05 June 23
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President Joe Biden on Saturday signed a debt ceiling deal into law that averts a catastrophic default by the United States through January 1, 2025, hailing it as a “big win” for the country. Critics say the agreement protects wealthy corporations and tax dodgers while imposing new cuts on key social programs and expanding work requirements for some recipients of food stamps. The legislation has also been called a “dirty deal” by climate activists because it rolls back environmental regulations and fast-tracks the approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline through West Virginia and Virginia, a pet project of powerful Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. “The working class of this country was deeply harmed by this bill,” says investigative journalist David Sirota of The Lever. He also faults Democratic leaders for not raising the debt ceiling after the midterm elections, when the party still had control of Congress. “What you see is a picture of a party that wanted this outcome,” says Sirota.
President Joe Biden has signed a debt ceiling deal into law that averts a historic default by the United States. In his first address from the Oval Office, Biden said passing this budget agreement was critical.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The only way American democracy can function is through compromise and consensus, and that’s what I worked to do as your president — you know, to forge a bipartisan agreement where it’s possible and where it’s needed.
AMY GOODMAN: Progressives who opposed the bipartisan deal cited new cuts it imposes on key social programs and expanded work requirements for some recipients of food stamps. The legislation was called a “dirty deal” by climate activists, because it rolls back the National Environmental Policy Act and fast-tracks the approval and construction of the fracked gas Mountain Valley Pipeline through West Virginia and Virginia, a pet project of the powerful conservative Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin.
Meanwhile, critics say lobbyists prevented the debt bill from including tax reforms and repealing high-income tax cuts. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who voted “no,” spoke Saturday at a “Rally to Raise the Wage” in Charleston, South Carolina.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: In this moment in American history, we have a choice: Either we abdicate our responsibilities to our kids and future generations, and we allow a handful of billionaires to consolidate their wealth and their power, or we stand up and fight back.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in Denver, Colorado, by David Sirota, award-winning investigative journalist, founder of the news website The Lever, where his latest piece is headlined “This Is What Biden Says Is A 'Big Win.'” Sirota is also editor-at-large for Jacobin.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, David. OK, can you just lay out who you think gained and lost in this historic debt signing deal, historic because it would have been the first time, if it hadn’t been signed, that the country defaulted?
DAVID SIROTA: Well, certainly, the fossil fuel industry is a big winner here, as you alluded to with the Mountain Valley Pipeline, expediting that controversial pipeline, which many say will be a climate bomb at a time of a climate emergency. So, the fossil fuel industry, a huge winner here.
Defense contractors, military contractors, also big winners in this deal, in which it approved the Pentagon budget going up to another record level.
Private student lenders, who have wanted the end of the private — the student lending moratorium, they are big winners here. They have been lobbying for that. One major private student lender, its stock began rising as soon as this deal was being finalized.
And then, of course, the very rich. Again, as you alluded to, there were no measures in this debt bill to repeal the high-income tax cuts that are responsible, primarily responsible, for the increase in the debt ratio that was supposed to be at issue in this bill. In fact, in addition to not repealing those high-income tax cuts, the bill also cuts a large amount of funding from the IRS, and the IRS’s specifically — its functions to enforce the basic tax laws already on the books as they relate to the very wealthy. We have a very big situation in this country where hundreds of billions of dollars of owed taxes go unpaid by the richest Americans. That funding was supposed to be to do that kind of crackdown. Now it has been moved out into other programs. So, those are the big winners in this bill.
AMY GOODMAN: The losers?
DAVID SIROTA: Well, the losers are everybody else. The losers, in particular, very, very poor people. Again, as you discussed, the changes to the food stamp program, to make it harder for lots of people to access food stamps, at a time of an affordability crisis, that’s a big loss. I think student debtors, where, again, in the middle of an affordability crisis, you’ve got student debt payments that are going to start up again. So, basically, the working class of this country was deeply harmed by this bill.
And I would say this. The president celebrating this bill as a big win — in other words, instead of saying this is something that we had to do — and we can go over whether he actually had to do it. He didn’t have to do this. But instead of saying, “We had to do this. It’s kind of unfortunate,” going out and celebrating this as a big win is an admission about what the Democratic president and the Democratic Party see as a win, and for whom they think they want to secure such victories. It’s all now out on the table. It’s all now there for everybody to see.
And it’s important to remember that we didn’t have to be at this point. The Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress in the lame duck and chose not to pass a clean debt ceiling bill. They chose not to. At the time, Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois simply said the party did not feel like making time at the end of the congressional session to do that.
So, the point being is this is exactly the result that the Democratic Party wanted. They wanted to work with Republicans to get to these exact policies. And now they are celebrating that. So I think we all need to take a moment to say, “OK, this is what the Democratic president and the Democratic Party, working alongside the Republican Party, this is what it actually wants.”
