US Feds Settle Suit Alleging Abuse by Men Detained After 9/11


TEHRAN (FNA)- The Justice Department on Tuesday settled a decades-old lawsuit filed by a group of men who were rounded up by the government in the weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks and held in a federal jail in New York in conditions the department’s own watchdog called abusive and harsh.

AFTER 21 YEARS A SIX WAY SPLIT THE LAWYERS MADE MORE
The settlement announced Tuesday calls for a $98,000 payout to be paid out among the six men who filed the suit and were held without terrorism charges at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, The Associated Press reported.

The men — Ahmer Iqbal Abbasi, Anser Mehmood, Benamar Benatta, Ahmed Khalifa, Saeed Hammouda, and Purna Raj Bajracharya — said they were detained in restrictive conditions and, in some cases, abused by members of the staff.

The settlement is somewhat unusual because federal courts at nearly every level, including the Supreme Court, had thrown out large chunks of the lawsuit. A federal district court judge threw out the remaining part of the suit last year. Though the plaintiffs filed an appeal, there had been little action in the case for months.

Though the Justice Department does not admit guilt as part of the settlement agreement, Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal wrote a letter to each of the men saying the Justice Department had determined they were “held in excessively restrictive and unduly harsh conditions of confinement and a number of individuals were physically and verbally abused by certain MDC officers”.

The letter went on to say, “Under the exceptional circumstances of this unique case and before the facts have been fully litigated or there has been any final judgment by the court in this case the Federal Bureau of Prisons has agreed to provide funds to the former Warden of the MDC, Dennis Hasty, to indemnify him for the settlement of your claims. This will resolve all of your claims in this litigation.”

“I don’t know that the director of the Bureau of Prisons has ever signed a letter of this nature before to individual clients, so that is unique,” said Rachel Meeropol, senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represents the men.

Meeropol called the court battle a failure of the justice system, pointing to limitations on claims against federal officials.

“Under the court actions, there’s no way people for people who have been injured to get justice,” Meeropol said in an interview with The Associated Press, adding, “Instead we’re seeing this pretty amazing work around with the defendants finding a way to make themselves be held responsible when the court said no. I think it’s a unique acknowledgment of this situation and the way that what happened were procedural obstacles to true justice.”

The Justice Department declined to comment.

The lawsuit originally sought accountability from high-level members of George W. Bush administration, and a settlement was reached in 2008 with the original five plaintiffs. Others were added.

In 2017 the Supreme Court threw out parts of the suit but tossed one claim, against the former warden of the federal lockup, back to a lower court. A federal judge in Brooklyn dismissed the remaining parts of the suit last year, finding that the men did not have the right to sue for their injuries, though the judge did not address whether there were constitutional violations.

The settlement closes a chapter on a troubling era in federal criminal justice when Muslim, Arab and South Asian men were rounded up in the days and weeks after the September 11 attacks. Soon, more than 1,000 were arrested in sweeps across the New York metropolitan area and nationwide. Most were charged only with overstaying visas and deported back to their home countries. But before that happened, many were held in detention for months, with little outside contact, especially with their families.

They were, according to the 9/11 Commission report, arrested as “special interest” detainees. Immigration hearings were closed, detainee communication was limited, and bond was denied until the detainees were cleared of terrorist connections. Identities were kept secret.

A review conducted by the Justice Department’s inspector general said the Justice Department’s “hold until cleared” policy meant a significant percentage of the detainees stayed for months despite immigration officials questioning the legality of the prolonged detentions and even though there were no indications they were connected to terrorism. Compounding that, they faced “a pattern of physical and verbal abuse” particularly at the federal jail in Brooklyn. Conditions were, the report said, “unduly harsh.”

“I am glad that the case is coming to an end after two decades of litigation. However, it is a bittersweet conclusion for me,” Benatta said in a statement released by the Center for Constitutional Rights, one of the plaintiff attorneys, along with Covington & Burling LLP, and attorneys Michael Winger and Alexander Reinert.

“I don’t believe justice is properly served, considering the detrimental consequences the defendants’ actions have had on my life,” he said, adding, “I can’t help but feel let down by the whole judicial system – federal courts had the opportunity to remedy the situation but chose not to intervene, and, by doing so, they left the door open for future mistreatment and abuse to take place without any ramifications.”

LEGALIZE DRUGS END WAR ON DRUGS

‘Set of failures’: are Peru’s gains in the drug war a loss for the Amazon?

A 2015 aerial view of the Esmeralda Base in the VRAEM area, some 280km south east of Lima. 

Photograph: Cris Bouroncle/AFP/Getty Images

In Vizcatán, the last redoubt of militarily active Maoist rebels Shining Path, the army is cracking down on cocaine traffickers


Dan Collyns at the Valle Esmeralda base
THE GUARDIAN

Wed 6 Jul 2022 

Sitting on a bluff overlooking the Tambo River, the Valle Esmeralda counter-terrorist base is only accessible by helicopter or a very long hike. It is strategically located to have a bird’s eye view of Vizcatán, the last redoubt of the only militarily active remnants of the Shining Path, the brutal Maoist rebels who terrorized Peru in the 1980s and 90s.


Peruvian firefighters contain blaze near Machu Picchu after three days

It is a rugged terrain of thickly forested mountains, steep canyons and fast-flowing rivers on the Amazon’s western edge which rises into the dry, treeless Andes. Its landscape and the Mantaro river which snakes away from jungle lowlands and through the mountains make it the ideal route for backcountry cocaine trafficking.

Vizcatán is one part of a huge stretch of jungle known as VRAEM (an acronym for the valley of the Apurimac, Ene and Mantaro rivers), and the centre of Peru’s drugs trade. Some 70% of the country’s coca, the plant used to make cocaine, is grown here, according to the Peruvian Observatory on Drugs.

Protected by a splinter group of Shining Path rebels, drug traffickers can shift tonnes of freshly made cocaine in kilo-sized bricks to the coast for smuggling out of Peru’s Pacific ports where shipping containers remain the principal vessels for the cargo.

The battalion of troops stationed at the base shout out battle cries, faces painted, guns at the ready, enveloped in swirling smoke for effect, as they receive a visit from Peru’s defence minister, José Gavidia, and the leader of the Joint Forces Command, Manuel Gómez de la Torre.

A coca farmer works with coca leaves in Rosario district, Ayacucho department, Peru. Photograph: Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images
The top brass is convinced the Shining Path remnants are on the back foot: Victor Quispe Palomino, ‘Comrade José’, is the last of three siblings which led the band. The US State Department has offered a reward of up to $5m for information leading to the 61-year-old’s arrest or conviction.

