31 May 23
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When 15-year-old Sasha Kraynyuk studied the photograph handed to him by Ukrainian investigators, he recognised the boy dressed in Russian military uniform immediately.
But the boy's name is Artem, and he's Ukrainian.
Sasha and Artem were among 13 children taken from their own school in Kupyansk, north-eastern Ukraine last September by armed Russian soldiers in balaclavas. Ushered onto a bus with shouts of "Quickly!", they then disappeared for weeks without trace.
When the children, who all have special educational needs, were finally allowed to call home, it was from much deeper inside Russian-occupied territory.
To get them back, their relatives were forced to make gruelling journeys across thousands of miles into the country that has declared war on them. Only eight of the children have been returned from Perevalsk so far and Artem was one of the last, collected by his mother just this spring.
When I reached the school's director by phone, she saw no problem with dressing Ukrainian children in the uniform of an invading army.
"So what?" Tatyana Semyonova retorted. "What can I do? What's it to do with me?"
I countered that the Z symbolised the war against the children's own country. "So what?" the director demanded again. "What kind of a question is that? No-one is forcing them."
Scrolling through the website of Perevalsk Special School, I found the photograph of Artem on public display. It was taken in February 2023, a year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in a class to mark Defenders of the Fatherland Day.
The lesson was dedicated to learning "gratitude and respect" for Russian soldiers.
I tried to question the director some more, but the phone line abruptly cut out.
The wanted war criminal
For Ukraine, the story of Kupyansk Special School is part of a growing body of evidence against Vladimir Putin as a suspected war criminal.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russia's president in March, accusing him and his children's ombudswoman, Maria Lvova-Belova, of the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children.
Russia insists that its motives are purely humanitarian, evacuating children to protect them from danger. Senior officials scorn the ICC indictment, even threatening retaliatory arrests against its representatives.
The ICC hasn't made the details of its case public and nor has Ukraine, but officials in Kyiv maintain that more than 19,000 children have been taken from occupied areas since the full-scale invasion. We understand that many have come from care homes and residential schools.
We investigated several cases, including another Special School in Oleshki, southern Ukraine, and found that each time Russian officials made minimal or zero effort to locate any relatives. Ukrainian children were frequently told there was nothing in their country to return to and were subjected, to varying degrees, to a "patriotic" Russian education.
The details and the nuance vary, as there is chaos in war as well as ill intention.
But there is also a clear, overriding ideology: Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, openly proclaims everything in occupied areas of Ukraine as its own, including the children.
Sasha's story
Kupyansk, north-eastern Ukraine
Sasha is a tall, shy boy with a long fringe that he likes to smooth into place like any self-conscious teenager.
Forced separation from family would be upsetting for any child. For someone vulnerable, like Sasha, it was deeply unsettling. His mother, Tetyana Kraynyuk, tells me he's still withdrawn, months after they were reunited. The 15-year-old even has grey hairs from all the stress.
They're now living in the western German town of Dinklage as refugees where, after school, Sasha mainly lies on his bed playing on his phone. But he remembers very clearly the moment when Russian soldiers took him away.
"If I'm honest, it was scary," Sasha admits in his quiet voice, rubbing his hands back and forth on his thighs. "I didn't know where they would take us."
When I ask about missing his mum he pauses for a long time, says it's too distressing for him to remember and asks if he can change the subject.
Before the war, Sasha went to Kupyansk Special School in north-eastern Ukraine. He would board during the week, returning home at weekends, but when Russia invaded in February 2022, much of the Kharkiv region was overrun immediately and Tetyana kept her son home for safety.
As September approached, the occupying administration began insisting that all children return to school, now with the Russian curriculum. There was the same push in all occupied areas, often using teachers from Russia to replace those locals who refused to collaborate.
Tetyana was reluctant to send Sasha back, but the teenager was bored stiff after seven months in their village, so on 3 September she dropped him off in Kupyansk.
Days later, Ukrainian forces launched their lightning operation to re-take the region.
"We heard the noise from miles away. The booms. Then the helicopters and the firing. It was a terrible din. Then I saw the tanks and the Ukrainian flag," Tetyana remembers of the counter-offensive.
Unable to contact her son, she was frantic.
"When we reached the school only the caretaker was left. He said the kids had been taken and no-one knew where," Tetyana says.
A teacher saw what happened that day, when as many as 10 heavily armed Russian soldiers "swooped into" the school.
"They didn't care about taking any documents or contacting parents," Mykola Sezonov told me, when we met in Kyiv. "They just shoved the kids in a bus with some refugees and left."
I put to him Russia's defence in such cases: that it was removing children from danger.