AMY GOODMAN: So, obviously, you agree that if the U.S. had defaulted, it would have created an absolute catastrophe. But you say, aside from even having negotiated the deal in the lame duck, when the Democrats were in control, that Biden had this option of the 14th Amendment and didn’t take it. Talk about the significance of that.
DAVID SIROTA: Sure. The Constitution makes pretty clear that the U.S. government is empowered, above statutes, if you will, to deal with the debt and make sure it does not default on its debt. Progressive lawmakers had asked the Biden administration to use this power to avert this entire manufactured crisis. And almost as soon as that proposal was floated by those lawmakers, the Biden White House said, no, they’re not even going to pursue it.
And again, I think you put that together with the fact that they didn’t try to pass a clean debt ceiling bill during the lame-duck session, when Democrats controlled the Congress, and what you see is a picture of a party that wanted this outcome. Overlay it, by the way, with one other layer, with the fact that Joe Biden, throughout his career, has given floor speeches on the floor of the Senate, has made clear that he wants to work with Republicans to cut spending, cut funding for social programs. So I think we have to step back and realize this is a moment of honesty, a moment of clarity, of where at least the leadership of the Democratic Party is when it comes to things like budget austerity.
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Donald Trump. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis could pursue charges using the state’s RICO law.
The Georgia investigation is just one of three ongoing probes into Trump’s potentially criminal activities during his presidency. It focuses on the former president’s efforts to have Georgia officials dispute or alter the results of the state’s 2020 presidential vote, which narrowly favored President Joe Biden. The two other investigations, both overseen by federal special counsel Jack Smith, concern the alleged mishandling of classified documents at the end of Trump’s presidency and efforts in other states to falsely certify the 2020 election results in his favor.
The Georgia investigation is led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat. Her office has been investigating allegations that Trump tried to convince Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, both Republicans, to deny that Biden won their state. In a 2021 phone call with Raffensperger, Trump urged him to “find” the campaign 11,780 more votes — one more vote than the 11,779 by which Biden won Georgia — “because we won the state.” Trump also told Raffensperger that he was taking “a big risk” if he did not overturn the state’s election results, and that Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the former general counsel for the secretary of state, could face unspecified criminal charges if they did not comply with Trump’s demands that they substantiate false claims of thousands of ballots being destroyed in Fulton County.
According to reporting from the Washington Post, Willis has been seeking information from two businesses, Simpatico Software Systems and Berkeley Research Group, which Trump hired to investigate claims of voter fraud in other states. Trump’s campaign spent more than $1 million to hire the firms in late 2020 to investigate claims of voter fraud in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The companies found no evidence of voter fraud and have reportedly cooperated with Smith’s investigation as well.
Willis’s requests for information from both companies indicate that her nearly three-year-long investigation will likely pull in evidence from other states and perhaps utilize the federal RICO statute to prosecute the Trump campaign.
The broadening effort to hold Trump accountable for election interference
In Georgia, Willis’s case is built around the Trump team's efforts to reverse the 2020 elections in a few different ways: Trump’s call to Raffensperger telling him to find the 11,780 votes; Trump and former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark’s call for a special session of the General Assembly to select Trump-supporting Electoral College electors and arrange a December 2020 meeting of alternate electors in which they cast their votes for Trump; and the Trump team’s possible involvement in a plan to access voting equipment without authorization in Georgia’s Coffee County.
Georgia’s RICO law has a broad definition of what constitutes racketeering behavior: “knowingly and willfully making a false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation in any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of state government” to carry out a crime, as Clark Cunningham, a professor at Georgia State University’s College of Law told the Guardian in January. “If you do that, you’ve committed a racketeering activity. If you attempt to do that, if you solicit someone else to do it or you coerce someone else to do it — it’s all considered racketeering under Georgia law.”
Willis has utilized the RICO statute in high-profile cases, including against rappers Gunna and Young Thug for allegedly helping found a violent street gang and to prosecute a cheating scandal in Atlanta public schools in 2015. Indications that Willis intends to use the RICO statute in the Trump investigation have repeatedly surfaced during the probe as well.
“The reason that I am a fan of RICO is I think jurors are very, very intelligent,” Willis said during a press conference last year regarding the Young Thug case. “They want to know what happened. They want to make an accurate decision about someone’s life. And so RICO is a tool that allows a prosecutor’s office and law enforcement to tell the whole story.”
Georgia’s RICO laws require only two incidents of racketeering behavior to justify an indictment and define a wide variety of activities, including illegally distilling liquor and prostitution, as racketeering. In the Trump case, it’s likely that Trump’s and his campaign’s false statements to Georgia officials constitute racketeering activity to further the scheme of overturning the 2020 election results; information from other states can be used because the intended outcome of all the campaign’s efforts to overturn the election was to do so in other states and nationally, in addition to Georgia.
