Manhattan prosecutors are set to present evidence to a grand jury investigating the former president's role in the payment. Criminal charges could be imminent
The investigation into Donald Trump’s role in a pre-election hush money payment to Stormy Daniels — the porn star alleged former lover of the former president — is starting to heat up.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office is set to begin presenting evidence to a recently impaneled grand jury, which could lead to criminal charges against Trump, The New York Timesreported on Monday. CNN reported that David Pecker — the former head of the National Enquirer who was involved in the effort to keep Daniels quiet — is meeting with prosecutors, with the Times adding that Pecker was spotted entering the building where the grand jury is on Monday.
Prosecutors are also interviewing Dylan Howard, the Enquirer‘s former editor, and two Trump Organization employees while also getting in touch with people involved with Trump’s 2016 campaign and issuing subpoenas for material related to the payments, according to the Times. Pecker sitting down with prosecutors is particularly notable, however, considering the dirt he may have on Trump, including potential specifics about the former president’s involvement in the Daniels payment.
Trump has repeatedly denied having any knowledge of the payments. He lashed out at the investigation on Truth Social following the Times‘ report, calling Daniels “Horseface” and claiming he “NEVER HAD AN AFFAIR.”
The Times notes that prosecutors could also lean on testimony from Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer who in 2018 pleaded guilty to charges related to the payment. Cohen met with prosecutors earlier this month, and is reportedly slated to meet with them again in February.
Cohen has said that he made payments to Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal at Trump’s direction, but Cohen isn’t exactly a rock-solid source. He’s also said that former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg conferred with Trump about whether to make the payments. Weisselberg corroborating Cohen’s claim that Trump directed the payments could be a home run for Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, whose office has been roiled by disagreement over how to handle investigations into the former president.
It’s unclear whether Weisselberg would cooperate. He was sentenced to five months in prison earlier this month after pleading guilty to an unrelated tax fraud scheme carried about by the former president’s company.
Today’s Action: Tell Congress to do MORE to reduce gun violence!
Daily Dose of Democracy:
Activists demand justice after Black double amputee shot to death by police in LA County As the nation still reels from the horror of the Tyre Nichols killing, the infamously corrupt and violent LAPD were caught on camera shooting Anthony Lowe — a Black double-amputee experiencing a mental health episode who had lost his legs in a previous run-in with the police — eight times as he tried to flee from them. Lowe had a knife and had recently stabbed someone — but it's hard to make an argument that the police were in a dangerous situation that couldn't have been solved without violence. What more can be said that isn't said over one thousand times a year? We need a top-to-bottom institutional reform of American policing.
Trump goes after Ron DeSantis, other Republicans The disgraced former president's 2024 run is off to a very rocky start and now it looks like he's hoping to save himself by dragging his opponents down to his level and slugging it out in the mud.
DeSantis to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at Florida universities Florida's detestable Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that he will completely defund the “DEI bureaucracies,” or departments within universities that promote diversity, equality and inclusion, which he said impose a liberal agenda on university students and faculty. This cynical move is exactly what it looks like: a power-hungry man completely devoid of morals pandering to bigots and white nationalists in the hopes of springboarding himself into the White House on a wave of hatred.
The most important election nobody’s ever heard of Control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is on the ballot this spring, and the contest could decide the fate of abortion rights, redistricting, and whether or not Democrats will ever be able to pass anything again — not to mention if Republicans will be able to throw out the results of a presidential election in the crucial swing state. Should a more liberal-leaning jurist win the job in the April election, it would flip the balance of the state’s highest court for at least two years.
Nikki Haley poised to enter 2024 presidential race The former Trump toadie, who has struggled to remain relevant since her abrupt exit from the Trump administration in 2018, is set to join the fray for the 2024 election. Between their appalling track records in the White House and their crude attempts to out-radical each other with progressively more deranged statements about whatever nonsense the GOP is mad about on a given day, it's hard to see how Haley or any of the other aspiring ex-Trump goblins — like Pompeo — could stand out from under Trump's shadow. But hey, he's gotta have someone to make fun of in the debates.
Kroger workers allege massive wage theft: "I’m tired of having to beg" In 2022, Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the country, launched "MyTime" — a new payroll system that Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen claimed would “simplify day-to-day work.” Kroger touted MyTime as a testament to how much the grocery store chain cares about its associates, but inevitably it's been a been a nightmare for thousands of Kroger employees across the country. Glitches with MyTime have resulted in a host of problems, including missing pay and incomplete checks, putting a huge hurt on thousands of workers who are struggling to keep food on the table. Multiple Kroger associates told Popular Information that they’ve missed rent payments and bills, overdrawn their bank accounts, or been forced to take out loans due to missing or reduced pay, and the company's slow response to the crisis only makes matters worse.
Republicans don't have their House in order atAdvocacy Partner: The humiliating debacle that was the Republican speakership election proves that they are entirely unfit to govern this nation — and we can't afford to let them implement their unhinged agenda of conspiracy theories and vicious budget cuts. The best way to restore our House majority is to invest (and invest EARLY) in rural America so that we have the foundation we need to kick these yahoos out of Congress. Can you donate to make our Blue House a reality?
Cop who helped kill Tyre Nichols once threatened to "blow" the faces off civilians Two residents of Memphis claim that one of the former police officers charged with murdering 29-year-old Tyre Nichols pulled a gun on them three years ago and threatened to shoot them both in the face. Not surprisingly, the blatantly psychopathic behavior was ignored and he was allowed to stay on the force because apparently it's totally acceptable for cops to make unhinged death threats against those they're supposed to protect and serve.
GOP leaders work to lock down votes to remove Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs Committee Ilhan Omar is Black, an immigrant, a Muslim and — perhaps most frightening to the GOP — she is incredibly effective at advocating for the American people. For these reasons, Kevin McCarthy and his scheming MAGA cronies are currently working hard behind the scenes to rally enough votes to remove Omar from the powerful Foreign Affairs Committee. Meanwhile, they're all too happy to lavish assignments on lunatics like Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos.
Nearly a year on from the supposed Russian exodus, most major companies have yet to withdraw Unfortunately and yet unsurprisingly, the companies who made a great big deal about ending their operations in Russia due to the Ukraine invasion — earning a boost in free PR — have in fact not shut down their very profitable business ventures in Putin's fascist state. As of November 2022, of the 2,405 subsidiaries owned by 1,404 EU and G-7 companies that were active in Russia prior to the war fewer than 9% had divested at least one subsidiary in Russia.
Yale honors Black girl, nine, wrongly reported to police over insect project Bobbi Wilson, 9, was spraying spotted lantern flies — an invasive species threatening America's forests — with repellant spray on trees near her home for a school project when some nosy neighbor CALLED THE POLICE ON her. “There’s a little Black woman walking, spraying stuff on the sidewalks and trees. I don’t know what the hell she’s doing. Scares me, though," said the caller to the police. Yale University has decided to honor her efforts with a ceremony, but the incident is a grim reminder of how the mere presence of Black Americans is somehow a fearful trigger for many Whites, who rush to profile and sic the instruments of state violence upon them.
Today’s Action: Tell Congress to do MORE to reduce gun violence!
Six mass shootings in 14 days. That’s what Californians are grappling with as we enter yet another new year of gun violence — and they’re not the only ones. In the first month of 2023, there have been almost 40 mass shootings throughout the country. That’s more than any other January since the Gun Violence Archives began keeping such records in 2014. It’s unacceptable that after so much loss, our elected officials still haven’t managed to advance any meaningful anti-gun violence legislation through Congress.
In the United States it is still legal to own an AR-15, the very killing machine that has been used time and time again to murder and maim innocent Americans en masse. AR-15s were used in the mass murders at Sandy Hook, Parkland, Aurora, Sutherland Springs, Las Vegas, San Bernardino, the Poway synagogue, the Tree of Life synagogue, the Buffalo supermarket, Uvalde…the list goes on and on — and will continue to do so unless we finally do something about it.