As a show of intent, journalists were shown a seizure of nearly two tonnes of refined cocaine piled in bricks at Los Sinchis army base in the frontier town of Mazamari – the result of a joint raid by police and army special forces.

The potential profit margin for smugglers is like that of no other product on earth. One kilo of cocaine hydrochloride worth around $1,000 in the VRAEM could be worth hundreds of times more if it reaches Saudi Arabia or China.

But coca represents an important income for the coca growers, who make up much of the valley’s 650,000 inhabitants. It provides easy money to pay for basic needs in a region which lacks sanitation, electricity and basic infrastructure.
Members of the Peruvian Armed Forces destroy a clandestine airstrip in the VRAEM. Photograph: Sebastian Montalvo Gray/EPA

“But in no way does [coca] lift them out of poverty,” says Gustavo Gorriti, a Peruvian investigative journalist and a veteran of the country’s drugs war. “The traffickers want to keep them in it.”

The military advances in VRAEM mean traffickers are looking for new places to grow coca with less intervention from the state security forces. That has led to a balloon effect as drug traffickers and coca farmers are squeezed out in one area, then pop up in another.

That means Indigenous territories to the north of the VRAEM in Ucayali, Huánuco and Loreto regions are increasingly under threat as traffickers invade their lands.

“The balloon effect is going to happen anyway,” Gen Gómez de la Torre told the Guardian. “When we pacify the area our troops are going to have to leave the area. As in any part of the world, the military apparatus moves to where the threat is.”


Police losing narco war in deadly Amazon region where duo disappeared

Increasingly that threat is on Peru’s north-eastern frontier with Colombia and Brazil, the dangerous triple frontier where Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were murdered.

It also lies along Peru’s Amazon border with Brazil and Bolivia where drug flights are a daily occurrence.

Global manufacturing of cocaine reached a record high in 2020, according to the UN report, and of the three countries that grow coca bushes to make cocaine, Colombia showed a slight decline (-7%) which was more than offset by increases in Peru (13%) and Bolivia (15%). However, Colombia, with 61% of the total, continued to be the country in the world with the highest level of coca plantations.

A record 21.5 million people used the drug in 2020, the report estimated, an increase coupled with rising consumption in South America which doubled over the last ten years.

Without more backing and resources from consumer countries to interdict trafficking along Peru’s 10,000km land and sea border, little will change, said Gorriti.

“All Peruvian anti-drug strategies are, and with very few exceptions have been, a set of failures and counterproductive actions that have produced cosmetic results,” he added.

“They have not affected the growth and movement of drug trafficking and its effects.”

FOTOS & NEWS

Violent Protests Erupt In North Macedonia's Skopje Over Dispute With Bulgaria

Violent protests erupted in North Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, where demonstrators tried to storm government buildings, after French President Emmanuel Macron announced the proposal — which many in the small Balkan country find controversial — last week. Macron said at a NATO summit in Madrid that “a compromise solution” to lift Bulgaria’s opposition to its neighbor’s EU aspirations had been achieved, without giving details.

UPDATED: 06 JUL 2022 

Protest in North Macedonia | Photos: AP/Boris Grdanoski

A crowd of people protest in front of the parliament building in Skopje, North Macedonia.

People light flares and throw eggs and stones on the foreign ministry building during a protest in Skopje, North Macedonia.

 

People break the fence in front of the parliament building in Skopje, North Macedonia.

Riot police guard the entrance of the parliament building in Skopje, North Macedonia, during a protest.

People light flares and throw eggs and stones on the foreign ministry building during a protest in Skopje, North Macedonia.


A man reacts as police officers form a cordon during a protest at the parliament building in Skopje, North Macedonia.

A couple under an umbrella watch as people throw stones at the police and at the parliament building in Skopje.


People throw stones at the parliament building in Skopje, North Macedonia.


People throw stones at the police during a protest at the parliament building in Skopje, North Macedonia.

Police confront protesters at the parliament building in Skopje, North Macedonia.

Protest in Skopje against deal with Bulgaria turns violent

A video posted by parliament speaker Talat Xhaferi shows windows smashed in the violent protest on July 5. / Talat Xhaferi

By Valentina Dimitrievska in Skopje

 July 6, 2022   bneIntelligence

A protest in North Macedonia’s capital Skopje against the French proposal that would lift Bulgarian veto on the start of the country’s EU accession talks turned violent in the evening July 5, leaving dozens of police officers injured.

The violent protest was the last in a series of demonstrations against the proposal drafted by the French presidency of the EU. It is intended to unblock North Macedonia’s stalled EU accession process, but opposition parties and most of the public consider it is harmful for the Macedonian national interest.

47 police officers were injured, 11 of them seriously, while two officers with serious injuries were hospitalised at the Neurosurgery Clinic. 11 protestors were detained, two of whom were minors, the police said on July 6.

“The consequences of last night's rampage in front of the Assembly!” parliament speaker Talat Xhaferi said on July 6 in a Facebook post, where he posted a video clip showing broken windows, tiles and bottles on the floor of the parliament following the previous night’s protest.

“I recognise and support everyone's right to protest and express his opinion. But I constantly and strongly condemn hooliganism, violence, incitement of hatred, because these are not a solution,” Xhaferi commented.

There was also damage to the buildings of the government and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where the protests were also held.

The Interior Minister Oliver Spasovski announced the harshest punishments for the organisers as well as students who participated in the violent protests against the French proposal.

“Last night we witnessed a dark event, which turned from a public gathering organised by the opposition parties into vandalism. Members of police were brutally attacked while on duty,” Spasovski said in the statement.

Spasovski added that during the evening protest, a significant damage was done, with damage to paving stones and road signs and benches torn out of the ground. Some protestors threw stones, eggs, Molotov cocktails, rubbish bins and fireworks at official buildings and the police officers who secured the state institutions.

Following the violent protests the police managed to disperse the protestors.

The French proposal has been sent to the parliament for consideration. The first discussions on the proposal are expected on July 6.

EU urges N Macedonia to back proposed deal with Bulgaria

By The Associated Press

Posted Jul 5, 2022, 

SKOPJE, North Macedonia (AP) — European Council President Charles Michel urged North Macedonia on Tuesday to back a French-proposed compromise on ending a dispute with neighboring Bulgaria that’s blocking the country’s long-delayed European Union accession bid.

Violent protests erupted in North Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, where demonstrators tried to storm government buildings, after French President Emmanuel Macron announced the proposal — which many in the small Balkan country find controversial — last week. Macron said at a NATO summit in Madrid that “a compromise solution” to lift Bulgaria’s opposition to its neighbor’s EU aspirations had been achieved, without giving details.

A new protest against the French proposal is planned for later Tuesday in Skopje.

