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Alexander Sammon | What the Heck Is Joe Biden Thinking Lately?
Alexander Sammon, Slate
Sammon writes: "After his historic midterm wins, he’s suddenly tacking right. A new hire may be why."
After his historic midterm wins, he’s suddenly tacking right. A new hire may be why.
In mid-March, the Biden administration formally approved the Willow oil drilling project on federally owned landed in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. The ConocoPhillips-led effort is a massive operation, with the potential to produce 600 million barrels of crude over 30 years and release an additional 9.2 million metric tons of carbon pollution annually. It is also a major campaign promise betrayal, one that came as a surprise: “No more drilling on federal lands,” Joe Biden said in 2020. “Period. Period. Period. Period.”
In fact, the Biden administration has recently been doing quite a few things seemingly out of character with the first two years of his presidency. That change is especially confounding given that his embrace of a series of progressive policies in his first half-term preceded a historic overperformance in November’s midterm elections. Despite his reputation as a centrist, Biden has pursued an agenda—from climate to labor to judicial appointments—well to the left of his reputedly progressive Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama. But now Biden seems to be tacking to the right, embracing policies that look much more like those championed by the 44th president.*
Perhaps that’s no surprise: These Obama-style policies have coincided with a major change atop the White House hierarchy of personnel. In late January, progressive ally Ron Klain announced he’d be stepping down as chief of staff; he was replaced by former corporate consultant and Obama apparatchik Jeffrey Zients. Zients has also brought Obama alums Anita Dunn and Steve Ricchetti—both effectively former lobbyists who have been criticized for evading the ethics constraints put on lobbyists—into greater decision-making positions.
From the moment Zients has arrived, the administration has either reversed course or leaned further into conservative policies. On Arctic drilling, immigration, and more, the White House has staked out new positions fiercely at odds with activist groups and with many members of the Democratic caucus. Those same policies, though, would have been very much at home in the Obama administration, which expanded Arctic drilling and pursued punitive action on immigration.
The Willow debacle was not the only time national Democrats used the word betrayal to describe the Biden team’s recent dealings. The repeal of D.C.’s criminal code revision was the first such incident, one that still has many Democratic groups stewing.
According to Politico, Zients was at the center of that saga. In the first days of Zients’ tenure, most House Democrats came out against a Republican-led effort to repeal D.C.’s rewrite. The administration appeared to support the District’s democratically decided changes at first too, even releasing a statement that said as much.
But weeks later, with Zients settled in, Biden did an about-face, pledging to sign the GOP’s repeal. Biden “made no mention of his newfound support for the bill during a private meeting with House Democrats only the day before, nor had any White House officials offered preemptive warnings,” Politico reported. That responsibility would have fallen to Zients and his team, but when congressional Democrats pressed the White House for information, they got nothing. House Dems, predictably, seethed. Politico, citing unnamed Biden aides, claims that “Zients has since ordered changes to the communication process.”
That pattern played out another time this month, when Democrats were shocked to discover that the Biden administration was considering reimplementing a plan that critics have described as “de facto family separation” at the border to deter immigration, and similarly got little guidance from Zients’ office as to what was going on with the hard-right swing in policy.
The Politico piece, at pains to show diplomacy, finds Zients’ work most worthy of complimenting in the government’s recent bank bailout—another policy that could have been written in the Obama administration. The “sprint to stabilize the banking sector following Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse offered a clear example of the management skills that catapulted Zients into the highest ranks of government,” Zients allies told reporters.
But the Biden administration has taken heat for that decision as well, given the politically toxic nature of bailing out banks and their super-rich depositors; its solution has been to avoid using the word bailout altogether.
Progressives have been hesitant to criticize a White House that has, in its first two years, established a closer working relationship with them than at any point under Obama. But it’s unclear how long this will last with Zients at the helm. The Obama White House, especially under chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, maintained a bitter, often antagonistic relationship toward activist groups, and often froze progressives out of crucial decision-making. The lack of communication between Zients and the party’s left has an eerie familiarity.
Is this all a canny show of political triangulation for 2024? That would be hard to believe. The election remains more than 18 months away. And just a few months ago, Biden actually tacked left, announcing student-loan debt cancellation and signing a massive climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, in the run-up to Election Day 2022, all to great effect. If anything, he would be unlearning the lessons of his own political success.
And there’s little reason to believe that the new posture is working. A new poll by the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed the president now sitting on a 38 percent approval rating, down considerably from the 45 percent mark in February and 41 percent in January. The president is nearing an all-time low mark of 36 percent.
There are plenty of good reasons to quibble with approval polls. But the numbers show support for Biden sagging in particular with Republicans, all the way down to 4 percent. In any case, the president’s willingness to team up with Republicans on crime, immigration, and drilling has endeared him to them not one bit. It’s another reason Biden should be skeptical of copying his erstwhile running mate’s outreach efforts to his right: Recall that Democrats lost seats at a historic clip during Obama’s presidency.
Despite some fits and starts, Biden has charted a different path for the Democratic Party, welcoming the party’s activists and establishing some working comity between the moderate and progressive flanks. But that balance is being threatened by a haunting of Obama-era officials and impulses that seem to be rising from the dead. Thus far, they’re only making Democrats’ lives more difficult.
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Mike Pence. (photo: The Roanoke Times/AP)
Mike Pence Must Testify About Conversations He Had With Donald Trump Leading Up to January 6, Judge Rules
Katelyn Polantz, Paula Reid, Zachary Cohen, Devan Cole and Tierney Sneed, CNN
Excerpt: "A federal judge has decided that former Vice President Mike Pence must testify to a grand jury about conversations he had with Donald Trump leading up to January 6, 2021, according to multiple sources familiar with a recent federal court ruling."
