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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Monday, May 3, 2021

Global coronavirus cases are surging, driven by India and South America (NYT) The number of new daily cases has exceeded 800,000 for more than a week. The spike is largely driven by the outbreak in India, which now accounts for more than 40 percent of the world’s new cases. The U.S. plans to halt travel for non-U.S. citizens from India starting Tuesday. Vaccines in India are running short, hospitals are swamped and cremation grounds are burning thousands of bodies every day. Health experts and political analysts say that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s overconfidence and domineering leadership style bear a huge share of the responsibility for the crisis. Meanwhile, Indians living abroad are frantically seeking to help sick relatives. Much of South America is also faring poorly. Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, Argentina and Colombia all rank among the 20 nations with the highest number of Covid deaths per capita.

Elderly statesman? (NYT) Arnold Schwarzenegger left the California governor’s mansion 10 years ago. He is a more popular political figure today than when he was elected. Over the past year, the former Republican governor, now 73, has been in demand, embracing an unlikely role that he describes as “elderly statesman.” He’s made public service announcements on hand washing, raised millions of dollars for protective health gear and is now being sought out for guidance on the Republican-led effort to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom, the same mechanism that led to Schwarzenegger’s election in 2003. “When you leave office, you realize—well, I realized—that I just couldn’t cut it off like that,” he said in a three-hour interview.

Looming showdown as Michigan governor orders Canadian pipeline shut down (Washington Post) For Michigan’s governor, the 645-mile pipeline jeopardizes the Great Lakes. For Canada’s natural resources minister, its continued operation is “nonnegotiable.” The clash over Calgary-based Enbridge’s Line 5, which carries up to 540,000 barrels of crude oil and natural gas liquids across Michigan and under the Great Lakes each day, is placing stress on U.S.-Canada ties. In a move applauded by environmentalists and Indigenous groups on both sides of the border, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) in November ordered the firm to shut down the nearly 70-year-old lines by May 12. Canadian officials, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have appealed to their American counterparts, including President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm for help. Joe Comartin, Canada’s consul general in Detroit, said a shutdown would have “significant” impacts on both sides of the border. He predicted effects ranging from months-long propane shortages to higher costs for consumers to fuels being carried by rail, truck or boat—methods that he said are less emissions-friendly and more dangerous than a pipeline. One “irritant,” he said, is “the claim from the state that they are doing this to protect the Great Lakes, that they’re more interested in protecting the Great Lakes than we in Canada are. Basically, we reject that completely.”

NYC Eyes Reopening (Bloomberg) New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said yesterday the city would aim to fully reopen July 1, lifting restrictions on restaurants, gyms, and all other businesses. A return to normal would mark a symbolic moment for both New Yorkers and the country—America's most populous city was a global epicenter early in the pandemic, registering an average of 800 deaths per day last April. The city is averaging roughly 1,700 new cases per day, down 70% since January, reporting about 30 deaths per day.

Kissinger warns of ‘colossal’ dangers in US-China tensions (AFP) Acclaimed diplomat Henry Kissinger said Friday that US-China tensions threaten to engulf the entire world and could lead to an Armageddon-like clash between the two military and technology giants. The 97-year-old former US secretary of state, who as an advisor to president Richard Nixon crafted the 1971 unfreezing of relations between Washington and Beijing, said the mix of economic, military and technological strengths of the two superpowers carried more risks than the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Strains with China are “the biggest problem for America, the biggest problem for the world,” Kissinger told the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum on global issues. “Because if we can’t solve that, then the risk is that all over the world a kind of cold war will develop between China and the United States.” While nuclear weapons were already large enough to damage the entire globe during the Cold War, he said advances in nuclear technology and artificial intelligence—where China and the United States are both leaders—have multiplied the doomsday threat. “For the first time in human history, humanity has the capacity to extinguish itself in a finite period of time,” Kissinger said.

Thousands march in Colombia in fourth day of protests against tax plan (Reuters) Thousands of Colombians took to the streets on Saturday for International Workers’ Day marches and protests against a government tax reform proposal, in a fourth day of demonstrations that have resulted in at least four deaths. Unions and other groups kicked off marches on Wednesday to demand the government of President Ivan Duque withdraw the reform proposal, which originally leveled sales tax on public services and some food. Cali, the country’s third-largest city, has seen the most vociferous marches, some looting and at least three deaths connected to the demonstrations.

Europe’s economy shrinks amid slow vaccine rollouts and lockdowns (Washington Post) With swaths of Europe still under lockdown restrictions and facing a stuttering vaccination rollout, the region’s economy slid into a double-dip recession in the first quarter of the year, in contrast to a rosy outlook in the United States. The European economy shrank by 0.6 percent in the first quarter of the year, according to data released Friday. The U.S. economy grew by 1.6 percent over the same period, amid massive federal stimulus spending and a speedy vaccination rollout. Export-dependent Germany, which had already been heading toward recession before the pandemic as manufacturing dropped off, saw its economy shrink by 1.7 percent, the most in Europe. The economies of Spain, Italy and Portugal also contracted. Much of Europe is battling a third wave of coronavirus infections. Germany has a nighttime curfew in place in 15 of its 16 states, and shopping requires booking appointments and getting a negative test.

Dozens of German police injured in May Day riots (AP) At least 93 police officers were injured and 354 protesters were detained after traditional May Day rallies in Berlin turned violent, Berlin’s top security official said Sunday. More than 20 different rallies took place in the German capital on Saturday and the vast majority of them were peaceful. However, a leftist march of 8,000 people through the city’s Neukoelln and Kreuzberg neighborhood, which has often seen clashes in past decades, turned violent. Protesters threw bottles and rocks at officers, and burned garbage containers and wooden pallets in the streets. There’s a nightly curfew in most parts of Germany currently because of the high number of coronavirus infections. But political protests and religious gatherings are exempt from the curfew.

Big Myanmar protests aim to ‘shake the world’; seven killed (Reuters) Myanmar security forces opened fire on some of the biggest protests against military rule in days, killing at least seven people on Sunday, media reported, three months after a coup plunged the country into crisis. The protests, after a spell of dwindling crowds and what appeared to be more restraint by the security forces, were coordinated with demonstrations in Myanmar communities around the world to mark what organisers called “the global Myanmar spring revolution”. Streams of demonstrators, some led by Buddhist monks, made their way through cities and towns including the commercial hub of Yangon. The protests are only one of the problems the generals have brought on with their Feb. 1 ouster of the elected government. Wars with ethnic minority insurgents in remote frontier regions in the north and east have intensified significantly over the past three months, displacing tens of thousands of civilians, according to U.N. estimates. In some places, civilians with crude weapons have battled security forces while in central areas military and government facilities that have been secure for generations have been hit by rocket attacks and a wave of small, unexplained blasts.

Vaccinated faithful throng Jerusalem church for Holy Fire (AP) Hundreds of Christian worshippers made use of Israel’s easing of coronavirus restrictions Saturday, packing a Jerusalem church revered as the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection for an ancient fire ceremony a day before Orthodox Easter. The faithful gathered at The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, waiting for clergymen to emerge with the Holy Fire from the Edicule, a chamber built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was buried and rose from the dead after being crucified. As bells rang and the top clerics from different Orthodox denominations appeared, the worshippers scrambled to light their candles and pass the fire on. Within a minute, the imposing walls of the old church glowed.

Israel asks whether autonomy of the ultra-Orthodox contributed to the deadly stampede (Washington Post) Israel’s ultra-Orthodox residents exist in a world within the world, citizens of Israel but pledging their allegiance, attention and obedience instead to their rabbis and God. In isolated enclaves, they are exempt from the military draft, outside the national school system and—in apartments usually without Internet or television—largely oblivious to the surrounding culture. Now, this shocked country is asking whether that self-segregation—and the secular politicians who have enabled it for decades—is responsible for the worst civilian catastrophe in Israel’s history, the trampling death of 45 ultra-Orthodox men and boys at a massively overcrowded religious festival in the early hours of the morning Friday. The ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim as they are known in Israel, follow some of the most conservative tenets in Judaism and have a lifestyle based on the Jewish culture that evolved hundreds of years ago in the communities of Eastern Europe. Since Israel’s founding, state leaders have sought preserve this culture after much of it was devastated during World War II. When more than 100,000 members of the Haredim convened for a boisterous annual festival at an ancient rabbi’s tomb on Mount Meron, they overflowed a narrow, sloped compound known to both government and religious leaders as a potentially dangerous setting. Sunday, as the final victims were being buried and flags around the country flew at half-mast in a national day of mourning, multiple investigations were getting underway that will target police planning, local regulators, site managers and national ministries with responsibility for oversight. Already, journalists and whistleblowers have unearthed a shocking paper trail of warnings ignored, recommendations overruled and absent supervision. Officials have been called to account for meetings in recent weeks in which specific recommendations from health and safety authorities were overruled at the behest of Haredi groups.

#headlines #news

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dianaluis008 · 4 years ago

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the-final-straw-blog · 5 years ago

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Anarchy and Indigenous Resistance to AMLO in Mexico

This week on The Final Straw, an anarchist living in Mexico talks about the reign of the MORENA gimpparty of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (aka AMLO), the new face of capitalism it presents, it’s relation to social movements and indigenous sovereignty and the anarchist and indigenous resistance to the regime. We cover mega-projects being pushed through around the country, the repression of activists and more in this whopper of an episode.

Here’s a great English-language blog based mostly out of Oaxaca that covers struggle in Mexico and across the northern border: https://elenemigocomun.net/

To learn more about the Anarchist Days that our guest spoke on, you can email [email protected]!

Channel Zero Fundraiser

The gofundme can be found at https://gofundme.com/Channel-zero-network-2020-fundraiser/ .To check out the video to match the audio you just heard so you can enjoy and spread it around, check out our show notes or at https://sub.media !

Final Straw Charla Notes from the guest: AMLO & Mexican social movements

These are the notes from the guest. They’re a little all over the place but touch on names, places, objects and movements mentioned for easier searching

Partido Revolucionaro Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party) 71 years in power from 1929-2000

Lost in 2000 to Vicente Fox (PAN Partido accion nacional, National Action Party)

2006 Felipe Calderon PAN

2012 EPR

Clientalist state, exchanging favors for political support

Typical politician

1977 Director of National Indigenous Institute of Tabasco, indigenismo

Late 1980’s joined the PRD

AMLO- elected mayor of Mexico City in 2000 PRD

2006 ran for president PRD Partido de la Revolucion Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution)

2012 ran for president, afterwards leaving the PRD to form the national regeneration movement (MORENA) in 2014

2018 won the presidency with 53% of the vote

More than 60,000 people have disappeared since the declaration of the war on drugs by Felipe Calderon

AMLO’s politics, modernization & neoliberal efforts. Fourth transformation?

Anti-corruption, address poverty, security, businessmen as mafia of power

Capitalism with a new face “Post-neoliberalism?”

Populism- Appeals to national sovereignty, nationalism, domestic self-sufficiency

“Popular consultations” to justify megaprojects “mandar obedeciendo”

Abrazos no balazos (hugs not bullets)

“we don’t repress anyone”

pacifists

conservatives, reactionaries of the left

modernization, development, overcoming of marginalization, bringing Indigenous communities into the national economy

Problematic support from leftists of the global north of AMLO

If you want to understand the politics of Mexico, listen to the voices of Indigenous peoples and communities, women in struggle, campesinos

Indigenous populations and megaprojects

Airport Lake Texcoco

New International Airport of Mexico City Proposed in 2001 by Vicente Fox, but cancelled shortly after due to organized resistance

Santa Lucia Airport, Toluca airport

Naucalpan- Toluca highway

Interurban train

– Tren Maya (Mayan Train) (consultation december 15, 2019)

950-mile train connecting principal tourist destinations in the states of Chiapas, Campeche, Tabasco, Yucatan and Quintana Roo

17 stations- Playa del carmen, Tulum, Palenque, Merida, Cancun

For tourists and cargo

April 30, 2020 to begin construction

– “Corredor Transistmico” Interoceanic corridor (consulta 30-31 of March)

Industrial corridor connecting the ports of Salina Cruz, Oaxaca, on the pacific coast, and Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, in the gulf of Mexico.

