The US Senate Judiciary Committee will review reports that Alito's Hobby Lobby decision was leaked to an anti-abortion leader: 'another black mark on the Supreme Court's increasingly marred ethical record'

Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert

BUSINESS INSIDER
Sun, November 20, 2022 

The Supreme Court of the United States on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022 in Washington, DC.Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Anti-abortion leaders knew about a 2014 Supreme Court decision before it was official, NYT reported.


Alito's Hobby Lobby decision on contraception would be the second of two known leaks from the court.


The Senate Judiciary Committee will investigate the allegations, AP reported.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating another potential leak out of the Supreme Court, following a New York Times report that said anti-abortion leaders knew about the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision before it was official.

The Times report, published Saturday, indicates Rev. Rob Schenck — an anti-abortion activist known for lobbying the Supreme Court — said in a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. and in interviews with the Times that he was informed of the outcome of the 2014 case weeks before it was announced.

The Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision held that corporations can refuse on religious grounds to pay for contraception as mandated by the Affordable Care Act.

Schenck, an evangelical minister and leader of a group called Faith and Action, told Politico earlier this year that, between the years 1995 to 2018, he arranged for conservative couples to fly to Washington to share expensive dinners and evenings of entertainment with Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and the late Antonin Scalia. Couples involved in the "Operation Higher Court" program discussed conservative issues with the justices while taking care not to specifically mention current cases, according to Schenck.

Gayle Wright — who was among those who shared meals with the justices as part of the program — dined with Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, in 2014 and, following a meeting with the justice, is reported to have told Schenck about the outcome of the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case weeks before the majority decision was published, according to the Times report.

Justice Alito denied the allegations in a statement to the Associated Press, saying any "allegation that the Wrights were told the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the Court, by me or my wife, is completely false."

If the Hobby Lobby leak is authenticated, it will be the second known leak from the Supreme Court. This summer, a draft opinion was leaked in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case that overturned abortion protections provided by Roe v. Wade.

The Dobbs decision was also authored by Alito.

Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, released a statement Saturday indicating the committee is "reviewing these serious allegations" and called on Congress to pass a bill requiring the high court to adopt a code of ethics.

AP reported Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia also issued a statement Saturday calling for a code of ethics for the highest court in the land, referring to the Times report as "another black mark on the Supreme Court's increasingly marred ethical record" and saying they "intend to get to the bottom of these serious allegations."

Representatives for the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Supreme Court did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.

Lawmakers urge action after report of other high court leak

Sun, November 20, 2022 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said his panel is reviewing “serious allegations” in a report that a former anti-abortion leader knew in advance the outcome of a 2014 Supreme Court case involving health care coverage of contraception.

The report Saturday in The New York Times followed the stunning leak earlier this year of a draft opinion in the case in which the high court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending constitutional protections for abortion. That decision was written by Justice Samuel Alito, who is also the author of the majority opinion in the 2014 case at the center of the new report.

In the Times story, Rev. Rob Schenck said he learned the outcome of the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores case weeks before the decision was made public. In a 5-4 decision, Alito wrote that some companies with religious objections can avoid the contraceptives requirement in President Barack Obama’s health care legislation.

Schenck, who previously headed the group Faith and Action, has said in other recent stories in Politico and Rolling Stone that he was part of a concerted effort to forge social and ministry relationships with conservative justices.

In the Times story, Schenck said the information about the Hobby Lobby decision came from Gail Wright, a donor to his organization who was part of the outreach effort to the justices and who had dined with Alito and his wife. Wright herself denied obtaining or sharing any information in an interview with the Times.

The New York Times also published a letter Schenck said he wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in July alerting him to the alleged breach years ago. Schenck wrote that he thought the information might be relevant as part of a probe into the leak of the abortion decision.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Saturday that the committee is “reviewing these serious allegations," and he called on fellow members of Congress to pass a bill that would require the high court to adopt a code of ethics.

Two fellow Democrats, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia, who chair courts subcommittees, issued a statement calling the Times report “another black mark on the Supreme Court's increasingly marred ethical record” and said they “intend to get to the bottom of these serious allegations.” They too urged passage of a code of ethics.