Afederal judge has decided that former Vice President Mike Pence must testify to a grand jury about conversations he had with Donald Trump leading up to January 6, 2021, according to multiple sources familiar with a recent federal court ruling.
But the judge said – in a ruling that remains under seal – that Pence can still decline to answer questions related to his actions on January 6 itself, when he was serving as president of the Senate for the certification of the 2020 presidential election, according to one of the sources.
The ruling from chief judge James Boasberg of the US District Court in Washington, DC, adds to more than a dozen wins for special counsel Jack Smith forcing witnesses to testify to the grand jury, and is unusual in that it delves into the powers of the vice presidency as well as separation of powers. Pence still has the ability to appeal.
The former vice president said his team is “evaluating the court’s decision,” telling Newsmax’s Greta Van Susteren in an interview Tuesday that “the requirements of my testimony going forward are a subject of our review right now, and I’ll have more to say about that in the days ahead.”
In the lead-up to the congressional certification vote, Pence faced enormous pressure from Trump and his allies to disrupt lawmakers’ plans to validate Joe Biden’s win. As president of the Senate, Pence was tasked with presiding over the certification proceedings.
Trump’s conversations with Pence in the days surrounding the insurrection have been of keen interest to investigators probing the attack. Though Pence declined to testify before the House January 6 committee that investigated the insurrection, people in Trump’s orbit told the committee about a heated phone call he had with Pence the day of the attack in which he lobbed insults at his vice president.
Pence and Trump did not speak during the attack on the Capitol itself, in which many of Trump’s supporters angrily sought him out, and Pence narrowly escaped the mob heading to the Senate floor.
Nicholas Luna, a former special assistant to Trump, told the committee he remembered Trump calling Pence a “wimp.” Luna said he recalled something to the effect of Trump saying, “I made the wrong decision four or five years ago.”
And Julie Radford, Ivanka Trump’s former chief of staff, said she recalled Ivanka Trump telling her that “her dad had just had an upsetting conversation with the vice president.”
Radford said she was told that Trump had called Pence “the P-word,” referencing a derogatory term.
For Pence’s part, many of his public comments about his conversations with Trump in the days before and after the insurrection have come in a memoir he published last year.
In the book, Pence wrote that Trump told him in the days before the attack that he would inspire the hatred of hundreds of thousands of people because he was “too honest” to attempt to overturn the results of the election.
The former vice president also said in the book that he asked his general counsel for a briefing on the procedures of the Electoral Count Act after Trump in a December 5 phone call “mentioned challenging the election results in the House of Representatives for the first time.”
Over lunch on December 21, Pence wrote, he tried to steer Trump to listen to the White House counsel’s team’s advice, rather than outside lawyers, a suggestion the then-president shot down.
And Pence wrote that Trump told him in a New Year’s Day phone call: “You’re too honest,” predicting that “hundreds of thousands are gonna hate your guts” and “people are gonna think you’re stupid.”
“Mr. President, I don’t question there were irregularities and fraud,” Pence wrote that he told Trump. “It’s just a question of who decides, and under the law that is Congress.”
Big win for special counsel
Smith is investigating the Trump-aligned effort to subvert the 2020 election. Smith subpoenaed Pence for testimony and documents earlier this year.
Days after news broke of the subpoena, Pence and his advisers indicated that the former vice president would challenge the subpoena under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which shields lawmakers from certain law enforcement actions connected to their legislative duties.
“I am going to fight the Biden DOJ subpoena for me to appear before the grand jury because I believe it’s unconstitutional and unprecedented,” Pence said at an event in February. He has suggested that – because he was also serving as president of the Senate during the January 6 certification vote – the constitutional clause covered the conduct that investigators are looking at.
The challenge in court has played out in secret.
Pence’s claims, as he has described them publicly, are seen as novel. His arguments attracted criticism from a broad range of legal scholars, including former Judge Michael Luttig, a conservative legal luminary who publicly argued that Pence should certify the electoral results.
Even as Pence has fought the subpoena, he has stood by his refusal to disrupt the congressional certification of Biden’s win, as Trump called upon him to do.
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Police officers at the scene of the massacre in Dayton, Ohio, that killed nine people in August 2019. The gunman used an AR-15. (photo: John Minchillo/Dayton Police Department/AP)
High-Capacity-Magazine Bans Could Save Lives. Will They Hold Up in Court?
Mark Berman and Todd C. Frankel, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Legislative and legal battles flare over restrictions that experts say could reduce casualties in AR-15 attacks."
Legislative and legal battles flare over restrictions that experts say could reduce casualties in AR-15 attacks
The first gunshot cracked through the air just after 1 a.m.
Then came another shot, and another. They kept coming, again and again, each shot thundering across downtown Dayton, Ohio. In just half a minute, more than three dozen gunshots echoed through the crowded streets.
Dion Green recalls hitting the sidewalk next to his father and fiancee, who had come out with him in August 2019. It had been a routine Saturday night: people dancing, drinking, standing in line to get into a bar, waiting for tacos outside. Green barely had time to drop down as the masked shooter ran by and kept firing. All around Green, bullets ripped into people’s heads, chests, backs, arms and legs. People ran from the carnage, diving behind parked cars and scrambling into nearby bars and clubs, piling on top of one another as they huddled on the floor.
