Sunday, July 05, 2020
UK historian quits Cambridge over slavery claim
"Slavery was not genocide. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived," Starkey said.
Issued on: 05/07/2020
"Slavery was not genocide. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived," Starkey said.
Issued on: 05/07/2020
David Starkey (R) seen here in 2007 with Britain's Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, has resigned from his position at Cambridge University IAN JONES POOL/AFP/File
London (AFP)
A British royal historian who said slavery was not genocide has quit his honorary position at Cambridge University and been dropped by his publisher HarperCollins.
The comments from Professor David Starkey came during a period of soul searching in Britain over its colonial past.
The Black Lives Matter movement that gained momentum after the death of George Floyd in US police custody in May saw the statue of a major slave trader dumped in an English harbour as protests hit cities across the UK.
Starkey is an expert on Britain's Tudor period -- a time in the 1500s when the slave trade was growing as European colonies across the Caribbean and the Americas expanded.
He said in a June 30 online interview with the right-wing UK commentator Darren Grimes that the BLM movement represented "the worst side of American black culture".
"Slavery was not genocide. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived," Starkey said.
"We had Catholic emancipation at pretty much exactly the same time that we got rid of slavery in the 1830s. We don't go on about that because it's part of history, it's a question that's settled," he added.
The remarks prompted Sajid Javid -- a former finance and interior minister who has talked about how his Pakistani father faced discrimination after coming to Britain -- to call Starkey a racist.
"We are the most successful multi-racial democracy in the world and have much to be proud of," Javid tweeted on Thursday.
"But David Starkey's racist comments ('so many damn blacks') are a reminder of the appalling views that still exist."
Javid's tweet was picked up by British media, and Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam College accepted Starkey's resignation the next day.
- 'Not engaged enough' -
Canterbury Christ Church University in southeastern England also terminated Starkey's contract as a visiting professor.
"His comments are completely unacceptable and totally go against our university and community values," the university said in a tweet.
HarperCollins UK called Starkey's views "abhorrent".
"Our last book with the author was in 2010, and we will not be publishing further books with him," it said.
"We are reviewing his existing backlist in light of his comments and views."
Starkey could not be reached for comment and did not respond to other UK media interview requests.
But the right-wing commentator who conducted the historian's interview disassociated himself from Starkey's remarks.
"Hand on heart, I wasn't engaged enough in this interview as I should have been," Grimes said in a statement.
"I should have robustly questioned Dr Starkey about his comments."
© 2020 AFP
London (AFP)
A British royal historian who said slavery was not genocide has quit his honorary position at Cambridge University and been dropped by his publisher HarperCollins.
The comments from Professor David Starkey came during a period of soul searching in Britain over its colonial past.
The Black Lives Matter movement that gained momentum after the death of George Floyd in US police custody in May saw the statue of a major slave trader dumped in an English harbour as protests hit cities across the UK.
Starkey is an expert on Britain's Tudor period -- a time in the 1500s when the slave trade was growing as European colonies across the Caribbean and the Americas expanded.
He said in a June 30 online interview with the right-wing UK commentator Darren Grimes that the BLM movement represented "the worst side of American black culture".
"Slavery was not genocide. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived," Starkey said.
"We had Catholic emancipation at pretty much exactly the same time that we got rid of slavery in the 1830s. We don't go on about that because it's part of history, it's a question that's settled," he added.
The remarks prompted Sajid Javid -- a former finance and interior minister who has talked about how his Pakistani father faced discrimination after coming to Britain -- to call Starkey a racist.
"We are the most successful multi-racial democracy in the world and have much to be proud of," Javid tweeted on Thursday.
"But David Starkey's racist comments ('so many damn blacks') are a reminder of the appalling views that still exist."
Javid's tweet was picked up by British media, and Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam College accepted Starkey's resignation the next day.
- 'Not engaged enough' -
Canterbury Christ Church University in southeastern England also terminated Starkey's contract as a visiting professor.
"His comments are completely unacceptable and totally go against our university and community values," the university said in a tweet.
HarperCollins UK called Starkey's views "abhorrent".
"Our last book with the author was in 2010, and we will not be publishing further books with him," it said.
"We are reviewing his existing backlist in light of his comments and views."
Starkey could not be reached for comment and did not respond to other UK media interview requests.
But the right-wing commentator who conducted the historian's interview disassociated himself from Starkey's remarks.
"Hand on heart, I wasn't engaged enough in this interview as I should have been," Grimes said in a statement.
"I should have robustly questioned Dr Starkey about his comments."
© 2020 AFP
Amid reckoning on police racism, algorithm bias in focus
Issued on: 05/07/2020 -
Washington (AFP)
A wave of protests over law enforcement abuses has highlighted concerns over artificial intelligence programs like facial recognition which critics say may reinforce racial bias.
While the protests have focused on police misconduct, activists point out flaws that may ad to unfair applications of technologies for law enforcement, including facial recognition, predictive policing and "risk assessment" algorithms.
The issue came to the forefront recently with the wrongful arrest in Detroit of an African American man based on a flawed algorithm which identified him as a robbery suspect.
Critics of facial recognition use in law enforcement say the case underscores the pervasive impact of a flawed technology.
Mutale Nkonde, an AI researcher, said that even though the idea of bias and algorithms has been debated for years, the latest case and other incidents have driven home the message.
"What is different in this moment is we have explainability and people are really beginning to realize the way these algorithms are used for decision-making," said Nkonde, a fellow at Stanford University's Digital Society Lab and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard.
Amazon, IBM and Microsoft have said they would not sell facial recognition technology to law enforcement without rules to protect against unfair use. But many other vendors offer a range of technologies.
- Secret algorithms -
Nkonde said the technologies are only as good as the data they rely on.
"We know the criminal justice system is biased, so any model you create is going to have 'dirty data,'" she said.
Daniel Castro of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank, said however it would be counterproductive to ban a technology which automates investigative tasks and enables police to be more productive.
"There are (facial recognition) systems that are accurate, so we need to have more testing and transparency," Castro said.
"Everyone is concerned about false identification, but that can happen whether it's a person or a computer."
Seda Gurses, a researcher at the Netherlands-based Delft University of Technology, said one problem with analyzing the systems is that they use proprietary, secret algorithms, sometimes from multiple vendors.
"This makes it very difficult to identify under what conditions the dataset was collected, what qualities these images had, how the algorithm was trained," Gurses said.
- Predictive limits -
The use of artificial intelligence in "predictive policing," which is growing in many cities, has also raised concerns over reinforcing bias.
The systems have been touted to help make better use of limited police budgets, but some research suggests it increases deployments to communities which have already been identified, rightly or wrongly, as high-crime zones.
These models "are susceptible to runaway feedback loops, where police are repeatedly sent back to the same neighborhoods regardless of the actual crime rate," said a 2019 report by the AI Now Institute at New York University, based a study of 13 cities using the technology.
These systems may be gamed by "biased police data," the report said.
In a related matter, an outcry from academics prompted the cancellation of a research paper which claimed facial recognition algorithms could predict with 80 percent accuracy if someone is likely to be a criminal.
- Robots vs humans -
Ironically, many artificial intelligence programs for law enforcement and criminal justice were designed with the hope of reducing bias in the system.
So-called risk assessment algorithms were designed to help judges and others in the system make unbiased recommendations on who is sent to jail, or released on bond or parole.
But the fairness of such a system was questioned in a 2019 report by the Partnership on AI, a consortium which includes tech giants including Google and Facebook, as well as organizations such as Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union.
"It is perhaps counterintuitive, but in complex settings like criminal justice, virtually all statistical predictions will be biased even if the data was accurate, and even if variables such as race are excluded, unless specific steps are taken to measure and mitigate bias," the report said.
Nkonde said recent research highlights the need to keep humans in the loop for important decisions.
"You cannot change the history of racism and sexism," she said. "But you can make sure the algorithm does not become the final decision maker."
Castro said algorithms are designed to carry out what public officials want, and the solution to unfair practices lies more with policy than technology.
"We can't always agree on fairness," he said. "When we use a computer to do something, the critique is leveled at the algorithm when it should be at the overall system."
© 2020 AFP
Issued on: 05/07/2020 -
Facial recognition technology is increasingly used in law enforcement, amid concerns that low accuracy for people of color could reinforce racial bias DAVID MCNEW AFP/File
Washington (AFP)
A wave of protests over law enforcement abuses has highlighted concerns over artificial intelligence programs like facial recognition which critics say may reinforce racial bias.
While the protests have focused on police misconduct, activists point out flaws that may ad to unfair applications of technologies for law enforcement, including facial recognition, predictive policing and "risk assessment" algorithms.
