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United States Tells Citizens: Leave Russia Immediately
Reuters
Excerpt: "The United States has told its citizens to leave Russia immediately due to the war in Ukraine and the risk of arbitrary arrest or harassment by Russian law enforcement agencies."
The United States has told its citizens to leave Russia immediately due to the war in Ukraine and the risk of arbitrary arrest or harassment by Russian law enforcement agencies.
"U.S. citizens residing or travelling in Russia should depart immediately," the U.S. embassy in Moscow said. "Exercise increased caution due to the risk of wrongful detentions."
"Do not travel to Russia," it added.
"Russian security services have arrested U.S. citizens on spurious charges, singled out U.S. citizens in Russia for detention and harassment, denied them fair and transparent treatment, and convicted them in secret trials or without presenting credible evidence," the embassy said.
"Russian authorities arbitrarily enforce local laws against U.S. citizen religious workers and have opened questionable criminal investigations against U.S. citizens engaged in religious activity."
The Kremlin said it was not the first time U.S. citizens had been asked to leave Russia. The last such public warning was in September after President Vladimir Putin ordered a partial mobilisation.
"They (warnings) have been voiced by the State Department many times in the last period, so this is not a new thing," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
The Federal Security Service(FSB) said in January that prosecutors had opened a criminal case against a United States citizen on suspicion of espionage.
Last December, U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner was released in a prisoner swap, having been sentenced to nine years in a penal colony for possessing vape cartridges containing cannabis oil - which is banned in Russia - after a judicial process labelled a sham by Washington.
Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, is serving a 16-year sentence in a Russian penal colony after being convicted of espionage charges that Washington also says are a sham.
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Police enter the MSU Union on Monday, Feb. 13, 2023, on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing. (photo: Nick King/Lansing State Journal)
3 People Are Killed at Michigan State University and the Gunman Is Dead, Police Say
Ayana Archie, James Doubek and Emily Olson, NPR
Excerpt: "A gunman shot and killed three students and injured five others on the campus of Michigan State University Monday night before fatally shooting himself, police said."
Agunman shot and killed three students and injured five others on the campus of Michigan State University Monday night before fatally shooting himself, police said.
Local authorities said the suspect, a 43-year-old man named Anthony Dwayne McRae, was found dead off the campus in East Lansing, Mich., from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Police said the suspect initially fled the scene on foot. Law enforcement located him roughly three hours later, using a tip from a local resident. He appeared to shoot himself after police confronted him.
Police said the suspect was believed to be acting alone and is not affiliated with the university.
Investigations are ongoing, and police currently have "absolutely no idea about a motive," said Chris Rozman, the interim deputy chief of the MSU police. He added that police executed a search warrant on the suspect's residence but have yet to release a motive.
Shots were initially fired at 8:18 p.m. ET inside Berkey Hall, which is home to the College of Social Science. Responding officers found two people dead on the scene.
Another shooting was reported shortly afterward at the MSU student union, which is located next door and is a gathering point for students. One person died there, Rozman said. Both Berkey Hall and the student union building are open to the public during business hours, police said.
Hundreds of officers from different agencies responded to the scene, Rozman said. Victims were transported to Sparrow Hospital in Lansing.
They were still in critical condition as of Tuesday morning and four had required surgical intervention, said Dr. Denny Martin, the acting chief medical officer at Sparrow Hospital.
Police confirmed on Tuesday morning that all of the shooting victims were students.
By 10:15 p.m. ET, police said Berkey and other buildings were secured, and the shelter-in-place warning was lifted early Tuesday morning. Earlier in the evening, police discouraged parents from coming to campus.
"For parents, we understand," Rozman said. "I can only imagine the emotion that's involved right now. It's going to help us, and it's going to help our response, and it's going to help us identify the shooter the less people that are on campus at this point."
All campus activities, including both in-person and virtual classes and sporting events, have been canceled for at least 48 hours. The school is providing counseling resources for students and employees.
Monday's shooting is the 67th so far in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection organization. The group defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot or killed, excluding the shooter. Nearly 650 mass shootings took place in the country in 2022, according to the group.
During a Tuesday morning press conference, lawmakers including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Rep. Elissa Slotkin and East Lansing Mayor Ron Bacon called for an end to gun violence.
According to local news reports, least one student who sheltered in place on MSU's campus Tuesday was a survivor of the Oxford High School shooting that occurred in a nearby town in November 2021.
"As a representative of Oxford, Michigan, I cannot believe I am here again, doing this 15 months later. I am filled with rage that we have to have another press conference to talk about children being killed in their schools," said Rep. Slotkin.
"I would say that you either care about protecting kids or you don't. You care about having an open and honest conversation about what's going on in our society or you don't."
Teresa Woodruff, MSU's interim president, said early Tuesday that support will be provided for the 17,000 university students who attend classes at MSU's East Lansing campus, as well as faculty and staff.
"We're devastated with the loss of life and we want to wrap our arms around every family touched by this tragedy," she said.
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Russian soldiers. (photo: Creative Commons)
'Our Losses Were Gigantic': Life in a Sacrificial Russian Assault Wave
Andrew E. Kramer, The New York Times
Kramer writes: "Creeping forward along a tree line late at night toward an entrenched Ukrainian position, the Russian soldier watched in horror as his comrades were mowed down by enemy fire."
Poorly trained Russian soldiers captured by Ukraine describe being used as cannon fodder by commanders throwing waves of bodies into an assault.
Creeping forward along a tree line late at night toward an entrenched Ukrainian position, the Russian soldier watched in horror as his comrades were mowed down by enemy fire.
His squad of 10 ex-convicts advanced only a few dozen yards before being decimated. “We were hit by machine-gun fire,” said the soldier, a private named Sergei.
One soldier was wounded and screamed, “Help me! Help me, please!” the private said, though no help arrived. Eight soldiers were killed, one escaped back to Russian lines and Sergei was captured by Ukrainians.
The soldiers were sitting ducks, sent forth by Russian commanders to act essentially as human cannon fodder in an assault.
And they have become an integral component of Russia’s military strategy as it presses a new offensive in Ukraine’s east: relying on overwhelming manpower, much of it comprising inexperienced, poorly trained conscripts, regardless of the high rate of casualties.
There are two main uses of the conscripts in these assaults: as “storm troops” who move in waves, followed by more experienced Russian fighters; and as intentional targets, to draw fire and thus identify Ukrainian positions to hit with artillery.
In interviews last week, half a dozen prisoners of war provided rare firsthand accounts of what it is like to be part of a sacrificial Russian assault.
“These orders were common, so our losses were gigantic,” Sergei said. “The next group would follow after a pause of 15 or 20 minutes, then another, then another.”
Of his combat experience, he said, “It was the first and last wave for me.”
By luck, the bullets missed him, he said. He lay in the dark until he was captured by Ukrainians who slipped into the buffer area between the two trench lines.
The New York Times interviewed the Russians at a detention center near Lviv in Ukraine’s west, where many captured enemy soldiers are sent. From there, some are returned to Russia in prisoner exchanges. The Times also viewed videos of interrogations by the Ukrainian authorities. The prisoners are identified only by first name and rank for security reasons, because of the possibility of retribution once they are returned.
Though they are prisoners of war overseen by Ukrainians, the Russians said they spoke freely. Their accounts could not be independently corroborated but conformed with assessments of the fighting around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut by Western governments and military analysts.
The soldiers in Sergei’s squad were recruited from penal colonies by the private military company known as Wagner, whose forces have mostly been deployed in the Bakhmut area. There, they have enabled Russian lines to move forward slowly, cutting key resupply roads for the Ukrainian Army.
Russia’s deployment of former convicts is a dark chapter in a vicious war. Russia Behind Bars, a prison rights group, has estimated that as many as 50,000 Russian prisoners have been recruited since last summer, with most sent to the battle for Bakhmut.
In the early phases of the war, the Russian Army had copious armored vehicles, artillery and other heavy weaponry but relatively few soldiers on the battlefield. Now, the tables have turned: Russia has deployed about 320,000 soldiers in Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s military intelligence agency. An additional 150,000 are in training camps, officials said, meaning there is the potential for half a million soldiers to join the offensive.
But using infantry to storm trenches, redolent of World War I, brings high casualties. So far, the tactic has been used primarily by Wagner in the push for Bakhmut. Last week, the head of Wagner, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, said he would end the practice of recruiting convicts. But Russia’s regular army this month began recruiting convicts in exchange for pardons, shifting the practice on the Russian side in the war from the Wagner private army to the military.
Some military analysts and Western governments have questioned Russia’s strategy, citing rates of wounded and killed at around 70 percent in battalions featuring former convicts. On Sunday, the British defense intelligence agency said that over the past two weeks, Russia had probably suffered its highest rate of casualties since the first week of the invasion.