North Macedonia’s president, Stevo Pendarovski, and the government have backed the proposed deal, which calls for the country to acknowledge in its constitution the existence of an ethnic Bulgarian minority. It would also provide for regular reviews on how the bilateral dispute is being addressed, which could potentially hamper North Macedonia’s future accession course.

But the center-right main opposition VMRO-DPMNE party, many international law experts and civic organizations say the proposal favors Bulgarian demands which dispute their own country’s views of regional history, language, identity and heritage.

As an EU member, Bulgaria has the power to block its neighbor’s accession bid.

At a joint news conference Tuesday with North Macedonia’s prime minister, Dimitar Kovachevski, Michel stressed that the French proposal is too “important an opportunity to be missed.”

Michel said that if North Macedonia accepts the proposal, then the path for the country to start EU accession talks could open within days.

Kovachevski reiterated his support for the “balanced proposal,” adding that “our aim is to start membership talks.”

On a third day of mass protests late Monday in Skopje, protestors threw stones, eggs and bottles at the government offices and parliament building in downtown Skopje. Police prevented the crowd of several thousand people from forcing their way into government offices. Four police were injured in front of parliament.

Bulgaria has already formally accepted the French proposal, which now requires the backing of North Macedonia’s parliament.

Bulgaria insists that North Macedonia formally recognizes that its language has Bulgarian roots, acknowledges a Bulgarian minority and quashes “hate speech” against Bulgaria.

North Macedonia has been a candidate for EU membership for 17 years. The country received a green light in 2020 to begin accession talks, but no date for the start of the negotiations has been set.

Before Bulgaria raised its objections, North Macedonia settled a decades-old dispute with another neighbor and EU member, Greece, to forward its aim of joining the 27-nation bloc. As a result it added the word North to its previous name, Macedonia, which Greece had complained implied claims on its own territory, history and cultural heritage.

The dispute with Bulgaria has also stalled the progress of another Balkan country, Albania, toward EU membership because the bloc is treating the pair as a political package. North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Albania are all NATO members.

The Associated Press

North Macedonia protests against deal with Bulgaria enter third day

By Valentina Dimitrievska in Skopje 

bneIntelligence

July 4, 2022

Protests in North Macedonia’s capital continued on July 4 for the third day in a row against the French proposal for solving the dispute with Bulgaria, which is expected to lift its veto on the start of EU accession talks with Skopje.

For most people in the country the French proposal is unacceptable because it incorporates the Bulgarian demands, which are seen as harmful for the Macedonian national interests.

The first day of protest under the motto "Ultimatum - No thanks" was held on July 2. The opposition in North Macedonia claims that the proposal is against the country’s national interest and takes into account only Bulgarian demands. Some smaller parties from the government coalition also said they would not support the proposal in the parliament if amendments are not made.

Some of the demonstrators clashed with the police, who set up a cordon in front of the government building, after they broke through the protective fence and started throwing eggs, stones and firecrackers at the building.

The protest started in a tense atmosphere, after the leader of the opposition VMRO-DPMNE, Hristijan Mickoski, called on citizens to gather in great numbers because, as he said, the government intends to accept the proposal of the French presidency on July 5. Then it will be voted on in the parliament.

Later, most of the demonstrators headed towards the parliament. Some of them tore down the protective fence in front of the assembly building. Protestors were singing patriotic songs, demanding the resignation of the government and a complete rejection of Bulgaria's demands.

The series of protests came after North Macedonia’s authorities said on July 1 that what they said was a modified French proposal is acceptable as it protects the Macedonian language and keeps historical issues out of the EU negotiation framework. But the opposition accused the government of lying.

According to the opposition and some experts the proposal only means Bulgarisation of the nation in a long-term EU accession process, and denies the existence of Macedonian identity.

“The consultation phase is still ongoing. We are working intensively on consultation about this proposal in order to make an appropriate decision in the coming days,” Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Bojan Maricic said on July 4.

“We did not commit ourselves to specific deadlines... but we have been waiting for 17 years. And in a situation where we have a proposal that pays attention to all our remarks, I think it is a package that is worth considering seriously," said Maricic.

The President of the European Council Charles Michel is visiting Skopje on July 5 to convince the country to accept the French proposal and open EU accession talks following a two-year delay due to Bulgaria's veto.

Bulgaria’s parliament on June 24 approved a French proposal that would lift the country's veto on the start of North Macedonia’s EU membership talks.

According to the text adopted by the parliament, Bulgaria’s government can lift the veto if four conditions are met. The text of the French proposal should be refined so that it guarantees inclusion of the Bulgarians living in North Macedonia in the constitution on an equal basis with the rest of peoples in those sections of the constitution where these peoples are mentioned.

Sofia also wants a clarification of the texts that would guarantee that nothing in the process of North Macedonia’s EU accession can be considered an admission of the existence of the Macedonian language by Bulgaria.

Bulgaria will also seek guarantees that the good relations between the two neighbours will remain part of the criteria that North Macedonia should fulfil to be accepted in the EU.

Sofia also wants a friendship treaty signed in 2017 to be referenced in the documents on the start of North Macedonia’s EU accession talks.

Horseshoe crabs: 'Living fossils' vital for vaccine safety

Agence France-Presse
July 01, 2022

Kristi Lieske conducts a survey of horseshoe crabs spawning on a beach at the Ted Harvey Wildlife Area near Dover, Delaware

On a bright moonlit night, a team of scientists and volunteers head out to a protected beach along the Delaware Bay to survey horseshoe crabs that spawn in their millions along the US East Coast from late spring to early summer.

The group make their way up the shoreline laying a measuring frame on the sand, counting the individuals inside it to help generate a population estimate, and setting right those unfortunate enough to have been flipped onto their backs by the high tide.

With their helmet-like shells, tails that resemble spikes and five pairs of legs connected to their mouths, horseshoe crabs, or Limulidae, aren't immediately endearing.

But if you've ever had a vaccine in your life, you have these weird sea animals to thank: their bright blue blood, which clots in the presence of harmful bacterial components called endotoxins, has been essential for testing the safety of biomedical products since the 1970s, when it replaced rabbit testing.

"They're really easy to love, once you understand them," Laurel Sullivan, who works for the state government to educate members of the public about the invertebrates, tells AFP.

"They're not threatening at all. They're just going about their day, trying to make more horseshoe crabs."

For 450 million years, these otherworldly creatures have patrolled the planet's oceans, while dinosaurs arose and went extinct, and early fish transitioned to the land animals that would eventually give rise to humans.

Now, though, the "living fossils" are listed as vulnerable in America and endangered in Asia, as a result of habitat loss and overharvesting for use in food, bait, and the pharmaceutical industry, which is on a major growth path, especially in the wake of the Covid pandemic.

