In Afghanistan, a girls' school is the story of a village

Afghan children stand among the ruins of houses destroyed by war in Salar village, Wardak province, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021. In urban centers, public discontent toward the Taliban is focused on threats to personal freedoms, including the rights of women. In Salar, these barely resonate. The ideological gap between the Taliban leadership and the rural conservative community is not wide. Many villagers supported the insurgency and celebrated the Aug. 15 fall of Kabul which consolidated Taliban control across the country. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)More

SAMYA KULLAB
Fri, October 29, 2021, 


SALAR, Afghanistan (AP)  Mina Ahmed smears a cement mixture to strengthen the walls of her war-ravaged home in rural Afghanistan. Her hands, worn by the labor, are bandaged with plastic scraps and elastic bands, but no matter, she welcomes the new era of peace under the Taliban.

She was once apprehensive of the group’s severe style of rule in her village of Salar. But being caught in the crosshairs of a two-decade long war has granted her a new perspective.

Taliban control comes with limits, even for women, and that is alright, the 45-year-old said. “With these restrictions we can live our lives at least.”

But she draws the line on one point: Her daughters, ages 13, 12 and 6, must go to school.

From a bird’s eye view, the village of Salar is camouflaged against a towering mountain range in Wardak province. The community of several thousand, nearly 70 miles from the capital Kabul, serves as a microcosm of the latest chapter in Afghanistan’s history — the second round of rule by the Taliban — showing what has changed and what hasn’t since their first time in power, in the late 1990s.

Residents of Salar, which has been under Taliban hold the past two years, are embracing the new stability now that the insurgents’ war with the U.S. military and its Afghan allies is over. Those displaced by fighting are returning home. Still, they fear a worsening economic crisis and a drought that is keenly felt in a province where life revolves around the harvest.

In Kabul and other cities, public discontent toward the Taliban is focused on threats to personal freedoms, including the rights of women.

In Salar, these barely resonate. The ideological gap between the Taliban leadership and the rural conservative community is not wide. Many villagers supported the insurgency and celebrated the Aug. 15 fall of Kabul which consolidated Taliban control across the country.

But even in Salar, changes are afoot, beginning with the villagers’ insistence on their local elementary school for girls.

That insistence helped push the Taliban to accept a new, small school, funded by international donors. But what the school will become — a formal public school paving the way to higher education, a religious madrasa, or something in between — is uncertain, like the future of the village and the country.

A VILLAGE DEMAND

By 8 a.m., 38 small faces framed by veils are seated on a carpeted floor looking up at their teacher, Qari Wali Khan. With a stick in hand and furrowed brow, he calls on the girls to recite from the Quran.

Rokia, 10, is the unlucky first. Merely three words of classical Arabic escape her lips when Wali Khan interrupts, correcting her pronunciation. When she repeats again, he exclaims, “Afarin!” — “Excellent,” in Pashtu.

In three hours, the students, ages 9-12, will cover Quranic memorization, mathematics, handwriting, and more Islamic study. Homework: What is 105 x 25?

The school opened two months ago, marking the first time in 20 years girls in the village have ever stepped foot in a classroom, or something like it. In the absence of a building, lessons are held in Wali Khan’s living room.

The classes are the product of U.N. negotiations with the Taliban.

In 2020, the U.N. began working on a program to set up girls’ learning centers in conservative and remote areas, including ones under Taliban control at the time, like Sayedabad district where Salar is located.

Taliban interlocutors were initially reluctant to embrace the idea, but an agreement was eventually reached in November 2020, said Jeanette Vogelaar, UNICEF’s chief of education. International funding was secured, $35 million a year for three years to finance 10,000 such centers.

Launch was delayed by COVID-19. By the time centers were scheduled to open, the Taliban had taken over in Kabul. To everyone’s surprise, they allowed the project to go ahead, even using the previous government’s curriculum — though they have introduced more Islamic learning and insisted on gender segregation and female teachers.

Wali Khan, a madrasa teacher by training, got the job in Wardak because most educated women had left for the capital.

The program enables girls without formal schooling to complete six grades in three years. When completed, they should be ready to enter Grade 7.

It remains unresolved whether they can continue after that. In most districts, the Taliban have prohibited girls ages 12-17 from going to public school.

Still, it’s a good start, Vogelaar said. “Based on what we see now, somehow the Taliban doesn’t seem to be the same as how they behaved before,” she said.

Ten years ago, the Taliban were at the forefront of a deadly campaign targeting government officials in Wardak, with particular venom reserved for those campaigning for girls’ schools. Two village elders recounted the shooting death of Mirajuddin Ahmed, Sayedabad’s director of education and a vocal supporter for girl’s' access to education.

Several public girls’ schools were burned down in 2007 in the province. To this day, not a single one stands.

Times have changed.

“If they don’t allow girls to go to this school now, there will be an uprising,” said village elder Abdul Hadi Khan.

The shifting attitudes may be part of a broader trend in support of education. In 2000, when the Taliban were last in power, there were just 100,000 girls in school, out of a total 1 million schoolchildren. Now they are 4 million out of 10 million schoolchildren, according to the U.N.

Salar’s villagers wanted no different. They convinced Wali Khan to teach.

“They put their trust in me, they told me, this is a need in our society,” he said.

That might be one reason why the Taliban decided to cooperate; with the economy in ruins, they could not risk alienating a constituency that supported them throughout the insurgency.

There are concerns of how much the Taliban will shape the schooling. The U.N. is aware the Taliban enter villages and insist on more Islamic study, said Vogelaar.

Most families are not against it, either. Sayedabad district is composed primarily of Afghanistan’s dominant Pashtun ethnic group, from which the Taliban are mostly drawn. Religion and conservatism are central to daily village life.

But a madrasa-type education “was not the intention,” said Vogelaar.

Wali Khan said he received specific orders from the Taliban-controlled education directorate in Sayedabad to “include more religious study” in the curriculum. He obeyed.

In late October, local Taliban officials came to visit Wali Khan. They wanted to know how the classes were going.

“The girls have a hunger to learn,” he told them.

A FATHER’S PRIDE

After class, 12-year-old Sima runs home, whizzing past Salar’s mud-brick houses, a cloud of dust in her wake.

Her father, Nisar, is away picking tomatoes in the fields for 200 afghanis ($2.5) a day. He is their only breadwinner.

