How to Fight Decades of Environmental Racism

The NRDC’s new head of justice and equity talks about what environmental justice means, and how community power-building is essential to that work.

By Danielle Renwick

Twitter
JUNE 28, 2022
THE NATION
JULY 11/18, 2022, ISSUE


Melissa Lin Perrella. (Ann Johansson for the NRDC)


The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Melissa Lin Perrella sees a direct line from her childhood in a small town in Central California in the 1980s to her work on the front lines of environmental justice.

This article is copublished with Nexus Media News and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

“We looked different from most everyone else; my house smelled different, because the food we ate was different,” she said. She was bullied. “It [affected] my confidence and what I thought was possible for myself, but it also made me the advocate that I am.” Today, Lin Perrella is the head of justice and equity for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, a role that was created last year. The move is part of a larger shift among environmental organizations toward recognizing that climate change and pollution do not affect all communities equally.

Lin Perrella got her start with the NRDC nearly 20 years ago in the organization’s Santa Monica office, where she worked alongside communities near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, areas with some of the worst air quality in the state. 

“That’s where I learned that in order for environmental policies to be responsive and durable, they have to be prioritized and really led by the communities that are most impacted by them,” she said.

DANIELLE RENWICK: How has your understanding of environmental justice changed over the years?

MELISSA LIN PERRELLA: In the beginning, I was very focused on outcomes. But what I think has deepened over the years is my understanding of how to do that work—the need to honor local community leadership and intentionally take care not to supplant it. Even a well-intended organization can disrupt local power-building if it does not intentionally look for ways to share power. I’ve learned that environmental justice means reducing pollution in communities of color and low-income communities, and building community power is part of that work.

DR: How does that relate to your new role at the NRDC?

MLP: If we’re working alongside communities to close down a polluting facility, NRDC shouldn’t stop there. We should also be working alongside communities to transition workers that were working at that facility [to green jobs]. If we’re going to propose new green spaces, we should be working alongside housing advocates to ensure that the new park doesn’t result in gentrification.

RELATED ARTICLE

“HANDSHAKE ACTIVISM” WON’T DEFUSE THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY
Bill McKibben

DR: You’ve said that being bullied as a child for being Asian American is part of what brought you to advocacy work.

MLP: All forms of violence, whether it’s a punch to your gut or pollution that burns your lungs, is targeted at those who are perceived as unable to fight back. Attackers choose who they attack. I’m vulnerable because of my race, my gender, my size—and similarly, polluters don’t site their facilities randomly. They go for communities that are perceived as lacking the power to resist. That’s why I think it’s so important for the environmental movement to support community power-building so that these perceptions change.

DR: Tell me about your work on clean air in Southern California.

MLP: The operations at the ports of LA and Long Beach produce more smog-forming pollution than all 6 million cars in the region. When I was an NRDC clean-air attorney, we recognized that if we wanted to make any dent in Southern California’s air pollution problem, we had to tackle the air pollution coming from port operations. That’s all of the ships, trains, the trucks and equipment. Something like 40 percent of all the goods that come into the US by water come in through the ports of LA and Long Beach.

The movement of all of those goods has created diesel death zones in Southern California. These are communities with higher rates of cancer and premature death and childhood asthma. NRDC has worked alongside community partners for about 20 years now, developing innovative, first-of-their-kind clean air policies with the port and suing the port when we felt like we needed to and standing next to the port when we thought they adopted a good policy.

DR: The Biden administration has pledged to deliver 40 percent of federal climate-related investments to “disadvantaged communities,” and it released a screening tool to determine which ones to include. The tool has been criticized because it doesn’t include race. Can a “race-neutral” environmental justice strategy succeed?

MLP: You need a comprehensive suite of policies and tools that consider race in order to correct long-
standing environmental racism, and to see whether the policies enacted actually reduced racial disparities in environmental protection and health outcomes. Some of these policies include restrictions on siting new environmental hazards in places that already get high and disproportionate amounts of pollution. They should also include actions to reduce existing pollution burdens on low-income communities and communities of color.

It’s not a mystery what needs to be done. Environmental justice advocates’ vision and policy priorities can be found in initiatives like the federal Environmental Justice for All Act, a bill that environmental justice leaders have been instrumental in crafting. From where I sit at NRDC, I can use the organization’s platform to lend its support to these movement voices and efforts.

ABOLISH SCOTUS

Thomas and Alito Are Appropriating Racial Justice to Push a Radical Agenda

Cynical whataboutism is the conservative legal movement’s new ploy.

Mother Jones illustration; Chip Somodevilla/Getty

MELISSA MURRAY

Mother Jones

JUNE 28, 2022

Just a day after the Supreme Court issued a radical decision on gun rights, it officially declared Roe v. Wade a dead letter. In all of the tumult surrounding the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, even eagle-eyed Court watchers would have been forgiven for overlooking one curious detail. After all, it was overlooked when it appeared in the draft opinion that was leaked in May. Nestled among Justice Samuel Alito’s arguments laying waste to nearly 50 years of abortion precedent lurked an unassuming footnote documenting a narrative advanced in amicus briefs submitted to the high court. These “friend of the court” briefs, Justice Alito explained, “present[ed] arguments about the motives” of those favoring “liberal access to abortion,” namely “that some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population.”

According to Alito, claiming abortion is a tool of racial genocide is not beyond the pale. “[I]t is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect.” After all, he noted “[a] highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are black.” As further support for the view that abortion has functioned as a tool of eugenics, Alito cited Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate opinion in 2019’s Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, a challenge to an Indiana law that prohibited abortion where undertaken for reasons of race or sex selection or because of the diagnosis of a fetal anomaly. The Court declined to review the law, deferring the question of the constitutionality of such “reason bans” to another day. While Justice Thomas agreed with the decision to decline review, he nonetheless wrote separately to emphasize that the day was coming when the Court would have “to confront the constitutionality of laws like Indiana’s,” which, in his view, merely reflected a “compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.”

Justice Thomas noted that “[t]he foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement,” which “developed alongside the American eugenics movement.”

As evidence of the “eugenic potential” of abortion and reproductive rights, Justice Thomas noted that “[t]he foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement,” which “developed alongside the American eugenics movement.” Indeed, reproductive rights advocates like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and the modern birth control movement, and Alan Guttmacher, who served as the President of Planned Parenthood in the 1960s, worked hand in glove with the eugenics movement, endorsing contraception and abortion as effective methods for “controlling the population and improving its quality.” But if the eugenics movement was principally concerned with optimizing the genetic profile of the white race, Sanger and Guttmacher’s commitment to population control through reproductive freedom reflected a shared concern for high maternal mortality rates and a commitment to allowing women to make decisions about childbearing—and the size of their families—for themselves.

