Is the U.S. ready for its 51st state? Puerto Rico’s bid gains momentum on its streets and in Congress

December 12, 2021

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People carry a giant Puerto Rican flag at an Oct. 15 protest in San Juan against LUMA Energy, which took over the U.S. territory’s fragile power grid this summer. Rolling blackouts in the fall have fuelled anger at public institutions on an island still coping with the after effects of Hurricane Maria in 2017.RICARDO ARDUENGO/AFP via Getty Images

At a community centre in the working-class Hill Brothers neighbourhood of San Juan, Carmen Villanueva Castro lists all the ways she and her neighbours have worked to fill the gaps left by government in this corner of Puerto Rico’s capital.

When Hurricane Maria uprooted trees, destroyed houses and knocked out electricity in 2017, Hill Brothers’ residents cleared the streets of detritus. When COVID-19 threw people out of work last year, they gathered food to cook collective meals. When trash isn’t removed from a nearby creek, they clean it up.

“If we are a territory of the United States, we should have the same rights and the same quality of life as people on the mainland,” says Ms. Villanueva, 60, on a warm, humid autumn evening, as she sits amid boxes of masks and hand sanitizer to distribute to senior citizens. “There’s definitely a lot that Puerto Rico can offer, but what’s holding us back is this relationship we have with the United States.”

That relationship constitutes one of the world’s most unusual political statuses, particularly two decades into the 21st century. Ceded by Spain to the U.S. after the Spanish-American War in 1898, Puerto Rico has remained an unincorporated territory ever since. Unlike American states, whose powers are delineated by the U.S. Constitution, Puerto Rico’s are delegated by the federal government.

Washington has used this sovereignty over the island to treat it very differently from the mainland.

While Puerto Ricans hold U.S. citizenship and elect a local government, they cannot vote in presidential elections and have only one, non-voting representative in Congress. They also face more stringent caps on federal Medicaid and food stamp funding than states do. Following the devastation of Maria, which knocked out Puerto Rico’s power grid for months, the U.S. government withheld some relief funds for four years. A lengthy recession and financial crisis have triggered two decades of outmigration, and prompted Washington to appoint a fiscal control board to impose austerity on San Juan.

Now, momentum is growing to revisit the status question. One bill before Congress would grant Puerto Rico statehood. A rival piece of legislation would see Puerto Ricans elect a constitutional convention that would draft several options to be put to a referendum. A series of legal actions, meanwhile, are challenging the Insular Cases, a string of racist, century-old U.S. Supreme Court decisions that codified the federal government’s colonial control over the island.

Puerto Ricans have different ideas about their ideal political future. Many favour immediate accession to the union. Some prefer independence. Others support free association, in which Puerto Rico would maintain a relationship with the U.S. but would have the sovereignty to negotiate the terms, rather than relying on Washington to grant authority by statute.

There is broad agreement, however, that something needs to change.

“It should be a relationship based on mutual respect,” Ms. Villanueva says. “But we are not receiving any.”

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Puerto Ricans place shoes at the legislature building in June of 2018 to honour victims of Hurricane Maria, which hit the island nine months earlier. One sign reads ‘genocide’ in Spanish.Alvin Baez/Reuters

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Two potential paths

For Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia, there is only one solution. His pro-statehood activism began as a university student in the late 1970s and has been a connecting thread in his long political career. Now 62, he contends the push is gaining momentum.

“It makes no sense to treat American citizens differently depending on where they choose to reside,” he says in his office at La Fortaleza, the blue 1500s mansion that has housed Puerto Rico’s governors since the Spanish era. “The end result is that anybody who is displeased with the way the federal government is treating them for nutritional assistance, health coverage or dealing with disabilities, they can hop on a plane and move to Florida or Texas or New York, and automatically, they get those services.”

He supports the Puerto Rico Statehood Admission Act, a congressional bill that would swiftly make the island a state. His position, he says, is bolstered by a referendum last year in which 53 per cent of those who cast ballots voted for statehood.

For all the U.S. government’s faults, he argues that Puerto Rico still gets more – in social security pension payments, hurricane relief and other social spending – than it would if it tried to go it alone. Independence would also lead to a further exodus of residents, he contends, while holding a constitutional convention would only prolong the process of change.

The attention hurricanes Irma and Maria focused on the island has helped shift the narrative nationally, he says.

“Now they realize, hey, we’re American citizens, and they didn’t like the way that the federal government was responding to us when we went through those hurricanes,” Mr. Pierluisi says. “Being part of America is something extraordinary. The U.S. may have its defects but, to me, it is the best country in the world.”

Puerto Rico’s Governor Pedro Pierluisi.Gabriella N. Baez/Reuters

Still, he’s realistic about the hurdles. For one, congressional Republicans fear Puerto Rican statehood would automatically guarantee additional seats to Democrats, who are more popular with Latino voters. For another, statehood would mean Puerto Ricans would need to pay federal income tax, which they currently do not.

But the Governor contends there are enough socially conservative Catholics on the island to make the Republicans competitive here. And he says an increase in business investment in the event of statehood would provide the economic lift needed to cushion the added taxes.

Other Puerto Ricans, however, say it’s not clear statehood is the most popular choice for the island’s future. For one, last year’s referendum had a turnout of only 55 per cent. And it only asked voters whether they supported statehood, without mentioning other potential status options. For another, the U.S. federal government has never defined exactly what the terms of Puerto Rico entering the union would be.