"I lived under Russian occupation, and I know the difference between what they say and what I see for myself through the window," was the teacher's response.
For six weeks, there was no word of the children.
"I cried every day, called the hotline and told them I'd lost my son and wrote to the police. We tried to find him through volunteers," Tetyana says.
It was a full month before a friend spotted a video on social media, dated early September 2022. It reported that 13 children from Kupyansk Special School had been moved east to a similar facility in Svatove, still under Russian control.
Another fortnight after that, Tetyana's phone beeped with a message: Sasha was at a Special School in Perevalsk, she read, and his mum could call to talk to him.
"He was happy to hear me, of course. But he really cried," Tetyana recalls of the moment they spoke. "They'd told him his home was destroyed and he'd been afraid we were gone too."
Communication with areas of heavy fighting is not easy, but the Kupyansk children passed through three institutions before anyone tried to reach any relatives.
"There was nothing. Only from Perevalsk, and even then not immediately. I think they did it on purpose," says Tetyana.
Her struggles weren't over.
She would have to return Sasha home in person, but the direct route crossed the frontline. Instead, Tetyana travelled from Ukraine through Poland and the Baltics before crossing on foot into Russia, where the FSB Security Service then interrogated her about Ukrainian troop movements.
She had nothing to tell.
"It was pitch dark, there were checkpoints, men in balaclavas with guns. I was so scared I took pills to calm me," Tetyana remembers of the rest of the trip into occupied eastern Ukraine.
She had another reason to be frightened. By then, Russia was openly taking children from care homes in occupied areas and placing them with Russian families.
The Telegram channel of the children's ombudswoman is full of videos showing her escorting groups of Ukrainian children across the border, where bewildered youngsters are greeted by Russian foster parents with gifts and hugs as the cameras roll.
We sent two requests for an interview with Maria Lvova-Belova and got no reply. But the message from all her posts is clear: Russia is the good guy in what it still refuses to call a war. Russia claims it's saving Ukrainian children.
By the time Sasha disappeared from Kupyansk, Vladimir Putin had already amended the law to make it easier for Ukrainian children to get Russian citizenship and be adopted. In late September he announced the annexation of four regions of Ukraine, including Luhansk where Sasha was then located.
In public and online, Maria Lvova-Belova referred repeatedly to children in those regions as "ours". She adopted a teenager from Mariupol herself, posting pictures with his new Russian passport.
"I was afraid that if they took Sasha into Russia, I would never find him. I was afraid he'd be put in a foster family, just like that," Tetyana tells me.
"What have our children got to do with anything? Why did they do this to us? Maybe it's just to cause us pain, like with everything else."
So when she finally reached Perevalsk, after an exhausting five days on the road, Tetyana hugged her son to her tightly. Sasha didn't say a word. He was crying from happiness.
Danylo's story
Kherson, southern Ukraine
For six months, Alla Yatsenyuk felt like part of herself was missing.
When she packed her 13-year-old son off to camp in Crimea, she thought Danylo was heading for two weeks by the sea. It was meant to be a break from the stress of war: other kids from Kherson had been to camp and come back, so Alla wasn't worried.
Besides, their city had been occupied since the very start of the invasion and by October 2022, she'd begun to think Russia would control Kherson for good, though she didn't want that.
But days after Alla waved Danylo off, the officials responsible for him announced that the children would not return. The Russians had begun retreating from Kherson. If the children's parents wanted them back, they were told they should come for them.
Alla pleaded with the regional administration but was told they would only return the children "when Kherson is Russian again." She called the Prosecutor's Office in Crimea, but they insisted she had to get Danylo herself.
And so for weeks, Alla reassured her son that she was coming for him even as she tried to work out how.
The distance from Kherson to Yevpatoria is short but the direct route was closed by the Russian military and a far longer route through Zaporizhzhia was too dangerous. "There was a less than 5% chance of getting there and back safely," Alla was told.
She would also need around $1,500 (£1,200) for a driver, as well as her first ever passport and all the paperwork the Russians were demanding to prove her link to her son.
Alla was already starting to despair when Danylo said officials at his camp were threatening to place the children in care if their parents didn't hurry.
"The kids have been calling us in panic, saying that they don't want to end up in homes," Alla fretted. "And Russia is huge! Where would we look for them then?"
We met as she finally set off in a train carriage full of other mums and grandmothers on the most anxious journey of their lives.
The women were being helped by a group called Save Ukraine, which stepped in when it emerged that hundreds of Ukrainian children might be stranded. Some were from broken homes or less well-off families, struggling with the logistics and funding for the trip. Other parents had been hesitant about returning their children to cities under heavy Russian fire.
But Alla couldn't wait any longer.