Once the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) signed into law by President Clinton in 1994 expired in 2004, the number of deaths in mass shootings skyrocketed. The AR-15 and weapons like it are specifically designed to kill on battlefields; there is no reason they should ever be in civilian hands.
There were 735 mass shootings in the United States last year, up from 693 in 2021. Excluding suicide, there were 20,726 gun deaths in 2021, as well. According to the Washington Post, a child is shot every hour in America. We simply cannot stand idly by and let 2023 continue this horrific trend. The cause of this problem is clear — it’s the guns!
The survival of the world's biggest rainforest is critical to the survival of life on Earth. The fossil fuel industry is hell-bent on drilling in it
Iwas trying to do something I never do: take a two-day vacation.
I had been in Peru for a month, deep in the Amazon, documenting the Achuar Tribe’s epic battle against the oil industry for my new HBO Documentary on climate refugees. I was exhausted, but I listened to that little voice of impending regret: “If you don’t see some Incan ruins, you’ll be sorry!” So I did it. I bought the ticket, got up at 4 a.m. and flew down to Cusco.
I was going to see the city sights, pop down to Machu Picchu for a few hours on Tuesday, and scramble back in time for my Wednesday morning flight back home.
Within 24 hours I was completely trapped.
CUSCO
A good friend of mine back home in New Orleans had suggested I book a shamanic ceremony when I got to Cusco. Nothing too intense — no “plant medicines” involved — just a humble thanking of the Earth and nature up on a hill with a shaman and a guide named Coco. My friend gave a slight warning: “The elevation is intense, but they will give you coca leaves to chew, so it will be OK.” We were to meet at the Plaza de Armas at 9 a.m. and head up the mountain, just me, Coco, and an Incan shaman and a bag full of coca leaves.
But as soon as I got to the Cusco airport, my heart started to race. I was dizzy and I couldn’t breathe. I could barely walk up the block, my feet and hands were tingling, and I felt like I was going to pass out. I hadn’t done my research. Cusco is at nearly 12,000 feet elevation. The air felt like a veil that passed over your face and vanished. I couldn’t suck enough of it into my lungs to lose this queasy vertigo.
At the Plaza, Coco took one look at me and canceled the shamanic ceremony. He said, “You can’t go further up the mountain. I’ve seen this happen before, I’m going to rush you down to the Sacred Valley, from there you can rest and go to Machu Picchu tomorrow morning on the 5 a.m. train.” A mild panic was setting in. I had to get lower. I had elevation sickness before — at the Sundance film festival in Utah, which was at 7,000 feet, and it lasted more than a week. And yet the lowest I could get was the 9,000-foot high village of Ollantaytambo. Panic is never a friend to any illness. Anxiety, exhaustion, and paranoia don’t make it any easier to breathe. I was cold-sweating gobs of fear. At this point I had no idea why I wanted to go to Machu Picchu in the first place.
And so I spent much of the next oxygen-starved day sleeping, with a pause for a coca leaf-aided walk with a two-strides-then-rest cadence. I decided to eat dinner early (chargrilled alpaca with a side of quinoa soup) and go to bed. It was 4 p.m. I Googled elevation sickness and I found I had at least three of the four most dangerous symptoms listed by the CDC — profound lethargy, with drowsiness, confusion, and mild ataxia — I couldn’t walk a straight line. If I was going to be able to wake up for the 5 a.m. train, I was getting in bed before the sunset.
I woke at 11 p.m. to a text from Coco. “All the trains have been canceled, the airport is closed and there is no way in or out of any town. The protestors have taken over all the roads.”
Roadblocks everywhere, 9,000 feet elevation, couldn’t walk down the block without feeling dizzy, stuck in a political conflict that I had no ability to influence with no reliable information and no clue as to when this would all end. I had turned to the wrong page in the choose-your-own-adventure book. Everything and everyone I knew was like a receding dream on the horizon, slipping further away with each alert from the American Embassy or Delta Airlines. I was trapped and no one and nothing could help. Out of reach and out of luck.
Multinational oil and mining companies have stretched their poisonous grasp deep into the Amazon and the Andes for decades, spilling, contaminating, and despoiling the landscape. And Peru’s dozens of indigenous nations who have clearly marked territory and languages have battled against them for what seems like eternity. The natural habitat they have preserved for thousands of years is the most diverse place on Earth. And yet, most of the time, the Peruvian government and the urban elites in Lima are firmly on the side of “development.” And development usually means extractive industry raping and pillaging the country’s natural beauty and history, poisoning the water and land and leaving a trail of displacement and cancer in its neoliberal, neocolonial wake.
Of course, I was in Peru to cover this deepening existential conflict. But I thought I was in for more of the slow burn that characterizes the degradation of the forest and the human rights of its defenders. Instead, I was caught in the middle of an explosion that feels more and more like the beginning of a revolution.
On December 8, 2021, President Pedro Castillo, who had run on a populist leftist platform was arrested and deposed. He had just lost a power struggle with the Peruvian Congress and was being replaced with his vice president, Dina Boluarte.
Some U.S. media outlets, focusing on Castillo’s efforts to dissolve Congress, have portrayed the struggle as something akin to Peru’s Jan. 6. Here on the ground, it is not so simple. Castillo had his faults, but whether he was more corrupt — or less committed to democracy — than the people who ousted him is a matter for history to debate at this point.
What is clear is that for the country’s indigenous tribes and leaders, this is a profound loss. Many saw Castillo as the first campesino president — and many indigenous tribes and leaders identified with him. He was in deep negotiations with indigenous tribes across the country and he was seen as, if not their ally, their kin. When he was arrested by the usual coterie of the rich urban elite and centuries-old oligarchy that holds power in Peru’s Congress, the poor erupted. The protests were immediately supported by the country’s largest indigenous associations, labor unions, and farmer’s associations.
I call my buddy Ricardo Perez of Amazon Watch for his take. “You really have to understand that the Peruvian indigenous people have never had any state working for them,” he says. “They know they have to fight for everything they have. This has been the case for the last 500 years. Right now, what we have is 20 years of people asking for change, asking for institutions, asking for the presence of the state in their territories, asking for stopping oil spills, asking for education, asking for the most basic stuff. And throughout their history everything they have won, the very little they have, they have gotten through protest. So this is why they are always protesting. And that’s why they’re good at it, because that’s the only thing they have had for 500 years. This is the only thing that the people running the country since forever understand.”
So in spite of the fact that I was trapped in Ollantaytambo with no way out, couldn’t breathe, walk straight or think properly, I was squarely on the side of the protestors.
ACHUAR TERRITORY in THE AMAZON, one month earlier
Lucas Tarir Jiyukam, the president of Chuintar, has malaria and a 102-degree fever, but he’s taking us upriver anyway. Specifically, he’s bringing us five hours by boat up the Pastaza River to his village, a small community named Chuintar in the Peruvian Amazon. No sickness or discomfort is going to stop him from showing us the mysterious underground oil spill that’s been contaminating his village for more than a decade.
We are deep in the territory of the Achuar, an indigenous nation within Peru that has been fighting tooth-and-nail to keep the oil industry from drilling in their territory.
The Achuar know the oil industry well. They have seen the apocalyptic effects of drilling all around them and they have a major pipeline running through their lands that spills and erupts constantly. But now it’s not just transport that the oil industry wants, they want to drill. The Achuar have fought off five different oil companies trying to enter their territory in just the past four years. Nelton Yankur, the Achuar Federation’s president has used every trick in the book to keep them out. He has mounted a full-on campaign of shame against the country’s oil company, PetroPeru, traveling to New York City to try to convince financiers not to set foot in his territory. If he loses this battle and international finance gives PetroPeru the money to drill, his tribe is in for decades of contamination, sickness, degradation, and despair. If he wins, he preserves the most diverse place on Earth, and we all get to breathe the oxygen that his way of life has provided for centuries.
Every battle they win is only the latest battle for this place. If they lose, it is the last one. Nothing could restore what thousands of years of fecundity created if the oil industry gets in here, it will ruin one of the last and greatest forests on the planet.