Recruiting citizen scientists helps engage the public while also scaling up the government's data collection efforts, explains the survey project's environment scientist Taylor Beck.Vital ecological role-

"Crabs" are something of a misnomer for the animals, which are in fact more closely related to spiders and scorpions, and are made up of four subspecies: one that inhabits the Eastern and Gulf coasts of North America, and the other three in Southeast Asia.

Atlantic horseshoe crabs have 10 eyes and feed by crushing up food, such as worms and clams, between their legs then passing the food to their mouths.

Males are noticeably smaller than females, whom they swarm in groups of up to 15 when breeding. Males grasp females as they head to shore, where the females deposit golf ball-size clusters of 5,000 eggs for the males to spray their sperm on.

Millions of these eggs, tiny green balls, are inadvertently churned up onto the beach surface, where they are a vital food source for migrating shorebirds, including the near-threatened Red Knot.

Nivette Perez-Perez, manager of community science at the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays, points out a vast band of eggs that stretch nearly the whole beach at the James Farm Ecological Preserve.

As she gestures, aptly-named laughing gulls with bright orange beaks swoop down to feast.

Like others in the area, Perez-Perez long ago succumbed to the crabs' charms.

"You're so cute," she tells a female she has picked up to point out its anatomical features.
Just flip 'em

Breeding is a dangerous business for horseshoe crabs as it's on the beach that they are at their most vulnerable: as the tide washes in, some end up on their backs, and while their long hard tails can help some right themselves, not all are so lucky.

Around 10 percent of the population is lost each year as their exposed undersides bake in the Sun.

In 1998, Glenn Gauvry, founder of the Ecological Research & Development Group, helped start the "Just flip 'em" campaign, encouraging members of the public to do their part by gently picking up upturned crabs that are still alive.

"Where it matters most of all, is changing the heart," he tells AFP on Delaware Bay's Pickering Beach, proudly sporting a "Just flip 'em" baseball cap festooned with horseshoe crab pins.

"If we can't get people to care and to connect to these animals, then they're less likely to want legislation to protect them."

Every year around 500,000 horseshoe crabs are harvested and bled for a chemical called Limulus Amebocyte Lysate, vital for testing against a type of bacteria that can contaminate medications, needles and devices like hip replacements.

Estimates place the mortality rate of the process at 15 percent, with survivors released back to sea.

A new synthetic alternative called recombinant factor C appears promising, but faces regulatory challenges.

Horseshoe crabs are a "finite source with a potentially infinite demand, and those two things are mutually exclusive," Allen Burgenson, of Swiss biotech Lonza, which makes the new test, told AFP.

Saving Florida’s Gopher Tortoises: Group rescues reptiles from death by development

2022/7/5 
Orlando Sentinel

Keith Crawford of Ecological Consulting Solutions, Inc., holds a juvenile gopher tortoise saved a site soon to be developed in Polk County near Davenport on Friday, June 3, 2022. - Patrick Connolly/Orlando Sentinel/TNS

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Though gopher tortoises have persisted for millions of years, they now face a barrage of threats from loss of habitat and developers with permits that allow the reptiles to be buried alive.

From 1991-2007, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission issued incidental take permits (ITPs) allowing land owners to pay a fee that would allow them to legally “take” tortoises. Though developers could relocate tortoises on-site, many were buried alive in their burrows underneath homes or roadways, forced to endure a slow, painful death.

Though new permits aren’t being issued by FWC, existing ITPs are grandfathered in and can be transferred when land changes hands.

Carissa Kent, a Tampa native who spent years living in Central Florida, first heard about ITPs when reading a Humane Society article detailing a Deltona Walmart project that was burying the creatures. Although Kent had a career with the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office and aspirations of working for the FBI, this was a turning point that would change her life.

“When a house, a sidewalk or infrastructure gets put on top of them, they’re stuck. There’s someone’s living room above their burrow, and they just go back down and slowly suffer and die,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep for about four days, and I decided to change my career.”

Having no experience in biology or conservation, Kent, then 28 years old, spent countless hours researching and reaching out to potential allies, often being “stonewalled” by people who wouldn’t give her the time of day. Then, she found Dr. Jennifer Hobgood, a former director of the Humane Society in Florida, and Dr. Matt Aresco, director of the Nokuse Plantation in the Florida Panhandle.

“Carissa and I met in 2006. She contacted us, it was the very first project she was working on,” Aresco said. “We agreed to accept the tortoises from that project. ... We have about 27,000 acres of good gopher tortoise habitat.”

The next spring, with some hard work from Kent and her team, around 700 tortoises found a new home on the preserve.
An ‘incredible loss’

The idea behind FWC’s incidental take permit program for gopher tortoises was that money earned from ITPs would be used to make up for habitat loss through new conservation lands.

Permits were issued based on the acreage of tortoise habitat affected. For example, in 2004, Lake Nona Land Co. paid $104,114 for an ITP on a 206-acre site that contained 62 acres of gopher tortoise habitat, allowing them to “take” an estimated 205 reptiles.

Other permits have been issued to Central Florida projects managed by Disney, Orange County Public Schools, the Florida Department of Transportation, Valencia Community College, Target, Walmart and Avalon Park.

But Aresco said that only a fraction of tortoise habitat was purchased to offset massive losses.

“The sad thing is that [ITP] money got taken by the Legislature and put into general revenue instead of being used for what the intended purpose was,” he said.

Using data from public records requests, Aresco determined that nearly $80 million was raised from the 15-year incidental take permit program.

“From 1991 to 2007, the estimate was 170,000 acres of gopher tortoise habitat loss under those permits,” he said. “They only purchased about 16,000 acres of land and only about 6,500 acres of actual gopher tortoise habitat. That’s only about a 4 percent offset of what was lost in habitat during that time.”

In his research of the more than 3,000 ITPs that were issued, Aresco estimated that more than 100,000 gopher tortoise lives could have been lost.
Getting to work

When Kent and Aresco joined forces to begin relocating gopher tortoises from ITP sites, there was a sense of urgency to their work, but funding and support were initially hard to come by.

After six years of serving with the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in child abuse investigations, Kent was vested and left her position to cash out her retirement — in the name of rescuing these reptiles. In 2006, she founded Saving Florida’s Gopher Tortoises and partners like Hobgood helped find grants for funding.

“I ended up becoming a process server working 40-60 hours a week and doing the gopher tortoise stuff on the side,” she said. “It was daunting at 28 years old to have a busy job and then also get this launched.”

While Kent and her team diligently worked to relocate tortoises to Nokuse Plantation, Aresco found environmental allies.

“They thought they were doing a good thing by collecting this money to buy habitat with it,” he said. “As it turns out, the program did not work very well and not very much habitat was actually purchased for the incredible loss in the number of tortoises — even the offset for loss of habitat.”