Her mother, Mina, is still mixing cement.

Mina expects it will be a long time before her home is in one piece again.

She’s rebuilding bit by bit, buying cement bags for the equivalent of $1 whenever she can. She has accumulated some 100,000 afghanis ($1,100) in debt to relatives and friends.

The family returned home just a month ago. Only one of the house’s four rooms was usable. Walls are still riddled with bullet holes.

They had fled more than 11 years earlier, moving to the other side of the village where it was safer. Their home was too dangerous, located on a strategic incline overlooking Highway One, which connects Kabul to the south and was a hotbed of insurgent activity throughout the war.

She remembers standing out in the cold as American troops inspected their house for insurgents. By 2007, ambushes of army convoys on the highway became frequent. Many times, Mina saw army tanks burst into flames from her kitchen window. She has lost two brothers-in-law.

The ruins of an army checkpoint lie above Mina's home. The Afghan army held it for 18 years, until the Taliban took over the area decisively two years ago.

Mina has made slow progress with the house but fears what will happen as temperatures drop and market prices rise.

Afghanistan is grappling with an economic crisis after the U.S. froze Afghan assets in line with international sanctions against the Taliban. Foreign aid that once accounted for 75% of state expenditure has also paused.

Mina has six children and they all need to be fed, she said.

Everyone who has returned has a similar story.

“You won’t find one person in this village who is in a good situation,” said Mahmad Rizak, 38, standing outside his home with a face flecked with cement.

Food shortages are taking a toll. The Mohammed Khan Hospital, the only one in the district, is struggling with a rising number of malnourished newborns wailing in the maternity ward.

In the surgical ward, an unusual museum of mementos hangs on the wall. It consists of bullets and kidney stones removed from patients — the first from the war, the second from poor water quality.

“Tells you everything about this place,” said Dr. Gul Makia.

Drought has decimated the harvest, leaving many whose lives revolve around tilling the earth and raising livestock with no means to make a living.

When October ends, so does tomato-picking season, and Nisar will be out of work.

He joins his wife in mixing cement.

He points to the room once occupied by Afghan soldiers, and then Taliban insurgents after them. “My daughter will become a teacher one day, and we will make this into a school for her to educate other girls.”

“She will be our pride,” he said.

 

In Afghanistan, a girls' school is the story of a village (yahoo.com)

Biden's new cyber czar is pushing for collective defense inside government and out


Ellen Nakashima
Thu, October 28, 2021

WASHINGTON - The Office of the National Cyber Director wants to bring cohesion to efforts to strengthen computer defenses across a sprawling set of more than 100 civilian agencies even as it seeks to drive more robust cybersecurity in the private sector.

"This is the beginning, not the end" of the attempt to ensure that the United States enjoys a secure and open Internet, said National Cyber Director Chris Inglis in an interview Wednesday laying out strategic vision for the federal government's newest agency.

Part of that effort may eventually include cybersecurity mandates for critical infrastructure.

"You can't rule that out," said Inglis, who was confirmed by the Senate as the first national cyber director in June and sworn in the following month. "I'm confident that at some point we'll get to that bridge and have to cross it."

He noted that such mandates would have to be set by Congress, and would be done "on an exceptional basis as opposed to a primary tool."

Congress established the office last year and purposely placed it in the White House, making the director report to the president, to ensure it had prominence and influence, and would be in a position to coordinate cyber defense efforts across the federal government.

Confronting challenges in cyberspace is a top priority for President Joe Biden, who has raised the issue of ransomware - a highly disruptive attack in which hackers demand exorbitant payments to free computers paralyzed by malware - with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Inglis's office will work toward building resilience against ransomware assaults, which often originate from Russia. But deterring them through bilateral talks, international pressure from allies and disruptive actions is more appropriately overseen by the National Security Council, he said.

Inglis has designated Chris DeRusha as his deputy for federal cybersecurity. DeRusha, who is also the federal chief information security officer for the White House Office of Management and Budget, will serve in a "dual-hat" role that is intended to bring his budget and cybersecurity expertise to the effort.

A key lever for the office is the ability to review agencies' cybersecurity budgets and recommend changes that will align spending plans with the president's cybersecurity priorities.

"It's a great opportunity to have that synergy," DeRusha said. "We're excited to have that extra capacity" afforded by the new office.

The coordination should be a boon for federal agency cybersecurity officers, Inglis said. "Particularly if you're a chief information security officer, you'll see us speaking in complementary ways and using our resources in a collaborative manner."

Inglis said that raising the federal government's cyber game is essential, but only a "predicate" to the broader effort to improve public-private collaboration. "You need to do that before the other things become a viable possibility," he said.

"I think we'll use our buying power" with federal contractors to encourage stronger cybersecurity practices, he said. But "we're not going to be big enough to drive the entire marketplace."

Inglis' role could be seen as encroaching on that of the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Jen Easterly, who leads the federal agency in charge of cybersecurity for civilian agencies and critical industrial sectors.

But Inglis said he sees himself more as a "coach" with Easterly as "quarterback." The two, who once worked together at the National Security Agency, speak daily about cyber matters.

"My job is to ensure that she has the right resources and the right authorities within the scope of what the federal government can do on its own, and that her job is to execute," said Inglis, a former NSA deputy director. "So when she goes on the field, she has significant resources and a growing capacity to succeed."

The office is just starting to hire and Inglis said he expects to have about 25 personnel by year's end, working toward a total of about 75.

The office will build on a federal executive order issued in May that, among other things, will require companies selling software to the government to meet a set of standards. The hope is that effort to improve software security will ripple across businesses and critical industries nationally and internationally.

After Congress established the office in December, the Biden administration created a new role of deputy national security adviser for cyber within the NSC. Debate ensued over whether that job would conflict with the NCD.

The administration's delay in naming a national cyber director frustrated some lawmakers, who wanted to see the position filled quickly amid major incidents such as the SolarWinds hack, which saw government agencies and private companies compromised by Russian government operatives. But the naming of Inglis appeased the critics.