And as you read this, PetroPeru is begging all their favorite funding sources: JPMorgan, Bank of America, Vanguard, Goldman, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, BNP Paribas, Santander, Bank of New York Mellon, and the like, to secure investment to drill in Achuar territory. Without further financing, Petroperu might collapse, an outcome that the Achuar would celebrate.
Nelton has invited me and Ricardo of Amazon Watch to their annual assembly to help document their struggle. It takes four to five days to get there from Lima, so very few people who are not Achuar make it there. These parts of the Amazon are both fiercely protected and challengingly remote. The tribe has maintained and cultivated the dense jungle for 7,000 years, making it one of the most spellbindingly beautiful and awe inspiring places on Earth.
This is the headwaters of the Amazon — hundreds of tributary rivers along which dozens of indigenous tribes have communities. Electricity is scarce, a cell phone signal is even more so. But somehow, it is home in a way that I can’t explain. You get the unshakeable feeling that this rainforest is home to the human race on a cellular level; the forest breathes out so that we can breathe in. So it is physically and emotionally harrowing to witness the hell that Petroperu, the state-owned oil company, has wrought on this territory.
Lucas, the president of his village, rides the entire way with a towel over his face because he’s freezing and he can’t handle the wind with his fever. But as soon as we reach the village he trudges up the trail with purpose. He starts to tell a tale that is familiar to anyone who regularly observes the oil and gas industry and their penchant for destroying paradise. “Petroperu’s pipeline began leaking underground,” he says. “That’s when the trouble started. We started to see animals dying, and our children getting sick. At first we didn’t know that the oil was causing it. For years we just didn’t know that the oil was causing the sickness.”
Petroperu’s pipelines have caused more than 500 oil spills in the Amazon rainforests of Peru in just the last 20 years. Chuintar is just one more tiny unremarkable place that has been ruined, possibly for generations. The villagers have rampant health problems — everything from a constant intestinal malaise afflicting the children to cancer and other deadly diseases. Such spills and pipeline ruptures are commonplace along the aging pipeline, which has been corroding for decades. And no one has come to clean up the oil.
Even though health studies have shown significant health problems, and communities along the route have lost their fisheries, drinking water and livelihoods due to deadly contamination from spills, Peru’s government has consistently pushed for more drilling and more investment in the oil industry.
Ricardo is the connective tissue between Amazon Watch, the well-heeled San Francisco-based NGO, and the Achuar, who are fighting to keep PetroPeru from further sinking its claws into their homelands. He is their communications director, but he has never been to an oil spill before.
Ricardo is a fucking angel with an acid tongue. He’s been to the jungle enough times that you know you won’t sink in quicksand or get bitten by a snake. His justified leftist rage is tempered by a cynical sense of humor, which you get the feeling is necessary in the Sisyphean struggle for justice in the Amazon. He looks me in the eye on our hour-long trek into the jungle. “Do everything exactly the way that the Achuar do it,” he says. “If they step on a log, you step on that same log. If they go around that tree, you go around that tree. Exactly the way they do it. OK? And don’t lean against any trees. The ants will come to defend the tree right away and you’ll get fifty bites in a few seconds.” I try to keep his Amazonian survival lessons at the front of my addled brain, but it doesn’t take long before a poisonous spiny black-and-white caterpillar gets in my shirt and bites me seven times. He says, “Do you want us to relay any final wishes to your family?” He finds a tree full of them and says, “Just kidding. These aren’t so bad. It’s the neon ones you have to worry about.”
Ricardo knows that the entire world depends on who wins the fight for the Amazon, and so we can’t lose. And yet these fights are chronically underfunded and ignored. Even though he works with a 30-member team at Amazon Watch, compared to the oil industry which has virtually unlimited money and power, they are fighting on a shoestring budget.
The Amazon rainforest is the lungs of the world. Without it, we all die. That’s the realpolitik of the indigenous struggle for the integrity of the jungle. Without the rainforest taking in all of the carbon of the world and spitting it back out as oxygen, we would simply not have enough oxygen in the atmosphere to function. And yet no place is more under attack. It’s as if we are all in the intensive care unit and hordes of unseen corporate stooges are trying to yank out our IVs and rip the tubes out of our noses. It’s amazing to me that there isn’t an international effort to support the tribes that are keeping all of us from suffocating to death, but, as far as real international political action goes, there isn’t. The Achaur and their whole assembly know that this is an uphill battle and it has been for 500 years.
As we walk along the sun-dappled path of Palm, Sangre De Grado, and Kapok trees Lucas points out black globules of oil that have accumulated on the path. They seem to be everywhere, like dog shit or deer droppings. Little black turds of crude oil that have bubbled up from the ground. This spill is more of a continuing rupture: Oil is pouring out in some subterranean strata, permeating the land like it’s a sponge and saturating the underbrush and streams.
We hack our way towards a small swamp. The black globs of oil paint the surface of a small pond. “PetroPeru says there is no oil spill here,”says Lucas. But look. He dips a leaf into the water and pulls it out, it is flecked with black oil stains. Ricardo takes a huge glob of oil from the pond and puts it into a Ziplock bag. “Evidence.” He says. Lucas looks on the verge of tears, he has that thousand-yard stare of the contaminated, the brutality of neglect and poison that threatens his family from below rippling across his face. “We can’t fish here anymore. I won’t let my children near here,” he says. “All the children in the village know they are forbidden to walk near the streams here.”
There is abandoned oil machinery scattered throughout the village. Relics of decades of oil drilling from decades past, never dismantled, never properly decommissioned. PetroPeru clearly just sees these people as collateral damage — people who are living in the wrong place at the wrong time, never mind the fact that they’ve been there for thousands of years and their traditions predate Columbus. “Is this neocolonialism?” I ask. They say, “Yes of course. First the Spaniards wanted gold. Then copper. Now they want the oil. We have been fighting them for 500 years.”
We are in Block 64 — a block of land in the Loreto region recently subdivided by the Peruvian government for leasing to oil companies: millions of hectares of Amazon rainforest, which encompasses all of the Achuar’s ancestral territory and much of the territory of the Wampis, a neighboring tribe. I’ve been to Loreto before, in 2014, investigating a huge oil spill in Cunninico. Fisheries had been poisoned, sources of clean water contaminated. Locals were paid to clean up oil in rubber boots and jeans, no proper safety equipment, some of them were even given toxic chemical dispersants to take home and wash up with after a long day’s work.
Several years ago, the Achuar forcibly occupied rigs and pipelines and shut down the oil industry all over their territory, demanding that the government clean up pipeline contamination and provide assistance to the people whose fisheries were destroyed. Eight years later, in 2022, there still has been no official cleanup or progress.
But now it isn’t just the pipeline — PetroPeru wants to drill. The company is primed to “explore” here, oil industry code for taking over an area and extracting its oil, a process that never fails to contaminate and destroy wetlands and forests. No matter what the oil industry seems to say or do, they always seem to leave a trail of destruction and toxicity. And in spite of the fact that there has been five decades of consistent neglect and oil spills in the Peruvian Amazon, they are close to persuading the West for more funding.
But in 2022, the Achuar have taken a slightly different tone — less militant but just as adamant. In October, Nelton Yankur, Amazon Watch, FENAP (The Achuar’s governing body) and a delegation from several other tribes traveled all the way to New York City to try to plead with the masters of finance, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Chase, and Bank of America to abstain from funding oil development in their area. They went to look the bankers square in the eye and say, “Don’t do this. This is our territory. We can’t live in a contaminated oil zone.”
They said in no uncertain terms that they would not tolerate oil drilling and that any investors financing PetroPeru’s would pay the price in bad press. Their threat was simple: If you try to drill here you will be stopped, blockaded, and protested, and you will be lambasted with as much public shaming that these tribes were capable of. Bad PR for the banks is the Achuar’s trump card, and they wanted to let the financiers know that they would be held responsible in the media. So far Nelton’s strategy has been successful. He has fought off five different oil companies during his tenure as president, creating connections with sponsors, NGOs, lawyers, and allies local and far flung.
