28 April 23
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The justice’s failure to disclose his financial entanglements aligns with his long-standing opposition to public disclosure laws.
There is no proof Thomas ever acted at Crow’s direction. The justice has publicly stated that the failure to comply with the law by disclosing his financial entanglements with Crow was an unintended error, but if so, it was a mistake that is remarkably consistent with his ideological position that people who use their money and influence to steer the American political system ought to be able to do so in complete secrecy. This error was curiously convenient, in that it just happened to conceal a deep financial relationship with a very politically active right-wing donor who has bankrolled organizations that have a winning record before the Court. Perhaps more significant, Thomas’s idiosyncratic views about speech, democracy, and accountability have become more popular among the justices themselves as Republican appointments have moved the Court to the right. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write at Slate, Thomas has argued over decades that laws compelling such disclosure are unconstitutional.
In the 2010 Citizens United decision striking down limits on corporate electioneering, Thomas was the only justice to argue that the Court “should invalidate mandatory disclosure and reporting requirements,” because donors to the California anti-marriage-equality referendum Proposition 8 had been subject to threats, harassment, and verbal criticism. The first two are potentially illegal acts, and the last is a form of constitutionally protected speech. The conflation foreshadows the current right-wing discourse on free speech, the core of which is that conservatives have a right to prevent others from disassociating from them because they find their views noxious.
The 2010 case Doe v. Reed laid bare a key distinction between Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia, in whose shadow Thomas was often unfairly accused of laboring. The columnist Helen Thomas once described him as being in Scalia’s “hip pocket,” a claim that woefully misunderstood their ideological relationship. In fact, Thomas frequently staked out much more extreme positions. In Doe v. Reed, Thomas argued that citizens participating in a ballot referendum had a right to conceal their identities, because “a long, unbroken line of this Court’s precedents holds that privacy of association is protected under the First Amendment.” Scalia, by contrast, asserted the importance of transparency in a democracy with a passage that struck Court watchers at the time as notable.
There are laws against threats and intimidation; and harsh criticism, short of unlawful action, is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance. Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.
Once, when asked to compare his approach with Thomas’s, Scalia reportedly quipped, “I’m an originalist, but I’m not a nut.”
The Court would get nuttier in Scalia’s absence—though it’s worth noting that he was prone to altering his jurisprudence to match trends in conservative politics. In the 2021 case Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the Supreme Court held that California’s donor-disclosure laws were unconstitutional, relying in part on a 1958 case, NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, which held that the civil-rights organization did not have to disclose its donors to a white-supremacist state government with a history of engaging in terrorism against its Black residents. A post on the website for the Federalist Society, the influential right-wing legal organization, hailed the recent decision as a victory against “cancel culture.”
Put simply, the conservative position had moved from heeding Scalia’s reminder in Doe v. Reed of the importance of transparency and civic bravery in a democracy, to embracing Thomas’s 2010 Citizens United opinion, which conflates threats, violence, and harassment with people thinking you’re a jerk.
The financial relationship between Crow and Thomas raises obvious questions about the influence the Texas-based donor has over the justice; Crow-funded organizations have done remarkably well before the Roberts Court. Conservative outlets have asserted that the reporting by ProPublica, Slate, and CNN is a “smear,” but none of those outlets forced Thomas to not disclose his financial entanglements with a man spending fortunes to advance his political interests. If Thomas had made the disclosures, he still would have come under criticism, but public suspicion is much greater because he did not. And although that lack of disclosure is damaging in and of itself, it does not confirm that Thomas has ever used his power on Crow’s behalf.
After the Thomas stories broke, a number of conservative commentators piped up to defend Crow, testifying to his moral fortitude and personal integrity. But their rebuttals did more to illustrate the problems with Crow’s patronage than to defend it. Many of those who spoke up have personal or financial relationships with Crow. One such defender was Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a former clerk to Justice Samuel Alito—who echoes Scalia’s resentments, preoccupations, and contemptuous tone far more than Thomas does, but without the late justice’s relative erudition—and a recipient of political donations from Crow. Lee asserted that the reporting on the financial relationship between the two men was defamatory.
“Make no mistake: this is defamation,” Lee wrote on Twitter. “The media gets away with it only because Justice Thomas is a public figure, and under a Supreme Court ruling from 1964, public figures have essentially no recourse when they’re defamed by the media.”
Lee was referring to Thomas’s crusade against the landmark case Times v. Sullivan, which established the standard of “actual malice” for defamation, under which public figures need to prove that a speaker knew something was false or had a reckless disregard for the truth when they made the statement. The precedent enables Americans to have a robust public discourse without being sued into silence by wealthy and powerful people. Even so, as Fox News and the right-wing commentator Alex Jones recently discovered, it is not an ironclad protection for liars with large platforms.
Indeed, Lee’s statement about the reporting on Thomas, implying that it’s false even though the justice himself has acknowledged some of his own errors, comes closer to defamation than anything those outlets have published. Fortunately for Lee, free-speech precedents like the one he wants to repeal protect his right to engage in baseless hyperbole on subjects of public interest when he feels like farming clout on social media.