Interviews with former Wagner soldiers at the Ukrainian detention center aligned with these descriptions of the fighting — and shed light on a violent, harrowing experience for Russian soldiers.
“Nobody could ever believe such a thing could exist,” Sergei said of Wagner tactics.
Sergei, sat, shoulders slumped, on the sofa in the warden’s office of the Ukrainian detention center. He was balding and wore shoes without laces.
The soldiers arrived at the front straight from Russia’s penal colony system, which is rife with abuse and where obedience to harsh codes of conduct in a violent setting is enforced by prison gangs and guards alike. The same sense of beaten subjugation persists at the front, Sergei said, enabling commanders to send soldiers forward on hopeless, human wave attacks.
“We are prisoners, even if former prisoners,” he said. “We are nobody and have no rights.”
Sergei said he had worked as a cellphone tower technician in a far-northern Siberian city, living with his wife and three children. In the interview, he admitted to dealing marijuana and meth, for which he was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2020.
In October, he accepted an offer to fight in exchange for a pardon. The arrangement, he said, was not offered to rapists and drug addicts, but murderers, burglars and other prisoners were welcome.
“Of course, any normal person fears death,” he said. “But a pardon for eight years is valuable.”
The fighting would turn out to be far more dangerous than he had imagined.
In three days at the front south of Bakhmut, Private Sergei first served as a stretcher bearer, carrying out mangled, bloody former prisoners who had been killed or wounded in an omen of what awaited him when ordered to join an assault.
On the night of Jan. 1, they were commanded to advance 500 yards along the tree line, then dig in and wait for a subsequent wave to arrive. One soldier carried a light machine gun. The others were armed with only assault rifles and hand grenades.
The sequential assaults on Ukrainian lines by small units of former Russian prisoners have become a signature Russian tactic in the effort to capture Bakhmut.
“We see them crawl for a kilometer or more,” toward Ukrainian trenches, then open fire at close range and try to capture positions, Col. Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the defense and intelligence committee in Ukraine’s Parliament, said in an interview. “It’s effective. Yes, they have heavy losses. But with these heavy losses, they sometimes advance.”
It could be, Colonel Kostenko said, that such infantry assaults on entrenched defenses will remain mostly confined to the fight for Bakhmut and that they are being used to conserve tanks and armored personnel carriers for the expected offensive. But they could also serve as a template for wider fighting.
The former convicts, Colonel Kostenko said, are herded into the battlefield by harsh discipline: “They have orders, and they cannot disobey orders, especially in Wagner.”
A private named Aleksandr, 44, who shaved three years off a sentence for illegal logging by enlisting with Wagner, said that before deploying to the front he was told he would be shot if he disobeyed orders to advance.
“They brought us to a basement, divided us into five-person groups and, though we hadn’t been trained, told us to run ahead, as far as we could go,” he said of his commanders.
His dash toward Ukrainian lines in a group of five soldiers ended with three dead and two captured.
Another captured Russian, Eduard, 22, enlisted to get four years cut from a sentence for car theft. He spent three months at the front as a stretcher bearer before being ordered forward. He was captured on his first human wave assault. From his time as a stretcher bearer, he said, he estimated that half of the men in each assault were wounded or killed, with shrapnel and bullet wounds the most common injuries.
Private Sergei said he had initially been pleased with the offer of a pardon in exchange for service in Wagner. “When I came to this war, I thought it was worth it,” he said.
But after his one experience in an assault, he changed his mind. “I started to think things over in a big way,’’ he said. “Of course it wasn’t worth it.”
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Earthquake victims receive treatment at the al-Rahma Hospital in the town of Darkush, in Idlib province in northern Syria, February 6, 2023. (photo: Ghaith Alsayed/AP)
Refik Hodzic | Why Was Northwest Syria Abandoned?
Refik Hodzic, Al Jazeera
Hodzic writes: "On February 6, yet another catastrophe hit northwest Syria. The series of earthquakes with an epicenter in southern Turkey devastated the region, home to four million Syrians, displaced and traumatised by a decade of war. Thousands of buildings collapsed, burying thousands of people."
No, the UN’s hands were not tied due to ‘logistical issues’ or decisions by the Security Council.
On February 6, yet another catastrophe hit northwest Syria. The series of earthquakes with an epicentre in southern Turkey devastated the region, home to four million Syrians, displaced and traumatised by a decade of war. Thousands of buildings collapsed, burying thousands of people.
The White Helmets, a local rescue organisation, along with local volunteers and family members, started digging through the rubble immediately, often with their bare hands, to try to get to the survivors. They pleaded to the world for help, asking for heavy machinery, rescue teams, and equipment to help them save as many lives as possible during the crucial 72-hour window following the earthquake. But the cries of the trapped slowly died down in the harsh cold winter nights, as no assistance arrived.
In the first three days, at least two dozen shipments of disaster relief aid were sent to the Syrian regime in Damascus. None reached areas under the opposition control in northwest Syria.
The only rescue teams that crossed into the Idlib area were a small group of volunteers from Egypt and a team from Spain. A prescheduled United Nations convoy carrying not emergency aid, not heavy equipment or disaster relief, but blankets and basic supplies, came on the fourth day. The pleas of White Helmets and other Syrians desperate to save the lives of their loved ones echoed around the world without response, unheard and unheeded.
Why? Why were Syrians trapped in opposition-controlled areas abandoned like this at a time of great need, at a time when the world came together in solidarity with victims of this disaster in Turkey and regime-controlled Syria; when rescue crews and disaster relief was dispatched in a matter of hours from places as distant as Venezuela, Canada, and Iceland?
Why were these people, already displaced and brutalised for almost 12 years, suffering in unliveable conditions even before the earthquake struck, left to their terrible fate with little more than promises of help that never arrived?
The explanation you are likely to hear from the United Nations is that there were “logistical issues” and damage inflicted by the earthquake on the infrastructure at Bab al-Hawa, the only border crossing used for aid delivery. And the reason why there is only one border crossing serving the humanitarian needs of more than four million people is Russian blackmail at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). For years now, Moscow has de-authorised all other border crossings for humanitarian aid deliveries through the UN at the threat of vetoing them altogether.
There are several border crossings between Turkey and Syria that are close to the areas affected by the earthquake and that are already used to bring in humanitarian aid by state and non-state actors. Saudi Arabia, for example, sent a humanitarian convoy through Al-Hamam crossing near Jindires, while the Kurdistan Region of Iraq used Bab al-Salama crossing to send its aid to Afrin.
Can the UN use these crossings? Yes, it can. Syrian organisations, such as the Syrian Association for Citizens’ Dignity (SACD), the Free Syrian Lawyers Association and others, have been vocal for more than two years about the legal basis that allows for the delivery of aid to Idlib without UNSC approval. Their position is based on international law and has been adopted by Amnesty International and a number of international legal experts.
Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has called for opening all border crossings to aid, while former US envoy to Syria Joel Rayburn has argued that a new US-Turkey-European Union mechanism should be created to deliver aid directly to the region without the redundant UNSC approval.
The UN has not acted. Why?
As the SACD has pointed out, the UNSC decision has been used as a “smokescreen” to cover up the real reason why emergency aid is not reaching northwest Syria: “It is about the brutality of the Syrian regime and its allies. It is about appeasement.”
Steven Heydemann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy, has explained further: “UN humanitarian operations on the ground in regime-held areas – which receive 90% of assistance flowing to Syria – remain cowed by the regime into complying with its heavy-handed insistence that it serve as the sole recipient and distributor of assistance coming into the country – a cynical gesture to force donors to acknowledge its sovereignty, while giving one of the most corrupt regimes in the world, with a track record of abuse and theft of humanitarian aid and a refusal to deliver aid across conflict lines into northern Syria, control over critical humanitarian resources.”
In other words, the UN allows the Syrian regime to weaponise aid for its benefit instead of acting in accordance with its mandate to protect Syrian civilians.
And this is where we come to the real reasons for the failure to deliver life-saving emergency aid to Syrians in Idlib: the normalisation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brutality and the dehumanisation of Syrians.
For years I have witnessed first hand how displaced Syrians in Europe, Lebanon, Turkey, and especially in northwest Syria have been dehumanised. The four million people living there have been written off by a large majority of the world in line with the Syrian regime and Russia’s narrative that the region is a hotbed of “Islamic fanatics” and “terrorists”.
Children who die in Idlib province under regime bombardment or from the cold or lack of medical care do not make headlines. They are not even footnotes anymore. Their stories no longer seem to count.
This is why the calls of Syrian organisations to accept the alternative legal basis for aid delivery to northwest Syria have been ignored by the UN and key powers. This is why the pleas of the White Helmets and Syrian activists for heavy equipment and rescue assistance have fallen on deaf ears. This is why the cries for help from under the rubble across northwest Syria – in Jindires, Idlib, Azmarin and Harem – were not answered.
