On 11 September, a jury found three Just Stop Oil activists not guilty of public nuisance. It follows a protest in 2022 on the M25 in which they protested government plans to licence 100 new oil and gas projects. The group has highlighted that this decision went against “expert advice”
Just Stop Oil: not guilty
The cleared defendants were Sam Holland, Rachel Payne, and Isabel Rock. Their trial took place over five days, and the jury’s verdict was unanimous.
In a press release, Just Stop Oil detailed the justification presented by each defendant:
Sam Holland argued that he had wanted to prevent harm. He had read academic papers which pointed to catastrophic consequences for humanity from burning fossil fuels, including food system collapse.
Rachel Payne explained that she took action because she was fearful for her children and grandchildren about government inaction on the climate crisis. She highlighted the government breaking its 2015 climate agreements by offering new fossil fuel licences.
Isabel Rock said that she felt a duty to look after people younger than herself and that the climate crisis is going to touch every single part of their lives. Taking action was something she weighed up very seriously and that as a self employed person, she knew how hard it was for people to earn money and to get by. However she felt that if they could see some of these agreed facts about the seriousness of the climate crisis, she hoped they would understand.
The jury found these to be ‘reasonable excuses’ for the protest, despite the disruption to traffic.
In closing
In his closing speech, defendant Sam Holland said:
We brought evidence on the largest evil committed in human history: the continued drilling and burning of oil and gas in full knowledge that large parts of humanity will be killed. The prosecution has said that these are beliefs. They are not beliefs. This is not a cause. This is not another ‘issue’. This is billions of deaths. Not according to me, according to the world’s leading scientists. These are the facts. If we hit 3C of warming by 2050, there could be four billion human deaths. Half of the world’s current population.
What was the UK government doing? It was issuing over 100 new licences for companies to explore and drill oil and gas in the North Sea. In the knowledge of everything I’ve just said, which is public knowledge and has been known for decades, the government was still wanting to drill. Unimaginable evil. We all talked about how we had extensively tried other methods for making change. Signing petitions, emailing MPs, going on conventional marches… So we had to turn to disruptive action.’
It is causing disruption that pressures the government to act – civil disobedience works by the very fact that it is disruptive. I feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility to do everything I can to stop this from happening. Once you learn about this stuff you can’t unlearn it. We have a very narrow window of time now to change the course of history. This is what I have tried to do by taking this action.
Following the verdict, Rachel Payne said:
I thank the members of the Jury deeply for their ‘common sense’ verdict — they were actually permitted to hear the several climate related agreed facts, which were read out to them, about the severe threats the present emergency poses to our world and they listened!
I thank the prosecution for agreeing to those facts following earlier trials I attended in which the ‘whole truth’ was repeatedly denied to the Jury. I thank the Judge for allowing them to decide that we “more likely than not” had a reasonable excuse for what we did.
In my statement to the police, I urgently expressed my fears for my family and world and my hopes for an ‘eco-U- turn’. With this acquittal, I feel this may be closer to being made possible. The tide may well be turning if the agreed facts on climate, allowed in this trial, can become widely known and acted upon internationally.
Rosebank is the largest undeveloped oil field in the North Sea. If developed, it would release an amount of emissions equal to those produced by all 28 low-income countries in the world.
In January, a court overturned the 2023 approval of Rosebank, deeming it unlawful. The UK Government will now decide to re-approve or reject the field, once owner Equinor has re-applied for permission to develop the field.
The article also noted:
The UK public is predicted to cover over 80% of the costs of developing Rosebank, due to generous tax reliefs that allow oil and gas companies to write off most of their development costs before profits are taxed. Norwegian state-owned oil company, Equinor – which owns the majority stake in Rosebank – is expected to profit up to £1.5 billion, along with its partner, Ithaca.
Despite some tax income from profits of Rosebank – most of which would come after 2030 – the UK Government is expected to incur a net loss of over £250 million.
The Norwegian government has a sovereign wealth fund that is largely funded by state-owned companies like Equinor, currently worth over $1.3 trillion that is reinvested towards the country’s public environmental, social and governance issues.
A salesperson takes an AR-15 rifle off the wall at a store in Orem, Utah, on March 25, 2021.Photo: George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Conservative America was shaken this week when Charlie Kirk, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump, was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University.
The incident recalls a disturbing pattern: Even the champions of “pro-gun” politics are not immune to America’s epidemic of gun violence.
Just last year, Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. Four decades ago, Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin. More recently, in 2017, a far-left gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice, critically wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. From Gerald Ford, who survived two separate assassination attempts in one month in 1975, to local GOP staffers dying in common gun crime, the list of right-wing political figures hit by gun violence is a long one.
These bloody episodes underscore a grim irony: The very politicians and pundits who promulgate expansive gun rights and tough-on-crime rhetoric have repeatedly found themselves on the receiving end of bullets.
These attacks have grabbed headlines, but there are other conservative victims of gun violence whose stories often go unmentioned — many of them. They are the rank-and-file of the GOP, the voters who put the elected officials in office and follow the likes of Kirk on social media.
It is the residents of conservative America — the so-called “red states” — who are suffering the heaviest toll in daily gun deaths.
Gun Violence Gap
Despite rhetoric painting liberal big cities as lawless war zones, the most dangerous places in America in terms of gun violence are often deep-red states and rural towns.
Federal health data reveal that states with conservative leadership consistently have higher firearm death rates than their blue-state counterparts.
In 2021, eight of the 10 states with the highest gun death rates per capita were won by Trump in the 2020 election. Mississippi — with a staggering 33.9 per 100,000 firearm death rate, the worst in the nation — voted solidly Republican. By contrast, states with the lowest gun death rates — like Massachusetts, at 3.4 per 100,000 — reliably vote Democratic.
This pattern holds nationwide. Public health research confirms that states in the South and Mountain West with weaker gun laws and higher gun ownership have the highest gun death rates, whereas Northeast states with strong gun safety laws see far fewer deaths.
In other words, the “gun-friendly” policies of red America correlate with more funerals and grieving families, year after year.
Crucially, this gap isn’t just about suicides in isolated areas; it extends to violent crime and murders as well. A recent analysis of homicide data found that the murder rate in Republican-voting states — such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama — was 33 percent higher than in Democratic-voting states in both 2021 and 2022.
Even when researchers control for big urban centers, the red-state murder problem persists. Remove the largest city from every red state, and their homicide rate still far exceeds that of blue states.
The notion that “Democrat-run cities” alone drive violence collapses under scrutiny. People are statistically safer in New York City or San Francisco than in many rural or Southern Republican-led states.
People are statistically safer in New York City or San Francisco than in many rural or Southern Republican-led states.
A groundbreaking study also found that firearm fatalities are now more likely in small rural towns than in big cities — a reversal of historical trends. Thanks largely to soaring gun suicides, the most rural counties experienced overall firearm death rates 25 percent higher than the most urban counties in recent decades. That means the archetypal “American heartland” — often solid Republican territory — quietly endures a higher per-capita burden of gun death than metropolises like Los Angeles or New York.
The carnage encompasses tragic self-inflicted shootings, domestic violence with firearms, and, yes, the mass shootings that now regularly strike church gatherings, small-town Walmarts, and school classrooms in conservative communities.
No corner of the country is spared, but red America is bleeding most.
Paradox of Pro-Gun Politics
Why do those who govern the most gun-afflicted states seem least inclined to acknowledge the crisis?
Republican leaders have long styled themselves as the party of “law and order,” yet they preside over what one analyst dubbed a “red state murder problem.” They champion the Second Amendment as a sacred pillar of freedom, but fail to target root causes that contribute to homicide and suicide rates that dwarf those in other advanced nations.
The Trump administration’s response to violence has instead been to deploy federal agents into conducting roving patrols in democratic strongholds such as Washington to help enforce some of the country’s most restrictive gun laws. Meanwhile, Trump and the GOP are hobbling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives by leaving it without a leader; legalizing fully automaticsimulation devices; and cutting key research into understanding and preventing violence.
It’s a cruel paradox. The right wing’s permissive gun policies have boomeranged to haunt their own constituents and politicians.
When even a figure like Kirk — who once declared that more armed citizens make us safer — ends up bleeding from a bullet wound, it highlights how indiscriminate and all-encompassing America’s gun scourge has become.
The victims are subsequently left with no solace. This year, the Trump administration shut down the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and slashed $158 million in gun violence prevention grants.
Rather than face the uncomfortable reality that easy access to firearms, poor gun trafficking controls, and under-resourced research is fueling more death in red states, GOP officials often deflect to problems in blue cities or pin violence on mental health alone. The numbers, though, don’t lie.
Those “pro-life” conservative lawmakers have effectively enacted policies that make their communities less safe, with more grieving parents, more emptied school desks, and more devastated towns as the predictable outcome.
Bullets Know No Politics
It’s increasingly apparent that the right wing’s embrace of guns has exacted a disproportionate price on its own side. From the would-be assassins targeting GOP presidents to the quiet epidemic of firearm suicide among rural white men — a demographic that leans conservative — American gun culture is, in a dark twist, victimizing the very communities that most fiercely defend it.
If this country is going to surmount its gun violence crises, it must confront an uncomfortable truth: The people of red America are not being protected by the gun-centric promises of the far right — they are being buried by them.
How many more Republican politicians must be rushed to the ER with gunshot wounds? How many small-town obituaries must quietly note a firearm tragedy, before ideology yields to reality?
The right’s reflexive answers to any shooting — more patrols, militarized police, more guns, and less firearm regulation — are looking less like freedom and more like a death pact. Until conservatives reckon with this it, the cycle will continue. The communities they lead will continue to suffer the highest rates of murder and suicide, and even their most venerated leaders will remain in the line of fire.
In the end, America’s gun violence crisis is not a red or blue issue. Right now, however, red America is paying the steepest price. The hope is that acknowledging this truth could spur the kind of cross-partisan soul-searching and reform that has so far proved elusive.
Until then, the grim paradox persists. The loudest champions of an absolutist gun culture are among its foremost casualties.
A salesperson takes an AR-15 rifle off the wall at a store in Orem, Utah, on March 25, 2021.Photo: George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Conservative America was shaken this week when Charlie Kirk, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump, was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University.
The incident recalls a disturbing pattern: Even the champions of “pro-gun” politics are not immune to America’s epidemic of gun violence.
Just last year, Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. Four decades ago, Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin. More recently, in 2017, a far-left gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice, critically wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. From Gerald Ford, who survived two separate assassination attempts in one month in 1975, to local GOP staffers dying in common gun crime, the list of right-wing political figures hit by gun violence is a long one.
These bloody episodes underscore a grim irony: The very politicians and pundits who promulgate expansive gun rights and tough-on-crime rhetoric have repeatedly found themselves on the receiving end of bullets.
These attacks have grabbed headlines, but there are other conservative victims of gun violence whose stories often go unmentioned — many of them. They are the rank-and-file of the GOP, the voters who put the elected officials in office and follow the likes of Kirk on social media.
It is the residents of conservative America — the so-called “red states” — who are suffering the heaviest toll in daily gun deaths.
Gun Violence Gap
Despite rhetoric painting liberal big cities as lawless war zones, the most dangerous places in America in terms of gun violence are often deep-red states and rural towns.
Federal health data reveal that states with conservative leadership consistently have higher firearm death rates than their blue-state counterparts.
In 2021, eight of the 10 states with the highest gun death rates per capita were won by Trump in the 2020 election. Mississippi — with a staggering 33.9 per 100,000 firearm death rate, the worst in the nation — voted solidly Republican. By contrast, states with the lowest gun death rates — like Massachusetts, at 3.4 per 100,000 — reliably vote Democratic.
This pattern holds nationwide. Public health research confirms that states in the South and Mountain West with weaker gun laws and higher gun ownership have the highest gun death rates, whereas Northeast states with strong gun safety laws see far fewer deaths.
In other words, the “gun-friendly” policies of red America correlate with more funerals and grieving families, year after year.
Crucially, this gap isn’t just about suicides in isolated areas; it extends to violent crime and murders as well. A recent analysis of homicide data found that the murder rate in Republican-voting states — such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama — was 33 percent higher than in Democratic-voting states in both 2021 and 2022.
Even when researchers control for big urban centers, the red-state murder problem persists. Remove the largest city from every red state, and their homicide rate still far exceeds that of blue states.
The notion that “Democrat-run cities” alone drive violence collapses under scrutiny. People are statistically safer in New York City or San Francisco than in many rural or Southern Republican-led states.
People are statistically safer in New York City or San Francisco than in many rural or Southern Republican-led states.
A groundbreaking study also found that firearm fatalities are now more likely in small rural towns than in big cities — a reversal of historical trends. Thanks largely to soaring gun suicides, the most rural counties experienced overall firearm death rates 25 percent higher than the most urban counties in recent decades. That means the archetypal “American heartland” — often solid Republican territory — quietly endures a higher per-capita burden of gun death than metropolises like Los Angeles or New York.
The carnage encompasses tragic self-inflicted shootings, domestic violence with firearms, and, yes, the mass shootings that now regularly strike church gatherings, small-town Walmarts, and school classrooms in conservative communities.
No corner of the country is spared, but red America is bleeding most.
Paradox of Pro-Gun Politics
Why do those who govern the most gun-afflicted states seem least inclined to acknowledge the crisis?
Republican leaders have long styled themselves as the party of “law and order,” yet they preside over what one analyst dubbed a “red state murder problem.” They champion the Second Amendment as a sacred pillar of freedom, but fail to target root causes that contribute to homicide and suicide rates that dwarf those in other advanced nations.
The Trump administration’s response to violence has instead been to deploy federal agents into conducting roving patrols in democratic strongholds such as Washington to help enforce some of the country’s most restrictive gun laws. Meanwhile, Trump and the GOP are hobbling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives by leaving it without a leader; legalizing fully automaticsimulation devices; and cutting key research into understanding and preventing violence.
It’s a cruel paradox. The right wing’s permissive gun policies have boomeranged to haunt their own constituents and politicians.
When even a figure like Kirk — who once declared that more armed citizens make us safer — ends up bleeding from a bullet wound, it highlights how indiscriminate and all-encompassing America’s gun scourge has become.
The victims are subsequently left with no solace. This year, the Trump administration shut down the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and slashed $158 million in gun violence prevention grants.
Rather than face the uncomfortable reality that easy access to firearms, poor gun trafficking controls, and under-resourced research is fueling more death in red states, GOP officials often deflect to problems in blue cities or pin violence on mental health alone. The numbers, though, don’t lie.
Those “pro-life” conservative lawmakers have effectively enacted policies that make their communities less safe, with more grieving parents, more emptied school desks, and more devastated towns as the predictable outcome.
Bullets Know No Politics
It’s increasingly apparent that the right wing’s embrace of guns has exacted a disproportionate price on its own side. From the would-be assassins targeting GOP presidents to the quiet epidemic of firearm suicide among rural white men — a demographic that leans conservative — American gun culture is, in a dark twist, victimizing the very communities that most fiercely defend it.
If this country is going to surmount its gun violence crises, it must confront an uncomfortable truth: The people of red America are not being protected by the gun-centric promises of the far right — they are being buried by them.
How many more Republican politicians must be rushed to the ER with gunshot wounds? How many small-town obituaries must quietly note a firearm tragedy, before ideology yields to reality?
The right’s reflexive answers to any shooting — more patrols, militarized police, more guns, and less firearm regulation — are looking less like freedom and more like a death pact. Until conservatives reckon with this it, the cycle will continue. The communities they lead will continue to suffer the highest rates of murder and suicide, and even their most venerated leaders will remain in the line of fire.
In the end, America’s gun violence crisis is not a red or blue issue. Right now, however, red America is paying the steepest price. The hope is that acknowledging this truth could spur the kind of cross-partisan soul-searching and reform that has so far proved elusive.
Until then, the grim paradox persists. The loudest champions of an absolutist gun culture are among its foremost casualties.
A salesperson takes an AR-15 rifle off the wall at a store in Orem, Utah, on March 25, 2021.Photo: George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Conservative America was shaken this week when Charlie Kirk, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump, was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University.
The incident recalls a disturbing pattern: Even the champions of “pro-gun” politics are not immune to America’s epidemic of gun violence.
Just last year, Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. Four decades ago, Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin. More recently, in 2017, a far-left gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice, critically wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. From Gerald Ford, who survived two separate assassination attempts in one month in 1975, to local GOP staffers dying in common gun crime, the list of right-wing political figures hit by gun violence is a long one.
These bloody episodes underscore a grim irony: The very politicians and pundits who promulgate expansive gun rights and tough-on-crime rhetoric have repeatedly found themselves on the receiving end of bullets.
These attacks have grabbed headlines, but there are other conservative victims of gun violence whose stories often go unmentioned — many of them. They are the rank-and-file of the GOP, the voters who put the elected officials in office and follow the likes of Kirk on social media.
It is the residents of conservative America — the so-called “red states” — who are suffering the heaviest toll in daily gun deaths.
Gun Violence Gap
Despite rhetoric painting liberal big cities as lawless war zones, the most dangerous places in America in terms of gun violence are often deep-red states and rural towns.
Federal health data reveal that states with conservative leadership consistently have higher firearm death rates than their blue-state counterparts.
In 2021, eight of the 10 states with the highest gun death rates per capita were won by Trump in the 2020 election. Mississippi — with a staggering 33.9 per 100,000 firearm death rate, the worst in the nation — voted solidly Republican. By contrast, states with the lowest gun death rates — like Massachusetts, at 3.4 per 100,000 — reliably vote Democratic.
This pattern holds nationwide. Public health research confirms that states in the South and Mountain West with weaker gun laws and higher gun ownership have the highest gun death rates, whereas Northeast states with strong gun safety laws see far fewer deaths.
In other words, the “gun-friendly” policies of red America correlate with more funerals and grieving families, year after year.
Crucially, this gap isn’t just about suicides in isolated areas; it extends to violent crime and murders as well. A recent analysis of homicide data found that the murder rate in Republican-voting states — such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama — was 33 percent higher than in Democratic-voting states in both 2021 and 2022.
Even when researchers control for big urban centers, the red-state murder problem persists. Remove the largest city from every red state, and their homicide rate still far exceeds that of blue states.
The notion that “Democrat-run cities” alone drive violence collapses under scrutiny. People are statistically safer in New York City or San Francisco than in many rural or Southern Republican-led states.
People are statistically safer in New York City or San Francisco than in many rural or Southern Republican-led states.
A groundbreaking study also found that firearm fatalities are now more likely in small rural towns than in big cities — a reversal of historical trends. Thanks largely to soaring gun suicides, the most rural counties experienced overall firearm death rates 25 percent higher than the most urban counties in recent decades. That means the archetypal “American heartland” — often solid Republican territory — quietly endures a higher per-capita burden of gun death than metropolises like Los Angeles or New York.
The carnage encompasses tragic self-inflicted shootings, domestic violence with firearms, and, yes, the mass shootings that now regularly strike church gatherings, small-town Walmarts, and school classrooms in conservative communities.
No corner of the country is spared, but red America is bleeding most.
Paradox of Pro-Gun Politics
Why do those who govern the most gun-afflicted states seem least inclined to acknowledge the crisis?
Republican leaders have long styled themselves as the party of “law and order,” yet they preside over what one analyst dubbed a “red state murder problem.” They champion the Second Amendment as a sacred pillar of freedom, but fail to target root causes that contribute to homicide and suicide rates that dwarf those in other advanced nations.