The Times' story included an emphatic denial by Alito that he'd disclosed the outcome of the case. The court released Alito's full statement to The Associated Press:

“The allegation that the Wrights were told the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the Court, by me or my wife is completely false. My wife and I became acquainted with the Wrights some years ago because of their strong support for the Supreme Court Historical Society, and since then, we have had a casual and purely social relationship.

"I never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything that I did in either an official or private capacity, and I would have strongly objected if they had done so. I have no knowledge of any project that they allegedly undertook for ‘Faith and Action,’ ‘Faith and Liberty,’ or any similar group, and I would be shocked and offended if those allegations are true,” it said.

Schenck's Faith and Action group became Faith & Liberty after becoming part of the Liberty Counsel in 2018.

Alito was appointed to the high court in 2006 by President George W. Bush.

Report of second major U.S. Supreme Court leak draws calls for probe


The U.S. Supreme Court building is seen in Washington

Sat, November 19, 2022 
By Matt Spetalnick and Laura Sanicola

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A New York Times report of a former anti-abortion leader's claim that he was told in advance about the outcome of a major 2014 U.S. Supreme Court case involving contraceptives triggered calls on Saturday for an investigation of a court still reeling from the leak of a landmark abortion rights ruling.

Rev. Rob Schenck was quoted by The Times as saying he was informed weeks before the public announcement of the 2014 ruling shortly after two conservative allies had dinner at the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife.

Alito wrote that majority opinion as well as a recent one overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion nationwide, both of which were victories for the religious right.

Schenck, who used to lead an evangelical nonprofit in Washington, said in a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts and in interviews with The Times that he was informed ahead of time about the ruling of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a case involving contraception and religious rights, the newspaper said.

Schenck used his knowledge of the ruling to prepare a public relations campaign and he also tipped off the president of the Christian evangelical-run craft store chain Hobby Lobby that he would win the case, according to The Times.

Alito said in a statement that any allegation that he or his wife leaked the 2014 decision was "completely false."

Neither Schenck nor Chief Justice Roberts immediately responded to requests for comment.

Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat and head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a written statement that the committee is reviewing the allegations. He urged passage of legislation pending in Congress that would create a code of ethics for the Supreme Court. Justices on the top court currently are not required to follow a binding code of ethics for judges in lower federal courts, which Durbin called "unacceptable."

U.S. Representative Mondaire Jones, a Democrat from New York, wrote on Twitter: "Today's well-sourced NY Times article strongly suggests Justice Alito leaked the 2014 opinion in Hobby Lobby, and describes a conspiracy by the far-right donor class to influence the Supreme Court Justices. The House Judiciary Committee must investigate this while we still can."

Brian Fallon, executive director of the progressive judicial group Demand Justice, said The Times' report was "the latest proof that the Republican justices on the Court are little more than politicians in robes."

"The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. At SCOTUS, the problems run deep," Democratic U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island wrote on Twitter.

COURT UNDER SCRUTINY

A draft of the majority opinion to overturn Roe, reversing five decades of abortion rights, was leaked in May, spurring scrutiny of the court's procedures at a time when critics were accusing its conservative majority of politicization. Polls show that the court's public approval has reached record lows.

Alito had called the Roe leak, which was confirmed when the ruling was announced in June, a "grave betrayal."

Schenck was quoted by The Times as saying he had worked for years to gain access to the court and that in early June 2014 two of his star donors, Ohio couple Donald and Gayle Wright, ate a meal with Justice Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann.

Schenck said one of the Wrights then told him that Alito had authored the Hobby Lobby opinion and that it would be in its favor, The Times said. The decision announced three weeks later held that requiring family-owned businesses to pay for insurance covering contraception violated their religious freedoms.

In his statement, Alito said: "The allegation that the Wrights were told the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the Court, by me or my wife is completely false."

"My wife and I became acquainted with the Wrights some years ago because of their strong support for the Supreme Court Historical Society, and since then, we have had a casual and purely social relationship," Alito's statement said.

"I never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything that I did in either an official or private capacity, and I would have strongly objected if they had done so."

Gayle Wright, in a phone interview, denied obtaining or passing along any such information, The Times reported.