"Standing up the Office of the National Cyber Director finally provides the government with the strategic leader who both reports to the president and to Congress and thus can lead both the federal cybersecurity effort and build the public-private collaboration that is necessary to the defense of critical infrastructure," said Mark Montgomery, senior adviser to the bipartisan Cyberspace Solarium Commission, which recommended the office's creation.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M GAME BROS
Activision Blizzard ends forced arbitration for harassment and discrimination claims

Igor Bonifacic
·Contributing Writer
Thu, October 28, 2021, 


Following months of pressure from employees and workers, Activision Blizzard says it will no longer employ forced arbitration in sexual harassment and discrimination claims. CEO Bobby Kotick announced the policy change in a letter to employees the company shared on Thursday. Kotick said the publisher will also implement a new company-wide zero-tolerance harassment policy. In the future, any employee who is found to have violated the rule will be fired immediately. Additionally, they’ll forfeit any future compensation, including equity awards.

“Our goal is to have the strictest harassment and non-retaliation policies of any employer, and we will continue to examine and tighten our standards to achieve this goal everywhere we do business,” Kotick said.

The executive outlined three other steps Activision Blizzard will take to create a safer and more diverse workplace. Over the next 10 years, it will invest $250 million in programs that create opportunities in tech and gaming for under-represented communities. Additionally, the company to plans to hire more women and non-binary people. According to Kotick, approximately 23 percent of all employees at Activision Blizzard identify as part of those groups. Its goal is to increase that number by 50 percent to more than one-third across the entire company within the next five years. Kotick also promised the company will share annual reports on progress it makes toward pay equity.

Separately, the executive said he has asked Activision Blizzard’s board of directors to reduce his total compensation to $62,500 per year until it feels like he has met the diversity and safety goals outlined above.

Today’s announcement sees Kotick and Activision Blizzard meeting many of the demands employees put before the company when they began protesting its actions in the wake of California’s sexual harassment lawsuit. When employees first staged a walkout in July, they demanded the end of forced arbitration, greater pay transparency and new hiring policies designed to increase representation across the company. “This is a great start, and there’s still work to do,” said Jessica Gonzalez, one of the employees involved with the A Better ABK advocacy group. “We can lead the charge as an industry standard. Victories and still pushing.”

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick cuts his salary to $62,500, California’s state minimum

Chris Morris
Thu, October 28, 2021


After issuing what he later called a “tone deaf” response to a recent sexual harassment lawsuit, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick laid out a more robust response early Thursday and asked that his total compensation be reduced to $62,500, the lowest amount allowed for someone earning a salary under California law.

“I want to ensure that every available resource is being used in the service of becoming the industry leader in workplace excellence,” he said in a note to staff. “Accordingly, I have asked our board of directors to reduce my total compensation until the board has determined that we have achieved the transformational gender-related goals and other commitments…To be clear, this is a reduction in my overall compensation, not just my salary. I am asking not to receive any bonuses or be granted any equity during this time.”

Kotick recently won a shareholder fight regarding his salary with the passage of a Say-on-Pay proposal. His 2020 pay package hit more than $150 million as the company laid off employees. Since 2007, he has received $461 million in compensation.

Kotick also announced a number of changes at the company, including a “new zero-tolerance harassment policy” and doing away with forced arbitration of sexual harassment and discrimination claims. The company also will increase the percentage of women and nonbinary people in its workforce by 50%, he said, and will invest $250 million to accelerate opportunities for diverse talent.

In July, Activision was sued by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing following a two-year investigation, which alleged the company fostered a “frat-boy” culture that led to widespread gender-based discrimination and harassment, and named several high-level executives. The company also has been the subject of multiple federal investigations from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The company settled the EEOC investigation for $18 million.

Many Americans Say They Believe in Ghosts. Do You?

Anna P. Kambhampaty
Thu, October 28, 2021,

A staircase at the Merchant Õs House Museum in New York, Oct. 14, 2018. (Jackie Molloy/The New York Times)

There are a number of different ways to quantify belief among Americans in so-called paranormal phenomena. One way is to ask a selection of people representative of the population if they believe in ghosts. In a 2019 Ipsos poll, 46% of respondents said they did.

Another is to ask what they fear. This year, according to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears, about 9% of 1,035 adults surveyed said they feared ghosts, and the same amount said they feared zombies; many more people said they were afraid of government corruption, the coronavirus or widespread civil unrest.

The last time Gallup surveyed people about ghosts, in 2005, 32% of respondents said they believed in “ghosts or that spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations.” When Gallup asked the same question in 1990, the result was 25%.

Such beliefs have pervaded U.S. culture and media for centuries. But some researchers are now studying whether their rise may be tied, in part, to the rise over the past few decades of Americans claiming no religious preference.

“People are looking to other things or nontraditional things to answer life’s big questions that don’t necessarily include religion,” said Thomas Mowen, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University.

For a continuing study on religion and paranormal belief, for example, Mowen said he was finding that “atheists tend to report higher belief in the paranormal than religious folk.”

‘This Supernatural Interest’

Last year, the share of Americans who belong to religious congregations fell below 50% for the first time in more than 80 years, according to a Gallup poll released in March. And the percentage of people claiming no religion nearly tripled from 1978 to 2018, according to the General Social Survey.

Still, even as religious frameworks for thinking about the meaning of life and death have become less popular in the United States, the big existential questions inevitably remain.

The General Social Survey found that as religious affiliation declined over four decades, belief in the afterlife remained relatively steady: In 1978, about 70% of those surveyed believed in the afterlife, and about 74% reported the same in 2018.

As Joseph Baker, co-author of the book “American Secularism: Cultural Contours of Nonreligious Belief Systems,” put it: “People are outside of organized religions, but they still have this supernatural interest.”

Paranormal television, film and media of all sorts also play a significant role in the perpetuation of belief in the supernatural. Sharon Hill, author of the 2017 book “Scientifical Americans: The Culture of Amateur Paranormal Researchers,” sees the rise of nonfiction paranormal television shows like Syfy’s “Ghost Hunters” — which averaged about 3 million viewers per episode at its peak — as particularly influential in the culture.

“Ghost Hunters,” which premiered in 2004 and originally ran for 11 seasons, portrayed the search for paranormal activity as a discipline. “They had gadgets, they talked in jargon, it sounded professional,” Hill said. “It was convincing to the person at home that this was a serious thing going on in the world.”

And then, Hill said, “because of the rise of the interest in the paranormal, it was really, really easy for these tabloids to pick up cheap stories of people saying that they have demons in their house or they’ve seen a ghost or they got something creepy on their video cam.”

