17 April 23
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
Even a year ago, the idea that corporate price gouging played a major role in the inflation crisis was a crazy, left-wing talking point. Now it’s the claim of central bankers and mainstream economists.
From the start, left-leaning economists, news outlets, and politicians have argued that corporate price gouging has spurred our current cost-of-living problems — that firms weren’t just passing on their own higher costs to consumers, but using the many headlines about inflation to mark up prices more than necessary and quietly make a tidy profit. This was largely dismissed by establishment voices as a left-wing excuse to bash corporations, even as corporate profits soared to record levels and executives explicitly told investors that this is exactly what they were doing.
But as is so often the case, what was once a supposedly fringe, kooky left-wing position is now being recognized as reality. Take last month’s testimony from Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. Asked by Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, if workers’ wages and benefits could keep growing steadily in a scenario where inflation was tamed and corporate profits fell, Powell replied that this was possible “in the shorter term.” It was a major admission: Powell’s anti-inflation strategy has been explicitly to “get wages down,” yet here he was saying that wages could keep growing if the country was to get out of its inflation woes — as long as the current sky-high corporate profits took a hit.
This comes after comments in January from then Fed vice chair Lael Brainard that “wages do not appear to be driving inflation in a 1970s-style wage-price spiral,” and that “retail markups in a number of sectors” are creating what might be called “a price-price spiral” instead. (Brainard is now the head of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council). That month also saw the release of a Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City paper that concluded that “markup growth was a major contributor to inflation in 2021,” being responsible for as much as half of that year’s inflation rate.
This seems to be taking hold in Europe, too. Reuters reported that in February, twenty-six European Central Bank (ECB) officials gathered at a retreat in Finland to discuss the matter, with more than two dozen slides’ worth of data presented to the group showing that company profits were growing bigger and bigger and were also outpacing wage growth, partly thanks to firms’ ability to set prices. Since then, a host of European policy makers have made similar points publicly, including ECB president Christine Lagarde and Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey.
At a March speech in Frankfurt, ECB executive board member Fabio Panetta warned that “opportunistic behaviour by firms could also delay the fall in core inflation,” and that “some producers have been exploiting the uncertainty” created by inflation to pump up their profit margins. “We should monitor the risk that a profit-price spiral could make core inflation stickier,” he urged.
Later that month, ECB economists noted the unusual fact that business profits were still going up despite a cyclical economic slowdown, arguing that the cost rises companies were facing in making their products “also made it easier for firms to increase their profit margins, because they make it harder to tell whether higher prices are caused by higher costs or higher margins.” They concluded that “the effect of profits on domestic price pressures has been exceptional from a historical perspective.”
This seems to be recognized across the continent. The central bankers of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have recently made the same points as these ECB officials, cautioning that “price hikes exceeded cost rises in several sectors” and had contributed to inflation, and promising to watch for a “profit-inflationary spiral.”
Even economists at profit-driven investment banks are sounding the alarm. “Today’s price inflation is more a product of profits than wages,” UBS Global Wealth Management chief economist Paul Donovan wrote in November, charging that firms had “taken advantage of circumstances to expand profit margins.”
More recently, in April, Albert Edwards, global strategist at Société Générale, France’s third largest bank, expressed disbelief at the “unprecedented” and “astonishing” ways that big business had used the inflation-driving disruptions of the past few years as an “excuse” to run up “super-normal profit margins.” Calling for price controls, he warned that this behavior, coupled with the way ordinary workers are being made to foot the bill for these excesses, could “inflame social unrest” and lead to “the end of capitalism.”
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have put forward bills to hold down firms’ price hikes and claw back their resulting profits. But because discussing the role of corporate price gouging in the inflation crisis has been rendered virtually taboo the past few years, and because the Fed’s limited tool set only lets it attack workers’ wages instead of firms’ profits, these ideas haven’t gotten much traction. Instead, the US central bank is persisting with a strategy that its own staff are predicting will tip the country into recession.
If and when that happens, we’ll no doubt see an uptick in the popular anger Edwards warns about, especially if that downturn is met with more bailouts for the rich while workers are once more told to grit their teeth and make do with scraps. The jury’s out on whether the second part of Edwards’s prediction will come true — but the Federal Reserve sure seems dead set on finding out.
READ MORE 
Former President Donald Trump sought a four-week delay in the civil rape and defamation trial stemming from a lawsuit by writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump denies the allegations. (photo: Alex Wroblewski/AFP)
A lawyer for Trump had argued that the former president should be allowed a “cooling off” period following his recent historic indictment by a Manhattan grand jury.
Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina asked U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in a letter last week to postpone the trial in the lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, scheduled to start April 25, until the end of May. Carroll’s lawsuit alleges that Trump raped her at a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s, which Trump has repeatedly denied.