She could not immediately be reached for comment.

(Reporting by Matt Spetalnick, Laura Sanicola and Nate Raymond; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

Supreme Court Breach Was Not the First, Says Former Anti-Abortion Leader

Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker
Sat, November 19, 2022 

The Rev. Rob Schenck, who spent years at the center of the anti-abortion movement and led a secretive effort to influence Supreme Court justices, in Washington, Nov. 15, 2022. (Shuran Huang/The New York Times)

As the Supreme Court investigates the extraordinary leak this spring of a draft opinion of the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a former anti-abortion leader has come forward claiming that another breach occurred in a 2014 landmark case involving contraception and religious rights.

In a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts and in interviews with The New York Times, the Rev. Rob Schenck said he was told the outcome of the 2014 case weeks before it was announced. He used that information to prepare a public relations push, records show, and he said that at the last minute he tipped off the president of Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that was the winning party in the case.

Both court decisions were triumphs for conservatives and the religious right. Both majority opinions were written by Justice Samuel Alito. But the leak of the draft opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion was disclosed in the news media by Politico, setting off a national uproar. With Hobby Lobby, according to Schenck, the outcome was shared with only a handful of advocates.

Schenck’s allegation creates an unusual, contentious situation: a minister who spent years at the center of the anti-abortion movement, now turned whistleblower; a denial by a sitting justice; and an institution that shows little outward sign of getting to the bottom of the recent leak of the abortion ruling or of following up on Schenck’s allegation.

The evidence for Schenck’s account of the breach has gaps. But in months of examining Schenck’s claims, the Times found a trail of contemporaneous emails and conversations that strongly suggested he knew the outcome and the author of the Hobby Lobby decision before it was made public.

Schenck, who used to lead an evangelical nonprofit in Washington, said he learned about the Hobby Lobby opinion because he had worked for years to exploit the court’s permeability. He gained access through faith, through favors traded with gatekeepers and through wealthy donors to his organization, abortion opponents whom he called “stealth missionaries.”

The minister’s account comes at a time of rising concerns about the court’s legitimacy. A majority of Americans are losing confidence in the institution, polls show, and its approval ratings are at a historic low. Critics charge that the court has become increasingly politicized, especially as a new conservative supermajority holds sway.

In May, after the draft opinion in the abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, was leaked in what Alito recently called “a grave betrayal,” the chief justice took the unusual step of ordering an investigation by the Supreme Court’s marshal. Two months later, Schenck sent his letter to Roberts, saying he believed his information about the Hobby Lobby case was relevant to the inquiry. He said he has not gotten any response.

In early June 2014, an Ohio couple who were Schenck’s star donors shared a meal with Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann. A day later, Gayle Wright, one of the pair, contacted Schenck, according to an email reviewed by the Times. “Rob, if you want some interesting news please call. No emails,” she wrote.

Schenck said Wright told him that the decision would be favorable to Hobby Lobby and that Alito had written the majority opinion. Three weeks later, that’s exactly what happened. The court ruled, in a 5-4 vote, that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance covering contraception violated their religious freedoms. The decision would have major implications for birth control access, President Barack Obama’s new health care law and corporations’ ability to claim religious rights.

Alito, in a statement issued through the court’s spokesperson, denied disclosing the decision. He said that he and his wife shared a “casual and purely social relationship” with the Wrights and did not dispute that the two couples ate together June 3, 2014. But the justice said that the “allegation that the Wrights were told the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the Court, by me or my wife, is completely false.”

Wright, in a phone interview, denied obtaining or passing along any such information. A representative for Hobby Lobby would not comment. Beyond sharing Alito’s statement, a spokesperson for the court declined to answer questions about Schenck’s account or its investigation.

Schenck was not present at the meal and has no written record of his conversation with Wright. But the Times interviewed four people who said he told them years ago about the breach, and emails from June 2014 show him suggesting he had confidential information and directing his staff to prepare for victory. In another email, sent in 2017, he described the disclosure as “one of the most difficult secrets I’ve ever kept in my life.”

The court deliberates about the fundamental rights of Americans — like access to contraception and abortion — behind closed doors. Schenck’s campaign offers insights into the court’s boundaries and culture, and into efforts to draw the justices closer to communities that are devoted to particular outcomes in critical cases.