Many support a different piece of federal legislation, the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act. Backed by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the act would see Puerto Ricans elect a constitutional convention and Congress appoint a negotiating team that would define several potential political statuses for the island. These would then be put to Puerto Ricans for a referendum.

This bill’s supporters contend it is the most democratic process, and also gives Puerto Ricans a better idea what they are voting on. Congress would have to agree on the exact terms of statehood, independence and free association before people voted.

“The redefinition of the relationship with the United States is probably the most consequential decision in Puerto Rico’s history, and I think that decision should be under a fair process,” says José Bernardo Márquez Reyes, a 29-year-old Puerto Rican legislator, in a coffee shop in San Juan’s hip Santurce neighbourhood. “Right now, the discussion has been mainly a local discussion without really knowing what the United States position is going to be regarding those de-colonization options.”

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At top, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes part in 2019’s National Puerto Rican Day parade in New York; two years later, at bottom, people protest against a debt-adjustment plan outside a federal court building in San Juan.Craig Ruttle and Carlos Giusti/The Associated Press

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A recession and a junta

Even before the hurricanes, Puerto Rico was suffering economically.

Between 1996 and 2006, the federal government abolished corporate tax breaks that incentivized business investment on the island, causing U.S. companies to leave and triggering a lengthy recession. Since 2000, about 900,000 residents have decamped for the mainland, pushing the population from more than 3.6 million to fewer than 2.8 million today.

Washington has also long restricted its social spending in Puerto Rico. The island is guaranteed only about one-quarter the amount of federal Medicaid funding it would receive if it were a state, for instance, forcing San Juan to cover the shortfall. Political gridlock on the island, meanwhile, stalled proposed reforms to government spending.

In 2016, after Puerto Rico nearly defaulted on its debt, the federal government created the Financial Oversight and Management Board, better known in English as the “fiscal control board” or in Spanish as “la junta.” Primarily made up of bankers, the board is tasked with overseeing a restructuring of the island’s finances. It has earned widespread ire from Puerto Ricans for pushing cuts to health care, education and pension payments. To many, it is the most glaring example of Washington imposing its will.

“The only language they speak is the language of reductions,” says retiree Sonia Palacios, 71, in an interview at the Capitolio, the island’s white marble legislature building, where she is testifying at a Senate committee hearing on the cuts.

Ms. Palacios spent 42 years climbing the ranks of Puerto Rico’s public sector. She started as a social worker at the Oso Blanco prison and finished as a prosecutor. Her pension has already been cut by 11.5 per cent, and the fiscal control board demanded a further 8.5 per cent reduction this year before backing down in the face of public outcry.

“I never thought that at my age I would have to be fighting for what I have worked toward all my life,” she says. “We have a right to our pensions. We are not the group responsible for this crisis.”

Aníbal Acevedo Vilá campaigns for governor in 2004.Ana Martinez/Reuters

The junta has even changed the minds of some Puerto Ricans who previously favoured the status quo.

Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, a former governor who supported keeping the island’s current status while in office during the 2000s, recounts a conversation with then-senator Hillary Clinton to illustrate how much the ground has shifted.

It was late 2005, and the White House had issued a controversial report saying the federal government could do anything it wanted with Puerto Rico, including selling it to another country, without the permission of Puerto Ricans.

Mr. Acevedo, who happened to be in Washington at the time meeting with members of Congress, asked Ms. Clinton if she believed the task force was correct. Yes, she confirmed, it was. He was angry at the time, he says, but the fiscal control board has effectively proven her right.

“I told her ‘are you telling me that you believe Congress has the power to pass a law tomorrow saying I’m no longer governor of Puerto Rico?’ Hillary Clinton told me ‘we will never do that, but yes, we do have that power,’” he recounts at his law office near San Juan’s university district. “I was really mad at her. But, years later, I have to say she told me the truth.”

Mr. Acevedo now backs Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s bill, and personally supports a compact of free association, a type of arrangement the U.S. already has with three countries in the South Pacific. He doesn’t believe statehood would work. For one, he contends the U.S. would never accept a state where Spanish is the working language of government, schools and courts. For another, he believes Puerto Ricans would be crushed by the requirement of paying federal income tax. And he favours keeping the markers of Puerto Rico’s distinct identity; its own Olympic team and basketball league, for example.

“Either Puerto Rico is assimilated, we lose that identity and we become part of the melting pot. Or the U.S. decides to be a multinational state, and that’s not what they are,” he says. “Could you imagine a congressman from Missouri coming to Puerto Rico, the 51st state, having a car accident and being tried in court in Spanish?”

Mr. Acevedo measures the island’s lost opportunities in the friends and family members, many of them young professionals, he has watched leave over the last decade. One of his nephews decamped to Connecticut so his wife could pursue her career in aerospace engineering. Mr. Acevedo’s daughter lives in Los Angeles.

As for the junta’s implication that Puerto Rico can’t manage its own affairs, people here point to the COVID-19 pandemic, which the island has handled better than most U.S. states. Its COVID-19 death rate is relatively low – 967 per million, compared to 2,456 for the U.S. overall – while its 70 per cent fully-vaccinated rate puts it on par with top-vaccinated states such as Massachusetts and New York.