"I still have this gnawing worry something will go wrong. It will be there until I have my son next to me. Then I can breathe again."
Over a week later, Alla was one of the last to cross the border back from Belarus, dragging a big suitcase into Ukraine past concrete boulders and anti-tank defences. Danylo, with his dimpled grin, was finally safe beside her.
There had been moments when she thought she wouldn't make it.
Save Ukraine had instructed the women to turn off their phones when they entered Russia, so the details of their traumatic journey only began spilling out between welcome hugs.
"They kept us like cattle, separate from anyone else. Fourteen hours with no water, no food, nothing," Alla described being held by Russia's FSB security service at a Moscow airport. "They kept asking us what military equipment we had seen, they checked our phones a million times and asked about all our relatives."
The women continued the 24-hour drive south to Crimea. As they drew close, they stopped for a break and 64-year-old Olha Kutova took a couple of steps, collapsed, and died by the side of the road. After days cramped-up in a minibus, in a state of stress, her heart had given out. Now Save Ukraine is trying to return Olha's ashes, as well as her granddaughter.
Eventually, Alla made it to the camp.
"The moment I saw my child running towards me in tears, it made up for everything we'd been through," Alla described her reunion, at last, with Danylo.
Her son tells me it was "just brilliant!"
Save Ukraine returned 31 children that day and several confirmed that camp staff had threatened to place them in care, which had scared them.
They talked of being taken on excursions at the start, and being reasonably fed and clothed. But on Russian-controlled territory they were treated and taught as Russians. When inspectors visited from Moscow, the Ukrainians had to line up beside the Russian flag and sing the Russian anthem.
In October, the occupying administration of Kherson posted a video on Telegram of such a moment. Russia's anthem booms through loudspeakers and the tricolour flag is unfurled. But look a little closer and it's clear that none of the children's lips are moving.
The camera operator suddenly realises that one girl has her hands over her ears to block out the sound. Too late, they zoom away from her.
Going home
A few weeks after her return, I call Alla in Kherson.
"Everything was finally over, once we made it here," she tells me cheerfully down the line.
She admits there was some bad feeling towards the summer-camp mums at the start, seen as "collaborators" for sending their children to Russian-run facilities in the first place. But Alla feels that has faded.
In her own family, Danylo is back to bickering with his younger brother and studying online, in Ukrainian. But with no internet at home, she has to dash into the city centre to hunt for wi-fi to download his schoolwork, and that's risky.
Since the Russians were forced into retreat, abandoning Kherson, they've been taking their revenge on the city from across the river.
"They're shelling from morning to night," Alla confirms, though she says their house is relatively far from Russian positions. They have no plans to leave.
Danylo is still in a group chat with the other children from camp and most who remained have now been collected. But he says five were transferred to a care home somewhere in Russia.
Alla forwards me a photograph of their room with rows of single beds, a cheap rug and a spider plant. Where the left-behind children go from there isn't clear.
The missing children
In rural Germany, Sasha has had time to settle into life and another new school, but Tetyana is finding the adjustment a little harder.
In their flat, over a pile of sprat sandwiches, she explains that her eldest son is still in Ukraine expecting to be called up to fight any day. Tetyana wants nothing more than to go home to her husband, too, but Kupyansk is under heavy fire again.
In late April, Russian missiles destroyed the local history museum, killing two women. Before that, Sasha's old school in the city was badly damaged when missiles landed nearby.
Eight months after he and the other children were taken from there, five still remain in Russian-controlled territory. The director of the school where they ended up, Tatyana Semyonova, confirmed that when I called.
I was surprised she agreed to talk at all, but the Russian number I used must have confused her. So did my questions.
The director claimed no-one had been in touch about the five, which we know isn't true, and insisted she would hand them "straight back" as soon as their legal guardians come to collect them.
But that's unlikely: various sources tell me the children are treated as "social orphans", whose parents are alive but who are not allowed or able to care for them.
When I asked why Russia could take children without permission from Ukraine, but demanded a pile of paperwork to return them, Tatyana Semyonova was short.
"What's that got to do with me? I didn't bring them here."
On the website of her school in Perevalsk, I see a large picture of the director staring out, bleached hair sitting on a strip of dark brown like she's wearing a helmet. The photographs of Artem, Sasha's classmate, with a Z mark, are publicly displayed on the same site.
Sasha has identified two more of the missing children from Kupyansk among the school pictures: 12-year-olds Sofiya and Mikita are dressed up and standing in line to celebrate the Russian military.
I ask Sasha's mother what she makes of the arrest warrant issued for Russia's president.
"Not only Putin, but all his main people - all the commanders - should be on trial for what they did to the kids," Tetyana Kraynyuk answers, without hesitating.