“It was like war,” Green said. “And I got angry. Because why was there a full-on war going on in the middle of the street?”
Thirty-two seconds after that first shot, the barrage ended when police killed the gunman. But the toll was already immense.
The gunman, shooting an AR-15-style weapon, had fired off 41 bullets, hitting more than two dozen people and killing nine of them — including Derrick Fudge, Green’s father.
In the aftermath of the Dayton massacre and another hours earlier in El Paso, all the familiar debates ignited over guns, assault weapons bans, mental health interventions and red-flag laws. Yet much of the public discussion overlooked a key factor in Dayton, something that connected the massacre to the carnage unleashed by mass shooters in Orlando, Las Vegas, Buffalo and other communities: the ammunition magazines that can enable gunmen to fire a hail of bullets without needing to stop and reload.
Those magazines are increasingly seen as an area where policy changes could lessen the carnage that has become emblematic of attacks waged with AR-15s and other guns, according to a growing body of research and interviews with experts and law enforcement veterans. An emerging consensus among these experts — and one that has taken hold in some state legislatures — is that mandating smaller magazines would force mass shooters to pause to reload, allowing people to flee or fight back.
Most states do not limit magazine sizes. But within the past year, lawmakers in four states have added restrictions capping magazine sizes at anywhere from 10 to 17 rounds — and Oregon voters in November approved a 10-round limit. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signed a bill in January that included a ban on the sale of long-gun magazines with more than 10 rounds.
Such efforts, however, face growing legal challenges from gun rights advocates — and the issue could ultimately wind up with the Supreme Court ruling on a pivotal question: whether the right to bear arms extends to these ammunition magazines.
The court’s ruling last year overturning a New York gun law has inspired a new wave of lawsuits by firearms advocates, who argue that magazine restrictions are unconstitutional and endanger law-abiding citizens who could need them for self-defense.
“It’s a different era,” said Dudley Brown, president of the National Association for Gun Rights, a pro-firearms organization mounting several legal challenges to magazine restrictions. “We think the Second Amendment wins on this every time now.”
Proponents of the restrictions say the value of the limits comes down to numbers: Fewer bullets fired means more lives could be saved. Something, they say, has to be done in the face of all the bloodshed — and they reject the notion that larger devices are protected by the Constitution.
“The Second Amendment, which I support and I respect, makes no mention of ammunition,” said Rhode Island state Rep. Justine Caldwell (D), who sponsored a ban that passed last summer. “Nobody has a constitutional right to a 100-round magazine.”
In Dayton, the shooter wielded a 100-round drum magazine for his brief but deadly rampage.
“If he was using a 30-round magazine, he would at least have to reload once,” said Richard Biehl, who was Dayton’s police chief at the time of the shooting. “A 15-round magazine, he would reload twice. That could be six lives saved in that particular incident. That’s why I think it matters.”
The American gun debate over high-capacity magazines
As the AR-15 has become a cultural symbol, so too have magazines, which can jut out from the bottom of guns.
There’s no universal definition for what size is considered “high capacity.” Some states have a narrow definition, passing laws that ban anything with more than 10 rounds. Magazines with at least 30 rounds are considered the standard among larger devices; the largest can hold 100 rounds or more.
Usually made of hard plastic, a typical 30-round magazine is about seven inches long and an inch thick — roughly the size of a television remote control — with a slight curve to trace the bullets within. They are readily available for sale online, often for under $20. Inside, a small spring pushes the new bullets toward the gun, feeding them into the actual weapon.
Magazines with 20 or more bullets have been around in some form at least since the 1800s. They emerged as popular accessories only in recent decades. The first civilian AR-15 rifle debuted in 1964 with a device that held five rounds, and during the Vietnam War era, the military relied on those with 20 rounds.
Over time, technological advances made it easier to produce them reliably and affordably out of plastic.
So when Congress passed the federal assault weapons ban in 1994, it also prohibited magazines with more than 10 rounds. When the weapons ban expired in 2004, that restriction also lifted. Now, in a country with an estimated 400 million guns, there are also millions of magazines with at least 30 rounds, according to gun rights groups and court filings.
They are advertised as easy to use and deeply convenient for gun owners. One company, Magpul, boasts a 60-round drum that it calls “the best high capacity drum in the world.” Sig Sauer touts one with 30 rounds of 9mm ammunition by promising that it will let users “spend less time loading magazines and more time shooting at the range.”
Gun advocates say that today, these devices are the rule, not the exception. Many modern gunmakers now ship their AR-style rifles with 30-round magazines standard.
When one is affixed to an AR-15, it is part of the rifle’s identity, the iconography that has turned the gun into as much a symbol as a weapon. That’s how the gun is shown on protest signs and T-shirts, cementing its image in the culture.
The fight over magazines has now become the American gun debate in a nutshell — an argument over a device that is cherished by some and condemned by others. For the people who own and use them, they are simply a part of life.
Paul Lewis, who owns a property management company in Maryland, extolled the virtues of firing dozens of rounds at a time during a recent visit to a gun range north of Dulles International Airport.
“It’s fun,” Lewis, 39, said shortly before sliding a 40-round device into a Ruger AR-556. And not having to reload so much, he said, “saves your thumbs.”
Lewis took aim at a nearby target and fired, emptying the magazine in nine seconds.
He visits the range at least once a week, both to practice with a handgun he carries for self-defense and to unwind. Since shooting requires full concentration, Lewis said, he stops worrying about anything else.