The central reason is that Puerto Rico’s government has had the political will to do things most state authorities have refused. This past summer, for instance, Mr. Pierluisi made vaccination mandatory for bar and restaurant patrons.

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Parents Abraham Rivera Berrios and Gladys Fuentes Lozada sit at bedside and hold hands with their son, Emanuel Rivera Fuentes, at his home in the San Juan suburb of Toa Alta. The younger Mr. Rivera needs constant care due to cerebral palsy and other disabilities.Alvin Baez/Reuters

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Constitutionally still a colony

In the spring of 2019, Abraham Rivera Berríos went to a federal government office in Toa Alta, the San Juan suburb where he lives, to apply for Supplemental Security Income for his son, Emanuel Rivera Fuentes. The younger Mr. Rivera, 35, is confined to his bed by cerebral palsy and a series of other medical conditions.

The elder Mr. Rivera hoped SSI, which offers up to US$794 a month to severely disabled Americans, would help purchase his son a bed lifter, a new wheelchair and physiotherapy.

But staff at the office rebuffed Mr. Rivera: the U.S. doesn’t pay SSI to anyone living in Puerto Rico. “I felt disappointed, frustrated, discriminated against, as a parent of any child with special conditions would,” says Mr. Rivera, 70.

Now, the younger Mr. Rivera has filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the estimated 300,000 Puerto Ricans who would be eligible for SSI if they lived on the U.S. mainland. The U.S. Supreme Court is already weighing a different case brought by another Puerto Rico resident, Jose Vaello Madero, on the same topic.

These legal actions shine a spotlight on the Insular Cases. Written in 1901, they effectively decided the constitutional status of Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories acquired in the Spanish-American War. Their central ruling was that the U.S. Constitution did not fully apply in these territories, and therefore the U.S. government had absolute power over them. In justifying this decision, one justice wrote that the territories were “inhabited by alien races” who couldn’t govern themselves “according to Anglo-Saxon principles.”

Many Puerto Ricans are less interested at this point in fixing the relationship with the United States than in severing it completely.

“Puerto Rico will lose its language, its culture,” Rafael Rodriguez, a 79-year-old retired roofer, says on the sidelines of a Sunday afternoon salsa dance party at the foot of Old San Juan’s city walls. “We can do it ourselves. We can have everything.”

A man takes pictures at San Juan’s Condado lagoon as buildings lie dark during a blackout.Carlos Giusti/The Associated Press

Much of Puerto Rico sits at an intersection between two worlds. It has a lower per capita income than any U.S. state, but is wealthier than any Latin American country. Its economy is dominated by manufacturing, in contrast with those of its tourism-dependent Caribbean neighbours. San Juan is a vibrant metropolis but everywhere – from the 16th-century old city to the waterfront highrises of Condado to the bank towers of Hato Rey – store fronts, apartment buildings and office blocks sit vacant.

Ms. Villanueva, for her part, favours independence, but she doesn’t believe it’s likely to happen. In any event, she considers political status a secondary question. More immediate are the needs for health care and other public services, whatever arrangement can provide them.

She’s lived in Hill Brothers her whole life, raising two children here as a single mother. Her earliest activism came at 16, she recalls, when she laid down on the street as part of a protest to turn a government-owned warehouse into a basketball court and community space.

In the aftermath of Maria, she and her neighbours burned candles and shared generators for months to deal with the power outages. They cooked meals together, and picked bananas and breadfruit, which grow wild in the neighbourhood. Residents of new subdivisions lacking these mature fruit trees, she says, would come to Hill Brothers to share in the bounty.

It was only the latest time people had to fend for themselves in a history of colonial mistreatment, which she lists off this evening: a program of forced sterilization from the 1930s to the 1960s; the testing of Agent Orange in the 1950s and ‘60s; the Jones Act, a law requiring only U.S. ships carry freight between U.S. ports, which drives up the costs of trade for Puerto Rico with the mainland.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is happy to avail itself of the most talented Puerto Ricans. She points to Antonia Novello, the first woman to serve as surgeon-general, and Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.

“The problem is not the status itself. It’s the way the relationship has been built throughout the years,” Ms. Villanueva says. “They have used our natural resources and our demographic resources, our people, they have really stripped us of everything we had, and now that there is nothing else to give, they are essentially throwing us away.”

RICARDO ARDUENGO/AFP/Getty Images

Opinion: Canada is still reckoning with the hijab – and not just around Quebec’s Bill 21

DECEMBER 29, 2021

Maria Kari is a freelance writer and lawyer.

Two disputes in December – the removal of Chelsea Elementary School teacher Fatemih Anwari from her class because her hijab violated Quebec’s secularism law, and the publication of one Letter The Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) has put a spotlight on the hijab being called “an instrument of oppression” by pediatrician Dr. Sherif Emil Canada’s Count with hijab.

