Hong Kong news site closes amid national security raid, journalist arrests

The arrests and raid are condemned as a further assault on the city's rapidly dwindling press freedom.

By Gigi Lee and Cheng Yut Yiu
2021.12.29

Stand News chief editor Patrick Lam is brought to the news outlet's office building in handcuffs after police were deployed to search the premises in Hong Kong's Kwun Tong district, Dec. 29, 2021.
 AFP

Police in Hong Kong on Wednesday arrested seven people linked to a major pro-democracy news website for "sedition" under a national security crackdown ordered by Beijing, and froze its assets, prompting it to shut down on the same day.

Police arrested a former chief editor of Stand News, Chung Pui-kuen, and acting chief editor Patrick Lam, as well as former pro-democracy lawmaker Margaret Ng, Cantopop star Denise Ho, Chow Tat-chi and Christine Fang, all of whom have served on the board of directors.

In an operation involving more than 200 plainclothes and uniformed police, officers also searched the home of Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) president Ronson Chan, who also worked as a senior editor at Stand News, although he wasn't arrested.

"Police arrested a number of senior and former senior officers of the company this morning, took a number of people in to help with enquiries, and seized a number of computers and some documents from the newsroom," Stand News said in a statement on Wednesday.

"Given the circumstances, Stand News is ceasing operations with immediate effect, with all online and social media content ... to be removed within the next few days," it said. "Acting editor in chief Lam has resigned and all staff will be laid off with immediate effect."

"Stand News has always been committed to protecting the core Hong Kong values of freedom and democracy, human rights, justice and the rule of law," it said. "Thank you to our readers for all of their support."

A Hong Kong national security police officer (L) and a worker carry boxes of evidence from the offices of Stand News in Hong Kong after police raided the office of the local media outlet and arrested six current and former staff, Dec. 29, 2021. Credit: AFP

'Seditious publication'

The HKJA expressed concern over the raid.

"The Hong Kong Journalists Association expresses its deep concern over police arrests at a prominent media organization and raids of its offices, the latest of several within the past year," it said.

"[We] call on the government to protect press freedom in accordance with the Basic Law," it said in a reference to the city's mini-constitution which enshrines Beijing's promises to preserve Hong Kong's traditional freedoms.

Police said all seven arrestees were being held for "conspiracy to publish seditious publication," a colonial-era charges under the city's Crimes Ordinance, while Stand News' assets were frozen under a draconian national security law imposed on the city by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from July 1, 2020.

"A total of three men and four women, aged 34 to 73, were arrested in the operation so far," a police statement said. "Searches of their respective residences are under way."

Ronson Chan said police confiscated his computer, mobile, tablet, press pass and bank records during an early morning search of his home.

The raid on Stand News came after the website and its journalists were denounced by a number of CCP-backed news organizations and high-ranking Hong Kong officials.

Secretary for Security Chris Tang, a former police chief, had taken issue with its criticism of conditions at the Tai Tam Gorge Correctional Institution, as well as "inciting hatred of the police."

'Already tattered press freedom'

Margaret Ng and Denise Ho have been repeatedly targeted by pro-China media after they set up the "612 Humanitarian Relief Fund" to fund bail payments for people arrested in connection with the 2019 pro-democracy protests.

The fund announced its dissolution in November 2021 in spite of receiving high levels of public donations.

"Conspiracy to publish seditious publications" carries a maximum jail term of two years for the first conviction.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemned the arrests, which it called "an open assault on Hong Kong's already tattered press freedom."

"Authorities must release the six and drop all charges against them immediately if Hong Kong is to retain any semblance of the freedoms that its residents enjoyed only a few years ago," CPJ Asia program coordinator Steven Butler said in a statement.

China remains the world’s worst jailer of journalists for the third year in a row, according to the CPJ.

It said 2021 marked the first time Hong Kong journalists were also imprisoned for doing their jobs, it said, in a reference to the arrests of founder Jimmy Lai and senior journalists at the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper, the Apple Daily.

Lai and colleagues are currently awaiting trial on charges of "collusion with a foreign power" under the national security law after the paper called for international sanctions on Hong Kong and Chinese officials.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Hong Kong: Police arrest reporters over 'seditious publications'

Pro-democracy outlet Stand News has announced it will stop operating after police arrested several of its current and former staff for "conspiracy to publish seditious publications."

Stand News editor Patrick Lam, second from left, is seen arrested by police officers

Police in Hong Kong arrested seven senior current and former staff members of online media organization Stand News on Wednesday.

The group was arrested for "conspiracy to publish seditious publications," the government said in a press release.

The official police statement did not identify those who were arrested but said they were three men and three women, aged 34 to 73.