In early 2005, longtime Orlando Sentinel environment reporter Kevin Spear wrote an article with the headline: “Developers’ legal gopher-tortoise killings rile foes,” a story that Aresco credits as a turning point for the public outcry against ITPs. In the years to follow, picketing, behind-the-scenes work and a March 2007 visit to Gov. Charlie Crist helped win the day for environmental activists.

Still, those same environmentalists had to reckon with the fact that existing permits would still be valid.

“People get confused because they think when the species was uplisted in 2007 and the permits stopped being issued that developers couldn’t use them anymore. But the permits were grandfathered in so they can,” Kent said.

She and Hobgood first worked with FWC to create an amendment to ITPs that would allow for off-site relocation. Though the officials once in charge of the ITP program are no longer with the agency, FWC still deals with the legacy of these permits.

“FWC recognizes that ITPs do not expire and the permit allows the taking of gopher tortoises from development-related activities on the site,” said Carli Segelson, public information director with the FWC Division of Habitat and Species Conservation, in an email. “FWC has also implemented projects to conduct targeted outreach regarding humane relocation efforts to permittees with incidental take permits.”
Silver linings

Kent and her team have been able to relocate or rehabilitate close to 15,000 tortoises through years of effort.

“With reptiles, you have to do extra hard work to get people on board with conservation. They’re not cute and cuddly, and they’re not adorable,” she said. “It hasn’t been an easy road, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

On a weekly basis, Kent enlists the help of partners such as Longwood-based Ecological Consulting Solutions Inc., who will use backhoes or excavators to dig burrows on ITP sites that are up to 30 feet deep.

Since 2017, the Saving Florida’s Gopher Tortoises project has received funding from the Department of Defense to relocate tortoises onto Eglin Air Force Base in the Panhandle. Jeremy Preston, an endangered species biologist with the base, said these tortoises are helping the Air Force meet its conservation goals.

“We’re not just thinking about an individual tortoise, but what’s really valuable is a population of animals that are successfully breeding, laying eggs and having hatchlings survive,” he said. “The Air Force is benefiting from having viable populations of this particular species restored back onto our landscape.”

However, future funding is unclear and Kent is raising money on GoFundMe to help ensure the longevity of this project. For years, she has partnered with Swamp Girl Adventures in Central Florida, as they can accept donations for her mission and help with tortoise rehabilitation.

In addition, some developers are now more willing to pay for relocation services, even if they are legally permitted to “take” tortoises.

“It’s about $200-$300 a tortoise for us. That’s not how much it costs for regular relocation, but we don’t make any profit on top of what it takes to break even and pay hour for hour,” Kent said. “We’re getting 800-1,000 tortoises a year on average … That’s well over $200,000 to do that.”

The conservationists know they need to keep fighting to save gopher tortoises still out there on these permitted parcels.

The gopher tortoise’s shell “protects it from just about everything there is in nature. Yet, it’s so vulnerable to development and roads and human disturbance,” Aresco said. “We do what we can to save the species from decline, and that’s what we’re going to keep doing.”

A gopher tortoise was rescued from a site soon to be developed in Polk County near Davenport on Friday, June 3, 2022. - Patrick Connolly/Orlando Sentinel/TNS

Keith Crawford of Ecological Consulting Solutions, Inc., rescues a gopher tortoise from a site soon to be developed in Polk County near Davenport on Friday, June 3, 2022. - Patrick Connolly/Orlando Sentinel/TNS

A gopher tortoise appears on camera within its burrow on a site soon to be developed in Polk County. - Patrick Connolly/Orlando Sentinel/TNS

The dangers of big data extend to farming

The Conversation
July 04, 2022

Farmer Standing in Field (Shutterstock)

Most internet users are by now aware of the vulnerability of their personal data. When the news broke that tech companies misuse and manipulate our personal data, there was a widespread “techlash” against the corporate giants Facebook, Amazon and Google.

The explicit motive for data harvesting is the prediction of consumer wants and needs. And scholars and activists have spent years exposing the dangerous effects of big data practices on individual privacy and civil liberties.

Researchers have also shown how biased big data and opaque artificial intelligence have reproduced racism, classism and many forms of inequity.

However less attention has been paid to agriculture firms such as Monsanto or John Deere. And yet, they are some of the largest, concentrated corporations in North America who increasingly centre their profits on the collection, processing and sale of big data.

We should pay close attention. Agricultural big data are likely to have far-reaching detrimental environmental and social impacts.

Maximizing profits: The past as a road map

While farmers have used satellite weather data for decades, today’s big data practices are different. Data get collected by sensors built into farm machinery, called “precision” farm equipment. Then, corporate data scientists aggregate and “mine” these data for insights.

While there are benefits to farmers who buy the data-driven insights, there are clear and potentially incommensurate benefits for the corporations. Both the data-driven insights as well as the datasets are sources of profit for private firms.

We can infer what agribusinesses might do with big data based on insights from other sectors but also by how agribusinesses have acted in the past.

It is likely that firms collecting data from farms about weather and pest pressures will be able to predict which products are most needed where and then use this information to maximize profit.

Companies supplying farmers with seeds and chemicals have for years used price discrimination, selectively setting higher prices for inputs within those demographics or regions which are seen to depend on them.

Big agricultural data could entrench the market advantage of large agribusinesses.

Agricultural big data

Companies collecting and controlling the most data are likely to accrue the most power. This is because of the scale-driven proposition of artificial intelligence: AI is only as good as the data which feeds it.


We have seen this advantage play out with Google and Amazon, who were first out of the gate collecting internet data. Their lead has enabled the development of robust AI systems like Google Search and Alexa.

That the powerful can become even more powerful in the big data era is relevant for agriculture where the sector has long been dominated by only a handful of companies.

A marriage made in hell

In 2018, Monsanto and Bayer, the two biggest agribusinesses, merged in a transaction worth US$63 billion. At the time, Monsanto owned over 80 per cent of all the genetically modified seeds in the world. Unprecedented in its scope, the merger was described as “marriage made in hell” given its anti-competition ramifications.

The side of the story that’s relevant to big data is that new Bayer has the capability to access data from almost half of all farmers in North America.

The ins and outs of Bayer’s AI system are impossible to assess because its workings are protected from scrutiny by trade secrecy law, rendering it a “pernicious black box.”

As with Facebook, Google and Amazon, neither the firms’ datasets or the AI processes by which they translate data into advice are transparent. Corporations justify tight data control as a means to protect consumers from privacy breaches and actions of nefarious hackers.

But as with social media companies, there is no democratic institutional oversight over agricultural big data. Most data breaches have so far been unearthed by watchdog sleuthing. Misuses of agricultural data will likely be worked out, as they have been for internet data — in the court of public opinion.