The Trump administration’s response to violence has instead been to deploy federal agents into conducting roving patrols in democratic strongholds such as Washington to help enforce some of the country’s most restrictive gun laws. Meanwhile, Trump and the GOP are hobbling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives by leaving it without a leader; legalizing fully automaticsimulation devices; and cutting key research into understanding and preventing violence.
It’s a cruel paradox. The right wing’s permissive gun policies have boomeranged to haunt their own constituents and politicians.
When even a figure like Kirk — who once declared that more armed citizens make us safer — ends up bleeding from a bullet wound, it highlights how indiscriminate and all-encompassing America’s gun scourge has become.
The victims are subsequently left with no solace. This year, the Trump administration shut down the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and slashed $158 million in gun violence prevention grants.
Rather than face the uncomfortable reality that easy access to firearms, poor gun trafficking controls, and under-resourced research is fueling more death in red states, GOP officials often deflect to problems in blue cities or pin violence on mental health alone. The numbers, though, don’t lie.
Those “pro-life” conservative lawmakers have effectively enacted policies that make their communities less safe, with more grieving parents, more emptied school desks, and more devastated towns as the predictable outcome.
Bullets Know No Politics
It’s increasingly apparent that the right wing’s embrace of guns has exacted a disproportionate price on its own side. From the would-be assassins targeting GOP presidents to the quiet epidemic of firearm suicide among rural white men — a demographic that leans conservative — American gun culture is, in a dark twist, victimizing the very communities that most fiercely defend it.
If this country is going to surmount its gun violence crises, it must confront an uncomfortable truth: The people of red America are not being protected by the gun-centric promises of the far right — they are being buried by them.
How many more Republican politicians must be rushed to the ER with gunshot wounds? How many small-town obituaries must quietly note a firearm tragedy, before ideology yields to reality?
The right’s reflexive answers to any shooting — more patrols, militarized police, more guns, and less firearm regulation — are looking less like freedom and more like a death pact. Until conservatives reckon with this it, the cycle will continue. The communities they lead will continue to suffer the highest rates of murder and suicide, and even their most venerated leaders will remain in the line of fire.
In the end, America’s gun violence crisis is not a red or blue issue. Right now, however, red America is paying the steepest price. The hope is that acknowledging this truth could spur the kind of cross-partisan soul-searching and reform that has so far proved elusive.
Until then, the grim paradox persists. The loudest champions of an absolutist gun culture are among its foremost casualties.
In the weeks after North Carolina’s Republican-led state legislature passed its infamous 2016 “bathroom bill” — banning transgender people from using the bathroom aligned with their gender — major companies and their CEOs tripped over themselves to denounce it.
The Intercept reached out to 59 of the companies whose names appeared on the amicus brief in 2016 — the other nine had gone out of business, been acquired by larger corporations, or spun off into separate subsidiaries — to get their thoughts on the Texas bill.
Their response: crickets.
Except for Affirm and TD Bank, which both declined to comment, none of the corporations responded to our inquiry or issued prominent public statements against the bill.
“The rise and fall of corporate support for things like LGBTQ rights and representation shows how weak corporations’ support for LGBTQ rights is,” said Joanna Wuest, an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University.
Wuest, who has been researching corporate support for LGBTQ+ rights since 2020, said that she used to find the decline surprising. But by now, she finds the lack of support from the 59 companies standard.
Those companies are Accenture, Affirm, Airbnb, American Airlines, Apple, Biogen, Bloomberg LP, Boehinger Ingleheim USA, Box, Capital One Financial Corporation, Cisco Systems, Consumer Technology Association, Corning Incorporated, Cummins, Dropbox, Dupont, eBay, Etsy, Everlaw, Expedia, FiftyThree, Gap, General Electric Company, Glassdoor, Grokker, Hilton Worldwide, Honor, IBM Corporation, IKEA North American Services, Instacart, Intel Corporation, John Hancock, Levi Strauss & Co., LinkedIn Corporation, Logitech, Marriott International, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, Microsoft, Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, Morgan Stanley, Nextdoor, Nike, PayPal, Quotient, RBC Capital Markets, Red Hat, Replacements Ltd., Salesforce, Slack, SV Angel, TD Bank NA, The Dow Chemical Company, Thermo Fisher Scientific, ThirdLove, Tumblr, United Airlines, Williams-Sonoma, Yelp, ZestFinance, and Zynga.
The Intercept first reached out to 56 of the 59 companies between August 29 and September 2. ZestFinance and RBC Capital Markets were contacted on September 8, and Box was contacted on September 9. Most were reachable via email, but three companies, Accenture, Slack, and Yelp, had to be contacted via web form. The Intercept followed up with all of the companies that did not provide comment.
The Intercept was unable to reach SV Angel and Quotient. Slack was acquired by Salesforce but was contacted separately by The Intercept.
In the past year, corporate support for transgender and LGBTQ+ rights has dropped precipitously. A survey of more than 200 corporations by Gravity Research, a risk-management advisory firm, found that roughly 39 percent of companies planned to reduce Pride Month-related engagement in the first months of the second Trump administration.
Major corporations, including Budweiser brewer Anheuser-Busch, ended their support of Pride festivals across the country this year. And several companies have ended their participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which rates companies based on their treatment of LGBTQ+ employees.
“One simple way of putting it is that many of these corporations just don’t see the added benefit to putting themselves on the line anymore,” said Wuest.
An obvious part of the equation is President Donald Trump.
“This current administration has made it a mission to impose harsh consequences on those who support and protect transgender people’s rights to exist freely and thrive,” said Heron Greenesmith, the deputy director of policy at the Transgender Law Center, in a statement.
More broadly, the administration has targeted companies and nonprofits showing any support for marginalized communities.
Jared Todd, a press secretary for the Human Rights Commission, which authored the 2016 amicus brief, told The Intercept in a statement that “the Trump Administration’s baseless crusade against diversity and inclusion has led to businesses operating in fear and uncertainty, trying to piece together the constantly moving threats from countless executive orders and DOJ guidance.”
In the past, Wuest said, companies tried to curry favor with more progressive consumers and employees — and viewed support for trans rights as beneficial to their brands. But the right’s relentless targeting of companies that have shown a modicum of support for the LGBTQ+ community have flipped their perceived incentives.
“They’re making considerations based on conservative boycotts,” she said, pointing to protests against Target and Budweiser as examples. “That makes even advertising appeals to the queer communities to be fraught.”
Past corporate activism on behalf of transgender rights was arguably performative — but it was at timesincredibly consequential.
“[Corporate activism] can have huge effects, but at the same time, it’s ultimately downstream from a lot of bottom-line interests, and so when those things disappear, the corporations aren’t going to put their necks out,” said Wuest.
Today, 19 states have some iteration of the transgender bathroom ban first modeled in North Carolina.
In the case of Texas, the consequences for both transgender and cisgender Texans are dire. The bill, which passed after roughly 16 attempts from conservative legislators over the last decade, would ban trans people from using public bathrooms, locker rooms, and even prisons and jails that align with their gender. Unlike the North Carolina version, the Texas bill would also impose significant penalties for government agencies and public institutions that allow trans people to use facilities that match their gender.
The fine is $25,000 for first-time offenders and $125,000 for the second time — the most significant penalty of any of the states with similar bans.
“The implications for trans, intersex, and nonbinary people in Texas are staggering: this bill deputizes a legion of potty-police who are incentivized to tattle on anyone whom they suspect is trans or nonbinary using the bathroom,” wrote Greenesmith of the Transgender Law Center. “Gender nonconforming people of every gender — cis, trans, and nonbinary alike — will face the ramifications of this bill.”
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.
South Korean officials are calling for the return of more than 300 of its citizens who were detained last week during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at an electric vehicle battery factory in Georgia. The Department of Homeland Security said it was the largest single-site investigation in the agency’s history. In total, 475 people were arrested.
Immigration officers arrested the workers on Sept. 4 at an under-construction battery factory, which will be part of a huge industrial manufacturing site near Savannah. The anchor of that complex is a new Hyundai electric and hybrid vehicle plant where cars started rolling off the line last year.
Investigators described the raid as the culmination of a long-running inquiry.
“This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses,” said Steven Schrank, DHS special agent in charge for the region. He said some of the detainees were in the US illegally, while others had overstayed their visas or were using the wrong visa to work.
“This has been a multi-month criminal investigation where we have developed evidence, conducted interviews, gathered documents, and presented that evidence to the court in order to obtain a judicial search warrant,” he said.
Schrank said the workers were employed by contractors, sub-contractors, sub-sub contractors, and investigators were still untangling who was employed where. In a statement last week, Hyundai said based on its “current understanding,” none of those detained worked directly for the Motor Company.
The South Korean government reacted quickly, expressing “concern and regret” over the arrests. Within a few days, officials had negotiated the release of the South Korean workers and announced the country was chartering a plane to bring the workers back to Korea. As of Wednesday morning, the workers are still in Georgia.
Many of those detained were engineers and equipment installers, according to an Atlanta immigration attorney representing several of them. They were in the U.S. temporarily to get the factory up and running, then train U.S. workers on it, said attorney Charles Kuck. The equipment at the plant is designed and manufactured in Korea and Japan, he said, so it’s standard practice to bring workers from abroad to install it.
“This is not abnormal to have people from a different country come and help set up a factory,” Kuck said. “It would be abnormal if they weren’t here.”
In 2022, when Georgia Governor Brian Kemp first announced that the Hyundai factory would be coming to the state, it was celebrated as “the largest economic development project in our state’s history.” (Georgia has long pushed to become a center of solar panel, electric vehicle, and battery manufacturing, and even has its own economic development office in Seoul.) Soon afterward, then-President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which enhanced tax credits for electric vehicles and included added incentives for vehicles made in the U.S.
Last week’s raid may have thrown a wrench into those efforts. Indeed, the business repercussions could be far-reaching, according to Andrew Yeo of the Brookings Institution.
According to Yeo, work at the battery plant has stopped. “There isn’t going to be any construction for a while as officials try to sort out what has happened and whether Koreans can continue operations,” he said. Yeo stressed that companies should be employing workers legally, and he said this raid will likely discourage future manufacturing partnerships with foreign companies — partnerships that the U.S. needs for the clean energy sector.
“I do think it’s going to put a pause on how countries think about future investments in the U.S.,” Yeo said. “But of course there are other factors at play that have already created some risks to investing in the U.S.”
Those factors include tariffs and the Trump administration’s reversal of many Biden-era policies and incentives on electric vehicles and renewable energy, which have already raised questions about the future of the factories that opened or expanded in response to the Biden incentives.
There is a “disconnect,” Yeo said, between Trump’s calls for foreign investment and onshoring of manufacturing on the one hand and immigration crackdowns on the other hand. But such issues predate the current administration, he said. During the manufacturing growth under Biden, he said, Korean companies complained that they couldn’t hire skilled workers quickly enough. It’s a problem that U.S. policymakers and foreign companies making EV and clean energy products will need to sort out.
“After all, this is how we create a win-win sort of economic alliance between the U.S. and our allies,” Yeo said.
Marlon Hyde and Emily Wu Pearson of WABE contributed to this report.
The Trump administration said on Monday that it was launching an operation targeting “criminal illegal aliens” in Chicago, dubbed Operation Midway Blitz.
The announcement came two days after President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image on Truth Social depicting himself as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now. In the film, Kilgore – an Air Cavalry Regiment commander who refers to Vietnamese people with a number of vile slurs – annihilates a village to secure a beach for surfing. Trump’s AI image was captioned with a riff on the character’s most famous line: “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’”
“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” the president’s post continued. It came a day after Trump signed an executive order changing the Defense Department’s name to the Department of War.
Following backlash to his threat to make war on America’s third largest city, Trump assured Chicagoans that “Only the Criminals will be hurt!” in another post.
That has not reassured Chicago’s elected officials.
“Trump swore an oath to protect the American people and defend the Constitution. Instead, he is declaring war on every American – including Chicagoans – who stands against his fascist agenda,” Congressmember Delia Ramirez, D-Ill, told The Intercept. “Attacking American cities and wasting billions of dollars on unlawful activities, while cutting essential services for working families are the tactics of wannabe dictators. Trump has betrayed his Constitutional duties and should be impeached.”
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker shared a “Know Your Rights” pamphlet, which mentions that ICE officers can be asked to present a warrant, on X on Saturday. He encouraged those witnessing arrests to film them and share them with media organizations. “Once Donald Trump gets the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law – what comes next?” he asked during a Sunday press conference.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill. – a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot for the Illinois Army National Guard who lost her legs and partial use of her right arm in combat in Iraq – also took exception to Trump’s Kilgore post but for different reasons. “Take off that Cavalry hat, you draft dodger. You didn’t earn the right to wear it. Stolen valor at its worst,” she wrote on X.
On Friday, Duckworth visited Naval Station Great Lakes, which local news outlets have reported the Trump administration is using as a base for federal troops in Chicago. Duckworth wrote on X that Navy personnel answered questions, but that “Trump’s DHS locked the doors and fled.” She continued: “That’s not how you act when you’re doing something legal.”
Experts, including a federal judge, say that the increasing use of military forces in the interior of the U.S. represents an extraordinary violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a bedrock 19th-century law fundamental to the democratic tradition that makes it illegal to use American federal troops on domestic soil as a presidential police force.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled last week that the Pentagon systematically used armed soldiers to perform police functions in California in violation of Posse Comitatus and planned to do so elsewhere. “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth,” he wrote, “have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country … thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”
Trump has also threatened to deploy National Guard troops to Baltimore, New York City, New Orleans, and Oakland. He thanked himself for turning Washington into a “SAFE ZONE” in a Truth Social post on Monday, adding: “Who’s Next???”
Members of Congress have called out Trump’s tyrannical tactics.
“The founders of this nation understood that an unchecked power to turn the military on the American people poses a grave threat to democracy and individual liberty,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. “Trump’s decision to deploy the military in American cities is more fitting for an authoritarian regime than the democracy that our nation’s founding fathers fought for.”
Last week,The Intercept reported that a U.S. military occupation of Chicago could cost almost $1.6 million per day, according to an exclusive expert estimate.
Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, found that if Trump deployed 3,000 National Guard troops to Chicago it would cost taxpayers around $1,590,000 per day. The figure exceeded the more than $1 million daily price tag of Trump’s troop deployment in Washington, D.C., which The Intercept reported last month. These runaway expenses connected to Trump’s efforts to turn the U.S. into a genuine police state are expected to climb into the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
Pritzker’s office called out the costs. “Governor Pritzker has been loud and clear: sending military into a U.S. city without any local coordination is unconstitutional and un-American,” a spokesperson for the governor told The Intercept, noting that the funds would be better spent on community violence interventions, job training programs, or education. “Instead of undermining our existing public safety efforts with fear campaigns or military troops, the people of Illinois deserve real leadership that delivers real solutions.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said last week that the deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles, which began June 7, peaked at around 5,500 personnel, and has since dwindled to about 300 National Guardsmen, has cost $118 million and amounts to “millions of taxpayer dollars down the drain.” A previous Pentagon estimate put the cost of the deployment at $134 million.
The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the potential cost of domestic troop deployments running into the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
The International Criminal Court bash fest is getting ever more frenetic in Washington and among the law shredding members of the Netanyahu cabinet in Israel. Last month, the Trump administration smacked sanctions on judicial members Kimberly Prost of Canada and Nicolas Guillou of France via Executive Order 14203. Prosecutors also received a chastening, sanctioning experience, including Nazhat Shameem Khan of Fiji and Mame Mandiaye Niang of Senegal.
The US Secretary State Marco Rubio, who occupies more administrative posts than he can identify, confirmed the line of his boss, President Donald J. Trump. The ICC was “a national security threat that had been an instrument for lawfare against the United States and our close ally Israel.” In an August 20 press statement, Rubio insisted that the individuals in question had sought to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute US and Israeli nationals “without the consent of either nation”. While Rubio has an undergraduate’s acquaintance with the principle of consent regarding the jurisdiction of the court, he should also be aware the involvement of the ICC can still take place regarding a non-signatory to the Rome Statute in certain cases.
In the case of the murder, mayhem and orgiastic slaughter being visited upon Palestinians by the Israeli forces, the ICC has assumed jurisdiction given Palestinian ratification of the treaty. As the alleged breaches of humanitarian law have taken place on Palestinian soil, Israel has fallen within the court’s investigative and judicial scope. In November 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant were issued with arrest warrants. Rubio, nonetheless, repeats the usual charge sheet and insists that actions are necessary “to protect our troops, our sovereignty, and our allies from the ICC’s illegitimate and baseless actions.” With depths of sheer cravenness, he insists that signatories to the Rome Statute appreciate that the freedom of many of the ratifiers “was purchased at the price of great American sacrifices”.
The response from the ICC to such head spinning conspiracy could do no more than summarise the important point: that the sanctions were “a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution.” The move was “also an affront against the Court’s States Parties, the rules-based international order and, above all, millions of innocent victims across the world.” With admirable pluck, the body went on to declare that it would persist in “fulfilling its mandate, undeterred, in strict accordance with its legal framework as adopted by the State Parties and without regard to any restriction, pressure or threat.”
UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric also told the press that the decision by Washington imposed “severe impediments on the functioning of the office of the prosecutor and respect for all the situations that are currently before the court.”
Such impositions, and the broader attempt to place the US outside the gravitational pull of the ICC, has become routine. American exceptionalism is always cited as the mainstay principle in doing so, despite the fact that drafting the original Rome Statute involved considerable interest from the American legal fraternity. The first Trump administration saw the issuing of Executive Order 13928 in June 2020, which imposed travel and financial sanctions on ICC personnel and their family members. President Joe Biden revoked the measure in April, 2021, with his Secretary of State Antony Blinken reasoning that the order had been “inappropriate and ineffective”.
Last year, the House of Representatives passed the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act which blustered against international law while shielding US citizens and entities, along with non-US citizens lawfully resident in the country. Were the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute such “protected” persons, the President would “impose visa- and property-blocking sanctions against the foreign persons that engaged in or materially insisted in such actions”. Sanctions blocking the visas of immediate family members of those targeted would also be implemented.
In January this year, the same bill failed by 54-45 votes to pass, though Democrat and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer could still offer considerable support for the instrument. “However, as much as I oppose the ICC bias against Israel, as much as I want to see that institution drastically reformed and reshaped, the bill before us is poorly drafted and deeply problematic.”
In February, Trump reprised his role as assaulter-in-chief of the ICC by issuing Executive Order 14203, reviving the provisions of the moribund Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act. He warned that the Court’s “recent actions against Israel and the United States set a dangerous precedent, directly endangering current and former United States personnel, including active service members of the Armed Forces, by exposing them to harassment, abuse, and possible arrest.” Accordingly, any non-American person or organisation can be sanctioned if they directly engage in any actions on the part of the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute a “protected person” without consent of that individual’s country or nationality. (Such persons are defined as US nationals and US military personnel, including persons who are citizens or lawful residents of a US NATO ally or “major non-NATO ally”.)
Anyone supplying material assistance, including sponsorship, financial, material or technological assistance to the Court’s activities, can also be sanctioned. As before, these can take the form of blocking assets within the US and bans on entry into the US for any sanctioned persons including their families. Most prominently on the list is ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan.
While criticism of these battering responses from Trump has been forthcoming from various Rome Statute member states, they constitute a mere smattering. Trump’s hostility to the regime of international justice and accountability is one shared, overtly or otherwise, by various allies and adversaries. Netanyahu knows, for instance, that the ICC arrest warrant will carry no truck in certain countries, however sentimental they claim to be about international humanitarian law. France’s Foreign Ministry is notably adamant that he is immune from arrest, as Israel is not a party to the ICC. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stoutly flouted the warrant by inviting the Israeli PM to Budapest and also announcing his country’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute. Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, preferring a certain obliqueness, called the ICC decision “unfortunate”, undermining “its authority in other cases when it equates the elected representatives of a democratic state with the leaders of an Islamist terrorist organization.” With supporters like these, the blunting and sundering of international judicial processes is always assured.
