Saturday, February 11, 2023
MAGA Committee Hearing BACKFIRES with Shocking Results
MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on what took place during the so-called MAGA “Weaponization” subcommittee.
The 'Rogue' Trump-Appointed Judge With Abortion Pill's Future in His Hands
10 February 23
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Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has amassed a litany of contentious rulings in less than four years
“Mr Kacsmaryk has demonstrated a hostility to the LGBTQ [community] bordering on paranoia,” Schumer said.
Only one Republican senator, Susan Collins from Maine, broke party ranks and voted against Kacsmaryk’s appointment for life. She also had harsh words, lamenting that his “extreme statements” on reproductive rights pointed to “an inability to respect precedent and to apply the law fairly and impartially”.
Soon Kacsmaryk, 46, will have the opportunity to prove Collins wrong or – as his many detractors fear – all too right. One of his most consequential decisions since joining the federal bench in the northern district of Texas could be delivered by the end of this month , in a case that has the potential to disrupt the lives and futures of millions of American women.
Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the next frontier in the war against abortion in the US. In it, a set of ideologically driven conservative Christian groups is inviting Kacsmaryk to impose a nationwide injunction that would in effect ban the abortion pill by nullifying the FDA’s medical approval of one of its key elements, mifepristone.
Should Trump’s judge side with the plaintiffs, as many reproductive rights experts suspect he will, the abortion pill ban would apply across the country. Unlike Dobbs, the US supreme court’s ruling last June that eviscerated the constitutional right to an abortion and returned legal control over terminations to individual state legislatures, Kacsmaryk’s injunction would render medication abortions unlawful in every state in the union.
The stakes are high: the abortion pill now accounts for more than half of all pregnancy terminations in the US.
“A decision to ban mifepristone nationwide would be devastating,” said Shaina Goodman, director for reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women … Families. “This is a very deliberate, coordinated strategy by the anti-abortion movement to attack abortion every which way they can, and they’ve found in Kacsmaryk a judge who has a track record of making decisions based not on law or evidence, but on partisan ideology.”
Partisan ideology certainly stands out in Kacsmaryk’s background. Before being plucked out by Trump for the federal bench, he worked as deputy general counsel at the First Liberty Institute, a Christian law firm based in Plano, Texas, which opposes the separation of church and state and propagates anti-LGBTQ legal theories.
In his early writings he developed a colourful way of describing the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 70s. Same-sex relationships were “disordered” and “contrary to natural law”, he opined, basing his claims on the Catholic catechism.
In 2015, he gave a grotesque caricature of the values of the LGBTQ community. He claimed that a person is seen through the LGBTQ lens as “an autonomous blog of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults”.
Since becoming a federal judge, Kacsmaryk has issued some of the most divisive and contentious decisions in federal jurisprudence. He made his mark by putting a spanner in the works of the Biden administration’s immigration policy – not once, but twice.
In August 2021, he ruled that the Department of Homeland Security had to permanently reinstate the widely criticised “Remain in Mexico” policy which forced thousands of asylum seekers to stay south of the Mexico-US border while their claims were processed. After the supreme court found last June that the US president did in fact have authority to end the policy, overturning Kacsmaryk’s decision, he confounded the Biden administration a second time – ordering in December that Remain in Mexico must be kept in place while lower courts complete their deliberations.
Having shaken up the US government’s approach to immigration, he then turned his spotlight on culture war issues. In October, he struck down as unlawful new guidelines from the Biden administration that protected transgender people from discrimination in the workplace.
His ruling, which delighted far-right Republicans in Texas and dismayed LGBTQ advocates, was perhaps unsurprising given Kacsmaryk’s earlier characterization of transgender people as suffering from a “mental disorder”.
Two months after wreaking havoc over transgender protections, Kacsmaryk opened a new front in the battle over reproductive rights: birth control. His opinion in Deanda v Becerra requires all under-18s in Texas to seek approval from their parent or guardian before obtaining contraception from federally funded clinics.