The strategy of shaming the financiers, governments, and citizens of wealthy countries has worked with varying degrees of success in the past, but stakes may be higher this time around. There is little in the activists’ warchest that seems to override the constant drumbeat of the oil supremacy of this moment. Blame the war in Ukraine, blame the United States’ constant penchant for bigger SUVs, or its total inability to envision carless cities and towns, blame the relative lack of media coverage, blame all of these ills put together. But Big Oil wants to drill and export no matter what the track record of consequences for the people in the Amazon or for the rest of the world. And if you happen to be in the way of what the oil industry wants, get ready for the battle of your life against the most wealthy and protected industry on the planet. From Peru to Brazil to Standing Rock, fighting for the forest can get you killed, or maimed, or branded a terrorist. And as we head into the mid-2020s the resources wars grow and grow, especially in Latin America, the most dangerous place in the world to be an environmentalist.
So far at least, it seems that banks are still afraid of bad PR and of the trillions of dollars pulled out of fossil fuels thanks to worldwide divestment campaigns. So yes, if you’re in the West and you have a Citibank or Wells Fargo bank account, be loud and proud when you tell them you’re taking your money out if they drill the Amazon.
TRUE DEMOCRACY
The day after we return from Chuintar, the Achuar federation will pick a new president, or perhaps Nelton will run for re-election. Nobody knows exactly what is going to happen.
We get back late at night and the assembly is in a heated debate over education. The delegates from dozens of villages are speaking passionately one after the other on the floor of the main assembly hall. I feel like I am watching a great democracy in action. Real debate, real passion, deep dialogue, and transparency. The budgets are projected onto a screen behind the dais. The tribe’s business and relationships are all there for everyone to see. The debate rages deep into the night.
Every morning at 4 a.m. the Achuar men take part in a ritual purging. They drink an herbal brew that encourages them to throw up, cleansing their digestive tracts of parasites and other bodily and karmic ills. It’s a sacred time of communion and gathering, the time when they get together and discuss policy. It’s no different on the morning of the election. We meet with Nelton as he is preparing for the day, discussing policy with other delegates and painting his face. He seems primed to be re-elected. “Empathy is the greatest of all human qualities,” he says. “Empathy has to rule our world. Now. We are just trying to keep our territory pure, not contaminated any further by PetroPeru. We fish, we farm, we hunt. We live a peaceful life and balance with nature … “and we believe in democracy.”
Nelton describes this as a conflict that has gone on since the days of Columbus. “We are 7,000 years old as a nation. We existed before the Peruvian state, so as a people we have to have our own nation within the state. We have a totally different system than the Peruvian state — in health, in education, in the way we eat, grow food and live. Our land and our forest is our life. Everything we live by and everything we think about comes from the forest. This is our wealth. That is what we want to preserve and leave uncontaminated for future generations, it is the bounty that we received from our ancestors. The state has been hindering us. The state has been violating our rights. And we will do what we must for our territory.”
Later that day, at the assembly, Nelton’s re-election bid is challenged by another faction of the tribe. They are saying that the next president must come from a different part of the river which is dictated by a disputed passage in the constitution. It is clear that some members of the Achuar tribe feel adamant about this, and that the nation’s solidarity could splinter if Nelton is re-elected. Rather than create a crisis of legitimacy, Nelton stands down and doesn’t run for re-election. His peaceful abstention is a noble move and is accepted by the whole tribe. The election happens that night with incredible positivity and solidarity among the factions of the tribe. As an American that just lived through the 2020 election and its aftermath, it is a jaw-dropping and inspiring thing to witness. Ricardo leaps towards me and points at the assembly voting one by one: “This is true democracy.” The Achuar are unified to fight again. Nelton’s belief that solidarity and unity are greater than his own personal leadership is a remarkable display of restraint and a stark difference from the political crisis that is about to engulf all of Peru.
I reluctantly leave Achuar Territory. A part of me is left there.
LIMA, a city that could be anywhere in the world
Back in Lima, in the more affluent neighborhoods of Miraflores and Barranco there is an ease and an affluence in the air. Well-lit streets, glistening supermarkets, gourmet restaurants abound. Fancy-shmancy mixers for expats, tourists, and locals wanting to co-mingle with the international backpacking jet set are common.
I dropped in on a mixer, mostly to try the city’s famous Pisco sours and found, much to my gut-wrenching disappointment, many members of the Lima intelligentsia held what can only be described as totally fucked up ass backwards classist views of the indigenous people that made up so much of their country’s population.
“Oh the indigenous people in this country, they are just greedy. They block our mines left and right, but really they are just trying to get more money. ”
“We offer them development and they fuck it up over and over again.”
“Those tribes in the Amazon, those spills are all their fault. They cut the pipelines themselves, deliberately. To cause problems and then they try to squeeze money out of the oil companies.”
I stagger out of the bar reeling. I might have expected this kind of talk at CPAC, not at a Lima mixer full of Tinder dates.
It’s true, like everywhere else, development is a set of blinders, a refusal to acknowledge where resources actually come from-places that have been dominated and exploited. Even worse is that we are blind to what the system is building, truly ugly places of affluence. It’s happening all over the world, gentrification erases the truly unique. This system loves building gleaming, vapid, impersonal cities like they’re minting brand new airport terminals. Placeless trappings of the international globalized mega consumer empire. The nowhere-ville that sources shoes from Vietnam, phones from China, wine from California, Europe and Chile, shrimp from Thailand, capital from the mega banks, and, of course, oil from somewhere that is probably being decimated by it.
In the middle of this dismaying conversation, news comes over the phones. The president of Peru, Pedro Castillo, is trying to close the Congress. As a counter attack, the Congress has voted to impeach him. Fifteen minutes later, the president is arrested. Fifteen minutes after that, the new president is being sworn in. The government of Peru has once more gone up in flames. Five presidents in six years.
I call Ricardo for his hot take. “The president was trying to flee to the Mexican Embassy, but he didn’t even make it to Downtown Lima. It’s over. It’s being called the 20-minute coup. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. But now we have to start all over again, all of our year and a half worth of negotiations with this government for the indigenous people, all wiped away.”
Five days later, it was clear that the indigenous people of the country, the poor campesinos and the indigenous tribes of the Amazon, were not going to wait for new negotiations and meetings. They were locking down the country, demanding new elections immediately. They are basically calling out the whole system, and asking for a restart of democracy. Close the Congress, shut it all down and let the people vote for an entirely new bunch.
OLLANTAYTAMBO — Fifth day of the lockdown, a week later
And that’s where I found myself trapped, locked in by what increasingly looks like a revolution. There is no sense of how long this is going to last, and at the time, I was getting increasingly worried at my lack of ability to deal with the altitude and no idea if I was actually going to make it home.
After Day 5 of being trapped in this tiny mountain I still can’t make it up the block without having to sit down. Huge trees and boulders block the main arteries all throughout the mountain, all the way to Cusco. Coco, feeling guilty for bringing me down there, has tried to reach me down in the valley but he texts me and says it’s impossible. “They threw rocks and oil at my car,” he writes. “There was 20 minutes of gunfire outside of my house when I got home.”
But getting to Cusco wouldn’t help me at all. Aside from being another dizzying 2,000 feet higher in elevation, if the airport is still shut down. I’ve been sent numerous videos of smoke and flames on the runways. One of the first things the protestors did was to set the tourism authority on fire and seize the airports in Cusco and Arequipa.
The protests in the main square of the Ollantaytambo happen daily. I go to observe, and sometimes to chant alongside them. They are demanding that the new president, Dina Boluarte, resign immediately, as well as that the Congress — who overwhelmingly support the kind of “development” that the urban elite are calling for — should be closed and new elections should happen immediately. Boluarte has become the ultimate symbol of the oligarchy who have long exploited the indigenous.
Boluarte responded by declaring martial law. Police and military cracked down, not just with rubber bullets and tear gas and mace, but with live rounds. Seven of the protestors were killed on the first day. The death toll from military violence has risen to more than 55. Now the protestors are calling Dina Boluarte Peru’s first female dictator. Protest signs that say “DINA ASESINA” (DINA THE MURDERER) are everywhere, a response to the dozens shot down in cold blood. With much of the news media influenced by the government, popular Instagram accounts like Wayka.pe detail the daily repression against the movement, a constant barrage of tear gas, stun grenades, military vehicles, shootings, and beatings.
