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Wednesday, May 10, 2023
POLITICO Massachusetts Playbook:
FOCUS: Eric Lach | The Vindication of E. Jean Carroll
10 May 23
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In response to a writer’s accusation of sexual assault, nine jurors in Manhattan finally held Donald Trump accountable.
Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle and media personality, went public with her allegations in 2019, in a New York magazine article, in which she wrote that Trump forced himself on her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. When she first filed a lawsuit against Trump, a few months after the article ran, he was still the President, and many considered the suit hopeless. How could a private citizen get justice through the courts in a case like this, against Trump of all people? And yet on Tuesday, Carroll was vindicated, in a trial that marks the first time jurors have been tasked with determining whether a former President was a rapist or merely a sexual abuser.
Carroll’s lawyers called Carroll herself to the stand (she was also cross-examined by Trump’s lawyers for two days), and then called two friends whom Carroll told about the encounter with Trump shortly after it happened. They also called two other women who have publicly accused Trump of sexual assault—Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff—as well as an expert in psychological trauma, and two former employees of Bergdorf Goodman, who both supported elements of Carroll’s account, with one testifying that he had seen Trump in the store. Trump skipped the trial, and his lawyers called no witnesses of their own. Joseph Tacopina, Trump’s lead lawyer, said that his client didn’t need to mount a defense, because his case had “emerged” through cross-examination of Carroll’s witnesses. He also pointed to dredged-up text messages and e-mails in which Carroll’s friends seemed to express concerns and frustrations with her. And he offered a number of implausible counter-theories, such as one in which Carroll and her friends had concocted a scheme to frame Trump based on the plot of a 2012 episode of “Law … Order: SVU.” Carroll’s lawyers made much of Trump’s absence. They also didn’t shy away from politics. Several times during the trial, they played the contents of the “Access Hollywood” tape for the jury, including Trump’s boasts of grabbing women “by the pussy.” During closing arguments, one of Carroll’s lawyers suggested to the jury that they consider the “Access Hollywood” video a “confession.”
“You saw for yourself, E. Jean Carroll wasn’t hiding anything,” Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lead lawyer, told the jury on Monday, as the trial reached its conclusion. As her lawyers readily acknowledged, Carroll could not remember exactly what night her encounter with Trump took place. She could find no witnesses who saw the two of them together. And though she told two friends about the assault soon after it occurred, she otherwise kept the story to herself for more than two decades. Trump’s lawyers argued that these gaps undercut Carroll’s credibility. “What they want is for you to hate him enough that you’ll ignore the facts,” Tacopina told the jury during his own summation. Carroll, Tacopina said, was abusing the system, bringing a false claim. “We cannot let her profit to the tune of millions of dollars.” Those lines might have played well with Tacopina’s client, but they didn’t sway the jury, which unanimously found in Carroll’s favor after less than three hours of deliberation. (Trump told Fox News Digital that he plans to appeal, and has “no idea” who Carroll is.)
Trump, despite his denials, appeared to understand the seriousness of Carroll’s claims, as both a legal matter and a political one. “She’s accusing me of rape, of raping her, the worst thing you can do, the worst charge,” he said, in a deposition taken last year. Trump is once again running for President, and recent polling suggests that his opponents in the Republican primaries are wilting in the face of his popularity and the pressure he puts on others to fight on his terms. And yet every month this year has brought escalating legal peril to Trump. Seven years ago, he imagined what his supporters would do if he committed a heinous act on Fifth Avenue. Now it’s no longer hypothetical. It’s a matter of record.
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Asawin Suebsaeng and Diana Falzone | Inside the 'Death Match' That Helped Doom Tucker Carlson at Fox
09 May 23
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The host tried to get a top executive canned. It backfired spectacularly
But after years of mutual antipathy between the executive and the high-profile host, Carlson attempted to force her out. The sources say Carlson made his case to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, Fox’s chief legal officer Viet Dinh, Murdoch family heir and Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch, and even other Fox News personalities such as Sean Hannity.
In pleading his case, Carlson argued Briganti spent too much time badgering on-air talent and the channel’s personnel; that she was generally incompetent and mean-spirited; and that she regularly engaged in dirty tricks against him and other hosts and contributors, when her job was ostensibly to protect them. One current Fox source with knowledge of the matter described the Carlson-Briganti feud as an intra-network “death match.”
“I do know that he was telling [Fox executives] that [Briganti] should be fucking fired,” a former Fox News commentator tells Rolling Stone. “She’s terrible. He was very bold there.”
But despite Carlson’s high ratings, influence in Republican political circles, and hyper-devoted fan base, he lacked the juice to oust Briganti. Her ties to other top executives were too tight for Carlson to overcome. In some cases, executives laughed off Carlson’s attempt to get Briganti fired, assuring him and others that Briganti was not going anywhere anytime soon.
Word of Carlson’s attempt to get her fired got back to Briganti, exacerbating an already terrible relationship. Briganti “hates all the talent,” the former Fox News commentator says. “She was so disgusted by the level of fucked up idiots who work there, in her opinion, and had to clean up their messes and their overblown egos.”