Biased data sets

Even without access to commercial code or data sets, one can analyze what is happening at the surface of agricultural big data — what media studies scholar Ian Bogost calls “procedural rhetoric.”

Many folks claim that big data and AI are efficient, objective, valuable and all-powerful. But contrary to the view that data are “raw” and “drive” advice (a fallacious view I call the Immaculate Conception of Data), people define and make relevant the range and content of big data and AI categories. Computer scientists and engineers design algorithms and build datasets.

For example, company scientists design the dominant commercial agricultural AI to include data only on a small selection of major agronomic commodity crops, those grown on large farms.

This design bias toward large, commodity crop and capital-intensive farms presents implications at a large scale, such that our food system could become increasingly characterized by an industrial mode of agriculture.

In just a few decades, canola has become one of the world’s most important oilseed crops and the most profitable commodity for Canadian farmers.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

Big data is not the solution to food problems

Many scholars believe data-driven readings of the world are a primary means of solving food system problems.

Indeed, the UN organization Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition and others call for opening agricultural data, as if data access was synonymous with broader social and environmental justice.

Industrial agriculture has proven negative impacts including on global climate change. There is growing consensus that we need to diversify our food system at all levels to foster a sustainability transition in agriculture.

Beyond data access and infrastructure, digital democracy calls for a fundamental redistribution of decision-making power from a small number of corporate stakeholders to a wider group of citizens who can help answer these questions: What kind of food system do we want? Which farming techniques and technologies will help us get there?

Kelly Bronson, Canada Research Chair in Science & Society, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

UK museum hunts 'Windrush' migrants in forgotten pictures

Agence France-Presse
July 05, 2022

The National Railway Museum is trying to find the smartly dressed 'Windrush' migrants who arrived at Waterloo station in 1962

 JOHN SIBLEY POOL/AFP

The anonymous face of a new arrival towered over Prince William at the unveiling of a national memorial to the "Windrush" generation of Caribbean migrants in London last month.


One fresh-faced young man is smartly dressed in a bow tie and Trilby hat. A woman, perhaps his wife or sister, stands to his right looking sideways at the camera.

Nervous anticipation is written over both their faces.

But the identity of the well-dressed people on the platform at London's Waterloo station, waiting for their new lives to begin, has been a mystery.

Now, a search has been launched to identify the young couple and others who arrived that day in 1962.

Britain's National Railway Museum in York, northern England, has acquired some of the photographs and is seeking to put names to the faces and tell their stories.
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The "Windrush" migrants are named after the MV Empire Windrush ship, one of the vessels that brought workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other islands to help fill UK labour shortages after World War II.

Underexposed

The photographs show the new arrivals being greeted by friends and family already in Britain. There are smiles and embraces as families are reunited.

Others look uncertain, pensive. In one, a family of four including two young children, all dressed in their Sunday best, wait by a newspaper stand.

In another, a man in a striped tie listens intently as something is explained to him. Piles of bags and old-fashioned suitcases lie on the platform.

But the faces of the new arrivals were nearly lost to history and only came to light recently because of new technology -- and the determination of the man who took the pictures.

On the day the migrants arrived, a young London photographer named Howard Grey had an idea.

Taking a break from his job photographing ladies' corsets, he decided to chance his hand at a bit of reportage.

Hopefully, he thought, he might capture a historic moment -- the last large-scale arrival of Caribbean migrants in Britain before new legislation imposed far tighter entry restrictions.

But arriving at the station on an overcast day in March or April, he says, he quickly realized the light conditions were so poor the photographs would be unusable.

"The glass roof of Waterloo station at that time was coated on the outside with grime," Grey, now 80, told AFP.

"It made the light yellow and so I knew when I was taking these pictures I really was up against it."

After around only 20 minutes Grey said he realized he hadn't got anything and went back to work.

"I did develop them the following day and I was right -- there was nothing there. They were all underexposed."

Despite his disappointment, something stopped him from throwing the negatives away as he usually did with failed projects.

New scanner

In fact, his own family background as refugees from what is now Ukraine gave the subject a subconscious hold on him.

"Because my family were immigrants in the 1900s from the Jewish pogroms I was always brought up with their stories and the stories of family friends who had relatives in the Holocaust.

"It was that kind of horror, it gave me a subconscious fear about immigration, the trepidation of the asylum-seeker or refugee," he added.

Instead Grey put the negatives in an envelope and tucked them away in a drawer where they stayed for about 50 years.

Decades later after a successful career as an advertising photographer, the London-based Grey had almost completely forgotten about the negatives in the envelope.

"One day I had a new scanner and I just thought I'd try it," he said.

"I did three scans of the same negative and made it into one and it (the image) just popped up, like invisible ink. I was astounded. It was a (sic) Eureka moment."

It's hoped that those in the photographs or their relatives may recognize their faces and come forward so their stories can be told as part of a major exhibition by the National Railway Museum planned for 2024.

"The pictures are incredibly special and very beautiful in their own right, but we don't actually know who the people in them are," a spokesman for the museum said.

"We want to have their stories properly told so we can do them the sort of justice and respect they deserve," he added.

© 2022 AFP

How Pfizer won the pandemic -- reaping outsize profit and influence

Kaiser Health News
July 05, 2022

Aiden Arthurs receives the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 Vaccine from

 Pharmacist Andrew Mac (R) at the Jewish Federation/JARC's offices 

in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (AFP)

The grinding two-plus years of the pandemic have yielded outsize benefits for one company — Pfizer — making it both highly influential and hugely profitable as covid-19 continues to infect tens of thousands of people and kill hundreds each day.

Its success in developing covid medicines has given the drugmaker unusual weight in determining U.S. health policy. Based on internal research, the company’s executives have frequently announced the next stage in the fight against the pandemic before government officials have had time to study the issue, annoying many experts in the medical field and leaving some patients unsure whom to trust.

Pfizer’s 2021 revenue was $81.3 billion, roughly double its revenue in 2020, when its top sellers were a pneumonia vaccine, the cancer drug Ibrance, and the fibromyalgia treatment Lyrica, which had gone off-patent.

Now its mRNA vaccine holds 70% of the U.S. and European markets. And its antiviral Paxlovid is the pill of choice to treat early symptoms of covid. This year, the company expects to rake in more than $50 billion in global revenue from the two medications alone.

Paxlovid’s value to vaccinated patients isn’t yet clear, and Pfizer’s covid vaccine doesn’t entirely prevent infections, although each booster temporarily restores some protection. Yet, while patients may recoil at the need for repeated injections — two boosters are now recommended for people 50 and older — the requirement is gold for investors.