Uninterested in this nuance, Justice Thomas maintains that the work of these birth control pioneers was shot through with racial animus. Margaret Sanger, he notes, “campaigned for birth control in black communities”—creating a birth-control clinic in Harlem as well as the “Negro Project,” which worked with Black leaders like W.E.B. DuBois and Black clergy to promote birth control in poor, Southern Black communities. Thomas’s implication is clear: contraception and abortion—the twin pillars of reproductive rights—are not merely rife with “eugenic potential,” they are, put simply, tools of racial injustice.

Justice Alito’s decision to include this footnote, and its not-so-subtle association of abortion with eugenics and racial genocide, in the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs is puzzling, if only because, as a matter of law, it is entirely gratuitous. Having laid out his case that Roe is “egregiously wrong” because the abortion right is unmoored from constitutional text and lacks deep roots in the country’s history and traditions, there was no need to invoke racial eugenics. So, why did Justice Alito, a shrewd tactician when it comes to advancing the conservative legal project, insist on this unusual aside?

Perhaps it was merely an anodyne gesture of collegiality toward Justice Thomas, who, as the most senior justice in the majority, could have kept this plum opinion assignment for himself, but instead allowed Justice Alito the opportunity to spear Roe’s great white whale. After all, Justice Thomas has diligently husbanded the notion of “eugenic abortion” to great effect, helping it to flourish in the lower federal courts, particularly among conservative jurists. When the Sixth Circuit, for example, recently upheld an Ohio law that barred doctors from performing abortions on women who choose to end their pregnancies because the fetus has Down syndrome, the majority opinion and all but one of the concurrences referenced Thomas’ Box concurrence and its condemnation of “eugenic” abortion. Judge Richard Allen Griffin explicitly noted “Nazi Germany’s horrific implementation of eugenics,” musing that the tragic practice of eugenics “continues today with modern-day abortions.”

Colleagueship aside, Alito’s footnote seems like a strategic choice—an effort to till new ground in an opinion that will be dissected and scrutinized for generations to come. With this in mind, the footnote seems less like an inadvertent aside or a gesture of collegiality, and more like a poison pill, laying the foundation for extending the assault on reproductive rights to contraception, with which Margaret Sanger is most closely associated. This prospect is not far-fetched, especially considering that the Court has previously justified revisiting and overturning earlier decisions in order to remedy racial injustice—Brown v. Board of Education’s overruling of Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate but equal doctrine is perhaps the most famous example. Indeed, in his own concurrence to the Dobbs majority opinion, Justice Thomas made the case for revisiting—and eventually overruling—precedents securing the right to contraception, same-sex marriage, and same-sex sexuality.

The conservative impulse to use race as a means of toppling reproductive rights has unexpected roots. Over the last 20 years, reproductive justice advocates have made the case that restrictions on abortion and contraception are disproportionately borne by women of color and poor women, and that it is essential to consider reproductive rights in concert with economic and environmental justice, immigration status, disability, and race, class, and sexual orientation. This critique has proved incredibly effective, prompting mainstream reproductive rights groups, like Planned Parenthood and NARAL, to expand their agendas beyond abortion to include things like access to affordable contraception, sex education, pre- and post-natal care, family leave, and childcare.

Conservatives also noted the reproductive justice movement’s success in reframing the debate. In time, the pro-life movement too began to recast antipathy to abortion as a matter of social justice. Responding to claims that abortion was a reasonable choice for women of limited means and resources, the pro-life movement invested heavily in the expansion of crisis pregnancy centers—which sought to dissuade pregnant individuals from abortion, in part by providing free or low-cost access to prenatal testing, prenatal care, diapers, and other newborn essentials.

Simultaneously, the pro-life movement began emphasizing the supposed harms that abortion posed to minority children and their communities. The Radiance Foundation, an antiabortion group, placed billboards in predominately Black neighborhoods staunchly asserting that “Black children are an endangered species.” Life Always, another prominent pro-life group, orchestrated a billboard campaign in minority neighborhoods that proclaimed “The Most Dangerous Place for an African American is in the Womb.” More recently, the tagline Black Lives Matter has been met with retorts from antiabortion groups that unborn Black lives matter.

The right’s embrace of racial justice may seem curious—particularly given the conservative assault on identity politics, anti-discrimination laws, and voting rights protections. But in some respects, this pivot is entirely predictable. It’s not the first time the conservative movement has repackaged some of its core agenda items in the wrappings of racial equity.

Ten years ago, for example, the defense of Second Amendment rights was framed primarily in terms of public safety. But more recently, advocates have recast their support of more robust gun rights as an appeal to racial justice. And once again, Justice Thomas has led the charge. In a separate concurrence in 2010’s McDonald v. City of Chicago, Justice Thomas linked the right to bear arms to thwarted Black citizenship. As he explained, the federal government’s failure to protect Second Amendment rights during Reconstruction “enabled private forces, often with the assistance of local governments, to subjugate the newly freed slaves and their descendants through a wave of private violence designed to drive blacks from the voting booth and force them into peonage, an effective return to slavery.” In conjuring up images of lynchings and other forms of racial violence, Justice Thomas effectively insisted that more expansive gun rights are antidotes to racism.In conjuring up images of lynchings and other forms of racial violence, Justice Thomas effectively insisted that more expansive gun rights are antidotes to racism.

Justice Thomas reprised these arguments in his majority opinion in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court’s recent decision striking down New York’s concealed carry permitting regime and holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms in public spaces. He noted the systematic efforts to disarm newly freed Blacks and recounted how “blacks used publicly carried weapons to defend themselves and their communities” in the postbellum period. Indeed, in a truly stunning aside, Justice Thomas cited Dred Scott v. Sanford, the 1857 case that precipitated the Civil War, for the view that the right to bear arms was so clearly understood as a marker of citizenship that Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of Dred Scott, fretted that recognizing Blacks as full citizens would permit them “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Not to be outdone on racial wokeness, Justice Alito concurred separately to detail circumstances in which “[o]rdinary citizens frequently use firearms to protect themselves from criminal attack.” In particular, he noted that the Court had fielded amicus briefs from groups, including the Asian Pacific American Gun Owners Association, “whose members feel that they have special reasons to fear attacks.”

This racial pivot is a potent form of “whataboutism” that can be incredibly hard to refute—what about the unarmed Blacks, like Ahmaud Arbery, who are left vulnerable to white supremacist violence? Do they not deserve the Second Amendment’s protection to defend themselves and their families against racial violence? In another amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in Bruen, the National African American Gun Association, a group of Black gun owners, doubled down on this point, observing that, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Southern states relied on gun control laws to enforce Jim Crow. Their brief even recounts Martin Luther King, Jr.’s unsuccessful efforts to secure a gun license in the face of credible threats against himself and his family.

