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The Kansas City Regional Fusion Center warned law enforcement of a “developing threat” — but with no specifics.
Now, Malm’s work is once again drawing the attention of a fusion center. “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” a new movie dramatizing Malm’s 2021 nonfiction book of the same name, sympathetically depicts the infrastructure sabotage by environmentalists. The film’s fictional protagonist, Theo, contracts leukemia after growing up in a Long Beach neighborhood with heavy pollution. She joins several others to strap a homemade bomb to an oil pipeline in West Texas.
In a report disseminated last week, another intelligence command center — this time in Kansas City, Missouri — quietly warned of a “developing threat” related to the movie. It was obtained by The Intercept via a source with access to law enforcement reporting, and the Kansas City Regional Fusion Center did not reply to a request for comment.
Again, however, this new report conceded that the intelligence center could not identify any specific threat — a contradiction that experts say speaks to the overbroad authority of state intelligence entities and the make-work required by these centers.
“The performance metric is the number of reports you write, rather than the accuracy of them,” Mike German, a retired FBI agent who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, said of fusion centers. “What do you do after you write reports on realistic threats? Pretty soon you have to start writing about imaginary ones. Lots come straight from the fever swamps of social media.”
The Missouri report goes a step further than Texas’s, since the film “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is fictional.
Another fusion center, the Colorado Information Analysis Center, recently issued a similar bulletin in anticipation of a student walkout to protest legislative inaction on gun violence, as The Intercept reported last week. The report did not identify any potential crime that might arise in relation to the protest. Defending its report, CIAC said that it was not monitoring the protesters and that the report was merely distributed for situational awareness.
“Fusion center leaders often say this type of reporting is for ‘situational awareness’ but then why send this type of report out broadly to the law enforcement community,” German said. “I am surprised how many of the fusion center products we see focus on protest activity, where the analysts acknowledge in the report itself that they have no indication that any criminal activity might take place.”
“The Kansas City Regional Fusion Center (KCRFC) has prepared the following Situational Awareness Bulletin,” the report, dated April 4, reads, “to provide information to partners concerning a developing threat targeting Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources (CIKR), especially oil and natural gas pipelines.” But in a separate caption, it notes “The KCRFC has no information on specific threats directed at the energy sector in this area.”
KCRFC is one of 80 fusion centers across the country, which were established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to combat terrorism by sharing intelligence with law enforcement partners. But fusion centers lack the traditional law enforcement requirement for a criminal predicate to exist in order to investigate something, German told The Intercept.
“Passing along ‘see something, say something’ leads is a significant part of what fusion centers do,” German said. “The concept of proactive Intelligence Led Policing and predictive policing is to forego traditional law enforcement reporting requirements, by not waiting for crime to occur in favor of passing tips and leads that might forewarn of potential future problems; so the normal criminal predicates were intentionally reduced or abandoned, leading to some of the low-quality, and often low-accuracy ‘intelligence’ reports we’ve seen.”
While KCRFC’s bulletin acknowledges that neither the film nor the book advocate for the targeting of people, it alludes to unspecified social media posts calling for more extreme tactics. “While the book and movie advocate for property destruction and targeted sabotage, not the targeting of people, some social media posts have indicated the tactics employed do not go far enough,” the bulletin states.
While Malm’s book draws a hard line between sabotage that only affects property and tactics that might harm people, the FBI makes no such distinction, referring to it all as “eco-terrorism.” “Animal rights/Environmental violent extremism” represents one of five domestic terrorism threat categories the U.S. government has focused on since 2019, per a report to Congress last year.
KCRFC cites a January 24, 2022, intelligence report by the Department of Homeland Security called “Domestic Violent Extremists Likely to Continue Physical Threats Against Electricity Infrastructure.” Though the DHS report is not publicly available, its date matches an assessment by the same agency that reportedly said they “have developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020.”
Fusion centers frequently share intelligence with DHS and countless other federal law enforcement agencies — which civil liberties advocates say dissolves the legal distinctions between state and federal authorities.
“Part of the problem is the overbroad mission,” German said. “Part of it is that there are so many fusion centers, on top of the FBI, DHS, DEA, etc. intelligence platforms, not to mention all the private intelligence sources, so everyone is either just re-hashing reports others wrote or trying to find something brand new.”
