Evers: GOP concerns over Afghan refugees ‘dog whistle crap’

By SCOTT BAUER

August 30, 2021

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers speaks during a news conference Monday, Aug. 30, 2021 during a Democratic Party bus tour that stopped outside the state Capitol in Madison, Wis. Evers says Republican concerns over the screening process for thousands of Afghan refugees who stood side by side with Americans and are now being processed through Fort McCoy are unfounded “dog whistle crap.” (AP Photo/Scott Bauer)


MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Republican concerns over the screening process for thousands of Afghan refugees who stood side by side with Americans and are now being processed through Fort McCoy are unfounded “dog whistle crap,” Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers said Monday.

Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have criticized the vetting process and warned about terrorists being allowed into the country. After a tour of the base last week, Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson questioned whether the refugees at Fort McCoy had been fully vetted and called White House assurances about the process “lipstick on a pig.”

Evers also toured the base last week and met with refugees. He said Republicans criticizing the vetting of those refugees are “vastly uninformed.”

“Or they like to raise that specter of maybe some of those little kids I saw at Fort McCoy are terrorists or maybe those adults that I saw at Fort McCoy who were working hand in hand with our soldiers and airmen in Afghanistan, somehow they are terrorists even though they’ve been vetted four or five or six times even before they left Afghanistan,” Evers said. “To me, it’s dog whistle crap and we don’t need any of that.”

Evers, who made his comments during a Democratic Party bus tour, said he didn’t have an update on how many refugees have been sent to Fort McCoy, but that it is capable of housing up to 10,000. On Friday, Wisconsin Republican congressmen toured the base and said there would be 3,000 refugees there by the end of the day.

Cheryl Phillips, a spokeswoman for a task force overseeing the refugees at Fort McCoy, said she’s not permitted to release the number of Afghans currently on the base. But she said 41 flights carried Afghans to Volk Field in Camp Douglas between Aug. 22 and Sunday.

Fort McCoy is located in western Wisconsin, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of La Crosse and the Minnesota border.

As of Friday, the United States and its coalition partners had evacuated more than 100,000 people from Afghanistan since Aug. 14, including more than 5,100 American citizens.

___

Associated Press writer Todd Richmond contributed to this report.

Tea party 2.0? Conservatives get organized in school battles

By THOMAS BEAUMONT and STEPHEN GROVES

1 of 9

Supporters to recall the entire Mequon-Thiensville School District board wave at cars outside Homestead High School Monday, Aug. 23, 2021, in Mequon, Wis. A loose network of conservative groups with ties to major Republican donors and party-aligned think tanks is quietly lending firepower to local activists engaged in the culture war fights in schools across the country. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

MEQUON, Wis. (AP) — A loose network of conservative groups with ties to major Republican donors and party-aligned think tanks is quietly lending firepower to local activists engaged in culture war fights in schools across the country.

While they are drawn by the anger of parents opposed to school policies on racial history or COVID-19 protocols like mask mandates, the groups are often run by political operatives and lawyers standing ready to amplify local disputes.

In a wealthy Milwaukee suburb, a law firm heavily financed by a conservative foundation that has fought climate change mitigation and that has ties to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election helped parents seeking to recall Mequon-Thiensville school board members, chiefly over the board’s hiring of a diversity consultant. A new national advocacy group, Parents Defending Education, promoted the Wisconsin parents’ tactics as a model.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, a Justice Department spokesperson in the Trump administration rallied parents in a recall effort sparked by opposition to a district racial equity program. In Brownsburg, Indiana, a leader of a national network of parents opposed to anti-racist school programs helped a mother obtain a lawyer when the district’s superintendent blocked her from following his Twitter account.

This growing support network highlights the energy and resources being poured into the cauldron of political debate in the nation’s schools. Republicans hope the efforts lay the groundwork for a comeback in congressional elections next year. Some see the burst of local organizing on the right as reminiscent of a movement that helped power the GOP takeover of the House 10 years ago.

“It seems very tea party-ish to me,” said Dan Lennington, a lawyer with the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which has offered free legal advice to several parent groups pursuing or weighing school board recalls, including the one in Mequon. “These are ingredients for having an impact on future elections.”

Lennington’s group is funded in part by the Bradley Foundation, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit that supports conservative causes. The foundation’s secretary, GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell, advised Trump as he sought to overturn the 2020 election results and has since worked to push for tighter state voting laws.

Like the tea party movement, the groups have been labeled “astroturf” by some opponents — activism manufactured by powerful interests to look like grassroots organizing.

“Outsiders are tapping into some genuine concerns, but the framing of the issues are largely regularized by national groups,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, who has written on the nationalization of education.

But the advocates and their outside backup argue they’re harnessing real outrage and working to counter the disproportionate influence of liberal groups in schools.

“There’s a misconception out there that this is part of some national right-wing agenda,” said Amber Schroeder, a 39-year-old parent of four who is helping lead the Mequon recall. “We’re the ones pushing back on our own here against an extreme liberal agenda by the teachers union.”

The political tracking website Ballotpedia counts about 30 active school board recall efforts nationwide. Some are focused chiefly on disputes over anti-racism training and education in schools, often labeled critical race theory. Others were prompted by debates over school policies on transgender students and pandemic public health measures.

Local parent activists are quick to claim credit for that work, and the outside groups offering legal help, research, organizing tools and media training are often reluctant to discuss their role.

Among those is Parents Defending Education, an Arlington, Virginia-based group formed in January and dedicated to “fighting indoctrination in the classroom.” It provides templates for requesting public records, a guide to parent rights, organizing strategies and talking points.

“We created Parents Defending Education because we believe our children deserve to learn how to think at school — not what to think,” its president, Nicole Neily, wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

Neily stated the group is “not involved in any recall efforts, in Mequon or elsewhere.” But the group’s website does promote the Mequon activists’ campaign. As part of its national database of parent “incident reports,” the group highlights Mequon’s case by posting, as a guide for others, the Freedom of Information Act request that parents filed.

Neily declined to name Parents Defending Education’s funding sources. As a tax-exempt organization, the group is not required to make its donors public. Neily has worked in senior positions for conservative groups including the Independent Women’s Forum and Cato Institute, according to the group’s website.

Another newly influential group is No Left Turn in Education, an organization that has ballooned to 78 chapters in more than 25 states since it was founded last year by Elana Fishbein.

Since December, Fishbein has secured free legal representation for parents fighting curriculum battles with school districts. Most of those lawyers are affiliated with firms similar to Lennington’s, including the Liberty Justice Center and Pacific Legal Foundation, which also receive funding from the Bradley Foundation, as well as prominent GOP donor Dick Uihlein, a shipping supply billionaire.