News agency AFP reported that Stand News acting editor-in-chief Patrick Lam was being led away in handcuffs.

Former editor-in-chief Chung Pui-kuen and four board members who resigned in June were among those arrested, according to local media.

Later Wednesday, Stand News announced its closure. 

Police raid office, houses

The national security police were seen hauling boxes from the Stand New office around lunchtime Wednesday, AFP reported.

Hong Kong police said in a press release that they had conducted a search against an "online media company," deploying over "200 uniformed and plainclothes police officers."

DW correspondent Phoebe Kong told DW that the more than 200 officers deployed to search the office of Stand News confiscated materials and documents.

She also said officers of the Hong Kong police's national security department searched the home of Hong Kong Journalists Association chairman Ronson Chan.

Chan, who is also a deputy editor at Stand News, said that police confiscated his computer, mobile telephone, tablet device, press pass, and bank records during the early morning raid. 

He was taken away for questioning but was later released, his organization said.

"Stand News has always conducted professional news reporting, this is beyond doubt," Chan told reporters. "Criminal charges won't change this fact."

Police said in a statement that they were conducting a search with a warrant authorizing them "to search and seize relevant journalistic materials."

Stand News posted a video on Facebook of police officers saying they had a warrant to investigate the "conspiracy to publish a publication of seditious publications." 

Police were also searching the homes of Chan's colleagues from Stand News, according to Kong.

A 'dangerous precedent'

Eric Lai, Hong Kong law fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Asian Law, told DW that the arrests were a "dangerous precedent" as the government can arrest people "retroactively."

"The charge of seditious publication was also used to charge the unionists who published the children's book a few months ago," Lai said, referring to five people being detained in July for publishing a book called "Defenders of the Sheep Village."

"It was quite disturbing because seditious law in Hong Kong is a kind of speech crime that the government can use whenever it needs once they interpret any expression or publications that are anti-government."

Lai warned that charges of seditious publication would have an "unprecedented" and "chilling effect" throughout the city.

"It would force the newspapers in Hong Kong to decide if they still want to act independently and critically of the government," he added.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) described the raid as "an open assault on Hong Kong's already tattered press freedom" and called for charges to be dropped.

A crackdown on dissent

This is not the first time Hong Kong police have conducted raids on journalists.

In June, hundreds of police raided the premises of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily. The paper's executives were arrested for "collusion with a foreign country."

Hong Kong prosecutors filed an additional "seditious publications" charge against Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai on Tuesday.

Hong Kong passed a controversial national security law in June of last year.

Earlier this month, Hong Kong held a "patriots-only" legislative election, which critics said marginalized pro-democracy candidates.  

DW's William Yang in Taipei contributed to this report.

mvb, sdi/dj (AFP, AP, dpa, Reuters)

Hong Kong police arrest 6 journalists 

amid crackdown on dissent under 

national security law

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Raid raises concerns about media freedom under law

imposed by Beijing in 2020

Thomson Reuters · Posted: Dec 28, 2021

Stand News deputy assignment editor Ronson Chan, centre, is shown after being arrested by police in Hong Kong on Wednesday. He is also head of the Hong Kong Journalists Association. (The Associated Press)

Hundreds of Hong Kong national security police raided the office of online pro-democracy media outlet Stand News on Wednesday and arrested six people, including senior staff, for "conspiracy to publish seditious publications."

The raid further raises concerns about freedom of speech and that of the media in the former British colony, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997 with the promise that a wide range of individual rights would be protected.

Police said in a statement that they had a warrant authorizing officers "to search and seize relevant journalistic materials."

"Over 200 uniformed and plainclothes police officers have been deployed during the operation. The search operation is underway," the statement said.

Sedition is not a crime under the sweeping national security law imposed by Beijing on the city in June 2020.

But recent court judgments have freed authorities to use powers conferred by the new legislation to deploy previous sparsely used colonial-era laws, including the Crime Ordinance that covers sedition.

June raid led newspaper to shut down

Authorities say the national security law has restored order after often-violent pro-democracy unrest in 2019 and that it does not curb rights and freedoms. But critics say the legislation is a tool to quash dissent.

In June, hundreds of police officers raided the premises of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, arresting executives for alleged "collusion with a foreign country." The newspaper subsequently shut down.

Hong Kong broadcaster TVB said the six people arrested on Wednesday included former board members Margaret Ng, a former democratic legislator and pop singer Denise Ho, a Canadian raised in Montreal. Acting chief editor Patrick Lam was also arrested.

Patrick Lam, centre, the acting chief editor of Stand News, is arrested on Wednesday. Hong Kong police say they have arrested several current and former staff members of the online media company for 'conspiracy to publish seditious publications.' (Vincent Yu/The Associated Press)

Stand News posted a video of police arriving at the residence of Ronson Chan, its deputy assignment editor, who is also head of the Hong Kong Journalists Association.