Limiting the number of bullets in his magazines during these trips “would suck,” he said, “because that’s more times that I have to stop and say, ‘Okay, load up another 10, load up another 10.’”
More importantly, Lewis said, magazine restrictions would make law-abiding gun owners less safe from criminals who might disregard the bans. “How can I protect myself if I don’t have enough ammo?” Lewis said.
A gun restriction could save lives
In 2019, a gunman wielding an AR-15-style rifle burst into a synagogue in Poway, Calif., killing one person and injuring three others while emptying a 10-round magazine.
When the attacker ran out of bullets, he tried and failed to reload another 10-round magazine, then fled as “several members of the congregation moved to confront him,” an FBI affidavit said.
This episode — which ended with the shooter’s arrest after the FBI said he called 911, made antisemitic remarks and confessed — crystallizes what law enforcement veterans and experts say can happen when shooting stops: a break and, for the potential victims, a chance.
“That moment to reload, it’s the linchpin of the event,” said Katherine Schweit, a retired FBI agent who ran the bureau’s active shooter program.
“If there is a way during that time or when the rounds in that weapon are expended to intervene,” she said, “that is the difference between a few and dozens injured or killed.”
Academic researchers agree, with numerous studies in recent years finding that laws restricting magazines sizes reduce casualties.
One study found that almost two-thirds of deadly mass shootings with at least six fatalities over nearly three decades involved magazines with more than 10 rounds — and that the death tolls in those cases far exceeded the number of fatalities in attacks with smaller magazines.
A person with experience using guns can reload quickly, but in most mass shootings a shooter might take eight to 10 seconds to reload, said Louis Klarevas, a research professor at Teachers College at Columbia University who studied nearly three decades of data.
“No matter where you are, stop, look around you,” he said. “How far can you get in six, seven, eight seconds if you bolted? If there was a pause in the shooting?”
Such findings, though, are disputed by gun rights advocates who argue that fighting mass killers requires ensuring that law-abiding citizens are adequately armed. Brown, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, pointed to a shooting last summer at an Indiana mall. Police said a gunman opened fire, killing three people, before a 22-year-old bystander fired 10 rounds and killed the attacker.
Advocates for larger magazines say they are important for self-defense because gun owners can’t predict how many rounds they may need when facing a threat. In court filings, they argue that people can face grave danger if confronted by multiple attackers or while swapping out magazines.
But other analysts dispute the argument that larger ammunition magazines are necessary for self-defense.
Lucy Allen, a former White House economist, studied cases published by the National Rifle Association about people using guns for self-defense between 2011 and 2017, and found that in those 700 cases, on average, people fired a little more than two shots in self-defense. Many times, she said in a court declaration, these people never fired a shot. Someone fired more than 10 shots in just two cases, she said.
The NRA said the cases Allen cited were based on a collection of news stories and not meant to be exhaustive or representative. “To suggest that any law-abiding individual should diminish their ability to defend themselves is wrongheaded and dangerous,” Lars Dalseide, an NRA spokesman, said in a statement.
While the recent stretch of research validating the restrictions is relatively new, the idea of trying to cap the size of magazines is not. In 1990, New Jersey passed the first modern restrictions. The federal assault weapons ban followed four years later, though it exempted devices manufactured before the law took effect.
Since the federal ban expired, states and local jurisdictions have passed numerous bans and restrictions, often in the wake of tragedy.
After the 2012 massacre at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., lawmakers in that state passed a ban. Lawmakers in Connecticut similarly banned the devices after a gunman slaughtered students at Sandy Hook Elementary School that same year.
Lawmakers in Delaware, Rhode Island and Washington state approved restrictions last year, along with the city council in Columbus, Ohio. In January, lawmakers in Illinois — where a gunman using 30-round magazines killed seven people at an Independence Day parade last year — followed suit. That ban immediately took effect after the governor signed it.
All told, 14 states and D.C. have some sort of magazine restriction on the books, along with some individual cities and counties, though the Oregon measure approved by voters last year has been put on hold by a judge.
The bans differ from other gun laws in a key way. Gun manufacturers can easily skirt assault weapons bans by making cosmetic changes to the weapons, but restrictions on magazine capacity are straightforward, said Andrew R. Morral, a behavioral scientist at Rand Corp. who leads its Gun Policy in America initiative.
“You might disagree about what the threshold might be, but once you set a threshold for how many rounds it can hold, or how it attaches to the gun, or whatever the rule is, it’s very easy to define,” he said.
Advocates of the restrictions have found allies in some law enforcement veterans who responded to mass shootings.
Douglas Fuchs, a former police chief in Redding, Conn., was among the first responders at Sandy Hook Elementary, where his own children had once gone to school.
He struggled with what could be done to stop such carnage. He didn’t think the answer was banning any guns or taking them “out of law-abiding people’s hands.” But Fuchs took a lesson from what he heard from children who survived, who told their parents they fled while the shooter was “playing with his gun,” he said.
Fuchs concluded that the gunman was reloading, and that the children “saw that as an opportunity to run.” That proved just how valuable that pause could be, he said.
“Even a child knew,” he said. “They knew it was time to flee.”
A courtroom battle over magazine restrictions
Just as governors in Rhode Island and Delaware were signing magazine restrictions into law last summer, a Supreme Court ruling sent shock waves through groups supporting stricter gun laws and emboldened gun rights groups hoping to overturn the bans and other firearms restrictions.