Last month, Kacsmaryk stuck his oar into another area of fervent ideological disagreement: vaccinations. He agreed to hear a case in which an array of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists are suing four of the world’s leading media organisations, including the BBC and Associated Press, for refusing to carry misinformation about vaccines that could put people’s lives at risk.
Taken together, Kacsmaryk has amassed an extraordinary litany of contentious rulings in less than four years. For Stephen Vladeck, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Texas at Austin, the judge’s rapid emergence as a central figure in legal battles across so many different fault lines in American public life is anything but coincidental.
“That’s by design,” Vladeck told the Guardian. “It’s no coincidence that Judge Kacsmaryk has on his docket a higher concentration of hot-button divisive social policy cases than any other judge in the country – people are seeking him out.”
Vladeck explained that conservative plaintiffs deciding where to lodge high-profile cases have 94 federal district courts to choose from. Yet so often they select Amarillo, Texas.
Probe a bit deeper and it becomes clear why this particular court is so popular among extreme, rightwing litigants. Last September, the rules of the court were amended so as to require all new civil and criminal cases to be heard by Kacsmaryk – no exceptions.
That means that anyone going judge shopping in Amarillo knows exactly what they are going to get: a Trump-appointed federal judge unafraid to sweep legal precedent aside and replace it with ideological conservative positions.
As Vladeck pointed out, there is an added bonus for any rightwing plaintiff coming to Amarillo: what happens to Kacsmaryk’s cases if they are appealed, as is almost certainly the case given their contentious nature. Texas is covered by the fifth circuit court of appeals, a panel composed of 16 active judges, 12 of whom were appointed by Republicans.
“Part of what makes Kacsmaryk especially attractive to conservative litigants is not just his actions as a trial judge, but also that his cases will end up in the fifth circuit which is by far the most conservative in the country,” Vladeck said.
Which brings us back to the pending decision over the abortion pill. As Rolling Stone has noted, the Alliance of Hippocratic Medicine has a mailing address in Tennessee, almost 1,000 miles away from Amarillo.
Yet the group has lodged its challenge to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone with Kacsmaryk. Had the case been brought in any other jurisdiction, it might have struggled even to get a hearing.
Mifepristone received FDA approval 22 years ago, and in that time has proved itself to be resoundingly safe and effective. In its response to the call for a ban, the FDA cites a study of more than 30,000 American women undergoing pregnancy terminations before nine weeks of gestation which found that the efficacy of the abortion pill was 99.6%.
Despite such an overwhelming scientific scorecard, the conservative plaintiffs claim that a ban would “protect the health, safety and welfare of all Americans by rejecting or limiting the use of dangerous drugs”. The alliance leans heavily on an obscure 1873 provision known as the Comstock Act which on paper bars materials used in abortions from being sent in the mail – though the Department of Justice has shown that federal courts have dismissed such a prohibition for at least a century.
This titanic clash now falls into the hands of a single “rogue federal judge”, as Vox has dubbed Kacsmaryk. “He has an inordinate amount of power to make sweeping, and in this case, devastating impacts on people across the country,” Goodman said.
She added that a contentious Kacsmaryk ruling would fall more heavily on certain people. “Women of colour, low-income families, young people, are always – over and over again – disproportionately harmed by bans on abortion, and a ban on medication abortion would be no exception.”
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Former vice president Mike Pence sits for an interview with the Associated Press, Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022, in New York. (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
The search is expected to conclude Friday afternoon
The search was anticipated, and federal law enforcement and Pence’s legal team had coordinated the precise timing Friday.
Law enforcement is examining the property for any additional classified materials that may be stored there, according to an individual familiar with the search who spoke on the condition of anonymity frankly discuss a sensitive matter. The search is expected to conclude in the afternoon.
Pence, who is contemplating a 2024 presidential bid, is in California, but a lawyer for the former vice president has been present at the Carmel, Ind., home while the search is underway.
The planned search follows revelations last month that the Pence had turned over to the FBI “a small number” of documents bearing classified markings that his lawyers discovered at his home.