“Hopefully, we could be giving it annually and maybe for some groups that are high-risk more often,” CEO Albert Bourla told investors this year. “Then you have the treatment [Paxlovid] that will, let’s say, resolve the issues of those that are getting the disease.”

Just last week, the Biden administration agreed to buy another 105 million doses of Pfizer’s covid vaccine for the fall booster campaign, paying $3.2 billion. At $30.47 a dose, it’s a significant premium over the $19.50-a-dose rate the government paid for the first 100 million. The vaccine is being modified to target early omicron variants, but newer variants are gaining dominance.

Because the virus keeps mutating and will be around for a long time, the market for Pfizer’s products won’t go away. In wealthier countries, the public is likely to keep coming back for more, like diners at an all-you-can-eat restaurant, sated but never entirely satisfied.

The reliance on Pfizer products at each stage of the pandemic has steered the U.S. response, including critical public health decisions.

When last year Bourla suggested that a booster shot would soon be needed, U.S. public health officials later followed, giving the impression that Pfizer was calling the tune. Some public health experts and scientists worry these decisions were hasty, noting, for example, that although boosters with the mRNA shots produced by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech improve antibody protection initially, it generally doesn’t last.

Since January, Bourla has been saying that U.S. adults will probably all need annual booster shots, and senior FDA officials have indicated since April that they agree.

At a June 28 meeting of FDA advisers considering a potential fall vaccination campaign, Pfizer presented studies involving about 3,500 people showing that tweaks to its covid vaccine allowed it to elicit more antibodies against the omicron variant that began circulating last December. But most of the advisers said the FDA should require the next vaccine to target an even newer omicron variant, known as BA.5.

That would mean more work and expense for Pfizer, which called on the FDA to enable it to make future changes to the covid vaccine without human trials — similar to how annual influenza vaccines are approved. “If such a process were implemented, responses to future waves could be substantially accelerated,” said Kena Swanson, Pfizer’s vice president for viral vaccines.

FDA officials at the meeting did not immediately respond to the suggestion.

As societies abandon other efforts to control covid’s spread, such as mask mandates and physical distancing, Pfizer’s prospects look even brighter, especially now that the company has brought out the first oral covid treatment, Paxlovid.

“People are going to get out there,” Angela Hwang, president of Pfizer Biopharmaceuticals Group, told investors May 3. “We know with all of that, infections are going to increase, and that’s the role that Paxlovid can play.”

During a recent investor call, a Pfizer official could spin the recent reports that the virus can hide from Paxlovid into good news, predicting that, as with the vaccine, patients may need multiple courses.

Immunocompromised patients “may carry this virus for a very, very long time,” Dr. Mikael Dolsten said in the investor call. “And we see that area as a real new opportunity growth area for Paxlovid to do very well, where you may need to take multiple courses.”

Pfizer has spent handsomely to bolster its influence during the pandemic. Since early 2020, it has shelled out more than $25 million for in-house lobbying and payments to 19 lobbying firms, pushing for legislation to protect its products and promote more robust U.S. vaccination programs.

Pfizer’s donations to political candidates in the 2020 cycle were larger than those of any other drug company, totaling about $3.5 million, with the greatest share going to Democrats. Joe Biden got $351,000; Donald Trump just $103,000.

Unlike Moderna, Sanofi, Novavax, and Johnson & Johnson, which got billions of dollars in U.S. support, Pfizer did not seek government money to develop its vaccine, saying it would work independently.

Pfizer did benefit from $445 million the German government provided to BioNTech, Pfizer’s partner in developing the vaccine. And, in the end, Pfizer relied substantially on U.S. government logistical support, according to a new book by former Health and Human Services official Paul Mango.

Pfizer recorded $7.8 billion in U.S. revenue for its covid vaccine in 2021. The government has options to buy 1.6 billion Pfizer vaccine doses and has so far bought 900 million of them, including 500 million purchased at not-for-profit prices to be donated to poor countries.

Pfizer’s terms in the contracts exclude many taxpayer protections. They deny the government any intellectual property rights and say that federal spending played no role in the vaccine’s development — even though National Institutes of Health scientists invented a key feature of Pfizer’s vaccine, said Robin Feldman, a patent law expert at the University of California.

“The agreement could set a precedent,” in which another company could cite Pfizer’s contracts to argue the government has surrendered any rights to an invention, she said.

The government also has agreed to buy about 20 million five-day courses of Paxlovid for $530 each.

Prices for the covid drug and vaccine will go up once the pandemic period is over, Bourla said at a January event, “to reflect the cutting-edge technology.”

Pfizer spokesperson Sharon Castillo declined to respond to specific questions about Pfizer’s influence on pandemic policy. She released a statement saying that “since Day 1 of this pandemic, we have been laser-focused on working collaboratively with all relevant stakeholders to bring to the world two medical breakthroughs. In doing so, we have moved at the speed of science, complied with the strict regulatory processes, and relied on our scientists’ expertise and manufacturing prowess.”

There is little question that the company ripped a scientific home run in responding rapidly to meet the medical needs created by the pandemic. It used artificial intelligence to track the spread of the virus and find the best places to recruit volunteers for its vaccine trials and deployed rapid drug-screening tools to develop Paxlovid.

Its success with the covid vaccine has raised hopes for a Pfizer vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus, a danger to babies and older adults. The company is also moving toward seeking licensure for shots that protect against Lyme disease and hospital infections.

Pfizer had long shunned the vaccine business, with its historically modest financial returns. It dropped out of human vaccine production in the late 1960s after the recall of its disastrous measles vaccine, which sickened scores of children after exposure to the virus caused unexpected reactions with antibodies stimulated by the shot. The company returned to the field in 2009 when it bought Wyeth, which was making a highly effective and uncommonly profitable vaccine against pneumonia and ear infections.

Now, Pfizer is a new kind of global powerhouse. In 2021 alone, the company hired nearly 2,400 people. “We are a household name right now to billions of people,” Bourla said in January. “People are trusting the Pfizer vaccines.”

The company’s power worries some vaccinologists, who see its growing influence in a realm of medical decision-making traditionally led by independent experts.

During a recent investor call, analyst Evan Seigerman of BMO Capital Markets asked whether the world was “kind of walking blindly into recommending boosters” so frequently.

Data from Israel, which uses only Pfizer’s vaccine and has provided most of the studies that have led to vaccination booster recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggests that third and fourth doses of the mRNA vaccines increase antibody levels that quickly wane again. Added boosters saved some lives in the over-60 population, but the data is less clear about the benefit to younger adults.

When President Biden in September 2021 offered boosters to Americans — not long after Bourla had recommended them — Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a developer of a vaccine for an intestinal virus, wondered, “Where’s the evidence you are at risk of serious disease when confronted with covid if you are vaccinated and under 50?”