Dr. Emil’s letter came in response to a former CMAJ publication that featured an image of two young girls – one in black, the other wearing a hijab – reading a book together. The picture, he wrote, “shocked and outraged many”; To support his claim, Dr. Emil cited a tweet by a Vancouver-based, former Muslim activist Yasmin Mohammed In which she refers to the hijab as a practice “which is happening only in the most extreme of religious homes.” Dr. Emil also cited an unnamed surgical trainee who felt “afraid of seeing the image”. [because it] Raised painful childhood memories of growing up in a radical Islamic society. ,

Indeed, the author even went so far as to declare that the little girls featured in the CMAJ report were “usually banned from riding a bike, swimming, or participating in other activities characterized by a healthy childhood.” Goes.” He also claims that the mentality of the Taliban allowing “institutionally child rape” has a lot in common with the “child-covering mentality”. And while Dr. Emil briefly acknowledges the “real” and “wrong” harassment and discrimination faced by hijabis – women who wear the costumes – she ironically disguises women for subjecting them to the same harassment and discrimination. Go ahead what he condemns.

CMAJ is a peer-reviewed general medical journal that aims to “champion knowledge that matters to the health of Canadians and the rest of the world.” But the letter, in its pages, also sends a clear message of the unwelcome to Canada’s hidden health care providers and patients – and should serve as a wake-up call to all Canadians to ignore the politics of the veil. There is a luxury that we no longer have.
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With hate crimes With Muslims rising up against here, and relentless efforts to legislate what Muslim women can wear, Muslim Canadians are finding themselves increasingly on the defensive. While Muslim men have long been compared to terrorists who are naturally prone to violence, the stereotype behind Muslim women is that they lack control and agency over our lives. But for most Muslim women in the West, wearing the hijab is an intimate matter of choice – a marker of empowerment, and a claim to identity. And while there are some communities and three countries around the world where the hijab has been made mandatory, generalizing about the veil and all women wearing it is patriarchal and Islamophobic.

I, myself, choose not to veil. But my best friend, an Alberta-based physician, has worn a head scarf since she was little as a girl pictured in CMAJ, and I assure you she bikes, swims, and goes hiking. is – all started while working in a medical clinic by her mother, who was herself a hijabi doctor. My sister-in-law was raised in a family where no one wore a hijab, and yet began veiling shortly before starting her journey into pediatrics. We all consider ourselves practicing Muslim women, doing our best to personally interpret and follow the standards of modesty that the Qur’an asks of all Muslims regardless of gender.

The letter has been attacked by Muslim Advisory Council of Canada And this National Council of Muslims of Canada, Hijabi health care workers have taken to social media to share examples from their personal lives. A therapist shares the story of her 11-year-old daughter, who chose to wear a hijab and loves to skateboard, ice skate, swim and ride a bike. Others have noted that by publishing letters recounting the experiences of a non-hijabi, male health care provider known only to a female Muslim hijabi, the CMAJ has signaled to hijabi health care workers that their There is no voice or choice in matters affecting the pass. their own life. The irony is laughable.

The CMAJ has since issued an apology, but anger and frustration continue to spread on social media. I think this is good and necessary, because anger and frustration tell our systems that something is wrong – that our balance is out of whack, that we are under attack and that action is necessary – and alerts us to danger. does, which in turn helps us find it. Justice.

And if the recent debates surrounding Quebec’s Bill 21, Ms Anvari’s case and now Dr Emil’s letter tell us anything about ourselves, it is that Islamophobia is the breathing space in Canada. It simply cannot be wanted or ignored.

Mexico approves use of Cuba's Abdala coronavirus vaccine


A person is pushed in a wheelchair to be vaccinated for COVID-19 with a third, booster shot during a vaccination campaign using AstraZeneca at the Campo Marte military venue in Mexico City, Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2021. 

(AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)


Wed, December 29, 2021

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s health safety council announced Wednesday that it has approved the use of Cuba’s three-dose Abdala coronavirus vaccine.

The council said it had sufficient evidence the vaccine is safe and effective.

The approval for emergency use does not necessarily mean the Mexican government, which is currently the country’s only purchaser of vaccines, will acquire or administer Abdala in Mexico.

Mexico has approved 10 vaccines for use, but has made little use of some, like China’s Sinopharm.

Cuba has approved Abdala for use domestically and begun commercial exports of the three-dose vaccine to Vietnam and Venezuela.

Could a comet really destroy Earth like in 'Don't Look Up' on Netflix? Astronomer explains

Elisabetta Bianchini
Wed, December 29, 2021

Adam McKay’s newest movie Don't Look Up (now on Netflix), starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett, tells the fictional story of a comet set to destroy Earth in six months — but could that really ever happen?

Dr. Amy Mainzer, an astronomer and advisor on the movie, said it’s “really, really unlikely.”

“The good news is a really major event like what's portrayed in the movie, we know that, that can't happen very regularly…because we're here,” Mainzer explained to Yahoo Canada. “If that sort of thing happened on a regular basis in our time span, compared to the span that humans have been on the planet, well we wouldn't be here."

“The last such major event was the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. So we know that this is a very infrequent event, that said, smaller events can happen more frequently. So that's why we go out and we look for the objects and try to figure out where they are.”

Mainzer and her team actually discovered Comet NEOWISE in 2020, the brightest comet in the northern hemisphere since Hale-Bopp in 1997.

While Mainzer started working on Don’t Look Up before NEOWISE was discovered, some aspects of the comet in the movie were modelled after this particular real-life comet.

“It had a pretty good set of orbital characteristics for what we were looking for, for the movie,” Mainzer said.”In fact, I even think I took some of the discovery images of comet NEOWISE.”

“I looked at a bunch of different comet orbits and kind of picked one that I thought best represented what we were looking for in terms of the plot.”