More importantly for Carlson, the failed attempt to oust Briganti helped erode his goodwill among the Fox News executive class.
“He really thought he was going to make a change, and I kind of shook my head,” says a different former Fox News talent. “It was such a terrible idea. It was such a clear suicide mission … But then again at the time I guess he thought he was big enough to do anything.”
Carlson wasn’t, and last month, he was forced out of Fox News, shocking the political media ecosystem and, within Fox, marking a decisive victory for Briganti.
The precise cause of Carlson’s sacking remains unclear, as high-level Fox sources and others have pushed out a variety of explanations. But it’s widely accepted, inside of Fox and out, that Carlson’s tensions with senior executives — particularly Briganti — helped lay some of the groundwork for his ouster.
One of many factors that looms large in their years-long feuding is a chapter nowadays often described internally at Fox as “cuntgate,” according to current Fox personnel who spoke to Rolling Stone. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that, in the wake of the Dominion lawsuit, redacted legal filings revealed Carlson referred to an unidentified senior Fox executive as the c-word. Several people familiar with the matter are confident the executive in question is Briganti.
“One thousand percent” it was Briganti, the former Fox News commentator says.
Multiple people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone that Carlson has repeatedly in recent years, in text messages and elsewhere, referred to Briganti as a “cunt” and other extremely pejorative terms.
In recent months, as Fox’s legal brass pored over discovery documents in advance of the high-profile Dominion-Fox defamation lawsuit (which has since been settled), some of Carlson’s private messages and texts were flagged for high-ranking executives and board members, some of whom now claim to have been utterly floored by them. In this still mostly concealed trove, there were messages written by Carlson calling multiple people the misogynist epithet, including Briganti, according to two sources familiar with the situation. When Fox lawyers asked Carlson about the messages and Briganti, the then-host privately told them that his characterization of the senior Fox exec was “objectively true,” and showed zero contrition for it.
Now, Carlson and Briganti may be gearing up for another round.
Axios reported Sunday that he was “ready to torch” Fox News, saying he hoped to unleash allies in bid to free the former host to start a rival media operation. And in the time since details of some of his private messages have leaked into the press, Carlson has stressed to people close to him that he does not regret sending nor is he ashamed by some of the now-public texts,” sources familiar with the matter say. That includes the vulgar text about the top female executive, as well as a racist text revealed by The New York Times about how white men supposedly fight.
On Briganti’s end, as Rolling Stone previously reported, high-level executives at Fox have kept a secret dossier of workplace complaints and alleged dirt on Carlson — and have been prepared to leak portions of their files.
“Fox News staffers live in fear of Briganti and that’s by design,” says Megyn Kelly, a former marquee name at Fox who also became a target of Briganti’s ire. “They know she will plant negative stories about them, release private unflattering details about them [and] their work that may or may not be true, and generally do what it takes to remind them how dangerous it is to challenge her. She is one of the main reasons Roger Ailes was able to cover up his harassment of women for so long. She was his most loyal protector. Crossing him meant making an enemy of her, which would invite attacks, public embarrassment, and even ruination of one’s career. It’s stunning they kept her after Ailes’s downfall. Clearly, they like what she does.”
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Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, an independent, with advocates at a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol on raising the minimum wage, May 4, 2023. (photo: Ariana Figueroa/States Newsroom)
Florida, which leans red, has also passed an increase in its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026
Outside the U.S. Capitol, Sanders, a Vermont independent and chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said the panel will vote June 14 on a bill that would increase the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to $17 an hour over a five-year period.
That goal is a $2-an-hour increase from labor organizers’ past campaign of “Fight for $15.”
“Frankly, it is embarrassing for us to be here today and have to talk about a reality where people need to work two or three jobs to put food on the table for the kids,” Sanders said, surrounded by advocates for a higher minimum wage. “You have billionaires who don’t know what to do with their money, buying yachts and going off into outer space, so the time is long overdue.”
Sanders argued that the idea is popular regardless of party affiliation and cited Nebraska, a deep red state that approved an increase in the state minimum wage to $15 an hour, and Florida, which leans red but has also passed an increase in its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026.
He said the U.S. Senate “is going to push it as quickly and hard as we can,” but did not specify if it would be brought to the Senate floor for a vote. There is also the hurdle of the 60-vote threshold when Democrats have a slim 50-seat majority.
And with a Republican-controlled House, it’s unlikely to be brought up by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican.
Heidi Shierholz, the president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said at the press conference that the economic impact of an increase to the federal minimum wage is one of the most-studied subjects in economics.
“The weight of that evidence shows that (when the) minimum wage increases, they raise the wages of our lowest wage-workers, they reduce inequality, they reduce poverty, they reduce child poverty, they reduce gender wage gaps, they reduce racial wage gaps because Black and brown workers, due to the broad impacts of structural racism on our labor markets, are disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-wage jobs,” Shierholz said.
