering equipment with hazardous chemicals, in the construction industry, or packaging food for massive corporations using fast-moving conveyor belts that can rip off a person’s fingers.
Henning, Sanders’s spokesperson, stated that the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which prohibits children under 18 from doing certain dangerous work — such as manufacturing or construction — still applies to labor practices in Arkansas. The FLSA was enacted in 1938 and limits the hours children can work so they have plenty of time to go to school, do homework, and get enough sleep to stay awake in class.
Relying on the federal system to protect children from exploitative work is a dubious proposition, though the government has pledged to do more to crack down on child labor. The federal system has failed the most vulnerable children, leaving them exposed to dangerous labor practices and exploitation. In Hannah Dreier’s New York Times investigation, children reported working overnight shifts in hazardous conditions which affected their health and prevented them from getting enough rest to attend school. Many children dropped out of school so they could continue supporting their families back home.
The penalties for breaking child labor laws are minimal, especially for large corporations. Packers Sanitation Services Inc., the subject of the Department of Labor investigation which employed 102 children to clean meat-processing tools like “back saws, brisket saws and head splitters,” was ordered to pay a fine of $1.5 million — just over $15,000 for each illegally employed child, which is the maximum penalty allowed by law.
The new Arkansas bill presumes that “businesses [will comply with federal law] just as they are required to do now,” as Henning said in a statement to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Though the federal government has vowed to crack down on child labor violations, the Labor Department doesn’t currently have the capacity to investigate and punish all reported violations, the Washington Post reports, making states the practical enforcers of labor laws.
Arkansas state Senator Clint Penzo, a co-sponsor of the bill, told the Democrat-Gazette that he is working with the state attorney general’s office and state Rep. Rebecca Burkes, who proposed the bill, to strengthen penalties for businesses that violate child labor laws. Rep. Burkes did not respond to Vox’s request for comment by press time.
Michael Lazzeri, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Regional Administrator said in a statement that their investigation found “Packers Sanitation Services’ systems flagged some young workers as minors, but the company ignored the flags,” indicating that the risk of fines or breaking federal law wasn’t enough to make the company stop employing children.
Additionally, a multistep supply chain often means that the facilities where children are working aren’t technically their employers. Different companies around the country contracted with Packers to clean their facilities. When the supply chain is this convoluted, it’s easier for companies to have plausible deniability about who is working for them.
Other states are poised to follow Arkansas’ lead
After decades of reform trying to make labor safer for everyone, adults and children alike, Arkansas’ new child labor rollbacks seem retrograde, especially given the realities of child labor as exposed by the Labor Department and New York Times investigations.
“Stories of kids dropping out of school, collapsing from exhaustion, and even losing limbs to machinery are what one expects to find in a Charles Dickens or Upton Sinclair novel, but not an account of everyday life in 2023, not in the United States of America,” Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI) told the House of Representatives in a February 27 speech.
But the push to roll back child labor protections isn’t just limited to Arkansas, and it follows a decades-long Republican effort to roll back labor protections of all kinds, including by enacting right-to-work legislation and eroding the political power of labor unions.
In a tight labor market such as the US is facing now, there are more jobs available than there are workers who want to do those jobs. Employers offering lower-wage, low-skilled jobs in particular have tried tactics like giving signing bonuses and increasing pay to lure workers to jobs they may have abandoned during the Covid-19 pandemic. But that bait hasn’t been enough to fill the gaps, and some corporations refuse to offer the kinds of wages and benefits that would attract adult workers.
“Because of the high demand for workers, where there are holes in the system, unfortunately child laborers can get caught up in staffing some of those holes,” David Weil, a professor of social policy and management at Brandeis University, told the Washington Post.
States like Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota are now considering looser child labor bills, and Ohio just passed a law allowing 14- and 15-year-olds to work till 9:00 pm all year long.
Per the Iowa bill, children as young as 14 would be allowed to work in certain jobs in meatpacking plants. That bill would also protect businesses from responsibility if a child were injured or killed while on the job. The Iowa Department of Labor declined Vox’s request for comment on the bill.
Following the findings of the Labor Department and the New York Times investigation, the federal government has vowed to crack down on child labor violations, particularly in regard to migrant children. The new initiatives laid out by President Joe Biden’s administration include a proposal to target and hold accountable corporations which use child labor in their supply chains — not just the smaller contractors that are responsible for hiring children. Labor Department officials will also open investigations in states found to be child labor hot spots and ask Congress to increase the fines for FLSA violations, the Times reported last month.