This kind of racialized logic is not only hard to refute—it is hard to resist, wooing some strange bedfellows to the gun rights cause. Because the scourge of gun violence has disproportionately impacted minority communities, Black voters have mostly sided with gun control measures. But a racialized reframing of gun rights has prompted a reappraisal by some. A group of Black Legal Aid Lawyers filed an amicus brief in support of striking down New York’s concealed carry permitting law. The brief raised eyebrows—legal aid lawyers do not tend to be conservative, after all. But they argued that because gun restrictions are often selectively enforced, such laws provide a potent vehicle for increased state surveillance—and criminalization—of minorities. It was the kind of argument that liberals would typically make. And perhaps that was the point. When the decision in Bruen was announced, the group applauded it as “an affirmative step toward ending arbitrary licensing standards that have inhibited lawful Black and Brown gun ownership in New York.”

Abortion and gun rights are the twin pillars of the modern conservative legal movement. And while this Court, with its 6-3 conservative super-majority, has just overruled Roe and expanded gun rights, they surely recognize that broad swaths of the country object to their vision of the Constitution. Which is why this pivot to race is so attractive. And it is hard, perhaps even impossible, for any other Justice to refute Justice Thomas’s account of racial harm. He is, after all, the only member of the Court that can speak from personal experience about the issues facing the Black community. Ketanji Brown Jackson will surely alter the Court’s racial dynamics, providing a useful foil to Justice Thomas’s account of race, but her voice was not yet available in these two consequential decisions.

The appeal to race also usefully complicates the traditional ideological alignments, fracturing the coalition of social justice groups, while uniting the conservative legal movement and some unexpected allies under the banner of racial uplift. And perhaps most importantly, pivoting to race provides the Court with the veneer of racial justice that helps to insulate their most egregious decisions from the inevitable public blowback. After all, when progressives decry the dismantling of Roe and the expansion of the Second Amendment, conservatives need only parrot back these new racial talking points to insist that they are the ones who are centering the needs of minority communities.

The right’s newfound interest in race speaks to the left’s success in centering questions of racial justice in contemporary political discourse. When millions of protesters lined the streets to mourn George Floyd and challenge the status quo, they made clear that our political and legal discourses would have to grapple with questions of race and racialized violence. The right’s recent embrace of race—even as it decries identity politics and critical race theory—would be amusing if it weren’t so obviously cynical. The Court has cloaked its radically conservative legal agenda in a mantle of wokeness that conservatives would be quick to denounce—if it weren’t so useful for achieving their most deeply cherished goals.

ABOLISH SCOTUS

Poll: Confidence in Supreme Court collapses as just 33% agree with decision to overturn Roe v. Wade

Andrew Romano

·West Coast Correspondent

Tue, June 28, 2022 

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that more than six in 10 Americans (61%) now have little or no confidence in the Supreme Court after its decision Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade — a near-total reversal from the 70% of voters who expressed at least some confidence in the court right before conservative justices gained a 6-3 majority with the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett in October 2020.

A more recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted in May 2022 — immediately after Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion on Roe first leaked — found that the court’s standing was already slipping with conservatives in control.

Since Roe was officially reversed, however, the number of Americans who express a total lack of confidence in the court has soared by 14 percentage points (to 39%), with large increases among Democrats (+24 points) and independents (+14 points). A clear majority of Democrats (54%) now say they have zero confidence in the court, while another 22% say they have only “a little”; just a quarter have “some” (18%) or “a lot” (7%).

Since Friday's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, 54% of Democrats say they have lost confidence in the Supreme Court. (Yahoo News/YouGov)

At the same time, half of all Americans (50%) now disapprove of the way the Supreme Court is doing its job, an 8-point jump from last month (driven by increases of 11 points among both Democrats [to 70%] and independents [to 52%]). Overall, just 37% of Americans approve.

And even fewer (33%) say they agree with the court’s actual decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — the decision at the center of its collapsing reputation.

The other two-thirds of Americans either disagree with the court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health (49%) or say they’re not sure (18%).

Now that Roe is gone, the new survey of 1,630 U.S. adults, which was conducted from June 24 to 27, is striking in part because it reveals a counterintuitive gap in energy and emotion between Americans who favor abortion rights and those who oppose them.

For decades, so-called pro-life forces have been portrayed as the more passionate side in U.S. politics. But Dobbs may change that.

Lisa Turner holds her teenage daughter Lucy Kramer during a candlelight vigil outside the Supreme Court on Sunday night. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

When asked to choose from a list of emotions describing their reaction to the end of Roe v. Wade, for instance, far more Americans say they are "disgusted" (34%), "outraged" (30%) or "sad" (31%) than say they are "happy" (16%), "grateful" (16%) or "thrilled" (11%). When combined, nearly twice as many Americans place themselves in the first category (46%) than in the second (24%).

Why? Because while 74% of Americans who think abortion should be mostly legal say they feel disgusted, sad or outraged, a far smaller percentage of Americans who think abortion should be mostly illegal say they feel grateful, happy or thrilled (57%).

This could have political consequences in the 2022 midterms. For one thing, more Democrats now name abortion (17%) over inflation (16%) as “the most important issue to you when thinking about this year’s election,” suggesting that the issue could motivate them to turn out at the polls. Among all voters, abortion (11%) now ranks third behind inflation (34%) and democracy (20%), with crime (4%), immigration (7%), health care (5%) and climate change (5%) trailing well behind.

Likewise, Americans now say the Democratic Party (40%) would do a better job handling abortion than the Republican Party (31%), up slightly from 38%-32% a month ago.

Adjectives used to describe the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade tended to be more negative than positive in a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll. (Yahoo News/YouGov)

But perhaps most importantly, the new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that 45% of registered voters now say they would vote for a Democrat for Congress if the election were held today, versus 38% who say they would vote for a Republican — a 7-point gap that has nearly doubled since last month. And when explicitly asked to choose between a “pro-choice” Democrat (47%) and a “pro-life” Republican (32%), that same gap actually doubles again, to 15 points.

Since Friday, national Democrats from President Biden on down have argued that “Roe is on the ballot” this fall; on Monday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the U.S. House would soon take up legislation to "further codify freedoms which Americans currently enjoy.” Meanwhile, former Republican Vice President Mike Pence, among others, has said conservatives “must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land.”

If the coming congressional elections do become a battle between national abortion protections on one side and a national abortion ban on the other, Democrats will likely be on firmer political footing.

Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, 52% of registered voters say they want Congress to pass “a law that keeps abortion as legal and accessible nationwide as it has been under Roe”; just 35% of voters oppose such a law. Even more voters (64%) oppose "passing a law that bans abortion nationwide” (i.e., the Pence position). Less than a quarter (23%) favor such a ban — including only half of those who say abortion itself should be illegal in most or all cases.

______________

The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,630 U.S. adults interviewed online from June 24 to 27, 2022. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race and education based on the American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, as well as 2020 presidential vote (or non-vote) and voter registration status. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.9%.