But just because Willis can point to behavior that breaks Georgia’s RICO statute in other places, she won’t necessarily file charges in those instances — she may merely use that evidence to build out her office’s case that the Trump campaign’s behavior amounts to a large-scale, illegal scheme.
Willis’s case will be challenging to prosecute; some of it depends on whether the people involved knew they were making false statements, or whether they actually believed the false claims they were repeating to state officials. Whether Trump and other campaign officials explicitly told people to break the law in order to overturn the election in Trump’s favor will also likely play a factor.
More is expected to become clear in the near future; Willis has indicated her office may bring charges as soon as August.
Georgia is just one of Trump’s problems
Trump’s legal troubles have come to define his third run for the presidency, but there’s no certainty about what they indicate for his future. They may end up playing into his narrative as a political martyr, persecuted by Democrats bent on keeping him out of office — or actually result in accountability for his and his followers’ attempts to subvert democracy.
In addition to the Georgia probe, the two federal investigations continue. On Friday, CNN reported that federal prosecutors had a 2021 tape of Trump telling his aides and two people working on an autobiography of former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that he had retained a classified Pentagon plan to attack Iran. On the recording, Trump indicates that he would like to share the contents of the document but has limited power to declassify documents after leaving the White House. That evidence potentially contradicts his claims that he declassified all of the documents removed from the White House during the wind-down of his presidency, as well as indicating that he may have broken the law by keeping documents pertinent to national security outside of a protected domain.
Smith, the special counsel, and federal prosecutors are also continuing to look into the Trump campaign’s false claims of election fraud — particularly whether they knew those claims were untrue but continued to make them in order to stay in power and profit financially.
Though the outcomes of those investigations are yet to be seen, recent cases against Trump have not gone in his favor.
In April, Trump was indicted in a Manhattan district court on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to alleged hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels, a porn actress with whom Trump allegedly had an affair in 2006, during his 2016 campaign. Trump’s former attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, already served time in federal prison for his part in the scheme to keep Daniels from speaking openly about the affair; the charges against Trump relate to the manner in which he reimbursed Cohen for the payments to Daniels, labeling them as legal expenses. Though Trump has been indicted, that case likely will not head to trial till 2024.
E. Jean Carroll, the former advice columnist for Elle, also won a victory against Trump last month, eliciting $5 million in damages in her civil suit against the former president. The jury in that case found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation regarding his attack on Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s and the later maligning of her in the media after she made the allegations public in 2019. Carroll has sought additional damages against Trump for repeatedly denigrating her after the verdict.
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An aerial view of destruction in Bakhmut, most of which was captured by the Wagner group last month. (photo: Ukrainian Armed Forces/Reuters)
Lt Col Roman Venevitin seen telling interrogator he ordered troops to shoot at convoy of mercenaries
In a video posted on Prigozhin’s social media channels, Lt Col Roman Venevitin, the commander of Russia’s 72nd Brigade, tells an interrogator that, while drunk, he had ordered his troops to fire on a Wagner convoy.
In the footage, which resembled clips of prisoner of war soldiers, Venevitin said he acted because of his “personal dislike” for Wagner and then apologised.
Last week, Prigozhin accused the Russian army of trying to blow up his men as they were pulling back from the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut.
The businessman, who is best known as “Putin’s chef” because of his catering contracts with the Kremlin, also claimed his men had discovered explosives, which he said were planted on purpose by defence ministry officials.
The Russian ministry of defence has yet to comment on the footage.
Two close family members of Venevitin confirmed to the Guardian that the man filmed in the video was their relative.
Prigozhin, who has been arguing with top military officials for months, announced last week that his troops had largely pulled back from Bakhmut, most of which they captured last month after taking heavy casualties. The city is now believed to be controlled by the regular Russian forces.
The latest incident again exposes the rifts in Moscow’s war machine. It also comes amid an increase in fighting along the frontlines in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, leading to speculation that Kyiv has launched its much-anticipated counteroffensive.
Some nationalist pro-war commentators said Wagner’s arrest of a senior Russian soldier attested to Prigozhin’s growing influence within the Kremlin.
“Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose subordinates posted a video in which they mock a senior officer and an entire brigade commander … is allowed to do whatever he wants. He is considered as the highest caste!” Igor Strelkov, a retired Russian special operations officer and popular military blogger, wrote on his Telegram channel.
Prigozhin’s influence grew as his troops gradually captured Bakhmut in recent months, delivering Moscow the first tangible military victory since last summer.