But stopping dangerous and exploitative child labor — particularly when it’s enabled by failures in multiple systems — requires more vigilance and more protection for the vulnerable, not less, as Labor Solicitor Seema Nanda told the Washington Post. “No child should be working in dangerous workplaces in this country, full stop.”
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Solitary confinement, often including being shackled and beaten, is a common feature of dhaqan celis centres. Punishments can sometimes be for just making a mistake in reciting from the Qur'an. (photo: Seamer/Alamy)
Westernised children of Somalis are being forcibly detained for years ‘back home’ in unregulated, brutal dhaqan celis sites where sexual abuse is rife
In retrospect, there had been clues before they left England, when her mother suddenly announced, in 2022, that the two of them were going on holiday in a few days’ time. But it had been a difficult school year and Fadumo welcomed the idea of a break as a chance to repair their crumbling relationship.
Onboard the aeroplane, her mother had explained that they were flying via Mogadishu to see their family.
But Fadumo was sure something was wrong, so she searched the hotel room and found the plane tickets. Her mother’s flight was in a few weeks but hers was the following summer.
When her mother told her it was an old ticket, Fadumo asked to see the new one. Her mother said she did not have it but she would have it tomorrow.
Tomorrow never came. That evening, Fadumo was in a car with her family. “Everyone was deadly silent. No one would talk to me,” she says.
As they left the city lights behind, and the roads became bumpier, she realised they were leaving Mogadishu. “We stopped outside a compound. It was really dark so I couldn’t see the writing on the sign above the door. I thought maybe we were there to visit someone.”
The place was intimidating, surrounded by barbed wire, with tall gates guarded by armed men. A man told her to come inside and join her family. Everything suddenly came into focus.
“I walk in and [my family] look like they’ve seen a ghost. But also like they all know something I don’t,” she says. “I’m looking around, asking questions, making small talk, and I notice they’re locking the gates.” Fadumo’s confusion turned to anxiety, and she asked: “What are we doing here?”
Finally, she was told the truth. “My mum takes me by the hand and says: “This is where you’ll stay. Inshallah, you’ll become a better person.”
Shock and anger hit Fadumo. “I felt so betrayed,” she says. Then one of the men told her mother it was time to go.
Dhaqan celis is a well-known phenomenon in the Somali diaspora, where parents often feel their children have become too westernised. It can be translated as “return to culture” and may just involve being sent to live with relatives in Somalia. But in recent years, dhaqan celis has come to mean cultural re-education centres, offering an experience like a boarding school or boot camp, with a robust Islamic education and strict routines to straighten out attenders.
Dhaqan celis centres emerged as children of refugees who fled Somalia’s civil war in the early 1990s reached adolescence. Facebook and Google feature innocuous pictures of exteriors and promises that the centres rehabilitate young people who disobey their parents or use drugs. Some feature videos of young Somalis talking positively about their experiences at these centres.
But many Reddit threads and TikTok videos feature anxious young people who fear their families plan to send them away for dhaqan celis. Younger Somalis know that being sent “home” could happen to anyone at any time – and there is little anyone can do.
Cousins or family friends can disappear after being caught drinking or “acting out”. If anyone asks where they are, the response is vague: they are in Hargeisa, or Puntland, or with an aunt in Nairobi, or at a boarding school.
These stories inspire fear because it is an open secret among Somalis that these dhaqan celis centres are places with little or no oversight, where anything can happen.
Fadumo was held at al-Xarameyn, Mogadishu, with girls from the UK, continental Europe and North America. Once her family left, it got worse. “They told me to give them my phone but I refused. I put it in my bra, thinking they wouldn’t touch me there. One of the guards held my arms, another pointed a gun at me, and a third one went through my bra and got it from me. They were all laughing.”
A strict daily regime of religious teaching and violence began. “The staff hit me with a wooden stick after I refused to do something,” says Fadumo. “I can’t even remember for what now. It was more than one person hitting me for about 20-30 minutes, just hitting me everywhere. Then they tied me up with chains.”
Any deviation from the rules had brutal repercussions. Waking up late or incorrectly reciting from the Qur’an could lead to beatings.
