19 April 23
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With a $787.5 million settlement for its election lies, Fox News has avoided the legal and moral punishment of a court verdict.
That question, which has lurked behind the defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems filed against Fox News, was answered today in an unsurprising fashion: no.
Fox and Dominion reached a $787.5 million settlement just moments before opening arguments were set to begin in the Delaware trial. A jury had been selected, and everyone was preparing for what seemed likely to be a six-week trial that would scrutinize Fox’s broadcasting of false conspiracy theories that Dominion machines stole votes from then-President Donald Trump in 2020. Dominion was seeking $1.6 billion in damages from Fox.
The settlement is not a total shocker. Just days ago, there was a flurry of speculation that Fox wanted to settle, with the goal of avoiding a court’s verdict that it had lied with malice when it aired false accusations — from its hosts and guests like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani — that Dominion had tried to rig the presidential election.
The settlement is unlikely to be welcomed by Fox critics who believed that a guilty verdict would serve a mortal blow to the network’s reputation. The idea was that Fox, on the ropes, should not be allowed to slip away by writing a settlement check and mumbling an insincere apology. As a headline from The New Republic pleaded amid the settlement rumors a few days ago, “Don’t Settle, Dominion! Drag Fox News Across the Coals.” It argued that with a guilty verdict, “we will be able to say, with a certainty we can’t quite claim now, that Fox News lies.”
But Dominion does not exist to serve the public interest or liberal magazines. It is a for-profit company owned by Staple Street Capital, a small private equity firm. Staple Street has fewer than 50 employees and claims $900 million of assets under management (a modest amount in its industry). It was founded in 2009 by Hootan Yaghoobzadeh and Stephen D. Owens, who previously worked at Carlyle Group and Cerberus Capital Management, giants in private equity. Yaghoobzadeh and Owens graduated from Harvard Business School and have no records of political donations or political activity; they are business people, not pro-democracy agitators.
The size of the settlement represents a windfall on Staple Street’s investment in Dominion: Its controlling stake cost just $38.3 million in 2018, according to a filing in the case. While Dominion’s lawsuit has attracted an enormous amount of attention, it’s actually not a large company, as the market for its vote-counting services is limited; its expected revenues in 2022 were just $98 million, according to the filing.
While Dominion and Staple Street have not explained why they agreed to the settlement, the rationale is pretty clear. Their case was strong, but it wasn’t certain that a jury would deliver as much as they were seeking, and it also was not certain how quickly they might see any award, as Fox would likely appeal. The owners of Staple Street — along with John Poulos, who is Dominion’s chief executive and has a 12 percent stake in the firm — were unlikely to have been strapped for cash before the settlement, but now their companies will reap an immediate and significant bounty. In its discovery efforts, Fox unearthed a text message from a former Staple Street employee to a current executive that noted, “Would be pretty unreal if you guys like 20x’d your Dominion investment with these lawsuits.”
Speaking to reporters after the settlement was announced, a lawyer for Dominion, Justin Nelson, said, “The truth matters. Lies have consequences.” A statement from Fox said, “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”
It’s not uncommon for a company to turn its back on the public good for the sake of enriching its owners (a transaction that’s traditionally known as maximizing shareholder value). That’s essentially what happened, for instance, when Twitter’s board eagerly decided to sell the company to Elon Musk for the generous sum of $44 billion. The board lunged at the lucrative transaction even though it was widely predicted that Musk would diminish the usefulness of the social media site, which has indeed happened (Musk recently admitted the company is now worth half as much as he paid for it).
Triumph of American Capitalism
The discovery process that preceded the trial’s opening was a nightmare for Fox, because it exposed in detail the levels of deceit practiced by hosts and executives as they pumped out the conspiracy theory that Trump actually won the 2020 election. But those disclosures appear to have had zero impact on the network’s ratings, which remain strong. While Fox’s reputation is at rock bottom with its critics, its viewers have remained loyal, and it’s not clear that a jury’s verdict would have influenced them any more than the bounty of evidence that emerged in discovery. It’s pretty certain, however, that a settlement will have even less sway.
The high hopes that were riding on the trial reflected the exasperated state of the longtime — and so far unsuccessful — effort to counteract the deceptive and racist programming that has been Fox’s hallmark since its founding in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch, who is now 92 years old and oversees the network with his eldest son, Lachlan (both were deposed and were expected to testify in the trial). Despite years of criticism from journalists and politicians — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., memorably described Fox as a “hate-for-profit racket” — the network has prospered. While most advertisers have fled its airwaves, Fox remains profitable because the bulk of its income consists of exorbitant payments from cable and satellite providers (so-called carriage fees). Despite several years of attempts to pressure those companies, there has been little success, though a renewed push is underway.
“Cable and satellite providers have to stop paying Fox News the carrying fees that are really Fox’s bread and butter, far more than ad revenue,” noted The New Republic. “If the jury finds against Fox, pressure must mount for that to end as well.”
These hopes, while widely held among Fox’s detractors, constitute the kind of magical thinking that circled around earlier efforts to undo the lies and violence of the Trump era. Just as the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller failed to deliver the knockout blow that was hoped for by its supporters, the now-settled lawsuit filed by Dominion is unlikely to alter the nature of Fox News, as the network has escaped the legal, moral, and financial punishment of a judicial verdict. We probably shouldn’t be surprised by this outcome: One terrible limb of American capitalism was always unlikely to save us from another terrible limb.
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Helmets of Ukrainian soldiers with blood stains are seen on a roadside while medics evacuate wounded servicemen near Soledar in Donetsk Oblast on Jan. 14. (photo: Kyiv Independent)
One video posted on Russian Telegram channels on April 11 shows a man in a Russian military uniform using a knife to decapitate a man who appears to be a captive Ukrainian soldier. The man, wearing a Ukrainian uniform and insignia, is screaming from pain as the murderer cuts his throat.
It is unknown when and where the video was filmed, and the victim hasn't been identified yet. Ukrainian authorities said they likely have identified the perpetrators.
President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the international community to hold Russia accountable for what appears to be yet another explicit war crime.
"This is a video of Russia as it is… of Russia trying to make this the new norm, such a habit of destroying life. This is not an (isolated) accident or episode. This has happened earlier. This has happened in Bucha. (This has happened) a thousand times," Zelensky said on April 12.
"We are not going to forget anything, nor are we going to forgive the murderers. There will be legal responsibility for everything," the president added.
Russian troops routinely commit extrajudicial executions of both POWs and civilians, sometimes beheading victims.
Shortly after the beheading video started circulating, CNN uncovered another video in which allegedly Wagner Group mercenaries behead two Ukrainian POWs in a separate case.
The Wagner Group, a Kremlin-controlled mercenary outfit, is notorious for its atrocities in Syria and other countries, and most recently in Ukraine.
