New York Governor Kathy Hochul vetoes "Grieving Families" bill out of spite As part of her ongoing efforts to somehow be worse than Andrew Cuomo, Gov. Hochul gave corporations a huge win by vetoing a bill that would allow families to sue for emotional damages in wrongful death civil claims. Though she claimed that the legislature had failed to negotiate a "scaled-down" bill, many believe she did it because the bill's co-sponsor helped tank her nomination of right-wing, anti-choice Judge Hector De La Salle to the state Supreme Court.
This is the most important race in the country right now BY FAR Wisconsin Democrats: Wisconsin is the most gerrymandered state in the country — a Dem-leaning purple state with a Republican-dominated legislature. That means Speaker McCarthy, criminalized abortions, persecution of marginalized communities, and massive handouts to the wealthy at the expense of hardworking families. But all of that changes if a progressive wins the April Supreme Court race, stripping control from MAGA stooges. Can you chip in to make sure Republicans don't turn Wisconsin into a one-party state?
As profits soar, US utilities lavish shareholders while shutting off power for millions In a scene seemingly lifted directly off a Monopoly game board, major power companies have shut off MILLIONS of struggling families' electricity and heat due to missed payments — while raking in record profits, spending lavishly on compensation for (probably monocled) executives, issuing billions in shareholder dividends, and concentrating even more obscene wealth with ongoing stock buybacks. On average the 12 worst-offending companies spent about $4 BILLION on dividends each, but the customer debt they were owed by millions of households struggling to pay accounted for less than 1 PERCENT of that amount. Disgusting.
Biden administration moves to strengthen Obamacare contraceptive mandate The Biden administration wants to make it easier for women to access birth control at no cost under the Affordable Care Act, reversing draconian Trump-era rules that weakened the law’s contraceptive mandate for employer-provided health insurance plans. The proposed rule would remove an exemption to the mandate that allows employers to opt out for supposed moral convictions. It would also create an independent pathway for individuals enrolled in plans offered by employers with religious exemptions to access contraceptive services through a willing provider without charge.
7th Memphis officer disciplined, EMTs fired in Tyre Nichols' death Two more Memphis police officers have been disciplined and three emergency responders fired in connection with the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols, widening the circle of punishment for the shocking display of police brutality after video showed many more people failed to help the murdered man beyond the five officers who savagely beat him to death.
Texas police chief on paid leave after a SWAT team raids wrong house In yet another appalling show of police incompetence and trigger-happy excess, a SWAT team busted into the home of Erika Rios at 2 AM, shattering windows and forcing Rios and her children out of the house at gunpoint in search of a tip-off about a murder suspect who was not in the house and who ultimately turned out to not be a murder suspect at all. Not only did the police do over $5,000 in damage to the house and reportedly injured Rios' children with flashbangs, they then failed to tell the city about the raid. The mayor had to learn about the incident from the newspapers.
Surge in complications from unsafe abortions likely post-Roe, doctors warn In what amounts to just the latest piece of evidence that America is sliding into a full-blown dystopia, top doctors are now warning that surgeons should be prepared to treat more patients with complications from self-managed abortions and forced pregnancies after last summer's disastrous overturning of Roe v. Wade. Republican policies kill.
LGBTQ groups promise lawsuit over new Utah law banning transgender surgeries, treatments As Republicans across the country roll out an expansive hate campaign against the the LGBTQ community to shore up their support amongst bigoted and theocratic voters, the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah and the National Center for Lesbian Rights are taking a stand against Utah's vile, wholly unnecessary anti-trans laws.
Black lawmakers urge Biden to push police reform after Tyre Nichols' murder The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Steven Horsford, said the 60-member-strong congressional group asked to meet with the president this week to “push for negotiations on much-needed national reforms to our justice system — specifically, the actions and conduct of our law enforcement." Every day that passes without serious, federally-mandated police reform brings us one step closer to another inevitable police shooting.
George Washington University installs emergency contraception vending machine Students at George Washington University successfully advocated for a vending machine on campus that dispenses Plan B morning-after pills following last summer's reviled repeal of Roe v. Wade by the conservative-packed Supreme Court. With any luck, we'll see these kinds of vending machines pop up all over the country until full reproductive healthcare rights are finally and rightfully enshrined at the federal level.
Today’s Action: Register voters for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election in April!
Abortion rights are taking center stage once again, this time in Wisconsin, where progressive voters have a chance to flip control of the state Supreme Court and help restore equitable access to reproductive healthcare. Securing Democratic seats on the state’s high court could spell the end of the current, near-total abortion ban that’s been on the books since 1849. And since Republican gerrymandering in Wisconsin is some of the most egregious in the country, this may be our best chance at restoring reproductive rights for marginalized people currently being denied equitable access to care.
While progressives have managed to deliver a string of recent statewide abortion-rights victories in the wake of last summer’s disastrous SCOTUS ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, we must be steadfast in our pursuit to restore and preserve access to abortion care to the millions of folks living in Republican-dominated red states. The battle for reproductive healthcare is raging, and we must stand ready to fight.
This is nothing new. Former Fox host Bill O’Reilly once accused me of being a communist (this was before O’Reilly was ousted after it was reported that he and Fox News paid five women $13 million to settle various sexual misconduct lawsuits).
Fox’s Lou Dobbs accused me of wanting government to favor women and Black people over white men (this was after Dobbs accused Barack Obama of not being a natural-born U.S. citizen but before Dobbs was named in a multibillion-dollar defamation suit claiming he employed false conspiracy theories to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election).
