FOCUS: Robert Reich | Will Trump Go to Jail Before His Trial Even Begins?

 

07 August 23

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FOCUS: Robert Reich | Will Trump Go to Jail Before His Trial Even Begins?
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Substack
Reich writes: "He has already violated a key condition of his release pending trial."

He has already violated a key condition of his release pending trial.

Friends,

At Trump’s arraignment last Thursday for trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election, Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya warned him that he could be taken into custody if he violated the conditions of his release, including attempting to influence jurors or intimidate future witnesses.

Calling him “Mr. Trump” rather than President Trump — thereby emphasizing that he was being treated as any criminal defendant would be treated — she said:

“I want to remind you that it is a crime to try to influence a juror or to threaten or attempt to bribe a witness or any other person who may have information about your case, or to retaliate against anyone for providing information about your case to the prosecution, or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.”

The judge then warned Trump, “You have heard your conditions of release. It is important you comply. You may be held pending trial in this case if you violate the conditions of release.”

She asked Trump, “Do you understand these warnings and consequences, sir? Are you prepared to comply?”

Trump responded, “Yes.”

But not 24 hours later, Trump posted on social media a message that could be understood as an attempt to influence potential jurors or retaliate against any witness prepared to testify against him: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

On Friday evening, prosecutors from the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the court for a protective order to stop Trump from making public any of the information they were about to deliver to his lawyers under the discovery phase of the upcoming criminal trial, such as the names of witnesses who will testify against him.

They noted that such protection was “particularly important” because Trump “has previously issued public statements on social media regarding witnesses, judges, attorneys and others associated with legal matters pending against him.”

Citing his social media message from earlier in the day, they argued that publishing such information “could have a harmful chilling effect on witnesses.” The prosecutors included a screenshot of Trump’s threatening post from that same evening.

On Saturday, the presiding judge in the case, Judge Tanya Chutkan, ordered that Trump’s lawyers respond to the prosecutor’s request for a protective order by 5 pm today.

All through the weekend, Trump continued to threaten potential witnesses. “WOW, it’s finally happened! Liddle’ Mike Pence, a man who was about to be ousted as Governor Indiana until I came along and made him V.P., has gone to the Dark Side,” he posted Saturday.

And Trump hasn’t stopped attempting to obstruct justice. On Sunday he called Special Counsel Jack Smith “deranged,” and in another all-caps message he accused Smith of waiting to bring the case until “right in the middle” of his election campaign. In another post he asserted that he would never get a “fair trial” with Judge Chutkan and jurors from Washington, D.C.

Folks, these statements directly violate the conditions of Trump’s release pending trial. They also could inflame Trump supporters — thereby endangering those who are trying to administer justice, such as Jack Smith and Judge Chutkan, as well as potential witnesses like Mike Pence.

***

It’s going to get worse unless Judge Chutkan (on her own initiative or at the urging of prosecutors) orders Trump’s lawyers to show cause why his release pending trial should not be revoked in light of his violation of the conditions of his release.

This would at least put Trump on notice that he will be treated like any other criminal defendant who violates conditions of release pending trial.

That’s what the rule of law is all about. At this moment, 400,000 criminal defendants in the United States are awaiting trial in jail because they didn’t meet a condition of their release.

Trump is now under the supervision of the court, as would be any criminal defendant after an arraignment. But he will continue to test the willingness and ability of the court to treat him like any other criminal defendant unless he’s firmly reined in.

The court must fully assert the rule of law during these proceedings, even if that requires threatening Trump with jail pending his trial.

Or actually putting him in jail.

What do you think?

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FOCUS: Jon Lee Anderson | The Death of a Ukrainian Writer

 

07 August 23

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FOCUS: Jon Lee Anderson | The Death of a Ukrainian Writer
Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker
Anderson writes: "Victoria Amelina was a gifted novelist who put fiction aside to devote herself to documenting the atrocities of Putin’s war." 

Victoria Amelina was a gifted novelist who put fiction aside to devote herself to documenting the atrocities of Putin’s war.

On the evening of June 27th, in eastern Ukraine, four friends of mine stopped for dinner at the Ria Lounge, a restaurant attached to a shopping center in the city of Kramatorsk, in the embattled Donetsk region. They had spent the previous two days travelling around the area, speaking to the locals and getting a firsthand look at the war’s destruction. They had been on the road all day and were hungry by the time they reached Kramatorsk. At around seven o’clock, they found an outdoor table at the Ria, where they joined a large crowd of diners, including many families. The Ria was popular for its pizzas, and had a pleasant, informal atmosphere.

Just about half an hour later, as their food was being served, a medium-range Russian Iskander cruise missile hit the concrete roof of the restaurant and exploded. People screamed in pain and confusion; many were trapped under the roof, which had collapsed. At least sixty-one people were injured and thirteen died in the strike, among them several children, including fourteen-year-old twin sisters. Speaking on Russian television afterward, the head of the Duma Defense Committee, Colonel General Andrey Kartapolov, was exultant, saying, “The strike on Kramatorsk was a real beauty. I bow my head to those who planned it. Not a blow but a song. My old military heart rejoices.” It was, in fact, the second mass civilian atrocity caused by Russian forces in Kramatorsk since the invasion of Ukraine began. On the morning of April 8, 2022, a pair of Russian Tochka-U missiles hit the city’s main railway station, which was packed with more than a thousand people waiting for a train to evacuate the city; at least fifty-eight were killed, including seven children, and more than a hundred and fifty were injured. On that occasion, the Russian Defense Ministry first claimed the attack was a Ukrainian hoax, then insisted that the Ukrainians had carried it out themselves.

In the latest missile strike, three of my friends, all of them Colombians, escaped without major injuries. Héctor Abad, a writer from Medellín, was unhurt, as was Catalina Gómez Ángel, a longtime war correspondent who now spends much of her time in Ukraine. Sergio Jaramillo, a former senior government official and a lead negotiator during the peace talks with the FARC guerrillas, had a few cuts and bruises. But the fourth, Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian novelist and poet, suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She was taken to a local hospital and then, a couple of days later, to a better-equipped medical facility in the city of Dnipro. She did not regain consciousness, however, and was put on a life-support system. On the night of July 1st, we learned that she had died.