Just a month before the beheading video circulated, footage of a similarly shocking execution of a POW surfaced online. In it, a Ukrainian POW, later identified as Oleksandr Matsiyevsky, is shot in the head by Russian troops after defiantly saying, "Slava Ukraini! (Glory to Ukraine)," a Ukrainian national salute.
The footage
In the most recent graphic video, a serviceman wearing a white taped band, which Russian soldiers wear as an identifying symbol, is seen torturing and killing a prisoner of war. Another serviceman is filming the execution and shouting encouraging comments.
The video is so explicit that most media have refrained from publishing it, while others published blurred screenshots.
The green foliage suggests that it was filmed in late spring or summer of 2022.
The victim is screaming in pain and apparently begging to be spared.
As one of the Russian servicemen is beheading the captive, another is shouting encouraging comments from behind the camera. He is heard telling the main perpetrator to break the man’s spine, before asking, mockingly, “Haven’t you cut off heads before?”
He then tells him to show the severed head to the camera and suggests it is “sent to Kyiv.”
The perpetrators later demonstrate the bulletproof vest apparently taken off the victim. It has a patch with a trident, Ukraine's coat of arms. It resembles what Ukraine's Land Forces wear on their bulletproof vests. They then start looting the equipment, commenting on how well-equipped Ukrainian soldiers are.
A Ukrainian military ID is visible lying on the ground next to the victim.
The original source of the video isn’t clear. The earliest posting of the video found by the Kyiv Independent is on the Telegram channel of a Russian ultranationalist blogger Vladislav Pozdnyakov, who shared it with his nearly 300,000 followers on April 11. He later claimed he was not the source of the video, but found it circulating in Russian online groups.
Perpetrators
Ukraine's ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said on April 12 that the Ukrainian military intelligence “roughly knows” the details of the alleged execution.
“They roughly know who did it, in what area, and who was directly involved in this, including who was directly the perpetrator,” Lubinets told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Former Wagner Group mercenary Andrey Medvedev, who fled Russia and sought asylum in Norway, said he "recognized his fellow servicemen from the Wagner Group" in the video.
"He (Medvedev) unequivocally recognizes his colleagues there, he can tell they are Wagner Group fighters by their distinctive call signs, by the way they speak, by their voice," Vladimir Osechkin, the founder of Gulagu.net human rights group, said on the Russian YouTube program "Khodorkovsky Live" on April 12.
Osechkin also said Medvedev was helping Gulagu.net to identify the perpetrators.
Medvedev has been seen as a controversial figure, having been arrested in Norway and himself accused of mistreating prisoners while fighting for Russia.
Andrii Yusov, Ukraine's military intelligence spokesperson, said that Russians posted the video to demoralize the Ukrainian military and "to prevent Russian troops from surrendering," because they would expect Ukrainians to reciprocate violence.
Another spokesperson for Ukraine's military intelligence, Andrii Cherniak, told the Kyiv Independent on April 13 that Ukraine's special services were verifying the video.
Ukraine's Security Service is also conducting an investigation into violations of the laws and customs of war.
Western officials have condemned the beheading of a presumed Ukrainian POW.
"Executing a prisoner of war is a war crime. I won't share the video, but the clip appearing to show Russian forces executing a POW is simply horrific. This barbarity will only strengthen Ukrainian resolve and U.K. support," said U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly.
U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink said that “there can be no impunity for these heinous actions."
"Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the brutality of its forces has become more clear by the day," she tweeted.
Czech President Petr Pavel said that "if the authenticity of the recorded barbaric act on video is confirmed, Russian soldiers would side with the Islamic State."
A string of executions
After the video of the decapitation was posted online, CNN discovered another video, reportedly published on April 8, that appears to show beheaded Ukrainian servicemen.
According to the report, the video was purportedly filmed recently by Wagner Group mercenaries.
It shows two beheaded corpses of Ukrainian soldiers lying next to a destroyed artillery piece. Their hands appeared to be cut off as well. The scene has already been looted: some of the equipment, as well as the soldiers' shoes, are gone. The Russian soldiers filming the video steal what they can find – the Ukrainians' helmets.
The Wagner mercenaries have documented committing war crimes before – and not only in Ukraine.
In 2017, Wagner mercenaries were accused of torturing and executing a man in Syria, smashing him with a sledgehammer and cutting off his arms and head while filming everything on a phone.
Another video of Russian troops executing a defiant Ukrainian POW went viral in early March. The soldier captured in the video was identified as Oleksandr Matsiyevsky, a sniper from the 163rd Battalion of the 119th Territorial Defense Brigade of northern Chernihiv Oblast.
Zelensky posthumously awarded Matsiyevsky the Hero of Ukraine title, the highest state award.
On April 10, a photo surfaced online showing a severely decomposed human head stuck on a pole near the entrance of what appears to be a destroyed apartment block.
A popular pro-Ukrainian OSINT Twitter account Necro Mancer shared the photo on April 10 and claimed the picture was taken in the embattled city of Bakhmut in eastern Donetsk Oblast, most of which is now occupied by Russia. The Kyiv Independent couldn't verify this claim.
Several pictures of human heads stuck on poles in a similar way were published last August. They were reportedly taken in the Russian-occupied city of Popasna in eastern Luhansk Oblast.
In late July, a video appeared on social media showing people in Russian army uniforms cutting off the genitals of a Ukrainian serviceman and then killing him. Ukraine’s Prosecutor General's Office launched an investigation into the incident. Investigative group Bellingcat later identified one of the perpetrators.
Wagner mercenaries have also been known to assault and kill their own servicemen, and film it.
In November, a video circulated showing Wagner mercenaries executing their own fellow soldier, Yevgeny Nuzhin, with a sledgehammer in November 2022.
Nuzhnin, a former convict who had signed a contract to fight with the group in Ukraine, surrendered to Ukrainian forces shortly after being deployed to the front line. He was sent back to Russia in a prisoner exchange.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's ally Evgeniy Prigozhin, who runs the Wagner Group, said Nuzhnin was “a traitor” and approved of the execution.
Executions and tortures of POWs, as well as mutilation of the bodies of those killed in action, breach the Geneva Conventions and constitute war crimes. Following the latest explicit video of the beheading of an alleged Ukrainian POW, Ukraine's Foreign Ministry on April 12 called on the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to "immediately pay attention to another atrocity committed by the Russian military" in the investigation of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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Ammon Bundy. (photo: Jim Urquhart/Reuters)
The militia leader is accused of harassing hospital workers. Now he’s allegedly avoiding court documents by threatening cops who deliver them.
In a Monday filing, lawyers for St. Luke’s Health System accused Bundy of trying to avoid his day in court by threatening process servers who deliver his court papers. St. Luke’s contends that Bundy, who leads the right-wing activist group People’s Rights Network, has attempted to intimidate process servers and even a local sheriff’s department when deputies tried delivering documents to his home.
