You’ve seen the videos of deadly encounters. What effect can a witness have?
The video was filmed on the night of Feb. 1, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Watch it, and the first words you hear are high-pitched with fear. “What’s going on?” a young Black man asks. He is standing on the sidewalk, wearing a bright yellow hoodie under a black jacket. “I’m so confused.”
The response comes in a booming voice, its source hidden from view by the blinding headlights of a police S.U.V. (Later, the camera will dip behind the lights, revealing three officers, one holding a large rifle, hoisted and aimed.) “We need to make sure you don’t have a gun,” an officer says. “I have no weapon,” the man pleads. “This is a speaker!”
By this point, those of us watching feel our own anxiety begin to spike. We’ve seen videos like this before, far too often. We know exactly how they go, exactly why the man in the yellow hoodie is so afraid. We brace for what’s coming.
But we’re not the only watchers. The street is crowded: There are cars driving past, people standing around, someone walking a fluffy dog. The bystanders, it starts to become clear, have seen this video before, too. Up and down the street, they begin to repeat the words of the man in the hoodie. “I have nothing on me!” he yells, and other voices chorus after: “He has nothing on him!” We can’t see most of the speakers, but we can hear their dread, their anger. “He has nothing on him!” “He’s holding a phone!”
Like any police encounter, this one was set off by a unique mix of events. The man in the yellow hoodie, a witness later told the Capitol Hill Seattle blog, came onto the street to calm down after an argument: The speaker in his hand was for listening to music; the “gunshot” sound that prompted the call to 911 was reportedly the sound of him slapping a stop sign. But like any police encounter of the present moment, its contours were sharpened and shaped by the history within which it unfolded.
It has been almost a decade since George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman in Florida, was acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old wearing a hoodie and carrying a pack of Skittles — “a real suspicious guy,” according to Zimmerman. Police violence against people of color was nothing new. But Martin’s death was followed by those of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Walter Scott and Philando Castile and an ever-growing list of victims. Over and over, videos emerged, revealing how often police narratives were incommensurable with what actually happened. Where police reported threats worthy of deadly force, viewers saw racist overreaction, often to ordinary or benign or misunderstood situations. They watched as a variety of possible outcomes — the other ways these stories could have gone, if only different decisions were made — dropped away, leaving only the most tragic.
And then came the 911 call from Capitol Hill in February, reporting a sound like gunfire. A young Black man in a hoodie holding something in his hand. Lights flashing and phone cameras recording.
In the video, the police keep telling the man in the hoodie that he should walk toward them, toward the bright glare of lights and the mouth of the rifle. He seems terrified and stays where he is, shouting that he’s unarmed. “The man ignored commands,” is the ominous description the police blotter later provides.
But the encounter is already beginning to go off script. A voice says, probably too quietly for the police to hear, “He’s not holding a gun — I’m more afraid of you.” Someone else says, more loudly, to the blazing light, “We’re much more scared of the [expletive] police in this situation than this guy.” Soon the cry echoes down the street: “No one has a gun except for you.”
Someone shouts at the police: “Calm down! Calm the [expletive] down!” A bystander in a green coat comes forward, offering to walk alongside the man in the hoodie so he’ll be safer approaching the police, but after agreeing, the man says, shakily, “I’m just getting on the ground” and falls to his knees. The dog walker comes protectively close; Green Coat positions himself between the man and the rifle. “Oh, God,” a voice somewhere behind the camera breathes, sure that the moment of crisis has arrived.
It never comes. On body-cam video released by the Police Department, officers shout repeatedly at the bystanders who crowd the scene: “You with the dog, get out of there!” Finally, one speaks into the radio. “We’re going to go ahead and disengage.” The officer with the gun lowers it, locks it up and begins to drive away.
When the police suddenly leave the scene, it feels bizarre: What is this, a gun-toting emergency or a nonevent? The camera doesn’t capture the aftermath for the man in the hoodie, who, according to a witness quoted by the Capitol Hill blog, was left “terrified and sobbing when it was all over.” The police-blotter version of the incident focuses on the abruptness of the departure: “Based on the number of community members becoming involved and their unwillingness to comply with officers’ commands, it became clear there was no safe means to detain the subject.”
What really stands out in the video is the remarkable power that witnesses can have. The panicked question that opens the video — “What’s going on?” — is the same one that animates so many police encounters, moments of confusion and alarm, met with the assertion of control. Here, though, the bystanders are evaluating all the potential dangers around them, but especially the ones that arrived with flashing lights. What they see is a perilous misunderstanding, a frightening escalation, the possibility of a terrible, and terribly familiar, conclusion — and a responsibility to act.
Contrary to the myth of the bystander effect, passers-by step in to help in a vast majority of public conflicts. But in cases where bystanders have disrupted police actions, even just by videotaping them, they’ve been arrested and charged with obstruction of justice. It’s not hard to imagine the scene playing out quite differently in a majority-Black neighborhood, or one that’s not Seattle’s Capitol Hill. The video was recorded just blocks from the East Precinct, which was abandoned during protests over the murder of George Floyd, and statistical analysis has indicated that police killings of Black and Hispanic people drop after protests against police violence.
This video didn’t go viral. It wasn’t even covered in The Seattle Times. It is, in a way, a document of nothing happening. Still, the nothing feels significant. For once, we get to see a video with a different ending.
Republican state attorneys general are threatening action against pharmacies that dispense it, as a federal lawsuit challenges the F.D.A.’s authority to approve it.
More than half of abortions in the United States are accomplished with pills, rather than with surgeries. So, when the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, last year, allowing states to regulate and prohibit abortion as they wish, an inevitable battle in the ensuing war was going to involve pharmacists. Mifepristone, which has been F.D.A.-approved for medication abortions since 2000, causes the uterine lining to break down, thereby terminating a pregnancy. A second drug, misoprostol, which is approved for multiple medical purposes, is used afterward to vacate the uterus. As states have banned or restricted abortion, access to these pills has become the focus of conflict in the new legal landscape.
