Teen killer in 1986 Middleboro murder granted parole
By Cody Shepard The Enterprise
Posted Sep 24, 2020
A now-51-year-old man who killed an elderly Middleboro man when he was just 17 years old has been granted parole to a long-term residential program with “special conditions.”
Jeffrey Roberio asked the Massachusetts Parole Board in June to release him from prison — and his life sentence — early to enter into a long-term residential rehabilitation program. It was the second time Roberio had sought early release, but he was denied parole in 2015.
The parole board on Tuesday granted Roberio’s release with conditions that he enter a long-term residential program, abide by a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, wear a GPS-monitoring bracelet, abstain from and comply with drug and alcohol testing, attend mental health counseling and Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous and not have any contact with the victim’s family.
“Since his last hearing, he has immersed himself in meaningful treatment and rehabilitation,” Pamela Murphy, the parole board’s general counsel, wrote in the decision.
Despite initially being sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in the July 29, 1986, murder of Lewis Jennings, Roberio became eligible for parole because of a retroactive December 2013 Supreme Judicial Court ruling. The state’s highest court decided that life without parole was a cruel and unusual punishment for minors because scientific evidence shows that juvenile brains are not yet fully developed.
Roberio was resentenced to life with parole eligibility in 2013 and instantly became eligible for parole because he had previously served 15 years.
During the June parole hearing, which lasted about 2 hours and 40 minutes, Roberio said he was “truly sorry for the pain” he caused Jennings’ family.
“I cannot undo the damage I have done,” Roberio said. “I can only say I am sorry and work every day to become a better person and pray that, when the day comes, I will be judged by the content of my character and not by my horrible actions.”
Roberio and a co-defendant, Michael Eagles, beat and strangled Jennings inside his Pleasant Street trailer in Middleboro in an attempt to rob him.
Jennings’ spine, several ribs and bones in his neck were fractured. He suffered numerous injuries to his face and head and had numerous lacerations on his hand indicative of defensive wounds. He was alive when the injuries occurred.
Jennings’ daughter, Donna Jennings Villaire, said at the hearing that her family has been given a life sentence with no parole because it has to relive “haunting memories” of her father’s death.
“My dad did not deserve to die like this. No one or nothing does,” Villaire said. “There are just not enough classes, programs or classes to rehabilitate this evil. My family and I ask that the Parole Board strongly take into consideration this horrific crime and deny the parole of Jeffrey Roberio. He will never have our forgiveness.”
Villaire couldn’t immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.
Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz, who spoke at the hearing against Roberio’s release, said he respectfully disagrees with the board’s decision.
“This man admitted to being the mastermind and primary actor in robbing and then brutally beating and strangling Mr. Jennings to death. To me, the heinous nature of this murder alone was enough to give the Board a reason to deny his request for parole,” Cruz wrote in a statement. “We believe that Jeffrey Roberio has never demonstrated the level of rehabilitation that was compatible with someone who could re-join society and live according to our laws. The family of this victim have endured nearly 35 years of suffering with loss of their loved one. Over those years, Jeffrey Roberio barely offered any expression of remorse or any apology. I will not apologize for continuing to advocate on behalf of crime victims and their devastated families.”
The parole board wrote that Roberio’s release was “not incompatible with the welfare of society.”
“In forming this opinion, the Board has taken into consideration Mr. Roberio’s institutional behavior, as well as his participation in available work, educational, and treatment programs during the period of his incarceration,” the decision states. “The Board has also considered a risk and needs assessment, and whether risk reduction programs could effectively minimize Mr. Roberio’s risk of recidivism. After applying this appropriately high standard to the circumstances of Mr. Roberio’s case, the Board is of the opinion that Jeffrey Roberio merits parole at this time.”
One parole board member “voted to deny parole with a review in two years,” according to the decision. The votes are confidential, according to a spokesperson for the state’s Executive Office of Public Safety and Security.
Roberio has been in prison at the Pondville Correctional Center in Norfolk, a minimum-security prison where he has been for about a year and a half. He previously spent more than two decades at the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater after his conviction. It wasn’t immediately clear when he would be released.
Attorney General drops charges in Westport animal abuse case
By Jeffrey D. Wagner Contributing Writer
Posted Sep 24, 2020
Healey’s office says former Lt. Majewski’s credibility is damaged
WESTPORT — The state Attorney General’s office has dropped charges and will discontinue prosecuting 25 defendants charged with more than 150 counts of animal cruelty, following a 2016 landmark animal abuse case on American Legion Highway.
Responding to a status update from the Herald News, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Maura Healey on Wednesday cited a complication in the prosecution — former town police officer, Lt. Jeff Majewski, was put on leave earlier this year and is being investigated by the police department. Healey’s office referred to Majewski as the key witness and his circumstances, though separate from the animal abuse case, would damage the prosecution’s case.
“It has been our priority from the beginning of this case to ensure that justice is served for the Westport community and the animals that were mistreated. Unfortunately, due to the circumstances surrounding the conduct and credibility of the key witness — the investigating Westport police detective — in connection with another matter, we have determined we must dismiss the charges and terminate the prosecution of these cases,” according to a statement from the AG’s office.
This decision comes while around a dozen defendants awaited trial on animal cruelty charges.
“We reached this conclusion reluctantly, based on the understanding that the facts concerning the detective, whose testimony would be needed at trial to prove these charges beyond a reasonable doubt, gravely compromised our ability to successfully prosecute these cases. Our office remains committed to prosecuting cases of animal cruelty and abuse,” the AG office also said in a statement.
“Some time ago the town finished its deliberations and was satisfied we had pursued the issues as far as we could go,” Westport Selectmen Chairman Richard Brewer said on Wednesday. “The Attorney General’s actions were a separate matter and we have no further comments on their decision.”
According to Herald News reports, Majewski was put on paid administrative leave in February as the department investigates whether “a consensual relationship” he had with two unidentified women violated department policy, a police spokesman said.
Majewski was formerly the department’s public information officer, and in that role made public statements to members of the media about Westport police matters and cases.
“I was told by an ex-girlfriend that she wasn’t going to be happy until I lost my job and was on the other side of the news. I understand why I was placed on leave and hope that the facts come out at the end of the investigation,” Majewski said in a February statement.
Majewski, after 30 years on the Westport force, retired in May.
The AG statement also said in its release that the department reviewed primary source investigatory materials connected to Majewski’s case and decided not to proceed with the animal cruelty case.
The AG release cited Rule 3.8 of the Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct for Attorneys: a “prosecutor has the responsibility of a minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate. This responsibility carries with it [the] specific obligation to see ... that guilt is decided upon the basis of sufficient evidence.”
Reached Wednesday via email, Majewski said that there were “dozens of officers working on (the case) besides me and it occurred in 2016.”
Constance Gee, an animal rights activist in town, also said in a statement that there is plenty of evidence and documentation without the testimony of the case’s “lead detective.”
“That the remaining cases have been dismissed because of the lead detective’s personal indiscretions does not negate the reality of what was found and meticulously documented, first in 2010 (on the same property) and again in 2016. The cold hard fact is human beings are capable of unimaginable cruelty toward animals,” Gee said in an email. “And that is why we must have tighter and more comprehensive laws and harsher mandatory sentencing for animal abusers.”
Gee on Wednesday released photos that were presented in court in June 2019 but not released previously. She further released police statements — also read in court — that further illustrate the animal abuse.
Gee said these reports, never previously released, also would aid the prosecution.
“The smell of ammonia and feces was overpowering. A feed trough located near the entrance in this area (of the farm) was filled with moldy bread. Feces near the trough was over 12 inches deep,” it read.
“The unspeakable cruelty on the Medeiros property happened. Men and women starved animals to death,” Gee also said in her statement.
According to background released by the AG’s office, Healey’s office in March 2017 indicted the owner of a Westport Farm — Richard Medeiros — and 26 tenants who rented space on the property on 151 counts of animal cruelty, making it the largest investigation of its kind in New England.