DON'T LOOK UP (L to R) LEONARDO DICAPRIO as DR. RANDALL MINDY, and JENNIFER LAWRENCE as KATE DIBIASKY. (NIKO TAVERNISE/NETFLIX)

Women in the male-dominated field of astronomy

The movie starts when astronomy graduate student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a massive comet, under the supervision of her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). While there’s excitement about the discovery, it turns out that it’s on a direct course to collide with Earth in six months, which would destroy the planet.

Kate and Randall try to alert the public and government officials about the severity of this comet, but are just met with pushback, and even comet deniers who spread misinformation about the severity of the situation.

Mainzer worked with both Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio on making their characters as authentic as possible, but specifically, Mainzer had several detailed conversations with Lawrence about being a woman in the male-dominated field of science and astronomy.

“It's a historical fact that this field has been extremely male-dominated throughout most of its existence, and it is changing, more and more women are getting into the hard sciences, which is great to see, but we still have a really long way to go,” she said.

“The movie, I think, touches on this in a couple of important ways, there are a couple of scenes where you can just sort of see Kate's face fall when she's not acknowledged for her important work in a couple of spots.”

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - DECEMBER 05: Amy Mainzer attends the "Don't Look Up" World Premiere at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 05, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Netflix)

'A plea to make decisions based on the tools of science'

Ultimately, Mainzer hopes that people who watch Don’t Look Up will understand that scientists are “knocking [themselves] out” trying to bring their research and knowledge to the public.

“The movie, hopefully, is a plea to make decisions based on the tools of science,” she said. “Science-based decision making is really at the core of this movie and the future, how we live as humanity on this planet, is very much up to us.”

“So if we make good science-based decisions, we can avoid the worst outcomes, we can make them less bad. So let's do that.”

In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis, in particular, Mainzer said it is “absolutely frustrating” when scientists are sounding the alarm bells, but are met with pushback and counter arguments based on misinformation.

“We are kind of hardwired…to fear the thing that's right in front of us, it's hard to sometimes grasp the immediacy of a problem with a gas that's invisible, or a virus that you can't see with your own eyes,” Mainzer explained. “Yet, it doesn't make it any less real and that's why I think we really want scientists to be seen as human beings.”

“We do science because we love it and I hope that people take away from this is that we are trying to bring you the best and most accurate information that we can, even if the news isn't always good.”

SHOOT FIRST, ASK Q? LATER
How would humans respond to the discovery of aliens? NASA enlisted dozens of religious scholars to find out.

Erin Snodgrass
Wed, December 29, 2021

Shane Kimbrough, a NASA astronaut, photographed the aurora from the International Space Station on October 12.Shane Kimbrough/NASA


NASA partially funded a program to study the intersection of religion and possible alien life.


Theologians examined how world religions would react to the discovery of extraterrestrial life.


They found that adherents of religion may be more prepared for otherworldly company.

A rabbi, a priest, and an imam walk into a research program funded by NASA to talk about the intersection of God and aliens.

It's not the start of a religious joke. It's precisely what happened at Princeton University's Center for Theological Inquiry in 2016 when two dozen theologians gathered to participate in a program partially funded by NASA to research how humans might respond to the discovery of extraterrestrial life.

One of the religious scholars who participated in the program, the Rev. Dr. Andrew Davison of the University of Cambridge, told The Times UK earlier this month that he was one of 24 experts examining the existential question from 2016 to 2017.

Will Storrar, the director of the Center for Theological Inquiry, told The Times that NASA was interested in producing "serious scholarship" addressing the "profound wonder and mystery and implication of finding microbial life on another planet."

A NASA spokesperson told The Hill that the agency's astrobiology program provided partial funding in the form of a $1.1 million grant to the Center for Theological Inquiry from 2015 to 2017. The spokesperson said NASA was not involved in selecting the study's researchers.

Davison, whose own work involves studying how astrobiology and Christianity interconnect, told the outlet that he and his fellow participants considered how followers of major religions might react to the discovery of aliens.

Their findings suggested that adherents of religion could be more prepared for otherworldly company, and that those who weren't already indebted to a religious movement could be tempted to seek one out should aliens make their presence known.

"The headline findings are that adherents of a range of religious traditions report that they can take the idea in their stride," Davison wrote in "Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine," a forthcoming book that touches on his time during the program, reported The Times, which obtained portions of the book.

Davison also wrote in the book, which is set to be released in 2022, that the nonreligious community tended to "overestimate the challenges that religious people" might face if evidence of extraterrestrial life were discovered.

Davison said a "large number of people would turn to their religious traditions for guidance" in the event of a universe-expanding discovery.

Other religious experts, including a rabbi, an imam, and an Anglican priest, agreed, telling The Times that their respective faiths and followers would likely persist, even in the face of aliens.

Detection of alien life "might come in a decade or only in future centuries or perhaps never at all," Davison wrote, "but if or where it does, it will be useful to have thought through the implications in advance."

‘(Expletive) Bigfoot!’ Alleged Sasquatch sighting in central Illinois adds to legendary creature’s big year



John Keilman, Chicago Tribune
Wed, December 29, 2021

You’ve probably seen the famous footage of Bigfoot — that grainy film from 1967 showing an apelike creature ambling through the California woods, casting a brief, leisurely glance at the camera before disappearing off screen.

What an Illinois man saw last month was rather different.