Pence is the latest politician to face scrutiny for potentially mishandling classified materials after leaving elected office. The Justice Department currently has two separate criminal probes into classified documents found at President Biden’s and former president Donald Trump’s personal properties.
But the cases have key differences.
In Trump’s case, the former president appears to have resisted government attempts to obtain official documents for months, including after a grand jury subpoena demanded the return of any material marked classified. That led to the FBI obtaining a search warrant and executing an unannounced search of his property last August. In contrast, Biden’s lawyers said that they allowed law enforcement officials to search his properties.
So far, the search of Pence’s property appears akin to aspects of the Biden case, with Biden’s lawyers saying they are being forthcoming with law enforcement and allowed officials to search his properties.
In late January, a lawyer for Pence said that the former vice president brought in outside counsel with experience handling classified materials to search records stored in his Indiana home “out of an abundance of caution” after news broke that materials were discovered at Biden’s home.
The lawyer, Greg Jacob, said in a Jan. 18 letter to the National Archives that counsel “identified a small number of documents that could potentially contain sensitive or classified information interspersed throughout the records.” Jacob said that Pence was “ready and willing to cooperate fully.”
Jacob said that Pence gave the FBI permission to collect the classified materials on Jan. 19 and planned to deliver the boxes in which those documents were found to the National Archives on Jan 23.
In November, Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned veteran federal prosecutor Jack Smith as special counsel to oversee day-to-day operations of the criminal probe of Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving the White House. Smith is also managing aspects of the Justice Department’s investigation of the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that are most closely linked to Trump.
In January, Garland appointed Robert Hur as a special counsel to oversee the Biden investigation.
The attorney general has not commented on the documents discovered at Pence’s home.
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A makeshift memorial is seen near Atlanta, Georgia. (photo: Cheney Orr/AFP)
Law enforcement training center has drawn attention and concern from a broad range of local and national US voices who worry about its impact
But in fact the movement opposed to the center – planned for the South River forest in an area south-east of the Georgia city – has drawn attention and concern from a broad range of local and national US voices who worry about the social and environmental impact of the huge complex.
Two editorials on the $90m, 85-acre project, called “Cop City” by activists, recently appeared in the New York Times, both calling attention to flaws in the democratic process that led Atlanta city council to approve the training center in late 2021.
Students and faculty from Atlanta-area schools Emory University, Morehouse College, Spelman College and other historically Black schools also issued statements this week, urging the schools to denounce the project.
Three members of Congress – Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush and Senator Ed Markey – have called for an independent investigation into Tortuguita’s death, who law enforcement officials say fired first, wounding a Georgia state patrol officer.
The Georgia bureau of investigation (GBI) has released a photo of the pistol that the activist allegedly used and the “Firearms Transaction Record” for the gun. An officer or officers – it’s still unclear which – then shot Tortuguita at least 12 times, killing the activist, according to the family’s attorneys. The GBI said there’s no body-cam footage of the shooting. The Guardian also asked if there is any drone, film or video camera recording of the incident; a spokesperson wrote that she is “not aware of any video of the incident”.
Meanwhile, the DeKalb county commissioner, Ted Terry, whose district includes the South River forest, and environmentalist Jackie Echols, of the South River Watershed Alliance, say they have been rebuffed or ignored in attempts to have the county reject Atlanta’s applications for permits to begin construction of the training center, due to alleged violations of the Clean Water Act the project would incur.
The county approved the “land disturbance permit” anyway last week. The Atlanta mayor, Andre Dickens, and the DeKalb county CEO, Michael Thurmond, held a press conference without advising Terry of the decision in advance. “I’m being boxed out of the process,” said Terry, a former state director of the Sierra Club.
Dickens and Thurmond referred several times to a committee meant to represent communities surrounding the forest, which are mostly Black, with large shares of low-income residents.
But the permit approval led a member of the same committee to file an appeal seeking to stop the project this week, also calling it a violation of the Clean Water Act.