An April 12 letter from the sheriff, including in new court filings, suggests that the sheriff has also given up trying to contact Bundy.
Bundy, who could not be reached for comment, is best known for his confrontational and often armed protests, like a pair of armed standoffs in 2014 and 2016. His current group, the People Rights Network, has also mobilized to antagonize opponents in Idaho, holding aggressive demonstrations outside the homes of a county commissioner who supported COVID-19 precautions and a judge who was overseeing one of Bundy’s many criminal cases.
Bundy and the PRN have cultivated a reputation for intimidating behavior, St. Luke’s lawyers allege.
“Any individual corporate leader, or government official who in some way offends Ammon Bundy and the People’s Rights Network knows they will be attacked online, will face armed protests outside their homes and workplace, and will have to live with the very real threat of violence against themselves and their families,” reads a Monday filing by the hospital’s lawyers.
Bundy and the PRN are accused of doxxing and defaming St. Luke’s staff, after the hospital treated a PRN member’s grandson who was diagnosed with “severe malnourishment,” against the child’s family’s wishes. The baby was returned to his parents after three days of hospital treatment. While protesting the hospital, Bundy was arrested for alleged trespassing after he blocked an ambulance bay, sending the facility into lockdown during which time it was unable to receive ambulances.
Even after the initial furor, Bundy and the PRN continued to fundraise off conspiracy theories about St. Luke’s, “based on defamatory statements about the St. Luke’s Parties and others kidnapping, trafficking, and killing children,” according to the hospital’s lawsuit. The hospital says PRN followers inundated its inboxes and phone lines with death threats and intimidating messages.
Now even process servers are facing threats, St. Luke’s alleges. In its Monday filing, the hospital claims that Bundy has threatened process servers with trespassing charges.
What’s more, the hospital’s lawyers allege, the sheriff in Gem County, Idaho has supported Bundy in those allegations.
“The Sheriff interpreted the criminal trespass statute to apply to process servers and that any process server returning to the Bundy residence could be charged with criminal trespass. This effectively prevents the St. Luke’s Parties from using private process servers,” the Monday filing reads.
The Gem County Sheriff did not return a request for comment. Police stopped at least one process server in March, a St. Luke’s lawyer wrote in an affidavit.
“On or about March 3, 2023, I was informed that a private process server was pulled over by law enforcement officers after serving Bundy at Bundy’s residence,” the filing reads. “The process server was informed that he had been trespassed by Bundy.”
After another legal threat earlier this month, the process server company told St. Luke’s that they would no longer attempt deliveries to Bundy’s home. St. Luke’s turned to the Gem County Sheriff’s department to hand Bundy the court documents—but the sheriff claims his deputies were also threatened.
In an April 12 letter, Gem County Sheriff Donnie Wunder said he was no longer comfortable sending deputies to Bundy’s house.
“Mr. Bundy expressed to me that he feels like he is being harassed by all the papers that have been served on him (by mail and personnel service),” Wunder wrote of a recent phone call with Bundy. “Mr. Bundy went on to say that he is at his breaking point. By the tone in his voice I believe he is. In my opinion, if this continues, there is potential for someone to getting hurt. My concern is with the safety of process servers and my deputies. I do not want to risk harm over a civil issue.”
In its Monday filing, St. Luke’s requested a court order requiring the sheriff to serve Bundy with papers and barring the sheriff from pursuing trespassing charges against other process servers who deliver court documents to Bundy’s house.
Bundy has consistently avoided court proceedings in the case. He skipped a September sanctions hearing and, in a December video, boasted about throwing out legal papers from the case.
“I just throw it all away. I literally just take it from the mail and throw it in the garbage,” he said. “I haven’t responded one bit to them.” He added that “they have servers that come here all the time, knocking on the door, serving papers.”
In that video, he hinted at a new armed standoff, should he lose the court case and have to pay damages.
“They’re suing me for defamation. They’re probably going to try to get judgments of over a million dollars and take everything they have from me,” Bundy said. “And I’m not going to let that happen. I’m making moves to stop that from happening. And if I have to meet 'em on the front door with my, you know, friends and a shotgun, I’ll do that. They’re not going to take my property.”
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President Biden drives the new electric Ford F-150 Lightning at the Ford Dearborn Development Center in Dearborn, Michigan, last year. (photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP)
If the Biden administration is so gung ho about climate, why did it approve a big-ass oil-drilling project in Alaska a few weeks ago?
But now let’s somber up and ask a tough but necessary question: If the Biden administration is so gung ho about maintaining a habitable planet, why did it approve a big-ass oil-drilling project in Alaska a few weeks earlier? The Willow Project, as it is known, is a $7 billion drilling project that began in the 1990s when crude-oil producer ConocoPhillips acquired leases to develop oil inside the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a 23 million-acre area on the state’s North Slope that is the largest tract of undisturbed public land in the United States. In 2016, the company drilled two exploratory wells and discovered what it determined was economically recoverable oil. After more than five years of permitting and legal fights, the Biden administration finally approved the proposal, allowing three drilling sites with up to 199 total wells. Over its 30-year life, the Willow Project could produce up to 600 million barrels of oil and release as much as 230 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere — roughly equivalent to emissions from 70 coal plants.
“This is the crux of the climate problem,” says Jamie Henn, a longtime climate activist and the director at Fossil Free Media, a nonprofit media lab working to end the use of fossil fuels. “The Biden administration is taking some bold action — but they only want to tackle the demand for fossil fuels, not the supply. That’s like trying to cut a piece of paper with only one side of the scissors.”
For Biden, and for virtually every other living thing on the planet, this is the moment the rubber hits the road. Biden was elected in 2020 with a pledge to cut CO2 pollution in half by 2030. The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed last year in a hard-fought battle with Congress, will channel $390 billion into clean-energy and climate-related projects over the next decade. That’s a huge step in the right direction. But it’s not enough. Fossil fuels must die. And the quicker the better.
You can think of the push for electric vehicles as part of a slow starvation campaign against Big Oil. “There are about one billion machines that use CO2 on the planet — from power plants to home heating furnaces to lawn mowers,” says Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental politics at University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of Short Circuiting Policy, a book about the battle over clean energy and climate policy. “If you get rid of those machines, you get rid of oil.” Or, to put it another way, if you electrify everything, fossil fuels will die because no one will need them for anything. It’s a very Silicon Valley idea — fossil fuels are land lines, and renewable energy is an iPhone. Innovation and investment will pour into clean energy, making it ever cheaper, ever more ubiquitous. Stokes calls the “electrify everything” movement “a new theory of social change.”