The creature he says he spotted outside the small town of Chandlerville, northwest of Springfield, was fast, athletic and massive, covering a two-lane road in two quick strides. It had incredibly long limbs and was covered in shiny black hair, the man said, and was gone almost before he could register what was happening.

“It jumped into the darkness and I was kind of freaked out about it,” said the man, a 59-year-old engineer who lives near Peoria. “I said to myself out loud, ‘(Expletive) Bigfoot!’”

In a year when UFOs have gained newfound respect, becoming the subject of a Pentagon investigative panel, the alleged Bigfoot sighting is a reminder that other paranormal phenomena are still out there, entrancing true believers and amusing skeptics.

Sasquatches are having a particularly good run. In the past 12 months they’ve been the subject of a conference in Florida, where they’re known as skunk apes, and have been featured in several documentaries and TV programs, including one that investigates whether a Bigfoot killed a trio of California pot farmers.

In Oklahoma, state Rep. Justin Humphrey, whose district hosts an annual Bigfoot festival, sought to pass a law that would establish a Sasquatch hunting season and announced a $3 million reward for the capture of a live one, though he all but admitted it was a stunt to attract tourists.

“We are wanting the whole world to come to Southeastern Oklahoma … and get involved in our bounty,” he said on the floor of the statehouse.

Illinois, which according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has had more than 300 reported sightings, has also been known to play the publicity game. Doug and Carrie DeVore, owners of the Shawnee Forest Cabins, mounted a 7-foot-tall concrete statue known as Sassy on their property several years ago, and it has since become a roadside attraction.

Carrie DeVore said she didn’t realize until later that the nearby Shawnee National Forest is a hotbed of sightings: People have phoned her to talk about their own supposed encounters with the creature.

“I am sure there are people who have seen something,” she said. “(I hear) the earnestness in their voices when they call me up, but I was a geologist before (having) kids and getting into the cabin rental business so the other part of me is like, ‘We’d find some evidence, wouldn’t we?’ But I guess it remains to be seen.”

The downstate engineer who says he spotted the mysterious figure last month asked not to be named after the initial report of his sighting, released without his knowledge, brought him a crush of unsought attention (“I don’t want to be known as Mr. Bigfoot,” he said).

He said he was driving home on Illinois Route 78 after visiting his mother when, just across the Sangamon River, he saw the creature bound across the road about 40 yards from his vehicle. It turned toward him just before it vanished, though he couldn’t make out its eyes or face.

The man said he is not a Bigfoot enthusiast and was sober as a judge when he made his sighting. He acknowledged, though, that when friends went back to look for tracks, they found nothing.

Even so, Matthew Moneymaker of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization graded the man’s sighting as Class A, or very reliable: The relative closeness of the encounter and lack of red flags about the man’s credibility helped to convince him, he said.

Moneymaker, who has produced or hosted several Bigfoot-related TV shows, said he started his organization in the mid-1990s after he spotted a “squatch” during an early morning outing in a patch of woods near Akron, Ohio.

Since then the group has received hundreds of sighting reports each year, he said, with many coming from the Pacific Northwest. His theory is that the creature is a primate genus known as Gigantopithecus that crossed into North America from Asia during the Ice Age and has managed to elude capture.

But Paul Garber, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign anthropologist who studies primates, said that is not supported by the fossil record. Gigantopithecus went extinct around 500,000 years ago, he said, and there’s no evidence it ever made it here.

He said a large primate would leave telltale signs of its presence, from droppings to bones to the remnants of “nests” in which apes sleep. Moneymaker said the lack of definitive proof could be due to Sasquatches living in extremely remote areas, but Garber said that’s also true of other big apes whose existence has been well documented.

Garber said tales of Bigfoot-like creatures exist all over the world, which he attributes to the human impulse to rationalize odd sights that defy ready explanation.

“I believe this guy saw something,” he said. “I just think the visual evidence alone is what we have. The other kind of physical evidence that would be consistent with ape behavior is what we tend not to have.”

Pressed about what he saw, the man said he thought it might have been a bear running at full tilt, but its bipedal gait and the lack of bear tracks convinced him otherwise. It resembled the classic image of Bigfoot, he said, and others who live in the area have since told him they’ve seen similar creatures.

As for the possibility of a prankster, the man said he hoped that isn’t true.

“If someone thinks of coming down to central Illinois to put a hoax on people or something, I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said. “There’s just way too many hunters. There’s too many people with guns. It would be too dangerous.”

The State Journal-Register
Letter: Christians mean satanic worshippers no harm but pray their 

minds are changed


Wed, December 29, 2021, 4

This is written concerning the article in SJ-R dated Dec. 21. Your paper has many readers especially since you joined forces with USA TODAY publication.

Only in America, you can have a satanic demon baby next to the nativity scene at the State Capitol. Looks like half goat and half person. These followers of Satan must have not read the Bible because Satan will ultimately lose the battle with the Lord Jesus Christ as shown in Revelation chapter 12.

More: Letter: Religious beliefs expressed at Capitol building can not be limited to Christianity

Christians mean them no harm but we do pray that they will change their mind and follow Jesus Christ who is seated at the right hand of the father in heaven.