"What right did they have [to take the children]? How were we supposed to get them back? They just didn't care."
READ MORE 
The new SNAP work requirements will inflict pain on poor people and accomplish nothing else. (photo: Andrew Lichtenstein)
The debt ceiling deal is a cruel agreement that imposes new work requirements on SNAP recipients and bureaucratic hurdles for those who still qualify. It will kick people off the rolls and inflict pain, seemingly randomly, with no regard for the human toll.
The bill imposes new work requirements for food stamps on adults ages 50 to 54 who don’t have children living in their home. Under current law, those work requirements only apply to people age 18 to 49. The age limit will be phased in over three years, beginning in fiscal year 2023.
The bill would also exempt veterans, the homeless and people who were children in foster care from food-stamp work requirements — a move White House officials say will offset the program’s new requirements, and leave roughly the same number of Americans eligible for nutrition assistance moving forward.
The rules being extended to ages fifty to fifty-four require individuals to complete, record, and report eighty hours of work in a month, either in the form of actual paid employment or by participating in an uncompensated “work program” organized by the government. The maximum monthly SNAP benefit for an individual is $281, which makes the eighty-hour work program route effectively the same as a job that pays $3.51 per hour. This is less than half the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
Indiscriminate Culling of the Rolls
Most of the discourse about this change has been centered on the philosophical debate about the justness of conditioning benefit receipt on labor market activation and on the empirical debate about what effect these kinds of requirements actually have on employment.
These are interesting debates, but they miss the more mundane administrative reality of these kinds of rule changes. More than anything else, what happens when you tighten the requirements like this is that existing benefit recipients fail to realize that the rules have changed and that they need to submit new forms in order to keep their benefits going. This results in them being disqualified from benefits even if they are actually meeting the new requirements.
So while, in theory, this sort of reform aims to distinguish the active SNAP beneficiaries from the inactive SNAP beneficiaries and threaten benefit cuts to the latter in order to get them to take up work or a work program, in reality, this reform just uses information-dissemination frictions and paperwork burdens to indiscriminately cull the SNAP rolls of both active and inactive beneficiaries.
This happened in 2018 when Arkansas tightened work rules for Medicaid receipt. After that change, only 20 percent of people affected by the new rules even filled out the relevant forms and only 6 percent reported enough work to meet the requirements.
It happened again this year when the COVID-era Medicaid eligibility rules were rolled back. This change was meant to not only kick people off the program who would be ineligible for Medicaid but for the COVID-era expansion of the program. In practice, the vast majority of those who have lost coverage during the rollback have done so for procedural reasons related to failure to fill out new forms.
Early data shows that many people lost coverage for procedural reasons, such as when Medicaid recipients did not return paperwork to verify their eligibility or could not be located. The large number of terminations on procedural grounds suggests that many people may be losing their coverage even though they are still qualified for it. Many of those who have been dropped have been children. . . .
Other states have also removed a large number of Medicaid recipients for procedural reasons. In Indiana, nearly 90 percent of the roughly 53,000 people who lost Medicaid in the first month of the state’s unwinding were booted on those grounds. In Florida, where nearly 250,000 people lost Medicaid coverage, procedural reasons were to blame for a vast majority.
If we actually had some administrative ability to apply these new SNAP rules to only zero out the incomes of inactive recipients, then the philosophical and empirical debates would be much more compelling. But the actual policy we are talking about is randomly kicking out a bunch of fifty- to fifty-four-year-old SNAP recipients regardless of whether they are actually active.
The Veteran Exemption Is Telling
To have a policy discourse, you need policy intellectuals of various political leanings to generate justifications for various policy choices. But justifications only work as justifications insofar as they connect to certain consensus values about what makes a policy good or bad.
This creates a strange situation for conservative policy intellectuals, because the welfare policy opinions of conservative voters and politicians are largely driven by resentments and punitive impulses that are not regarded as relevant to good policymaking. The role of conservative policy intellectuals thus becomes coming up with arguments that, though they don’t actually motivate conservative policymaking, nevertheless operate as justifications in a way that is legible to policy debates.
In the case of work requirements for SNAP, Medicaid, TANF, and similar programs, the real-life appeal is largely rooted in the desire to harm the kind of people who are imagined to fail the requirements: druggies, layabouts, and so on. Many think these kinds of people are scum and don’t want to see them receiving income.
But “fuck those people” doesn’t count as a justification within the norms of policy debate, and so conservative intellectuals are left trying to argue that these kinds of work requirements are actually good for the people who are subject to them. It nudges them out into work, which gives them meaning and community, and puts them in a position to advance in the labor market, which gives them more money.