Workers in the South
Economic researchers have found that an increase to the federal minimum wage would particularly benefit low-income workers in the South.
A report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that a boost to a $15-an-hour wage by 2025 would nearly lift a million people out of poverty and more than 17 million workers would experience a wage increase by 2025.
Shierholz said because of inflation, a $15 minimum wage isn’t sufficient.
“So just to give you an idea, $17 today has roughly the same purchasing power as $15 did just two years ago,” she said.
A 40-hour work week with a minimum wage of $15 an hour comes out to an annual salary of about $31,000, before taxes. That is just above the poverty line for a family of four, which is $30,000. A 40-hour work week of $17 an hour would come out to an annual salary of about $35,000 before taxes.
“Mama Cookie” Bradley, a longtime labor organizer from Durham, North Carolina, who attended the press conference, said that a $17-an-hour wage in her city would mean residents would be able to afford rent, food and child care costs.
“It would make life a lot more easier,” she said.
Bradley said she’s fighting for an increase in the federal minimum wage not only for herself, but for the next generation.
“They need it,” she said, adding that her advice for the younger generation is to “keep fighting, keep unionizing and keep organizing.”
The last time the federal minimum wage was raised was in 2009, to $7.25 an hour. Efforts to increase the federal minimum wage have stalled several times in Congress.
When Democrats held control in both chambers in 2021 they tried to include a gradual increase of the federal minimum wage in the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package through a process known as reconciliation that requires only a simple majority, but not all Senate Democrats were on board.
The Biden administration issued an executive order in April 2021 to raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $15 an hour, which includes nursing assistants at Veterans Administration hospitals, maintenance workers, cleaning staff and food service workers.
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David Miranda, a champion of the LGBTQ+ cause married to the journalist Glenn Greenwald, had been suffering a severe gastrointestinal infection. (photo: Marina Ramos/Camara dos Deputados)
Lula celebrates ‘extraordinary trajectory’ of favela-born politician and Guardian columnist who played key role in Snowden leaks
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, celebrated the “extraordinary trajectory” of the favela-born politician who served in the country’s congress between 2019 and 2022 and was a powerful voice of resistance during the far-right administration of Jair Bolsonaro.
The death of Miranda, who was also a columnist for Guardian US, was announced on Tuesday by his husband, the American journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald, with whom he raised two adopted sons, João and Jonathan.
“He would have turned 38 tomorrow,” Greenwald tweeted. “He died in full peace, surrounded by our children and family and friends.”
Miranda was admitted to hospital last August with a severe gastrointestinal infection and died early on Tuesday after nine months in intensive care.
“[I feel] such immense sorrow at the departure of my dear friend David Miranda. A funny, loving, party-loving guy who never gave up fighting for life and for the people of the favela,” tweeted the leftist lawmaker Renata Souza, remembering Miranda’s friendship with Marielle Franco, the Rio politician assassinated in 2018.
One of Brazil’s most celebrated rappers, Emicida, tweeted: “Today Brazil has lost a courageous young man who, in fighting for his dreams, ended up unshackling the dreams of many others too.”
Brazil’s first lady, Rosângela Lula da Silva, said Miranda left a legacy “of struggle and love”. “He had a vivacity which brought joy to politics,” tweeted the president of Lula’s Worker’s party (PT), Gleisi Hoffmann.
Another leading leftist, Guilherme Boulos, remembered how Miranda had relentlessly championed the LGBT cause throughout Brazil. “He will be greatly missed,” tweeted Boulos, a member of the Socialism and Liberty party (PSOL) to which Miranda belonged.
Greenwald, 56, remembered how his husband had been born in Jacarezinho, one of Rio’s most deprived favelas, and been orphaned at the age of five after the death of his mother.
Despite those humble origins, Miranda rose to become the first gay man elected to Rio’s city council and played an important role in 2013’s Edward Snowden leaks, which Greenwald spearheaded. That year, Miranda was controversially detained for nine – hours at London’s Heathrow airport as he travelled back to Rio with memory sticks containing documents relating to that project.
“He inspired so many with his biography, passion, and force of life,” Greenwald wrote.
“David was singular: the strongest, most passionate, most compassionate man I’ve known. Nobody had a bad word for him. I can’t describe the loss and pain.”
In a 2019 New York Times profile of the couple, Greenwald remembered how he had met his future husband on Rio’s Ipanema beach after Miranda knocked his drink over with a ball.
“I was not at all the type that ever fell in love with someone at first sight,” Greenwald remembered. “But the passion, David’s intensity, it was like two asteroids colliding.”
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In the middle of the Venn Diagram between Kanye West and Marjorie Taylor Greene is alt-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos and a campaign credit card. (photo: AP)
In the middle of the Venn Diagram between Kanye West and Marjorie Taylor Greene is alt-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos and a campaign credit card.
The receipts match Federal Election Commission filings from both campaigns. Those filings show that on Nov. 22, the Greene campaign reported a $7,020.16 expense to the GoDaddy hosting service for “domain registration and hosting.” That same day, the Kanye 2020 committee reported paying Yiannopoulos $9,955 for “domain transfer.”