The internet allowed for people across the globe to connect with each other over paranormal interests, Hill added. Reddit became a popular forum to discuss unexplainable mysteries, such as an eerie experience at a rest stop or claims of a demonic run-in at a hospital unit. The site added a new element to these stories by making them interactive, with readers going back and forth in the comments, joining and adding to the narrative themselves.

Pandemic-Fueled Paranormal

Some paranormal investigation groups in the United States say they have received more requests than usual during the pandemic.

Don Collins, a director at Fringe Paranormal, a group in Toledo, Ohio, that investigates claims of unexplained happenings, said his team has been contacted for residential investigations or information on a weekly basis this year, as opposed to the typical one or two requests per month they got before the pandemic.

“I think part of it is that since a lot of people are at home due to COVID, if there is something paranormal going on, they’re actually home to notice it,” Collins said.

“People try to explain things happening through paranormal means when they can’t find an explanation for things that are going on,” he continued. “Negative things are happening around them, they may tend to attribute it to paranormal activity.”

Baker put it another way. “Religion and supernatural belief tend to go up in times of what we would call existential crisis or more existential perils,” he said.

“The increased suffering and death” caused by the pandemic means that people are “more likely to have experiences with death recently,” he said. “That may bring up these sorts of issues of wondering about spirits of loved ones.”

Believing in the supernatural can even be a source of solace. Emily Midorikawa, a biographer of Victorian-era women, provided a historical parallel. “There was certainly a real spike in people who sought the services of mediums, sought comfort in spiritualism about the time of the American Civil War,” she said.

Then as now, the paranormal was fodder for connection. In the Victorian era, seances were gathering places where social structures were less rigid, Midorikawa said.

“It wasn’t unusual, for instance, to have a female medium leading a seance, talking to groups of men and women,” she said. “There was an appeal to women who just went to seances as participants, perhaps it was a chance to get out and mix with people in that setting that was a little bit unusual — and one where perhaps there was a little bit more freedom.”

Today, believing in some form of the paranormal may represent freedom in another way, perhaps as an avenue to conceptualize other possibilities. After all, there are plenty of everyday mysteries we simply accept as part of modern life.

“A belief in the paranormal maybe doesn’t seem as much of a stretch,” Midorikawa said, “when we think about all the things we’re interacting with all the time that might as well be a kind of magic for all the understanding we have of them.”

© 2021 The New York Times Company

Teens in America

From spellcasting to podcasting:

Inside the life of a teenage witch

By Michelle Boorstein

Photos by Ilana Panich-Linsman for The Washington Post

MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION

Teenage witch: From spellcasting to podcasting - Washington Post

 Bennett embraced witchcraft at the tail end of childhood, which they spent partly in Turkey, their mother’s native country, and in England, where their father is from and still lives.

Bennett is a witch influencer — albeit on a small scale. Shot in their bedroom, “Lunar Faery Witch” has 1,100 YouTube subscribers following their video explainers about different aspects of witchcraft.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema delivers ... for pharmaceutical companies

Opinion: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has apparently succeeded in killing a wildly popular plan to allow Medicare to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs. Shame on her for that.

Laurie Roberts
Arizona Republic


Congratulations are apparently in order to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema for her role in killing a wildly popular plan to have Medicare negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs.

President Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled a new framework that cuts in half his proposal for social and climate change spending.

Gone from the $1.75 trillion proposal is a plan that would have allowed Medicare to use its considerable bargaining power to lower the price of prescription drugs for Americans – a proposal that would have saved the government about $600 billion over 10 years.

Instead, Sinema struck a deal with Biden on a narrower proposal that would, among other things, cap out-of-pocket prices for seniors. It was not included in the framework released on Thursday because the votes aren't there to pass it. Presumably, it’s that or nothing if Democrats want to do something this year on prescription drug prices.

“As she promised Arizonans, Kyrsten is working hard to ensure prescription drugs are available at the lowest cost possible, and she looks forward to continuing that work,” her spokeswoman, Hannah Hurley told The Arizona Republic’s Ronald J. Hansen.
BigPharma must be high-fiving all around

Or put another way, the lowest cost possible, given the hundreds of millions of pharmaceutical dollars flowing forth into campaign warchests and into lobbying members of Congress.

While allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prices is popular with Arizonans – and Americans – it isn't so much with prescription drug companies.

Or with Sinema, who, along with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is calling the shots in Washington D.C. these days.

I’d tell you why the senator, who is among the top recipients of pharmaceutical campaign donations this year, is opposed to allowing Medicare to negotiate better prices for us all but alas, Sinema doesn’t generally talk to people like me. Or you.

She did, however, put out a two-sentence statement praising the $1.75 trillion bill’s new framework — the one that doesn't free Medicare to cut us a better deal on drugs.

“After months of productive, good-faith negotiations with President Biden and the White House, we have made significant progress on the proposed budget reconciliation package. I look forward to getting this done, expanding economic opportunities and helping everyday families get ahead.”
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I imagine it’s high fives all around pharmaceutical board rooms across the land.
Letting Medicare bargain seemed like a no brainer

The idea of unleashing the bargaining power of Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices seems like a no brainer.

Yet Republicans and a few moderate Democrats oppose it, buying the pharmaceutical companies’ rationale that barring them from gouging ailing Americans would stifle the development of new life-saving drugs.

Pharmaceutical companies get away with charging Americans close to three times what they charge, on average, in other countries, according to a 2021 analysis by the Rand Corporation.

Medicare doles out more $129 billion on prescription drugs every year. Yet it is barred by law from using its purchasing power to negotiate a better deal.

Let me repeat that. Medicare negotiates prices for every other type of health care but federal law bars the government agency from negotiating drug prices.

As a result, we sucker Americans are stuck paying the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.
It's widely popular with Arizona voters

Biden’s plan would have allowed Medicare to negotiate the cost of medicine on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries and people enrolled in private insurance plans. He also proposed that drug companies pay a penalty if they raise their drug prices higher than the inflation rate.

A startling 94% of Arizona voters favor the idea, according to a recent poll conducted by OH Predictive Insights. That includes 92% of Republicans and independents and 97% of Democrats.

Sinema, instead, reached a deal with Biden to back a narrower plan that tracks with one offered by Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif., who has raked in more than $128,000 from pharmaceutical and health products companies this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That’s more than all but two other lawmakers on Capitol Hill, but I digress. (Sinema rings in at No. 5.)