Since the start of the war, Prigozhin has emerged as one of the most visible power players, frequently using social media to deliver scorching tirades against the defence ministry. His turbulent rise, however, has angered some elements of the Russian elite.
Last week, Prigozhin received rare public criticism when two close allies of the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, described him as a “hysterical blogger” who undermined Russia’s war effort.
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Texas, where the family crossed into the US, is a hotspot of border control activity. (photo: Reuters)
An eight-year-old girl with underlying medical conditions who died in US Border Patrol custody was repeatedly denied requests to go to hospital.
She was seen by a nurse four times on the day she died.
However, the nurse denied "three or four requests from the girl's mother for an ambulance to be called".
Details of the tragedy come from Customs and Border Patrol, which has written a report about Alvarez's death.
The girl, who was born in Panama to Honduran parents, was treated for her symptoms on 16 May with flu and fever medications, ice packs, and a cold shower, it said.
But none of the staff seemed aware that Alvarez suffered from sickle cell anaemia, a condition which usually requires life-long treatment, or that she had a history of congenital heart disease.
The family said they reported her medical history when they had first been taken into custody at a different facility a week earlier.
Agency rules say detention should not be longer than three days, but that is often not the case, as average processing times have lengthened drastically in recent years.
The family were transferred to the Harlingen facility, where Alvarez died, for medical isolation after the girl tested positive for the flu. CCTV at the facility had been broken for weeks, and investigators have pieced together events from interviews.
It said a different member of medical staff reported bringing "a pile of documents" and some folic acid tablets from the family home to the nurse the morning the girl died. Folic acid - also called vitamin B9 - can be used to help treat anaemia.
The nurse allowed Alvarez to take one tablet, but "declined to review the papers", CBP said.
At that stage, her symptoms had worsened to include stomach ache, nausea and difficulty breathing.
Hours later, after the fourth visit that day to the nurse, Alvarez's mother returned carrying her daughter in her arms, who seemed to be having a seizure. It was at that point that emergency services were called, but the eight-year-old was declared dead within an hour.
The agency's version of events appears to support details in an interview her mother, Mabel Alvarez Benedicks, gave to the Associated Press news agency days after her daughter's death.
"They killed my daughter, because she was nearly a day and a half without being able to breathe," she told AP. "She cried and begged for her life and they ignored her. They didn't do anything for her."
The CBP's review so far suggests that the medical staff never consulted with doctors - including an on-call paediatrician - about Alvarez's illness.
The young girl's autopsy found a build-up of fluid in her chest cavity, and noted "the attempted surgical repair of the girl's aortic stenosis [a heart condition], and also referenced the provided history of sickle cell anaemia". A cause of death has yet to be officially declared.
In a separate statement Thursday, the acting head of CBP Troy Miller said her death was "a deeply upsetting and unacceptable tragedy".
"Several medical providers involved in this incident have now been prohibited from working in CBP facilities," he said.
The agency's top medical officer was carrying out a review of procedures across all its facilities, and steps had been taken to review the cases of "all medically fragile individuals," he added.
Alvarez's death was the second death in custody of a child in two weeks, after a 17-year-old Honduran boy, Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza, died in a shelter in Florida run by the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement.
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Misinformation. (photo: Slate)
I fought to make the term misinformation mainstream. Now, I think focusing on labels can distract from a larger problem.
By spring of that year, I had already become exasperated by how this term was being used to attack the news media. Worse, it had never captured the problem: Most content wasn’t actually fake, but genuine content used out of context—and only rarely did it look like news. I made a rallying cry to stop using fake news and instead use misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation under the umbrella term information disorder. These terms, especially the first two, have caught on, but they represent an overly simple, tidy framework I no longer find useful.
Both disinformation and misinformation describe false or misleading claims, but disinformation is distributed with the intent to cause harm, whereas misinformation is the mistaken sharing of the same content. Analyses of both generally focus on whether a post is accurate and whether it is intended to mislead. The result? We researchers become so obsessed with labeling the dots that we can’t see the larger pattern they show.
By focusing narrowly on problematic content, researchers are failing to understand the increasingly sizable number of people who create and share this content, and also overlooking the larger context of what information people actually need. Academics are not going to effectively strengthen the information ecosystem until we shift our perspective from classifying every post to understanding the social contexts of this information, how it fits into narratives and identities, and its short-term impacts and long-term harms.
To understand what these terms leave out, consider “Lynda,” a fictional person based on many I track online. Lynda fervently believes vaccines are dangerous. She scours databases for newly published scientific research, watches regulatory hearings for vaccine approvals, reads vaccine inserts to analyze ingredients and warnings. Then she shares what she learns with her community online.
Is she a misinformer? No. She’s not mistakenly sharing information that she didn’t bother to verify. She takes the time to seek out information.