During her time there, Fadumo’s health deteriorated significantly. “The food they served there was like green glue. I don’t even know what it was. I’d give my food away; I just didn’t eat.”
As she lost weight, her mental health also degenerated. “My body felt dissociated from my mind, like this person wasn’t me,” Fadumo says.
The Guardian has spoken to two other British Somalis who allege that they were also detained at al-Xarameyn for months, and subjected to beatings, solitary confinement and psychological abuse.
One young British woman, Bilan*, says she was sent away in 2021 and detained for two years: first at al-Xarameyn, and then, after she tried to escape, at another centre called Luqman al-Hakim, also in Mogadishu. She alleges she was abused at both centres.
Like Fadumo, she says she lost weight, often fainting because of a lack of food and water. Bilan, now 22, claims brutal beatings were routine at both places. Luqman al-Hakim is a particularly notorious centre, with several online accounts of abuse there. “They beat me into submission,” one woman said on YouTube. She also claimed that sexual abuse was common, including of detainees under 16.
Al-Xarameyn and Luqman al-Hakim did not respond to a request for comment regarding the claims made by the former detainees interviewed here.
Two young American Somalis, speaking on condition of anonymity, had similar stories. One believes his family wanted him dead when they discovered he was gay. They tricked him into going on holiday to Nairobi and told him, once he arrived, he was going for dhaqan celis. He escaped that night, finding his way to the embassy and back to the US. Another former detainee described shackling, beatings and solitary confinement.
Bilan said her feet became so swollen from lashings at Luqman al-Hakim that she could not put shoes on. Sometimes, she vomited from the shock. “They tied my legs up, blindfolded me and put me in ‘room 6’, where they lock you up, and beat me up with drainpipes.” She also claims she was sexually assaulted in the first centre by one of the men running the facility.
Hodan*, from Manchester, was 22 when she was detained in al-Xarameyn. She had been growing apart from her family and calls herself the “black sheep” of her siblings. As Hodan was an adult, she did not believe dhaqan celis could happen to her. However, the centres have no age limit.
Like Fadumo, she had no idea what lay ahead until it was too late. When they arrived, Hodan’s father asked: “Do you know where we are? This is where you will die.” Understanding him to mean that he would leave her there for the rest of her life, Hodan says she had a terrible panic attack. “I thought I must be walking into my grave,” she says.
At one point, Hodan spent five days locked up alone, with one toilet break and one meal a day. “It’s about making you feel like you can’t do little things by yourself because what they want you to do is to leave the place and be reliant on whoever is meant to control you,” she says.
As they operate outside the law, it is unclear how many centres exist. Estimates are difficult in Somalia, where the US and British embassies have a limited presence because of the “constant threat of terrorist attack”.
The US embassy in Nairobi said it had helped about 300 citizens in Somalia and Kenya, where dhaqan celis is also prevalent, after they were held in “unlicensed facilities” against their will.
Bilan says these centres are all over Mogadishu. When she was finally allowed out of the centre where she was held, she saw another one across the street.
Guleid Jama, a Somali human rights lawyer who has represented former captives, believes hundreds of US and European citizens are trapped in these “detention centres”. With so little awareness of them, or political will to confront the problem, many people are left in limbo, Jama says. “There is a huge need for a legal framework, as currently there isn’t really one.”
The lack of regulation can be fatal: in 2014 an American teenager died in a “boarding school” in Somalia’s north-east state of Puntland. Ammar Abdirahman’s family said they wanted to get him away from gangs in Minneapolis and let him learn about his culture.
Instead, they say the 17-year-old was tortured and killed, pointing to photographs showing his badly beaten body. An autopsy suggested he was strangled. Somali authorities said they looked into his death in 2015, but it is unclear whether an investigation was even carried out.
According to US researchers last year, parents turn to dhaqan celis largely for fear of losing control of their children’s behaviour and values.
The 1991 civil war upended the lives of nearly 2 million Somalis and in much of the country fighting continues. Somalia is still one of the world’s most dangerous countries. “Because they were refugees, they couldn’t necessarily visit home often. So they couldn’t revise the idea of ‘home’,” says a co-author of the study, Farah Bakaari. “Somalia looks very different right now.”
This, combined with social alienation in their host countries and fear of cultural “corruption”, created a “perfect storm” of conditions that make Somali parents feel they should send their children away, says Bakaari.