Victoria, who was originally from the western city of Lviv, was thirty-seven and had been living with her husband, an I.T. specialist, in Kyiv. They had a twelve-year-old son who, for safety, was living with her mother in Krakow. Victoria was a gifted writer, the author of two novels and a children’s book. Her second novel had been short-listed for the European Union Prize for Literature, in 2019, and she’d received the Joseph Conrad Literary Award, in 2021, but since the Russian invasion she had stopped writing fiction to devote herself to the war effort. She joined the efforts of PEN Ukraine, and received training from Truth Hounds, a war-crimes investigation group based in Kyiv that sent teams to document abuses in towns and villages that had been occupied by Russians.

She had already made an extraordinary discovery. Last September, Victoria took a trip to the city of Izyum, in northeastern Ukraine, following the Russian retreat from the area. There, she looked into the disappearance of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian poet and children’s-book author whom she knew. He had not been seen since Russian soldiers detained him in Kapytolivka, his home village, on Izyum’s outskirts, in March of 2022, and he was presumed dead, but little else was known. Victoria went to Kapytolivka, where Vakulenko’s father told her that his son had kept a diary of the occupation, which he had buried under a stand of cherry trees in the garden, evidently shortly before he was taken away. She managed to dig up the notebook, in which he described encounters with Russian soldiers—one of whom said that their mission was to build a “different Ukraine”—and the growing effects of hunger, from surviving mostly on potatoes from the garden. Later, his body was found in a mass grave in a forest outside the city, with those of more than four hundred other people, including nearly two hundred women. Many of the bodies bore evidence of torture. Vakulenko had been killed with two bullets from a Makarov pistol.

Even before the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine occurred, in February, 2022, Victoria was keenly aware of the fragility of her country and its culture, and sought to do something about it. In 2021, using some of her Joseph Conrad Award prize money, she organized a literary festival, in her husband’s birthplace in Donetsk—a village named New York. (The origin of the name is unknown, but it dates back to the nineteenth century. In 1951, during the Cold War, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet changed it to Novhorodske, or “New City.” In July, 2021, Ukraine’s parliament voted to change it back.) For Victoria, choosing New York—a cultural backwater—for the festival was an act of intentional irony, but it was also political. She wanted to bring some respite to the front lines of the region, which had been under assault by Russian-backed paramilitary separatists since 2014—in a conflict that was largely ignored by the outside world but had smoldered ever since Vladimir Putin’s occupation and annexation of Crimea—and in which more than fourteen thousand people had died.

Victoria posted images of the first and only New York Literary Festival, in October, 2021, which was attended by writers from Lviv and Kyiv, many of whom had never been to the region before. In one photograph, people are milling around the courtyard of a small neoclassical building where the festival was housed. In another, taken more recently, after a missile attack, the same building is shown with its roof blown off. There is rubble in the courtyard, and it is empty of people.

Last year, Victoria won a “Documenting Ukraine” grant, from the Institute for Human Sciences, in Vienna. A few weeks before her death, she learned that she had been awarded a residential fellowship at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination, which provides for scholars, writers, and artists to spend a year in Paris. She was excited at the prospect of a war-free interlude in the French capital with her husband and their son—however long the war was to last, they would at least spend the coming year together in relative peace. She also intended to use the time to complete a book about efforts that she and other Ukrainian women were undertaking to uncover Russia’s war crimes in their country, entitled “War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War.”

I first met Victoria last October, at the annual Lviv BookForum. Some of the writers who participated, including Victoria and me, went on to Kyiv, and she showed me around the capital. We visited a playground in a pretty park that had a statue of the nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet and national hero Taras Shevchenko at its center. The previous day, a Russian missile had struck the playground—fortunately, no children had been present. Victoria’s apartment was not far away; she told me that the park was her “favorite place in Kyiv.”

We met again this year, in January, at a literary event, the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia. She was recovering from a bout of pneumonia that she had contracted on a trip to the recently liberated city of Kherson, but she attended along with other Ukrainians, including the novelist Andrey Kurkov; the human-rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk, whose Center for Civil Liberties was the co-recipient of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize; and Victoria’s close friend Sofia Cheliak, the young curator of the Lviv BookForum. It was in Cartagena that Victoria met Sergio Jaramillo, who was launching a consciousness-raising campaign called Aguanta Ucrania—or “Resist, Ukraine!”—by enlisting Latin American writers and intellectuals to denounce the invasion. (In Latin America, as in much of Africa and other parts of the Global South, there is widespread incomprehension about the war, and many on the left parrot the official Moscow line while lauding Putin’s regime as the moral inheritor of the Soviet government’s efforts to train, arm, and finance the national liberation movements that fought Western-backed governments in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.)

Catalina Gómez Ángel was also in Cartagena and met Victoria there. Last April, they met again, in Ukraine, and travelled to New York (the one in Donetsk). Victoria had not been back to the village since the invasion began, and she wanted to see it before she left for Paris. “She was saying goodbye,” Catalina said. “She felt guilty about leaving her country in wartime, but was also aware that she needed to spend time with her son.” In June, both women were at the Book Arsenal literary festival, in Kyiv, where Victoria presented a newly published volume of Volodymyr Vakulenko’s diary and his war poetry. In the book’s foreword, she had written, “As long as a writer is read, he’s alive.” Sergio and Héctor Abad were at the festival, too, and the four of them took part in a talk about Aguanta Ucrania. Sergio wanted to visit some of the frontline towns, and invited Héctor to join him. Catalina, who knows the terrain—and had a trusted driver and S.U.V.—offered to take them. At the last minute, Victoria decided to go, too.

Catalina had been particularly struck by Victoria’s caustic wit. She noted that she was “being deluged by invitations from around the world to come and speak about Ukraine, but only after Ukraine’s victory,” Catalina told me, adding, “But she said she wondered what victory would feel like, after so many deaths.”

Victoria’s moral clarity, determination, and love of country impressed me greatly. She now joins the ranks of those whose lives have been cut short by war, their truncated careers the source of what-if musings forever afterward. In Victoria’s case, I feel certain that her legacy, and her words, will endure, infusing a contemporary, combustive element to the Ukrainians’ growing sense of identity and nationhood. Her funeral was held on July 5th, at a cathedral in Lviv. That night, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in the city, killing ten civilians and wounding dozens more. Human Rights Watch called the strike “a possible war crime.”

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KEANU REEVES

 

This man is a inspiration!

Story of the day

Srsdoepontuc8fc1M013t00tg64fa23f1117cs c:5uaAmt 2l3 44h i4mP  · 

Keanu Reeves was abandoned by his father at 3 years old and grew up with 3 different stepfathers. He is dyslexic. His dream of becoming a hockey player was shattered by a serious accident. His daughter died at birth. His wife died in a car accident. His best friend, River Phoenix, died of an overdose. His sister has leukemia.