Nor is she a disinformation agent as commonly defined. She isn’t trying to cause harm or get rich. My sense is that Lynda is driven to post because she feels an overwhelming need to warn people about a health system she sincerely believes has harmed her or a loved one. She is strategically choosing information to connect with people and promote a worldview. Her criteria for choosing what to post depends less on whether it makes sense rationally and more about her social identities and affinities.
Dismissing Lynda for her selective interpretation and lack of research credentials risks failing to see what she’s accomplishing overall: taking snippets or clips that support her belief systems from information published by authoritative institutions (maybe an admission by a scientist that more research is needed, or a disclaimer about known side effects) and sharing that without any wider context or explanation. This “accurate” information that she has uncovered via her own research is used to support inaccurate narratives—perhaps that governments are rolling out vaccines for population control, or that doctors are dupes or pharmaceutical company shills.
To understand the contemporary information ecosystem, researchers need to move away from our fixation on accuracy and zoom out to understand the characteristics of some of these online spaces that are powered by people’s need for connection, community, and affirmation. As communications scholar Alice Marwick has written, “Within social environments, people are not necessarily looking to inform others: they share stories (and pictures, and videos) to express themselves and broadcast their identity, affiliations, values, and norms.”
Lynda’s online world points to the importance of connections, which is not easily captured by the labels misinformation and disinformation. While Lynda might post primarily in anti-vaccine Facebook groups, if I follow her activities, it’s very likely I’ll also find her posting in #stopthesteal or similar groups and sharing climate change denial memes or conspiracy theories about the latest mass shooting on Instagram.
One of the challenges of studying this arena is that its narrow focus means that the role of the world’s Lyndas is barely understood. A growing body of research points to the volume of problematic content online that can be traced back to a surprisingly small number of so-called superspreaders, but so far even that work studies those who amplify content within a particular topic rather than create it—leaving the impacts of devoted true believers like Lynda still understudied.
This reflects a larger issue. Those of us who are funded to track harmful information online too often work in silos. I’m based in a school of public health, so people assume I should just study health misinformation. My colleagues in political science departments are funded to investigate speech that might erode democracy. I suspect that people like Lynda drive an outsize amount of wide-ranging problematic content, but they do not operate the way we academics are set up to think about our broken information systems.
Every month there are academic and policy conferences focused on health misinformation, political disinformation, climate communication, or Russian disinformation in Ukraine. Often each has very different experts talking about identical problems with little awareness of other disciplines’ scholarship. Funding agencies and policymakers inadvertently create even more silos by concentrating on nation states or distinct regions such as the European Union.
Events and incidents also become silos. Funders fixate on high-profile, scheduled events like an election, the rollout of a new vaccine, or the next United Nations climate change conference. But those who are trying to manipulate, monetize, recruit, or inspire people excel at exploiting moments of tension or outrage, whether it’s the latest British royals documentary, a celebrity divorce trial, or the World Cup. No one funds investigations into the online activity those moments generate, although doing so could yield crucial insights.
Authorities’ responses are siloed as well. In November 2020, my team published a report on 20 million posts we had gathered from Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook that included conversations about COVID-19 vaccines. (Note that we didn’t set out to collect posts containing misinformation; we simply wanted to know how people were talking about the vaccines.) From this large data set, the team identified several key narratives, including the safety, efficacy, and necessity of getting vaccinated and the political and economic motives for producing the vaccine. But the most frequent conversation about vaccines on all three platforms was a narrative we labeled liberty and freedom. People were less likely to discuss the safety of the vaccines than whether they would be forced to get vaccinated or carry vaccine verification. Yet agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are only equipped to engage the single narrative about safety, efficacy, and necessity.
Unfortunately, most scholars who study and respond to polluted information still think in terms of what I call atoms of content, rather than in terms of narratives. Social media platforms have teams making decisions about whether an individual post should be fact-checked, labeled, down-ranked, or removed. The platforms have become increasingly deft at playing whack-a-mole with posts that may not even violate their guidelines. But by focusing on individual posts, researchers are failing to see the larger picture: People aren’t influenced by one post so much as they’re influenced by the narratives that these posts fit into.
In this sense, individual posts are not atoms, but something like drops of water. One drop of water is unlikely to persuade or do harm, but over time, the repetition starts to fit into overarching narratives—often, narratives that are already aligned with people’s thinking.
What happens to public trust when people repeatedly see, over months and months, posts that are “just asking questions” about government institutions or public health organizations? Like drops of water on stone, one drop will do no harm, but over time, grooves are cut deep.