The KCRFC’s own bulletin appears to acknowledge that the film is protected by the First Amendment. “The KCRFC continues to recognize the constitutionally protected rights afforded to all people under the First Amendment,” the bulletin states. “KCRFC reports on only those activities where the potential use of rhetoric and/or propaganda could be used to incite violent or criminal acts.”
But experts say that law enforcement should not be interfering with anything protected by the First Amendment.
“I haven’t seen the movie, but my understanding is it’s not a literal step-by-step guide on how to blow up an oil pipeline,” Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told The Intercept. “Rather, it tells a story about environmental activists who went on a mission to sabotage a pipeline. That’s constitutionally protected artistic expression. If a movie or book lost First Amendment protection for portraying illegal activity, we’d lose a huge chunk of our culture’s artistic output.”
“Even if the movie gives viewers ideas on how to sabotage a pipeline, or conveys a message of approval of the character’s actions, that’s not enough to take it outside the First Amendment’s protection.”
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A package of the abortion medication mifepristone in a clinic in Carbondale, Ill. (photo: Erin Schaff/The New York Times)
The judges blocked the drug from being sent to patients through the mail and rolled back other steps the government had taken to ease access.
In its order, a three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit partly overruled Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas, who last week declared that the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone in 2000 was not valid, in essence saying that the drug should be pulled from the market.
The appellate court said its ruling would hold until the full case was heard on its merits.
In its order, the appellate panel said the F.D.A.’s approval of mifepristone could stand because too much time had passed for the plaintiffs, a consortium of groups and doctors opposed to abortion, to challenge that decision. The court also seemed to take into account the government’s view that removing a long-approved drug from the market would have “significant public consequences.”
But the appellate court said that it was not too late for the plaintiffs to challenge a set of steps the F.D.A. took beginning in 2016 that lifted restrictions and made it easier for more patients to have access to the pill.
The court also said that the government could not logically claim that the changes made since 2016 “were so critical to the public given that the nation operated — and mifepristone was administered to millions of women” before the old restrictions were eased.
Those changes approved use of the pill for up to 10 weeks into pregnancy instead of seven weeks, allowed it to be prescribed by some health providers other than doctors and permitted mifepristone to be mailed to patients instead of requiring it to be picked up from a health care provider in person.
Such steps significantly expanded access to medication abortion, which is now used in more than half of pregnancy terminations in the United States. It usually involves taking mifepristone — which blocks a hormone that allows a pregnancy to develop — followed one or two days later by another drug, misoprostol, which causes contractions similar to a miscarriage.
Judge Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has written critically of the Roe v. Wade decision, had stayed his order for seven days to give the F.D.A. time to appeal. On Monday, the F.D.A. had asked the appeals court to extend that stay, and the judges partly granted that request.
In the decision, which came just before midnight on Wednesday, two Trump-appointed judges voted to reimpose some of the restrictions that the F.D.A. had eased. The third judge, appointed by President George W. Bush, said she would essentially have granted the full request. All of those restrictions were temporarily reinstated.
The Justice Department is likely to appeal the order to the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs may also appeal to the Supreme Court and ask it to invalidate the initial approval of mifepristone.
The 42-page appeals court opinion appeared to accept several of the claims of the anti-abortion plaintiffs and used some of the terminology of abortion opponents, referring to medication abortion as “chemical abortion” and in one instance referring to a fetus or embryo as “an unborn child.”
In their lawsuit, the abortion opponents claim that mifepristone is unsafe, causing “cramping, heavy bleeding and severe pain,” and that the F.D.A. has ignored safety risks and never adequately evaluated the scientific evidence.
The F.D.A. vigorously disputes this claim, as do mainstream medical organizations. They say that bleeding and cramping are normal consequences of the process, a sign that the pregnancy tissue is being expelled, and cite years of scientific studies that show that serious complications are rare, resulting in less than 1 percent of patients needing hospitalization. The F.D.A. applies a special regulatory framework to mifepristone, meaning that it has been regulated much more strictly and studied more intensively than most other drugs.