Rick Petrone, 

Rochester

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Satanic baby displayed at Illinois State Capitol next to the nativity

KULTURKAMPF

A former Marine and prosecutor who monitors Trump's base online worries confrontations over race and gender education could endanger school-board members

Nicole Gaudiano

Thu, December 30, 2021

Ron Filipkowski, a former marine and ex-Republican dedicates his time to tracking right-wing conspiracy theories.Ron Filipkowski

• A criminal-defense attorney began tracking Donald Trump's base online before the 2020 election.

• His monitoring has made him concerned about the safety of school-board members.

• "I'm watching them post their home addresses online, their phone numbers," he told Insider.

Ron Filipkowski, a criminal-defense attorney in Sarasota, Florida, wasn't surprised by the violence at the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.

By then, he had tracked enough social-media posts from right-wing extremists in his spare time to see trouble ahead. He shared warnings on Twitter from the Proud Boys and one of the Oath Keepers who talked of "blood lust" on that day. The activity had picked up, he said, after President Donald Trump urged supporters on Twitter to be there.

"This is their Super Bowl," he tweeted about the Proud Boys on December 30, 2020.

Filipkowski, a former longtime Republican, began tracking extremists on social media before the 2020 election to help persuade moderates to vote for then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden over President Donald Trump.

The former Marine and state and federal prosecutor still keeps a close eye on the far right, working with two researchers he keeps anonymous, monitoring livestreamed events, podcasts, radio broadcasts, social media, and dark chat rooms. Every day, he watches streamed video of the "War Room" podcast with Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist in the White House, whom Filipkowski describes as a "chaos agent."

All that work has left him with one main concern moving forward: the safety of school-board members. The cause for alarm goes beyond the rowdy protests at meetings across the country over mask mandates, COVID-19 policies, and race and gender education.

"I'm watching them post their home addresses online, their phone numbers," he told Insider of the school-board members' personal information.

Filipkowski is prolific on Twitter, but he shares only some of what he sees. The majority of it can't be shared because it includes "violence, conspiracies, you know, crazy theories," things that would get him barred from Twitter, he said.

"For everything I post, I've seen 99 things worse," he said.

'You're like Inspector Clouseau'

Sometimes, his tweets include derisive commentary. For example, "The editor on this is going to have one of the most difficult jobs in America in 2022," he tweeted about GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert's forthcoming book.

Or he will post screenshots or videos, including one of a "guy screaming that if the LA City Council doesn't lift their mask mandate 'get your guns' because it's going to be 'civil war.'"

Filipkowski's Twitter account, which is followed by more than 263,000 people, is getting media attention, and he's been doing television interviews about his work.

"You're like Inspector Clouseau out there, assembling all this data," the CNN host Michael Smerconish said during an interview with Filipkowski.

Filipkowski, 53, has a day job, so why keep doing this after Biden won? He told Insider he believed the country and democracy were in peril. He sees Trump trying to get elected officials who control voting across the country replaced, he said, adding: "I believe that 2024 could be our last real democratic election."

In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, Filipkowski said Trump loyalists who promoted and attended the January 6 rally had now made targets of school boards, city and county commissions, secretaries of state, and supervisors of elections.

"They have taken their disparate causes and motives to the local level, refocusing on softer, more vulnerable targets such as local government agencies because, according to the new motto of one of their ubiquitous leaders, former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, 'Local action has a national impact,'" he wrote.

Filipkowski, who taught high-school history for a few years, told Insider he felt invested in the challenges facing school-board members because he had documented so many of the wild meetings. Many members don't feel protected by local law enforcement, he said, and the activists who are intimidating them are trying to get them to quit.

Attorney General Merrick Garland drew attention to the problem when he called on the FBI to address illegal threats against public servants, Filipkowski said. But the response was "just bungled," he said, with the Department of Justice relying too much on a National School Boards Association's complaint — one that riled Republicans by comparing threats to domestic terrorism.

In October, he tweeted a video of the Brevard County School Board member Jennifer Jenkins' speech about the threats and harassment she had endured. "THIS is what the Garland memo was about," he wrote, not about Republicans' "BS that the FBI is arresting moms for speaking!"

Republicans say the discontent originated with parents, but Filipkowski said others were clearly orchestrating the chaos on masks and race education. They include "influencers, the grifters, the people making money off this and political leaders who are exploiting it for votes," he said.

A crowd of angry, largely unmasked people at a school-board meeting objecting to Gov. John Bel Edwards' mask mandate for schools on August 18, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.AP Photo/Melinda Deslatte

Trump's 'Frankenstein monster'

Until December 2020, Filipkowski served on Florida's 12th Circuit Judicial Nominating Commission after being reappointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. He resigned in protest over the treatment of the former state data scientist Rebekah Jones, who said she was fired for refusing to manipulate COVID-19 data and who was later arrested. Filipkowski's pinned tweet is his resignation letter.

His protest hasn't earned him friends in DeSantis' office, which denies Jones' allegations. "How either of these characters became left-wing celebrities is puzzling," Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for the Executive Office of the Governor, wrote in an email to Insider.

It was surprising to his former law partner Jeffrey Haynes to see Filipkowski change his party registration after years of being a hard-core Republican who was active in the local party. "His first child's name is Ronnie Reagan Filipkowski," Haynes said.

Filipkowski had intended to change to an independent this year, but after January 6, he said he became a Democrat the following day. What led him to abandon the GOP, specifically, is a "long answer," he told Insider, but he wrote in his op-ed that he no longer recognized the party.