ABOLISH SCOTUS

The US supreme court is letting prayer back in public schools. This is unsettling

The court’s rightwing majority was extremely receptive to a case this week that would weaken the separation of church and state

A district judge called Kennedy’s claim to be engaged in ‘personal, private prayers’ a ‘deceitful narrative.’

Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Moira Donegan

THE GUARDIAN
Tue 28 Jun 2022 

On Monday, the United States supreme court overturned decades of precedent governing the separation of church and state, and achieved one of the most long-standing goals of the Christian right: the return of official Christian prayer to public schools.

Kennedy v Bremerton School District had a strange path to the supreme court. Initially filed in 2015, the case concerns Joseph Kennedy, formerly a public high school football coach from a Seattle suburb, who sued the community that used to employ him for religious discrimination after the school objected to his habit of making public, ostentatious Christian prayers on the 50 yard line at football games, surrounded by young athletes. Kennedy has lost at the district and circuit levels; he moved to Florida in 2019, which technically should have rendered his case moot. But the supreme court agreed to hear his case anyway. This week, they ruled in his favor, 6-3.

Students now face the prospect of their schools becoming sites of religious pressure and indoctrination

The facts of what happened with Coach Kennedy at the school district are contested, but only because Kennedy himself keeps revising them. In allowing Coach Kennedy to pray publicly at school, while conducting his official duties as a public official, Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, characterized the prayers this way: “Mr. Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.”

Sam Alito, in his concurrence, claimed that Kennedy “acted in a purely private capacity.” That’s Kennedy’s version of events. But evidence suggests things looked different. In her dissent, Justice Sonya Sotomayor cast doubt on the idea that the coach offered his prayers “quietly, while his students were otherwise occupied.” She included a photograph of Coach Kennedy at one of his game night prayers. In the picture, he stands surrounded by a dense group of dozens of high school football players, uniformed and kneeling at his feet. Kennedy is speaking with a football helmet in his hand, stretched high above his head in what looks like a gesture of command. Spectators can be seen in the background, looking on from the stands. Quiet and private this was not.

The court held that the school was required to allow this: that in attempting to maintain separation of church and state – as is required by the first amendment’s establishment clause – they were actually infringing on Coach Kennedy’s free exercise rights. Thus, the court allowed the free exercise clause to effectively moot the establishment clause, denying Americans like Coach Kennedy’s students the freedom from religion that the church-state divide had previously granted them. It should not escape us that in issuing this ruling, and overturning a decades-old test for establishing the efficacy of church-state separation measures, the court relied on a version of the facts that is blatantly, demonstrably false.

All of this could have been avoided, because in fact, over the course of Kennedy’s employment, the school district took pains to balance the coach’s desire for prayer with their own obligations to remain religiously neutral. Starting from when he began coaching in 2008, Kennedy, an evangelical Christian, initially prayed to himself at games, a practice that nobody had a problem with. He says that he got the initial idea from a movie, the low-budget 2006 Christian football drama “Facing the Giants,” which he saw on TV. The film features a fictional coach who prays with his high school football team. But at some point, Kennedy’s praying became louder, and more public. He would stand on the 50-yardline just after the final whistle, and pray out loud. Teen athletes, both from his team and from the opposing side, would kneel with him in a large scrum; Kennedy mixed his prayers with pep talks. Kennedy says that the visible center of the field was an important location for him. “It made sense to do it on the field of battle,” he told the reporter Adam Liptak.

It is these public prayers, conducted while Kennedy was acting in his official capacity as the coach, that became an issue. The school tried to accommodate Kennedy, offering him ways to exercise his faith that did not involve students, and did not risk giving the impression that his religion was endorsed by the public school. Kennedy refused, and lawyered up. He eventually left the school – voluntarily – and began to claim that the district’s policies amounted to both religious discrimination and a violation of his free speech rights.

Kennedy and the First Liberty Institute, the conservative legal group that is funding his lawsuit, have tried to cast him as a first amendment hero. Before his departure from Bremerton, Kennedy spent months working with his media-savvy legal team to draw attention to his own prayers. The football games became a chaotic mess of culture-war politicking, with reporters, politicians, and evangelical Christians flocking to the field to witness Kennedy’s displays and join him in prayer. Parents complained about the shambolic “stampedes” of Kennedy’s fans, who would run, phones outstretched through the stands to join his prayer circles at the end of the games, sometimes knocking people down. Players were made uncomfortable, with one telling his father that he feared that if he didn’t pray, he “wouldn’t get to play as much.” Other coaches weren’t thrilled, either. In effect, the school-district-sponsored football games became more about Kennedy’s religious practice than about the football itself.

As it has done with increasing frequency over this term, the court threw out a long-held precedent in order to secure a conservative outcome in Kennedy’s case: Lemon v Kurtzman, the 1971 case that established a three-part test for Establishment Clause compliance. The new right-wing court, it seems, isn’t interested in Establishment Clause compliance at all. By ruling in Kennedy’s favor, they have opened the door for any Christian public official to claim that they are being discriminated against if any limits are placed on their religious expression during the conduct of their jobs, and imperiling any public bodies that try to maintain a separation between their employee’s private religious actions and their own public official ones. And they have made American public schools vulnerable to the religious proclivities of their teachers and administrators, which can now be wielded in ways that coerce the participation of students.

The supreme court seems poised to allow this. Why? Because its conservative supermajority has adopted a radically expansionist view of the first amendment’s free exercise clause, interpreting the constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion in a way that in fact tramples on the freedoms of others. An emergent trend in conservative thought – backed by a growing body of case law emerging from the Republican-controlled federal bench – has begun framing what were once considered standard features of the separation of church and state as oppressive discrimination against Christians.

It’s an absurd argument, one that would not hold water before this court if it were brought by a non-Christian. But Kennedy got a sympathetic ear, and a maximalist ruling. “That’s protected speech,” Amy Coney Barrett declared bluntly of Kennedy’s prayer circles at oral arguments. For Christians, at least, the supreme court has redefined religious liberty – as religious privilege.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

NCAA

Growing Participation, Widening Funding Gap

A report from the National Collegiate Athletic Association finds women’s participation in college sports is growing—but so is the funding gap between men’s and women’s programs.

Sara Weissman
June 28, 2022

STEPH CHAMBERS/GETTY IMAGES


Women are participating in college sports at higher rates than in the past, but men’s participation still outpaces women’s—and the funding gap between women’s and men’s programs continues to widen, according to a recent report by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The report, released Thursday by the NCAA inclusion office, marks the 50th anniversary of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs that receive federal funds and is well-known for opening up opportunities in college women’s sports.

“Title IX has been a federal law for 50 years,” the report reads. “This milestone anniversary marks an opportune time to ask why aren’t we there yet? How can we work together to eliminate sex discrimination in education? How can we succeed at providing equitable intercollegiate athletics participation opportunities; at using resources to provide equitable treatment and to create equitable experiences for all student-athletes; and at hiring and retaining diverse leaders who reflect the demographics of the increasingly diverse student-athlete population and serve as impactful role models?”

The report found that the number of women competing in college sports has increased significantly over the decades. The overall women’s participation rate in college athletics was 43.9 percent in 2020, compared to 27.8 percent in 1982, when the NCAA started hosting women’s championships across divisions.

“The number of women competing in college sports is an enormous lift from 50 years ago,” said Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

About 47 percent of athletes in Division I were women in 2020, compared to only about 26 percent in 1982. However, women made up 54 percent of the student body in Division I institutions in 2020, so the gender breakdown of athletes in the division was still out of pace with that of the student body.


Meanwhile, Divisions II and III had lower participation by women relative to their male counterparts. Division II had a 15.4 percent gap in participation rates between men and women’s sports in 2020, and Division III had a 16 percent gap, according to the report.

Opportunities in men’s college sports have grown at a slightly faster rate than women’s sports in the last two decades. Male student athletes gained nearly 73,000 participation opportunities between 2002 and 2020, while female athletes gained more than 67,000.

“Sport was a domain dominated by boys and men in our country for many decades before Title IX opened the doors for educational and athletics opportunities for girls and women,” Amy Wilson, NCAA managing director of inclusion and the author of the report, wrote in an email. “That ‘head start’ for men in the sports world in terms of acceptance and opportunities means we need continued progress for girls and women. I do not think the cause for lagging participation rates is that female student-athletes are less interested in college sports participation opportunities.”

An especially stark finding was that Division I athletic departments typically spend twice as much on men’s programs compared to women’s programs, with the largest disparity in the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, the roughly 130 institutions that play big-time football. The report found a 23 percent difference in total spending between men’s and women’s athletics programs in Division I and an 8 percent difference in spending in Divisions II and III. The gap in total expenses increased three percentage points in Division I, one percentage point in Division II and stayed the same in Division III over the last five years.

These findings come after an external review of gender equity in NCAA championships, commissioned by the NCAA and conducted by an outside law firm last summer, which found an approximately $35 million spending gap between the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments in 2019.

Across multiple reports on gender equality in sports, “we’re seeing consistent findings in terms of clear increases in opportunities for girls and women,” said Ellen J. Staurowsky, a professor of sports media at Ithaca College whose research focuses on equity in college athletics. “We’re seeing findings that continue to affirm the fact that Title IX did not destroy men’s sports. That misperception had been prevalent for so long. We’re still seeing tremendous gaps in terms of resource allocation.”

She believes there needs to be much more transparency regarding how athletic departments spend their budgets.

“We need to see more specifics about where the money is actually flowing,” she said.

Wilson said she hopes the report motivates presidents, chancellors and athletic department heads to reflect on their individual institutions’ practices and “prioritize equity in athletics.”

“I hope the disparities in the overall data spur campus and athletics department leadership to recommit to reviewing their participation opportunities, athletics’ financial aid and student-athlete experiences and treatment in their women’s and men’s athletics programs,” she said.

Women also occupy relatively few leadership positions in college sports, especially women from underrepresented backgrounds. They hold about a quarter of NCAA head coaching and athletics director positions and 30 percent of conference commissioner positions. Meanwhile, only 16 percent of female head coaches of women’s teams and female athletics directors were minority women.

Lapchick found the lack of women’s athletic leadership noted in the report to be especially jarring. He believes it should be mandatory for athletics departments to have diverse pools of candidates for positions to ensure more gender and racial diversity and pointed to the “Russell rule,” adopted by the West Coast Conference, as a model. It requires member institutions to include a candidate from a historically underrepresented background in the pool of final candidates for every athletic director, senior administrator, head coach and full-time assistant coach position in the athletic department.

“It’s my hope that … 10 years from now, 20 years, whatever reports we issue show we’re more closely following equality for both race and gender in the years ahead,” he said.

Crime and profit: Why prison is good for business in the U.S.

Data Speaks



Opinion 

28-Jun-2022

A murky world inhabited by the U.S. government, private corporations that build, manage, supply and service jails, lobbyists, and a myriad of other groups …

Welcome to the prison–industrial complex, a system that incentivizes corporate profit over offender rehabilitation and well-being.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world. It's the third most populous country worldwide, with over a billion fewer people than India, yet its total prison population is over four times larger. The American incarceration rate is even more dramatic. Thirty-four of its states have a higher incarceration rate than any country other than the U.S.



Does this mean that Americans are more prone to crime than other nationalities?

Of course not. In fact, the prison population over the past decades was bloated by a series of political campaigns and harsher sentencing legislation during the War on Drugs era from the 1970s to 1980s.

Nationwide, there was an abrupt rise in the number of people caged in the 1970s, and this trend kept accelerating through to the 2000s. Drug offences made up 63 percent of all federal prisoners in the U.S. in 1997.

Yet the weak connection between drug imprisonment and drug problems in the U.S. suggest that expanding incarceration is not likely to be effective in reducing drug crime, according to Pew Research Center.

For example, the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that in 2019 those defined as "high-level suppliers" or "importers" who take larger responsibilities in drug trades, only represented 11 percent of federal drug perpetrators, and lower-level actors like street dealers, couriers and mules made up around half of those. And they can be rapidly replaced.

So who does mass incarceration benefit? Here comes the next component of the prison–industrial complex. Overcrowded prisons make room for more profit opportunities for private corporations.

Both founded after President Ronald Reagan institutionalized the War on Drugs, CoreCivic and GEO Group collectively have over half of the prison contracts in the U.S.

Despite occasional fluctuations, the net incomes of the two companies in a recent seven years were significantly higher than the last seven-year period between 2006 and 2012, as their annual reports indicate.

Overall, there are over 4,100 companies that aim to directly profit from the prison industry. They include private prisons, private companies with overpriced commissaries and telephone services, and those using underpaid or even unpaid prison labor in their supply chains.

U.S. criminal justice officials claim that prison labor programs offer job skills to inmates that help prepare them for life on the outside. But the U.S. still has one of the world's highest recidivism rates – 76.6 percent of prisoners are rearrested within five years.

In Norway, inmates who were unemployed before conviction saw an increase of 40 percent in employment rates after release. The recidivism rate in Norway is only 20 percent. In short, rehabilitation can be effective – so why isn't it in the U.S.?

Let's look at the money flows, the last and critical element of the prison-industrial complex. Public data shows that private corporations in the prison industry could be generous political spenders.

Since 2010, 48 companies have spent a combined $17 million on lobbying as well as financially supporting federal and state candidates, major party committees and ballot measure committees. And 44 of them have revenues from the prison industry only.

The top two on the list, GEO Group and CoreCivic donated heavily to Donald Trump during his presidential campaign in 2016. Less than a month into the Trump administration, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded a six-month-old Obama directive aimed at curtailing the use of private prisons.

