The Washington Post
The patterns of gun sales in the United States, visualized
Philip Bump - 2h ago

According to Oakland County, Mich., authorities, James Crumbley bought a Christmas present last Friday. It was Black Friday, a day on which Americans commonly begin shopping for the holidays in earnest. Crumbley’s alleged purchase was one that’s also common these days: a handgun, intended as a gift for the son who joined him at Acme Shooting Goods when the purchase was made.



On this particular Black Friday, nearly 188,000 instant background checks were conducted through the FBI, generally (but not always) indicating the purchase of a new firearm. Since the instant background check system was implemented in 1998, there have been only nine days on which more background checks were conducted.

In the case of James Crumbley, we see one of the flaws in that system. According to the county, his son brought the gun to school Tuesday, where he allegedly used it to kill four of his classmates. That James Crumbley seems to have passed a background check did not prevent the weapon from allegedly being used in a violent crime. Crumbley and his wife now face criminal charges related to the shooting.

In the past, the FBI only shared data on background checks on a monthly basis. Recently, though, they’ve expanded that, creating a file that indicates the number of background checks conducted on any day since the system was put in place. That allows us a unique opportunity to see the patterns in gun sales, using background checks as a proxy.

We took that data and created a visualization of sales by day since Nov. 30, 1998. Each day is indicated with a square. The darker the red that square is colored, the more background checks were completed. Squares outlined with white boxes are days on which a new record number of background checks were performed. We’ve also added notes to indicate various patterns and anomalies.

The patterns of gun sales in the United States, visualized

As noted in the graphic, the number of background checks has increased over time. We can visualize that another way. Here, for example, is the number of background checks each year as a function of the country’s population. Two decades ago, there were about 30 checks for every 1,000 Americans each year. In 2020, the figure was four times as high.


The patterns of gun sales in the United States, visualized

Again, this is not only because of more gun sales. Some states use background checks for permitting, for example; in some states, those checks occur multiple times a year.

But it is also because of increased gun sales.

Mike Thompson, USA TODAY

Huge $2.6 billion green hydrogen project planned for Europe

Hydrogen, which has a diverse range of applications and can be deployed in a wide range of industries, can be produced in a number of ways.

Over the last few years, a number of major businesses have become involved in projects centered around green hydrogen.


© Provided by CNBC The Iberdrola Tower in Bilbao, Spain.

Anmar Frangoul - CNBC

Spanish power company Iberdrola and Sweden's H2 Green Steel are to partner and develop a major facility that will produce green hydrogen, in yet another example of how companies are taking an interest in the much talked about sector.

In an announcement on Thursday, the firms said the 2.3 billion euro ($2.6 billion) project would see them set up a green hydrogen facility with an electrolysis capacity of 1 gigawatt. Financing will come from a mixture of equity, green project financing and public funding.

Hydrogen, which has a diverse range of applications and can be deployed in a wide range of industries, can be produced in a number of ways.

One method includes using electrolysis, with an electric current splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. If the electricity used in this process comes from a renewable source such as wind or solar then some call it green or renewable hydrogen.

The idea is that the green hydrogen from the Iberdrola and H2 Green Steel development will be utilized to generate roughly 2 million tons of direct reduced iron, or DRI, each year, which can then be used to produce steel.

At 1 GW, the scale of the project is significant: according to the International Energy Agency, global installed electrolyzer capacity stood at just 0.3 GW in 2020.

The development by Iberdrola and H2 Green Steel will be situated on the Iberian Peninsula — no specific location has been announced yet — and is slated to commence production in 2025 or 2026.

The electrolyzer itself will be co-owned and operated by the two companies. Iberdrola will provide renewable energy to the site, with H2 Green Steel owning and operating DRI production, including any processes connected to downstream steel production.

The businesses said they would also "explore the opportunity to co-locate a Green Steel production facility capable of producing 2.5-5 million tons of Green flat steel annually, in conjunction with the plant."

In a statement, Aitor Moso, Iberdrola's liberalized business director, said green hydrogen would be "a critical technology in the decarbonization of heavy industrial processes such as the production of steel."

Projects such as the one being planned with H2 Green Steel would, Moso said, "help to speed-up the commercialization of larger and more sophisticated electrolyzers, making green hydrogen more competitive."

Reducing the environmental footprint of intensive industrial processes is a significant challenge.

"Among heavy industries, the iron and steel sector ranks first when it comes to CO2 emissions, and second when it comes energy consumption," the IEA says, adding that the iron and steel sector is responsible for 2.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

"The steel sector is currently the largest industrial consumer of coal, which provides around 75% of its energy demand," it says.

Hopes for hydrogen, but hurdles too

Over the last few years, a number of major businesses have become involved in projects centered around green hydrogen.

In November, for example, Australia-headquartered Fortescue Future Industries said it would become the U.K.'s largest supplier of green hydrogen after signing a memorandum of understanding with construction equipment firm JCB and Ryze Hydrogen.

In the same month, it was announced that Norsk Hydro and oil giant Shell would look into the potential of joint projects focused on green hydrogen production.

While there is excitement about the potential of green hydrogen, there are also hurdles to overcome.

In October, the CEO of Siemens Energy spoke about the issues he felt were facing the sector, telling CNBC that there was "no commercial case" for it at this moment in time.

In comments made during a discussion at CNBC's Sustainable Future Forum, Christian Bruch outlined several areas that would need attention in order for green hydrogen to gain momentum.

"We need to define boundary conditions which make this technology and these cases commercially viable," Bruch told CNBC's Steve Sedgwick. "And we need an environment, obviously, of cheap electricity and in this regard, abundant renewable energy available to do this." This was not there yet, he argued.

A few months earlier, in July, Enel CEO Francesco Starace said there was "no competition for capital between hydrogen and renewables."