Peters' plan calls for caps on prescription drugs for seniors, ranging from $1,200 $3,100, a $50 cap on out-of-pocket costs for insulin (though Sinema supports something lower) and government negotiation on prices of some hospital-administered drugs and drugs whose patents have expired.

As if drugmakers won’t develop a sudden hankering to extend those patents for a decade or three.

Now, that popular plan is gone. Coincidence?

It’s worth noting that Manchin, Sinema’s fellow Senate holdout, supported the original plan to let Medicare get a better deal for all of us.

It’s also worth noting that Sinema – who campaigned in 2018 on a pledge to lower prescription drug prices – has scooped up nearly $520,000 from the pharmaceutical and health products industry over the course of her career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

This year alone, she's enjoyed $100,000 in BigPharm donations, the Center for Responsive Politics reports.

And now, in a strange twist of coincidence, the insanely popular plan to allow Medicare to bargain for a better deal on prescription drugs is going ... going ... gone.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

Nazis' lawyers distance themselves from Chris Cantwell after he accuses Charlottesville victims of being 'Antifa'

Jordan Green, Staff Reporter
October 28, 2021
RAW STORY

Booking photo for Christopher Cantwell

Lawyers representing multiple white nationalists on Thursday rushed to distance their clients from a legal strategy being pursued by fellow white nationalist Christopher Cantwell.

During opening statements at the Charlottesville civil lawsuit trial, attorney James Kolenich, who represents white nationalist Jason Kessler and Identity Evropa founder Nathan Damigo, pursued a cautious strategy in his opening statement to the jury today by saying there simply is no evidence to connect the deadly 2017 car attack carried out by Ohio man James Fields with the other defendants' efforts to organize the rally.

"A conspiracy is an agreement," Kolenich said. "If you agree to yell at people, to annoy them, how is that an agreement to hit them with a car? If you spit at people, how is that an agreement to kill them?"

"There is a giant chasm in the plaintiffs' argument that anything you find that Kessler and Damigo agreed to that day that happened resulted in injuries for these defendants," he added.

In his opening statement on behalf of Fields, who in 2019 pleaded guilty to 29 counts in violation of the federal hate crimes law, attorney David Campbell said "there's no question" that his client "committed racially motivated violence."

But he suggested there is little to connect Fields to the other codefendants, who played a role in organizing and promoting the rally.

"I don't believe, despite a mountain of evidence that you will see any communication, any email, any agreement between Fields and any codefendant. I don't believe you will see any evidence that any of the codefendants knew James Fields before August 12th, 2017."

Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell, the two defendants who are representing themselves, suggested to the jury, as the plaintiffs' counsel predicted they would, that the trove of damaging communications from the Discord messaging platform was hyperbole and not evidence of a conspiracy.

Responding to a recording the plaintiffs played for the jury in which the normally polished Spencer raged that "those pieces of shit are going to be ruled by people like me…. we are going to destroy this f***ing town," Spencer dismissed it as "tough talk."

Cantwell described himself to the jury as a "professional entertainer," admitting to the jury that he tweeted at a Black man who challenged him on Twitter: "Shut up, n***er."


"The show is marketed as fiction, because it prioritizes entertainment over accuracy," Cantwell said, describing the podcast that earned him notoriety. "I'm an artist."

In an unhinged rant, Cantwell promised that his body-worn camera video that recorded a two-and-a-half-hour "leadership meeting" before the violent Aug. 11 torch march at the University of Virginia would absolve him of wrongdoing.

He went on to say: "You'll hear a couple racist jokes; we're kind of notorious for that…. You'll hear a brief mention of running people down in a vehicle and getting in a gun fight. But what you won't hear is a conspiracy."


Cantwell signaled to the jury that he will employ a starkly different strategy from his codefendants, who attempted to convey sympathy for the victims. In contrast, Cantwell criticized plaintiff the Rev. Seth Wispelwey, accusing him of blocking a roadway, and peppered his opening statement with derisive commentary about Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

In the runup to the trial, Cantwell has continued to promote a discredited conspiracy theory in an attempt to shift blame for the violence onto antifascist counter-protesters. In a handwritten brief filed three days before the start of the trial, he claimed that "the defendants were the victims, not the perpetrators, of the planned criminal conspiracy."

Kolenich, the lawyer for Kessler and Damigo, took pains to distinguish his clients from Cantwell in his opening statement.

"At no time are we going to claim the plaintiffs are Antifa," he said. "They're innocent people who were caught in between the alt-right and Antifa."

Spencer has also signaled that he will not join Cantwell in attempting to deflect blame onto "Antifa."

During jury selection earlier this week, when Judge Norman K. Moon invited counsel to offer evidence that the plaintiffs were linked to Antifa, Spencer said, "I will not argue that."

Josh Smith, who is representing Matthew Heimbach and David Matthew Parrott of Traditionalist Worker Party, previewed a somewhat different argument. Smith, who is ideologically aligned with his clients, revived a conspiracy theory generated by white supremacists in the immediate aftermath of Unite the Right that Fields' car attack was somehow engineered by law enforcement and city government.

Smith told the jury that the "alt-right and the far right were defamed" by publicity surrounding Fields' car attack, describing it as being "like a movie trope."

"Here, what we have is one of those situations where legally permitted rally-goers are not able to access the park and fighting breaks out," Smith said. "Police allow fighting to continue so they can step in and shut the rally down... This is why it's such a failure of local and city government. Why didn't you just keep the two different groups separate?"

Smith and other defense counsel have unsuccessfully attempted to cite an independent review of the violence that took place in Charlottesville in 2017 into evidence. The report authored by former US Attorney Timothy Heaphy was sharply critical of law enforcement handling of Unite the Right. But Judge Moon ruled the report is inadmissible as hearsay evidence.

William Edward ReBrook IV, representing former National Socialist Movement commander Jeff Schoep, told the jury he was "disgusted" by what he saw in the video presented earlier in the day by the plaintiffs depicting white nationalists marching on the Rotunda at the University of Virginia and Fields' car attack. He added that he wouldn't bother trying to humanize Schoep and the National Socialist Movement, whom he described "the most nefarious and notorious defendants other than James Fields."

"It would be a waste of time to humanize someone who holds repugnant views that most of us would give our dying breath to oppose."