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A Black Lives Matter march. (photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
Fears of Renewed FBI Abuse of Power After Informant Infiltrated BLM Protests
Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK
Pilkington writes: "The FBI's use of an informant to infiltrate Black Lives Matter in Denver during the wave of protests over the 2020 police killing of George Floyd has prompted concern in Congress that the federal agency is once again abusing its powers to harass and intimidate minority groups."
‘Outraged’ senator Ron Wyden urges agency to explain tactics from 2020 protests reminiscent of rogue behaviour from decades past
The FBI’s use of an informant to infiltrate Black Lives Matter in Denver during the wave of protests over the 2020 police killing of George Floyd has prompted concern in Congress that the federal agency is once again abusing its powers to harass and intimidate minority groups.
Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator from Oregon, is calling for the FBI to explain how it came to recruit a violent felon as an informant who then went on to gain prominence among Denver racial justice activists. The informant is alleged to have encouraged protesters to engage in increasingly violent demonstrations while trying to entrap them in criminal misdeeds.
“If the allegations are true, the FBI’s use of an informant to spy on first amendment-protected activity and stoke violence at peaceful protests is an outrageous abuse of law-enforcement resources and authority,” Wyden told the Guardian.
Wyden sits on the Senate intelligence committee which has oversight over federal intelligence-gathering agencies, including the FBI. He also fought for public disclosure of Donald Trump’s deployment in 2020 of more than 750 officers to his home town of Portland, Oregon, based on what he called “politicised and false intelligence reports”.
The FBI’s infiltration of Black Lives Matter in Denver “appears to show another instance of the Trump administration trampling on the rights of Americans in order to divide our country and gain a political advantage”, Wyden said. “The FBI owes the public a full accounting of its actions, including how anyone responsible for attempting to entrap and discredit racial justice activists will be held accountable.”
The Guardian contacted the FBI for a response but did not immediately hear back.
The new revelations of alleged FBI abuses towards Black activists comes at a paradoxical moment, given the efforts of the incoming Republican House leadership. On Thursday Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump loyalist from Ohio, chaired the opening hearing of his subcommittee on the “weaponization of the federal government” which seeks to show that the main victim of federal overreach is not minority and progressive groups but Donald Trump and his far-right supporters.
The actions of the FBI informant, Michael Windecker, or Mickey, as he was known, are revealed in a new 10-episode podcast by the investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson. Drawing on hours of undercover FBI recordings, along with internal FBI reports and interviews Aaronson conducted with genuine racial justice protest leaders, Alphabet Boys pieces together how Windecker inveigled himself into Black Lives Matter from May 2020.
Windecker, who the FBI paid $20,000 to spy on the activists, stood out from the crowd. He was white, while most protesters in Denver were African American, and dressed in military fatigues. He drove an ostentatious silver hearse with a boot filled with AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles and other firearms.
Despite his glaring profile, Windecker managed to convince activists that he was committed to the struggle for racial justice and could help them cope with volatility on the streets. He bragged about having served with the French Foreign Legion and the Kurdish Peshmerga.
As 2020’s long hot summer of protests deepened, Windecker became more prominent in the Denver scene. He also became more proactive in his advice, encouraging activists to consider taking the protests to the next level.
He told one Black Lives Matter leader: “I can teach you how to shoot a gun, to hand-to-hand combat, all the way up to like blowing up fucking buildings and guerrilla warfare tactics and sabotage.”
Audio clippings from the undercover recordings obtained by Aaronson reveal what Windecker then went on to ask the activist: “How extreme do you want it to go? Do you want to learn to shoot a gun and throw someone around, or do you want to go all the way uptown? If that’s what you want to do, I can make it happen.”
The podcast reports that Windecker went on to give an activist $1,500 to buy a gun for him, which led to the individual being arrested on weapons charges. Aaronson also alleges that the informant helped to organize a series of demonstrations in August 2020 that led to violent assaults on police stations.
Windecker denied being an FBI informant, but when Aaronson told him about the recordings he fell silent.
Congressman Jordan and his Republican team have taken to calling their “weaponization” subcommittee “the new Church committee”. The reference is to the post-Watergate 1970s investigation led by the Democratic senator Frank Church into the rogue behaviour and abuses of power by the FBI and other federal agencies.
The attempt by Trump-allied Republicans to claim the mantle of the Church committee to justify weakening federal action against far-right attacks on American democracy has incensed those who participated in the 1970s investigation. Gary Hart, the former senator from Colorado who is the only surviving member of the Church committee, told the Guardian that the new House “weaponization” panel was the antithesis of what he and his colleagues had done.
“We did not have a partisan axe to grind, we bent over backwards to ensure the Church committee was not a partisan activity,” Hart said. “What is going on in the House today is a purely Republican operation. They are trying to go back to the bad old days by destroying oversight, particularly as it applies to rightwing militias and the insurrection on January 6.”
It is perhaps worth remembering what those “bad old days” of the 1960s and 70s invoked by Hart looked like. Before the Church committee succeeded in imposing guardrails on the surveillance and other activities of the FBI, the bureau was largely untethered.
J Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s infamous director, ran rampant, instructing agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” dissenting political groups in the US, especially African American ones. Under the vast Counter Intelligence Program, Cointelpro, which ran from 1956 to 1971, informants were used to infiltrate the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers, going so far as to blackmail Martin Luther King in an attempt to cajole him into killing himself.
One of the Bureau’s favourite tricks was for its undercover FBI informants to spread rumours that the real leaders of leftwing and civil rights movements were themselves undercover FBI informants. The technique, which had a devastating impact on the Panthers, is known in the trade as “snitch-jacketing”.
Alphabet Boys reveals that, in a chilling echo of Cointelpro, the FBI informant Windecker used exactly the same “snitch-jacketing” tactic to sow discord among the Black Lives Matter crowd in Denver during the 2020 summer of protests. At a time when his own cover was in danger of being blown, he planted seeds of doubt about key leaders suggesting they might be cooperating with police.
Hart told the Guardian that he had no special knowledge of the events in Denver. But he said that the podcast’s disclosures were a timely warning against complacency.
“The Denver story and other recent stories indicate that in some ways oversight may have become lax,” he said. “Maybe – and I don’t know this for sure, but maybe – the FBI is slipping back into the old patterns.”
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MUST READ! WEST VIRGINIA REPUBLICANS SILENCE THE TRUTH & CONCEAL CORRUPTION!
THE POOREST STATE IN THE NATION DUE TO CORRUPT POLITICIANS!
West Virginia Public Broadcasting dismissed part-time reporter Amelia Ferrell Knisely after she covered allegations of the mistreatment of people with disabilities in the state's care. Knisely (left) is shown reporting in this 2021 photograph. (photo: F. Brian Ferguson/Report for America)
Reporter's Dismissal Exposes Political Pressures on West Virginia Public Broadcasting
David Folkenflik, NPR
Folkenflik writes: "Late last fall, West Virginia Public Broadcasting's Amelia Ferrell Knisely reported one story after another about allegations that people with disabilities were abused in facilities run by the state."
Late last fall, West Virginia Public Broadcasting's Amelia Ferrell Knisely reported one story after another about allegations that people with disabilities were abused in facilities run by the state.
The state agency Knisely was covering demanded that one of her key stories be fully retracted. While her coverage remains on West Virginia Public Broadcasting's website, Knisely is gone. She says she was told the decision came from the station's chief executive.
Interviews with 20 people with direct knowledge of events at West Virginia Public Broadcasting indicate Knisely's involuntary departure from her position as a part-time reporter was not an aberration but part of a years-long pattern of mounting pressure on the station from Gov. Jim Justice's administration and some state legislators.
"We all knew that our jobs could go at any moment if politicians fought that hard enough," says former West Virginia Public Broadcasting reporter and producer Roxy Todd. "Gov. Justice's presence was always looming over us."
Since 2017, politicians have sought to eliminate state funding. The governor appointed partisans hostile to public broadcasting to key oversight positions. And the station's chief executive has intervened repeatedly in journalistic decisions.
"The press ... needs to be free from interference"
Knisely's dismissal was first reported by Steven Allen Adams, the state government reporter for Ogden Newspapers, in late December. "This reporting focused on some of the most vulnerable people who are in state-run facilities," Knisely tweeted about her stories.
"I am deeply concerned about the state of WV media," Knisely later posted. "It is our job as reporters to watch … report on decision makers. In our state, one of the poorest, not everyone can drive to the Capitol where decisions are being made. Not everyone has internet access to stream meetings."
According to its 2021 annual report, West Virginia Public Broadcasting serves 684,000 television viewers each month and 91,000 radio listeners each week. Its website received 1.6 million page views from December 2021 to December 2022, according to station materials.