But it is not at all clear that simply attacking the demand for oil will be enough. Even staid governmental bureaucracies like the International Energy Agency have argued that in order to meet the Paris climate goals, expansion of new fossil-fuel development has to stop now. If not, climate chaos will only accelerate. As writer and activist Bill McKibben argues in a recent Rolling Stone story: “The fossil-fuel industry has continued to explore and prospect, and now controls reserves of coal, gas, and oil that, if burned, would produce 3,700 gigatons of CO2. That’s 10 times the amount scientists say would take us past Paris temperature targets.”
In 2020, then-candidate Biden made an explicit promise that there would be “no more drilling on federal lands.” “Period,” he emphasized during a New Hampshire town hall. “Period, period, period.” That period, unfortunately, now looks more like an exclamation point. According to the Center for Biodiversity, federal data show the Biden administration approved 6,430 permits for oil-and-gas drilling on public lands in its first two years, outpacing the Trump administration’s 6,172 drilling-permit approvals in its first two years. And there is plenty of evidence that, in the largest sense, ignoring the supply side of our fossil-fuel addiction is not working. Despite all of the money that has been poured into clean energy in recent decades, the percentage of primary energy from fossil fuels has only declined from 87 percent in 1990 to 81 percent in 2021. CO2 emissions in the U.S. are down about 15 percent since 2005, but only back to the high level they were in 1990. Meanwhile, global CO2 emissions are up by about 40 percent since 1990. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today is comparable to where it was around 4.3 million years ago during the mid-Pliocene epoch, when the sea level was about 75 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times, and large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.
Biden inherited the Willow Project from the Trump administration, which had initially approved the project in 2020. But in 2021, a federal judge in Alaska reversed that decision, saying the environmental analysis was flawed and needed to be redone. The footprint of the drilling operation was reduced, and after months of review, the project was approved. Why? “The environmental-review process in a project of this scale is very complex,” says Erik Grafe, an attorney at EarthJustice who has been involved in lawsuits trying to stop the project. “But in the end, it is a political decision.”
For climate activists, Willow was another in a succession of fights against infrastructure that have galvanized the movement: the Keystone XL and Line 3 pipeline campaigns, for example, or the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign that has shut down hundreds of old coal plants. But opposition to the Willow Project reached a new level. An online petition gathered more than 6 million signatures. According to Alex Haraus, an independent creator and impact producer who was involved with the campaign, hashtags related to the Stop Willow movement like #stopwillow and #stopthewillowproject got 650 million views across all social platforms. “Willow was so obviously bad, and in so many ways, that people were really motivated to fight it,” Haraus explains. Stephen Colbert pressed Vice President Kamala Harris about it on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. By one account, even Biden’s grandchildren, who were following the fight on TikTok, were upset about the idea of expanding drilling in Alaska. “I think the White House was really taken aback by the amount of pushback on this project,” says Henn.
But within Alaska, Willow had real support. The entire congressional delegation was behind it, as were large parts of the Alaska Native communities, including the powerful Alaska Native corporations. And the reason is simple: money. Because of the way revenue sharing is set up in Alaska, if and when oil starts rising out of Willow, hundreds of millions of dollars will be begin flowing into communities in the North Slope Borough where the project is located. More broadly, the state also depends on oil money to survive. “Alaska is a banana republic,” one Alaskan activist told me over lunch when I visited the state with President Obama in 2015. “It either has to pump oil or die.” Almost 90 percent of Alaska’s revenues come from oil. In addition, every Alaska resident gets a monthly check from what’s called the Alaska Permanent Fund, which is an investment fund built up from oil revenues. This year, the check is expected to be about $3,900 for every man, woman, and child in the state. For a family of four, that means a $16,000 annual check. If you stop drilling, you’re literally taking money out of people’s pockets. Which is why, given that Alaska’s oil-and-gas production is only about 25 percent of what it was a few decades ago, there’s no more urgent task in Alaska than planning what a post-fossil-fuel future would look like in the state.
Opposition in Alaska has come largely from the Nuiqsut tribe, which includes a community of about 400 who live near the drilling site and will suffer the most, from air pollution to having the migration of caribou, which they depend on for food, disrupted. Jade Begay, director of policy and advocacy at NDN Collective, an indigenous-led activist and advocacy organization based in Rapid City, South Dakota, stated: “Just because Nuiqsut is a small community doesn’t make it any less wrong for them to lose their land and their culture. No community should be sacrificed. The oil industry and the right-wingers say no one lives out on the North Slope, that it’s just ice. But that’s wrong, and it is racist. It is a dangerous line when you say there are communities that can be sacrificed just for the sake of people and corporations getting rich.”
So why did the Biden approve Willow? He said that it was because they were going to lose in court anyway (several lawyers I spoke with who are involved in the fight to stop Willow just flat disagreed with that view). Others cite the fear of gas-price politics in the 2024 election. “Willow’s just the starkest manifestation of a core tension between sincere climate intentions and the outsize impact of gas prices on electoral politics,” one senior administration official tells me. The White House is gambling that it can push hard enough on the demand side to make a big dent in CO2 emissions without provoking a full-frontal assault from Big Oil or a backlash from SUV-loving moderate voters.
Environmental groups still hope to stop Willow in court before the drilling begins next fall. But for many climate activists, the real problem in the administration — committed to climate action as they certainly are — is the fear of going toe-to-toe with Big Oil. “The White House is unwilling to engage in the politics of confrontation,” Henn says. Collin Rees, the U.S. program manager at Oil Change International, says that restricting supply of fossil fuels requires a whole different level of political engagement than, say, pushing for more electric cars. “The oil industry can handle cuts in demand, because they believe they can always find new outlets for their product,” Rees says, citing the expansion of liquified-natural-gas terminals that allow oil-and-gas companies to export their product as a prime example. “But when you are messing with supply, you are messing with their existence.” Reserve-replacement ratio is a key metric on any fossil-fuel company’s balance sheet — without future reserves to show investors, they have no viable future.
But by failing to take on Big Oil directly, Guay, among others, thinks the White House is misreading the room. The climate movement is no longer a daydream of lefty environmentalists — it is loud and powerful and young and growing fast. And if Biden wants people to get out there and knock on doors for him in 2024, they want real action. What would that look like? Here’s a short list: making good on Biden’s vow to stop all fossil-fuel leases on federal land; eliminating fossil-fuel subsides; taxing Big Oil’s windfall profits; and stopping the permitting of new export terminals and expanding infrastructure like the $39 billion, 807-mile long LNG pipeline in Alaska that the U.S. Department of Energy approved this week.
None of this would be easy. The risk of political blowback is high. But then, so are the stakes. The fossil-fuel industry is going to wither and die anyway — the faster it happens, the faster we can get on with inventing a better future for ourselves. “The climate fight is about politics and power,” Guay argues. “If you’re not willing to have the hard fight, you’re not really fighting the fight.”