A Uihlein spokesperson declined to comment. Messages left with the Bradley Foundation weren’t returned.

Fishbein says the journey from local mom to nationally recognized conservative activist was swift.

“A year ago, I had a handful of moms in my suburban Philadelphia living room,” Fishbein said. “Three weeks later, I was on Tucker Carlson, and within a week, I had more than a million visitors to my Facebook page.”

Fishbein and leaders of similar groups say they believe conservative activism in schools has exploded as parents have taken a closer look at their children’s schoolwork during remote learning.

“Now this whole problem of radical indoctrination is adding to their agenda,” Fishbein said. “This is a very big fight.”

It’s a fight likely to help Republicans in congressional elections next year, said Ian Prior, a former Justice Department official who is now the executive director of a conservative organization called Fight for Schools, which is working to recall board members in Loudoun County.

“You’re going to need a team. You’re going to need a command staff. You’re going to need what I call the army of moms,” he said at a conservative conference in Texas in July.

That could include Schroeder, who describes her previous political activity beyond voting as “zero.”

Frustrated chiefly by the district’s $42,000 contract last year with Milwaukee diversity consultant Blaquesmith, Schroeder got in touch with Scarlett Johnson, a 46-year-old fellow Mequon mother who had researched strategies for challenging school boards on No Left Turn’s website.

“All the critical race theory buzzwords were present,” Johnson noted, referring to the online Blaquesmith seminars she watched. “I think it would be bad to backslide into a more race-conscious, race-focused society.”

When Mequon police asked parents collecting signatures at the city park to remove their sign, Schroeder reached out to Lennington, who wrote a letter to the city arguing for the group’s right to assemble.

The letter, offered at no charge, was a small service but allowed parents to return to the park.

It also provided an opening for Lennington, who lobbies at the state Capitol, to invite Johnson and Schroeder to testify at a legislative hearing in Madison for legislation to require school districts to make all curriculum public.

___

Groves reported from Sioux Falls, S.D.

 

Afghan crisis shows EU needs more autonomy, Charles Michel says

Charles Michel has said that the EU needs to be able to make more decisions on its own following the Afghanistan crisis and chaotic attempts to evacuate people from Kabul.

    

Several EU member states were involved in the scramble to evacuate citizens and local Afghan supporters

 from Kabul

EU Council President Charles Michel said on Wednesday that the European Union needs to pursue decision-making autonomy in the wake of the chaotic evacuations from Afghanistan that ended last week.

"In my view, we do not need another such geopolitical event to grasp that the EU must strive for greater decision-making autonomy and greater capacity for action in the world," he told the Bled Strategic Forum in Slovenia.

Influence is EU's 'greatest challenge'

Looking to the future of the EU's role in the world, the EU Council president discussed the importance of maintaining the bloc's influence in an interdependent world.

"European influence will be our greatest challenge in the coming years, and Afghanistan has offered a stark demonstration," he said.

However, he added that while interdependence is a good thing, dependence is not and thus it is important for the EU to be able to secure its own interests.

"We must reflect openly and clear-eyed on a new stage in collective security and defense capabilities, especially in the wake of the Afghan crisis." Michel added.

EU needs a 'strong and common voice'

European Parliament President David Sassoli echoed Michel's words, calling for a "strong and common European voice on the international stage" to pursue the bloc's interests.

"This goes hand in hand with the need to move forward together toward a true common security and defense policy, without which we will remain dependent on the goodwill of other great powers and expose ourselves to the threats of authoritarian regimes," Sassoli said at the same Bled conference.

However, he also chided EU member states that had not come forward to accept Afghan refugees, in contrast to several states outside the EU.

"Everyone rightly thought of those who worked with us and their families, but none had the courage to offer refuge to those whose lives are still in danger today. We cannot pretend that the Afghan question does not concern us, because we participated in that mission and shared its objectives and aim," the parliament president said.

ab/sms (Reuters, EFE)

Joe McCarthy was never defeated — and Donald Trump now leads the movement he created

McCarthy dreamed of a right-wing movement rooted in bigotry, demagoguery and false accusations. Well, here it is

By MATTHEW ROZSA

SALON
PUBLISHED AUGUST 29, 2021 

LONG READ 

 

Joe McCarthy, Donald Trump and Joe Biden 

(Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images/Tom Brenner/Drew Angerer/MPI)

Afew years ago, I was interviewing Roger Stone when he happened to use the phrase "new McCarthyism," describing those who accused former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort of being a tool of Russian interests. This was more than a little ironic for abundant reasons, especially given that as a younger man, Donald Trump had been mentored by the infamous Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy's right-hand man, Roy Cohn.

Stone tried to defend himself by saying that he'd read M. Stanton Evans' book "Blacklisted by History," and found it "a more balanced review of exactly what McCarthy was talking about and what he did." That didn't make much sense either: Evans' book is a revisionist attempt to defend McCarthy, which is widely maligned by serious historians. It's not surprising that a longtime Republican operative would read it — but then, if Stone was on McCarthy's side, why was he accusing other people of "new McCarthyism"?

Stone tried to salvage that one too, arguing, "Whether I like it or not, people view McCarthyism, as a label, as the hurling of false accusations." Overall, though, there was more truth-telling in that exchange than you normally get from Stone. The Republican Party of 2021 is very much the party that McCarthy envisioned, centered on a supposed strongman's personality, viciously seeking to destroy any outsiders seen as threats and rooted in blatant bigotry. In that context, it's important to clarify what Joe McCarthy did and why his legacy is still dangerous.

McCarthy was elected to the Senate from Wisconsin in 1946, and his early years in office were unmemorable — except for one revealing episode. He denounced the death sentences handed down in U.S.-occupied Germany to a group of Waffen-SS soldiers convicted of murdering American troops in an event known as the Malmedy massacre. This moment in McCarthy's career, though virtually forgotten today, is highly instructive On the surface, he presented himself as a crusader for justice, arguing that the Army was covering up judicial misconduct and that this called into question the validity of the Germans' confessions. (He never provided any evidence for this.)

In fact, McCarthy was doing something much more sinister. On some level he understood that defending a group of Nazis would appeal to the antisemitic American far right at a moment when expressing public hatred for Jews was unacceptable. At least implicitly, McCarthy was accusing the Jewish Americans who helped investigate the crimes of seeking vengeance and perpetrating injustice. Today we might call this flipping the script: Suddenly Jewish people, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, were persecutors, and "Aryan" Germans — those who had committed mass murder — were their victims.