Put together, Thomas’s hostility to disclosure laws and to free-speech precedents paints a vivid picture of American democracy as he believes it should exist: a system small enough to be bought by a tight circle of anonymous oligarchs, and big enough to silence anyone who might criticize them. Only then, when the rich men who own the place and the rich men who run the place can take their Indonesian cruises on superyachts together in private, will speech and association be truly free.
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Carolyn Bryant with her husband, Roy Bryant, and their children during his trial in 1955. (photo: Ed Clark/Life)
Carolyn Bryant Donham died in hospice care Tuesday night in Westlake, Louisiana, according to a death report filed Thursday in the Calcasieu Parish Coroner's Office.
Her death marks the last chance for anyone to be held accountable for a kidnapping and brutal murder that shocked the world.
Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in their hometown of Chicago so the world could see her 14-year-old son's mutilated body, which was pulled from a river in Mississippi. Jet magazine published photos.
In August 1955, Till had traveled from Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi. Donham — then 21 and named Carolyn Bryant — accused him of making improper advances on her at a grocery store where she was working in the small community of Money. The Rev. Wheeler Parker, a cousin of Till who was there, has said Till whistled at the woman, an act that flew in the face of Mississippi's racist social codes of the era.
Evidence indicates a woman identified Till to Donham's then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, who killed the teenager. An all-white jury acquitted the two white men in the killing, but the men later confessed in an interview with Look magazine.
A Till relative says Donham's death brings mixed emotions
When Till disappeared in Mississippi, Ollie Gordon — one of Till's cousins — was 7 years old and living in the Chicago home with Till's mother and family. Gordon told The Associated Press on Thursday that in the days following when he went missing, the home was full of fear, because people knew there was a strong likelihood he had been killed.
Gordon said she had mixed emotions about Donham's death.
"She was never tried in the court of man," Gordon said. "But I think she was judged by God, and his wrath is more punitive than any judgement or penalty she could have gotten in a courtroom. I don't think she had a pleasant or happy life."
Parker is the last living witness to Till's abduction. He and Till were staying at an uncle's home in Mississippi when Till was taken in the dark of night. Parker said Thursday that his heart goes out to Donham.
"As a person of faith for more than 60 years, I recognize that any loss of life is tragic and don't have any ill will or animosity toward her," Parker said in a statement. "Even though no one now will be held to account for the death of my cousin and best friend, it is up to all of us to be accountable to the challenges we still face in overcoming racial injustice."
Last year, President Joe Biden was proud to sign the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act to make lynching a federal crime, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday.
"The president is committed to ... dealing with racial hatred," Jean-Pierre said.
Donham had an unpublished memoir
In an unpublished memoir obtained by The Associated Press in 2022, Donham said she was unaware of what would happen to Till.
The contents of the 99-page manuscript, titled "I am More Than A Wolf Whistle," were first reported by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. Historian and author Timothy Tyson of Durham, North Carolina, who said he obtained a copy from Donham while interviewing her in 2008, provided a copy to the AP.
Tyson had placed the manuscript in an archive at the University of North Carolina with the agreement that it not be made public for decades, though he said he gave it to the FBI during an investigation the agency concluded in 2021. He said he decided to make it public after some of Till's relatives and other people doing research at the Leflore County, Mississippi, courthouse in June 2022 found an arrest warrant on kidnapping charges that was issued for "Mrs. Roy Bryant" in 1955 but never served.
Tyson said in a statement Thursday that Donham's precise role in the killing of Till remains murky, but it's clear she was involved.
"It has comforted America to see this as merely a story of monsters, her among them," Tyson said. "What this narrative keeps us from seeing is the monstrous social order that cared nothing for the life of Emmett Till nor thousands more like him. Neither the federal government nor the government of Mississippi did anything to prevent or punish this murder. Condemning what Donham did is easier than confronting what America was — and is."
Activists sought criminal charges against Donham
Last year, members of the New Black Panther Party and other activists, began showing up at addresses associated with the aging Donham, including in North Carolina and Kentucky. They were there to serve unofficial "warrants" for her arrest and trial.
Weeks after the unserved arrest warrant was found, the office of Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said there was no new evidence to pursue a criminal case against Donham. In August, a district attorney said a Leflore County grand jury declined to indict Donham.
Till's cousin, Priscilla Sterling, filed a federal lawsuit against the current Leflore County Sheriff, Ricky Banks, on Feb. 7, seeking to compel him to serve the 1955 warrant on Donham. In a response April 13, Banks' attorney said there was no point serving the warrant on Donham because the grand jury did not indict her last year.
The Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, run by some of Till's relatives, posted a blank black square to social media sites Thursday after news of Donham's death was reported.
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Russia bombarded towns and cities across the country in its first major attack in more than a month. (photo: Roman Pillpey/New York Times)
In the first wide-ranging Russian assault against civilian targets in more than a month, air alarms blared around 4 a.m. as Russian bombers over the Caspian Sea unleashed about two dozen cruise missiles and attack drones at targets across Ukraine.