Tacopina argued that his client should be allowed a “cooling off” period following his recent historic indictment by a Manhattan grand jury in a case involving hush money payments made during his 2016 presidential campaign, which drew a surge of media coverage.
In a 10-page opinion denying Trump’s request on Monday, Kaplan wrote that “there is no justification for an adjournment.”
“This case is entirely unrelated to the state prosecution," Kaplan wrote. "The suggestion that the recent media coverage of the New York indictment — coverage significantly (though certainly not entirely) invited or provoked by Mr. Trump’s own actions — would preclude selection of a fair and impartial jury on April 25 is pure speculation. So too is his suggestion that a month’s delay of the start of this trial would ‘cool off’ anything, even if any ‘cooling off’ were necessary.”
Kaplan also rejected the notion that delaying the trial would decrease the possibility of “negative publicity” before the trial. In the request to delay the trial, Tacopina argued that the influx of media coverage of Trump’s indictment and arraignment could taint the jury pool.
Kaplan wrote, “It is quite important to remember [also] that postponements in circumstances such as this are not necessarily unmixed blessings from the standpoint of a defendant who is hoping for the dissipation of what he regards, or says he regards, as negative publicity. Events happen during postponements. Sometimes they can make matters worse.”
Kaplan also noted that “at least some portion” of recent media coverage of Trump’s indictment “was of his own doing” and that the alleged sexual conduct at the heart of the Manhattan district attorney’s case, which involves adult film star Stormy Daniels’ allegations that she had an affair with Trump — accusations that Trump denies — and was paid to keep quiet, is “dramatically different” from Carroll’s allegations of rape by the former president.
Kaplan concluded that there is a “possibility that this latest eve-of-trial request for a postponement is a delay tactic” by Trump and would disrupt the jury panel summoned more than three weeks ago as well as court personnel involved in making preparations, including security arrangements, for the trial. He noted that Carroll is 79 years old and her case has been pending for three years, and that both parties are entitled to a fair trial.
Tacopina and Carroll’s lawyers declined NBC News’ request for comment. A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kaplan’s ruling comes after a Washington, D.C., appeals court ruled that it did not have enough facts to decide whether Trump was acting as president when he accused the former Elle magazine columnist in June 2019 of lying about the alleged encounter.
It sent the case back to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, which last September asked whether under local law Trump made his comments in his role as president or in his personal capacity as Carroll argued.
READ MORE 
Smoke rises from a central neighborhood of Khartoum, Sudan. (photo: AP)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The United Nations, the African Union, the United States, Russia and China are all calling for a ceasefire in Sudan, after fighting between the Sudanese military and a rival paramilitary force have left nearly 100 civilians dead since Saturday. Hundreds of civilians have been injured. The actual death toll is believed to be much higher. The heaviest fighting has been in the capital Khartoum around the Republican Palace, the army headquarters and the international airport.
The fighting has pitted Sudan’s military, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against a powerful paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, led by Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan, known as “Hemedti.” General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has been the de facto leader of Sudan since the overthrow of the longtime ruler Omar al-Bashir in April 2019. Mohamed Hamdan is a former commander of the janjaweed militias, which was responsible for murders, rapes and torture in Sudan’s Darfur region. The fighting has dashed hopes of a civilian-led, democratically elected government, a key demand of protesters who led the mass mobilizations four years ago that led to al-Bashir’s ouster. The fighting stems in part from a dispute over how the paramilitary Rapid Suppport Forces would be integrated into the Sudanese military.
The deadly clashes have also impacted humanitarian efforts in Sudan. In North Darfur, three employees of the World Food Programme were killed, forcing the U.N. agency to temporarily halt all operations in Sudan. In addition, a U.N. humanitarian plane was significantly damaged at Sudan’s airport in Khartoum on Sunday.
We go now to Khartoum, where we’re joined by the Sudanese activist Marine Alneel.
We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, Marine. Can you explain what’s happening in your city, in the capital of Sudan, in Khartoum?
MARINE ALNEEL: Good morning, Amy Goodman.
As I’m speaking to you right now from Khartoum, we are hearing airstrikes. We’re hearing fighter jets. We’re hearing different kinds of explosions that we’re not aware what are they exactly. I think what is not clear, when we’re saying — when in the international media we’re talking about the clashes being around the military headquarters, around the presidential palace and around other military buildings, that these buildings are in the middle of the city, very close by to residential areas. Not meters away from any of these buildings, there are neighborhoods that are populaced. There are many residents living there. And these clashes are happening in between these buildings. The people, the civilians, are caught in the middle of the clashes and are being affected. And the casualties, as you said, are probably much higher than reported. These people are not able to reach hospitals. We’re not able to reach medical attention. Many have been shot on their ways to hospitals and medical attention. And the streets are not safe.