That wasn't enough to make McCarthy a right-wing superstar, probably because any hint of pro-Nazi sympathies was completely out of bounds in the postwar years. McCarthy needed a different vehicle to achieve political stardom and found it in 1950 when, while delivering a speech in West Virginia, he claimed to have a list of more than 200 known Communists who were allowed to work in the State Department. (No such list existed.) '

The speech was a smash hit and over the course of four years, the Wisconsin senator accused countless people of either actually being Communists, being "Communist sympathizers" (whatever that meant) or being "soft on Communism," a hopelessly vague term that could be applied to almost anyone who didn't support open military confrontation with the Soviet Union. With America on edge during the early years of the Cold War, McCarthy inflamed widespread paranoia, without once provided evidence that any of his targets had done anything illegal. That didn't much matter: He was saying what unhappy right-wingers wanted to hear, and they supported him with enthusiasm. (Yeah, some of this might sound familiar.) gave him tremendous political influence as a result.

Many of McCarthy's targets were political opponents, like Sen. Millard Tydings, a Maryland Democrat who had criticized him, and Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee in both 1952 and 1956. He also persecuted members of marginalized groups, claiming that they could be vulnerable to Communist influence: Today we would say he was obsessed with the "cultural elite," going after East Coast intellectuals and LGBT people (although that term did not exist), left-wing activists and journalists, members of the Washington political establishment and, of course, Jews. His strident attacks powered Republican victories in the 1950 midterm elections, and plenty of Southern Democrats liked him too.

McCarthy was rewarded with a powerful chairmanship, at the Senate Committee on Government Operations, where Cohn and the young Robert F. Kennedy serving as assistant counsels. There he targeted the Voice of America, the overseas library program of the International Information Agency (this led to book burnings), several prominent Protestant clergymen and finally the U.S. Army. That last crusade proved to be a bridge too far: Joseph Welch, chief counsel for the Army, called out McCarthy on national television for his cruelty and recklessness, famously demanding, "At long last, sir, have you no decency?"

The American public, seeing McCarthy exposed as a bully and liar, rapidly turned against him. He died in 1957, likely as a result of alcoholism, but if he'd lived would likely have lost his Senate seat the following year. Although the term "McCarthyism" had been coined well before his downfall, that guaranteed that it would be an epithet rather than a compliment. From that point on, even Republicans began using the term "McCarthyist" to refer to baseless and malevolent smears.

This brings us to the Trump era. First of all, the accusations that Trump's campaign colluded with Russian agents in 2016 are not "McCarthyist," both because they were highly plausible (and at least partly true) and because they had nothing to do with left-wing or Communist ideology. For a better idea of what McCarthyism actually entails, consider this passage from a 2017 article about Cohn's influence on Trump. It practically lays out, step by step, the ways that Trump's narcissism would later fuel his attempts to overturn the 2020 election:

For author Sam Roberts, the essence of Cohn's influence on Trump was the triad: "Roy was a master of situational immorality . ... He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat." As columnist Liz Smith once observed, "Donald lost his moral compass when he made an alliance with Roy Cohn."

That attitude is a key element of McCarthyism. The only two ingredients missing from that description are the blatant pandering to bigotry and paranoia and the way supporters are seduced by a narcissist's charismatic allure into a sense of shared omnipotence with them. Without the former, the McCarthyist lacks the fuel necessary to whip up the mob against supposed enemies; without the latter, the demagogue can't convince the mob that his individual desires are also their own.

The bogus and evidence-free claim that Trump really won the 2020 election is quintessentially McCarthyist: Trump refused to settle or admit defeat, trying to proclaiming victory before all the votes had been counted and filing dozens of nonsensical lawsuits. Like McCarthy and Cohn, Trump gaslit America. As with McCarthy's claims that he had lists of Communist agents in the government, Trump's empty allegations force his supporters either to take him at his word or reveal their disloyalty — and nobody who wants a career in Republican politics can afford to be disloyal to Trump at the moment. In both cases, proof was no longer needed, and on some level was viewed with scorn. To doubt Joe McCarthy in the early '50s was to become an accomplice to the Communist conspiracy, just as anyone who rejects Trump's Big Lie today is clearly a socialist antifa liberal.

That is how a lie becomes political dogma, a phenomenon also visible in the current right-wing obsession with "critical race theory." Just as McCarthy defined "Communism" so broadly that it lost all meaning, opposition to "critical race theory" has very little to do with the academic approach that term actually describes — but a great deal to do with maintaining white supremacy. Salon's Chauncey DeVega has described it this way:

For today's Republicans, Trumpists and other members of the white right, "critical race theory" is a form of political ectoplasm: It's both a liquid and a solid, something slimy and sticky which can be shaped into whatever frightening or dangerous thing suits their mood and needs in a given moment.

In this political context, "critical race theory" means both everything and nothing; it is a fetish object used to summon up centuries-old racist nightmares and fears about "scary" Black and brown people who are plotting a rebellion or uprising to undermine the (white) family, indoctrinate (white) children and attack (white) America.

By implication, if "critical race theory" and other Black and brown bogeymen are threats to (white) America, then preemptive violence is both necessary and reasonable. Moreover, multiracial democracy is seen, by definition, as incompatible with white people's safety, security and material interests.

In channeling McCarthyism, whether consciously or otherwise, Trump has been successful to a degree McCarthy himself could only have dreamed about. But the connection is clear. While McCarthy was personally discredited, he made it difficult for any prominent American to express unpopular or radical views without being accused of disloyalty or possessing "Communist sympathies." The McCarthyist current has been with us ever since, and as Trump's career demonstrates, has not yet been defeated. If anything, it appears to be winning. Roger Stone is correct, in an upside-down fashion: There is a new McCarthyism in America today, and his pal Donald Trump and his supporters are the ones practicing it.

MATTHEW ROZSA is a staff writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

Republicans' plot to impeach Joe Biden is not about Afghanistan — it's payback for Trump

If Republicans win the midterms, they'll impeach Biden to make a mockery of accountability

By AMANDA MARCOTTE

SALON
PUBLISHED AUGUST 31, 2021 

LONG READ

Joe Biden, Kevin McCarthy and Donald Trump (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

The wheels of the last U.S. military plane were barely off the ground in Afghanistan when Republicans trotted out their plot to impeach President Joe Biden over ending the war.

