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There’s no distancing the Republican Party from Solomon Peña — or his alleged acts of political violence.
Peña’s story is a case study in the close and direct links between Republicans and right-wing violence, even as party leaders try to deny them.
For those who haven’t been following him, Peña ran as a Republican for a seat in the New Mexico Legislature in November but was handily defeated by his Democratic opponent. Peña received only about 26 percent of the vote in his district, yet he refused to concede, and instead, like other Republican losers around the country, mimicked Donald Trump by complaining that he was the victim of election fraud.
“Trump just announced for 2024,” Peña tweeted on November 15, 2022. “I stand with him. I never conceded my HD 14 race. Now researching my options.”
Trump just announced for 2024. I stand with him. I never conceded my HD 14 race. Now researching my options. pic.twitter.com/sKVHhxG9Vq
— Solomon Pena for NM (@SolomonPena2022) November 16, 2022
Peña’s “options” were revealed last week, when he was arrested in connection with a series of shootings at the homes of four Democratic state officials in Albuquerque, including two involved in certifying the results in his race.
Peña, 39, is accused of leading a group that included four others who shot at the homes of the Democratic officials; in one case, bullets fired into the house of a Democratic state senator came close to hitting the official’s 10-year-old daughter. Peña allegedly paid the four accomplices and provided them with weapons; he’s also accused of personally participating in at least one of the drive-by shootings.
The Peña case is part of a surging wave of right-wing political violence that now arguably represents the biggest national security threat facing the United States. Academic researchers are finally catching up with the trend, and recording what has become obvious: The violence is overwhelmingly committed by extremists on the right rather than the left.
In 2022, an extensive historical study of acts of extremist violence, committed between 1948 and 2018, found that the likelihood that an act of violence was committed by a right-wing extremist was virtually equal to the chance that it was committed by an Islamist extremist, while the likelihood that such an act was committed by a left-wing extremist was far lower. The study, conducted by a research team co-led by University of Maryland criminology professor Gary LaFree, also analyzed global data related to acts of terrorism between 1970 and 2017, showing that attacks by left-wing extremists throughout the world were 45 percent less likely to result in fatalities than attacks by right-wing extremists.
Right-wing violence seems to have increased since the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In fact, Peña’s arrest came just weeks after the two leading members of a 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were finally sentenced, and follows the October attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as the August armed attack on the FBI’s Cincinnati office by a pro-Trump extremist angered by the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago in connection with Trump’s classified documents case.
What makes Peña’s case significant — and clarifying — is that the defeated candidate himself may have engaged directly in the violence. In other recent cases, Republicans have sought to dismiss acts of violence by claiming that there was no proof the criminals involved were motivated by their pro-Trump, Republican ideology. Republicans and conservatives have frequently pushed conspiracy theories to falsely assert that violence was actually committed by left-wing extremists, or, alternatively, was brought on by the victims themselves. In the aftermath of the attack on Paul Pelosi, for example, prominent conservatives embraced a wide variety of conspiracy theories, including claims that the assailant was Pelosi’s gay lover.
But it is not really possible to distance the Republican Party from Peña — or from his acts of violence. After all, the Republicans’ own candidate for a seat in New Mexico’s House of Representatives is now sitting in jail, and the evidence against him seems ironclad.
The Peña case underscores how the lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories that now dominate the rhetoric of the Republican Party lead to violence, and that makes Peña’s story even more significant than that of George Santos, the first-term House representative and serial fabulist who has garnered far more national attention.
Solomon Peña, like so many others in the pro-Trump world, never succeeded at life. Demoted twice while serving in the Navy, he later was part of a group that drove cars into four different stores and robbed them, resulting in a string of smash-and-grab burglaries in Albuquerque that landed him in prison for almost seven years. He was released from prison in 2016 and remained on probation until 2021, just a year before he ran for the state legislature.