The ceasefire that was announced yesterday had absolutely no manifestation on the ground. And I think the Sudanese people were aware of that. The Rapid Support Forces, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the U.N. — all the parties that were announcing this ceasefire or the truce that was supposed to provide safe routes — are not credible for the Sudanese people. And it was shown to us. When 4 p.m. came, the time for the truce, actually, the explosions were louder. There were many more gunfires that were being heard by residents of Khartoum. And people were frantically trying to warn each other to not believe the ceasefire, to not go out of their houses, to stay sheltering in place.
AMY GOODMAN: I am so sorry you’re speaking to us under such duress. I wanted to play for you Sudan’s former Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok urging warring parties to reach a ceasefire.
ABDALLA HAMDOK: [translated] I speak to you today as our country faces the danger of separation, and I say to you that when a bullet is fired from a weapon, it cannot tell the difference between the attacker and those being attacked, and the victims are the Sudanese people. My first message is to General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the leaders of the Sudanese military and to Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo and the leaders of the Rapid Support Forces. The exchange of fire must stop immediately, and the voice of reason must rule. Everyone will lose, and there is no victory when it is on the top of the bodies of our people.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, he’s the former prime minister, for a very brief period of time. But for people who are not understanding this conflict and what happened after Bashir was thrown out in April of 2019, go back in time and explain how what we’re seeing today is unfolding, Marine.
MARINE ALNEEL: The 2019 popular revolution ousted President Omar al-Bashir. And immediately, the military took over, and the political powers at the time, the Forces of Freedom and Change, immediately entered a negotiation with the military, causing a lot of frustration amongst the people, who have given their lives and souls to the revolution, as we knew that this negotiations do not meet our demands. We did not want to enter into negotiations. We wanted an immediate exit from the power when it comes to the military, and we wanted an immediate transition of power to a civilian government. However, the negotiations are what led us to this moment, and we hear statements such as the one that we just heard from former Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok — we hear them with a lot of frustration, because this is the transitional government that when it was in power empowered the Sudanese Armed Forces and empowered the Rapid Support Forces and further legitimized them. And this is what led us to a situation of a full-blown conflict.
AMY GOODMAN: So, on Sunday, Sudan’s fighting factions agreed to a three-hour humanitarian pause, from 4:00 to 7:00 in the afternoon. Did that actually happen? That’s simply an indication of what could happen. And talk about all the different countries that are now weighing in, if that matters.
MARINE ALNEEL: The truce did not manifest on the ground at all. There was continuous airstrikes and gunshots and explosions being heard by people sheltering in place. And we did not think it was credible. We did not think it was going to happen. And they proved us right, that they are not serious about this truce, the same way that they are not serious in their interest for the well-being of the Sudanese people.
And as for the foreign entities, the regimes that are backing the Rapid Support Forces or the Sudanese Armed Forces, which have switched sides, you could say that maybe for the time being the Rapid Support Forces is backed by Russia, while the Sudanese Armed Forces is backed by Egypt. There are other players, such as the United States or the United Arab Emirates. And all of these anti-democratic regimes that are backing our anti-democratic regime, to a far extent, are irrelevant to what is happening on the ground. As long as this support is happening, they are now continuing to — we are living under airstrikes, under the attack.
And I think what matters right now is a ceasefire on the ground. It does not matter if we’re talking about whether they’re going to go back to negotiations. I think there’s a lot of talk in the international media and focus on the framework agreement. Honestly, when we hear that on the news, it just seems like our lives are irrelevant. Why are we focusing on an agreement that led us to the war, when what should be the priority right now is a ceasefire, opening safe routes for people to be able to flee these active conflict zones right now? And what is written on paper right now does not matter, when we have people under fire, losing their lives.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what led to this latest outbreak of violence? And a lot of attacks on military installations, but they’re throughout Khartoum, so that, of course, threatens many civilians. Explain who these two forces are.
MARINE ALNEEL: So, the two forces are the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, also known as the janjaweed, which was legitimized by Omar al-Bashir’s regime and further legitimized by the transitional government. For the Sudanese people, what matters is that — this is an accumulation of what has happened during Omar al-Bashir’s regime, what has happened during the transitional government, starting from the negotiations. It’s an accumulation of allowing these forces to remain in power, to remain having arms, and to remain a legitimate entity in Sudan, when the Sudanese people have been on the ground chanting, “The military back to its barricades, and the janjaweed must be abolished.”
AMY GOODMAN: And the revolt against Bashir was largely led by women. So, what are you demanding happens right now?
MARINE ALNEEL: The demands of all the Sudanese people is a ceasefire, opening safe routes, and, most importantly, a lesson out of this that we cannot continue to legitimize these powers. We cannot continue to allow the Sudanese Armed Forces to be in the political scene. They need to return to their barricades. And we cannot continue to make little of the lives of the Sudanese people and the residents of Sudan.
AMY GOODMAN: So, how do the civilians — how is civilian power achieved in Sudan? Right now military leader.