"Hydrogen today is a niche, and it is a niche that needs to develop into commercial standard and into … big industry, competitive pricing," Starace said, signaling that such a shift would probably take 10 years.

ECOLOGY

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a 'raft of life' for animals in the open ocean

Kate Baggaley - 

Every year, at least 14 million tons of plastic garbage enter the world’s oceans and cause all kinds of problems for the wildlife that eat, suffocate on, or become entangled within it. There’s also another consequence of all this trash for marine habitats that’s been mostly overlooked until now, scientists reported this week.


© Smithsonian Institution

Feather-like coastal animals called hydroids join an open-ocean crab and gooseneck barnacles on a piece of floating debris.

It turns out that coastal plants and animals are hitching a ride on the ever-growing deluge of plastic debris and traveling hundreds of miles from shore to create a new kind of ecosystem in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest accumulation of moving plastic debris in the ocean. Researchers identified a host of anemones and other species living within the rubbish, which allows the little creatures to thrive in an otherwise inhospitable environment. The coastal organisms may compete with local species and journey across the sea or be carried to the shore to invade new coastlines, the team wrote on December 2 in Nature Communications.

“There are so many questions at this point about what the ecological impacts are,” says Linsey E. Haram, a research associate at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and coauthor of the study. “If this is a common phenomenon across oceans, then we’re looking at an avenue for invasive species transport that’s really difficult to manage.”

Researchers have long understood that marine detritus such as floating logs and seaweed can ferry coastal organisms to islands and distant shores. But these rafts were generally rare and short-lived before the advent of durable, buoyant plastics. It was thought that coastal plants and animals would struggle to survive in the harsh conditions of the open ocean, where there’s often little food and shelter.

However, the glut of plastic that’s accumulated in the ocean since the mid 20th century has given enterprising critters new and more enduring opportunities to colonize the high seas, Haram and her team wrote. The massive East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011 offered a striking example of how this can happen. Hundreds of coastal Japanese marine species rode the debris released by the destruction over 6,000 kilometers (3,728 miles) to North America’s west coast and the Hawaiian Islands.

“We're still finding examples of tsunami debris landing even in 2020 and 2021,” Haram says. “It really opened our eyes to the fact that plastics in particular can be really long-lived as floating debris, which opens up opportunities for some of these rafting species to be out in the open ocean for extended periods of time.”

Much of the waste washed out to sea by the tsunami ended up in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, better known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The gyre, which lies between Hawaii and California, is formed by rotating ocean currents and has, over the past 50 plus years, become a reservoir for plastic litter of all sizes.

[Related: The great Pacific garbage patch is even trashier than we thought]

Haram and her colleagues wanted to find out whether any coastal marine life from the tsunami was still clinging to this trash. They worked with the Ocean Voyages Institute, a nonprofit that cleans up plastic pollution, and volunteers to collect debris larger than 5 centimeters (about 2 inches). The researchers then combed through samples of the garbage—which included buoys, derelict fishing gear, and household items such as hangers and toothbrushes—for signs of life.

They found coastal species attached to well over half of the plastic pieces they examined, and many were species that typically thrive in eastern Asia. Among them were anemones, brittle stars, barnacles, shrimp-like crustaceans called isopods, seaweeds, and even coastal fish that were “corralling around or on these floating plastics,” Haram says. “It really creates a little raft of life.”

Alongside the coastal creatures were organisms that have evolved to settle on marine floating debris or animals. These open ocean dwellers included gooseneck barnacles, crabs, and filter-feeding animals called bryozoans. Intriguingly, Haram says, these native rafters were actually less diverse than the array of coastal species her team identified.

The findings suggest that the blend of lifeforms thriving on plastic rafts in the middle of the ocean are a community in their own right, says Henry S. Carson, a marine ecologist at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife who wasn’t involved with the research.

“You’ve got this mix of species that are evolved to be [in the] open ocean and evolved to be coastal, and now they’re mixing on this new kind of habitat,” he says. “I couldn’t predict what will happen, but it's fascinating.”

The two groups do seem to be competing for space, but beyond that it’s not clear yet how the coastal species interact with their neighbors or what they’re eating, Haram says. She and her colleagues are also investigating whether the new arrivals can actually reproduce and sustain their populations in the open ocean.

“To figure out how much of this community is persisting on its own and how much is being constantly imported from the coast…would be a natural and very interesting place to go,” Carson says.

[Related: This luxurious fabric breaks down in the ocean without leaving a trace]

Another key question is whether these communities form in other oceans. It’s also important to investigate the extent to which plastic rafts carry invasive species to new habitats, points out Carson, who has previously identified organisms that cause disease in corals on plastic debris from the Pacific Ocean.

It’s likely that these rafting communities will only become more prevalent in the future as the amount of plastic dumped into the sea continues to grow, and flooding and destruction along coastlines worsens due to increased storminess driven by climate change, Haram and her colleagues concluded.

“We’re looking at more opportunities for inoculation of plastics into our oceans, and what that will mean for open ocean communities time will tell,” Haram says. “But we can expect to see more and more plastic ending up in the middle of the ocean and if our research is any indication that may mean more coastal species as well.”

USA TODAY investigation reveals a stunning shift in the way rain falls in America

Nicole Carroll, USA TODAY - 

© George Walker IV / The Tennessean

I'm USA TODAY editor-in-chief Nicole Carroll, and this is The Backstory, insights into our biggest stories of the week. If you'd like to get The Backstory in your inbox every week, sign up here.

Think your area has had more rain than usual? You're probably right.

Think your area has had less rain than usual? Again, you're probably right.

For our climate change investigation out this week, called Downpour, USA TODAY reporters used 126 years of monthly data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to analyze average annual precipitation at 344 climate divisions. They used daily precipitation data from weather stations to measure the change in frequency of extreme rain events across the U.S. from 1951-2020.