In a statement to NPR News, West Virginia Public Broadcasting Chief Executive Carl "Butch" Antolini denies firing Knisely and any hint of political interference in coverage: "A lot of the information that has been reported or disseminated is either partially or completely inaccurate." He said she was let go when a full-time reporter was hired. The statement was the only response Antolini or any West Virginia Public Broadcasting official would give NPR News for this story, despite repeated questioning.
"The press acts as a check and a balance on government," says former West Virginia Public Broadcasting news director Jesse Wright, who left in early 2020, before Antolini's arrival as the station's chief executive. "To be effective in that role, it needs to be free from interference from the people that it covers." Wright says the two chief executives he served under would notify him when the station's stories inflamed politicians, but never intervened in his news decisions.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting plays outsized role in state's shrinking media industry
West Virginia news outlets have been holding powerful political and financial interests to account for more than a century. Vast natural resources and wealth sit alongside abject poverty in the state. The news industry has hit hard times, too, and West Virginia Public Broadcasting now plays an outsized role in the local media landscape.
A significant number of the people who spoke to NPR asked not to be named in this story, saying they fear it would damage them professionally.
"I have concerns about independent news gathering — there and across the state," says Andrea Billups, the station's news director from 2020 until January 2022. "It's disturbing to think it's eroding."
West Virginia Public Broadcasting was troubled before Antolini arrived in 2021, having been roiled by allegations of favoritism under the previous CEO. And the state's dominant newspaper is embroiled in its own journalistic controversy. Meanwhile, the state has become increasingly conservative; Republicans, many of whom are skeptical of public broadcasting, now hold a supermajority in the legislature. Many of the people who spoke to NPR say they worry that state lawmakers or the governor will use the current crisis as a reason to slash West Virginia Public Broadcasting's funding.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting is part of the national system of public broadcasting stations and pays fees to NPR to broadcast its flagship programs. More than a third of West Virginia Public Broadcasting revenue comes directly from the state. Outside West Virginia, there are currently eight NPR member stations licensed to state entities, according to NPR. Many others are licensed to state universities. Allegations of serious political pressure on state-funded stations are rare.
Like many of its peers, West Virginia Public Broadcasting says it subscribes to the guidelines in the NPR Ethics Handbook, the PBS Redbook, and the Code of Integrity for Public Media. The latter echoes the NPR and PBS codes: "Protect the editorial process from the fact and appearance of undue influence."
Governor tests West Virginia Public Broadcasting's independence
The arrival of Justice on the political scene has tested both elements of that pledge. Justice campaigned for governor as a Democrat in 2016, yet adopted a form of conservative populism championed by former President Donald Trump. He is one of West Virginia's wealthiest people, the owner of coal mines, resorts and other endeavors. (Justice's communications director, Jordan Damron, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
NPR News correspondent Howard Berkes reported aggressively on Justice's mines prior to his entry into electoral politics. During Justice's candidacy, NPR News revealed that his coal mines and other companies owed $15 million in unpaid taxes and federal safety fines. Journalists from West Virginia Public Broadcasting sometimes collaborated with Berkes, who has since retired. Other major national outlets picked up the story.
Once in office in early 2017, Justice sought to jettison all state funding for West Virginia Public Broadcasting. That would have caused the station to shut down, state public broadcasting officials said at the time.
After a significant public outcry, Justice relented. Yet state legislators still cut West Virginia Public Broadcasting's state funding by nearly a quarter, roughly $1 million.
That represented about 10% of West Virginia Public Broadcasting's entire budget. Job cuts ensued. Two senior station officials, Eddie Isom and Marilyn DiVita, pressed the newsroom to stop covering Justice's business travails, according to Wright, then the news director. (Neither Isom nor DiVita responded to NPR's queries.)
"Eddie was pretty vocal about it. So was Marilyn," Wright recalls.
He says they asked why the station should antagonize a major source of its revenue. And Wright says they suggested he could leave it to other news outlets, such as the Charleston Gazette-Mail and the nonprofit site Mountain State Spotlight.
Wright says he remembers how he felt about it: "Hell, no. I'm not going to let Ken Ward [the co-founder of Mountain State Spotlight] own a story we were able to take a lead on, thanks to Howard."
Later in the summer of 2017, Justice switched parties. The next year, he fired state Education and Arts Secretary Gayle Manchin, the wife of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat whom Justice is considering running against in 2024.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting had been under the state department of education and the arts. Justice moved it to the Department of Arts, Culture and History. It is now overseen by the governor-appointed state arts curator and a board called the Educational Broadcasting Authority.
NPR and West Virginia Public Broadcasting kept reporting on the governor's continuing failure to meet his obligations. And Wright says pressure recurred, although he tried to shield his journalists from any political or corporate heat.
"I always saw my job as part of a firewall to take that and not let it trickle down into the newsroom," Wright says.
Accusations of favoritism open the door to political influence
The spring after the budget cuts, the station's CEO took a job at Vermont Public Media. His replacement, Chuck Roberts, had come up through the production side of the station and sought to champion it.
But his tenure proved rocky.
The following incidents, based on accounts of four people with knowledge, have never been previously reported. (They requested anonymity to discuss the highly sensitive episodes.)
In 2018, Roberts was accused of favoritism after he gave a promotion and significant raise to a female employee with whom he had a close personal relationship. The job opening had not been posted publicly, according to a grievance filed by a more experienced colleague. The complaint was ultimately settled.
In early 2020, a male staffer at the station filed a sexual harassment complaint with the West Virginia Public Employees Grievance Board against that same female employee, saying Roberts had dismissed the seriousness of his allegations because of Roberts' friendship with the employee. (She is no longer with West Virginia Public Broadcasting.) The staffer also alleged that he was passed over for a promotion in retaliation for his complaint.
The Educational Broadcasting Authority, led by its chairman, forced Roberts to take two weeks of unpaid leave and to apologize to his leadership team for what he termed an "inappropriate" relationship. (Roberts did not respond to NPR's detailed requests for comment.) NPR News has reviewed internal messages among staffers at the time, which reflected low morale and a belief that the station's leadership had failed them.
Roberts was weakened; others made their moves.
Attempts to cut funds and take over a prized program
In winter 2021, the Senate Finance Committee, led by state Sen. Eric Tarr, acted to slash all funding for public broadcasting. The state curator, Randall Reid-Smith, directed Roberts not to talk to state lawmakers, three people with knowledge say. Roberts nonetheless personally delivered a single-page fact sheet about the station to the state Capitol for lawmakers.
With some lawmakers' support, Reid-Smith, a former opera singer, was himself angling to wrest away control of the station's crown jewel, Mountain Stage. The program, distributed nationally by NPR, draws renowned musical acts to West Virginia for live performances. (Reid-Smith did not respond to requests for comment.)
Another outcry ensued. The legislature ended up preserving most of the funds for public broadcasting and the station retained Mountain Stage.
That year, Reid-Smith required that newsletters be reviewed by him and the governor's communications office before release, according to four people at West Virginia Public Broadcasting at the time. That included newsletters created by news programs.
Oliver Artherhults, then an associate producer for West Virginia Public Broadcasting's program Inside Appalachia, says journalists ended up self-censoring — offering as one example the removal of references to proposed legislation that would have enacted protections for people on the basis of sexual orientation.
In August 2021, Justice appointed five new members to the West Virginia Educational Broadcasting Authority.
Among the new directors was attorney Danielle Waltz, a top lobbyist for the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce. She had been a member of the board of directors of the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy, a conservative think tank that has characterized state funding on West Virginia Public Broadcasting as "wasteful" spending that should be returned to taxpayers. (Waltz did not return a message seeking comment.)
Another new director was political consultant Greg Thomas, a lobbyist and former top adviser to coal baron Don Blankenship, who infamously spent a year in federal custody over safety failures at a mine where an explosion killed 29 miners. Thomas' Twitter feed contains frequent digs at media outlets, including NPR.
"No one believes anything the media/government says," Thomas tweeted last August. His most common refrain: "Climate change is a hoax."
The Charleston Gazette-Mail recently fired three journalists after they publicly objected to a deferential interview of Blankenship by the paper's owner. Thomas called them "activists" for taking to Twitter. (The paper's owner is also the top Democrat in the House of Delegates.)
Thomas tells NPR he "might run my mouth more than I should" on Twitter but that he works constructively on the board to improve West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
A third director appointed by Justice was Stephen Taylor Hood. Hood is listed as a business partner of Sen. Tarr, on at least seven limited liability companies, according to a review of state records. They cite real estate, marketing, polling, veterinary services and other ventures. In four instances, the two men are the only business officers listed. (Hood could not be reached for comment; Tarr did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)
A new chief executive with close ties to the administration
In early October 2021, the Educational Broadcasting Authority fired Roberts without publicly stating a cause. Two weeks later, the board named Antolini to serve as West Virginia Public Broadcasting's acting executive director.
Antolini had spent years at small West Virginia newspapers and a local radio station. He had also earlier served as Justice's communications director.