In interviews and thousands of emails and other records he shared with the Times, Schenck provided details of the effort he called the “Ministry of Emboldenment.”

Schenck recruited wealthy donors like Wright and her husband, Donald, encouraging them to invite some of the justices to meals, to their vacation homes or to private clubs. He advised allies to contribute money to the Supreme Court Historical Society and then mingle with justices at its functions. He ingratiated himself with court officials who could help give him access, records show.

All the while, he leveraged his connections to raise money for his nonprofit, Faith and Action. Schenck said he pursued the Hobby Lobby information to cultivate the business’s president, Steve Green, as a donor.

It is unclear if Schenck’s efforts had any effect on legal decisions, given that only Justices Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas proved amenable to the outreach, records show, and they were already inclined to overturn Roe v. Wade. That decision was only reversed this year after the addition of new conservative justices altered the court’s ideological makeup. But Schenck said his aim was not to change minds but rather to stiffen the resolve of the court’s conservatives in taking uncompromising stances that could eventually lead to a reversal of Roe.

Schenck, 64, has shifted his views on abortion in recent years, alienating him from many of his former associates, and is trying to reestablish himself, now as a progressive evangelical leader. His decision to speak out now about the Hobby Lobby episode, he said, stems from his regret about the actions that he claims led to his advance knowledge about the case.

“What we did,” he said, “was wrong.”

‘Pushing the Boundaries’

When the Hobby Lobby case was argued before the Supreme Court in March 2014, Gayle Wright and her husband watched from a select spot: seats in the courtroom reserved for guests of Scalia and Alito.

“We were invited to use seats from Nino and Sam,” she had written to Schenck days earlier, using nicknames for the justices. “Wow!”

In the interview, Wright said she used such seats “all the time” because “Nino and my husband were very good friends.” She was eager to hear the Hobby Lobby arguments, she added, because she had an interest in “all cases related to biblical issues.”

Her ties were the result, in part, of years of effort by Schenck.

He had long been an ends-justify-the-means anti-abortion provocateur. During the 1992 Democratic convention, he plotted a stunt to accost future President Bill Clinton with an aborted fetus in a container. He was repeatedly jailed for blocking access to abortion clinics. He helped pay Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of the 1973 ruling establishing abortion rights, for speaking appearances years later opposing the decision. (She later said she had been paid to lie.)

But no matter how much attention those tactics yielded, Roe v. Wade, one of the most consequential decisions in the past half-century, stood in the way of efforts to end the right to an abortion.

Historically, the court does not like to get too far out ahead of public opinion, and justices do not lightly overturn long-standing precedents. So in 2000, Schenck launched “Operation Higher Court”— an attempt to reach the justices directly.

Justices are given lifetime appointments to promote independence and buffer them from lobbying and politicking. But Schenck wanted the conservatives on the court to hear from people who would hail them as heroes if they seized the opportunity to strike down Roe one day. The goal, he said in an interview, was to “embolden the justices” to lay the legal groundwork for an eventual reversal by delivering “unapologetically conservative dissents.”

He wanted to gain access himself — but because he was a controversial figure, he also recruited couples who were less likely to draw notice. His leading players were Wright and her husband, a real estate developer and philanthropist from Centerville, Ohio. They got involved in his work “to have a major impact on the attitudes and actions of those in a position to shape and interpret our laws,” they wrote in a 2001 newsletter.

From 2000 to 2018, when he left Faith and Action, Schenck raised more than $30 million in pursuit of that goal. His donors ranged from evangelicals with little political involvement to the American Center for Law & Justice, a conservative legal group that was founded by televangelist Pat Robertson and litigates abortion and religious freedom cases. (Faith and Action paid Schenck an average annual salary of about $83,000, plus a housing allowance.)

Schenck has recounted some aspects of his initiative to Politico and Rolling Stone. But he has spoken exclusively with the Times about the alleged Hobby Lobby breach and provided far more detail and documentation about his efforts — including correspondence with donors, anti-abortion activists, court officials and justices.

To remain as close to the court as possible, Schenck purchased a building across the street and began working the court’s employees.