And with everything that has happened, Keanu Reeves never misses an opportunity to help people in need. When he was filming the movie "The Lake House," he overheard the conversation of two costume assistants; One cried because he would lose his house if he did not pay $20,000 and on the same day Keanu deposited the necessary amount in the woman's bank account; He also donated stratospheric sums to hospitals.

In 2010, on his birthday, Keanu walked into a bakery and bought a brioche with a single candle, ate it in front of the bakery, and offered coffee to people who stopped to talk to him.

After winning astronomical sums for the Matrix trilogy, the actor donated more than $50 million to the staff who handled the costumes and special effects - the true heroes of the trilogy, as he called them.

He also gave a Harley-Davidson to each of the stunt doubles. A total expense of several million dollars. And for many successful films, he has even given up 90% of his salary to allow the production to hire other stars.

In 1997 some paparazzi found him walking one morning in the company of a homeless man in Los Angeles, listening to him and sharing his life for a few hours.

Most stars when they make a charitable gesture they declare it to all the media. He has never claimed to be doing charity, he simply does it as a matter of moral principles and not to look better in the eyes of others.

This man could buy everything, and instead every day he gets up and chooses one thing that cannot be bought: To be a good person.

Keanu Reeves’ father is of Native Hawaiian descent

Also read Keanu’s life https://fabliyo.com/keanu-reeves-sacrificed-his-success.../

Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley | Jack Smith Has an Indictment. Trump Has a Massive Plan for Revenge

 

 

07 August 23

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Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley | Jack Smith Has an Indictment. Trump Has a Massive Plan for Revenge
Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley, Rolling Stone
Excerpt: "The thrice-indicted former president and his allies have long been drawing plans to undo Smith's investigations, as well as to punish everyone involved."   

The thrice-indicted former president and his allies have long been drawing plans to undo Smith's investigations, as well as to punish everyone involved

Donald Trump is a long, long way from winning the GOP primary, let alone retaking the White House. But he always has revenge on his mind, and his allies are preparing to use a future administration to not only undo all of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s work — but to take vengeance on Smith, and on virtually everyone else, who dared investigate Trump during his time out of power.

Rosters full of MAGAfied lawyers are being assembled. Plans are being laid for an entire new office of the Justice Department dedicated to “election integrity.” An assembly line is being prepared of revenge-focused “special counsels” and “special prosecutors.” Gameplans for making Smith’s life hell, starting in Jan. 2025, have already been discussed with Trump himself. And a fresh wave of pardons is under consideration for Trump associates, election deniers, and — the former president boasts — for Jan. 6 rioters.

The preparations have been underway since at least last year, with Trump being briefed on the designs by an array of attorneys, political and policy advisers, former administration officials, and other allies. The aim is to build a government-in-waiting with the hard-right infrastructure needed to turn the Justice Department into an instrument of Trump’s agenda, according to five sources familiar with these matters and another two people briefed on them.

Trump’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

One idea that has caught thrice-indicted former president’s attention in recent months is the creation of the so-called “Office of Election Integrity,” which would be a new unit inside the Justice Department. It would be tasked not only with relitigating Trump’s lies about his 2020 election loss, but also with aggressively pursuing baseless allegations of election “fraud” (including in Democratic strongholds) in ways that Trumpist partisans believe the department has only flirted with in the past.

This idea was recently pitched to Trump by a longtime Republican activist and an attorney who’s known the ex-president for years, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter. (Republican officials have also begun voicing their own support for state-level offices of election integrity. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made the proposal a reality in his state. Officials in Tennessee, Missouri, and Wisconsin have proposed the offices, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, proposed a similarly named office.)

And when it comes to Special Counsel Smith’s office — which just handed Trump his third indictment, this one related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election — the former president and his fellow travelers already know what they want: They want the FBI and DOJ to name names.

This year, close advisers to Trump have begun the process of assembling lists of the names of federal personnel who have investigated the former president and his circle for years, and are attempting to unmask the identities of all the DOJ attorneys and others connected to Smith’s office. The obvious purpose of this, according to one source close to Trump, is to “show them the door on Day 1 [if Trump’s reelected]” — and so “we know who should receive a subpoena” in the future.

Such subpoenas would of course be instrumental in Trumpland’s vows to its voters that, should he return to power, Trump and his new attorney general will launch a raft of their own retaliatory “special counsel” and “special prosecutor” probes to investigate-the-investigator, and to go after their key enemies. As it were, Jeffrey Clark, a former DOJ official and a central figure in Trump’s efforts to subvert the legitimate 2020 presidential election results, has been on Trump’s informal shortlist for plum assignments, including even attorney general, in a potential second administration.

Sources familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone that Trump and his close ideological allies — working at an assortment of MAGA-prone think tanks, advocacy organizations, and legal groups — are formulating plans for a wide slate of “special prosecutors.” In this vision, such prosecutors would go after the usual targets: Smith, Smith’s team, President Joe Biden, Biden’s family, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI director Christopher Wray. But they’d also go after smaller targets, from members of the Biden 2020 campaign to more obscure government offices.

“There are almost too many targets to keep track of,” says one Trump adviser familiar with the discussions. Trump and members of his inner orbit have already outlined possible legal strategies, examining specific federal statutes they could wield in a Republican-controlled Justice Department to go after Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who delivered Trump’s first indictment of this year.

The FBI’s investigation of over a thousand rioters who breached and trashed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — officially the largest criminal investigation in Justice Department history — is another area where Trump has stated he would like to reverse course. “I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control,” Trump told host Kaitlan Collins during a CNN town hall in May.

When the broader topic of possible second-term pardons has come up behind closed doors, Trump has at times said that such pardons should be signed at the start of the term, not saved for the later on, according to those who’ve heard him discuss it since last year. Aside from the rioters themselves, Trump has also privately floated issuing a wave of pardons to higher-ranking figures who were scrutinized in Special Counsel Smith’s two main investigations.

“This would be like hitting the delete-key on all of DOJ’s work on these investigations,” a person intimately familiar with the conversations told Rolling Stone in March. In the past several months, when confidants have quipped to Trump that he may have to “pardon yourself,” should he return to the Oval Office, the ex-president has sometimes simply smirked and replied that they’ll have to wait and see.