To really move forward, proponents of healthy information ecosystems need a broader, integrated view of how and why information circulates. They must learn to assess multilingual, networked flows of content that span conventional boundaries of disciplines and regions. I chaired a taskforce that proposed a permanent, global institution to monitor and study information that would be centrally funded and thus independent of both nations and tech companies. Right now, efforts to monitor disinformation often do overlapping work but fail to share data and classification mechanisms and have limited ability to respond in a crisis.
To clean up our polluted information ecosystem, we also must learn to participate, because the system itself is participatory—a site of constant experimentation as participants drive engagement and better connect with their audiences’ concerns. Although news outlets and government agencies appear to embrace social media, they rarely engage the two-way, interactive features that characterize Web 2.0. Traditional science communication assumes that experts know what information to supply and that audiences will passively consume information and respond as intended. These systems have much to learn from people like Lynda about how to connect with, rather than present to, audiences. An essential first step is to train government communications staff, community organizations, librarians, and journalists to seek out and listen to the public’s questions and concerns.
Today, global and national funders also have an outsized focus on how to expunge the “bad stuff” rather than how to expand the “good stuff.” Instead of pursuing such whack-a-mole efforts, major funders should find a way to support specific place-based responses for what communities need. For example, health researcher Stephen Thomas created the Health Advocates In-Reach and Research campaign, which trains local barbershop and beauty salon owners to listen to their customers about health concerns and then to provide advice and direct people to appropriate resources for follow-up care. And after assessing the information needs of the local Spanish-speaking community in Oakland, California, and finding them to be woefully underserved, journalist Madeleine Bair founded the participatory online news site El Tímpano in 2018.
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Two more men have been charged over the murders of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira. (photo: Luciola Villela/AFP)
Alleged leader of ‘transnational criminal organisation’ and a supposed subordinate have been charged over the 2022 murders of journalist and Indigenous expert
The British journalist and the Brazilian Indigenous expert were shot dead while returning from a reporting trip to the remote Javari valley region on 5 June 2022.
Three local fishers are currently in prison awaiting a possible jury trial on suspicion of murdering Phillips and Pereira, a former government official who had been helping Indigenous activists to defend their lands from illegal fishing and mining gangs.
On Sunday night, the Brazilian broadcaster TV Globo revealed that federal police had formally charged two more men over the murders.
They are:
- Ruben Dario da Silva Villar, the alleged leader of a transnational illegal fishing network that operated in the tri-border region between Brazil, Colombia and Peru
- And Jânio Freitas de Souza, a fisher who was allegedly one of Silva Villar’s henchmen along the Itaquaí river where Phillips and Pereira were murdered.
Federal police charged Silva Villar – who is known by the nickname Colombia - with ordering the murders and the concealment of the bodies of the victims. Souza was charged with participation in both crimes.
The six-page federal police indictment, seen by the Guardian, said police investigations indicated that Silva Villar and Souza had spoken repeatedly in the days before and after last year’s crime.
During an interview with police in 2022, Souza allegedly claimed he knew Silva Villar “by sight”. But according to the federal police indictment, a total of 419 calls were made between the two men between 1 June 2022 – when Phillips and Pereira arrived in the Javari to begin a four-day reporting trip – and 6 June, the day after they were killed.
Evidence gathered during the year-long investigation suggested “the steps of Bruno and Dom were being monitored by the criminal organization” in the days leading up to the crime.
Phillips, 57, had travelled to the region to report on the Indigenous patrol teams the 41-year-old activist had helped create to protect the Javari Valley Indigenous territory from groups of illegal fishers and miners.
The 31 May 2023 federal police document also says a memory card belonging to Phillips, which investigators found in the region where they were killed, contained an image of the British journalist talking to Souza near the murder scene of the morning of the murders.
The indictment accuses Silva Villar – who holds Brazilian, Colombian and Peruvian citizenship – of being the head of an armed illegal fishing syndicate which illegally extracted fish from protected Indigenous lands in Brazil before selling them in towns across the border in Colombia and Peru.
Souza is described as the alleged criminal’s “right-hand man” in São Rafael, the riverside village from which Phillips and Pereira set off by boat minutes before they were ambushed and shot. One of the three men awaiting trial for the murders, Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, is described as the gang’s point man in São Gabriel, another nearby fishing community.
The news came as friends and admirers of Phillips and Pereira prepared to gather in Brazil and the UK to remember the men and the causes they cherished.
To mark Monday’s anniversary, events will be held in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, where Pereira once worked for the Indigenous agency, Funai, and on Rio’s Copacabana beach, where Phillips often went paddleboarding while living in the seaside city.
Other memorials will be held in Campinas, Salvador and the Amazon city of Belém while activists from EVU, the Indigenous monitoring team Pereira helped create, will travel up the Itaquaí river to erect a towering redwood cross where the two men were killed.
Tributes will also be paid in the UK with an event on Monday evening at the Rich Mix arts centre in east London.