In June, the court struck down a New York law dealing with gun licensing and declared that Americans had a right to carry handguns for self-defense outside their homes. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority in New York State Rifle … Pistol Assoc. v. Bruen, said that beyond adhering to the Second Amendment’s text, government officials have to prove that their gun regulations are “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition.”
Legal observers say the ruling and its emphasis on “historical tradition” could dramatically reshape how American courts approach gun laws, including magazine restrictions.
The court’s ruling “articulates a test that few gun laws will easily survive,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who is an expert on the Second Amendment.
Gun rights advocates and organizations have mounted a number of challenges to the bans in court. In addition to the self-defense and constitutional arguments, some say that the term “high-capacity magazines” is itself a misnomer. Those devices holding more than 10 rounds are “common to the point of ubiquity among law-abiding gun owners,” a group of Republican attorneys general said in a court filing last year.
“The 10-round magazine is the exception, not the rule,” said Brown, of the National Association for Gun Rights. “It’s like saying the car with five gears is a high gear, high-capacity transmission. No, it’s not, it’s the standard capacity, the standard number of gears.”
For years, though, legal challenges to magazine bans generally failed. Brown’s group mounted an unsuccessful challenge to Colorado’s restrictions, which the state’s Supreme Court upheld in 2020.
But now gun rights advocates see the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling as momentous.
“Clarence Thomas handed us a four-ton wrecking ball to go after these ludicrous Second Amendment infringements,” Brown said. After the ruling, Brown’s group filed lawsuits taking aim at bans enacted by four states, including Colorado and Connecticut. Those cases are among at least 15 ongoing lawsuits challenging magazine restrictions across the country.
The Supreme Court’s decision also rippled out into cases that had previously survived court challenges, including bans in New Jersey and California that were sent back to lower courts to reconsider.
Polling suggests such challenges echo the wishes of gun owners. While 74 percent of American adults who don’t own guns supported banning magazines with more than 10 rounds in a Pew Research Center survey in April 2021, only 40 percent of gun owners supported that policy.
States facing legal challenges are battling back. Colorado has argued that its nearly decade-old restrictions are still allowed under the Supreme Court’s recent ruling. A federal judge in December allowed Rhode Island’s new restrictions to take effect, saying the measure did not violate the Constitution and calling it “common sense public safety legislation.” Opponents of the law plan to appeal.
For those who have seen firsthand the toll of mass killings, the political and legal debate over magazine sizes is deeply personal. Biehl, the former Dayton police chief, said he was “haunted” by how much bloodshed was unleashed by a single attacker firing so many bullets in so little time.
“One needs to question why anyone would need so many bullets in a magazine, that kind of capacity, for any legitimate reason,” Biehl said.
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A CCTV camera installed near a Kremlin Tower in central Moscow, Russia. (photo: Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA)
US Hardware Is Fueling Russia's Facial Recognition Crackdown on Anti-War Dissidents
Matthew Gault, VICE
Gault writes: "According to a new report, Russia’s facial recognition systems are powered by American technologies."
According to a new report, Russia’s facial recognition systems are powered by American technologies.
Russia has been using cameras powered by facial recognition systems to crackdown on dissidents, according to reporting from Reuters. Several Russian companies are using algorithms trained and powered by chips made by U.S. firms Intel and Nvidia. Reuters said that one of the companies even received money from U.S. intelligence.
Not everyone in Russia is happy with Moscow’s war in Ukraine, but protesting can be dangerous. On March 4, 20022—a week after it launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine—Russia made it illegal to publicly criticize the war. Some protesters even found themselves rounded up and sent to the frontlines. The father of a 13-year old girl who drew an anti-war picture was recently sentenced to a year in a penal colony.
The report from Reuters details how facial recognition software has aided the Kremlin in its crackdown against dissidents. There are more than 160,000 cameras in Moscow and 3,000 of them are connected to facial recognition software. According to Moscow court records, the technology has aided in the arrest of hundreds of protestors.
In one case, a man stood alone near a fountain in Pushkin Square with a home-made poster that said “Peace to Ukraine.” A week later he was boarding a subway when police ushered him into their station and explained that the computer system had recognized his face.
The software powering the software was created by three companies: NtechLab, VisonLabs, and Tevian. Tevian and NtechLab are based in Moscow, while VisionLabs is based in the Netherlands. According to Reuters, the companies used chips designed by Intel and Nvidia to train their systems. It also reported that one of the firms joined a U.S. facial recognition test program and received $40,000 in prize money from “an arm of U.S. intelligence.”
Nvidia announced it was stopping all product sales in Russia on March 5, 2022. In October that year it followed up by shutting down all its offices in the country. This was partially due to widespread outrage against the war, but also because U.S. sanctions made it illegal for chip manufacturers to do business in the country.
Nvidia GPUs are incredibly common for training facial recognition software, and it’s likely that these tech firms had Nvidia chips in the country before the company pulled out. “Pretty much any company out there that is doing any kind of AI application is utilizing Nvidia GPUs,” Anton Nazarkin, an executive at VisonLabs, told Reuters.
In a statement to Reuters, Nvidia said it had brief contact with VisionLabs and NtechLab and that it had ceased all shipments to Russia and was complying with U.S. law. “If we learn that any Nvidia customer has violated U.S. export laws and shipped our products to Russia, we will cease doing business with them,” it said. According to the report, 129 shipments of Nvidia products facilitated by third parties reached Russia between April 1 and October 31, 2022. Fifty-seven of these contained GPUs.
Nvidia said it had no more to add when reached for comment.