"The charge was conspiracy to publish seditious publications. This is the court warrant and this is my warrant card. Your phone is obstructing our work," an officer is seen saying.

Police said in a separate statement that they had arrested three men and three women, aged 34 to 73, and that searches of their homes were underway. It did not name those arrested, in line with its usual practice.

• Hong Kong votes for legislature with only China loyalists approved

• Statue commemorating Tiananmen Square massacre removed from Hong Kong University

The Stand News bureau, in an industrial building in the Kwun Tong working-class district, was partially sealed off by dozens of police, according to a Reuters reporter at the scene.

A police media liaison officer on the 14th floor said entry to the office would not be permitted given an "ongoing operation." He declined to give further details.

Four police vans were parked downstairs as dozens of officers milled around the lobby.

Stand News earlier this year said it would suspend subscriptions and remove most opinion pieces and columns from its website due to the national security law. Six board members had also resigned from the company.

Denise Ho, singer and pro-democracy activist, was among those arrested in Hong Kong. Above, Ho speaks during a Congressional-Executive Commission on China hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. in September. (Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Benedict Rogers, co-founder and CEO of the non-governmental organization Hong Kong Watch, said the arrests are "nothing short of an all-out assault on the freedom of the press in Hong Kong."

"When a free press guaranteed by Hong Kong's Basic Law is labelled 'seditious,' it is a symbol of the speed at which this once great, open, international city has descended into little more than a police state," he said.

The arrests come as authorities crack down on dissent in the semi-autonomous Chinese city. Police charged former newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai with sedition on Tuesday. His Apple Daily newspaper shut down after its assets were frozen. He was already facing charges under the national security law.

Police have not disclosed which Apple Daily or Stand News articles they considered seditious.

The arrests also follow the removal of sculptures and other artwork from university campuses last week. The works supported democracy and memorialized the victims of China's crackdown on democracy protesters at Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.

With files from The Associated Press

Denise Ho: the Cantopop star and pro-democracy activist arrested in Hong Kong

The singer, who was swept up in a raid on people linked to StandNews, has been an outspoken critic of Beijing for years

Denise Ho in Washington in 2019 where she gave evidence to Congress about human rights abuses in Hong Kong.

 Photograph: Pablo Martínez Monsiváis/AP

Rhoda Kwan in Taipei
Wed 29 Dec 2021    

The arrest of Cantopop star Denise Ho in a raid on reporters and prominent figures linked to the Hong Kong media outlet StandNews has shocked her many fans in the city and around the world.

The artist was taken from her home in Hong Kong on Wednesday for allegedly conspiring with five others to publish seditious materials in her role as a former director of the independent news provider.


Denise Ho: the Cantopop Queen on a crusade against China's Communist party

Ho’s arrest marks the first time a popstar of global renown has been detained for a political crime after Beijing imposed a national security law on Hong Kong 18 months ago in response to months of pro-democracy protests in 2019.

The artist had long been an outspoken public figure. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Canada, she is hero to the region’s LGBT community, as one of the first local celebrities to come out almost a decade ago.

She was actively involved in the city’s pro-democracy movement, testifying at the US Capitol about reports of police brutality during the protests, as well as serving as a trustee for a now defunct humanitarian fund for arrested or injured protesters.

“Denise Ho has been the most vocal and popular artist in Hong Kong who dares to oppose Beijing,” Sunny Cheung, one of the activists who had travelled with Ho to the US, told the Guardian.

Ho sought to comfort her fans on Facebook after her arrest. “I am feeling OK. Friends who are concerned about me, please don’t worry.” The post drew thousands of well wishes within hours.

“Hang in there!,” one user wrote. “This is too ridiculous! Please be ok!” wrote another.

In a creative industry where access to the lucrative mainland Chinese market has swayed many Cantonese artists to refrain from angering Chinese sensitivities, Ho emerged in 2014 as a voice of defiance when she joined the Umbrella Movement and demanded wider democracy with thousands of other Hongkongers.

“When I first saw the teargas fired into the peaceful crowds … I decided, regardless of all the so-called consequences, that I had to speak my mind,” she said in 2019.

The consequences for Ho’s career came long before Wednesday’s arrest. In 2014, Chinese authorities banned her from performing on the mainland. In the years that followed, brands and other celebrities shunned her, while some of her concerts in Hong Kong were cancelled.

Canada Child Benefit still needed alongside national daycare system, minister says

Jordan Press
The Canadian Press
Tuesday, December 28, 2021 


Karina Gould holds a press conference on Parliament Hill

 in Ottawa on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2020.

 THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

The federal minister in charge of child-care efforts says she still sees a need for the government's cornerstone children's benefit even in a Canada with a national daycare system.

Families Minister Karina Gould says the Canada Child Benefit was never designed as a child-care program, but to help parents defray the costs of raising a family and reduce poverty rates.

Since the income-tested benefit was introduced in 2016, the poverty rate for children under 18 has fallen to 9.7 per cent in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available. That compared to 16.4 per cent in 2015.

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Gould says the push to build a national daycare system is also aimed at easing cost pressures for parents by lowering child-care fees that in some cities can cost more than a monthly mortgage payment.

But even when average fees reach the government's goal of $10-a-day by 2026, Gould says there will still be households that will need the Canada Child Benefit to pay the bills.

It's why Gould says she doesn't see the benefit disappearing from the federal toolkit for families.

"There are always going to be families -- maybe it's a single parent, or a single-income household, or there are reasons why the other parent is unable or can't work -- that are going to continue to need that benefit," Gould said in an interview.

"I think it's going to continue to be a really important way for us to fight child poverty in Canada."

The government's economic update in December forecasted spending on the child benefit would fall for the second straight fiscal year starting in April, dropping from $26.4 billion to $25.5 billion, before climbing to $28.2 billion by 2027.

The decline is the result of the end of a temporary bonus paid to families with young children.

Gould said there have been some families that saw a reduction in CCB payments because they received emergency income-support in 2020, but it was nowhere near as dramatic a drop as seen for low-income seniors who receive the guaranteed income supplement.

As spending on the benefit rebounds, the government will up its annual funding for provincially run child-care systems. The Liberals have inked deals with 11 provinces and territories, with only Nunavut and Ontario left.

On talks with Canada's most populous province, Gould said there's political goodwill on both sides of the bargaining table to get a deal done, although she didn't say how soon that might take.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau named Gould minister of families, children and social development in October, after she previously served as minister of democratic institutions and, most recently, international development.

For Gould, taking over her new position helps merge her political and personal lives: Her three-year-old son is in daycare in Ottawa and her riding of Burlington on the western edge of the Greater Toronto Area.

A pandemic parent herself, Gould said she's keeping in mind that families, and children in particular, need a bit more support than usual "because life is just that much tougher."

A recent report by the government's poverty advisory council noted that the pandemic has been traumatic for children through rounds of lockdowns that may have "long-lasting impacts on general health and on the educational attainment of a whole generation."

Gould is being tasked with boosting mental-health services for children, and suggested a way to do that would be to earmark the money to provinces in health-care transfers.

She also has on her plate modernizing Service Canada, which is responsible for doling out billions in benefits annually.

The move to digitize the department's systems has included automatically signing up seniors for old age security and the income supplement payments.

More work could better identify seniors who still aren't getting benefits, she said, and maybe provide unemployment benefits to people faster by seeing payroll changes in real-time.

"There's just such a huge opportunity here to service Canadians and provide support to citizens in just a much more efficient and effective way that will alleviate a lot of stress, and really help provide those benefits to them when they need them," Gould said.

A day after giving birth, I was asked back to work. America needs paid family leave


The US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among developed countries. Yet Senator Joe Manchin struggles to understand why paid family leave is important

‘My employer provided no paid maternity leave, so the longer I was off from work, the longer I would go without income.’ Photograph: Lionel Wotton/Alamy

Mon 27 Dec 2021 
Bobbi Dempsey

Twenty-four hours after I gave birth to my second child, my employer called to ask when I planned to return to work.

It had been a high-risk pregnancy and a complicated, precarious delivery involving a breech birth. I should have remained in the hospital for several days. But my oldest child – then just a year old – needed major surgery that couldn’t be delayed. So we brought our newborn home and rushed to prepare to leave for a hospital two hours away where our oldest child would have surgery while our newborn was at home being cared for by relatives.

As we gathered our things, the phone rang. It was someone from the HR office at the paper bag factory where I worked. After briefly making the obligatory inquiry as to how my new baby was doing, the HR rep got to the real reason for her call.

“So, we know you were planning to take a few weeks off, but I just wanted to make sure you knew that you can come back anytime now. I could even get you back on the schedule this weekend, if you wanted.” After a brief pause, she added, “I figured, you know, you might want to start getting paid again.”

I got the message loud and clear.

My employer provided no paid maternity leave, so the longer I was off from work, the longer I would go without income. With two young children to support and medical bills piling up, this was money I desperately needed. By dangling a paycheck in front of me, the HR rep knew she was making it very tempting for me to return to work sooner than I had planned – and way sooner than I should.

That was in the early 1990s, in a rural area in the coal region of Pennsylvania, where I live. I doubt much has changed since then.