In 2018, Richard Medeiros, the property owner, died. Scottie Medeiros, a tenant but with no relation to Richard Medeiros, also died during the course of the prosecution, according to the AG’s office.
In June 2019, 13 defendants resolved their cases, with 10 pleading guilty and three admitting to sufficient facts to warrant a finding of guilty, and their cases were continued without a finding, according to the AG’s office, adding that Healey’s office pushed for maximum allowable sentencing guidelines — including jail time for the majority of defendants.
There were 11 defendants who were going to trial but now will escape it, according to the AG’s office.
“Never forget: The largest animal abuse case in New England’s history happened here in Westport. That is why we must always have in place means by which to check on the situation and health of all farm animals within our town, and must hold officials who fail to do their job in that regard accountable,” Gee also said.
Massachusetts man dies from eating too much black licorice
By Marilyn Marchione / AP Chief Medical Writer
Posted Sep 24, 2020
A Massachusetts construction worker’s love of black licorice wound up costing him his life. Eating a bag and a half every day for a few weeks threw his nutrients out of whack and caused the 54-year-old man’s heart to stop, doctors reported Wednesday.
“Even a small amount of licorice you eat can increase your blood pressure a little bit,” said Dr. Neel Butala, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who described the case in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The problem is glycyrrhizic acid, found in black licorice and in many other foods and dietary supplements containing licorice root extract. It can cause dangerously low potassium and imbalances in other minerals called electrolytes.
Eating as little as 2 ounces of black licorice a day for two weeks could cause a heart rhythm problem, especially for folks over 40, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warns.
“It’s more than licorice sticks. It could be jelly beans, licorice teas, a lot of things over the counter. Even some beers, like Belgian beers, have this compound in it,” as do some chewing tobaccos, said Dr. Robert Eckel, a University of Colorado cardiologist and former American Heart Association president. He had no role in the Massachusetts man’s care.
The death was clearly an extreme case. The man had switched from red, fruit-flavored twists to the black licorice version of the candy a few weeks before his death last year. He collapsed while having lunch at a fast-food restaurant. Doctors found he had dangerously low potassium, which led to heart rhythm and other problems. Emergency responders did CPR and he revived but died the next day.
The FDA permits up to 3.1% of a food’s content to have glycyrrhizic acid, but many candies and other licorice products don’t reveal how much of it is contained per ounce, Butala said. Doctors have reported the case to the FDA in hope of raising attention to the risk.
Jeff Beckman, a spokesman for the Hershey Company, which makes the popular Twizzlers licorice twists, said in an email that “all of our products are safe to eat and formulated in full compliance with FDA regulations,” and that all foods, including candy, “should be enjoyed in moderation.”
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
BAKER SLAMS TRUMP COMMENTS AS 'APPALLING' — Top-ranking officials on both sides of the aisle in Massachusetts are raising the alarm after President Donald Trump refused to sayearlier this week whether he'd commit to leaving the White House peacefully if he loses in November.
“We’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said on Wednesday.
That led Gov. Charlie Baker to issue a sharp rebuke of Trump during a Thursday press conference, calling his comments "appalling and outrageous." The GOP governor has distanced himself from the party's leader over the last several years, and in his remarks yesterday referenced Abraham Lincoln's election that came at a time when the country was "basically unraveling."
"A huge part of this nation'sglory, to the extent it exists as a beacon to others, is the peaceful transfer of power based on the vote of the people of this country ," Baker said. "That peaceful transfer of power is what the people of this country rely on when they go to vote."
"It is appalling and outrageous that anyone would suggest for a minute that if they lose an election they're not gonna leave. Period," Baker continued. "Those of us who serve in public life will do everything we can to make sure that the people's will is followed through and executed on. Because that is fundamentally why there's the United States of America in the first place."
And Attorney General Maura Healey called the president's words "distressing."For weeks, Healey has warned that she is worried about voting rights and Trump's "effort to undermine" the election.
"It's distressing that this is where we are in the country now, where we have a president who is suggesting that he would not leave peacefully were he voted out. This has never happened before. That's not who we are as a country," Healey said during arecent GBH interview.
Have a tip, story, suggestion, birthday, anniversary, new job, or any other nugget for the Playbook? Get in touch: smurray@politico.com.
TODAY — Sen. Ed Markey holds a press conference on the Supreme Court vacancy and the Affordable Care Act in Newton. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh attends a Boston Fire Department beam raising ceremony for the new Engine 42 Firehouse in Egleston Square.
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THE LATEST NUMBERS
– “Massachusetts reports 455 new COVID cases as state sees 40% increase in average cases from two weeks ago,” by Tanner Stening, MassLive.com: “State health officials confirmed another 455 coronavirus cases on Thursday, bringing the total number of cases across Massachusetts to at least 126,863. Officials also announced 15 more COVID-related deaths, for a total now of 9,150.”
DATELINE BEACON HILL
– “Baker denies ‘bullying’ school districts,” by Shira Schoenberg, CommonWealth Magazine: “Gov. Charlie Baker on Thursday continued to push schools to bring students back in person while denying allegations by the state’s largest teachers union that his administration is ‘bullying’ local districts. ‘If you are a low-risk district, and you’ve been a low-risk district for eight weeks, and you have no plan to return to in-person learning when most people in education and public health and the pediatric communities all believe that in-person learning, especially for young kids, is a critical part of their educational and social development, we want to know what your plan is to get back,’ Baker said. ‘I don’t think that’s bullying.’”
– “Baker activates Mass. National Guard to help ‘maintain public safety during large scale events,’” by Travis Andersen, Boston Globe: “Governor Charlie Baker on Thursday activated the Massachusetts National Guard to assist cities and towns if they need help maintaining public safety during ‘large scale events,’ according to a copy of his order and the state Executive Office of Public Safety and Security.”
– “State limits “forever chemicals” in drinking water,” by Christian M. Wade, CNHI News: “Drinking water systems will be required to remove contamination from ‘forever chemicals’ under new statewide rules that go into effect next month. The regulations, finalized Thursday by the state Department of Environmental Protection, require public water systems to test for so-called PFAS compounds and remove the contamination if the concentrations of six chemicals test above 20 parts per trillion.”
– “Former Massachusetts Senate President Stanley Rosenberg returns to Beacon Hill as lobbyist,” by Matt Murphy, State House News Service: “When Stanley Rosenberg left Beacon Hill in the spring of 2018 under less than desirable circumstances, no one could say for sure if or when the Amherst Democrat might resurface after a career spent in public service. But Rosenberg, who once ascended the political platform in Massachusetts to become the first openly gay and Jewish president of the Senate, is back, and in a position he never imagined for himself. He’s a lobbyist.”
– “Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker: ‘What happened to Breonna Taylor was a horrible, terrible tragedy;’ pushes police reform bill,” by Benjamin Kail, MassLive.com: “Gov. Charlie Baker on Thursday spoke out in support of Breonna Taylor and her family and said he hoped that Massachusetts lawmakers would soon advance a reforms package to improve accountability, transparency and training in law enforcement.”
– “Massachusetts Public Health Association says it had nothing to do with state guidance on return to in-person learning despite Gov. Baker crediting them,” by Douglas Hook, MassLive.com: “Gov. Charlie Baker at Wednesday’s press conference, credited the Massachusetts Public Health Association as developing and endorsing the state’s guidelines on returning to in-person learning. However, the executive director of the association, Carlene Pavlos, said that this was entirely inaccurate.”
FROM THE HUB
– “Brigham and Women’s Hospital scrambles to contain cluster of COVID-19 cases,” by Felice J. Freyer, Boston Globe: “Brigham and Women’s Hospital revealed Thursday that it is working to contain a cluster of COVID-19 cases in two of its medical-surgical units, an unusual outbreak that apparently occurred as ‘battle-weary’ staffers let their guard down. Hospital officials believe the outbreak was triggered by either a patient or an employee who interacted last week. The employee came to work while ‘presymptomatic’ — infected but not yet showing symptoms. The employee tested positive on Sunday and the patient on Monday.”