Using Politico, ground zero for the media pressure campaign to bully Biden into occupying that nation forever, the GOP rushed to concept test the idea of impeaching Biden in 2023. "The I-word looms: McCarthy faces internal pressure to go harder at Biden on Afghanistan," reads Politico's headline the morning after the withdrawal. "Republicans [] want to make a high-stakes call for impeaching Biden over his handling of Afghanistan — a vow that would come due should the GOP take back the chamber next November."

Yep, they want to impeach Biden over Afghanistan. Or impeach him for something, anyway. Not because Biden committed any high crimes or misdemeanors, mind you. Nor even really because of "incompetence," which is a word that is thrown around mainly by people who haven't explained how one is supposed to make losing a 20-year war to the Taliban look prettier on the TV box.

No, it's all about pandering to Donald Trump's rabidly bitter, trollish base, the same people who are so furious about losing the 2020 election they're committing biowar on their own bodies just to hurt the rest of the country for not wanting Dr. Drink Bleach as their president. As Politico's Olivia Beavers writes of congressional Republicans, "their offices were being bombarded with calls from base voters for a future Biden impeachment" even before the full military withdrawal from Afghanistan this week.

What's going on here is not mysterious and, critically, is not about the lost war in Afghanistan, which was lost long before Biden set up camp in the Oval Office. Nope, this is about Trump. When it comes to Republicans, it's always about Trump.

"There's a school of thought in McCarthy's conference that Democrats opened the door to politically motivated impeachment efforts by going after Trump," Beavers writes, quoting an anonymous Republican congressional member claiming, "this is exactly what we said would happen when Democrats weaponized impeachment last time."

Democrats must face the lasting damage of Trump's coup attempt

00:15 / 01:55  Go To Video Page

Of course, this excuse is just more rationalization and lies. Democrats did not, in any way, "weaponize" impeachment by impeaching Trump twice. On the contrary, Democrats didn't impeach Trump enough.

Trump was only impeached for two crimes: The first was for blackmailing a foreign leader into trying to help him cheat in the 2020 election. The second was for inciting an insurrection on January 6. But the actual number of impeachable offenses committed by Trump was a lot more than that, from his obstruction of justice in the Russia probe to his mainlining foreign bribes through his hotels to abuse of power against the press to tax fraud to campaign fraud, and probably a few more things I'm forgetting. Trump loves crime as much as he loves Diet Coke, and if he could have had a "commit a crime" button on his desk, he would have also been constantly punching it.

So no, the problem is not that Democrats politicized impeachment. It's the opposite: Democrats are so afraid of this "politicization" accusation that they haven't done nearly enough to hold Trump accountable for his criminal behavior. Trump is still walking around, free as a bird, even as the people he compelled to storm the U.S. Capitol are being sent to prison at a steady clip. Considering how much public evidence there is for Trump's criminality, it's hard not to conclude that the Department of Justice's failure to prosecute is less about the law and more about politics. Specifically, there's reason to fear that Attorney General Merrick Garland worries that Republicans will seize on any legitimate prosecution of Trump as an excuse to launch a thousand illegitimate prosecutions against Democrats the next time they control the DOJ.

But, as this talk of impeaching Biden demonstrates, Democratic reluctance to hold Trump accountable has not slowed down the vindictiveness and corruption of Republicans in the slightest.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

Republicans claim the mantle of victimhood, no matter what, and if they don't have anything to point to as evidence, they'll just make stuff up. After all, the entire GOP caucus now tacitly endorses Trump's Big Lie that Biden stole the election, without a single shred of even decently faked evidence to support it. All that Democrats bought themselves by being under-zealous about going after Trump was that Trump is now free to run in 2024. Republicans don't really need excuses anymore. Hating Democrats is reason enough.

Beyond pleasing Trump and his base, there's an even deeper reason Republicans will want to impeach Biden the second they seize control of the House: to make a mockery of the very idea of accountability.

Remember, the current GOP plan is to run Trump as their presidential nominee in 2024. If and when that happens, Trump will almost certainly commit a series of crimes, both during the campaign as he attempts to cheat his way to victory, and likely from the White House if he manages to get back there. Betting against that is about as wise as betting against dogs barking and the sun rising in the east.

All Republicans can do, then, is undermine confidence in our systems of justice as much as possible before then. One way to do that is to impeach, perhaps repeatedly, a Democratic president who is clearly innocent of any crimes. Making the impeachment process a joke through shameless kangaroo trials will exhaust the public, and blunt the impact of the word "impeachment." That way, when Trump gets back to campaigning — and therefore back to committing crimes — even the already insufficient accountability tool of impeachment will be substantially weakened.

That's been Trump's strategy from the beginning. He can't convince people he's not corrupt, so instead, he instills the idea that corruption is endemic and therefore unimportant. The rest of the GOP has learned the lesson well, which is why, if they regain the House in 2022, they will likely start impeachment proceedings early in 2023. It probably won't be over Afghanistan — as that will be thoroughly faded from the headlines by then — but Republicans will make up some other B.S. reason. The point is not simply to accuse Biden of crimes but to make accusing someone of crimes a meaningless gesture altogether. That way, when they bring back a real live criminal to office, Democratic outrage will be read by the media as little more than "playing politics" and "both sides do it," instead of as a substantive concern.
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It's cynical and anti-democratic to impeach Biden. That's why it's almost certainly the inevitable Republican move if they win the House in 2022.

A university falls, taking down a symbol of US soft power, Afghan cultural dignity

Issued on: 01/09/2021 -

File photo of students chatting at the American University of Afghanistan as they wait for the start of classes in Kabul on March 28, 2017. © Wakil Kohsar, AFP

Text by: Leela JACINTO 

LONG READ

When the Taliban swept into Kabul last month, they immediately took over the abandoned American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), the country’s most prestigious private university. Most of the endangered students are now stuck in Afghanistan as its faculty attempt to get them out while mourning an intellectual and cultural loss.

On a cold Kabul morning three years ago, students at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) gathered around a wall in the sprawling, heavily fortified campus to declare their defiant commitment to education.

“I am back because education prevails,” the students painted, next to a drawing of a young man and woman picking up their books amid an orange swirl of feathers of a rising phoenix.

Students paint a wall at the American University of Afghanistan, Kabul, in February 2018. © Reuters

Aided by the Artlords – a group of Afghan artist-activists that, in recent years, painted public messages on the city’s drab walls – the students were sending a message to the Taliban following an August 24, 2016, attack, which killed 13 people.

The attack occurred just days after two professors, a US and Australian national, were kidnapped near the campus gates. The two hostages were released in November 2019 in a prisoner swap between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

Funded by US aid and with a mandate to educate Afghanistan’s next generation of professionals and leaders, AUAF was a symbolic target in an age when jihadists from Afghanistan to Nigeria are determined to deny populaces access to knowledge.