The deadliest attack appeared to be in the central city of Uman, which is nearly 200 miles north of the front line and has not been a frequent target of attacks.
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Russian president Vladimir Putin at a meeting at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence, outside Moscow, on April 19. (photo: AFP)
The Russian Presidential Administration’s strategy documents for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania show a Kremlin “out of touch” with realities in the NATO and EU member states at its doorstep.
Formerly annexed states of the Soviet Union, all three are now proud NATO and EU members with governments fiercely critical of Russia’s foreign policy.
Among other things, the documents show Moscow’s intention to thwart the construction of NATO military bases, weaken the local democratic governments, expand Russian cultural and linguistic influence and bolster pro-Kremlin political organizations. But in a running theme throughout the documents, which were drafted in 2021, Russia’s subsequent invasion of Ukraine has undermined almost every aspect of the plans.
“Estonia, our allies and partners have long been aware of Russia’s interest to use hybrid tactics to pursue their goals and try to assert their influence in other countries,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told Yahoo News. “It’s Russia’s classic playbook — many of their tactics are taken straight from the KGB.
“We know our neighbor,” she continued. “Our job is to continuously share our knowledge of Russia’s actions, build resilience and stand against Russia’s direct and indirect attempts of influence. We have had to bolster our defenses to stand up against any threat, including hybrid threats. And it’s also crucial to discuss these matters publicly.”
Ingrida Šimonytė, the Lithuanian prime minister, similarly told Yahoo News after reading the Russian plan for her country that it was all something “you would usually suspect.”
“Latvia has been facing Russia’s desire to strengthen and expand its influence in neighboring countries since the restoration of independence,” said Krišjānis Kariņš, the Latvian prime minister. “Latvia maintains a realistic view of Russia's foreign policy and its initiatives. At the international level, Latvia actively advocates for and promotes Russia’s isolation.”
The documents were drafted by the Russian Presidential Administration’s Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation, which formulated similar plans, previously revealed by Yahoo News, for the creeping annexation of Belarus and the toppling of Moldova’s pro-Western government.
Despite its benign name, the Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation is staffed by Russian intelligence officers from the three main spy services, the FSB, SVR and GRU, respectively representing the domestic, foreign and military agencies. The directorate’s real agenda is bringing nations back into Russia’s sphere of influence.
Yahoo News obtained these documents together with its consortium partners Delfi Estonia, Sweden’s Expressen, London-based Dossier Center, Latvia’s Re:Baltica, Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT, Süddeutsche Zeitung, German radio networks WDR and NDR, the Kyiv Independent, Poland’s FrontStory and Central European media outlet VSquare.
With populations between 1 million and 3 million, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are all small countries dwarfed by Russia but strategically located on the easternmost edge of both NATO and the EU. Annexed by Moscow as part of a deal between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, the three now-liberal democracies restored their independence when the Soviet empire collapsed. Their alliance with the West is a source of deep annoyance to Vladimir Putin’s regime, especially because there are hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians living inside their borders.
Like the Belarus and Moldova documents, Russia’s plans for the Baltic countries are broken up into three chapters: political, military, military-technical and security-related objectives; trade and economic; and humanitarian or society-related goals. All chapters are subdivided into three distinct time frames: the short term (by 2022), the medium term (2025) and the long term (2030).
Each country in the latest Kremlin documents is addressed in two separate texts. The first lists the “strategic interests of the Russian Federation” in different areas and at different periods. The second text outlines the risks that lie in Russia’s path.
A European intelligence source described the Russian Presidential Administration as a kind of think tank that, in addition to drafting Russian foreign policy prescriptions, also decides on the conduct of disinformation campaigns — ways to weaken preexisting ties between and among allies. “The Baltic papers are not about gaining influence in the respective countries,” the source told Yahoo News, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “They’re rather a containment policy to prevent Russian influence from dwindling any further.” Few in the Kremlin, the source added, really think the Baltic states can be “brought back” into the Russian fold. A more realistic plan would be sowing internal opposition to keep them from slipping more completely into the Western one.
A different European intelligence official, who is aware of the documents, said it was very unlikely that the authors were aware of the forthcoming invasion of Ukraine, given how remote the prospects for success of their schemes now look in hindsight.
Indeed, Europe is far more united against Russian influence than it was before the attack on Ukraine. All three Baltic states have poured hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid into Ukraine, making them per capita the three largest contributors to Ukraine’s defense, whose struggle they see as a bulwark against the Kremlin’s designs for their own countries. Estonia alone has spent $440 million on military assistance for the embattled nation, more than 1% of its gross domestic product, and, as Yahoo News first reported, is transferring its entire inventory of 24 FH70 towed howitzers to Kyiv.