– “What will it mean if Boston shifts into the ‘red zone’?” by Christopher Gavin, Boston.com: “Boston appears to be heading for a ‘red zone’ designation by the state — indicative of areas of Massachusetts at the highest risk of coronavirus — as the city’s number of hospitalized cases have recently ticked up. Mayor Marty Walsh noted the bump, amid the metrics public health officials monitor closely to keep tabs on local virus spread, during a press conference Wednesday.”
– “A new survey says white support for Black Lives Matter has slipped. Some historians say they’re not surprised,” by Deanna Pan and Dasia Moore, Boston Globe: “Earlier this summer, thousands of Americans spilled into the streets in anger and anguish over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, whose killings at the hands of police and vigilantes sparked an outcry against racism not seen in this country since the peak of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.”
– “Massachusetts Has Second Fewest Fatal Police Shootings Per Capita, But Minorities Are Over-represented,” by Tori Bedford, GBH News: “Massachusetts had the second-lowest number of fatal police shootings per capita in the country over the past five years, according to new data released Wednesday from the Washington Post. Of those fatal shootings, Black and Hispanic people were disproportionately affected: roughly a quarter of the victims were Black people, who represent nine percent of the state population, and 20% were Hispanic people, who make up 11% of the state.”
– “Massachusetts OKs resumption of indoor visits at nursing homes,” by Anne-Gerard Flynn, Springfield Republican: “Massachusetts nursing and rest homes may resume indoor visits beginning Friday, Sept. 25, so long as appropriate infection control and safety measures are in place, according to new state guidance.”
– “10,000-unit Suffolk Downs, largest development in Boston history, approved,” by Sean Philip Cotter, Boston Herald: “The largest private development project in Boston’s history now has the green light. The Boston Planning & Development Agency’s board approved the redevelopment of the 161-acre Suffolk Downs racetrack site, giving the go-ahead after the clock changed over to midnight Friday to a two-decade-long project that will add 10,000 apartments and condos to the East Boston area.”
– “In-person visits to resume at Mass. state prisons,” by Adam Sennott, Boston Globe: “Inmates at state prisons may again have regular in-person visits starting next week, the Massachusetts Department of Correction announced Thursday. Starting Monday, inmates may have up to two people visit them once per week, the department said in a press release. All visitors will have to adhere to strict COVID-19 health and safety measures put in place to protect people living and working at state prison facilities.”
WHAT CITY HALL IS READING
– “Marty Walsh Takes A Star Turn In Fredrick Wiseman's 'City Hall,'” by Sean Burns, WBUR: ““Here’s hoping Mayor Marty Walsh is ready for his close-up. After rapturous receptions in Venice and Toronto, director Fredrick Wiseman’s towering 272-minute documentary ‘City Hall’ has its U.S. premiere Friday, Sept. 25 as part of a reimagined New York Film Festival that’s moved online and to outer borough drive-ins.”
DAY IN COURT
– “In ruling written before his death, SJC Chief Justice Gants tells judges to address jury deliberations ‘infected by racial or ethnic bias,’” by John R. Ellement, Boston Globe: “In a decision written before his death, Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants passionately reaffirmed the duty of judges to ensure equal justice is provided to all defendants when there is a suggestion that racial bias among jurors may have led to a conviction. In a unanimous ruling released Thursday, Gants and the six other members of the state’s highest court instructed judges to investigate whenever they are notified by a defense lawyer, a fellow juror, a prosecutor, or court officer that racial bias may have tainted jury deliberations.”
– “Robert Kraft’s prostitution solicitation case in Florida is closed: Court docket,” by Rick Sobey, Boston Herald: “New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is no longer facing charges for prostitution solicitation in Florida, according to the Palm Beach County court docket on Thursday. The case is closed, reads the updated docket.”
– “Rachael Rollins On High Bail: 'That Is Not How We Operate,'” by Zoe Mathews, GBH News: “After the Massachusetts Bail Fund last month signaled they would post the initial bail amounts set in a handful of cases by Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins' office, prosecutors filed motions to significantly increase the amount. Rollins told Boston Public Radio on Thursday her office needs to ‘get it right the first time’ when it comes to holding dangerousness hearings, instead of requesting high bail for defendants they believe should be held before trial.”
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MARIJUANA IN MASSACHUSETTS
– “Marijuana delivery regs stir concerns on competition,” by Shira Schoenberg, CommonWealth Magazine: “With some marijuana retailers worried that newly licensed delivery companies will undermine their sales, Cannabis Control Commission Chair Steven Hoffman’s response is: That’s capitalism. The Cannabis Control Commission had initially planned to approve an updated set of state marijuana regulations on Thursday. But commissioners decided to delay their vote by a month to iron out the final changes to rules governing the newest segment of the market, marijuana delivery licenses.”
ABOVE THE FOLD
— Herald: “ON GUARD,”—Globe: “Brigham struggles to contain virus cluster," "Campbell joins race for mayor in 2021.”
FROM THE 413
– “Springfield NAACP calls for removal of Police Commissioner Cheryl Clapprood; Mayor Domenic Sarno says she is not going anywhere,” by Patrick Johnson, Springfield Republican: “The Springfield chapter of the NAACP is calling for Mayor Domenic J. Sarno to remove Police Commissioner Cheryl C. Clapprood, saying she lacks the ability to turn around a department put on the spot by a scathing U.S. Department of Justice report documenting recurring civil rights violations.”
THE LOCAL ANGLE
– “Feds Give Weymouth Natural Gas Compressor Station Final Green Light To Begin Operations,” by Miriam Wasser, WBUR: “The controversial Weymouth Natural Gas Compressor Station overcame its final regulatory hurdle Thursday when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave the company behind the facility, Enbridge, permission to put the station ‘into servic e.’”
– “Worcester to keep restaurant seating to a maximum of 6 people per table as city remains listed in COVID ‘high-risk’ category,” by Tanner Stening, MassLive.com: “Worcester officials on Thursday said they will keep indoor and outdoor restaurant seating to a maximum of six people ahead of the state’s plans to expand that number to 10 and allow bar seating beginning Monday. City Manager Edward M. Augustus Jr. signed an executive order maintaining the six-person limit and ensuring that bar seating remains prohibited in Worcester.”
– “Columbia Gas donating $10M to area nonprofits,” by Bill Kirk, Eagle-Tribune: “Columbia Gas has pledged another $10 million to the Merrimack Valley to compensate for the 2018 gas disaster, this time in the form of grants to nonprofits in Andover, North Andover and Lawrence. The money is on top of the $56 million the company was ordered to give to Merrimack Valley residents and businesses under a deal brokered by the state Attorney General and is in addition to the $47 million class action lawsuit settlement for victims of the disaster.”
– “Chelmsford financial picture looking brighter than expected,” by Alana Melanson, The Lowell Sun: “The town’s financial outlook is better than originally forecast at spring Town Meeting, thanks to level funding in state aid. The town’s finances were discussed in a joint meeting of the Board of Selectmen, School Committee and Finance Committee, conducted by Zoom Monday night ahead of fall Town Meeting on Oct. 19.”
– “Taunton woman puts up yard sign saying husband is ‘being killed’ by neighbor’s music,” by Susannah Sudborough, Taunton Gazette: “Dorothea Pelletier, 54, has lived with her 75-year-old husband and her two teenage children on 4th Street in Taunton for more than 20 years. But she says she can get no peace in her own home because of the loud music being played by her next-door neighbors. But those neighbors, other residents on the block, and even police say there isn’t a problem.”
MEDIA MATTERS
– “Jewish Advocate suspends publication after 118 years, plans to launch new online initiative,” by Travis Andersen, Boston Globe: “The Jewish Advocate, a Boston-based newspaper reporting on the Jewish community since 1902, is suspending publication of its weekly print product but plans to launch a new digital edition focused on advocacy, the paper says on its website.”
HAPPY BIRTHDAY – to Emma Sands, comms director for N.H. gubernatorial candidate Dan Feltes; Jonathan Cohn and Nicco Mele of Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation.