“Many people were touched by this tragedy and these events are for people to come together and remember Dom and Bruno, and help deal with their loss,” said the sister of the British reporter, Sian Phillips.
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'Oxygen levels in the world’s oceans have already dropped more than 2 percent between 1960 and 2010, and they are expected to decline up to 7 percent below the 1960 level over the next century.' (photo: Sebastian Pena Lambarri/Unsplash)
Global warming not only increases ocean temperatures — it triggers a cascade of effects that are stripping the seas of oxygen. Fish are already moving to new waters in search of oxygen, and scientists are warning of the long-term threat to fish species and marine ecosystems.
The reason for this mass invasion, says Pauly, is extremely low oxygen levels in these polluted waters. Fish species that can’t cope with less oxygen have fled, while the Bombay duck, part of a small subset of species that is physiologically better able to deal with less oxygen, has moved in.
The boom is making some people happy, since Bombay duck is perfectly edible. But the influx provides a peek at a bleak future for China and for the planet as a whole. As the atmosphere warms, oceans around the world are becoming ever more deprived of oxygen, forcing many species to migrate from their usual homes. Researchers expect many places to experience a decline in species diversity, ending up with just those few species that can cope with the harsher conditions. Lack of ecosystem diversity means lack of resilience. “Deoxygenation is a big problem,” Pauly summarizes.
Our future ocean — warmer and oxygen-deprived — will not only hold fewer kinds of fish, but also smaller, stunted fish and, to add insult to injury, more greenhouse-gas producing bacteria, scientists say. The tropics will empty as fish move to more oxygenated waters, says Pauly, and those specialist fish already living at the poles will face extinction.
Researchers complain that the oxygen problem doesn’t get the attention it deserves, with ocean acidification and warming grabbing the bulk of both news headlines and academic research. Just this April, for example, headlines screamed that global surface waters were hotter than they have ever been — a shockingly balmy average of 70 degrees F. That’s obviously not good for marine life. But when researchers take the time to compare the three effects — warming, acidification, and deoxygenation — the impacts of low oxygen are the worst.
“That’s not so surprising,” says Wilco Verberk, an eco-physiologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “If you run out of oxygen, the other problems are inconsequential.” Fish, like other animals, need to breathe.
Oxygen levels in the world’s oceans have already dropped more than 2 percent between 1960 and 2010, and they are expected to decline up to 7 percent below the 1960 level over the next century. Some patches are worse than others — the top of the northeast Pacific has lost more than 15 percent of its oxygen. According to the IPCC’s 2019 special report on the oceans, from 1970 to 2010, the volume of “oxygen minimum zones” in the global oceans — where big fish can’t thrive but jellyfish can — increased by between 3 and 8 percent.
The oxygen drop is driven by a few factors. First, the laws of physics dictate that warmer water can hold less dissolved gas than cooler water (this is why a warm soda is less fizzy than a cold one). As our world warms, the surface waters of our oceans lose oxygen, in addition to other dissolved gases. This simple solubility effect accounts for about half of the observed oxygen loss seen so far in the upper 1,000 meters of the ocean.
Deeper down, oxygen levels are largely governed by currents that mix surface waters downward, and this too is being affected by climate change. Melting ice adds fresh, less-dense water that resists downward mixing in key regions, and the high rate of atmospheric warming at the poles, as compared to the equator, also dampens winds that drive ocean currents.
Finally, bacteria living in the water, which feed off phytoplankton and other organic gunk as it falls to the seafloor, consume oxygen. This effect can be massive along coastlines, where fertilizer runoff feeds algae blooms, which in turn feed oxygen-gobbling bacteria. This creates ever more “dead zones,” including the infamous one in the Gulf of Mexico.
Researchers have even suggested that the rise of microplastics pollution has the potential to exacerbate the low-oxygen problem. This theory predicts that if zooplankton fill up on microplastics instead of phytoplankton — their usual prey — phytoplankton will proliferate, again feeding all those oxygen-gobbling bacteria on their way to the seafloor.
The Global Ocean Oxygen Network — a scientific group set up as part of the United Nation’s Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021-2030 — reports that since the 1960s, the area of low-oxygen water in the open ocean has increased by 1.7 million square miles. That’s an area a little more than half the size of Canada. By 2080, a 2021 study reported, more than 70 percent of the global oceans will experience noticeable deoxygenation.
In 2018, hundreds of researchers concerned with oxygen loss signed the Kiel Declaration to urgently call for more awareness of the problem, alongside work to limit pollution and warming. Researchers are now in the midst of establishing a Global Ocean Oxygen Database and ATlas (GO2DAT) to consolidate and map all the data.