After every attack, the university reopened, phoenix-like, with new security measures, additional watch towers and entrance cabins where entrants were thoroughly patted down. Its students – mostly scholarship boys and girls from across Afghanistan – always returned, acutely aware of the expectations of their impoverished parents and nation on their shoulders.

File photo a wall painting at the American University of Afghanistan © Reuters

Today, the AUAF is no more. Even on the Internet, the university has disappeared without a trace after AUAF officials deleted the site, burning servers and documents as a security precaution while the Taliban swept into Kabul.

Recounting her escape from Afghanistan, Victoria Fontan, AUAF’s vice president of academic affairs, said she managed to escape the university on August 14, a day before the Taliban entered Kabul. Along with around 400 staff members, students and their families, Fontan sheltered in the basement of a British private security company around 10 kilometers from the Kabul airport.

But as thousands of desperate people crowded at the airport in a desperate bid to flee the Taliban takeover, the evacuation process proved harrowing. “On August 15 evening, the compound near the airport where we were sheltering was attacked by the Taliban who encircled us,” said Fontan in an interview with FRANCE 24. “We were barred from leaving under threat of arrest. Negotiations followed, the security company guarding us enacted its hostage crisis response plan. They themselves established negotiations with the Taliban for our release. The negotiation resulted in [them] leaving a lot of military equipment for the Taliban and some money,” she explained.

The university’s non-Afghan faculty members from several nations have since returned home and are dispersed across the world.

Most of the students though have been left behind in Afghanistan – but not from a lack of trying, by the university’s committed staff and alumni, to get them evacuated.

On Sunday – just days before US President Joe Biden’s August 31 withdrawal deadline – hundreds of staff, students and relatives made a final evacuation attempt. But after waiting hours to get clearance to enter the Kabul airport, they were informed that evacuations had been called off, the New York Times reported.

Those students are now at critical risk, among the most vulnerable people under the new Taliban regime.

A symbol of American soft power

Inaugurated in 2006 by then US first lady, Laura Bush, AUAF was one of the most visible symbols of American soft power in Afghanistan.

The university has since produced thousands of graduates who can often be immediately identified with their excellent English language skills and critical acumen. Even before the Taliban takeover of the country, the word “American” in the university’s name often added a degree of pressure for some students with parents concerned about the association with the foreign occupiers, forcing them to take on their families in a bid to get a quality education.

Their abandonment, and the hasty US withdrawal, with its deadly consequences, has enraged Michael Barry, a renowned historian who taught at Princeton University before joining the AUAF faculty in 2017.

“Ever since President Joe Biden announced his intention of withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan, beginning in April, the American Embassy in Afghanistan did not extend a finger to assist the American University of Afghanistan, its staff, premises and especially the students,” said Barry in a phone interview with FRANCE 24 from Paris, where he is a visiting professor at The Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. “Hundreds of female students are desperate to leave the country along with their male classmates. They all believe in the universality of human rights. Does that mean they’re inferior humans to be sacrificed?”

The new ‘N-word’

The sudden, cataclysmic end of the university, leaving behind vulnerable students and staff to fend for themselves is a stain on America’s reputation, Barry believes. “It’s a betrayal, of course it’s a betrayal. We’ve betrayed every value that we profess to uphold,” he fumed. “It’s a symbol of the broken promises, betrayal, of an America that refuses to believe in itself. Everything that the American University of Afghanistan proclaimed itself to be – a showcase for the building of democracy – proved to be a hollow propaganda lie.”

File photo taken on April 7, 2019 of US historian Michael Barry during an interview at the American University of Afghanistan. 

Wakil Kohsar, AFP

Two days after Kabul fell to the Taliban on August 15, when Biden finally addressed a nation shocked by scenes of thousands of Afghans risking death to flee the Taliban, the US president stuck “squarely behind” his decision to withdraw troops on a truncated schedule. “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to be nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified centralised democracy,” said Biden.

Fact-checkers immediately got on the job, retrieving several Biden quotes over the past 20 years, when the seasoned politician explicitly extolled the virtues of nation-building.

Occupiers, including colonialists, throughout history have understood their primary duty to restore law and order involved administering terrain by setting up institutions tasked with implementing policies.

As a historian, Barry has little patience for Biden’s recent bids to denigrate what the US has been doing in Afghanistan over the past two decades. “Now nation-building is being used as if it’s a dirty word, which is implying that the hopes, aspirations and dreams of others is not as important as the well-being and aspirations of Americans. This goes against the professed ideals of the USA,” he noted, “which were reaffirmed after World War II with the Marshall Plan and the idea, however flawed, that the US had the imaginative scope and the moral outreach to believe in working on behalf of humanity.”

‘Cultural dignity’ in a war-torn nation

In many ways, Barry epitomises the spirit of AUAF at its prime, with its dedicated faculty braving the dangers of living in Afghanistan to fulfil what they saw as their mission to open the doors to the world for their students.

“At the American University of Afghanistan, we endeavored to enhance the cultural dignity of the Afghan people and nation instead of treating them like underdeveloped wards,” he explained.

As an Islamic art expert, Barry attempted to provide his students a scholarship avenue into their own culture – a path available in the world’s leading institutions, but which was denied to Afghans during decades of war and the anti-intellectualism of the Taliban’s 1990s rule.

His work at AUAF included a major project on 15th century miniatures of the Herat school, which flourished in western Afghanistan. Following years of research, Barry located the pages of the exquisite artwork dispersed across nearly 30 collections and institutions from the US to India.

In a collaboration with Boston University’s American Institute of Afghanistan Studies (AIAS) and with funding from the US and French embassies, Barry got the intricate manuscripts expertly photographed, enlarged and mounted on metal to be hung at the university.

Incident in a Mosque by Shaykh Zada; Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum © American Institute of Afghanistan Studies website

Another set of the mounted paintings was given to the Herat Palace, entering the institution’s permanent display. In a 2019 interview with a US newspaper, an Afghan social anthropology lecturer at AUAF recalled how Afghan visitors teared up during tours. “I feel like I am awakened after a long sleep,” Sharifi recalled a visitor telling him.

‘Daesh has done an enormous service to the Taliban’

As an Afghanistan historian fluent in Persian, Urdu, as well as the dialects and classical languages of the region, Barry is painfully familiar with the Taliban’s tyrannical repression of scholarship.