HAPPY BIRTHWEEKEND – to Brendan Creedon, who celebrates Saturday. And to Sunday birthday-ers Jack Eccles, Robert Cohen, Francisco Urena and Abby Curran.
NEW EPISODE: YES WE CAMPBELL – On this week’s Horse Race podcast, hosts Jennifer Smith, Steve Koczela discuss Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell's entrance into the 2021 race for mayor of Boston, and Rebecca Hart Holder of NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts weighs in on the Supreme Court and abortion access. Subscribe and listen on iTunes and Sound Cloud.
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A generation of women who admire the Notorious RBG work, in ways large and small, to emulate her
Even before her death, Ginsburg was not just a supreme court justice; she was a feminist icon, the Notorious RBG. She represented the kind of path to influence and power that today’s young women can imagine emulating, succeeding because of her own hard work, her meticulousness, and her intelligence (and, it should be said, to her excellent decision to marry a man who saw her as his intellectual and professional equal). She wasn’t on a soapbox with a megaphone; she was a quieter sort of dissident, always cool and collected even when she was clearly enraged, a kind of sharp fury that occasionally came across in her dissents – ice so cold it burns.
Ginsburg is celebrated, first and foremost, for what she accomplished. As a law professor, lawyer, and judge, she practically created the legal concept of gender discrimination, and then set about challenging that discrimination wherever it lived. Sometimes, the beneficiaries of her work were men; more broadly, though, her work and her own barrier-breaking (she was often the only or one of few women in any given room) meant that generations of women after her had an easier time getting into law school, getting legal jobs, arguing cases in court, and asserting their rights in the workplace and outside of it.
As a lawyer she argued, and later as a judge she decided, some of the most important gender discrimination cases in American history,including onethat held that the Virginia Military Academy’s male-only admissions policy was unconstitutional. In that opinion, she gave readers an accessible, compelling lesson in the history of discrimination on the basis of sex in America. Without Ginsburg, and certainly without the other feminist lawyers who proceeded her and whose work carries on, American women would not have the rights and opportunities we do today.
She also appeals to a particular kind of American feminist: one who appreciates and understands that the work of change is done on many levels. We need the activists like Gloria Steinem and Dolores Huerta, the theorists like bell hooks and Simone de Beauvoir, the creatives like Kathleen Hanna and Audre Lorde, and the women who work within the system to change it, including elected officials, lawyers, and judges. Ginsburg was very much a system-worker, using the analytical, rational conceit of the law to change it.
For a lot of women, especially those who are more bookworm than rabble-rouser, Ginsburg embodied a kind of quiet power that felt both thrilling and accessible. No, most of us are not going to be supreme court justices. But for today’s young women, who were raised in an era where being a “good girl” meant being a smart girl, Ginsburg’s success represented the pinnacle of what we were promised: that hard work pays off; that if you’re meticulous enough in all you do, you don’t need to be the loudest or the most intimidating or even the most charismatic to make change happen. You just have to be excellent. And a lot of American women spent their girlhoods and young adulthoods cultivating excellence.
Of course, the sad reality is that the promise that excellence means success isn’t always true; you can be excellent at something, as many women are, and still run into the many barriers women face: extreme inequality that makes what should be basic only on offer to a privileged few; the difficulty in working and having a family in a nation that puts the burden of childcare on individuals, and mostly on women; deep biases that still favor men and afford them a higher presumption of competence, authority, and importance. But Ginsburg fought these barriers, too, in her personal and professional life. Her marriage was a model for what gender egalitarianism could look like.
It wasn’t perfect, but by all accounts her husband, Marty, did his fair share at home so both he and his wife could do their best at work. They didn’t just flip the genders of the traditional caregiver / breadwinner roles, they were two ambitious, brilliant people, and so they both took on caregiving and breadwinning with equal commitment. So often, the biographies of even the most brilliant and admired women include men as cautionary tales: men who are unsupportive, who undermine, who hold back, who sap energy, or, perhaps, no men at all – the implication being that accomplished and ambitious women are oftentoo muchfor male partners. The Ginsburgs offered a model that was as desirable as it was possible. Marty wasn’t just a mensch, he showed it was possible for women to expect more. And Ruth was a shining example of what women could achieve when they didn’t settle and their husbands stepped up.
No one has done as much for women’s legal rights as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. For feminists, we didn’t just lose an icon, we lost one of our greatest advocates and legal minds. And many of us lost a role model.
But we’ve retained her legacy – the opportunities she created, the legal rights she fought for, and the norms she changed. A generation of women who admire the Notorious RBG work, in ways large and small, to emulate her. Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t solve sexism in America. But she died trying, and a lot of us are picking up where she left off.
The shell of a government office in Hiroshima, Japan, a month after the U.S. dropped its atomic bomb in August 1945. (photo: Stanley Troutman/AP)
Nick Turse | This Vanishing Moment and Our Vanishing Future Nick Turse, TomDispatch Turse writes: "Whether you're reading this with your morning coffee, just after lunch, or on the late shift in the wee small hours of the morning, it's 100 seconds to midnight. That's just over a minute and a half. And that should be completely unnerving."
It was the end of the world, but if you didn’t live in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, you didn’t know it. Not in 1945 anyway. One man, John Hersey, brought that reality to Americans in an unforgettable fashion in a classic 1946 report in the New Yorker magazine on what happened under that first wartime mushroom cloud. When I read it in book form as a young man -- and I did so for a personal reason -- it stunned me. Hersey was the master of my college at Yale when I was an undergraduate and he was remarkably kind to me. That report of his from Hiroshima would haunt me for the rest of my life.
In 1982, I actually visited that city. I was then an editor at the publishing house Pantheon Books. I had grown up in a 1950s world in which schoolchildren “ducked and covered” (diving under our desks) in drills to learn how to protect ourselves -- I know it sounds ridiculous today -- should Russian nuclear weapons hit New York, the city I lived in. Yellow signs indicating air-raid shelters were then commonplace on the streets. In those years, people not in cities were building their own personal fallout shelters, stocked with food, and some even threatened to shoot anyone who tried to join them there as the missiles descended. (A friend of mine remembers just such a threat, delivered by one of his schoolmates about his father’s shelter.)
We were, in other words, in a Cold War world that always seemed to be teetering at the edge of the apocalyptic. And yet here was the strange thing: with the obvious exception of Hersey’s book, there were still, in those years, remarkably few ways to see under those mushroom clouds that had destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In my youth, I “saw” under that cloud only once -- in scenes in the French film Hiroshima Mon Amour. After the core of the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania partially melted down in 1979, I realized how few Americans knew anything about the effects of radiation sickness or about what had truly happened at Hiroshima and I had an urge to find a book that took you under that grim cloud. I called John Dower, an old friend and historian of World War II and the occupation of Japan, and he recommended a Japanese book called Unforgettable Fire, containing the drawings of Hiroshima survivors. When I finally got a copy in my hands, I was chilled to the bone. I published it in 1981 just as a domestic antinuclear movement was gaining traction and because of that, the book’s memorable images would travel the country in slide shows.
Then its Japanese editor invited me to visit his country, ostensibly to meet other publishers there. Born near Nagasaki, however, it turned out he simply couldn’t believe an American editor had been willing to publish that book of his and had a deep desire to take me to Hiroshima. I was impressed by the bustle of Tokyo and the beauty of Kyoto, but Hiroshima? To be polite, I agreed to go, but I felt blasé about it. After all, I had already published the book. I knew what had happened. By then, Hiroshima was, of course, a thriving city, but he took me to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Even with its caramelized child’s lunch box and other artifacts, it could catch but the slightest edge of that nightmare experience. Still, emotionally it blew me away. Despite Hersey, despite Unforgettable Fire, despite Hiroshima Mon Amour, I realized that I had grasped next to nothing about the true nature of atomic warfare. When I returned to the U.S., though I couldn’t stop talking about Japan, I found that I could hardly say a word about Hiroshima. What being unable to truly duck and cover meant had overwhelmed me.