One of his targets was Perry Thompson, an administrator. Schenck befriended him by preaching at a church where Thompson served as pastor in his spare time. He leaned on Thompson to get coveted seats for oral arguments and decision days. In characteristically hyperbolic fashion, Schenck described him in a fundraising appeal as “God’s ‘secret agent’” at the court. Thompson did not respond to requests for comment.

“I exploited my friendships,” Schenck said. “The bad is on me.”

He also encouraged his donors to become patrons of the court’s Historical Society. Four of them, including the Wrights, became trustees, giving at least an estimated $125,000, records show.

That helped him draw close to the society’s executive director, David T. Pride. In November 2011, Pride took Green of Hobby Lobby to the chief justice’s annual Christmas party at Schenck’s request. In an email, Schenck described Green’s parents, already Faith and Action donors, as potential big givers to the society: “Family is worth about $3b.”

Pride responded, saying he would escort Green into the party. He added: “We should consult about what you might like me to promote on your behalf to Mr. Green. Do you have a particular project or the like that you’d like me to talk up? Or should I just extol your many virtues to him?”

A few months later, the Hobby Lobby owners began discussions about joining efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate.

Pride, now retired, said he was happy to help Schenck “do some fundraising with the Greens.”

“Anytime a member of the society — and Rob was a member, and also a close friend — wanted help, I always did what I could,” Pride said in an interview.

Schenck’s overtures met with a mixed response. Roberts and the court’s longtime swing voter, Justice Anthony Kennedy, were “polite but standoffish,” Schenck said. (Once, after he included a photo of himself with the chief justice in fundraising material, he received a letter of rebuke.)

But Schenck said he visited Scalia and Thomas in chambers, where he shaped his prayers as political messaging, using phrases like “the sanctity of human life” to plea for an end to abortion. (Peggy Nienaber, who worked with Schenck, was recently recorded saying that the group had prayed with justices at the court.)

Schenck also asked Scalia to meet privately with the Rev. Frank Pavone, an incendiary anti-abortion activist who ran Priests for Life, a nonprofit that has been involved in issues before the court, as have Schenck and Faith and Action.

“As I am sure you will appreciate, my position does not permit me to assist in the work of Fr. Pavone’s organization,” Scalia wrote in a letter, adding, “I will be happy to meet him, however, at a time he can arrange with my secretary.”

Pavone did not respond to requests for comment.

Supreme Court justices mostly police themselves, which Schenck said he exploited. While they are subject to the same law on recusals as other federal judges, they are not bound by the ethics code that applies to the rest. (Roberts has said they “consult” it.) Under court norms, they can socialize with lawyers or even parties with interests before them, as long as they do not discuss pending cases.

“I saw us as pushing the boundaries of appropriateness,” Schenck said.

Still, the ethics code requires judges to avoid any impression that outsiders are in a “special position” to influence them. It is this provision that the meetings Schenck arranged seemed most designed to test, according to judicial ethics experts.

Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said in an interview that because the court’s reputation was essential to its institutional legitimacy, justices must take care to “appear to be playing a different role than politicians.” Meeting with a well-known anti-abortion activist could create the appearance that the “person is getting a private opportunity to lobby the justice.”

Though the court does not require justices to disclose meetings with interested parties, there have been periodic controversies, such as when Scalia hunted with Vice President Dick Cheney in 2004 while a case involving his office was pending.

Worried about disclosures, Schenck gave his “stealth missionaries” close instruction. The justices were more likely to let their guard down at the Historical Society’s annual dinners, he advised recruits in a 2008 “orientation briefing,” because they assumed attendees had been “properly vetted.”

“See a justice — boldly approach,” he told the couples, according to a briefing document reviewed by the Times. If given the opportunity, bear witness to “biblical truth” but don’t push it, he said. “Your presence alone telegraphs a very important signal to the justices: Christians are concerned about the court and the issues that come before it.”

Kaitlynn Rivera, who worked for Faith and Action from 2013 to 2015, confirmed many details Schenck provided, including about the donor couples and his relationships at the court. To supporters, the minister boasted about his group’s connections, but he regularly warned them to keep quiet because he “knew the public at large would be upset by that kind of access,” she said in an interview.