Facial recognition use by authorities is a global problem. It’s used liberally by both authoritarian regimes like China, Russia, and Iran and American and European police forces. The systems often make mistakes and are notoriously racist. Even the U.S. government has admitted that the systems are biased. Indeed, innocent Black people have spent time in jail in the U.S. after being wrongly singled out by police using facial recognition systems. Despite this, the U.S. and other countries are rushing to roll the technology out.
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Volunteer pilots fly patients to get abortions and gender-affirming medical care from states with bans to nearby states where the services are available. (photo: Rose Conlon/Kansas News Service)
Volunteer Pilots Fly Patients Seeking Abortions to States Where It's Legal
Rose Conlon, NPR
Conlon writes: "The pilot, clad in a blue windbreaker, recently pulled his single-engine, four-seater prop plane onto the tarmac of a small municipal airport."
The pilot, clad in a blue windbreaker, recently pulled his single-engine, four-seater prop plane onto the tarmac of a small municipal airport.
The airport sits in a state where abortion is now banned in virtually all cases. But a short flight away in Kansas, abortion remains legal. That has launched a wave of travel from across the South and Midwest in pursuit of pills and procedures that used to be legal all across the U.S..
Michael is part of a growing group of pilots of small private planes who have begun ferrying people across state lines to get abortions and gender-affirming medical care, even if it means flouting local restrictions. They're volunteers with Elevated Access, an Illinois-based group that coordinates the flights. NPR agreed to use his first name only due to the potential for harassment and legal action.
The flights, which are free to passengers, spare people seeking this medical care from the delays and costs that go along with commercial flights or travel by bus or car. And it allows them to travel anonymously and leave no paper trail, by skipping security at commercial airports.
"There are tons of little airports like this dotted all over," Michael said. "I try to avoid the big airports. Usually, we fly into one that's closer to where they live."
The pilots donate their time and the use of their planes. Most also cover the cost of fuel, because private pilots can't legally be compensated for flying. (Elevated Access is trying to get an exemption that would allow the organization to reimburse fuel costs.)
Help during difficult moments
Recently, Michael took a woman back home to the Deep South after an appointment at a Kansas clinic. He loves to fly — he also does volunteer flights for an animal rescue group and he jumps at the chance to take his family and friends up in the sky. But an Elevated Access flight feels different, Michael said.
"It's maybe not the best time in a particular person's life, or they're going through a sensitive thing," he said. "So I treat that with a lot of reverence."
Only a handful of people in Michael's life know he's part of the budding network of people helping women get abortions that have suddenly become illegal in their home states. He says some members of his family and some of his pilot friends oppose abortion. That's, perhaps, not surprising — pilots tend to be more conservative than Americans generally. Fewer than 10% are women.
Soon after Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer and Elevated Access was launched, Michael posted a link to the organization in an online pilot forum. The blowback came immediately.
"It was obviously a polarizing thing to have shared," he said. "I'm glad I made quite a few pilots aware of it, even if it raised some ire." Still, the angry response has made him less likely to talk about his involvement with the group, he said.
For pilots like Michael, most of whom have day jobs, the flights offer a chance to keep their flying skills sharp while supporting a cause they believe in.
But for people trying to get to an abortion appointment several states away — maybe with just a few days' notice — the private flights can be life-changing.
They can turn a multi-day drive into just a couple of hours, or make flying much simpler by cutting out a trip to the nearest commercial airport which could be hours away.
And Elevated Access lets the passengers remain virtually anonymous. Pilots are only given the passenger's first name and weight (to avoid exceeding a small aircraft's weight limits).
"We don't check ID because that's not part of private aviation," said the founder of Elevated Access, who goes by Mike, and also asked that we not use his last name because he's concerned about possible legal risk or online harassment. "There's no ticketing or TSA or anything like that. If somebody feels like they need to use a fake first name, they can definitely do that."
Skirting a gray area in state laws
Pilots are instructed not to ask passengers why they're traveling. That relieves passengers of any pressure to explain or justify the services they're seeking, and also gives the pilots plausible deniability in the face of potential legal threats. Some states are considering prosecuting those who help people get abortions, and Texas has already made them liable to lawsuits.
No existing laws specifically target interstate travel, although Idaho could soon make it a crime to help a minor travel out of state for an abortion without parental consent. Still, legal experts say flying for Elevated Access could involve some legal risk.
"You could see an aggressive prosecutor trying to say, under the current laws, that, 'We are going to charge this pilot with being an accessory to murder or an accessory to abortion,' " said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University. "We haven't seen prosecutors try that yet. But there's good reason to believe that's on the horizon."
Rachel Rebouché, dean of the Temple University Beasley School of Law, said there's also a possibility that federal officials could place restrictions on abortion-related travel in U.S. airspace.
"This current administration would not try to use federal aviation powers to penalize people who are flying rather than driving," she said. "But in years to come, depending on who's elected, an anti-abortion administration could try to do that."
Elevated Access has completed "dozens and dozens" of flights and is growing rapidly, Mike said. More than 200 pilots have been vetted and more than 1,000 have expressed interest.
"We don't share our full numbers because we don't want to become a target," Mike, the group's founder said.
The flights represent only a tiny part of the abortion-related travel that has accelerated since last summer, when some states began enforcing abortion bans.
However, it's a window into the increasingly unconventional tactics of the underground groups that are working to keep abortion accessible to people across the country.
Abortion rights organizations are striving to be nimble in the face of legal uncertainty, Rebouché said.