So, as the world enters yet another (hypersonic) nuclear arms race and the Trump administration tears up Cold War nuclear pacts, I understand just why TomDispatch managing editor Nick Turse reacted so strongly (as I did when I read it this summer) to a powerful, new book on John Hersey’s Hiroshima experience, Lesley Blume’s Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World. He and I have both been living with Hersey’s Hiroshima report for a lifetime in a world that somehow refuses to grasp, even on an increasingly apocalyptic planet, what nuclear war truly means.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has adjusted its Doomsday Clock to provide humanity with an expert estimate of just how close all of us are to an apocalyptic “midnight” -- that is, nuclear annihilation. A century ago, there was, of course, no need for such a measure. Back then, the largest explosion ever caused by humans had likely occurred in Halifax, Canada, in 1917, when a munitions ship collided with another vessel, in that city’s harbor. That tragic blast killed nearly 2,000, wounded another 9,000, and left 6,000 homeless, but it didn’t imperil the planet. The largest explosions after that occurred on July 16, 1945, in a test of a new type of weapon, an atomic bomb, in New Mexico and then on August 6, 1945, when the United States unleashed such a bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Since then, our species has been precariously perched at the edge of auto-extermination.
No one knows precisely how many people were killed by the world’s first nuclear attack. Around 70,000, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as 280,000 were dead, many of radiation sickness, by the end of the year. (An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.) In the wake of the first nuclear attack, little was clear. “What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known,” the New York Timesreported that August 7th and the U.S. government sought to keep it that way, portraying nuclear weapons as nothing more than super-charged conventional munitions, while downplaying the horrifying effects of radiation. Despite the heroic efforts of several reporters just after the blast, it wasn’t until a year later that Americans -- and then the rest of the world -- began to truly grasp the effects of such new weaponry and what it would mean for humanity from that moment onward.
We know about what happened at Hiroshima largely thanks to one man, John Hersey. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and former correspondent for TIME and LIFE magazines. He had covered World War II in Europe and the Pacific, where he was commended by the secretary of the Navy for helping evacuate wounded American troops on the Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal. And we now know just how Hersey got the story of Hiroshima -- a 30,000-word reportorial masterpiece that appeared in the August 1946 issue of the New Yorker magazine, describing the experiences of six survivors of that atomic blast -- thanks to a meticulously researched and elegantly written new book by Lesley Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.
Only the Essentials
When I pack up my bags for a war zone, I carry what I consider to be the essentials for someone reporting on an armed conflict. A water bottle with a built-in filter. Trauma packs with a blood-clotting agent. A first-aid kit. A multitool. A satellite phone. Sometimes I forgo one or more of these items, but there’s always been a single, solitary staple, a necessity whose appearance has changed over the years, but whose presence in my rucksack has not.
Once, this item was intact, almost pristine. But after the better part of a decade covering conflicts in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, and Burkina Faso, it’s a complete wreck. Still, I carry it. In part, it’s become (and I’m only slightly embarrassed to say it) something of a talisman for me. But mostly, it’s because what’s between the figurative covers of that now-coverless, thoroughly mutilated copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima -- the New Yorker article in paperback form -- is as terrifyingly brilliant as the day I bought it at the Strand bookstore in New York City for 48 cents.
I know Hiroshima well. I’ve read it cover-to-cover dozens of times. Or sometimes on a plane or a helicopter or a river barge, in a hotel room or sitting by the side of a road, I’ll flip it open and take in a random 10 or 20 pages. I always marveled at how skillfully Hersey constructed the narrative with overlapping personal accounts that make the horrific handiwork of that weapon with the power of the gods accessible on a human level; how he explained something new to this world, atomic terror, in terms that readers could immediately grasp; how he translated destruction on a previously unimaginable scale into a cautionary tale as old as the genre itself, but with an urgency that hasn’t faded or been matched. I simply never knew how he did it until Lesley Blume pulled back the curtain.
Fallout, which was published last month -- the 75th anniversary of America’s attack on Hiroshima -- offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of just how Hersey and William Shawn, then the managing editor of the New Yorker, were able to truly break the story of an attack that had been covered on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers a year earlier and, in the process, produced one of the all-time great pieces of journalism. It’s an important reminder that the biggest stories may be hiding in plain sight; that breaking news coverage is essential but may not convey the full magnitude of an event; and that a writer may be far better served by laying out a detailed, chronological account in spartan prose, even when the story is so horrific it seems to demand a polemic.
Hersey begins Hiroshima in an understated fashion, noting exactly what each of the six survivors he chronicles was doing at the moment their lives changed forever. “Not everyone could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize an all-out, end-of-days nuclear world war,” Blume observes. “But practically anyone could comprehend a story about a handful of regular people -- mothers, fathers, grade school children, doctors, clerks -- going about their daily routines when catastrophe struck.”
As she points out, Hersey’s authorial voice is never raised and so the atomic horrors -- victims whose eyeballs had melted and run down their cheeks, others whose skin hung from their bodies or slipped off their hands like gloves -- speak for themselves. It’s a feat made all the more astonishing when one considers, as Blume reveals, that its author, who had witnessed combat and widespread devastation from conventional bombing during World War II, was so terrified and tormented by what he saw in Hiroshima months after the attack that he feared he would be unable to complete his assignment.
Incredibly, Hersey got the story of Hiroshima with official sanction, reporting under the scrutiny of the office of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, the head of the American occupation of defeated Japan. His prior reportage on the U.S. military, including a book focused on MacArthur that he later called “too adulatory,” helped secure his access. More amazing still, the New Yorker -- fearing possible repercussions under the recently passed Atomic Energy Act -- submitted a final draft of the article for review to Lieutenant General Lesley Groves, who had overseen the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, served as its chief booster, and went so far as to claim that radiation poisoning “is a very pleasant way to die.”
Whatever concessions the New Yorker may have made to him have been lost in the sands of time, but Groves did sign off on the article, overlooking, as Blume notes, “Hersey’s most unsettling revelations: the fact that the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”
The impact on the U.S. government would be swift. The article was a sensation and immediately lauded as the best reporting to come out of World War II. It quickly became one of the most reprinted news pieces of all time and led to widespread reappraisals by newspapers and readers alike of just what America had done to Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also managed to shine a remarkably bright light on the perils of nuclear weapons, writ large. “Hersey’s story,” as Blume astutely notes, “was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilization.”
Wanted: A Hersey for Our Time
It’s been 74 years since Hiroshima hit the newsstands. A Cold War and nuclear arms race followed as those weapons spread across the planet. And this January, as a devastating pandemic was beginning to follow suit, all of us found ourselves just 100 seconds away from total annihilation due to the plethora of nuclear weapons on this earth, failures of U.S.-Russian cooperation on arms control and disarmament, the Trump administration’s trashing of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and America’s efforts to develop and deploy yet more advanced nukes, as well as two other factors that have sped up that apocalyptic Doomsday Clock: climate change and cyber-based disinformation.
The latter, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is corrupting our “information ecosphere,” undermining democracy as well as trust among nations, and so creating hair-trigger conditions in international relations. The former is transforming the planet’s actual ecosystem and placing humanity in another kind of ultimate peril. “Dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder,” former California Governor Jerry Brown, the executive chair of the Bulletin, said earlier this year. “Climate change just compounds the crisis. If there’s ever a time to wake up, it’s now.”
Over the last three-plus years, however, President Donald Trump has seemingly threatened at least three nations with nuclear annihilation, including a U.S. ally. In addition to menacing North Korea with the possibility of unleashing “fire and fury” and his talk of ushering in “the end” of Iran, he even claimed to have “plans” to exterminate most of the population of Afghanistan. The “method of war” he suggested employing could kill an estimated 20 million or more Afghans, almost all of them civilians. John Hersey, who died in 1993 at the age of 78, wouldn’t have had a moment’s doubt about what he meant.
Trump’s nuclear threats may never come to fruition, but his administration, while putting significant effort into deep-sixing nuclear pacts, has also more than done its part to accelerate climate change, thinning rules designed to keep the planet as habitable as possible for humans. A recent New York Times analysis, for example, tallied almost 70 environmental rules and regulations -- governing planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane emissions, clean air, water, and toxic chemicals -- that have been rescinded, reversed, or revoked, with more than 30 additional rollbacks still in progress.