Among the couples Schenck recruited were Christ and Dolly Lapp, of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, now deceased. They befriended Thomas and his wife, Ginni, and hosted them at a restaurant they owned there, according to a letter Schenck wrote for a fundraiser held at the site.

But no donors drew closer to the justices than the Wrights. Donald Wright often hunted with Scalia, according to the businessman’s obituary, and the couple socialized with the Alitos, Scalias and Thomases. They hosted the Alitos at their retreat near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the Alitos had the Wrights for dinner at their home in Alexandria, Virginia.

Records show that Gayle Wright, who said in the interview that her interest in the court stemmed solely from her involvement in the Historical Society, regularly reported her contacts with the justices to Schenck.

“Don and I have been invited to a private party in Virginia to celebrate Nino’s 80th,” she wrote to him in a January 2016 email, referring to Scalia.

“Lunch with CT on Monday, Sam on Wednesday, dinner at court on Monday, Dinner with Maureen on Wednesday,” she wrote in another email that year. Schenck understood “CT” and “Sam” to be Clarence Thomas and Alito. (She referred to them by their first names in another email.) Scalia’s widow is named Maureen.

Alito appeared to know Wright’s views well enough to recommend she attend a lecture at the court by Kelly Shackelford, president of First Liberty Institute, which frequently litigates religious liberty cases before the justices. “Sam told us that Kelly is someone we should know,” she wrote to Schenck in 2013.

Wright said in the interview that she had shared such information with Schenck out of friendship and excitement.

In the statement from the court, Alito said, “I never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything that I did in either an official or private capacity, and I would have strongly objected if they had done so.”

He added, “I have no knowledge of any project that they allegedly undertook for ‘Faith and Action.’” He concluded, “I would be shocked and offended if those allegations are true.”

‘This Will Be It’

In June 2014, when Wright told Schenck that she and her husband would be dining privately with the Alitos, she and the minister agreed she would try to learn to learn the outcome of the Hobby Lobby case, he said. “She knew I had an interest in knowing,” Schenck wrote in his letter to the chief justice.

On June 4, the day after the meal, Wright sent Schenck her cryptic email saying she had news.

In the interview, Wright said that while she did not have her calendars from those days, she believed the night in question involved a dinner at the Alitos’ home during which she fell ill. She said that the justice drove her and her husband back to her hotel, and that this might have been the news she wanted to share with Schenck.

“Being a friend or having a friendly relationship with a justice, you know that they don’t ever tell you about cases. They aren’t allowed to,” Wright said. “Nor would I ask. There has never been a time in all my years that a justice or a justice’s spouse told me anything about a decision.”

The minister said that after he learned the outcome from Wright in a phone call, he froze. He knew that pending decisions were not supposed to be disclosed and that sharing the information could hurt everyone involved if it got out.

His wife, Cheryl Schenck, said he was agonized. “The reason I remember is all the stressful machinations on, ‘What should I do with this information?’” Cheryl Schenck, a therapist, said in an interview.

Ultimately, Rob Schenck could not resist using it, he said. Emails he wrote over the following weeks reflect the advance knowledge he said he had of the Hobby Lobby decision. While the outcome was not surprising — the justices’ questions during oral arguments had hinted at it — Schenck appeared to know that Alito would author the opinion, even though many court watchers expected Roberts to write it.

On June 12, as Schenck’s team prepared dueling statements for the news media envisioning both a win and a loss, he privately expressed confidence about the ruling to his staff and drafted only a victory message for donors. “I have a Plan B for a different outcome, but from all the information I have, I think this will be it,” he wrote. He included a detailed plan to celebrate their triumph on the steps of the court, where they would drop to their knees in a “prayer of thanksgiving.” When a publicist pointed out there was no message for donors in the event of a loss, he did not email a reply.

He was still torn, he said, over whether to pass the news to Hobby Lobby’s owners. But Schenck hoped to further ingratiate himself with the Green family. “I wanted to give them something of value, and perhaps that would engender a reciprocal gift back,” he told the Times.