Policies on booster recommendations for different groups are complex and shifting, Offit said, but the CDC, rather than Bourla and Pfizer, should be making them.

“We’re being pushed along,” he said. “The pharmaceutical companies are acting like public health agencies.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

Editorial: The filibuster is further endangering abortion rights. It's time to scrap it

2022/7/5 06:08
© St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A view of the U.S. Capitol Building on March 11, 2022, in Washington, D.C.. 

- Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images North America/TNS

The irony is thick: A Republican president took office despite getting fewer votes than his opponent, then installed three conservative Supreme Court justices — and now that court majority has ignored America’s majority, not to mention its own precedent, to impose its ideological will on society. The fall of Roe v. Wade is the result of a series of minoritarian quirks in the nation’s political structure and the GOP’s single-minded exploitation of those quirks. With Republicans posed to retake Congress thanks to factors unrelated to actual merit, anti-choice extremism could ultimately be forced upon even those states that still support abortion rights.

There’s nothing Democrats can immediately do about the court’s brazenly politicized majority, the byzantine Electoral College, gerrymandering or the inherent red-state advantage in the Senate. But it could end or alter the filibuster immediately to protect abortion rights across America, now, before the GOP has the chance to eliminate those rights nationally.

The filibuster, of course, is the Senate rule that requires an extraordinary majority of 60 votes (instead of a simple majority of 51) to pass most legislation. A previously reluctant President Joe Biden on Thursday called for making an exception to the filibuster in order to codify abortion rights. That’s the minimum that should happen — though a better approach would be to eliminate the filibuster altogether.

The Constitution’s framers set up the Senate as a majoritarian body and had no notion of this odd rule that lets a minority of the chamber hold everything up. The filibuster arose later, an unintended consequence of Senate rule-making. But it has been around long enough to develop the patina of institutionalism. Filibuster defenders like Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., wax on about how it promotes bipartisanship.

And how has that been going lately?

Senate Republicans were able to seat the Supreme Court majority currently overruling Americans’ policy preferences with the zeal of zealots because the GOP in 2017 carved out an exception to the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. Just as Democrats did earlier for other presidential appointments. Now Biden wants an abortion rights exception. When a rule requires escalating exceptions to the rule in order for a lawmaking body to function, perhaps it’s time to rethink the rule.

But if an abortion carve-out is all that’s politically possible, Senate Democrats should do it. Many Republicans are already salivating to eliminate abortion rights nationally when they next hold Congress. Anyone who thinks Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell won’t ditch his supposed reverence for the filibuster and scrap it the second it obstructs that goal hasn’t watched his multiple chameleon-like transformations when it comes to power politics.

Manchin and any other Democratic holdouts against scrapping or limiting the filibuster aren’t fostering bipartisanship — they’re just blowing what is probably their final chance in the foreseeable future to protect America’s women while they still can.

Minnesota House Dems hope to fully legalized marijuana after sneaking THC edible provision past their GOP colleagues

Max Nesterak, Minnesota Reformer
July 05, 2022

Marijuana (Facebook)

House Democrats responsible for legalizing low-dose THC products said on Tuesday the under-the-radar approach that seemingly took Republicans by surprise was a necessary gambit to fully legalizing marijuana in the future.

“We absolutely did this on purpose. It was an intentional step forward,” said House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler, DFL-Golden Valley, who authored another bill that fully legalized marijuana but failed to gain traction in the Republican-controlled Senate.

The provision was tucked into a large health and human services bill and legalizes the production and sale of edible products with tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. The food and beverages can only be sold to people over 21 and with no more than 5 milligrams of THC per serving — about half the dose allowed in other states with legal marijuana — or 50 milligrams per package.

It was signed into law by the governor in early June but went largely unnoticed by the public until the day before it went into effect on July 1.

“Sometimes legislation benefits from a lot of publicity. Sometimes legislation benefits from the ability to do the work more quietly, but it was all done in the public eye,” Winkler said when asked why Democrats didn’t publicize a bill they’re now all celebrating.

Republicans have responded both with surprise and subdued approval.

Sen. Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, said it has a “broader effect” than he expected. Senate Majority Leader Jeremy Miller, R-Winona, said in a statement he supported the “bipartisan legislation” that regulates the sale of products with THC.

The law has few restrictions on the sale — virtually any store can sell THC edibles — but does prohibit the edibles from looking like cartoon characters, animals or fruit so as not to make them attractive to kids. The products must also come in child-resistant packages.

But already there are problems with THC products looking too much like candy — they are sold as gummies and chocolates — according to the bill’s author, Rep. Heather Edelson, DFL-Edina.

“Later this week, I’ll be having more information about how we plan to handle that as a state,” Edelson said during the Tuesday news conference. “There’s going to be some problems in terms of how do we enforce this.”

Edelson said she and her fellow lawmakers are working with the League of Minnesota Cities, indicating they will ask local governments play an active role in regulating THC edibles. The state Legislature is not in session and the governor would have to call a special session to pass any updates to the law.


The Board of Pharmacy, which mostly oversees licensing pharmacists and pharmacies, is tasked with regulating the potency, packaging and age requirements of the new products. It’s a large task for an agency that has fewer than two dozen employees.

The Democrats’ answer to any problems with the current law is to vote more of them into office this November, promising to pass full legalization if they control the House, Senate and governorship.

“The right thing to do is to elect Democrats, send us back to St. Paul so that we can continue working on this important issue,” said Rep. Jess Hanson, DFL-Burnsville.

The House Democrats, joined by activists and a hemp farmer, held the news conference outside Indeed Brewing in northeast Minneapolis, which Winkler suggested could benefit from selling beverages with THC.

The guidance from the Board of Pharmacy, however, says restaurants and bars may not add THC to food or beverages for onsite or take away consumption. THC also may not be added to beer or other alcoholic beverages.

Democrats emphasized the foot-in-the-door legalization bill furthers racial justice, as Black and Indigenous people have been disproportionately arrested and incarcerated for marijuana crimes.

The law, however, doesn’t do anything to explicitly advance racial equity, such as giving licensing priority or grants to people from areas that were targeted in the War on Drugs — although those efforts have largely floundered elsewhere in the country. That means people with capital and relationships to financial lenders and existing THC businesses will likely dominate the Minnesota legal marijuana market.

Angela Dawson, a Black hemp farmer from Pine County, said the law isn’t perfect, but it will create more opportunities for people of color.

“We’re working with the scraps we’re given, quite frankly,” Dawson said. “We’re going to continue to push (an) equity agenda. We’re going to ask Minnesota to also be advocates for equity within this system.”


Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on Facebook and Twitter.