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Matthew Colangelo and Trump. (image: Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Reuters/Department of Justice)
Matthew Colangelo has taken on Trump multiple times before. Now, he’s in the middle of his highest-stakes Trump case yet.
Matthew Colangelo, after years of relentlessly aggressive work, is finally on Trump’s personal radar—and that of his most combative MAGA allies, who’ve painted a target on his back in recent weeks.
Colangelo, who pursued Trump while at the New York Attorney General’s Office, joined the Department of Justice after Trump’s exit from the White House. He recently left the DOJ to join Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s team of prosecutors pursuing criminal charges against Trump that threaten to brand him the first-ever American president-turned-felon. And now he’ll be instrumental in prosecuting the DA’s case against Trump.
As such, Colangelo faces the same violent threats that have inundated the DA’s office ever since it decided to arrest Trump. But he’s being singled out.
Trump zeroed in on Colangelo in a Truth Social post on Monday, April 3, breathlessly labeling him “a top Democrat DOJ official.” Right on cue, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) fired off a letter to Colangelo later that week making an unprecedented request that the prosecutor—who’s actively working on an open criminal investigation—show up to testify and explain “the circumstances and chain of events that led to your hiring” by the DA, breathing life into the conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden is behind the Trump indictment in New York City.
Media Matters has since documented how MAGA acolytes have gone into a frenzy, with right-wing media darlings spreading that conspiracy with Colangelo as the proverbial missing link.
The DA’s Office declined to make Colangelo available for an interview for this story. However, a close look at his two decades of legal work reveals a man who embodies a zeal for progressive civil rights and pushed Congress for fair housing prices for Blacks, a particularly pertinent point given that he’s now prosecuting a real estate tycoon who once engaged in illegal housing discrimination against African Americans—and routinely lied about the values of his own properties.
But Colangelo’s record also tells the story of a lawyer who somehow found himself at the epicenter of Trump’s legal troubles from the moment Trump sought the presidency.
“I had the opportunity to work with Matthew at the New York Attorney General’s Office. He is a fantastic lawyer, committed to serving the public interest, and of the utmost integrity,” said Jeffrey Novack, who fought alongside Colangelo in a legal battle against the Trump administration’s Securities and Exchange Commission.
Colangelo worked as a human rights researcher at an anti-apartheid group in South Africa and as a Boston management consultant before attending Harvard Law School, according to a college announcement for a keynote speech he made there. He later served as a law clerk to then-Appellate Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who is now one of the few remaining liberal justices on the Supreme Court.
Colangelo then became the director of “economic justice” at the NAACP’s legal defense and educational fund, where he took on discrimination cases. One in particular stands out, because it brought him before a congressional subcommittee in 2009 where he stressed the damage that unfair real estate prices can cause. In that case, an $11 billion post-Hurricane Katrina housing recovery program linked “housing assistance to the depressed values of black families’ pre-storm, segregated housing.”
After that, Colangelo spent seven years at the DOJ’s civil rights division, where his team managed to block Texas in 2012 from implementing a voter ID law.
But it was only after Trump won the presidency that Colangelo began to make his life hell. In late 2017, Colangelo became the New York AG’s top “social justice” lawyer—notably backfilling a role left by Alvin Bragg, his future boss at the Manhattan DA’s Office.
And that’s where Colangelo promptly sank his teeth into Trump.
In June 2018, Colangelo’s team sued to dismantle the business executive’s charity, the Trump Foundation, for being “little more than a checkbook for payments” that seemed like a mere extension of his personal business. They eventually won, after the AG’s lawyers proved that Trump illegally used his charity to fund then-Florida AG Pam Bondi. The charity was dissolved after a state judge found Trump had “breached his fiduciary duty.”
But Colangelo soon used his authority at the AG’s office to thwart the federal government’s hard right turn.
The Daily Beast reviewed thousands of court documents that show the extent of Colangelo’s involvement in monumental constitutional challenges to Trump’s vision for America. As the New York AG’s chief counsel for federal initiatives, Colangelo was involved in 32 lawsuits ranging from immigration and civil rights to health care and state tax breaks. He challenged Trump’s attempts to strip DACA legal protections for young, undocumented “dreamers” who were brought to the United States as children—while simultaneously fighting to keep Trump’s 2020 census from inquiring about a person’s citizenship.
Indeed, Colangelo’s record in court reads like an entirely separate indictment—against Trump for nearly every policy imaginable. And it dates back to the former president’s very first day at the White House.
Trump signed a day-one executive order to kneecap the Affordable Care Act by limiting consumer protections from a huge chunk of the health insurance market, and in 2018 Colangelo led a multi-state lawsuit that cited his tweets and his stated desire to “let Obamacare explode.” It ended with a clear victory when a federal judge halted the Trump administration.
When Trump’s Agriculture Department in 2018 suddenly halved the amount of whole grains school kids would be served at breakfast and eliminated a cap of salt, Colangelo in New York again led the multi-state fight against the Trump administration. A parallel lawsuit stopped the USDA in its tracks.
When Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric manifested in a new rule that would suddenly consider a migrant’s use of Medicaid and food stamps to determine whether they should be allowed into the United States, Colangelo was New York’s top-named lawyer in a three-state lawsuit to block it. The Biden administration eventually dropped the policy last year.
Not every battle was victorious. When Trump’s pro-corporate Labor Department in 2019 undid an Obama policy that required electronic collection of work-related injury data, Colangelo represented New York as one of several states challenging that rule. But a federal judge ended up siding with the Labor Department’s ability to manage its own affairs.
However, it was toward the end of the Trump administration that Colangelo moved from tackling Trump’s policies to aiming at Trump himself.
In the summer of 2020, Colangelo emerged as a key investigator probing the Trump Organization’s business practices. Months of law enforcement subpoenas and interviews had discovered what AG Letitia James would later call “significant evidence” of fraud: a decades-long pattern of overvaluing Trump-branded properties to score better bank loans, preferred insurance policies, and bigger tax breaks on donated land.
But in the closing months of the Trump administration, the president’s multi-billion-dollar company was refusing to turn over documents that Colangelo, and his fellow assistant attorneys general, had requested. So they asked a New York state judge to intervene, and Justice Arthur F. Engoron forced the company to respond. In short order, Engoron compelled one of Trump’s sons, Eric Trump, to show up for a deposition.
Colangelo was the one who led the all-day virtual call with Eric Trump on Oct. 5, 2020, grilling the family company executive with questions on what he knew about his dad’s bogus-looking financial statements, seemingly unverified property appraisals, and a huge conservation easement for their forested estate north of the city.
When the Trump son refused to answer basic questions—launching into a minutes-long diatribe about how the AG had “weaponized her office to target my father”—Colangelo cut him off several times.
“I can’t spend the entire day with this sort of obstreperous answer,” Colangelo shot back.