“Russia’s plans to gain leverage over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania remind me why their NATO accession was such a good idea,” Dan Fried, the former U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, told Yahoo News. “Without Baltic NATO membership, Russia would have invaded by now. With Baltic NATO membership, the Russians are reduced to cheap political intrigue.”
Though each Baltic nation is distinct, there are commonalities in Russia’s proposed approaches to all three. In the stated “humanitarian sphere,” the promotion of Russian culture and the preservation of Russian-language education are paramount.
Estonia is home to about 300,000 ethnic Russians, about 24% of the population. Latvia is home to around 471,000, roughly 25% of its population. Lithuania, the most populous of the Baltics, with 2.8 million people, is also host to the smallest ethnic Russian diaspora: 140,000, a mere 5%.
Moscow has for years routinely criticized all three Baltic states for their reluctance to acknowledge Russian as a state language and for allegedly discriminating against ethnic Russians.
Estonia and Latvia have both recently adopted language reforms that will gradually bar kindergartens and schools from teaching in Russian. At the same time, both countries have kept the door open for extensive opt-in Russian language and culture classes.
To counter such efforts, Russia’s Estonia strategy directly calls for the “propaganda of Russian culture,” including the cultivation of children and the training of “talented Russian-speaking youth” in Russian universities.
Analysts and intelligence officials have long argued that language and culture are integral to the Kremlin’s “compatriots” policy, by which Moscow claims for itself the role of patron of the world’s ethnic Russians and Russian speakers, and which it believes it has the right to defend by military means. Moscow’s coercive form of cultural outreach is prosecuted by a host of Russian government agencies, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its culturally oriented subsidiaries Rossotrudnichestvo and the Russkiy Mir (“Russian World”) Foundation, both of which previously had offices throughout Europe but now face EU and NATO sanctions.
A medium-term goal for Latvia is the “opening of a school at the Russian foreign mission in Riga as a potential center for the implementation of a set of measures to maintain and strengthen the position of the Russian language, literature, culture and education in Latvia.”
Although it sounds innocuous, such a “school” could easily act as a clearinghouse for the recruitment of Russian spies and agents of influence, according to Latvia’s Constitution Protection Bureau (SAB), the foreign and counterintelligence service. SAB sent a written statement to Yahoo News after reviewing the Latvia strategy document, noting that Russia’s intelligence services play an outsize role in the country. “This includes obtaining intelligence information and conducting research on the possibilities of influence, working with agents of influence, including providing financing to various individuals and groups in Europe to use as a lobby for Russian interests,” the statement read. “The Kremlin’s interest lobby is often carried out through economic interests and businessmen whose activities are related to Russia.”
Another explicit aim of the Russian documents is to prevent “the establishment of NATO military bases” in Latvia and Lithuania. National air and army installations in the Baltic countries host troops and units from NATO allies on a rotating basis.
But since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, the alliance’s footprint has only grown in the Baltics. The number of allied troops in Estonia alone is already near 2,000, and the U.S. sent an infantry company equipped with High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to Estonia just before last Christmas.
The next goal in the documents is the creation of the conditions for “weakening the influence of the Western countries in the military-political, trade-economic and humanitarian spheres” and “counteracting the attempts of anti-Russian Estonian political forces to falsify history.”
Falsifying history, in this context, refers to Estonia’s memorialization of its loss of independence in 1940 following the Soviet annexation; its heroizing of “forest brothers,” or anti-Soviet partisans, during the long years of occupation; and its celebration of reclaimed independence upon the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. These themes, integral to Estonia’s modern national identity, are falsely rebranded by the strategy document as the “glorification of Nazism.”
Part and parcel of that alleged glorification is Estonia’s decision to remove or relocate Soviet-era World War II monuments. In 2007, a decision to move the so-called Bronze Soldier from its perch at an intersection in central Tallinn to an Estonian military cemetery caused riots by ethnic Russians, perhaps encouraged from abroad. Then it led to a massive cyberattack against the country, which temporarily crippled Estonia’s expansive digital commerce and banking sectors. One unnamed Estonian official told the BBC in 2017 that the attacks, traced to Russian IP addresses, were “orchestrated by the Kremlin, and malicious gangs then seized the opportunity to join in and do their own bit to attack Estonia.”
In a symbol of how these three small countries, numerically outmatched by Russia’s military, have adapted to inhabiting a hostile piece of geography, Estonia has since grown into a cybersecurity powerhouse, including in eastern Ukraine. Its foreign intelligence service, Välisluureamet, is considered to be one of the premier collectors of signals intelligence, or communications intercepts, in NATO. Moreover, the bulk of Estonian society has only grown more inhospitable to Russian influence operations and espionage since the invasion of Ukraine last February. Since then the EU has expelled more than 600 Russian diplomatic staff, 36 of them from Estonia alone, a remarkable proportion given the country’s small population of just 1.3 million.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have also since barred the entry of Russian citizens, including those fleeing conscription following Putin’s mass mobilization order in September, a decision criticized by other EU members. A big motive for this controversial decision, hinted Mikk Marran, the recently retired head of Välisluureamet, wasn’t just showing solidarity with Ukraine but safeguarding Estonian national security. “Hosting a few hundred thousand military-aged men, aged 18 to 35 — I’m not so sure that’s a good idea for any country so close to Russia,” Marran said in a wide-ranging interview last November.