A week after the Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Postal Service asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel for advice about an existing federal statute that makes it a felony to mail anything “designed, adapted or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.” The statute, which also prohibits mailing “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” materials, is a vestige of the Comstock Act of 1873, the work of Anthony Comstock, an infamous crusader against the corruption of public morals who became a special agent of the Postal Service. The question was whether that statute prohibits sending and delivering abortion drugs by mail. In December, the O.L.C. answered that the statute does allow the mailing of abortion pills “where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully,” and that the “mere mailing” of the pills does not establish that intent. That is because no states have banned abortion in all circumstances, with many retaining exceptions for rape or for protecting a pregnant person’s life. Abortion being legal in those circumstances, a pharmacist could lawfully mail the pills, even to states where abortion is mostly illegal, because the sender would lack the intent that the pills would produce abortions of the unlawful kind.
Earlier this year, the F.D.A. announced that retail pharmacies could become certified to dispense mifepristone, including by shipping it to patients, and Walgreens announced that it would apply for certification. In response, nearly two dozen Republican state attorneys general sent letters to Walgreens, CVS, and other large pharmacies, claiming that the statute’s “plain text” prohibiting the mailing of any materials “for producing abortion”—and not what they called the O.L.C.’s “bizarre interpretation”—should be decisive. The A.G.s warned that, regardless of the federal government’s view, they could enforce the statute through civil litigation. And, they noted, many state laws also disallow using the mail to send and receive abortion drugs.
The O.L.C.’s interpretation is based on twentieth-century federal cases that declined to construe the statute literally, as doing so would criminalize the mailing of items that have lawful purposes, just because they can also be used for unlawful ones. Conservatives maintain that the statute makes no distinction between lawful and unlawful abortions, and so it prohibits mailing things intended to produce abortions, full stop.
Danielle Gray, Walgreens’ global chief legal officer, quickly responded to the red-state A.G.s by clarifying that the company will still seek certification to dispense mifepristone, but that it does not intend to ship it to people in their states. Gray was a law clerk for Merrick Garland when he was a judge on the D.C. Circuit, and for Justice Stephen Breyer when he was on the Supreme Court, and during the Obama Administration she served in the White House counsel’s office and as the Cabinet Secretary. She is plenty confident when it comes to legal interpretation.
The Walgreens decision, though, has resulted in calls for boycotts, a drop in the company’s stock, and blowback from Democratic governors, including Gavin Newsom, of California, whose office is withdrawing from a fifty-four-million-dollar contract with the company and “reviewing all relationships between Walgreens and the state.” Notwithstanding accusations of cowardice for “caving” to Republican threats, however, a different decision by Walgreens or other companies could subject pharmacists to criminal liability and civil actions. Even federal prosecutions for mailing the pills are imaginable if a Republican Administration is installed and rejects the Biden O.L.C.’s opinion. And federal courts, now filled with Trump appointees, may well highlight the statute’s text, rather than past court interpretations. Not to mention that defying state A.G.s could place the companies’ state pharmaceutical licenses at risk.
A precursor to the mailing of pills, of course, was the F.D.A.’s approval of them, which is now also under legal attack, twenty-three years after the fact. Last month, nearly two dozen Republican-led states filed an amicus brief supporting a federal lawsuit in Texas, claiming that approving mifepristone for abortion had violated the F.D.A.’s own rules. The regulations, they said, permit approval of drugs “that have been studied for their safety and effectiveness in treating serious or life-threatening illnesses,” which they allege does not cover pregnancy. The judge in the case, a pro-life Trump appointee, may order the agency to rescind its approval of the drug, and possibly halt its availability nationwide.
That lawsuit was countered last month by a separate one, in which twelve Democratic states are asking a federal court in Washington State to find the F.D.A.’s approval of mifepristone valid and prevent its removal from the market. The suit also challenges the agency’s special restrictions on access to the drug—for example, the requirement that pharmacies be certified to dispense it and, further, that they confirm that the prescription is from a certified provider. If the two federal cases result in conflicting orders, the Supreme Court will soon find itself presented with another abortion case. So much for federal courts getting out of the “abortion-umpiring business,” as Justice Antonin Scalia once put it.
But, beyond lawsuits and boycotts, the proper target for pro-choice complaints is Congress. It has not managed to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would establish a federal statutory abortion right to replace the constitutional right that the Court removed. And it has never repealed the Comstock Act, leaving us in the situation where nineteenth-century sexual morality now shapes the twenty-first-century abortion debate. Still, as the branch constitutionally empowered to make laws for the nation, Congress should, at the very least, amend the statute to make it clear that drugs can be mailed for lawful abortions. Alas, that would resolve but one legal interpretative front in the ongoing war of red versus blue states, and of federal versus state governments.
Being a public servant is one of the hardest jobs in the country right now, thanks the threat of far-right conspiracy theorists. Nina Jankowicz tells American Voices host Alicia Menendez about what it’s like to be at the center of a right-wing conspiracy theory.
NEW: Unearthed footage SCREWS Trump over bank collapse
To tell Georgia DA Fani Willis to charge Trump for interfering in the 2020 election, sign here 👉 https://odaction.com/georgia-charge-1...
INTERVIEW: Brian interviews legal analyst and prosecutor @GlennKirschner2 about Matt Gaetz’s rapidly devolving scandal, including a glaring hole in his story and how a pardon might still factor into all of this.
As former President Donald Trump faces multiple legal jeopardies, Congressman Adam Schiff of California joins Ali Velshi with a major question on his mind: If Manhattan is moving forward with investigating Donald Trump, why didn’t the Justice Department? “They said Michael Cohen had to go to jail for his role in that so what's the argument that the guy who directed and coordinated the scheme gets a pass?” Schiff also notes that as the path to 2024 widens, Donald Trump’s threat of “retribution” is merely a ploy. “This is Donald Trump doing what he does best sadly, tragically, and that is played the victim and appeal to people's sense of victimhood.”
Jonathan Capehart and Rep. Katie Porter discuss the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) taking control of Silicon Valley Bank and its deposits after the bank shut down in what is the largest U.S. bank failure since the global financial crisis more than a decade ago.