Another major focus of some of these counter-probes would be “grand jury violations,” says one person familiar with the matter. The counter-probe of those alleged “violations” is the surest sign yet that in a second Trump administration, the Justice Department would seek to investigate the special counsel’s use of grand juries in the Mar-a-Lago and January 6 cases. (Indeed, Trump has already vowed to sic a special counsel on President Biden if he beats him in 2024.)

Some of these “special prosecutors” wouldn’t even be based out of the Justice Department, as special counsels typically are. In some of these private Trumpworld legal plans, some of the “special counsels” would be based out of places like the White House. This idea is nearly identical to the controversial position that Trumpist lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell tried to convince then-President Trump to give her in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Some lawyers and operatives close to Trump have pitched themselves for these kinds of roles, telling either Trump or some of his closest advisers that they’d be more than happy to take the gig in Trump’s possible return to power in 2025.

And along with having dreams of sweeping retribution and purges, the upper ranks of Trumpworld have spent years putting together projects to vet and prepare a new generation of appointments — for “special prosecutor” posts, as well as much else — and administrative talent.

In this informal vetting for Justice Department candidates, former senior Trump aides and well-connected activists have sought lawyers with a track record of loathing DOJ, particularly what they deem its supposedly “liberal,” “left-wing,” or “Marxist” elements. Between these different Trump allies, different private spreadsheets have been created in recent years, some laying out dozens of possible contenders, while some include upwards of a hundred names, sources with direct knowledge of the situation say. Former top Trump White House policy adviser Stephen Miller and other key Trump diehards have contributed names to several of these lists.

Rolling Stone has reviewed one of these internal spreadsheets that has circulated among Trump lieutenants, and the roster is heavy on individuals connected to America First Legal, the Center for Renewing America, and other Trump-backing entities.

Prominent allies of the former president are open about plans to tie the Justice Department more tightly to the White House.

“I recall talking to a senior official in the Trump administration, who said after all of [these investigations] are over, we’ve got to think of a way to bring the Justice Department back into the government,” says Tom Fitton, president of the conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch and a close ally of the former president.

The Justice Department has typically enjoyed a degree of insulation from White House control, a norm aimed at avoiding the politicization of prosecution. But Fitton argues that the department should be more “responsive” to a president’s priorities, a belief that Trump and various influential conservatives embrace enthusiastically. “Is the Justice Department going to operate as an entity outside the White House as opposed to an entity that’s controlled by the president, as the Constitution requires?” he says.

Putting it another way: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russ Vought, a former top Trump official who heads the Center for Renewing America, told The New York Times in a story published last month.

“I think there’s an argument that what the Justice Department’s doing to Trump now is criminal,” Fitton tells Rolling Stone, suggesting — of course — that a future administration should launch an investigation into Special Counsel Smith’s work.

Fitton also says the department should revisit Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the FBI probe of the Trump campaign in 2016. Durham, he argues, was a “failure” and acted only as “a glorified inspector general.”

Once, Special Counsel Durham was supposed to be Trumpworld’s savior, someone who Trump, his allies on Capitol Hill, and large swaths of conservative media were counting on to expose and imprison “Deep State” foes. But when the Durham probe ended earlier this year with lackluster results for a vengeance-hungry GOP, he became much less a hero and more a cautionary tale to the right.

As one conservative lawyer who has discussed “special prosecutor” ideas with Trump in recent months tells Rolling Stone, the guiding principle of this project is simple: “No more John Durham’s — never again.”

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The USS Paul Hamilton. (photo: Jon Gambrell/AP)

US Dispatches Warships After China and Russia Send Naval Patrol Near Alaska
Maya Yang, Guardian UK
Yang writes: "The US dispatched four navy warships as well as a reconnaissance airplane after multiple Chinese and Russian military vessels carried out a joint naval patrol near Alaska last week." 

Combined naval patrol appeared to be largest such flotilla to approach US territory and ‘highly provocative’, expert says

The US dispatched four navy warships as well as a reconnaissance airplane after multiple Chinese and Russian military vessels carried out a joint naval patrol near Alaska last week.

The combined naval patrol, which the Wall Street Journal first reported, appeared to be the largest such flotilla to approach US territory, according to experts that spoke to the outlet.

“It’s a historical first,” Brent Sadler, a retired Navy captain and senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Journal.

He also said the flotilla’s proximity to Alaska was a “highly provocative” maneuver given Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and political tensions between the US and China over Taiwan. The flotilla has since left.

The US Northern Command confirmed the combined Chinese and Russian naval patrol, telling the Journal: “Air and maritime assets under our commands conducted operations to assure the defense of the United States and Canada. The patrol remained in international waters and was not considered a threat.”

The command did not specify the number of vessels which made up the patrol or their exact location. But US senators from Alaska said the flotilla in question was made up of 11 Chinese and Russian warships working in concert near the Aleutian Islands.

Four destroyers and a Poseidon P-8 patrol airplane made up the US response to the Chinese and Russian flotilla.

In a statement to the Journal, the spokesperson of the Chinese embassy in Washington DC, Liu Pengyu, said that the patrol “is not targeted at any third party”.

“According to the annual cooperation plan between the Chinese and Russian militaries, naval vessels of the two countries have recently conducted joint maritime patrols in relevant waters in the western and northern Pacific ocean,” Pengyu said. “This action is not targeted at any third party and has nothing to do with the current international and regional situation.”

The Journal reported that the US destroyers sent to track the flotilla were the USS John S McCain, the USS Benfold, the USS John Finn and the USS Chung-Hoon.

Alaska senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan have since responded to the joint Chinese and Russian patrol that came close to the Aleutian Islands by saying they are monitoring the situation closely for their constituents.

Murkowski said: “We have been in close contact with leadership … for several days now and received detailed classified briefings about the foreign vessels that are transiting US waters in the Aleutians.

“This is a stark reminder of Alaska’s proximity to both China and Russia, as well as the essential role our state plays in our national defense and territorial sovereignty.”

Sullivan echoed the sentiments of his fellow Republican Murkowski, saying: “The incursion by 11 Chinese and Russian warships operating together – off the coast of Alaska – is yet another reminder that we have entered a new era of authoritarian aggression led by the dictators in Beijing and Moscow.”

He went on to compare the situation to one last September, when a single US coast guard cutter spotted a total of seven Chinese and Russian naval ships near Alaska.

“Last summer the Chinese and Russian navies conducted a similar operation off the coast of Alaska,” Sullivan said. “Given that our response was tepid, I strongly encouraged senior military leaders to be ready with a much more robust response should such another joint Chinese-Russian naval operation occur off our coast.