It was a humid June morning when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents knocked on the door of a modest condo in North Miami Beach, Florida, just across the canal from Greynolds Park — a relic of the New Deal, shaded by old oaks. They weren’t conducting a sweep. They had come for Foad Farahi, a Sunni imam who had lived in the area for more than 30 years.
Farahi was taken to a detention center in Miami and then put on a government plane to Texas, bound for a different detention facility. Later, he was moved again, this time to Torrance County Detention Center: a bleak, privately run complex in the remote deserts of New Mexico, where recent reports describe sewage backups and a lack of clean drinking water. He’s been locked up there ever since.
Farahi, 50, is one of thousands who have been swept up by ICE since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January. But this wasn’t the first time the U.S. government had backed him into a corner. Nearly 20 years earlier, in the last years of George W. Bush’s presidency, U.S. officials tried to use the threat of deportation as leverage to turn him into an informant against his own community.
He refused. He wasn’t deported, and he never became an informant. For years after, he lived in the shadow of the immigration system, checking in with authorities, complying with every rule. Now, his lawyers argue, his detention is less about process than punishment. “Mr. Farahi’s detention appears to be purely punitive,” they wrote in a recent habeas petition in federal court in New Mexico.
Farahi’s story stretches across two decades of American security policy, linking the FBI’s post-9/11 informant machine to today’s immigration dragnet. His treatment has long raised questions about whether the FBI weaponized immigration enforcement as a tool of coercion and what it means when saying no to the government results in a life sentence in limbo.
“We Want You to Work With Us”
Farahi’s fight with the government began in November 2004. As he walked home from evening prayers in North Miami Beach, he saw two men waiting outside his apartment. They introduced themselves as FBI agents.
The country was still in the grip of post-9/11 panic, and the agents wanted information about two men who had attended Farahi’s mosque: José Padilla, the so-called “dirty bomber” accused of plotting to set off a crude radioactive device, and Adnan El Shukrijumah, a Saudi national who became a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda after leaving the U.S.
Farahi said he’d talk, but only in the open. He wanted his congregation to know why he was speaking to the FBI. The federal agents wanted something very different: secrecy.
“We want you to work with us,” they told him. “We’ll give you residency. We’ll give you money to go to school.”
“I can’t,” he told them. To him, becoming an informant would have meant betraying his faith community. “People trust you as a religious figure, and you’re trying to kind of deceive them,” Farahi said to me years ago, when I first asked him about his encounter with the FBI. “That’s where the problem is.”
The agents left, but the pressure never did. In 2007, at a routine asylum hearing, ICE agents gave Farahi an ultimatum: Drop his asylum claim and agree to be deported, or face federal terrorism charges. The subtext was clear: There was another way out — become an informant.
A Policy of Coercion
I first wrote about Farahi’s case in 2009, when it was one of the earliest public examples of the FBI using immigration to recruit Muslim informants. At the time, the FBI denied the practice outright. As other journalists uncovered similar cases, the FBI continued to deny.
FBI agents were even tasked under official policy with helping deport informants who were “no longer suitable for use” — an acknowledgment that the policy goal wasn’t transactional so much as coercive.
For years, FBI agents and their informants probed and surveilled Farahi, always coming up short on evidence. The FBI recruited a con man named Mohammed Agbareia to work as an informant in Florida and tasked him with befriending Farahi. “Farahi was a person of interest,” Agbareia later told me.
While working for the FBI, Agbareia was bilking Muslim communities nationwide using a stranded-traveler scam — calling mosques and claiming he was on his way, something had happened, just needed some money to get there — but FBI agents allowed his scams to continue and protected him from deportation, because he was useful for spying on Muslims like Farahi.
The unrelenting investigations of Farahi never yielded charges. Farahi has never been credibly accused of terrorism, much less indicted. The government’s ongoing suspicion appears to stem, in part, from a single FBI report from 2007 alleging that Farahi was a Muslim Brotherhood recruiter — based entirely on the claims of a source in Trinidad who offered no evidence.
His actual record consists only of a 2003 case for driving on a suspended license.
In 2020, an immigration court judge denied Farahi’s asylum claim but ruled that he could not be deported to Iran, his country of citizenship. As a Sunni Muslim, Farahi faces likely religious persecution in majority-Shia Iran, the judge determined.
The ruling left Farahi in immigration limbo. Under a so-called “withholding of removal” order, he could not be sent to Iran, but he also had no legal status. He could remain in the U.S. on the condition that he check in with immigration officials every six months. He complied, without fail, for years.
The Crackdown
Then came Trump’s immigration crackdown. Detention has ballooned to record levels, with more than 60,000 people now held in immigration detention, compared to a high of fewer than 40,000 under former President Joe Biden.
The Trump administration has implemented sweeping new tools: expedited removals, raids in sanctuary cities, and deportation flights to third countries — even where individuals lack ties. ICE has struck deals with Uganda, Eswatini, Rwanda, and South Sudan to accept deportees, while others were dropped at El Salvador’s massive CECOT prison, built for gang crackdowns and now housing migrants under a U.S. agreement to pay El Salvador $6 million.
Lawyers for men deported to Eswatini say they were delivered into prisons without due process, just as happened in El Salvador — signs of how the U.S. government’s deportation practices are outsourcing indefinite confinement to countries with poor human rights records.
Farahi is now trapped in this sprawling, multinational system of deportation and detention. After three decades in the U.S., he’s facing the greatest risk of being forced out. Where to? For months, no one would say. “He hasn’t been told where they would send him, if anywhere,” his lawyer, Kenia Garcia, told me.
This week, that silence broke. ICE told Farahi they were asking Kuwait to take him. Farahi grew up there, but he was never a citizen, and he knows Kuwait could simply send him on to Iran — the very danger he fled when he arrived in the U.S. at 19 years old.
ICE declined an invitation to comment on Farahi’s case.
What began for Farahi with a knock on his door in 2004 has ended with another in 2025, and what began as a counterterrorism strategy has evolved into a system that wields detention and deportation not as tools of security, but as punishments in their own right.
The Trump administration, citing an ongoing “energy emergency,” has once again saddled a community already overburdened by pollution with a dirty, obsolete power plant it doesn’t want or need. The decision has confounded residents and environmental justice advocates, who called the move an abuse of federal law and a lost opportunity to improve the area’s air quality.
The Department of Energy issued what’s called an emergency stay open order for Constellation Energy’s gas-fired power plant in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, on August 27. It is the second time since May the agency has taken this step, and amounts to “an extraordinary and unprecedented” use of the Federal Power Act, said Robert Routh of the National Resources Defense Council.
The NRDC, along with the Sierra Club, The Clean Air Council, and several other environmental groups, is challenging the decision. Emergency stay open orders have previously been reserved for wartime conditions or natural disasters, said Routh, who is the Pennsylvania policy director for the organization. “This is an abuse of an extraordinary authority reserved for emergency situations,” he said, noting that the short-term need for increased electricity the administration cited in defending the move would not justify keeping the facility open. “They are concocting the emergency situation in order to justify keeping a dirty fossil plant online past its retirement date.”
Eddystone lies just outside Philadelphia, at the head of a 12-mile industrial corridor that stretches to the town of Marcus Hook and is generally considered one of the most toxic areas in the state. Today, it’s home to myriad hazardous industries, including the nation’s largest trash incinerator, chemical plants, and refineries. Childhood asthma rates in the region are four times the national average, and the rates of some forms of cancer are more than 1,000 times higher.
Constellation Energy’s gas plant in Eddystone began operation in the early 1960s and currently provides about 782 megawatts to the surrounding region. It has run only sporadically in recent years, in large part because it simply was not economical to operate consistently. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, it emitted 23,102 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022, 16 tons of methane, and 31 tons of nitrous oxide. Grid operator PJM approved Constellation’s shutdown request for the plant in December of 2023 after finding that the closure would not adversely impact the grid, and the facility was scheduled to close May 31. But, one day before the closure, the Department of Energy, or DOE, ordered the plant to continue operating. The agency reissued that order when it expired last week.
Although environmental advocates argue the emergency order is a manufactured crisis, the DOE cited summer heatwaves as the rationale for keeping the plant open, noting that the “Eddystone units were called on by PJM to generate electricity during heat waves that hit the region in June and July.” The grid operator did not respond when asked if closing the plant would have caused blackouts — something that would not have been considered in its decision to approve the facility’s closure, because PJM cannot deny a closure solely on those grounds. But PJM said it supported extending the emergency order. Constellation Energy blamed the rapid expansion of the data centers powering artificial intelligence, saying that it is “continuing to work with the Department of Energy and PJM in taking emergency measures to meet the need for power at this critical time when America must win the AI race.”
In July, Trump and Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick announced the private sector had promised $90 billion in funding to turn Pennsylvania into a hub for data centers. This has drawn concern from environmental advocates, who worry that the promise of corporate investment will provide a handy excuse to prolong the life of oil and liquid natural gas in order to generate electricity for hypothetical data centers.
“We have not yet seen that demand that everyone is talking about from the data centers,” said Jessica O’Neill, managing attorney at PennFuture, an environmental advocacy nonprofit. “In Pennsylvania, we just seem to fall over ourselves, again and again, to attract new industry.” Her concern, she explained, was that the state would build speculative gas plants or extend the life of aging plants in the service of an industry that might never materialize.
When Constellation’s shutdown request was approved almost two years ago, the grid operator noted that the plant’s closure would not cause “any reliability violations,” or leave the region at risk of blackouts.” Both Routh and O’Neill noted that PJM’s interconnection crisis has left many renewable energy projects in limbo as they wait to be brought onto the grid. Despite the administration’s dire warnings of an energy emergency, it has moved aggressively to shut down renewable energy projects that would provide more electricity.
“I personally think it’s interesting that they’re justifying the stay open order on the grounds that there’s an energy emergency, because that has not been shown to be the case,” said Lauren Minsky, a medical historian and professor of environmental health at Haverford College. “And what there clearly is, is a public health emergency.” As part of her work, Minsky has been tracking community cancer rates in the industrial stretch between Eddystone and Marcus Hook. Pediatric Hodgkin’s Lymphoma rates in Eddystone are 1051 percent higher than the national average; youth uterine cancer rates are 1813 percent higher.
The emergency stay open order will likely increase costs for ratepayers, Routh explained. Because the order came down just a day before the plant was to retire, Constellation Energy had to abruptly order an enormous amount of fuel and tackle deferred maintenance it never expected to deal with. “Those costs are going to be shifted to ratepayers,” said Routh. “Whereas this plant otherwise would not have been operating. This is an unprecedented use of this authority, and it’s done in a way that doesn’t make sense even on its own face.”
Bougainvilleans went to the polls today, keen to elect a leader who will continue their fight for independence.
“There’s a mood of excitement among the people here,” said Electoral Commissioner Desmond Tsianai.
“It is important that this election is successful and credible, because we want legitimate leaders in the government, who will continue discussions with Papua New Guinea over independence,” he said.
Tsianai said there were more than 239,000 registered voters in the autonomous PNG region and he expects a better turnout than the 67 percent during the 2020 election.
“We anticipate voter turnout will increase due to the importance of this election in the political aspirations of Bougainville.”
Tsianai said his office had been proactive, encouraging voters to enrol and reaching out through schools to first-time voters aged 18 and over.
Polling pushed back
Polling was scheduled to begin on Thursday but was pushed back a day to allow time to dispatch ballot papers.
In addition, he said, there were some quality control issues concerning serial numbers.
“These are an important safeguard against fraud. We, therefore, took measures to ensure that these issues were rectified, so that electoral integrity was assured.”
The final shipment of ballot papers, which was scheduled for delivery on August 23, finally arrived on September 2, he said.
This did not allow enough time for packing and distribution to enable polling to take place on Thursday.
“The printing of the ballot papers and the delay afterwards was out of our hands, however we’ve taken the necessary steps to ensure the integrity of the process.
The polling period for the elections was from September 2-8, and the office had discretion to select any date within that period based on election planning, he said.
“Rescheduling allowed sufficient time to resolve ballot delivery delays and to ensure that polling teams are ready to serve voters.”
Preventing risk
He said that the rescheduling was done in the interest of voters, candidates and stakeholders, to prevent any risk of disenfranchisement.
“We remain fully committed to delivering a credible election and will continue to provide regular updates to maintain transparency and confidence in the electoral process,” he said.
“We have taken the necessary steps and anticipated that some wards within constituencies have a larger voting population so extra teams had been allocated to those wards so polling can be conducted in a day.”
The dominant issue going into the election remained the quest for independence.
In 2020, there were strong expectations that the autonomous region would soon achieve that, given the result of an historic referendum.
A 97.7 percent majority voted for independence in a referendum which began in November 2019.
However, that has not happened yet, and Port Moresby has yet to concede much ground.
Toroama not pressured
Bougainville’s 544 polling stations will open from 8am to 4pm local time (9am-5pm NZT) in what is the first time the Autonomous Bougainville Government has planned a single day poll.
Some 404 candidates are contesting for 46 seats in the Bougainville Parliament, including a record 34 women.
Six men are challenging Ishmael Toroama for his job.
Toroama recently told RNZ Pacific that he was not feeling any pressure as he sought a second five-year term in office.
“I’m the kind of man that has process. They voted me for the last five years. And if the people wish to put me, the decision, the power to put people, it is democracy. They will vote for me.” he said.
Counting will take place on September 9-21, and writs will be returned to the Speaker of the House the following day.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The last time Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., faced a primary challenge, special interest groups came to his aid by pouring more than $1 million into the race.
Today, in the 2026 race, another challenger is trying their hand against Gomez — and they have the backing of progressive outfit Justice Democrats.
Supporters of Angela Gonzales-Torres think she’ll be able to fight off spending from the pro-Israel and cryptocurrency lobby groups that dominated Gomez’s last primary. Justice Democrats said it will help Gonzales-Torres raise money through its grassroots, digital funding network.
“Being deemed progressive isn’t the same as delivering real change.”
Gonzales-Torres, a former Highland Park neighborhood council president, launched her campaign against Gomez in April, saying the incumbent had sold out the congressional district thanks to the influx of special interest money.
“I didn’t move to this district to become a politician funded by corporate super PACs,” said Gonzales-Torres, who was born and raised in North East LA. “We need to recognize that being deemed progressive isn’t the same as delivering real change.”
Gonzales-Torres criticized Gomez for not signing onto progressive bills that would have conditioned arms sales to Israel, stanched the flow of corporate cash in politics, and tackled price gouging.
“It isn’t just about calling for someone’s resignation,” she told The Intercept. “It’s about answering for our calls as Angelenos.”
Justice Democrats said Gomez’s leadership isn’t meeting the moment in a city that President Donald Trump has flooded with ICE agents and National Guard troops.
“Jimmy Gomez got to Washington and closed the door on his community behind him to embrace the same corporate PACs and right-wing lobbies that are raising costs for Angelenos and demanding their tax dollars fund genocide,” said Justice Democrats spokesperson Usamah Andrabi. “In a city that has become ground zero for Donald Trump’s war on immigrant families, Angelenos deserve a leader whose donors will never dictate how hard they fight back.”
Defended by AIPAC
Gonzales-Torres is the second challenger Gomez has faced in recent years from his left. In office since 2017, Gomez easily beat a challenge during his first term from Kenneth Mejia, now the Los Angeles city controller. In each of the last three elections, Gomez fended off more credible challenges from Democrat David Kim.
Kim came within 6 percent points of beating Gomez during the general election in 2020 — where they faced off thanks to California’s “jungle primary” system — and 3 points in the 2022 general election.
In the 2024 race, Kim called for cutting off U.S. military funding to Israel and drew fire from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and its super PAC, United Democracy Project. Kim also supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and called for an international court to prosecute illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Kim endorsed Gonzales-Torres, who previously volunteered for his campaign.
After AIPAC, the nation’s flagship Israel lobby, spent more than half a million dollars against Kim last year, Gomez won by 11 points.
AIPAC has been among Gomez’s top campaign contributors over the last decade. AIPAC’s candidate page for Gomez praises him for supporting pro-Israel legislation, including co-sponsoring a resolution affirming U.S. support for Israel after the October 7 attacks.
The group also touted his support for legislation for supplemental security assistance to Israel, condemning BDS and traveling twice to Israel on trips paid for by AIPAC’s educational arm. The lobby group congratulated Gomez in November for beating Kim, who they described as running on an “overtly anti-Israel platform.” (AIPAC and its super PAC did not respond to a request for comment.)
Still, Gomez’s record on Israel has not agreed with AIPAC’s every position.
In the wake of the October 7 attack, he signed on quickly to measures affirming unconditional U.S. support for Israel and a harshly worded resolution on escalating campus protest movements against the war.
In November 2023, though, Gomez called for a “cessation of hostilities” in Gaza, even as AIAPC raged against any call for an end to the violence.
Whenprogressives, responding to spiking Palestinian deaths in the early days of the war, pushed a ceasefire resolution, Gomez did not sign on. (Gomez’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
He has voted both for and against U.S. funding for Israel and called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign. Unlike many other pro-Israel Democrats, Gomez did not vote for a measure to condemn the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as antisemitic; instead, he abstained. He was also absent for a vote to adopt a definition of antisemitism that includes any criticism of Israel. And he voted present on a resolution to condemn antisemitism on college campuses.
Crypto Cash
Gomez also received support in his last race from the cryptocurrency industry. Putting in more than half a million dollars to back Gomez, crypto was the second-largest outside spender in the race after AIPAC. The political action committee Fairshake, whose subsidiary PACs back candidates in both parties, spent $511,000 to support Gomez.
Gomez has an A rating from a leading pro-cryptocurrency group and has voted for at least four bills in the last two years that were supported by the industry, including Trump’s bill to accelerate deregulation. (FairShake did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
More recently, however, Gomez criticized Trump for profiting from crypto. Replying to a story earlier this week about the Trump family making billions of dollars from its crypto venture, Gomez tweeted that Trump and the billionaire establishment are profiting as “everyone else gets screwed.”
Gomez has enjoyed steady support from constituents since he was first elected in 2016. Gomez has been a vocal critic of Trump. He made national headlines in June for being denied entry to a federal immigration detention facility and, in July, sued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for blocking him and three other Democrats from visiting detention facilities.
The money Gomez gets from corporate PACs is what Gonzales-Torres is focusing on. After pro-Israel groups, Gomez’s top donors throughout his career include real estate and insurance groups, law firms, and securities and investment outfits. He has also received support from labor unions and progressives including another Justice Democrats candidate, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Gonzales-Torres, for her part, is rejecting corporate PAC money. Instead, she is running on affordable housing, access to mental health support, and ending mass incarceration. And she supports protecting immigrants’ rights, Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal — all things Gomez supports too.
Gonzales-Torres said she’s not focused on whether AIPAC will spend against her campaign. She’s betting small-dollar donors and a student-led campaign can overcome the big money. She said her campaign is focusing on mobilizing students in the district.
She said, “That means that we are not selling out our communities to corporate PACs.”
A West Papuan activist says the transfer of four political prisoners by Indonesian authorities is a breach of human rights.
In April, the men were arrested on charges of treason after requesting peace talks in the city of Sorong in southwest Papua. They were then transferred to Makassar city in Eastern Indonesia and are awaiting trial.