Yahoo News showed the document to Aleksander Toots, the deputy director general of the Estonian Internal Security Service. “Naturally, we have to pay serious attention to such plans,” he said. “But we also need to understand which point in time the documents originate from. Maybe the set strategic goals have already become obsolete because of changed circumstances. If you see that the plans are being implemented, you need to do everything you can to put brakes on it.”
One of the most dated chapters in all the Baltic documents concerns Russia’s plans to influence local economies, trade and business. A medium-term goal is increasing Russian exports and bilateral trade and foreign direct investment. This plan was clearly based on the relationships that were burned by Moscow’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
“They want to increase exports to Estonia by 2022,” Toots said, “but last summer Russia itself decided to close the Narva-Ivangorod bridge to trucks in retaliation for Estonia’s support for Ukraine,” referring to the border crossing in Estonia’s northeast. “How can you increase exports if you close the main channel?”
Stoking pro-Russian sentiment in Estonian society and within the political and military elites is listed as an ever-present goal throughout all three periods. So is limiting the influence of nationalist elements and creating new public associations and nongovernmental organizations that promote cooperation with Russia.
“It’s the same thing the Russians have been doing for 30 years,” Toomas Henrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia, told Yahoo News after reviewing the strategy documents. “What strikes me is the same out-of-touch understanding of the reality of Estonia evinced already with the invasion of Ukraine. They just don’t understand what’s happening in our country, or in Latvia and Lithuania, for that matter.”
Per the documents, a short-term goal for Estonia is the “formation of new public structures, foundations, NGOs and NGOs advocating cooperation with the Russian Federation.” Another short-term goal is working “with Estonian businessmen to explain the Russian Federation’s readiness to open up the Russian market to them, provided that Tallinn changes its foreign policy to be more pro-Moscow.”
This is a more practical goal than many of the others in the documents, according to experts. “Entrepreneurs are the most easily vulnerable and influenceable group,” said Toots. “Once a politician runs out of votes and power, he has nothing. But as long as businessmen have money, they will try to influence politics in their own interests.”
One of the most bizarre objectives stated in the Estonia strategy is the counteraction of Estonia’s alleged efforts to “foster separatist sentiments in the Russian regions [and] to create such sentiments among representatives of Finno-Ugric peoples living in Russia.”
Estonians, along with Finns and Hungarians, originate from the Finno-Ugric tribes, descendants of ancient inhabitants of Europe.
But the notion that Tallinn is trying to foment a separatist movement in its next-door neighbor reeks of projection, according to one senior Estonian intelligence official. “This is the stuff of Russian fantasy. It has zero correspondence to reality, but sounds like something they’d say because it’s exactly something they’d do and indeed have done in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine” — three countries where Moscow has fostered independence movements among Russian-speaking minorities.
The strategy document for Lithuania, the most populous Baltic country, contains the most specific military requirements for Russia, starting with the short-term project of stopping the “build-up of the military presence of the United States and other NATO member countries” on Lithuanian territory. A medium-term follow-on is preventing the “deployment … of medium-range air defense/missile defense systems integrated into a single NATO air defense system” and reducing the “number and scope of NATO’s operational and combat training activities” in Lithuania.
But a large swath of that has already happened.
A NATO multinational battalion battle group is based in Rukla, Lithuania, in the central county of Kaunas. In the first two years of Enhanced Forward Presence, the Lithuanian Armed Forces state, “roughly 8 thousand allied soldiers from nine NATO allies have served in the unit on a rotational basis.” A NATO summit in Vilnius is scheduled for July, and a big item on the agenda will be integrated air defenses along the alliance’s eastern flank, something Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda has called for.
Another Kremlin preoccupation with Latvia is “ensuring the necessary protection of Russian assets … including in terms of possible court decisions on freezing or arresting the property of the state or private companies.” Latvia has long been a notorious hub for Russian money laundering, with banks being the gateway for billions of dollars in Russian wealth entering the European Union. Yet this access to Western markets is now also closed thanks to the Latvian authorities' shuttering of the dirty banks and, more recently as well, the Western sanctions due to the war.
“The current objectives in Latvia,” said the Latvian intelligence service SAB, “are to divide the Latvian society as much as possible, promote tension and dissatisfaction with the state authorities, create contradictions among Western countries to make unified decision-making difficult.”
According to the documents focusing on potential risks Russia envisions in pursuing its objectives in the Baltic countries, the increased militarization of NATO, sanctions, resurgent “Nazism,” and suppression of Russian language, culture and education in the Baltic states are listed. The first two are now accomplished facts, again thanks to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
As a whole, the Kremlin’s designs on the Baltics reflect time-tested Soviet tactics, Marius Laurinavičius, a Lithuanian expert on international affairs, told Yahoo News. “This is the old KGB method: ‘We should weaken our enemies. And the best way to weaken them is from inside, not from outside.’ What they are good at is dividing societies, creating problems, creating conflicts.”