The issue came to the forefront recently with the wrongful arrest in Detroit of an African American man based on a flawed algorithm which identified him as a robbery suspect.
Critics of facial recognition use in law enforcement say the case underscores the pervasive impact of a flawed technology.
Mutale Nkonde, an AI researcher, said that even though the idea of bias and algorithms has been debated for years, the latest case and other incidents have driven home the message.
"What is different in this moment is we have explainability and people are really beginning to realize the way these algorithms are used for decision-making," said Nkonde, a fellow at Stanford University's Digital Society Lab and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard.
Amazon, IBM and Microsoft have said they would not sell facial recognition technology to law enforcement without rules to protect against unfair use. But many other vendors offer a range of technologies.
- Secret algorithms -
Nkonde said the technologies are only as good as the data they rely on.
"We know the criminal justice system is biased, so any model you create is going to have 'dirty data,'" she said.
Daniel Castro of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank, said however it would be counterproductive to ban a technology which automates investigative tasks and enables police to be more productive.
"There are (facial recognition) systems that are accurate, so we need to have more testing and transparency," Castro said.
"Everyone is concerned about false identification, but that can happen whether it's a person or a computer."
Seda Gurses, a researcher at the Netherlands-based Delft University of Technology, said one problem with analyzing the systems is that they use proprietary, secret algorithms, sometimes from multiple vendors.
"This makes it very difficult to identify under what conditions the dataset was collected, what qualities these images had, how the algorithm was trained," Gurses said.
- Predictive limits -
The use of artificial intelligence in "predictive policing," which is growing in many cities, has also raised concerns over reinforcing bias.
The systems have been touted to help make better use of limited police budgets, but some research suggests it increases deployments to communities which have already been identified, rightly or wrongly, as high-crime zones.
These models "are susceptible to runaway feedback loops, where police are repeatedly sent back to the same neighborhoods regardless of the actual crime rate," said a 2019 report by the AI Now Institute at New York University, based a study of 13 cities using the technology.
These systems may be gamed by "biased police data," the report said.
In a related matter, an outcry from academics prompted the cancellation of a research paper which claimed facial recognition algorithms could predict with 80 percent accuracy if someone is likely to be a criminal.
- Robots vs humans -
Ironically, many artificial intelligence programs for law enforcement and criminal justice were designed with the hope of reducing bias in the system.
So-called risk assessment algorithms were designed to help judges and others in the system make unbiased recommendations on who is sent to jail, or released on bond or parole.
But the fairness of such a system was questioned in a 2019 report by the Partnership on AI, a consortium which includes tech giants including Google and Facebook, as well as organizations such as Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union.
"It is perhaps counterintuitive, but in complex settings like criminal justice, virtually all statistical predictions will be biased even if the data was accurate, and even if variables such as race are excluded, unless specific steps are taken to measure and mitigate bias," the report said.
Nkonde said recent research highlights the need to keep humans in the loop for important decisions.
"You cannot change the history of racism and sexism," she said. "But you can make sure the algorithm does not become the final decision maker."
Castro said algorithms are designed to carry out what public officials want, and the solution to unfair practices lies more with policy than technology.
"We can't always agree on fairness," he said. "When we use a computer to do something, the critique is leveled at the algorithm when it should be at the overall system."
© 2020 AFP
Big Oil confronts possibility of terminal demand decline
Issued on: 05/07/2020 -
Paris (AFP)
Although crude prices have rebounded from coronavirus crisis lows, oil execs and experts are starting to ask if the industry has crossed the Rubicon of peak demand.
The plunge in the price of crude oil during the first wave of coronavirus lockdowns -- futures prices briefly turned negative -- was due to the drop in global demand as planes were parked on tarmacs and cars in garages.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast that average daily oil demand will drop by eight million barrels per day this year, a decline of around eight percent from last year.
While the agency expects an unprecedented rebound of 5.7 million barrels per day next year, it still forecasts overall demand will be lower than in 2019 owing to ongoing uncertainty in the airline sector.
Some are questioning whether demand will ever get back to 2019 levels.
"I don't think we know how this is going to play out. I certainly don't know," BP's new chief executive Bernard Looney said in May.
The COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing then with most planes grounded and white-collar workers giving up the commute to work from home.
"Could it be peak oil? Possibly. I would not write that off," Looney told the Financial Times.
- Summited? -
The concept of peak oil has long generated speculation.
Mostly, it has been focused on peak production, with experts forecasting that prices would reach astronomical levels as recoverable oil in the ground runs out.
But in recent months, the concept of peak demand has come into vogue, with the coronavirus landing an uppercut into fuel demand for the transportation sector followed by a knock-out punch from the transition to cleaner fuels.
Michael Bradshaw, professor at Warwick Business School, said environmental groups are already lobbying to prevent the Paris agreements becoming another casualty of the pandemic, stressing the need for a Green New Deal for the recovery.
"If they are successful, demand for oil might never return to the peak we saw prior to COVID-19," he said in comments to journalists.
The transport sector may never fully recover, Bradshaw posited.
"After the pandemic, we might have a different attitude to international air travel or physically going into work," he said.
- 'Science fiction' -
Other experts say we haven't reached the tipping point yet, and might not for a while.
"Many people have said, including some CEOs of some major companies, with the lifestyle changes now to teleworking and others we may well see oil demand has peaked, and oil demand will go down," IEA executive director Fatih Birol said recently.
"I don't agree with that. Teleconferencing alone will not help us to reach our energy and climate goals, they can only make a small dent," Firol added while unveiling a recent IEA report.
Moez Ajmi at consulting and auditing firm E&Y dismissed as "science fiction" the idea that a definitive drop in oil demand could suddenly emerge.
He expects a slow recovery in demand even if the coronavirus leaves the global economy weakened.
That weakness would also likely slow adoption of greener fuels.
"It will take time for fossil fuels, which today still account for some 80 percent of primary global consumption to face real competition" from rival energy sources, he said.
Meanwhile, the oil industry could face financing challenges.
Bronwen Tucker, an analyst at Oil Change International, says the industry is now under pressure from investors.
After "a pretty big wave of restrictions on coal and some restrictions on oil and gas, the risks to oil and gas investment right now feel a lot more salient," she said.
The industry is already writing down the value of assets to face up to the new market reality of lower demand and prices.
Royal Dutch Shell said this past week that it will take a $22 billion charge as it re-evaluates the value of its business in light of the coronavirus.
Last month, rival BP reduced the worth of its assets by $17.5 billion.
"This process has further to run, and we expect further large impairments to occur across the sector," said Angus Rodger of specialist energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
© 2020 AFP
Issued on: 05/07/2020 -
Is this the sunset of the oil industry? Paul Ratje AFP
Paris (AFP)
Although crude prices have rebounded from coronavirus crisis lows, oil execs and experts are starting to ask if the industry has crossed the Rubicon of peak demand.
The plunge in the price of crude oil during the first wave of coronavirus lockdowns -- futures prices briefly turned negative -- was due to the drop in global demand as planes were parked on tarmacs and cars in garages.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast that average daily oil demand will drop by eight million barrels per day this year, a decline of around eight percent from last year.
While the agency expects an unprecedented rebound of 5.7 million barrels per day next year, it still forecasts overall demand will be lower than in 2019 owing to ongoing uncertainty in the airline sector.
Some are questioning whether demand will ever get back to 2019 levels.
"I don't think we know how this is going to play out. I certainly don't know," BP's new chief executive Bernard Looney said in May.
The COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing then with most planes grounded and white-collar workers giving up the commute to work from home.
"Could it be peak oil? Possibly. I would not write that off," Looney told the Financial Times.
- Summited? -
The concept of peak oil has long generated speculation.
Mostly, it has been focused on peak production, with experts forecasting that prices would reach astronomical levels as recoverable oil in the ground runs out.
But in recent months, the concept of peak demand has come into vogue, with the coronavirus landing an uppercut into fuel demand for the transportation sector followed by a knock-out punch from the transition to cleaner fuels.
Michael Bradshaw, professor at Warwick Business School, said environmental groups are already lobbying to prevent the Paris agreements becoming another casualty of the pandemic, stressing the need for a Green New Deal for the recovery.
"If they are successful, demand for oil might never return to the peak we saw prior to COVID-19," he said in comments to journalists.
The transport sector may never fully recover, Bradshaw posited.
"After the pandemic, we might have a different attitude to international air travel or physically going into work," he said.
- 'Science fiction' -
Other experts say we haven't reached the tipping point yet, and might not for a while.
"Many people have said, including some CEOs of some major companies, with the lifestyle changes now to teleworking and others we may well see oil demand has peaked, and oil demand will go down," IEA executive director Fatih Birol said recently.