“For that reason, I was heartened to see that this latest incursion was met with four US Navy destroyers, which sends a strong message … that the United States will not hesitate to protect and defend our vital national interests in Alaska.”

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Shere Dore, a volunteer with Food Not Bombs, preparing a plate of food in Houston. (photo: Evan Garcia/Reuters)

Houston Volunteers Fight Tickets for Serving Meals to Homeless People
Amanda Holpuch, The New York Times
Holpuch writes: "A Food Not Bombs chapter faces $23,500 in fines for serving meals to homeless people in violation of a city ordinance." 

A Food Not Bombs chapter faces $23,500 in fines for serving meals to homeless people in violation of a city ordinance.

Avolunteer group that has been feeding homeless people in Houston with heaping plates of rice, fresh fruit and vegetables outside the city’s library for more than a decade is fighting a local law that could cost $23,500 in fines.

The Houston Police Department has issued at least 47 tickets to volunteers for the group, Houston Food Not Bombs, since March for violating a city ordinance that restricts meal donations.

The ordinance is not new.

It was enacted in 2012 and bars people and organizations from holding events where food is given free to five or more people in need, on public or private property, without approval from the property owner.

When the ordinance was passed, Annise D. Parker, then the mayor, designated the plaza in front of the central Houston Public Library for Food Not Bombs volunteers, and the group was able to continue providing meals there.

Now, the city says there has been an increase in harassment outside the library because of the meal donations, which happen four times a week after the library closes. The city has said that it plans to continue issuing tickets and that the group could serve platters of food somewhere else.

Paul Kubosh, a lawyer for Food Not Bombs volunteers, said that he had asked the city to prove an increase in harassment and that the tickets unfairly targeted the volunteers. Each ticket carries a penalty of up to $500, he said.

On Thursday, a judge dismissed eight tickets after the police officers who issued them did not appear in court, Mr. Kubosh said. The city plans to refile the dismissed cases, including one against an 87-year-old volunteer, he said.

The city attorney, Arturo G. Michel, said in an emailed statement that Houston would continue to “vigorously pursue” ordinance violations.

“It is a health and safety issue for the protection of Houston’s residents,” he said.

The mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner, said on Friday that the city was not opposed to groups that feed homeless people but that the meal donations were discouraging visitors to the library.

“After people provide the food, they leave, but those who are homeless camp around the library and stay,” he said.

The city is funding food donations through a different charity at a parking lot outside a courthouse and jail, about a half mile from the library, and invited Food Not Bombs to serve meals there.

Shere Dore, a Food Not Bombs volunteer in Houston, said in May that the group decided not to move to that location in part because the people served spend much of their day at the library to escape bad weather and to charge devices such as cellphones, the television station ABC13 reported.

In a separate legal action, a Food Not Bombs volunteer, Phillip Picone, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the ordinance for violating his rights to free speech and free exercise of religion.

His lawyer has also asked the court to temporarily stop enforcement of the food ordinance. In its response, the city said Mr. Picone could donate meals somewhere else. The case remains pending.

Mr. Picone, 66, has been volunteering since 2011 with Houston Food Not Bombs, which has been serving homeless people and families experiencing food insecurity. He said there were about 150 to 200 people who come by each night for home-cooked meals provided by volunteers.

He said that Houston Food Not Bombs, which started in 1994, did not want to move to the location suggested by the city for several reasons. Most of the people whom the group helps are homeless and are likely to have had previous interactions with law enforcement, so serving food next to the city jail could deter the group’s ability to reach people.

“Food Not Bombs really fills a need that’s been needed to be filled for a long time, and the city is just now in 2023 trying to offer what it says is a solution,” he said. “How many years, how many decades have you waited? So, no, we don’t have the trust in them to really do it.”

Houston Food Not Bombs said that the city ordinance needed to be abolished because “people need to be allowed to go out with no advance notice or application process and find homeless people” and give food wherever they are.

Food Not Bombs is an international group that says its vegetarian and vegan meal donations are a protest against war and poverty.

The group has more than 1,000 chapters worldwide, according to its website, and several chapters have challenged laws that restrict the group’s activities.

In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the Food Not Bombs chapter there challenged a city ordinance that restricted food giveaways.

A federal appeals court ruled in the group’s favor in 2021, saying that the city could not regulate the group’s food sharing because doing so violated the group’s First Amendment rights.

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Wild horses gallop on the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Indian Reservation on April 25, 2023, near McDermitt, Nev.(photo: Rick Bowmer/AP)

Federal Agency Given Deadline to Explain Why Deadly Nevada Wild Horse Roundup Should Continue
Scott Sonner, Associated Press
Sonner writes: "A judge has asked federal land managers to explain why they should be allowed to continue capturing more than 2,500 wild horses in northeastern Nevada — a roundup opponents say is illegal and has left 31 mustangs dead in 26 days." 

Ajudge has asked federal land managers to explain why they should be allowed to continue capturing more than 2,500 wild horses in northeastern Nevada — a roundup opponents say is illegal and has left 31 mustangs dead in 26 days.

Wild Horse Education, a nonprofit seeking to protect the horses, has sued the Bureau of Land Management and is seeking a court order to temporarily halt the roundup halfway between Reno and Salt Lake City.

Among other things, it says the agency is violating its own safety standards that prohibit roundups in extreme heat and the use of helicopters to assist in the capture of the animals when foals are present.

More than 260 foals are among the 2,643 animals that have been rounded up for transport to government holding pens since July 9, the agency said on its website Saturday. Several-hundred more are expected to be gathered before the roundup ends Aug. 22.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, of Nevada, has introduced a bill that would outlaw the use of helicopters under any circumstances to assist wranglers on horseback chasing the mustangs into traps — makeshift corals on the high-desert range.

She urged the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee this week to expedite a hearing on her proposal due to the horse deaths, including one with a broken leg that was chased for 35 minutes before it was euthanized.

“Despite BLM's directive to `humanely capture' wild free-roaming horses and burros ... the use of helicopters routinely creates frightening and deadly situations for horses as demonstrated in recent weeks,” Titus said.

“These horses have suffered through a host of tragic injuries, ranging from broken necks, broken legs and even dehydration due to the oppressive triple digit heat,” she wrote in a letter to the committee chairman, Republican U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman, of Arkansas, and ranking U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz.

"Without meaningful reforms, BLM's operations will continue to kill off these icons of the West in completely avoidable circumstances," she wrote.