The worst people on earth assembled for CPAC 2023, and I gotta tell you, it was the most deranged, pathetic, and low energy event in front of a tiny crowd that we've ever seen. MeidasTouch contributor Gabe Sanchez sat through the whole thing so you didn't have to. Watch all the madness on this episode of 'What Was That?'
Asecond autopsy of an environmental activist who was shot and killed by the Georgia State Patrol on Jan. 18 shows their hands were raised when they were killed, lawyers for their family say. The full autopsy report will be released at a press conference Monday.
The 26-year-old protester, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, was killed in an Atlanta-area forest while police cleared an encampment of activists who oppose the construction of Atlanta's "Cop City" — or Public Training Safety Facility. Terán went by Tortuguita.
"Both Manuel's left and right hands show exit wounds in both palms. The autopsy further reveals that Manuel was most probably in a seated position, cross-legged when killed," lawyers said in a press release.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation says officers killed Tortuguita in self-defense after they shot a state trooper, but the City of Atlanta released videos in which an officer suggests the trooper may have been injured by friendly fire.
The Atlanta Police Department said that the "officers had no immediate knowledge of the events at the shooting site" before making their comments, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said that officer's speculation is not evidence.
Tortuguita's family has sued for the release of more information under the Georgia Open Records Act, the press release says.
"Imagine the police killed your child. And now then imagine they won't tell you anything. That is what we are going through," Belkis Terán, Tortuguita's mother, said in a statement.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation hasn't released the government's autopsy report or met with Tortuguita's family, and it blocked the City of Atlanta from releasing more video evidence. It has said there's no body camera or dashcam footage of the shooting, and that ballistics evidence shows the bullet that injured the trooper came from a gun belonging to Tortuguita.
"The actions of the GBI to prevent inappropriate release of evidence are solely intended to preserve the integrity of the investigation and to ensure the facts of the incident are not tainted," the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said.
The family's lawyers dispute this rationale. Attorney Brian Spears said in a statement that the agency "has had more than enough time to interview all witnesses. Once those interviews are complete, there is no reason to withhold this evidence."
The training facility is set to cost $90 million and take up 85 acres of land in the South River Forest, which is an important area of green space that the City of Atlanta has described as one of its four "lungs." Tortuguita was one of the forest defenders camping out on the site to prevent its development.
At a press conference at a Stop Cop City children's march and rally on Saturday, Tortuguita's mother shared memories of Tortuguita cleaning beaches in Panama, where their family is from, and of them feeding and sheltering people everywhere they lived.
"I'm suffering," Belkis Terán said. "But this suffering is giving to me power — power to fight, power to stand."
The expected approval of the massive Willow oil project would be just the latest shift by Biden toward the political center before a potential reelection bid.
President Joe Biden’s allies in the climate movement are bracing for their biggest setback from his administration as he moves closer to approving an Alaskan oil project that would pump as much carbon into the atmosphere as 60 coal-burning power plants.
The administration is expected to approve ConocoPhillips’ plans to build its proposed Willow project on federal land in the Arctic tundra, according to three people at environmental groups who have talked to the White House and Interior Department in recent days about it. But there is no indication yet that Biden himself has signed off on it, and the administration appears to be still trying to decide how big the project would be, these people said.
The White House insisted Friday and Saturday that the administration has made “no final decisions” about the project. But administration officials have touted the importance of oil production in recent months, and people outside the administration said they had been expecting the approval to be announced this past Friday.
Biden pledged to halt new oil and gas development on federal land during his 2020 campaign, and he and Democrats in Congress passed landmark climate legislation last summer aimed at weaning huge swaths of the economy off of fossil fuels. But the surge in oil prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced the administration into an awkward embrace of the oil industry, as Biden countered Republican accusations that his policies were to blame for the skyrocketing price at the gas pump that was stoking inflation.
Approving Willow would be just the latest shift by Biden toward the political center as he moves toward a potential reelection bid. He similarly dismayed liberals last week by saying he would not veto a GOP-led repeal of changes to D.C.’s criminal code.
The White House defended Biden’s environmental record Saturday in comments to POLITICO, saying Biden’s policies have made the U.S. “a magnet for clean energy manufacturing and jobs” with policies that help the U.S. come closer to meeting climate goals. A White House official said that using oil and gas is still consistent with Biden’s near- and long-term emissions targets, which the official said the U.S. is on track to meet.
“This approach has not changed — nor will it. Our climate goals are cutting emissions in half by 2030 and reaching net-zero by 2050 — not 2023,” the official said. “That has always meant that oil will continue to be a part of the energy mix in the short-term while we shore up domestic clean energy production for the long-term.”
Environmental groups acknowledged Saturday that they were largely in the dark about the White House’s plans, but said they believed that the current discussions inside the administration were largely over whether to limit the number of drilling sites at the Willow project to two rather than three. Conoco had proposed building five well pads.
“It sounds like different groups in the White House are still discussing” the potential size of the project, said one environmental advocate who had been in contact with the administration late Friday.
“They told us they had nothing to offer” on the state of project deliberations, added the person, who was granted anonymity to describe internal White House deliberations.
But if the reports of the approval are true, Biden’s shift to the center on oil would threaten to demoralize the climate activists he needs to support him in 2024, said Jamal Raad, co-founder and senior adviser of the group Evergreen Action.
“It will be harder for us and climate activists to rally around this president come next year,” Raad said, explaining the action would detract from his many accomplishments, such as the $370 billion in climate and clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, while putting the onus on Biden to issue tougher environmental rules on cars and power plants.
Conoco declined to comment until it hears a decision directly from the administration.
Conoco Chief Executive Ryan Lance last week urged the administration to approve Willow, saying the project was in line with the Biden administration’s recent exhortations to the industry to increase oil production to help batten down prices.
“This is exactly what this administration has been asking our industry to do over the last couple of years,” Lance told an energy conference in Houston.
Regardless of the size, any plan would call for drilling oil and building miles of pipelines and roads, a gravel pit, an air strip and other infrastructure in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a 36,875-square-mile patch of federal land in the relatively undeveloped Arctic wilderness. It would produce as much as 600,000 barrels of oil over its three-decade lifetime.