Meanwhile, another member has resigned in protest of the killing of Tortuguita.
Tortuguita had been staying in South River forest for about six months, at times in tree houses, when dozens of officers swept through the forest on 18 January. The activist was one of dozens of “forest defenders” who formed part of a loose coalition of people trying to protect the forest.
At least 85 acres of the forest is under threat from the training center, while another 40 acres is under threat from Ryan Millsap, former owner of Blackhall Film Studios, who made a deal with DeKalb county to swap the forest land for another parcel.
Nicole Morado, who served on the community stakeholder advisory committee, meant to offer input on the training center since its inception in late 2021, told the Guardian: “It doesn’t sit well with me, to be affiliated with a project that has resulted in somebody’s life being taken.”
Morado said that the shooting confirmed her “worst fear”, and that her resignation from the committee was effective on the day it took place, but hadn’t been made public until this week.
The shooting came as a year-plus of growing opposition to both projects threatening the forest had drawn increasing national attention.
Although the “forest defenders” on the site of the two projects were responsible for much of that attention, many local voices had expressed support for the forest since the Cop City project was announced in March, 2021 – and before.
Five years earlier, in 2017, the city of Atlanta had included in its charter, or constitution, a plan to protect the South River forest as key to mitigating climate change in the Atlanta metro area.
More recently, opposition to development in South River forest has included neighborhood associations, established environmental groups such as the Sierra Club’s Georgia chapter, local schools, Atlanta-area citizens and others. About 70% of more than 1,000 comments to Atlanta city council in advance of their September 2021 vote on the project also opposed the project, according to an independent analysis.
Still, not only was the project approved, but a multi-jurisdictional taskforce including Atlanta and DeKalb county police, the GBI, the Georgia state patrol and the FBI began staging sweeps of the forest to try to clear the area of protesters.
Some of the protesters in and out of the forest committed acts of vandalism against machinery and businesses linked to both projects. To date, at least 18 activists have been arrested in the forest and during a protest, charged under a state domestic terrorism law.
Both Tortuguita’s killing and use of state law in this manner are firsts in US environmental activism history, according to experts. These actions have also been matched by strident rhetoric from police and politicians in Georgia, including the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, seeking to define a largely peaceful protest movement – often focused on environmental and racial justice issues – as terrorism, and those who participate in it as terrorists.
“I thought they – the Atlanta police department, the DeKalb county police and the rest – were doing a bad job of escalating things,” said Morado in explaining her decision to resign from the committee. “My fear was that something like this would happen.”
Meanwhile, Amy Taylor, also a member of the advisory committee, filed an appeal of the recent permit that DeKalb county had given the city of Atlanta to begin work on Cop City. Atlanta owns a parcel that includes the 85-acre training center planned, but it is located in DeKalb.
Taylor, a member of the committee representing the nearby neighborhood of Starlight Heights, said her appeal of the permit was “premised on the fact that the South River [a tributary of which runs through the forest] is of poor quality according to the EPA, and sediment in the river has exceeded the legal point allowable. Any development will contribute to the pollution of the river,” she said. “It’s a clear violation of the Clean Water Act.
“My community doesn’t want this,” she said, adding the training center should not be built in the forest.
Also this week, more than 100 healthcare professionals and students signed a letter urging Dr Claire Sterk, former president of Emory University, to leave the board of the Atlanta police foundation, the organization behind the training center.
Faculty of Morehouse College – the school Martin Luther King Jr graduated from – also signed a letter in opposition to the project, and students from several historically Black schools in Atlanta attended a meeting in opposition to the center.
Taylor’s concerns regarding the environmental impact on Intrenchment Creek, a tributary of South River, had already been expressed for months by the South River Watershed Alliance, an environmental organization that has been working on behalf of the river for more than a decade.
Jackie Echols, president of the organization’s board, had the organization’s attorney send letters first to DeKalb county and, on 25 January, to the state environmental protection division, outlining the concerns about how building the training center would increase the sediment load in the creek, negatively impacting all life in its waters and violating the Clean Water Act.