Antolini began meeting with his new colleagues one-on-one at the station, including the newsroom. According to two colleagues who requested anonymity, at a meeting in October 2021, Antolini declared himself disappointed that a former West Virginia Public Broadcasting reporter who had pursued stories about Justice had already left the station. Antolini said he had wanted to fire the reporter himself.
Typically, the corporate chiefs of news outlets do not become involved in journalistic decisions; they allow their top news executives to run the newsroom. Todd, the former reporter and producer for Inside Appalachia, says she asked Antolini how the broadcaster's journalistic independence would be protected.
Antolini made clear he'd be responsible for major journalistic decisions, she says, and that he would be the one to protect the broadcaster from political heat.
"Yeah I feel honestly like I'm going to have to quit," Todd wrote to a former colleague in a Dec. 3, 2021, text. "This isn't ethically sound." (Todd, who now works at a public radio station in neighboring Virginia, shared the text with NPR for this story.)
In May 2022, Antolini received the job permanently and was given the CEO title. "We have been impressed with his efforts and his passion and vision for West Virginia Public Broadcasting," William File, the Educational Broadcasting Authority's chairman, said. File added, "He has developed a good working relationship with our legislature, the governor's office and with our supporters throughout the state."
A hard-hitting story angers the state health secretary
Last summer, while unemployed, Amelia Ferrell Knisely took a gig writing on children's health issues for a child advocacy group that does not lobby the state. In September, Knisely joined West Virginia Public Broadcasting in a part-time position and continued her past focus on poverty and child welfare. As the fall progressed, she turned her attention to the state agency overseeing facilities that care for people with disabilities.
The backlash that would follow prompted Antolini to do damage control, according to several people with direct knowledge and a review of email exchanges. The chief executive dictated what interviews should be done, how they should be conducted — and who would be covering state politics.
On Nov. 3, West Virginia Public Broadcasting published a story by Knisely reflecting tough questions from state Senate leaders. Its headline: "Reports Show People With Disabilities Are Abused in State Care."
In an 8 1/2-page letter to Antolini, the state health secretary demanded a full retraction. He denied some key assertions, dismissed others, and said the Senate based its analysis on incorrect information.
The matter continued to gather steam.
Eleven days later, federal regulators announced an investigation of the state health department's treatment of people with disabilities. Antolini was livid, colleagues say.
In late November, Antolini ordered West Virginia Public Broadcasting news director Eric Douglas to conduct an interview with the state health secretary, Bill Crouch, according to two people with knowledge. Antolini demanded to review Douglas' questions ahead of time and sat in on the interview, conducted at the station's Charleston studios.
A spokeswoman for Crouch later told Ogden Newspapers that "Secretary Crouch had a friendship with Butch Antolini for decades." (Crouch, who did not return a message left with his wife seeking comment, has since stepped down.)
In early December, Douglas told Knisely that state health officials had called Antolini with an unspecified threat to hurt the broadcaster. As a result, the news director said, she would have to stop reporting on the health agency.
On Dec. 14, West Virginia Public Broadcasting put in a routine request for press passes at the state legislature for its journalists, including Knisely.
Asked the next day about Knisely's work outside West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Douglas said she would be there strictly to report for the station. "I do expect she will serve a vital role in our legislative coverage," he wrote to legislative aides.
At approximately the same time — early afternoon on Dec. 15 — Knisely delivered a letter to West Virginia Public Broadcasting's human resources department, according to two people with knowledge. Knisely documented Antolini's involvement, the pressure from state officials on the station, and being barred from reporting on the state health agency.
A few hours later, Isom, the broadcaster's chief operating officer and programming director, overrode Douglas, telling the legislature that West Virginia Public Broadcasting did not need credentials for Knisely, emails reviewed by NPR show.
The communications director for state Senate President Craig Blair forwarded Isom's note to Douglas, who replied that Antolini had told him that "things had changed with Amelia." He echoed the language of the communications director, writing, "you're right, it does seem gross and shady."
On Dec. 20, West Virginia Public Broadcasting let Knisely go.
Sen. Blair, a frequent antagonist of the governor, defended Knisely's reporting in a statement he released on Dec. 29. It was republished in several newspapers around the state.
"It appears our Executive Branch has gone from largely refusing to cooperate with the media to actively undermining it," Blair wrote. "I hope the Executive Branch disavows this blatant abuse of the First Amendment and holds the management of West Virginia Public Broadcasting responsible for it."
Later that day, File, the broadcasting authority chairman, emailed a statement to reporters supporting Antolini and West Virginia Public Broadcasting. Metadata show that the document was created by and last edited by Antolini or someone with direct access to his account. (File did not respond to a message left with his brother seeking comment.)
That same day, Blair granted an interview to the commercial radio news station West Virginia MetroNews in which he criticized West Virginia Public Broadcasting for cutting Knisely loose.
Antolini ordered his news director to get the Senate president on West Virginia Public Broadcasting's airwaves immediately, saying Blair misspoke or was uninformed. The CEO warned that the station could lose all state funding. Antolini instructed Douglas to listen to the MetroNews interview "three or four times" and said, once more, he would review Douglas' questions prior to the interview.
On Jan. 3, emails show, Douglas asked Blair's communications director for the chance to interview the Senate president. She turned him down, writing, "I don't believe there's anything to be gained from an interview like this."
Later that afternoon, Suzanne Higgins, a longtime executive producer, told colleagues she was resigning just before the legislative session, citing what she called Antolini's interference. She also said Isom had warned her that West Virginia Public Broadcasting reporters cannot be producing stories that anger the Justice administration.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting's future unclear
Greg Thomas, who sits on the Educational Broadcasting Authority, says he was troubled by Knisely's departure but that the board had no involvement. Overall, he says, West Virginia Public Broadcasting has resolved management issues and should now reconsider more fundamental questions about its mission.
"What do we need?" he says. "Does NPR have a role in it? Does public broadcasting have a role in it? I don't know."
On Jan. 25, two days after NPR first approached Antolini about this story, West Virginia Public Broadcasting abruptly changed its website. It no longer links to any reporting from NPR News. Most member station sites do.
In his statement to NPR and other news outlets, Antolini said that the station had not retracted Knisely's stories. He wrote that it was extremely important to note that she was welcome to apply for another full-time position at West Virginia Public Broadcasting that had become available.
Knisely can be found once more in Charleston covering the legislature and the welfare of people with disabilities in state facilities — this time, for The Register-Herald of Beckley. The state Senate took up the issue on its first day of its session this year.
According to two people with direct knowledge of its activities, the legislature's commission on special investigations — a joint committee of the House and Senate — has launched hearings behind closed doors about the political pressures besetting the station.
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Drone footage of the South Yuma County Landfill in Arizona, Nov. 29, 2022. (photo: Miguel Gutierrez Jr./CalMatters)
California Toxics: Out of State, Out of Mind
Robert Lewis, CalMatters
Lewis writes: "In September 2020, workers in Brawley near the Mexico border began loading dump trucks with soil from the site of an old pesticide company."
In September 2020, workers in Brawley near the Mexico border began loading dump trucks with soil from the site of an old pesticide company. As an excavator carefully placed the Imperial County waste into the vehicles, a worker sprayed the pile with a hose, state records show. Another was on hand to watch for any sign of dust. The trucks then drove through a wash station that showered dirt off the wheels and collected the runoff water.
There was a reason for such caution. Shipping documents indicate the soil was contaminated with DDT, an insecticide the federal Environmental Protection Agency banned decades ago and that research has linked to premature births, cancer and environmental harms. The Brawley dirt was so toxic to California, state regulation labeled it a hazardous waste. That meant it would need to go to a disposal facility specially designed to handle dangerous material – a site with more precautions than a regular landfill to make sure the contaminants couldn’t leach into groundwater or pollute the air.
At least, that would have been the requirement if the waste stayed in California. But it didn’t.
Instead, the trucks – carrying nearly 1,500 tons of California hazardous waste – rumbled just over the Arizona border to the La Paz County Landfill, a municipal solid waste dump several miles from the Colorado River Indian Tribes’ reservation.
The journey is a familiar one for California’s toxics. Since 2010, nearly half of California’s hazardous waste has left the Golden State, according to figures the state released last summer.
Some of this estimated 10 million tons has gone to specialized facilities, but California government agencies and businesses have also transported much of it over the border to states with weaker environmental regulations and dumped it at regular municipal waste landfills, a CalMatters investigation has found. These are cheaper alternatives with more limited protections and oversight than sites permitted to handle hazardous waste. A CalMatters analysis of state shipping records shows that two of the most heavily used by California are near Native American reservations – including a landfill with a spotty environmental record.
While there is nothing illegal about the practice, critics contend it raises troubling questions for a state that loves to pat itself on the back as an environmental leader and a shining example of how to protect the planet.
