Middleboro Review 2

FOCUS | 'This Is How I'm Going to Die': Police Swarm Activists Protesting 'Cop City' in 'Week of Action'
Timothy Pratt, Guardian UK
Pratt writes: "Dozens of law enforcement officers, many with automatic weapons, swarmed into a forest of hundreds of acres, seeking to find any of the 200 or so activists who had set fire to a bulldozer, trailer and other infrastructure used for construction on 'Cop City,' a $90m, 85-acre police and fire department training center, about an hour earlier."

Hours of chaos as officers descended upon forest, seeking activists protesting $90m police and fire department training center

"Check their shoes and look for mud!” shouted one Atlanta police department officer to another.

The sun was setting against a tree line growing greener daily due to recent balmy, spring-like weather in Atlanta, but the bucolic setting of a Sunday in the sun at a free music festival abruptly became panic and chaos.

Dozens of law enforcement officers, many with automatic weapons, swarmed into a forest of hundreds of acres, seeking to find any of the 200 or so activists who had set fire to a bulldozer, trailer and other infrastructure used for construction on “Cop City”, a $90m, 85-acre police and fire department training center, about an hour earlier.

The clash was just the latest dramatic chapter to hit the Cop City project, which has already seen one environmental activist shot dead by police – the first incident of its kind in the US – and drawn national and international attention to the fight to save the Georgia forest where the giant project is planned.

The one officer’s frenzied order about dirty footwear seemed as absurd as any part of the Sunday night operation, since Georgia rains had left muddy patches all over the forest, and at least 600 people were lying on the grass, or camped among the trees, or entering the forest to catch an evening’s music under the stars or leaving – thus many had mud on their shoes.

But such was the situation on Sunday night, on the second night of the fifth “week of action” by activists over the last year dedicated to protecting the land called South River forest on municipal maps and Weelaunee forest by activists – using the Muscogee (Creek) word for “brown water”.

The scene included police running through trees, arresting a legal observer from the National Lawyers Guild, sending a negotiator to agree on terms with five randomly chosen individuals for letting about a hundred music festival audience members safely leave the forest, and detaining journalists for questioning on “what they were there to cover”.

The first two days had included free music, herbal workshops and a peaceful march through neighborhoods surrounding the forest south-east of Atlanta. Then, around 5.30 on Sunday evening, about 200 activists, most in balaclavas and camouflage clothing, began lining up to the right of the stage. They marched around three sides of the audience, chanting “Viva Tortuguita” – a reference to Manuel Paez Terán, a 26-year-old activist who was camping several hundred feet away from that spot on 18 January when police shot and killed him in another raid. It was the first time police killed an environmental activist while protesting in US history. Authorities said that Paez Terán fired first.

After several hours of chaos on Sunday night, 23 people – including a legal observer with the National Lawyers Guild – had been arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism” under state law, adding to the 18 defendants facing the same unprecedented charges who have been arrested in recent months.

Police officers had also threatened to arrest the hundred or so people who were lolling about in the field and listening to music only hours earlier if some agreement couldn’t be reached for their evacuation, said Jeff Simms, a retired federal endangered species biologist who was there.

Simms – who had come to the forest from Tucson, Arizona, to spend the week camping in the forest with his 21-year-old daughter, Alyssa – found the two of them thrust into unexpected positions as members of a five-person negotiating team on Sunday night.

Simms had watched dozens of police officers entering the forest from various sides and thought: “We’re all going to jail.”

He had spent one night camped in what is technically called Intrenchment Creek park. At least 85 acres of the forest is under threat from the construction of Cop City and another 40 acres is under threat from Ryan Millsap, former owner of Blackhall Studios, who made a deal with DeKalb county in 2020 to swap the land, in use as a public park, for another piece of land nearby. That deal is on hold due to a local environmental group’s lawsuit, and residents of surrounding neighborhoods continue to use the park for recreation.

The two parts of the forest are divided by a stream, Intrenchment Creek. The pair of threats to the forest led dozens of “forest defenders” to camp in the woods on both sides of the creek starting in late 2021. After Tortuguita’s death, hundreds recently began camping on the park side again – where all the arrests on Sunday were made.

On Sunday night, even as music continued on stage – mostly soft folk tunes, Simms said – police formed a line on the field. One had an AR-15 assault-type rifle, he said. Another announced on a bullhorn that they had a negotiator, and asked for five people to step forward.

“My daughter and I went, along with three others, and we all took turns speaking,” the 61-year-old said. The officer assured the team that they weren’t setting a trap, and said the crowd, which included at least one elementary school-aged child, would have 10 minutes to clear the field – or “we will arrest you for domestic terrorism”, Simms said the police told him.

“We told them the musicians had equipment, people had gear and bags, and we’d need at least 15 minutes,” Simms said. Then “I went back and told them, ‘We’re not gonna make it in 15.’”

The group of five spoke to the crowd and helped arrange transportation out of the forest for those who hadn’t arrived in their own cars. Organizers on stage urged them to “stay together. They can’t arrest us all,” Alyssa said.

Eventually, the crowd was able to leave – even as officers in other parts of the forest were attempting to find, and arrest, anyone who had participated in vandalizing the construction equipment.

Simms and his daughter returned to the forest on Monday, to camp for the rest of the week. “I want to take notes about the biology of this forest,” he said. “I came here to do that.” The Center for Biological Diversity, a national organization, recently issued a statement calling for protecting the forest due to its biological and ecological importance.

Mariah Parker, a union organizer, rapper and former Athens-Clarke county commissioner, went to the forest for the first time on Sunday. She had already been public in her opposition to the Cop City project for months, based on concerns about the increasing militarization of police and mass incarceration, particularly in Black communities.