In seeking a stay of Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling, lawyers from the Justice Department, representing the F.D.A., wrote, “There is no basis in science or fact for plaintiffs’ repeated claims that mifepristone is unsafe when used in the manner approved by F.D.A.”
The appeals court did not evaluate all of the safety arguments in the case, but it said that the F.D.A. “cannot deny that serious complications from mifepristone” occur and said that the agreement form that the agency requires patients to sign stipulates that the drug can carry risks. The court also said that the F.D.A. was incorrect in saying that mifepristone was comparable in safety to ibuprofen. “F.D.A.’s own documents show that mifepristone bears no resemblance to ibuprofen,” the court said.
The appeals court also seemed to agree with the plaintiffs that a 19th-century law called the Comstock Act prevents the mailing of drugs used for abortions. The Justice Department said in a recent memo that the act prohibits mailing the pills only if the sender knows they will be used for an illegal abortion, not if the patient is in a state where abortion is legal.
The appeals court wrote that “merely by knowingly making use of the mail for a prohibited abortion item” would violate that law.
The court also disagreed with the F.D.A.’s argument that the plaintiffs did not have legal standing to file the lawsuit. Legal standing requires that plaintiffs incur damage or harm from the actions of the party they are suing.
The plaintiffs said they were injured because they treated some women who needed additional care after taking abortion pills, requiring the doctors to divert medical resources they would have used for other patients and to sometimes act against their moral views and perform a surgical procedure after an incomplete medication abortion. The F.D.A. said that those claims of harm were too far removed from the agency’s actions in regulating mifepristone and that the definition of a doctor’s job was to care for patients so the doctors could not be harmed by doing the job they were trained to do.
The appeals court said that “as a result of F.D.A.’s failure to regulate this potent drug, these doctors have had to devote significant time and resources to caring for women experiencing mifepristone’s harmful effects. This harm is sufficiently concrete.”
The opinion added that the plaintiffs “also face an injury from the irreconcilable choice between performing their jobs and abiding by their consciences.”
The case has attracted interest beyond the groups that usually weigh in on abortion cases. On Monday, more than 400 pharmaceutical industry leaders and investors issued a scathing condemnation of the ruling and demanded that it be reversed.
“If courts can overturn drug approvals without regard for science or evidence, or for the complexity required to fully vet the safety and efficacy of new drugs, any medicine is at risk for the same outcome as mifepristone,” they wrote. Leaving the fate of medicines in the hands of jurists, they argued, would have a chilling effect on drug development in the United States, reducing incentives for investment and innovation.
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Nabila Massrali, EU spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. (photo: AFP)
"Killing prisoners of war is a very serious breach of the Geneva Convention and demonstrates once more Russia's complete disregard of international law, in particular, international humanitarian law," Massrali told reporters.
"The EU reiterates its firm commitment to holding to account all perpetrators and accomplices of war crimes committed in connection with Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine," added the EU spokesperson.
Late on April 11, a video was posted on social media, which appeared to show a Russian fighter cutting off the head of a Ukrainian soldier with a knife. A voice heard at the beginning of the video indicates that the victim might have still been alive when the alleged execution started. The video has not been verified, and the alleged victim is yet to be identified.
President Volodymyr Zelensky called on international leaders to react to the alleged execution while Ukraine's Security Service launched an official investigation.
Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the video with the supposed brutal execution of a Ukrainian POW emphasizes the need to exclude Russia from the UN Security Council and the organization in general.
"It's absurd that Russia, which is worse than ISIS, is presiding over the UNSC. Russian terrorists must be kicked out of Ukraine and the UN and be held accountable for their crimes," Kuleba said on Twitter.
Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu also commented on the footage. "Video is circulating on Twitter showing Russians beheading a Ukrainian soldier... And yet we are literally talking about the need for dialogue and competing against each other in the Olympics? What are we doing here?"
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Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox. Corp. (photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)
Judge Eric Davis moved to sanction Fox News after the network withheld evidence in discovery, and is considering further punitive action
Dominion and Fox are in the throes of a $1.6 billion dollar defamation suit over the network’s attempts to link the voting systems company to unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud. The sanction came in a pretrial hearing ahead of a high-profile jury trial slated to begin next Monday.