“California shouldn’t have stringent laws and then send this waste out of state. How is that fair?” said Cynthia Babich, an environmental advocate who was on a state advisory committee several years ago looking at hazardous waste. “You’re just shifting the burden. It’s really not addressing the problem.”
CalMatters spent four months examining how California handles its hazardous waste – analyzing state and federal databases with millions of shipping records, reviewing regulatory filings and archival documents, obtaining hundreds of pages of environmental inspection reports for waste disposal facilities in Arizona and Utah, and interviewing regulators, environmental advocates, engineers and waste industry sources.
CalMatters found no reports directly linking California waste to public health issues or pollution in surrounding communities. But environmental analyses at and around these out-of-state landfills are, at best, limited – largely relying on self-reported data from the waste companies. One Arizona landfill doesn’t conduct groundwater monitoring.
The waste leaving California includes asbestos, treated wood and auto shredder detritus. But the biggest source is contaminated soil – the product of California’s massive efforts to right decades of environmental harm and restore the land at the site of old factories, refineries and military installations. This is soil contaminated with heavy metals such as lead and nickel, petroleum hydrocarbons, and chemicals including DDT. The soil largely comes from cleanups that government agencies either oversee or directly manage.
In the past five years, California has disposed of more than 660,000 tons of contaminated soil in Arizona landfills and nearly a million tons at a Utah landfill, according to data in a state tracking system. That includes hazardous waste from the Mission Bay redevelopment in San Francisco, military base cleanups in San Diego and transportation authority projects in San Bernardino County.
At least one business hopes there will be more. A company in Utah is currently trying to get a permit in that state to open a landfill right on the edge of the Great Salt Lake and planning to take – among other waste streams – contaminated soil. An economic analysis the company filed with Utah regulators says there’s a “unique market opportunity created by California law.”
And while California officials have discussed the issue for years, including a state initiative that looked at ways to treat more contaminated soil on-site, they’ve done little to address it. In fact, the state’s own hazardous waste watchdog – the Department of Toxic Substances Control – is one of the biggest out-of-state dumpers. That’s despite a 1991 pledge signed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson to keep California waste in California.
Since 2018, the department has removed more than 105,000 tons of contaminated soil from the site of the state’s biggest cleanup effort – the area around the old Exide battery recycling plant in Los Angeles County – and disposed of it in western Arizona. Regulatory filings show most wound up at the South Yuma County Landfill, which sits just a few miles from the Cocopah Indian Tribe’s reservation and abuts the lush, green orchards of a company that grows organic dates. It’s a landfill that the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality labeled as posing an “imminent and substantial threat” in 2021 after an inspection noted windblown litter, large amounts of “disease vectors” (flies and birds), and groundwater with elevated levels of chromium – a metal that can harm people and the environment.
Officials with the Department of Toxic Substances Control said the decision to ship the waste out-of-state was driven by cost. Director Meredith Williams acknowledged her agency doesn’t monitor landfill conditions in other states. But she said the department is crafting a new hazardous waste management plan for the state – due in 2025 – that could “reflect the kinds of concerns that you’re hearing about.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Some waste industry experts contend there’s little risk to people or the environment from the contaminated dirt. They say California regulations are too strict – labeling some waste as hazardous under state law even though it falls below the federal threshold to be considered hazardous. They say modern landfills here and out-of-state are more than equipped to handle the cleanup waste, particularly because contaminants such as heavy metals don’t migrate well through soil. They contend the regulations are therefore driving up disposal costs for businesses and the government, and also carry an unintended environmental cost – creating needless emissions from the thousands of trucks and train cars transporting the waste out of state each year.
That’s little comfort to people like David Harper, a member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes whose reservation is near the La Paz County Landfill. That’s a landfill where California agencies and businesses sent more than 160,000 tons of contaminated soil since 2018, including the DDT contaminated waste from Brawley, the state’s waste tracking system shows.
“If it was not a problem, why didn’t they keep it themselves? Why does it have to come here?” Harper said. “Why isn’t it in California?”
California’s magical border
Drive an hour east of Joshua Tree National Park and you’ll hit the Colorado River Indian Tribes’ reservation — nearly 300,000 acres of land straddling the Colorado River, the natural border between California and Arizona.
A funny thing happens at that border. Soil contaminated with enough heavy metals like lead, or chemicals like DDT, that it would be regulated as a hazardous waste in California suddenly turns into little more than a pile of regular, old dirt. This alchemy (and no, nothing actually changes in the soil as it crosses the border) has to do with patchwork regulations and interstate commerce.
Congress enacted the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976. This federal law defines what counts as a hazardous waste nationwide and lays out how such waste needs to be handled. A separate law enacted around the same time governs disposal of chemicals such as PCBs. If a lab determines that a waste is hazardous under federal law, then it needs to be treated, stored or disposed of at a facility specially permitted to handle hazardous waste.
But the federal law acts as a baseline. Some states, including California, have enacted their own more stringent environmental laws and regulations. California’s Hazardous Waste Control Act was enacted in 1972 under then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, defining hazardous waste under state law. Subsequent laws and rulemaking expanded the state’s reach.
California has also adopted its own testing requirements. Both federal- and state-required lab tests essentially try to mimic landfill conditions to see how much of a contaminant might leach into groundwater. The tests vary in terms of how long they last, the amount of dilution and the acid used.
So even if a waste doesn’t meet the threshold to be considered a hazardous waste under federal law, it can be considered hazardous under California’s different testing system and requirements. Such waste is sometimes called “California hazardous waste.”
From 2010 through mid-last year, California generated about 17 million tons of waste considered hazardous only under state law compared to about 3.8 million tons of waste that met the federal definition of hazardous, according to figures from the state. More than a third of the California-only hazardous waste was contaminated soil.
California hazardous waste generally needs to be treated as toxic in the state and disposed of at facilities authorized to handle such materials.
Such sites are subject to increased state and federal oversight and design requirements. For example, a hazardous waste disposal facility needs to have a double liner system, essentially making it harder for toxic material to seep out of the landfill and into the surrounding area. A regular landfill isn’t required to have two of those protective barriers, experts told CalMatters.
California has only two hazardous waste landfills: the Kettleman Hills Facility in Kings County and the Buttonwillow landfill facility in Kern County.
Officials in the Department of Toxic Substances Control initially told CalMatters that capacity could be a barrier to disposal at these two California sites. But they could not provide any examples where space considerations had driven a decision to export waste instead.
Jennifer Andrews, a spokeswoman for WM (formerly known as Waste Management Inc.), which operates the Kettleman Hills facility, said the site “has enough capacity to meet the State of California’s hazardous waste disposal needs.”
“We also have plenty of space to meet the needs of DTSC waste for years to come, providing the agency permits new disposal units at our site.”
Buttonwillow, whose representatives didn’t respond to an interview request, also appears to have enough room to take contaminated soil – with about 5.5 million cubic yards of remaining space, according to corporate filings.
But the two sites have faced their own scrutiny over regulatory lapses and environmental concerns, including a chemical spill at Buttonwillow years ago and the mishandling of some toxic waste at Kettleman Hills that resulted in government fines for each. State regulators have cited both for numerous violations over the years, Department of Toxic Substances Control records show. And while environmental activists have said they don’t want waste going to out-of-state landfills, some also don’t want California’s hazardous waste going to those two in-state facilities near low-income communities of color.
Cost appears to be a major factor in determining where California-only hazardous waste ends up. The Department of Toxic Substances Control provided figures to CalMatters showing the cost to dispose of California-only hazardous waste in-state can be about 40% to 60% higher than out-of-state disposal. Reasons include fees, taxes and “time at landfill for disposal (i.e., long wait times), and scheduling difficulty due to large volumes of hazardous waste for disposals,” according to the department. Other estimates put the cost at about 20% more, depending on where in the state the waste is generated.
Last year, state parks officials needed to dispose of 2,300 tons of soil workers excavated from the site of the Los Angeles State Historic Park in California – an old railyard. Ultimately, the soil – listed in shipping records as “Impacted with metals” – was transported just over the river to the La Paz County Landfill outside of Parker, Arizona, shipping records show.
“The environmental consultant hired by State Parks selected the La Paz facility as it was the most economical, at roughly half the cost, and most reliable choice, while also meeting all required environmental standards,” according to a written statement from the parks department.
The parks department also said California’s two hazardous waste landfills “do not always accept certain hazardous wastes due to various factors such as capacity or technical issues. They also typically require a more lengthy and burdensome approval process.”
The decision was certainly not unique. Since 2010, about 43% of California-only hazardous waste has been transported out of the state – much of it to Arizona and Utah landfills, government records show.
California regulations may stop at the border, but its waste does not.
Sacred ground
On a clear morning shortly after Thanksgiving, David Harper took a CalMatters reporter and photographer on a tour of the area around the La Paz County, Arizona, landfill. Harper is a member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes and a former chairman of the Mohave Elders Committee. He is also a founding board member of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, an environmental advocacy organization that has long opposed California’s out-of-state dumping.