After spending an afternoon in the forest and at the music festival, she said: “It was so beautiful – seeing people building community. I was feeling excited for what this space could be, what kind of a world we could really have.” Parker, who is Black, had met a Black mother and her two children who lives near the forest, other rap artists, and local community gardeners and teachers.

She left at about 5.30pm – right before activists entered the training center construction site. Several hours later, friends in the forest texted her, frightened. “People were hiding in the woods, and not sure how to get out – and they weren’t even involved [in the vandalism],” she said.

Several of Parker’s friends were Black. For them, she said, “it must have been one of the worst moments of their lives, not being able to leave, or know what would happen. Particularly for Black folks, it must have felt like, ‘This is how I’m going to die.’”

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RSN: William Boardman | Ron DeSantis for President? Among His Qualifications, War Crimes?

07 March 23

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RSN: William Boardman | Ron DeSantis for President? Among His Qualifications, War Crimes?
William Boardman, Reader Supported News
Boardman writes: "The official website for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis does not mention his time at the Guantanamo prison camp."

“Ron DeSantis was there watching us. We were crying, screaming. We were tied to the feeding chair. And he was watching. He was laughing. Our stomachs could not hold this amount of Ensure. They poured one can after another. So when he approached me, I said, “This is the way we are treated!” He said, “You should eat.” I threw up in his face. Literally on his face. ”

– Mansoor Adayfi, held without charge at Guantanamo Bay, 2002-2016, describing force
feeding used by guards to break hunger strike

The official website for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis does not mention his time at the Guantanamo prison camp. His military records released by the Navy in 2018 were heavily redacted. His official site notes his graduating from Yale with honors as a history major and earning a law degree with honors from Harvard Law School. The official site says only this about his active military service:

While at Harvard, he earned a commission in the U.S. Navy as a JAG [Judge Advocate General’s Corps] officer. During his active-duty service, Ron deployed to Iraq as an adviser to a U.S. Navy SEAL commander in support of the SEAL mission in Fallujah, Ramadi and the rest of Al Anbar province. His military decorations include the Bronze Star Medal for Meritorious Service and the Iraq Campaign Medal.

In March 2006, when DeSantis first went to Guantanamo, he was a 27 year old graduate of two elite universities. He was a Navy officer, sworn to uphold the Constitution. He was a JAG lawyer dealing with illegally held prisoners in an illegal concentration camp in the midst of an illegal “war on terror.” Like every other American participant in these crimes against humanity, he has not been held accountable.

Mansoor Adayfi (aka Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi) is a Yemeni citizen who was 18 when he was captured by warlords in Afghanistan and sold to the US as a “terrorist.” He was held without charges in Guantanamo from February 2002 until July 2016, when he was transferred to Serbia and released. In 2021 he published “Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo,” a book recounting his years of torture and resistance at the criminal camp that still holds innocent prisoners. In November 2022, Monsoor Adayfi joined the Eyes Left podcast hosted by Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner, who promotes this episode as a “journey into Ron DeSantis's shadowy military career reveals shocking new details about his complicity in illegal torture. Featuring exclusive never-before-heard testimony from former Guantanamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi….” An edited version of that ten minute interview appears in the March 2023 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Ron DeSantis’s office did not respond to Harper’s requests for comment.

For all that the DeSantis campaign for President is much in the news currently, Harper’s appears to be the only mainstream media outlet taking notice of his role in torturing Guantanamo prisoners. Some alternative media, such as The Real News Network (Dec. 2, 2022) and Florida Bulldog (Jan. 26, 2023), have reported the story in depth, with no response from DeSantis.

In the mainstream there has been some intense criticism of DeSantis, in Vanity Fair (Jan. 2, 2023) or The Nation (Feb. 27, 2023), with no mention of Guantanamo. [In 2018, when DeSantis was running for Governor, the Miami Herald asked what DeSantis did in Guantanamo, got no answer from DeSantis, got puffery from the Navy, talked to no detainess, and left the question unanswered.] Diane Ravitch in her blog (Feb. 27, 2023) doesn’t refer to torture even though she makes DeSantis’s education policy sound like force-feeding children’s minds:

… this audacious attempt to put the governor of the state in charge of whatever is taught in his state. What DeSantis is doing is not conservative. It is radical. It is authoritarian. He shows no respect for critical thinking or debate. He is unwilling to allow students to learn anything he does not like. His desire for control of what can be taught or learned is dangerous to democracy. He is attempting to establish a dictatorship and has a super-majority of both houses in the [Florida] legislature who will give him whatever he wants.

Failing to address the known war crimes that DeSantis is known to have been a part of allows mainstream media to normalize him. This is a form of deceit by omission. A representative example is this New York Times op ed by Damon Linker on February 27 focused on the essentially meaningless question of whether a DeSantis Presidency would be worse than another Trump Presidency. Linker writes:

The case against Mr. DeSantis is rooted in his policy commitments. During his time as Florida’s chief executive, he has governed from the hard right, taking aggressive aim at voting rights, pursuing politicized prosecutions, restricting what can be taught in public schools and universities, strong-arming private businesses, using refugees as human props to score political points and engaging in flagrant demagogy about vaccines. Before that, as a congressman, he supported cuts to Social Security and Medicare and voted for a bill that would have severely weakened Obamacare. All of that provides ample reason to rally against him should he end up as the Republican nominee in 2024. But none of it makes Mr. DeSantis worse than Trump….

Linker concludes that comparisons with Trump are distractions, because “Calling Mr. DeSantis bad should be good enough.” And that’s without even considering war crimes, which both have committed. In its odd way, this approach is a form of “critique” as whitewash.