MARINE ALNEEL: Right now what needs to happen is a ceasefire, before anything else. What is happening on the ground, actually, is that the Sudanese people are the ones leading efforts that could have been expected from a government, if we had a government that is actually interested in the well-being of the people. The civilians are the ones who are rescuing people who are trapped in risky zones. They are the ones who are — we are the ones who are creating makeshift ways of receiving and delivering medical attention. We are using our own personal vehicles to transport the injured and anyone who is in need of medical attention. And we are the ones who are coordinating the efforts of how to cope with the situation, how to cope with the power outages, with the water cuts. It is civilians who have returned to work during this time just for such emergencies, such as water cuts and power outages.
And we are not receiving any help, whether from the government — we’re not even receiving statements to clarify what is happening. All we’re doing is guess work from the ground. And we’re not receiving any help from U.N. entities or international community. We are our own government right now, helping ourselves, and absolutely not paying attention to the statements of the government, because they have been proved to be absolutely not credible.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Marine Alneel, we thank you so much for taking this time to speak to us, Sudanese activist currently in the capital, Khartoum. Please stay safe. We will continue to follow this story, of course.
Next up, we go to a leading Ugandan LGBTQ activist who risked his life by traveling to the United States to speak out against a recently passed bill in Uganda that criminalizes anyone identifying as LGBTQ. Stay with us.
READ MORE 
Community members watch as crime scene investigators work the scene of a shooting on Sunday in Dadeville, Ala. (photo: Megan Varner/NPR)
The attack took place at the Mahogany Masterpiece dance studio just after 10:30 p.m. local time as people gathered for a Sweet 16 celebration.
By Sunday evening, law enforcement officials still had not provided any details about a motive or whether any suspects had been identified.
"This is also a very fluid situation," Sgt. Jeremy Burkett of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said during a press conference, adding that officials are still trying to confirm who was in the studio building at the time of the incident.
He did not specify how many of those 28 injured were injured by gunshots or how many of those injured were in critical condition.
He urged community members to come forward with any information that may be helpful to the investigation, which the ALEA launched at the request of the Dadeville police chief.
Heidi Smith, the marketing director of Ivy Creek Healthcare, which runs a hospital in Dadeville, said the hospital treated at least 15 gunshot victims.
Smith said at least 17 ambulances responded to the scene. Some victims were treated and released from the Lake Martin Community Hospital, while several additional victims were transferred to other hospitals — including flown to a trauma center in Birmingham, she added.
Annette Allen said that it was her granddaughter's 16th birthday party where the attack occurred. Allen's grandson, a high school athlete, was killed by the gunfire, while her daughter was wounded and sent to an area hospital.
"This is a small community and they just wanted to enjoy the birthday party," Allen told NPR member station Troy Public Radio. "We had to be standing and waiting for bodies to brought out."
Phil Dowdell, her grandson, was weeks from graduation and planned to attend Jacksonville State on a football scholarship, Allen told the Montgomery Advertiser.
Rich Rodriguez, the head football coach at the Alabama university, mourned the death of Dowdell in a statement on Twitter.
"Jax State Football is heartbroken to have lost an upcoming member of our program," Rodriguez said. "He was a great young man with a bright future."
The shooting happened in a small "tight-knit community"
Dadeville is a small city with a population of approximately 3,000 people. It's located about an hour's drive from the state capital of Montgomery.
At a press conference on Sunday morning, Dadeville Police Chief Jonathan Floyd described the town as a "tight-knit community full of wonderful people."
Alabama State Superintendent of Education Eric Mackey said in a statement that "multiple communities and high schools" were affected by the shooting.
The superintendent of the Tallapoosa County Schools, Raymond Porter, said counselors would be at various campuses on Monday to offer support to students — adding that kids will suffer the most from the recent tragedy.
"This does not represent our community or our children," Porter added.
Authorities have not released details about the victims or their ages. But the shooting at the sweet 16 birthday party comes as firearms have become the leading killer of children in the U.S. In 2020, gun violence overtook car accidents as the leading cause of death in people 19 years old or younger.
There have been 161 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year, according to the independent group Gun Violence Archive. The group defines a mass shooting as any event in which there were four or more victims, excluding the shooter. The Saturday attack comes less than a week after a gunman opened fire at a bank in Louisville, Ky., killing five people and injuring nine others.
President Biden was briefed on the shooting, according to the White House, which said Biden and his team have been in contact with local authorities to offer support and are closely monitoring the situation.
Gov. Kay Ivey tweeted on Sunday morning that she was grieving the events in Dadeville, but did not provide further detail on what transpired.
"This morning, I grieve with the people of Dadeville and my fellow Alabamians. Violent crime has NO place in our state, and we are staying closely updated by law enforcement as details emerge," Ivey said.