Echols said she received no answer. “No one has addressed this,” she said.
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Photos of Monterrious Harris taken nine days after he says he was attacked by police. (photo: Harris lawsuit)
Monterrious Harris alleges he was pulled from his car and beaten by the same “Scorpion Unit” officers charged in the murder of Tyre Nichols.
These men were not carjackers, as Harris initially believed, but officers from Memphis’ police department—allegedly the very same officers who, only days later, would be seen on body camera brutally beating Tyre Nichols, leading to his death.
A new federal lawsuit alleges that the now-fired officers from the department’s now-disbanded “Scorpion Unit” “hurled racial epithets” at Harris, while demanding he exit the car “or be shot.”
Because Harris, who was medically discharged from the U.S. army after serving several years, thought he was being robbed, he says he initially panicked and tried to reverse, striking an object behind him. Then he got out with his hands above his head, hoping the men would just take his vehicle and leave him be. After he got out of the car, according to the lawsuit, the officers “exacted a swift, violent, and continuous physical assault on Mr. Harris that included punching, stomping, and dragging him across concrete.”
The civil lawsuit, seeking $5 million in damages and a jury trial, names Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills, Justin Smith, Demetrius Haley, and Tadarrius Bean, all of whom have been charged with second-degree murder in connection with Nichols’ death and been fired from the Memphis police department. It also names the Memphis Police Department, and four other officers who are listed as John Does 1 - 4.
The brutal beating of Nichols, 29, has shone a very harsh light on the practices of Memphis Police Department. The civil lawsuit alleges that Memphis officers have engaged in police brutality for more than a decade, particularly targeting Black men.
Harris thinks that his fate could have been much worse, had residents of the nearby apartment complex—who were alerted to a problem due to the noise and shouting outside—not intervened.
When the “Good Samaritans,” as they’re described in the lawsuit, came outside, the officers arrested Harris, took him into custody, and filed a “host of false criminal charges against him.” Those charges included being a “convicted felon in possession of a handgun” (the lawsuit says unbeknownst to Harris, his cousin, who had been in the car earlier, had left his his licensed, legally-owned firearm in the vehicle), criminal trespass, possession of a controlled substance with intent of manufacturing or selling, and tampering with fabricated evidence.
When he arrived at the jail, Harris was bleeding from the head, his left eye was swollen shut, and was having trouble walking due to a gash on his left leg, and bruises on his right leg from being stomped and kicked. The nurse or intake specialist assessed his injuries and ordered he be taken to hospital.
After he was treated for his injuries, Harris was returned to the jail where he remained for several times until his family were able to come up with enough money to bail him out. The lawsuit included photos of Harris, taken approximately nine days after he was discharged from hospital, showing his face still bruised and swollen.
“The current ignoble chapter of the Memphis Police Department ending with the violent and unconstitutional beatings of Mr. Harris, other Memphians and the death of Mr. Nichols began decades ago,” the lawsuit states. “The Memphis Police Department unconstitutional policies, practices, and customs leading to the formation of the Scorpion Unit, which operated as a gang of vigilantes, was consistent with abuses that citizens have suffered for many years.”
The Memphis Police Department did not respond to VICE News’ request for comment.
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Alexey Kovalev, investigative editor of Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet. (photo: Democracy Now!)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
The Ukrainian president, President Volodymyr Zelensky, is in Brussels today, where he addressed the European Union Parliament. The visit comes after he made surprise trips to Paris and London, where he urged European nations to begin providing Ukraine with fighter jets. The British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak confirmed heavy tanks are being sent to the battlefield, and pledged to train Ukrainian forces on NATO-standard jets, indicating the U.K. would likely follow up by providing fighter planes, though they haven’t agreed to this yet.
Moscow has warned such a move would only prolong the war. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said today, “The line between indirect and direct involvement is gradually disappearing,” unquote.
This all comes as Ukraine prepares for what’s expected to be a major new Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine. Earlier this week, the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres repeated his call for an end to the war.
SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: I want to convey my deep sadness about the devastating earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria. I extend my condolences to the families of the victims. The United Nations is mobilizing to support the emergency response. And so, let’s work together, in solidarity, to assist all those hit by this disaster, many of whom were already in dire need of humanitarian aid. During my tenure as high commissioner for refugees, I went several times to work in —
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by Alexey Kovalev, investigative editor of Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet. We were scheduled to interview Alexey in January, but just before we went to air, the Russian government banned Meduza and designated it an “undesirable organization,” forcing him to postpone the interview. Last March, Alexey Kovalev wrote a piece for The Washington Post headlined “I’m a Russian journalist. I had to flee my country. Putin’s latest crackdown has destroyed the independent media.” And now we see this latest attack on Meduza.
Alexey, welcome to Democracy Now!, speaking to us from Berlin, Germany. Can you start off by saying what does this designation mean? How does this affect all of your work?
ALEXEY KOVALEV: Hello, and thank you for having me.
So, this effectively means that both producing and distributing our content is illegal in Russia. It’s a criminal offense. So, anyone who is involved in our work, as a freelancer or a staff member, is liable, but also anyone who shares a link to one of our stories on social media. That is also — under the undesirable organization law in Russia, is also a criminal offense, which is punishable by prison up to four or five years. So, yeah, it’s pretty drastic. It could be worse. For example, in neighboring Belarus, it’s not just the production and distribution of content that’s criminalized, but also the consumption. For example, you go outside, and the police stop you in the streets and see that you subscribe to a certain Telegram channel, for example, and that’s also a criminal liability. So, yeah, it could be worse for us, but here we are now.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Alexey, so, explain what the fallout of this has been already. Do you still have people working with you from Russia? And has there been any impact on them?
ALEXEY KOVALEV: I cannot, for their safety, go into specifics. But we — for example, we had to remove most of the bylines of our freelance contributors to protect them from criminal liability. We still have sources, and we still have contributors, but they have to work on deep background, because they cannot be publicly associated with Meduza now, because this is very serious. I mean, even for people who left the country, they are not — still not safe, because unless they’ve evacuated their entire extended families and friends from Russia, they are still in danger, because the Russian security services can and will and have in the past gone after relatives of people who left Russia. So this is also something that we have to keep in mind.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And explain, Alexey, how — you know, the impact of this on the Russian public. How are people learning? I mean, at the end of this month, it will be one year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. How are people in Russia learning of what’s actually going on? I mean, talk about the kind of reporting that Meduza and the few other independent news outlets that remain — the critical reporting that you were doing, issues that you were covering, that simply aren’t being covered now.
ALEXEY KOVALEV: OK. Look, so, on February 24 last year, Meduza and all other independent media in Russia — by “independent,” I mean outlets that are not directly owned or indirectly controlled by the Kremlin. And that is most of the media consumption in Russia. Most of the media consumed by Russians are either directly or indirectly controlled or owned by the Kremlin. So, all of the others, on the day of the invasion, received a memo from the censorship ministry. It has a different name, but it’s, in essence, the censorship ministry. So, we all received a memo where they demanded that we only use information in our coverage provided to us by government officials. Everything else will be considered fake news. And a few days later, the Russian parliament adopted a set of laws that effectively criminalized any independent journalism.
So we were facing a choice whether to self-censor. Even the — in this memo, even the word “war” itself was out of bounds, so you could only refer to the invasion as a “special military operation,” not “war.” And people have already been persecuted for calling this a war. But we made a choice on that day. We made a choice that we will not be submitting to these demands, and we will be covering this for what it is — a criminal invasion. And we had to — well, we had to face the consequences. We had to — I was living — until March last year, I lived in my home in Moscow. I had to leave it all behind, all my life. But I don’t regret it. I mean, this is what we were — we have been preparing to do all of our lives. This is probably the most important missions, to record the crimes committed by a country in our name, no matter the cost. And this is what we’ve been doing for day in, day out, most of the time without weekends, for 20 — for 12, 14 hours a day.