ReBrook, who was out of court for two days with an unspecified illness, instead argued that the First Amendment is at stake.

Defense counsel Roberta Kaplan interjected a protest when ReBrook urged the jurors to "not allow attorneys from another state, from New York, to come down here and whittle away at the First Amendment."

Other members of the defense team have previously attempted to make Kaplan's Jewish identity an issue in the trial.


"The lawyers are not on trial," the judge admonished ReBrook.

Arlo Guthrie - Alice's Restaurant Massacree - Part 2 (1970)

Attorneys vow to prove neo-Nazis 'planned for violence' during start of Charlottesville trial

Jordan Green, Staff Reporter

RAW STORY
October 28, 2021

Kim Kelley-Wagner on Shutterstock.

Lawyers for nine people injured in the 2017 Unite the Right rally laid out their case in federal courtroom in Charlottesville that organizers of the violent white nationalist gathering conspired to commit racially motivated violence.

"They are going to tell their stories directly to you because they believe the truth about what happened in Charlottesville must be told," Karen Dunn, one of the lead attorneys, told the 12 jurors. "These plaintiffs will tell you this is a case about justice and accountability — accountability for these defendants who planned and perpetrated violence thinking they would always get away with it."

In a riveting 90-minute opening statement that included video footage, audio recordings, Dunn and fellow lead attorney Roberta Kaplan presented a searing diorama of a white nationalist movement in 2017 bristling with violence in text messages exchanged by leaders and escalated into eliminationist lust as they hurtled towards the appointed date of Aug. 11 and 12 in Charlottesville.

They told the jurors about the defendants — locals that included a pastor, a landscaper and students at the University of Virginia — who took a nonviolent stand against white supremacy and were subjected to ghastly attacks, racial slurs and a car attack that left them with lasting injuries.

"We will show you that the violence on August 11th and August 12th was no accident," Dunn told the jurors. "They planned for violence. They executed violence. They celebrated and ratified the violence, after the fact. That is what we're going to prove to you."

Emphasis on prior planning, acts of violence by some of the defendants and celebratory statements by the organizers after the fact provided a common refrain in the plaintiffs' opening statement, underscoring that they need to prove that the defendants shared an unlawful objective to prove a conspiracy, even if other aspects of their activity such as publicly demonstrating to promote their white supremacist and anti-Semitic views are protected under the First Amendment.

In her portion of the opening statement, Dunn attempted to draw a tight connection between leaders like Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler, respectively the most prominent white nationalist in the country at the time and the rally's local organizer, and James Fields, an Ohio man who sped his Dodge Challenger into a peaceful antiracist march, killing Heather Heyer.

Dunn told the jury that when Kessler decided to organize Unite the Right, he reached out to three men: Spencer; Matthew Heimbach, leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party; and Elliott Kline (then known as Eli Mosley sp), an organizer with Identity Evropa. Kline, who helped organize the rally alongside Kessler, reached out the Vanguard America, another neo-Nazi group.

"James Fields has admitted he was inspired by Richard Spencer to go to Charlottesville," Dunn said. "He marched with Vanguard America. He was wearing the Vanguard America uniform. He carried a Vanguard America shield. Dillon Hopper was the leader of Vanguard America and had communications with Kline. Thomas Rousseau also had communications with Kline and took control of Vanguard America just before August 12th. He led the soldiers on the ground."

Neither Hopper nor Rousseau are defendants, although the defunct Vanguard America is.

Previewing the plaintiffs' case that the defendants used the First Amendment as a ruse to cover for racist violence, Dunn quoted from a text message Kessler sent in response to Spencer's confirmation that he would speak at Unite the Right: "We're raising an army, my liege, for free speech, but the cracking of skulls if it comes to it."

Dunn also previewed testimony from Samantha Froehlich, who is the former girlfriend of Elliott Kline.

"Mr. Kline was actually working for an exterminator, as unbelievable as that sounds," Dunn said. "Samantha Froelich, she will testify that Mr. Kline wanted to kill Jews instead of cockroaches. He would say, 'Gas the kikes forever.'"

Dunn cited messages exchanged among the defendants and co-conspirators discussing using sticks and shields as weapons, and celebrating weaponizing cars, including a message by defendant Matthew Heimbach with the hashtag #HitTheGas.

"While watching someone run over counter-protesters may seem shocking to most of us, you will come to see it was reasonably foreseeable that a car would run over counter-protesters," Dunn said.

Jordan Green covers right-wing extremism for Raw Story. A Kentucky native, he now lives in North Carolina, where he spent 16 years writing for alt-weeklies and freelancing for the Washington Post and other publications.

Neo-Nazis use racist slurs and clown around on first day of Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' trial

Travis Gettys
October 29, 2021

Neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell (Vice.com/Screenshot)


The organizers of the "Unite the Right" rally that drew hundreds of white supremacists to Virginia used racial slurs and clowned around during opening statements in their trial.

The civil rights group Integrity First for America brought a lawsuit against the rally organizers under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which allows victims of racially motivated violence to sue conspirators who harmed them, and the organization's legal team argued that rally organizers carried out a plot to bring violent right-wing extremists to Charlottesville, reported BuzzFeed News.

"They wore riot gear, they marched in formation, they carried shields that were later used to break through the counterprotesters, and they carried flags that were later used as weapons," attorney Karen Dunn told jurors. "This case is a case about violence and intimidation that was planned for months and culminated in a tragic and violent weekend on Aug. 11 and 12 of 2017, right here in Charlottesville, Virginia."

On the other hand, Christopher Cantwell, the right-wing shock jock known as the "crying Nazi," used his opening statement to promote his radio program, mention Mein Kampf, utter the N-word and blast Antifa activists.

"You'll hear us making a couple racist jokes, we're sort of notorious for those things," Cantwell said. "But what you won't hear is a conspiracy to commit any crime, much less a violent one."

"I'm not a lawyer … [but] I'm the best attorney I could afford," Cantwell added, "and I didn't even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night."

White nationalist Richard Spencer, who has seen his profile drop since getting sucker-punched on video after Donald Trump's inauguration, also represented himself, saying the lawsuit had already "financially crippled" him and insisted that he did not initiate the deadly violence or communicate often with his two-dozen co-defendants.