Look, I’m sufficiently hard-boiled not to let any of this fry me. I mention it today only to illustrate the extremes to which Fox and other right-wing outlets (bankrolled by big money) will go to stop any talk of “corporate greed.”
It started last Friday when I tweeted:
“Egg prices are up 60%. That’s absurd. People are paying up upwards of $6 and $7 for a dozen eggs. Why? Corporate greed. Cal-Maine, the largest egg producer in the US, is raking record profits — $198 million in its latest quarter. That’s a 65% increase from a year ago.”
“Corporate greed” are fighting words in the land of Rupert Murdoch.
So Fox tried to throw egg on my face by quoting Nick Freitas, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, who tweeted: “I’ve noticed for Bob, that ‘corporate greed’ explains everything. And giving people like Bob more power fixes everything.”
As to the facts, there’s no doubt egg prices have soared. As CNN reported last week, the average selling price per dozen eggs from Cal-Maine — which controls about 20 percent of the U.S. egg market and sets egg prices nationally — more than doubled last year.
The question is why.
Fox blames avian flu. Avian flu did kill a lot of hens, but according to Farm Action, a farmer-led advocacy organization, in a letter sent last week to the Federal Trade Commission, avian flu did not reduce egg production.
After accounting for chicks hatched during 2022, the average size of the egg-laying flock in any given month of 2022 was never more than 7-8 percent lower than in 2021. And due to record-high rates of egg-laying among the remaining hens — between 1-4 percent higher than the average rate observed between 2017 and 2021 — the industry's quarterly egg production experienced no substantial decline in 2022 compared to 2021.
So if the supply of eggs didn’t decline, what accounts for the surge in prices?
Fox then blames inflation. “Prices increased across all product categories last year due to high inflation.”
But Cal-Maine’s production costs didn’t jump nearly as high as its prices (as Cal-Maine told its investors).
What did jump was Cal-Maine’s profits. For the 26-week period ending November 26, 2022, Cal-Maine reported a 10-fold year-over-year increase in gross profits. Max Bowman, the chief financial officer of Cal-Maine, conceded that the firm’s high profits were due to “significantly higher selling prices, our enduring focus on cost control, and our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures.”
Yet Fox News won’t take greed for an answer. To egg me on, they quote Minnesota State Representative Walter Hudson, who tweeted: “Hey, Bob. Why weren't they greedy last year?” (I assume Hudson means 2021.)
Answer: They didn’t have an excuse to raise prices in 2021. That was before the avian flu outbreak and before inflation really took off. Companies don’t like to openly engage in price gouging. That would be bad for the corporate image.
So what’s caused egg prices to soar?
After sifting through the evidence, Farm Action concludes:
The real culprit behind this 138 percent hike in the price of a carton of eggs appears to be a collusive scheme among industry leaders to turn inflationary conditions and an avian flu outbreak into an opportunity to extract egregious profits reaching as high as 40 percent.
What Cal-Maine Foods and the other large egg producers did last year—and seem to be intent on doing again this year—is extort billions of dollars from the pockets of ordinary Americans through what amounts to a tax on a staple we all need: eggs. They did so without any legitimate business justification. They did so because there is no ‘reasonable substitute’ for a carton of eggs. They did so because they had power and weren't afraid to use it.
Not especially sunny-side up — but at least not scrambled by Fox.
While avian flu and inflation may have contributed to some of the rise in prices, the extraordinary surge certainly smells rotten. The leading egg firms have a long history of cartel-like conspiracies to limit production, split markets, and increase prices for consumers.
Farm Action wants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate. On Tuesday, Senator Jack Reed asked the FTC to investigate whether “fowl play” by egg producers may have harmed consumers.
When it comes to the corporate monopolization of eggs — or of anything else — the American public shouldn’t go over easy.
Almost a thousand of people gathered at the Oscar Grant Plaza over Tyre Nichols killing by Memphis police, in Oakland, California, on Sunday. (photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Black lawmakers call for meeting with president to discuss police reform as investigation into Nichols’s death continues
Asixth officer involved in the death of Tyre Nichols has been removed from duty, police said, as an influential group of Black elected officials has called for a meeting with Joe Biden to discuss police reform.
Officer Preston Hemphill was relieved of duty and put on what is known as administrative leave, Memphis police maj Karen Rudolph said on Monday, according to multiple reports.
Rudolph stopped short of saying what role Hemphill had at the scene of Nichols’s deadly beating or whether he would be charged with a crime in connection with the killing as several other officers have been. But Rudolph said that the investigation into Nichols’s death remained ongoing, and “more information will be shared as it develops”.
Hemphill’s removal comes as calls for changes to American policing intensify after officers’ deadly beating of Nichols.
The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Steven Horsford, said the group of 60 members of Congress had asked to meet with the president this week to “push for negotiations on much-needed national reforms to our justice system – specifically, the actions and conduct of our law enforcement”.
Nichols, a Black man, died on 10 January, three days after Memphis police officers beat him after a traffic stop. Nichols’s parents, who have been invited to attend Biden’s State of the Union speech on 7 February, said the 29-year-old was driving home after photographing the sunset.
Video footage released by Memphis officials last week showed officers kicking and punching Nichols and hitting him with a police baton.
Five Memphis officers were fired after the attack and have since been charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression.
“No one in our nation should fear interacting with the police officers who serve our diverse communities, large and small,” Horsford, a Democratic congressman from Nevada, said. “We all want to be safe.
“Many Black and brown people, however, and many young people in general, are justifiably afraid to interact with law enforcement officials.”
Horsford continued: “We are calling on our colleagues in the House and Senate to jumpstart negotiations now and work with us to address the public health epidemic of police violence that disproportionately affects many of our communities.