"I don't agree with that. Teleconferencing alone will not help us to reach our energy and climate goals, they can only make a small dent," Firol added while unveiling a recent IEA report.
Moez Ajmi at consulting and auditing firm E&Y dismissed as "science fiction" the idea that a definitive drop in oil demand could suddenly emerge.
He expects a slow recovery in demand even if the coronavirus leaves the global economy weakened.
That weakness would also likely slow adoption of greener fuels.
"It will take time for fossil fuels, which today still account for some 80 percent of primary global consumption to face real competition" from rival energy sources, he said.
Meanwhile, the oil industry could face financing challenges.
Bronwen Tucker, an analyst at Oil Change International, says the industry is now under pressure from investors.
After "a pretty big wave of restrictions on coal and some restrictions on oil and gas, the risks to oil and gas investment right now feel a lot more salient," she said.
The industry is already writing down the value of assets to face up to the new market reality of lower demand and prices.
Royal Dutch Shell said this past week that it will take a $22 billion charge as it re-evaluates the value of its business in light of the coronavirus.
Last month, rival BP reduced the worth of its assets by $17.5 billion.
"This process has further to run, and we expect further large impairments to occur across the sector," said Angus Rodger of specialist energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
© 2020 AFP
Anti-racism protests contrast with official festivities on US Independence Day
VIDEO AT THE END
VIDEO AT THE END
The administration held a fireworks display over the National Mall as night fell after Trump’s speech, despite Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser’s warnings that the mass spectator event would defy health officials’ guidance during the pandemic.
Just steps from where Trump spoke, peaceful protesters marched down blocked-off streets around the White House, Black Lives Matter Plaza and the Lincoln Memorial. They were confronted by counter-protesters chanting, “USA! USA!” but there were no reports of violence.
Protests also took place Saturday in New York, Chicago, Nashville, Boston, Oakland and other cities. In Baltimore, protesters pulled down a statue of Christopher Columbus and threw it into the city’s Inner Harbor on Saturday night.
Protesters just took down the Christopher Columbus statue in Baltimore’s Little Italy. pic.twitter.com/ViPk5eKOtz— Louis Krauss (@louiskraussnews) July 5, 2020Millions of Americans have been demonstrating against police brutality and racial inequality since the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. In addition to achieving police reforms in some cities, some protesters have removed Confederate statues and other symbols of America’s legacy of slavery.
“There have always been those who seek to lie about the past in order to gain power in the present, those that are lying about our history, those who want us to be ashamed of who we are,” Trump said on Saturday. “Their goal is demolition.”
Trump’s Fourth of July remarks doubled down on his speech the previous evening at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota where he accused “angry mobs” of trying to erase history and painted himself as a bulwark against left-wing extremism.
Just months before November’s presidential election, opinion polls in key states show Trump trailing his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Biden wrote a Fourth of July opinion piece that struck a contrasting note with the Republican president and accused him of finding “new ways to tarnish and dismantle our democracy” every day.
In a separate letter to donors, Biden said: “We have a chance now to give the marginalized, the demonized, the isolated, the oppressed, a full share of the American dream.”
Trump, in his speech, also said the United States would have a vaccine or therapeutic solution to the virus “long before” the end of 2020. Such a success could help the US economy and Trump’s chances of re-election.
On Thursday, a top US health official said he was optimistic the Trump administration’s vaccine-acceleration program “Operation Warp Speed” will generate a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19 by year-end.
Apart from fireworks spectators in Washington, activists of different stripes also appeared willing to disregard health warnings.
Roar of the Deplorables, a bikers group, said via social media that they planned to gather to protest against what they call “the anti-Trump regime” and celebrate the nation’s birthday.
Freedom Fighters DC, a new activist group which seeks to rally ethnically diverse supporters, especially the Black population of Washington, is one of the anti-racism groups ignoring the mayor’s heed to refrain from gathering.
“Black folks are not free from the chains of oppression, so we don’t get to truly celebrate Independence Day,” said Kerrigan Williams, 22, one of the founders of the group, which will host a march and an arts demonstration on Saturday afternoon.
“We’re marching today to showcase that Black folks are still fighting for the simple liberties that the constitution is said to provide.”
(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS and AP)
Just steps from where Trump spoke, peaceful protesters marched down blocked-off streets around the White House, Black Lives Matter Plaza and the Lincoln Memorial. They were confronted by counter-protesters chanting, “USA! USA!” but there were no reports of violence.
Protests also took place Saturday in New York, Chicago, Nashville, Boston, Oakland and other cities. In Baltimore, protesters pulled down a statue of Christopher Columbus and threw it into the city’s Inner Harbor on Saturday night.
Protesters just took down the Christopher Columbus statue in Baltimore’s Little Italy. pic.twitter.com/ViPk5eKOtz— Louis Krauss (@louiskraussnews) July 5, 2020Millions of Americans have been demonstrating against police brutality and racial inequality since the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. In addition to achieving police reforms in some cities, some protesters have removed Confederate statues and other symbols of America’s legacy of slavery.
“There have always been those who seek to lie about the past in order to gain power in the present, those that are lying about our history, those who want us to be ashamed of who we are,” Trump said on Saturday. “Their goal is demolition.”
Trump’s Fourth of July remarks doubled down on his speech the previous evening at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota where he accused “angry mobs” of trying to erase history and painted himself as a bulwark against left-wing extremism.
Just months before November’s presidential election, opinion polls in key states show Trump trailing his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Biden wrote a Fourth of July opinion piece that struck a contrasting note with the Republican president and accused him of finding “new ways to tarnish and dismantle our democracy” every day.
In a separate letter to donors, Biden said: “We have a chance now to give the marginalized, the demonized, the isolated, the oppressed, a full share of the American dream.”
Trump, in his speech, also said the United States would have a vaccine or therapeutic solution to the virus “long before” the end of 2020. Such a success could help the US economy and Trump’s chances of re-election.
On Thursday, a top US health official said he was optimistic the Trump administration’s vaccine-acceleration program “Operation Warp Speed” will generate a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19 by year-end.
Apart from fireworks spectators in Washington, activists of different stripes also appeared willing to disregard health warnings.
Roar of the Deplorables, a bikers group, said via social media that they planned to gather to protest against what they call “the anti-Trump regime” and celebrate the nation’s birthday.
Freedom Fighters DC, a new activist group which seeks to rally ethnically diverse supporters, especially the Black population of Washington, is one of the anti-racism groups ignoring the mayor’s heed to refrain from gathering.
“Black folks are not free from the chains of oppression, so we don’t get to truly celebrate Independence Day,” said Kerrigan Williams, 22, one of the founders of the group, which will host a march and an arts demonstration on Saturday afternoon.
“We’re marching today to showcase that Black folks are still fighting for the simple liberties that the constitution is said to provide.”
(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS and AP)
The Trump Administration Is Set To Resume Executions In Two Weeks. There’s A Last-Ditch Effort To Stop It.
Federal death row inmates are asking a judge to intervene on new legal grounds after the US Supreme Court refused to get involved. The ACLU is also suing.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is set to execute Daniel Lewis Lee on July 13 by lethal injection. If it happens, it’ll be the first time in nearly two decades that the federal government has carried out an execution.
Death row inmates and death penalty opponents have less than two weeks to convince a judge to intervene before Lee’s execution, the first of four that the Trump administration has scheduled for men convicted of murdering children. On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a new lawsuit raising a novel argument — that at least one of the executions should be delayed because the coronavirus pandemic puts everyone involved in the lethal injection process at risk of exposure.
Rev. Seigen Hartkemeyer, a Zen Buddhist priest who has served as a spiritual adviser to Wesley Purkey, a death row inmate scheduled for execution on July 15, wrote in a blog post published by the ACLU on Thursday that he has a religious duty to be with Purkey. But Hartkemeyer said that because he has a history of lung illness and is 68 years old, he was being “asked to make an impossible decision.”
“The federal government’s decision to proceed with Wes’s execution burdens my religious freedom by forcing me to choose between performing my religious duties as a priest, and protecting my own life,” Hartkemeyer wrote. “Although Trump officials have repeatedly claimed the mantle of guardians of religious liberty, too often their commitment wavers when it is inconvenient for their political agenda. This appears to be one of those times.”
Late Thursday, a federal appeals court stepped in to pause Purkey's execution, issuing a decision in a separate challenge that Purkey raised about his criminal conviction. The US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled against Purkey, finding that he wasn't entitled to raise issues now related to whether his trial counsel was ineffective. But the court agreed to stay Purkey's execution until he'd had a chance to exhaust all of his legal options — he could petition the full 7th Circuit to rehear the case for instance, or ask the US Supreme Court to take the case. If Purkey does end up losing, however, the new ACLU case would come back into play.