US returns antiquities to India in stolen art investigation






Indian Antiquities Returned Some of the stolen objects being returned to India are displayed during a ceremony at the Indian consulate in New York, Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021. U.S. authorities have returned about 250 antiquities to India in a long-running investigation of a stolen art scheme. The items, worth an estimated $15 million, were handed over on Thursday during a ceremony at the Indian consulate in New York City. AP Photo/Seth Wenig

Thu, October 28, 2021, 10:27 AM·2 min read


NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. authorities returned about 250 antiquities to India on Thursday in a long-running investigation of a stolen art scheme.

The items, worth an estimated $15 million, were handed over during a ceremony at the Indian Consulate in New York City. The centerpiece is a bronze Shiva Nataraja valued at $4 million, authorities said.

The ceremony stems from a sprawling probe by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the Homeland Security Investigations arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The investigation has focused on tens of thousands of antiquities allegedly smuggled into the United States by dealer Subhash Kapoor, who has denied the allegations.

The case "serves as a potent reminder that individuals who maraud sacred temples in pursuit of individual profit are committing crimes not only against a country’s heritage but also its present and future,” District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said in a statement.

Authorities say Kapoor — jailed in India and facing charges there pending a U.S. extradition request — used his Arts of the Past gallery in New York to traffic looted treasures from India and various countries in Southeast Asia. The investigation has resulted in the recovery of 2,500 artifacts valued at $143 million and convictions of six Kapoor co-conspirators, Vance said.

The Shiva Nataraja bronze was sold by the mother of Nancy Wiener, a gallery operator who pleaded guilty in the case this month to charges of conspiracy and possession of stolen property, authorities said. Nancy Wiener sold looted items to major museums in Australia and Singapore, they said.

In June, the district attorney’s office returned more than two dozen artifacts worth $3.8 million to Cambodia as part of the investigation. Another 33 objects were sent back to Afghanistan in April.

Court papers filed in New York says Kapoor went to extraordinary lengths to acquire the artifacts, many of them statues of Hindu deities, and then falsified their provenance with forged documents. They say Kapoor traveled the world seeking out antiquities that had been looted from temples, homes and archaeological sites. Some of the artifacts were recovered from Kapoor’s storage units in New York.

Kapoor had the items cleansed and repaired to remove any damage from illegal excavation, and then illegally exported them to the United States from their countries of origin, according to U.S. prosecutors.

https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.544205

STATE SANCTIONED TORTURE

Prisoner gives Guantanamo court first account of CIA abuse
 

This 2018 photo provided by the Center for Constitutional Rights shows Majid Khan. The much-criticized war crimes tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station reached a milestone on Oct. 28, 2021, with the sentencing of Majid Khan, a former resident of the Baltimore suburbs who pleaded guilty to terrorism and other offenses and agreed to cooperate with U.S. authorities prosecuting five men charged in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. (Center for Constitutional Rights via AP)

This photo provided by the Center for Constitutional Rights shows Majid Khan during his high school years in the late 1990's when he was in Baltimore. The much-criticized war crimes tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station reached a milestone Oct. 28, 2021, with the sentencing of Majid Khan, a former resident of the Baltimore suburbs who pleaded guilty to terrorism and other offenses and agreed to cooperate with U.S. authorities prosecuting five men charged in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. (Center for Constitutional Rights via AP)

This 2018 photo provided by the Center for Constitutional Rights shows Majid Khan. The much-criticized war crimes tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station reached a milestone on Oct. 28, 2021, with the sentencing of Majid Khan, a former resident of the Baltimore suburbs who pleaded guilty to terrorism and other offenses and agreed to cooperate with U.S. authorities prosecuting five men charged in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. (Center for Constitutional Rights via AP)

BEN FOX
Thu, October 28, 2021,


FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) — A Guantanamo Bay prisoner who went through the brutal U.S. government interrogation program after the 9/11 attacks described it openly for the first time Thursday, saying he was left terrified and hallucinating from techniques that the CIA long sought to keep secret.

Majid Khan, a former resident of the Baltimore suburbs who became an al-Qaida courier, told jurors considering his sentence for war crimes how he was subjected to days of painful abuse in the clandestine CIA facilities known as “black sites,” as interrogators pressed him for information.

It was the first time any of the so-called high value detainees held at the U.S. base in Cuba have been able to testify about what the U.S has euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation" but has been widely condemned as torture.

“I thought I was going to die,” he said.

Khan spoke of being suspended naked from a ceiling beam for long periods, doused repeatedly with ice water to keep him awake for days. He described having his head held under water to the point of near drowning, only to have water poured into his nose and mouth when the interrogators let him up. He was beaten, given forced enemas, sexually assaulted and starved in overseas prisons whose locations were not disclosed.

“I would beg them to stop and swear to them that I didn’t know anything," he said. "If I had intelligence to give I would have given it already but I didn’t have anything to give.”

Khan, reading from a 39-page statement, spoke on the first day in what is expected to be a two-day sentencing hearing at the U.S. base in Cuba.

A panel of military officers selected by a Pentagon legal official known as a convening authority can sentence Khan to between 25 and 40 years in prison, but he will serve far less because of his extensive cooperation with U.S. authorities.

Under a plea deal, which the jurors were not told about, Khan's sentence by the jury will be reduced to no more than 11 years by the convening authority, and he will get credit for his time in custody since his February 2012 guilty plea.

That means he should be released early next year, resettled in a third, as yet unknown country because he can't return to Pakistan, where he has citizenship.

Some of Khan’s treatment is detailed in a Senate Intelligence Committee report, released in 2014, that accused the CIA of inflicting pain and suffering on al-Qaida prisoners far beyond its legal boundaries and deceiving the nation with narratives of useful interrogations unsubstantiated by its own records.

Khan agreed with that assessment. “The more I cooperated and told them, the more I was tortured," he said.

He spent about three years in CIA black sites before he was taken to Guantanamo in September 2006. He said he never saw the light of day in the black sites and had no contact with anyone other than guards and interrogators from his capture until his sixth year at the detention center on the base in Cuba.

Khan, 41, has admitted to being a courier for al-Qaida and taking part in the planning of several plots there were never carried out. He pleaded guilty in February 2012 to charges that include conspiracy, murder and providing material support to terrorism in a deal that capped his sentence in exchange for cooperating with authorities in other investigations, including the case against the five men held at Guantanamo who are charged with planning and providing logistical support for the Sept. 11 attack.