"The threat of passing a law can itself chill behavior — or incite people to organize in different ways," she said. "It's an interesting dynamic, how this push-pull of potential policy is shaping both care [and] advocacy strategies."
Elevated Access typically works with partner groups to coordinate flights, usually after other options have been exhausted — if a patient isn't old enough to rent a car, for example, or if their commercial flight was canceled.
Escaping an abusive situation and seeking care
Mike says the idea for Elevated Access arose out of his experience volunteering with another organization, Midwest Access Coalition, which helps people coordinate and pay for abortion-related travel.
"I wanted to learn about abortion access because I thought pilots might be able to help," Mike said.
Alison Dreith, Midwest Action Coalition's director of strategic partnerships, said she's connected several clients with Elevated Access. Most have low incomes and some have never flown before.
The organization's first official passenger flew from Oklahoma to get an abortion in Kansas City, Kan., last summer.
"She was a bit nervous about flying," said Dreith. "But the pilot was able to walk out into the parking lot and walk her directly onto the airfield. It really feels like a V.I.P. experience."
Dreith said the flights prove particularly useful for people who don't have the documents needed to fly commercially. That group could include undocumented immigrants — or people escaping abuse, such as one of her recent clients, who contacted Midwest Access Coalition in December for help getting an abortion.
"She was in a domestic violence situation where her abusive partner had destroyed her ID and birth certificate," Dreith said.
Dreith initially traveled to North Carolina to help the woman get safely away from the abusive partner and to a nearby clinic that provides abortions. The woman thought she was around 16 weeks pregnant — so still legally eligible for an abortion under the state's 20-week limit — but wasn't certain because her partner hadn't allowed her to get an ultrasound or any prenatal care.
When she got to the clinic, the woman learned she was just past the state's limit. That's when Dreith contacted the staff at Elevated Access, who organized a flight to the St. Louis area, where the woman was originally from.
After crossing the Missouri state line into Illinois, the woman was able to get an abortion. She also sought help from a domestic violence group and is now living on her own.
"She had been suicidal because she thought she was never going to get out of her situation," Dreith said. "I don't even have the superlatives to describe how thankful she was."
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Migrants hold a vigil at the gate of the Mexican migrant facility where 39 migrants lost their lives after the facility caught fire where they had been detained. (photo: Omar Ornelas/El Paso Times)
‘They’re Killing Us’: Anger Grows After Deadly Fire at Mexican Migrant Center
Marisol Chávez, Guardian UK
Chávez writes: "A loud voice cut through the thick quiet of the night: '¡Justicia! ¡Justicia! ¡Justicia!' Frark Martín Pérez Pérez, 32, chanted angrily, and hundreds followed."
Protesters call for justice as blaze at detention facility in Ciudad Juárez highlights tough US immigration policies
Aloud voice cut through the thick quiet of the night: “¡Justicia! ¡Justicia! ¡Justicia!” Frark Martín Pérez Pérez, 32, chanted angrily, and hundreds followed.
Justice is what the crowd of about 400 migrants from Latin America gathered to protest about on Tuesday outside the migrant processing centre in Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city on the US border, where at least 40 were killed in a fire on Monday night.
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, blamed protesting migrants for causing the fire. Security footage published by El Universal showed two immigration agents leaving the scene after the fire began, while detainees were locked up and unable to escape the flames.
Rights groups have frequently flagged concerns about poor conditions and overcrowding in detention centres as the US and Mexico attempt to cope with record levels of crossings at their shared border.
The fire has highlighted the increasingly tough immigration policies that have been put in place by Joe Biden’s administration. Limits on the number of people allowed to seek asylum have left cities along Mexico’s northern border overwhelmed with people wanting to cross into the US, including many forced to sleep on the streets, inside churches or packed shelters.
Dozens of white daisies, rosaries, banners, and photographs decorated the metal fence that separated the centre from protesters. One by one, the national anthems of the countries of the victims were sung.
“In honour and grief of the fallen, they’re the martyrs of the immigrant population. We cannot forget them,” said Juan Pavón, 55, a migrant from San Cristóbal, Venezuela, who attended the protest with his two teenage daughters.
Pavón and his daughters are homeless and awaiting the opportunity to request an inspection appointment with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
“We don’t know if they’re dead. They’re friends we met on this journey, family after all we went through,” said Pérez Pérez, a Venezuelan who emigrated from Perú in search of a better future for his wife and five children.
He was the only one of his friends not at the detention centre when the fire occurred, because he had run away when immigration authorities detained a group that was cleaning car windscreens at a busy intersection.
More than 24 hours after the incident, the victims’ names have not been revealed by authorities. Many, like Pérez Pérez, still wonder if their friends and family are among the dead or injured.
“Justice!” the crowd chanted after each name during a roll-call. Not knowing the victims’ names, a list of all the people detained at the time of the incident was read.
The protest remained peaceful, many sat on the street, closed off by local authorities to prevent the flow of traffic.
Xenophobia and abuse from Mexican authorities were a complaint throughout the day. Some of those detained on Monday claimed they were forcibly taken off the streets, without an explanation.
“What is the crime we committed?” said Katiuska Marquez, 23, from Estado Miranda, Venezuela. “They kept telling us this wasn’t our country, and that we weren’t allowed to do what we were doing.”
Marquez and her brother, Orlando Maldonado, 30, were asking drivers for money at an intersection when authorities detained them.
Marquez was released on Monday afternoon, shortly after being detained, because she has a toddler, and no children are allowed in the building. Her brother was inside when the fire happened. She still doesn’t know if he is alive.