“The brutal beating of Tyre Nichols was murder and is a grim reminder that we still have a long way to go in solving systemic police violence in America.”
The Senate judiciary committee’s chairperson, Dick Durbin, said on Sunday that Congress can pass additional policing measures like “screening, training, accreditation, to up the game so that the people who have this responsibility to keep us safe really are stable and approaching this in a professional manner”.
Law enforcement primarily falls under the jurisdiction of states, rather than the federal government. But Durbin said that should not “absolve” Congress from acting.
“What we saw on the streets of Memphis was just inhumane and horrible,” he said. “I don’t know what created this – this rage in these police officers that they would congratulate themselves for beating a man to death. But that is literally what happened.”
Also on Sunday, the civil rights attorney representing the Nichols family, Benjamin Crump, called for Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
The bill, drafted after a Minneapolis police officer murdered Floyd in May 2020, would ban chokeholds, create national standards for policing ostensibly to increase accountability, and reform qualified immunity, which shields police officers from civil liability for misconduct.
The legislation passed the US House – then controlled by Democrats – in March 2021 but stalled in the Senate. With the House now under Republican control, it remains to be seen whether progress can be made on the bill.
Crump told CNN there could be further criminal charges brought against Memphis police while Steve Mulroy, the prosecutor handling the case, said in an interview with the news channel that “nothing we did last Thursday [when the five officers were charged] regarding indictments precludes us from bringing other charges later”.
“We are going to need time to allow the investigation to go forward and further consideration of charges,” Mulroy said.
The Memphis police department on Saturday announced it would disband its “Scorpion” unit, which was tasked with proactively taking on street crime. The five officers charged over Nichols’s death were all part of the unit.
Later that night protesters gathered outside Memphis city hall to mark the victory but said it was just the first step.
Local community organizer LJ Abraham told the Guardian that organizers are still demanding that Memphis police dismantle other task forces they run – such as the multi-agency gang unit – and transparency in releasing body-camera footage.
She showed the Guardian video from 2020 from a woman showing multiple Memphis police kneeling on her husband’s back while they tried to handcuff him, reportedly on his property.
“Right now, when somebody is shot by police, we can’t see that video,” Abraham said, adding that four people had been killed by Memphis police since November. “The only reason we got to see Tyre’s footage was because of the manner in which he died.”
A New York Times analysis found that police had given Nichols dozens of “contradictory and unachievable orders” during the traffic stop and subsequent beating. In the 13 minutes between officers stopping Nichols and taking him into custody, police shouted at least 71 commands, the Times reported.
“Officers commanded Mr Nichols to show his hands even as they were holding his hands,” the Times found. “They told him to get on the ground even when he was on the ground. And they ordered him to reposition himself even when they had control of his body.”
Russian soldiers — pushed into retreat by a counteroffensive late last year — control the east bank of the mighty Dnieper River. Ukrainians control the west.
As Ukraine awaits new tanks from the United States and Europe, and fighting rages over strategic towns in the east, a war of attrition is underway in this southern battleground. The river limits territorial advances, permitting — for now at least — only destruction from a distance.
On the route traveling east and north from villages on the Gulf of the Dnieper to the battered but never-occupied city of Nikopol, the width of the river ranges from several miles to fewer than 1,000 feet, putting the Russians close enough to strike with mortars and shells or sniper fire. They hit some villages dozens of times a day. Ukrainian forces are firing back.
Before the war, the journey would have amounted to about 150 miles — and taken a few hours to drive. But with damaged roads and bridges over the river’s inlets, the journey through former Russian occupied territory has become difficult. Roads are still littered with abandoned Russian checkpoints and military equipment. Russian trenches and firing positions are dug into farmers’ fields. Signs warn of mines. At village entrances, Ukrainian troops warn the chances of being shelled are high.
Washington Post journalists spent several days traveling along the Ukrainian-controlled main and back roads that connect these towns and villages to see how civilians are surviving winter, frequently without gas or electricity. Often only the elderly are left, surviving without heat on food handouts. Residents fear they could be killed at any moment, and still whisper of collaborators living among them.
Many of the villages here withstood months of Russian occupation, and are in territory President Vladimir Putin claims, illegally, to have annexed. The Kremlin now insists they must be “liberated” — signaling Moscow’s resolve to return, possibly in new offensives this spring.
Oleksandrivka
The damaged road into this recently liberated village is a harbinger for what lies beyond. Burned-out cars and carcasses of a cow and dog are scattered on the side of the road. Soldiers shouted frantically to stay on hard ground — the marsh below still hasn’t been demined.
Before the war, 2,123 people lived in this peaceful enclave on the Gulf of the Dnieper. But fighting grew so fierce here that by last spring, only 16 residents remained. Russian forces controlling the town evacuated most others to villages deeper inside Russian-occupied territory.
Once Ukraine retook the village late last year, civilians started to return and assess the damage. But most found there’s little left. More than two months after liberation, only 150 people now live in the wreckage.
“If there was a hell, it was here,” said village leader Natalya Kamenetska, 36. Some residents were executed. Four are still missing. Exhumations are still underway, but the village remains so heavily mined that the process is slow.
Residents who need repairs to their homes must visit Kamenetska’s office at the village council to fill out questionnaires and register for aid. Many are impatient.
In a damaged kindergarten nearby, Yaroslava Kusherenko, 81, was trying to drag a large, dirty rug out of a brightly painted classroom. Kusherenko spent seven months in the nearby village of Bilozerka after Russian forces moved her there during heavy fighting. “I spent the first three months crying,” she said.