The project is meant to compete with the Panama Canal, as a route of land transportation connecting the Pacific with the gulf of Mexico.

United States has been trying to get this project going since the 19th century

Train routes and a super highway, modernization of ports, and various older train routes

Los pueblos originarios Binizz��, Ikoot, Chontal, Zoque, Nahua y Popoluca, que habitamos el Istmo de Tehuantepec, en los estados de Oaxaca y Veracruz

Dos bocas oil refinery- tabasco

Proyeto integral de morelos (Integral Project of Morelos)

Project that began in 2012 and has faced stiff resistance

(Frente de pueblos en defensa de tierra y agua Morelos-puebla-tlaxcala)

People’s Front in Defense of Land and Water Morelos-Puebla-Tlaxcala

Project includes:

Thermoelectric plant in Huexca, Morelos (consultation 23-24 of February)

A natural gas pipeline to supply gas to the plant which passes through 60 Indigenous and campesino communities in Tlaxcala, Puebla and Morelos

An aqueduct that seeks to move 50 million liters of water daily to the thermoelectric plant from the Rio Cuautla

Italian and Spanish transnationals

Zapatismo:

Armed Indigenous rebellion in Chiapas in 1994. After failed talks with the government, they took the path of autonomy

2003-formation of five caracoles (zones of autonomous self-government) The caracoles, then, became regional administrations where autonomous authorities come together and from which clinics, cooperatives, schools, transportation and other services are administered.

Thus, the Zapatista communities became administered by the Juntos de buen gobierno (Good Government Councils), formed, in turn, by representatives of the autonomous councils of the rebel municipalities.

Expansion of autonomous territory: In august of 2019 the Zapatistas announced 7 new New Centers of Autonomous Zapatista Rebellion and Resistance (CRAREZ) and 4 new rebel Zapatista autonomous municipalities. Added to the 5 original Caracoles for a total of 16. In addition to the 27 original autonomous municipalities, that gives us a total of 43 (CRAREZ). Made up of different assemblies, autonomous municipalities, etc.

New Yearas announcement of resistance to the megaprojects

Los pueblos tzotziles, tzeltales, mames, choles, tojolabales y zoques

Celebration of Life: A December of Resistance and Rebellion

Film Festival 7-14 of December 2019

Dance Festival 15-20

Forum in Defense of Territory and Mother Earth, December 21-22

Second Gathering of Women who Struggle, December 26-29, 2019

3,259 women, 95 little girls, 26 men from 49 countries

Celebration of the 26 Anniversary of the Beginning of the War Against Oblivion, December 31 and January 1

Autonomous struggles in Indigenous and campesino communities. Processes of self-organization

Community assemblies

Community and free media

Self-defense and community police forces

State repression of social movements and migrants

Repression and suppression through consultations, social programs

2019: 31 land defenders killed, 11 communicators/ journalists

Militarization (national guard) (Discipline, hierarchy)

The Secretariat of Security and Citizen protection, Alfonso Durazo Montaño, announced the beginning of the year the deployment of 21,170 new elements of national guard in 50 new regions to reach a total of 200 regions.

Streets of Mexico city

June 5th, detained Cristobal

Other in Sonora

Samir Flores- Killed February 20, 2019 of CODEDI (Comité de Defensa de los Pueblos Indígenas)

Took over an abandoned coffee plantation in 2013

Centro de capacitación, training center

CODEDI Murders:

On February 12, 2018, we were ambushed at Cerro Metate by people in the service of the State with high caliber weapons, causing the death of three of ours, including two minors: Ignacio Ventura, Luis Angel Martínez and Alejandro Diaz Cruz.

On July 17, 2018, Abraham Hernandez Gonzales was killed by members of the state police, who tortured and murdered him about 500m from his home. The public prosecutor’s office of the State of Oaxaca has in its possession the report in which appears the name and the photograph of the group of the police officers who participated in this criminal action are clearly displayed.

On October 25, 2018, Noel Castillo Aguilar was tortured and murdered by organized crime in Barra de la Cruz.

May of 2019

José Lucio Bartolo Faustino, Modesto Verales Sebastián, Bartolo Hilario Morales, and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote of the Nahua people organized as the Indigenous and Popular Council of Guerrero – Emiliano Zapata (CIPOG – EZ).

Political prisoners

Miguel López Vega

Fredy García Ramírez (detained November 6)

Fidencio Aldama Pérez (detained October 27, 2016) Loma de Bacuum

Prison organizing in Chiapas- Hunger strike of over 130 days http://www.noestamostodxs.tk

Other deaths

Samir Flores Soberanes of the Nahua people of Amilcingo, Morelos.

Julián Cortés Flores, of the Mephaa people of the Casa de Justicia in San Luis Acatlán, Guerrero.

Ignacio Pérez Girón, of the Tzotzil people of the municipality of Aldama, Chiapas.

Juan Monroy and José Luis Rosales, of the Nahua people Ayotitlán, Jalisco.

Feliciano Corona Cirino, of the Nahua people of Santa María Ostula, Michoacán.

Josué Bernardo Marcial Campo, also known as TíoBad, of the Populuca people of Veracruz.

State of the anarchist movement in Mexico

Primary organizational efforts

Anarcha-feminism, women’s movement

Relation with Indigenous and campesino struggles

Building international networks of solidarity, both anarchist and otherwise, with Mexico

* Anarchist Days, July 13-19, 2020 in DF

LAS JORNADAS EN DEFENSA DEL TERRITORIO Y LA MADRE TIERRA “SAMIR SOMOS TODAS Y TODOS”

El rapero TíoBad luchó por la lengua mixe-popoluca, propia de su pueblo Sayula de Alemán, y denunció a través del arte el despojo en su territorio por el fracking, el narco estado en Veracruz, los asesinatos a periodistas y el desplazamiento de su lengua. Este martes, fue hallado, asesinado.

Overseer of the plantation has changed

Here we present to you the names of the Centers of Autonomous Zapatista Rebellion and Resistance (CRAREZ). There are 11 new CRAREZ and 5 original Caracoles for a total of 16. In addition to the 27 original autonomous municipalities, that gives us a total of 43 (CRAREZ).

Names and location of the new Caracoles and Autonomous Municipalities:

New Caracol: Colectivo el corazón de semillas rebeldes, memoria del Compañero Galeano (The Heart of Rebellious Seeds Collective, in Memory of Compañero Galeano). Its Good Government Council is called: Pasos de la historia, por la vida de la humanidad (The Path of History for the Life of Humanity). It will be located in La Unión on recuperated land just to the side of the ejido San Quintin where the bad government’s army currently has its barracks.

New Autonomous Municipality: Esperanza de La Humanidad (Hope for Humanity). Its center will be located in the ejido Santa María in the official municipality of Chicomuselo.

New Autonomous Municipality: Ernesto Che Guevara. It will be located in El Belén in what is the official municipality of Motozintla.

New Caracol: Espiral digno tejiendo los colores de la humanidad en memoria de l@s caídos (Spiral of Dignity Weaving the Colors of Humanity in Memory of the Fallen). Its Good Government Council is called: Semilla que florece con la conciencia de l@s que luchan por siempre (Seed that Blooms with the Conscience of those who are Always in Struggle). It will be located in Tulan Ka’u on recuperated land located in the official municipality of Amatenango del Valle.

Another new Caracol: Floreciendo la semilla rebelde (The Flowering of the Rebellious Seed). The Good Government Council there is called: Nuevo amanecer en Resistencia y rebeldia por la vida y la humanidad (New Dawn in Resistance and Rebellion for Life and Humanity). It will be located in Poblado Patria Nueva on recuperated land in the official municipality of Ocosingo.

New Autonomous Municipality: Sembrando conciencia para cosechar revoluciones por la vida (Cultivating Conscience in order to Harvest Revolutions for Life). Its center will be in Tulan Ka’u on recuperated land located in the official municipality of Amatenango del Valle.

New Caracol: En honor a la memoria del Compañero Manuel (In Honor of Compañero Manuel). Its Good Government Council is called: El pensamiento rebelde de los pueblos originarios (The Rebellious Thought of the Originary Peoples). It will be located in Dolores Hidalgo on recuperated land located in the official municipality of Ocosingo.

New Caracol: Resistencias y Rebeldias por la humanidad (Resistances and Rebellions for Humanity). Its Good Government Council is called: La luz que resplandece al mundo (The Light which Shines on the World). It will be located in Poblado Nuevo Jerusalen on recuperated land located in the official municipality of Ocosingo.

New Caracol: Raíz de Resistencias y Rebeldías por la humanidad (Root of Resistances and Rebellions for Humanity). Its Good Government Council is called: Corazón de nuestras vidas para el nuevo futuro (Heart of Our Lives for the New Future). It will be located in the ejido Jolj’a in the official Municipality of Tila.

New Autonomous Municipality: 21 de Diciembre (December 21). It will be located in Ranchería K’anal Hulub in the official municipality of Chilón.

New Caracol: Jacinto Canek. Its Good Government Council is called: Flor de nuestra palabra y luz de nuestros pueblos que refleja para todos (The Flower of Our Word and the Light of Our Communities Reflected for All). It will be located in the community of CIDECI-Unitierra in the official municipality of San Cristóbal de Las Casas.

. … . ..

Music for this episode by:

U.N.E. - Explosion Humana

Check out this episode!

#anarchist #podcast #interview #feminist #antifa #anticapitalist

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actutrends · 5 years ago

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Why Trump is winning on trade in Iowa

The closest thing to a shout-out to trade policy originated from Sen. Bernie Sanders– the 6th and last candidate to speak– who asserted he would “defend employees abroad” and “stand up for workers in the United States of America.”

It’s foregone conclusion in the Democratic primary. If the presidential competitors state anything at all about trade policy, it’s usually criticism of Trump’s go-it-alone technique in fighting China, a passing recommendation that farmers are hurting from the president’s approach or a care that the replacement deal for NAFTA needs to be strongly enforceable.

They aren’t even taking on the problem in their broader messaging. Out of the lots of tv ads Democrats have gotten in Iowa, not a single one has concentrated on trade.

Trump, on the other hand, has actually made trade a central focus of his presidency. The self-styled “Tariff Male” characterizes his battle against China as a hugely effective relocation that has actually maimed its economy, and lauded his own efforts to fix the long-criticized trade handle Mexico and Canada as huge achievements made it possible for by his deal-making savvy.

Simply today the president, who argues his confrontational method is ending “the war on American workers,” revealed an initial trade handle China. And his administration landed a handle House Democrats to change the 25- year-old NAFTA.

The Democratic field has been noticeably peaceful on both concerns here, leading some Iowa Democrats to worry it might cost the party here and in the battleground states they intend to claw back from Trump in2020

” It’s certainly a missed chance,” Sean Bagniewski, chair of the Polk County Democrats, stated.

” I believe trade is the area to reveal you care about what’s injuring rural citizens.

Trump has actually imposed tariffs on more than $360 billion worth of Chinese products, a relocation that resulted in harsh retaliation from Beijing, especially on U.S. farming items like soybeans and pork. The pain has been felt acutely in Iowa, the nation’s primary pork producing state and second-leading soybean producer.

Iowans are quick to acknowledge that sales are down and farm communities– from farmers to equipment makers to the banks they put their money in– are struggling due to Trump’s actions.

But in numerous journeys to Iowa by 2020 Democrats, they aren’t spending much time talking in depth about a problem that’s vital to the health of the state economy.

” We ‘d expect them to speak out more,” said Quentin Hart, mayor of Waterloo, Iowa.