AMY GOODMAN: Alexey —
ALEXEY KOVALEV: We have sources in Russia and Ukraine. We are covering the war both the domestic consequences of this war for Russians and for Ukraine. We are investigating war crimes committed by the Russian military in Ukraine — so, doing basically our job —
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you —
ALEXEY KOVALEV: — as journalists, as any journalist would do.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Alexey, about — you have Zelensky going from — you know, from Britain to Paris to Belgium, appealing for more weapons. And you have the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres speaking about the call to end the war. Earlier we played the wrong clip about him on the earthquake. Let’s go to the correct clip.
SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: The Russian invasion of Ukraine is inflicting untold suffering on the Ukrainian people with profound global implications. The prospects for peace keep diminishing. The chances of further escalation and bloodshed keep growing. I fear the world is not sleepwalking into a wider war; I fear it’s doing so with its eyes wide open.
AMY GOODMAN: If you could respond to this? I also want to ask you about this latest news, the former far-right Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett saying he actually brokered a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine early last year, but Western leaders blocked it. He made the claim in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12.
NAFTALI BENNETT: [translated] I’ll say this in a broad sense: I think there was a legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin, and not —
HANOCH DAUM: [translated] Striking Putin? Putin was striking Ukraine.
NAFTALI BENNETT: [translated] Hold on, yes, but given — I mean the more aggressive approach. I’ll tell you something: I can’t say if they were wrong.
HANOCH DAUM: [translated] Maybe other thugs in the world would see it.
NAFTALI BENNETT: [translated] My position at the time in this regard, it’s not an Israeli interest. Unlike the consulate or Iran when I’m concerned about Israel, I stand firm, yes. Here, I don’t have to say that I’m just the mediator, but I turn to America in this regard. I don’t do as I please. Anything I did was coordinated, down to the last detail, with the U.S., Germany and France.
HANOCH DAUM: [translated] So they basically blocked it?
NAFTALI BENNETT: [translated] Basically, yes. They blocked it. And I thought they’re wrong.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Alexey, your response to both him and Guterres’s call for an end to this war?
ALEXEY KOVALEV: OK, there is a — you know, it’s actually perfectly clear when the war will end. This is when Russian troops withdraw from Ukraine — not sooner, not later. I mean, this is pretty straightforward. So, any peace — any proposed peace deal must involve that.
And it doesn’t sound to me very likely that a peace solution could have been reached at any point in the first months of the war, while the Russian army was occupying large chunks of Ukraine, which then the Ukraine — if Ukrainians were pushed into a peace deal, for example, in summer last year, they would have been — they would have had to concede large chunks of their territory which they later liberated. So it doesn’t seem very likely to me that a peace deal could be reached by — could be negotiated by some third party last year. And I don’t think it’s ethical for anyone to claim credit for the effort, because, well, any peace resolutions that don’t involve the Ukrainians, and it’s just, “Let’s have the Americans or British or someone else negotiate a peace deal, or blame someone else for torpedoing such a peace deal,” any peace deal of that kind would involve, like I said, Ukraine conceding parts of its territory to the aggressor, Russia, which is —
AMY GOODMAN: Alexey, we have to break now, but we’re going to bring Part 2 of this conversation at democracynow.org. Alexey Kovalev, investigative editor at Meduza. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
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Some of the illegal miners are leaving the Yanomami lands on foot. (photo: EPA)
A major operation to drive out illegal miners from indigenous land is under way in Brazil.
Thousands of illegal gold miners have invaded the indigenous reserve on Brazil's border with Venezuela.
The raid is part of a larger policy to halt the advance of illegal mining.
It is a joint operation by Brazil's environmental protection agency, Ibama, the indigenous affairs department, Funai, and special forces tasked with protecting the environment.
With an estimated 20,000 illegal miners dispersed throughout the dense jungle region, officials said the aim of the raids was to interrupt the flow of supplies rather than to target individual settlements.