“They’re killing us, but they’re also killing us psychologically,” said Elerith Medina, 31, from Cumana, Venezuela. “There’s immigrant children who have been detained more times than any criminal.”
Medina described her experience with the Mexican immigration system as “torture,” and called for President Biden to rethink immigration policies.
“I ask him for compassion,” Medina said. “There are many mothers who are being given appointments, but they’re not allowed to enter the country with their children.”
Frustration over appointments through the US’s CBP One app was high. The app is meant to serve as a one-stop shop portal for migrants with services and appointments tailored to their needs. However, its limitations mean families are unable to schedule appointments together and are forced to separate.
During the protest, the crowd cheered after Pavón suggested the app be disabled, and a better platform created. “That website is playing tricks with our minds,” Pavón said. “It must be suspended, cancelled.”
Many of the protesters planned to set up camp and stay the night outside the processing centre, saying they would remain peacefully until authorities from the US and Mexico gave them answers.
“Even though we’re a multitude, we’re still afraid,” said Sofía García, 29, from Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, who joined the protest.
García has been in Juarez for two weeks awaiting her inspection appointment with CBP, and says that although some locals have welcomed her, she has still faced discrimination.
“Why are we being asked to stay in this country to work and fight if we don’t have freedom?” García said. “I’d rather go back with nothing but alive.”
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Protesters in San Francisco chained themselves together outside a Wells Fargo bank as part of a national effort to get banks to move away from investing in fossil fuel projects. (photo: Christopher Alam/KQED)
Climate Activists Target Nation's Big Banks, Urging Divestment From Fossil Fuels
Michael Copley and Paula Moura, NPR
Excerpt: "Across the U.S., people protested outside major banks on Tuesday, calling on financial institutions to shift investments away from fossil fuel companies."
Across the U.S., people protested outside major banks on Tuesday, calling on financial institutions to shift investments away from fossil fuel companies. In Boston, more than 200 people marched from a Chase Bank to a Bank of America branch. A man there used a solar-powered chain saw to cut through giant credit cards from Chase and Bank of America.
One hundred protests took place across the country, from Juneau, Alaska, to Washington, D.C., to urge banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citi to stop funding fossil fuel projects, which significantly contribute to human-caused climate change. Third Act, a climate activism group largely made up of retirees, organized the nationwide events ahead of annual meetings where investors can propose changes to corporate policies.
San Francisco climate activists chained themselves together outside a Wells Fargo branch in the rain.
In Washington, D.C., protesters sat in rocking chairs outside banks while the crowd cheered on people who cut up their credit cards in protest.
Mary McCabe, 61, from the Boston suburb of Arlington, made a poster with a baby picture of her son, to put a face on the younger generations she's striving to protect. It was the first time, she said, she took part in a demonstration like this.
"We keep hearing reports in the news every day about how our window for preventing catastrophic damage keeps closing and that really this decade is critical for us to take action," McCabe said.
Third Act co-founder Bill McKibben created the group to take advantage of the life experience, skills and political power of retirees. And the activists point out their economic influence too: Baby boomers own over half of U.S. wealth.
"Part of the thing that's really interesting about today [Tuesday] is that, for once, it's not just being left up to young people to do this work," said McKibben, who was in Washington, D.C., for the protest there. "That's important in this case, in part, because older Americans have about 70% of the country's financial assets. So it's particularly appropriate that they're putting pressure on here."
That message wasn't lost on Bob Follansbee, 73, who biked a half-hour from his home in Dorchester to downtown Boston. "I feel it's incumbent on us to stand up for the next generations coming and do what we can as the people who are, kind of, of age and of some resources," said Follansbee. He also said one of the reasons he went is that his generation is responsible for a lot of the climate change.
The demonstrations happened a day after a United Nations report was released showing that the world is on track to face catastrophic warming. However, world leaders already have the necessary tools to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save lives, according to the report. The authors of the report hope it will give guidance for political leaders who will gather later this year for international negotiations on how to limit emissions.
McKibben said the world faces a "balancing act" trying to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the economy. "We're not going to be off oil and gas tomorrow, sadly," he said. "That's why we've been very clear in saying our only demand is that these guys [banks] stop funding the expansion of the fossil fuel industry."
Citi, one of the banks where protests happened Tuesday, said in an emailed statement that the bank "shares the goal of transitioning to a low-carbon economy." The company pointed to efforts to invest in "clean energy solutions through our net zero commitments and our $1 trillion commitment to sustainable finance." Citi also stated its commitment to its clients to "support their efforts to decarbonize their businesses."
Bank of America, another bank targeted by the climate activists, declined to comment.
Eric Compton, a bank analyst at Morningstar, a financial services company, said he didn't know of instances where protests like Third Act's affected a bank's decision-making. "Typically you need acts of [C]ongress or much more elevated political/branding pressure," Compton wrote in an email.
"The banks have also rejected shareholder resolutions in the past that would have limited funding of fossil fuels," Compton said. "At the end of the day, banks serve a complex set of interests and constituencies, so bringing about wide ranging changes through demands from a select group of constituents is difficult."
Still, McKibben remains hopeful. "We've had conversations now with executives at a couple of them [banks] who've reached out because they know what's going on," he said. "But I think it'll take a lot of work to really make them shift."
Third Act has gathered some 17,000 pledges from people who have said they'll close accounts and cut up credit cards if banks continue to support fossil fuels. The organization said in a news release that those pledges went to bank leaders at branches across the United States.
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