READ MORE 
Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza inside a defendants cage in a Moscow courtroom in October. (photo: Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP)
Amid a draconian crackdown on dissent, it was the harshest penalty yet for an opponent of the war, in a case that Kara-Murza condemned as “unfounded, illegal and politically motivated.”
The closed trial further highlighted Russia’s isolationist path, as President Vladimir Putin has disregarded Western criticisms of Russia’s human rights abuses and moved to brutally destroy any remnants of his country’s pro-democracy opposition.
The sentence was strongly condemned by Western governments, international human rights organizations and Russian activists and rights groups.
The U.S. State Department has described the charges as false and has sanctioned Russian officials involved in the case for “gross violation of human rights.”
Kara-Murza, who has been an outspoken critic of Putin, defiantly denounced the charges against him at a hearing last week in which he was allowed to make a final statement in the case.
“I’m in jail for my political views. For speaking out against the war in Ukraine. For many years of struggle against Putin’s dictatorship,” he said. “Not only do I not repent of any of this, I am proud of it.” He declined to request an acquittal.
In Russia’s highly politicized legal system, the court’s verdict was never in doubt. The prosecutor had sought the maximum term of 25 years for Kara-Murza.
One of Kara-Murza’s lawyers, Maria Eismont, said he expressed pride after the verdict in his work as an opposition politician. “My self-esteem has even risen. I realized that I have done everything right as a citizen and as a politician,” Eismont quoted him as saying.
Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia Kara-Murza, posted a message to her husband on Twitter saying that being handed a quarter-century in prison was the highest possible mark he could be given “for your courage, consistency and honesty in your many years of work.” She added: “I am infinitely proud of you, dear, and I am always there.” Evgenia Kara-Murza and their three children live in the United States.
In an interview with The Washington Post, she said her husband has repeatedly shown that he will not stop fighting or betray his country and his ideals.
“And this sentence shows that they’re so afraid of him and they hate him so much for his consistency, for his courage, for his amazing bravery … that they want to lock him up for a quarter of a century,” she said.
Asked by The Post whether the 25-year treason sentence for making speeches criticizing the war was fair and reasonable, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, “You know very well we never comment on court decisions, and we will not do so this time, either.”
Kara-Murza was arrested last April on charges of spreading false information in a speech he made in the United States to Arizona lawmakers condemning Russian military actions in Ukraine.
In the summer, he was charged with cooperating with a nongovernmental organization, the Free Russia Foundation, designated as undesirable by Kremlin authorities. In October, authorities added treason charges related to antiwar speeches that Kara-Murza delivered abroad.
Russian media reported that journalists, supporters and diplomats who tried to attend the announcement of the verdict on Monday were denied access to the courtroom and sent to a room on a separate floor where the decision was broadcast, a decision that left Kara-Murza isolated, cut off from many who came to show their support.
Kara-Murza’s mother, Elena Gordon, told reporters at the court that she has been allowed to visit him only once since his arrest more than a year ago. She condemned the court’s verdict.
“I felt like I fell asleep there and woke up in a Kafka novel or an Ionesco play. Who are all these people? The world is upside down. We are in the 23rd year of the 21st century. What’s going on?” she said. Kara-Murza’s father, also named Vladimir, was a journalist and television host. He died in 2009.
Another of his lawyers, Vadim Prokhorov, told The Post that Kara-Murza’s health has been deteriorating so much that his long sentence amounts to “some kind of death penalty.” Kara-Murza’s lawyers plan to appeal.
International condemnation of the verdict was widespread.
U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy called for Kara-Murza’s immediate release, describing the sentence as “another terrible sign of the repression that has taken hold in Russia.” She said speaking truth to power was the act of a patriot.
“The right to have political opinions, or to disagree with the decisions of one’s own government, are fundamental freedoms enshrined in both the Russian constitution and international treaties to which Russia is a party,” Tracy said. “This ruling is an attempt to silence dissent in this country and to make an example of those with the courage to offer an alternative to the policies of the Russian government.”
Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics banned 10 Russian officials “involved in this bogus case” from entering the country and called on the European Union to impose sanctions on them as well. “I condemn the unfair and harsh sentence against prominent Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza handed down today by a Russian court,” Rinkevics said.
The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said the trial was “politically motivated” and did not meet international standards for a fair trial. “Today’s outrageously harsh court decision clearly demonstrates yet again the political misuse of judiciary in order to pressure activists, human rights defenders and any voices opposing Russia’s illegitimate war of aggression against Ukraine,” Borrell said.
The British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office summoned Russia’s ambassador to Britain to protest the verdict. Britain’s ambassador to Russia, Deborah Bronnert, condemned the sentence in comments outside the court and said Kara-Murza is being punished for his brave opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Norwegian Helsinki Committee described the sentence as “absurd” and called for European sanctions on all Russian officials involved in the case.