The version of the Build Back Better plan passed by the House on 19 November includes a provision for paid family leave. While it would mandate only four weeks of paid time off – much less than the 12 weeks in the original plan – it is being heralded as a big victory, which is depressing. Even worse: there’s a good chance that even that minimal amount of paid family leave won’t survive in the final version of the bill.

At least, not if Joe Manchin has his way. The West Virginia senator has voiced his opposition to any paid family leave in the bill, and the Democrats need his critical vote to pass the package in the Senate.

It’s incomprehensible that one individual could single-handedly decide the fate of something that affects so many American families. Manchin has never had to endure the physical and mental agony of returning to work before you’ve recovered from childbirth. His family is wealthy and has likely benefited from the support of nannies, assistants and paid daycare. I’m guessing he has never known the panic of worrying you might lose your job – or not have enough in your paycheck to pay essential bills – because you need to miss work to care for a sick child or handle a family emergency.

It’s stunning that one man who has never needed paid leave has the ability to keep it from millions of parents who do. Manchin seems to be enjoying the power trip, relishing the attention his cat-and-mouse game has attracted. But for many people – particularly postpartum mothers – this is no game. The ability to take even just a few precious weeks at home without fear of financial losses could literally be a matter of life and death.

Like many industrial employers (at least at that time), the factory where I worked used a point system to track and regulate employee absences. When you took a day off – unpaid, of course – it didn’t matter if you were sick, taking a vacation, or attending to a sick relative or family emergency. It was all treated the same way. You were given a point for each absence. After five points, you were given a warning. At six points, a one-day suspension without pay. If you reached seven points, you were fired. I received a point after absences for each of my appointments for prenatal care, and another for the time I missed while having the baby.

It’s inexcusable that American companies are allowed to operate like this. Among the handful of countries without any form of national paid leave, the United States is by far the largest and richest.

Forcing people to choose between their paycheck and their families or their own physical health is heartless. In the case of someone who has just given birth, it is particularly cruel – and dangerous. I suffered serious (and potentially life-threatening) complications during and after each of my pregnancies. I am far from unusual. The US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world among developed countries – and the risk is especially high for black and Native American women and women in poor rural areas. Workers in these communities are also more likely to receive little or no paid leave from their employers.

Only roughly one in five workers in the US has access to paid family leave. The rest are forced to make impossible and risky choices. One in four new mothers returns to work within two weeks of giving birth. I know firsthand that is not nearly long enough to recover.

Even looking at it purely from an economic and labor standpoint, a national paid leave policy makes sense. Paid leave actually keeps people in their jobs in the long run. When parents don’t have even the bare minimum of paid leave available for emergencies, they may be forced to quit their job – or end up getting fired.

While paid family leave could make a big difference to new parents, they aren’t the only ones who benefit. Paid leave can also be extremely beneficial to people in the “sandwich generation” situation – which is exactly where I am now. About 44 million Americans provide care to parents or other adult relatives or friends, representing 37bn hours of unpaid labor each year.

Providing a basic minimum of paid family leave to all Americans shouldn’t be controversial – and definitely shouldn’t seem like such an impossible goal.

Bobbi Dempsey is a freelance writer specializing in topics related to poverty, a reporting fellow at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and an economic justice fellow at Community Change

 British Columbia

Homeless people left to fend for themselves amid extreme-cold warning, advocates say

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Cold snap hits most of the province with Arctic outflow

warnings for Metro Vancouver and Fraser Valley

CBC News · Posted: Dec 28, 2021 

A person finds shelter for the evening in a bus stop on Burrard Street in downtown Vancouver. An extended cold snap has settled over the province and there are concerns for the homeless population. (Andrew Lee/CBC)

Advocates for unhoused people in B.C.'s Lower Mainland say not enough is being done to help during the current record-breaking cold snap.

Much of the province is currently under an extreme weather warning due to snowfall and cold temperatures, with Arctic outflows affecting regions in the South Coast and the Fraser Valley.

The province increased the number of shelter spaces in anticipation of the extreme cold last week, with numerous cities also activating their extreme weather response shelters to help those experiencing homelessness.

However, Ward Draper, a pastor with 5 and 2 Ministries who works with homeless populations in Abbotsford, says the province isn't "keeping pace" with the increasing numbers of people who are having to live on the streets.

WATCH | Not enough help available, says pastor

"When I started doing this stuff about 18 years ago, we had about 100 people on the streets," he said. 

"Now we have 500 or so, with no sign of stopping. We don't have enough space for people."

The province's cold snap has reached historic proportions, with Vancouver recording its lowest temperature in 52 years on Dec. 27.

Nicole Mucci, spokesperson for the Union Gospel Mission in Vancouver, says frostbite, pneumonia and hypothermia are major concerns for many people who are seeking shelter during the frigid temperatures.

• B.C. prepares for more snow as extreme cold, Arctic outflow warnings continue

• Province increases number of extreme weather shelters ahead of freezing temperatures across B.C.

"This is one of the coldest stretches we've had in many, many years," she said.

"We're doing our best to try to make sure [people experiencing homelessness] have got the warm gear they need. But it's dangerous out there." 

Draper says the situation has been exacerbated by a spike in COVID cases, with enforced social distancing at shelters.

• Extreme weather creating unprecedented demand and challenges for shelters in B.C.

• Vancouver SRO tenants have been without heat since Christmas Day

He says the province's recent move to open more shelter spaces was a "Band-Aid on a fire," helping the situation slightly, but not enough for all the people living outside.

"We've probably got in the neighborhood of about 150-ish beds," he said. "But I mean, that's 350 people still without any sort of indoor space."

"We just need people to realize that we need help today. We need help yesterday … I'm tired. My friends outside are tired and it's just not enough."

Opinion: Trump idolatry has undermined religious faith


President Donald Trump THE ANTICHRIST holds a Bible during a visit outside St. John's Church across Lafayette Park from the White House on June 1, 2020.

By Jennifer Rubin

Much has been written about White evangelicals’ central role in the fraying of democracy. More attention, however, should be paid to the damage the political movement has inflicted on religion itself.

The demographic — which remains in the throes of White grievance and an apocalyptic vision that postulates America (indeed “Western civilization”) is under attack from socialists, foreigners and secularists — forms the core of the MAGA movement. Many have rejected the sanctity of elections, the principle of inclusion and even objective reality.

The consequences have been dire for American politics. The siege mentality has morphed into an ends-justify-the-means style of politics in which lies, brutal discourse and even violence are applauded as necessary to protect “real America.” Essential features of democracy, such as the peaceful transfer of power, compromise with political opponents and defining America as an idea and not a racial or religious identity, have fallen by the wayside.

Jennifer Rubin: America cannot give evangelicals what they want

Sadly, the degradation of democracy has intensified in the wake of Joe Biden’s victory. The doctrinal elevation of the “big lie," the increase in violent rhetoric and the effort to rig elections all reflect a heightened desperation by the MAGA crowd. This has driven the GOP to new lows (e.g., vaccine refusal to “own the libs,” virtually all House Republicans defending an animation depicting the murder of a congresswoman).

While lovers of democracy around the world view these developments in horror, we should not lose track of the damage the MAGA movement has wrought to religious values. Peter Wehner, an evangelical Christian and former adviser to President George W. Bush, explains in a column for the Atlantic how a recent speech from Donald Trump Jr. reflects the inversion of religious faith. “The former president’s son,” Wehner writes, “has a message for the tens of millions of evangelicals who form the energized base of the GOP: the scriptures are essentially a manual for suckers. The teachings of Jesus have ‘gotten us nothing.’ ”

Wehner continues:

It’s worse than that, really; the ethic of Jesus has gotten in the way of successfully prosecuting the culture wars against the left. If the ethic of Jesus encourages sensibilities that might cause people in politics to act a little less brutally, a bit more civilly, with a touch more grace? Then it needs to go. Decency is for suckers.

Understanding this phenomenon goes a long way toward explaining the MAGA crowd’s very unreligious cruelty toward immigrants, its selfish refusal to vaccinate to protect the most vulnerable and its veneration of a vulgar, misogynistic cult leader. If you wonder how so many “people of faith” can behave in such ways, understand that their “faith” has become hostile to traditional religious values such as kindness, empathy, self-restraint, grace, honesty and humility.

Robert P. Jones, who leads the Public Religion Research Institute, writes that “in the upside-down world white evangelicalism has become, the willingness to act in self-sacrificial ways for the sake of vulnerable others — even amid a global pandemic — has become rare, even antithetical, to an aggressive, rights-asserting white Christian culture.” The result is reckless self-indulgence that places some evangelicals’ own aversion to “being told what to do” ahead of the health and lives of vulnerable populations.

Jones explains:

White evangelicals remain the most vaccine resistant of any major religious group, with one quarter (25%) refusing vaccination (compared to only 13% of the country). And these refusal rates are not all tied to theological objections. Only 13% of white evangelicals say the teachings of their religion prohibit receiving a vaccine, a rate comparable to the general public (10%).
Strikingly, the evidence suggests churches and pastors are the heart of the problem. White evangelicals who attend religious services regularly are twice as likely as less frequent attenders to be vaccine refusers (30% vs. 15%). If ever there were clear evidence of a massive abdication of pastoral responsibility and leadership, this is it.