And if the Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation sounds misguided in its ambitions for the Baltics, that may be because it needs to justify its existence to the higher-ups in the Kremlin.
Toots, the deputy director of Estonia’s intelligence service, thinks the plans feature exactly the same kind of delusional thinking and hubris, predicated on poor intelligence and false premises, that led Russia to believe it could quickly sack Kyiv over a year ago. “Knowing how the Russian regime operates,” he said, “I can say that the employees there have a habit of lying to their bosses because the bosses don’t like to receive unvarnished accounts of the real situation. If you provide them with embellished stories, you will live in an illusion. The Russian system is built on everyone bluffing.”
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A porter carries a yellowfin tuna from a fishing boat to a market in Male, capital of Maldives. (photo: Carl Court/iStock)
Europe accused of ‘neocolonialism’ for using vassal small island states to sway policy and continue ‘disgraceful plundering’ of distant waters
The numbers could shed some light on why the EU recently objected to an agreement by African and Asian coastal nations to restrict harmful fish aggregating devices (FADs) that disproportionately harvest juvenile tuna. Stocks of yellowfin tuna are overfished in the Indian Ocean.
FADs are large floating rafts that attract fish by casting a shadow, making it easy for vessels to catch massive numbers of tuna. They contribute to overfishing of yellowfin because they attract juveniles as well as endangered turtles, sharks and mammals that get caught up when the devices are encircled in purse seine nets.
In February, a proposal by Indonesia and 10 other coastal states in the region – including India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan – for a 72-day ban on FADs used by purse seine vessels was adopted by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), the main regulatory body. With a two-thirds majority vote, the measure was welcome by conservationists as a “huge win” for yellowfin and other marine life.
Retailers including Tesco, Co-op and Princes have previously issued calls for tough action to preserve and rebuild the $4bn yellowfin industry, while this year Marks … Spencer warned EU officials that FADs are a major cause of yellowfin tuna overfishing, and that they cripple future stocks.
The devices, typically made of plastic, also pollute the ocean and small island states when lost or discarded.
But earlier this month the EU, which is the largest harvester of tropical tuna in the region, objected to the measure, effectively exempting it from the restrictions. Critics described the move as “neocolonialism”, pointing to the influence of industry lobbyists from France and Spain in ignoring the will of many coastal nations.
At the last annual IOTC meeting, the EU’s 40-strong delegation was made up of at least 24 industry lobbyists listed as “advisers”, Guardian analysis shows. At the smaller special session on FADs this year, at least half of the 10 EU delegates were from the tuna industry.
The percentage of lobbyists in the EU’s official delegation has been rising since 2015, when yellowfin tuna was declared overfished by IOTC scientists. A report in January by Bloom, a French NGO, calculated that the annual number of industrial lobbyists within the EU delegation has more than doubled in recent years, rising from an average of eight in 2015 to 18 in 2021.
A European Commission official said, in a statement, that industry representatives have “no decision-making responsibility” at the IOTC, unlike commission officials. Policymaking at the IOTC relies on the European Green Deal objectives, the conservation of biodiversity and sustainability of stocks, and was more complex than the number or type of delegates, said the official. The EU tabled the largest number of proposals in 2022, including yellowfin management and FAD management, the statement said, adding that this was not what you might expect if “commercial interests dominated the EU position”.
Concerns over the European industry’s influence over Indian Ocean coastal states deepened following two proposals by Seychelles to the IOTC containing changes that appear to have been made by Europêche and other industry groups.
Jess Rattle, the head of investigations at the Blue Marine Foundation, said the EU’s actions flew in the face of commitments made at the historic high seas treaty, agreed last month to protect biodiversity. “The EU has entirely abandoned this sentiment in favour of plundering the Indian Ocean’s already overfished stocks, safe in the knowledge that, once all the fish are gone, its highly developed fleet can simply move to another ocean, unlike the many coastal states left behind with nothing.”
More than two-thirds of countries accepted the ban. But Seychelles, which has 13 EU-owned tuna vessels flagged to its state, also objected to the FAD proposal, along with Comoros, Oman, Kenya and the Philippines.
“Their objections can be seen as a form of neocolonialism by the EU,” said Rattle. “This measure was voted in at the IOTC, not just by a majority but a two-thirds majority. By objecting, and stirring up objections from their vassal states, the EU are making it clear they’re going to continue to fish the way they want to, regardless. That is disgraceful.”
Referring to the changes to Seychelles’ proposals by Europêche, Rattle said: “The industry appears to be making changes to proposals submitted by Seychelles. They clearly have power over this coastal state.”
Jeremy Raguain, a Seychellois conservationist and a negotiator for Seychelles in the high seas treaty talks, said his country is highly dependent on the EU, its largest trading partner, and on tuna exports. “We need a thriving tuna industry for economic survival, but it is environmentally unsustainable and only profitable through huge subsidies,” he said.