In last November’s Eyes Left podcast, Mansoor Adayfi described conditions at Guantanamo, which De Santis supervised, without intervening. As a JAG officer, DeSantis would have been, or should have been, aware that he was participating in torture, clear violations of internationsl law. According to Monsoor Adayfi:

They used to restrain us in that feeding chair. They tied our head, our shoulders, our wrists, our thighs and our legs. They put some kind of laxative in the feeding liquid. We were shitting ourselves all the time. Then we were moved to solitary confinement – really cold cells. It was live five times a day. It wasn’t feeding. It was just torture. Five times a day. You can’t possibly handle it. They just kept pouring the Ensure. In one week, they broke all the hunger strikers. And he [Ron DeSantis] was there. All of them were watching. They used to beat us. And if we screamed or were bleeding out of our nose and mouth, they were like, “Eat.” The only word they told us was “eat.” We were beaten all day long. Whatever they were doing – they just beat you. Pepper spray, beating, sleep deprivation. That continued for three months. And he [Ron DeSantis] was there. He was one of the people that supervised the torture, the abuses, the beatings.

The fundamental reality is that 2006 was a year of military depravity at Guantanamo. Even the UN human rights agency criticized the place. Three detainees died there that year, hanged – the Navy said they were suicides, but the Navy sent their bodies home without major organs, making any autopsy impossible. DeSantis was there through all of that. The official story is that his job was to make sure the US military was abiding by the laws of war.

But what did DeSantis actually do at Guantanamo? Did he object to or intervene in the military torture program? Did he do anything to mitigate the suffering of prisoners held illegally, without charges? Did he participate in any way in torturing these prisoners? Or did he, as alleged, do exactly the job he was expected to do, talk to prisoners as a “friend” about what distressed them most, then report back to his superiors, so that they could increase the most stressful torture techniques, while keeping the whole process secret?

Whatever DeSantis did in Guantanamo, the Navy saw fit to send him next to Iraq, as a JAG officer tasked with advising Seal Team One how to follow the rules of war. In 2007, DeSantis was assigned to Anbar province, which experienced some of the worst American atrocities and war crimes, especially in Fallujah and Ramadi. As in Guantanamo, whatever DeSantis accomplished in Anbar, he did not effectively protect human rights. He did get a medal. And he’s running for President? With most of his service record is still shrouded in secrecy? Who benefits from that?

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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FOCUS: Ben Jacobs | CPAC Was a Janky Half-Empty Trump Convention

06 March 23

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FOCUS: Ben Jacobs | CPAC Was a Janky Half-Empty Trump Convention
Ben Jacobs, New York Magazine
Jacobs writes: "This Conservative Political Action Conference lacked both conservatives and action."

ALSO SEE: John Hendrickson |The Martyr at CPAC

This Conservative Political Action Conference lacked both conservatives and action.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was once a marquee event on the political calendar where Republicans seeking the favor of the party’s conservative base would attempt to woo a crowd of right-wing activists and diehards. In 2015, the last time there was a competitive Republican presidential primary, a dozen candidates showed up, representing all wings of the party from Chris Christie to Ted Cruz. And they weren’t the only ones there, it was a marquee event for the entire right-wing ecosystem with seemingly every group represented. Eight years later, the vibe was entirely different. The 2023 CPAC felt like a mall after all but one of its big department stores has shut down — an emptier, jankier, lower-rent version of conferences past. The rooms were more deserted, the vendors more downmarket, and speakers a little less important.

In the exhibit hall, where Facebook once had a booth with virtual reality games, there was now a booth where attendees could stand on a vibrating board promoted as effort-free exercise which could also boost sexual function. Many of the vendors simply sold Trump merchandise and nothing else. Upstairs, in the main ballroom, the list of speakers was considerably less A-list than in years past. Most potential presidential candidates didn’t show. Aside from Donald Trump, those who did attend had either served in the Trump administration or were political neophytes. And in the halls, it was far less crowded, save for a bottlenecked corner where, at one point, Steve Bannon held court and attendees flocked to see him.

There was no one reason for the event’s decline. The rise of competing conferences like Turning Point USA means CPAC is no longer the only show in town for those who want to spend an entire weekend listening to right-wing celebrities. And while CPAC is still a legacy brand, the allegations of sexual misconduct around its leader, Matt Schlapp, have further diminished its luster. Once a frequent Fox News guest, Schlapp has not appeared on the cable news network in months, and Fox News was almost a non-presence at the event; it did have journalists there, but no longer live-streamed it and none of its prime time hosts appeared on stage.

There’s also the fact that the event has, for years, been turning into a virtual proxy for Donald Trump and Trumpism. It wasn’t just that the halls were packed with attendees in red MAGA hats and wearing t-shirts proclaiming “Trump won” or “Let’s Go Brandon.” It was that the crowd was often indistinguishable from one at a Trump event. Many of the diehard Trump loyalists who followed the former president from rally to rally were now showing up at a conservative confab where panelists once held discussions about how to better achieve economic growth. And those devotees aren’t interested in other speakers. The attendance was at best sparse over much of the three-day conference, and Trump’s 2024 competitors, like Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo, weren’t even given the courtesy of boos by the MAGA crowd, who reacted instead with something like polite indifference.

The event isn’t receding on all fronts, however. While once mainly a celebration of the American conservative movement, (just last year, Lee Greenwood, the singer of “Proud To Be An American” was inducted to the CPAC Hall of Fame), the event has taken on a somehwat more cosmopolitan air in recent years thanks to the sprouting of various international franchises. Among the most robust are CPAC Hungary, which celebrates strongman prime minister Viktor Orban, and CPAC Brazil, which celebrates ousted strongman president Jair Bolsonaro. The latter spoke at CPAC on Saturday, where a number of attendees waved Brazilian flags and wore Brazilian soccer jerseys as Bolsonaro gave an address in Portuguese. Even the media organizations ringing the ballroom have been internationalized. Outlets linked to the Falun Gong and to the New Federal State of China, a dissident group led by Steve Bannon and his ally Guo Wengui, had prominent space next to conservative outlets like Newsmax and Real America’s Voice.