Police had reportedly used “heavy-handed” attempts to disrupt the protest but was met with riotous responses, with tyres set on fire and government buildings being attacked.
A 28-year-old man was seriously injured when police shot him in the abdomen.
Seventeen people were arrested for property damage, while police are still search for former political prisoner Sayan Mandabayan accused of being the “organiser” of the protest.
West Papuan activist Ronny Kareni told RNZ Pacific Waves the protest was initially meant to be peaceful.
He said the four political prisoners being far from their home city had raised concerns.
‘Raises many concerns’
“What the transfer really transpired, is it raises many concerns from human rights defenders and many of us arguing that the transfer violates the principles of the Article 85 of the Indonesian Procedure Code which requires trials to be held where the alleged offence occured.”
Kareni said the transfer isolated prisoners from their families, community support and legal counsel.
Indonesian authorities say the group were transferred due to security concerns for the trial.
Kareni said the movement to liberate West Papua from Indonesia would continue to be seen as “treason”, even if there was peaceful dialogue.
“There is no space for exercising your right to determine your future or determine what you feel that matters to you,” he said.
“Just talking peace, just to kind of like come to the table to offer peace talks, is seen as treason.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Last year, my mum finally had a hysterectomy due to her endometriosis after years of disabling pain. In the months since, it’s become clear that I will likely be following. But, the care on offer for me so far has consisted of a suggestion to use the contraceptive pill.
The kicker? I had avoided acknowledging my symptoms for months, knowing the realities of seeking support.
During the course of 2025, I have watched countless competition reality TV shows, ranging from Race Across the World to Hell’s Kitchen. Last week, during the final of The Fortune Hotel, finalist Briony spoke about her participation being related to her need to self-fund fertility care in relation to her endometriosis, and described how she was not being supported to access in the NHS.
This is not the first time this year we have heard something similar from a competition participant in the UK. Following her banishment during season 3 of The Traitors in January, Elen spoke to the press about being on a four-year waiting list for surgery following ten years of debilitating pain and gaslighting from her doctors, including being told she had a low pain tolerance.
What is the UK getting so wrong about endometriosis?
For people with endometriosis or seeking care for their menstrual health, a comment like that experienced by Elen will not come as a shock. In 2024, Endometriosis UK surveyed over four thousand people, finding that 78% of those who later received a diagnosis had been told by one or more doctors that they were making a ‘fuss about nothing’ or similar, with many having their symptom severity questioned.
Research on medical misogyny is still in its infancy, relatively speaking. However, it is a tale as old as time for women and other people of marginalised genders. The Women and Equalities Committee published a report into reproductive health conditions in December. Their findings echoed similar sentiments when it came to dismissal of symptoms. They also looked into the impact of delays in treatment, both in progressive symptoms and on an individual’s mental health.
The journey to diagnosis for endometriosis continues to be an average of eight years and 10 months. And, that statistic is rising, rather than falling. In the past few years, this has been attributed to the pandemic. However, it doesn’t change the fact that lack of treatment is not for lack of trying by patients. The same Endometriosis UK survey found almost half of respondents visited their GP ten or more times with symptoms, and 70% at least five times.
Endometriosis and similar menstrual conditions are still not taken seriously. This is clear not only from the attitudes of professionals but also through the lack of funding, intervention or support. But when endometriosis is represented on television and other media, the reality is crystal clear: people with endometriosis are desperate to be heard.
Financial factors: why might TV be the best route?
For many seeking treatment, private healthcare becomes the only route. Waiting lists simply get longer for everything from initial gynaecological appointments to surgeries. This was the case for my mum: as a family, we had to borrow the £14,000 it cost to get her surgery sooner. Her symptoms were so debilitating she could barely move, impacting every aspect of her life.
This, of course, impacted her ability to work. The lack of funding for endometriosis at large feels even more cruel as the government continues to insist disabled people must be in employment. And, just for the kicker, if we don’t work – because we can’t – we’re seen as scroungers. As part of written evidence for the government report into reproductive health conditions, charity Bloody Good Period highlighted employment as a barrier to treatment and diagnosis due to inability to take leave or discuss their conditions openly.
Given these compounding financial factors, it’s no wonder why people with endometriosis are turning to reality television for desperately needed funds. Unfortunately, these competition shows often have extremely active elements during their missions and challenges. It is an extremely dystopian sign of the times that individuals are better off putting themselves in taxing situations that could cause more harm to their bodies in order to get basic healthcare.
What private healthcare?
In The Fortune Hotel, the final clips revealed the winners giving £5000 to Briony and her mum to contribute to her treatment. Whilst it should have felt touching, it only troubled me further that this is even necessary in the first place.
Going on TV for any kind of healthcare should be seen as extremely concerning. But, surely it’s time to ask: how and why is the system going so wrong for people of marginalised genders, and where can the situation even go from here?
Ultimately, I hope someone from the government has been trying to enjoy some evening television and been reminded of the failures they are inflicting on endless people with menstrual health conditions – because we’re reminded every single day.
The Trump administration’s war on immigrants is expanding. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday confirmed its deportation operations would ramp up in Chicago and other major U.S. cities in the coming weeks. When the new fiscal year kicks in October 1, Immigration Customs and Enforcement can begin tapping billions in new funds from President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. With the agency seeking to hire 10,000 new agents, Americans can expect more violent raids snatching their neighbors off the streets.
The epicenter of America’s anti-immigrant campaign has been Los Angeles and its surrounding cities, where thousands have been arrested since June. Almost every day this summer, federal agents from ICE and U.S. Border Patrol have stalked Home Depot parking lots, car washes, and immigrant communities across Southern California, detaining people based on ethnicity or language.
“If they break LA, they can break any community in this country.”
But as the Trump administration’s war on immigrants expands, so does the resistance against it.
“It’s important that they break LA,” said Ron Gochez, a high school history teacher and leading member of the LA-based grassroots group Unión Del Barrio. “If they break LA, they can break any community in this country.”
Gochez and Unión Del Barrio are a part of the Community Self-Defense Coalition, a network of dozens of grassroots groups. The network conducts daily street patrols to warn their neighbors of possible ICE activity.
Filmmaker Brandon Tauszik embedded with Gochez and other members of Unión Del Barrio throughout the summer for The Intercept. In the documentary film “A City Fights Back: How LA Defends Itself Against ICE,” activists show a multifaceted strategy of opposition. They drive the streets in search of federal agents, monitor highway off-ramps to flag suspicious cars entering their communities, organize protests, and recruit and train new members willing to combat ICE.
For Gochez, a high school teacher and a father, the stakes are increasingly personal.
Ron Gochez at a rally outside a Home Depot in Los Angeles.Photo: Brandon Tauszik/The Intercept
On August 8, federal agents snatched up high school student Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruz, 18, while he was walking his dog in Van Nuys, days before he was set to begin his senior year at Reseda Charter High School. He remains in ICE detention at a privately owned facility 80 miles away in Adelanto, California. Days later, agents detained at gunpoint Nathan Mejia, 15, outside of Arleta High School before releasing him later that day.
Both Mejia and Guerrero-Cruz are students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where Gochez teaches. In the film, he reflects on how his fight is intertwined with that of the next generation.
“It’s a constant reminder why we struggle and why we do what we do,” he says, while playing with his son. “One day when we’re no longer here and he’ll be here, and maybe his children, they’ll have a better life than what we had and what our parents had — so we’re fighting for the next seven generations, and he’s next up.”
This project was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with funding made possible by The Puffin Foundation.
The rats scurried into the shed. Flinching at the sound of a horde of tiny claws scratching at the ground, Migdalia Mass Llorens kept vigil over her sleeping family huddled together under a single blanket. The 35-year-old mother of three couldn’t bring herself to join her kids in peaceful slumber. The hard floor and the rodents were bad enough. There was also the sinking awareness that her family may no longer have a home to return to that kept her up well into the night.
It was late September 2017, and Hurricane Maria had just roared through Puerto Rico. The catastrophic storm came just weeks after Hurricane Irma swept through the archipelago. When Maria hit, the family was sheltering inside their wooden house, which they had tied down with wire cables in the hopes it would hold. But the cables were no match for the 155 mph winds: In the middle of the night, the cords snapped and the roof flew off, letting in a deluge of rain. During the eye of the storm, the terrified family ran out the front door and to a tiny cinder-block shed still under construction on their farm. Torrents of water joined the rodents creeping in through holes in the structure.
In the daylight, the Mass Llorenses emerged to find their house flattened — one of many in the rural agricultural municipality of Las Marías, tucked high up in the Cordillera Central mountain range on the main island’s west coast, destroyed by the storm.
“When the storm passed, we went outside and realized we had nothing left,” said Mass Llorens in Spanish. They picked through the wreckage to gather what they could, before she and her husband moved their children into the half-built shed — meant to store farm tools and crops, not people. “We lost everything. We cried.”
A woman pulls a trash can past a home destroyed by Hurricane Maria. Ricardo Arduengo / AFP via Getty Images
After shelter, hunger quickly became the biggest concern for Mass Llorens and her family. At first, she harvested the scores of breadfruit and bananas that had fallen from their trees during the hurricane. Then she salvaged tins of Spam and sausages, boxes of crackers, and bags of rice from the rubble of her home. They had scarce other options. The Category 4 storm had isolated their rural community from rescue and relief efforts. Landslides and floods washed away roads and downed trees, and mounds of debris blocked the routes that remained.
As the days bled into weeks, with both electricity and cell tower communications still offline, the Mass Llorens family passed the time by beginning the slow, arduous process of cleaning up their land. Piece by piece — broken kitchen chair by shattered dish — they methodically cleared the debris into heaping piles of trash.
Time itself soon became another thing to contend with: Some of their food started to spoil. The rats also seemed to be getting hungrier — and braver. Before nightfall every day, the family had to pile their cache of food on a rotted wooden table and fight them off by hand. It was then that Mass Llorens realized that help would be a long way off.
“I was afraid of having nothing, of running out of food… it was horrible,” she said. “The help just didn’t come. It just didn’t arrive.”
In the wake of Maria, a hunger crisis set in across Puerto Rico. But the food and water shortages preceded the hurricane. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
At the same time, the food and water shortages experienced by millions of Puerto Ricans were also linked to the island’s staggering rate of food insecurity that preceded the hurricane — and that still persist today. Roughly 41 percent of the population currently lives below the poverty line, and up to one-third is believed to be food-insecure — which is nearly four times the average throughout the continental U.S.
In the wake of Maria, many residents of Puerto Rico, especially those working to improve the archipelago’s local food system, began to think about hurricane preparedness differently. Because they weren’t able to rely on federal assistance, they decided to build their own prototypes of resilience, which didn’t just set them up to be ready for the next storm, but also set them up to live better everyday lives. Cooperatives, gardens, and school-based agricultural programs emerged to fill the gaps left by the government. Barter networks and local farmers markets have become increasingly popular. Mutual-aid kitchens and community-led supermarkets have also expanded their work, ramping up donations, surplus food, and partnerships with nearby producers. These projects aren’t just temporary disaster responses. They are models of long-term resilience and food independence. They are living blueprints of what food sovereignty could look like in Puerto Rico — and elsewhere.
After Maria, many residents began to think about hurricane preparedness and their food system differently. A woman buys her lunch at a community kitchen in Humacao, Puerto Rico. Lester Jimenez / AFP via Getty Images
“Puerto Rico’s food system does not exist in a vacuum,” said David Josué Carrasquillo Medrano, executive director of the San Juan-based nonprofit Planifiquemos who also served on the Department of Agriculture’s Equity Commission during the Biden administration. The “food-secure, climate-resilient, economically just” future of Puerto Rico, he added, “requires breaking the policy cage that has kept it vulnerable for too long.”
A U.S. soldier hands out bottled water, provided by FEMA, to residents of Puerto Rico. Mario Tama / Getty Images
Puerto Rico is overly reliant on imported food, which history shows can quickly spiral into a crisis of accessibility when a bout of extreme weather strikes, power is knocked out, and a group of islands home to more than 3 million people becomes entirely dependent on outside aid shipped in by sea and by air for survival. Many experts say that this situation was spurred by one pivotal policy: the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, colloquially known as the Jones Act, which bars international maritime vessels from shipping goods between U.S. coasts — meaning that merchandise traveling between U.S. ports must be delivered on vessels owned and operated by Americans. Some analysts have argued that this law has had the effect of ticking up shipping costs and making it less possible over time for Puerto Rican farmers to compete with U.S. mainland food manufacturers. Others have questioned the true impact of the Jones Act on the archipelago’s food sovereignty. A 2012 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York noted that “to the extent that it inhibits free trade, the Jones Act does indeed have a negative effect on the Puerto Rican economy, although the magnitude of the effect is unclear.”
The Jones Act, however, wasn’t the only policy to contribute to Puerto Rico’s broken food system. In the 1930s and ’40s, a series of local economic regulations directed at the sugar cane industry led to the demise of what was once the archipelago’s most common agricultural product and its largest source of revenue. From there, the U.S. territory’s reliance on imports steadily climbed. In the 1980s, Puerto Rico grew around 45 percent of its own food; today that number is around 15 percent.
Declining local agricultural production only deepened Puerto Ricans’ dependency on external supply chains. From 1992 to 2007, the number of farms decreased by 30 percent, the amount of land being farmed decreased by 33 percent, and total livestock and poultry products sold dropped by nearly 19 percent. The agriculture sector also lost roughly a third of workers. In 2006, an economic recession gripped Puerto Rico. Nearly 20 years later, that recession has not abated.
Shortly after Hurricane Maria, Republican senators John McCain and Mike Lee introduced a bill seeking to repeal the Jones Act, which they said was hindering the island’s recovery process by limiting the flow of maritime emergency aid shipments. McCain, who had long championed ending the policy, called it an “antiquated, protectionist law that has driven up costs and crippled Puerto Rico’s economy.”
Though McCain and Lee’s legislative efforts were unsuccessful, President Donald Trump temporarily suspended the law at the request of Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló. The suspension expired in early October 2017, just two weeks after the storm, and made little difference for Puerto Ricans. According to a Brookings Institution report from that year, the law, and its waiver, didn’t contribute to the larger relief issues at play; there were other, more consequential factors — “The key problems, including insufficient and delayed federal resources, and a lack of means to distribute supplies on the island, have nothing to do with the Jones Act.”
A worker sorts live chickens from dead ones in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The Corporacion Avicola Morovis farm lost approximately 80,000 chickens when the storm hit the area. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
For nearly a decade before the storm, Owen Ingley and his wife, Paula Paoli Garrido, ran a nonprofit organization called Plenitud PR, which maintained a small, sustainable farm and advocated for a localized network of agricultural producers throughout Las Marías. The cataclysmic hurricane set the organization down a new path.
They distributed emergency water filtration stations, installed rainwater harvesting tanks at elderly residents’ homes, and collaborated with local doctors to hold health clinics. The experience sparked a new awareness for Ingley — that something was missing. The Las Marías community needed a physical place, stocked with critical recovery resources, where they could go to get support after a disaster like a hurricane.
“It was a really defining moment for our organization,” said Ingley. “There’s some comfort in having hot, prepared, healthy meals after a hurricane, having access to a warm plate of food, cooked with love, with healthy, local ingredients. I think there’s a health benefit, and I think there’s an emotional, psychological benefit to it also.”
Meanwhile, life became exceedingly difficult for Migdalia Mass Llorens and her family. About a month after the storm, her youngest son, José, was stung by a scorpion. Mass Llorens herself contracted leptospirosis, a rat-borne disease. For roughly 60 days, the breadfruit and bananas available on the farm and a dwindling stash of canned goods were about all they ate. When first responders and government officials finally showed up, nearly three months after Maria made landfall, hand-delivering boxes of bottled water and ready-to-eat meals, Mass Llorens felt a sense of overwhelming relief. Then the frustration hit. She wondered: Why had it taken them so long? Why was her community, her family, left to fend for themselves? In that moment, she knew she never wanted to be in that position — waiting for help that didn’t come — again.
As time went on, life slowly began to retain some normalcy — enough, at least, for José to be sent back to his elementary school. One day, Paoli Garrido, of Plenitud, came to the school to try to make connections with local farmers. José offered her a breadfruit from his parents’ stash. That prompted the team at Plenitud to reach out to Mass Llorens to see if she and her husband, Juan, were interested in participating in the group’s agricultural cooperative.
Over the next year or so, Mass Llorens and Plenitud continued to talk about how they could work together. Mass Llorens was inspired by the concept of community-powered resilience. Plus, she needed to bring in a paycheck after Maria had wiped out their harvest, so in 2020 she eventually signed on to help start and run the community kitchen.
The Plenitud team was still in search of a site to work from. First, they collected signatures from a little over 200 residents in Alto Sano, a petition they shared with the municipality to permit the nonprofit to launch the kitchen in an abandoned school building. The town leased the half-acre lot to the organization for $120 — paid monthly, $1 at a time over a decade. Plenitud then got to work finding a mix of grant and philanthropic funding that would keep the kitchen open year-round, so that it could ensure food security for some of the area’s most vulnerable residents and double as a disaster resilience hub when the next storm swept through.
Plenitud set itself up to receive donations of surplus nonperishables from a nearby food bank and launched an on-site community garden with crops like lettuce, cilantro, herbs, and peppers. The team secured funding to pay farmers for fresh produce such as breadfruit and jackfruit, with the goal to freeze it all and store bulk amounts of it ahead of hurricane season every year. Staffers set up a rainwater filtration system that could store thousands of gallons of potable water and fundraised to buy dozens of at-home mini filtration systems. They also partnered with other nonprofits to establish off-grid solar to help power the site and acquire solar lights for folks with mobility limitations that would prevent them from evacuating or reaching the center.
By 2021, Plenitud was ready to open the new facility. It was part kitchen, part food vault, and part community gathering place. They would call it La Cancha Sana — named in honor of the property’s basketball court, or una cancha, and the neighborhood, Alto Sano.
“People saw after Hurricane Maria that the local government just doesn’t have enough resources and enough efficiency to be able to effectively respond,” said Ingley. “We need to come together and be prepared to jump in ourselves. …El pueblo salva al pueblo. The people save the people.”
Migdalia Mass Llorens (left), pictured with another Alto Sano resident the day after Hurricane Fiona blew through their rural community. Unlike after Maria, Mass Llorens and her family had a safe haven. Courtesy of Plenitud PR
La Cancha Sana had its first big test run when Hurricane Fiona barrelled through Puerto Rico on September 18, 2022, once again knocking out power, triggering mudslides and flash floods, and destroying roads. Just after the storm, a ship sailing under the flag of the Marshall Islands attempted to deliver about 300,000 barrels of fuel to help with the recovery, but it was initially unable to dock because of foreign vessel restrictions mandated by the Jones Act. (It docked several days later after the Department of Homeland Security granted a Jones Act waiver.)
By then, Plenitud had stored thousands of gallons of filtered rainwater and stockpiled nonperishable food and fresh vegetables from their nearby farm. They had also acquired hundreds of gallons of emergency propane. Unlike after Maria, Mass Llorens and her family had a safe haven; a space to eat, get water, and gather with their community after another storm tore through their lives. She spent the next 21 days at La Cancha Sana cooking, day in and day out. She made plates of rice and beans, cooked squash, guacamole, and fried plantains, a welcome source of nutrition for rural communities like hers still without power. Those days, Mass Llorens said, were a blur.