Peña embraced Trump’s MAGA cult and posted photos of himself on Twitter showing that he was in Washington on January 6, 2021, to support Trump’s false claims that he had actually won the 2020 election.
This is one of the last pictures I have of the Jan 06 trip. I lost that phone at the Trump rally in Phoenix, July 2021. Make America Great Again! pic.twitter.com/EJToLrD8md
— Solomon Pena for NM (@SolomonPena2022) November 14, 2022
Unlike Santos, Peña’s troubled past was well known during the 2022 campaign; his Democratic opponent sued to have him removed from the ballot because of his felony convictions. In September 2022, a court ruling allowed Pena to stay on the ballot, but the issue was fully covered in the New Mexico press.
Republicans, meanwhile, continued to back him, arguing that Peña deserved a second chance. “Please support Solomon Pena,” Michelle Garcia Holmes, a Republican congressional candidate in New Mexico, tweeted in October, after the court ruling allowing Peña to stay on the ballot. “He is the right choice!”
On November 9, the day after he was soundly defeated in the election, Peña tweeted: “I dissent. I am the MAGA king.”
Police say that, after his election loss, Peña went to the homes of the four Democratic officials and confronted them with his claims of election fraud. Soon after that, he escalated to allegedly enlisting a group of criminals to shoot at their homes.
During this post-election period, while he was publicly claiming election fraud, Peña was still moving up in Republican circles in New Mexico. Two days before his arrest, he was elected to posts as a county ward chair and a Republican Party State Central Committee member.
Following his arrest, the Republican caucus in the New Mexico House of Representatives issued a bizarre statement that did not mentioned Peña’s statehouse candidacy, instead criticizing the government for allowing him to have guns. In a statement that seemed to turn everything about the Peña case on its head, state Republican House leader Ryan Lane said, “This is yet another example of a convicted felon gaining access to firearms, which they are barred from owning or possessing, and using the weapon in a manner that causes public harm.”
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Memphis Police Department Officers Demetrius Haley, Tadarrius Bean, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills and Justin Smith were terminated on Jan. 18 for their role in the arrest of deceased Tyre Nichols. (photo: AP)
Nichols, 29, died three days after a traffic stop turned into a fatal physical attack on 7 January
Shelby county sheriff’s office online records showed that Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Desmond Mills Jr, Emmitt Martin III and Justin Smith were in custody. All five were charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression.
“While each of the five individuals played a different role in the incident in question, the actions of all of them resulted in the death of Tyre Nichols and they are all responsible,” Steve Mulroy, the Shelby county district attorney, said during a press conference on Thursday.
David Rausch, director of the Tennessee bureau of investigation, said: “Let me be clear: What happened here does not, at all, reflect proper policing.
“This was wrong,” Rausch said. “This was a crime.”
Nichols’s stepfather, Rodney Wells, told the Associated Press by phone that he and his wife, RowVaughn Wells, who is Nichols’ mother, discussed the second-degree murder charges and are “fine with it”. They had sought first-degree murder charges.
“There’s other charges, so I’m all right with that,” he said.
Nichols, 29, endured a three-minute attack, Mulroy said. An attorney representing his family reportedly said an independent autopsy indicated that he “suffered extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating”.
“He was a human piñata for those police officers,” the family attorney, Antonio Romanucci, told reporters. “Not only was it violent, it was savage.”
Police officials initially said there was a “confrontation” when officers came toward Nichols’s vehicle and then another “confrontation” after they arrested him.
The five former officers accused of involvement in the deadly encounter, who are all Black, were fired last week. Memphis police officials said the officers flouted “multiple department policies, including excessive use of force, duty to intervene, and duty to render aid”.
Other officers are being investigated for possible policy violations. Two Memphis fire department members who worked on Nichols’s initial care have been “relieved of duty” pending an internal investigation, officials said.
State and federal officials are investigating the fatal encounter.
Memphis authorities said they would release video of the incident. The public has not yet seen the footage, but family members and their attorneys have. During the press conference on Thursday afternoon, officials indicated that the footage would be released after 6pm local time on Friday.
The chilling recording showed that Nichols “called repeatedly for his mother”, his family’s legal team said, throughout the beating, which took place some 100 yards from his mother’s home, family representatives told reporters.
Speaking to reporters after viewing the video, Romanucci said officers pepper-sprayed Nichols, used a stun–gun and restrained him. Family representatives said Nichols said he wanted just to return home.
“Tyre was brutalized by Memphis police, much like how Rodney King was beaten more than 30 years ago – but unlike Rodney, Tyre lost his life from this violent attack,” the civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is on the family legal team, said after seeing the video.
“How are we here again so many years later? These former officers must face the consequences of taking this young man’s life and robbing his family of their loved one – justice is the only path forward.”
A day before charges were announced, the city’s police chief, CJ Davis, denounced the fatal encounter as “heinous, reckless and inhumane”.
“Aside from being your chief of police, I am a citizen of this community we share,” Davis said in a video published on YouTube. “I am a mother, I am a caring human being who wants the best for all of us.
“This is not just a professional failing. This is a failing of basic humanity toward another individual … and in the vein of transparency when the video is released in the coming days, you will see this for yourselves.”
A description of Nichols’s health provided by his family suggested a dramatic disparity between his physical strength and that of the arresting officers. Nichols had Crohn’s disease and had trouble maintaining his body weight, the Washington Post reported.
Nichols’s weight was about 145lb. All the officers allegedly involved in his death exceeded 200lb. Two of the officers were on college football teams, the Post noted.
RowVaughn told the Post her son was a “gentle soul”. Nichols, who had a four-year-old son, worked for the shipping giant FedEx. Every night, during his evening meal break, he would return to his mother’s home. His hobbies included taking photos of sunsets and skateboarding, the New York Times reported. He had a tattoo of his mother’s name on his arm.
“That made me proud,” RowVaughn told the New York Times. “Most kids don’t put their mom’s name. My son was a beautiful soul.”
Rodney, Nichols’s stepfather, said: “He was a great, great kid, he didn’t deserve what he got, now what he deserves is justice.”
Memphis remains on edge as residents await the video release. The Democratic congressman Steve Cohen, who represents the city, said the killing was “awful” while urging calm, the Times said.
While people might “want to exercise their first amendment rights to protest actions of the police department”, Cohen said, “and people should, they should be peaceful and calm”.
Palestinian leaders cut security ties with Israel after deadly gun battle at Jenin refugee camp. (photo: AFP)
Palestinian leaders cut security ties with Israel after deadly gun battle at Jenin refugee camp
A 61-year-old woman and a male civilian were among the dead, the Palestinian health ministry said, and about 20 more people were seriously injured in the violence on Thursday morning. The seven other casualties were claimed by various Palestinian militant groups, and two more people were killed in clashes in Ramallah and East Jerusalem later in the day.
The Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank and works alongside Israel to contain militant activity, announced on Thursday night it was suspending security cooperation with the Israeli government – a step it has taken on a temporary basis in the past.
Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers arrived at daybreak at several entrances of the Jenin refugee camp, a militant stronghold in the north of the Palestinian territory, said Sakir Khader, a Palestinian-Dutch film-maker at the scene. Armed Palestinians shot at an Israeli armoured vehicle disguised as a commercial van, at which point the IDF returned fire and a fierce four-hour gun battle ensued, causing widespread damage, he said.
“I was stuck in the middle of the firefight for hours,” Khader said. “It was crazy. There were snipers and drones and they used a bulldozer to block off a street. It destroyed lots of cars and a public meeting spot.
“At the hospital there are mothers looking for their sons … Everything is still very tense. I have been coming to Palestine all my life and I have never seen something like this.”
The raid’s death toll is the highest in a single operation ever recorded by the United Nations since the international body’s records began in 2005.
Hamas, the Palestinian militant group in control of the Gaza Strip, along with the smaller group Islamic Jihad, promised a response to the Jenin violence. In the early hours of Friday, six rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip towards southern Israel that were intercepted by missile defences, the Israeli military said.
There was no immediate claim for the rocket fire or reports of injuries. The IDF responded by conducting bombing raids on what it said were rocket-making sites in central Gaza.
UN and Arab mediators have been left scrambling to prevent the violence from escalating, with diplomats saying late on Thursday that negotiations were being held with Israel and Palestinian factions across the West Bank and Gaza Strip in an effort to calm the situation.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the country was not looking for escalation, though he ordered security forces “to prepare for all scenarios in the various sectors”.
The IDF said it conducted the unusual daytime operation in Jenin, which ventured deep into the camp, because of intelligence suggesting a cell linked to Palestinian Islamic Jihad was planning to carry out imminent attacks against Israelis.
The army also denied firing teargas at a nearby hospital after video emerged showing children in the paediatric ward choking and coughing. Teargas had probably wafted inside the hospital from the clashes nearby, it said. There were no Israeli casualties.
Thursday’s bloodshed is the latest development in Operation Breakwater, a nine-month-old Israeli military campaign that has targeted Palestinian factions in the northern West Bank city and nearby Nablus on a near-nightly basis. It was launched in response to a wave of deadly Palestinian terrorist attacks last spring.
The operation has contributed to the highest death toll in the occupied West Bank since the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, concluded in 2005, with about 250 Palestinians and 30 Israelis killed last year, according to rights groups. Another 30 Palestinians, among them fighters and civilians, have been killed so far in 2023.
As large funeral processions in Jenin got under way on Thursday afternoon, Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, declared three days of mourning and ordered flags at half mast. A general strike was also declared across the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, and by lunchtime hundreds of people had headed towards Israeli military checkpoints to protest.
At the Beit El checkpoint near Ramallah, soldiers fired teargas at the demonstrators, some of whom threw stones and set fire to tyres. Three Palestinians in the area were reportedly shot and seriously injured, according to local media.
“It is the same story again and again. The occupation does not stop killing us, so we will not stop resisting,” said Nour, a 22-year-old student who wrapped her face in a black and white keffiyeh to protect against the teargas.
Tensions in the decades-long conflict have soared as a result of the escalating violence, and recent polling suggests that support for the dormant peace process has reached an all-time low on both sides.
The recent election of the most rightwing government in Israeli history is expected to inflame an already volatile situation. Members of the new Israeli coalition have pledged to accelerate the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank – a practice that negates the possibility of a two-state solution – and loosen the rules of engagement for soldiers and police.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken is due to travel to Egypt, Israel and the West Bank next week to discuss the situation.
“With both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, the secretary will underscore the urgent need for the parties to take steps to deescalate tensions in order to put an end to the cycle of violence that has claimed too many innocent lives,” state department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement.
The United Arab Emirates, China and France have also asked the UN security council to meet behind closed doors on Friday over the violence, diplomats said.
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Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is the most heavily visited wilderness area in the country, according to the Interior Department. (photo: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The move comes as the administration faces a string of tough decisions on federal conservation for spots in Alaska and Nevada
The move, announced Thursday, extends a temporary decision from a year ago to block copper, nickel and other hard-rock mining that the Trump administration had tried to greenlight near the Canadian border. Officials said they determined the potential toxic leaching from mining would be too threatening to nature, local Native American communities and a growing recreation economy.
Boundary Waters is the most heavily visited wilderness area in the country, according to the Interior Department. And Thursday’s decision will affect 225,000 acres of federal lands and waters in the Rainy River Watershed, which abuts the wilderness area northwest of Lake Superior.
It comes a day after the administration took action to protect Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, and as it faces other decisions on hotly fought over sites in Alaska and Nevada. The Biden administration has promised to set aside sacred tribal sites and to conserve 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by 2030, but has come under fire for how to balance that push with demand for oil, renewable energy and minerals.
“The Department of the Interior takes seriously our obligations to steward public lands and waters on behalf of all Americans,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement. “Protecting a place like Boundary Waters is key to supporting the health of the watershed and its surrounding wildlife, upholding our Tribal trust and treaty responsibilities, and boosting the local recreation economy.”
Advocates for mining in the region have said it can be a key domestic source of the materials needed for President Biden’s promised transition to cleaner energy. Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta, held leases there that the administration canceled last year, and has accused the administration of trying to go around the law to stop the project for political gain.
In a statement Thursday, a mining industry leader said the decision was frustrating, given the Biden administration’s stated goals on “electrification, the energy transition and supply chain security.”
“At a time when demand for minerals such as copper, nickel and cobalt are skyrocketing for use in electric vehicles and solar and wind infrastructure, the administration is withdrawing hundreds of thousands of acres of land that could provide U.S. manufacturers with plentiful sources of these same minerals,” said Rich Nolan, president and chief executive of the National Mining Association.
The administration’s environmental agenda has led to similar showdowns with oil and mining companies in Alaska and solar developers in Nevada. The administration is expected to announce decisions soon — possibly within days — on the Bristol Bay watershed in Alaska and as many as 450,000 acres around the Avi Kwa Ame mountain in Nevada.
It also made a commitment to Alaskan leaders to finish an environmental review this month on ConocoPhillips’s multibillion-dollar Willow oil project, which climate activists oppose. That deadline arrives Tuesday, and the administration has signaled it may allow drilling to go forward there, within a smaller area.
Current and former administration officials think the company’s long-standing leases would be hard for the federal government to break. Such legal impediments have forced the administration to go slow on big swaths of its climate agenda and limited how far it can go to fulfill promises Biden has made to block oil drilling in the Arctic and other federal territory.
“They have had legitimate difficulties with a divided country and Congress,” said John Leshy, a law professor who served as Interior’s solicitor under President Bill Clinton and has written on federal authority to curb fossil fuel leasing. “They are exhorting people — in state government, in the private sector, at all levels — to pay more attention to conservation. I think that is generally working.”
Administration officials did not take questions on the timing of their moves and whether there is a strategy to expedite them now. But in recent days they have emphasized they are committed to fulfilling the environmental promises Biden made at the start of his administration.
On Thursday, an Interior official noted the department had already canceled the Twin Metals leases, clearing an easier path for Haaland to order protections around the 1.1 million acres of Boundary Waters to go into effect. The department had said the leases were improperly renewed under the Trump administration through an inadequate environmental analysis that had sidestepped the U.S. Forest Service, which manages the surface area.
Senior officials at the department see the wilderness there as a unique place, irreplaceable and easily damaged because of the immense and fragile connections between all the waterways that dot the region. In 2021, the Biden administration launched a scientific analysis, which found mining could cause irreparable damage to the region’s nature and culture, officials said Thursday. It found several examples in the last decade where containment efforts failed and other leaks from mines in the region caused such damage, an Agriculture Department official said.
Each year, Boundary Waters attracts roughly 150,000 visitors looking to canoe, fish and connect with nature. The glaciers that gouged the region over the past 2 million years left behind a rugged terrain that is now home to wolves, moose, bobcats, beavers, bald eagles and peregrine falcons.
“Acid pollution from sulfide mines as far away as 100 miles threaten the park’s waters and all who visit. Even small amounts of this pollution is detrimental to public health,” Christine R. Goepfert, a campaign director for the National Parks Conservation Association, said in a statement. “Banning mining activities in the region’s prized Boundary Waters will protect the broader park ecosystem now and for years to come.”
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Protestors hold signs and march during demonstrations in Atlanta, Georgia, related to the death of a 26-year-old activist, who was killed during a police raid inside Weelaunee People's Park. (photo: Cheney Orr/Reuters)
The “Stop Cop City” movement has gone global as more than a dozen activists defending the Atlanta Forest are charged with domestic terrorism.
Members of Atlanta’s burgeoning “Stop Cop City” movement were rattled after Georgia state police shot and killed Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran, a 26-year-old queer environmental activist who had joined the protest encampment in Atlanta’s South River Forest. But the activists—some of whom were arrested and are now facing domestic terrorism charges and excessively high bail amounts—are showing no signs of backing down.
Local organizations like Community Movement Builders, a Black-led nonprofit and mutual aid group which has mobilized with Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest activists, have described the police’s actions as blatant attempts to derail the movement.
“The high bail amounts and charges are a way to make an example of people so that others see themselves out of the movement,” Jasmine, an organizer with Community Movement Builders, told Motherboard. “Those things are a strategic choice to dissuade people from participating, [and] also to try to bleed resources from the movement. They’re trying to bleed the movement dry.”
Since the summer of 2021, Atlanta’s forest defenders have held camp as part of a widespread local resistance to halt construction of a new state-of-the-art $90 million police training facility, which locals call “Cop City.” The project plans to use 381 acres of dense woodland forest to build a massive mock city designed to train police in urban warfare. The plan has been widely opposed by local residents and environmental experts, who say it would cause extreme flooding in areas populated primarily by Black and brown residents.
The shooting occurred last week after Georgia State Patrol and other law enforcement agencies entered the South River Forest to conduct a SWAT operation to clear forest encampments, part of the police’s escalating tactics to stifle the growing movement. Police say Teran refused to exit a tent and shot at the state troopers first—a claim that has been fiercely contested by protesters who knew Teran and were present during the sweep.
That night, community members gathered in Atlanta to mourn and protest Teran’s killing, which has been described by organizers as a tragic culmination of events in Atlanta police repression. In the following days, activists around the globe, from Los Angeles to Lützerath, Germany, have joined Stop Cop City activists in their demands to save the forest, abolish the police, and vindicate Teran’s death, transforming Stop Cop City from a local movement to an international one almost overnight.
Six people were arrested during the forest raid the morning Teran was killed. Fifteen others were arrested late that night during the evening’s protest of solidarity and mourning. Last weekend, four others were arrested during a protest in downtown Atlanta which resulted in property damage of a few businesses and a police car. This resulted in the second wave of domestic terrorism charges mounted against protesters and forest defenders, with five others arrested and charged in December 2022.
In total, the state of Georgia is now planning to prosecute 18 people for domestic terrorism, all of whom are connected to the movement against the police training facility. The activists will also be among the first to be charged under the state’s weighty 2017 domestic terrorism statute, which carries a maximum sentence of 35 years in prison.
Local activists and legal experts have condemned the charges, and called for an independent investigation into the killing of Teran, which includes demands for the release of body cam footage. Atlanta Solidarity Fund, an organization that provides financial and legal resources to those arrested during protest, released a statement calling the domestic terrorism charges a “dangerous precedent, designed to stifle public opposition and scare anyone concerned about police militarization and climate change away from protesting.”
The tactics on display are all-too-familiar, according to Lauren Regan, director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, a nonprofit legal movement organization that is offering legal representation to Atlanta protesters.
“In my 25 years of experience defending activists, it is unfortunately a recurrent type of state repression when a campaign like this one gains momentum and broad public support,” Regan told Motherboard. “We’ve seen this time and time again. Domestic terrorism statutes, false arrests, high bonds, escalated charges—all of these along with police brutality are things on the state repression menu. And you’re seeing all of them in Atlanta right now.”
Local authorities have also made numerous claims that Atlanta’s forest defense movement, commonly known as Defend the Atlanta Forest, has been named by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as “domestic violent extremists.” However, Regan told Motherboard those claims are false.
“We have heard authorities in Atlanta regularly make statements along the line that the [DHS] has classified the forest defense as a terrorist organization or a violent extremist organization,” says Regan. “That’s not true. We have called and DHS does not classify individual groups. We keep seeing lies being made by government officials in order to attempt to justify this outrageous use of rhetoric against not-uncommon property crimes.”
During a bail hearing for those arrested on Jan. 18, bail was denied for four arrestees while two others were granted bond at the unprecedented cost of $355,000 each, along with bail conditions including ankle monitors and curfews, according to members of Atlanta Solidarity Fund who were present for the hearing. On Jan. 25, DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston recused herself from the investigation that would uncover more details about Teran’s death. Body cam footage has still not been released, with officials saying they did not have badge cams during the raid. Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr is now taking the lead in the domestic terrorism cases.
While activity in the forest has waned since Teran’s killing, organizers have been pivoting to other means of resistance along with redoubling efforts taking place outside of encampments. Activists are demanding that prosecutors drop all charges against protesters and authorize an independent investigation of Teran’s murder, and that city officials cancel the lease for Cop City with the Atlanta Police Foundation, and that corporations involved in Cop City divest from the project. They are also calling for continued national and international support, urging people outside of Atlanta to spread awareness and host events in their own communities to prevent what would be the largest police training facility in the U.S.
Mariah Parker, a local organizer and hip-hop artist, says that the Stop Cop City movement brings together multiple spheres of collective struggles being fought around the world.
“There can be no guessing that with this facility, they will be bringing in folks from police departments from across the country, other armed groups, and state agents around the world,” Parker told Motherboard, detailing how Stop Cop City is no longer just an Atlanta issue. “The money and support coming in [for Cop City] is coming from outside of Georgia. The offense is coming from all over the country. The city and police foundation had been mobilizing national forces, and so are we now, because we have to.”
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Visitors wearing military camouflage at the entrance of the 'PMC Wagner Centre,' the private military group's HQ, during the official opening, St Petersburg, Nov 4, 2022. (photo: AFP)
The Treasury and State departments announced the moves in coordinated statements that target dozens of Wagner Group affiliates, including some in the Central African Republic and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the president of Russia’s Kalashnikov Concern, the original manufacturer of the AK-47 assault rifle.
The sanctions also hit the Chinese company Changsha Tianyi Space Science and Technology Research Institute Co. LTD, also known as Spacety China, which has supplied Wagner Group affiliates with satellite imagery of Ukraine that support Wagner’s military operations there. A Luxembourg-based subsidiary of Spacety China was also targeted.
The announcements re-designate the Wagner Group, a private Russian military group owned by a close associate of President Vladimir Putin, as a “significant transnational criminal organization.” The firm had already been identified as such but the re-designations expand the sanctions.
The sanctions freeze any assets those identified may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bar Americans from conducting business with them by adding a number of affiliates to American blacklists.
“As sanctions and export controls on Russia from our international coalition continue to bite, the Kremlin is desperately searching for arms and support — including through the brutal Wagner Group — to continue its unjust war against Ukraine,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.
“Today’s expanded sanctions on Wagner, as well as new sanctions on their associates and other companies enabling the Russian military complex, will further impede Putin’s ability to arm and equip his war machine,” she said.
A total of eight people, 16 companies and four specific aircraft were sanctioned by Treasury. In addition, the State Department imposed separate but related sanctions on five companies and one person linked to the Wagner Group and 23 others for being part of Russia’s military-industrial complex.
The State Department also placed 531 members of the Russian military on a travel blacklist for actions that threaten or violate the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.
“This action supports our goal to degrade Moscow’s capacity to wage war against Ukraine, to promote accountability for those responsible for Russia’s war of aggression and associated abuses, and to place further pressure on Russia’s defense sector,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.
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Oil facilities release a "witches' brew" of toxins in their wastewater. (photo: Getty)
Facilities release a "witches' brew" of toxins in their wastewater.
While the Environmental Protection Agency, or the EPA, is legally required to regulate these pollutants and impose penalties, a new study released Thursday by the Environmental Integrity Project maintains that hasn’t been happening.
The project’s analysis looks at monitoring data, permit applications, and toxic release reports from the nation’s 81 oil refineries that discharge their waste into waterways directly or through off-site treatment plants. In 2021 alone, the plants released a total of 60,000 pounds of selenium, known to cause mutations in fish, and 15.7 million pounds of nitrogen, which feed harmful algal blooms. Some 10,000 pounds of nickel, also toxic to fish in trace amounts, streamed into waterways as well, plus 1.6 billion pounds of chlorides, sulfates, and other dissolved solids that can corrode pipes and contaminate drinking water.
The totals in the report do not include contaminants released in stormwater runoff or spills that bypass water treatment systems, noted Eric Shaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project who previously served as director of the EPA’s Office of Civil Enforcement. “We think we’re understating the problem,” he said.
Most of this pollution, the report found, happens in places where people have fewer economic resources and political influence to push back. More than 40 percent of the refineries in the study are located in communities where the majority of residents are people of color or considered low-income.
John Beard, executive director of the Port Arthur Community Action Network, which advocates for environmental justice in the refinery-dense communities east of Houston, Texas, joined a press call for the report. “They don’t build these facilities in Beverly Hills or River Oaks, Texas, and places that have a way and a means to seek justice and correction,” he said. “They take the ‘path of least resistance,’ [building near] people who can ill afford to fight back.”
The “witches’ brew,” as the report calls it, flowing out of these refineries poses a real threat to aquatic life and communities. Wastewater from two-thirds of the refineries studied contributed to the “impairment” of downstream waterways, meaning they became too polluted to drink, fish, or swim in, or support healthy aquatic plants and animals.
Yet much of this pollution is actually legal, the Environmental Integrity Project points out.
The federal Clean Water Act requires the EPA to limit industrial discharges of 65 toxins, but in fact they regulate only 10 pollutants for refineries. The agency is also supposed to update its limits every five years as technologies to treat wastewater improve, but the rules for refineries have not been changed since the 1980s. In addition, refineries are now twice the size on average than they were when those regulations were last made.
While the EPA does have rules about ammonia, for example, they are not reflective of the current technology that makes refineries capable of much lower discharge rates of the compound. And there are no limits to the amount of selenium, benzene, nickel, lead, cyanide, arsenic, mercury, and PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as forever chemicals, that can come out of these facilities.
When it comes to the outdated rules the EPA does have for refinery wastewater, the agency has repeatedly failed to enforce them. The Environmental Integrity Project found that 83 percent of U.S. refineries violated regulations on water pollutants at least once between 2019 and 2021. The EPA is supposed to fine violators, but less than a quarter of the refineries received any penalty. One of the worst offenders, Hunt Southland Refinery in Lumberton, Mississippi, violated water pollution limits 144 times during the study period, but was subject to just two penalties, amounting to fines of $85,500. The Phillips 66 Sweeny refinery near Houston, Texas, exceeded its limits 44 times, mostly for excess cyanide, but was only penalized once.
States also have authority to regulate refinery wastewater through permitting, but they often look to the EPA guidelines in setting their rules. While a few have included additional limits, the report notes that these are also rarely enforced. The EPA has made recent headlines for being short staffed and falling far behind on its own deadlines to create dozens of regulations that are central to the President’s climate goals, despite a new injection of funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act.
“What are we asking for? No more than what the Clean Water Act has required since the 1970s,” said Shaeffer. “We ask the EPA to comply with the law, rise to the occasion, and write new standards based on the advanced treatment systems we have in this century, instead of the ones we should have left behind in the last one.”
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