President Trump has not, however, been a total outlier when it comes to promoting environmental degradation. American presidents have been presiding over the destruction of the natural environment since the founding of the republic. Signed into law in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, the Homestead Act, for instance, transformed countless American lives, providing free land for the masses. But it also transferred 270 million acres of wilderness, or 10% of the United States, into private hands for “improvements.”
More recently, Ronald Reagan launched attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency through deregulation and budget cuts, while George W. Bush’s administration worked to undermine science-based policies, specifically through the denial of anthropogenic climate change. The difference, of course, was that Lincoln couldn’t have conceptualized the effects of global warming (even if the first study of the “greenhouse effect” was published during his lifetime), whereas the science was already clear enough in the Reagan and Bush years, and brutally self-apparent in the age of Trump, as each of them pursued policies that would push us precious seconds closer to Armageddon.
The tale of how John Hersey got his story is a great triumph of Lesley Blume’s Fallout, but what came after may be an even more compelling facet of the book. Hersey gave the United States an image problem -- and far worse. “The transition from global savior to genocidal superpower was an unwelcome reversal,” she observes. Worse yet for the U.S. government, the article left many Americans reevaluating their country and themselves. It’s beyond rare for a journalist to prompt true soul-searching or provide a moral mirror for a nation. In an interview in his later years, Hersey, who generally avoided publicity, suggested that the testimony of survivors of the atomic blasts -- like those he spotlighted -- had helped to prevent nuclear war.
“We know what an atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us,” writes Blume. Unfortunately, while there have been many noteworthy, powerful works on climate change, we’re still waiting for the one that packs the punch of “Hiroshima.” And so, humanity awaits that once-in-a-century article, as nuclear weapons, climate change, and cyber-based disinformation keep us just 100 clicks short of doomsday.
Hersey provided a template. Blume has lifted the veil on how he did it. Now someone needs to step up and write the world-changing piece of reportage that will shock our consciences and provide a little more breathing room between this vanishing moment and our ever-looming midnight.
Jalil Muntaqim was one of several black liberation radicals incarcerated for decades in the wake of political and racial turbulence of the 1960s and 70s
Jalil Muntaqim, AKA Anthony Bottom, has been in unbroken custody for more than 49 years having been arrested and later convicted of the 1971 murders of two police officers in Harlem. Under the terms of his parole he must be released from the maximum-security Sullivan correctional facility in upstate New York by 20 October.
At a hearing earlier this month – at least his 10th such panel appearance since he became eligible for parole in 1998 – Muntaqim expressed his remorse for the killings of Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones. The officers had answered what they believed was a domestic dispute call but were then ambushed and shot.
The two parole commissioners on the panel accepted his expression of remorse as genuine.
Muntaqim, 68, was the subject of a Guardian profile in 2018 as part of a series that looked at black liberation radicals incarcerated for decades in the wake of political and racial turbulence in the late 1960s and 70s. At the time of the Harlem incident he was a clandestine member of the underground wing of the Panthers, the Black Liberation Army.
In the course of a three-hour filmed interview with the Guardian in Sullivan, Muntaqim described how he was only 18 years old when he signed up for the Panthers, quickly going on to join the armed and clandestine BLA. He said that in his many years behind bars he had matured from the revolutionary position that he adopted in 1971, though he remained committed to the cause of racial equality and justice.
“I now take the ‘r’ off the word and make it ‘evolutionary’,” he said. “Revolution for me is the evolutionary process of building a higher level of consciousness in society at large. I’m an evolutionary revolutionary.”
Muntaqim’s release has been virulently opposed by the New York police union, the PBA, and by the widow of one of the murdered police officers, Diane Piagentini. In a statement she said: “We are heartbroken to see another of Joe’s killer set free by politics. But more than anything else, we are angry.”
Muntaqim was one of a dwindling number of black liberation radicals who were incarcerated during the heyday of the Black Panthers and who have been locked up ever since. Edward Poindexter, convicted of the killing of a police officer in Omaha, Nebraska, marked his 50 years in a prison cell in August.
Others have been released on parole in recent months. The surviving seven members of the Move 9, black liberation and environmental radicals from Philadelphia who were arrested following a police siege of their communal home in 1978, were all released on parole over the past two years.
One of the seven, Delbert Africa, died in June just five months after he was set free.
Muntaqim had two co-defendants at trial for the killings of the police officers in Harlem, when they each received sentences of 25 years to life. Albert “Nuh” Washington died in prison in 2000, and Herman Bell was released on parole in April 2018.
According to local media, Hankinson was brought into the Shelby County Detention Center after a Kentucky grand jury indicted him on three counts of wanton endangerment over the March 13 raid. He was released not long after posting bail, an official confirmed to The Hill.
He could face up to five years in jail for each of the counts.
Hankinson was the only officer involved in the shooting to be indicted by the grand jury, officials announced Wednesday. However, the charges are not tied directly to the shooting, which means none of the three officers have so far been charged in the killing of Taylor.
Taylor was a Black EMT who died at the age of 26 after being fatally shot by Louisville police in her apartment. Three police officers -- Hankinson, Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove -- had arrived at her home in plainclothes late at night after obtaining a no-knock search warrant as part of a drug case targeting Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover.
The office of Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who served as a special prosecutor in the case, said in a release detailing the completion of the investigation into Taylor’s death on Wednesday that officers were “advised by superiors to knock and announce their presence in serving this specific search warrant.”
The office pointed to a single witness they said was “near in proximity” to Taylor’s home to corroborate claims that the officers knocked and announced their presence at her residence.
However, Cameron was pressed by a reporter who noted that a number of other witnesses had not corroborated claims that the officers knocked and announced their presence at Taylor’s home during the raid.
“[The grand jury] got to hear and listen to all the testimony and made the determination that Detective Hankison was the one that needed to be indicted,” Cameron said in response.
After the officers entered Taylor’s home on March 13, her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who is licensed to carry, fired shots, believing the officers were intruders. The officers returned fire, fatally striking Taylor. No drugs were uncovered in the raid.
Cameron's office said the 26-year-old was hit with six bullets in total.
Ahead of his indictment on Wednesday, Hankinson was the only officer involved in the shooting to be fired for “display[ing] an extreme indifference to the value of human life.” The two other officers were put on administrative reassignment.
Cameron’s office said Hankinson fired 10 shots during the raid and that “some bullets traveled through apartment four and into apartment three, before some exited that apartment.”
“At the time, three residents of apartment three were at home, including a male, a pregnant female, and a child,” the office continued, though it said there is “no conclusive evidence that any bullets fired from Detective Hankinson’s weapon” hit Taylor.
Mattingly, Cameron’s office said, fired six times, and Cosgrove fired 16 times. Those shots, Cameron said Wednesday, were “justified,” however, because Walker was first to fire.
The decision announced by the grand jury on Wednesday has prompted widespread outrage from the public, lawmakers and celebrities who say more should be done to hold the officers accountable for Taylor’s death.
Missouri's Governor Has Refused to Mandate Masks. Now He's Tested Positive for the Coronavirus. Jaclyn Peiser, The Washington Post Peiser writes: "Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) has often inflamed critics by downplaying the risks of reopening schools during the coronavirus pandemic, resisting calls for a statewide mask mandate and attending large events without wearing a mask in a state with rising covid-19 numbers."
Now Parson, 65, and his wife, Teresa, have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the governor announced Wednesday. They are quarantining, forcing Parson to postpone campaign events and to reschedule a gubernatorial debate.
“Right now, I feel fine — no symptoms of any kind,” Parson said in a recorded message posted on Facebook. The first lady is exhibiting mild symptoms, the governor said.
Coronavirus cases have been on the rise in Missouri, which has recorded almost 117,000 cases and nearly 2,000 deaths, according to The Washington Post’s tracker. A Sept. 13 report from the White House coronavirus task force, obtained by radio station KCUR, said by population, the state had the fourth-highest rate of new cases in the country.