"We were hearing a lot about extreme rainfall, stories of flooding, people with sewer backups, people flooded out of their homes, and we wanted to know, is this happening everywhere?," said Dinah Pulver, one of the project's lead reporters. "How many people, how many places, are contending with this kind of rainfall?


© Eric Seals, Detroit Free Press

A man in a red SUV surrounded by other cars and trucks that are also stuck and stalled waits to get help on I-94 West near Trumbull and Rosa Parks in Detroit on June 26, 2021. Heavy rains in Metro Detroit caused massive flooding in homes, streets and freeways.

We found more than half of the nation's 344 climate divisions had their wettest periods on record since 2018. We calculated the same rolling averages for states.

"East of the Rockies, more rain is falling, and it’s coming in more intense bursts," our report finds. "In the West, people are waiting longer to see any rain at all.

"Taken together, the reporting reveals a stunning shift in the way precipitation falls in America."

Specifically, our reporting finds:

At some point over the past three years, 27 states – all east of the Rocky Mountains – hit their highest 30-year precipitation average since record keeping began in 1895.
A dozen states, including Iowa, Ohio and Rhode Island, saw five of their 10 wettest years in history over the past two decades.

Michigan saw six of its wettest 10 years on record over the past 13 years.

In June, at least 136 daily rainfall records were set during storms across five states along the Mississippi River.

At the opposite extreme, eight states – including five in the West – had at least three record-dry years in the same time period. That’s double what would be expected based on historical patterns.

Look up your zip code: See how precipitation has changed in your community
"People talk about the climate we're leaving for our kids or the climate of the future," Pulver said. "But the reality is climate change is here now and it's affecting most of us."

So how does the warming planet impact rainfall?

Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, told our reporters the greenhouse effect is important to keep Earth from freezing, but excess heat greatly reduces the temperature difference between the warmer tropics and cooler polar regions in the summer.

Mann said that reduction in the temperature difference slows down the jet stream, which makes it weaker and wavier in the summer. That means weather systems moving across the country can slow or stall more often.

"The gentle rains for a number of days are kind of disappearing and are being replaced by downpours," said Chris Davis, USA TODAY's executive editor for investigations. "And that in and of itself has a lot ramifications, everything from flooding, to mudslides out west, to how much fertilizer gets picked up and carried into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico."


© Jon Austria/The Coloradoan

Dan Bond stands in a debris field on Nov. 3, 2021. The debris was left over from the Black Hollow post-fire debris flow near his Colorado home.

In the West, the high temperatures and lingering high pressure systems pull moisture from soil and plants. The increased heat and long periods between rains contribute to record wildfires.

“They’re all interconnected to the impact that climate change is having on these persistent weather extremes,” Mann said. “It’s not a contradiction to have huge floods, unprecedented floods and unprecedented heat waves and droughts at the same time.”

The downpours bring a deluge of problems. Stormwater, sewage and drinking water pipes are 50 to 100 years old and nearing the end of their life expectancy, said Christine Kirchhoff, an associate professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Connecticut.

That leaves communities increasingly vulnerable to flooding. It also prompts massive releases of treated and untreated wastewater into waterways, which can cause or inflame gastrointestinal issues.

Downpours also push fertilizer from Midwestern fields into rivers, which ultimately slowly poison the Gulf of Mexico.

"But it’s not just the Gulf of Mexico," reported Ignacio Calderon, with our partner the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. "Fertilizer runoff wreaks havoc on rivers and lakes across the country. It contaminates drinking water, harms aquatic life and sickens both people and pets."

It took our reporters months to collect, organize, analyze and publish this information. Now, you can see how rainfall has changed in your community in just seconds.

Here, you can enter your address or ZIP code to see how rainfall has changed dating back to 1895.

Data reporter Kevin Crowe led our data analysis efforts, a huge undertaking given the number of climate divisions and years of data. Crowe ran our methodology by several scientists to make sure our findings were spot on. We also drew on the data and expertise of climatologist Brian Brettschneider.

What stood out?

"Looking at states in the Midwest and in the Northeast and just how much more rain places like Michigan, Indiana or Ohio or Pennsylvania are getting, that kind of boggled my mind," Crowe said. "I mean the Great Lakes are higher, all sorts of things kind of indicate that there's more water falling, but just seeing the overall trend lines was still pretty surprising."

Our team also dreamed up creative ways to help our readers understand the changing rainfall. Developer Chris Amico wondered if we could create a sonification of the hundred-plus years of rainfall data.

Pulver took that challenge to Florida's Full Sail University, where musicians composed songs based on changing precipitation patterns in several states.

Timothy Stulman, a composer and department chair of music composition, took on Pennsylvania. He gathered sounds of wind, thunder and rain, then combined those with flute and cello melodies. The density and volume directly correlate to the data.

“If there was a really high rainfall year, I would choose recordings of intense rainfall, strong winds, and mix them with loud thunderclaps," he told us. "So it's not a single recording of a storm, but rather various storm elements blended together based on the rainfall data.”

The point of all of this work is to help people understand the impact of climate change, right now, in their specific communities.

"These extreme events are not coincidence. They're really all part of the same pattern," said investigative editor Emily Le Coz.

"You still hear terms like '100-year rainfall event' or this is a '50-year flood.' Those terms are sort of meaningless now. What's the point of calling it a 100-year event if it's happened five times in the last decade?

"There's a lot that we need to do to wrap our brains around the new reality that we're living in."