But this also reinforced the parochial nature of the event. CPAC may have attracted the Trump of Brazil, but it couldn’t draw rising post-Trump Republican stars like Ron DeSantis or Glenn Youngkin. It felt like the continuation of CPAC’s slow spiral from a can’t-miss conservative confluence to an increasingly shabby Trump-con that seems smaller and smaller each year. The cycle feeds itself, just like the once popular mall that attracts fewer customers as stores close, causing more and more stores to close, drawing even fewer customers. And it seems like the exact same demographic of people who only go to a struggling mall to get in their daily steps are the same ones still converging at CPAC to celebrate Trump. The Orange Julius may be gone, but there’s still plenty of kiosks peddling the Orange Donald.

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How a New DOJ Memo Sets Up Two Potential Trump Indictments

07 March 23

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How a New DOJ Memo Sets Up Two Potential Trump Indictments
Jose Pagliery, The Daily Beast
Pagliery writes: "When the Department of Justice took the position this week that former President Donald Trump acted improperly by urging his followers to attack Congress in 2021, prosecutors did more than open the door to a potential flood of civil lawsuits from police officers who were injured on Jan. 6."

What seemed like a narrow decision could have far-reaching implications.

When the Department of Justice took the position this week that former President Donald Trump acted improperly by urging his followers to attack Congress in 2021, prosecutors did more than open the door to a potential flood of civil lawsuits from police officers who were injured on Jan. 6.

What they actually did, according to legal scholars, is lay the groundwork for a potential criminal indictment against Trump for inciting the insurrection.

“If they took the position that the president was absolutely immune, then they wouldn’t be able to bring a criminal prosecution,” said one person familiar with the DOJ’s ongoing investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Legal scholars have come to the same conclusion.

“Had DOJ concluded that incitement unprotected by the First Amendment could nevertheless be within the president’s official functions, that could conceivably have impacted criminal charging decisions related to the same speech,” said Mary B. McCord, a former federal prosecutor now teaching at Georgetown University Law Center.

At the behest of the District of Columbia’s federal appellate court, the DOJ last week submitted a legal memo weighing in on a civil dispute by injured police officers. The department clarified that Trump’s speech, full of vitriol and fury, was not protected by presidential immunity, nor was it protected by his own free speech rights under the First Amendment.

“Such incitement of imminent private violence would not be within the outer perimeter of the Office of the President of the United States,” the DOJ wrote.

The department went out of its way to say it doesn’t necessarily support officer lawsuits against Trump, noting that it “expresses no view on that conclusion, or on the truth of the allegations in plaintiffs’ complaints.” But by making clear that Trump’s speech was outside the norms of his office, it stripped the former president of virtually any defense he could make.

“If they’re saying it’s outside the scope of immunity of civil suits, and outside the scope of protected speech, there really isn’t anything else out there protecting Trump,” said one attorney, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid rattling DOJ leadership.

The two indictments Trump could face are for his incitement of the Jan. 6 riot—a federal crime—and his attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia, a state case there.

So far, the Justice Department has not indicated its legal analysis of the looming federal case against Trump, which concerns the effort his campaign led to undermine the electoral vote by Congress. However, its new legal memo draws a clear red line on his actions during the lead up to the actual attack on Congress.

Trump’s defense lawyer, Jesse Binnall, did not reply to a request for comment.

In the current lawsuit, leaving Trump without a viable defense could cost him millions. But the ongoing grand jury investigation in Washington could lead to the first criminal indictment of a former American head of state.

Trump’s legal team is already gearing up for a fight over allegations that he broke the law by inciting a riot. However, sources briefed on DOJ special counsel Jack Smith's criminal investigation say they’re more concerned about potential charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States. That separate matter deals with the Trump campaign’s scheme to use fake state electors to usurp the official congressional tally of real votes.

Still, these sources noted that Trump still faces potential criminal liability over the way he encouraged his MAGA devotees to march on the Capitol building on that early 2021 winter afternoon. The violent attack didn’t stop Congress from certifying the electoral college votes, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington has undertaken a historic effort to prosecute more than 985 insurrectionists for savagely beating police officers, stealing from congressional offices, and forcing their way into the Capitol.

Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University, pointed out that the ongoing federal crackdown on insurrectionists could be interpreted as a buildup to a powerful case against the man who encouraged them to do it.

That said, Saltzburg noted, a criminal charge for inciting the violence that took place on Jan. 6 would be a footnote compared to the difficulty of assembling a mob-like takedown. That takedown would center around a conspiracy case built upon Trump lying to the American public about nonexistent election fraud and trying to circumvent the democratic system itself.

The District of Columbia appellate court still has to decide whether the police officers’ lawsuit can go forward, Saltzburg noted. And if the court is unconvinced by the DOJ’s position, the civil lawsuit would fail—but so would any criminal indictment for incitement.

“A criminal case would have no chance because of the higher burden of proof,” Saltzburg said.

By decisively planting a flag for the first time since Trump’s full-scale attack on efforts to stay in power, the Justice Department has also surprisingly handed some effective ammunition to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Her special purpose grand jury recently advised her office to seek indictments over Trump’s concerted effort to overturn Georgia’s election results and his intimidating phone call to the top elections official there.

“It has profound implications for the Georgia case, and they are ominous for Trump,” said Norm Eisen, an attorney who previously advised the House Judiciary Committee and helped build the case for Trump’s first impeachment.