Andrew Babbin, a biogeochemist at MIT who is on the steering committee for GO2DAT, in 2021 mapped out huge areas of extremely low oxygen in the Pacific. “It’s concerning for sure,” says Babbin, who hopes to repeat the mapping exercise in a decade or so to see how things change. One issue, he notes, is that low-oxygen conditions tend to host a class of anoxic bacteria that produce methane or nitrous oxide — potent greenhouse gases.
Modelling the net impacts of the three factors — solubility, mixing, and microbiology — has proven tricky. “Any one of those is hard,” says Babbin. “And then you put them all together, and it’s dramatically difficult to make any predictions.” In the tropics, for example, one model suggests that a shifting balance of biological factors that deplete oxygen, versus ocean mixing that delivers oxygen, will drive oxygen levels down until about 2150 but then raise them — a spot of potentially good news for tropical fish. On the whole, though, climate models seem to have underestimated changes in oxygen levels, which have been dropping faster than expected.
The impacts on marine life are going to be complicated — and not good.
In general, a hot fish has a higher metabolism and needs more oxygen. Trout, for example, need five to six times more dissolved oxygen when waters are a balmy 75 degrees F than when they are a chilly 41 degrees F. So as waters warm and the oxygen seeps out, many marine creatures take a double hit. “Fish require a lot of oxygen, particularly the large ones we like to eat,” says Babbin.
Right now, there are about 6 milligrams of oxygen per liter of seawater in the tropics, and 11 milligrams per liter at the colder poles. If levels drop below 2 milligrams g (a 60 to 80 percent reduction), as they often do in some patches, the water is officially hypoxic — too low in oxygen to sustain many species. But subtler drops can also have a big impact. Fish already expend tens of times more energy to breathe than people do, notes Pauly, since they must pump the paltry oxygen out of viscous water.
The effects of low oxygen are well known to mountaineers, who experience headaches and potentially fatal confusion at high altitudes. Fish often try to swim away from low oxygen waters, but if they can’t escape, they become sluggish. Low oxygen levels affect almost everything across the board, including fish growth, reproduction, activity levels, and outright survival. A host of genetic and metabolic changes can help fish conserve energy, but only within limits. In general, larger fish are more affected simply because their body-volume-to-gill ratio is larger, making it harder to feed their cells with oxygen. Overfishing has already had the effect of decreasing the number of large fish in the ocean; deoxygenation looks set to exacerbate that effect, says Verberk.
The long-term chronic effects of slightly decreased oxygen levels are harder to evaluate than the short-term effects of hypoxia, says Verberk, and researchers have urgently called for more research on the subject. “For mild hypoxia over longer terms, there’s not that many studies, but it’s likely to have quite a strong impact,” he says. “If you continually have 7 percent less energy [from 7 percent less oxygen], that’s going to accumulate to quite a large deficit.”
Fish are already moving to find more oxygen. Those living in deeper waters may move down to colder, and therefore more oxygenated waters, while fish living in the top few hundred meters of the water column, like coastal rockfish, may move toward the surface to catch a breath. In a study of California reef fish from 1995 to 2009, 23 species moved up an average of 8.7 meters per decade toward the surface as oxygen levels declined. In the tropical northeast Atlantic, tuna have been driven into a narrower layer of water by oxygen declines; overall, they lost 15 percent of their available habitat from 1960 to 2010.
While warming and deoxygenation often go hand in hand, the two effects are not completely matched everywhere, all the time, says Verberk. The result is a patchwork of areas too hot or too low in oxygen for various fish to thrive, leading to a mishmash of different escape routes. Researchers are currently trying to trying to map the anticipated effects for different species, studying how temperature and oxygen might restrict their future habitats and how those ranges will overlap with each other.
Once in waters where they can breathe, fish will then have to see what food they can find — and what predators they need to avoid. “Low oxygen is going to be a trigger to move to other places, but those other places are not empty,” says Verberk. “They will encounter other animals living there. It’s going to change competitive interactions between species.” Crabs, says Pauly, are currently marching on the Antarctic as those waters warm and will feast on unprotected mollusks. “There will be a mass destruction,” he says.
Over the past century, says Pauly, the greatest pressure on marine life has been overfishing, which has caused huge declines in fish numbers. That could change. If we get overfishing under control, he continues, climate-related pressures will pose the biggest problem for marine life in the coming decades. A 2021 paper showed that the oceans are already committed to a fourfold greater oxygen loss, even if CO2 emissions stop immediately.
If you chart out the trends in warming and oxygen loss, the cataclysmic endpoint for the ocean thousands of years from now would be “a soup that you that you cannot live in,” says Pauly. The ocean already has sporadic hypoxic zones, he says, “but you could imagine all the dead zones of the world coalescing into one, and that is the end of the thing.” If we don’t get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions, he says, “we have to expect this to happen.”
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