Legal experts told The Daily Beast that the transactions raise a number of questions, including about possible theft and conversion of campaign funds to personal use.
According to the receipts, GoDaddy billed Greene senior adviser Isaiah Wartman for a $7,020.16 purchase of the “ye24.com” domain on Nov. 22. The person with direct knowledge of the events said that Yiannopoulos oversaw the transaction with the Greene campaign card, but the person did not know whether the Greene campaign was aware at the time of the expense.
The transactions occurred on the same day that West—now known as Ye—infamously dined at Mar-a-Lago with former President Donald Trump and white supremacist and Nick Fuentes, who had been advising Ye throughout the rapper’s highly publicized Hitler-loving meltdown last fall.
Yiannopoulos, who has taken credit for arranging the Mar-a-Lago evening, told The Daily Beast that multiple media reports placing him at the dinner were inaccurate, and that he was not personally in attendance. Ye fired Yiannopoulos after the provocateur told NBC News he orchestrated the dinner with the notorious Fuentes “to make Trump’s life miserable,” but the disgraced hip-hop mogul rehired him as political director last week, The Daily Beast reported.
The transactions are coming to light after Ye’s latest treasurer, Patrick Krason, resigned on Monday—the second treasurer to jump ship within the last six months. A leaked internal email, first reported by Politico, shows Krason expressing concern that Yiannopoulos had “submitted falsified invoices for expenditures that would be deemed unlawful.” Treasurers carry personal liability for the accuracy and truthfulness of each report they submit to the government, under penalty of law.
Krason declined to comment for this article. The Greene campaign did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance law specialist and deputy executive director at watchdog Document, told The Daily Beast that if the Greene campaign paid for Kanye’s web domain, “that’s an excessive and unreported in-kind contribution to his campaign.”
Fischer also noted that if Yiannopoulos charged the Greene campaign’s card without the campaign’s knowledge, “then he may have committed a range of serious violations—including, potentially, causing Greene’s campaign to file false reports with the government.”
Paul S. Ryan, a campaign finance expert and deputy director of the Funder’s Committee for Civic Participation, told The Daily Beast that Ye’s campaign purchase of the domain would appear to officially establish him as a candidate for election, since the expense exceeded the $5,000 spending threshold that triggers a registration requirement. While Ye has in recent months used the context of his 2020 campaign to court media attention around a potential 2024 run—spending hundreds of thousands of dollars while raising none—he has still not declared his candidacy or registered with the FEC.
Ryan also pointed to a 2018 FEC ruling in favor of MAGA rap-metal star Kid Rock, in which the commission, rejecting the agency’s own internal legal analysis, dismissed similar allegations. The decision cited in part Rock’s claims that his senate “candidacy” was part of an “artistic and commercial undertaking” to promote a new album and tour.
But Ryan also raised the question of whether Yiannopoulos had converted Greene donations to personal use.
“The law is broadly understood as preventing candidates from converting funds to their personal use, but the plain language of the statute suggests that this ban applies to anyone, not just the candidate,” Ryan said. “This is arguably Milo converting Greene campaign funds to his personal benefit—and for a profit on top of that. Was Milo stealing $7,000 from the Greene campaign for his benefit?”
Jordan Libowitz, communications director for government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told The Daily Beast that “this is a new one for me,” saying the transaction appeared “fraudulent” and a possibly criminal violation of the personal use ban.
“It’s concerning that the domain appears to have been sold to personally benefit Milo. You cannot use campaign funds to benefit yourself. That’s the kind of thing that [former Rep.] Duncan Hunter was convicted of doing,” Libowitz said. “You can’t use the campaign card for your personal benefit. That’s about as clear-cut as it gets.”
He observed that the transaction on its face “looks fraudulent,” adding that if Yiannopoulos used the campaign card for his own purposes, “he would need to repay the Greene campaign—otherwise it’s potentially a criminal area.”
“First, there’s the question of Milo using the Greene campaign credit card without authorization, which could amount to theft,” he said. “Then there’s the personal use question. Campaign funds cannot be used for personal benefit, and if it’s accidental it needs to be repaid immediately.”
Libowitz added that if the Greene campaign had been aware of the transaction—which was conducted in the campaign manager’s name, and which Greene’s treasurer signed off on in the campaign’s post-general report—then “the Greene campaign would appear to be complicit in facilitating the conversion of campaign funds to Milo’s personal use.”
Asked for comment, Yiannopoulos—who last year served six months as an intern in Greene’s office—told The Daily Beast that “the story is absolutely false from start to finish.” However, he also provided a statement he had previously shared on his Telegram social media account that appears to confirm the events, and acknowledged to The Daily Beast that the Greene credit card purchase was made through his personal GoDaddy account.
But the statement also sloughed the blame off to a “junior staffer” and attempted to throw doubt on a “supposed connection between a Marjorie Taylor Greene credit card and a domain connected to YE24.”