Backstory: How Reviewed experts pick products and deals for shoppers (sometimes they set things on fire)

Backstory: USA TODAY investigation finds widespread retaliation against police whistleblowers

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: USA TODAY investigation reveals a stunning shift in the way rain falls in America

Climate change comes to US insurance

Bridget Pals and Michael Panfil, opinion contributors - 

© AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

Natural disasters have cost the United States more than $600 billion over the past five years. With climate change, those costs are expected to continue increasing. Moving forward, managing and distributing these harms will become increasingly important. Insurance is one tool to do so. Unfortunately, the insurance system is also at risk from climate change.

By changing the underlying risk profile of certain insurance products, climate change threatens insurers' business model. At the same time, insurers also face risk as investors, as insurers' assets may be overvalued due to unassigned climate risk. Improved data, research and resilience planning can contribute to a more robust and more equitable insurance system, while improving financial disclosure requirements can limit investment risk. Just last month, the New York State Department of Financial Services took major strides toward solving these problems by issuing guidance on how insurers are expected to integrate climate risk assessment into their operations and investments. Further action is needed.

Insurance works by pooling risk across a population. Essentially, policyholders pay into a pot. When a policyholder suffers a harm, they collect from the value in the pot. Because only a small number of policyholders are likely to suffer an insured harm in a given period, the money from the lucky policyholders covers the claims of the unlucky.

However, this system breaks down when large portions of the population suffer harms at the same time, as is the case with many climate-related events. Consider a wildfire, which can affect an entire region. In response, insurers may either raise premiums beyond what most Americans can afford or pull out of a high-risk market altogether, leaving gaps in coverage and reducing accessibility (an alarmingly common trend for homeowners in wildfire-prone areas of California).

Underwriters and policyholders need better access to climate data in order to make informed decisions with regards to climate risk. Where private insurance is uneconomical, however, policymakers should consider how public insurance programs can play a role, with an eye toward designing those programs to distribute risk equitably. Alongside this research, policymakers should investigate how resilience measures can reduce damages from disasters, limiting overall risk in the first place. Federal resilience grants have been found to save the public $6 for every $1 spent.

However, underwriting risk is only a piece of the puzzle. Insurers are also large institutional investors, holding about $7.5 trillion (about one-third of the United States gross domestic product) in cash and invested assets. As investors, insurers face and create climate risk by making investing decisions without fully accounting for the underassessed financial risks created by climate change.

For example, sea-level rise might mean coastal homes are worth less than they appear, and movement away from fossil fuel dependence could indicate that long-term oil assets have little value. Just as mortgages were overvalued in 2008, experts fear investors are ignoring climate risk and consequently overvaluing assets across our economy, creating a climate bubble. This climate bubble means that insurance companies, their policyholders and their investors may be on far less stable financial ground than they think.

Policymakers should take action to unearth hidden risk in insurers' portfolios. Requiring insurers to identify and disclose the climate risk in their portfolios is a necessary step. Disclosure would create a foundation from which policymakers could consider how climate risk threatens insurer solvency and, from there, regulate the risk. This is important not only to insurers and policymakers, but to all Americans who rely upon a well-functioning financial system.

Change is coming. On the investment side, a recent survey by BlackRock found that 95 percent of insurers expect climate change to affect how they build their investment portfolios. Regulators are also taking action, as evidenced by New York's recent guidance, setting the expectation that insurers analyze their climate risk as both underwriters and investors and report that risk to stakeholders.

These efforts are encouraging, but more are urgently needed.

These solutions need to be incorporated across all 50 states. While insurance is state-regulated, the Federal Insurance Office, established by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, is charged with monitoring the insurance industry and can play a critical role in giving states the tools they need to do the job. Working with a coalition of advocacy groups, we encouraged the agency to use its unique position to set and socialize best practices in this area, provide the insurance industry, policyholders and state regulators with better climate data, as well as develop research on resilience efforts and the role of public insurance in spreading risk.

Climate risk can be redistributed only to a point; ultimately, the best tools in the fight against climate change are decarbonizing the economy and investing in climate resilience measures. But, as climate risks grow steeper and the climate bubble expands, it is necessary to align incentives in the insurance industry to prevent widespread defaults that would leave policyholders unprotected. Where insurers are absent from the market, policymakers must also examine who is bearing risk in society and how that burden can be shared. Other states should follow New York and take concrete steps to protect consumers and investors.

Bridget Pals is a legal fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

Michael Panfil is lead counsel and director of Climate Risk Strategies at the Environmental Defense Fund

UK: Used Electric Cars Now Sell Faster Than Gas, Auto Trader Says

James Fossdyke -
© InsideEVs

The company says its the first time electric vehicles (EVs) have sold faster than petrols.

Used electric cars are now selling faster than their petrol-powered alternatives for the first time, according to one online car marketplace. Auto Trader says the average used electric vehicle (EV) is currently taking 26 days to sell, compared with 28 days for the average used petrol vehicle.

That isn’t just the first time EVs have sold faster than petrol-powered alternatives, but it marks a 41-percent reduction in the time EVs spend on dealer forecourts compared with January. Back at the beginning of the year, the average used EV took 44 days to sell.

On a more granular level, 2017 Nissan Leafs are the fastest-selling used electric cars in the UK, taking an average of just 20 days to find a buyer. In second place is the 2016 Renault Zoe, which takes an average of 23 days to sell, while nearly-new (2021) examples of the Tesla Model 3 take an average of 27 days to shift.


© InsideEVs2017 Nissan LEAF

According to Auto Trader, the acceleration in sales times is down to “massive growth” in consumer demand for electric cars. That’s backed up by the 122.6-percent increase in the number of searches for electric cars on the Auto Trader website compared with 12 months ago.

That said, electric cars still represent a tiny proportion of the overall used car market, and Auto Trader says only a small proportion of those searching for EVs are serious about making the switch. In fact, the company says a mere 25 percent of “EV considerers” account for 79 percent of all the EVs looked at.