More prisoners mean more contracts and more opportunities for profit, contributing to higher political spending, and that in turn leads to support from the government to build a sentencing system that cages more people. That's how the cycle of the prison-industrial complex circulates – and who it benefits.

 opinions@cgtn.com. Follow @thouse_opinions on Twitter to discover the latest commentaries in the CGTN Opinion Section.

SAN ANTONIO

Indigenous advocates want Brackenridge bond project to recognize native peoples’ history

by Lindsey Carnett

June 28, 2022

Matilde Torres, an Indigenous environmental advocate, says the San Antonio River and its surrounding trees in Brackenridge Park speak to thousands of years of native history and cosmology. 

Credit: Bria Woods / San Antonio Report



Standing before about 50 people in a large room at the Witte Museum during the last public meeting on the Brackenridge Park bond project, Matilde Torres held one end of a laminated poster depicting an intricate cave mural painted thousands of years ago in the Lower Pecos region of southwest Texas.

The ancient work contains the origin story of her ancestors, Torres explained, and the San Antonio River plays a central — and spiritual — role in that story: the headwaters of Yanaguana, or Spirit Waters, as the river was known to the Coahuiltecans, is considered the sacred spot where life began.

That conviction is one reason why Torres and other Indigenous descendants say they oppose the removal of dozens of trees from the banks of the river at Brackenridge Park as a part of the 2017 bond project.

“Those trees are alive and they’re also a part of the underworld, and the middle world and the upper world,” Torres said. “Everything that flows within that tree is water, right? Those are waters [that were] within our ancestors.”

More than just opposing the tree removal, however, Torres and others want to ensure that as Brackenridge Park is revitalized, it represents and honors the history of the people who lived along its banks for 12,000 years before the Spanish arrived.

Origin stories

The 26-foot-long cave painting, now known as the White Shaman Mural, is considered one of the most important and illuminating pre-historic artifacts of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands Archeological District. Located in Val Verde County, about 200 miles from San Antonio, researchers have been studying its many-layered meanings for decades. That includes Gary Perez, an Indigenous descendant and researcher who has deciphered crucial elements of the mural for the Witte Museum.

In his interpretation, Perez sees a map of Texas — perhaps the oldest one in existence. This map includes depictions of the four great springs of Central Texas, Perez said: Barton Springs in Austin, Comal Springs in New Braunfels, San Marcos Springs in San Marcos, and the headwaters of the San Antonio River, now known as the Blue Hole.

He and Torres recently shared various aspects of their ancestors’ origin story and other cosmological myths of the Payaya people, one of the Coahuiltecan tribes of South Texas who lived along the banks of the San Antonio River, likely within the bounds of modern-day Brackenridge Park.

“Our roots go deep,” Perez said. “These trees are our teachers because the trees teach us that our roots go deep and are everywhere.”

The headwaters of the river, which spring from the Edwards Aquifer on property now owned by the University of the Incarnate Word, was a sacred pilgrimage site for Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, Perez said.

The story goes, Torres said, that a waterbird flew into the Blue Hole, where he encountered a blue panther that lived there. Startled, the waterbird immediately flew back out, flinging water droplets from his tailfeathers. These droplets fell onto the land, and from them sprang life.

The Payaya were one of the groups upon whose sweat the San Antonio de Valero Mission was established, according to accounts kept by the Texas Historical Association. They are mentioned in records of this mission as late as 1776.

Today, the story of the blue panther and the waterbird is loosely depicted through art and sculptures at Yanaguana Garden in Hemisfair.

Torres and Perez also said they share Indigenous people’s cosmological belief that the part of the river where the bond project will be primarily focused — the horseshoe bend just north of Joske’s Pavillion — aligns perfectly with the Eridanus, a constellation in the southern celestial hemisphere, each winter solstice.

Matilde Torres points out that the shape of the San Antonio River at the horseshoe bend in Brackenridge Park is the same shape as the constellation Eridanus. 

Credit: Bria Woods / San Antonio Report

Indigenous populations native to the area, Perez said, believed a bridge between the physical world and spirit world opened there at midnight on the solstice — “much like the bridge in [the movie] Coco does on Dia de Los Muertos,” Torres added.

Both said the headwaters and the river are still considered sacred to local Indigenous people today, and they want to see that reality represented inside San Antonio’s central park.

Representation within the park

Over the last several decades, Brackenridge park has fallen into disrepair.

In an effort to reverse that slide, the City of San Antonio commissioned a master plan in 2016 “to shape the future development and rehabilitation of Brackenridge Park for many years to come.” That master plan was finalized and approved by City Council in 2017.

As a part of the process, the Brackenridge Park Conservancy, a nonprofit created in 2008 to help restore and care for the park, commissioned extensive research on the park and its history. The result was the Brackenridge Park Cultural Landscape Report, which aims to understand the park’s assets and deficits, and asks how best to accurately reflect its history while also serving city residents in the decades to come.

According to the report, the occupation of the area by Indigenous people prior to written history is one of eight distinct timeframes encompassed by the parkland’s history.

In 2017, San Antonio voters approved an $850 million bond for city projects, with $116 million to improve parks. Of that, roughly $7.75 million was to be used to “repair and enhance” historic features of Brackenridge Park, including the Lily Pond, Upper Labor dam, Upper Labor acequia, the pump house and Lambert Beach.

While the coronavirus pandemic slowed down those plans, city staff went before the San Antonio Planning Commission in January seeking a project variance to remove 104 trees — including nine heritage trees — as part of the project. City staff said those trees were either damaging the historic structures, are diseased or invasive, and so should be removed. To replace the lost tree canopy, the plan has always included planting new trees.

While the planning commission approved the removal, the city’s Historic and Design Review Commission delayed making a decision after about dozens of citizens spoke passionately against the action. The city paused the project, and later announced a series of public meetings to get input from the community on the design process.

Those meetings began in March; at the last one, city staff shared a preliminary design that it called phase one of the project, and announced three more meetings to discuss phase two.

Torres has attended all four public meetings, joining environmentalists and other advocates who continue to strenuously object to any tree removal. Attendees also continue to demand that the city cease its rookery mitigation efforts in the park.

During the last meeting, city officials and project designers announced they would be able to save 19 of the trees originally slated for removal by relocating them within the park.

But like others who have shown up to every meeting, Torres was not impressed with the city’s most recent effort. Prioritizing the walls and other “built” structures at the expense of the trees favors colonial and post-colonial history over Indigenous history, she said.

She chided officials for not reaching out to any Indigenous groups before designing the project, even though three tribes (the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, the Lipan Apache Band of Texas and the Comanche Nation Historic Preservation Office) had written letters opposing the tree removal.