Democrats at the regional level, varying from state and county leaders to Reps. Abby Finkenauer and Cindy Axne, have made trade a more main issue since they understand Iowans are harming, Hart stated.

” It’s especially important in places like Waterloo, however it hasn’t been a primary leading point in these discussions,” Hart said recently after his city hosted a governmental forum gone to by five prospects, none of whom mentioned trade policy.

At the Iowa Farmers Union annual meeting in Grinnell in early December, it was a similar story: Democrats made fast referrals to Trump’s trade wars, without using much detail on what their method on trade would be.

” Donald Trump is dealing with farmers like poker chips in among his insolvent casinos,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar stated to an audience of more than 100 farmers and agricultural industry members.

Klobuchar is typically credited on Capitol Hill as one of the most trade-savvy legislators considered that she represents Minnesota, a farm state that mostly relies on trade, particularly with Canada, its neighbor to the north. Klobuchar is likewise a member of the Senate Farming Committee, where she has been singing in pushing the Trump administration to broaden U.S. exports abroad.

Still, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the just major prospect to roll out a comprehensive trade plan, which in some methods more carefully looks like Trump’s agenda than Barack Obama’s. Her plan would revamp how Democratic administrations have actually managed sell the past and create a list of 9 separate requirements a country would have to meet prior to working out a trade deal with the U.S

” For decades, huge international corporations have purchased and lobbied their way into dictating America’s trade policy,” Warren wrote, calling the policies throughout Republican and Democratic administrations a “failed trade program.”

But after revealing her vision days prior to the July Democratic debate in Detroit, Warren seldom makes reference to her grand prepare for trade.

” It would be an advantage for her to emphasize more,” stated Jeff Link, a long time Iowa-based Democratic strategist.

Link explained that trade policy is showing up a lot more in congressional races, such as in Iowa’s fourth District where Democrat J.D. Scholten is running for Rep. Steve King’s seat. He kept in mind that stems from Scholten’s ability to travel to towns with less than 1,000 people and truly “choose up a lot of product on trade from speaking to little towns.”

Some Iowa Democrats believe candidates are avoiding from speaking about trade since it’s a complicated subject and they don’t desire a blunder on the project path to get amplified on social networks. (Trump, by contrast, never shies from talking about trade at rallies.)

” There’s a palpable worry of stating something wrong,” Bagniewski stated.

Democratic strategists argue that it’s likely trade policy will loom larger once the crowded field of candidates diminishes and the prospect of challenging Trump directly draws nearer.

Link observed that Buttigieg has more just recently weaved trade into his stump speech in Iowa– a move that comes as he has actually risen in the polls in the Hawkeye state.

” It’s an inevitable issue due to the fact that it’s a signature problem for Trump,” said Bill Reinsch, a former Clinton administration official and trade professional with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They’re going to need to deal with it, and they would be clever to practice in Iowa, however think not.”

Maya King contributed to this report.

The post Why Trump is winning on trade in Iowa appeared first on Actu Trends.

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courtneytincher · 5 years ago

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U.N. Climate Summit Makes Real Progress While Trump Lives in Fantasy

Carlo Allegri/ReutersUNITED NATIONS—Donald Trump, the reality TV president, is living in a fantasy.At the United Nations on Monday, leaders from numerous countries, global corporations, and nonprofits came together for the Climate Action Summit, committing to real steps to fight global warming: new targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions, billions of dollars to implement green technologies, and numerous public-private partnerships.Trump popped into the summit for a few minutes, glowered in the back, and then gave a speech in an adjacent conference room about fake solutions to a nonexistent problem: America’s persecution of Christians.On the positive side, much was actually accomplished at the climate summit.Fifteen countries pledged to be carbon-neutral by 2050: an ambitious goal, but one that is eminently achievable given current technologies for renewable energy, zero-emissions transportation, and sustainable agriculture.Contradicting the myth that only liberal globalists care about global warming, India’s ethno-nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, committed $50 billion dollars to moving his country away from coal and other fossil fuels. Interestingly, Modi presented his proposals in his own, values-centered terms, saying that “what is needed today is a comprehensive approach which covers education, values, and everything from lifestyle to developmental philosophy.”Greta Thunberg Calls Out World Leaders at United Nations: ‘You Are Failing Us’And numerous new collaborations were announced. To take one example, India and Sweden announced that they will co-lead a private-public “leadership group for industry transition” together with the World Economic Forum and other participants. Dominic Waughray, WEF’s managing director, said that the group will focus on “key sectors of economy: steel, cement, chemicals, aviation, trucking, shipping – backbone areas of economy.”As part of that effort, the board chair of steel giant ThyssenKrupp committed the company to carbon neutrality by 2050—a massive change that, if followed by the rest of the steel sector, could make an enormous dent in world CO2 emissions. (Steel is extremely coal-intensive, and ThyssenKrupp pledged to shift to hydrogen.)Those steps still won't be enough to avoid some of the most disastrous effects of global warming, but they do represent a new level of collaboration and commitment. Basically, everybody is working with everybody, with the exception of the United States, Russia, and Brazil, who sat out the summit and who are actively making global warming worse, going backward on dirty fuels, deforestation, and climate denial.And yet, even the U.S. wasn’t totally absent. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, now the UN Secretary General’s “Special Envoy for Climate Action,” pointed out that the U.S. states already committed to net-zero emissions by 2050 would form the world’s fourth largest economy. While Trump glowered, Bloomberg gloated that of 530 U.S. coal plants open in 2011, 289 had closed.The contrast between the science-based, evidence-based, reason-based reality of the climate action summit and Trump’s own ignorance couldn’t have been more obvious. Trump chose to spend his time trying to upstage the climate summit by addressing a separate UN gathering on religious persecution. That, of course, is a very real issue, but Trump focused on the non-existent persecution of Christians in America (non-existent unless you count not being able to discriminate against other people “persecution”), and praised himself for having “obliterated” a policy banning churches from engaging in electoral politics.As if the separation of church and state is religious persecution.Ironically, Trump’s absurd rhetoric is perhaps most offensive to Christians themselves. Christians are being persecuted around the world: terrorist massacres in Sri Lanka, the ethnic cleaning of Christians from the Middle East (where their numbers are down from 20 percent of the population a century ago to 4 percent today), continued violence in Egypt, anti-Christian hate speech from government figures in Turkey and Algeria.But no, the real victims are bakers who won’t sell a wedding cake to gays.Meanwhile, while Trump was busy fighting a non-existent problem, literally the rest of the world (except Trump pals Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro, of course) was focused on a real one.As part of the climate summit, the UN released a new scientific report entitled United in Science. Its key findings read like a litany of terrifying facts:“The average global temperature for 2015–2019 is on track to be the warmest of any equivalent period on record.”“The amount of ice lost annually from the Antarctic ice sheet increased at least six-fold between 1979 and 2017.”“Carbon dioxide emissions grew 2% and reached a record high of 37 billion tons of CO2in 2018. There is still no sign of a peak in global emissions.”“Global emissions are not estimated to peak by 2030, let alone by 2020,” as the Paris Climate Accords had demanded.The last time the Earth had this much CO2 in it “was about 3-5 million years ago, when global mean surface temperatures were 2-3°C warmer than today [and] ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica melted.”And of course, “consolidated evidence reinforces human influence as the dominant cause of changes to the Earth system, in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene.”All of these facts are based on measurement, observation, and evidence. They are reported and analyzed by scientific experts who have no vested interest in the results (unlike climate denial pseudo-science which is invariably paid for by the fossil fuel industry).And yet, when it comes to American politics, facts are no match for the persecution fantasies of Christian fundamentalists and the greed of the Republican Party’s fossil fuel industry donors.As the young activist Greta Thunberg put it, in an astonishing, prophetic speech that has dominated coverage of the summit, “for more than thirty years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away?”Or as her fellow youth activist Paloma Costa put it, “how many children will it take for adults to listen to scientists?”We still don’t know.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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rolandfontana · 5 years ago

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Violence and the Mentally Troubled: Reaching Them Before They ‘Explode’

Miami-Dade Judge Steven Leifman. Photo by Isidoro Rodriguez

The key to successfully redirecting and removing the seriously mentally ill from the criminal justice system is creating systems and programs that provide the treatment they actually need, according to Judge Steven Leifman, a Miami-Dade County Mental Health Court Judge.

It’s the first step in abandoning today’s failed punitive application of rehabilitation, Leifman, a pioneering advocate for alternatives to incarceration (ATI), told a recent forum in New York City.

“When you apply a criminal justice model to an illness, you’re getting what you should get—a disaster,” said Liefman.

The forum, sponsored by The Greenburger Center for Social and Criminal Justice and entitled “Not Going Back: A Conversation About New Diversion and Re-Direction Options,” was held at Baruch College of the City University of New York

The launch pad for the discussion was the planned shutdown of New York’s infamous Rikers Island complex, which authorities have promised to close within 10 years and for which the New York Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice has recently been tasked with implementing closure plans.

The forum examined viable alternatives to prison for the mentally ill that have enjoyed success around the country, discussed the goals of alternatives that are currently in development, and addressed the overall need for new approaches and new thinking.

“The standard ‘lock em up response’ not only won’t necessarily be the most just, but also won’t be the result that will get you the best outcome,” said Leifman.

Other speakers at the forum included: DJ Jaffe, Executive Director of MentalIllnessPolicy.org, a non-partisan think tank providing information about the care and treatment of people with serious mental illnesses; Arizona Representative Nancy Barto, chair of the state House Health and Human Services Committee; Judge Mathew D’Emic of the Brooklyn Mental Health Court; and Vincent Schiraldi, a senior research analyst at the Columbia Justice Lab and former New York City Probation Commissioner.

All agreed that the current system results in the seriously mentally ill perpetually falling through the cracks, recycling through hospitals, and ending up homeless, in jail, or in prison. Today, according to Human Rights Watch, roughly 360,000 seriously mentally ill are in prison or jail on any given day.

“We don’t want to lock these people up, they need treatment,” said Nancy Barto.

Arizona Rep. Nancy Barto. via Facebook.

“And we’re not meeting that need.”

According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), approximately 50 percent of individuals with severe mental illness (3.5 million people) are receiving no treatment for their mental illness at any given time.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) reports that at least 83 percent of jail inmates with a mental illness did not have access to needed treatment. And a 2010 survey by the Treatment Advocacy Center found that people with mental illness are nine times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized, and 18 times more likely to find a bed in the criminal justice system than at any state and civil hospital.

For Barto, these statistics are a painful reminder of the situation in her home state of Arizona.

“Starting out with the lack of beds, in Arizona, and that is long term for this small chronically mentally ill population, we have 1/10th of the national average (or) 1.3 beds per 100,000,” she said. “The national average is between 40 and 60.”

Barto added that the type of housing that Arizona has is inadequate for this specific population as well, who often wind up homeless and on the street.

According to a 2015 survey by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the seriously mentally ill comprise 25 percent of the American homeless on any given night. In Arizona’s Maricopa County, the fourth most populous in the country, azcentral.com reports a 150 percent spike in people living on the street in the last five years. With no supports in place, the seriously mentally ill find often find themselves in an unbreakable cycle.

Nowhere to Go

“They end up committing small and, if left untreated, sometimes violent crimes and end up in prison or in jail,” said Barto, who pointed out the dangers this raises for communities. “Then, when they’re released, there’s nowhere for them to go to get the type of care that they need to stay in treatment.”

She continued: “You end up with a situation that, unfortunately, is more typical than we want to admit.”

On March 23, 2018, Curtis Bagley was huddled behind a barrier outside a downtown Phoenix newspaper office, screaming that dead people were after him and were going to kill him. It took five police officers to subdue him and take him immediately to an emergency psych unit. He was later released.

Eight days after that incident he was found in the backyard of a downtown phoenix home. At his feet was a bloody kitchen knife. He had killed the resident inside, Joshua Fitzpatrick.

“This man had been petitioned to an urgent care psych facility over 30 times,” said Barto. “This is a failure of the system.”

And that failure has consequences.

In an analysis of multiple studies on the relationship between violence and the seriously mentally ill, MentalIllnessPolicy.org found that roughly 10 percent of U.S. homicides are committed by people with severe and untreated psychiatric disorders.

With no place to go, and no treatment, it’s not a matter of wondering if an incident will occur, but when.

“The idea is to get ahead of these situations before they explode,” said Judge Leifman.

To demonstrate what can be done to achieve this goal, Leifman discussed the Eleventh Judicial Circuit Criminal Mental Health Project, which he implemented in Florida in 2000. The project seeks to steer people with mental illness that have committed low-level offenses away from incarceration and towards community-based care.

“We now have a pre- and post-arrest diversion type of system,” he said. “Pre-arrest involves a massive crisis intervention team police program (CIT).”

This consists of a 40-hour training program that teaches Miami-Dade law enforcement officers how to identify people who are in crisis, how to deescalate the situation, and where to take them as opposed to arrest them.

And with currently over 6,700 law officers trained at all 36 of their departments, the resulting numbers have been positive.

“The number of arrests in Dade County went from 118,000 a year to about 56,000 this year as a result of all these different parts and approaches,” said Leifman.

These results have allowed Leifman and his team to develop more sophisticated approaches. In addition to CIT training for officers, 911 call-takers are instructed on how to ask the right questions so they can dispatch a CIT officer to any scene that’s involving mental health.

Trained liaison officers are stationed at every department and substation to meet with care providers on a monthly/quarterly basis to make sure that people don’t fall through the gaps. And a newly developed “homeless resource unit” enables officers to initiate petitions for homeless individuals with serious mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders, find them housing, and do spot checks on them to make sure they are improving.

Threat Management Units

Finally, because of their sophisticated CIT program, the police have been able to set up a threat management unit. Created after the Parkland shootings, this unit helps to prevent instances like the one with Curtis Bagley from ever happening.

“They have about 13 detectives working in this unit, they go through every CIT call live every day, and if there’s any indication of any kind of threat or violence, they then do a follow up,” said Leifman.

This follow-up involves sending a plain clothes officer out to the house who, instead of using a traditional police approach, attempts to develop a relationship and dialogue with the individual.

If a weapon is involved, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public High School Safety Act allows police to remove it. More importantly, Leifman points out that officers are trying to encourage the person to call them first if they’re not feeling well so the officers can work with providers to help them get treated. So far, this has allowed them to keep tabs on 100-150 people at a time.

“It avoids explosive situations,” said Leifman.

And tactics like these have grown in popularity among states around the country that are working to keep the mentally out of prison and in treatment.

In Texas, the Houston Police Departments 911 Crisis Call Diversion program places mental health professionals in the 911 dispatch center, giving operators the chance to quickly connect callers who have mental health-related issues to counselors instead of or in addition to dispatching a police or fire/EMS unit, according to The Council of State Governments Justice Center.

In southern California, the Los Angeles Times reports that 39 psychiatric emergency response teams, staffed with a police officer and a mental health professional, act as “second responders” for cases involving mentally ill people across L.A. County.

In addition, multi-purpose diversion centers, such as the Greeenburger Center’s own Hope House in the Bronx, scheduled to open this year, offer treatment, housing, and continual care for people in a secured environment. In Miami-Dade, Leifman’s Mental Health Diversion Center is slated to open in 2020 and will provide a range of mental and primary health care services, living space for up to a year, as well as assistance with housing, employment training, daily activities and courtroom support.

San Antonio’s diversion center, the Center for Health Care Services, according to a previous story by TCR, lowered the county jail population by 22 percent, and reduced recidivism rates for the mentally ill to 6.6 percent, versus the national average for felons after release of 43 percent as reported by the Pew Research Center.

“The goal is to enable a person to not walk away from treatment.”

“The goal is to enable a person to not walk away from treatment, due to their illness, which is what is happening in an un-secure setting,” said Barto.

She recently helped pass legislation in Arizona that started the process towards establishing their own secure residential treatment places.

However, while these efforts are steps in the right direction, the reality is that they are of little use to a number of people who don’t believe that they are sick at all.

According to a report by NAMI, anosognosia, or the inability of a person with a serious mental illness to be aware of or perceive their condition accurately, affects roughly 50 percent of people with schizophrenia, and 40 percent of people with bipolar disorder.

A 2014 study in Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience emphasized anosognosia’s importance as an outcome predictor, associated with treatment adherence, relapse frequency, symptom remission, psychosocial functioning, vocational attainment, and risk of violence toward self or others. Keeping this population of people in treatment is exceedingly difficult.

DJ Jaffe. Courtesy DJ Jaffe

“As a kind and compassionate society we should be helping them,” said DJ Jaffe of MentalIllnessPolicy.org.

“But to say that having more treatment options, which somebody is likely not going to participate in, is going to solve the problem, isn’t consistent with reality.”

Finding Solutions

Jaffe offered several examples of solutions to the problem.

One is New York State’s assisted outpatient treatment (AOT), under which courts can order somebody with a history of being arrested, violent, incarcerated, homeless, and hospitalized due to untreated mental illness to stay in treatment for at least six months while they continue to live in the community. A second is Kendra’s Law, granting judges the authority to issue those orders to people who meet certain criteria,.

“(These are) not an alternative to community based services, (but) a way to see the most seriously mentally ill get into those services,” said Jaffe.

And while he notes that everyone supports voluntary community based services, he warns that many of those services are likely to reject people who reach the level of impairment experienced by the untreated seriously mentally ill.

An important part of Kendra’s Law protects against just that, he said.

“Many providers cherry pick. They want the highest functioning. They say this person is not eligible because they abused substances, they had a felony, they can’t manage their own care, they’re not physically well,” said Jaffe.

“Kendra’s Law allows the judge to not only order the person to receive treatment, but to order the mental health system to provide it.”

As a result, he reports a 70 percent reduction in violence, arrest, hospitalization, homelessness, and incarceration of persons suffering from mental illness. Coupled with mental health courts, which offer early screening in the court system, the law and AOT are powerful tools in identifying and diverting this population of the seriously mentally ill out of the criminal justice system and into the more developed, and secure, forms of ATI proposed by Judge Leifman and the Greenburger Center.

“I think the key is flexibility,” said Judge D’Emic of the Brooklyn Mental Health Court.

“We’re flexible in the sense that we seek out the best treatment alternatives for the person, the clinical is in contact with the program on a daily basis, I see the individual every week. Relationships are established.”

Launched in 2002, the Brooklyn Mental Health Court adheres to the tenets of procedural justice to maintain this flexibility: Officials there establish a therapeutic relationship that focuses on respect, patience and understanding; in court, defendants often communicate with the judge directly regarding their progress, discuss and arrange their own treatment plans with social workers and caseworkers, and have an active role in their own rehabilitation.

The model has enjoyed 17 years of success.

Judge Matthew J. D’Emic. Courtesy mentalill;nesspolicy.org

“Today 87 percent of the people actively involved in the court are compliant. We have a graduation rate of 81 percent, and we’re about to have our thousandth graduate sometime this year,” said D’Emic.

However, while the combination of Kendra’s Law, the Brooklyn Mental Health Court, and AOT in New York may enjoy and represent some of the best possible outcomes of a layered approach to handling this small population of seriously mentally ill, it is far from a perfect solution and even encounters many of the same problems as anywhere else.

“Housing is a huge hurdle,” admitted D’Emic.

“If a person doesn’t have a home or a family, that’s the problem for us.”

In fact, a 2017 article from The New York Times reported roughly 4,000 needy individuals without supportive housing. A recent feature by ProPublica found that those who have housing are often living in boredom and squalor, with little therapeutic services. And while, according to the New York Post, the number of mental health shelter beds have increased to 4,000, up from 2,800 in 2015, they offer little more safety or support to the seriously mentally ill who wind up rotating through the system as the mental health courts tread water.

And though 43 states have implemented some form of AOT, metalhealthpolicy.org reports that most don’t implement it as widely or as effectively as it should be.

In addition, while D’Emic’s court has seen success with its alternative model, other mental health courts still adhere to the traditionally punitive system. A 2016 Boston Globe Spotlight series on the mentally ill in Massachusetts found that a majority of the state’s mentally ill offenders struggle through a system with few options, and that many judges still look at punishment as the best solution, frequently recommending jail time for minor probationary infractions and drug relapses.

According to Vincent Schiraldi, a former commissioner of New York City Probation, this type of maltreatment should be expected from a justice system that includes a probation and parole model designed for people to fail. Especially the seriously mentally ill.

“It’s a super risk-averse field, where you have malign parole and probation officers, with way too many people on their caseloads, who have lots of challenges.,” said Schiraldi.

“It’s a total set up.”

A 2018 brief by Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that there are roughly 4.5 million people on probation and parole in the United States, twice that of the total incarcerated population. A report by the American Criminal Law Review states that roughly 760,000 of those on parole and probation are seriously mentally ill. They represent a majority of the people who annually fail to successfully complete their supervision.

According to a report by the United States Courts, a person on parole must comply with roughly 20 different conditions ordered by the court. These can include residential restrictions, scheduled meetings with a probation/parole officer, drug testing, required counseling and treatment for addiction or mental illness, supervision fees, and association and contact restrictions.

Vincent Schiraldi. Photo by John Ramsey/TCR

It is a maze that is almost impossible to navigate without assistance, even without a mental illness, and Schiraldi warns it’s only made worse by a staff with little motivation to rehabilitate.

“If I’m a parole or probation officer and I take a chance on a guy, and he does well, gets a job, I get nothing for that. Zero,” said Schiraldi.

“But if that person goes out and reoffends, I get humiliated, maybe I’ll get transferred, maybe I’ll get demoted, maybe I’ll get written up, maybe I’ll get fired.”

And while most expect these people to be either heroes or villains, Schiraldi points out that more often than not they are simply “lunch pail” employees trying to just get through the job and reach retirement. Facing low wages and a high stress environment with no rewards, parole and probation officers are more inclined to go whichever way the wind is blowing in a field that is far too punitive when it comes to even the smallest violations.

Community Supervision

A recent study by the Prison Policy Initiative found that nearly 350,000 people are shifted from community supervision to prison or jail each year, often for low-level offenses (such as drug use) or technical violations (such as breaking curfew).

The study also stresses that current probation and parole policies ignore the realities of drug addiction and relapse, unemployment, and homelessness, effectively criminalizing marginalized populations, like the seriously mentally ill, who struggle with these problems daily. The result is a revolving door.

“If we’re saying to people if you use drugs, which is the normal course of an addiction, if you relapse, we’re going to imprison you for that, we should expect lots of [people who abscond],” said Schiraldi.

“And if we tell the probation officers, if you don’t do something when somebody absconds you’re going to be in trouble, we should expect lots of incarceration.”

He maintains that the solution is substantially smaller, substantially shorter, and substantially more supportive and rehabilitative probation and parole models.

“If we want things to change we have to change the rules, and we have to provide the kind of resources that people need to turn their lives around,” said Schiraldi.

In 2018, Schiraldi and a coalition of New York community groups, attorneys, advocates, and victims, along with Assemblyman Walter Mosley, proposed the Less is More: Community Supervision Revocation Reform Act.

Addressing the current problems of how technical violations in the parole system lead to reincarceration, the bill will incentivize good behavior and allow New Yorkers to earn accelerated release from parole, require fair hearings, create maximum terms of reincarceration for violations and eliminate incarceration as a sanction for certain technical violations.

It’s a probation and parole model that is much needed in a state with over 6,000 people returned to prison for technical violations every year, the second highest in the country according to Schiraldi’s own “Less Is More” report.

And while the daily population of Rikers Island has steadily dropped from 9,400 to roughly 7,000, according to The Gothamist, the number of people held in Rikers for violation of their probation continues to rise, and the seriously mentally ill are among them and every other similar prison population around the country.

“We create an atmosphere, an environment that discourages the [seriously mentally ill] from wanting to get better,” said Judge Steven Leifman.

“Everyone has this inverse pressure to do the wrong thing as opposed to setting up systems that actually help people recover.”

To do that, law enforcement must be trained to know who to divert and how, treatment centers must be built to house and care for those in most serious need of help, laws are required to enforce change and make certain those who are a danger to themselves and others stay in treatment, and housing is needed for those who are without friends or family to care for them.

Perhaps most important of all, the criminal justice model of handling these circumstances must be abandoned for one more akin to medicine.

“Look at this like cancer,” said Leifman.

“When you have a more acute illness you need an acute approach.”

“You have stage 1 vs. stage 4. When you have a more acute illness you need an acute approach.”

By creating a triage of acute support from start to finish, one which emphasizes rehabilitation and an informed understanding of the circumstances the seriously mentally ill regularly find themselves in, states can ideally clear their prisons of a population that has no business being there in the first place.

“Don’t operate on a hair trigger,” said Judge D’Emic.

“If somebody relapses, is off their medication, or doesn’t go to their program, unless [you’re] worried about innocent people being affected, always give second or third or fourth chances.”

However, while these and other initiatives being taken by the criminal justice community to remove the seriously mentally ill from prisons like Rikers are a step in the right direction, Schiraldi and others like him remain wary of even the best intentioned plans.

Especially when it concerns treating people behind locked doors.

“The day after you open a locked facility, it takes a major step away from all the hopes and dreams of everybody who built it; it starts to get institutionalized,” said Schiraldi.

“We have to fight this institutionalization from the day it opens to the day we knock it down.”

Isidoro Rodriguez is a contributing writer to The Crime Report. He welcomes readers’ comments.

Violence and the Mentally Troubled: Reaching Them Before They ‘Explode’ syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

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worldcitiesday · 2 months ago

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3rd Session, Forum of Mayors 2024.

The United Nations Fourth Forum of Mayors, the "Cities Summit of the Future", will take place at the Palais des Nations, Geneva from 30 September to 1 October 2024. It will immediately follow the United Nations Summit of the Future (New York, 22-23 September 2024). Mayors convening in Geneva will have the opportunity to deliberate on the ramifications for local authorities of the "Pact of the Future" to be adopted by United Nations Member States in New York.

Watch the 3rd Session, Forum of Mayors 2024!

#United Nations Fourth Forum of Mayors #summit of the future #local authorities #Cities Summit of the Future #un geneva #palais des nations #pact of the future

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newstfionline · 3 years ago

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Sunday, August 29, 2021

Louisiana braces for ‘life-altering’ Hurricane Ida (AP) Residents across Louisiana’s coast Saturday were taking one last day to prepare for what is being described as a “life-altering” Hurricane Ida which is expected to bring winds as high as 140 mph (225 kph) when it slams ashore. A combination of voluntary and mandatory evacuations have been called for cities and communities across the region including New Orleans, where the mayor ordered a mandatory evacuation for areas outside the city’s levee system and a voluntary evacuation for residents inside the levee system. The storm is expected to make landfall on the exact date Hurricane Katrina devastated a large swath of the Gulf Coast 16 years earlier. But whereas Katrina was a Category 3 when it made landfall southwest of New Orleans, Ida is expected to reach an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane, with top winds of 140 mph (225 kph) before making landfall likely west of New Orleans late Sunday. “This will be a life-altering storm for those who aren’t prepared,” National Weather Service meteorologist Benjamin Schott said during a Friday news conference with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards.

White House More Than Doubles Its Inflation Forecast in New Update (WSJ) The White House more than doubled its forecast for annual inflation in new projections released Friday, as supply-chain disruptions stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic continue to put upward pressure on prices. The Office of Management and Budget said it expected consumer prices would rise 4.8% in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, up sharply from the 2% rise that the Biden administration forecast in May. Officials see those price pressures quickly abating next year, with the consumer-price index rising 2.5% in the fourth quarter of 2022, more than the 2.1% they expected in May, and reaching 2.3% in 2023.

Hurricane Nora on track to skirt along Mexico’s coast (AP) Hurricane Nora formed Saturday in the eastern Pacific on a forecast track that would bring it near the Puerto Vallarta area and then head toward a close encounter with resorts at the tip of Baja California Peninsula. Nora had maximum sustained winds of 80 mph (130 kph) Saturday morning, with tropical storm force winds extending out 175 miles (280 kilometers) from the center in some places. The storm’s large wind field and heavy rains mean much of Mexico’s central and northern Pacific Coast could see floods, mudslides and perilous surf even if it misses the very heart of the hurricane.

Brazil water survey heightens alarm over extreme drought (AP) The Brazilian scientists were skeptical. They ran different models to check calculations, but all returned the same startling result. The country with the most freshwater resources on the planet steadily lost 15% of its surface water since 1991. Gradual retreat in the Brazilian share of the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, left water covering just one-quarter the area it did 30 years ago. And the data only went through 2020—before this year’s drought that is Brazil’s worst in nine decades. The ongoing drought has already boosted energy costs and food prices, withered crops, rendered vast swaths of forest more susceptible to wildfire and prompted specialists to warn of possible electricity shortages. President Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday said hydroelectric dam reservoirs are “at the limit of the limit.” Brazil’s energy minister Bento Albuquerque on Aug. 25 called a press conference to deny the possibility of rationing, while at the same time calling on companies and people to reduce power consumption.

UN team: Unclear if Fukushima cleanup can finish by 2051 (AP) Too little is known about melted fuel inside damaged reactors at the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant, even a decade after the disaster, to be able to tell if its decommissioning can be finished by 2051 as planned, a U.N. nuclear agency official said Friday. “Honestly speaking, I don’t know, and I don’t know if anybody knows,” said Christophe Xerri, head of an International Atomic Energy Agency team reviewing progress in the plant’s cleanup. A massive earthquake and a tsunami in March 2011 destroyed cooling systems at the Fukushima plant in northeastern Japan, triggering meltdowns in three reactors in the worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Japanese government and utility officials say they hope to finish its decommissioning within 30 years, though some experts say that’s overly optimistic, even if a full decommissioning is possible at all.

As China-Taiwan Tensions Rise, Japan Begins Preparing for Possible Conflict (WSJ) China’s growing assertiveness toward Taiwan has triggered a public push by Japanese leaders to plan for a possible conflict. Tokyo officials, normally wary of upsetting Beijing, are speaking openly about preparing for a crisis and supporting Taiwan, a self-ruled island claimed by China, despite Japan’s pacifist constitution. Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso said recently in a speech to supporters that Japan and the U.S. should plan together to defend the island in the event of hostilities. In its annual regional security review, Japan said there a “greater sense of crisis than ever before” regarding Taiwan, after China stepped up maneuvers by its ships and aircraft nearby. Major Japanese military drills starting in September are expected to further help Tokyo prepare for any trouble in areas including Taiwan, current and former Japanese officials say.

American forces keep up airlift under high threat warnings (AP) American forces working under heightened security and threats of another attack pressed ahead in the closing days of the U.S.-led evacuation from Afghanistan after a devastating suicide bombing, and U.S. officials said they had killed two members of the extremist group that the United States believes responsible for it. Thursday’s bombing marked one of the most lethal attacks the country has seen. The U.S. said it was the deadliest day for American forces in Afghanistan since 2011. Around the world, newly arriving Afghan evacuees, many clutching babies and bare handfuls of belongings in plastic bags, stepped off evacuation flights in the United States, in Albania, in Belgium and beyond. More than 110,000 people have been safely evacuated through the Kabul airport, according to the U.S., but thousands more are struggling to leave.

U.S. military begins withdrawal from Kabul airport (Reuters) U.S. troops have begun their withdrawal from Kabul airport, the Pentagon said on Saturday, as the evacuation efforts from the Afghan capital entered their final stages. President Joe Biden sent thousands of troops to the airport as the Taliban swept through Afghanistan earlier this month to help evacuate American citizens, at-risk Afghans and other foreigners desperate to flee. At the peak of the deployment there were 5,800 U.S. troops securing Hamid Karzai International Airport, where an unprecedented airlift operation is set to end by Tuesday.

From garbage to garden, Nairobi resident helps slum bloom (Reuters) A decade ago, a patch of land in Nairobi’s Dandora district was a dumping ground for the trash of the city’s wealthier residents with scarcely a plant to be seen. Now, children play on the grass and locals relax among avocado trees as birds sing in the branches above. The lush community garden has even become the backdrop for rappers and other creatives to shoot their videos. This transformation is thanks to Charles Gachanga, 45, who grew up in the neighbourhood back when it reeked of garbage. “We came and cleaned ... We did not even have a penny,” said Gachanga, who started working in 2013 on the garden space, called Mustard Seed, with three friends. “We just had that focus, we had that passion to see how we could transform our neighbourhood.” Their project has inspired a network of similar community-built green spaces, 20 alone in Dandora, he said. Maintenance costs are covered by community contributions. Residents living near Gachanga’s green space pay 100 shillings a month, less than $1, for maintenance. People without the funds often volunteer, planting trees or cleaning, Gachanga said.

15 more students freed in Nigeria after release of 90 others (AP) Overjoyed parents awaited the return of 90 young schoolchildren who had spent three months held by gunmen as authorities elsewhere in northern Nigeria announced a second group of 15 students also had been released. The news was celebrated across Nigeria, where more than 1,000 students have been kidnapped from schools since December. The abductions have stepped up pressure on the Nigerian government to do more to secure educational facilities in remote areas.

How water shortages are brewing wars (BBC Future) As much as a quarter of the world's population now faces severe water scarcity at least one month out of the year and it is leading many to seek a more secure life in other countries. "If there is no water, people will start to move," says Kitty van der Heijden, chief of international cooperation at the Netherlands' foreign ministry and an expert in hydropolitics. Water scarcity affects roughly 40% of the world's population and, according to predictions by the United Nations and the World Bank, drought could put up to 700 million people at risk of displacement by 2030. People like van der Heijden are concerned about what that could lead to. "If there is no water, politicians are going to try and get their hands on it and they might start to fight over it," she says. Over the course of the 20th Century, global water use grew at more than twice the rate of population increase. Today, this dissonance is leading many cities—from Rome to Cape Town, Chennai to Lima—to ration water. Water crises have been ranked in the top five of the World Economic Forum's Global Risks by Impact list nearly every year since 2012. In 2017, severe droughts contributed to the worst humanitarian crisis since World War Two, when 20 million people across Africa and the Middle East were forced to leave their homes due to the accompanying food shortages and conflicts that erupted. Peter Gleick, head of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, has spent the last three decades studying the link between water scarcity, conflict and migration and believes that water conflict is on the rise. "With very rare exceptions, no one dies of literal thirst," he says. "But more and more people are dying from contaminated water or conflicts over access to water."

The year of COVID burnout (The Week) “September was supposed to mark the beginning of a new normal,” said Katherine Bindley at The Wall Street Journal. Instead, for many workers, the spread of the Delta variant is déjà vu all over again. Companies of all sizes are delaying plans to return to the office, and outbreaks have already forced some schools to shut down. It’s left many workers “in an anxiety-producing state of limbo.” As the pandemic drags on, more people are struggling with exhaustion, loss, and isolation, and “employees’ mental health is quickly becoming a top concern,” said Erica Pandey at Axios. In addition to seeing more employees quit, “a whopping 52 percent of U.S. employers say they are ‘experiencing significant workplace issues’ with substance misuse or addiction by employees,” according to a new survey. Forty-four percent of workers now say they feel fatigued on the job, up from 34 percent in 2020. Some companies are going to great lengths to boost worker morale, said Jenny Gross at The New York Times. LinkedIn, Bumble, and Intuit recently “introduced weeklong companywide shutdowns so employees can fully disconnect.” PricewaterhouseCoopers is even “offering workers $250 each time they take 40 consecutive hours off.” Recognizing that extended vacations might not benefit workers hesitant about travel, Adobe began giving the entire company a day off one Friday per month. Before the pandemic, “I had a solid division between my work and home life,” said Cody Barbo at Fast Company. “Now everything has sort of blended together.” My company has added a monthly flex day that employees can take off for their “mental health.” We’ve also added guest speakers, virtual happy hours, and stipends for work-from-home costs.

#headlines #news

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itsnelkabelka · 6 years ago

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Speech: The City of London's Offer to Nigeria

Honourable Minister, High Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen.

It is a real honour to be here with you all this afternoon.

I’d like to start by thanking the Honourable Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment whom I first met in London at the UK/Nigeria Trade & Investment Summit in the margins of the Commonwealth Business Forum. I also had the pleasure of meeting him alongside His Excellency Vice-President Osinbajo in Abuja a few days ago. Many thanks for that generous introduction and for joining us today.

Just a few words about myself, I have the privilege of being the 690th Lord Mayor of the City of London. And often get asked two questions:

· “Gosh, have you been around for all that length of time?”

· And, “What is the difference between you and the Mayor of London” - my good friend Sadiq Khan.

As the Lord Mayor, my principal role is to act as an ambassador and a key spokesperson for the UK’s financial and professional services sector, which has had its historic links in the City…

It is a sector that employs two point three million people nationwide…

…it accounts for some twelve per cent of our GDP…

It is the world’s leading exporter of financial services, it has the largest insurance sector in Europe, and hosts more than 250 foreign banks - more than any other international financial centre.

It is a national, European and international jewel.

In this role, I will spend some 110 days during my year in office travelling to 30 countries to promote the UK financial and professional services sector. And it is no coincidence that I have chosen Nigeria - an important bilateral partner with whom the UK already enjoys a special bond as evidenced by the important contribution the 200,000-strong Nigerian diaspora make to the UK. We have a rich history of collaboration and a joint desire to deepen this further.

And whilst in Nigeria, I have five key objectives:

First, to provide assurance that the City of London will remain the pre-eminent global financial centre well into the future.

Second, to advance the strong ties that exist between the UK and Nigeria.

Third, to harness this relationship to improve bilateral trade, investment and business-to-business opportunities.

Fourth, to promote innovation in financial services.

And fifth and finally, to engage, discuss and promote my Mayoral programme – The Business of Trust - which aims to create a lasting legacy of better business, trusted by society.

It is these five priorities that I want to talk to you about today – in short, I want to talk about the City’s offer to Nigeria.

The relationship between Nigeria and the UK is strong.

Our bilateral trade is strong, currently standing at around £3.4 billion pounds per annum. And it is set to become even stronger – forecast to reach £7 billion by 2030.

This is a great foundation on which to build future success, but in my view, we can do much more.

As I’ve travelled in Abuja and Lagos these past few days it has become abundantly clear that Nigeria – already Africa’s largest and most populous country - is at an important point. With the rapidly rising population and the current economic growth rates, the IMF has forecast declining GDP per capita for the foreseeable future. To convert the democratic reality from challenge to opportunity, the country needs to sustain some 3-4 million jobs each year and, to achieve that, economic growth must rise from the current 2 per cent to at least 6-7 per cent.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is clearly possible. But to ensure the opportunity is harnessed, the economic engine needs to shift up a gear or two.

I’ve been hearing during my three days in Nigeria that in order to achieve this four things need to happen:

· Creating investable infrastructure assets;

· Improving access to capital;

· Promoting financial inclusion;

· And developing an enabling and compliance-based business environment.

I’m pleased to announce today that the City is well positioned to be Nigeria’s partner of choice in all four areas. Let me take each of these in turn:

First, Nigeria needs to finance and create the modern infrastructure that every successful economy needs, specifically in the areas of power, gas distribution, transport, IT and broadband. Whilst not forgetting the softer areas of health and education.

London hosts the largest cluster of professional and financial services required for largescale infrastructure projects. We can finance projects, advise on their legal and regulatory framework, deliver the projects through our civil engineering and project management experts, and insure the final product. In short, the City is a full-service centre for infrastructure. And more details on all these strengths can be found in this booklet published on the City of London’s website.

Here are just some of the projects we are working on.

On my own doorstep in London: the Crossrail project, the largest construction project in Europe – to open this December -, will provide a modern and efficient rail link crossing London from East to West.

And, internationally we are busy the world over. For example, becoming key partners with China in its ‘One Belt, One Road’ programme providing the Chinese with both the hard and soft skills necessary to deliver this extraordinary vision.

I said a moment ago Nigeria’s second priority should be improving access to capital – moving away from an over reliance on the banks and unlocking dead capital – be it in pensions or real estate, finding innovative solutions and unleashing the capital market

And Nigeria is and can further benefit from access to London’s capital markets.

The City of London has always been at the forefront of financing the African growth story, ever since 1938 when the first African company listed in London.

Eighty years later there are now 116 African companies listed in London with a combined market capitalisation just under £200 billion - the largest concentration of African listed companies outside of Africa. But the City of London will not rest on this privileged history. We are here to work in partnership and collaboration to innovate on financing solutions underlined by the strong partnership with the London and Nigerian Stock Exchanges.

The two stock exchanges have created an innovative platform for dual listing of equity and bonds which has already proved successful, as the heavily oversubscribed Eurobond and Diaspora bond showed last year. Nigerian sovereign bonds have raised £6.5 billion in total so far.

The massive demand is a strong statement of international investor interest in building exposure to Nigeria’s economy. It demonstrates the City’s ability to provide a deep additional channel of finance for the development of Nigerian infrastructure and the growth of its economy. The City of London also recognises the need to finance Nigeria’s infrastructure using Naira-denominated financial instruments. Engagement has begun with the City of London and key Nigerian institutions to develop the concept of a Jollof Bond. Similar instruments have already been used successfully in India and China. And will eliminate foreign exchange risk for Nigerian issuers – from the government down to SMEs and provide even greater access to capital for this key sector.

Moving forward, the opportunities for London to facilitate the finance of Nigeria’s growing infrastructure, includes green infrastructure as Nigeria moves towards a low carbon economy. London is the global centre for green finance. To date, London has raised £20 billion via green bonds and another £9 billion via the 13 green equity funds that are listed on the LSE. Nigeria is developing its status in this field and was a pioneer as one of the first governments in the world to issue a sovereign green bond. To advance Nigeria’s ambitions, the LSE will be initiating an international green advisory board spearheaded by the finance and environment ministries to further develop Nigeria’s green finance aspirations.

I am delighted that Ibukun Adebayo (Head of Emerging Market Strategies at the London Stock Exchange) is a member of my business delegation this week in Nigeria. And I know that he would be pleased to meet with you afterwards and answer any questions you may have.

Let me turn from the financial markets to the marketplace. UK Export Finance, the UK’s Export Credit Agency, offers Naira denominated buyer credit guarantees providing commercial loans at competitive rates with tenors of up to 18 years for Nigerian clients wishing to purchase UK goods and services.

In Nigeria, UKEF is eager to deploy £750m towards viable trade opportunities, of which only a fraction has so far been used. And I’m delighted to have with me Steve Gray, UKEF’s West Africa representative who can give you more details.

Put simply: if you have the investable infrastructure opportunities, we have the capital and knowhow to ensure they succeed.

I suggested that Nigeria’s third priority should be to promote financial inclusion so that more of the population can access and benefit from the financial sector. I understand that only 40 per cent of adults are currently banked and some 42 per cent of the population are financially excluded. And thus stifling the development of SMEs – the lifeblood of any successful economy.

Promoting financial inclusion requires innovation, something the City has always had at its heart. Perhaps the most exciting innovation in finance today is fin tech, which is changing the way we all access financial services. As Bill Gates put it, “banking is needed, but banks are not.”

London has become a world leader in fin tech, through, strong government tone from the top, a supportive regulatory environment and healthy private investment. We are home to about 1,600 fin tech firms helped by the fact that the Square Mile and the Tech City are only 500 meters apart compared with 5,000 kilometres for their equivalents in the United States.

This proximity has been a key driver for increasing technological innovation in the City. Access to expertise, the huge potential for commercial partnerships and an explosion in demand for digital products within finance are all major pull-factors.

A very exciting development in fin tech as far as Nigeria is concerned is the Open Banking Initiative which was launched in the UK and has since gone global. Open Banking combines security, innovation and accessibility, underpinned by a strong regulatory framework. If given the right regulatory support, Open Banking in Nigeria has the potential to provide a pathway so that millions more can access basic financial services, empowering them to lead more prosperous lives. Indeed, Nigeria could become the leading country in Africa for Open Banking.

I am pleased to have brought with me in my delegation, Carlos Figueredo from Open Vector, whose team co-authored the UK’s Open Banking Initiative and we have had constructive discussions with the Central Bank and Finance Ministry about furthering this important agenda.

And let me turn finally, to creating a more enabling business environment. Success here will enable Nigeria to make further strides up the Ease of Doing Business ranking, as well as bringing more business into the formal economy and thus generating the tax revenues to improve the public services. A crucial component of this favourable business environment is high-quality regulation and high professional standards that inspire Trust.

The City’s pre-eminence as the leading international financial centre is in no small part down to our robust, modern and proportionate regulatory framework.

I believe that there is a lot of scope for the UK and Nigeria to deepen our regulatory dialogue whether that’s through technical expertise, knowledge transfer or capacity building. And by way of example, I know that the Prudential Regulatory Authority is happy to offer secondments to share best practice with Nigerian regulators.

Given Nigeria’s blossoming fin tech industry, which I heard from yesterday, I also think that regulatory dialogue on fin tech between our two countries would be particularly valuable.

A second underpinning of London’s pre-eminence are strong professional standards. Nearly 1 million people have qualifications administered by the UK’s legal, accounting and professional services bodies. I am delighted that my own institute, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales, signed a Memorandum of Understanding earlier this year with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria to promote high professional standards in accounting and finance.

Which brings me to my final point – trust. We can all recognise that since the global financial crisis, public trust in business and finance has been sharply eroded, both in the UK and throughout the world.

I believe that we have a responsibility – indeed a duty, to rebuild public trust so that people can regain confidence in our respective industries. That is why I have made the Business of Trust a personal priority for my year in office. Working towards, helping to create, a lasting legacy of better business trusted by society.

Trust is at the heart of everything we do. It is the cornerstone and fundamental foundation to trade. Trade generates the prosperity, which in turn creates the social cohesion that provides the stability, that results in security for us all.

I’ve had many engaging conversations about the importance of trust during my visit. And looking ahead to the elections in February, I think we can all recognise the importance of a fair, free, credible and peaceful democratic process in strengthening that foundation of trust and building on the progress Nigeria has made.

Indeed, I am pleased to report that my Business of Trust is resonating everywhere I go. So much so, that we began interviewing public figures on my travels. So far, we have carried out some 25 interviews including with the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, and even – rugby fans will be pleased to hear – the All Black legend Sir John Kirwan.

And on Tuesday, I had the privilege of interviewing your own Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun. These interviews and a link to our survey on Trust can be found on my Twitter page - @CityLordMayor – and I would be delighted to receive your views.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have seen and heard first-hand how Nigeria has so much going for it.

People that don’t know Nigeria often have negative preconceptions of this country, through media reports that focus on the challenges and not the successes and opportunities.

Having spent three amazing days here, I can only echo what some Nigerians working in the City told me before my visit: “Nigeria may be scary from afar, but up close it’s far from scary.”

This view has been reinforced throughout my visit. Just yesterday I met with ambitious Nigerian start-ups like Riby, Flutterwave and Paga – if this is the face of the new Nigeria we can all be confident that the future is a bright one.

I do believe that the UK and Nigeria can work closer together in the years ahead.

Whether that’s through working together on infrastructure projects…

Or accessing finance through our capital markets and UK Export Finance…

Or using fin tech to promote financial inclusion

Or, working together to improve regulation, professional standards and trust.

But perhaps you have your own points which I haven’t discussed…and I look forward to take any questions you have after my speech…

But before I finish I want to say this…

Let’s keep up the momentum,

Let’s put Nigeria at the forefront of exciting developments.

Let’s work together for our mutual benefit.

May the long history of our countries’ collaboration continue. Thank you

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csrgood · 7 years ago

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Chevron Fabricated Evidence in U.S. Court to Evade $12b Liability to Indigenous Peoples of Ecuador, Report Says

A controversial U.S. trial-level judge ignored undisputed evidence that Chevron paid at least $2 million for false witness testimony and fabricated other evidence to obtain a discredited civil “racketeering” (or RICO) decision that company lawyers are now trying to use in Canada to block enforcement of the $12 billion pollution judgment from Ecuador, according to a report Chevron’s RICO Fraud.

Written by lawyers for the Ecuadorian Indigenous peoples and farmer communities that won the environmental judgment against Chevron, the report comes on the heels of a tough week for the oil major in Canadian courts. A three-judge panel in the Court of Appeal of Ontario shut down a Chevron lawyer when he tried to suggest the RICO matter should stop a lawsuit brought by the Ecuadorians to seize company assets in the country to enforce their judgment. The Ecuadorians seeking to force Chevron to comply with the judgment have now won three consecutive appellate court victories in Canada, including one before the country’s Supreme Court.

A fourth consecutive favorable decision in Canada for the Ecuadorians – the Ontario appellate court is expected to rule this summer after argument on April 17-18 – would allow them to try to seize Chevron assets currently held by the company’s wholly-owned Canadian subsidiary to pay for their judgment. The pollution judgment against Chevron issued in 2011 based on 105 technical evidentiary reports showing the oil major dumped billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste onto Indigenous ancestral lands. It was later affirmed unanimously by Ecuador’s highest court in the venue where the company insisted the trial be held.

To try to block the asset collection effort, Chevron has tried to argue Chevron Canada is a separate and independent company even though 100% of its shares are owned by Chevron. The decision is critical because of all of Chevron’s estimated $15 billion to $25 billion worth of assets in Canada are held by Chevron Canada. (See this summary of the evidence against Chevron.)

The report about Chevron’s fraud rebuts 12 false or distorted findings by U.S. trial judge Lewis A. Kaplan in the RICO case. The findings were based primarily on discredited testimony from an admittedly corrupt Chevron witness paid $2 million by the company to claim that lawyers for the Ecuadorians offered a bribe to the Ecuador trial judge in exchange for “ghostwriting” the judgment. The Chevron witness, Alberto Guerra, later admitted he had lied on the stand after being coached for 53 days by Chevron’s lawyers. (See here and here for media reports.)

The report also documents Judge Kaplan’s hostility toward the Ecuadorians and their lawyers in a proceeding that amounted to a “Dickensian farce”, according to a legal motion filed by prominent U.S. lawyer John Keker, who participated in the case (see here for background). Kaplan refused to seat a jury and committed numerous procedural violations to favor Chevron, including allowing secret testimony from witnesses whose identities were concealed from the defense, according to the report. Kaplan also authorized Chevron to secretly pay the fees of a court official while failing to disclose his financial ties to Chevron while presiding over the trial.

The report is being put in the public domain after dozens of law scholars, environmental groups, and human rights organizations urged reversal of Judge Kaplan’s ruling on the grounds that it failed to consider Chevron’s fabrication of evidence and overstretched the authority of the U.S. to judiciary to interfere with court decisions in other countries, said Patricio Salazar, a lawyer who represent the Ecuadorians. A U.S. appellate court later affirmed Kaplan’s RICO decision without any independent review of his problematic findings.

Just last week – apparently in response to the fact the Canadian court refused to hear argument about the RICO findings – Judge Kaplan again tried to bar the Ecuadorian rainforest villagers from collecting on the judgment in the entire world, even in Canada. That trial-level decision, like many Kaplan has issued, was widely condemned as a violation of international law and is seen by experts as an attack on��Canada’s sovereignty, which has its own laws governing the enforcement of foreign judgments. A previous attempt in 2011 by Kaplan to issue an order from his trial court purportedly barring enforcement of the Ecuador judgment in the entire world was overturned on appeal in the United States.

Both Chevron and Judge Kaplan seem increasingly anxious over recent setbacks for the oil giant in what is shaping up to be a historic campaign by the Ecuadorian Indigenous peoples and farmer communities who live in the affected area.

Last December, the Amazon Defense Coalition of Ecuador (FDA) – the NGO group enforcing the judgment – signed a joint protocol with Canada’s powerful national Indigenous federation (Assembly of First Nations) to hold Chevron accountable for causing environmental harms in both countries. Canada National Chief Perry Bellegarde and former Canada National Chief Phil Fontaine sat in court in Toronto with the Ecuadorians; Fontaine and Grand Chief Ed John harshly criticized Chevron for failing to address the concerns of the Indigenous peoples after a tour of the affected area last September.

Another prominent Canadian Indigenous leader, Cree lawyer Willie Littlechild, blasted Chevron over its Ecuador pollution problem two weeks ago before a plenary session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. "This is considered the world's worst oil-related environmental catastrophe," he said. "The peoples of the region have not only seen their ancestral lands drastically reduced and restricted, but also poisoned, degraded, and destroyed."

The Chevron fraud report explains how the paid-for Chevron witness, Alberto Guerra, admitted under oath in a separate arbitration proceeding that he lied on the stand before Judge Kaplan. Later, a forensic analysis by one of the world’s leading computer experts scientifically debunked Guerra’s ghostwriting story. Both of these critical developments were ignored by Judge Kaplan, who has been subject to harsh reviews by lawyers across a number of cases for his perceived pro-business bias and lack of neutrality.

Guerra’s changing stories about a bribe were honed in daily coaching sessions with Chevron lawyers at the U.S. law firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher that spanned several weeks, according to Guerra’s own admissions. Chevron is still paying Guerra a large salary, housing costs, health care and his personal income taxes while maintaining him in a secret location in the U.S., according to court records. The company agreed to pay Guerra $12,000 monthly for no work other than being a witness under the company’s control, according to his contract with Chevron.

(For more background about the corrupt acts committed by Chevron and Guerra, see here and here. For background on the many procedural flaws in Judge Kaplan’s RICO proceeding, see here.)

The Ecuadorians have long claimed that Chevron officials and its outside lawyers conspired to fabricate false evidence through Guerra’s testimony and present it to U.S. courts as part of a long-running campaign to evade paying the Ecuador liability, which was issued based on overwhelming evidence in the venue where the company had accepted jurisdiction. Lawyers for the villagers also have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether the payments to Guerra violated criminal statutes. (See here for a criminal referral letter of Chevron to the DOJ.)

The forensic analysis, conducted under the auspices of an international investor arbitration panel overseeing a lawsuit filed by Chevron against Ecuador’s government, proved the Ecuador trial judge opened and saved a Word document that became the judgment more than 400 times over a three-month period prior to its issuance. This contradicts Chevron’s claim based on the Guerra testimony that the judgment was written by the plaintiffs and given to the judge on a flash drive.

The report also names some of the individuals at Chevron law firm Gibson Dunn who orchestrated the fabrication of evidence on behalf of the company. They include Randy Mastro, the former deputy mayor of New York City under the administration of current Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Gibson Dunn advertises itself as a “rescue squad” for scandal-plagued clients, but the firm frequently has been criticized and sanctioned for ethical violations.

In the Chevron case, a federal judge in Oregon scolded the firm for trying to harass a non-profit group that was working to assist the Ecuadorian legal team. In an echo of its current problems in the Chevron case, Gibson Dunn recently was sanctioned by the High Court of London for fabricating evidence to help frame a political opponent of a client from Djibouti. Montana’s Supreme Court also accused the firm of engaging in “legal thuggery” and fined it $9.9 million.

Other amicus briefs filed before U.S. courts (see here and here) argue that Judge Kaplan’s RICO decision violates international law and amounts to an unconstitutional SLAPP-style lawsuit. SLAPP lawsuits are designed by corporate or governmental entities to harass opponents and to silence criticism in violation of Free Speech guarantees in the U.S. Constitution and international law.

After an eight-year trial that lasted from 2003 to 2011, the Ecuador court found that Chevron dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest when it operated more than 400 well sites (under the Texaco brand) from 1964 to 1992. The company’s sub-standard operational practices decimated Indigenous culture and caused an outbreak of cancer that has killed or threatens to kill thousands of people, according to independent health studies.

As evidence against it in Ecuador mounted, Chevron began to attack the country’s courts while threatening the villagers with a “lifetime of litigation” if they persisted. “We will fight this until hell freezes over, and then fight it out on the ice,” said Chevron’s General Counsel, Charles James. Chevron has used at least 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers to defend the company since the inception of the case; Donziger litigated pro se in the RICO case for several months against 114 lawyers from Gibson Dunn.

source: http://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/40990-Chevron-Fabricated-Evidence-in-U-S-Court-to-Evade-12b-Liability-to-Indigenous-Peoples-of-Ecuador-Report-Says?tracking_source=rss

#CSR #corporate social responsibility #social good #philanthropy #employee engagement #workplace givi

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neptunecreek · 7 years ago

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Communities from Coast to Coast Fight for Control Over Police Surveillance: 2017 in Review

Americans in 2017 lived under a threat of constant surveillance, both online and offline. While the battle to curtail unaccountable and unconstitutional NSA surveillance continued this year with only limited opportunities appearing in Congress, the struggle to secure community control over surveillance by local police has made dramatic and expanding strides across the country at the local level.

In July, Seattle passed a law making it the nation’s second jurisdiction to require law enforcement agencies to seek community approval before acquiring surveillance technology. Santa Clara County in California, which encompasses most of Silicon Valley, pioneered this reform in spring 2016 before similar proposals later spread across the country.

Two other jurisdictions in the San Francisco Bay Area—the cities of Oakland and Berkeley—have conducted multiple public hearings on proposed reforms to require community control. Both cities are nearing decision points for local legislators who in 2018 will consider whether to empower themselves and their constituents, or whether instead to allow secrecy and unaccountability to continue unfettered.

Other communities across California have also mobilized. In addition to Oakland and Berkeley, EFF has supported proposed reforms in Palo Alto and before the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board, and also addressed communities seeking similar measures in Davis, Humboldt County (where a local group in the Electronic Frontier Alliance hosted two public forums in March and another in December), and Santa Cruz (where local activists began a long running local dialog in 2016).

Reflecting this interest from across the state, the California State Senate approved a measure, S.B. 21, which would have applied the transparency and community control principles of the Santa Clara County ordinance to hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the state. While the measure was successful before the state Senate, and also cleared two committees in the State Assembly, it died without a vote in the state Assembly’s appropriations committee.

While S.B. 21 was not enacted in 2017, we anticipate similar measures advancing in communities across California in 2018. In many other states, municipal bodies have already begun considering analogous policies.

In New York City, over a dozen council members have supported the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, which would require transparency before the New York Police Department acquires new surveillance technology. This is an important step forward, though without reform elements that, in Santa Clara County and Seattle, have placed communities in control over police surveillance. The support of local policymakers may help bring to the public debate underlying facts about the proposed reform which appear to have escaped figures who oppose it, including Mayor Bill de Blasio.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, policymakers began a conversation last year that continued throughout 2017. This October, a coalition of local allies hosted a public forum about a proposed ordinance that the City Council will reportedly consider in 2018. They included Digital Fourth (a member of the EFA), the Pirate Party, and students at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, one of whom wrote that “[w]ithout appropriate controls, technologies intended for one purpose can be twisted for another.”

In the Midwest, Missouri has emerged as a potentially crucial state in the nationwide battle over surveillance technology. Years after grassroots opposition to police violence vaulted the town of Ferguson to international recognition, St. Louis city policymakers introduced B.B. 66, a measure modeled closely on Santa Clara County’s.

While the Missouri state legislature has yet to consider a similar proposal, it did consider—without yet adopting—another proposed reform to limit law enforcement surveillance. In particular, S.B. 84 would have limited the parameters under which state and local police could deploy cell-site simulators, which use cell phone networks to track a user’s location or monitor data or voice transmissions. This is just one of many invasive surveillance platforms available to law enforcement.

Nearby states have also taken notice of cell-site simulators. Illinois has already enacted a strong law constraining the use of those particular tools, while Nebraska considered a bill that would have prohibited police from using cell-site simulators at all. This established support for limiting one surveillance tool across the region suggests potential traction for process reforms, like Seattle’s and Santa Clara County’s, that would apply to all platforms.

The fight against unaccountable secret government surveillance will continue across the United States in 2018. While Congress has yet to enact legislation this year protecting the American people from NSA surveillance, local and state legislatures are heeding the call to conduct effective oversight and to empower the communities they represent.

This article is part of our Year In Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2017.

Like what you're reading? Support digital freedom defense today!

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trumptweettuesdays-blog · 7 years ago

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TTT 8.22.17

This week’s themes are Charlottesville, Military, White House Staff Changes, Faker News, Republican Campaigning, Propaganda, Veterans, Arapio, and Presidential Notes

Charlottesville

Last week there was an alt-right/neo-Nazi/KKK rally in Charlottesville, Virginia - the town is a well-known circle of blue in an otherwise red state and home to The University of Virginia (founded by Thomas Jefferson). The rally was ideologically and physically violent with chants to “unite the right” along with torches and military like gear. The marchers were overtly racist, nationalist, sexist and homophobic; they carried all the symbolism and vitriol of the KKK but without the robes as they openly declared their feelings to ‘defend America.’ On Saturday afternoon, during the protests against the rally, a car drove into the crowd injuring several and killing Heather Heyer - a protestor against the rally. Trump would not initially condemn the rally, then he did condemn White nationalists, but then he backed off those remarks - saying there was problems on ‘all sides’ of the issue. He then Tweeted about the destruction of American culture - i.e. removing Confederate statutes. Needless to say Trump has received a lot of backlash for not using stronger words to condemn the rally (or we would say, he more than implicitly supported the alt-right marchers), this backlash has come from both the left and the right. Boston protestors turned out to a alt-right led ‘free speech’ rally and Trump took a stronger stance in support of these protestors, though it is unclear who he is addressing when he says ‘anti-police agitators’. Civil Rights Movement activists were anti-police agitators.

Charlottesville

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/13/us/charlottesville-white-nationalist-rally-car-crash/index.html

http://time.com/charlottesville-white-nationalist-rally-clashes/

Boston

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/19/trump-praises-boston-mayor-and-police-for-response-to-protests-241828

http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-boston-protests-revealed-the-limits-of-trumpism

Military

Trump has failed miserably at his campaign attempts such as health care reform and building the wall so it seems Trump is hitting the military angle hard. Without much else to cling to, investing himself in increasing the US military is probably the easiest political target. In his military Tweets this week, Trump touches upon a range of issues including terrorism, Cyber attacks, the US destroyer collision, and North Korea.

North Korea leader Kim Jong Un paused on releasing four missiles, which Trump praised him for on Twitter. Trump had previously said he would release ‘fire and fury’ if North Korea didn’t reign in the missile tests.

The US destroyer John S. McCain collided with an oil tanker near Singapore and officials are still working on recovering all the sailors. This is, sadly, the fourth time a US warship was in an accident in Asian waters this year.

Trump increased the US Cyber Command to a Unified Combatant Command, which recognizes the importance of cyber warfare.

Trump signed the Global War on Terrorism Act, which is a commission that authorizes a Global War on Terrorism memorial somewhere in DC.

In his recent statement, Trump also announced that military decisions about presence in war zones abroad would be based on ‘conditions’ and not ‘arbitrary deadlines.’ Specifically, Trump said he is calling for a review of Afghanistan noting that it is likely US troops will be there much longer than he originally planned.

North Korea

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/16/politics/trump-kim-north-korea-tweet/index.html

US destroyer

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/21/politics/uss-john-s-mccain-collision/index.html

Cyber Command

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/20/16175638/trump-cyber-command-nsa-decision

Global War on Terrorism Act

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/08/20/trump-gives-go-ahead-for-global-war-on-terrorism-memorial-in-dc.html

Afghanistan

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/21/trump-afghanistan-241876

White House Staff Changes

Trump’s administrative staff has undergone some significant changes since Trump took office, and continues to do so. This past week, Trump said goodbye to his chief strategist and hit a wall with prominent company CEOs invited to sit on his Manufacturing Council.

Despite claims of Bannon being forced out, news from the White House is that the separation was mutual. Trump’s tweets on the subject also attempt to paint a positive picture. Bannon’s departure came just as Trump was under fire for sounding too much like Bannon, when Trump equated White supremacist rioters to those who opposed them. Responses have been mixed, but both sides seem to agree that Trump’s rhetoric may take a more “liberal” tone than previously. However, Bannon returned to the highly conservative Breitbart News, and Trump optimistically tweeted that this would mean competition for “fake news” outlets.

Trump suffered more staff losses as a result of his response to the Charlottesville protest; leaders of several major businesses stepped down from his Manufacturing Council. Walmart’s CEO was the most recent to criticize Trump’s lack of willingness to completely reject the actions of White supremacist protestors that participated in the events in Charlottesville. Six other CEOs preceded the Walmart leader’s decision, including those of Intel and Under Armour. Trump bragged on Twitter about having “many more” CEOs that could replace them, but the reality is that despite Trump’s pro-business stance getting him through the election, businesses are losing their patience with Trump.

These changes come on the tail end of several others for Trump’s administration and if the trend continues, it seems there may only be a matter of moments until the next staff member is out.

Bannon leaves the White House:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/us/politics/steve-bannon-trump-white-house.html

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/18/politics/steve-bannon-white-house/index.html

CEOs are leaving the council:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/business/trump-councils-ceos.html

Faker News

Last TTT we introduced the theme of ‘faker news’ to emphasize Trump’s fake claims about fake news. This week Trump tries to dispel all the negative press on him in relationship to his remarks on Charlottesville by blaming fake news. After the violent alt-right protests, Trump’s public remarks blamed ‘both sides,’ which likened the mores and values of neo-Nazis with those of the protestors. Some Republicans were outraged enough to call Trump out. Senator Lindsey Graham said he did not agree with Trump’s ‘moral equivalency’ and Sen. John McCain along with others on Twitter said Trump needed to take a stronger stance. However, the ever supportive Jerry Falwell of Liberty University in Virginia said he was proud of Trump’s ‘bold truthful’ statement. In a classic Trump move, instead of denouncing racists or standing by what he said, Trump is blaming the ‘fake news’ for telling the truth.

Trump’s remarks on Charlottesville

http://www.npr.org/2017/08/15/543463673/trumps-fuzzy-history-of-denouncing-white-nationalism

Republicans address Trump

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/16/politics/republicans-list-denouncing-trump-by-name/index.html

Jerry Falwell

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/21/liberty-university-graduates-return-diplomas-because-of-support-for-trump-by-jerry-falwell-jr/?utm_term=.1e434af8364f

Republican Campaigning

Trump took to Twitter again this week to offer commentary on Republican campaigning efforts. He continued to promote his stance on border control and crime, while attempting to help far-right Republicans garner a few more Senate seats. Despite her being less qualified and more of a risk for the Senate position, Trump has thrown his support behind Kelli Ward in the Arizona Senate primary. Many believe this is a result of Flake’s willingness to disagree with Trump, as well as Trump partially blaming Flake for the failure of Trump’s healthcare bill. So, along with congratulating the winners and finalists for certain seats, Trump has also made sure to promote the Republicans he feels won’t challenge him and will fall into line and vote in agreement with his problematic policies, particularly those regarding border control and crime. This is why Luther Strange, who has voted in line with Trump about 92% of the time, finds himself receiving high praises in the race for the open Alabama Senate seat.

The battle for Arizona:

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a57152/arizona-flake-trump/

Trump endorses Strange:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/15/alabama-election-trump-touts-luther-strange-in-special-senate-primary.html

Propaganda

Trump’s propaganda is really nothing new this week. He makes the same tired claims to a successful stock market and high job numbers.

His two specific propaganda tweets this week touch upon sanctuary cities and the Manufacturing Council and Strategy and Policy Forum. Sessions went to Miami to celebrate the city abandoning its sanctuary city policy, with supposed clear support from Mayor Gimenez. What the Tweet doesn’t reveal is that the mayor finally kowtowed to the policy because the local police were given $500,000. Trump’s propaganda behind ending sanctuary cities is that it will help end violent crimes committed by immigrants, a claim that has been repeatedly shown to be false.

Trump also sent out a Tweet about the Manufacturing Council and Strategy and Policy Forum. CEOs of the council and forum started stepping down from their posts in response to Trump’s remarks about Charlottesville (i.e., that he did not condemn neo-Nazis and the KKK). Rather than admit to this defeat, Trump said he chose to end both the council and the forum.

Sanctuary City

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fabiola-santiago/article167855707.html

Manufacturing Council and Strategy and Policy Forum

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/16/trump-abruptly-ends-manufacturing-council-after-ceos-disband-strategy-and-policy-forum.html

Veterans

Trump continues to make good on earlier promises to improve conditions for veterans. He passed an educational assistance bill that will authorize additional funding for members of the National Guard and Army Reserve, increasing the amount and eligibility for those who serve. Veterans will see an increase in funding for tuition as well as more financial support for housing. This is another positive step for service members and some are hoping Trump uses this as an opportunity to begin expanded educational opportunities for other communities.

Full text of the educational assistance act

https://www.whitehouse.gov/legislation/hr-3218-harry-w-colmery-veterans-educational-assistance-act-2017

Arapio

Former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is well known for his anti-immigrant beliefs. Last month he was convicted of contempt of court for not following an order to stop apprehending suspected undocumented immigrants. He faces a possible six months in jail. Trump alluded that he might consider pardoning him at an upcoming Arizona campaign rally. The White House now says he won’t but clearly this option isn’t off the table since Trump chose to Retweet Fox news reporting that he might pardon Arapio.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news-other-administration/347542-trump-wont-pardon-sheriff-joe-arpaio-at

Presidential Notes

Trump’s notes this week were limited to sharing condolences for a few different attacks. He tweeted in support of one officer killed and another wounded in a stop that turned violent in Kissimmee, Florida. He also “condemned” a terrorist attack in Barcelona, Spain that left thirteen killed and more than 100 others injured. But, most notably was in tweet for a young woman killed during the Charlottesville protest.

Trump tweeted a seemingly sweet message for the young woman, but her mother refuses to speak with him personally. Heather Heyer, was at the Charlottesville protest to speak against the White supremacist that had gathered. So, upon hearing Trump’s remarks comparing protesters like Heather to the White supremacists that marched to terrorize, Heyer’s mother said she will not forgive the president and advised him to think before speaking; a lesson he could surely stand to benefit from.

So, many are still left to understand that to Trump, acts of terror in other countries is to be condemned but here in the United States, we must see how the blame falls on both sides.

Kissimmee, Florida attack

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/us/police-shooting-florida-kissimmee.html

Barcelona, Spain attack

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/22/europe/barcelona-attacks/index.html

Comments from Heather Heyer’s mother

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/08/18/mother-of-woman-killed-in-charlottesville-says-she-wont-speak-to-trump-after-his-comments/?utm_term=.333e1e89e2f5

#trump #45th president #republicans #democrats #charlottesville #White House #fake news #Propaganda #Veterans #Arapio #military #afghanistan

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oldguardaudio · 8 years ago

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