The company suggests that reluctance to commit to an electric car could be down to the “significant price disparity” between used electric vehicles and their petrol- or diesel-powered peers. The firm claims the average sticker price of a ‘nearly new’ EV (under 12 months old) is currently 47 percent more expensive than its petrol or diesel equivalent, whilst a one-year-old EV is 40 percent more expensive than an internal combustion-powered car.
More on the switch to electric cars:

UK car industry calls on government to support electric car uptake

UK electric uptake 'lacks required pace' to meet government targets

“The acceleration in the speed of sale of used electric vehicles reflects a significant increase in consumer demand this year, which has been driven by a myriad of factors, not least rising fuel costs,” said Auto Trader’s director of commercial products, Karolina Edwards-Smajda. “The used electric market will play an important role in driving mass adoption and reaching the government’s 2030 targets, however, as it stands, the ‘green premium’ for buying a new or used EV means they remain out of reach for the vast majority of car buyers.

“If the government is serious in its ambition, it will need to do a lot more to make EVs financially accessible to more than just the most affluent; it would do well to take the lead from other European markets which are applying a smarter approach to incentives and a more comprehensive set of enabling policies.”

Source: AutoTrader.co.uk

In a lot of respects, progress regarding sustainability and climate change is still far too slow for what the world needs. One area where the pace is really picking up however is that of electric vehicles. That is, the production and purchase of them. When it comes to public infrastructure to match this growing demand, a lot of countries are still a long way behind in providing charging points.

As this infographic using International Energy Agency data shows, there is a large discrepancy in countries like New Zealand, where there were 52 electric vehicles for every one public charging point in 2020. It doesn't have to be like this though, as exemplified by South Korea where fighting over the parking space at the charging station is surely a very rare occurence. Here, there is a public charger for every two EVs in the country.

This chart shows the ratio of electric vehicle stock to public charging points in selected countries in 2020

PATRIARCHY IS MISOGYNY, FEMICIDE, CHILD BRIDES

Taliban decree on women's rights makes no mention of school or work

By Eliza Mackintosh, CNN - 

© HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images


The Taliban released a so-called "decree on women's rights" on Friday that failed to mention access to education or work and was immediately panned by Afghan women and experts, who said it was proof that the militant group was uninterested in upholding basic freedoms for millions of Afghan women who have largely been constrained to their homes in recent months.

The decree, which sets out the rules governing marriage and property for women, states that women should not be forced into marriage and that widows have a share in their husbands property. "A woman is not a property, but a noble and free human being; no one can give her to anyone in exchange for peace...or to end animosity," said the Taliban decree, released by spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid.

The Taliban have been placed under immense pressure to support the rights of women by the international community, which has mostly frozen funds for Afghanistan since the group seized control of the country. Instead, in their four months of rule, the Taliban's leaders have imposed limits on girls' education and banned women from certain workplaces, stripping away rights they had fought tirelessly for over the last two decades.

Afghan women interviewed by CNN on Friday said that the decree would do little to change their lives, adding that the rights detailed by the Taliban were already enshrined under Islamic law. The Taliban's leaders promised that women would have rights "within the bounds of Islamic law" when they swept to power, but it's been unclear what that would mean or how it would differ from the strict interpretation of the law imposed by the group from 1996 to 2001, when women were banned from leaving the home without a male guardian and girls were blocked from school.
'They only want women to stay home'

"[The decree] has no connection with our right to go to school, university or participate in government. We don't see any hope for our future if it goes on like this," said Muzhda, a 20-year-old university student in the capital Kabul, who asked that her surname not be used. "We were not feeling comfortable since the the Taliban took control and we won't feel comfortable after this decree ... if they don't bring changes to their rules for the women's rights we will prefer to stay inside."

"They only want women to stay home and prevent them from going out for school, university or work, but they want to appeal to international community," she added.

The timing of the edict comes as Afghanistan plunges deeper into an economic crisis and amid warnings of a looming famine. But it is unlikely that the statement will go far enough to assuage international concerns that Afghan women are currently unable to work and go to school, or even access public spaces outside the home.

"It's been becoming more and more clear to the Taliban over the last three and a half months that women's rights, particularly girls education, is a really serious barrier to achieving some things that they want from the international community -- recognition, legitimacy, funding, unfreezing of assets," Heather Barr, the associate director of women's rights at Human Rights Watch, told CNN.

The Taliban's leaders have presented a more moderate face of the group to the world in recent months, pledging to allow primary education and some secondary education for girls, but rights advocates are unconvinced their views have changed. According to Barr, "their views are pretty intact compared to '96 to 2001, about what the role of women and girls should be. And so, in that context, this looks like a statement that costs them nothing."

"It gives you a sense of how the Taliban see women's roles in society," Barr added. "It feels a bit insulting, honestly, at a moment when millions of girls are being denied access to education."
A worsening crisis

Barr noted that, in practical terms, the Taliban has no way to uphold women's rights after having abolished all the mechanisms to do so. Since sweeping to power, the Taliban has abolished the Ministry of Women's Affairs, a key body in promoting women's rights through Afghan laws. They've also rolled back the Elimination of Violence against Women Law, signed in 2009 to protect women from abuses -- including forced marriage, leaving them without recourse to justice, according to the UN.

"Enforcement of this decree in most parts of the country is impossible, only the Taliban can implement it in the capital and some parts of the country, but most parts are having their own custom, which they won't accept this decree," Fariha Sediqi, 62, a former school teacher in Kabul, told CNN.

Even though marriage under the age of 15 is illegal nationwide, it has been commonly practiced for years, especially in more rural parts of Afghanistan. And the situation has deteriorated since the August takeover, as families became more desperate in the face of a worsening economic crisis.