“Daesh has done an enormous service to the Taliban,” he noted, referring to the Islamic State (IS) group. “Daesh’s actions were so heinous, they made the Taliban look more moderate and Western powers will work with the Taliban to try to limit Daesh,” he predicted.

The future for a country resigned to the “moderation” of the Taliban against the excesses of the IS group’s Khorasan branch, the IS-K, is utterly bleak for Barry and he has no patience for putting a positive spin on what he sees as a disaster.

AMERICAN BRUTALIST ARCHITECTURE

File photo of the American University of Afghanistan taken on March 28, 2017. 

Wakil Kohsar, AFP

Classes go online

This week, at the start of a new semester, AUAF classes went online, beginning with a “two-week study group period for the students and faculty to get together and process what’s happening. It’s a buffer period for everyone to get back and reconnect. On September 15, the credit-bearing classes begin,” explained Fontan.

The move online began last year with the Covid-19 crisis, giving students, staff and technical teams valuable lessons in virtual learning. Despite the security crisis this year, Fontan is confident of the university’s cybersecurity measures, explaining that the system only allows university email logins and “everything is centralised and secured”.

While Fontan is a professor of peace and conflict studies, as the university’s vice president of academic affairs her role entails “coordinating the teaching efforts and making sure the trains run on time,” she explained. That involves “dropping in on [online] classes, showing them that I’m there with them and making sure things are okay,” said Fontan.

Her assessment of the students’ reception to the online classes is positive, for the most, under the circumstances. “Some students feel happy to be starting the semester online. It’s the only consistency at a moment in their lives when they don’t know what’s happening to them, their country, their neighborhoods,” she explained. “Others feel they are not in a state to concentrate on their studies, the situation is too overwhelming, and they felt threatened by their association with the university. But the overall feeling is a relief to be allowed to be back with the community, even if it’s online, to allow everyone to process what’s happening.”

Barry’s appraisal of his online session, which included initial technical glitches under the new circumstances, was less affirmative. “It’s terrifying to be reaching out to people trying to speak in whispers, hiding in corners of their homes in terror of being discovered for connecting with us,” he explained.

The university administration in exile have been at pains to assert that an August 29 New York Times report quoting AUAF president, Ian Bickford, as saying that the university had shared the students’ names with the US military, and that the US military’s protocol was to share that information with the Taliban to coordinate airport access, was false. An August 30 correction noted that Bickford “did not say the US military had shared with the Taliban a list of students trying to leave Afghanistan”.

Since their takeover, the Taliban have conducted intimidating house searches to identify Afghans who worked for the government or “collaborated” with the foreign invaders. For Afghans left to their fates, the US military’s conduct during the disastrous withdrawal – including abandoning its main Bagram base in the night without informing their Afghan counterparts – gives them little cause for reassurance.

As an American who voted for Biden, Barry is incensed with the way his president pulled his country out of a region he has long studied. Barry is careful to explain that he speaks “on behalf of the entire faculty, both international and national, in denouncing this moral disgrace”. AUAF’s teaching and administrative staff, he notes, is currently working “with no salaries, purely out of humanitarian concern” since the university’s funds are frozen.

“When the staff, dispersed across the world, discuss the way the US government has treated the American University of Afghanistan, the word that keeps emerging is ‘abject’,” he explained. “Academic excellence is a moral commitment. We played with something with which one does not toy.”

 

United States: Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes on trial for fraud

With a new type of simple blood test, Elizabeth Holmes wanted to revolutionize the health care industry. Her company Theranos was a Wall Street darling until it was exposed as a fraud. Now she is on trial in California.

   

Elizabeth Holmes the former CEO of medical startup Theranos knew how to lure unsuspecting investors

It's one prick that can save lives. At least that was the promise that made the founder of the US medical company Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, look like a prodigy. It was that same promise that made her downfall all the more dramatic.

Just a few drops of blood could be enough to determine hormone and viral loads, discover anomalies and even detect life-threatening diseases with the help of a specially developed instrument. The problem was, the device — with the promising name Edison — never actually worked.

Still for more than 12 years, Holmes successfully tricked companies, money managers and billionaires into believing that Edison was so efficient and inexpensive that the company would not only make blood testing easier, but also replace time-consuming and expensive laboratory tests forever.

The American drugstore chain Walgreens even offered the testing service in 40 of its stores in Arizona and California. It is thought that hundreds of thousands of customers received inaccurate and sometimes dangerously incorrect blood results.

Bring light into the dark

The fact that the scam was exposed is mainly attributable to John Carreyrou, an investigative journalist at the Wall Street Journal. About six years ago, he received a call from a former employee who told him what was going on at the company. His research, interviews and publications went a long way toward unmasking Holmes.

In 2018, she was indicted by the Department of Justice. Federal prosecutors accuse the 37-year old of defrauding investors, doctors and patients. Now she is to stand trial on 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She has plead not guilty.

Elizabeth Holmes with her supposed revolutionary blood test

The trial is now getting underway with the selection of jurors. The company's former president, Ramesh Balwani, who was also her boyfriend for a while, will also soon be sitting in the dock. If the court finds either guilty, they face up to 20 years in jail and fines of more than $2 million (€1.69 million) each.

A central question in the case will be whether the entrepreneurs acted deliberately in order to steal investors' money under false pretense. One focus will be on their luxurious lifestyles, which presumably made both of them increasingly greedy. The prosecutors are therefore calling for specific and sometimes intimate details from Holmes' life to be disclosed. Above all, traveling in private jets, expensive shopping tours and regular stays in luxury hotels.

Getting in the black

Holmes knew how to cast a spell over investors. On stages, at lectures or meetings, she deliberately changed her voice to sound deeper and more serious. Her appearances almost always mirrored those of her role model, Apple founder Steve Jobs, who also influenced her choice of clothing. Her closet was full of black clothes and turtlenecks, which would make it easier for her to choose what to wear in the morning and not waste unnecessary energy.

She was particularly able to wrap influential and wealthy men around her finger. The Theranos supervisory board included statesmen such as ex-Secretary of State George Shultz, former Defense Secretary James Mattis and even Henry Kissinger. The investors, in turn, included prominent names like media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper and the Walton family, founders of Walmart.

Blinded by the vision and without much scrutiny of the books, they invested more than $700 million in the medical startup. At the height of its success in 2014, Theranos was valued at a whopping $9 billion. A year later, Time magazine named Holmes one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world. She was regularly featured on the covers of popular business magazines.