The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, originally set aside by the Harding administration for potential oil drilling in 1923, is outside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, another swath of northern Alaska that Biden has declared off-limits for oil development.
Environmentalists said they were still holding onto hope based on the administration’s denial that it made a final decision to OK the project, despite multiple news reports saying that an announcement of the approval would be made in the coming days. (Bloomberg News first reported Friday night that the administration had decided to greenlight it.)
“Great! Then there is still time to turn this all around!!!” Natural Resources Defense Council spokesperson Anne Hawke posted on Twitter after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denied on Friday that a final decision had been made.
Hawke also reached out to Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg for help persuading Biden, tweeting at the young advocate: “In just days, the US will approve a massive oil project in Alaska. Can you help us tell US @POTUS to #StopWillowProject?”
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a longtime climate advocate, expressed dismay at the news.
“We cannot allow the Willow Project to move forward,” he tweeted late Friday. “We must build a clean energy future — not return to a dark, fossil-fueled past.”
An approval, if it comes, would infuriate environmental groups and continue a year-long strengthening of the administration’s relationship with the oil industry. But it would also come as market analysts are forecasting that oil prices will remain volatile for the next several years, which would make killing the project politically tricky.
Biden himself has softened his rhetoric on transitioning the country away from fossil fuels, and he has repeatedly pressed the oil and gas industry to increase production in the short term to keep prices lower.
The Willow development is the rare large-scale oil project to be announced in recent years in the United States, where the industry has instead shifted its focus to drilling smaller, cheaper and faster projects using fracking to tap into shale fields in the Southwest. If approved, construction could start soon, and additional construction in Alaska’s North Slope for Willow will occur throughout the summer and fall, the company has said.
Alaskan native tribes have expressed split opinions on the project, with some warning it would degrade their environment and others welcoming its potential economic gains.
“The Willow Project is a new opportunity to ensure a viable future for our communities, creating generational economic stability for our people and advancing our self-determination,” said Nagruk Harcharek, president of the nonprofit Voice of Arctic Iñupiat, in a statement Saturday. “North Slope Iñupiat communities have waited nearly a generation for Willow to advance.”
Yet that urgency to develop the project, and the signals from the White House, were disheartening to environmental groups.
“To us, it all sucks because it flies in the face of meeting our climate goals. So we’re going to keep fighting until there is a final record of decision,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs with the League of Conservation Voters.
Some of Biden’s green allies suggested the move could have repercussions for Democrats in 2024. Along with the long-debated Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, which Biden effectively killed in one of his first acts as president, Willow has joined the ranks of fossil fuel projects that in earlier decades would have flown under radar but have now taken on outsized political significance.
The Biden administration is caught in the middle, hyping the Inflation Reduction Act it signed into law as the biggest climate-related legislation ever but also asking companies to keep pumping barrels to keep fuel prices low in the here-and-now. That law has also won praise from the oil and gas sector for its incentives for carbon capture and storage and clean hydrogen – technologies the fossil fuel producers are pursuing.
Raad, from Evergreen Action, said the Willow project “was something that really took the internet and social media by storm the last few weeks – because it is a physical thing and a physical place that feels real.” And that has implications for Biden’s hopes for reelection, he added.
“There’s just no escaping the fact that we’re going to need to rally young folks and folks interested in climate next year to win,” Raad said. “And this does not help in any shape or form.”
Deirdre Shelly, campaigns director with the youth environmental group Sunrise Movement, said her organization is already strategizing for the next election and that approving Willow would make organizers’ jobs more difficult.
“This is just a huge disappointment. … It does feel like an about-face,” she said. “It makes it even harder for us to convince young people that they need to vote, that the Democratic Party leaders will act on climate.”
But the administration also felt heavy pressure from the oil industry and the state’s politically powerful Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski has long championed Willow as a needed boost to the Alaskan economy, which has been troubled for years as the overall oil industry has picked up stakes to move to the cheaper opportunities in the Lower 48.
Oil and gas companies and energy-state lawmakers would have been ready to blame the rejection of Willow for any subsequent rise in energy costs, even though the Biden Interior Department has approved new permits to drill on public land at a faster rate than his predecessors.
Murkowski, speaking Friday in Houston before the announcement, said she had met with the White House last week to warn that the administration was legally bound to approve the project, given that Conoco held oil leases on federal land.
“The fact of the matter is these are valid existing leases that Conoco holds,” Murkowski told reporters. “If the administration [had] basically not allowed them to be able to access those leases, what follows then? … Alaska litigation is always something that we have to reckon with.”
A surge of citizens snitching on each other for anti-war comments is reportedly landing Russians across the country in jail.
Russian citizens are ratting each other out to authorities in droves for anti-war comments made in bars, beauty salons, and grocery stores in roughly a dozen cities across the country, according to a new report from the independent Russian news outlet Vrestka.
Legal filings obtained by the outlet from Moscow, Bryansk, Novosibirsk, and other cities indicate that citizens have been turned in for “violations” as minor as cracking a joke about the war, listening to Ukrainian music, or even just talking about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion in a public space.
Many of those jailed after being reported by other citizens were charged under Article 20.3.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation, a new law signed by Putin last year criminalizing “public actions aimed at discrediting” Russian Armed Forces.
One Russian man from Bryansk, Mikhail Kolokolnikov, was reportedly fined and jailed for two days after a stranger called authorities on him for saying the phrase “Glory to Ukraine” at a bar on Jan. 15. In an interview with Vrestka, Kolokolnikov said that two officers stormed the bar shortly after he said the phrase to another man, demanding to know, “Who said ‘Glory to Ukraine’ here?”
“The other day, a rocket hit a house in Dnipro,” Kolokolnikov, who was born in Ukraine, told the outlet—explaining why he said the slogan in a public place. “And I used to walk past this house every day to the beach, along the Pobeda embankment. In short, I was still a little angry because of this.”
In another case, Chita resident Ivan Sleponogov was jailed after being accused of saying an anti-war slogan during an Easter church service last April, according to a legal complaint. Sleponogov had allegedly claimed that he was actually chanting “Glory to the guys who died in Ukraine!” in reference to Russian soldiers who were killed in combat, and the case was eventually dropped—after Sleponogov had spent 10 days in jail.