So far, U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks in Reno has declined to grant the Aug. 1 request for a temporary restraining order to halt the Nevada roundup. But on Friday, he put the agency on notice it has until 4 p.m. Monday to formally respond to the allegations of illegal mistreatment of the animals.

He set a hearing for Wednesday to hear more detailed arguments if necessary from lawyers on both sides.

Nevada is home to nearly two-thirds of the 68,928 wild horses the bureau estimated on March 1 were roaming federal lands in 10 Western states stretching from California to Montana.

The bureau said in a court filing Wednesday that its latest roundup, which began July 9 between Elko and Ely near the Utah border, is a “crucial gather” because overpopulated herds are seriously damaging the range.

It said the estimated 6,852 horses there is nearly 14 times what the land can ecologically sustain. It says roundups typically have a mortality rate of less than 1%.

Critics say the real purpose of the removals is to appease ranchers who don’t want horses competing with their livestock for precious forage in the high desert, where annual precipitation averages less than 10 inches (25 centimeters).

Wild Horse Education's motion for a temporary restraining order says there's no legitimate reason to conduct the current roundup in extreme heat with helicopters when foals are present, "especially when the BLM has plenty of time to conduct this gather in a humane manner as the law requires.”

“Without injunctive relief, plaintiffs will continue to be permanently and irrevocably harmed in witnessing the atrocious and horrific sights of wild horses and burros dying due to the inhumane handling, extreme heat and use of helicopters during foaling season."

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Former President Donald Trump speaks as the keynote speaker at the 56th Annual Silver Elephant Dinner hosted by the South Carolina Republican Party on Aug. 5 in Columbia, S.C. (photo: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images/NPR)

Why Prosecutors Want a Protective Order in the Criminal Case Against Trump
Joe Hernandez and Juliana Kim, NPR
Excerpt: "Attorneys for former President Donald Trump have until Monday evening to respond to a request by federal prosecutors for a protective order in the latest criminal case against him."

Attorneys for former President Donald Trump have until Monday evening to respond to a request by federal prosecutors for a protective order in the latest criminal case against him.

The Justice Department charged Trump with four criminal counts related to allegations that he attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost. In federal court in Washington, D.C., last week, Trump pleaded not guilty.

Federal prosecutors are now asking District Judge Tanya Chutkan to issue a protective order in the case.

That would bar Trump and his attorneys from improperly using any evidence — which may include sensitive and highly confidential information — that prosecutors share with the defense team before trial.

On Saturday, Chutkan denied a request from Trump's attorneys for more time to respond to the request for a protective order, leaving them until 5 p.m. Monday to reply to the Justice Department's proposal and suggest any changes.

Chutkan said she would decide whether to schedule a hearing on the proposal after reviewing the defense's response.

What is a protective order?

Long before a criminal case goes to trial, prosecutors have to share what's called "discovery" with the defense.

That could include potential evidence, such as grand jury documents and witness statements, and it may contain personal identifying details and other confidential information.

Stanford Law School professor David Sklansky said protective orders are commonly used in criminal cases to shield sensitive information about investigative tactics, cooperating witnesses or national security.

"It's a case-by-case decision by the judge about whether there's reason to fear that disseminating information could be harmful to the public, to national security, to potential witnesses," he said.

Sklansky added that a protective order in this case would not be intended to "silence Trump" or prevent him from talking about the case, but rather an effort to "protect the use of information that's provided in discovery."

Legal experts say a person could receive a warning or be held in contempt of court for violating a judge's protective order.

The DOJ says it will protect sensitive information in the case against Trump

In their motion for a protective order, Special Counsel Jack Smith and prosecutors Molly Gaston and Thomas Windom argued that it would allow the Justice Department to release discovery material to the defense quickly and give Trump expedient access to information that could be used in his defense.

The prosecutors said the order would also shield any "sensitive and confidential" information included in discovery from public view.

That is particularly critical in this case, they argued, because Trump has "previously issued public statements on social media regarding witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him."

Prosecutors pointed to a post Trump made on Truth Social on Friday that read: "IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I'M COMING AFTER YOU!"

"If the defendant were to begin issuing public posts using details—or, for example, grand jury transcripts—obtained in discovery here, it could have a harmful chilling effect on witnesses or adversely affect the fair administration of justice in this case," the motion reads.

Government attorneys say the proposed protective order is "consistent with other such orders commonly used in this District and is not overly restrictive," and that Trump's legal team could ask the judge to modify it at any point during the case.

A Trump campaign spokesperson on Saturday said the Truth Social post is "the definition of political speech" and not aimed at anyone involved in the election case against him.

An attorney for Trump slams the prosecution's proposal

On Saturday, Trump's attorneys John Lauro and Todd Blanche asked Judge Chutkan to be able to respond to the prosecution's request by Thursday rather than Monday, but their request was denied.

In their motion for an extension, the attorneys said a few more days would allow them and the Justice Department to "meaningfully confer—and potentially resolve—this dispute without Court intervention."

Defense attorneys said Trump was "prepared to confer in good faith regarding an appropriate protective order" but may ask for a hearing on the proposal if the two sides failed to reach a compromise.

Publicly, though, Lauro made pointed criticisms of the proposed protective order during his appearances on various political TV talk shows Sunday morning.

"This is an attack on you and members of the press," Lauro told ABC This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos. "What the Biden administration is trying to do is prevent the press from learning about exculpatory and helpful information — evidence — that the people have a right to know about," Lauro added.

Trump says he'll ask for a new judge and a change of venue

The protective order isn't the only legal issue at play.

Trump said in another social media post on Sunday that his defense team would immediately ask "for recusal of this judge on very powerful grounds," though he didn't specify what those grounds would be.

The former president said he wouldn't be able to get a fair trial under the current judge.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, District Judge Tanya Chutkan got her law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and later worked for the District of Columbia Public Defender Service and in private practice. She was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2014.

Trump also said his defense team would request a change of venue and ask that the case be moved outside of Washington, D.C. Lauro previously said they would seek a trial in West Virginia.

Republican rivals respond to Trump's indictment

The latest indictment against Trump comes as candidates campaign for the GOP nod in the 2024 presidential election.

Trump remains the Republican front-runner, but other candidates, including his former Vice President Mike Pence, have criticized Trump for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election won by Joe Biden.

Trump, in turn, has lashed out at those critics. He called Pence "delusional" in a social media post Friday evening.

On Sunday morning, Pence again accused Trump of asking him to interfere in the election.