From shooting star to bankruptcy. At its peak Theranos was valued at $9 billion

200 tests in a small box

What many did not see — or did not want to see — became apparent to critics like journalist John Carreyrou. For example, the Edison device was extremely simple. In reality, the machine consisted of a robotic arm and countless pipettes that were lined up inside the crate-sized machine. Carrying out more than 200 different blood tests in such a machine was simply impossible, which is why Theranos secretly used competitors' machines. But Holmes never let on to the switch.

She always said that she was on to something very big and therefore didn't want to reveal details. When asked about the basic design though, she showed how little she actually knew about the technology.

"It sounded like the words of a high school chemistry student as opposed to a sophisticated laboratory scientist who'd really invented new science," Carreyrou wrote in his book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, in which he deals with the case.

Holmes, on the other hand, has been unapologetic. With the help of some of the best lawyers in the country, she put legal pressure on all those who wanted to testify against her or bring her company into disrepute. She labeled many as envious while she apparently continued to believe in her vision.

"This is what happens when you work to change things. First, they think you're crazy, then they fight you, then all of a sudden you change the world," she said on CNBC in 2018.

A new baby on board

Holmes is expected to rely on confrontational tactics in court. In the past few days, the number of potential jurors has been reduced after her lawyers complained that the majority of them were biased.

"Thirty to 40 of the jurors have consumed substantial, and I mean lengthy extrajudicial material, about the case and about the defendant," attorney Kevin Downey told the judge. It is already becoming apparent that it will be a lengthy trial.

Former COO Ramesh Balwani will also soon be on trial

Holmes herself is going on the offensive. On the weekend, news came out that she will say she was the victim of a decade-long abusive relationship with former COO Ramesh Balwani. According to documents, she plans to have an expert testify about the psychological, emotional and sexual abuse that she went through. It was Balwani, according to Holmes, who first controlled her and then manipulated her.

It is questionable, however, if this tactic will work. Holmes has already had to answer for her actions several times and has taken some of the blame. In order to avoid a lawsuit in 2018, she agreed on a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which said she "made numerous false and misleading statements in investor presentations, product demonstrations, and media articles" about their key product. Holmes then paid $500,000 and agreed not to run a public company in the next 10 years.

What could benefit her most is the fact that a few weeks ago she gave birth to her first child. Planned or unplanned, many consider it a smart move. "Being a new mother can only help get her sympathy from jurors," said legal analyst Danny Cevallos on NBC News. "If convicted, even if her sentencing guidelines call for incarceration, her attorneys will place her motherhood front and central before the judge."

Could Elizabeth Holmes’ Surprising Theranos Defense Work?

BY AARON MAK

AUG 31, 2021

Elizabeth Holmes is prepared to make allegations of intimate partner abuse. 

Nick Otto/AFP via Getty Images


Jury selection for the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of the disgraced blood-testing startup Theranos, began on Tuesday. Federal prosecutors have charged Holmes with multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy, alleging that she misled patients, doctors, and investors about the effectiveness of her company’s technology, which could supposedly diagnose a wide variety of medical conditions with a finger prick. Investigations by the Wall Street Journal and federal officials beginning in 2015 found that Theranos’ devices were providing inaccurate results, and that in many cases the company was using its competitors’ technology to run tests with diluted blood samples. Over the weekend, unsealed court documents revealed Holmes’ planned defense: that emotional and sexual abuse from Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the former president and chief operating officer of Theranos, during their romantic relationship impaired her mental state.

Holmes, 37, and Balwani, 56, worked together closely to build up Theranos and maintained a secret relationship during that time. They first met in Beijing while Holmes was attending a Mandarin language program in the summer before her first year at college, and they later formed a partnership in leading Theranos in which Holmes reportedly handled big-picture ideas and the board of directors, and Balwani oversaw partnerships and day-to-day operations. Filings indicate that she intends to accuse Balwani of controlling and manipulating her by withholding affection if she displeased him and dictating how much she could eat, what she wore, how much she could sleep, and whom she could speak to. She is also prepared to claim that he threw “sharp, hard objects” at her. Holmes’ lawyers wrote in a court document, “This pattern of abuse and coercive control continued over the approximately decade-long duration of Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani’s relationship, including during the period of the charged conspiracies.” Her lawyers also plan to have Mindy Mechanic, a psychologist who specializes in intimate partner abuse who evaluated Holmes, testify during the trial.

While Balwani has his own trial next year for alleged crimes committed as a Theranos executive, it is Holmes whose face, name, and voice became practically synonymous with the company. Reporting on the rise and fall of Theranos has often portrayed Holmes and Balwani as collaborators in the alleged deceptions. So Holmes’ legal strategy may come as a surprise. But could it work?

By raising these abuse allegations, Holmes is mounting what’s known as a “mental disease or defect” defense in which she’s arguing that she can’t be held responsible for her actions because of the trauma from the relationship. “If a jury finds that she has proven this, it’s essentially finding that because of a severe mental disease or defect, she was either unable to appreciate the nature of her acts or the wrongfulness of her acts,” said Miriam Baer, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who specializes in corporate and white-collar crime. The accusations against Balwani complicate what otherwise might’ve been a traditional fraud case in which the government would set out to show what Holmes knew, analyze ways in which her statements were allegedly misleading, and perhaps brings up ways in which she tried to conceal certain information. Holmes’ defense partly shifts the narrative away from fraud. “This claim of intimate partner abuse introduces a whole new narrative, and that narrative has the potential to cause the jury to question the story that they hear from the prosecution’s witnesses,” said Baer. “That means the jury is potentially going into that deliberation room unsure of what really happened, and that lack of certainty and ambiguity can’t help but benefit the defendant.”

This kind of defense is fairly unusual, particularly in corporate cases. “The classic case is an abused partner then harming or killing the abuser,” said Thomas Joo, a professor at the University of California–Davis school of law who specializes in white-collar crime and corporate governance. In order for this defense to succeed in Holmes’ case, her lawyers have to first prove that the abuse actually happened, and then show that it in fact influenced her to lie about Theranos’ technology. Joo notes that this strategy may be more effective in neutralizing allegations of misleading investors than of misleading doctors and patients. “Balwani appears to have been the finance person, and he’s not a scientist, so the idea that he manipulated her may be a stronger argument with respect to statements she made about finances, because he controlled that area,” Joo said. “With respect to the patients and doctors, the financial health of the company is not relevant. It’s really about whether the product worked or not.” Balwani initially joined Theranos in 2009 to help with its e-commerce operations after working at Microsoft and Lotus as a software engineer. He quickly rose the ranks of the company to become one of its top executives, though Holmes was clearly the face of the company in the media, and famously convinced famous figures like George Shultz to invest and serve on the board.