“The truth is a junior staffer made an error with the stored credit cards on a third-party vendor GoDaddy account, picking the one ending 2032 instead of 2002,” the statement said. “The accident was quickly rectified and the correct card charged. I have apologized privately to Marjorie for the mixup.”
Asked on Monday when the payment had been “rectified,” Yiannopoulos would only tell The Daily Beast that “I can tell you that it has been refunded.” If he had refunded the money before March 31, however, that transaction would appear to have gone unreported in the campaign’s FEC filings.
Yiannopoulos also claimed to The Daily Beast that the “junior staffer” in his statement was not himself or a Greene employee, but someone who was working under him personally. He also stated that in addition to his internship, the Greene campaign had paid him directly for his political work, claiming he had “set up her podcast and associated websites,” which is why, he said, his personal card and the Greene campaign card were stored in his GoDaddy account.
FEC filings do not show any payments from the Greene campaign to Yiannopoulos. Asked how he was paid, Yiannopoulos told The Daily Beast that “you understand how vendors work,” and declined to elaborate.
Ryan pointed out that if the transaction were in fact a mistake, “it should have been flagged immediately, and corrected on the next report.”
The Greene campaign has filed two reports since the transaction, without such a correction. If Yiannopoulos paid the campaign back in recent weeks, it will appear in Greene’s next filing, due July 15.
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Delores Lowery was diagnosed with diabetes in 2016. Her home in Marlboro County, S.C., is at the heart of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls the Diabetes Belt. (photo: Nick McMillan/NPR)
She turned to her co-workers. "And I asked, I said, 'Why y'all got it so dark in here? They said, 'Delores, it's not dark in here.' I said, 'Yes it is. It's so dark in here.'"
She landed in the hospital. Her A1C level, which shows the average percentage of sugar in someone's blood over the past few months, was 14.
A reading of 6.5% or higher indicates diabetes.
Lowery's home in Marlboro County is at the heart of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls the "Diabetes Belt" — 644 mostly Southern counties where rates of the disease are high.
And of those counties, NPR found that more than half have high levels of medical debt. That means at least 1 in 5 people have medical debt in collections.
That's much higher than the national rate, which is 13%, according to the Urban Institute, a social-policy nonprofit. In Marlboro County, 37% of people have medical debt in collections.
NPR measured the overlap of Diabetes Belt counties and high medical debt counties by merging the institute's medical debt database with the CDC's list of Diabetes Belt counties.
Institute economist Breno Braga says medical debt, like diabetes, is concentrated in the South.
"The single most important predictor of a county's medical debt is the prevalence of chronic conditions. So it's basically the share of the population that has disease, such as diabetes, hypertension and other types," he says.
Lowery has been dealing with both the medical and financial challenges of Type 2 diabetes, and much more. The years since her diagnosis have been extremely difficult, with one life-changing event having overwhelming health and financial consequences.
In 2017, she came home one day to find her daughter, Ella Shantrica, on the floor, stabbed to death. The body of her granddaughter, 8-year-old Iyana, was found 12 days later in a nearby creek. In February, a man was found guilty in the killings and sentenced to life in prison.
In an interview in the front room of that tidy single-family home in Bennettsville, Lowery says it took some time before she could bring herself to return to the house.
"Every day, 24 hours a day, that incident is in my head," she says. "It will never, ever go away."
She credits her church's pastor with helping her go back to the home, which she shares with her grandson Tyreon, a teenager on the autism spectrum. With her daughter gone, Lowery says she is Tyreon's sole caregiver.
Paying for diabetes care along with bills for food and housing has been a constant financial strain that eventually put her in debt.
"The cost of living was so extremely high in trying to raise my grandson that I just got behind," she says.
She's not alone. In addition to NPR's findings, research from the American Diabetes Association says people with the disease have more than twice the medical expenses annually as those without the disease.
"Because diabetes is a chronic illness, there are always six-month appointments," says Donna Dees, who lives in Georgia and was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in 2008. "Every six months, go to the doctor, you've got lab work. So that's how the costs keep building up and building up."
Dees built up thousands of dollars in medical debt and got help from RIP Medical Debt, a nonprofit group that says it has wiped out more than $8 billion in medical debt.
Lowery will tell you that she gets high-quality and compassionate health care from a local provider. But the financial challenge of living with diabetes has put her health into decline.
A drug that once helped her, Ozempic, is now too costly for her.
She says the medicine had been helping bring her diabetes under control. She was getting it delivered to her home, but she didn't meet her copays and the bills piled up as unpaid debt.
Soon, the deliveries stopped and Lowery tried to renew the prescription at the local pharmacy.
"I went to get it and the woman told me, 'I don't think you're going to be able to afford this.' I said, 'Why not?' She said, 'Because it's seven hundred and some dollars.'"
Worse, as the drug's profile skyrocketed in recent months as a "Hollywood" treatment for weight loss, demand increased and a shortage developed.