This kind of stuff is entertaining to some extent, but the policymakers clearly do not think like this because, if they did, these rules wouldn’t always come with a laundry list of exemptions for sympathetic populations.
In this case, the SNAP work requirements are not going to be applied to veterans. This is obviously because veterans are a venerated group in our society. But if work requirements are good for the people who are subject to them, as conservative policy intellectuals claim, then they should especially be applied to venerated groups, like veterans, who we want good things for, right?
How Are These People Supposed to Live?
Unlike most developed countries, the United States does not have what is often called a “social assistance” benefit — i.e., a last-ditch benefit that catches people who are otherwise unable to piece together a bare-minimum income from the market or the welfare state. The closest we have to that is SNAP, but SNAP has so many eligibility restrictions, which are now getting worse, that it does not function as a social assistance benefit. SNAP’s $281 per month in food vouchers is also nowhere near a bare-minimum income.
Elsewhere, social assistance at least nominally answers the question of how certain kinds of people who fall through all the cracks of the ordinary income system are supposed to live. These are usually very stingy benefits with very strict means tests, but they at least exist and serve this important function as a last-ditch protection.
But what is our answer to how these kinds of people are supposed to live in the United States? It’s weird that we don’t even seem to ask the question, let alone make any real effort to answer it.
What do we want a fifty-two-year-old who does not have a job and gets cut off of food stamps to do exactly? Beg on the streets? Die? Do crime? Seriously, what’s the idea? Does anyone know? Does anyone care?
READ MORE 
Activists protest the Mountain Valley Pipeline. (photo: Tom Williams)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at how the proposed bipartisan debt limit deal the House is voting on today could cut funds for the Environmental Protection Agency and speed completion of the controversial $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline in Virginia and West Virginia.
Over 750 frontline communities and environmental justice groups oppose the pipeline. This comes as protests in several cities demanded lawmakers vote down what they are calling the “dirty debt ceiling deal.”
If built, the proposed MVP — that’s Mountain Valley Pipeline — will carry 2 billion cubic feet of fracked gas across more than a thousand streams and wetlands of Appalachia.
It has long been pushed by powerful West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, the biggest recipient of fossil fuel money in Congress.
Meanwhile, the entire Virginia Democratic delegation in the House has submitted an amendment to the strip the Mountain Valley Pipeline provision from the debt ceiling bill, calling it a “free pass for the pipeline” that “sidesteps our nation’s environmental laws and judicial review processes.” Virginia Senator Tim Kaine says he’ll introduce an identical amendment in the Senate.
Well, for more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by a West Virginian who lives in the path of this massive pipeline. Maury Johnson is a southern West Virginia landowner whose organic farm has already been impacted by the Mountain Valley Pipeline. He’s a member of Preserve Monroe, as well as the POWHR Coalition — that is, Protect Our Water, Heritage and Rights Coalition. Both groups have been opposing MVP. His new essay for Common Dreams is headlined “It Is Time to Kill the 'Dirty Deal' Once and For All.”
Maury Johnson, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Why are you so concerned about the passage of the debt deal, the lifting the debt ceiling, including a final approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline?
MAURY JOHNSON: Thank you. Good morning, Amy. Thanks for having me.
So, this debt ceiling deal has a lot of things in it that should be nowhere near a debt ceiling deal. Especially the student loan thing is really bad. My son’s a recipient of student loans, and it’s just a crushing thing. But as far as the permitting and the Mountain Valley pipe exclusion from law, it’s — we have been telling the people permitting this and the people building this for eight years that they can’t build this pipeline and follow the law. And it’s been proven in court numerous times. So they just want to circumvent the law.
I’m what a sacrifice looks like. If this deal goes through, this dirty deal of Joe Manchin’s pet project, Mountain Valley Pipeline, everybody in America needs to look in the mirror and say, “I can be sacrificed also.”
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Maury, could you — for those people who are not familiar with this 303-mile proposed pipeline, how directly would it affect not only Monroe County but the entire path of the pipeline? What are your major concerns about it?
MAURY JOHNSON: Well, we have documented many things, all along the pipeline path, from the very beginning in northern West Virginia, in Mobley, across some very steep slopes, the steepest that’s probably ever been crossed in Appalachia, and slope-prone soils that’s in central West Virginia and southern West Virginia, and even in southwest Virginia. We’re in an earthquake zone, one of the most active earthquake zones in the East, and we have actually had some minor earthquakes during the construction of this pipeline. We know that the methane that leaks all along the pipeline is harmful to the climate.
It’s already impacted a lot of people’s water, including my own. I actually have not been able to use my water since 2021. I started having pretty severe — because I’m in karst, and that’s, for people — that’s caves and sinkholes. Now, they’ll say, “Well, you got to prove that.” And they have an army of attorneys. So, I suspect, very strongly suspect, that this damage was done once they blasted near my house.