POPULAR IN TECHNOLOGY
Which Elizabeth Holmes Will Show Up at Her Trial?

It’s unclear how Holmes’ defense will play out in the court room because we don’t know what and how much evidence her lawyers are planning to present regarding the alleged abuse. The strategy does have its risks, though, partly because Holmes’ lawyers have to do the extra work of proving something rather than just casting doubt on the prosecution’s arguments. “The defense is difficult to prevail on; it requires the defendant to prove it with clear and convincing evidence,” said Baer. “It’s such that it may result in a defendant deciding that he or she would be best served by testifying, which can itself open up new problems.” Indeed, defense lawyers are typically wary of having defendants take the stand because it opens their clients up to cross examination. At the same time, though, the strongest evidence that Holmes’ lawyers can introduce to prove that she was psychologically damaged due to abuse is likely her own personal testimony. “It’s always an enormous risk when a defendant testifies, but in this case, it appears that the jury will likely be very eager to hear her side of the story,” said George Demos, a former Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement attorney and adjunct professor at the UC–Davis School of Law. “The big risk for Holmes is that if she lies about anything on the stand, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, the jury will then conclude that she’s lying about the underlying charges in the case.” Demos adds that the prosecution is likely to try to poke holes in the defense’s claims about her mental state and lack of agency by examining “evidence about her control of communications, employment decisions, legal matters, and other financial decisions that would demonstrate that, in fact, she was the one in control and making the decisions, not Sunny.”

Hurricane Ida could become costliest weather disaster: UN

Issued on: 01/09/2021 - 

Hurricane Ida is known to have killed four people, although the death toll is expected to rise 

Mark Felix AFP


Geneva (AFP)

Hurricane Ida, which slammed into the US Gulf Coast at the weekend, could become the costliest weather disaster on record, the UN said Wednesday, hailing though that prevention measures had dramatically limited casualties.

Louisiana and Mississippi are still taking stock of the disaster inflicted by the powerful Category 4 storm that hit exactly 16 years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall and devastated the area.

Ida is known to have killed four people, although the death toll is expected to rise, and knocked out power for more than a million properties across Louisiana.

"There is a chance that the economic cost will be higher then Katrina," Petteri Taalas, who heads the UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO), told reporters in Geneva.

He pointed as an illustration to the "major damage to the electric system in Louisiana."

Until now, Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people and destroyed large parts of New Orleans, had been considered by far the costliest weather-related disaster.

A fresh WMO report that examined mortality and economic losses from weather, climate and water extremes between 1970 and 2019, found that Katrina had raked in nearly $164 billion in economic losses.

Currently, hurricanes Harvey and Maria, which both hit in 2017, are considered the second and third-costliest weather-related disasters, carrying price tags of nearly $97 billion and over $69 billion respectively.

Taalas said it would likely take a month or more before a full cost estimate for the losses caused by Ida could be made.

But he hailed that improved early warning and flood protection systems as well as evacuation procedures appeared to have saved numerous lives.

"The good news when it comes to Ida is that the casualties as compared to Katrina, they were much lower," Taalas said.

Mami Mizutori, who heads the UN office for disaster risk reduction, agreed.

She told reporters that the differences between the impacts of the two storms showed the importance of investing in prevention.

"The economic loss indeed will be quite big, but the good news is that ... the mortality has been very, very low, and this is because the city of New Orleans and Louisiana ... invested in prevention."

What had made the biggest difference since Katrina, she said, was the $14.5 billion invested in building flood walls and levees as part of a new "hurricane and storm damage risk-reduction system."

"They did not wait for another century to do this. They did it very quickly."

© 2021 AFP

Weather, climate disasters surge fivefold in 50 years: UN

Issued on: 01/09/2021 

On average, a disaster linked to weather, climate and water extremes has occurred every single day over the past 50 years

JOSH EDELSON AFP/File

Geneva (AFP)

The United Nations warned Wednesday that weather-related disasters have skyrocketed over the past half-century, causing far more damage even as better warning systems have meant fewer deaths.

A report from the UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) examined mortality and economic losses from weather, climate and water extremes between 1970 and 2019.

It found that such disasters have increased fivefold during that period, driven largely by a warming planet, and warned the upward trend would continue.

"The number of weather, climate and water extremes are increasing and will become more frequent and severe in many parts of the world as a result of climate change," WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

In total, there were more than 11,000 of disasters attributed to these hazards globally since 1970, causing more than two million deaths and some $3.64 trillion in losses.

- 115 deaths each day -

On average, a disaster linked to weather, climate and water extremes has thus occurred every single day over the past 50 years, killing 115 people and causing $202 million in daily losses, WMO found.

More than 91 percent of the deaths occurred in developing countries, it said.

Droughts were responsible for the largest losses of human life during the period, alone accounting for some 650,000 deaths, while storms have left over 577,000 people dead.

Floods have meanwhile killed nearly 59,000 over the past 50 years and extreme temperatures have killed close to 56,000, the report found.

On a positive note, the report found that even as the number of weather and climate-related disasters ballooned over the past half-century, the number of associated deaths declined nearly threefold.

The toll fell from over 50,000 deaths each year in the 1970s to fewer than 20,000 in the 2010s, WMO said.

And while the 1970s and 1980 reported an average of 170 related deaths per day, the daily average in the 1990s fell to 90, and then to 40 in the 2010s.

Taalas said dramatic improvements in early warning systems were largely to thank for the drop in deaths.

"Quite simply, we are better than ever before at saving lives," he said.

- More people exposed -

WMO stressed though that much remains to be done, with only half of the agency's 193 member states currently housing the life-saving multi-hazard early warning systems.

It also cautioned that severe gaps remained in weather and hydrological observing networks in Africa and parts of Latin America and in Pacific and Caribbean island states.

Mami Mizutori, who heads the UN office for disaster risk reduction, also hailed the life-saving impact of the improved early warning systems.

But she warned in the statement that "the number of people exposed to disaster risk is increasing due to population growth in hazard-exposed areas and the growing intensity and frequency of weather events."

And while early warning systems save lives, they have done little to shield disaster-prone areas from swelling economic damage.

In fact, the reported losses from 2010 to 2019 stood at $383 million per day -- seven times more than the some $49 million in average daily losses in the 1970s.

Seven of the costliest 10 disasters in the past 50 years have happened since 2005, with three of them in 2017 alone: Hurricane Harvey, which caused nearly $97 billion in damages, followed by Maria at close to $70 billion and Irma at almost $60 billion.

© 2021 AFP