Throughout the pandemic, Parson has often resisted calls for tougher measures from health experts.
In March, the governor declined to issue a stay-at-home order in Missouri, saying social distancing rules and banning large gathering was enough. The next month, facing mounting pressure as more than 30 states enforced similar orders, Parson issued one. But some health experts called Parson’s order weak, noting it allowed every business to stay open, not only those considered “essential,” as long as there wasn’t a gathering of more than 10 people.
In May, Parson, along with four other Republican governors in the region, wrote an op-ed for The Post promoting their effectiveness on keeping the economy open and maintaining low infection rates.
“The Plains states have managed this emergency exceptionally well by many measures,” the governors wrote. “Our states’ experiences offer collective proof that a one-size-fits-all approach is not the best way to address unique circumstances.”
In July, Parson criticized local governments for closing recreational facilities for children and called for schools to reopen with in-person classes. The governor told KFTK radio host Marc Cox he wasn’t concerned about students contracting the virus.
“They’re at the lowest risk possible,” Parson said. “And if they do get covid-19, which they will — and they will when they go to school — they’re not going to the hospitals. They’re not going to have to sit in doctor’s offices. They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it.”
In a response, Missouri’s Democratic Party noted children can spread the virus to older relatives. “Mike Parson today said he is fine with every child in Missouri getting COVID-19 and spreading it to their family members,” the statement said. “There is no place in our politics for such a reckless disregard for Missourians’ lives.”
Parson has also held firm on not establishing a statewide mask mandate, which was among the recommendations from the White House coronavirus task force on how to lower his state’s infection rate. Sixteen states don’t have statewide mask mandates.
Parson has encouraged Missourians to wear masks and to social distance. “I don’t want anybody to think I’m anti-mask, because that’s not the case,” Parson told KFTK. “I just don’t think it’s government’s place to tell everybody to do that.”
Critics note, though, that Parson hasn’t consistently followed his own advice. In July, he tweeted pictures from an indoor event where he didn’t wear a mask and stood close to other people. An image also showed him grilling steaks while not wearing gloves or a mask.
In August, the governor didn’t wear a mask as he spoke at the Missouri State Fair, along with the majority of the crowd members who were also not social distancing.
Parson is not the first governor to test positive for the virus. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) contracted the virus in July. Stitt, similarly, has stated he would not mandate masks.
Watchtowers at a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp on the outskirts of Hotan, in China's northwestern Xinjiang region. (photo: Greg Baker/AFP)
Report: China Has 380 Ethnic Uighur Detention Centers and Is Building More Al Jazeera Excerpt: "China's network of detention centres in the northwest Xinjiang region is much bigger than previously thought and is being expanded, even as Beijing says it is winding down a 're-education' program for ethnic Uighurs that has been condemned internationally, new research released by an Australian think-tank showed on Thursday."
Australian study finds camps have expanded, despite claims that Uighurs were being released.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) said it had identified more than 380 “suspected detention facilities” in the region, where the United Nations says more than one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic-speaking residents have been held in recent years.
China has said the camps are vocational skills training centres and a necessary part of efforts to counter the threat of “extremism”.
The number of facilities is around 40 percent higher than previous estimates.
“The findings of this research contradict Chinese officials’ claims that all “trainees” from so-called vocational skills training centres had “graduated” by late 2019,” lead researcher Nathan Ruser wrote. “Instead, available evidence suggests that many extrajudicial detainees are now being formally charged and locked up in higher security facilities.”
The researchers used satellite imagery, witness accounts, media reports and official construction tender documents to classify the detention facilities into four tiers depending on the existence of security features such as high perimeter walls, watchtowers and internal fencing.
It found at least 61 detention sites had seen new construction and expansion work in the year to July 2020.
Fourteen more facilities remain under construction, while around 70 had had fencing or perimeter walls removed, indicating their use had changed or they had been closed, ASPI added. It noted that more than 90 percent of the sites were lower-tier security facilities.
The data forms part of the institute’s Xinjiang Data Project, which includes details not only about the network of detention facilities – creating 3D animated models – but also the region’s cultural sites such as mosques.
Ruser noted that many of the centres that had been expanded were higher security facilities, while others had been built close to industrial parks, suggesting those who had been charged might also have been sent to “walled factory compounds for forced labour assignments”.
Politicians in the United States recently voted to ban imports from Xinjiang, citing the alleged use of systematic forced labour.
Beijing recently published a white paper defending its policies in the semi-autonomous region, where it says training programmes, work schemes and better education mean life has improved.
Separately on Thursday, the Global Times, a state-run tabloid, reported that two Australian scholars Clive Hamilton and Alex Joske had been banned from entering China.
Hamilton is a professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, while Alex Joske is an analyst at ASPI specialising in the Chinese military and the international influence of the Communist Party.
Joske, who grew up in China, said in a statement he had not applied for a Chinese visa in years because the risks were too high. He added that the ban was the “latest in a series of attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to punish those who shine a light on its activities”.
The Global Times, which cited unnamed sources for its story, did not elaborate on the reason for the move.
Earlier this month, Australia cancelled the visas of two Chinese academics who had been linked to a continuing investigation into foreign interference.
Carmen 'Carmelita' Obeso (center) directs volunteers as they prepare food boxes to donate to fellow farmworkers in Oxnard, California, on September 20, 2020. (photo: Daniel A. Anderson/Grist)
How California's Farmworkers Are Banding Together to Survive the Pandemic Yvette Cabrera, Grist Cabrera writes: "Interviews with farmworkers throughout the state reveal a safety net stretched to the limit: Desperate parents are calling relief and advocacy groups for basic needs like diapers for their babies, quarantined farmworkers sick with COVID-19 are relying on colleagues for deliveries of food and other supplies, and some workers have lost their jobs after calling for better safety measures in the fields and packing plants where they work."
COVID-19 relief package for California’s farmworkers landed on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk last week. Legislators describe the bill as the first of its kind, and it addresses a wide array of issues, from workplace enforcement of COVID-19 guidance to the expansion of rural telehealth services across the state. But, as the novel coronavirus continues to tear through farmworker communities, such measures may not be enough.
Nowhere is the crisis more palpable than in Monterey County, where agriculture is a leading industry. State Assembly Member Robert Rivas, a primary author of the relief package, pointed out that Latinos represent a “staggering” 93 percent of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the county, though they comprise just 61 percent of the county’s population. Astudy from the California Institute for Rural Studiesfound that Monterey County farmworkers are three times more likely to contract COVID-19 than those working in non-agricultural industries.
“These regions in our state — of agricultural workers, of their families — have experienced the worst of the COVID-19 crisis,” Rivas said at a recent press conference. “Many of our agricultural regions here in California have seen disproportionately high rates of COVID-19 cases, and clearly this has threatened California’s most vulnerable workers. It has threatened their families, in an industry that is vital to our food security — not only in California and in the United States, but globally.”
Despite the outsized risks, farmworkers by and large are carrying on with their work whenever possible. One Monterey County farmworker has continued to work through the recent wildfires, despite battling cancer and losing her job four times previously during the pandemic, according to Irene de Barraicua, a spokesperson for Lideres Campesinas, an Oxnard-based network of women farmworker leaders that is calling on Newsom to sign the relief package into law.
“A lot of change has been made,” she said. “Unfortunately, we find that with the crisis it simply just hasn’t been enough.”
The relief package includes three bills. AB 2043 is meant to ensure the enforcement of workplace COVID-19 guidance, and it funds a bilingual outreach campaign to educate agricultural workers about that guidance. It also provides coronavirus-related paid sick leave and workers compensation benefits. AB 2164 aims to improve access to medical care for farmworkers and other marginalized groups by expanding telehealth services for rural and community health centers. AB 2165 will help rural residents who face obstacles filing court documents in person by expanding their ability to electronically file documents in all state trial courts.