He and the other researchers aren't being paid for monitoring the far-right, though he hopes to someday make a career in journalism or opposition research for politics.

He could have a lot of work, given the direction he believes that the Republican Party is headed. What he has seen online, he said, has left him "shook" by how radicalized people have become. Trump has "created a Frankenstein monster, and it's the MAGA people," he said.

That Trump gets booed when he talks about vaccines shows how he has lost control, he said.

"That's the base pushing back, saying, 'Yo, we're in charge now, not you,'" he said.

INTERNECINE RIVALRIES ON THE RIGHT

The Infowars host Alex Jones slammed Trump's social-media network and called him 'pathetic'for supporting the COVID-19 vaccine

Matthew Loh

Thu, December 30, 2021

Alex Jones lashed out at Trump on Wednesday, saying the former president "doesn't know what he's doing."Zach Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images

• Jones came out swinging against former President Donald Trump on Wednesday.

• Angered by Trump's support of vaccines, Jones threatened to "dish all the dirt" on him.

• Jones criticized Trump's social-media platform Truth Social, suggesting it isn't "a real network."

The Infowars host Alex Jones tore into former President Donald Trump and his upcoming social network Truth Social over Trump's recent public approval of COVID-19 vaccines.

On Wednesday, Jones, previously a staunch and outspoken Trump supporter, told listeners of his Infowars show to "move on" from the former president.

"Yeah, we all wish Trump would do the right thing. But listen, I've got the inside baseball on Trump. He doesn't know what's going on. And I'm not even defending Trump. I'm just saying we've got to move on," said Jones, a prominent conspiracy theorist on the right.

He then threatened to "dish all the dirt" on Trump, saying he had access to unnamed sources from "inside Trump's camp," The Daily Beast's Zachary Petrizzo first reported.

"It's not to hurt Trump. It's so people can know how pathetic he is when you think he is playing 4D chess going to save you and he's not," Jones said.

He said that Trump is "not a bad guy," but added that the former president "doesn't know what he's doing, and he's surrounded by bad advisors."

Jones proceeded to criticize Truth Social as well. "He's got that multibillion-dollar social-media network based on Mastodon that they said's an original program that doesn't even work," he said, referring to the open-source social-media software.

"And there's all these SEC criminal investigations of it right now," Jones continued. "And it's all falling apart. I wish Trump could go build a real network."

Trump revealed during a December 19 appearance with the former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly that he'd gotten a booster shot and told people in the crowd not to boo because of it. Later in an interview with the conservative commentator and activist Candace Owens, he repeated the same sentiment.

"Trump did a lot of good, and I believed in him," Jones later said after Trump's comments. "So the fact that he's done this makes it personal. It makes it hurt!"

On a Christmas broadcast, Jones said Trump was either "completely ignorant" or "one of the most evil men who ever lived."

Jones joins several far-right commentators in their newfound criticism of the former president.

Others who have recently lashed out against Trump include the radio host and longtime Trump supporter Wayne Allyn Root, who said on Jones' show that Trump is "horribly wrong" about the vaccines and "needs an intervention."

The "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander blasted Trump as well, writing on his Telegram channel: "Trump, stop. Just stop. Have your position (backed by Fauci) and allow us to have ours (which is backed by science). This losing is getting boomer level annoying."

Alex Jones threatens to ‘dish all the dirt’ on Trump in retaliation for his support of vaccines

Oliver O'Connell
Thu, December 30, 2021

Right-wing conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones is threatening to “dish all the dirt” on Donald Trump because of the former president’s support for Covid-19 vaccines.

Mr Jones told his listeners it was time to “move on” from Mr Trump and that any impression that he was “playing 4D chess” was wrong and that he was not going to save them.

On his Wednesday afternoon show on InfoWars, he said: “Yeah, we all wish Trump would do the right thing, but listen, I’ve got the inside baseball on Trump. He doesn’t know what’s going on, and I’m not even defending Trump, I’m just saying we’ve got to move on.”


“In fact — you know what — maybe to get Trump’s attention, ‘cause I don’t even get this from Roger Stone, I get this from people directly in Trump’s camp,” he continued.

“Maybe I should just dish all the dirt — you know what, you know what — I am going to dish it all on Trump next hour.”

Mr Jones added: “It’s not to hurt Trump, it’s so people can know how pathetic he is, when you think he is playing 4D chess, going to save you and he’s not!”

“He’s not a bad guy, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s surrounded by bad advisors.”

Mr Trump’s support for Covid-19 vaccines — the funding of which through Operation Warp Speed was one of the few widely lauded achievements of this presidency — is at odds with many of his supporters and fringe commentators such as Mr Jones.

Recently, the former president was booed on stage when he said he had received a booster shot of the vaccine as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises all Americans receive.

Earlier this month Mr Jones excoriated Mr Trump on his show lumping him in with many of the traditional targets of the far right.

“Hell, we’re fighting Bill Gates and Fauci and Biden and the New World Order and Psaki and the Davos Group,” he said before Christmas, “and now we’ve got Trump on their team!”

Mr Jones has not yet revealed any “dirt” on the former president.

In the same segment on Wednesday, the radio host also referred to Bill Gates as a “psychotic eugenicist piece of garbage”, and railed against Republican lawmakers Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul.