06 June 23
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Ukrainian authorities call for people living downstream of Nova Kakhovka dam to evacuate in face of potentially deadly flooding
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, declared the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam as an act of terrorism and the “largest man-made environmental disaster in Europe in decades”.
He blamed Russian occupying forces, which have had control of the dam and the adjacent town since last year’s full-scale invasion. “It is physically impossible to blow it up somehow from the outside, by shelling. It was mined by the Russian occupiers. And they blew it up,” Zelenskiy said on Twitter.
Aerial footage showed the dam missing a broad mid-section with the reservoir behind, which had been at record levels, pouring over it and roaring downstream. Towns along its path were inundated, complete houses could be seen floating away in the waters, while countless pets and wild animals scrambled to survive.
The governor of the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said about 16,000 people were in the “critical zone” on the Ukrainian-controlled right bank of the river. He said people were being evacuated for districts upstream of Kherson city and would be taken by bus to the city and then by train to Mykolaiv and other Ukrainian cities, including Khmelnytskyi, Odesa, Kropyvnytskyi and Kyiv.
The disaster will have damaging effects that could last for generations, from the immediate potential for loss of life to the thousands of people forced to abandon their homes and farms. It is expected to have a catastrophic impact on the ecology of the region and will sweep mines from the banks of the Dnipro into villages and farmland downstream.
It also robs Ukraine of long-term capacity for generating hydroelectric power. The loss of the upstream reservoir threatens water supplies to Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and Crimea, and has long-term implications for the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant 120 miles (200km) upstream.
The dam collapse happened on the second day of Ukrainian offensive operations likely to mark the early stages of a mass counteroffensive. It could affect any Ukrainian plans for an amphibious assault across the river.
“The purpose is obvious: to create insurmountable obstacles on the way of the advancing [Ukrainian army] … to slow down the fair final of the war,” the Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said on Twitter. “On a vast territory, all life will be destroyed; many settlements will be ruined; colossal damage will be done to the environment.”
The Ukrainian hydroelectric power corporation said the dam had been destroyed by a bomb placed in one of the turbine halls on top of it.
Local Russian authorities in the city of Nova Kakhovka initially denied anything had happened to the dam, then blamed the collapse on Ukrainian shelling. The Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed official from the Kherson emergency services as saying the dam had collapsed from structural weakness under water pressure.
Zelenskiy called an emergency meeting of his national security council on Tuesday. “Russian terrorists,” Zelenskiy said on Twitter. “The destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam only confirms for the whole world that they must be expelled from every corner of Ukrainian land.
“Not a single metre should be left to them, because they use every metre for terror. It’s only Ukraine’s victory that will return security. And this victory will come. The terrorists will not be able to stop Ukraine with water, missiles or anything else.”
Prokudin posted a video to Telegram in which he said that as a result of the damage to the dam, “water will reach a critical level in five hours” and that evacuations had begun. Russia’s state-run news agency Tass cited emergency services saying 80 settlements could be affected.
A Russian military blogger, Rybar, said 11 out of 28 spans in the dam were destroyed after explosions at 2am, though this could not immediately be verified. Another blogger said there were no reported missile attacks on the dam prior to the breach, while videos circulated on Russian channels were said to be of civilians evacuating.
Vladimir Leontiev, the head of the Russian-occupied administration of Nova Kakhovka city, on the southern bank of the Dnipro, initially denied the dam had been blown up, according to the Ria Novosti news agency, but he was later reported to confirm there was “damage” and blame it on shelling.
Interfax quoted an unnamed representative from regional emergency services as saying the collapse was the result of a catastrophic structural failure. “The dam could not stand it: one support collapsed, and flooding began,” the representative said, adding that there were no attacks on the hydroelectric power station overnight.
Last month, it was reported that water levels in the reservoir had reached a 30-year high as the Russian occupiers had kept relatively few sluice gates open, according to experts.
David Helms, a former US air force and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist who has monitored the dam, said on Twitter: “The Russians allowed the reservoir to fill to record levels; if the dam failed ‘naturally’, it certainly failed due to 6 weeks of over-topping and stress on the structure.”
The areas most under threat from flooding are the islands along the course of the Dnipro downstream of Nova Kakhovka and much of the Russian-held left bank in southern Kherson. Earlier modelling of such a disaster suggested Kherson city would not bear the brunt, but the harbour, the docklands and an island in the south of the city are likely to be inundated. It is unclear how many people could lose their homes.