“Seychelles is in a tight spot. Indonesia has taken the right stance, but Seychelles is not Indonesia. There is neocolonial pressure.”
An official in the European Commission said the EU had already submitted a proposal “with a strong scientific basis” to reduce the number of FADs but that the IOTC “unfortunately” agreed to an alternative from Indonesia. The adopted proposal “lacks a scientific basis and would prove impossible to implement”, added the spokesperson, claiming it could have a “very substantial” negative impact on many fishers and communities.
A spokesperson for Europêche , which represents fishers in the EU as well as tropical tuna producers organisations – including the Europêche Tuna Group (ETG) – confirmed that some of its boats fly Seychelles’ flag.
“Seychelles consult ETG, as they also consult NGOs and other industries’ groups, on their proposal projects,” the spokesperson said. “It is then up to its government representatives to follow or not the different comments they receive.”
The Guardian approached authorities in Seychelles for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
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This aerial footage screen grab shows Jack Teixeira taken into custody by FBI agents North Dighton, Massachusetts. (photo: CBS)
Defence lawyers argue 21-year-old Jack Teixeira should be released on bond, saying weapons were ‘lawfully owned’.
In a court filing late on Wednesday, authorities said Teixeira, 21, may still have access to secret documents and would pose a “serious flight risk” if released on bail.
During a court hearing on Thursday, a US federal judge did not make an immediate ruling on whether Teixeira should remain in detention or be granted a conditional release.
Judge David Hennessy expressed concern, however, that the 21-year-old’s knowledge of classified material might be valuable to a foreign government, noting that the defendant had copied some of the documents and may still remember the secret information “reasonably well”.
Charged with the unauthorised disclosure of classified national defence information in violation of the Espionage Act, Teixeira faces 25 years in prison “and potentially far more”, the prosecutors said.
“He accessed and may still have access to a trove of classified information that would be of tremendous value to hostile nation states that could offer him safe harbor and attempt to facilitate his escape from the United States,” their court filing reads.
Teixeira’s defence rejected the government’s characterisation of their client, calling the prosecutor’s assessment “hyperbolic” and stressing that he no longer has access to secret documents.
“The government’s supplemental motion for detention in many respects engages in hyperbolic judgements and provides little more than speculation that a foreign adversary will seduce Mr Teixeira and orchestrate his clandestine escape from the United States. This argument is illusory,” the defence said in a court filing on Thursday.
At the hearing later that day, Hennessy expressed scepticism of defence arguments that the prosecution had not shown that Teixeira ever intended for the leaked information to be spread widely.
“Somebody under the age of 30 has no idea that when they put something on the internet that it could end up anywhere in this world?” the judge asked. “Seriously?”
Defence lawyers asked for Teixeira to be released to his father’s home on a $20,000 bond under conditions that would restrict his movement and access to the internet.
The files that Teixeira allegedly leaked have been described by experts and officials as a threat to US national security. They included details of Western military support to Ukraine, information about Russia’s war effort, and intelligence collected from allied states.
Officials have said Teixeira, who served in the Massachusetts Air Force National Guard, shared the information with members of a Discord server to “discuss geopolitical affairs and current and historical wars”.
Teixeira’s age and junior rank have raised questions about why he had access to top-secret information and how he was able to leak the documents over several weeks without being detected. Many Congress members have pledged to seek answers about the issue.
Wednesday’s court filing by prosecutors said Teixeira, who was arrested in the small town of North Dighton, Massachusetts earlier this month, made threatening comments relating to weapons and murder online.
“In November 2022, the defendant stated that if he had his way, he would ‘kill a [expletive] ton of people’ because it would be ‘culling the weak minded’,” the prosecutors wrote.
They also said he was suspended from high school in 2018 for “remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school and racial threats”.
Prosecutors added that authorities had found a “virtual arsenal of weapons” at Teixeira’s primary and secondary residences — his mother’s and father’s homes — including “bolt-action rifles, rifles, AR and AK-style weapons, and a bazooka”.
Teixeira’s defence team, however, stressed that the weapons were “lawfully owned and properly stored”.
The defendant’s lawyers also tried to dismiss his online threats and the high school suspension, saying that he has not committed a “single act of violence”.
“The high school incident was thoroughly investigated, and he was allowed to return to school within a handful of days, having completed a professional psychiatric evaluation,” they wrote.
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Activists in North Carolina allege that DuPont has for decades fouled Cape Fear River. (photo: David Byron Keener/iStock)
Activists in North Carolina allege that DuPont has for decades fouled Cape Fear River. They want the UN Human Rights Commission to hold it accountable.
In a letter sent to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, Clean Cape Fear alleges that Dupont and its spin-off company Chemours have for decades contaminated their source of drinking water with carcinogenic chemicals. Among other things, the 36-page document, sent Thursday morning, asks that the commission deem the community’s pervasive pollution an infringement of international law.