When she returned home after liberation, all that remained of her house was her kitchen. Her cows had been slaughtered and she and her son now live off humanitarian aid. Her stove still works, which has saved them from freezing. But she needed the carpet, she said, to warm up her makeshift bed.
She worried she would be punished for taking it, even though it wasn’t being used. But she was so cold, she said, she did not know what else to do.
“We had such a beautiful village. People were so happy. There was so much green. And see what has happened to it now,” she said, gesturing to the bombed-out kindergarten behind her. “In one second, I lost everything. Who will return it to me?”
Tiahynka
In the three months since Ukrainian forces liberated Tiahynka, Helena Horobets, 72, has prepared carefully for the possibility that daily Russian shelling from across the river might destroy her home.
She and her son wrapped their valuables in plastic — including the dress she wants to wear to her own funeral, should she be killed — and moved themselves and their belongings to their cramped basement where they now spend most of their time.
With no power, Horobets’s connection to the outside world has been limited to using a neighbor’s generator to occasionally watch TV. But news of what is happening elsewhere in Ukraine, she said through tears, just “makes me sad.”
On a recent morning, she came upstairs, opened her blue gate and handed her neighbor a small wad of cash. In return, Alla Kravtsova, 55, passed a raw chicken in a red plastic bag. It would sustain Horobets for about a week.
At her home down the street, Kravtsova’s chickens, geese and turkeys squawked as she opened her barn door, revealing four cows. The youngest, Borka, is only two weeks old.
Selling poultry and dairy has helped Kravtsova survive. But her responsibility to the animals, she said, has also trapped her here. Just before Ukraine retook her village, Kravtsova’s daughter and granddaughter fled. The 5-year-old was so traumatized by the war that she developed a stutter and shaky hands.
They are now safe in Lithuania while Kravtsova sleeps most nights in her cellar where she stores jars of preserves made during occupation. “My daughter asked me to forgive her for leaving me alone,” she said. “I told her ‘Save the child.’”
She stepped down a rickety ladder to her basement to rummage through her supply and emerged weeping — the dusty jars filled with pickled red peppers, strawberries and squash a reminder of the darkest days of Russian control. “I was afraid my children and grandchildren would die of hunger,” she said.
In her kitchen, Kravtsova flicked on a small lamp powered by a car battery and recounted how she thought Ukraine’s advances meant her family would be able to return. But the Russians barely retreated. “We were waiting for autumn to put an end to it,” she said. “Now we’re waiting for spring.”
Lvove
Soon after Ukrainian forces pushed Russians out of this village in November, Natasha and Anton Dyadchenko adopted new rules: 1. Avoid leaving home at all costs 2. If you must go outside, run as fast as you can. 3. Always stay between houses for cover.
They had watched with fear that month as the retreating Russians set up a pontoon bridge and crossed from their riverbank to the other side. The next day, their three children, ages 9, 13 and 14, were playing outside when Ukrainian troops arrived.
Civilians fell to their knees in thanks. A giant Ukrainian flag was spread across the main street.
But within days, Russian attacks from across the river began. People fled. “The shelling started to get loud and the kids were very scared,” Natasha said, so they made the decision to send them to their grandmother’s house in central Ukraine.
Now their street is quiet, save for barking dogs whose families fled. On their limited ventures outside, the Dyadchenkos see few people. They have not left because Natasha’s elderly mother wants to stay.
For now, they are surviving off the animals they raised, including her mother’s seven cows, 10 chickens and 20 ducks. The livestock helped keep them afloat during occupation. Each week, they braved the road to sell meat in the market in Kherson.
But their supplies won’t last forever. When asked how many pigs were left, Natasha gestured at the one they had slaughtered that morning, which they would butcher in their kitchen. “None now,” she replied.
Mylove
After a few hours without explosions, a handful of civilians here felt safe enough to step outside for some fresh air. The last blast had been that morning. Now it was afternoon.
“Thank God today has been quiet so far,” said Yuriy Boronko, 69, as he walked by pushing his bike. It was a day off for the humanitarian aid station where residents usually collect food.
A young couple walked by with their dog. They are surviving, they said, on bread and beans. There has been no electricity, gas or water since the retreating Russians bombed the infrastructure. Continuous shelling has made repairs impossible.
“The ‘liberators’ on the other side of the river are shelling us,” said Valeriy Kulyush, 57. “We just have to persevere.”
Dudchany/Havrylivka
This village has been shelled so much lately that Lyuba Voznyak, 66, no longer knows where to hide. On a recent afternoon, she sat outside her red gate riddled with bullet holes, shivering on a rickety bench. Her street was deserted.
“I’m afraid to sit in my house because I’m afraid it will collapse on me,” she said. But “it’s even too scary to sit in my garden. How do you expect me not to shake?” The only ones left, she said, are “pensioners with nowhere to go.”
Just two days earlier, a house around the corner was hit by a Russian strike from across the river. The people had already left, Voznyak said, but their animals — including dogs and chickens — were still outside.
Voznyak’s children have begged her to evacuate. But after surviving occupation, she doesn’t want to flee. “I need to watch over my garden,” she said.
Then, another boom, as a mortar landed nearby.
The strike Voznyak and Perepada heard from Dudchany hit a garage housing farm machines down the road in the village of Havrylivka. No one was killed or wounded. A fire blazed in the yard. Plumes of smoke rose into the sky. A dog walked by. A group of men, accustomed to shelling, stood outside joking about the strike just minutes after the blast. None of them, they said, had anywhere else to go.
Novovorontsovka/Maryanske
On a recent day, volunteers from nearby Zolota Balka came to Novovorontsovka to pick up supplies, including bread. Their village had been hit 60 times the day before, they said.