And the pro-extraction government agenda has never been more clear. Boluarte has come down squarely on the side of increased extractivism, appointing a major leader of PetroPeru as her cabinet’s secretary of the ministry of energy. Her pro-business and extraction stance is at the top of the list of the grievances of the campesinos and indigenous tribes marching against her. “Food prices are sky high. So are prices for fertilizer,” says Leopoldo, a local Andean workers federation leader. “Now they want to come in and destroy our fields and farms with their mines. This is a struggle of the indigenous and the campesinos against the extractive companies.”
The battle lines are drawn. For the Andes and the Amazon — and for the whole Earth.
This type of injustice makes me sick. It’s in my blood. Love the people, hate the elites. Love the land, the mountains and the jungle. Love the chakras, the small farms that poor campesinos in the Andes tend and love the yucca and Sangre De Grado trees for herbal medicines. Love the mud under your toes, the mountain streams that sing the infinitely varied sounds of running water. Love the dancing, and the singing, and the total lack of an internet or cell phone signal way up the winding Pastaza river. We march for these things that we love.
And hate, with all your might, the oil companies, the mining companies that rape and despoil the land. Hate the chemical runoff from gold mines. The poisons that kill the land. Hate with all your might, the pipelines that burst in the Amazon, the pits filled with crude petroleum that destroy the streams and the land. The cancer that rots the people and steals their lives, their stories, their bones and blood. Hate the live rounds killing our brothers and sisters in the streets.
There are more than 3,000 species of fish in the Amazon, and yet, in Cunninico, the indigenous population there is eating canned tuna because their fisheries are contaminated, their culture degraded and blackened by decades of oil spills and neglect. We march against these things that we hate.
Indigenous people have been protecting 80 percent of all the biodiversity that’s left on Earth. In my lifetime alone, 70 percent of all wildlife has disappeared, paved over, extracted to extinction, ripped apart. It’s the indigenous that keep what’s remaining of the wild earth alive. It’s a war that’s been going on for 500 years, and if the indigenous people of this earth lose that war, we’re all fucked. This may just be the final chapter of a 500-year war of colonialism and extractivism and capitalism. If they lose the remaining battles, the climate tanks, ecosystems crash, and it becomes impossible for all of us.
My vacation doesn’t matter and neither does yours. We should be inconvenienced by this. Over and over. It is unfair that the lockdowns only happen in Peru. They should be happening everywhere in response to this crisis. Because that would look like justice.
This isn’t your Ayahuasca healing retreat. This isn’t your family vacay to Incan ruins. This is a 500-year war between “development” in the name of extractive mega corporations and the indigenous protectors of all life. Between neocolonialism and those who are protecting the forest and our future. And there is a constant war in what is left of the intact ecosystems of the world from the Amazon to the Congo to the fracking fields of Pennsylvania, to rob us of those territories, to rip to shreds and contaminate the last of the rainforest and the highlands, for the profits of the urban political and corporate elite.
A nationwide strike has been going on since January 4, with all protest organizations vowing to shut the whole country down. Ricardo leaves a message on my WhatsApp saying, “I hope it’s a big one.”
The Peruvian protestors remind us, the world economy is based on forms of resource extraction that are so brazenly unfair, destructive and contaminating that it is basically legal theft, or worse, genocide and annihilation.
But they hold the trump card. They know that this kind of unrest means it will be really hard for PetroPeru to court new investment to drill in the Amazon. They know the miners can’t get in through their blockades. So hell yeah. Shut the fucking roads down. Shut all of it down.
I am reminded of Nelton’s words about extractivists as he stepped down voluntarily to make way for democracy: “They call us poor. But they want what we have. We have a sustainable life. We are not poor. Our medicinal plants got us through covid, thanks to our ancient wisdom, to our medicinal plants that are only on our lands. And so we say to the people of the world — nature must be preserved, because it is life. We can see 500 years into the future.”
And to give this report its proper anticlimax, I will just say that on the seventh day, I magically found a way out. I got a tip from one of the protesters that I was interviewing that the roads would be open for two hours that evening. As usual, the only way out was through. As luck would have it, the airports reopened for a few days and I found the right local contact and bribed my way into the airport and I got out. No doubt my foreigner privilege didn’t hurt. And as my plane landed in Lima at sunset all the hardship and asphyxiation of a week of powerlessness vanished as sea-level oxygen flooded my thankful capillaries once more.
But I am not out of this and neither are you. None of us are.
The battles of the 21st Century, it turns out, are not much different than the battles of 500 years ago. But now, because of climate change, they involve all of us. Ricardo observes, “I think that’s what’s really interesting about climate change is that it really puts all of us, not in the same boat, but maybe in a more equal starting point.”
To view Peru’s current chaotic political morass without the history would be a mistake. And as the country heads towards further confrontation, it seems clear to me that this is the shape of things to come. That the system is breaking and there will be more and more of this kind of conflict, which is necessary, in my view, if we are going to survive the coming decades. Because the colonial world is still operating its power structure under a different name: development.
And to understand what is going on in Peru today means you have to have some kind of basic working knowledge of the horrors of the last 500 years of colonialism, genocide, theft of land and resources that characterize the last half millennia of history in the Western Hemisphere. And you have to feel it. It traps everything in our morality and puts the lie to the development that any comfortable person relies upon.
To view this struggle as separate from you would also be a mistake. When you use the fossil fuel extracted from the Amazon, when you burn the resources that someone was exploited, disenfranchised and displaced for, will you take action? Or will you conveniently believe that you have no stake in this? When you breathe in deeply, without getting dizzy or sick, will you understand that the oxygen making your brain work comes from these indigenous protesters who are being shot in the streets? Will you contribute your voice to the struggle that is giving you enough breath to speak?
Former president Donald Trump appears to have lied in sworn court records, opening him up to severe sanctions by a New York judge. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP)
Trump’s lies were exposed after he was caught talking out of both sides of his mouth.
Former President Donald Trump appears to have lied in sworn court records, opening him up to severe sanctions by a New York judge who has already lost his patience and threatened to punish him before.
Trump claimed he wasn’t the president of the Trump Organization during his four years at the White House, despite previously testifying that he was an “inactive president.” And he claimed that he didn’t have a financial stake in a partnership with the real estate company Vornado, even though he previously testified that he did.
On Tuesday, the New York Attorney General’s Office asked Justice Arthur F. Engoron to intervene quickly to ensure that the former president still faces a trial later this year that could bankrupt his company.
New York AG Letitia James sued the Trump family and their real estate empire for at least $250 million last year, the end result of a three-year investigation that documented how the Trumps have routinely faked property values to score better bank loans and cheat taxes. The civil lawsuit threatens to yank the company’s credentials, seize its bank accounts, and choke off its access to any banks in New York City—the global finance capital.
The Trumps, desperate to avoid the collapse of their company, initially tried to disqualify the AG and stop her from accessing company records. But when Judge Engoron threatened to sanction lawyers for incessantly making “frivolous” legal arguments, the Trumps last week were finally forced to answer James’ lawsuit with actual defenses.
The result was a legal document that read like a joke, with Trump attorney Alina Habba going as far as claiming there is formally no such thing as the “Trump Organization’—a ridiculous position, given that it’s a billion-dollar company Trump used to build his reputation over decades.
On Tuesday, the AG’s office called her out on that too, noting that in November she began a court hearing before this very judge by introducing herself as an attorney for that company.
“Good morning, Your Honor. Alina Habba for Trump Organization, Donald Trump, et cetera,” she said on Nov. 22 in a New York City courtroom.
The AG’s office also pointed out how Trump, in a separate case involving how his security guards beat up protesters in Manhattan, testified behind closed doors that while at the White House he “was an inactive president and now I’m active again.” The testimony shows that he remained atop the Trump Organization.