A citizen of Pakistan who was born in Saudi Arabia, Khan came to the U.S. with his family in the 1990s and they were granted asylum. He graduated from high school in the Baltimore suburbs and held a technology job in the D.C. area at an office where he could see the smoke billowing from the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

He says he turned to radical ideology following the death earlier that year of his mother, whom he described as the most important person in his life.

Khan apologized for his actions and said he takes full responsibility. He said he now just wants to reunite with his wife and the daughter who was born while he was in captivity. He said he has forgiven his captors, and his torturers.

“I have also tried to make up for the bad things I have done,” he said. "That’s why I pleaded guilty and cooperated with the USA government”

Khan is the first of the high-value detainees, those who went through the interrogation program, to be convicted and sentenced at the military tribunals held on the base.

The five men charged in the Sept. 11 attacks include Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, who has portrayed himself as the architect of the plot. That case remains in the pretrial stage and a judge has said it will start no sooner than next year.

The U.S. holds 39 men at the detention center on Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.

——

Editor's note: The Associated Press viewed proceedings from a video feed at Fort Meade, Maryland.

THE STATE TORTURES AND EXECUTES PRISONER
Oklahoma puts first inmate to death since 2015, but witness reports he convulsed and vomited during execution

ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY

By Raja Razek, CNN
Thu October 28, 2021


John Marion Grant killed a cafeteria worker while in an Oklahoma prison for robbery.

(CNN)Hours after the US Supreme Court vacated a ruling that granted a stay of execution for death row inmate John Grant, a witness to the execution on Thursday said Grant convulsed and vomited after the first drug, Midazolam, was administered.

Midazolam was also used in Oklahoma's 2014 controversial execution of Clayton Lockett. Instead of becoming unconscious, Lockett twitched, convulsed and spoke.

According to CNN affiliate KOKH reporter Dan Snyder, who attended the execution at the state penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma, Grant began convulsing almost immediately after the first drug was administered.

"His entire upper back repeatedly lifted off the gurney," Snyder said. "As the convulsions continued, Grant then began to vomit."

For the next few minutes, medical staff entered the room multiple times to wipe away and remove vomit from the still-breathing Grant, according to Snyder. Grant was declared unconscious by medical staff at about 4:15 pm.

The doses of the second and third drugs used were administered a minute later, according to Snyder.
The time of death was 4:21 p.m., local time, according to Oklahoma Corrections Communications Director Justin Wolf.

Grant was convicted in 2000 for first-degree murder of prison worker Gay Adams in the kitchen of the Dick Conner Correctional Facility in 1998.


Death Penalty Fast Facts

"Inmate Grant's execution was carried out in accordance with Oklahoma Department of Corrections' protocols and without complication," Wolf said.

Oklahoma hasn't executed a death row inmate since January 2015, when Charles Warner was put to death by lethal injection. Another inmate, Richard Glossip, was scheduled to be executed in September of that year but then-Gov. Mary Fallin called for it to be postponed.

Earlier this week, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections said in a news release, "After investing significant hours into reviewing policies and practices to ensure that executions are handled humanely, efficiently, and in accordance with state statute and court rulings, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections is prepared to resume executions in the state of Oklahoma."


Garland suspends federal executions and orders review of Trump-era rules

"ODOC continues to use the approved three drug protocol which has proven humane and effective. The agency has confirmed a source to supply the drugs needed for all currently scheduled executions. Extensive validations and redundancies have been implemented since the last execution in order to ensure that the process works as intended," added the release.

An attorney for Grant, Sarah Jernigan, said in a statement to CNN on Thursday, "John Grant took full responsibility for the murder of Gay Carter, and he spent his years on death row trying to understand and atone for his actions, more than any other client I have worked with.

"Through all of this, John never received the mental health care he needed or deserved in prison. And when he eventually committed a violent crime, the murder of a prison worker, Oklahoma provided him with incompetent lawyers who had no business handling a case with the ultimate punishment at stake," Jernigan wrote.

Timothée Chalamet Compares Manchin to Dune Villain Harkonnen

Lexi McMenamin

Thu, October 28, 2021, 

In a sentence I did not expect to type today, Timothée Chalamet is asking some pressing questions about President Joe Biden’s battered Build Back Better Agenda. For example: What exactly is the difference between Rep. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and an evil, blockbuster, sci-fi movie villain?

A meme that started circulating on Twitter early this week comparing Manchin — referred to as “Coal Baron,” which… not wrong! — to Dune villain Baron Vladimir Harkonnen made its way to Chalamet’s Instagram Story on October 27.

What they have in common, according to the joke: Both “[use] the government to enrich themselves via their family mining company, [ignore] the overwhelming will of the people out of naked greed,” and both are “actively destroying the climate, dooming millions.” A tweet with a screenshot from Chalamet’s story has over 15,000 likes on Twitter as of this writing.

Dune, which was released in theaters on October 22 and a day earlier on HBO Max, stars Chalamet and Zendaya facing off against House Harkonnen, a family of bads that exploits the indigenous population of planet Arrakis to control access to the drug spice. So a family business built around making a profit at the expense of the marginalized, and driving humanity to disaster in the process… Sounds familiar. This brings us back to the current kerfuffle in Congress.

Thanks to Manchin and fellow obstructionist Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), the new plan for Biden’s Build Back Better bill cut provisions including two years of free community college, guaranteed paid parental leave, lowering prescription drug prices, and a proposal to add dental coverage to Medicare.

But the climate issue is especially concerning when it comes to Manchin. Recent reports say Manchin’s made $4.5 million over his 11 years in the Senate from his son’s coal companies, and he met weekly throughout last summer with ExxonMobil lobbyists pushing him to weaken Biden’s climate plan. Five youth climate activists are on day nine of a hunger strike to try to push Biden to maintain his commitment to climate policy as advocated by the Sunrise Movement and other groups.

“Does the fossil fuel industry money you’ve taken have anything to do with you blocking vital climate legislation right now?” hunger striker Abby Leedy, 20, asked Manchin on October 26. “Joe Manchin, I’m going to grow up in a catastrophic climate emergency if you continue to block the Civilian Climate Corps.”

By choosing fossil fuels, Manchin isn’t just ignoring progressives' “overwhelming will,” he’s ignoring his own constituents. The original Build Back Better plan was “immensely popular” among West Virginians, according to a recent survey.