There could be two further serious side-effects: the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant upstream could lose access to water for cooling as the reservoir drains away, and the water supply to Crimea could also be severely affected.
Four of the six reactors at the nuclear plant are completely shut down, and two are on “hot shutdown”, producing a small amount of energy for the plant itself and the neighbouring town. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a tweet its experts at the plant were monitoring the situation. It said there was “no immediate nuclear safety risk at plant”.
A Moscow-backed official in the Zaporizhzhia region was quoted by a Russian news agency as saying there was no “critical danger” to the plant yet.
The dam, a Soviet power project, was completed in 1956 and was 30 metres high, holding back a vast reservoir of 18 cubic kilometres of water. It sits about 20 miles (32km) upstream from Ukrainian-held Kherson.
Zelenskiy warned last November that Russia was plotting to blow up the two-mile structure and that doing so would cause “a large-scale disaster” affecting people living downstream.
Blowing up a dam can be considered a war crime, the Geneva conventions say, if it “may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population”.
Ukrainian military intelligence said late last year that Russia had conducted the main mining works as long ago as April 2022, but warned that the floodgates and supports of the dam were further primed in November as Ukraine’s forces closed in on Kherson. “Now everyone in the world must act powerfully and quickly to prevent a new Russian terrorist attack,” Zelenskiy said at the time.
The country’s military intelligence also said in November that “dozens of Ukrainian settlements, including Kherson” could be affected by a breach and that “the scale of the ecological disaster will go far beyond the borders of Ukraine and affect the entire Black Sea region”.
The bridge over the dam was one of only two crossing points over the Dnipro south of Zaporizhzhia city before the war. The other, the Antonovsky road bridge at Kherson, was destroyed in November by the retreating Russians, and Russian snipers target anybody lingering on the waterside near the remaining bridge span.
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A 'Stop Cop City' environmental protester was killed by police §near the proposed site in January. (photo: Erik S Lesser/EPA)
City council vote 11-4 to move ahead with police and firefighter training center despite significant pushback
Some Cop City opponents have faced unprecedented arrests during which police have accused them under a state domestic terrorism statute, prompting a legal challenge which argues that the protesters are being unduly targeted over their constitutionally protected free speech.
Tuesday’s 11-4 vote just after 5am is a significant victory for Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, who has made the $90m project a large part of his first term in office, despite significant pushback to the effort. The city council also passed a resolution requesting two seats on the governing board of a foundation dedicated to raising funds for Atlanta police.
The decentralized “Stop Cop City” movement has galvanized protesters from across the country, especially in the wake of the January fatal police shooting of Manuel Paez Terán, a 26-year-old environmental activist known as “Tortuguita” who had been camping in the woods near the site of the proposed project in DeKalb county.
For about 14 hours, residents again and again took to the podium to denounce the project, saying it would be a gross misuse of public funds to build the huge facility in a large urban forest in a poor, majority-Black area.
“We’re here pleading our case to a government that has been unresponsive, if not hostile, to an unprecedented movement in our city council’s history,” said Matthew Johnson, the executive director of Beloved Community Ministries, a local social justice non-profit. “We’re here to stop environmental racism and the militarization of the police … We need to go back to meeting the basic needs rather than using police as the sole solution to all of our social problems.”
The training center was approved by the city council in September 2021 but required an additional vote for more funding. City officials say the new 85-acre (34-hectare) campus would replace inadequate training facilities and would help address difficulties in hiring and retaining police officers that worsened after nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice three years ago.
But opponents, who have been joined by activists from around the country, say they fear it will lead to greater militarization of the police and that its construction will exacerbate environmental damage. Protesters had been camping at the site since at least last year, and police said they had caused damage and attacked law enforcement officers and others.
The highly scrutinized vote on Tuesday also comes in the wake of the arrests last week of three organizers who lead the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has provided bail money and helped find attorneys for arrested protesters.
Prosecutors have accused the three activists of money laundering and charity fraud, saying they used some of the money to fund violent acts of “forest defenders”. Warrants cite reimbursements for expenses including “gasoline, forest clean-up, totes, (Covid-19) rapid tests, media, yard signs”. But the charges have alarmed human rights groups and prompted both of Georgia’s Democratic senators to issue statements over the weekend expressing their concerns.