San Antonio Parks and Recreation Director Homer Garcia said during the meeting that while he hasn’t seen the letters, he would be happy to meet with representatives from San Antonio’s indigenous community, as did Kinder Baumgardner, managing principal with the SWA Group, the landscape architecture firm designing the project.

“We know that there are these Indigenous contributions and significance to the park,” Baumgardner said. He added he and his staff will look for ways to incorporate Indigenous history into phase two of the project.

To date, no meeting has been set; Garcia told the San Antonio Report he and his staff plan to call Torres and Perez this week to set up a time.

Torres stressed she is just one representative, and said she hopes Garcia speaks with representatives from multiple tribes.

“One thing they need to understand is that [one group doesn’t] speak for all Indigenous people,” Torres said. “I would like to see [the city] invite these other groups, invite these other tribes as well [and to] make it a day for them to share their knowledge, to share their stories.”

Colombia's tribunal exposes how troops kidnapped and killed thousands of civilians

By John Otis
Published June 28, 2022 

Carlos Saavedra For NPR

Blanca Nubia Monroy photographed at her home in Bogotá, Colombia. Her son Julián Oviedo was kidnapped and killed in 2008. The Colombian army is accused of taking civilians, killing them, and disguising them as guerrilla fighters to falsify higher body counts.


BOGOTÁ, Colombia — In front of a war crimes tribunal, Blanca Monroy took the microphone and addressed the former Colombian army officers who were responsible for killing her son. He was an unemployed carpenter who, in 2008, was kidnapped, shot 13 times and was then buried in a mass grave.

"No one understands the pain of a mother who loses her son. It's an emptiness that will never, ever, be filled," she said. "You should ask God for forgiveness."

Carlos Saavedra For NPR

Monroy got the Libra symbol tattooed on her arm. Her son had the same tattoo, and it was how she identified his body.

Monroy's son died in one of the darkest chapters of Colombia's 50-year guerrilla war. To run up body counts, Colombian soldiers kidnapped and executed more than 6,400 civilians from 2002 to 2008 and falsely reported them as Marxist guerrillas killed in combat, a special tribunal found.

The killings, known in Colombia as "false positives," were never fully investigated by Colombian courts. But now the tribunal, set up under a 2016 peace deal, is trying to get to the bottom of what happened. And it could result in a former high-ranking officer in the country's U.S.-backed military being convicted of war crimes.

This comes as Colombia's Truth Commission is about to release its final report, documenting accounts from people affected by the long civil war.

There was pressure to pump up body counts

Formally known as the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, the tribunal functions outside of Colombia's regular judicial system and has a 15-year mandate to prosecute the most heinous crimes committed by guerrilla fighters and the government troops they fought against. The tribunal started work in 2018 by investigating thousands of kidnappings carried out by the rebels, but it has now moved on to abuses committed by the armed forces.

/ Nicole Acuña Cepeda/JEP
Accusers face former Colombian army officers in the second day of special tribunal hearings in Ocaña, Colombia, on April 27.

Most of the false positive killings took place in the 2000s, when Colombian military officers came under fierce pressure to crush the guerrillas. Failure could derail their careers. However, reporting bigger body counts could mean promotions, overseas postings and other benefits.

"There was constant pressure from our superiors, including the army commander, to produce combat deaths," former Lt. Col. Álvaro Tamayo, one of the defendants, told a war crimes tribunal hearing in April in the northern town of Ocaña, where many of the false positive killings took place.

"'Good' officers produced bigger body counts. 'Bad' officers didn't," he said. "This generated psychological pressure and fear of being demoted or expelled from the army for a lack of operational results."

So, some officers hatched a lethal conspiracy.

They lured poor, unemployed young men from Bogotá and other cities to small towns near the war zone with promises of jobs. Then, according to testimony gathered by the tribunal, soldiers gunned them down, planted weapons on them, dressed them in camouflage and reported these innocent civilians as rebels killed in combat.

Officers can avoid prison

The tribunal's estimate of false positives goes far beyond previous tallies. And the tribunal's president, Eduardo Cifuentes, says the real number could be even higher than what investigators found. He tells NPR the killings are "the absolute worst" of Colombian war crimes.

/ Carlos Saavedra For NPR
Eduardo Cifuentes is the president of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a tribunal set up to prosecute war crimes in Colombia. Here he shows an Italian Renaissance painting made by Ambrogio Lorenzetti called <em>The Allegory of Good and Bad Government</em>.

The top priority of the tribunal is to learn exactly how and why the crimes happened. The goal is to make sure they never happen again and to help the country heal after decades of warfare.

"Our objective is reconciliation," said tribunal judge Alejandro Ramelli, speaking at the Ocaña hearing. "But you can't forgive if you don't know what happened."

That's why the tribunal is being lenient with defendants. They can avoid prison if they confess to and fully explain their crimes, including who gave the orders. They're also required to make up for some of the harm they've caused and participate in public hearings held in former war zones where the crimes were documented.

/ Carlos Saavedra For NPR
Alejandro Ramelli, one of the judges who heard the case of alleged extrajudicial killings in Ocaña, sits in his office in Bogotá on June 8.


Mothers want false positives' names cleared

The hearing in Ocaña took place in a local university auditorium where a dozen defendants, now stripped of their military uniforms, sat stiffly onstage and heard directly from the relatives of their victims.

When it was her turn to speak, Zoraida Muñoz faced the former army officers and insisted that it made no sense to target her 22-year-old son, who was himself a former soldier.

"I want my son's name cleared," she said. "He was no guerrilla. He'd just gotten out of the army. But he was abducted and killed."

/ Carlos Saavedra For NPR
/Zoraida Muñoz is part of a group of mothers denouncing extrajudicial killings known as "false positives." The mothers say their sons were kidnapped by the Colombian army, killed and disguised as guerrillas to add to a fictitious war record. The mother of Jonny Duvián, who was killed in 2008, Muñoz spoke at the hearing in Ocaña. Here she is photographed at her home in Bogotá, Colombia, on May 18.

The defendants include a retired general who stands to become the highest-ranking former officer convicted of war crimes. They all sounded deeply repentant. At one point, former Lt. Col. Tamayo admitted that he gave the direct order to execute several innocent civilians on the outskirts of Ocaña.

"I betrayed my family and the army," Tamayo said, his voice breaking. "I am a disgrace."

Sandro Pérez, a former army sergeant, was even more blunt, saying, "I became an assassin, a monster for society, a death machine."

Not all Colombians are on board with the tribunal

The testimony has been riveting. But critics in the right-wing political and military establishment claim it could hurt army morale and damage the institution. They insist that the tribunal should stick to investigating massacres and kidnappings carried out by the guerrillas and that it is placing far too much blame for war atrocities on government troops.

President Iván Duque, a conservative who opposed Colombia's peace treaty, tried in 2019 to overhaul the tribunal and strip it of some of its powers, saying, "we can reform and design a [court] that assures genuine truth and justice to all Colombians." But that effort failed.