“Was there a period of time that you were not the president of the Trump Organization?” asked the protester’s lawyer, Benjamin Dictor.
“Well, I wasn’t active during the time I was at 1600,” Trump said, referring to the White House address. “I would say that I was an inactive president and now I’m active again.”
By contrast, in court documents last week, Trump swore that he “specifically denies the definition of ‘Trump Organization’” and “each and every allegation” that he was ever the inactive president of the company during four years in public office.
At the bottom of the 300-page document, Trump signed his name using his usual thick, black marker beneath an affirmation that says his list of responses “is true to the best of [his] own current knowledge.”
Lying in court documents is a red line that could result in hefty fines and serious blowback in court.
In Tuesday’s filing, the lawyer at the AG’s office leading the case asked the judge to drag the Trumps into court again to punish them for pulling the stunt—and to not give them a second chance.
“The Court has already admonished defendants and their counsel for their continued invocation of meritless legal claims but exercised its discretion in not imposing such sanctions,
‘having made its point.’ It does not appear that this point was taken, however, and [AG’s office] would ask the court to renew the issue,” attorney Kevin Wallace wrote.
People in underserved medical communities in states that ban abortions may be more likely to attempt self-managed abortions. (photo: Reginald Mathalone)
People in underserved medical communities in states that ban abortions may be more likely to attempt self-managed abortions
Top doctors in the US warn that surgeons should be prepared to treat more patients with complications from self-managed abortions and forced pregnancy after the overturning of Roe v Wade.
In a recent opinion piece published in the BMJ, 17 experts from medical centers and universities including the University of Chicago, Duke Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania urged surgeons to be prepared to treat medical consequences related to a person’s inability to access an abortion.
“In the aftermath of the supreme court’s Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health decision, acute care surgeons face an increased likelihood of seeing patients with complications from both self-managed abortions and forced pregnancy in underserved areas of reproductive and maternity care throughout the USA,” read the op-ed.
The Dobbs v Jackson case eliminated the nationwide abortion rights established by Roe v Wade in 1972. While many states still provide access to abortions, many others now generally prohibit the termination of pregnancies.
Physicians noted that self-managed abortions with pills such as mifepristone are extremely safe and used across the country to help provide access to abortion services.
But physicians warned that people in underserved medical communities in states that ban abortions may be more likely to attempt a self-managed “by ingestion of toxic substances or by self-inflicted physical injury”.
“Depending on their location and state laws regarding abortion access, trauma and acute care surgeons may find themselves providing care for people [affected] by the Dobbs ruling who undergo [self-managed abortion] and suffer injury as a result,” the op-ed noted.
“While we should strive to prevent such injury by advocating for the protection of access to safe abortion care, surgeons should also prepare to treat resulting complications.”
Doctors noted that surgeons must act to protect patient privacy and legal safety, especially as conservative states have weighed prosecuting pregnant people who seek an abortion in a state that prohibits it.
“The patient’s legal safety should also be of utmost concern and underscores the significance of knowing your state laws around this issue,” the op-ed noted.
“Providers have the ethical duty to protect patient privacy and to not report these complications which implicate self-induced abortion to law enforcement in states where this is prohibited.”
Providers also warned that surgeons may have to deal with the medical complications associated with forced pregnancy, especially given higher rates of maternal morbidity and mortality in the US.
“Again, in those states that restrict access to abortion care, maternal morbidity, and inevitably mortality, will increase and require physicians from all fields to expand their ability to care for these needs,” read the op-ed.
Physicians warned that the consequences of abortion bans will most affect marginalized communities, including people of color and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, who are overrepresented in patients seeking abortion services and are more likely to live in areas where abortion access is restricted.
The op-ed urged medical professionals to become educated on how to treat pregnant patients who may face health consequences as a result of not being able to access an abortion.
At least 22 states have taken some action to limit abortion access, with 12 states banning the procedure from conception.
Medical providers in states that have banned abortion have stated that they are often delayed in providing life-saving treatment due to bans on the procedure.
A recent study from Texas showed that even with high-risk pregnant patients, doctors were forced to wait until some were “at death’s door” before providing pregnancy termination services.
A separate study from Texas found that delays in miscarriage care due to anti-abortion laws resulted in severe health consequences, including admission into an intensive care unit and a hysterectomy.
Meanwhile, states have begun enshrining abortion protections amid the continuing battle over reproductive rights.
Minnesota on Saturday became the first state to pass a bill that would codify abortion rights following the Dobbs decision.
“This is a crucial first step in establishing rock-solid protections for everyone in Minnesota to make their own decisions about their reproductive destiny,” said Abena Abraham, campaign director for the advocacy group UnRestrict Minnesota, in a statement, according to the Star Tribune.
Rep. George Santos, R-NY, leaves a meeting of the House Republican Conference at the Capitol Hill Club on Wednesday, January 25, 2023. (photo: Tom Williams/Getty)
Multiple GOP lawmakers tell NPR that embattled New York Republican Rep. George Santos is voluntarily stepping down from his committee assignments amid outcry over his fabricated biography and ongoing questions about his personal and campaign finances.
"We just got out of conference and George has voluntarily removed himself from committees as he goes through this process," said Rep. Elise Stefanik, who chairs the GOP conference.
Santos had previously been placed on the Science, Space and Technology Committee and the Small Business Committee.
Texas Rep. Roger Williams, who chairs the latter committee, said he understood from Santos that the move is temporary.
"There's a threshold that he feels like [where] he's not the issue anymore and when he hits that, it sounds like he wants to get back on committees and get going," Williams told reporters.
He added Santos' withdrawal came as a surprise but he supports the decision.
"For a while, the question I was getting asked by [the press] is 'Where you gonna put him? Can he do this?' - it became about him," Williams said. "It's not about him. It's about our committee and we have so much to do and when he gets ready to get back on and he's met the thresholds that he's set or whatever, then let's go."
Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called Santos' move "bold" as she left the GOP's weekly closed-door conference meeting Tuesday morning.
"He just felt like that there is so much drama really over the situation," she said.
"Mr. Santos' statement in there was just saying that he spoke with Speaker McCarthy and made this decision on his own," Greene added.
Oklahoma GOP Rep. Tom Cole said he's seen members step down from committees in the past "usually when they were under some sort of legal question."
Cole said Santos told colleagues he "didn't want to become a distraction" and didn't indicate a particular timeline for him returning to committee.
There are ongoing calls for Santos to resign
Several Republican members of the House as well as Republicans in his New York district have called on Santos to resign. Santos did not take questions from NPR Tuesday morning but has repeatedly said he has no plans to resign.
Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y. had previously pushed for an ethics review of Santos.
"Half-measures like voluntarily taking himself off his committee assignments are not good enough for the people of New York's third congressional district, or for the American people," Torres said in a statement. "He was a disgrace yesterday. He's a disgrace today. And he'll be a disgrace tomorrow. He should resign from office immediately."
Nassau County GOP Chairman Joseph Cairo recently called Santos' run for office a "campaign of deceit, lies, and fabrication."
"He has no place in the Nassau County Republican Committee, nor should he serve in public service or as an elected official," he said. "He's not welcome here at Republican headquarters for meetings or at any of our events."
Santos, who won an open congressional seat held by a Democrat in November, came under fire for reports he deceived voters with an extensively fabricated biography, including false claims about his Jewish heritage and imagined story about his family escaping the Holocaust. Santos has previously admitted to making some "mistakes," but maintains that he is not "a fraud or a fake."
An investigation from The New York Times couldn't substantiate many of Santos' claims, including his graduation from Baruch College and his work for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.
Questions have also emerged as to the source of $700,000 that Santos claimed to loan his campaign in 2022, just two years after filing a financial disclosure report indicating he had no major assets.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said earlier this month that although Santos has "a long way to go to earn trust," he would remain in Congress.
"The voters have elected George Santos," McCarthy said during an early January press conference. "If there is a concern, he will go through ethics. If there is something that is found, he will be dealt with in that manner."