As self-identified evangelicals reject small inconveniences and show disdain for others’ lives, Jones observes, “there is no hint of awareness that their actions are a mockery of the central biblical injunction to care for the orphan, the widow, the stranger, and the vulnerable among us.”

In sum, while the White evangelical political movement has done immeasurable damage to our democracy, its descent into MAGA politics, conspiratorial thinking and cult worship has had catastrophic results for the religious values evangelicals once held dear. Jones writes: “It’s important to say this straight. This refusal to act to protect the vulnerable — particularly because of the low personal costs involved — is raw, callous selfishness. Exhibited by people I love, it is heartbreaking. Expressed by people who claim to be followers of Jesus, it is maddening.”

If these trends continue uninterrupted, we will wind up with a country rooted in neither democratic principles nor religious values. That would be a mean, violent and intolerant future few of us would want to experience.

Less ice in the Arctic could mean more wildfires in the US

Researchers uncovered a surprising climate connection.

BY NIKITA AMIR |

 PUBLISHED DEC 28, 2021

 POP SCI

Atmospheric patterns link climate change in the far north with US wildfire activity. 

William Bossen via Unsplash

While human-induced global warming is an obvious culprit in the worsening wildfires seen across the planet, a group of researchers have found evidence of one surprising factor in particular: ice loss in the Arctic could be adding fuel to infernos in the Western United States.Top Articlesby Popular 

Arctic sea ice has been declining since the 1970s, and according to one dire estimate, this drop will leave the ocean nearly ice-free by the 2050s. The loss of this Arctic ocean cover may have profound effects much further south. Climate scientists refer to such a link as a teleconnection—the effect that two different climate conditions located in distant regions can have on each other. Hailong Wang, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Lab and one of the co-authors of the study, explains that atmospheric circulation patterns drive the bulk of these phenomena.

In this case, the researchers say, a reduction in sea ice cover leads the ocean to absorb a lot more sunlight during the summer. Later on, when the season cools and that heat is released into the atmosphere, it interacts with the cold air to create a low pressure system. This cyclonic rotation can then move south, creating a polar jet stream that is diverted from its usual course and draws moisture away from the Western US, in turn creating a high pressure system somewhere else. This ushers in hotter and drier weather, leading to fire-favourable conditions such as increased fuel aridity, which is a measure of how dry combustible material like grasses and trees are.

In order to establish this link, the researchers used satellite data from 1981 to 2019 to check sea ice concentrations at monthly intervals, as well as other daily and monthly variables such as air temperature, humidity, and precipitation. Yufei Zou, the lead author on the paper, also created a fire model to assess the relationship between fires, climate, and regional ecosystems.

[Related: Lightning strikes could double in the Arctic this century, setting the tundra on fire]


To make sure that the model was only examining the relationship between Arctic ice and wildfires, the authors paused the effects of all other variables, such as rising temperatures. That allowed them to see how the different pressure systems and conditions over the Western US evolved alongside the diminishing sea ice cover.

After analyzing six years worth of data where sea ice was at its highest and six years where it was at its minimum, Wang found that the state of the sea ice had as much of an impact on wildfire risk as natural variability—the normal cycles that affect the climate from year to year.

While Wang and his colleagues focused on defining the relationship between two extreme events—melting ice in the Arctic and more severe and frequent wildfires in the Western US—several other studies have highlighted more direct effects of human induced climate change, such as warming temperatures and forests that are more susceptible to burning.


The number of wildfires in the Western US doubled between 1984 to 2015. This teleconnection between Arctic sea ice and wildfires gives us more information on how the natural world is changing as the planet gets warmer, which could help us better prepare for worsening wildfire seasons. But that means putting time and money into figuring out how, exactly, humans stand to be affected—and how we can mitigate that risk. Olivia Romppainen-Martius, a climate impact researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland who was not involved with the new study, is eager to see how findings like these can be used to save lives.

“The next step is to translate this information into adaptation—basically into actions that reduce the vulnerability and reduce the exposure,” she says.

The Record-Breaking Failures of Nuclear Power

BY LINDA GUNTER

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Photograph Source: Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear power reactor – CC BY 2.0

The Tennessee Valley Authority could likely rightfully claim a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, but it’s not an achievement for which the federally-owned electric utility corporation would welcome notoriety.

After taking a whopping 42 years to build and finally bring on line its Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear power reactor in Tennessee, TVA just broke its own record for longest nuclear plant construction time. However, this time, the company failed to deliver a completed nuclear plant.

Watts Bar 2 achieved criticality in May 2016, then promptly came off line due to a transformer fire three months later. It finally achieved full operational status on October 19, 2016, making it  the first United States reactor to enter commercial operation since 1996.