"President Trump was wrong then, and he's wrong now. I had no right to overturn the election," Pence said on CNN's State of the Union. "The American people deserve to know that President Trump asked me to put him over my oath to the Constitution, but I kept my oath and I always will."

Also appearing on the show was former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor who said he believes Trump could get a fair trial in D.C.

"I believe jurors can be fair," said Christie, a former supporter of Trump's who's criticized his attempts to cast doubt on the 2020 election results. "I believe in the American people, and I believe in the fact that jurors will listen fairly and impartially."

Another GOP candidate, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, also weighed in on the indictment, telling NPR on Saturday that no one is above the law.

"I've always said that Donald Trump was morally responsible for what happened on Jan. 6, and now he's been charged with criminal conduct in regard to that," he said.

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The trucking industry has been under pressure over the last year from rising interest rates and higher fuel costs, which it has struggled to pass on to shippers. (photo: Charlie Riedel/AP)

Trucking Firm That Got $700 Million US Bailout Declares Bankruptcy
Alan Rappeport and Madeleine Ngo, The New York Times
Excerpt: "A pandemic-era lifeline that the Trump administration predicted would turn a profit for the federal government failed to keep Yellow afloat." 

A pandemic-era lifeline that the Trump administration predicted would turn a profit for the federal government failed to keep Yellow afloat.

Three years after receiving a $700 million pandemic-era lifeline from the federal government, the struggling freight trucking company Yellow is filing for bankruptcy.

After monthslong negotiations between Yellow’s management and the Teamsters union broke down, the company shut its operations late last month, and said on Sunday that it was seeking bankruptcy protection so it can wind down its business in an “orderly” way.

“It is with profound disappointment that Yellow announces that it is closing after nearly 100 years in business,” the company’s chief executive, Darren Hawkins, said in a statement. Yellow filed a so-called Chapter 11 petition in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware.

The downfall of the 99-year-old company will lead to the loss of about 30,000 jobs and could have ripple effects across the nation’s supply chains. It also underscores the risks associated with government bailouts that are awarded during moments of economic panic.

Yellow, which formerly went by the name YRC Worldwide, received the $700 million loan during the summer of 2020 as the pandemic was paralyzing the U.S. economy. The loan was awarded as part of the $2.2 trillion pandemic-relief legislation that Congress passed that year, and Yellow received it on the grounds that its business was critical to national security because it shipped supplies to military bases.

Since then, Yellow changed its name and embarked on a restructuring plan to help revive its flagging business by consolidating its regional networks of trucking services under one brand. As of the end of March, Yellow’s outstanding debt was $1.5 billion, including about $730 million that it owes to the federal government. Yellow has paid approximately $66 million in interest on the loan, but it has repaid just $230 of the principal owed on the loan, which comes due next year.

The fate of the loan is not yet clear. The federal government assumed a 30 percent equity stake in Yellow in exchange for the loan. It could end up assuming or trying to sell off much of the company’s fleet of trucks and terminals. Yellow aims to sell “all or substantially all” of its assets, according to court documents. Mr. Hawkins said the company intended to pay back the government loan “in full.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment after the filing.

Yellow estimated that it has more than 100,000 creditors and more than $1 billion in liabilities, per court documents. Some of its largest unsecured creditors include Amazon, with a claim of more than $2 million, and Home Depot, which is owed nearly $1.7 million.

Yellow is the third-largest small-freight-trucking company in a part of the industry known as “less than truckload” shipping. The industry has been under pressure over the last year from rising interest rates and higher fuel costs, which customers have been unwilling to accept.

Those forces collided with an ugly labor fight this year between Yellow and the Teamsters union over wages and other benefits. Those talks collapsed last month and union officials soon after warned workers that the company was shutting down.

After its bankruptcy filing, company officials placed much of the blame on the union, saying its members caused “irreparable harm” by halting its restructuring plan. Yellow employed about 23,000 union employees.

“We faced nine months of union intransigence, bullying and deliberately destructive tactics,” Mr. Hawkins said. The Teamsters union “was able to halt our business plan, literally driving our company out of business, despite every effort to work with them,” he added.

In late June, the company filed a lawsuit against the union, asserting it had caused more than $137 million in damages by blocking the restructuring plan.

The Teamsters union said in a statement last week that Yellow “has historically proven that it could not manage itself despite billions of dollars in worker concessions and hundreds of millions in bailout funding from the federal government.” The union did not immediately respond to a request for comment after Yellow’s bankruptcy filing.

“I think that Yellow finds itself in a perfect storm, and they have not managed that perfect storm very well,” said David P. Leibowitz, a Chicago bankruptcy lawyer who represents several trucking companies.

The bankruptcy could create temporary disruptions for companies that relied on Yellow and might prompt more consolidation in the industry. It could also lead to temporarily higher prices as businesses find new carriers for their freight.

“Those inflationary prices will certainly hurt the shippers and hurt the consumer to a certain extent,” said Tom Nightingale, chief executive of AFS Logistics, who suggested that prices would likely normalize within a few months.

In late July, Yellow began permanently laying off workers and ceased most of its operations in the United States and Canada, according to court documents. Yellow has retained a “core group” of about 1,650 employees to maintain limited operations and provide administrative work as it winds down. Yellow said it expected to pay about $3.4 million per week in employee wages to operate during bankruptcy, which “may decrease over time.” None of the remaining employees are union members, the company said.

The company also sought the authority to pay an estimated $22 million in compensation and benefit costs for current and former employees, including roughly $8.7 million in unpaid wages as of the date of filing.

Yellow had readily accessible funds of about $39 million when it filed for bankruptcy, which it said would be insufficient to cover its wind-down efforts, and it expected to receive special financing to help support the sale process and payment of wages.

Jack Atkins, a transportation analyst at the financial services firm Stephens, said that Yellow’s troubles had been mounting for years. In the wake of the financial crisis, Yellow engaged in a spree of acquisitions that it failed to successfully integrate, Mr. Atkins said. The demands of repaying that debt made it difficult for Yellow to reinvest in the company, allowing rivals to become more profitable.

“Yellow was struggling to keep its head above water and survive,” Mr. Atkins said. “It was harder and harder to be profitable enough to support the wage increases they needed.”

The company’s financial problems fueled concerns about the Trump administration’s decision to rescue the firm.

It lost more than $100 million in 2019 and was being sued by the Justice Department over claims that it defrauded the federal government during a seven-year period. Last year it agreed to pay $6.85 million to settle the lawsuit.