“We live in one of the richest nations in the world, yet our basic human rights are being violated,” Emily Donovan, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear, said in a statement. “We refuse to be a sacrifice zone. Residents here are sick and dying and we continue to lack equitable access to safe water in our region, or the necessary health studies to truly understand the impact from our chronic PFAS exposures.”
The Cape Fear River provides water for 500,000 people in three counties. For three decades, unbeknownst to residents, the Fayetteville Works chemical plant owned first by Dupont and then by Chemours was slowly contaminating the river and local wells with PFAS chemicals. In 2017, the public, long confused by the commonplace occurrence of very rare illnesses, finally learned who was responsible when a local newspaper broke the story.
Chemours was made to pay a $12 million fine to the state and clean up its mess – but has yet to provide reparative assistance for the damage it caused. Now, the company has asked the state Department of Environmental Quality for a permit to expand its site, which sits 70 miles upstream from Wilmington,, a growing city of more than 117,000 people.
In a statement to Grist, Chemours said it has taken several steps to reduce emissions and remediate the pollution.
“In doing so, at our Fayetteville, North Carolina site active process air emissions of fluorinated compounds have reduced by more than 99 percent and the volume of fluorinated compounds reaching the Cape Fear River have reduced by approximately 97 percent,” the company said. “When the barrier wall project at the Fayetteville site is completed, the reductions will be even greater. Chemours supports science-based regulation; our remediation activity and emissions control technologies are grounded in the best available science and proven approaches. It is unfortunate to see misinformation campaigns like this continue to be aggressively advanced by groups unwilling to acknowledge the proven progress that has been made or the truth that not all PFAS originates from our site.”
Only in the past few decades have scientists begun to fully understand what PFAS does to the human body. The substances, called “forever chemicals” and used in all kinds of industrial processes, bioaccumulate in the body. That means even a series of small exposures, or exposure through the food chain, such as in contaminated fish, can lead to serious health problems down the line. Research has linked these chemicals to endocrine disruption, multiple forms of cancer, pregnancy complications, and an array of other chronic and dangerous health problems.
Clean Cape Fear claims in its letter to the UN that residents of the Cape Fear area have been exposed to more than 300 distinct PFAS chemicals. The region is home to one of the worst cases of PFAS contamination in the country.
Donovan, by her own admission, became an environmental activist only recently. She was a youth group director at a local church and a devout Christian, mostly concerned with the weekly Bible study she ran. But she began to realize that, during prayer meetings, students discussed the same things over and over.
“I noticed most students were asking heavy prayers,” she told Grist. “For terminal cancer in a parent, or a brother in the hospital for autoimmune issues.”
With seven other community members, she started Clean Cape Fear around a dining room table.
“This is my mission project now,” Donovan said. “This is what motivates me.”
Donovan says the contamination has not only impacted residents’ health, but also put a financial strain on the community, as local water utilities struggle to clean PFAS chemicals. The upgrades required to do so have resulted in sharp rate hikes. In the meantime, residents who buy bottled drinking water are incurring the costs of ensuring their own protection.
Together with the U.C. Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic, Clean Cape Fear is demanding that Chemours and DuPont be held accountable for all water treatment and cleanup costs still to come. They also demand that state authorities deny the expansion permit.
Claudia Polsky is the director of the law clinic. She led the creation of the letter, and hopes it leads to greater public appreciation of the dangers of PFAS. The European Union has already proposed a ban on the use of most PFAS chemicals, but in the U.S. some 200 million Americans live with PFAS in their drinking water. “There’s an underappreciation of the risk,” said Polsky. She added that when doctors in Cape Fear see patients for health problems that might stem from PFAS exposure, many of them don’t know what to test for.
Polsky believes their request to Marcos Orellana, the UN Special Rapporteur on Toxics and Human Rights, marks a milestone in the fight against PFAS. Though the UN has investigated PFAS contamination in other nations, this would be the first in the United States. Should Orellana, who has investigated and reported on a similar case in Veneto, Italy, agree to launch an inquiry, the next step is to alert Chemours, DuPont, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the state Department of Environmental Equality. Each would be asked to assume responsibility for the pollution and defend their actions. The complaint would be made public.
The communication asserts that the actions of DuPont and Chemours are illegal under international law. “DuPont and Chemours have violated the human right to clean water and a sustainable environment, the right to bodily integrity, the right to life and health, the right to information, and the right to access to justice and an effective remedy,” the document states. “As a signatory to relevant international instruments, the United States is legally obligated to protect these rights.”
Though the U.N. couldn’t force a response, Polsky says the allegation and inquiry would inspire public pressure for regulatory agencies to act. “We’re hoping it would create the conditions for the DEQ to deny the expansion permit,” she said.
But even if the U.S. were to take severe actions on PFAS, Polsky says companies are adept at finding ways to modify the chemical recipes they use in order to continue business as usual.
“It’s the crook one step ahead of the locksmith,” she said.
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