The case is the latest in a series of increasingly harsh sentences for Russian opposition politicians and activists. Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition figure, has been suffering acute stomach pains in prison, and his lawyers and associates have warned that Russian authorities may be slowly poisoning him.
Navalny and Kara-Murza each survived poisoning attacks. The State Department has accused Russian officials of attempting to assassinate Navalny in 2020 using a banned chemical weapon. Investigative group Bellingcat reported in 2021 that Kara-Murza was tailed by the same special unit of Federal Security Service, or FSB, that followed Navalny.
Kara-Murza, who was the victim of poisoning attacks in Russia in 2015 and 2017, has lost 48 pounds since he was arrested near his home last April and imprisoned in pretrial detention. His health has declined sharply, according to his lawyers, raising fears about whether he would survive a lengthy jail term.
Navalny, speaking Monday at a hearing on a lawsuit against Russia’s prison authorities, expressed deep outrage over Kara-Murza’s sentence, calling it “revenge for the fact that he did not die, having survived two poisonings that were committed — obviously, and this has already been proved — by members of the Russian Federal Security Service.”
“I consider this sentence as illegal, unconscionable and simply fascist,” Navalny said.
Ivan Pavlov, a top Russian human rights lawyer known for defending Russians in cases of treason and espionage, said Kara-Murza’s sentence for expressing his views about the war exceeds the term normally given to murderers. Pavlov fled Russia in 2021 after facing a criminal investigation himself.
“In fact, all Vladimir Kara-Murza did was exercise his constitutional right to express his opinions freely,” Pavlov said. “This right should not be subject to prosecution. But it turns out that, with this verdict, the court simply overturned Article 29 of the Constitution.” He referred to the section in Russia’s constitution guaranteeing the right to free speech and thought.
Kara-Murza is suffering from spreading numbness in his feet and his left hand, a condition prison doctors have diagnosed as polyneuropathy, caused by damage to peripheral nerves, according to his lawyers.
Amid Russian military failures in Ukraine, the Kremlin has blamed the West for the war on Ukraine, accusing it of trying to destroy Russia, plunging relations with the United States into their worst crisis since the Cold War.
The recent arrest of American journalist Evan Gershkovich, a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, during a reporting trip in Russia and his indictment on espionage charges last month marked a new low in relations between Washington and Russia. Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal and the State Department rejected the espionage charges.
During his final statement to the court a week ago, Kara-Murza said that the trial had turned the clock back to the 1930s, the height of Stalinist political repressions.
Kara-Murza has long been a supporter of the Magnitsky Act, which allows for sanctions against Russian officials responsible for human rights abuses. The law, named after Russian tax auditor and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky who died in prison in 2009 after exposing massive fraud by Russian officials, has been adopted by the United States, Britain and several other Western nations.
The judge in Kara-Murza’s case, Sergei Podoprigorov, is under sanctions by the United States and Britain for his role in the jailing of Magnitsky.
Even as he faced treason charges, Kara-Murza continued to speak out against the war, and wrote opinion columns for The Post critical of the path taken by the Putin regime.
“My case marks the first moment in post-Soviet Russia when public criticism of the authorities is officially clarified as ‘treason,’” he wrote in a column in October. “Adding significant insult to a very real injury was the accusation of ‘betraying’ the country I love — coming from the people who really are destroying its future, its reputation and its standing in the world.”
In earlier comments on social media, Kara-Murza said he did not understand how criticizing the government could qualify as treason.
“It is incomprehensible to me how obvious and confirmed facts about the crimes committed during the aggression of Putin’s regime against Ukraine can be presented as ‘deliberately false information’ and the obvious lie — on the contrary, as the only truth.”
Yet he also said that he was convinced that Putin’s regime would fall because of the war, and expressed optimism that, in time, Russia would have a bright, democratic future.
“I also know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate,” he said in his final statement, speaking of a time in the future “when those who kindled and unleashed this war, and not those who tried to stop it, are recognized as criminals.”
He added: “This day will come as inevitably as spring comes to replace even the most frosty winter. And then our society will open its eyes and be horrified by what terrible crimes were committed on its behalf.”
After the verdict, Kara-Murza’s supporters launched a nonprofit fund, the 30 October Foundation, that he founded to offer financial support to Russian political prisoners and their families.
According to a statement posted on his Twitter account, Kara-Murza said Russia now has “hundreds of political prisoners — more than in the waning years of the Soviet Union — whose only ‘crime’ is to have political or religious beliefs unwelcome under Vladimir Putin’s regime.”
READ MORE
Protesters run from tear gas and flash bang grenades on the fifth night of action against police brutality in Portland, Ore., on June 2, 2020, after the death of George Floyd in police custody. (photo: Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/AP)
A forensic investigation found the police used dangerous amounts of tear gas in an attempt to put down Black Lives Matter protests
The international investigation is yet another black eye for a Portland Police Bureau that has become synonymous with brutality — in particularly against “dirty hippies” — and which has been subject to federal supervision for more than a decade.