By clarifying that some actions by a sitting president fall far outside legal behavior, the Justice Department has narrowly carved out just enough protection to leave Trump in the open. If encouraging an attack on Congress isn’t legal, neither is a ploy to band together fake electors and pressure an elections official into finding “11,780” Trump votes that didn’t exist, Eisen said.

“Indeed, the Georgia conduct may be even more outrageous and unrelated to his official duties or his First Amendment rights than giving a speech on the Ellipse,” Eisen told The Daily Beast. “This brief is going to be utilized by the Fulton County prosecutor because it is so powerfully indicative of the only possible logical conclusion here: that an attempted coup cannot be part of the job description of a president under the United States Constitution.”

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Southern Poverty Law Center Attorney Hit With Terrorism Charges After 'Cop City' Arrests A demonstration in response to the death of Manuel Terán, who was killed during a police raid inside Weelaunee People's Park, the planned site of a "Cop City" project, in Atlanta. (photo: Cheney Orr/Reuters)

Southern Poverty Law Center Attorney Hit With Terrorism Charges After 'Cop City' Arrests
Kelly Weill, The Daily Beast
Weill writes: "A legal observer with the National Lawyers Guild was arrested and charged with domestic terrorism while monitoring a Sunday night demonstration against an Atlanta police training facility that opponents have dubbed 'Cop City.'"

The National Lawyers Guild said that Thomas Jurgens, an attorney with the SPLC, was monitoring the Atlanta protest for the Guild at the time of his arrest.

Alegal observer with the National Lawyers Guild was arrested and charged with domestic terrorism while monitoring a Sunday night demonstration against an Atlanta police training facility that opponents have dubbed “Cop City.”

Thomas Jurgens is an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the civil-rights group confirmed on Monday. Jurgens also works with the National Lawyers Guild, which monitors protests. Jurgens was acting as a legal observer at the time of his arrest in Atlanta, the NLG said in a statement. He is one of more than 40 people charged with domestic terrorism in connection to protests against Cop City, raising concerns from civil liberties advocates.

“An employee at the SPLC was arrested while acting—and identifying—as a legal observer on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG),” the SPLC said in a statement. “The employee is an experienced legal observer, and their arrest is not evidence of any crime, but of heavy-handed law enforcement intervention against protesters.”

The proposed police training facility—a $90 million, 85-acre project on the current site of an Atlanta forest—has been the subject of long-running opposition from environmentalists, racial justice activists, and religious leaders. Tensions escalated at the proposed construction site in late 2022, when police began a series of arrests on domestic terrorism charges, even though many of the defendants are not accused of any illegal activity beyond misdemeanor trespassing, Grist reported at the time.

In January, police shot and killed the activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Paez Terán, whom they accused of shooting at them. The case is currently under investigation, but has fueled a fresh wave of demonstrations, including a Sunday night concert in the forest.

Some distance from the concert, demonstrators set fire to construction vehicles, hurling objects over a fence into a construction area, video shows. In a statement, Atlanta police said they had “detained” 35 people, 23 of whom were soon charged with domestic terrorism.

“On March 5, 2023, a group of violent agitators used the cover of a peaceful protest of the proposed Atlanta Public Safety Training Center to conduct a coordinated attack on construction equipment and police officers,” the Atlanta Police Department said in a statement. “They changed into black clothing and entered the construction area and began to throw large rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at police officers.”

Soon thereafter, concertgoers filmed mass arrests as police cleared out the makeshift music festival.

Aurielle Marie, a poet who won Georgia’s 2022 Author of the Year Award, attended the concert and live-tweeted the crackdown. “They were doing things like snatching and grabbing people indiscriminately and they ended up grabbing several legal observers who were there doing a protected job, which is to monitor protests,” Marie told The Daily Beast.

NLG legal observers are easy to identify, dressing in neon green hats to distinguish them both from protesters and police. Members of the group act as legal watchdogs at protests, recording potential abuses like police brutality. For its efforts, the group has sometimes become a target of the same forces it monitors. During protests in New York City in 2020, police were alleged to have given orders to “round up all the green hats.” The NLG legal observers who were targeted in that case later won a settlement in a federal lawsuit against the New York City Police Department.

Marie filmed police leading away one handcuffed NLG observer who was wearing the bright green cap. Although the man’s face is not visible in the short clip, he appears to have hair and a beard of the same color and length as Jurgens, and is wearing a light-green long-sleeved top, like Jurgens is wearing in his mugshot.

Reached for clarification on its statement, which describes the defendants as black-clad, the Atlanta Police Department referred The Daily Beast to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Jurgens has been charged with domestic terrorism, a rarely used Georgia statute that comes with a mandatory minimum of five years in prison if convicted, and a maximum detention of 35 years. Legal experts have raised concerns about the use of domestic terror charges against Atlanta activists.

“As someone who handled capital murder cases in Georgia, I can tell you Georgia law has a lot of ways to deal with violence against law enforcement or against anyone,” Patrick Keenan, a professor of law at the University of Illinois previously told NBC News. “So this domestic terrorism statute is not necessary and it can lead to this politicized use that I think doesn’t do anybody any good.”

As of Monday, more than 40 people are facing domestic terror charges related to the police training facility. The NLG and SPLC both issued statements condemning Jurgens’ arrest and police treatment toward Stop Cop City activists.

“Law enforcement detained at least 35 demonstrators in Atlanta on Sunday, including an NLG Legal Observer,” the NLG said in a statement. “All of these arrests are part of ongoing state repression and violence against racial and environmental justice protesters, who are fighting to defend their communities from the harms of militarized policing and environmental degradation. Each of these instances, including the many protesters charged with domestic terrorism, make clear that law enforcement views movement activists as enemies of the state.”