The Democratic US senator Raphael Warnock tweeted that bail funds held important roles during the civil rights movement and said that the images of the heavily armed police officers raiding the home where the activists lived “reinforce the very suspicions that help to animate the current conflict – namely, concerns Georgians have about over-policing, the quelling of dissent in a democracy, and the militarization of our police”.
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Rob Bonta, California's attorney general, said that 16 South Americans were abandoned outside the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento on Friday. (photo: Tran Nguyen/AP)
After 16 South Americans were abandoned outside a church on Friday, another flight of 20 migrants arrived on Monday morning
California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, on Monday branded his rightwing Republican Florida counterpart, Ron DeSantis, a “small, pathetic man”, and appeared to threaten kidnapping charges after the first incident in which a group of migrants was dumped at a Sacramento church.
Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said in a statement that 16 South Americans abandoned outside the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento on Friday were “in possession of documentation purporting to be from the state of Florida”, and may have been duped into boarding charter flights via New Mexico after entering the US in Texas. On Monday morning, a second flight of 20 migrants arrived in the state’s capital.
The newest arrivals remained at the airport for a couple of hours and were fed before being transported to a “religious institution”, said Kim Nava, a Sacramento county spokesperson.
“Our county social workers are en route and are going to assess all those folks, make sure they have the services and support that they need,” Nava said.
The episode has parallels to what critics called a similar “soulless” stunt orchestrated by DeSantis last year in which his administration abandoned several dozen mostly Venezuelan migrants in Martha’s Vineyard.
Newsom, in a tweet posted Monday lunchtime directed at DeSantis, said: “You small, pathetic man. This isn’t Martha’s Vineyard. Kidnapping charges?” and linked to a section of California’s penal code stating anybody who “abducts or takes by force or fraud” a person found within the state “is guilty of kidnapping”.
Bonta, meanwhile, also said Florida was guilty of “state-sanctioned kidnapping” if it was found to be behind the flights. He told the New York Times the migrants showed documents to California authorities that indicated their travel had been administered by the Florida division of emergency management and its contractor, Vertol Systems Company. Vertol Systems is the same contractor hired last year by Florida’s department of emergency management to move migrants from Texas to Massachusetts for $1.6m.
“While we continue to collect evidence, I want to say this very clearly: state-sanctioned kidnapping is not a public policy choice, it is immoral and disgusting,” Bonta said in the statement.
The flight was operated by Berry Aviation, an active US defense contractor, according to flight tracking data on FlightRadar24. When reached on the phone, the company declined to comment. Acorn Growth Companies, an aerospace investment firm, which owns Berry Aviation, did not answer calls.
Acorn’s managing partner, Rick Nagel of Oklahoma, is a major Republican fundraiser. He was the campaign treasurer for congressman Tom Cole, who chairs the House rules committee. Cole is a former head of the Republican National Congressional Committee and a fervent backer of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies.
Lawyers for the migrants caught up in DeSantis’s stunt last September were on the ground in Sacramento on Monday, and say the circumstances are nearly identical, with the group having been promised accommodation, jobs and clothing that never materialized, and with no advance notice to social services.
“We’re trying to establish what exactly they were told when they boarded the flights,” said Oren Sellstrom, litigation director of Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights.
“This kind of conduct is reprehensible, morally repugnant and also illegal. To the extent the individuals flown to California had the same kind of fraud and misrepresentation visited upon them that we saw with our Martha’s Vineyard clients, we fully intend to hold Governor DeSantis and his co-conspirators accountable in a court of law.”
The community group Sacramento area congregations together (ACT) has been assisting the migrants, who are mostly Colombian and Venezuelan, with immediate needs. Cecilia Flores, spokesperson for ACT, said the group was taken to the church by bus and dumped there.
“They started out, ‘What city is this? What state are we in?’” Flores told CNN.
“According to them, they they got off of the bus, the person who was driving rang the doorbell of the building and told them they would be right back, and the bus pulled away and never came back.
“One of the migrants attempted to reach them because they did have a contact number. They said that the person told them they’ll be right there to get you, never specifying who was coming to get them. They continued to try to reach this person [but] their cellphone no longer was working.”
The allegation of deceit mirrors that of the Martha’s Vineyard episode, in which a former US army medic, Perla Huerta, was allegedly hired to lure migrants onto planes in Texas chartered by the DeSantis administration to protest Joe Biden’s immigration policies.