Federal watchdogs and congressional oversight committees have scrutinized the company’s relationships with the Trump administration. President Donald J. Trump tapped Mr. Hawkins to serve on a coronavirus economic task force, and Yellow had financial backing from Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm with close ties to Trump administration officials.

Democrats on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis wrote in a report last year that top Trump administration officials had awarded Yellow the money over the objections of career officials at the Defense Department. The report noted that Yellow had been in close touch with Trump administration officials throughout the loan process and had discussed how the company employed Teamsters as its drivers.

In December 2020, Steven T. Mnuchin, then the Treasury secretary, defended the loan, arguing that had the company been shuttered, thousands of jobs would have been at risk and the military’s supply chain could have been disrupted. He predicted that the federal government would eventually turn a profit from the deal.

“Yellow had longstanding financial problems before the pandemic, was not essential to national security and should never have received a $700 million taxpayer bailout from the Treasury Department,” Representative French Hill, a Republican from Arkansas and member of the Congressional Oversight Commission, said in a statement last week. “Years of poor financial management at Yellow has resulted in hard-working people losing their jobs.”

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Climate tipping points remain a topic of debate in the scientific community. (photo: Leila REgister/NBC News)

Climate Collapse Debate Reinvigorated by Study of Atlantic Ocean Currents
Evan Bush, NBC News
Bush writes: "When the fate of an ocean current system tops headlines during a historic heat wave, it’s a strange week for climate science." 

The arguments illustrate scientists’ uncertainty about the next phases of climate change and just how to characterize the risk of extreme — hopefully unlikely — events as real-world climate disasters are taking place.

When the fate of an ocean current system tops headlines during a historic heat wave, it’s a strange week for climate science.

A new study last week predicted the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, could pass a tipping point and collapse as soon as 2025. The bold prediction, which portends a future that could upend weather across the Atlantic Ocean, prompted news headlines fretting over “climate chaos,” “devastation” coming “ahead of schedule” and a “real-life Day After Tomorrow.”

Is AMOC on track to run amok? The risk of collapse remains a topic of hot debate and scientists are in disagreement over whether it is already slowing down or if it could be nearing a tipping point. Direct analysis of AMOC dates back to 2004 — too short a period to be certain of its trajectory.

It’s a debate with considerable stakes. The arguments illustrate scientists’ uncertainty about the next phases of climate change and just how to characterize the risk of extreme — hopefully unlikely — events as real-world climate disasters are taking place. The higher humans push temperatures, the less certain scientists are about where the climate is heading or if there are tripwires beneath humanity’s feet.

The term “tipping point” can be confusing — it’s often used interchangeably to describe sudden disruptions, irreversible shifts or feedbacks that rapidly amplify climate change.

Scientists are concerned the West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse and cause extreme, irreversible sea level rise or that Amazon forest dieback could metastasize Earth’s lungs, among other tipping points.

But some researchers worry that media fixation on tipping points in which there’s less confidence, like the recent AMOC study, could be a distraction when the perils of climate change are already in plain view.

“The focus on whether those changes will be abrupt or not or reversible or not … is missing the bigger picture,” said Kyle Armour, an associate professor in the departments of oceanography and atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. “We have good reason to worry. We don’t have to think about the exotic tipping point.”

He said there already are robust predictions that AMOC will slow down because of human emissions. He thinks most climate change impacts are far more likely to play out in a steadier, harmful fashion — in line with human emissions.

AMOC describes a series of ocean currents that cycle water in the Atlantic Ocean. In general, currents push warm water northward, where a small portion becomes sea ice. The remaining water gets colder, saltier and dense. It sinks to depths in the North Atlantic and then slowly travels southward.

When it comes to weather, AMOC transports heat to Europe and also determines the location of a belt of precipitation in Central America, said Spencer Jones, a visiting assistant professor in physical oceanography at Texas A&M University.

A rapid halt to AMOC would cause rapid cooling in the North Atlantic, warming in the Southern Hemisphere and extreme changes in precipitation.

Climate models have long predicted AMOC would slow. A collapse would trigger extreme change — perhaps three to four times bigger, Jones said.

Scientists began directly measuring aspects of AMOC in 2004. The new study uses sea surface temperatures dating back to 1870 to estimate change over a longer period of time, and suggests with 95% confidence that the current could collapse between 2025 and 2095.

“We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions,” wrote co-authors Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen, countering a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that said collapse was unlikely this century.

Some experts said the recent study adds a new angle to other evidence suggesting collapse could happen this century.

Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of physics of the oceans at Potsdam University in Germany, wrote that standard climate models are “underestimating risk” and that multiple methods of analyzing past climates suggest that a risk of collapse needs to be “taken very seriously.”

In an email to NBC News, Tim Lenton, a professor at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and founder of the Global Systems Institute, said the new study makes “important improvements to the method of providing early warning of a climate tipping point directly from data.”

But others are more skeptical of the research’s bold conclusions and reliance on a simple model.

“Proxies have to be taken with a grain of salt,” according to Eleanor Frajka-Williams, a physical oceanographer and climate scientist at the University of Hamburg in Germany, who said the science on how closely sea surface temperatures correspond to AMOC changes is unsettled and the new research risks simplifying a complex system for an overconfident prediction. She did note that the IPCC recently downgraded its confidence in the prediction that AMOC would not collapse by 2100.

Scientists have been directly tracking AMOC with sensors for about two decades, but it will likely take another 10 years before they can say for sure that the circulation system is slowing down, she said.

Some scientists aren’t sure that AMOC has a tipping point at all. There is evidence that AMOC has changed abruptly in the distant past, but researchers like Armour are unconvinced that it is likely in the near future.

“We’re just not in that climate anymore and we haven’t been for thousands of years. The drivers of AMOC right now are different,” he said. “What we do know is AMOC will slow with global warming in the future, but we haven’t yet seen the slowing and there’s no way to know if there’s an abrupt change or not.”

From Armour’s perspective, centering media conversation on uncertain predictions of systems where it’s not clear that tipping points exist could risk pushing people toward climate doomerism or could cost scientists credibility later on.

“We don’t have good evidence for anything being irreversible in the climate system except for ecosystems and ice sheets,” he said of large-scale physical climate systems. “We often find it’s much more complex than we think, and the complexity tends to reduce the likelihood of tipping points.”

Whether or not AMOC is heading for a slowdown or a frightening collapse, the solution remains the same.

From a policy perspective, “it doesn’t matter whether the AMOC is going to collapse. There are going to be hugely bad climate impacts if we don’t act today,” Jones said.

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