Marie said the moment calls for legal observers.

“As we’re aware, and the Atlanta Police Department is well aware, the legal observers are there to make sure the rights of protesters are not being infringed upon by law enforcement,” they said, “especially because of the death of Tortuguita that happened a month ago in the same forest.”

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Gavin Newsom Announces California Is 'Done' With Walgreens Due to Abortion Pill California governor Gavin Newsom. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage/EPA)

Gavin Newsom Announces California Is 'Done' With Walgreens Due to Abortion Pill
Mary Kekatos, ABC News
Kekatos writes: "California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday the state will not be doing business with Walgreens Boots Alliance over its decision not to dispense an abortion pill."

Walgreens said last week it would not dispense mifepristone in 20 states.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday the state will not be doing business with Walgreens Boots Alliance over its decision not to dispense an abortion pill.

Last week, the national pharmacy chain said it would not distribute mifepristone in 20 states after conservative attorneys general threatened legal action.

In a tweet, Newsom criticized the decision, writing, "California won't be doing business with Walgreens or any company that cowers to the extremists and puts women's lives at risk. We're done."

The governor's office did not immediately reply to ABC News' request for comment.

Last month, the group of attorneys general sent a letter to CVS and Walgreens saying that if they sold mifepristone, they would be in violation of the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that makes it illegal to send contraceptives, substances that induce abortion, pornographic content, sex toys and any written material about these items.

Several of the states that signed the letter -- including Alaska, Iowa, Kansas and Montana -- currently allow abortion access, including abortion medication, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group focusing on sexual and reproductive health.

In a statement to ABC News last week, Walgreens said it sent a letter to each of the attorneys general confirming it would not sell mifepristone in their states

"From the outset, we have made our intentions clear to become a certified pharmacy to distribute mifepristone wherever legally possible," a spokesperson said about the Newsom decision.

The spokesperson said Walgreen still intends to become certified under an FDA program to dispense the drug elsewhere but has not done so yet.

Newsom has been outspoken about his support of abortion rights. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade over the summer, he vowed to protect both women and healthcare providers.

"California must do everything it can to protect the fundamental rights of all women -- in California and beyond," Newsom said at the time. "California will continue to be a safe haven for all women seeking reproductive healthcare services in our state."

More than half of abortions in the U.S. are medication abortions, meaning they involved the use of mifepristone, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

The drug, which was authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000, works by blocking the hormone progesterone, which the body needs to continue a pregnancy.

This causes the uterine lining to stop thickening and to break down, detaching the embryo. The second drug, misoprostol, taken 24 to 48 hours later, causes the uterus to contract and dilates the cervix, which will expel the embryo.

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Yana "Yara" Rykhlitska's friends and acquaintances say that she did everything for the sake of victory, risked her life to help the wounded. (photo: Vadym Pavlov)

"Angel of the Troops": 29-Year-Old Paramedic Killed Near Bakhmut During Evacuation of Wounded
Ukrainska Pravda
Excerpt: "A 29-year-old volunteer and paramedic with the 93rd Kholodnyi Yar Mechanised Brigade, Yana 'Yara' Rykhlitska, has been killed near the city of Bakhmut."

A29-year-old volunteer and paramedic with the 93rd Kholodnyi Yar Mechanised Brigade, Yana "Yara" Rykhlitska, has been killed near the city of Bakhmut.

Yana died during the evacuation of the wounded – the ambulance she was moving in came under fire.

The tragedy was reported by Yana's family and friends.

Yana used to work in an insurance company before the war. After the full-scale invasion began, she volunteered, helping civilians and the military. Then she voluntarily joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces and worked as a medic at the stabilisation centre in the city of Bakhmut.

"A stabilisation point is a place where the wounded are bandaged and prepared for a long journey to the medics. So that they [the wounded] make it. I can't even comprehend the flow of wounded that was in Bakhmut. However, when I asked how it was going, [Yana] replied: "having fun, in one piece yet". [It was] a few hours before their medical evacuation vehicle came under fire," writes Yana's friend, Tetiana Zenart.

Yana’s friends and acquaintances say that she did everything for the sake of victory, risked her life to help the wounded.

"This is a dark day for all the tactical medics, tactical instructors and soldiers she helped. We will take revenge. Calmly, with cold rage inside, we are doing our job," volunteer Valerii Bahynskyi writes.

Vadym Pavlov, editor of a local Vinnytsia news outlet and a volunteer, also expressed his condolences over Yana's death.

"I met her a couple of times. At the front, she was called the 'Angel of the troops'. Rest in Peace," he says.

The paramedic's comrades posted a photo of a shell, which was labelled: "For Yara from Kholodnyi Yar".

Yana's parents refused to have a fundraising organised for themselves and urged everyone to donate to the needs of the Armed Forces in their daughter's memory.

"This is the will of Yana's parents. It is the last fundraising of Yana, who taught us that there are no impossible goals. She often signed her fundraisings with ‘for revenge’," says Tetiana Zenart.

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3 More Republican States Announce They're Leaving a Key Voting Data Partnership Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan)

3 More Republican States Announce They're Leaving a Key Voting Data Partnership
Miles Parks, NPR
Parks writes: "The Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, is a multi-state partnership that experts across the political spectrum say is the only reliable, secure way for states to share voter registration data with each other."

The Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, is a multi-state partnership that experts across the political spectrum say is the only reliable, secure way for states to share voter registration data with each other.

But on Monday, three Republican-led states announced they are pulling out of ERIC — leaving questions about the future of a system that up until recently was a bipartisan success story, as well as questions about how these three states will maintain accurate voter lists without such a resource.