Sorrel Dixon, a UK lawyer who specialises in child abduction, has spoken to parents who send their children abroad to places like dhaqan celis centres. “Many parents are probably reasonably well-intentioned, and think that if they send their children to be within the bosom of their family or country of origin, that somehow that is going to make them see the light and straighten them out,” she says.
The problem is so pervasive that Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said last November that it was working with other government agencies and the US embassy “in the fight against illegal rehabilitation centres in the country”. The DCI said foreign nationals, primarily from the US and Europe, were being subjected to “inhumane conditions” and “physical abuse”.
The DCI said: “It is after their arrival at the centres, and their travel documents get confiscated, that the youths learn that they are not on safari to learn their beautiful culture but a behaviour-rectification centre where the cane is administered thoroughly.” The DCI raided one Kenyan rehabilitation centre in April, rescuing 10 foreigners, many of whom were Somalis raised in the west.
The legal implications for people who take a child abroad for dhaqan celis are unclear. Very few detainees go to the authorities on their return home. Many have little trust in the authorities and point to the lack of action when they were being held against their will; or they believe nothing will be done if they do report it. They might also fear further reprisals from their family or feel the emotional toll of reporting a parent is too high.
For Hodan, it was a combination of these factors. Her friends grew worried when she stopped responding to messages and did not return from what was supposed to be a holiday. One friend called the police in the UK and the British embassy in Mogadishu but nothing was done, so the friend threatened the family with legal action and reporting them to the social services if they did not bring Hodan back.
Meanwhile, realising her only escape was to “play the game”, as she puts it, Hodan became quiet, respectful and promised her father that she had changed. After 91 days there, alongside her friend’s legal threat, Hodan was allowed to leave.
“I came back with a different perspective on life. I’m a lot more guarded because I never want to be put in that position ever again,” says Hodan. She no longer sees her family.
Fadumo, who was still only a minor when she returned, had no choice but to return to her mother in Birmingham. Before she was taken to Somalia, she was known to social services.
Sometimes, Fadumo says, her mother locked her out of her home as punishment for breaking rules. Once she was left outside all night before an exam and went to school hungry and unwashed.
Fadumo begged social services to take her complaints seriously, saying she was experiencing abuse. But she says they ignored her and told her to obey her mother. Fadumo believes no one at her school or in social services listened to her or tried to understand her situation before she disappeared. As a result, she felt that contacting local authorities or the police was futile. And, she added, no matter how betrayed she felt, she did not want to get her mother into trouble.
It is hard to comprehend how young Britons, barely out of childhood, can disappear abroad without anyone noticing, only to reappear months or years later, traumatised by abuse – and for there to be no consequences.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it was aware of conditions reported by young British citizens who had experienced cultural rehabilitation centres in Somalia but consular support there was severely limited. An FCDO spokesperson said: “Any cases of physical or emotional abuse experienced by young British people are totally unacceptable and we stand ready to help those who need our support. Anyone concerned about a British national in Somalia or Kenya should contact us.”
On her first night in the centre, Fadumo started a tally on the wall. She knew when GCSE results came out and when the new school year had started. Her life in London was moving on without her.
Fadumo thought her way out of her restrictive life was to excel in her education, go to university and find a career she cared about; she would become financially independent and free. Those dreams have been destroyed.
After months in captivity she became seriously ill with malaria, which she says many other detainees also contracted. She received medication from a man she calls a “makeshift doctor”.
Her declining health, and the intervention of a relative who disagreed with her detention, pushed her mother and staff at al-Xarameyn centre to agree she should be released, nine months earlier than planned. But by the time she returned to Britain the school year had started and Fadumo was refused entry to the sixth form, despite achieving the required grades.
Fadumo believes her health has not fully recovered. Months later, an infection left her in hospital because of a weakened immune system. “I used to have a bit of meat on me; I used to have chubby cheeks,” Fadumo says. “I don’t have those any more.”
She is trying to move on and wants to go to university and leave her family. But she says her biggest realisation from her experience was that she could only rely on herself.
“I grew up thinking that the police and social services are here to help you. Imagine you’ve been going to school every day for five years and they’re telling you, ‘We’re always here for you’. Then as soon as you’re actually in a situation where you need serious help, they do nothing.