Now, almost five years later, TVA has announced it has abandoned its unfinished two-reactor Bellefonte nuclear plant in Alabama, a breathtaking 47 years after construction began.

TVA was apparently happy to get out of the nuclear construction business, because, as the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported, the company “did not see the need for such a large and expensive capacity generation source.” No kidding!

Ironically, this is precisely the argument used to advance renewables, in an energy environment that cannot and will no longer support inflexible, large, thermo-electric generators that are completely impractical under the coming smart grids as well as climate change-induced conditions.

Accordingly, TVA was more than happy to accept overtures from a purchaser for Bellefonte — the Haney real estate company— whose director, Frank Haney, gained his own notoriety by lavishing $1 million on former President Trump and courting Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, possibly, suggested media reports, to curry regulatory favors for his new nuclear toy.

But when TVA announced last month that it had withdrawn its construction permit for Bellefonte, Haney got his down payment back — to the tune of $22.9 million plus interest. TVA had itself spent at least $5.8 billion on Bellefonte over the 47 years, which included long stoppages, before finally pulling the plug.

This kind of colossal waste of time and money on failed nuclear power projects is, of course, the more typical story than the myths spun in the press about the need for “low carbon” nuclear energy, a misleading representation used to argue for nuclear power’s inclusion in climate change mitigation.

In reality, the story of nuclear power development in the US over the last 50 years is beyond pitiful and would not pass muster under any “normal” business plan. How the nuclear industry gets away with it remains baffling.

As Beyond Nuclear’s Paul Gunter told the Chattanooga Times Free Press, “Bellefonte is just the most recent failure for this industry,” noting that “of the 30 reactors the industry planned to build 15 years ago with the so-called nuclear renaissance, only two are still being built. (Those two, at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, are years behind schedule with a budget that has more than doubled to $27 billion.)

As Gunter noted in the same article, “TVA has had major problems meeting projected costs and timetables for new nuclear plants, as the entire industry has had over the past 50 years. The inability to meet any budgets for these plants is what has repeatedly been the demise of nuclear energy.

“Nuclear energy is the most expensive way ever conceived to boil water and Bellefonte just shows once again how unreliable this technology really is in terms of projecting what it will cost and how long it will take to build these power plants,” Gunter told the newspaper.

That was certainly true for Westinghouse Electric Company and SCANA, still embroiled in the ever unraveling scandal around the failure to complete two new reactors at the V.C. Summer nuclear power plant in South Carolina. As executives of the bankrupt Westinghouse and SCANA, who retained them, continue to face criminal charges, Westinghouse has already had to shell out $2.168 billion in settlement payments related to the Summer debacle.

In August, news reports said Westinghouse would also be required to reimburse low-income ratepayers to the tune of $21.25 million. That’s because the new reactors got funded in part through electricity rates, even though they never delivered a single watt of electricity. The cost of the project itself eventually ballooned to more than $9 billion before collapsing.

Let’s look at the track record as a whole. According to Wikipedia’s article, List of cancelled nuclear reactors in the United States: “Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were cancelled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable.”

Wikipedia’s stunning list on the same page details 157 reactors that were either canceled before or during construction.

The massive costs, of course, send most corporations running scared, the Haney family notwithstanding. Even when meaty subsidies have been dangled — as they were for the Calvert Cliffs 3 EPR project in Maryland — utility companies balk and bail. In the case of Calvert Cliffs, Constellation Energy was the US partner with the French government utility EDF. But even when offered a $7.5 billion loan guarantee by the Obama administration, Constellation viewed those terms as “too expensive and burdensome” and quit.

This left EDF, a foreign company, as sole owner, a violation of the Atomic Energy Act. The project duly collapsed, one of many referred to earlier by Paul Gunter as the fantasy of a nuclear renaissance that first sputtered, then went out.

President Obama, of course, was no friend to the anti-nuclear movement. So eager was he to boost new nuclear construction in the US that he called for the inclusion of $55 billion for nuclear loan guarantees in his $3.8 trillion 2011 budget. In his State of the Union address that year, Obama talked of “building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” Kool-Aid thoroughly drunk, then.

All of this should send an obvious message to the deaf ears of Ben Cardin (D-MD), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), the leading pro-nuclear evangelists in the U.S. Senate. Cardin’s power production credit bill actually has the gall to describe nuclear power as “zero-emission”, a lie that even Cardin’s own staffer was forced to concede in a recent meeting attended by Paul Gunter who called him out on it.

Not that any of this will stop the bill going forward and almost certainly passing. Like the three not-so-wise monkeys, those Senators and their colleagues will acknowledge no negatives about nuclear power, even as the industry’s appalling litany of financial fiascoes and failures stares them in the face. They will forge right ahead, thus dooming to its own failure the very progress on climate change they claim to champion.