The reservation sits inside a valley about five miles from the landfill at its closest point. It’s a dusty landscape two-and-a-half hours west of Phoenix that smells of creosote bushes and is dotted with saguaro, the tall cactus symbolic of the American West.
Mountains border the area, each a part of the Mohave creation story. Redtail Hawk Mountain, Moon Mountain, Fishtail Mountain. Harper calls one range Old Woman and says his people believe the creator turned a revered member of the tribe into a mountain so she could forever oversee the land – her nose, chin and bosom silhouetted against the blue expanse of sky.
“It’s a living, breathing environment. But to you, it’s a desert wasteland. But it’s not to us,” Harper said. “These areas are sacred.”
Some liken the area to the land along the River Nile, said Valerie Welsh-Tahbo, director of the Colorado River Indian Tribes Museum and a former tribal council member. The river cutting through the desert landscape creates rich soil for farming melons, cotton and alfalfa, she said.
Like some other tribal members interviewed for this story, she worried about the California hazardous waste transported to the landfill just outside the reservation.
“I don’t think enough people are aware that that’s happening, for one thing, and what kind of toxic materials are being dumped out there,” Welsh-Tahbo said. “I think the general thinking is, ‘Well, it’s far enough away from the municipalities that it should be okay.’ So, I guess out of sight, out of mind seems to be the attitude.”
Landfills like the one in La Paz are subject to limited oversight. The federal EPA doesn’t routinely monitor conditions there. The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality does inspect municipal solid waste landfills though there is no requirement as to how often. The goal is annually, a department official told CalMatters. The department inspected the La Paz facility in October 2021 and identified no deficiencies, according to a copy of the inspection report the department provided CalMatters.
Such reviews, however, are not necessarily comprehensive. For example, the department typically doesn’t do its own water testing, a state spokeswoman confirmed, instead relying on landfills to test for contamination and to report the results accurately. But even then, there are gaps.
The La Paz facility obtained an exemption allowing smaller landfills to avoid certain requirements like groundwater monitoring. That was in 1996. As a result, the landfill hasn’t had to report such water quality test results for more than 25 years and, according to the most recent annual inspection report, doesn’t monitor groundwater at the site.
The operator of the site, Republic Services, said in an email to CalMatters that the landfill has “a state-of-the-art engineered composite liner system,” and that “the depth of the uppermost groundwater aquifer is 460 feet or more below the bottom-most liner.”
Republic Services is “committed to safety, environmental responsibility, sustainable solutions, and ensuring that all our facilities comply with federal, state and local laws and regulations,” according to the company’s statement to CalMatters.
Caroline Oppleman, a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, said in an email to CalMatters that “landfills are very closely regulated” under federal and state law. She said this includes oversight on “where they can be built, how they are built, waste they can accept, and finally, how they are closed and monitored for a minimum period of 30 years after closure.”
Indeed, some engineering experts say regular landfills are more than equipped to safely dispose of California’s contaminated soil, with or without the extra safety features of a permitted hazardous waste facility. Modern landfills are well designed, and composite liners have a remarkable record when it comes to containing waste, said Craig H. Benson, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin and national expert on waste facility design. It’s not like the 1980s when a landfill could be little more than a hole in the ground, he said.
And, even something as scary sounding as DDT doesn’t tend to migrate too far through the ground, he added.
“Those types of compounds are pretty immobile,” Benson said. “You wouldn’t want to be eating them.”
As a result, engineers CalMatters spoke with said California’s current regulatory system can be overkill – creating an unintended environmental impact from the greenhouse gas emissions of all the trucks and trains carrying the waste out of state when California could safely dispose of the contaminated soil in regular landfills in its own state.
“Does that make any sense at all with all the diesel emissions, safety issues, the risks from actually hauling it there?” Benson said. “I’d much rather put it in a safe and secure landfill that’s maybe 10 miles away.”
Decades of dumping
California hazardous waste has been going to out-of-state facilities for decades. In the late 1980s, the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco was sending its shredded money – considered hazardous in California because of the lead content – to a landfill in Jackson County, Oregon, according to memos from Oregon environmental officials at the time.
Oregon regulators in 1988 proposed a rule to effectively stop California from such disposal practices. A company wanted to build an infectious waste incinerator in Klamath County – three miles from the border with California.
“Hazardous waste is more strictly regulated, and therefore, more costly to manage … As a result, some generators of hazardous waste will pursue ways to ship the waste to a neighboring state,” according to a 1988 memo from an Oregon environmental regulator to the state’s Environmental Quality Commission.
“A receiving state is, therefore, at risk of becoming a ‘dumping ground.’”
Oregon ultimately adopted a rule in 1989 that says if another state considers waste to be hazardous, then Oregon will also consider the material to be hazardous even if the waste wouldn’t qualify for such a designation under Oregon’s laws. In other words, if California says contaminated soil is toxic then Oregon treats it as toxic. Nevada has a similar rule.
As a result, those states’ solid waste landfills don’t appear to be “dumping grounds” for California hazardous waste, shipping records indicate. But some of California’s neighbors – notably Utah and Arizona – don’t have such rules.
Environmental activists in the 1990s protested in Arizona about the waste coming from the Golden State.
“This stuff is toxic waste. It is material that can kill you,” said Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction, an environmental advocacy organization. “It is material that can cause cancer. That is why it’s called toxic waste.”
“The most vulnerable of our society continue to get dumped on.”
But the areas around the out-of-state landfills are sparsely populated, and some local officials there have welcomed the waste as a vital part of their economy.
Local officials in Utah sent letters in 2017 to their state environmental regulators saying the ECDC landfill in East Carbon was an important source of tax revenue and had “enabled quality jobs to be maintained in rural Utah.” ECDC is a major destination for California’s contaminated soil – much of it transported via rail from cleanup sites and development projects in San Francisco, according to hazardous waste shipping records filed with regulators.
The facility drew regulatory scrutiny years ago, Utah environmental records show. In 2004, Utah regulators learned some waste from a refinery in Wilmington, California – considered hazardous under federal standards – was disposed of at the landfill. In late 2005, workers started excavating that material from the landfill, according to archival documents.
In recent years Utah regulators haven’t identified any issues during inspections.
David Ariotti helped oversee the landfill for years as an engineer in Utah’s Department of Environmental Quality. Now retired, he said the landfill was “better managed than most.” He said regulators knew the types of waste the facility would take, including California-only hazardous waste.
“As with any industry, if there’s money to be made, they’re looking to make it,” Ariotti said. “They met everything they were supposed to. I inspected it and I was satisfied with the construction. They didn’t take any shortcuts.”
He was, however, always concerned about the landfill’s proximity to an aquifer. “I was not in favor of the landfill because of where they put it,” he said, adding that any risk to groundwater is a concern.
In a statement, Republic Services said, “The environmental services industry is one of the most heavily regulated in the United States and in most cases, our Landfills exceed safety standards set by the EPA and state regulatory agencies. This is the case at ECDC,” according to the company, which touted the site’s advanced leak barrier and detection system.
The Utah landfill conducts its own groundwater monitoring and submits the results to the state for review. Those reports in recent years have shown no problems, state regulators said.
Old promises
There was a time when California promised not to discard its toxic waste in other states, regardless of whether those states and communities would allow it.
In 1991, then-Gov. Pete Wilson signed the Western States Regional Waste Management Protocol. He was one of 21 governors to sign the document, which came out of the Western Governors’ Association, according to a copy of the protocol CalMatters obtained from the Colorado State Archives. The agreement was a pledge to “do everything economically and environmentally practical to ensure that wastes generated in our states are treated and disposed of in our own state before resorting to export.”
“Wastesheds, like watersheds, do not follow the political boundaries on a map,” the protocol stated.
California’s Department of Transportation – Caltrans – still adheres to the agreement even though it has long since expired. A Caltrans spokesman told CalMatters such regional protocols typically last for three years and expire unless renewed. The waste agreement was readopted in 1995. The Western Governors Association adopted a related policy resolution in 2003, according to a copy CalTrans provided CalMatters. That resolution didn’t ban waste shipments between states, citing “many examples of safe, effective and efficient cross-border waste management arrangements.”
The resolution did say “each state should do everything it possibly can to deal with its own solid waste in-state, including making those hard siting decisions when no one wants it ‘in their backyard.’”
In an email to CalMatters, Caltrans media relations manager Will Arnold said his department’s “policy is, and has been since 1995, to dispose of hazardous waste generated by highway construction within the state, unless there are exceptional circumstances.”
But the state agency in charge of overseeing hazardous waste in California apparently has no such self-imposed limitation.