Novovorontsovka hasn’t been shelled as regularly and has become a haven for storing humanitarian aid. Locals are starting to replace their broken windows, with glass purchased through a grant from the European Union.
Another four miles north, in riverside Maryanske, Viacheslav Borysenko has sold fish at a market for 22 years. Now, with much of this stretch of river too dangerous for boats, the fish he sells come from upstream. To live on the river and import fish “feels weird, but what can we do?” he said. “We have to adapt.”
Nikopol
Lyudmila Kruhlenko, 53, had just set out snacks on New Year’s Eve when a blast hit her building, badly damaging her balcony and destroying part of a neighbor’s apartment. Still, she did not consider leaving.
“The mood is to stay until victory,” Kruhlenko said. “The people left here are very strong.”
Mayor Oleksandr Sayuk, 49, said more than half the city’s 106,000 people have fled — including his wife and children. The city, perched on a wide section of the river, is protected by the water. Russian forces “don’t have the possibility to easily get to the city,” Sayuk said. “The negative side,” he added, is the Russians are still within range. “They shell whenever they please.”
An Ohio couple has been unmasked as leaders of the neo-Nazi “Dissident Homeschool” Telegram channel that distributes lesson plans to 2,400 members.
Earlier this month, while the rest of the country was celebrating the achievements of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., parents and children in the “Dissident Homeschool” network opened a lesson plan and were greeted with the words: “As Adolf Hitler wrote…”
The contents of the MLK lesson plan would be shocking for almost anyone, but for members of the 2,400-member “Dissident Homeschool” Telegram channel, this was a regular Monday at school.
“It is up to us to ensure our children know him for the deceitful, dishonest, riot-inciting negro he actually was,” the administrator of the network’s Telegram channel wrote, alongside a downloadable lesson plan for elementary school children. ”He is the face of a movement which ethnically cleansed whites out of urban areas and precipitated the anti-white regime that we are now fighting to free ourselves from.”
Since the group began in October 2021 it has openly embraced Nazi ideology and promoted white supremacy, while proudly discouraging parents from letting their white children play with or have any contact with people of any other race. Admins and members use racist, homophobic, and antisemitic slurs without shame, and quote Hitler and other Nazi leaders daily in a channel open to the public.
VICE News joined the group simply by clicking on a link, though the list of members was not publicly visible.
What’s even more disturbing, however, is that the couple who run the channel are not only teaching parents how to indoctrinate their children into this fascist ideology, they’re also encouraging them to meet up in real life and join even more radical groups, which could further reinforce their beliefs and potentially push them toward violent action.
‘Mr. and Mrs. Saxon’
The “Dissident Homeschool” network is run by a husband and wife team who use the aliases “Mr. and Mrs. Saxon.” This week the antifascist research group Anonymous Comrades Collective published a detailed report that unmasked the Saxons as Logan and Katja Lawrence, who live in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, with their four young children.
The researchers were able to identify the Lawrences through biographical details they shared in the Telegram channel’s group chat and on podcast appearances. One of the key clues to identifying them came when they revealed that they owned a German Shepherd called Blondi—the same name as Hitler’s dog.
The researchers found photos that Katja posted on Facebook with her German Shepherd, and were also able to confirm Katja Lawrence’s ownership of this dog through the Wyandot County dog licensing website dog search feature.
The Lawrences did not respond to multiple emails, text messages, social media messages, and phone calls from VICE News to discuss the contents of the report and their neo-Nazi homeschooling group.
Katja Lawrence, who is in her mid-30s, launched the channel in October 2021, because she “was having a rough time finding Nazi-approved school material for [her] homeschool children,” as she told the neo-Nazi podcast “Achtung! Amerikaner” last year.
Later in the same podcast episode, Lawrence expanded on her view on why she wanted to educate her children at home. “We have our children’s best interest at heart and nobody can do a better job than we can because it’s our child. We are so deeply invested into making sure that that child becomes a wonderful Nazi,” she said.
When VICE News asked for comment on the Lawrences and their channel, the host of the podcast, Gordon Kahl, replied: “I think you should kill yourself instead.”
Katja Lawrence, born Katja van den Berg, is originally from the Netherlands and moved to the U.S. after meeting her husband at the Oktoberfest festival in Berlin, according to an old LiveJournal blog uncovered by the researchers. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2017.
Logan Lawrence works as an agent for a local, family-run insurance agency. When reached by phone, an employee at the company told VICE News that they would not be commenting on the story.
Logan is also a member of a local Masonic lodge and features in a number of pictures on its website, where he is listed as an officer of the lodge. The secretary of the lodge did not respond to VICE News’ request for comment.
Both Katja and Logan have a limited presence on mainstream social media platforms, and the one Facebook account that was operated by Katja was deleted this week after the Anonymous Comrades Collective report was published.
Katja Lawrence is the main poster on the “Dissident Homeschool” channel, posting classroom schedules, book lists, lesson plans, and other educational resources for like-minded parents.
Racist lesson plans
Lawrence uses every lesson plan as an opportunity to push racist ideology. In one “math assignment,” children were asked to interpret “crime statistics,” the goal of which was to “realize the demographics to be cautious around.” Another lesson called “IQ Unit Study” discusses IQ scores. “The blacks—on average—have a much lower IQ than whites,” Lawrence wrote.
Last week the group chat channel belonging to the “Dissident Homeschool” network was shut down, but VICE News has reviewed an archive of the chats dating back to October 2021, showing that initially the channel was populated by a small number of core members who contributed most of the comments and content.