According to several of the migrants, Huerta showed up at a McDonald’s in San Antonio, offering gift cards and promising shelter and jobs in Boston, before the group was dumped without notice in the affluent community.
Lawyers for the migrants subsequently filed a lawsuit.
Rightwinger DeSantis, the leading challenger to Trump for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination, has ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric in recent months, and earlier this year persuaded the Florida legislature to approve an expansion to his “unauthorized alien transport program” to Democrat-led cities and states.
DeSantis’s media team did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.
Newsom’s tweet on Monday is not the first time the Democratic governor has attacked DeSantis. Last July, while running for re-election, Newsom aired television ads in Florida urging residents to stand up to DeSantis’s attacks on freedom or consider moving to California.
Their feud reignited in April when Newson decried efforts to reshape Florida’s higher education system into a more conservative model, accusing DeSantis during a visit to his state of “weakness masquerading as strength across the board”.
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Cornel West is known for his academic activism. (photo: Frederick M. Brown/POLITICO)
The political activist and academic said on Twitter that he is running to "reintroduce America to the best of itself."
“In these bleak times, I have decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for president of the United States as a candidate for the People’s Party,” West said in a video on Twitter. “I enter in the quest for truth, I enter in the quest for justice, and the presidency is just one vehicle to pursue that truth and justice – what I’ve been trying to do all of my life.”
West, 70, is the latest Black candidate to enter the 2024 presidential race, after Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) launched his campaign last month and California radio host Larry Elder joined the GOP race in April. The author was a professor of the practice of public philosophy at Harvard University, and focuses much of his social criticism on race, gender and class in American society.
“We’re not talking about hating anybody, we’re talking about loving, we’re talking about affirming, we’re talking about empowering those who have been pushed to the margins,” West said in his video. “Because neither political party wants to tell the truth about Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about Big Tech.”
The video also included a clip of West complaining to media figure Bill Maher about how the two options voters have are “neofascists like brother Trump or milquetoast neoliberals like brother Biden.”
On West’s campaign website, the candidate’s platform includes implementing term limits in Congress, forgiving all student debt, guaranteeing health care for all, stopping foreign military aid, fighting mass incarceration and ending drilling on public lands. The scholar also said he supports abortion rights, housing equity and labor unions.
“Do we have what it takes? We shall see,” he said. “But some of us are going to go down fighting, go down swinging with a style and a smile.”
In 2015, West endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Democratic primary for the 2016 presidential election, voicing his support for the senator’s plan to redistribute wealth from Wall Street to help America’s low-income population. When Sanders exited the race in 2016, West backed Green Party candidate Jill Stein, calling Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton a “neoliberal disaster.”
In the 2020 election, West again endorsed Sanders as the Democratic presidential nominee. The senator has not yet commented on West’s decision to run for president.
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Chris Licht. (photo: Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast)
CNN on-air talent, producers, and journalists who spoke with Confider united in damning conclusions about their boss in the days following an embarrassing profile in The Atlantic.
More on that shortly, but the deeper story insiders want to know is how David Zaslav got the network in this mess in the first place. This newsletter has made light of Licht on a regular basis as Confider’s “favorite schmoozer,” because that’s how he got the CNN gig: Instead of casting a wide search for a replacement to Jeff Zucker, Zaz went with someone who had little more experience than running shows with a couple dozen staffers at Morning Joe and CBS This Morning and had started showing up at Zaz’s annual Hamptons party.
Zaslav has now parachuted in his buddy and longtime lieutenant David Leavy to fix the mess he created. While hardly a rock star in the Warner Discovery universe, Leavy is throwing his weight around and calling CNN talent to try and shore up support. But it’s going to be a long, hard road back for the likes of Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, and Erin Burnett—CNN bedrocks who, Confider has learned, have lost confidence in the boss.
The fact anyone thought two flashy profiles in less than a year was a good idea is alarming, insiders griped to Confider. The most comical part of the Atlantic profile, our newsroom insiders said, was the starring role of Licht’s celebrity trainer, Joe Maysonet, and the lofty claims Licht has lost 50 pounds thanks to the rigid self-discipline of early-morning workouts and skipping breakfast. The reality may be more complicated, however, as the Daily Mail reported that Licht has bragged to associates about taking weight-loss drug Ozempic—a claim Confider’s sources have also confirmed hearing firsthand.