“It felt like no one cared about me. It still does.”
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Forests of the Pacific Northwest. (photo: Daniel DePinte/U.S. Forest Service)
Drought can stress trees to death, but heat’s effects are less known. New research could hold the keys to protecting conifer forests.
The damage was obvious even to those who weren’t tasked with looking for it. Drivers, homeowners, and tree experts alike called or sent photos of damaged redcedars, hemlocks, and spruce, particularly in coastal forests. Swaths of the landscape were so scorched it looked like a wildfire had torn through.
Some farmers and homeowners had tried to prepare, dumping water on their orchards and yards before and during the heat wave. Many lost branches, leaves, and entire trees anyway. “There’s a misconception out there that a lot of people have that, if things are just watered enough, they can get through these events,” said Chris Still, an Oregon State University tree ecologist and expert in tree heat physiology. “But the heat spells we’re talking about, like the heat dome, are so intense that I don’t think that’s really a tenable assumption anymore.”
Simply watering trees during extreme heat makes intuitive and practical sense, but that idea is based largely on knowledge about droughts. After all, nearly all of the research on climate-related stress in trees has focused only on the impact of insufficient water. But it turns out that trees respond quite differently to extreme heat versus prolonged drought. Still’s own research, including a new study on the heat dome, is part of a growing body of work focused on untangling the effects of both conditions. Given that extreme heat and drought are both becoming more common and intense — and won’t always coincide — foresters and tree farmers will need tools to prepare for each.
The thread human-caused global warming poses to the Northwest’s forests was evident long before the 2021 heat dome: Oregon and Washington’s most common conifer species are all dying in alarming numbers, many because of drought. Starting in 2015, state foresters began warning that western hemlocks, a particularly drought-sensitive species common to the Coast Range and Cascades, were succumbing to pests and fungi that infested the already-stressed trees. More recently, foresters have seen widespread die-offs of western redcedar and Douglas firs. Aerial surveys in 2022 documented what foresters have dubbed “firmageddon” — the sudden death of 1.2 million acres of “true firs” (which include grand and noble firs, but not Douglas firs), mostly in Oregon.
“All of our trees are drought-stressed,” Oregon state entomologist Christine Buhl told High Country News last July. “They can’t protect themselves against other agents” in their weakened state. Even common pests and native parasites that don’t normally kill trees are now proving lethal.
When the 2021 heat wave hit, foresters weren’t certain what new chaos it might bring. Drought affects tree stems and the structures that move water and nutrients around, but heat destroys needles and leaves. When those tender green structures heat up — and they often reach temperatures far higher than the air around them — they lose water fast. The tissues inside them fall apart, and they turn red or brown as their chlorophyll breaks down.
“Just like our skin, when (sun exposure) rips those cells apart and we have blisters and sunburn, it does the same exact thing to those needles and leaves,” said Danny DePinte, a forest health specialist who flies annual aerial surveys for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington and Oregon. The 2021 heat dome offered a rare glimpse of the results on a large scale: When DePinte flew over the region later that year, he saw whole landscapes of trees scorched on their south and west-facing sides, where temperatures would have been hottest. The worst damage occurred on southern slopes with prolonged exposure and in coastal forests that are adapted to far cooler temperatures.
DePinte’s survey found that at least 229,000 acres of forest had been damaged by the heat wave — a figure state researchers say only begins to capture the total area damaged, which was likely much larger. Research like Still’s, which drew in part on DePinte’s data, has made it clear that heat stress causes more immediate and acute damage than drought. Its long-term impacts are far less understood, though, because events like the 2021 heat dome are still unusual.
On his 2022 survey flights, DePinte found that the most obvious damage seems to have been temporary: Damaged areas are mostly green again with new growth. Further research, by Still’s team and others, will investigate possible lingering health effects, including whether the trees become more susceptible to pests, disease and death.
Researchers will also consider how foresters and tree farmers could respond, as extreme heat waves become more common. Adaptations might include planting certain species together to shade more vulnerable trees, determining which native trees are most tolerant to extreme heat, and planting species on farms or after wildfires that are already adapted to hotter conditions farther south.
“We need to be smart about what trees we’re planting so that we have forests in the same places,” DePinte said. “We’ve got to think hundreds of years into the future: What is this area gonna look like? And then plan accordingly.”
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