However, by the time the chat archive ended on Jan. 4, there were hundreds more people contributing to the conversations, and discussions had expanded from children’s education to the dangers of diversity and how “Indiana Jones” movies are nothing more than “Jewish revenge porn.”
One parent posting in the group last year thanked the Lawrences for their work and explained why they agreed that public school education was not for them.
“This is why I want to make the switch. I don’t even want my kids exposed to the gay loving, anti-family, Jew factory that is public school, I can’t stand it.”
Other parents offered their own educational resources, with one member writing: “Here is an overview of 10 Reason why Hitler was one of the Good Guys:”
When one parent named Nancy recommended three preachers that the group might find interesting, another member responded: “A ni**er, a race mixer, and a guy who literally says that Israel should rule the world. You're 0 for 3.”
Katja Lawrence then added: “Nancy, did you know you are in a chat of dissidents who fully support white nationalism? We do not support Israel and do not listen to black preachers.”
The members of the channel have also expanded beyond the U.S. to include members from other countries, though only those from European countries with acceptable ethnicity, such as Norway, Germany, and the U.K., are welcomed.
At one point in the chat, Katja Lawrence told a UK-based member of the group that she would help put him in touch with the head of one of the biggest white nationalist groups in the U.K., suggesting the Lawrences have made connections with antisemites and white supremacists outside of their own homeschooling community.
Baking a ‘Führer cake’
When the Telegram channel reached its 1,000th subscriber, just months after it launched, Katja Lawrence posted a picture of German schoolchildren performing a Nazi salute in a classroom, writing: “It fills my heart with joy to know there is such a strong base of homeschoolers and homeschool-interested national socialists. Hail Victory.”
The Lawrences also described how their family celebrated Hitler’s birthday by baking a “Führer cake.”
“We had a lovely dinner followed by Führerkuchen,” Katja Lawrence wrote. “Our children celebrated Adolf’s birthday today by learning about Germany and eating favorite German foods.” She later added that she had baked “quite a few swastika items, my latest a swastika apple pie.”
In one chilling, now-deleted post on Telegram, Katla Lawrence posted an audio message of her children shouting “sieg heil.”
While Katja and Logan Lawrence claim in Telegram comments that they warn their children not to discuss their Nazi views with those outside the family, they also don’t limit their activities to the online world and help others to connect with fellow white nationalists in the real world.
Secret ‘pool parties’
“There is a huge network of people like us,” Katja wrote on the Telegram channel. “If you are asking what you can do: get vetted and join a local pool party. I would say that’s the best decision Mr. Saxon and I made last year. We joined a pool party and our children now play with other white children where they can speak and play freely. ”
A “pool party” is the name for a secretive meetup organized by white supremacist group The Right Stuff and its political wing the National Justice Party. Katja Lawrence even goes so far as to share the direct email for a contact at The Right Stuff who deals with vetting, while an account named the “National Justice Party” posts updates that include calls for “Dissident Homeschool” members to join its supporter group and updates on its Christmas charity drive.
“It has been huge for us to get into that real life network. Contribute by joining. It makes all the difference,” Katja Lawrence wrote.
The Right Stuff and the National Justice League were described by the Anti-Defamation League as “virulently antisemitic”, while 31 members of Patriot Front were arrested last year inside a U-haul truck on their way to an LGBTQ Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, carrying shields and smoke grenades.
Yet Katja attempts to describe these group’s activities as entirely wholesome.
“To dispel some misconceptions: these groups do not encourage or solicit people to commit illegal activities,” Katja wrote. "It is a nice group of wholesome white people getting together for cookouts and such.”
The world’s largest humanitarian network says strong preparedness systems are ‘severely lacking’ despite three years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
All countries remain “dangerously unprepared” for the next pandemic, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has warned, saying future health crises could also collide with increasingly likely climate-related disasters.
Despite three “brutal” years of the COVID-19 pandemic, strong preparedness systems are “severely lacking”, the IFRC said in its World Disasters Report 2022, published on Monday. It called on countries to update their preparedness plans by year’s end.
The world’s largest humanitarian network said building trust, equity and local action networks were vital to get ready for the next crisis.
The recommendations were released on the third anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 an international public health emergency.
“The next pandemic could be just around the corner,” said Jagan Chapagain, secretary general of the IFRC, the world’s largest disaster response network. “If the experience of COVID-19 won’t quicken our steps toward preparedness, what will?”
The report said countries need to be prepared for “multiple hazards, not just one”, adding that societies only became truly resilient through planning for different types of disasters because they can occur simultaneously.
The IFRC cited the rise in climate-related disasters and waves of disease outbreaks this century, of which COVID-19 was just one.
It said extreme weather events are growing more frequent and intense “and our ability to merely respond to them is limited”.
The report said major hazards harm those who are already the most vulnerable. It called leaving the poorest exposed “self-defeating”.
The report also said countries should review their legislation to ensure it is in line with their pandemic preparedness plans by the end of 2023 and adopt a new treaty and revised international health regulations by next year that would invest more in the readiness of local communities.
It also recommended that countries increase domestic health finance by 1 percent of their gross domestic product and global health finance by at least $15bn per year, which Chapagain described as a “good investment to make”.
“The important thing is there has to be a political will to commit to that,” he said. “If it is there, it’s possible.”
Peruvian demonstrators clash with riot police in Lima, Peru, on January 28, 2023, as protests against President Dina Boluarte continue. (photo: Klebher Vasquez/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Peruvian protests — and the government’s response — are “a monster eating itself,” one expert told Vox.
After an attempted self-coup ending in the arrest of former Peruvian President Pedro Castillo in December, long-standing political and social tensions in Peru have resulted in popular unrest and a deadly government crackdown with no clear path to political compromise — or an end to the violence.