Despite being classified as essential workers, farmworkers have found themselves battling COVID-19, wildfire smoke, and a public health system that’s struggled to keep up with the challenges workers face in the fields. Farmworker advocates say that, despite the guidance that’s been issued by public health officials about proper social distancing and the use of personal protective equipment, a lack of enforcement has put the health of farmworkers at risk on the job. Some agricultural workers who have spoken up about the lack of protections have lost their jobs or faced other forms of apparent retaliation.
Irma Escobedo, a pistachio sorter in Kern County, is one of those workers. For nearly two years, Escobedo worked at Primex Farms LLC, a pistachio- and almond-processing facility in Wasco, a city in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Escobedo, a 55-year-old divorced mother of four, worked in a packinghouse room with nearly 20 other people, hand sorting and inspecting pistachios that moved along conveyor belts.
When COVID-19 cases began accelerating in March, Escobedo told Grist that she and her co-workers knew very little about the virus. But, when Escobedo started wearing a mask due to her own concerns, she was initially told she couldn’t enter the facility with her mask unless a doctor had prescribed its use. Later that spring, her coworkers began to disappear from their assigned spots along the conveyor belt. When Escobedo and her fellow sorters began asking why, she says their supervisors kept them in the dark as to why other workers weren’t showing up, citing medical confidentiality.
Escobedo’s fears that the coronavirus had spread to her workplace seemed to be confirmed when her friend Maria Hortencia Lopez, 57, died in July after exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms. (Primextold Cal Mattersthat Lopez, who was technically a third-party contractor, died from pneumonia and never tested positive for COVID-19, though union officials disputed this.) At least six other women who worked in that same sorting room also got sick, said Escobedo, who was herself hospitalized for COVID-19 and pneumonia in June.
“This is something that could have all been avoided… had they informed us of what was happening, and if they had taken action immediately and prevented the cases from spreading,” Escobedo told Grist in Spanish. “We went to work not knowing that our workplace was contaminated.”
In a written response to Grist, Primex said that the company has worked hard to protect and support its employees through the crisis. To try to prevent the coronavirus from spreading at its Wasco plant, the company said that it has instituted temperature-monitoring of employees before shifts, sanitizing and sterilizing of high-touch surfaces, employee hand sanitizing at time-clock check-ins, and physical distancing of six feet between employees. It also said that employees over the age of 65 can self-quarantine without financial consequences. Primex also stated that the company asked its employees to wear masks in early April before making the practice mandatory on June 15. In addition, Primex said that it closed its plant in late June to conduct a “rigorous” testing program and a deep cleaning of the plant.
Nevertheless, by early July, 91 Primex workers in Wasco were infected with COVID-19, along with 23 of their children and 36 relatives for a total of about 150 people, according to Armando Elenes, Secretary Treasurer for the Delano-based United Farm Workers of America (UFW) union. Some of the workers asked for time off to quarantine because they didn’t want to take the risk, but they were forced to resign because the company wouldn’t make exceptions to its standard procedures, Elenes said.
“We’d like for them to treat us like we matter, as people — not treat us like we’re just a number,” said Escobedo, whose 19-year-old daughter also came down with COVID-19 while working at Primex. “We’d like for them to treat us as human beings.”
Escobedo, who is a member of the UFW, recovered from COVID-19 at home while continuing to advocate for her coworkers, sharing information with colleagues, and speaking out in the media to raise awareness about working conditions faced by farmworkers. Ultimately, while still recovering she learned she had lost her contract job in late June, along with other coworkers who have been active in the campaign to raise awareness about Primex’s response to the pandemic. She has yet to find a new job.
That same month, the UFW filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging the company illegally retaliated against the workers who spoke up. Primex told the workers the company was cutting staff because of a lack of work, according to the UFW. (In an interview with Cal Matters, Primex’s chief operating officer denied that the company engaged in retaliation.)
“I brought my daughter to work thinking it was a safe place for her to work with me, and she got sick, too. It’s just not right that [Primex] didn’t take action, that they didn’t inform us what was happening, that they didn’t share any information,” said Escobedo. “They didn’t do what I believe every company should do, which is look out for their workers.”
Earlier this year, Grist featured Carmen “Carmelita” Obeso, an Oxnard strawberry picker, in a story highlighting therisks that farmworkers faceddue to a lack of worker safety protections, limited access to health care, and crowded living conditions across the state. Many advocates feared that these conditions could lead to a major COVID-19 outbreak, and those concerns were validated this summer, as farmworker communities across the state were hit hard by the pandemic. As the country navigated the perils and unknowns of the novel coronavirus, California designated farmworkers “essential.” Obeso feared that the pandemic would not only put agricultural workers’ health at risk, but also their already-fragile financial standing as well.
A study examining conditions among California’s farmworkers during the pandemic, which wasreleased by the California Institute for Rural Studiesin July, found that these workers have lost work and wages during the pandemic and yet continue to lack access to health care and public assistance programs. In some cases, farmworkers experienced a drop of nearly 40 percent in work from April to June, that study found. Another study from the University of California, Los Angeles, shows thatdeaths among working Latinoshave quintupled since May, in large part because Latinos comprise a large portion of the state’s essential workers, from farmworkers to truck drivers to meat and vegetable packers.
“COVID-19‒associated deaths are burning their way through the entire Latino working-age population,” the study concluded.
Given the frayed social safety net, food insecurity among these essential workers is a particularly acute issue —and farmworkers have turned to each other for help. A coalition of Oxnard farmworkers, including Obeso, recently launched a community project called “De Campesinxs a Campesinxs (From Farmworkers to Farmworkers): Feeding those who feed us.” Since April, the coalition has provided a monthly distribution of food, clothing, and other items like school supplies to hundreds of farmworkers and their families. The volunteers also coordinate food deliveries for families that are quarantined in their homes, as well as workers quarantined in motels. They help farmworkers navigate and apply for relief programs. The project is spearheaded by farmworkers from Lideres Campesinas and Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, a national alliance of farmworker women that works to create healthier workplaces, homes, and communities for its members by addressing social, environmental, and economic justice issues.
“There’s no end to this work,” said Obeso, who oversees the food drives as a member of Lideres Campesinas. “Everyone is at risk, and we continue to live in fear, but we have to learn how to survive this.”
Hundreds of cars lined up in the parking lot of a Masonic temple in Oxnard on Sunday, winding their way down the street. Some families waited for four hours in advance of the coalition’s monthly donation giveaway, which included staples such as rice, sugar, spices, as well bags of snacks and Gerber baby cereal. As farmworker volunteers flipped quesadillas on a griddle and prepped hot dogs to give away as hot meals, another team sorted and prepared boxes of frozen pork and chicken, as well as bags of cheese.
Nearby, UFW volunteers filled pouches with markers, crayons, pens, and other school supplies, while Lideres Campesinas volunteers prepared paper sacks filled with masks and information on COVID-19 and the U.S. Census. What began as 50 food donation giveaways in April quickly expanded as more organizations stepped up to help. Today, 24 organizations and two Southern California universities are involved. The coalition gives away between 750 and 1,000 food donations each month because the need among farmworkers in particular is so high, according to Elizabeth Cordero, co-founder and board president of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas and Mily Treviño-Sauceda, one of the founders of Lideres Campesinas.
“Farmworkers are working and picking fruits and vegetables, but they can’t even eat what they harvest,” Treviño-Sauceda told Grist on Sunday, as she helped distribute food.
The coalition offers help to anyone who shows up at the monthly distribution, including the homeless or those who have been displaced by wildfires. As cars filled with families inched forward on Sunday to collect their food, Obeso went from window to window chatting with the farmworkers, asking how their families were surviving. One strawberry picker, a mother of five children, said that sometimes her food doesn’t last long enough to feed her children — and that one of the toughest parts of the pandemic has been finding babysitters to care for her children, who are now distance-learning at home. It’s their stories that keep Obeso going, despite the workload.
“These past few days have been intense, because we’ve been working nonstop since Wednesday to prepare for this distribution. It’s a lot of work, but we’ll be here until the end,” Obeso said, standing between rows of idling cars. “As long as we have the support to continue this work, we’ll give it our all.”