Lowery said earlier this year that she hadn't been able to get Ozempic for several months and that her diabetes was getting worse. Her insurance company has been no help.
"Nobody is willing to work with me with Ozempic. I don't know what to do," Lowery says. "They won't send me the medicine."
She and her provider even talked about getting physician samples, but given Ozempic's growing popularity, that didn't work.
A changing economy
In Lowery's hometown, others are struggling too.
More than 1 in 3 residents of the surrounding county have medical debt in collections, and 1 in 3 live in poverty.
It wasn't always this way, locals tell NPR. The area once hummed with manufacturing companies, restaurants and other amenities. There were plenty of good jobs to go around.
But one by one, employers moved out. Today, downtown Bennettsville is pretty quiet. South Carolina as a whole has nearly 100,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than it did in 2000.
"Bennettsville used to be a more thriving community years ago," says Lowery's health care provider, nurse practitioner Pat Weaver. "With a lot of our plants leaving for, you know, overseas in the last 15-20 years really made a devastating impact. We used to have a hospital here and now we no longer have that. It is very poor."
Weaver works for CareSouth, a nonprofit health center that has a federal government designation as a safety net provider.
As she walks the halls of the clinic, checking on colleagues and patients, she says that of the 3,300 appointments she takes every year, more than 90% of them have Type 2 diabetes.
She and others point to Bennettsville's changing economic fortune as a source of health problems in the community. Half the households in the city have an income less than $32,000.
She says lower-income residents often can't or don't choose the kinds of healthy meals that would help them control their diabetes.
"The fast foods don't help at all, and a lot of people just eat it every day, and that's a problem. It truly is," Weaver says. "But we have programs to help them. We even have a program where we take patients to the grocery store and we teach them what to buy."
CareSouth takes other steps, too, to fight the effects of poverty and disease in Bennettsville. The center has a sliding fee scale based on ability to pay and an in-house pharmacy that uses a federal program to keep drug prices down.
For Lowery, having a medical provider like Weaver has been a lifeline. "She's seen me through so much," Lowery says. "She tried different medicines to get my diabetes intact."
Finding Weaver came at a time when her family's murders threw her into depression, her finances spiraled out of control, and her diabetes worsened. Weaver, she says, helped get her into counseling.
"When she found out what had happened, I honestly believe in my heart that she cried just like I cried," Lowery says. "She did so much for me."
South Carolina's choice on Medicaid
While there is no easy solution for Lowery, who is over 65 and on Medicare, the Urban Institute and others say a simple policy change could prevent others from getting to such a difficult stage in their disease and finances: Expand Medicaid.
"Seventy-nine out of the 100 counties with the highest levels of medical debt are in states that have not expanded Medicaid under the ACA," the Urban Institute's Braga says.
The ACA is the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, which offered states the option to expand their health insurance programs for the poor.
South Carolina is one of 10 states that have declined, and where NPR identified more than two dozen counties that fall within the Diabetes Belt and have high rates of medical debt. There's evidence from other states that people became healthier and owed less money to medical providers after Medicaid expansion.
A Boston University researcher looked at health centers just like CareSouth — more than 900 of them serving nearly 20 million patients.
The centers in states that did expand Medicaid reported better diabetes control than those in states that didn't expand the program, and the effect was quick — within three years of the expansion.
Those improvements happened consistently among Black and Hispanic patients, who have higher rates of diabetes.
A study in Louisiana found that people who gained Medicaid coverage after an expansion there had reduced medical debt.
An eye on the future
Lowery says going forward she will continue to rely on her faith and her church community to help her through the tough times.
Still, she worries about the possible worsening of her diabetes and the financial stress of daily life.
"I wish things would get better," she says. "I think I would sleep a little better, because sometimes it's kind of hard for me to try to keep some food on the table."
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Flowers and tributes adorn the grave of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, killed by Israeli forces one year ago, on May 7, 2023, in Jerusalem. (photo: Ilia Yefimovich/Picture Alliance)
A year after Israel killed the Palestinian American journalist, an FBI probe remains pending, yet the U.S. has gone silent on her death.
This week marks one year since an Israeli soldier killed the Palestinian American journalist with a single shot to the head while she was reporting from the city of Jenin. For her former colleagues, her absence is as dominating as her presence once was.
“She was a legend,” Rania Zabaneh, an Al Jazeera producer and friend of Abu Akleh told The Intercept during a visit to the office earlier this year. Abu Akleh was universally loved among her peers and a household name across the Middle East. While she spent her career covering the daily tragedies of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, her co-workers remember her as funny and upbeat, always seeking out stories about joy and resilience. “She dug for fun, happy stories in a place where everything else is dark,” said Zabaneh.
Over the last year, Abu Akleh’s colleagues have continued to report on Israeli violence across occupied Palestine, including increasingly frequent military invasions of West Bank cities like the one she was covering the day she was killed. They have also found themselves at the center of the story: regularly updating the public about the various probes into their colleague’s death while actively participating in global calls for justice.