What started as outrage and grief surrounding Castillo’s arrest and the ascension of his vice president, Dina Boluarte, to the nation’s top office has morphed into protests across the South American nation that reflect the lack of political representation many Peruvians, especially those outside the capital of Lima, have felt for decades. That crisis of representation has been exacerbated in recent years both by the economic impact of the pandemic and lack of access to basic services like health care and quality education and has now boiled over.
Castillo, who remains in jail after his failed coup attempt, got his start in politics as a teachers’ union leader. Elected president in 2021, he was a powerful symbol for disenfranchised Peruvians: a man from the poor Andean region of Cajamarca and a political outsider in the sequestered world of Lima’s political elite. Peru’s recent political history, however — from the terror of the Shining Path insurgency in the 1970s and 1980s to the brutal dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori which nonetheless jumpstarted Peru’s economic engine to the country’s post-2016 presidential chaos — has been one of instability even as Peru’s economic conditions improved due to its rich store of natural resources like copper.
All of these circumstances helped lead to the present crisis: protesters burning buildings, closing down highways, airports, and mines, and suffering violence at the hands of the police force; dozens dead and more injured; and a stagnant political class apparently unwilling and unable to respond to the political and economic demands of the Peruvian people.
The question of what comes next, though, doesn’t have a clear answer. Despite calls for new elections, Peru’s Congress on Saturday voted down a proposal to move elections to December 2023. A left-wing demand that such elections be accompanied by a constituent assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution — a relic of the Fujimori period which helped contribute to the present crisis by allowing the president to dissolve Congress and rule by decree — also failed, though polling now suggests that 69 percent of Peruvians would support such an effort.
At the heart of the crisis is Peru’s broken political system. According to Zaraà Toledo Orozco, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University, while there is a desire for change among broad swaths of the country, Peru’s “campesinos,” or rural poor, lack representation in a national political party that could fight for their priorities. Now, that social and political alienation, compounded by the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and ignited by Castillo’s ouster, has turned into a full-fledged conflagration.
The end of Fujimori didn’t result in a vibrant Peruvian democracy
Over the course of its history, Peru has had periods of democracy interspersed with dictatorships and chaos; most famous among its strongmen is Fujimori, who came to power in 1990 as a populist leader and an outsider. He emerged “out of nowhere,” according to Max Cameron, professor of comparative Latin American politics at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. Running against the “patrician” novelist Mario Vargas-Llosa, Fujimori “seemed more like a man of the people,” Cameron said. “He had sold some property and bought a tractor, and drove around in this tractor with a trailer behind it, called it the Fujimobile, drove around the shantytowns of Peru, gathering popular support.”
Fujimori was the first Peruvian leader to really reckon with the Shining Path, which started as a communist guerrilla organization in the 1970s. The group started in Ayacucho, a city in southern Peru, and recruited from Peru’s poor and Indigenous populations and was active in some of the areas that are now erupting in violent protest.
Fujimori’s government dealt with the Shining Path insurgency through a suspension of democracy and brutal state violence against those perceived as part of or sympathetic to the insurgency. At the same time, he privatized Peru’s mining concerns and introduced measures to reduce the nation’s debilitating inflation. Those measures, dubbed “Fujishock,” did turn around the economy, and the macroeconomic policies implemented at the time have until recently produced an economy that withstood political instability.
The country’s economic success and Fujimori’s willingness to take on the Shining Path earned him devoted political followers, to the extent that “Fujimorismo” and “anti-Fujimorismo” are still in popular use to describe political stances, and Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko Fujimori, is still a potent political force. As Verónica Hurtado, a PhD candidate in political science at the University of British Columbia, explained to Vox, the legacy of Fujimori and the Shining Path insurgency survives, too, in the political polarization between the government and anyone who dares to criticize its policies.
Right-leaning critics of the protesters have referred to them as terrorists, evoking the deep national trauma of the Shining Path insurgency of the ’80s and ’90s. Maoist insurgents killed an estimated 31,000 Peruvians, and their actions are still evoked in the Peruvian concept of terruqueo, as Simeon Tegel wrote in the Washington Post. Terruqueo, or smearing opponents by falsely accusing them of terrorism, has bubbled up in the recent protests on the part of the government, providing a degree of impunity for the use of excessive force against demonstrators.
That kind of political polarization, combined with the social polarization and stratification that dominates Peruvian society, has helped create a political system without real political parties — at least not ones that have real ideologies, experts told Vox. Political power is concentrated in Lima, with little connection to the cities and regions where mayors and local organizations, and to a lesser extent regional governors, are expected to respond to the needs of ordinary people rather than the central government.
According to Toledo Orozco, Peru is an “empty democracy.” Political parties exist, but only to field candidates for office rather than as organizations with ideals, policy platforms, and infrastructure. That system has created a politics uninterested in change or accountability, but it also helped bring Castillo to power.
Since 2016, no Peruvian president has finished their term, and it’s unlikely that Boluarte will complete the remainder of Castillo’s, which is set to end in 2026. Boluarte has proposed new elections in 2024, two years ahead of schedule, and Congress gave preliminary approval to that change last month, although protesters demand new elections for both the presidency and the legislature as soon as possible. Boluarte has insisted that she doesn’t want to stay in office and that she is only fulfilling her constitutional duty by staying in power.
But she has managed to cobble together support from the several small right-wing parties that together hold the majority — another point of anger for the protesters who see her as moving toward the right despite being elected as a leftist. However, the legislature approved her government earlier this month, a significant vote of confidence despite the unrest.