The ACLU lawsuit isn’t the only pending legal action challenging the Trump administration’s plan. Purkey and other death row inmates have been fighting in court since the Justice Department announced last July that Attorney General Bill Barr had ordered the Bureau of Prisons to resume lethal injections for the first time since 2003. The inmates are still waiting to see if a judge will step in before Lee’s scheduled execution on July 13.
Purkey, Lee, and the other two inmates whose executions are scheduled for July and August were all convicted of murder, among other serious crimes. The Justice Department has made clear that it chose these first four inmates to execute based on the fact that their cases involved the murder of children.
“The American people, acting through Congress and Presidents of both political parties, have long instructed that defendants convicted of the most heinous crimes should be subject to a sentence of death,” Barr said in a statement released by DOJ last month. “The four murderers whose executions are scheduled today have received full and fair proceedings under our Constitution and laws. We owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind, to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”
Lee was found guilty in the murder of a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl. His legal team released a video of the girl’s grandmother, Earlene Peterson, explaining that she was opposed to Lee being executed instead of serving a life sentence, which is what Lee’s codefendant received after he was found guilty.
“Yes, I believe you have to pay for what you do, but that don’t mean death,” Peterson says in the video.
Lee and the other death row inmates who went to court won an injunction in the fall from a federal judge in Washington, DC, putting a pause on their executions. But the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit reversed that decision in April, giving the Trump administration the green light to set a new schedule.
The inmates asked the US Supreme Court to order a delay and review the DC Circuit’s decision, but on June 29 a majority of the justices rejected that request; Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would have delayed the executions and taken up the case, according to the order released by the court.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to get involved didn’t end the inmates’ legal fight, however. In mid-June, the inmates filed a new motion for a preliminary injunction, this time pressing different legal arguments than they did the first round. US District Judge Tanya Chutkan set a fast briefing schedule, ordering the government to respond within a week. She has yet to rule.
The first injunction was about whether the single-drug injection protocol adopted by the Trump administration violated the Federal Death Penalty Act because it didn’t match execution protocols adopted by states where the federal death row inmates were set to be executed. Chutkan ruled that the inmates were likely to win on this argument. The DC Circuit disagreed in a 2–1 decision in April.
Trump’s two appointees to the DC Circuit, judges Greg Katsas and Neomi Rao, sided with the administration in that decision. The Trump administration has made clear that it views the confirmation of conservative federal judges, especially in the appeals courts, as a central part of its policy strategy, politicizing these nominations despite protests from judges, and Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., that they are nonpolitical actors.
The DC Circuit ruling noted that the inmates still had other unresolved legal claims, however, and that’s what the inmates are pressing now before Chutkan. They’re arguing that the administration’s lethal injection plan violates other federal laws, such as the Administrative Procedure Act; the inmates contend the administration failed to consider various risks associated with its lethal injection drug of choice, sodium pentobarbital, and that it represents the type of “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.
Purkey, who was convicted in 2003 of raping and killing a 16-year-old girl, has a separate lawsuit pending seeking to block his July 15 execution. His lawyers filed a request for an injunction in late June arguing that he has schizophrenia, dementia, and other mental illnesses that make him incompetent to be executed under the Eighth Amendment. That case is also assigned to Chutkan, and she set a similarly fast schedule for briefing.
“Wes Purkey is a severely brain-damaged and mentally ill man who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease,” Rebecca Woodman, one of Purkey’s attorneys, said in a statement. “He has long accepted responsibility for the crime that put him on death row, but as his dementia has progressed, he no longer has a rational understanding of why the government plans to execute him. He believes his execution is part of a large-scale conspiracy against him by the federal government in retaliation for his frequent challenges to prison conditions, and he believes his own lawyers are working against him within this conspiracy."
Purkey, Lee, and the two other inmates set for execution — Keith Nelson and Dustin Lee Honken — are held at the Terre Haute high-security federal prison facility in Indiana. In the lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Indiana by Hartkemeyer, the Buddhist priest, the ACLU lawyers noted that the Terre Haute facility had documented cases of COVID-19; state and federal jails and prisons across the US have been hot spots for coronavirus cases.
“The Federal Government’s extensive and large-scale plans for the executions amplify the risk posed by the executions. Each execution will require the travel, movement, and congregation of hundreds of individuals, including the families of the victims and the death row prisoners, scores of correctional officers, members of local and national media, as well as large numbers of witnesses and legal counsel from around the country,” the complaint states.
According to the lawsuit, there has been only one execution nationwide since March, carried out by state officials in Missouri.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 25 states still permit the death penalty. Among those states, nine haven’t carried out an execution in the past decade, and another five haven’t executed someone in the past five years, per the center’s data.
Federal executions have been even rarer. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, three federal executions took place in the early 2000s, with the last one taking place in 2003. There were a total of 37 federal executions between 1927 and 2003, with none occurring in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.
Since 2003, the federal government’s authority to execute inmates has been tied up in court. Federal death row inmates who had execution dates on the calendar filed a lawsuit to stop any future lethal injections in 2005, and a judge delayed those executions while the case was being litigated. As the George W. Bush administration and, later, the Obama administration set additional execution dates, those inmates joined the case and their executions were also put on hold.
The litigation had been inactive since 2011, when the Obama administration began exploring changes to the lethal injection protocol, which in practice put the entire system on hold. It picked back up when the Justice Department announced last summer that it had adopted the new protocol and initially set five execution dates.
The fifth inmate who originally had an execution date, Lezmond Mitchell, is involved in the lethal injection protocol case, but he also has a separate legal challenge to his conviction pending before the 9th Circuit. A three-judge panel in April rejected Mitchell’s argument that he should be allowed to interview jurors to probe whether there was racial bias; Mitchell is Native American. He filed a request for the full court to reconsider the case on June 15.
In ruling against Mitchell, two of the judges wrote separately to express concerns they had that the Justice Department chose to pursue the death penalty against Mitchell when the Navajo Nation, as well as the victims’ family, opposed capital punishment. Mitchell was found guilty in the murder of a 63-year-old woman and her 9-year-old granddaughter; the crime took place on a Navajo reservation.
“The imposition of the death penalty in this case is a betrayal of a promise made to the Navajo Nation, and it demonstrates a deep disrespect for tribal sovereignty,” Judge Morgan Christen wrote. “People can disagree about whether the death penalty should ever be imposed, but our history shows that the United States gave tribes the option to decide for themselves.”
UPDATE
July 2, 2020, at 6:49 p.m.
Updated with information about a new 7th Circuit ruling in Wesley Purkey's case.
MORE ON THIS
The Trump Administration Is Bringing Back Federal Executions. It Will Immediately End Up In Court.Zoe Tillman · July 25, 2019
Inmates Said The Drug Burned As They Died. This Is How Texas Gets Its Execution Drugs.Chris McDaniel · Nov. 28, 2018TOPICS IN THIS ARTICLE
Justice Department
Zoe Tillman is a senior legal reporter with BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.
Contact Zoe Tillman at zoe.tillman@buzzfeed.com.
Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.
Play
Federal death row inmates are asking a judge to intervene on new legal grounds after the US Supreme Court refused to get involved. The ACLU is also suing.
Handout / Getty Images
San Quentin State Prison's lethal injection facility, which was dismantled on March 13, 2019.
#ENDTHEDEATHPENALTY #ABOLISHTHEDEATHPENALTY
Zoe Tillman BuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From Washington, DC July 2, 2020
San Quentin State Prison's lethal injection facility, which was dismantled on March 13, 2019.
#ENDTHEDEATHPENALTY #ABOLISHTHEDEATHPENALTY
Zoe Tillman BuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From Washington, DC July 2, 2020
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is set to execute Daniel Lewis Lee on July 13 by lethal injection. If it happens, it’ll be the first time in nearly two decades that the federal government has carried out an execution.
Death row inmates and death penalty opponents have less than two weeks to convince a judge to intervene before Lee’s execution, the first of four that the Trump administration has scheduled for men convicted of murdering children. On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a new lawsuit raising a novel argument — that at least one of the executions should be delayed because the coronavirus pandemic puts everyone involved in the lethal injection process at risk of exposure.
Rev. Seigen Hartkemeyer, a Zen Buddhist priest who has served as a spiritual adviser to Wesley Purkey, a death row inmate scheduled for execution on July 15, wrote in a blog post published by the ACLU on Thursday that he has a religious duty to be with Purkey. But Hartkemeyer said that because he has a history of lung illness and is 68 years old, he was being “asked to make an impossible decision.”