No one has been held accountable for Abu Akleh’s killing to date. While Israeli officials quickly closed the case, declining to bring charges, the most significant movement has so far come from the United States. Last fall, the FBI launched an investigation last fall following a sustained public pressure campaign, including by members of Congress; that probe is ongoing. Meanwhile, the Office of the U.S. Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Territories, the liaison on security issues in the region, has delayed issuing its own report into the killing.
Along with Abu Akleh’s family, Al Jazeera has filed a formal request to investigate the killing to the International Criminal Court, whose probe into an array of alleged crimes committed in Palestine has not made much progress since it was launched in 2021.
As those probes stall, many of Abu Akleh’s colleagues still struggle to cope with the void she left.
“At first, we were on autopilot; we were like, she’s gone and we have to cover her killing,” said Zabaneh. “But it’s getting harder as time passes, because now we have to come to terms with the fact that she’s not coming back; she’s gone, gone.”
No Accountability
When Abu Akleh was shot on May 11, 2022, she was wearing a clearly marked press vest in an area with no active fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian fighters. (Israel initially claimed that she was killed at the scene of a firefight, a claim that was quickly debunked.) In the weeks following her killing, half a dozen independent reviews, including one by the United Nations, found that Israeli forces were responsible. Last July, Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq and the U.K.-based research agency Forensic Architecture released a detailed reconstruction of the shooting, which concluded that Abu Akleh had been deliberately targeted.
While the killing sparked significant international condemnation, it was hardly an isolated incident.
Last year was the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank since the end of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. This year is on track to be worse, as Israeli forces make military incursions into cities like Nablus and Jenin with increasing frequency. According to the U.N., Israeli forces have already killed at least 94 Palestinians this year, including at least 19 children, more than double last year’s number in the same period.
Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians almost never face consequences. And there also hasn’t been any accountability when they have killed citizens of other countries, including several Americans. As The Intercept reported last year, the U.S government never investigated Israel’s killing of 23-year-old peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death with a bulldozer while protesting a home demolition in Gaza 20 years ago, nor of 78-year-old Omar Assad, a former Milwaukee grocery store owner who died of a heart attack last year while in the custody of a notoriously violent Israeli military unit.
The Justice Department’s investigation into Abu Akleh’s death, which came only after serious outrage at U.S. inaction in the case, marked the first time the U.S. government moved to independently probe Israel’s killing of an American. As standard with criminal investigations by the FBI, Justice Department officials have not spoken publicly about the case. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Last July, the USSC, the U.S. security coordinator in the region, issued a cursory statement on the killing that sparked widespread condemnation and questions about the office’s independence. Since then, the coordinator has launched a new review of the killing, which has included a meeting with members of Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq earlier this year.
Following a formal request by Sens. Bob Menendez and Cory Booker, the security coordinator was expected to provide a classified congressional briefing on his office’s investigation of the case. That never happened, and a report by the coordinator, which was expected to be released earlier this year, has also been delayed. During a press briefing last week, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said that the USSC “has not changed” the conclusions it had reached last summer, “which is that [Israeli Defense Forces] gunfire was likely the reason, unintentionally.”
In a letter published last week, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who has consistently raised Abu Akleh’s case, criticized the delay and reiterated a request for the report to be released. “Most recently, we were informed that, before congressional release of the USSC Report is authorized, the Administration plans to make unspecified changes to its contents,” Van Hollen noted. “While the Administration has characterized its proposed changes as ‘technical,’ any actions to alter the USSC’s Summation Report in any way would violate the integrity of this process.”
The State Department declined to comment on government communications about the report. “We are determined to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future and continue to engage with Israel in this regard,” spokesperson Rachel E. Rubin wrote in an email.
A Chilling Effect
Abu Akleh was not the first journalist killed by Israeli forces. In a report published this week, the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, documented at least 20 instances of Israeli Defense Forces killing members of the media since 2001.
Like Abu Akleh, the majority of those killed — at least 13 — were clearly identified as journalists or inside vehicles with press insignia when they were killed, according to the report. Many more journalists were injured by Israeli forces, which also repeatedly targeted media headquarters. During a military assault on Gaza in 2021, for instance, Israel bombed buildings where more than a dozen local and international media outlets were headquartered, including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. As The Intercept has previously reported, Israel also regularly detains and questions Palestinian journalists, including 16 who are currently being held without charges.
“To be a journalist in Palestine is a very dangerous job,” said Ammar Al Dwaik, the director of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, Palestine’s national human rights institute, adding that journalists also face daily intimidation by settlers and soldiers.
Al Dwaik, who was a friend of Abu Akleh, said that her killing was a reminder that nobody was safe from Israeli violence, and that journalists were no exception. “Shireen was visible, in the broad daylight. Soldiers could see her wearing the vest and yet they shot her, which means that no one is safe and everyone could be a target,” he said. “Being a journalist doesn’t give you any protection with Israeli soldiers.”