Zahra Joya, an Afghan journalist who fled the Taliban, but is continuing to run her own women's news agency, Rukhshana Media, from London, England, where she is seeking asylum, said that the decree was meaningless.

"The Taliban said women are humans. Everyone knows women are humans. They say women are free. But how? It is the 21st century and all Afghan women need to have their freedoms — educational rights, working rights. And unfortunately, the Taliban they've limited women's life in the 100 days they've been in power," Joya said.

Joya, who grew up under the Taliban in the '90s and lived as a boy in order to flout the group's education ban and attend school, left Afghanistan to continue her work. She has a network of female journalists across the country who are reporting on women's issues, like rise in forced marriage amid the economic, in secret.

"Right now, the majority of Afghan people don't have enough food for eating. The Taliban don't have any solution for solving the economic situation in Afghanistan, and yet they're still trying to limit women," she added.

U.S. white supremacists blamed for targeting Aboriginal Australians with coronavirus vaccine misinformation

Amy Cheng - 

The leader of Western Australia has blamed white supremacists in the United States for spreading online misinformation about coronavirus vaccines among Aboriginal people in his state.

Premier Mark McGowan, whose state is home to the city of Perth, told reporters Thursday that the groups did not have the best interests of Australia’s First Nations people at heart and “wouldn’t be unhappy if bad outcomes occurred” to them. He urged Indigenous people to listen to medical experts about vaccines instead.

McGowan said he was made aware of the misinformation by local leaders. A senior Aboriginal affairs official in Western Australia, Wanita Bartholomeusz, said some misinformation was coming from Facebook groups, including one that had a cover image of former U.S. president Donald Trump. She also said inaccurate information is being relayed to Aboriginal communities and that the material was linked back to groups in the United States, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC).

Nearly 88 percent of Australians age 16 and older have been fully immunized as of Thursday, government data shows. Western Australia has largely kept the coronavirus at bay, but it has the lowest two-dose immunization rate in the country, with just over 77 percent of those 16 and above fully vaccinated.

But the vaccination rate for Indigenous people is much lower, at roughly 63 percent for those over 16. (Leonora, a town in Western Australia, has immunized just 13 percent of Aboriginal residents, according to the ABC.)

Some remote communities lack access to certain health-care facilities. In one notable instance, Walgett, which has a sizable Indigenous population and is about 400 miles northwest of Sydney, was forced into lockdown just two days after it detected its first case in August. The town’s hospital has no intensive care unit, and seriously ill patients have to be flown three hours by helicopter to another city for treatment.

‘There is panic’: Outback outbreak rings covid alarm for Australia’s Indigenous people

Experts have warned since the early days of the pandemic that the coronavirus could overrun the country’s Indigenous communities, which suffer from higher rates of chronic health issues and a lower life expectancy than non-Indigenous Australians, particularly in remote areas. Like many other First Nations people around the globe, Indigenous Australians have a painful history with infectious diseases.

Though the United States and Australia are thousands of miles apart, numerous comparisons have been made between the two countries during the coronavirus pandemic. The latter’s onetime “zero covid” policies and vaccine mandates have been attacked by conservatives, with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in October lamenting “covid tyranny” in Australia’s Northern Territory.

But the policies have largely managed to keep Indigenous communities safe during the pandemic, even though the delta variant infected relatively large numbers of Aboriginal people living in some remote but overcrowded places.

Escaping slow death in Beirut, Lebanese embrace farm life

At 28, Thurayya left behind the Beirut neighbourhood where she was born and moved to the family farm, not because of environmental concerns but forced there by Lebanon's bruising crises.

© JOSEPH EID

Like many Lebanese, Thurayya has left the capital Beirut for life on the family farm to escape from an economic crisis, the covid pandemic and chronic power cuts in the city


© JOSEPH EID

Graphic designer Hassan Trad ploughs a field with his brother Abed in southern Lebanon where he has relocated to grow an agriculture business to supplement his salary

"Living in the city has become very miserable," she told AFP from the lush south Lebanon farmland planted with avocado trees that is now her home.

"The quiet violence of city life sucks you dry of energy, of money... It was just too much."

Lebanon's unprecedented economic crisis, the coronavirus pandemic and last year's massive and deadly explosion of chemical fertiliser at Beirut's port have dimmed the cosmopolitan appeal of the capital.

Many are turning their backs on urban life and heading for their ancestral towns and villages, where they can cut down on living costs and forge new connections with a long-forgotten agricultural inheritance.

In October, Thurayya moved to the two-story house built by her father in the south Lebanon village of Sinay.

She took the step only weeks after her Beirut landlord said she would quadruple the rent at a time when electricity generator bills and transportation costs were already spiralling beyond reach for most.


© JOSEPH EID

Experts say a long-standing trend towards rapid urbanisation in Lebanon seems to be slowing down partly due to diminishing job projects in major cities where the cost of living is 30 percent higher that in the countryside

"It didn't make sense for me to stay in Beirut," Thurayya said.

"It's pitch dark, there is garbage everywhere and you don't feel safe... it's hostile in its unfamiliarity."

- YouTube farming tips -

Now, when she's not working remotely for a non-profit group, Thurayya spends much of her time in her family's farmland, discovering how plants look when they need water and the feel of ripening fruit.

She has turned to YouTube to learn how to prune trees and pestered local farmers for tips on how to best tend to a plot she hopes to one day take over.

"We are about to plant the new season and that's what I'm really excited for," Thurayya said. "I want to follow the planting from seed to harvest and I want to be there for all of those steps."


© JOSEPH EID

A massive explosion of chemical fertiliser at the Beirut port killed more than 200 people and destroyed swathes of the Lebanese capital

In a country where no official census has been held since 1932, there is little data on the demographic shift to rural areas, which are largely underprivileged and underserved.