“The federal government’s decision to proceed with Wes’s execution burdens my religious freedom by forcing me to choose between performing my religious duties as a priest, and protecting my own life,” Hartkemeyer wrote. “Although Trump officials have repeatedly claimed the mantle of guardians of religious liberty, too often their commitment wavers when it is inconvenient for their political agenda. This appears to be one of those times.”
Late Thursday, a federal appeals court stepped in to pause Purkey's execution, issuing a decision in a separate challenge that Purkey raised about his criminal conviction. The US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled against Purkey, finding that he wasn't entitled to raise issues now related to whether his trial counsel was ineffective. But the court agreed to stay Purkey's execution until he'd had a chance to exhaust all of his legal options — he could petition the full 7th Circuit to rehear the case for instance, or ask the US Supreme Court to take the case. If Purkey does end up losing, however, the new ACLU case would come back into play.
The ACLU lawsuit isn’t the only pending legal action challenging the Trump administration’s plan. Purkey and other death row inmates have been fighting in court since the Justice Department announced last July that Attorney General Bill Barr had ordered the Bureau of Prisons to resume lethal injections for the first time since 2003. The inmates are still waiting to see if a judge will step in before Lee’s scheduled execution on July 13.
Purkey, Lee, and the other two inmates whose executions are scheduled for July and August were all convicted of murder, among other serious crimes. The Justice Department has made clear that it chose these first four inmates to execute based on the fact that their cases involved the murder of children.
“The American people, acting through Congress and Presidents of both political parties, have long instructed that defendants convicted of the most heinous crimes should be subject to a sentence of death,” Barr said in a statement released by DOJ last month. “The four murderers whose executions are scheduled today have received full and fair proceedings under our Constitution and laws. We owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind, to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”
Lee was found guilty in the murder of a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl. His legal team released a video of the girl’s grandmother, Earlene Peterson, explaining that she was opposed to Lee being executed instead of serving a life sentence, which is what Lee’s codefendant received after he was found guilty.
“Yes, I believe you have to pay for what you do, but that don’t mean death,” Peterson says in the video.
Lee and the other death row inmates who went to court won an injunction in the fall from a federal judge in Washington, DC, putting a pause on their executions. But the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit reversed that decision in April, giving the Trump administration the green light to set a new schedule.
The inmates asked the US Supreme Court to order a delay and review the DC Circuit’s decision, but on June 29 a majority of the justices rejected that request; Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would have delayed the executions and taken up the case, according to the order released by the court.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to get involved didn’t end the inmates’ legal fight, however. In mid-June, the inmates filed a new motion for a preliminary injunction, this time pressing different legal arguments than they did the first round. US District Judge Tanya Chutkan set a fast briefing schedule, ordering the government to respond within a week. She has yet to rule.
The first injunction was about whether the single-drug injection protocol adopted by the Trump administration violated the Federal Death Penalty Act because it didn’t match execution protocols adopted by states where the federal death row inmates were set to be executed. Chutkan ruled that the inmates were likely to win on this argument. The DC Circuit disagreed in a 2–1 decision in April.
Trump’s two appointees to the DC Circuit, judges Greg Katsas and Neomi Rao, sided with the administration in that decision. The Trump administration has made clear that it views the confirmation of conservative federal judges, especially in the appeals courts, as a central part of its policy strategy, politicizing these nominations despite protests from judges, and Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., that they are nonpolitical actors.
The DC Circuit ruling noted that the inmates still had other unresolved legal claims, however, and that’s what the inmates are pressing now before Chutkan. They’re arguing that the administration’s lethal injection plan violates other federal laws, such as the Administrative Procedure Act; the inmates contend the administration failed to consider various risks associated with its lethal injection drug of choice, sodium pentobarbital, and that it represents the type of “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.
Purkey, who was convicted in 2003 of raping and killing a 16-year-old girl, has a separate lawsuit pending seeking to block his July 15 execution. His lawyers filed a request for an injunction in late June arguing that he has schizophrenia, dementia, and other mental illnesses that make him incompetent to be executed under the Eighth Amendment. That case is also assigned to Chutkan, and she set a similarly fast schedule for briefing.
“Wes Purkey is a severely brain-damaged and mentally ill man who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease,” Rebecca Woodman, one of Purkey’s attorneys, said in a statement. “He has long accepted responsibility for the crime that put him on death row, but as his dementia has progressed, he no longer has a rational understanding of why the government plans to execute him. He believes his execution is part of a large-scale conspiracy against him by the federal government in retaliation for his frequent challenges to prison conditions, and he believes his own lawyers are working against him within this conspiracy."
Purkey, Lee, and the two other inmates set for execution — Keith Nelson and Dustin Lee Honken — are held at the Terre Haute high-security federal prison facility in Indiana. In the lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Indiana by Hartkemeyer, the Buddhist priest, the ACLU lawyers noted that the Terre Haute facility had documented cases of COVID-19; state and federal jails and prisons across the US have been hot spots for coronavirus cases.
“The Federal Government’s extensive and large-scale plans for the executions amplify the risk posed by the executions. Each execution will require the travel, movement, and congregation of hundreds of individuals, including the families of the victims and the death row prisoners, scores of correctional officers, members of local and national media, as well as large numbers of witnesses and legal counsel from around the country,” the complaint states.
According to the lawsuit, there has been only one execution nationwide since March, carried out by state officials in Missouri.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 25 states still permit the death penalty. Among those states, nine haven’t carried out an execution in the past decade, and another five haven’t executed someone in the past five years, per the center’s data.
Federal executions have been even rarer. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, three federal executions took place in the early 2000s, with the last one taking place in 2003. There were a total of 37 federal executions between 1927 and 2003, with none occurring in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.
Since 2003, the federal government’s authority to execute inmates has been tied up in court. Federal death row inmates who had execution dates on the calendar filed a lawsuit to stop any future lethal injections in 2005, and a judge delayed those executions while the case was being litigated. As the George W. Bush administration and, later, the Obama administration set additional execution dates, those inmates joined the case and their executions were also put on hold.
The litigation had been inactive since 2011, when the Obama administration began exploring changes to the lethal injection protocol, which in practice put the entire system on hold. It picked back up when the Justice Department announced last summer that it had adopted the new protocol and initially set five execution dates.
The fifth inmate who originally had an execution date, Lezmond Mitchell, is involved in the lethal injection protocol case, but he also has a separate legal challenge to his conviction pending before the 9th Circuit. A three-judge panel in April rejected Mitchell’s argument that he should be allowed to interview jurors to probe whether there was racial bias; Mitchell is Native American. He filed a request for the full court to reconsider the case on June 15.
In ruling against Mitchell, two of the judges wrote separately to express concerns they had that the Justice Department chose to pursue the death penalty against Mitchell when the Navajo Nation, as well as the victims’ family, opposed capital punishment. Mitchell was found guilty in the murder of a 63-year-old woman and her 9-year-old granddaughter; the crime took place on a Navajo reservation.
“The imposition of the death penalty in this case is a betrayal of a promise made to the Navajo Nation, and it demonstrates a deep disrespect for tribal sovereignty,” Judge Morgan Christen wrote. “People can disagree about whether the death penalty should ever be imposed, but our history shows that the United States gave tribes the option to decide for themselves.”
UPDATE
July 2, 2020, at 6:49 p.m.
Updated with information about a new 7th Circuit ruling in Wesley Purkey's case.
The Trump Administration Is Bringing Back Federal Executions. It Will Immediately End Up In Court.Zoe Tillman · July 25, 2019
Inmates Said The Drug Burned As They Died. This Is How Texas Gets Its Execution Drugs.Chris McDaniel · Nov. 28, 2018TOPICS IN THIS ARTICLE
Justice Department
Zoe Tillman is a senior legal reporter with BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.
Contact Zoe Tillman at zoe.tillman@buzzfeed.com.
Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.
Play
The Washington Redskins Will Review Their Team Name Amid Pressure From Investors
“Want to really stand for racial justice? Change your name.”
Ade Onibada BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on July 3, 2020
Joe Robbins / Getty Images
The Washington Redskins are considering a change to their long-standing controversial name amidst mounting pressure from financial backers and continued anti-racist protests around the country.
In a statement to BuzzFeed News, the NFL franchise confirmed the launch of a review into the name with the intention of formalizing discussions that it said had already been underway in recent weeks following “feedback” from the community.
“This process allows the team to take into account not only the proud tradition and history of the franchise but also input from our alumni, the organization, sponsors, the National Football League and the local community it is proud to represent on and off the field,” said Dan Snyder, the owner of the team.
Head coach Ron Rivera appeared to have changed his stance on the debate describing the issue as one of “personal importance” — after just days ago dismissing the conversation as a “discussion for another time.”