The Department of Toxic Substances Control oversees or manages numerous environmental remediation projects around the state. The biggest cleanup is at the site of an old battery recycling facility called Exide in the Los Angeles County community of Vernon. For years, the department has been cleaning up toxic waste on site and in the surrounding neighborhoods, digging up soil littered with lead.
Much of that waste is going to Arizona. The state’s hazardous waste tracking system shows that since 2018, more than 105,000 tons of contaminated soil from the Exide residential cleanup have gone to that state. Some wound up at the La Paz County Landfill. Most, however, went to the South Yuma County Landfill, just outside of Somerton and near the Mexico border, according to the state’s data.
“A cost-analysis determined that savings associated with out-of-state disposal allowed DTSC to cleanup more contaminated residential properties,” according to a statement from the Department of Toxic Substances Control.
The landfill is about three miles from the Cocopah Reservation, federal records show. The site is bordered by lush agricultural fields – a chain link fence and narrow dirt path separate the landfill from a neighboring organic date orchard. (The head of the date farm did not respond to an interview request.)
CalMatters obtained landfill inspection reports for 2020 through 2022 from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. During that period, Arizona inspectors flagged issues in a number of the South Yuma landfill inspections. Some were relatively minor and easily corrected – for instance, not enough fire extinguishers near the area where the landfill stored waste tires.
Others were potentially more concerning. An April 2021 inspection report identified issues with windblown litter, disease vectors like birds and insects, and the system to collect and control stormwater runoff. The inspection also noted elevated chromium levels in one of the monitoring wells on site. In a question on the inspection report asking, “Has any condition or activity resulted in an imminent and substantial threat to public health or the environment?” the box for yes is checked.
As a result, the landfill operator in October 2021 entered into a consent order with the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. In signing the order, the company didn’t admit to wrongdoing but agreed to a number of fixes. The landfill made changes and the department terminated the order in February 2022, regulatory filings show.
Just a few months later, however, Arizona inspectors again identified “potential deficiencies” at the site. Among the issues, inspectors in June again saw windblown litter, flagged the company for not submitting certain reports and noted some groundwater tests exceeded water quality standards, according to a June inspection report.
The landfill “corrected all conditions listed” in the findings, according to an email from Arizona’s Department of Environmental Quality. The department is also “working with them to develop a revised groundwater monitoring plan,” the department said.
The company declined to give CalMatters a tour of its facility. (“Sorry. But no,” a company official texted in response to a reporter’s request.) A company representative did provide written responses to questions indicating the company, which bought the landfill more than 12 years ago, “hired the best engineers we knew in Southern CA to review the permits and substantiate the operations.”
According to the response, the elevated chromium noted in the April 2021 inspection “has not been repeated in subsequent groundwater monitoring events.”
The company “maintains a 100-foot setback from all adjacent properties and public right of ways for all waste disposal activities. California waste traffic approaches the landfill from a public road and enters from a point of access as far as possible from neighboring farms and after checking in and initial screening, directed to the landfill working face where it is landfilled and daily covered with earthen material,” according to the company.
The response also indicated windblown litter is a common problem at municipal solid waste landfills and that the company has filed all required notices and reports with state regulators.
The recent regulatory issues don’t appear to have impacted the flow of waste from California to the South Yuma landfill. Since the April 2021 inspection, the landfill has gotten more than 1,800 shipments of contaminated soil from the Exide cleanup, the state’s waste tracking system shows.
Asked if it’s safe to dump California-only hazardous waste at a municipal solid waste landfill like South Yuma, the director of California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control, Meredith Williams, said she couldn’t “make a blanket statement about the safety of that because everything’s so situational.”
“What is the hazard? Why is it classified as hazardous, non-hazardous waste? What are the conditions that are relevant and how well is …that out-of-state landfill managed?” she said.
Her department doesn’t appear to know how such landfills are managed or their safety track records. The department doesn’t routinely get inspection records nor does the agency monitor out-of-state facilities, Williams said.
“We have our hands full enough,” Williams said. “I think we’re not in a position to go out of state and assess an out-of-state landfill for its operations. It’s more than we can take on.”
Lots of talk
In 2015, the Department of Toxic Substances Control got money from the state for an initiative to reduce the amount of hazardous waste generated in California. The state had recently approved the expansion of one of California’s two hazardous waste landfills but officials were concerned the communities around those landfills bore a “disproportionate burden” for disposal of toxic waste in the state, agency records show.
That led to the creation of a special advisory committee made up of members representing a diverse cross section of interests including the waste industry, environmental advocates and academic researchers.
One of the main areas the panel looked at was contaminated soil. That’s because in 2015, soil from cleanup sites was the single biggest type of hazardous waste generated in California, according to a report of the group’s findings.
The committee talked about the fact the soil was often going to landfills in other states, members told CalMatters.
“We didn’t want to be shipping California’s risk factors to other people’s backyards,” said Oladele Ogunseitan, a microbiologist and presidential chair at the University of California, Irvine, who was on the committee. The panel didn’t explore what happens to the waste out of state, he added.
“We hope they know what they’re doing,” Ogunseitan said. “These things don’t know state boundaries.”
Ogunseitan said he understood the engineering of landfills has changed over the years and that modern designs are more protective. But little risk is not the same as no risk, he said, and contaminants can be a danger generations from now.
“If I lived in Arizona I’d be out protesting,” he said.
Cynthia Babich was also on the committee. Babich is director of the Del Amo Action Committee, an environmental justice organization that formed in response to community concern over Superfund sites in Los Angeles County. She said the advisory panel looked at various alternatives to excavating soil and dumping it at landfills. These were technologies to treat contaminated soil on site.
Among the technologies discussed was something called “soil washing,” in which dirt contaminated with metals was scrubbed to remove the toxic material, the committee’s report shows. Another involved the use of heat to destroy certain contaminants.
At the time there were questions about the cost and effectiveness of such technologies. The Department of Toxic Substances Control ultimately released a 2017 report based on the committee’s findings. That report, among other things, recommended more research into technologies for treating contaminated soil.
But the state didn’t follow through, citing a lack of money.
“Now we have a report and nothing happened,” Babich said.
Babich said her group wants the state to clean up contamination that has long burdened lower-income communities of color. But simply dumping the waste on another marginalized community is not the answer.
Williams, the department’s director, acknowledged the original vision was for pilot projects to study alternatives to excavation.
“However, there was no appropriation that was given to support those pilots. And so there was no place to take the recommendations and continue to act,” she said.
Officials are once again taking a close look at how the state handles its toxic materials and could make changes. The review is part of a 2021 law that, among other things, is requiring the state to prepare a hazardous waste management plan.
As part of the planning process, the department is scheduled to release a detailed public report with data on hazardous waste California is generating and where it’s going by March 1. The actual management plan, however, isn’t due until March 2025.
Next up: The Great Salt Lake
One company appears to be banking on the continued flow of California hazardous waste. A company called Promontory Point Resources is currently trying to get a permit from Utah regulators to operate a landfill that could take out-of-state waste, including contaminated soil from California.
The company behind the Promontory Point project had a needs assessment prepared as part of its permit application. That analysis calls excavated soil a “unique market opportunity” and suggests many Northern California hazardous waste generators would send their contaminated soil to the landfill because of the low cost. The analysis estimates the cost to send contaminated soil from northern California to the Promontory Point facility would be $100 per ton as compared to $145 per ton at the Kettleman Hills hazardous waste disposal facility.
The proposed landfill sits on the tip of Promontory Point, a peninsula jutting down into the Great Salt Lake. The facility is roughly half a mile from the edge of the lake and accessible from Ogden via a bumpy railroad causeway. The drive yields expansive views of the surrounding mountains and, on a recent visit, the sight of an eagle perched atop a wooden utility pole.
“It’s very problematic,” said Lynn de Freitas, executive director of FRIENDS of Great Salt Lake, one of the groups opposing the landfill. She said the area is important for “migratory bird habitat, brine shrimp” and the overall health of the saline system.
Compass Minerals, a company with facilities near the landfill, has also raised concerns. The company uses brine from the lake to produce minerals for fertilizers used in fruit, tree nut and vegetable crops.
Early soil borings in the area found fractured bedrock, said Joe Havasi, Compass Minerals’ vice president of natural resources. Such fractures could be a path for contaminants from the landfill to “flow quickly and efficiently to the lake,” Havasi said. The scale and extent of such fractures hasn’t been fully assessed and there should at the very least be more testing before any permit approval, he added.
In a written response to questions from CalMatters, the Utah Department of Environmental Quality wrote that “there are no concerns with the bedrock beneath the landfill.”
As to whether the department has any concerns about the type of waste that could be dumped on the lake’s edge, the agency responded that the “landfill permit application is currently under review.”
Landfill representatives did not respond to multiple interview requests.
If Utah does approve the permit, Lynn de Freitas, the environmental advocate, has a plea to California.
“You could hold on to your own waste,” she said. “That would be ideal.”
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