But a long-standing trend towards rapid urbanisation seems to be slowing partly due to diminishing job prospects in major cities, where the cost of living is 30 percent higher than in the countryside.

A spike last year in the number of construction permits outside Beirut suggest such a movement, according to Lebanon's Blominvest bank.

Information International, a consultancy firm, estimates that more than 55,000 people have relocated to rural areas.

UN-Habitat Lebanon said that some mayors and heads of unions of municipalities had also reported an increase in the number of people moving, although it said it had no data to verify or quantify these claims.

"The lack of rural development plans and the highly centralised nature of Lebanon are expected to ultimately deter a counter-urbanisation in the long run," said Tala Kammourieh of the agency's Urban Analysis and Policy Unit.


© -Lebanon is battling economic turmoil and the cash-strapped country has struggled to import enough fuel oil for electricity production

- 'Suffocation' of city life -

Another Beirut escapee, graphic designer Hassan Trad, was ploughing a craggy field near the southern village of Kfar Tibnit and said he now steers clear of the "suffocation" of city life.

"My return to the village is an escape from three crises," the 44-year-old said, scattering thyme seeds on a bed of soil.

He pointed to the country's economic collapse, the pandemic, and the so-called trash crisis that has long left festering piles of garbage strewn across the city.

Trad, a father-of-four who works remotely as a freelancer for a daily newspaper, started weaning away from the capital in 2016 but resettled full-time after Covid-19 and last year's portside blast.

Hassan said the cost of schooling his children is about half what it would be in the city but, more importantly, he can grow an agriculture business to supplement his salary.

"I took advantage of the crisis and grew closer to farming and working the land," he told AFP from one of his many plots. "I now have a deeper attachment to my village."

Writer and essayist Ibrahim Nehme, 35, who was severely wounded when the Beirut port blast ripped through his home, has sought solace in his family's north Lebanon village of Bechmizzine.

"An explosion that made me lose touch with my ground eventually led me to realise how much I am connected to my land," he wrote in a recent essay reflecting on the months he spent recovering there from his injuries.

In June, he left Beirut and rented a chalet by the sea, only a 20-minute drive away from his family's olive grove.

He is not yet ready to commit fully to village life but Nehme said he is growing to realise his role in safeguarding an agricultural legacy left to him by his forefathers.

"I am connected here, I am rooted," he said. "I have these olive trees, and one day I will have to take care of them."

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AFP

Hunger strikes show the history of Irish-Palestinian solidarity

Yousef M Aljamal 

© Provided by Al Jazeera



During the 11-day Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in May, which claimed the lives of 254 Palestinians, including 66 children, acts of solidarity were staged around the world. But, perhaps, none was as significant as that which took place in Ireland. On May 26, the Irish parliament passed a resolution condemning Israel’s “de facto annexation” of Palestine.

It was significant, but it was not surprising, for the history of Irish-Palestinian solidarity is long and mutual.

It was on display again when the best-selling and award-winning Irish author, Sally Rooney, declined an offer to translate her novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, into Hebrew, citing support for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The BDS movement, which calls for global civil society to engage in a comprehensive campaign of boycott against Israel until it allows Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, ends its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, dismantles settlements and the separation wall and treats Palestinians with Israeli passports on an equal footing with Israeli Jews, is particularly popular in Ireland. But, again, this should come as no surprise – for the very term “to boycott” originated there.

Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832-1897) was an English land agent who worked for Lord Erne, who owned 40,000 acres (16,000 hectares) of land in Ireland. At the time, during British rule, 750 – often absentee – landlords owned half of the country. Many of them paid agents to manage their estates, as Boycott did for Erne in County Mayo. His job involved collecting rent from the tenant farmers who worked the land.

In 1880, the Land League, which had been formed the year before to work for the reform of the landlord system, which left poor tenant farmers vulnerable to excessive rents and eviction if they could not pay, demanded that Boycott reduce rents by 25 percent. Harvests had been bad and the prospect of famine loomed. But Erne – and Boycott – refused and obtained eviction notices for those tenants who could not pay.

Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish nationalist leader and president of the Land League, urged Boycott’s neighbours to shun or ostracise him in response. Shops in the area refused to serve him and when labourers refused to work the land, he was forced to bring in workers from Ulster at a cost far greater than the value of the crops they harvested.

But Father John O’Malley, a local leader of the Land League, reportedly felt the word ostracise was too complicated for the tenants – and so the term ‘to boycott’ was born.

But that word – and concept – is not the only thread connecting Irish and Palestinian history.

‘Bloody Balfour’ – from Ireland to Palestine

Not long after the 1916 Easter Rising – when, from April 24 to April 29, Irish nationalists rebelled against British rule until the British military brutally quashed the rebellion and executed its leaders – Palestinians experienced their own calamity at the hands of the British.

On November 2, 1917, the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, wrote a letter to Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild, a leading figure in Britain’s Jewish community, in which he declared: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

The Balfour Declaration would have terrible consequences for the Palestinians, but the Irish were already familiar with Balfour’s work.

From 1887 to 1891, Balfour had been chief secretary for Ireland, where he had immediately set about trying to repress the work of the Land League. The Perpetual Crimes Act of 1887 went after agrarian activists and aimed to prevent, among other things, boycotts.

Hundreds of people, including more than 20 MPs, were imprisoned as a result of the Act, which allowed cases to be tried by a magistrate without a jury. But when members of the Royal Irish Constabulary fired at a crowd demonstrating against the conviction of two people in Mitchelstown, County Cork, on September 9, 1887, killing three men, Balfour was given the moniker “Bloody Balfour”.