Bolsonaro has rejected criticism over the riot in Brasilia, Brazil, saying that peaceful protest is part of democracy but that vandalism and invasion of public buildings were 'exceptions to the rule.' (photo: Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)
Application for six-month US visa comes as Jair Bolsonaro faces accusations he helped incite riot in Brazil’s capital.
Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro has applied for a six-month tourist visa to remain in the United States, his lawyer said, as the far-right politician faces an investigation at home into accusations he helped incite this month’s riot in the Brazilian capital.
US authorities received Bolsonaro’s visa application on Friday, his lawyer, Felipe Alexandre, told the Reuters news agency in an emailed statement on Monday. The news was first reported by The Financial Times.
While the application is processed, Bolsonaro will remain in the US, Alexandre said. “He would like to take some time off, clear his head, and enjoy being a tourist in the United States for a few months before deciding what his next step will be,” the lawyer said.
“Whether or not he will use the full six months will be up to him and whatever strategy we agree to embark on based on his plans as they develop.”
Bolsonaro — who left Brazil for the US just days before his successor, left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was inaugurated this month — has faced widespread criticism after a mob of his supporters rioted in the capital of Brasilia on January 8.
Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters ransacked the country’s Congress, presidential palace and Supreme Court in a bid to pressure the military to overturn the October election results, which saw Lula narrowly defeat his far-right rival in a tense run-off.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has expressed admiration for the military regime that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, had falsely claimed for months that the country’s electronic voting system was vulnerable to fraud.
He maintained a long public silence after the election results were confirmed and never formally recognised Lula’s victory — prompting some observers to say that he helped set the stage for the riot in Brasilia, a charge Bolsonaro rejects.
After the attack, Bolsonaro said on Twitter that peaceful protest is part of democracy, but vandalism and the invasion of public buildings were “exceptions to the rule”. His son, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, also slammed attempts to link the former president to the riot, saying his father had been “virtually incommunicado” since the election results were announced.
But in mid-January, Brazil’s Supreme Court agreed to open an investigation into allegations that Bolsonaro encouraged the anti-democratic protests “that resulted in vandalism and violence in Brasilia”.
“Public figures who continue to cowardly conspire against democracy trying to establish a state of exception will be held accountable,” Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is leading the probes, said at the time.
Bolsonaro has been in the US state of Florida, where he briefly sought care at a local hospital earlier this month for abdominal pain linked to a knife wound he received during the 2018 presidential race, which he won.
The former president previously said in an interview with CNN Brasil that he had planned to return to Brazil by the end of January and was considering moving his departure earlier for health reasons.
He is understood to have entered the US on a visa for visiting world leaders, which expires on Tuesday as Bolsonaro is no longer on official business.
A Bolsonaro ally, former Justice Minister Anderson Torres, also was on vacation in Florida when the January 8 riot in Brazil’s capital broke out. But Torres, who was in charge of security in Brasilia at the time of the attack, has since returned to Brazil, where he was arrested on accusations of “connivance” and “omission”.
Bolsonaro’s presence in the US has drawn concern from some American legislators, who recently urged President Joe Biden “not [to] provide shelter for him, or any authoritarian who has inspired such violence against democratic institutions”.
“We should cooperate fully with Brazilian authorities in investigating any role Mr. Bolsonaro or those around him played in the events of January 8, and any crimes he committed when in office,” dozens of US Congress members said in a January 12 letter (PDF) to Biden.
Nearly 1,400 people have been arrested in relation to the attack in Brasilia, with Lula’s government pledging to hold accountable all those who participated in the riots, as well as those who helped plan and carry them out.
Eight Egyptian men convicted for 'inciting debauchery' following their appearance in a video of an alleged same-sex wedding party on a Nile boat appear in the defendant's cage in a courtroom in Cairo, Egypt, Saturday, November 1, 2014. (photo: Hassan Ammar/AP)
In Egypt, homosexuality is highly stigmatised, and there have long been allegations that police are hunting LGBT people online. Now BBC News has seen evidence of how the authorities are using dating and social apps to do this.
All victims' names have been changed
Having grown up in Egypt, I am aware of the pervasive homophobia that permeates every part of its society. But friends there tell me that the atmosphere has recently become far more brutal, and the tactics for tracking down LGBT people more sophisticated.
There is no explicit law against homosexuality in Egypt, but our investigation has found that the crime of "debauchery" - a sex work law - is being used to criminalise the LGBT community.
Transcripts submitted in police arrest reports show how officers are posing online to seek out - and in some cases allegedly fabricate evidence against - LGBT people looking for dates online.
They reveal how the police initiate text conversations with their targets.
Egypt is one of the most strategically important Western allies in the Middle East and receives billions of dollars in US and EU support every year. Around half a million British tourists visit the country annually and the UK trains Egyptian police forces, via the UN.
In one text conversation between an undercover police officer and someone using the social networking and dating app WhosHere, the officer appears to be pressuring the app user to meet up in person - that person was later arrested.
Police: Have you slept with men before?
App user: Yes
Police: How about we meet?
App user: But I live with mom and dad
Police: Come on dear, don't be shy, we can meet in public and then go to my flat.
There are more examples which are too explicit to publish.
It is extremely difficult for LGBT people to openly meet potential dates in public in Egypt, so dating apps are a popular way to do that. But just using the apps - regardless of your sexuality - can be grounds for arrest based on the incitement of debauchery or public morality laws in Egypt.
It is not just Egyptians who are being targeted. In one transcript, police describe identifying a foreigner, who we are calling Matt, on the popular gay dating app Grindr. A police informant then engaged Matt in conversation, and - the transcript says - Matt "admitted his perversion, his willingness to engage in debauchery for free, and sent pictures of himself and his body".
Matt told the BBC that he was subsequently arrested, charged with "debauchery", and eventually deported.
In some of the transcripts, the police appear to be trying to pressure people who seem to be simply seeking dates or new friendships into agreeing to sex for money. Legal experts in Egypt tell us that proving there has been an exchange of money, or an offer of one, can give the authorities the ammunition they need to take a case to court.
One such victim, whom we found through the transcripts, was a gay man we are calling Laith. In April 2018, the contemporary dancer was contacted from a friend's phone number.
"Hello, how are you?" the message said. The "friend" asked to meet for a drink.
But when Laith arrived to meet him, his friend was nowhere in sight. He was met instead by police who arrested him and threw him into a cell belonging to the vice squad.
One policeman stubbed a cigarette out on his arm, he told me, showing me the scar.
"It was the only time in my life that I tried to kill myself," Laith says.
He claims police then made a fake profile for him on the WhosHere app, and digitally altered his photos to make them look explicit. He says they then mocked up a conversation on the app which appeared to show him offering sex work.
He says the pictures are proof that he was framed, because the legs in the picture do not resemble his own - one of his legs is bigger than the other. The BBC has only had access to grainy photocopied police case files, so it cannot independently verify this detail.
Three other people told us the police forced or falsified confessions related to their cases, too.
Laith was jailed for three months for "habitual debauchery", reduced to a month on appeal. Laith says the police also tried to get him to inform on other gay people he knew of.
How we disguised contributors' identities
For the BBC documentary Queer Egypt Under Attack we used innovative face-tracking 3-D masking to ensure identities remained protected - the aim was to give the film a more attractive aesthetic than the usual blobbing technique of disguise allows.
"[The policeman] said: 'I can fabricate a whole story about you if you don't give me names.'"
The Egyptian government has spoken publicly about its use of online surveillance to target what it described as "homosexual gatherings".
In 2020, Ahmed Taher, former assistant to the Minister of Interior for Internet Crimes and Human Trafficking, told the newspaper Ahl Masr: "We recruited police in the virtual world to uncover the masses of group sex parties, homosexual gatherings."
The UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office told the BBC that no UK funding has gone towards training for the Egyptian police in activities relevant to the claims made in the investigation.
UK MP Alicia Kearns, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, told the BBC that she wanted more to be done to warn LGBT travellers about the risks in countries such as Egypt, "where their sexuality might be weaponised against them".
"I would urge the Egyptian government to cease all activities which target individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation."