There’s just so many problems with this pipeline. The eminent domain issues, where they just take — could take whatever they want. They’ve never really proven that it’s for the use of the people in this country. Former Commissioner Cheryl LaFleur, in 2017, said she’d only seen where a small portion of this was actually being used. They use something called a precedent agreement, where the pipeline company, the people building the pipeline, can sell the capacity on the pipeline to themselves — affiliate to themselves. And that’s all that FERC has said is needed.
One other thing, the day before Earth Day, President Biden issued an executive order saying that environmental justice for all is the priority of his administration. He cannot say that and permit things like the Willow project, the more LNG projects in the Gulf Coast and more pipelines across Appalachia.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you — a spokesperson for Mountain Valley Pipeline, Natalie Cox, told the Mountain State Spotlight, and I’m quoting her there, “The [MVP] project, along with all submitted plans and processes, have undergone rigorous review and evaluation for more years, and in many cases, has been subject to a level of scrutiny that is unprecedented for a project of this nature.” How do you respond to her comments?
MAURY JOHNSON: It has received lots of scrutiny, and the courts has struck down their permits, because they cannot follow the law. I don’t know how many different agencies — West Virginia, Virginia, federal agencies — have tried to change the law, weaken the law, to permit this project. Permitting should not — for any project, should not be weakened and fast-tracked. If they had followed the law and followed our bedrock environmental and Endangered Species Act, this project may not have ever been started, to begin with, or would have just drastically been changed. So, yes, and even the 4th — the D.C. Circuit just last Friday questioned FERC on: Why did you issue a two-year extension back in 2020 without doing a supplemental environmental impact statement?
This project has been very poorly designed from the very beginning, and we have told them so many, many, many times. And all they do is pay more legislators. If this project is added to the dirty — to this debt ceiling, then that just will violate constitutional law. It will end democracy for people, for citizens being able to say, “This is wrong. You can’t do this.” All that corporations would have to do is throw a bunch of money to politicians. The corporations get rich, the politicians get rich, and the people and the citizens of the country are sacrificed.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a comment of Crystal Cavalier-Keck. We spoke to her last year. She’s chair of the NAACP Environmental Justice Committee and a member of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, talking about how the MVP threatens sacred burial grounds.
CRYSTAL CAVALIER-KECK: So, the map, it starts in West Virginia, and it goes through the mountaintops. And on these mountaintops are our sacred burial grounds of our Monacan, Saponi and Occaneechi nations. And, you know, the MVP, they call these burial mounds “rock piles,” and they often say these do not exist, which often makes us — they’re trying to extinct us or genocide us again. But it’s going through these very sacred mountains, going through waters, boring under rivers — and these sacred waters of, like, the Roanoke, the Dan and the Haw River, which is very sacred to my tribe and my community.
AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, can you comment, Maury, on what Cavalier-Keck is saying, and also the very stringent rules that are being set forth in this deal that would really take power away from the courts, where environmentalists have been having a series of victories against the MVP, and demand that it be approved within, what, 21 days of signing?
MAURY JOHNSON: Yeah, well, let’s talk about the Native American artifacts and burial grounds. I’ve been told — I haven’t actually gotten to see it, but I’ve been told that in Lewis County, West Virginia, MVP destroyed Native American artifacts that were 15,000 years old. I know that in numerous areas they found lots of Native American artifacts in Summers County on a place called Keeney’s Knob. I know that on Peters Mountain — I can see Peters Mountain from my house — where the Appalachian Trail will be impacted, not only there but along this pipeline for over a hundred miles, unprecedented impacts. On Peters Mountain on the Virginia side, I have and other people have photoed an area of significant Native American artifacts. And they just want to blast through it. They’re not going to do a — they won’t have to do any kind of a study or looking for it. It’s happened in Bent Mountain, Virginia. And then, if the MVP is completed and they do the MVP Southgate that goes through Crystal’s area, there’s lots and lots of Native American artifacts and areas in southern Virginia and south, northern North Carolina.
So, this pipeline — this bill says that the federal government and the state government has to issue permits within 21 days. Whether they can meet the actual rules or not, it doesn’t matter. And you can’t take it to court. There’s the unconstitutional part of it. Citizens’ rights to redress their grievances before the court is part of the Constitution, and they’re taking the power from the citizens and from the courts. If they can do that to us and people in Appalachia, they can do it to anyone.
AMY GOODMAN: Maury —
MAURY JOHNSON: They also said that — yes?
AMY GOODMAN: We just have to wrap up. We have 15 more seconds.