Castillo in particular fit into the pattern of post-2016 instability, largely due to his enmity with Peru’s Congress. That body has been at odds with the presidency since the surprise win of former finance minister Pedro Pablo Kuczynski — popularly known as PPK — over Keiko Fujimori in that year’s presidential contest. The younger Fujimori, though, retained influence and power in Congress, and her party and its allies stymied Kuczynski as he tried to institute a cabinet and implement policy. Congress also wielded its impeachment authority with zest, creating a pattern of animosity between the legislative body and the executive office that has continued through Castillo’s tenure, as have corruption scandals like the one that helped bring down PPK.
According to Hurtado, Castillo didn’t have the tools, experience, infrastructure, and know-how to successfully implement his campaign promises; however, it’s also true, Hurtado said, that Congress and Peru’s political establishment stymied him because it didn’t approve of his win — a common complaint among Castillo supporters.
“The use of impeachment so easily by Congress also frustrates people,” Hurtado said, “because before 2016, it’s not like we had that great policy implementation ... but there was an understanding, I believe, that even the most unpopular president could get stuff done. There were some major reforms; you could observe the country was trying to expand the presence of the state, there were major social programs being implemented. Since 2016, it just seems that very little has changed, and what was in place has deteriorated.”
That’s part of why the protesters’ call to dissolve Congress resonates so strongly; recent polling from the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos put Congress’s approval rating at 7 percent and found that 74 percent of those surveyed would approve of dissolving the current Congress. But the fear in a relatively new and unstable democracy, particularly one in which an elected president previously dissolved Congress and instituted a dictatorship, is that the absence of such a body would create an even deeper crisis.
The question of where Peru can possibly go from here doesn’t have a satisfying answer, experts told Vox, because there’s no real desire or mechanism on the part of the state to engage with the protesters other than through violence. And the protesters, despite their material and political demands, don’t have an overarching organization, an umbrella under which they can unite and pursue a dialogue with the government.
For there to be any hope of Peru moving past its current disfunction, Toledo Orozco said, “We need to take the conflict, the conflictive issues, out of bullets and back to politics.” But without a leader, organization, or even a clear and consolidated list of demands, the protests remain fractured and without a clear line of communication with the government. And as Boluarte’s government continues to resort to violence to address the protests, observers say the capacity for compromise diminishes.
“The core of this conflict is that democracy does not only need economic growth,” Toledo Orozco said. “It needs to come with parties that address the needs, the demands of the masses. Democracies that do not address issues of representation, do not include the needs of the poorest, end up paying the price.”
The Agriculture Department just restored the so-called Roadless Rule, but federal land swaps could still open forest lands to logging.
Last week, the Biden administration restored protections for the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, reversing a Trump-era initiative that opened up millions of acres to road-building and logging. The Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska covers 16.7 million acres — an area larger than West Virginia — and is home to old-growth Sitka spruce and cedars. Bald eagles swoop low over the forest’s dense canopy. Deer, moose, and black bears roam wild, and salmon swim in the forest’s streams.
Because the Tongass is a massive carbon sink, storing 8 percent of the total carbon in U.S. forests, it’s often called the “lungs of the country.” Locally, Alaskan Native tribes depend on the forest to hunt deer and moose, forage for medicines, and fish salmon. “It’s just very important that we keep [the forest] intact,” said Joel Jackson, president of the Organized Village of Kake, a federally recognized tribe located on the forest’s edge.
But the abundance of old-growth trees has long made the Tongass a target of the timber industry. A controversial Clinton-era policy called the Roadless Rule banned logging, roadbuilding, and other extractive industrial activity in the Tongass and other national forests. The rule has been weakened by legal challenges and the revisions of subsequent presidential administrations — some of them more friendly to logging interests. Most recently, the Trump administration repealed the Roadless Rule for more than 9 million acres of the Tongass.
“It’s incredibly important to have these sorts of common sense protections in place,” said Austin Williams, the Alaska director of law and policy for the nonprofit conservation group Trout Unlimited. The Roadless Rule is “central to making sure that these remote areas are managed in a way that is smart, that’s forward looking, and that’s responsive to the economic values in the region,” he added.
Even with the Roadless Rule firmly back in place, however, threats to the Tongass remain. An investigation by Grist in partnership with CoastAlaska and Earthrise Media last year found that vast swaths of the forest continue to be logged through the use of federally-approved land swaps. Congress can approve the exchange of federally-protected lands for private tracts. As a result, 88,000 acres have been transferred out of the Tongass National Forest to groups with logging interests since 2015. The analysis also found that 63 percent of the forest acreage razed between 2001 and 2014 had been transferred out of federal ownership. Restoring the Roadless Rule does little to prevent federal land swaps that can open up the Tongass to logging.
The Tongass is also reeling from the effects of a warming planet. Jackson said that in recent years the region has received very little rain and has experienced drought — an unusual phenomenon for a rainforest. When it does snow, it melts in a few days, and drought conditions have allowed the hemlock sawfly, which feeds on the foliage, to thrive.
“The cold usually kills the little insects that feed on a tree,” said Jackson. “It’s just too warm.”
Restoring Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass is part of a larger management strategy by the Biden administration for Southeast Alaska. In 2021, the Department of Agriculture announced a four-pronged plan to end large-scale logging in the Tongass and instead focus on forest restoration, recreation, and resilience. It also invests money in local communities to identify ways to conserve natural resources while increasing economic opportunities in the region.
The plan also prioritizes engaging in meaningful consultation with tribes — a marked departure from the practices under the Trump administration, according to Jackson. In previous years, administration officials would meet with tribal representatives, listen to their concerns, but not take their feedback into consideration.