Other cases detailed in the Vrestka investigation include complaints made against Russian citizens for playing a Ukrainian song in the car while driving, drunkenly making pro-Ukrainian statements from a balcony, and criticizing the war in private conversations with friends at a coffee shop. The individuals who made the complaints allegedly include eavesdropping neighbors, coworkers, and janitors.
In many of the cases, according to the outlet, little to no evidence was provided by witnesses who reported the alleged violations.
In some court filings, however, the “anti-war” sentiments allegedly expressed by accused citizens are not so subtle. In Serpukhov, a city near Moscow, two Russian army veterans accused Yuri Nemtov of approaching them at a shopping mall last November with some choice words. “Well, invaders! Go there to die like meat!” he allegedly said.
Stefan Kalb was in the middle of a meeting around 1 p.m. on Thursday when a fellow company executive sent him a panicked Slack message: "Do you know what's happening at SVB?"
Kalb, the CEO and co-founder of Seattle-based food management startup Shelf Engine, had been following news of a bank run at Silicon Valley Bank, with droves attempting to pull out $42 billion from the bank on Thursday alone on fears that it was teetering on the brink.
The bank was on firm financial footing on Wednesday. The following day, it was under water.
For Shelf Engine, a 40-person startup founded in 2015 that uses artificial intelligence to help grocery stores reduce food waste, this was a major problem.
Not only did Silicon Valley Bank help the company process checks and payments, but all of the startup's cash was locked up in the bank.
Kalb sprung into action. He and his team quickly opened an account at JPMorgan Chase and attempted to wire transfer every last penny out of Silicon Valley Bank.
"Unfortunately, our wire was not honored and our money is still at Silicon Valley Bank," Kalb, 37, said in an interview on Friday. "We woke up this morning hoping the money would be in that JPMorgan bank account, and it was not."
While he declined to provide the exact amount, he noted that Shelf Engine has raised more than $60 million from investors. "It was a very large sum of money," he said of the transfer.
It is a nail-biting limbo state that many tech startups deeply entrenched in Silicon Valley Bank are now facing in the wake of the bank's implosion, the largest American bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis.
For tech startups, which for decades have relied heavily on the bank based in Santa Clara, Calif., it has set off a crisis that could lead to mass layoffs, or hundreds of startups collapsing, according to industry insiders.
"If the government doesn't step in, I think a whole generation of startups will be wiped off the planet," Garry Tan, president and CEO of the startup incubator Y Combinator, said in an interview.
While critics consider the idea of the government rescuing the bank a bailout for the tech and venture capital world, Tan argues that such a move would save depositors, many of which are small businesses in the tech sector.
An 'existential risk' to innovation and competition in America
Founded over a poker game in 1983, Silicon Valley Bank became the go-to lender for tech startups that appeared too risky in the eyes of larger, more traditional banks. Eventually, Silicon Valley Bank would come to do business with nearly half of all U.S. tech startups backed by venture capitalists.
"If you're a high-growth startup, you can't get a credit card from a normal credit card provider, you can't get a loan from a big bank, but Silicon Valley Bank would give you that," Shelf Engine's Kalb said. "It's these services that startups couldn't get elsewhere."
Silicon Valley Bank did business with well-known tech companies including Shopify, Pinterest, Fitbit and thousands of lesser-known startups, in addition to established venture capital firms, like Andreessen Horowitz.
Roku, the TV streaming provider, was among the companies caught in the middle to the tune of $487 million, it said in a regulator filing on Friday. "At this time, the company does not know to what extent the company will be able to recover its cash on deposit at SVB," officials at Roku wrote of what amounts to about 26% of the company's cash.
Tan, with Y Combinator, which helped launch startups including Airbnb, Reddit and Instacart, said the biggest threat right now is not to the Rokus of the world, but rather to the scrappy startups that were already fighting to stay alive amid a challenging fundraising environment.
Startup leaders have been reaching out to him nonstop since Silicon Valley Bank failed with a sense of dread and fear — and increasingly confronting what could be inevitable layoffs, or even the end of their companies.
"Founders are texting me now and saying they don't know how to make payroll next week. Will they have to take out personal loans to keep the business running? Do they have to furlough workers?" Tan said. "This can be an existential risk to competition and innovation in the American economy for the next decade."
While most banking experts do not expect the fallout from Silicon Valley Bank's collapse to spread to other parts of the financial world, how much money depositors will be able to recoup remains an open question.
Silicon Valley Bank failure comes amid 'challenging' time for startups
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has said that depositors will be able to access up to $250,000 of their funds by Monday morning. Any amount above that will result in a "receivership certificate."
And when the FDIC sells the assets of Silicon Valley Bank, those with certificates will receive payments — but how long that will take, and what amount of money will be paid back, remains unclear.
According to Silicon Valley Bank filings, as little as about 4% of the bank's deposits are below $250,000, meaning the vast bulk of depositors have money that exceeds standard federal insurance.
Kalb said he is exploring debt financing, or other lines of credit, in order to survive.
Securing $250,000 from the FDIC would allow the startup to stay open for an additional several days, but not much longer.
He just paid his employees this week, and his next payroll deadline is March 20.
"If we don't have access to capital by then, we're going to have to make some very difficult decisions," he said.
The meltdown of one of Silicon Valley's cornerstone financial institutions could not have come at a worse time for the startup ecosystem, said Tan of Y Combinator.
High interest rates and market uncertainty has made lenders tighten the spigot on money, after many years of low interest rates and easy money sent valuations soaring.
Lately, entrepreneurs have been raising alarms about existing cash quickly evaporating, forcing thousands of startups to lay off workers or shutter altogether.
Into those bruising conditions comes the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, considered a financial pillar of the startup world.
"Venture capital funding had already been in a contraction mode," Tan said. "So this is really a challenging time for something so devastating to happen."
Donald Trump is in so much trouble that his trials are starting to run into one another, and now his lawyers might get in trouble for fooling judges into delaying them all.