The 48-page legal memo Colangelo signed back then—detailing investigators’ interest in particular properties and the elder Trump’s financial statements—served as a preview of the gargantuan $250 million lawsuit James eventually filed four years later seeking to tear apart the Trump Organization and bleed it dry.
But Colangelo wouldn’t see that through. On Biden’s first day in office, the incoming DOJ brass appointed Colangelo as acting associate attorney general overseeing several law enforcement divisions. And after nearly two years in one of the most coveted leadership positions in the legal field, his former colleague Bragg convinced Colangelo to join him at the Manhattan DA—an office that had long been working on a parallel criminal case about Trump’s business records in parallel to the one Colangelo did back at the New York AG’s office.
On April 4 in Manhattan criminal court, Colangelo was sitting at the desk alongside two fellow prosecutors when the former president sauntered to the defense table. After years of battling Trump’s policies, his corporations, and his refusal to turn over evidence, Colangelo finally had the man himself—before a judge.
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A man looks at the damage inside a house during clashes between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and the army in Khartoum, Sudan. (photo: Stringer/Reuters)
Loud shooting reverberated in the background of live feeds by Arab television news channels in the Khartoum capital region minutes after the agreed 6 p.m. (1600 GMT) onset of the ceasefire.
Warplanes were roaring in the skies above Khartoum, a Reuters reporter heard tanks firing shortly after the truce was due to take hold, and a resident told Reuters he heard an air strike being carried out in Omdurman, Khartoum's sister city on the opposite bank of the Nile river. Several witnesses reported a large army ground force entering the city from the east.
The regular army and the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) issued statements accusing each other of failing to respect the ceasefire. The army's high command said it would continue operations to secure the capital and other regions.
"We have not received any indications here that there's been a halt in the fighting," United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric told a news briefing in New York.
The conflict between Sudan's military leader and his deputy on Sudan's ruling council erupted four days ago, derailing an internationally backed plan for a transition to a civilian democracy four years after the fall of Islamist autocrat Omar al-Bashir to mass protests and two years after a military coup.
The fighting has triggered what the United Nations has described as a humanitarian catastrophe, including the near collapse of the health system. The U.N.'s World Food Programme suspended operations after three of its employees were killed.
At least 185 people have been killed in the conflict.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking in Japan, said on Tuesday he had telephoned both army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, appealing for a ceasefire "to allow the Sudanese to be safely reunited with families" and to provide them with relief.
Fighting had appeared to tail off close to the deadline for the ceasefire, which coincided with the evening breaking of the daily fast during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
WARPLANES AND EXPLOSIONS
Earlier in the day, the sounds of warplanes and explosions echoed across Khartoum. Residents in the neighbouring cities of Omdurman and Bahri reported air strikes that shook buildings and anti-aircraft fire. Fighting also raged in the west of the country, the United Nations said.
In video verified by Reuters, RSF fighters could be seen inside a section of the army headquarters in Khartoum. The fighters did not appear to control the sprawling site, a Reuters reporter in the capital said.
Burhan heads a ruling council installed after the 2021 military coup and the 2019 ouster of Bashir, while Dagalo - better known as Hemedti - is his deputy on the ruling council.
Their power struggle has stalled the plan for a shift to civilian rule after decades of autocracy and military domination in Sudan, which sits at a strategic crossroads between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Africa's volatile Sahel region.
Unless controlled, the violence also risks drawing in actors from Sudan's neighbourhood who have backed different factions, and could play into competition for regional influence between Russia and the United States.
REPORTS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT
Fighters have attacked aid workers, hospitals and diplomats, including a European Union ambassador assaulted in his home.
U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths said humanitarian relief workers and facilities were continuing to be targeted in Sudan and the United Nations was "receiving reports of attacks and sexual violence against aid workers".
"This is unacceptable and must stop," Griffiths posted on Twitter, adding that the U.N. aid office in South Darfur was also looted on Monday.
Three workers for the World Food Programme were killed in the fighting on Saturday, and a U.N. plane was hit in crossfire at Khartoum's international airport.
Blinken said a U.S. convoy was attacked despite its vehicles being marked with diplomatic licence plates and bearing U.S. flags. Initial reports suggest the attack was undertaken by RSF-associated forces, he said, calling the action "reckless". Blinken said all U.S. personnel were safe after the incident.
After the call with Blinken, Hemedti said the RSF approved the ceasefire to ensure the safe passage of civilians and the evacuation of the wounded.
In a post on Twitter, he said he and Blinken "discussed pressing issues" and more talks were planned. The RSF issued a statement saying it was waging a battle to restore "the rights of our people" in what it called a new revolution.
A previous, shorter ceasefire agreed for Sunday was widely ignored. Artillery volleys, strikes by combat aircraft and street fighting have made it almost impossible to travel in Khartoum, trapping residents and foreigners in their homes.
The main international airport has been under attack, halting commercial flights.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said it was nearly impossible to provide humanitarian services around the capital. It warned that Sudan's health system was at risk of breakdown.
The outbreak of fighting followed rising tensions over a plan for the RSF's integration into the regular military.
Discord over the timetable for that process delayed the signing of the framework deal to launch a civilian transition that was due to be signed earlier this month.
The fighting has affected several parts of the country since Saturday, including the western desert region of Darfur, which borders Chad and suffered warfare from 2003 that killed as many as 300,000 people and displaced 2.7 million.
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A teenage Sami boy stands with a reindeer in the snow at the Sami village of Ravttas near Kiruna, Sweden. (photo: Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket)
How some UNESCO World Heritage Sites can threaten Indigenous lives.
In those warm months, this region in the far north of Sweden provides a bounty for large migrating herds of reindeer: grass, birch, and herbs. Snow patches in the high mountains provide relief from insects on hot days, and the verdant lowland provides ample grazing as the nights cool. When winter arrives, rivers and marshes ice over, and the reindeer venture south beyond the Laponian Area along well-worn pathways, traveled by generations of Sámi reindeer herders, to winter grazing lands. This migration of both the reindeer and the Sámi who tend to them, reveals an ancient relationship with the land that persists to this day.
“It is the variation of landscape that makes the area so good,” said Helena Omma, who is Sámi and president of the Association of World Reindeer Herders. “Reindeer use all these landscapes during different times and conditions.”
Nestled deep in the heart of Sápmi, the traditional homelands of the Sámi, the Laponian Area covers nearly 4,000 square miles. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, considers it a place of “exceptional beauty” and its stewardship by Sámi hunters, fishers, and herders “an outstanding example” of traditional land use. That combination of natural and Indigenous values was essential in the agency’s decision to declare it a World Heritage Site.
Since earning that designation in 1996, Sámi leaders and the Swedish government have, for the most part, enjoyed a successful and cooperative relationship managing the area. But an iron mine, recently approved on land barely 20 miles south of the Laponian Area’s border, is straining that collaboration. If the British-owned Kallak mine is built, it will impede the migration of reindeer to critical winter grazing lands and sever routes Sámi families and villages have relied upon for centuries.