In the statement, Rivera added: “I look forward to working closely with Dan Snyder to make sure we continue the mission of honoring and supporting Native Americans and our Military.”
Brian McCarthy@NFLprguy
New from @nflcommish03:20 PM - 03 Jul 2020
Reply Retweet Favorite
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has backed the review. In a statement, he said: “In the last few weeks, we have had ongoing discussions with Dan, and we are supportive of this important step.”
Previously, Snyder had emphatically declared that a name change would never be on the table. But the announcement of a review comes a week after 87 investment firms and shareholders wrote letters to various sponsors — including FedEx, PepsiCo, and Nike —, calling on the companies to withdraw support for the Redskins, according to AdWeek.
FedEx, which has its brand name on the team’s stadium, was the first of its major backers to respond and call for a name change. Nike appears to have acted by removing all Redskins team apparel from it’s online store, Bleacher Report reported.
As the racial reckoning sweeping the country ignited by the death of George Floyd continues, the team participated in black out Tuesday by posting a black square in call for racial justice.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez@AOC
Want to really stand for racial justice? Change your name. https://t.co/XTlIJrfNx409:22 PM - 02 Jun 2020
Reply Retweet Favorite
The gesture was immediately criticised by those who pointed to its name and logo as being racially offensive to Native Americans and how campaigns for a name change spearheaded by this community had been dismissed for decades.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Want to really stand for racial justice? Change your name.”
It is believed that a name change is inevitable for the team who recently removed its founder, George Preston Marshall, from its Ring of Fame and also took down a monument honouring him from their previous home, RFK stadium.
Ian Rapoport@RapSheet
My understanding of the #Redskins situation, based on conversations with several sources: A name change is likely. It would truly be a monumental decision. It is time. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s statement was supportive, as well.03:36 PM - 03 Jul 2020
Reply Retweet Favorite
Ade Onibada is a reporter at BuzzFeed and is based in London.
Posted on July 3, 2020
Joe Robbins / Getty Images
The Washington Redskins are considering a change to their long-standing controversial name amidst mounting pressure from financial backers and continued anti-racist protests around the country.
In a statement to BuzzFeed News, the NFL franchise confirmed the launch of a review into the name with the intention of formalizing discussions that it said had already been underway in recent weeks following “feedback” from the community.
“This process allows the team to take into account not only the proud tradition and history of the franchise but also input from our alumni, the organization, sponsors, the National Football League and the local community it is proud to represent on and off the field,” said Dan Snyder, the owner of the team.
Head coach Ron Rivera appeared to have changed his stance on the debate describing the issue as one of “personal importance” — after just days ago dismissing the conversation as a “discussion for another time.”
In the statement, Rivera added: “I look forward to working closely with Dan Snyder to make sure we continue the mission of honoring and supporting Native Americans and our Military.”
Brian McCarthy@NFLprguy
New from @nflcommish03:20 PM - 03 Jul 2020
Reply Retweet Favorite
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has backed the review. In a statement, he said: “In the last few weeks, we have had ongoing discussions with Dan, and we are supportive of this important step.”
Previously, Snyder had emphatically declared that a name change would never be on the table. But the announcement of a review comes a week after 87 investment firms and shareholders wrote letters to various sponsors — including FedEx, PepsiCo, and Nike —, calling on the companies to withdraw support for the Redskins, according to AdWeek.
FedEx, which has its brand name on the team’s stadium, was the first of its major backers to respond and call for a name change. Nike appears to have acted by removing all Redskins team apparel from it’s online store, Bleacher Report reported.
As the racial reckoning sweeping the country ignited by the death of George Floyd continues, the team participated in black out Tuesday by posting a black square in call for racial justice.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez@AOC
Want to really stand for racial justice? Change your name. https://t.co/XTlIJrfNx409:22 PM - 02 Jun 2020
Reply Retweet Favorite
The gesture was immediately criticised by those who pointed to its name and logo as being racially offensive to Native Americans and how campaigns for a name change spearheaded by this community had been dismissed for decades.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Want to really stand for racial justice? Change your name.”
It is believed that a name change is inevitable for the team who recently removed its founder, George Preston Marshall, from its Ring of Fame and also took down a monument honouring him from their previous home, RFK stadium.
Ian Rapoport@RapSheet
My understanding of the #Redskins situation, based on conversations with several sources: A name change is likely. It would truly be a monumental decision. It is time. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s statement was supportive, as well.03:36 PM - 03 Jul 2020
Reply Retweet Favorite
Ade Onibada is a reporter at BuzzFeed and is based in London.
Saturday, July 04, 2020
‘We can’t afford an ounce of meat’: Economic crisis strangles Lebanon
WHY IS LEBANON STARVING
BECAUSE THE WORLD IS IGNORING THE CAPITALIST CRISIS THERE
WHY IS LEBANON STARVING
BECAUSE THE WORLD IS IGNORING THE CAPITALIST CRISIS THERE
EVEN BEFORE COVID-19
Issued on: 03/07/2020 -
Issued on: 03/07/2020 -
Omar al-Hakim speaks during an interview in Tripoli, northern Lebanon on July 1, 2020. © Mohamed Azakir, Reuters
Text by:NEWS WIRES
For Amer al Dahn, the idea of eating meat is now a dream. Today, he can't even afford bread and depends on credit from the local grocer to feed his wife and four children in the Lebanese city of Tripoli.
"We can no longer buy meat or chicken. The closest we get to them is in magazines and newspapers," said Dahn, 55, leafing through a supermarket brochure in his cramped apartment.
Living in one of the poorest streets of Lebanon's poorest city, Dahn and his family are feeling the full force of a financial meltdown that is fuelling extreme poverty and shattering lives across the country.
In the capital Beirut, a 61-year-old man shot himself in the head on the busy Hamra street on Friday. Reuters could not establish his motives, but local media attributed the suicide to hunger.
Struggling to walk because of diabetes, Dahn already faced a difficult life before the crisis which has sunk the Lebanese pound by 80% since October, driving up prices in the import-dependent economy.
"Life has become very difficult. The dollar is still climbing and the state is incapable of providing a solution.”
Even chickpeas, beans and lentils - a traditional part of the Lebanese diet - are out of reach for some.
>>Read: Food insecurity hits middle class amid Lebanon's economic crisis
The crisis is seen as the biggest threat to stability since the 1975-90 civil war.
"We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people who have fallen off the cliff," said Bojar Hoxja, country director at CARE International, an aid agency. Lebanon faces a humanitarian crisis that requires urgent international intervention, he said.
Bread price hike
Lebanon is already a big recipient of international aid, the bulk of it directed at the 1 million Syrians who fled from the war next door.
Tripoli, a predominantly Sunni Muslim city on the Mediterranean, is home to some of Lebanon's wealthiest politicians, who critics say only remember their constituents at election time.
"If it was not for the neighbours here sending food to each other, people would be dying of hunger," said Omar al-Hakim, who lives with his six children and wife in a one-room apartment.
"We used to eat meat on Sunday, or fish, or chicken ... none of that now. We can't afford an ounce of meat," Hakim said.
The World Bank warned last November that the proportion of Lebanese living in poverty could rise to 50% if conditions worsened. Since then the crisis has only deepened and the economy has been further hit by a COVID-19 lockdown.
Many people depend on charity. Some are using social media to barter furniture or clothes for baby formula or diapers.
Shopkeeper Kawkab Abdelrahim, 30, is struggling to keep her store open as she extends more and more credit.
"Do you have the heart to turn them away if they want a bag of bread? Sometimes they ask for a tub of yoghurt or 1,000 pounds of labneh," she said, referring to a type of strained yoghurt that is a Lebanese staple.
"That is one spoonful that a mother spreads on bread to feed three children."
(REUTERS)
Text by:NEWS WIRES
For Amer al Dahn, the idea of eating meat is now a dream. Today, he can't even afford bread and depends on credit from the local grocer to feed his wife and four children in the Lebanese city of Tripoli.
"We can no longer buy meat or chicken. The closest we get to them is in magazines and newspapers," said Dahn, 55, leafing through a supermarket brochure in his cramped apartment.
Living in one of the poorest streets of Lebanon's poorest city, Dahn and his family are feeling the full force of a financial meltdown that is fuelling extreme poverty and shattering lives across the country.
In the capital Beirut, a 61-year-old man shot himself in the head on the busy Hamra street on Friday. Reuters could not establish his motives, but local media attributed the suicide to hunger.
Struggling to walk because of diabetes, Dahn already faced a difficult life before the crisis which has sunk the Lebanese pound by 80% since October, driving up prices in the import-dependent economy.
"Life has become very difficult. The dollar is still climbing and the state is incapable of providing a solution.”