Faced with an onslaught of expensive lawsuits ranging from fraud to racketeering, former President Donald Trump is desperately trying to delay several trials well into the 2024 presidential election season—and he was just called out for the scheme.
Trump’s lawyers have until Wednesday to explain how they tried to play two New York judges off each other by double-booking trials to potentially delay them both.
Trump already pushed back a potential late 2023 trial over duping investors to Jan. 2024, citing a conflict with the New York Attorney General’s trial over his fake financial statements to banks. But when Trump’s team recently sought to delay that AG trial, they got caught.
An attorney has alerted U.S. District Judge Lorna G. Schofield in federal court and Justice Arthur F. Engoron in state court that they may be getting played.
“Donald Trump has a history of leveraging his presidential-campaign activities to delay and avoid judicial proceedings,” attorney Roberta Kaplan wrote in a letter sent to both judges. “We anticipated that, should the case schedule run into 2024, Mr. Trump will begin to argue that his campaign obligations must take precedence over his participation in this case, including at trial.”
One retired state judge, who asked not to be quoted because he still oversees New York legal disputes, likened the Trump tactic to a child who separately asks parents for permission to eat more and more candy to trick them both into a better deal.
Randolph M. McLaughlin, a law professor at Pace University, called it an apt analogy—particularly because Trump eventually got caught.
“When children do this—go from one parent to another—if the parents aren’t aware of what the kid is doing, the kid can get away with things. But once the parent is aware the child is playing them against each other, the game is over,” he said.
McLaughlin stressed how rare it is for a lawyer to do what Kaplan did: contact a judge in a separate case to flag questionable behavior.
“I’ve never seen a situation like this where a lawyer who’s not before the court puts the court on notice on what the defendant is doing in the federal case. I think Engoron is going to slam with this,” McLaughlin said. “It’s highly irregular. Then again, we’ve never seen so many actions filed against one person all over the place.”
Justice Engoron has not yet responded to Kaplan’s letter. But he has previously dragged Trump’s lawyers into his courtroom to explain their delay tactics in the past—at one point sanctioning the former president $10,000 a day for refusing to turn over documents and slowing down AG Letitia James’ investigation. Trump was eventually ordered to pay a $110,000 fine.
By contrast, Judge Schofield immediately ordered Trump’s lawyers to explain themselves in writing by March 15.
Trump’s defense attorneys, Clifford S. Robert and Alina Habba, did not respond to questions from The Daily Beast. Instead, a spokeswoman for the team offered a statement saying, “We maintain the utmost confidence that our client will be vindicated at the upcoming trial.”
Kaplan, who wrote the letter on behalf of the investors who argue they were duped by Trump, did not respond to a request for comment. Kaplan has repeatedly called out Trump for his delay tactics in another case she’s working on for journalist E. Jean Carroll, who says Trump raped her in the 1990s—and defamed her when she went public decades later. In that third case, a federal judge has resisted Trump’s attempts to push the trial into later this year.
The two cases in question here are vastly different, but both have one common factor: lies.
In federal court, angry investors say Trump and the adult children he made executives used NBC’s The Apprentice show to knowingly hawk a crappy videophone—one that turned out to be a sour investment. In state court, the New York AG accuses the Trumps and their family company of routinely lying to banks by faking financial statements and inflating property values.
In her letter concerning those two cases, Kaplan noted that Trump’s lawyer, Clifford Robert, agreed to a “firm” trial date in federal court—only to try and push the state court trial, too.
“Based on Mr. Robert’s prior estimate that trial in that case will take longer than eight weeks, the delay that the [Trumps] are now seeking in the NYAG Case would almost inevitably risk interfering with the January 29, 2024 trial date the court has set for this case,” she wrote.
The last-minute request to postpone trials is “consistent with the pattern of delay” judges keep seeing from the Trumps, she said.
Alan David Marrus, a retired state judge in Brooklyn, noted that Kaplan’s “extraordinary action in contacting this judge directly” was “aggressive and unusual.” He explained that Kaplan could have been discreet and done it the way lawyers usually do—by simply notifying the AG and letting the government lawyers do it instead.
“ As a former judge, I would find it very disconcerting to receive a letter from a lawyer in another case,” he said, adding that the tactics exhibited by the Trump team show why “transparency is really something we would expect from the lawyers.”
Marrus, who retired in 2016, now runs a civil wedding officiant service called Judges for Love.
The nation’s inundated court system—with too few practitioners and too many cases—often results in schedule scrimaging, with lawyers and judges coordinating calendar dates months ahead of time. Some attorneys use that to their advantage, double booking important hearings or trials and hoping that one of them just falls through. When that happens, lawyers tend to lean on local, elected state judges to give way to the whims of Senate-confirmed federal judges, who have lifetime tenure and greater stature.
“I’ve certainly had the experience of being told by lawyers, ‘I can’t do it because somebody else has scheduled something.’ Very often, people try to trump the state courts with the federal courts,” said Carolyn E. Demarest, a retired New York justice who oversaw the entire commercial division in Brooklyn for more than a decade.
But going back and forth? That’s basically unheard of.
“I would think any judge—including me—would be furious if I found out somebody was trying to play me,” Demarest said. “Usually the judge takes very seriously a firm trial date and does not schedule anything in conflict for themselves. That’s frustrating everybody.”
Outside of New York, Trump’s army of attorneys has been busy trying to slow down the FBI’s investigation of his mishandling of classified records at his gilded Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida, the Department of Justice review of his attempt to overturn the 2020 election to stay in office, and the Fulton County District Attorney’s probe into his meddling in Georgia’s election. These varied attempts have had limited success, but all of these law enforcement efforts continue to plow forward and are expected to result in multiple indictments later this year.
McLaughlin, the law school professor, said Trump’s games are over.
“Delays work for the defendant. But you can only run the clock out so long. Eventually, judges get wise to this. And I think they’re getting wise,” he said. “They’re playing games with the legal system. It can be an effective strategy, when you have one or two cases. But he’s being pilloried all over the country in New York, Georgia, and D.C. It’s like he’s trying to stop the waterfall.”