Nor has being a clearly identifiable journalist led to greater accountability. “The degree to which Israel claims to investigate journalist killings depends largely on external pressure,” Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, wrote in a statement. “There are cursory probes into the deaths of journalists with foreign passports, but that is rarely the case for slain Palestinian reporters. Ultimately, none has seen any semblance of justice.”
In its report, CPJ warned that Israeli violence against journalists has a “chilling effect” that undermines press freedom. That chilling effect, some Palestinian journalists told The Intercept, comes not just in the form of fear but also of a lost sense of purpose and the impression that their lives are considered unworthy.
Those feelings intensified after Abu Akleh was killed. A few days after the shooting, Zabaneh was with a team who traveled to Jenin, to report on Israel’s incursion into the city’s refugee camp. As they parked on the camp’s outskirts, the group of seasoned journalists froze, unsure of what to do. “We were like, do we go in? We got stuck there for 10 minutes before deciding,” said Zabaneh. “We’re not talking about a bunch of rookies. … Everybody’s coming in with at least 10 years of experience. It was like, what do we do now?”
Dalia Hatuqa, a freelance Palestinian American journalist who has written for The Intercept and was a friend of Abu Akleh, echoed those sentiments. “Fear has permeated our work.”
In February, when Israeli settlers invaded the city of Hawara, outside Nablus, setting fire to homes and cars in the most severe episode of settler violence in years, Hatuqa hesitated before deciding not to go cover the news as she would have in the past. “It was a combination of fear, but also of, ‘What’s the point?’” she said. “The whole thing has had a depressive effect on our ability to work.”
Despite the lack of accountability, many members of both the U.S. government and the U.S. media seemed to have moved on, lamented Hatuqa. She noted that at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last week, President Joe Biden spoke of journalists Austin Tice, who has been missing in Syria since 2012, and Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter detained in Russia. Biden made no mention of Abu Akleh. Neither did Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, at a recent event commemorating World Press Freedom Day.
“It’s almost like, it happened, let’s all move on,” Hatuqa said. “But some of us haven’t moved on at all.”
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The fin whale is the second-largest mammal on Earth. (photo: Mark Carwardine/Minden Pictures)
Food and veterinary authority report questions whether hunting large whales can meet animal welfare objectives
A number of the carcasses of the fin whales shot by explosive harpoons during hunts in Iceland last year were examined by the organisation, which found that almost 40% struggled for approximately 11 and a half minutes before they died, while two took more than an hour. A quarter of the fin whales, the second-largest mammal on Earth after the blue whale, considered “vulnerable” globally by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, had to be harpooned a second time. Only 59% died instantly.
The report, described as alarming by Iceland’s minister of food agriculture and fisheries, found the killing of some whales had taken too long. The provisions of the animal welfare act on hunting had not been violated, it found, due to the “best known” methods used by the hunt. But it questioned whether hunting large whales could meet animal welfare objectives and referred its finding to an expert animal welfare council to decide.
Animal welfare campaigners described the findings as intolerable and unacceptable and called on the Icelandic government to halt all whale hunts.
Svandís Svavarsdóttir, Iceland’s minister of food, agriculture and fisheries, said: “This alarming report underscores the need for a discussion in Iceland about the values we want to be known for. I believe that industries incapable of guaranteeing animal welfare should be considered part of our past rather than our future. This report, along with the expert council on animal welfare’s findings, will serve as essential background material for making decisions about the future of whaling post 2023.”
Iceland is one of the few countries that hunts whales commercially, along with Norway and Japan, despite a ban on commercial whaling that has been in place since 1986 under the international whaling commission.
However, Svavarsdóttir said last year that the country planned to end whaling from 2024 as demand dwindled. Last August, the ministry issued a regulation requiring the food and veterinary authority (MAST) to carry out regular inspections of whaling hunts, in order to promote animal welfare.
Patrick Ramage, senior director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), said: “Whatever their views on whaling, both Icelanders and the international community will be horrified by these findings. No animal – however it is killed – should suffer for such a long time. Whales are sentient, intelligent and complex creatures that suffer both physically and psychologically during this traumatic massacre.”
“There is no humane way to kill a whale at sea. This new evidence underscores how outdated this practice is. It has to end immediately – no one in Iceland is dependent on this meat.”
In Iceland, 148 whales were killed in 2022. The hunting of 58 whales was filmed and analysed by experts on behalf of the food and veterinary authority. It showed, of the 36 whales shot more than once, five whales were shot three times and four whales were shot four times. One whale with a harpoon in its back was chased for five hours without success.
Árni Finnsson, the chair of the Iceland Nature Conservation Association, said: “This killing is inhumane; it has to stop. There is no economic benefit for Iceland and it undermines the country’s record as a pro-conservation nation.”
Danny Groves, a spokesperson for Whale and Dolphin Conservation, said: “We’ve known for a long time that time to death in these hunts can take 20-25 minutes. It will be an agonising death because these are sentient beings. They will experience great pain.
“You’re using a grenade-tipped harpoon from a moving ship to a moving target. This wouldn’t be allowed in a slaughterhouse in the UK.”
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