The miners and their illegal activities are a grave threat to the Yanomami indigenous group, which is estimated to have 28,000 members.
Diseases, violence and environmental damages caused by the influx have triggered a humanitarian crisis among the Yanomami, resulting in the deaths from preventable diseases and hunger of scores of Yanomami children.
Two weeks ago. the government airlifted 16 members of the group out of the jungle to treat them for malnutrition.
Federal police last month launched an investigation to determine if the previous government of President Jair Bolsonaro could face charges of "genocide" after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office on 1 January, said that its treatment of the Yanomami was "a premeditated crime".
Ex-President Bolsonaro actively encouraged economic development in the Amazon region. Violence there increased during his four years in power, with illegal miners opening fire on indigenous communities.
Since the new government started taking action, some illegal miners have been seen leaving the Yanomami lands.
Marcio Astrini of the Climate Observatory, a network of 72 climate NGOs, said it was key to find alternative employment opportunities for the miners, many of whom are very poor.
He told the G1 news site: "If nothing is done, if these people don't have alternative incomes. they will end up coming back to the areas from which they have been expelled, or they will invade new ones."
Justice Minister Flávio Dino said the federal government was working on a plan to support them.
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A house sits along the long stretch of River Road by the Mississippi River and the many chemical plants, October 12, 2013. (photo: Giles Clarke/Getty)
The studies confirm what many locals and scientists have long suspected, that the industrial pollution rampant in this region is harmful to human health. Yet officials have said that cancer rates in the region along the Mississippi River are not higher than averages across Louisiana.
“LDEQ does not use the term cancer alley,” Greg Langley, spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ), said, as reported by Inside Climate News. “That term implies that there is a large geographic area that has higher cancer incidence than the state average. We have not seen higher cancer incidence over large areas of the industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.”
But two recent studies, led by Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist and director of community engagement at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, and Gianna St. Julien, law clinic research coordinator, show evidence that “Cancer Alley” exists, as a region where cancer rates are higher. The studies also found that the way state regulators have implemented industrial permitting has led to discrimination and disparities in industrial pollution, with the biggest burden falling on communities of color in the state.
One of the studies, published in January 2023, found that more than half of industrial facilities in Louisiana were clustered in the area known as “Cancer Alley,” and communities of color faced 7 to 21 times more emissions than predominantly white communities. Chemical manufacturing was the largest contributor of the emissions.
Another study from Terrell and St. Julien published in 2022 found higher estimated cancer risk from air pollution associated with higher cancer rates related to poverty and race. Terrell also shared in The Advocate that the research found 850 cancer cases for predominantly Black and or low-income communities in Louisiana that were related to toxic air pollution over the past 10 years.
“Our analysis provides evidence of a statewide link between cancer rates and carcinogenic air pollution in marginalized communities and suggests that toxic air pollution is a contributing factor to Louisiana’s cancer burden,” the authors said in the 2022 study. “These findings are consistent with the firsthand knowledge of Louisiana residents from predominantly Black, impoverished, and industrialized neighborhoods who have long maintained that their communities are overburdened with cancer.”
Following up on three filed complaints, the EPA shared that actions by LDEQ and the Louisiana Department of Health contributed to “disparate adverse impacts on Black residents of St. John the Baptist Parish, St. James Parish, and the Industrial Corridor.” The EPA also noted that LDEQ’s air permitting program was implemented in a way that continued to expose residents, including children, to “average annual concentrations of chloroprene in ambient air at levels associated with increased lifetime cancer risk.”
While Terrell noted in an interview with Inside Climate News that first-hand accounts from the communities should have been enough for officials to make policy changes, the authors say that the studies will help provide more data as a tool for decision-makers to better protect communities in the “Cancer Alley” area.
“We’re already heavily industrialized, but there are more facilities that are trying to make their way into Louisiana,” St. Julien said. “Ultimately, it comes down to protecting the health of people living within the state that are currently being overburdened and don’t exactly have access to resources to protect their health.”
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