At desk, from left: Eric Alexander, senior advocate at the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, Carissa McGee, a formerly incarcerated person in New Mexico, and Denali Wilson, an ACLU of New Mexico staff attorney, speak to lawmakers about juvenile life sentences at the New Mexico Capitol on Jan. 24. (photo: Minesh Bacrania/ProPublica)
New legislation would require the New Mexico Corrections Department to help schedule parole hearings for prisoners given life sentences as children. But the agency wasn’t aware of at least 21 “juvenile lifers” in its custody.
The New Mexico Corrections Department has lost track of nearly two dozen prisoners in its custody who are serving life sentences for crimes they committed as children, an error that could keep these “juvenile lifers” from getting a chance at freedom under a bill likely to be passed by the state Legislature within days.
As the legislation was being drafted, ProPublica asked the department for a list of all state prisoners who were sentenced to life as juveniles. Using court records, the news organization then identified at least 21 such individuals not on the state’s list. Many of them had been locked up for decades.
Denali Wilson, a staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who helped discover the problem, said such carelessness on the part of the state government makes it plain that “when you throw away kids in adult prison, they are lost.”
Or as one of the forgotten prisoners, Sigmundr Odhinnson, told ProPublica in an email from behind bars, “We are, quite literally, missing children.”
This is not just a philosophical issue. The New Mexico Legislature is on the cusp of passing a bill that would give a new shot at parole to all state prisoners serving life or lengthy sentences for crimes they committed when they were juveniles, provided that they have served at least 15 to 25 years of their time, depending on their offense.
But to do that, the corrections department will first need to identify all of these individuals to help schedule their parole hearings.
“When the entity that is imprisoning people isn’t a reliable source for who it is imprisoning, how do we know the people exist?” said Wilson.
The New Mexico legislation is premised on multiple recent Supreme Court decisions and studies of brain science finding that kids are impulsive, prone to risk-taking, bad at understanding the consequences of their actions and highly susceptible to peer pressure (often committing their offenses among groups of friends), all of which make them less culpable than adults when they commit crimes. They are also, according to the high court, more capable of redemption.
The bill wouldn’t guarantee freedom to juvenile lifers in New Mexico, but it would provide them a chance to articulate to the state parole board how they have changed, including whether they’ve taken accountability for their actions, followed prison rules and completed educational programming.
Prosecutors opposed the legislation in previous years but dropped their opposition after changes were made to account for the seriousness of certain offenses.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office has indicated that she will likely sign the legislation, if it is passed, by early April; it would go into effect this summer. In the meantime, officials in her administration could not answer basic questions about the number of prisoners affected and were unclear about which office is responsible for maintaining that information.
Carmelina Hart, spokesperson for the corrections department, initially sent ProPublica the names of 13 people in New Mexico’s prison system who were sentenced to life as children, which she said was the extent of the cohort.
But a disclaimer below the list read, “Due to inconsistencies and mistakes over decades of data entry, as well as ensuing attempts of varying success to fix previous inaccuracies over that time, it is virtually impossible to conclude that all of these data are entirely correct.”
When challenged about whether there are in fact many more New Mexico juvenile lifers, Hart said there possibly had been a miscommunication with her information technology team. She added that some people who had committed their crimes as kids (thus making them eligible for relief under the new legislation) might have turned 18 before they entered NMCD custody from local jails or juvenile detention facilities, causing the record-keeping confusion.
Asked for the names of all prisoners who would be affected by the bill, Hart said that only the state court system could provide such a list.
That caught Barry Massey, spokesperson for the New Mexico administrative office of the courts, off guard. “I am surprised that the Corrections Department claims it has no such records, given that the agency has to know the sentences imposed on someone in order to track their incarceration,” he said.
Massey said the courts do not maintain a database of individuals in prison, nor any records his team is capable of searching by prisoners’ ages at the time of their offenses. “Only the Corrections Department would have that,” he said.
Because these kids were prosecuted as adults, he added, their cases can look the same as adult ones in court data.
To that, Hart, the corrections department spokesperson, emailed back, “LOL! Now I’m confused too!”
She later said on a phone call, “Come on now, people don’t just fall out of our dataset.”
Then she said the department doesn’t need to identify those affected by the legislation until the governor signs it. “We’re not going to look for people who are not defined in the law,” she said. “You can’t put the cart before the horse.”
Hart emphasized that the agency does have records of every person serving in its facilities, and that if the bill becomes law, NMCD will take the appropriate steps to ensure that it is in compliance.
“There Are People We Still Don’t Know About”
The problem of the missing juvenile lifers would not have come to light if not for the efforts of Wilson, the ACLU of New Mexico’s lead attorney on the issue of children sentenced to decades in adult prison.
Back when she was still a law student at the University of New Mexico in 2017, Wilson and a group of colleagues started asking the corrections department for information on everyone in its custody serving long sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles. It was alarming, she said, to learn of the prisoners’ ages at the time they went in — 15, 16, 17 — and then see their ages now — 40, 45, 50.
She knew these people had been responsible for real harm: in many cases, a loss of life.
But, she said, she still felt a sense of indignation that hasn’t left her.
According to a 2012 Sentencing Project survey, Wilson learned, 79% of those serving life sentences for crimes committed as juveniles nationally had witnessed regular violence in their homes growing up, and 47% were victims of physical abuse. In many cases, they had committed their offenses while caught up in gang activity that they’d long since renounced, or had been getaway drivers during armed robberies gone wrong.
Meanwhile, just 1% of former juvenile lifers who are given a second chance at a free life end up committing another crime, according to a 2020 study in Philadelphia.
Wilson also learned that New Mexico, despite having banned the death penalty for children three decades before the Supreme Court did, had not yet addressed extreme juvenile sentencing. (Twenty-six other states and Washington, D.C., have done so.)
Using the list of juvenile lifers identified for her by the corrections department, she and the incarcerated people’s family members started sending them a regular newsletter, sharing updates from her team’s advocacy at the state Capitol for legislation just then starting to be considered. She also relied on the names provided by NMCD to find individuals she might be able to help in court, in some cases challenging their decadeslong prison terms as cruel and unusual punishment.