“We need the lands outside of Laponia to ensure that the Sámi culture within Laponia can survive,” said Omma, who is also co-chair of the Laponiatjuottjudus Association, the administrative body that oversees the World Heritage Site. “We want to protect the land because the reindeer need the land, and we need the land.”
To protect the Laponian Area, their culture, and their livelihoods, Sámi leaders say Sweden must stop the mine. By threatening their way of life, they argue, the mine threatens the Laponian Area’s status as a UNESCO site.
These tensions highlight growing international concerns about UNESCO’s treatment and inclusion of Indigenous communities in establishing and managing World Heritage Sites. Although this occurs around the world, it is perhaps most explicit in Thailand and Tanzania, where violent evictions and killings define relations between Indigenous peoples, governments, and the U.N. agency’s reputation.
The issue, which has unfolded over decades, could grow more widespread. World Heritage Sites, which are protected by the United Nations, are rich with biodiversity, making them a small, but essential, part of the successful implementation of the global conservation program 30×30. That ambitious effort calls for setting aside 30 percent of the world’s land and sea for permanent protection against development by 2030. Given that Indigenous territories comprise almost 20 percent of Earth’s land and shelter almost 80 percent of its remaining biodiversity, human rights experts worry that a history of systemic mistreatment of Indigenous peoples coupled with so rapid a timeline could be detrimental — even deadly — if it does not specifically include and respect those communities and their knowledge.
“UNESCO cannot turn away from its obligations,” said Lola GarcÃa-Alix, senior adviser on global governance at the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, or IWGIA, a human rights advocacy organization. “States can, but not UNESCO, and we should not allow it to do so.”
When Sweden sought World Heritage Site status for the Laponian Area, its application was based solely on the region’s natural beauty. UNESCO rejected that application, saying Laponia’s splendor was not unique enough to warrant protection. However, the committee said the inclusion of its cultural values in a subsequent application could reopen the process. The country followed that guidance, and in 1996, with essential help from Sámi reindeer herders, secured the land’s protection. It remains just one of a few World Heritage Sites with an internationally recognized connection to living Indigenous cultures, effectively making the Sámi true stakeholders with authority over its management.
The Laponian Area is one of the 1,157 World Heritage Sites worldwide. The U.N. established UNESCO in 1959 after Egypt proposed building a dam that would flood the valley containing the Abu Simbel temples and other antiquities. The campaign saved those treasures, leading to similar efforts in Italy, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Today, 167 countries have at least one place on the list, ranging from iconic locales like the Taj Mahal and Chichen-Itza to smaller gems like the Madriu-Perafita-Claror Valley in Andorra, which provides, in the words of UNESCO, “a microcosmic perspective of the way people have harvested the resources of the high Pyrenees over millennia.”
Such a designation often brings a boom in tourism. Worldwide, these sites attract some 8 billion visitors per year and generate as much as $850 billion in revenue. But the infrastructure needed to handle those tourists often strains the very places and ecosystems UNESCO hopes to protect. Angkor Wat, which was designated a World Heritage Site in 1992, in Cambodia, for example, saw tourism increase 300 percent between 2004 and 2014 alone. Beyond the on-site human impact, places like the Great Barrier Reef, near Australia, and the city of Venice, Italy, face mounting threats from climate change.
Yet many of these cherished places could prove essential to the planet’s survival. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which advises UNESCO, estimates that two-thirds of natural World Heritage Sites are crucial sources of water, while those in tropical regions store nearly 6 billion tons of carbon. These locations make up more than 1 million square miles of protected terrain and represent approximately 8 percent of all protected areas worldwide. However, only 48 percent of them are considered by the Union to have effective protection and management while nearly 12 percent raise serious concern.
Sámi communities tended the Laponian Area centuries before the Kingdom of Sweden in 1532. That kind of history is not uncommon across the UNESCO system; many World Heritage Sites are near, or overlap, traditional Indigenous territories. What is uncommon is how it has been managed.
It took more than a decade after its inscription as a World Heritage Site to establish Laponia’s oversight board, Laponiatjuottjudus. “It started when I was a child, in ’96, ” said Omma. “It was a 15-year-long struggle where the Sámi’s really worked hard to get a majority on the board, to create consensus-based decision-making processes, and to get reindeer herding rights respected within the Laponia site. It was a long, long struggle against authorities.”
Today, Laponiatjuottjudus is legally responsible for managing the entire region. Representatives of nine Sámi villages work with local and county officials and the national Environmental Protection Agency to manage and maintain the area. Decision-making is grounded in Sámi cultural values and the collaboration has been so successful that the U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples lauded the relationship.
But Indigenous peoples worldwide have long raised concerns about violations of their rights within UNESCO sites. Three U.N. special rapporteurs on the rights of Indigenous peoples — independent human rights experts appointed by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights — have reported recurring problems at World Heritage Sites, including a lack of Indigenous participation in the nomination, declaration, and management process of sites; significant restrictions on access to resources and sacred sites; and harassment, criminalization, violence, and killings of Indigenous peoples.
As a United Nations agency, UNESCO must comply with international obligations, including the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Traditionally, the challenge has been doing so in countries where the government regularly mistreats, or even refuses to recognize, Indigenous peoples and declarations of their rights. The United Nations has no punitive tools for dealing with such cases, and UNESCO can only threaten to delist a site — something that has happened only twice in the last 50 years, and never as retribution for human rights violations.
Putting aside that serious shortcoming, UNESCO fails to consider Indigenous communities in even the most fundamental tasks, like telling people the land they’ve lived on for centuries is slated for conservation.
“Many Indigenous peoples are not aware that there will be a World Heritage Site perhaps until they are in a World Heritage Site,” said GarcÃa-Alix of the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. “They have never been informed. Information is not publicly available.”
Currently, 186 proposed World Heritage Sites are pending review, and although UNESCO’s website states that fact, it offers no details about how they are considered. Evidence suggests the process is increasingly politicized. One study found that political or economic factors played heavily in cases in which the World Heritage Committee ignored recommendations that it decline designation or defer a decision pending additional information.
In other cases, the body seemingly overlooks any consideration of the communities impacted by its decision. Such was the case in 2021, when the World Heritage Committee ignored reports of human rights violations in Thailand’s Kaeng Krachan Forest Complex, and inscribed it to the World Heritage List despite pleas from the Indigenous Karen communities within the park, a U.N. human rights panel, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to defer the nomination.
“Kaeng Krachan is a stain on the whole U.N. system,” said GarcÃa-Alix. “It raises questions about the accountability of UNESCO as a U.N. organization.”