Even chickpeas, beans and lentils - a traditional part of the Lebanese diet - are out of reach for some.
>>Read: Food insecurity hits middle class amid Lebanon's economic crisis
The crisis is seen as the biggest threat to stability since the 1975-90 civil war.
"We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people who have fallen off the cliff," said Bojar Hoxja, country director at CARE International, an aid agency. Lebanon faces a humanitarian crisis that requires urgent international intervention, he said.
Bread price hike
Lebanon is already a big recipient of international aid, the bulk of it directed at the 1 million Syrians who fled from the war next door.
Tripoli, a predominantly Sunni Muslim city on the Mediterranean, is home to some of Lebanon's wealthiest politicians, who critics say only remember their constituents at election time.
"If it was not for the neighbours here sending food to each other, people would be dying of hunger," said Omar al-Hakim, who lives with his six children and wife in a one-room apartment.
The salary of 600,000 pounds a month he makes as a security guard now lasts just six days. Before the pound's collapse, it was the equivalent of $400 a month. Today, it is around $60.Basics such as sugar, rice and lentils become harder to buy, he says. This week, Hakim was hit by a one third increase in the price of state-subsidised bread.
"We used to eat meat on Sunday, or fish, or chicken ... none of that now. We can't afford an ounce of meat," Hakim said.
The World Bank warned last November that the proportion of Lebanese living in poverty could rise to 50% if conditions worsened. Since then the crisis has only deepened and the economy has been further hit by a COVID-19 lockdown.
Many people depend on charity. Some are using social media to barter furniture or clothes for baby formula or diapers.
Shopkeeper Kawkab Abdelrahim, 30, is struggling to keep her store open as she extends more and more credit.
"Do you have the heart to turn them away if they want a bag of bread? Sometimes they ask for a tub of yoghurt or 1,000 pounds of labneh," she said, referring to a type of strained yoghurt that is a Lebanese staple.
"That is one spoonful that a mother spreads on bread to feed three children."
(REUTERS)
Air France to cut 7,580 jobs at French flagship carrier and regional unit Hop!
Under CEO Ben Smith, who joined from Air Canada in 2018, Air France-KLM has sought to cut costs
Issued on: 03/07/2020 -
Under CEO Ben Smith, who joined from Air Canada in 2018, Air France-KLM has sought to cut costs
Issued on: 03/07/2020 -
An Air France plane is pictured on the tarmac at Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris on April 30, 2020. © Bertrand Guay, AFP/Archives
Text by:FRANCE 24
Air France confirmed plans to cut some 7,500 jobs including 1,000 at sister airline Hop! on Friday, as staff protested over its response to the collapse in travel due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The French flag carrier, part of Franco-Dutch group Air France-KLM, said it had lost €15 million a day during the worst part of the crisis, which also saw its revenues plunge by 95 percent. It did not see traffic returning to 2019 levels before 2024.
As a result, Air France plans to cut 6,560 or 16 percent of jobs at the main airline by the end of 2022, more than 3,500 of which will come through natural departures, it said after union talks.
Another 1,020 jobs will go over the next three years at Hop!, representing 42 percent of staff at the regional carrier based in the coastal city of Nantes, which has also been hit by job cuts at plane manufacturer Airbus.
The French government – which granted Air France €7 billion ($7.9 billion) in aid, including state-backed loans, to help it to survive – has urged the airline to avoid compulsory layoffs, though it has conceded Air France is "on the edge”.
"A successful labour reorganisation is one where there are no forced departures," junior economy minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher told Sud Radio on Friday.
In its statement, Air France said it would give priority to voluntary departures, early retirement and staff mobility. It did not rule out compulsory redundancies, however.
The reconstruction plan will be presented at the end of July, together with a plan for the wider Air France-KLM Group.
‘This is not how I wanted to leave’
Some 100 union members and employees, from cleaning staff to check-in assistants, demonstrated earlier outside the airline's base at Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris against plans to cut staff after receiving state aid to absorb the pandemic fallout.
Text by:FRANCE 24
Air France confirmed plans to cut some 7,500 jobs including 1,000 at sister airline Hop! on Friday, as staff protested over its response to the collapse in travel due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The French flag carrier, part of Franco-Dutch group Air France-KLM, said it had lost €15 million a day during the worst part of the crisis, which also saw its revenues plunge by 95 percent. It did not see traffic returning to 2019 levels before 2024.
As a result, Air France plans to cut 6,560 or 16 percent of jobs at the main airline by the end of 2022, more than 3,500 of which will come through natural departures, it said after union talks.
Another 1,020 jobs will go over the next three years at Hop!, representing 42 percent of staff at the regional carrier based in the coastal city of Nantes, which has also been hit by job cuts at plane manufacturer Airbus.
The French government – which granted Air France €7 billion ($7.9 billion) in aid, including state-backed loans, to help it to survive – has urged the airline to avoid compulsory layoffs, though it has conceded Air France is "on the edge”.
"A successful labour reorganisation is one where there are no forced departures," junior economy minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher told Sud Radio on Friday.
In its statement, Air France said it would give priority to voluntary departures, early retirement and staff mobility. It did not rule out compulsory redundancies, however.
The reconstruction plan will be presented at the end of July, together with a plan for the wider Air France-KLM Group.
‘This is not how I wanted to leave’
Some 100 union members and employees, from cleaning staff to check-in assistants, demonstrated earlier outside the airline's base at Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris against plans to cut staff after receiving state aid to absorb the pandemic fallout.
Air France employees gather to protest a restructuring plan that includes thousands of job cuts in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis outside the French airline's headquarters in Roissy-en-France near Paris on July 3, 2020. The sign at right reads, "Not born to end up in the dumpster.” © Gonzalo Fuentes, Reuters
"It's scandalous. The government is putting in €7 billion and the company is destroying jobs," said 62-year-old Annick Blanchemin, who works as ground staff for the airline.
"They'll push me to retire but I won't get my maximum pension this way. And this is not how I wanted to leave.”
In Nantes, where Hop! is based, employees also erected banners in protest on Friday.
The shake-up was expected after sources familiar with the matter said that at least half of the cuts were likely to entail voluntary departures and retirement plans.
The French government, which is being reshuffled under new Prime Minister Jean Castex, has also expressed concerns about Airbus's plans to cut some 15,000 jobs across Europe – with a third of those in France.
A wave of restructuring triggered by the virus outbreak is hitting airlines and industrial firms across Europe.
Under CEO Ben Smith, who joined from Air Canada in 2018, Air France-KLM has sought to cut costs, improve French labour relations and overcome governance squabbles between France and the Netherlands, each owners of close to 14 percent of the group.
(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)
"It's scandalous. The government is putting in €7 billion and the company is destroying jobs," said 62-year-old Annick Blanchemin, who works as ground staff for the airline.
"They'll push me to retire but I won't get my maximum pension this way. And this is not how I wanted to leave.”
In Nantes, where Hop! is based, employees also erected banners in protest on Friday.
The shake-up was expected after sources familiar with the matter said that at least half of the cuts were likely to entail voluntary departures and retirement plans.
The French government, which is being reshuffled under new Prime Minister Jean Castex, has also expressed concerns about Airbus's plans to cut some 15,000 jobs across Europe – with a third of those in France.
A wave of restructuring triggered by the virus outbreak is hitting airlines and industrial firms across Europe.
Under CEO Ben Smith, who joined from Air Canada in 2018, Air France-KLM has sought to cut costs, improve French labour relations and overcome governance squabbles between France and the Netherlands, each owners of close to 14 percent of the group.
(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)
UPDATED
Mystery of hundreds of elephants found dead in Botswana
Issued on: 03/07/2020
350 elephants found dead in Botswana within past two months
Scientists in Africa have reported more than 350 elephants have died within the last two months in what has been described as a "conservation" disaster in Botswana. File Photo by Gernot Hensel/EPA-EFE
July 1 (UPI) -- More than 350 elephants have died in Botswana within the past two months in what experts have described as a "conservation disaster."
Niall McCann of British charity National Park Rescue said his colleagues first discovered 169 dead elephants in early May during a 3-hour flight over the Okavango Delta in Botswana, the southern African country which is home to one-third of the continent's elephant population.
"To be able to see and count that many in a 3-hour flight was extraordinary. A month later our, colleagues did another flight over and spotted 187 new carcasses, bringing the total to over 350," McCann said. "This is totally unprecedented in terms of numbers of elephants dying in a single event unrelated to drought."
Acting director of Botswana's department of wildlife and national parks, Cyril Taolo, said the government has confirmed 280 deaths and has sent samples for testing but said COVID-19 restrictions have delayed the process, so causes for the deaths are not yet known.