/ Nicole Acuña Cepeda/JEP
Victims and loved ones fill the audience of the tribunal and photos, flowers, messages and other items line the walls in the auditorium of Francisco de Paula Santander University in Ocaña, Colombia, on April 26.

Some critics accuse the tribunal of exaggerating the scope of army atrocities.

"What we are seeing is the case of a few bad apples," says John Marulanda, a former army colonel who heads a national association for retired military officers. "You cannot generalize and say 'all the army is involved.' "

He thinks military judges or the country's ordinary justice system should handle the false positives cases. However, 15 years after the army killings were first revealed by human rights groups and mothers of the dead, there have been only a handful of convictions.

Testimonies show the killings were carefully coordinated

This so-called "impunity gap" justifies the efforts of the war crimes tribunal to revisit the cases, says Rodrigo Uprimny of the Bogotá human rights group Dejusticia. What's more, he says the testimony makes it clear that the killings were carefully coordinated and not the work of just a few out-of-control troops.

"When you see a colonel saying 'I did that, I did that, I did that,' really confessing systematic crime in public view, it's really very powerful," he says.

Accused soldiers who fully cooperate with the tribunal will not go to a traditional prison, though their freedom will be restricted. They'll also spend up to eight years performing community service in the neighborhoods of their victims.

/ Nicole Acuña Cepeda/JEP
Retired Colombian military commander Paulino Coronado (right) speaks at the special tribunal in which army officers are accused of killing civilians and presenting them as false combat casualties, in Ocaña, Colombia, on April 27.

At first, that didn't sit well with Blanca Monroy, who spoke at the Ocaña hearing and whose son, Julián Oviedo, was shot 13 times.

"I was thirsty for justice and I wanted them put in jail," she says, speaking from her modest home in Bogotá.

But the war crimes tribunal allowed her to meet face to face with the men responsible for her son's death. She rebuked them. She cried with them. Gradually, she says, she even began to forgive them.

"I no longer feel fury or hatred," she says. "Now I feel at peace."

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Texas tragedy is apparently latest in global series of migrant suffocation deaths

Police work at the scene where a tractor-trailer full of dead bodies was discovered Monday in San Antonio.
(Eric Gay / Associated Press)

ASSOCIATED PRESS

JUNE 28, 2022 

Authorities in Texas say that 46  (53) people believed to be migrants were found dead in a tractor-trailer and 16 others were taken to hospitals Monday in a remote part of San Antonio.

The deaths were apparently the latest in what has become a global series of mass deaths from suffocation or heat during human-trafficking attempts. Here’s a look at some of those incidents:

— June 27, 2022: 46 people believed to be migrants were found dead in a sweltering trailer on a remote back road in southwestern San Antonio.

— Oct. 23, 2019: 39 Vietnamese migrants were found dead in a truck trailer in Essex, England. Four men were jailed for manslaughter.

— July 23, 2017: Eight immigrants were found dead in a sweltering trailer at a San Antonio Walmart parking lot. Two others died later in hospitals. The driver was sentenced to life in prison.

— Feb. 20, 2017: 13 African migrants suffocated inside a shipping container while being transported between two towns in Libya. A total of 69 migrants, most from Mali, were packed into the container, according to the local Red Crescent branch.



— Aug. 27, 2015: Austrian police discovered an abandoned truck containing the bodies of 71 migrants, including eight children, from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The truck, found along a highway, had crossed into Austria from Hungary.

— April 4, 2009: 35 Afghan migrants suffocated inside a shipping container in southwestern Pakistan. Authorities said that more than 100 people were packed inside the container.

— April 9, 2008: 54 Burmese migrants suffocated in the back of an airtight refrigerated truck in Ranong, Thailand.

— May 14, 2003: 19 migrants died inside a sweltering tractor-trailer while they traveled from southern Texas to Houston.

— June 18, 2000: 58 Chinese migrants were found dead inside a truck in the English port town of Dover. The Dutch truck had transported the migrants across the English Channel from Belgium. Two people survived.

TRUMP'S BANK

From Peru to Uganda, activists call on Deutsche Bank to drop fossil finance

Tom Sims and Marta Orosz
Tue, June 28, 2022 


Activists meet Deutsche Bank to voice concerns about energy project in Amazon




FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Climate activists from Peru to Uganda are descending on Deutsche Bank's headquarters in Frankfurt this week to call on Germany's largest lender to stop financing fossil fuel companies.

The demand comes as Deutsche Bank markets itself as a lender that firms can turn to as they transition to a greener future, a strategy it views as key to delivering its own turnaround and boosting profits.

On Monday, two leaders of indigenous Peruvians and several climate activists met with Deutsche Bank staff in the sustainability department to demand it stop working with Peruvian state oil company Petroperu, which they say is harming wildlife and waterways in the Amazon.

On Tuesday, Fridays for Future activist Luisa Neubauer from Germany and Evelyn Acham from the Rise Up Movement in Uganda will also meet with Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing to insist he distance the bank from an oil pipeline plan in Africa.

Sewing has said sustainability is "at the core of our strategy", but for many activists, the bank isn't doing enough.

In a blow to its green credentials, Deutsche Bank's fund unit DWS is facing allegations of so-called "greenwashing" for allegedly misleading investors over how sustainable its investments are. DWS has denied the allegations.

Deutsche Bank declined to discuss the meetings or its dealings with Petroperu, but said it understood and appreciated demands and views of activists.

"We are committed to reducing our own CO2 emissions and in particular those of our loan portfolio to net zero by 2050," it said.

In Peru, the government wants to ramp up oil production in some of its dormant Amazonian fields as global crude prices soar on supply fears linked to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Deutsche is a lead bank for a $1.3 billion loan for Petroperu and played a key role in recent talks with creditors to extend a deadline for the energy firm to provide its 2021 audited financial statements, according to Petroperu.

Missing that deadline prompted credit agencies to downgrade Petroperu to junk status and sent its bonds tumbling.

The bank financing has helped Petroperu modernise a refinery to increase its ability to process more crude oil.

Shapiom Noningo Sesen, an indigenous leader of the Wampis Nation and part of Monday's meetings, said he asked Deutsche to reevaluate its role, and that activists would keep the pressure on the bank until it drops Petroperu.

He said locals couldn't eat fish anymore due to pollution and toxins were ending up in their blood.

"These companies are just playing with our lives, our culture and our history," he said through an interpreter.

Petroperu didn't respond to a request for comment. It said this month it was "committed to caring for the environment through responsible practices".

Ricardo Perez, an official with Amazon Watch, said he would also visit other banks to pressure them to end dealings with Petroperu.

But for now his focus was on Deutsche, which Perez said "has invested in the biggest driver of new oil production in the Amazon for the next decade".

(Additional reporting by Marco Aquino in Lima; Editing by Mark Potter)