La Cancha Sana became part kitchen, part food vault, and part community gathering place. Courtesy of Plenitud PR
The rest of her family worked with the Plenitud team to deliver food and rainwater harvesting devices to homes in the barrio. They also got the word out: La Cancha Sana had power, and everyone was welcome. Some of Mass Llorens’ colleagues went down to the local farms to help the producers salvage produce like avocados, plantains, and breadfruit that could no longer be sold in markets or shipped anywhere. As the news about La Cancha Sana spread, people filtered in from nearby barrios, too. By the time the power had been restored, three weeks after the storm, they had served around 2,500 meals.
“In hurricanes, in moments of emergency, in the place where we are, a very rural place, we are far from the coast, from the cities. In el campo — the rural areas — we’re left for last,” said Mass Llorens. “Communities really need this kind of support because the government just won’t show up in the way you need. We can’t wait for help to come from outside.”
In another part of Puerto Rico, a different community developed its own post-Maria solution to its broken local food system — Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico’s mutual aid kitchen. Courtesy of Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico
On the central-eastern side of Puerto Rico’s main island, in the densely populated city Caguas, another resilience center jumped into action as Fiona thundered through. The first iteration of Giovanni Roberto Cáez’s community kitchen was cobbled together in days after Hurricane Maria. Following Fiona, Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico was running a full-scale mutual aid operation in its own building.
Every Tuesday for the next month, hundreds of Caguas residents showed up to take home free rice, beans, and canned goods in addition to fresh produce sourced from local farmers. Instead of being given pre-packed food, people were encouraged to choose what they needed or wanted, and invited to participate as a volunteer or donate to the effort if they could.
Unlike Plenitud, and most traditional charitable food businesses, Comedores Sociales doesn’t rely on government money. Instead, it receives philanthropic support, sells merch, hosts concerts, offers catering services, and twice a year hosts community fundraising dinners. “Food is not only a biological need,” said Roberto Cáez. “It’s a cultural need, it’s a social need. Because food brings us together. It puts us at the same table, organizes our communities to harvest together.”
It is also a matter of politics, he continued. “Its loss, and land, and power, and the companies who control the food. Who has the power to decide those things. And who does not.”
“Food is not only a biological need,” said Giovanni Roberto Cáez (above). “It’s a cultural need, it’s a social need. Because food brings us together. It puts us at the same table, organizes our communities to harvest together.” Courtesy of Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico
The lack of coordination from governmental agencies that followed Hurricane Maria led many Puerto Ricans to come to the conclusion that they were on their own, said University of Central Florida disaster sociologist Fernando Rivera — which he said may have, in an ironic twist of fate, prepared them for the reality of sweeping federal disinvestment unfolding now across the U.S.
“There’s a redefining of what the role of the federal government is in everyday life of our people. There’s a profound discussion now of who takes the realms of emergency management, or emergency preparedness,” said Rivera, who has studied disaster response and preparedness in Puerto Rico and Florida. “In a sense, that predisposition of the horrible things that happened after Hurricane Maria actually activated these communities and brought about this knowledge of what we need to do.”
But Rivera warns that if community-led programs like these end up being successful, and are privately funded, then it could serve as an incentive for federal agencies to retreat even further from the fundamental duties of the government.
Every Tuesday for the month following Hurricane Fiona, hundreds of Caguas residents showed up at Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico’s mutual aid kitchen to take home free rice, beans, canned goods, and fresh produce. Courtesy of Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico
The Trump administration has imposed severe cuts on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the speed at which the government processes declarations of major disasters has noticeably slowed down. Trump also terminated $4.5 billion in FEMA grants that helped communities prepare for future disaster damage, though a federal judge recently barred the administration from doing so. This almost certainly does not bode well for Puerto Rico, said Rivera.
The second Trump term has also resulted in direct cuts to federal funding pots going to Puerto Rico, including the end of roughly $10 million that backed two programs supporting farmers and forest stewards with technical assistance and workforce development tools: Smart Ag Puerto Rico, created to support smallholder coffee and cacao farmers, and conservation initiative Puente Forestal. The former is on hold until further notice; the latter has been cancelled outright. The administration’s cancellation of federal grants supporting food pantries and local food systems has also sparked concern among community organizations that the reductions will have a knock-on effect on Puerto Rico’s disaster recovery efforts — similar to the shortages experienced by food banks responding to the recent floods in Texas. Puerto Rico is also one of three U.S. jurisdictions excluded from the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Instead, the archipelago receives a capped annual block grant through the Nutrition Assistance Program, or NAP, which does not adjust to inflation, population growth — or, notably, disaster impacts.
Even groups like Comedores Sociales that aren’t federally funded are still confronting the consequences of Trump’s considerable policy shifts. Since January, private groups funding the organization’s mutual aid center have begun scaling back their donations, shortening the terms of their agreements, and some individual donors have even suspended their contributions. Comedores Sociales has a runway through the end of next year, but founder Roberto Cáez doesn’t know whether it will have the funding needed to sustain operations beyond then.
In the case of La Cancha Sana, the federal funding roller coaster is also exacting a toll. Although none of its contracted grants have yet to be canceled, the group gets much of its federal funding through AmeriCorps, which has faced significant cuts in the last eight months. The future of several of their pending grant proposals is also now unclear amid the administration’s slashing and burning of climate justice programs they once relied on for their work.
Ingley says his team is taking it one day at time; the main priority right now is continuing to stockpile food and water so Plenitud can best be prepared to feed the community this hurricane season. Some 4,000 gallons of water are currently stored in cisterns at La Cancha Sana, alongside more than 3,000 servings of rice and hundreds of pounds of canned beans, dried nuts, and legumes. Ingley worries it won’t be close to enough.
“I am concerned about facing an even greater need in the event of a hurricane like Maria,” he said. “There’s a sense of burden about not being able to do enough. Our capacity is staying about the same, and the need is just growing more.”
Western reporters are full partners in the genocide. They amplify Israeli lies, which they know are lies, betraying Palestinian colleagues who are slandered, targeted and killed by Israel.
ANALYSIS:By Chris Hedges
There are two types of war correspondents. The first type does not attend press conferences. They do not beg generals and politicians for interviews. They take risks to report from combat zones.
They send back to their viewers or readers what they see, which is almost always diametrically opposed to official narratives. This first type, in every war, is a tiny minority.
Then there is the second type, the inchoate blob of self-identified war correspondents who play at war. Despite what they tell editors and the public, they have no intention of putting themselves in danger.
They are pleased with the Israeli ban on foreign reporters into Gaza. They plead with officials for background briefings and press conferences. They collaborate with their government minders who impose restrictions and rules that keep them out of combat.
They slavishly disseminate whatever they are fed by officials, much of which is a lie, and pretend it is news. They join little jaunts arranged by the military — dog and pony shows — where they get to dress up and play soldier and visit outposts where everything is controlled and choreographed.
The mortal enemy of these poseurs are the real war reporters, in this case, Palestinian journalists in Gaza. These reporters expose them as toadies and sycophants, discrediting nearly everything they disseminate. For this reason, the poseurs never pass up a chance to question the veracity and motives of those in the field.
I watched these snakes do this repeatedly to my colleague Robert Fisk.
Took huge hit
When war reporter Ben Anderson arrived at the hotel where journalists covering the war in Liberia were encamped — in his words getting “drunk” at bars “on expenses,” having affairs and exchanging “information rather than actually going out and getting information” — his image of war reporters took a huge hit.
“I thought, finally, I’m amongst my heroes,” Anderson recalls. “This is where I’ve wanted to be for years. And then me and the cameraman I was with — who knew the rebels very well — he took us out for about three weeks with the rebels.
“We came back to Monrovia. The guys in the hotel bar said, ‘Where have you been? We thought you’d gone home.’ We said, ‘We went out to cover the war. Isn’t that our job? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’
“The romantic view I had of foreign correspondents was suddenly destroyed in Liberia,” he went on. “I thought, actually, a lot of these guys are full of shit. They’re not even willing to leave the hotel, let alone leave the safety of the capital and actually do some reporting.”
You can see an interview I did with Anderson here.
This dividing line, which occurred in every war I covered, defines the reporting on the genocide in Gaza. It is not a divide of professionalism or culture. Palestinian reporters expose Israeli atrocities and implode Israeli lies. The rest of the press does not.
Palestinian journalists, targeted and assassinated by Israel, pay — as many great war correspondents do — with their lives, although in far greater numbers.
Israel has murdered 245 journalists in Gaza by one count and more than 273 by another. The goal is to shroud the genocide in darkness.
No other war close
No war I covered comes close to these numbers of dead. Since October 7, Israel has killed more journalists “than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.” Journalists in Palestine leave wills and recorded videos to be read or played at their death.
A funeral for Palestine TV correspondent Mohammed Abu Hatab. Hatab was killed, along with his family members, in an airstrike on his home in Khan Yunis, Gaza. Image: Abed Zagout/Anadolu via Getty Images
The colleagues of these Palestinian journalists in the Western press broadcast from the border fence with Gaza decked out in flak jackets and helmets, where they have as much chance of being hit by shrapnel or a bullet as being struck by an asteroid. They scurry like lemmings to briefings by Israeli officials. They are not only the enemies of truth, but also the enemies of journalists doing the real work of war reporting.
When Iraqi troops attacked the Saudi border town of Khafji during the first Gulf War, Saudi soldiers fled in panic. Two French photographers and I watched frantic soldiers commandeering fire trucks and racing south. US Marines pushed the Iraqis back.
But in Riyadh, the press was told of our gallant Saudi allies defending their homeland. Once fighting ended, the press bus stopped a few miles down the road from Khafji. The pool reporters clambered out, escorted by military minders. They did stand-ups with the distant sound of artillery and smoke as a backdrop and repeated the lies the Pentagon wanted to tell.
Meanwhile, the two photographers and I were detained and beaten by enraged Saudi military police, furious that we had documented the panicked flight of Saudi forces, as we tried to leave Khafji.
My refusal to abide by press restrictions in the first Gulf War saw the other New York Times reporters in Saudi Arabia write a letter to the foreign editor saying I was ruining the paper’s relationship with the military. If not for the intervention of R.W. “Johnny” Apple, who had covered Vietnam, I would have been sent back to New York.
I do not fault anyone for not wanting to go into a war zone. This is a sign of normality. It is rational. It is understandable. Those of us who volunteer to go into combat — my colleague Clyde Haberman at The New York Times once quipped “Hedges will parachute into a war with or without a parachute” — have obvious personality defects.
Pretend war correspondents
But I fault those who pretend to be war correspondents. They do tremendous damage. They peddle false narratives. They mask reality. They serve as witting — or unwitting — propagandists. They discredit the voices of the victims and exonerate the killers.
When I covered the war in El Salvador, before I worked for The New York Times, the paper’s correspondent dutifully regurgitated whatever the embassy fed her. This had the effect of making my editors — as well as editors of the other correspondents who did report the war– question our veracity and “impartiality.”
It made it harder for readers to understand what was happening. The false narrative neutered and often overpowered the real one.
The slander used to discredit my Palestinian colleagues — claiming they are members of Hamas — is sadly familiar. Many Palestinian reporters I know in Gaza are, in fact, quite critical of Hamas. But even if they have ties with Hamas, so what?
Israel’s attempt to justify targeting journalists from the Hamas-run al-Aqsa media network is also a violation of Article 79 of the Geneva Convention.
I worked with reporters and photographers who had a wide variety of beliefs, including Marxist-Leninists in Central America. This did not prevent them from being honest. I was in Bosnia and Kosovo with a Spanish cameraman, Miguel Gil Moreno, who was later killed with my friend Kurt Schork.
Miguel was a member of the right-wing Catholic group Opus Dei. He was also a journalist of tremendous courage, great compassion and moral probity, despite his opinions about Spain’s fascist ruler Francisco Franco. He did not lie.
Seeking to crush
In every war I covered, I was attacked as supporting or belonging to whatever group the government, including the US government, was seeking to crush. I was accused of being a tool of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, Hamas, the Muslim-led government in Bosnia and the Kosovo Liberation Army.
John Simpson of the BBC, like many Western reporters, argues that the “world needs honest, unbiased eyewitness reporting to help people make up their minds about the major issues of our time. This has so far been impossible in Gaza.”
The assumption that if Western reporters were in Gaza the coverage would improve is risible. Trust me. It would not.
Israel bans the foreign press because there is a bias in Europe and the United States in favour of reporting by Western reporters. Israel is aware that the scale of the genocide is too vast for Western outlets to hide or obscure, despite all the ink and airtime they give to Israeli and US apologists.
Israel also cannot continue its systematic campaign of annihilation of journalists in Gaza if it has to contend with foreign media in its midst.
Israel ‘lies like it breathes’
I covered the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis, much of that time in Gaza, for seven years. If there is one indisputable fact, it is that Israel lies like it breathes. The decision by Western reporters to give credibility to these lies, to give them the same weight as documented Israeli atrocities, is a cynical game.
The reporters know these lies are lies. But they, and the news outlets that employ them, prize access — in this case access to Israeli and US officials — above truth. The reporters, as well as their editors and publishers, fear becoming targets of Israel and the powerful Israel lobby.
There is no cost for betraying the Palestinians. They are powerless.
Call those lies out and you will swiftly find your requests for briefings and interviews with officials rebuffed. You won’t be invited by press officers to participate in staged visits to Israeli military units. You and your news organisation will be viciously attacked.
You will be left out in the cold. Your editors will terminate your assignment or your employment. This is not good for careers. And so, the lies are dutifully repeated, no matter how absurd.
It is pathetic watching these reporters and their news outlets, as Fisk writes, fight “like tigers to join these ‘pools’ in which they would be censored, restrained and deprived of all freedom of movement on the battlefield”.
When Middle East Eye journalists Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, along with Reuters photojournalist Hussam al-Masri, and freelancers Moaz Abu Taha, and Mariam Dagga — who had worked with several media outlets, including the Associated Press — were killed in a “double tap” strike — designed to kill first responders arriving to treat casualties from initial strikes — at Nasser Medical Complex, how did Western news agencies respond?
‘Hamas camera’
“Israeli military says strikes on Gaza hospital targeted what it says was a Hamas camera,” the Associated Press reported.
“IDF claims hospital strike was aimed at Hamas camera,” announced CNN.
“Israel army says six ‘terrorists’ killed in Monday strikes on Gaza hospital,” the AFP headline read.
“Initial inquiry says Hamas camera was target of Israeli strike that killed journalists,” Reuters said.
“Israel claims troops saw Hamas camera before deadly hospital attack,” Sky News explained.
Just for the record, the camera belonged to Reuters, which said Israel was “fully aware” the news agency was filming from the hospital.
When Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and three other journalists were killed on August 10 in their media tent near al-Shifa Hospital, how was it reported in the Western press?
Pulitzer prize-winner
“Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist It Says Was Hamas Leader,” Reuters titled its story, despite the fact al-Sharif was part of a Reuters team that won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize.
The German newspaper Bild, published a front page story headlined: “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.”
The barrage of Israeli lies amplified and given credibility by the Western press violates a fundamental tenet of journalism, the duty to transmit the truth to the viewer or reader.
It legitimizes mass slaughter. It refuses to hold Israel to account. It betrays Palestinian journalists, those reporting and being killed in Gaza. And it exposes the bankruptcy of Western journalists, whose primary attributes are careerism and cowardice.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.
When the city of Seattle contacted Fusus, one of the nation’s leading police surveillance tech companies, in 2023, a company exec did more than just send over a brochure — he offered to connect Seattle with a “peer” in Atlanta’s police department who was familiar with the company’s products.
This kicked off months of communication between Claudia Gross-Shader, a director in Seattle’s city auditor’s office, Marshall Freeman, who was introduced as the deputy chief administrative officer of the Atlanta Police Department, and other Seattle officials.
Seattle was hoping that Fusus’s Connect system — which ties together license plate readers, public cameras, and privately owned cameras into a single surveillance platform — could help them combat retail theft. The next year, after a Seattle Police Department project manager visited Atlanta to see the system in action, Fusus sealed the deal: Seattle signed a contract for “Connect Seattle” at an estimated price tag of $1.8 million.
But what Gross-Shader and the rest of her colleagues in Seattle didn’t know — until The Intercept called with questions — was that Freeman was wearing two hats the whole time they were talking: The APD official was not only a consultant for Fusus, he was also a board member and owner of a small share of the company that could be worth millions.
“He never disclosed that to me!” Gross-Shader told The Intercept, after hearing about Freeman’s involvement with the company. She said everyone in Seattle who spoke with him was “duped,” and that knowing about his role “would have affected our procurement decision.”
An Intercept investigation, based on public documents and a City of Atlanta ethics investigation, has found that Freeman didn’t disclose his role with Fusus in conversations with at least 14 other cities during a period spanning at least two years, and at least nine of those cities went on to make or amend millions of dollars worth of contracts with Axon Fusus — the company’s name since Axon, the company behind the Taser and a major vendor of bodyworn cameras and other police surveillance systems, purchased Fusus last year.
Atlanta’s ethics investigation, which began in March 2024 and concluded in May of this year, was prompted by email queries and reporting from the Atlanta Community Press Collective, a local digital outlet. Investigators found that Freeman’s conversations with other cities, his undisclosed position on the board, his stake in the company, and his appearances at public events about Fusus software violated the city’s public employee laws regarding disclosure and use of city property and also created “an appearance of impropriety.” Freeman is appealing the decision.
But the Atlanta investigation, despite taking 15 months to complete, did not cover the full extent of Freeman’s activities. It did not follow-up to see whether the cities that Freeman spoke with went on to buy Fusus products, did not inform the officials he visited or spoke with about his dual roles, failed to turn up multiple Axon Fusus events around the country where Freeman spoke, and missed the fact that Freeman was a director on Fusus’s main governing board.
Neither Freeman, his attorney Joe Siegelman, nor Axon Fusus responded to queries from the Intercept.
Freeman told Atlanta ethics investigators that he stopped consulting with the company after Axon’s purchase of Fusus in January 2024. He did this, he told investigators, to avoid conflicts of interest because Axon has contracts with the city of Atlanta. But public documents show that Freeman has served on the company’s board as a director since at least January of 2023 and remained in that position until the most recently available filings, dated June 24 of this year.
Screenshot from Axon's video stream of its Axon Week keynote on April 25, 2025. Screenshot
That means Freeman was on the company’s board, for example, when he spoke at “Axon Week” on April 25 in Phoenix. Introduced by company CEO Rick Smith as an APD official and “a wonderful partner with us over the years,” Freeman’s name flashed across a huge screen. “I’m proud to be here representing the men and women of the Atlanta Police Department,” he told attendees. “Axon has been such a trusted partner in our journey to modern public safety.” After concluding his remarks, the two embrace, and Smith says, “It’s been a great relationship.”
Freeman told investigators that he didn’t think his work with Fusus presented a conflict of interest before Axon acquired the company because the City of Atlanta did not contract directly with Fusus, and instead relied on the city’s private police foundation — where he worked before joining the city — to purchase the company’s technology. Atlanta began developing its “Connect” system using Fusus and other technology in 2021, and has since become what a tech publication would later call “the most surveilled city” in the United States.
The ethics report, in a seeming misunderstanding of public filings, identified Freeman as serving on the board only in its “Virginia and Florida-based subsidiaries.” But filings in those states, and seven more, show that Freeman is a director of Fusus itself, which continues to operate with its own board of directors even after the Axon acquisition.
The Intercept discovered that cities that expanded or created contracts involving Axon Fusus’s signature Connect systems, and who also spoke with Freeman, include Seattle; New York City; Sacramento; Savannah, Georgia; Springfield, Illinois; Omaha, Nebraska; and Birmingham, Alabama.
The exact value of these contracts is difficult to pin down, because some cities do not publish their contracting data and others did not itemize the portion of the contract linked to Fusus’s “Real-Time Crime Center” technology. The financial impact of Freeman’s enthusiastic testimonials about the “Connect” system and Fusus generally at events in which he was billed as an Atlanta police official, with hundreds of police departments and cities in attendance, is also difficult to quantify.
New York City Police Department detective Joseph Raffaele emailed Freeman on September 11, 2023, telling him the department was “considering purchasing [Fusus’] service.”
“We would appreciate your opinion on Fusus,” Raffaele continued. “If you don’t mind, please fill in the attached excel spreadsheet and email it back to me. The NYPD just would like a gauge of how good Fusus is. Their customer service, and any general issues you may have had?”
He then forwarded his response to Fusus CEO Christopher Lindenau.
Less than two hours later, Freeman filled out and returned the spreadsheet, adding in an email to Raffaele, “As you will note from my responses, we are HUGE fans of Fusus … [and] our officers and investigators rely on Fusus around the clock every day. It would be impossible for us to be as effective without it.” He then forwarded his response to Fusus CEO Christopher Lindenau, who replied, “Thank you sir!!!”
All references to such emails in this story come from the Atlanta ethics office’s report.
The Intercept has obtained a recording of Atlanta ethics investigators interviewing Freeman on June 12 of last year. At one point, Freeman says, “We share with other cities all the time how we utilize the technology. So it’s not being an advocate for Fusus, saying, ‘You should buy this.’ I never did that.”
Freeman told investigators that Atlanta’s system using Fusus “is what America is looking to mimic,” adding, “There’s ‘Connect’ everywhere.”
In May of last year, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a $1.5 million contract with Fusus. “Connect New York” now has nearly 7,000 public and privately owned cameras linked to the city’s surveillance system. The NYPD did not reply to a request for comment from the Intercept.
Not everyone in New York sees the new surveillance system as the “home run” Adams called it in his press conference announcing the contract.
“This silent expansion of surveillance casts a long shadow over our public housing communities, places that should feel like home, not a monitored zone,” Council Member Shahana Hanif, who asked about the Fusus system in a city council meeting last year, told the Intercept. “We must demand full disclosure, democratic oversight, and a halt to unchecked policing embedded within our basic infrastructure.”
Freeman followed the same playbook when the police in Sacramento got in touch.
Sacramento Police Department Lt. Jason Start emailed Freeman on September 15, 2023, letting him know Fusus public safety adviser Jim Macedo had suggested contacting him because the department was “upgrading hardware and software” in their surveillance system, according to the Atlanta ethics investigation.
“I was the purchaser of Fusus and directed much of this from my end,” Freeman wrote back. “It would likely make sense for us to have an initial chat.” He was referring to his previous role as COO of the Atlanta Police Foundation, where Freeman oversaw the private organization’s purchase of Fusus technology on behalf of the city, before starting work at APD in January 2023.
Several months after his first email to Freeman, Start wrote in another email that he planned to visit Atlanta on November 29 with a group of six or seven. Less than a year later, in October 2024, Sacramento signed a $300,000 contract with Fusus, according to the Sacramento Bee.
When The Intercept reached Start on the phone, he said he had retired and hung up. The department declined to comment. “Connect Sacramento”now has about 2,000 cameras linked to the city’s surveillance system.
In Georgia, several hours southeast of Atlanta, Savannah IT Project Manager Jacque Fountain emailed Freeman August 29, 2023, referring to a conversation the two had the day before and how the “Savannah PD would like to implement Fusus.”
Within two months, in October, the city announced a contract worth $150,000 a year with the company. The contract was renewed in February. Reached on the phone, Fountain said she “was not aware” of Freeman’s ties with Fusus. She referred The Intercept to the city’s public information office, who didn’t answer queries about the Atlanta police official’s communication with the city.
In Springfield, the capital of Illinois, Fusus public safety adviser Jack Howard emailed Assistant Chief Joshua Stuenkel on February 7, 2023, introducing Freeman as a “long-time partner” of the company and explaining his former role at the police foundation.
The Springfield City Council approved a $3.4 million contract in November allocating money to the police department that includes Fusus’s services. It is unclear how much of the contract will go to the city’s “Real-Time Crime Center.” Stuenkel told The Intercept, “I don’t recall meeting with [Freeman]. We didn’t use him. I think we’re done.”
On January 25 of last year, retired Omaha Police Department Lt. James Pauly emailed Freeman, telling him he was “honored that you allowed Fusus to share your information with us.” Fusus had been registered with Nebraska’s secretary of state since the year before, with Freeman listed as a director. Reached on his cellphone, Pauly said, “You would think that would be a conflict of interest,” before directing The Intercept to the Omaha Police Department, who didn’t respond to a query.
Seattle is currently considering a $1 million expansion to its Fusus-powered surveillance system; four community meetings on the proposal were scheduled in August.
Seattle’s Surveillance Advisory Working Group, which is authorized by city law to evaluate city surveillance contracts and their potential impact on issues such as civil rights and civil liberties, produced a report in July of last year with five of six members opposing the “Connect Seattle” plan. Their concerns ranged from “disparate impacts … on minority communities” to a lack of specific information on the technology.
René Peters, who was co-chair of the group at the time and works at AI chipmaker NVIDIA, said the city ignored his group’s report. At one city council meeting last year, a police official got several hours to make a presentation on the proposed surveillance system, while Peters was given just one minute of public comment despite his group’s official watchdog role.
When told about Freeman’s role in communicating to Seattle about Fusus, Peters said, “If we had had that information, there would have been a lot more people at city council meetings, and demonstrations [against the proposal].”
Gross-Shader highlighted the difference between sharing information with peers and a salesperson. “If you’re a peer jurisdiction talking to someone from another peer jurisdiction, you assume you’re speaking to another public servant,” she said. “Not an agent of a for-profit corporation.”
“He’s trusted, and it was a betrayal of that trust, because [Seattle employees] thought he was a public servant,” she added. “It’s disturbing that a public servant would do that — and that a tech company would not disclose the relationship.”
Gross-Shader also noted that the city had not seen research demonstrating the ability of Fusus’s technology to play a significant role in reducing retail theft, the issue that originally brought her to look into the company.
“In the absence of rigorous evaluations … it’s a practical matter for jurisdictions,” she said. “You weigh the experience of other jurisdictions. But if somebody has undisclosed financial interests, how can we trust what they offer as their experience?”
When the Flores and Velasco articles and posts whitewashing Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza first came out a few days ago, I was waiting for people in the Philippine media to criticise and denounce them since they were so obviously hack pieces that did not meet the minimal standards of decent journalism.
I waited and waited, until I realised that there were no media people or organisations that were going to speak up.
I was not out to do an expose, but that’s what it effectively became. In my subsequent posts, I raised the question of what was the reason just two journalists were willing to challenge the stories.
Was it a case of circling the wagons to protect errant colleagues? Was it fear of ties with the Israeli state being exposed by the Israelis in retaliation? Was it fear of physical or political reprisals by the Israelis?
These may have played a part, but the deafening silence meant there was something bigger at work.
This morning I received a long text from a prominent media practitioner that provided the answer. It’s not fear. It’s actually worse: agreement with Zionist ideology and policies, including genocide.
That the person asked me not to divulge his name for fear of suffering retribution from his colleagues stunned me. OMG, is this how deep the rot is with our media? ? Here is his disconcerting revelation to me:
‘Most are prejudiced’ “Yes some are scared, but honestly most of them actually are prejudiced against Muslims and side with the Zionists anytime.
“Most believe in the US religious fascist Zionist narrative, and also cannot accept that the world has changed — that the US is no longer the unipower it was decades ago, and that Russia, China, India and BRICS are on the rise.
“And also, you should hear them talk about how Filipino Muslims should be wiped off the face of the earth.
“These are college graduates from UP [University of the Philippines], UST [University of Santo Tomas], Ateneo who studied media.
“Whenever I would voice empathy for the Muslim minority here, or Palestinians, I’d be called stupid. Same also because I refused to join in the corruption.
“Oh, and also they have the same prejudice against China and the Chinese and mistake the Japanese imperial army atrocities as something China did to us!
“Also this is not limited to media. I have batchmates from UP Diliman, medical doctors, lawyers, engineers who also have the same prejudices.”
He added: “Some of these journalists have won awards abroad.”
Walden Bello is a Filipino academic and analyst of Global South issues who was awarded Amnesty International Philippines’ Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights Award in 2023. He has also served as a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines.
Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has hinted that the country may “hold its first-ever referendum” following a landmark Supreme Court opinion aimed at amending the 2013 Constitution.
On Friday, the nation’s highest court ruled that thresholds for constitutional amendments should be lowered — requiring only a two-thirds majority in parliament and a simple majority of voters in a referendum.
The ruling followed a three-day hearing in August, after Rabuka’s Cabinet, in June, had sought clarification on making changes to parts of the Constitution.
Submissions came from the State, seven political parties, the Fiji Law Society, and the Fiji Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Commission.
Rabuka said that the Supreme Court’s opinion established a “clear and democratic pathway” for his government’s constitutional reform efforts.
“This opinion provides clarity on matters of constitutional law and governance. It will now go before Cabinet for further deliberation, after which I, as Head of Government, will announce the way forward,” he said in a statement.
Fiji’s 2013 Constitution . . . the coalition’s “unwillingness to spell out the constitutional changes it was contemplating” has made Indo-Fijians “apprehensive”. Image: RNZ Pacific/Kelvin Anthony
However, the Fiji Labour Party, while welcoming the Supreme Court’s opinion, expressed concerns over the lowering of the current “75 percent double super majority requirement” to amend the constitution.
Fijians of Indian descent make up just over 32 percent of Fiji’s total population.
Indo-Fijians ‘particularly vulnerable’
Labour leader and former Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry said that the Indo-Fijian community felt “particularly vulnerable” due to the nation’s race-based political tensions, which have resulted in four coups.
He noted that the coalition’s “unwillingness to spell out the constitutional changes it was contemplating” had made Indo-Fijians “apprehensive”.
“It is for this reason that Labour had submitted that constitutional changes should be left to political negotiations with a view to achieving consensus, and stability,” he added.
Fiji Labour Party’s Mahendra Chaudhry (facing camera) embraces Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka during a reconciliation church service in May 2023. Image: RNZ Pacific/Fiji govt
But Rabuka dismissed Chaudhry’s concerns on Monday, saying that his “argument does not stand”.
“In a referendum, every community is part of the decision. Indo-Fijians, like all other minority groups, vote as equal citizens,” he said.
He said that any government wanting to change the constitution would need support from the whole nation.
“This forces proposals to be fair, broad, and inclusive. Discriminatory ideas would never survive such a test.”
‘Generalised statements’ criticised
Rabuka said Chaudhry should refrain from making “generalised statements”, adding that he does not have the mandate to speak for all Indo-Fijians.
“Chaudhry says change should only come through political negotiations and consensus. But that usually means a few leaders making deals in closed rooms. That gives a small group of politicians’ veto power over the entire country, blocking needed changes and leaving Fiji stuck,” he said.
“A referendum is the opposite of backroom politics. It is open, transparent, and gives the final say to the people themselves. That is real democracy. That is what the Coalition Government welcomes entirely.”
While Rabuka’s People’s Alliance Party wanted the 2013 Constitution thrown out and replaced with the previous 1997 Constitution, he said the former Prime Minister should “move past the old style of politics and recognise that Fiji may now hold its first-ever referendum”.
“That would be a historic step, one that strengthens democracy for every community, not weakens it.
“As your Prime Minister, I give my assurance to all Fijians that this process belongs to you.”
When Voreqe Bainimarama walked out of Parliament after his government lost by a single vote on Christmas Eve in December 2022, he told reporters who swarmed around him in the capital, Suva: “This is democracy and this is my legacy [the] 2013 Constitution.”
Visibly shellshocked
His most trusted ally Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, looking visibly shellshocked at FijiFirst’s loss of power, said at the time: “We hope that the new government will adhere to the rule of law.”
Sayed-Khaiyum is widely viewed as the architect of the 2013 Constitution, although he disputes that claim.
Critics of the document, which is the country’s fourth constitution, argue that it was imposed by the Bainimarama administration
Meanwhile, the country’s chiefs want the 2013 Constitution gone. In May, the Great Council of Chiefs (GCC) unanimously rejected the document as “restricting a lot of work for the iTaukei (indigenous Fijians)”.
Following the Supreme Court opinion, the head of of GCC told local media that the 2013 Constitution lacked cultural legitimacy and undermined Fiji’s democratic capacity.
Today, 1 September 2025, is being marked as a Black Monday following the latest deadly strikes by the Israeli army against journalists in the Gaza Strip as part of a worldwide action by the Paris-based global media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders and the community politics organisation Avaaz.
On August 25, one of these strikes targeted a building in the al-Nasser medical complex in central Gaza, a known workplace for reporters, killing five journalists and staff members of local and international media outlets such as Reuters and the Associated Press.
Two weeks earlier, on the night of August 10, an Israeli strike killed six reporters, including Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, who was the intended target.
According to RSF data, more than 210 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip in nearly 23 months of Israeli military operations in the Palestinian territory.
At least 56 of them were intentionally targeted by the Israeli army or killed while doing their job. This ongoing massacre of Palestinian journalists requires a large-scale operation highly visible to the general public.
With this unprecedented mobilisation planned for today, RSF renews its call for urgent protection for Palestinian media professionals in the Gaza Strip, a demand endorsed by over 200 media outlets and organisations in June.
Independent access
The NGO also calls for foreign press to be granted independent access to the Strip, which Israeli authorities have so far denied.
“The Israeli army killed five journalists in two strikes on Monday, August 25. Just two weeks earlier, it similarly killed six journalists in a single strike,” said Thibaut Bruttin, executive director of RSF.
“Since 7 October 2023, more than 210 Palestinian journalists have been killed by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip.
“We reject this deadly new norm, which week after week brings new crimes against Palestinian journalists that go unpunished. We say it loud and clear: at the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no one left to keep you informed.
“More than 150 media outlets worldwide have joined together for a major operation on Monday, 1 September, at the call of RSF and Avaaz.
“This campaign calls on world leaders to do their duty: stop the Israeli army from committing these crimes against journalists, resume the evacuation of the journalists who wish to leave Gaza, and ensure the foreign press has independent access to the Palestinian territory.
More than 150 media outlets in over 50 countries aretaking part in the operation on Monday, 1 September.
They include numerous daily newspapers and news websites: Mediapart (France), Al Jazeera (Qatar), The Independent (United Kingdom), +972 Magazine (Israel/Palestine), Local Call (Israel/Palestine), InfoLibre (Spain), Forbidden Stories (France), Frankfurter Rundschau (Germany), Der Freitag (Germany), RTVE (Spain), L’Humanité (France), The New Arab (United Kingdom), Daraj (Lebanon), New Bloom (Taiwan), Photon Media (Hong Kong), La Voix du Centre (Cameroon), Guinée Matin (Guinea), The Point (Gambia), L’Orient Le Jour (Lebanon), Media Today (South Korea), N1 (Serbia), KOHA (Kosovo), Public Interest Journalism Lab (Ukraine), Il Dubbio (Italy), Intercept Brasil (Brazil), Agência Pública (Brazil), Le Soir (Belgium), La Libre (Belgium), Le Desk (Morocco), Semanario Brecha (Uruguay), Asia Pacific Report (New Zealand) and many others.
Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.
Those events attracted 50,000 to 300,000 protesters.
The Auckland march is being organised by Aotearoa for Palestine, a coalition of Palestinians and tangata whenua. They want the government to sanction Israel for what they say is a genocide being carried out in Gaza.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Auckland Harbour Bridge . . . following on from recent protest marches that walked over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Brisbane’s Victoria Bridge in Australia. Image: RNZ/Tom Kitchin
West Papuan civil society and solidarity networks are calling for urgent action over a brutal Indonesian security forces crackdown that has led to a wave of arrests and political repression.
Protests erupted in Sorong, in the western part of the Melanesian territory, on Wednesday over the transfer of 4 political prisoners out of the territory.
One man, Michael Walerubun, 28, was seriously injured when police shot him in the abdomen, said activists.
The transferred prisoners, Abraham Goram Gaman, Nikson May, Piter Robaha, and Maxi Sangkek, are facing “treason” charges, which are commonly used by Indonesian authorities against independence supporters in West Papua.
The four men were arrested on April 28 after they requested “peace talks” in the city of Sorong.
Transferring political prisoners to other islands in the Indonesian archipelago separates them from families and support networks, and is a common tactic used by Indonesian authorities.
The umbrella group Pro-Democracy Papuan People’s Solidarity called for the community to protest against the four prisoners’ removal on Monday, August 25, that continued for three days.
Enforced relocation
Heavy-handed police attempts to disperse the protest, and the enforced relocation of all the prisoners despite community opposition, led to an escalation.
Several spontaneous protest actions followed, with tyres set ablaze and government buildings attacked, including the governor’s private residence.
Police have arbitrarily arrested 17 people, alleging involvement with property damage during the protests. Footage shows police discharging firearms, and armoured vehicles on patrol, through the afternoon and into the night in Sorong city and was continuing this weekend.
Women leader and former political prisoner Sayang Mandabayan has also been targeted.
She was accused by authorities as the so-called “organiser” of protests that followed the August 25 action.
Sayang Mandabayan’s home was attacked at around 4pm by heavily armed police officers who surrounded the building and shouted her name, demanding she present herself for arrest.
Police broke down door
Police then broke down the front door and attempted to force their way into the family’s home.
Sayang’s mother and pregnant niece refused them entry, blocking in the doorway and demanding they leave, said a statement from the Merdeka West Papua Support Network.
After a standoff of almost an hour, police arrested Sayang’s husband, Yan Manggaprouw, who remained in custody with 16 other members of the pro-democracy solidarity.
The attack on Sayang Mandabayan’s home, and the arrest of her husband, marks a further escalation in the range of repressive tactics commonly used against West Papuan human rights defenders.
“This is a deliberate campaign to criminalise political leadership, intimidate women defenders, and silence West Papua’s democratic voices,” Australia-based West Papuan rights advocate Ronny Kareni said.
“In West Papua talking about peace is seen as treason. These raids, transfers, and arrests are not isolated. They are part of a long-standing pattern of state systemic violence designed to crush West Papua’s movement for justice.
“Leaders like Sayang Mandabayan are not criminals — they are voices of democracy that the Pacific must defend.”
The timing of the crackdown comes just before the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders’ Meeting in the Solomon Islands on September 8-12.
Manokwari, since 2am this morning.
West Papuans are protesting against the transfer of four political prisoners to outside West Papua. pic.twitter.com/kP8RgEgnpC
Lawyers for an Idaho death row prisoner accused the state of failing to disclose important details about its execution drugs and blocking mandated depositions. Idaho prevented attorneys from obtaining information critical to death row prisoner Gerald Pizzuto Jr.’s legal defense, his lawyers wrote in a previously unreported filing last week.
Discovery in the case is currently scheduled to end next month, but “obstructionism and mishandling of valid discovery requests” by the Idaho attorney general’s office mean that Pizzuto’s lawyers need more time, said the filing. Pizzuto’s attorneys accused Idaho officials of “unjustifiable” and “potentially sanctionable” conduct — and said they “obfuscated key information on lethal injections so as to mislead.”
“What we’re seeing here is that there is a persistent pattern of obstruct and delay.”
According to Pizzuto’s filing, Idaho officials said they were seeking death penalty drugs, then asserted they couldn’t obtain the necessary chemicals, even though they had purchased lethal injection drugs earlier that year. The state’s misleading responses amounted to a “misdirection campaign,” the filing said. Idaho responded that the state has acted diligently in discovery.
“I think what we’re seeing here is that there is a persistent pattern of obstruct and delay with the hope that the judge will get impatient and make it go away,” Robert Dunham, the director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, told The Intercept.
Pizzuto, who has terminal cancer, is suing the state on the grounds that his execution by lethal injection would violate the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. His attorneys have expressed concerns that, like other states, Idaho could be attempting to conduct executions with contaminated or unsafe drugs.
“Defendants have been stubbornly resistant to engaging with lawful discovery requests,” Pizzuto’s lawyers wrote, in a request to extended discovery.
The Idaho Department of Corrections declined to comment on pending litigation. The attorney general’s office did not respond to questions sent by The Intercept. In court, Idaho has depicted its resistance to disclosing information as a necessary means of protecting its drug source. On Wednesday, the attorney general’s office filed a legal response objecting to extended discovery, arguing Pizzuto’s lawyers are seeking to drag out the legal process.
Prisoners’ lawyers regularly seek to obtain information about lethal injection chemicals and details about members of a state’s execution team to ensure that their clients’ Eighth Amendment rights won’t be violated.
The inquiries can allow defense attorneys to find out whether drugs have been stored at properly or received quality testing and determine the training levels of execution medical team members.
These efforts, however, have been heavily impeded, say lawyers in Pizzuto’s case. Prison officials and the attorney general’s office vigorously resisted providing answers to routine questions. Leaders at the Idaho Department of Corrections fought basic inquiries about their lethal injection chemicals, such as questions about the drugs’ countries of origin and testing for sterility.
“They know that lethal injection relies on secrecy.”
When forced to answer, state officials have sometimes offered false information. Previous filings noted that former Department of Corrections director Josh Tewalt misstated the expiration date of execution drugs, which Pizzuto’s lawyers said prevented them further investigating the chemicals. The new filing from Pizzuto’s team paints an even starker picture of how Idaho has obstructed discovery, accusing the state of a “lengthy and persistent history of mishandling proper discovery requests.”
“We see this type of deliberate concealing and misrepresentation again and again in Idaho and other executing states,” Matt Wells, the deputy director of human rights nonprofit Reprieve US, told The Intercept. “States conceal this information from the public, from people on death row, from pharmaceutical companies themselves, because they know that lethal injection relies on secrecy. They know if its brokenness and truth emerges, the inhumanity of lethal injection is laid bare.”
Trouble Getting Drugs?
In 2012, Idaho carried out its most recent death sentence with the execution of Richard Leavitt. Prison officials obtained the drugs used in that lethal injection from an out-of-state pharmacy through a cash payment made in a Washington parking lot.
As the state prepared to execute Pizzuto in October 2022, his lawyers first requested that the government produce all documents “related to obtaining” execution drugs. The next month, the state issued a death warrant, but just two weeks later, officials announced that they could not obtain the chemicals necessary to kill Pizzuto and would let the warrant expire.
Against this backdrop, state legislators took up a bill to authorize firing squad executions when lethal injection drugs were unavailable. In March 2023, during a hearing on the bill, Idaho Deputy Attorney General L. LaMont Anderson testified that the state had not been able to obtain pentobarbital for executions. The firing squad bill passed and was signed into law.
Unbeknownst to Pizzuto’s lawyers, Idaho moved to procure execution drugs just days after Anderson’s testimony. The state generated a purchase order for the lethal injection chemicals and in April 2023 spent $50,000 on the drugs, according to last week’s legal filing. That information would only become apparent earlier this year, after a protracted dispute in court over releasing the information.
For years, states around the country have struggled to obtain pentobarbital made by major pharmaceutical manufacturers, who have taken measures to ensure their drugs don’t get used for lethal injection. As discovery progressed in 2023, Pizzuto’s attorneys worked under the impression that Idaho would be seeking execution drugs made by a compounding pharmacy: businesses that produce custom-made products by combining or otherwise manipulating raw pharmaceutical ingredients.
Idaho officials left open the possibility that it could obtain compounded drugs. In September 2023, Tewalt and a deputy attorney general wrote in a court filing that they were “attempting to acquire any chemical that would be permissible,” according to the state’s execution protocol. The next month, the attorney general’s office said in a filing that “the Idaho Department of Correction does not have the present ability to carry out an execution via lethal injection or firing squad.”
Just two days later, the warden of the state’s death penalty facility obtained 15 grams of pentobarbital in an exchange that took place outside the prison gates. Pizzuto’s lawyers would later learn that the state had obtained pentobarbital manufactured by a pharmaceutical company, not a compounder.
“In short, the defendants effectively spent seven months obligating Mr. Pizzuto and the Court to expend time and resources delving into imaginary discovery disputes about compounded drugs,” Pizzuto’s lawyers wrote in last week’s filing. “During that time, the Idaho Attorney General’s Office (AG)—which represents the defendants here—went out of its way to foster the impression that IDOC lacked a drug source.”
On October 12 — the same day Idaho received the drugs it paid for — the state issued a warrant to execute Thomas Creech, who had been on death row since 1983.
Still under the impression that the state could not have obtained manufactured pentobarbital, defense lawyers alleged that using compounded drugs would violate Creech’s Eight Amendment rights. The court deemed these concerns irrelevant in light of having obtained the manufactured drug and denied Creech’s request for a stay of execution. In February 2024, Creech’s execution proceeded — but was called off after eight failed attempts to place an IV line to deliver lethal injection drugs.
Unlike Creech, the restraints on Pizzuto’s discovery are not dictated by a looming execution. There is no active death warrant, and all the pentobarbital Idaho has obtained since 2023 is now expired. That allows his lawyers to pursue legal challenges to Idaho’s obstruction over a more extended time period — if Pizzuto survives his illness.
Obstruction as Tactic
In the months since Creech’s attempted execution, Idaho has continued withholding information from Pizzuto’s lawyers, even escalating discovery disputes to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In filings, Idaho justifies its refusal to disclose information by citing a 2022 secrecy statute that protects the disclosure of information about businesses and people involved in supplying, manufacturing, and dispensing execution drugs. The tactic is art of a broader national pattern: At least 16 states have passed similar secrecystatutes since 2010.
“The more secretive the process, the more likely it is that there will be a botched execution.”
These laws inhibit meaningful oversight, said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
“We know that from the data, the more secretive the process, the more likely it is that there will be a botched execution, because the right questions cannot be asked and answered before,” Maher said.
In court, attorneys general try to wield these secrecy laws as a panacea against all manner of disclosures. Most commonly, though, states attempt to block defense attorneys from gaining information that could stop an execution.
“We’ve seen in a lot of other states, obstruction and using the artificial limits created by death warrants as a way of trying to force the courts to move the case along. And then, strategically, using the fact that they’ve been able to obstruct discovery as a way of saying that the defense hasn’t come forward with facts to justify stopping the execution,” said Dunham, of the Death Penalty Policy Project. “It raises serious questions about whether the justice system is willing to do justice.”
Guildford Crown Court has found eight Just Stop Oil supporters not guilty of public nuisance. The trial concerned an August 2022 action in which the group peacefully disrupted the UK’s largest petrol station to demand an end to new fossil fuel projects.
Just Stop Oil M25: activists not guilty of public nuisance for petrol station shut down
Michael Davies, Charles Laurie, Phoebe Frewer, Sophie Sharples, Tez Burns, Peter Lay, Gareth Harper and Emma Ireland took action at Cobham Services on 24 August 2022. They were among 35 Just Stop Oil supporters who blocked three M25 petrol stations and disabled scores of petrol pumps at Cobham, Clacket Lane, and Thurrock. The action led the Daily Mailto proclaim that:
no petrol was available for M25 drivers.
On 28 August, the court found all eight not guilty of intentionally or recklessly causing a public nuisance. However, the court did rule Tez Burns and Peter Lay guilty of criminal damage. It also found Charles Laurie guilty of possession of a hammer with intent to damage property, after he damaged two petrol pumps. Sentencing has been scheduled for 10 October 2025.
During the trial, the prosecution alleged that police were already at the scene when the Just Stop Oil supporters arrived at around 5am. Moreover, it claimed that two supporters had rushed off to damage two petrol pumps before the police could stop them. It had argued that other activists had acted “as a decoy” by blocking the entrance to the service station. The prosecution further alleged that this was not “peaceful protest” because in law damaging property is a violent act. It suggested that while not all eight had smashed petrol pumps, all were implicated.
A police witness confirmed that police had set up contraflow system. This allowed motorists to access the petrol station within 20 minutes of the activists blocking the entrance. Meanwhile, the service station manager confirmed that 34 out of 36 petrol pumps remained operational throughout and that there was little evidence to support earlier statements that large traffic queues were caused by the protest. Both prosecution witnesses and defendants struggled to recall in detail the events which happened some three years previously.
The ‘alarm bells are deafening’: it’s time to act
The judge, Recorder L Harris, ruled that those who had been accused of criminal damage or attempted criminal damage could not claim they were exercising their rights to peaceful protest under the ECHR article 10 and 11. However, he also ruled that it was for the jury to decide whether or not those the police had charged with public nuisance had the reasonable excuse of peaceful protest, or if they too had violent intentions by wanting fellow activists to damage the petrol pumps.
In their closing speeches, all the defendants were able to refer to the agreed facts in the case. Notably, this included several key points about the climate crisis.
In his closing speech, Charles Laurie said:
What is most important? The agreed facts are still going to be true. They won’t go away because you find us guilty. We all know things are getting worse on the climate. We are facing an existential crisis.
He then read from Adrienne Rich’s poem, Natural Resources:
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed, I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
Tez Burns said:
I did the right thing despite what the law says, there’s a threat to life.
He then quoted the UN secretary general António Guterres:
The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse‑gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.
Common sense prevails
Following the verdict, Emma Ireland said:
I am grateful to the Judge and the prosecution for allowing the agreed facts on the climate crisis to have played a part in this trial and for allowing us to speak to our motivations without fear of being found in contempt of court.
The prosecution spoke about common sense and I was reminded that in 2022, I felt that common sense would have been for the Conservative government to stop issuing new oil and gas licenses, to show a commitment to reducing carbon emissions, and in turn, to offer some protection to humanity from the gravest predictions of climate collapse. When Labour came to power that is what they did, because it’s common sense, right? And it’s common sense now that women have the vote in the UK, but to get this, the suffragettes took direct action and found themselves in court, in front of juries just like us. I’m grateful to the jury for their attentive listening, for their patience, and for the essential part they played in the trial.
French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls has ended an extended seven-day visit to New Caledonia with mixed feelings.
On one hand, he said he was confident his “Bougival deal” for New Caledonia’s future is now “more advanced” after three sittings of a “drafting committee” made up of local politicians.
On the other hand, despite his efforts and a three-hour meeting on Tuesday before he returned to Paris, he could not convince the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) — the main component of the pro-independence camp — to join the “Bougival” process.
The FLNKS recently warned against any attempt to “force” an agreement they were not part of, raising concerns about possible unrest similar to the riots that broke out in May 2024, causing 14 deaths and more than 2 billion euros (about NZ$3.8 billion) in material damage.
The unrest has crystallised around a constitutional reform bill that sought to change the rules of eligibility for voters at local provincial elections. The bill prompted fears among the Kanak community that it was seeking to “dissolve” indigenous votes.
But despite the FLNKS snub, all the other pro-independence and pro-France parties took part in the committee sessions, which are now believed to have produced a Constitutional Reform Bill.
That bill is due to be tabled in both France’s parliament chambers (the National Assembly and the Senate) and later before a special meeting of both houses (a “Congress” — a joint meeting of both Houses of Parliament).
Valls still upbeat
Speaking to local reporters just before leaving the French Pacific territory on Tuesday, Valls remained upbeat and adamant that despite the FLNKS snub, the Bougival process is now “better seated”.
“When I arrived in New Caledonia one week ago, many were wondering what would become of the Bougival accord we signed. Some said it was still-born. Today I’m going back with the feeling that the accord is comforted and that we have made considerable advances,” he said.
“Gone” . . . the vanishing French and New Caledonian flags symbolising partnership on the New Caledonian driving licence. Image: NC 1ère TV
He pointed out that non-political players, such as the Great Traditional Indigenous Chiefs Customary Senate and the Economic and Social Council, also joined some of the “drafting” sessions to convey their respective input.
Valls hailed a “spirit of responsibility” and a “will to implement” the Bougival document, despite a more than three-hour meeting with a new delegation from FLNKS just hours before his departure on Tuesday.
The FLNKS still opposes the Bougival text their negotiators had initially signed, that was later denounced following pressure from their militant base, invoking a profound “incompatibility” of the text with the movement’s “full sovereignty” and “decolonisation” goals.
Also demands for this process to be completed before the next French Presidential elections, currently scheduled for April-May 2027.
The Bougival deal signed on July 12 near Paris was initially agreed to by all of New Caledonia’s political parties represented at the local parliament, the Congress. However, it was later denounced and rejected “in block” by the FLNKS.
Door ‘remains open’
Valls consistently stressed that his door “remains open” to the FLNKS throughout his week-long stay in New Caledonia. This was his fourth trip to the territory since he was appointed to the post by French Prime Minister François Bayrou in December 2024.
Manuel Valls (right, standing) and his team met a FLNKS delegation on 26 August 2025. Image: RNZ Pacific
He pointed out that non-political players, such as the (Great Traditional Indigenous Chiefs) Customary Senate and the Economic and Social Council, also had joined some of the “drafting” sessions to convey their input.
In a statement after meeting with Valls, the FLNKS reiterated its categorical rejection” of the Bougival process while at the same time saying it was “ready to build an agreement on independence with all [political] partners”.
“I will continue working with them and I also invite FLNKS to discuss with the other political parties. I don’t want to strike a deal without the FLNKS, or against the FLNKS,” he told local public broadcaster NC 1ère on Tuesday.
He said the Bougival document was still in a “decolonisation process”.
‘Fresh talks’ in Paris Valls repeated his open-door policy and told local media that he did not rule out meeting FLNKS president Christian Téin in Paris for “fresh talks” in the “next few days”.
Téin was released from jail mid-June 2025, but he remains barred from returning to New Caledonia as part of judicial controls imposed on him, pending his trial on criminal-related charges over the May 2024 riots.
At the time, Téin was the leader of a CCAT (field action coordinating cell) to mount a protest campaign against a Constitutional reform bill that was eventually scrapped.
The CCAT was set up late 2023 by one of the main components of the FLNKS, Union Calédonienne.
While he was serving a pre-trial jail term, in August 2024, Téin was elected president in absentia of the FLNKS.
As for FLNKS’s demand that they and no other party should be the sole representatives of the pro-independence movement, Valls said this was “impossible”.
“New Caledonia’s society is not only [made up of] FLNKS. There still exists a space for discussion, the opportunity has to be seized because New Caledonia’s society is waiting for an agreement”.
However, some political parties (including moderates such as Eveil Océanien (Pacific Islanders’ Awakening) and pro-France Calédonie Ensemble have expressed concern on the value of the Bougival process if it was to be pushed through despite the FLNKS non-participation.
Other pro-independent parties, the PALIKA (Kanak Liberation Party) and the UPM (Union Progressiste en Mélanésie), have distanced themselves from the FLNKS coalition they used to belong to.
They remain committed to their signature and are now working along the Bougival lines.
‘There won’t be another May 13’ Valls said the the situation is different now because an agreement exists, adding that the Bougival deal “is a comprehensive accord, not just on the electoral rules”.
On possible fresh unrest, the former prime minister said “this time, [the French State will not be taken by surprise. There won’t be another 13 May”.
He stressed during his visit that some 20 units (over 2000) of law enforcement personnel (gendarmerie, police) remain posted in New Caledonia.
“And there will be more if necessary”, Valls assured.
When the May 2024 riots broke out, the law enforcement numbers were significantly lower and it took several days before reinforcements from Paris eventually arrived in New Caledonia to restore law and order.
Very tight schedule The Constitutional Reform Bill would cover a large spectrum of issues, including the creation, for the first time in France, of a “State of New Caledonia”, as well as a dual France/New Caledonia citizenship, all within the French Constitutional framework.
Two other documents — an organic law and a fundamental law (a de facto constitution) — are also being prepared for New Caledonia.
The organic law could come into force some time mid-October, if approved, and it would effectively postpone New Caledonia’s crucial provincial election to June 2026.
The plan was to have the freshly-produced text scrutinised by the French State Council, then approved by the French Cabinet on September 17.
Before the end of 2025, it would then be tabled before the French National Assembly, then the Senate, then the French special Congress sitting.
And before 28 February 2026, the same text would finally be put to the vote by way of a referendum for the people of New Caledonia.
French government to fall again? Meanwhile, Valls is now facing another unfavourable political context: the announcement, on Monday, by his Prime Minister François Bayrou, to challenge France’s National Assembly MPs in a risky motion of confidence.
This, he said, was in direct relation to his Appropriation Bill (budget), which contains planned sweeping cuts of about 44 billion euros (NZ$87.4 billion) to tackle the “danger” of France further plunging into “over-indebtment”.
If the motion, tabled to be voted on September 8, reveals more defiance than confidence, then Bayrou and his cabinet (including Valls) fall.
In the face of urgent initial plans to have New Caledonia’s texts urgently tabled before French Parliament, Bayrou’s confidence vote is highly likely to further complicate New Caledonia’s political negotiations.
Pro-France leader and former French cabinet member Sonia Backès, who is also the leader of local pro-France Les Loyalistes party, however told local media she remained confident and that even if the Bayrou government fell on September 8, “there would still be a continuity”.
“But if this was to be followed by a dissolution of Parliament and snap elections, then, very clearly, this would impact on the whole New Caledonian process”, she said.
“The Bougival agreement will be implemented,” Valls said.
“And those who think that the fall of the French government would entail delays on its implementation schedule are mistaken, notwithstanding my personal situation which is not very important.
“I will keep a watch on New Caledonia’s interests.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Like many government agencies, the Department of Agriculture has a fraught history with discrimination and disenfranchisement. Farmers of color and young and beginning producers have long struggled to access capital, in the form of loans and grants, from the agency.
So in 2022, former President Joe Biden’s USDA created the Regional Food Business Centers program using funding from the American Rescue Plan. The program established 12 virtual centers to function as business development resource hubs within rural communities nationwide. The centers were intended as a way to provide technical assistance, navigate federal and state resources, and administer grants to small- and mid-sized farmers and ranchers who wanted to develop food businesses or access new markets. The overall goal was to build a more resilient food system.
A total of roughly $400 million was earmarked to support the 12 centers, each run by a coalition of organizations and partners based in each region, which the USDA agreed to fund for five years. In 2024, many began distributing sub-awards from that pool of funds in the form of “business builder” grants.
In early January, Ed Harvey, a Navajo farmer in rural northern Arizona, was awarded a technical assistance contract dedicated to assisting Indigenous producers from the Southwest Regional Food Business Center, which was created to strengthen local supply chains throughout Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah. Not only does he grow apples, peaches, pears, plums, nectarines, cherries, and sumac berries, but Harvey runs a consulting business geared toward helping other Navajo tribal members through all of the paperwork needed in order to begin or continue farming on their land.
Much of the farmland throughout Navajo Nation is left idle, buried in layers of dirt, wind deposits, and towering weeds, with slivers of corn, squash, and melons here and there. Harvey attributes the situation to the federal mandate that tribal members need a permit with a conservation plan in order to use their land for agricultural production. It’s an exceedingly onerous application process, and the reimbursable RFBC funding was intended to cover the costs associated with the development of conservation plans for other tribal members. When he heard he was selected for the program, Harvey was elated, and immediately began advertising the opportunity to work with him free of charge: He reached out to community farm boards, promoted it across all of the reservation’s chapter houses, and even posted flyers in local businesses.
That sense of joy morphed into one of sinking despair when, the following month, President Donald Trump’s administration abruptly froze the program’s funding, and a tsunami of layoffs at USDA and the Bureau of Indian Affairs saw thousands of federal workers leave their positions. The month of February, Harvey said, was the “worst of my life.”
“It hurt me. It hurt the business,” he said. “I did a lot of conservation plans for free, not getting paid for it, because I expressed to people that it’s paid for, so I didn’t want to let it ruin my reputation.” While the fate of the centers remained in purgatory, Harvey scrambled to remedy the damage done, completing 36 conservation projects at no charge, the equivalent of hundreds of unpaid hours and thousands of dollars worth of labor — a huge net loss.
Finally, on July 15, the USDA announced it was shuttering the program, a decision that was met with considerable opposition across food and farming sectors. And just like that, Harvey’s big plans for his community went up in smoke.
“This was a program fully dedicated to support rural people. So I was thinking, ‘Heck, yeah, I can support my relatives who live in the middle of nowhere. I can find a way to help my uncle, to help with what he needs by planting corn,’” said Harvey. “Out here in Navajo Nation, you have to take in the fact that there’s very limited opportunities for people to make money. The tribe here, we live on government assistance…people don’t have that dedicated time to give back to the land, to give back to who they are. It takes funding mechanisms or opportunities to find [it].”
Ed Harvey grows apples, peaches, pears, plums, nectarines, cherries, and sumac berries in Salina Springs, a small Navajo chapter in northern Arizona. Ed Harvey
In the press release announcing the end of the RFBCs, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins criticized the Biden administration for creating the RFBCs “without any long-term way to finance them,” which the release described as a “COVID-era program.” The release also specified that “over 450” grants so far awarded would be honored — which meant that roughly four of the centers that hadn’t yet officially awarded their grant selections had 60 days to cease operations, and the other eight overseeing those awards would end next May. But even those centers still operating through next spring won’t be running at full capacity, as the cancellation limits the scope of what each center can do to no more than merely monitoring awards and technical assistance for existing grants. Rollins also stated that “any remaining funds will be repurposed to better support American agriculture.” As of this story’s publication, the details of that repurposing are not yet known.
Roughly a week after the USDA announced the end of the RFBCs, Rollins released a memo that again took the agricultural world by storm. The five-page document revealing Rollins’ plan to significantly reorganize the agency was accompanied by an unlisted YouTube video intended for employees, which also broadly detailed the four pillars powering the decision: ensuring the size of the agency’s workforce aligns with available resources and priorities, bringing USDA closer to those it serves by relocating resources, getting rid of bureaucracy, and paring down redundant support functions.
According to current and former USDA staffers, the closure of the country’s regional food business centers and the agency’s reorganization rollout should not be considered as separate developments, but rather as successive decisions with intertwining impacts. Both moves are expected to have lasting effects on historically underserved rural communities in particular, where farmers and families are already facing the day-to-day impacts of a shrinking federal workforce in local offices. That’s to say nothing of the growing role of climate change in throttling agricultural production and amplifying economic stressors such as increased price volatility, trade war disruptions, and surging labor and production costs.
“To me, there is a real friction here between those in the administration that simply want to diminish, destroy, and decimate the federal workforce and any sort of policy goal that is aimed at improving the lives of Americans and reducing costs for those who live in rural communities,” said Michael Amato, former USDA communications director. So far in his second term, Trump’s USDA has gotten rid of more than 15,000 federal employees, nearly a fifth of its workforce, straining bureau capacity, even as the agency has culled billions of dollars in funding streams that, in the process, has buckled local and regional food systems. At least ten percent of the federal employees who have left the USDA this year worked for Rural Development, the nation’s lead agency that fights rural poverty.
“If there was some policy objective, then it’s lost on me, because I don’t see how simply just cutting funds to try to run up your DOGE score as high as possible, and calling for deferred resignations across the entire department with no strategic plan about where you see waste or where you see bureaucratic bloat,” Amato continued. “It just seems like a meat axe approach with the goal of shrinking the department.”
Rollins did not specify a timeline for the plan, nor did she share many details of how it will be carried out, but noted that the agency will move more than half of the roughly 4,600 D.C. area employees out of the capital area. According to Rollins, the five hubs, located in Raleigh, North Carolina, Kansas City, Missouri, Indianapolis, Indiana, Fort Collins, Colorado, and Salt Lake City, Utah, would bring the USDA closer to its “core constituents.” The USDA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Multiple current USDA employees told Grist that not even they have been briefed on the details of the reorganization. “We haven’t been given any more information than is publicly available,” said one USDA employee who is based in D.C. and asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. “It’s been unsettling. Morale is low. It has not been a great work environment, just because everyone feels insecure right now.”
“The relocation is actually going to be moving many of our regional office partners farther from the states that they cover,” the staffer continued. “The logic is just not there. It doesn’t make sense. And the claim that they’re moving up closer to the people we serve, is just patently false.” The USDA staffer added that the mass layoffs experienced have already resulted in overworked employees and significant delays in processing financial assistance applications. “There are things falling through the cracks,” they said.
On Thursday, August 21, a letter addressed to Rollins and signed by 32 USDA unions, and shared with Grist, also expressed widespread concerns about the reorganization. It noted that over 90 percent of USDA employees already live and work outside of the D.C. area and urged the department to “slow down, engage with Congress and the labor unions in good faith, and fully assess the true impacts of this reorganization before proceeding further.”
“We are just trying to call attention to how poorly planned the USDA reorganization is, that they seem to be hiding whatever details that they have,” said Ethan Roberts, a physical science technician at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service based in Peoria, Illinois, who represents the bargaining unit employees at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research as union president. “There’s something going on. When I talk to the management in this building, they don’t know anything. They’ve not been told anything.
“Why this is incredibly harmful is because the USDA is already struggling administratively,” Roberts continued. “Here in my laboratory, the management and the admin are taking on two to three jobs just to keep up to try and make everything continue to function. If we lose even more people in D.C., at the highest levels of the human resources department, and our budgeting and our billing, it’s going to be catastrophic. There’s going to be a critical administrative failure.”
The lack of clarity has prompted plenty of congressional backlash, too. When news of the reorganization broke, a Senate hearing was swiftly assembled where a bipartisan contingency of Democrats and Republicans grilled Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Stephen Vaden about the unusually secretive nature of the rollout of the reorganization. Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry ranking member Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, said at the hearing that the committee first heard of the plan just minutes before it was announced.
“It is clear from the hearing that this is a half-baked reorganization plan developed without input from Congress or stakeholders that will almost certainly result in worse services for farmers, families, and rural communities,” Senator Klobuchar later told Grist. She noted that the reorganization “follows the cancellations or delays of funds for voluntary conservation programs that protect our environment and improve farmers’ bottom lines.”
Klobuchar and some of her colleagues on the Senate Agriculture Committee sent a letter to Vaden on Monday requesting more time to comment on the plan and increased transparency with the results of the agency’s ongoing public comment period. The letter followed at least two others that have been issued in the last month by groups of lawmakers demanding more information. Nearly all have referred to the first Trump administration’s relocation of the USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which resulted in the resignation of three quarters of employees, and declining workforce productivity.
Kevin Shea, a 45-year veteran of USDA who led the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service for 11 of those years, and briefly served as Secretary of Agriculture during the Biden administration, points to the USDA’s claim that the reorganization plan will bring staffers closer to constituents as one example of the contradictions at play. “This whole ruse about being closer to farmers — what nonsense. They’re still going to be in cities hundreds of miles from farmers,” said Shea.
What’s more, the RFBC program wasn’t solely addressing an immediate food system crisis that became clear because of the pandemic, he said, but “it was addressing a problem that had been revealed. The problem was always there.” A USDA report released last October found that the RFBCs led to more than 2,800 individuals receiving technical assistance, 1,500 new partnerships formed by recipients, and 287 businesses reporting increased revenue as a result of the program. Other critics of the Trump administration’s decision to cancel it have argued the program was established to meet a $4 billion congressional mandate in the American Rescue Plan to build more resilient food systems.
Another current USDA employee based in D.C., who also asked to remain anonymous, told Grist that the double blow of the closure of the regional food business centers and the proposed relocations “is going to result in massive harm to rural America which, again, is a population that they purport to care about.” “There’s no particular rhyme or reason that we can tell,” the staffer said, while pointing out where the new hubs aren’t. “California is the biggest agriculture state in the country, and there’s not a hub there. Doesn’t make any sense.”
“For farmers and people that rely on the USDA for information, for money, it’s going to be poorer quality service and less of it because there’s just going to be less people working,” said Roberts, the USDA union president. “If we experience an even greater loss of the administrative staff that keeps the USDA running, by telling them that they need to pick up their entire lives and move to somewhere across the country, the USDA is going to grind to a halt.”
Angry residents of a Washington high-rise apartment building gathered as federal agents, backed by Metropolitan Police Department officers, swooped in to encircle a delivery driver last week.
The armed agents with tactical vests arrived first. They were joined by District police officers and a truck brimming with the sorts of mopeds and scooters used by delivery drivers. Soon, the driver’s moped — representing another livelihood of a person at the bottom of Silicon Valley’s pecking order — was added to the pile.
Residents pleading for the driver’s release were ignored. As the police van drove away, one resident shouted at the driver, “Fuck you!” The officer lowered his window and spat in the resident’s direction.
Scenes like this have become common in a city under siege by President Donald Trump’s administration, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and a federalized police force. The delivery drivers are only the latest targets of Trump’s attempt to turn the city into a test run for deploying troops and federal agents to cities that oppose his administration.
The delivery drivers’ whizzing motorcycles, mopeds, and electric bicycles filled city streets just a few weeks before, but now advocates say they’ve become a top ICE target.
Hard numbers about the crackdown are hard to come by. In a statement, the police department linked the arrests of delivery drivers to an operation that dates back to last year — without acknowledging ICE’s new role. The targeting of delivery drivers appears to be widespread, however, and has led to a dramatic decline in the number of visible delivery drivers on the streets.
In stark contrast to Trump’s first term, when the major ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft both came out against the government’s Muslim ban, the big players in the food-delivery space have been quiet about the administration’s attack on their workforce.
Advocates for immigrants and low-wage workers said the companies owe it to their drivers to speak out.
“I would hope that every employer in the District is not only finding ways to protect their staff, but they are also speaking out and speaking to their elected folks about how unhappy they are,” said Michael Lukens, executive director of Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, which represents people facing deportation in the D.C. area. “Profit cannot be paramount over people.”
A “Lazy” Tactic
Lukens’s nonprofit has already seen an increase in newly arrested clients, including those who worked as delivery drivers before the federal takeover of D.C.’s police force began August 11.
Videos bear that out. Across D.C., residents have posted videos of police swooping in to arrest delivery drivers. In one scene captured by bystanders on video, a delivery driver emerging from a coffee shop was tackled to the ground and pummeled by masked ICE agents.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, Metro police attempted to tie the recent videos of violent arrests involving ICE to a monthslong operation.
“In response to community complaints about unsafe scooter driving behavior, the Metropolitan Police Department began conducting scooter enforcement in 2024,” the department said. “Since Operation Ride Right started, we have impounded approximately 1,249 scooters, made 139 arrests, and issued 1,258 Notice of Infractions.”
The operation predated the Trump administration and what the statement left out was ICE’s new, heavy-handed role. The agency has specifically been partnering with the city’s police officers to check drivers’ immigration status, the Washington Post reported last week.
ICE has zeroed in on delivery drivers, Lukens believes, because they are easy prey.
“It’s very clear ICE is targeting delivery drivers because they’re outdoors, which makes it easier to do warrantless arrests. It’s a population that ICE is aware is very immigrant-heavy. And frankly, it’s easy for ICE to go after them,” Lukens said. “It is, to me, a very lazy way for ICE to operate.”
In Washington, many delivery drivers are recently arrived Venezuelan immigrants, putting them even more in harm’s way because ICE is fast-tracking deportations for people who have not been in the U.S. for long.
“Given the government’s racial profiling, and profiling of people from Venezuela and Central America as potential gang members,” Lukens said, “that is also problematic.”
The Sound of Silence
The street corners where drivers once gathered to await new orders have emptied out since the joint police–ICE crackdown began.
As authorities round up their work force, the big players in the world of Silicon Valley-developed delivery apps have largely remained silent. Three of the biggest — Uber, Grubhub, and DoorDash — did not respond to requests for comment.
The app companies have long relied on exploiting low-wage workers, Wells said. A core premise of the apps’ business models is that their workers are independent contractors, not direct employees. Even before the crackdown, delivery drivers faced the physical risk of accidents on the road and the economic risk of account deactivations with little support from the companies.
“The violence, the stress of getting there on time, and the indignities of being deactivated without a single human to call for help — it makes the jobs very difficult,” said Wells, who is the director of research at Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank that opposes excessive corporate power.
Organizing efforts have made slow progress given the fragmented nature of the workforce, with the exception of groups such as Los Deliveristas Unidos in New York City. The app companies have deployed armies of lobbyists to fight back against attempts to regulate the industry through minimum pay guarantees or pay transparency rules.
In many cases, immigrant delivery drivers rent time on the apps from people who are legally authorized to work in the U.S., according to Sergio Avedian, a rideshare driver, industry consultant, and senior contributor at the Rideshare Guy.
The people whose names are on the account sometimes fail to turn over the agreed-upon split of the earnings to the drivers, according to Avedian.
For years, the app industry has relied on undocumented workers to meet the demand for its always-on, nearly-instant delivery services, Avedian said. But it has made few efforts to ensure that they are being treated well.
“Capital doesn’t care about fairness,” Avedian said. “But as far as these immigrants, my heart goes out to them. They get screwed every possible way.”
Canadian photojournalist Valerie Zink has resigned after eight years with Reuters, criticising the news agency’s stance on Gaza as a “betrayal of journalists” and accusing it of “justifying and enabling” the killing of 245 journalists in the Palestinian enclave.
“At this point it’s become impossible for me to maintain a relationship with Reuters given its role in justifying and enabling the systematic assassination of 245 journalists in Gaza,” Zink said today via the US social media company X.
Zink said she worked as a Reuters stringer for eight years, with her photos published by many outlets, including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and others worldwide.
She criticised Reuters’ reporting after the killing of Anas al-Sharif and an Al Jazeera crew in Gaza on August 10, accusing the agency of amplifying Israel’s “entirely baseless claim” that al-Sharif was a Hamas operative, which was “one of countless lies that media outlets like Reuters have dutifully repeated and dignified,” she said.
“I have valued the work that I brought to Reuters over the past eight years, but at this point I can’t conceive of wearing this press pass with anything but deep shame and grief,” Zink said.
Zink also emphasised that the agency’s willingness to “perpetuate Israel’s propaganda” had not spared their own reporters from Israel’s genocide.
“I don’t know what it means to begin to honour the courage and sacrifice of journalists in Gaza, the bravest and best to ever live, but going forward I will direct whatever contributions I have to offer with that front of mind,” Zink highlighted, reflecting on the courage of Gaza’s journalists.
“I owe my colleagues in Palestine at least this much, and so much more,” she added.
I can’t in good conscience continue to work for Reuters given their betrayal of journalists in Gaza and culpability in the assassination of 245 our colleagues. pic.twitter.com/WO6tjHqDIU
‘Double tap’ strike
Referring to the killing of six more journalists, including Reuters cameraman Hossam Al-Masri, in Israel’s Monday attack on the al-Nasser hospital in Gaza, Zink said: “It was what’s known as a ‘double tap’ strike, in which Israel bombs a civilian target like a school or hospital; waits for medics, rescue teams, and journalists to arrive; and then strikes again.”
Zink underlined that Western media was directly culpable for creating the conditions for these events, quoting Jeremy Scahill of Drop Down News, who said major outlets — from The New York Times to Reuters — had served as “a conveyor belt for Israeli propaganda,” sanitising war crimes, dehumanising victims, and abandoning both their colleagues and their commitment to true and ethical reporting.
She said Western media outlets, by “repeating Israel’s genocidal fabrications without determining if they have any credibility” and abandoning basic journalistic responsibility, have enabled the killing of more journalists in Gaza in two years than in major global conflicts combined, while also contributing to the suffering of the population.
The new fatalities among the media personnel in Gaza brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023 to 246.
Israel has killed more than 62,700 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The military campaign has devastated the enclave, which is facing famine.
Last November, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its war on the enclave.
The Trump administration announced Monday it was processing Kilmar Abrego Garcia for expulsion to Uganda, threatening to banish him to the United States’ growing network of deportee dumping grounds for the second time.
Abrego Garcia, a native of El Salvador, was erroneously deported to his home country in March and held in the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, becoming the face of President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation regime. After the Trump administration spent months claiming falsely that Abrego Garcia could not be recovered from El Salvador’s custody, he was returned to the U.S. in June and jailed on federal human smuggling charges. A judge ruled that he should be released from detention ahead of a trial set for January.
Abrego Garcia was freed from pretrial detention last Friday. His attorneys were sent a court-required notice of his potential deportation to Uganda on Saturday. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on X Monday morning that ICE had arrested Abrego Garcia, and DHS said in a statement that he was “being processed for removal to Uganda.”
DHS did not reply to The Intercept’s request for additional information prior to publication.
The United States is pursuing deals with around a third of the world’s nations to expel immigrants to places where they do not hold citizenship. Once exiled, these third-country nationals are sometimes detained, imprisoned, or in danger of being sent back to their countries of origin — which they may have fled to escape violence, torture, or political persecution.
The nations that the Trump administration is collaborating with to accept these expelled immigrants are some of the worst human rights offenders on the planet.
The Trump administration has expelled more than 8,100 people in this manner since January 20, and the U.S. has made arrangements to send people to at least 14 nations, so far, across the globe. Of them, 13 have previously been cited by the State Department for significant human rights abuses.
The State Department recently sanitized its annual human rights reports, whitewashing the records of some of the world’s most notorious nations. Even this year’s stripped-down report paints Uganda as a pariah state. “Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; [and] arbitrary arrest or detention,” among many other abuses, according to the new report issued this month.
Uganda is a relatively new addition to the Trump administration’s global gulag for expelled immigrants: The country reached an agreement with the U.S. to accept some deportees last week. In total, the Trump administration has solicited 64 nations to participate. Fifty-eight of them — roughly 91 percent — were rebuked for human rights violations in the State Department’s past human rights reports.
The Trump administration has sought, or struck deals with, or deported third-country nationals to Angola, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gabon, Georgia, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Honduras, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Libya, Kosovo, Malawi, Mauritania, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Palau, Panama, Peru, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, The Gambia, Togo, Tonga, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Zambia, and Zimbabwe; these 58 were previously taken to task by the State Department for significant human rights abuses. Tuvalu and Santa Lucia were also cited in the report for having repressive laws on paper but were not found to enforce them in practice. Only four of the 64 total nations solicited by the Trump administration— Antigua and Barbuda, Cabo Verde, Costa Rica, and Saint Kitts and Nevis — received a clean bill of human rights health from the State Department in the past.
To justify Abrego Garcia’s second attempted expulsion, the Department of Homeland Security claims he is a member of MS-13, a gang that’s known for its prominence in El Salvador but originated in Los Angeles. His family denies the government’s allegations.
“President Trump is not going to allow this illegal alien, who is an MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser, and child predator to terrorize American citizens any longer,” Noem said.
The White House did not reply to a request for comment.