Several years into this work, Wilson got a call from the father of one juvenile lifer who hadn’t been named in the department’s data. But she had already learned of the case on her own, so she didn’t think much of it.
What came as a shock to Wilson was when, last spring, she clicked on an email listserv for New Mexico attorneys and read about a case involving a middle-aged prisoner who’d been behind bars since he was a teenager.
She had never heard of this man.
“I had the initial thought, ‘Oh shit, what have I been doing wrong?’” she said. “I just couldn’t figure out how I didn’t know about him.”
Still a relatively young attorney, Wilson experienced a bout of impostor syndrome, she said, noting that the people she advocates for “have been in prison longer than I’ve been alive.”
She had to scramble, given that by this point she was considered a legislative expert on extreme youth sentencing — and one of the main questions she always got from lawmakers assessing the proposed legislation that she was working on was “How many people will this impact?” Still using the list provided by the corrections department, she had been repeating a specific number of prisoners she believed would become eligible for parole under the bill.
But now she was realizing that there might be more who the department had never identified to her.
Sometimes prison systems misspell prisoners’ names on paperwork and in other contexts, so Wilson searched NMCD data using alternate spellings. “But they’re just not there,” she said.
The most disconcerting part, she said, is that she discovered the problem by chance.
“I feel certain that there are people we still don’t know about,” she said. “I don’t know, and I don’t know how to know.”
“I Want to Do Something Good Instead of Bad”
One subset of New Mexico’s juvenile lifers who seem to have been disproportionately forgotten are those serving their time in out-of-state prisons.
Jerry Torres and Juan Meraz, for example, are both in the custody of the New Mexico Corrections Department for crimes they committed as juveniles in the state, yet they are locked up in Arizona — in a for-profit prison operated by the company CoreCivic.
Neither has appeared on the department’s lists of juvenile lifers, even though they too should be getting a parole hearing (by Zoom, that is) under the upcoming legislation.
Torres is serving a life sentence for a murder he went to jail for as a 17-year-old in 1996. He emphasized in a phone interview that he didn’t want to cause additional pain to his victim’s family by speaking about the legislative issue.
Torres said that because he is not in New Mexico, he feels even more unknown than the other juvenile lifers.
“I’m not surrounded by as many people possibly affected by this,” he said, given that he is watching the bill’s progress from a state away.
If he is located by the department and given the parole hearing that the law should provide, and if he is then actually paroled, Torres said, he just wants to do “everything I missed out on because of the decisions I made,” like simply going to a store, playing baseball at the park with his family and getting a commercial driver’s license to be a truck driver. “It’s as simple as that,” he said. “I want to be productive. I want to do something good instead of bad.”
Meraz, also in his mid-40s, shot someone when he was 15.
While insisting on not minimizing the harm he caused, he said he has done nearly every educational program there is to do while locked up, including parenting classes even though he doesn’t have any kids.
Meraz recently had major colon surgery. “Fifteen or 20 years of good health out there, I can’t ask for anything more,” he said of what he dreams of if he gets this parole opportunity.
Wilson, the lawyer, said that if the law is passed, she will be specifically asking the department to review all out-of-state prisoners for their ages at the time of their offenses.
Her one solace is that whenever a juvenile lifer materializes whom she hadn’t known about — which continues to happen — they often know about her and about the legislation, sometimes down to which New Mexico state representatives are and are not voting for it.
“And I’m like, oh right, this is people’s lives — they are paying attention,” Wilson said. “We will find them.”
Spike underscores challenge new President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva faces to reverse years of environmental destruction.
Deforestation in Brazil’s portion of the Amazon rainforest hit a new record high in February, new data has shown, as President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s administration works to end years of widespread devastation.
Satellite monitoring detected 322sq km (124sq miles) of forest cover destroyed in the Brazilian Amazon last month, an increase of 62 percent from the previous record in February 2022, according to data from the national space agency released on Friday.
In the Cerrado, a biodiverse tropical savanna to the south of the Amazon, satellites identified 558sq km (215sq miles) of destruction.
That is up 99 percent from February 2022 and nearly double the previous record of 283sq km (109sq miles) from February 2020, the data showed.
The spike in destruction has underscored the difficulties that Brazil’s new president – known as Lula – faces in addressing the rampant deforestation that flourished under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.
The far-right former army captain, who lost a close election run-off to Lula in October of last year, cut environmental enforcement in the Amazon, which environmental and Indigenous groups have blamed for an increase in illegal mining and violence.
Bolsonaro’s four years in office saw average annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon surge by 75 percent compared with the previous decade.
The issue has been of international concern, as the hundreds of billions of carbon-absorbing trees in the Amazon offer a critical buffer in the global fight against climate change.
In November, Lula made a high-profile appearance at the United Nations COP27 climate summit in Egypt, pledging to reassert Brazil’s place as an environmental protector and get Amazon deforestation down to zero. “Brazil is back,” he said.
Lula has taken early action to address the environmental destruction, including rebuilding Brazil’s environmental protection agencies, relaunching a defunct national action plan to protect the rainforest and convincing international donors to revive the so-called “Amazon Fund”, which includes more than $580m for anti-deforestation operations.
Following his election victory, Lula also appointed noted environmentalist Marina Silva as the country’s minister of environment.
Nevertheless, observers have said reversing the trends will be a slow process.
“It’s difficult to reverse the damage of an anti-environmental policy in so little time,” Frederico Machado of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Brazil office said in a statement on Friday.
“Reducing deforestation will only happen when there is a consistent strengthening of the institutions responsible for policing it,” he said.
The latest figures came after heartening data from January – Lula’s first month in office – showed Amazon deforestation in Brazil had fallen by 61 percent compared with the previous year.
In a presentation last week, a scientist with the space research agency, Inpe, blamed the large month-to-month fluctuations on cloud cover that hid deforestation on satellite images in January, only for it to be revealed in February.
Meanwhile, environment minister Silva last month called the high rate of deforestation shown in early data from February “a kind of revenge against the actions already being taken”.
She said the level of deforestation was unusual that early in the year, when heavy rains make it difficult for loggers to work in the forest.
“We will keep working towards our goal,” she told reporters.