Abby Grossberg, a former Tucker Carlson producer who has claimed the network coerced her testimony regarding the lawsuit, reportedly created recordings of conversations she had with several Trump attorneys boosting allegations of Dominion’s involvement in voter fraud schemes. The recordings were not made available to Dominion during discovery.
In a statement provided to Rolling Stone, a Fox News spokesperson wrote that the network “produced the supplemental information from Ms. Grossberg when we first learned it.”
Judge Davis’ sanction against the network will allow Dominion to conduct further depositions on Fox’s dime. “I am very concerned … that there have been misrepresentations to the court,” Davis reportedly said during the pretrial hearing. “This is very serious.”
Davis further indicated that he may appoint a special master to conduct a review of whether or not Fox’s lawyers made “untrue or negligent” statements regarding evidence in the case.
According to Dominion’s lawyers, Fox also misrepresented Rupert Murdoch’s position in the company, claiming the network concealed Murdoch’s role as an officer. “It’s been represented more than once to me that he’s not an officer of Fox News,” Davis said. “I need to feel comfortable that when you represent something to me, it’s the truth. I’m not very happy right now. I don’t know why this is such a difficult thing.”
Fox’s spokesperson indicated that “Rupert Murdoch has been listed as executive chairman of FOX News in our SEC filings for several years and this filing was referenced by Dominion’s own attorney during his deposition.”
Grossberg filed a pair of lawsuits in March alleging that her former employer pressured and manipulated her into giving misleading testimony to investigators. Fox initially attempted to have a gag order placed on Grossberg in order to prevent her from publicly discussing the suit, but later dropped the request.
“Based on what I understood and took away from the deposition preparation sessions I had with Fox’s legal team which were coercive and intimidating … I felt that I had to do everything possible to avoid becoming the ‘star witness’ for Dominion or else I would be seriously jeopardizing my career at Fox News and would be subjected to worse terms and conditions of employment than male employees as I understood it,” Grossberg wrote in her complaint.
According to the filing, during preparatory sessions for her deposition, Fox’s attorneys responded with “emphatical head shakes ‘no,’ [or] shook their heads whenever Ms. Grossberg answered hypothetical questions in a manner that was truthful but implicated others or needed elaboration.” Grossberg claims that the reactions from Fox’s attorneys led her to believe that she needed to avoid problematic questions or say something equivocal for Fox News to continue to ‘have her back.’”
Fox’s spokesperson told Rolling Stone that attorneys for the network had “produced the supplemental information from Ms. Grossberg when we first learned it.”
On March 31, Davis ruled in a partial summary judgment that Fox News’ statements about Dominion in the aftermath of the election were categorically false and denied the network’s effort to have the $1.6 billion defamation suit thrown out.
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Dominion has accused Fox of smearing its reputation by linking it to a nonexistent conspiracy to rig voting machines in the 2020 presidential election. (photo: John Taggart/The New York Times)
Judge Eric Davis also said an investigation was likely into Fox’s handling of documents and whether it had withheld details about Rupert Murdoch’s corporate role.
The rebuke came after lawyers for Dominion, which is suing for defamation, revealed a number of instances in which Fox’s lawyers had not turned over evidence in a timely manner. That evidence included recordings of the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo talking with former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, which Dominion said had been turned over only a week ago.
In imposing the sanction on Fox, Judge Eric M. Davis of the Delaware Superior Court ruled that if Dominion had to do additional depositions, or redo any, then Fox would have to “do everything they can to make the person available, and it will be at a cost to Fox.”
He also said he would very likely appoint a special master — an outside lawyer — to investigate Fox’s handling of discovery of documents and the question of whether Fox had inappropriately withheld details about the scope of Rupert Murdoch’s role. Since Dominion filed its suit in early 2021, Fox had argued that Mr. Murdoch and Fox Corporation, the parent company, should not be part of the case because Mr. Murdoch, the chair, and other senior executives had nothing to do with running Fox News. But in the past few days, Fox disclosed to Dominion that Mr. Murdoch was a corporate officer at Fox News.
Dominion, a voting technology company, accused Fox and some of the network’s executives and hosts of smearing its reputation by linking it to a nonexistent conspiracy to rig voting machines in the 2020 presidential election. Fox had said that it was just reporting on newsworthy allegations from Mr. Trump, who was then the president, as well as his lawyers and supporters, who told Fox’s hosts and producers that they would prove their allegations in court.
Jury selection starts on Thursday, and the trial is scheduled to begin on Monday. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Dominion would avail itself of the judge’s ruling allowing its lawyers to conduct additional depositions. But it was clear from Judge Davis’s stern reprimand of Fox’s lawyers on Wednesday — and similarly piqued remarks from him during another hearing on Tuesday — that he was losing patience.
The judge told Fox’s lawyers to retain all internal communications, starting from March 20 of this year, that related to Mr. Murdoch’s role at Fox News. That was the date the lawyers submitted a letter to Judge Davis asking that Mr. Murdoch and other Fox Corporation executives not be forced to testify at the trial in person, saying they had “limited knowledge of pertinent facts.” The letter did not mention that Mr. Murdoch was also a Fox News executive.
Judge Davis said he would weigh whether any additional sanctions should be placed on Fox.
He also said he was very concerned that there had been “misrepresentations to the court.”
“This is very serious,” Judge Davis said.
Davida Brook, a lawyer for Dominion, told the court that they were still receiving relevant documents from Fox, with the trial just days away.
“We keep on learning about more relevant information from individuals other than Fox,” she said. “And to be honest we don’t really know what to do about that, but that is the situation we find ourselves in.”
She pointed to one email that had recently been handed over, between Ms. Bartiromo and Ms. Powell on Nov. 7, 2020. In the email, Ms. Powell was forwarding evidence to Ms. Bartiromo that Dominion said was proof Fox had acted recklessly: an email from a woman Ms. Powell relied on as a source who exhibited signs of delusion, claiming, for instance, that she was aware of voter fraud because she had special powers, including the ability to time travel.
“I just spoke to Eric and told him you gave very imp info,” Ms. Bartiromo wrote back to Ms. Powell, most likely referring to Eric Trump, Mr. Trump’s son.
Ms. Brook also played two recordings for the court of pre-interviews, which are preliminary conversations before an on-air interview, conducted by Ms. Bartiromo that Ms. Brook said were received only after they were revealed in legal complaints filed by Abby Grossberg, a former Fox News producer who is suing the network.
In one of the recordings, on Nov. 8, 2020, Ms. Bartiromo asks Mr. Giuliani about Dominion’s software. In it, he admits that he doesn’t have hard evidence to back up the claim that the software could be manipulated, saying it was “being analyzed right now.” When Ms. Bartiromo asks about a conspiracy theory circulating at the time that claimed Dominion was connected to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, Mr. Giuliani says: “Yeah, I’ve read that. I can’t prove that yet.”
A Fox News spokeswoman said in a statement on Wednesday: “As counsel explained to the court, Fox produced the supplemental information from Ms. Grossberg when we first learned it.”
Justin Nelson, another lawyer for Dominion, told Judge Davis that had Fox Corporation, the parent company, been quicker to share the information about Mr. Murdoch’s role as an officer of Fox News, the universe of documents Dominion could have obtained during discovery from him and other Fox Corporation executives would have been much larger. He also said that Fox might have failed to produce relevant documents.
“We have been litigating based upon this false premise that Rupert Murdoch wasn’t an officer of Fox News,” he said.
The question of whether Mr. Murdoch made decisions as a corporate officer of Fox News cuts to the heart of Dominion’s case. It has tried to prove — and Fox has repeatedly denied — that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox Corporation, were closely involved in overseeing Fox News coverage of the 2020 election. Their decisions, Dominion has argued, directly affected what Fox broadcast about the voting technology company and, more broadly, fed a climate inside the network where hosts and producers amplified misinformation as part of a plan to win back viewers who had stopped watching after Mr. Trump’s loss.
Proving so would mean that the larger Fox Corporation — not just Fox News — could also be found liable for defaming Dominion.
Mr. Nelson argued that the case should be split in two so that Dominion lawyers could separately pursue action against Fox Corporation now that Dominion could obtain more information from executives. Judge Davis declined, but he expressed concern that Fox’s legal team had not been forthcoming with the information, despite being asked multiple times whether Mr. Murdoch was a corporate officer for Fox News.
“I need people to tell me the truth,” he said. “And by the way, omission is a lie.”
Dan K. Webb, a lawyer for Fox, pushed back on the assertion from Dominion, saying that both he and even Mr. Murdoch didn’t realize he also held the executive chair role at Fox News.
“On a day-to-day basis, Mr. Rupert Murdoch had nothing to do with making decisions with what goes on the air on Fox News,” Mr. Webb said.
In an emailed statement, a Fox News spokeswoman said: “Rupert Murdoch has been listed as executive chairman of Fox News in our S.E.C. filings since 2019 and this filing was referenced by Dominion’s own attorney during his deposition.”
Judge Davis admonished Fox’s lawyers, saying he had previously asked for clarity on who had corporate responsibilities at Fox News but had not heard back.
“What do I do with attorneys that aren’t straightforward with me?” he asked.
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Justin J. Pearson stands with state Rep. Gloria Johnson during a rally in Memphis, Tenn., before a vote to reinstate him to the Tennessee House on April 12, 2023. (photo: Katie Riordan /WNKO)
Shelby County is home to Memphis, the area Pearson represents. Wednesday, in a 7-0 vote, the board decided to reinstate Pearson while six of the 13 members, including Republicans, were absent from the meeting.
While talking with reporters after the vote, Pearson says he will head to the Capitol in Nashville Wednesday night to be in place for Thursday's House session.
Chairman Mickell M. Lowery of the commission, who put forth the resolution to reinstate Pearson, said he had heard from people across the country who disagree with the expulsion.
"I think that it's important that the people of District 86 are represented by the person that they voted overwhelming to have in the office," he said in an interview.
Wednesday afternoon, Pearson led a march from from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis to the Shelby County Commission building telling the rally-goers to "show me what Democracy looks like."
"This is the Democracy that is going to transform a broken nation and a broken state into the place that God calls for it to be," he said. "This is the Democracy that is going to lift up the victims of gun violence instead of supporting the NRA and the gun lobbyists."
Expulsions put a spotlight on race in Tennessee
Pearson's reinstatement is the latest twist in a political battle that ignited accusations of racism and toxic partisanship: Republican House members, largely white and male, employed a disciplinary tool little used since the 1800s to expel Pearson and another Black Democrat, Rep. Justin Jones, while sparing Rep. Gloria Johnson, who is white.
The Republican supermajority voted to punish Pearson and Jones, of Nashville, after they — alongside Johnson of Knoxville — broke procedural rules to lead a protest from the House floor calling for gun law reforms.
When asked about the differing outcomes, Johnson replied, "It might have to do with the color of our skin."
Pearson and Jones are returning to the legislature on an interim basis, but they can both run in a special election to regain the seat until the next general election, in 2024.
Pearson and Jones were kicked out of the House on April 6. Jones was reinstated to his seat on Monday.
Commission leader says expulsion was hasty
As he announced Wednesday's special meeting, Lowery said he understood the Republican leadership's desire to send "a strong message" to Pearson and Jones. But he also said it was a hasty process that brought an "unfortunate" outcome.
The commission meeting is the second time Pearson has faced a vote on his political future in just three months. He won office in January, in a special election to replace state Rep. Barbara Cooper — who won reelection despite dying two weeks before Election Day.
Pearson and Jones now have high profiles
"It is a throwback to our racist past," political analyst Otis Sanford, a professor at the University of Memphis, said of the expulsion vote, speaking to member station WKNO in Memphis.
But Sanford predicted the expulsions would lead young people in Tennessee to get more involved with their state's politics. He also said the lawmakers who were singled out could have bright futures.
"On a more positive note, both Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, I think, showed the voters in their districts exactly why they should be reelected," Sanford said. "But also, it seems like they made themselves look like future political stars nationally."
Calls for gun laws sparked lawmakers' protest
Pearson, Jones and Johnson, whom supporters call "The Tennessee Three," took to the House floor days after a 28-year-old assailant shot and killed six people at the Covenant elementary school in Nashville. As crowds of students and parents amassed at the legislature to urge new gun controls, the three lawmakers accused their Republican colleagues of inaction in the face of an epidemic of mass shootings.
"We are losing our democracy in Tennessee," Pearson told WPLN before the vote to expel him from the House. "This is another example of the erosion of democracy because we spoke up for gun reform. Because we spoke up for people and children who will never become state legislators, who will never graduate from high school and never get engaged, never be able to see or protest for their own lives because they've been killed by gun violence."
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee took up some changes to gun laws on Tuesday, asking the General Assembly to expand the state's "order of protection" law (which is similar to other states' "red flag" laws that are meant to prevent anyone who poses a threat to themselves or others from accessing guns.)
Lee also issued an executive order that is intended to make the state's background check process more effective.
Like most mass killers, the Nashville shooter acquired the guns they used legally. Nashville Mayor John Cooper has said stronger laws could have prevented three mass shootings in his city, including the recent tragedy at the Covenant School.
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Saguaro Cactus near Tucson, Arizona. (photo: Lindsey Nubern)
Heat, drought and an invasive grass are driving wildfires killing the giant saguaros in Arizona, raising concerns about how the cactus will recover without human intervention.
Each saguaro planted was a small part of a big project from the conservation and birding group, which is planting 14,000 saguaros over the next two years to help restore the cactuses’ dwindling population. At the same time, they are removing 1,000 acres of an invasive grass that has helped fuel wildfires that have been more destructive across the Sonoran Desert in recent years, particularly to the giant cactuses.
“Saguaros aren’t regenerating and establishing populations in the wild anymore in the last 24 years,” Aya Pickett, a restoration project manager with the Tucson Audubon Society, told the group of volunteers before they set off to plant cactuses. “They really require specific weather conditions. A really good monsoon season. One really good winter. And then another really good monsoon season after that.”
Because of changing weather patterns due to climate change, she said, that hasn’t happened for over two decades. That means when a saguaro dies in the wild, there’s frequently no new one to replace it. With hotter temperatures, dryer landscapes and bigger and hotter wildfires, thousands of saguaros have died in recent years. Without human intervention, desert ecologists said, their ability to recover in some areas is unlikely.
The Tucson Audubon Society has received just over $500,000 in grant money from the Wildlife Conservation Society and the U.S. Forest Service, making its saguaro project one of the biggest restoration efforts in the Sonoran Desert. The money will help fund planting thousands of saguaros, mostly in areas recovering from wildfires in the Tonto and Coronado national forests, and developing bird nesting boxes to help replace the habitat once provided by saguaros that have died.
Most of the money, though, will go not toward planting cactuses, but ripping out buffelgrass, an invasive species from West Africa brought into the region as cattle forage. The National Park Service has named it the “archenemy of the Sonoran Desert.”
Saguaros planted by the Tucson Audubon Society are just a few inches tall but old enough to develop spines to protect themselves from feasting rodents. Once mature, they are the largest cactus in the Americas, growing up to 40 feet tall with dozens of elbowed arms, but it takes decades to get there. Saguaros take around 35 years to even begin flowering, decades longer to grow out their iconic arms, and more than a century to reach adulthood.
Icon of the American Southwest, they are integral to the region’s culture. For the Tohono O’odham nation, it’s a sacred plant and its fruit has been harvested for generations as a staple food source during the desert’s hot summers. The cactus even has its own national park.
The saguaro is also a keystone species of the Sonoran Desert. More than 100 other species rely on it for their survival. Gilded flickers and Gila woodpeckers make nests within the cactus, which other birds take over once they leave.
Various insects subsist on its nectar during the summer “when the rest of the desert is brown and crispy,” said Jonathan Horst, director of conservation and research at the Tucson Audubon Society, who is leading the project. “It’s like the worst of the worst of times,” Horst said. “And then suddenly you’ve got this amazing crop of flowers with nectar and pollen.”
While the saguaro isn’t in danger of going extinct, “they’re definitely in danger of disappearing in large sections of the landscape, especially after wildfires,” he said, “and having incredibly long periods before they can re-establish.” Without the giant cactuses, other species that depend on them will struggle. And the landscape of the Sonoran Desert will change.
Invasive Grass Drives Change in the Desert
The Mercer Spring Fire didn’t draw much notice when it broke out in the Catalina Mountains near Tucson in 2019. But the images of saguaros burning caught Horst’s attention.
“It was the first fire that was predominantly fueled by buffelgrass,” he said, which thrives on wildfire, which it is spreading to habitats with species like saguaros that haven’t evolved to endure the blazes.
Around the same time as the Mercer Spring Fire, the Tucson Audubon Society had been monitoring the desert purple martin, a swallow that nests only in cavities they find in the oldest saguaros, which are typically around 150 years old.
Horst realized that if buffelgrass wasn’t contained and restoration efforts made to establish lost saguaros, the Sonoran Desert ecosystem could see serious change and desert purple martin populations would likely plummet.
For the growth of saguaro populations, it’s a numbers game, said Ben Wilder, a desert ecologist and the director of Next Generation Sonoran Desert Researchers. As a succulent, it pulls in resources when it can—particularly during monsoon seasons—and then stores them for months or even years. It flowers each year and its fruits each have a couple of hundred seeds, he said.
That means that across the landscape, you have billions of seeds. But the Southwestern drought of the past 20 years has led few of those seeds to grow into new saguaros, something Wilder said isn’t unexpected.
This could currently be a saguaro establishment period thanks to recent rainy seasons, Wilder said, but another wildfire could very well take out what has been gained. Wildfires are “novel” to the Sonoran Desert, Wilder said, but species like buffelgrass are driving more of them, fueling bigger and hotter fires and then quickly growing back to serve as tinder for more fires.
Saguaros, especially the young ones, are poorly adapted to fires, he said. One blaze can wipe out a saguaro recruitment event that occurs only every few decades, which “could be catastrophic to their ability to produce and to maintain populations,” Wilder said.
That has complications for other species as well. After a bad fire, Horst said, there could be a 150-year gap before new saguaros can replace what was lost and support the desert purple martin.
“We’re looking at a future that will be more and more difficult for saguaros to get established,” Horst said.
The buffelgrass does more than just fuel fires. It changes the landscape, too. Peter Breslin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill at the University of Arizona and editor of The Cactus and Succulent Journal, said the lab has begun researching the effect the invasive grass is having on saguaros. They’ve yet to fully analyze their data, but Breslin said when buffelgrass proliferates, other native species seem to struggle.
Saguaros often rely on other plant species to provide shade and shelter that helps the cactus flourish when they are young, he said. That’s why the Tucson Audubon Society plans to plant them as often as they can under nursing trees.
But the buffelgrass is changing that by allowing fires to burn away some of the larger plants that the cactuses depend on. Parts of Tumamoc Hill, Breslin said, are “shifting from Sonora upland to desert grassland. That’s a massive ecological change.”
Desert grasslands, which typically occur in valleys and basins, can spread invasive, fire-dependent grass species that fuel bigger and hotter blazes in a landscape known for its long-living vegetation that has lived for centuries without frequent wildfires
“You just stand there and you can see it,” he said. “There’s no denying it.”
The radically different life cycles and time frames of the grass and the cactus are speeding change.
Things happen slowly in the desert, Breslin said. It’s not unheard of for saguaros to not regenerate for decades and then recover their population once the right weather conditions return. But the invasive grasses are bringing rapid change to the slow-moving ecosystem.
“That’s the general doom of the Southwest,” he said.
That makes the Tucson Audubon Society’s project a crucial restoration project for the Sonoran Desert.
But recovery for the cactuses with raised arms will be tough. In the burn scars that need to be replanted, other vegetation the saguaros depend on may have also died in the flames, Breslin said, while buffelgrass that could bring more blazes is challenging to remove.
But there are few other options for saving the cactus ecosystem.
“Unless there’s human intervention, I don’t see a path forward based on soil biology for (saguaros) to reestablish themselves back in those areas that have turned into what has regressed to savanna grassland,” Horst said.
Over the course of two hours, the volunteers and staff at the Tucson Audubon Society’s Mason Center planted a few dozen young saguaros and logged their locations to monitor them over the coming years, a small step toward planting thousands of the iconic cactuses across Arizona.
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