The investigative findings released Monday by Forensic Architecture are stark:
- On the night of June 2, 2020 — infamous to locals as “Tear Gas Tuesday” — Portland Police fired nearly 150 “tear gas” munitions across a tight area of downtown.
- The CS gas deployed resulted in protesters being exposed to concentrations far higher than those deemed “immediately dangerous to life and health” by a federal agency. In some instances, that safety threshold may have been exceeded by 2,200 times.
- Clouds of chemical compounds spread half a mile, hanging in the air between downtown buildings for hours that night. With settling and runoff, more than four pounds of the caustic compounds polluted the nearby Willamette River, threatening wildlife.
Based at the University of London, Forensic Architecture is renowned for high-tech investigation techniques that combine open-source video evidence and computer modeling to reconstruct front-line horrors in places like Syria and Mariupol, Ukraine. This rare investigation of abuses in the United States builds on a previous FA investigation of tear gas deployment against protesters in Chile. (The new FA study was first reported by The Guardian.)
Chemical agents like CS or “tear” gas are banned in warfare by the Geneva Conventions. But they’re still permitted — and frequently deployed — as crowd-control agents in American policing.
Forensic Architecture trained its focus on Portland after the Oregon city gained infamy as an epicenter of police violence directed at anti-police-violence demonstrators, as well as against journalists covering those protests. Protests roiled Portland for more than 100 consecutive days in the summer of 2020, exacerbated by the Trump administration’s July incursion of irregular federal forces, itself marked by copious use of tear gas.
As detailed in the FA investigation, the Portland Police did not maintain records of “what or how many” munitions it fired that June night. To reconstruct events, FA gathered open-source intelligence, including videos posted to social media and private footage from activists and other witnesses. It then scoured the videos for distinctive visual signatures of chemical munitions known to exist in the PPB arsenal.
FA collected technical data about the quantities of chemicals in these munitions. It then created a 3D computer model of downtown Portland. After geolocating and time-synching the video footage, FA could then simulate the point-source emissions of tear gas, and how the fluid dynamics of the airflow downtown that night carried the gasses. Using this elaborate model and days of computing power, FA then measured concentrations of the caustic chemicals faced by protesters and that leached into local waterways.
The methodology is complex. But the FA visualization of its investigation, embedded below, conveys what is at heart a simple story about law-enforcement excess and the indiscriminate use of health-threatening chemical agents during a respiratory pandemic:
Robert Trafford, an assistant director of FA, emphasized to Rolling Stone that the group’s findings likely understate the risk faced by protesters. “We’re building models of reality; there are variables that can’t be captured,” he says, including munitions that were not captured on video. “We consider every input with scientific patience and care, and draw careful limits around what we don’t know,” he says, “to make sure that we are low-balling our figures [and] not falling prey to exaggeration.”
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration has found that a CS gas concentration of 2 milligrams-per-meter-cubed is “immediately dangerous to life and health.” PPB records reportedly recognize this standard. The FA model cannot recreate exact air-quality measurements, but can reproduce the intensities of exposures protesters likely faced. In the worst “sample” studied, FA found demonstrators could have confronted CS concentrations of more than 2,000 times the OSHA limit. Even if that datapoint is discounted as an outlier, every other location sampled in FA the investigation also exceed the OSHA limit.
“This is a very painstaking and complicated way to say something that was intimately understood by everybody who was at the protest,” Trafford says. “That this was reckless and dangerous policing. This is a testament to the total bankruptcy of the use of tear gas as as a protest management tool.”
FA’s findings add to those of a federal judge. PPB’s use of tear gas inspired a federal class action lawsuit as well as changes to state law. In mid-June 2020, judge Robert Hernandez placed a temporary restraining order on PPB, citing evidence that “tear gas was used indiscriminately”; that “officers fired cannisters of tear gas at protestors without warning or provocation”; that “crowds were surrounded by tear gas without available avenues of escape”; and that “protesters were confronted with tear gas while trying to follow police orders and leave the demonstrations.” The plaintiffs were ultimately awarded $250,000 as part of a settlement that requires PPB to strictly adhere to new state law and bureau policies on tear gas.
On the day after “Tear Gas Tuesday,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, who also serves as the police commissioner, publicly praised his cops for “doing everything they can within their power to respect and protect peaceful demonstrators.” A few days later he directed cops to only use tear gas only when confronting a “serious and immediate threat to life safety.” Not long after getting tear gassed himself during the federal incursion into Portland, Wheeler issued a broader, September 2020 directive to police to block use of CS gas for crowd control.