The Egyptian government did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.
The WhosHere app was referenced in nearly every police transcript the BBC has had access to.
Cyber privacy experts told us that WhosHere seems to have specific vulnerabilities, allowing hackers to scrape information about its users - such as location - on a large scale.
And they say the way WhosHere is collecting and storing data is likely in breach of privacy laws in the UK and the EU.
It was only after the BBC formally approached WhosHere that the app changed its settings, removing the "seeking same sex" selection, which could put people at risk of identification.
WhosHere disputes the BBC's findings about vulnerabilities and say that they have a robust history of addressing problems when raised. And that they do not operate any specific service for the LGBT community in Egypt.
Grindr, also used as an app by police and criminals to find LGBT people in Egypt said: "We work extensively with Egyptian LGBTQ activists, international human rights advocates, and safety-focused technologists to best serve our users in the region."
Criminal gangs are using the same tactics as the police to find LGBT people. They then attack and humiliate them, and extort them by threatening to post the videos online.
I managed to track down two people we are calling Laila and Jamal, who were victims of a video that went viral in Egypt a few years ago. The footage shows them being forced to strip and dance, while being beaten and abused. They are forced at knife point to give their full names and admit they are gay. They told me the duo behind the video - named Bakar and Yahia - are notorious amongst the community.
We saw at least four videos in which Bakar and Yahia either appeared, or could be heard, extorting and abusing LGBT people before they uploaded the videos to Whatsapp, YouTube and Facebook. In one of these videos, an 18-year-old gay man we are calling Saeed is forced to, falsely, say he is a sex worker. I met him to hear about what happened next. He told me that he considered legal action but says his lawyer advised against this, telling him his sexuality would be perceived as more of a crime than the attack he suffered.
Saeed is now alienated from his family. He says they cut him off when the gang sent them the video in a bid to blackmail them too.
"I have been suffering from depression after what happened, with the videos circulating to all my friends in Egypt. I don't go out, and I don't have a phone.
"No-one used to know anything about me."
We've been told about dozens of attacks like this - carried out by multiple gangs. There are only a few reports of attackers being arrested.
It shocked me to learn, in the course of investigation that one gang leader, Yahia, is gay and actively posting online about his own sex work.
But perhaps it gives him a criminal edge - he knows just how vulnerable his targets are. And arguably his own position, as a gay man with little opportunity, fuels his criminality.
We have no evidence that Yahia has been involved in recent attacks, and he has denied involvement in any of the attacks.
Covering any of these issues inside Egypt itself has been banned since 2017, when the country's Supreme Council for Media Regulation imposed a media blackout on LGBT representation except if the coverage "acknowledge[s] the fact that their conduct is inappropriate".
LGBT community advocates, many of them in exile, are divided over whether the problems in Egypt should be highlighted in the media or tackled behind the scenes.
But Laila, Saeed, Jamal and Laith have chosen to step out of the shadows and break the silence.
Wind and solar are rapidly growing, but Texas Republicans want to throw a lifeline to natural gas.
Clean energy is rapidly rising on the Texas power grid, but regulators in the Lone Star State are now considering a plan that could give fossil fuels a boost.
The zero greenhouse gas emissions trio — wind, solar, and nuclear energy — provided more than 40 percent of electricity in the state in 2022. It was a year when several Texas cities experienced their hottest summers on record, driving electricity demand to its highest levels ever as fans and air conditioners switched on. Winter proved stressful too, with freezing temperatures last month pushing winter electricity peaks to record-high levels, narrowly avoiding outages.
Texas wasn’t alone. Over the past year, states like California have faced their own brushes with blackouts as searing temperatures drove up electricity consumption while the ongoing drought in the Western US throttled power supplies. Throughout the country, renewable energy is growing, but so are threats to the power grid. Utility regulators are trying to come up with ways to cope, and Texas — the largest energy producer in the US — could provide critical lessons.
However, Texas has some unique factors at play.
Texas leads the US in oil and natural gas production, but it’s also number one in wind power. Solar production in the state has almost tripled in the past three years. Part of the reason is that Texas is particularly suited to renewable energy on its grid. Wind turbines and solar panels in Texas have a high degree of “complementarity,” so shortfalls in one source are often matched by increases in another, smoothing out power production and reducing the need for other generators to step in. That has eased the integration of intermittent energy sources on the grid.
Coal, meanwhile, has lost more than half of its share in Texas since 2006. For a long time and across much of the country, the story was that cheap natural gas from hydraulic fracturing was eating coal’s lunch on the power grid. Coal was also facing tougher environmental regulations like stricter limits on mercury, requiring coal power plants to upgrade their equipment, and raising electricity production costs.
“The combination of the environmental regulations that are tightening and the cheapness [of competitors] mean that coal has trouble competing in the market,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin.
But in Texas, natural gas’s share of the electricity mix has been holding around 40 percent for more than a decade. On the other hand, renewable energy has surged as coal withered. Wind alone started beating out coal in 2019 and is now the second-largest source of electricity behind natural gas in the state.
Clean energy sources (wind, nuclear, solar) generated about 40% of electricity in @ERCOT_ISO in 2022, natural gas once again took the top spot, holding steady at its 17-year average of 43%, and coal continued its decade plus long decline. pic.twitter.com/X0Pv0oAN5X
An important factor is that the state has its own internal power grid, serving 26 million customers and meeting 90 percent of its electricity demand. It’s managed by the nonprofit Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. In the freewheeling Texas energy market, the cheapest sources of electricity become dominant, and wind and solar — with low construction costs, rapid build times, and zero fuel expenses — have emerged as winners.
Some Texans are also going out of their way to buy renewable electricity. Utilities like Austin Energy offer customers the choice of paying extra to buy wind and solar power, and thousands have done so. “As a public utility, Austin Energy’s decades-long shift towards renewable energy reflects the priorities of our customers and our city,” Matt Mitchell, a spokesperson for Austin Energy, said in an email.
Since there are few grid connections to other states, the Texas power grid avoids federal oversight, giving Texans more flexibility in setting their own rules. The downside is that Texas has a hard time getting extra juice when its own dynamos lose steam.
That was starkly evident in February 2021 when Winter Storm Uri chilled huge swaths of the United States. In Texas, more than 4 million customers lost power as temperatures dipped below those in Alaska. The official death toll was 246, though some estimates place the number higher.
The blackouts resulted largely from frozen coal piles and natural gas pipelines, stalling the flow of fuel into power plants. Nonetheless, Texas Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, blamed wind power for the crisis.
Some lawmakers are now working to tilt the balance toward fossil fuels. “There are different political figures who are trying to incentivize gas power plants or deny, prohibit, or inhibit renewables,” Webber said.
Last year, the Texas legislature passed a law that would prevent the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that “boycott” fossil fuels.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said one of his legislative priorities for this year is to secure more support for natural gas-fired generation. “We have to level the playing field so that we attract investment in natural gas plants,” Patrick said during a press conference last November. “We can’t leave here next spring unless we have a plan for more natural gas power.”
He may get his way. With recent winter storms in mind, the Texas Public Utility Commission, which regulates electricity, is now considering proposals for how to reform the electricity market to boost reliability. This month, the commission approved a proposal that is ostensibly technology-neutral, but may end up favoring natural gas plants.
While wind and solar power are ascendant, they are intermittent, and regulators want to make sure there is enough dispatchable power like natural gas to ramp up on still, cloudy days. The new proposal would create a credit scheme that would encourage more of these dispatchable plants to come online and extend a lifeline to some existing generators that are struggling to compete. But it would also raise the costs of electricity production.
Environmental groups like the Sierra Club noted that the proposal leaves the door open for other tactics for balancing electricity supply and demand, like energy storage, increasing energy efficiency, and demand response.
While Texas regulators hammer out the details of these reforms, the rest of the country should pay attention. With climate change pushing average temperatures upward, the US power grid is more stressed than ever, not only from rising demand and struggling supplies, but from extreme weather damaging infrastructure. Clean energy sources may be more abundant than ever, but so are the threats to the power grid.