"[ERIC] is a godsend," Paul Pate, the GOP secretary of state of Iowa, told NPR in an interview last month.

But state officials in Florida, Missouri and West Virginia have joined a growing number of Republicans who don't see it that way.

The states announced in tandem Monday that they were beginning the process to pull out, after weeks of tense negotiations over potential changes the organization could make to appease GOP members who have been facing constituent pressure about ERIC, in part due to a sustained misinformation campaign from the far-right.

Just last week, ERIC's executive director, Shane Hamlin, put out an open letter to, as he claimed, "set the record straight" amid misinformation about the compact.

In a press release Monday, Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, an appointee of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, said the voting organization didn't do enough to secure data privacy or "eliminate ERIC's partisan tendencies."

Just weeks ago, a January report from the Florida Department of State Office of Election Crimes and Security said it had "used data provided by ERIC to identify" hundreds of voters who appeared to have voted in Florida and in another ERIC member state in the same election.

Hamlin confirmed to NPR that ERIC had received the three states' requests for resignation. "We will continue our work on behalf of our remaining member states in improving the accuracy of America's voter rolls and increasing access to voter registration for all eligible citizens," he added in a statement.

How ERIC came to be

To be clear, for the first 10 or so years it was in existence, ERIC operated in obscurity.

Four of its founding seven state members were Republican-run, and its membership has slowly grown to include more than 30 states and governments across the political spectrum, from the more liberal-minded Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., to the conservative South Carolina and Texas.

The partnership allows states to use and share government data — from election offices as well as the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security Administration — to eliminate dead voters from the rolls, find the few people in every federal election who illegally vote twice, and also register eligible voters when they move to a new place.

"ERIC started with a question to election officials, which is: If you could fix one thing in elections that would make your job better, that would enable you to provide better services to voters, what would it be?" said David Becker, who helped found ERIC while he was working at the Pew Charitable Trusts a decade ago. "Every single election official we asked ... said voter registration."

The Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, even praises states for joining ERIC.

What changed for ERIC

But early last year, fringe conservative media began to target the organization — and Becker, who has remained involved with the organization as a non-voting board member.

The Gateway Pundit, a far-right publication, published in January 2022 the first of a series of articles painting ERIC as part of a liberal conspiracy to steal elections.

The two main villains at the heart of the conspiracy? The billionaire George Soros and Becker.

Becker now runs a separate nonprofit called the Center for Election Innovation and Research, which helped distribute hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated to election officials during the 2020 election cycle amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Some on the right have pointed to that work as evidence that Becker is a liberal activist, though NPR spoke with numerous current and former Republican election officials who say they have worked with Becker over the years and found him to be even-handed in his elections work.

Shortly after the first Gateway Pundit article published in 2022, Louisiana became the first state to begin the process of withdrawing its membership in ERIC, citing "concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports."

Other conservative media outlets published "investigations" that implied ERIC is a taxpayer-funded voter registration drive to help Democrats, and Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer who helped Donald Trump try to overturn the 2020 election, began focusing on the organization on her podcast, which is influential in election-denier circles.

In November, Alabama elected a new secretary of state, Wes Allen, who had made pulling out of ERIC one of his key campaign promises. On his first day in office, Allen sent a letter to ERIC's executive director, following through on that promise.

His Republican predecessor had praised ERIC.

In a recent interview with NPR, Allen said his office was "putting a plan together" to keep his state's voter registration list up to date without the data from across the country the state previously received from ERIC.

But election officials from across the political spectrum have told NPR that it is essentially impossible to replicate what ERIC does, and Alabama and Louisiana will now just have less up-to-date voter records.

In their separate announcements on Monday, Florida, West Virginia and Missouri did not explain how they will maintain the accuracy of their voter lists without data from ERIC.

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Protests Over Netanyahu's Judiciary Overhaul Spread to Israel's Military Israeli military reservists demonstrating near Jerusalem in February against proposed judicial changes by Israel's right-wing government. (photo: Amir Cohen/Reuters)

Protests Over Netanyahu's Judiciary Overhaul Spread to Israel's Military
Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley, The New York Times
Excerpt: "A plan by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to severely curtail the powers of Israel's Supreme Court has prompted weeks of demonstrations, rattled the country's technology sector and raised fears of political violence. Now, protests are emerging even within the nation's military."

The military leadership is concerned that anger over the government’s plan, with some pilots saying they will skip some training sessions and operations, could diminish military capabilities.

Aplan by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to severely curtail the powers of Israel’s Supreme Court has prompted weeks of demonstrations, rattled the country’s technology sector and raised fears of political violence.

Now, protests are emerging even within the nation’s military.

Hundreds of soldiers in the military reserves either have signed letters expressing a reluctance to participate in nonessential duty or have already pulled out of training missions, officials said. The affected units include the 8200 division that deals with signal and cyberintelligence and whose graduates have helped drive the country’s tech industry, as well as elite combat units.

The military leadership fears that growing anger within the ranks over the government’s plans will affect the operational readiness of Israel’s armed forces, according to senior military officials.

It is most concerned about unrest within the Air Force, with reserve duty pilots increasingly upset over the government plans, the officials said. They also fear that they may be asked to engage in illegal operations, and that restraints on Israel’s judiciary may strengthen foreign calls to prosecute them in the International Criminal Court, the officials said. Reserve duty pilots often lead Israel’s regular airstrikes on Syria and the Gaza Strip, and would be involved in any major Israeli attack on nuclear facilities in Iran.

The unrest within the military is the latest flare-up of opposition to the government’s plans to overhaul the judiciary after protests brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis to the streets of cities like Tel Aviv. Prominent American Jews have also criticized the plans, and on Sunday, Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, wrote in a New York Times guest essay that Mr. Netanyahu was “courting disaster.”