Presented with the FA findings, Portland Police Bureau said in a statement: “We can’t provide comments due to pending litigation.” A spokesperson for Wheeler said, “We have not yet seen the report but look forward to reviewing it.” He highlighted the mayor’s CS directives, and added: “These unprecedented events characterize one of the most difficult chapters in our city’s history, and I believe we have taken what we learned to move Portland forward in many positive ways.”
The newly documented excesses by Portland police underscore longstanding problems across America. “U.S. policing has, time and again, demonstrated itself to be operating along militaristic lines that are unproductive any of society’s stated goals for its police forces,” Tratford says. He also insists that the FA investigation brings into sharp relief a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do attitude in America’s stance toward repression of protest. “This is the kind of sustained, repeated inflicting of harm on a civilian population that the U.S. federal government has castigated countries around the world for — happily and frequently,” he says.
While hopeful that FA’s model will be useful for those seeking accountability for the harms of a diffuse weapon like tear gas, Trafford is pessimistic about the prospect for a change in police practice. “What this consistent use of tear gas demonstrated in the case of the protests in 2020 — and what we are sure it will demonstrate the next time that there is such a major uprising — is that U.S. police have very little idea how to safely and responsibly manage Amercians’ right to protest,” he says. “We’ve seen routinely that they will invest in making situations more dangerous, and more harmful, than almost any other response would have done.”
READ MORE 
'A collective performance, free of charge, unfolding across all Britain to all people.' Mistle thrush in Warwickshire. (photo: Mike Lane/Alamy)
More than 40m birds have disappeared from UK’s skies since 1970: a trend that imperils the network that gives us life
As I listen to my soloist there is an added delight in knowing that, from Cape Wrath in northernmost Scotland to Kingsdown in Kent, his voice unites with tens of millions of other dawn birds. The blue and great tits of the inner cities, blackbirds and robins among the English villages, chaffinches and wrens through the remotest Scottish glens: it is a collective performance, free of charge, unfolding across all Britain to all people.
Have we time enough and opportunity, we can attune ourselves to one of the greatest events of every April morning on our planet, since birdsong unfolds across all Eurasia and North America as daylight processes over those lands too. Think of it as the Earth rejoicing at the sun’s cyclical return.
The global chorus may unite us in planetary ritual but increasingly, as underlined by a recent report, there are more and more gaps in the avian responses to this daily passage. Both in the long and short term, Britain’s birds are now shown to be on a dangerous downward trajectory.
The UK has lost 40m birds since 1970 and Europe as a whole has lost 600m birds since 1980. The British figures, especially for farmland species such as skylark and lapwing, have long been the worst of any country in the region. The North American continent, meanwhile, but especially the US, has seen avian populations fall by almost a third since 1970, losing a cumulative 3bn birds.
What is at stake is not simply some aesthetic thrill or existential reassurance which we have long vested in our avian neighbours, although the prospect of these losses alone is crushing. Aldous Huxley once suggested that if you took birds out of the English poetic canon you would have to lose half the nation’s verse.
We have yet truly to understand how much environmental loss is also cultural impoverishment, but the lesson is now among us. Imagine the arts without the following: music without Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, ballet without Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, poetry without Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, literature without JA Baker’s The Peregrine.
In its 150-year history as a science, ecology has increasingly revealed how life functions as an infinitely complex yet always interconnecting process. Affect a single part of nature and we invariably see major, often unforeseen, even counterintuitive, consequences elsewhere. The best recent illustration of this was a study from Germany in 2017 known as the Krefeld report.
It showed what impacts had resulted from 60 years’ use of agricultural poison – the so-called pesticides that are a default instrument of intensive agriculture. And revealed that Germany’s insect biomass had declined by 75%. Most alarming was the fact that losses were recorded not among serried fields of chemically drenched maize, but inside the nation’s network of protected nature reserves. No arrangement of our affairs in our heads, or on paper, can gainsay life’s indivisible unity. In nature there is only one place. And it is everywhere, even in our towns and cities.
As the most charismatic component of our full wildlife spectrum, birds enjoy major, some would say disproportionate, concern and attention. Our largest wildlife charity is still the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, with 1.3 million members. Yet our so-called feathered friends perform an infallible service to other lifeforms that don’t enjoy the same levels of love such as insects, lichens and fungi.
Birds are the ultimate vertebrate life form arising in almost all environments, whether it is a kittiwake on a sea cliff, or a blue tit hunting for caterpillars in our garden, or a worm-probing curlew on high moorland, or a barn owl patrolling down the cornfield’s hedge border. Each is completely dependent upon the continued healthy functioning of all the other parts of life in their specific places: the bacteria, protists, tardigrades, nematodes, springtails, insects, arachnids, fungi, lichens, mosses, flowers, trees, molluscs, crustacea, fishes, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. If birds are in trouble, then we can be absolutely sure that the rest of the system is in crisis too.
Our own species shares a place at the top of this pyramid of life. If birds continue to decline then so too shall the very network on which the human project depends. And we depend on this network in its entirety.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.