The 1980s – from Lebanon to Long Kesh

The connection between the Irish struggle against the British and that of the Palestinians against Israel continued in later years. During the 1970s and early 1980s, members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) reportedly had ties with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Irish members of the IRA would visit Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where the PLO was based until 1982, to show solidarity with the Palestinian people. According to Danny Morrison, a former director of publicity for Sinn Fein, an Irish republican political party historically associated with the IRA: “The IRA has never confirmed a working relationship with the Palestinian Resistance. There were reports of republicans being trained at a Palestinian camp. There was an arms seizure by the Irish authorities in Dublin Port which came via Cyprus and was allegedly from the PLO to the IRA in 1977 but the IRA never confirmed this.”

But, perhaps, the issue that most closely connects the Irish and Palestinian experience is that of political prisoners.

In 1936, during the British Mandate in Palestine, Britain introduced Administrative Detention, which allowed for prisoners to be interned for an indefinite period without trial or charge. Israel still uses this law to this day, and hundreds of Palestinians are currently imprisoned under it.

In the north of Ireland, an equivalent law was introduced in 1971, three years after the start of the Troubles, with the intention of penalising the IRA. Internment without trial involved mass arrests, mostly of nationalists and Catholics, many of whom had no connection to the IRA. Those arrested were sent to Long Kesh Prison Camp (which later housed the notorious H-Blocks or Maze Prison). By the time the law ended in 1975, almost 2,000 people had been interned.

Those held at Long Kesh argued that they were political prisoners rather than common criminals and should be treated as such. In 1972, prisoners serving sentences related to the Troubles were granted Special Category Status, or political status, meaning that they did not have to wear prison uniforms or do prison work and could receive extra visits and food parcels.

But, in 1976, Special Category Status was ended. (A century earlier, Arthur Balfour had advocated treating political prisoners in Ireland like common criminals.) Israel, likewise, refuses to recognise the political status of Palestinian political prisoners, even though many of them – like Ahmad Sadat and Marwan Barghouti – are leaders of political groups.

The hunger strikers

On March 1, 1981, five years after the Special Category Status was ended, an Irish republican prisoner, Bobby Sands, began a hunger strike to demand the restoration of political status. Other republican prisoners joined him in the hunger strike at staggered intervals. Ten of them, including Sands, died.

After Sands’s death on May 5, the 66th day of his strike, Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s Nafha prison smuggled out a letter in support of the Irish hunger strikers. It read: “We salute the heroic struggle of Bobby Sands and his comrades, for they have sacrificed the most valuable possession of any human being. They gave their lives for freedom.”

There had been several hunger strikes by Palestinian prisoners before this and many more since. Five Palestinians have passed away while on hunger strike and dozens have come close to death. Thousands of Palestinian prisoners have participated in what Palestinians call “the battle of empty stomachs”, either alone or en mass, over the years.

Hunger strikes are effective because, as well as humanising the prisoners as people willing to sacrifice their lives for freedom, they gain international attention – helping to build international solidarity, particularly among people in the diaspora.

I recently contributed to a book – A Shared Struggle: Stories of Irish and Palestinian Hunger Strikers – in which the stories of some of these Palestinian hunger strikers, and their Irish counterparts, are told.

One of those stories is that of Rawda Habib, who was arrested by the Israeli army in 2007 and sentenced to eight years in prison. When Israel refused her request to be moved to the women’s section of the prison, Habib, who was pregnant at the time and later gave birth while imprisoned, went without food or water for three days.

“I didn’t know that usually a hunger striker stops eating food and only takes salt with water, so as their stomachs don’t rot,” she explained in the book. “I also discovered that a striker could just tolerate hunger but not thirst. Not taking water can lead to paralysis, renal failure or even death within a few days. On the evening of the third day, I collapsed and fell to the ground.”

She was moved to the female section of the prison and was later released as part of a prisoner swap between Hamas and Israel in 2011.

Habib’s story is similar to that of Hana Shalabi. In 2012, Shalabi, who is from the West Bank city of Jenin, went on a hunger strike for 43 days, ending it when Israel agreed to deport her to the Gaza Strip, where she still lives today. Shalabi told me that while she was on hunger strike, she was transferred to a hospital in Haifa, the city where her parents had lived before they became refugees during the Nakba. But when the Israeli authorities realised she was happy to be in her hometown, she said they transferred her to a different hospital as a form of punishment.

Laurence McKeown, an Irish Republican who was jailed for 16 years from 1976 to 1992 took part in the 1981 hunger strike, joining after Sands and three others had died. His strike ended on its 70th day when his family authorised medical intervention to save his life. In the book, he described how prison guards would bring him food three times a day in an attempt to convince him to abandon his hunger strike. Today, Israel adopts a similar method against hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners; in April 2017, when 1,500 Palestinian prisoners went on hunger strike, Israeli settlers organised BBQ parties close to the cells where hunger strikers were held.

The similarity between the inhumane practices suffered by Irish political prisoners in the past and the inhumane treatment of Palestinian prisoners today serves as a reminder of this long history of solidarity between two countries plagued by settler-colonialism. On the cover of A Shared History is a photograph of Palestinian women carrying signs that read Nafha, H-Block, Armagh, One Struggle; it is an image that speaks volumes about Irish-Palestinian solidarity.

As of November 29, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, two Palestinian prisoners are on hunger strike: Hisham Abu Hawwash, who has been on hunger strike for 108 days, and Nidal Ballout, who has been on hunger strike for 35 days. Both are held under Administrative Detention without charge or trial.

But as Bobby Sands wrote all those years ago in The Lark and the Freedom Fighter – an essay that reminds us of the late Palestinian prisoner Muhammad Hassan, who kept a bird in his cell at Nafha prison, feeding it and granting it freedom every day, until an inmate accidentally stepped on the bird and killed it: “I have the spirit of freedom that cannot be quenched by even the most horrendous treatment. Of course, I can be murdered, but while I remain alive, I remain what I am, a political prisoner of war, and no one can change that.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.