But for many Israelis, anger within the military is perhaps the most worrying and significant reaction to the plans, which would increase government control over how judges are chosen, limit the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down new legislation and make it easier for Parliament to overrule the court.

Nearly 50 squadron leaders representing hundreds of reserve pilots met on Friday with the head of the Israeli Air Force to express their misgivings about the government’s judicial overhaul efforts, according to five Israeli military officials who either attended the meeting or were briefed on it and who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The pilot corps is overwhelmingly staffed by reservists who usually report for duty three or four times a month.

Thirty-seven pilots from a key F-15 fighter jet squadron later wrote to the Air Force chief to say they would pull out of training for part of this week, while stressing that they remained available for combat missions, according to three officials briefed on the letter.

Many Israelis believe the government’s plan to overhaul the judiciary will undermine the country’s democracy. That view is shared by many military officers, a number of whom have participated in regular protests, even as an analysis of polling data from November’s general election suggested that the governing coalition also received strong support from rank-and-file soldiers.

To the government’s supporters, the judicial changes it is pushing through Parliament are an essential means of giving a majority of elected lawmakers primacy over unelected judges. But to critics, the overhaul would remove one of the few checks on government overreach, in a country lacking a formal Constitution, threatening Israel’s minority rights.

Both sides have accused each other of attempting a coup, and a recent poll suggested that more than a third of Israelis fear civil war could break out because of the crisis. Israelis have attended mass rallies every week against the proposals since the start of the year, in one of the longest and biggest waves of protests in Israeli history.

These tensions are roiling the military, which was previously perceived as a social leveler that unified otherwise fragmented parts of society and which remains essential to the security of a country that is locked in several low-intensity conflicts, including with Iran.

The meeting on Friday between the nearly 50 officers from the reserve pilot corps and the Air Force commander, Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar, was held at Air Force headquarters, and it was tense and emotional, participants said.

According to several military officials, the reservists’ concerns included worries about the judicial overhaul itself, as well as the fear that the government, which is led in part by far-right political leaders, might order them to enact something they deemed illegal.

Last week, a far-right minister in the Defense Ministry, Bezalel Smotrich, who also doubles as the finance minister, called for the state to “wipe out” a Palestinian town at the center of recent violence in the occupied West Bank. One of the participants at the meeting asked how a pilot could know with confidence that when given the coordinates to bomb a certain target, he would not be serving such a goal, according to three officials.

Because the overhaul would undermine judicial independence in Israel, it might bolster the argument that the Israeli court system is not fit to adjudicate on alleged crimes committed by Israelis, according to Roy Schondorf, a recently retired deputy attorney general for international legal affairs.

In turn, that might heighten pressure on prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague to charge Israeli officers, according to Mr. Schondorf, who oversaw efforts to protect Israeli officers from international prosecution.

While no formal threats to avoid reserve duty were made at the meeting itself, all but three of the 40 members of Squadron 69, a key strike force that flies F-15 fighter jets, later wrote to General Bar to withdraw from training for part of this week, but remain available for combat missions.

In a joint letter to Mr. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Monday, all 10 surviving former Air Force chiefs expressed “great concern” about the “processes happening in the state of Israel and in the Air Force.”

The letter added, “We are fearful for the consequences of these processes and the grave and palpable threat that can be perceived to the state of Israel.”

The government has largely dismissed the reservists’ concerns and warnings as the tantrums of a privileged elite fearful of losing its dominant role in society.

The wavering reservists are “not patriots,” Galit Distel Atbaryan, the minister of information, said in a social media post on Sunday night. “Not the salt of the earth. Not Zionists. Not the best of our guys. Not wonderful people. Not the people of Israel.”

On Monday evening, Mr. Netanyahu, who served as an officer in a commando unit, said in a speech that the reservists’ actions “threaten the foundation of our existence.”

“There is room for protest; there is no room for rejection” of military service, Mr. Netanyahu said, standing next to the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was prevented from serving in the Army during the 1990s because of concerns over his extremist views.

But some government members have appeared more conciliatory. “The situation requires that we talk, and quickly,” Mr. Gallant, the defense minister, said in a video statement.

There is also debate among reservists themselves about whether to bring politics into military service.

As reports of reservists’ discontent spread over the weekend, a reserve general in the Air Force, Ori Seiffert, wrote an open letter to fellow reservists, asking that they continue to serve as pilots despite opposing the judicial overhaul.

“Like many of us, I am also very disturbed and afraid of the direction” of the government, General Seiffert wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Times. But, he added, “We must maintain the power of the Air Force and the power of the Israel Defense Forces.”

“To my reservist brothers, I say, Protest and serve, serve and protest,” General Seiffert added.

Reservists who have already chosen to limit their volunteer duty said the decision had been extremely difficult. A reserve colonel in Unit 8200 — one of more than 500 reservists in the cyberdivision who signed a letter criticizing the overhaul — said that the decision had kept him up at night, and that he would swiftly return to service if war broke out.

“If we get into a situation where an offensive attack occurred against Israel,” said the 47-year-old colonel, who declined to be identified for fear of security threats from Israel’s foreign enemies, “all of us would be there to protect the citizens of Israel.”

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1,000 Super-Emitting Methane Leaks Risk Triggering Climate Tipping Points Methane emissions cause 25% of global heating today and there has been a "scary" surge since 2007, according to scientists. (image: Guardian Design/CATF/AP)

1,000 Super-Emitting Methane Leaks Risk Triggering Climate Tipping Points
Damian Carrington, Guardian UK
Carrington writes: "Methane emissions cause 25% of global heating today and there has been a 'scary' surge since 2007, according to scientists."
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