RELATED WHO: Ebola outbreak that killed more than 2,000 in Congo is over
Poisoning or an unknown pathogen are considered the most likely possibilities as the government has ruled out anthrax and poaching, noting the tusks had not been removed.
Male and female elephants of all ages have died and witnesses have said some were seen walking in circles, indicating possible neurological impairment, while others have appeared weak and emaciated, suggesting more forthcoming deaths.
"If you look at the carcasses, some of them have fallen straight on their face, indicating they died very quickly. Others are obviously dying more slowly, like the ones that are wandering around. So it's very difficult to say what this toxin is," McCann said.
upi.com/7018562
Botswana reports mysterious deaths of hundreds of elephants
Issued on: 02/07/2020 -
Mystery of hundreds of elephants found dead in Botswana
Issued on: 03/07/2020
An elephant carcass in Botswana, where 356 of the animals have been found dead by unknown causes in recent weeks. © Reuters / France 24
Text by:FRANCE 24Follow|
Video by:Sam BALL
Nearly 400 elephants have been found dead in Botswana in recent weeks but local authorities and wildlife experts are struggling to find an explanation, with disease and poisoning among the possible causes.
The reports of the deaths in the northern Okavango Delta region first began in early May. Since then, the government has confirmed 275 deaths.
But aerial surveys by wildlife group Elephants Without Borders have counted some 356 elephant carcasses.
Poaching has been ruled out as a cause, as the ivory has not been removed from the elephants.
Infectious disease as well as poisoning by farmers have also been considered and samples from the elephants have been sent to labs in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Canada for testing.
"At this stage it’s difficult to really tell what could be the cause of the mortality,” Mmadi Reuben, head veterinarian at the Botswana Department of Wildlife and National Parks, told AFP.
“We have eliminated from the local labs the possibility of anthrax being the cause of the mortality, but there are still of a lot of infectious diseases and potentially other toxins that are still being investigated by the laboratory samples that have been collected."
The unexplained deaths have sparked concern among wildlife groups, with Botswana previously considered a safe-haven for elephants.
The country is home to almost a third of Africa’s elephants and although numbers are declining across the continent due largely to poaching, Botswana’s elephant population has grown to 130,000 from 80,000 in the late 1990s.
But elephants are seen as a growing nuisance by farmers whose crops have been destroyed by the animals, while last year the country controversially lifted a five-year ban on elephant hunting.
Text by:FRANCE 24Follow|
Video by:Sam BALL
Nearly 400 elephants have been found dead in Botswana in recent weeks but local authorities and wildlife experts are struggling to find an explanation, with disease and poisoning among the possible causes.
The reports of the deaths in the northern Okavango Delta region first began in early May. Since then, the government has confirmed 275 deaths.
But aerial surveys by wildlife group Elephants Without Borders have counted some 356 elephant carcasses.
Poaching has been ruled out as a cause, as the ivory has not been removed from the elephants.
Infectious disease as well as poisoning by farmers have also been considered and samples from the elephants have been sent to labs in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Canada for testing.
"At this stage it’s difficult to really tell what could be the cause of the mortality,” Mmadi Reuben, head veterinarian at the Botswana Department of Wildlife and National Parks, told AFP.
“We have eliminated from the local labs the possibility of anthrax being the cause of the mortality, but there are still of a lot of infectious diseases and potentially other toxins that are still being investigated by the laboratory samples that have been collected."
The unexplained deaths have sparked concern among wildlife groups, with Botswana previously considered a safe-haven for elephants.
The country is home to almost a third of Africa’s elephants and although numbers are declining across the continent due largely to poaching, Botswana’s elephant population has grown to 130,000 from 80,000 in the late 1990s.
But elephants are seen as a growing nuisance by farmers whose crops have been destroyed by the animals, while last year the country controversially lifted a five-year ban on elephant hunting.
350 elephants found dead in Botswana within past two months
Scientists in Africa have reported more than 350 elephants have died within the last two months in what has been described as a "conservation" disaster in Botswana. File Photo by Gernot Hensel/EPA-EFE
July 1 (UPI) -- More than 350 elephants have died in Botswana within the past two months in what experts have described as a "conservation disaster."
Niall McCann of British charity National Park Rescue said his colleagues first discovered 169 dead elephants in early May during a 3-hour flight over the Okavango Delta in Botswana, the southern African country which is home to one-third of the continent's elephant population.
"To be able to see and count that many in a 3-hour flight was extraordinary. A month later our, colleagues did another flight over and spotted 187 new carcasses, bringing the total to over 350," McCann said. "This is totally unprecedented in terms of numbers of elephants dying in a single event unrelated to drought."
Acting director of Botswana's department of wildlife and national parks, Cyril Taolo, said the government has confirmed 280 deaths and has sent samples for testing but said COVID-19 restrictions have delayed the process, so causes for the deaths are not yet known.
RELATED WHO: Ebola outbreak that killed more than 2,000 in Congo is over
Poisoning or an unknown pathogen are considered the most likely possibilities as the government has ruled out anthrax and poaching, noting the tusks had not been removed.
Male and female elephants of all ages have died and witnesses have said some were seen walking in circles, indicating possible neurological impairment, while others have appeared weak and emaciated, suggesting more forthcoming deaths.
"If you look at the carcasses, some of them have fallen straight on their face, indicating they died very quickly. Others are obviously dying more slowly, like the ones that are wandering around. So it's very difficult to say what this toxin is," McCann said.
upi.com/7018562
Botswana reports mysterious deaths of hundreds of elephants
Issued on: 02/07/2020 -
Botswana is home to some 130,000 elephants
MONIRUL BHUIYAN AFP/File
Gaborone (Botswana) (AFP)
Hundreds of elephants have died mysteriously in Botswana's famed Okavango Delta, the head of the wildlife department said Thursday, ruling out poaching as the tusks were found intact.
The landlocked southern African country has the world's largest elephant population, estimated to be around 130,000.
"We have had a report of 356 dead elephants in the area north of the Okavango Delta and we have confirmed 275 so far," Cyril Taolo, the acting director of the department of Wildlife and National Parks, told AFP in a text message.
He said the cause of the deaths was yet to be established with anthrax having been ruled out.
"We do not suspect poaching since (the) animals were found with tusks," he said.
Samples have been collected and sent to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Canada for testing.
Similar deaths were first reported in May when authorities found 12 carcasses in just a week in two villages in the northwest of the country.
The latest discoveries were flagged by a wildlife conservation charity, Elephants Without Borders (EWB), whose confidential report referring to the 356 dead elephants, was leaked to the media on Wednesday.
EWB suspects the elephants have been dying in the area for about three months.
According to the report dated June 19, 2020, "70 percent of elephant carcasses were considered recent, having died about a month ago, and 30 percent of the carcasses appeared fresh, ranging from one day to two weeks old".
"There was good evidence to show elephants of all ages and sex appear to be dying," said the report penned by EWB director Mike Chase.
Several live elephants appeared to have been weak, lethargic and emaciated, with some showing signs of disorientation, difficulty in walking or limping, EWB said.
"One elephant was observed walking in circles, unable to change direction although being encouraged by other herd members," said the report.
© 2020 AFP
Hundreds of elephants have died mysteriously in Botswana's famed Okavango Delta, the head of the wildlife department said Thursday, ruling out poaching as the tusks were found intact.
The landlocked southern African country has the world's largest elephant population, estimated to be around 130,000.
"We have had a report of 356 dead elephants in the area north of the Okavango Delta and we have confirmed 275 so far," Cyril Taolo, the acting director of the department of Wildlife and National Parks, told AFP in a text message.
He said the cause of the deaths was yet to be established with anthrax having been ruled out.
"We do not suspect poaching since (the) animals were found with tusks," he said.
Samples have been collected and sent to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Canada for testing.
Similar deaths were first reported in May when authorities found 12 carcasses in just a week in two villages in the northwest of the country.
The latest discoveries were flagged by a wildlife conservation charity, Elephants Without Borders (EWB), whose confidential report referring to the 356 dead elephants, was leaked to the media on Wednesday.
EWB suspects the elephants have been dying in the area for about three months.
According to the report dated June 19, 2020, "70 percent of elephant carcasses were considered recent, having died about a month ago, and 30 percent of the carcasses appeared fresh, ranging from one day to two weeks old".
"There was good evidence to show elephants of all ages and sex appear to be dying," said the report penned by EWB director Mike Chase.
Several live elephants appeared to have been weak, lethargic and emaciated, with some showing signs of disorientation, difficulty in walking or limping, EWB said.
"One elephant was observed walking in circles, unable to change direction although being encouraged by other herd members," said the report.
© 2020 AFP
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