Ultimately it was Licht’s comments about CNN’s COVID coverage—that it was feverish, lacked context, and often broke from reality—that most enraged network staffers. Further insulting staffers over the weekend, insiders told us, was the fact that Licht’s camp appeared to leak unflattering internal data to try to defend his negative portrayal of the network’s COVID coverage.
Licht made a weak attempt at damage control during Monday’s 9 a.m. staff-wide editorial call. “I know these past few days have been very hard for this group,” he reportedly said. “I fully recognize that this news cycle and my role in it overshadowed the incredible week of reporting that we just had and distracted from the work of every single journalist in this organization. And for that, I am sorry.”
But network staffers at all levels who spoke with us suggested that if Licht’s ego would allow him, he’d be smart to start negotiating an exit with Zaslav so both execs can soon put this sorry mess behind them. “Perhaps the parent company can tolerate shitty management at CNN. But how long will they stomach lousy ratings and shrinking revenue?” one CNN staffer asked Confider. Another question that came up often in chats with insiders: Does right-wing billionaire John Malone really want to own a piece of what is quickly becoming a distressed asset?
The most telling part of this shambolic episode, sources pointed out, is how Zaslav—too busy co-hosting Graydon Carter’s fuck-you-to-Vanity Fair party at Cannes—did not sit for an on-record interview with The Atlantic to offer support for his own hire.
And realizing how brutal the profile would be, Zaz seemingly wasted no time inserting Leavy into the newly created position of CNN’s chief operating officer. While that role has been sold as Leavy “reporting to CNN CEO Chris Licht,” Licht himself did not announce the gig in one of his trademark staff-wide memos featuring his name in a gigantic font at the top.
Speaking of Zaz, CNN sources told Confider that the Warner Discovery boss last month raised eyebrows inside the newsroom when he commented “Looking great buddy….miss u” on a picture posted to Instagram by Brian Stelter, whom Zaslav fired last summer.
A rep for Warner Discovery and a rep for CNN declined to comment.
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Mr. Hanssen's identification and business cards on display at the F.B.I. academy in Quantico, Virginia, in 2009. (photo: Paul J. Richards/AFP)
Mr. Hanssen was sentenced to life in prison in 2002, bringing to a close one of the most lurid and damaging espionage cases in American history.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement that Mr. Hanssen was found unresponsive just before 7 a.m. at the United States Penitentiary Florence, where he was serving a life sentence. He was pronounced dead after lifesaving efforts by emergency medical workers. The statement did not identify a cause.
Mr. Hanssen’s case was considered one of the most notorious spy scandals of his generation, shocking F.B.I. leaders and other government officials when they learned that one of their own had been feeding information to the other side with impunity for so many years. To this day, the F.B.I. describes him as “the most damaging spy in bureau history.”
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New homes and more planned along a golf course in Florence, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, Jan. 26, 2022. (photo: Brian van der Brug/LA Times)
Most of Arizona’s water, around 41%, comes from groundwater, according to the Arizona Department of Water Resources. Another 36% comes from the Colorado River, although the state, along with California and Nevada, recently agreed to reduce their water intake from the river by 3 million acre-feet through 2026 as the Colorado River faces shortages.
Water demand is expected to outpace supply in the Phoenix area. A recent analysis over a 100-year period found that about 4% of groundwater demand around Phoenix will not be met, unless additional actions are taken. This prompted the Arizona Department of Water Resources to deny additional Assured Water Supply Program certificates for new home construction projects around Phoenix to preserve water for existing properties.
“We have these rules in place to protect people from buying a home without a water supply, so that’s really the effect here,” Sarah Porter, director of Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, told The Hill. “The state is telling developers you can no longer rely on the water underneath the future subdivision as the water for that subdivision.”
The certificates are not necessary for construction in all parts of greater Phoenix, but the limits are meant to slow growth in the area and make sure existing water demand can be met. Developers can use other sources of water, including water sold from designated parties, farmers or Native American tribes, to continue their projects, The Guardian reported. However, drought and short water supply have been an issue everywhere in this region.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs also announced $40 million from the American Rescue Plan Act funds to further conserve the state’s water resources and assured there would be enough water for existing homes and businesses.
“What the model ultimately shows is that our water future is secure: the Assured Water Supply Program is working,” Hobbs said in a statement. “Water supplies for homeowners and businesses are protected. Growth has been planned for, and will continue. My message to Arizonans is this: we are not out of water and we will not be running out of water because, as we have done so many times before, we will tackle the water challenges we face with integrity and transparency.”
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