The Karen have for hundreds of years lived as gatherers and farmers in what is now known as the Kaeng Krachan Forest. In 1981, the Thai government named the area a national park and began relocating the Karen communities from the upper Bangkloy to the Pong Luik-Bang Kloy in 1996. In exchange for voluntarily leaving their traditional homeland, they would receive land to farm and financial support.
Many of them agreed, but upon arriving at their new homes, some families found only sandy, rocky land unfit for farming. What’s more, the support the Thai government promised never arrived, or very little did. The Karen immediately demanded authorities follow through on their promises. When good land and support failed to materialize, communities faced two options: return home or migrate to towns looking for jobs.
“When we talk with the Karen people who live there, they say that they are not against the World Heritage Site, but their concerns and issues need to be resolved,” said Kittisak Rattanakrajangsri, who is Mien and chairs the Council of Indigenous Peoples in Thailand. “The land issues remain. That’s why they decided to go back to their homelands again.”
The Karen have tried to return home at least three times. Each time, Thai authorities responded with violence, harassment, and forced evictions. Park officials have burned homes and rice barns, confiscated ceremonial items, seized fishing nets, and arrested Indigenous residents and activists.
At least two human rights defenders have been killed. Tatkamol Ob-om, who was helping the Karen report illegal logging and human rights abuses, was shot by an unknown assassin in 2011. Three years later park officers arrested Por La Jee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen, who assisted affected villagers to file a legal complaint against park officials over the destruction of Karen housing. He vanished until 2019, when Thailand’s Department of Special Investigation identified his remains after discovering a burnt skull fragment in an oil barrel at the bottom of a reservoir. This had no impact on the World Heritage Committee’s decision to add the site to the list.
Rattanakrajangsri says there will be a review of the site’s World Heritage status every five years. “If the independent study shows that the situation is not getting better, and on the contrary, is getting worse, I think that it sends a strong message to UNESCO and other conservation agencies,” he said.
Such abuses, and what appears to be a history of indifference to them, go back decades. The Maasai of Tanzania have faced repeated violent evictions from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a UNESCO site since 1979. The Maasai, mobile pastoralists much like the Sámi, have moved through the region for centuries, and although UNESCO has insisted that it never called on Tanzanian authorities to expel them from the park, it has done little to address the tens of thousands of Maasai who have been forced from their homelands, injured, and even shot and killed. In the last year alone, nine U.N. human rights experts and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature have called on Tanzanian officials to halt relocation until consulting with the Maasai. Human rights defenders have demanded UNESCO sever ties with the Tanzanian government.
“The World Heritage Committee is closely monitoring the state of conservation of the mentioned properties,” said a spokesperson for the World Heritage Centre. “Including the issues related to the rights of the Indigenous peoples.”
The agency could begin to address such injustices by establishing a mechanism under which Indigenous peoples and human rights watchdogs could bring evidence of violations to its attention, said Nicolás Süssmann, conservation and Indigenous peoples project director with Project Expedite Justice, a human rights organization. He also says UNESCO could be more open and clear in its handling of human rights complaints.
“The consequences cannot just be removing or firing an eco-guard who conducted an operation,” he said. “This is not a problem of rogue eco-guards. This is a problem with a conservation model that is incompatible with Indigenous peoples.”
But that conservation model has been the global standard for more than a century, and with more than 100 countries expressing support for 30×30, Süssmann and other human rights experts say the situation will get worse. “You can say you respect Indigenous peoples,” said Süssmann, “but when you have a deadline and you’re used to doing things without Indigenous peoples’ real, and meaningful, involvement, you’re not going to change the way you do things if you don’t have to.”
Süssman says this is especially true when you read the fine print: Under 30×30, countries don’t have to preserve 30 percent of their own lands and waters by 2030. The plan calls only for preserving 30 percent of the world’s land and waters by then. “Nobody is going to demolish a couple of buildings near Central Park to make it bigger,” said Süssmann. “They’re going to get that 30 percent from other parts of the world.”
Much of that land will, almost inevitably, encompass Indigenous territories, which make up nearly a quarter of the planet. In 2016, human rights experts estimated that 50 percent of protected areas worldwide encompassed traditional Indigenous lands covering more than 6 million square miles. Today, protected areas comprise nearly 9 million square miles – an area roughly the size of China, India, Mongolia, and the United States combined. To reach 30% by 2030, more than 15 million square miles must be protected – an area nearly the size of Russia.
All told, protected areas represent just 16 percent of the Earth’s surface, and while there is no disagreement that safeguarding biodiversity is critical to planetary survival, advocates say failing to make human rights foundational to global conservation efforts may continue to drive evictions, violence, and killings in Indigenous territories.
“World Heritage Sites, which are U.N. protected areas, at the minimum, should be the ones who respect and protect Indigenous people’s rights,” said GarcÃa-Alix. “If I have to be diplomatic: UNESCO has a lack of sensitivity about human rights issues, particularly when it comes to World Heritage.”
Beyond ensuring Indigenous rights and traditional knowledge are respected, such arrangements could advance UNESCO’s preservation goals and help mitigate the impacts of climate change.
A rapidly expanding body of science shows that working with Indigenous communities can accelerate conservation efforts. Legal recognition of Indigenous territories in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest have led to increased reforestation. Studies show that the world’s healthiest forests often stand on protected Indigenous lands, and sustainable pastoralism, like that of Maasai or Sámi herders, offers benefits ranging from preserving soil fertility to maximizing genetic diversity. Formal recognition of territory and rights also creates legal pathways to stopping the development of extractive industries: Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel projects in North America is thought to have stopped or delayed the creation of greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least 25 percent of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions. That resistance, however, is often criminalized by state authorities.
Humans have shaped and sustained landscapes for more than 12,000 years, and Indigenous communities continue to care for the territories that have sustained them for generations. Embracing and applying that knowledge – and the understanding that Earth is an interconnected system of physical, biological, cultural, and spiritual networks that extend beyond borders — could go a long way toward addressing the climate crisis. In some cases, like the Kallak iron mine, it even means the difference between life and death.
“We know how this will affect our culture and our livelihoods,” said Omma. “But it’s very common that our knowledge is viewed as opinions, not as knowledge.”
Human rights experts continue to urge Sweden to stop the project, and the World Heritage Centre says a report on its potential impacts will be presented to the World Heritage Committee at its annual conference this September. The committee will then offer recommendations to the Swedish government. For the Sámi, there can be one way forward.
“You can’t coexist with a mine,” said Omma. “It’s not possible.”
But to Indigenous communities like the Sámi, the issue is so much bigger than one mine. Truly protecting a place goes beyond preserving its landscapes and historic sites. It must include the protection, respect, and participation of the people who have, for millennia, lived in good relation with that land and know, perhaps better than anyone, how to protect it for future generations.
“Protection of land is good,” said Helena Omma, “if Indigenous peoples are part of that protection.”
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