MAURY JOHNSON: OK. OK. Well, they just need to get this out of this debt ceiling package, or let’s just pass a clean CR and get some of this bad stuff, like this permitting and this Mountain Valley Pipeline and the student loan stuff — it needs to go. And thank you, Tim Kaine and the delegates from Virginia and the others who are fighting on our behalf.
AMY GOODMAN: Maury Johnson, I want to thank you for being with us, southern West Virginia organic farmer whose land has been impacted by the Mountain Valley Pipeline, member of the Preserve Monroe, as well as POWHR Coalition —
MAURY JOHNSON: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — Protect Our Water, Heritage and Rights Coalition. We’ll link to your article —
MAURY JOHNSON: And we have a website.
AMY GOODMAN: — “It Is Time to Kill the 'Dirty Deal' Once and For All.” The website, Maury?
MAURY JOHNSON: POWHR.org.
AMY GOODMAN: POWHR.org.
MAURY JOHNSON: P-O-W-H-R dot org.
AMY GOODMAN: Next up, we look at a major Supreme Court ruling weakening the Clean Water Act. Back in 30 seconds.
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Special Counsel Jack Smith appears to be narrowing the focus of his investigations into the former president. (photo: Brandon Bell and Jerry Lampen/AFP)
Special Counsel Jack Smith appears to be narrowing the focus of his investigations into the former president
Smith reportedly issued the subpoenas two weeks ago. Sources who spoke to the Times said the special counsel is probing witnesses for information regarding “loyalty” tests, and efforts within Trump’s administration to root out officials whose devotion to Trump was deemed insufficient.
Krebs was among those administration figures targeted by former Trump aide John McEntee. According to a memo obtained by ABC News, White House staff drafted a list of Krebs’ alleged sins against the former president. Items included allowing a Black Lives Matter town hall to take place, endorsing mail-in voting, his wife posting a photo on Facebook with a Biden/Harris watermark, and being “known to have direct contact with Dominion [Voting] Systems.”
Trump fired Krebs less than two weeks after the 2020 election.
In addition to examining Trump’s efforts to undermine the election, Smith has also been tasked with investigating the former president’s handling of classified documents following his departure from office. According to a Tuesday report from The Washington Post, Smith’s office has honed in on a yet-unnamed employee who aided in moving boxes of documents containing classified information from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago the day before an FBI official came to the property to collect materials from the room.
Smith’s dual investigations have the former president sweating. As previously reported by Rolling Stone, Trump’s own attorneys have told him he should be prepared to be indicted (again). Trump has never been one to take things quietly, of course. Rolling Stone reported on Tuesday that Trump has already informed advisers of his plans to purge federal law enforcement agencies of individuals involved in the investigations into his conduct. He just needs to get elected again to make it happen.
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Aderrien Murry, 11, called the police as his mother asked - but when officers arrived, one of them shot him in the chest. A new lawsuit says officials failed to train and supervise its officers. (photo: Courtesy of Nakala Murry)
The boy has been recovering from his wounds, which include a collapsed lung, a fractured rib and a lacerated liver.
The family's lawsuit seeks at least $5 million in damages, accusing the police department of gross negligence and reckless disregard, and failing to properly train and supervise its officers.
The family has called for the officer involved to be fired, along with Police Chief Ronald Sampson. They also want police body camera footage of the incident released.
The shooting unfolded on May 20
Officers who responded to the domestic disturbance call acted in a way, the suit alleges, that was "so outrageous that it shocks the moral and legal conscience of the community."
Aderrien Murry's mother says she told him to call the police after the father of one of her other children came to their home in the early hours of May 20 in an "irate" mood.
After arriving at Murry's home in response to the emergency call, police instructed everyone inside to come out with their hands up. His mother says that when Aderrien Murry emerged from around a corner, running toward the door, an officer opened fire.
She rushed to help her son, putting her hands on his wound to try to stop the blood flowing out. The officer also tried to render aid, and police called an ambulance. Her son didn't understand what happened, she said.
"His words to me were: 'Why did he shoot me? What did I do?' and he just started crying," Nakala Murry said at a news conference last week.
Suit alleges civil rights violations, poor oversight
The lawsuit filed by Carlos Moore, the family's attorney, accuse the police of violating Aderrien Murry's civil rights — specifically the Fourth Amendment's protection against the use of excessive force and the 14th Amendment's guarantee of due process.
"What we do know is he obeyed the officer's command," Moore said of Aderrien, according to member station Mississippi Public Broadcasting. "He came out of his room with nothing in his hands and was shot."
"He was not a threat to anyone. He was just obeying the command."
The officer who fired his weapon is Sgt. Greg Capers, according to the court documents. Last week, Indianola City Attorney Kimberly Merchant told local newspaper The Enterprise-Tocsin that Capers had been removed from active duty.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is investigating the shooting. It has released few details, citing the ongoing inquiry.
Nakala Murry has said the key issue in this case isn't race — she, her son and Capers are all Black — but police training and attitudes.
"You're here to protect and serve," Murry said. "In this case, we didn't feel protected. We felt like victims."
In the U.S., police are more likely to use fatal force on Black people than any other ethnic group, according to Statista — which notes that fatal police shootings have continued on a worrying upward trend.
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Smoke rises after fights in Khartoum, Sudan. (photo: Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters)
The armed forces said in a statement it halted talks in the Saudi city of Jeddah, accusing the other side of a lack of commitment in implementing any terms of the agreement and a continuous violation of the ceasefire.
The negotiations with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which began in early May, had produced a declaration of commitments to protect civilians and two short-term truce agreements, although those deals were repeatedly violated.
Eyewitnesses reported on Wednesday that the RSF had expanded its footprint within central Khartoum's Mogran district. They also reported heavy clashes across the Nile in northern Omdurman and northern Bahri through Wednesday evening.
At least 15 people were killed and 30 injured after projectiles fell on a market in a dense southern Khartoum on Wednesday, the local neighborhood resistance committee said in a statement. It said the local Bashair hospital, one of the few still operating in the capital, was overwhelmed.
The war has killed hundreds of people, displaced more than 1.2 million inside Sudan and driven 400,000 others across borders to neighbouring states, the United Nations says.
The army, which relies on air power and artillery, and the RSF, a more lightly armed force that has dominated on the ground in Khartoum, had agreed to extend a week-long ceasefire deal by five days just before its Monday expiry.
Army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, a career military officer, and RSF General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a former militia commander known as Hemedti, have been locked in a battle for power since April 15. Neither side seems to have an edge.
"We do not want to use lethal force. We still haven't used our maximum strength ... We don't want to destroy the country," Burhan said in a military video released on Tuesday, speaking to cheering forces at a military base with a gun slung on his back.
"But if the enemy does not obey and does not respond we will be forced to use the strongest force we have."
The RSF said in a statement late on Tuesday it was committed to the ceasefire "despite repeated violations" by the army.
In a video released by the RSF on Wednesday, Hemedti's brother and RSF number two Abdelrahim Dagalo called on army soldiers to desert and work together with the RSF.
"Anyone who wants Sudan's best interests should leave Burhan," he said, adding that his brother was well and on the front lines.
Sudan has a history of political upheaval, coups and internal conflicts, but violence had previously hit regions far from Khartoum, which is home to millions of people.
CHALLENGING NEGOTIATIONS
Commenting on the Sudanese army's withdrawal from the Jeddah talks, Mohamed El Hacen Lebatt, African Union spokesperson on the crisis in Sudan, said: "It is not surprising. It happens often. We hope the mediator will succeed to bring both parties for working on an expected ceasefire."
The capital has seen widespread looting and frequent power and water supply cuts. Most hospitals have stopped functioning.
Before the ceasefire deal was renewed, an army source said the army had demanded the RSF withdraw from civilian homes and hospitals as a condition for an extension. After the five-day extension was agreed, talks continued on the truce terms.
The truce deal was brokered and is being remotely monitored by Saudi Arabia and the United States. They say it has been violated by both sides, although the truce has still allowed the delivery of aid to an estimated 2 million people.
Clashes have also erupted outside the capital, including Darfur, a region in the far west of Sudan where a conflict that erupted in 2003 has flared on and off for years.
The United Nations, some aid agencies, embassies and parts of Sudan's central government have moved operations out of the capital to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, which has remained calm.
Burhan and Hemedti fell out over the chain of command and restructuring of the RSF under a planned transition to civilian rule. After conflict flared, Burhan sacked Hemedti as his deputy in the ruling council that had run Sudan since the two toppled autocratic Islamist President Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
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A firefighter tried to save a home in Meyers, California, in 2021. (photo: Max Whittaker/The New York Times)
The largest insurer in California said it would stop offering new coverage. It’s part of a broader trend of companies pulling back from dangerous areas.
This month, the largest homeowner insurance company in California, State Farm, announced that it would stop selling coverage to homeowners. That’s not just in wildfire zones, but everywhere in the state.
Insurance companies, tired of losing money, are raising rates, restricting coverage or pulling out of some areas altogether — making it more expensive for people to live in their homes.
“Risk has a price,” said Roy Wright, the former official in charge of insurance at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and now head of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, a research group. “We’re just now seeing it.”
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