As the announcement neared, he grew bolder. On June 29, the day before the ruling, he emailed a staff member that “if it’s positive (confidential: I have good reason to believe it will be),” she should publicly laud Alito as a “reliable defender” of religious freedom. No other justice was mentioned.

That same day, he said, he phoned Green. “As I mentioned, we’ll need to keep it strictly ‘in the family,” Schenck emailed him later that night. “We’re watching and praying!”

Green, through his company, declined to comment. Reached by phone, Barbara Green, his mother, said she learned about the decision when it was announced. “We had no idea which way it was going to go,” she said.

The minister said he told almost no one else at the time, beyond his wife, brother and sister. But three years later, he confided the details to a business associate, who corroborated his story in an interview. That same year, he recounted the episode to a potential ghostwriter for his memoir in an email, calling the ruling “a decision I already knew was a done deal weeks before it was announced from the bench.”

By then, he was changing his position on abortion, citing the toll that unwanted pregnancies take on women, as he later wrote in a Times Opinion essay arguing for the Roe decision to stand. He now regrets the tactics he once employed, saying he had used women and babies as props. “In all of my rhetoric about humanizing the fetus, I had very much dehumanized others,” he said in the interview.

The ruling this year thrilled anti-abortion supporters, though it has proved deeply unpopular among the majority of Americans. After the draft was leaked, Schenck said, he felt compelled to come forward about his attempts to influence the court.

“You can position yourself in a special category with regard to the justices,” he said. “You can gain access, have conversations, share prayer.”

Even when his group was most active at the court, he said, “I would look up at that phrase that’s chiseled into the building itself, ‘Equal Justice Under Law,’” he recalled. “I would think, ‘Not really.’”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

BOTH SIDES ARE TO BLAME! STOP IT!

More than a dozen powerful explosions at a huge Russian-occupied nuclear power plant in south Ukraine, says IAEA



Bethany Dawson
Sun, November 20, 2022 

Renewed shelling near Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in the last 24 hours.

"Powerful explosions shook the area," said the IAEA in a statement.

Grossi said that there is an "urgent need for measures to help prevent a nuclear accident."

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has issued a dire warning about the potential threat of new shelling at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant.

There has recently been relative calm near the plant, which was captured by Russian forces early into Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but the area was shaken by more than a dozen explosions caused by shelling over the weekend. "Powerful explosions shook the area," said the IAEA in a statement.

Ukraine and Russia are blaming each other for the attacks.

Citing information provided by the plant management, the IAEA team said there had been damage to some buildings, systems, and equipment at the ZNPP site, but none so far were critical for nuclear safety and security. There were no reports of casualties.

Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi of the IAEA said: "Whoever is behind this, it must stop immediately. As I have said many times before, you're playing with fire!"

Grossi said that there is an "urgent need for measures to help prevent a nuclear accident there."

The Director General has been pushing for a nuclear safety and security zone around the power plant, said: "I'm not giving up until this zone has become a reality. As the ongoin apparent shelling demonstrates, it is needed more than ever."

President Zelenskyy has recently accused Putin of "energy terrorism" as thousands of Ukrainians are forced to live without power as a result of damage to the national grid infrastructure.

Speaking on November 4, Zelenskyy said: "Tonight, about 4.5 million consumers have been temporarily disconnected from energy consumption."

"The very fact that Russia is resorting to energy terrorism shows the weakness of our enemy. They cannot b at Ukraine on the battlefield, so they try to break our people this way."

'Stop madness': Risk of nuclear accident looms over Ukraine plant

Issued on: 21/11/2022 -

04:34  Video by: Douglas HERBERT

Fresh explosions over the weekend at Ukraine's Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant have once again heightened fears of an accident at Europe's biggest atomic plant. FRANCE 24's International Affairs Commentator Douglas Herbert tells us more.

First Ukrainian passenger train rolls into newly freed Kherson

First train from Kyiv arrives at Kherson central station after Russia's retreat

Sat, November 19, 2022 
By Stefaniia Bern and Joseph Campbell

KYIV/KHERSON (Reuters) - Jubilant Ukrainians rolled into Kherson by train on Saturday for the first time in more than eight months as residents of the newly liberated southern city greeted them on the platform with flowers and national flags.

"I can't even put my feelings into words," said Hryhorii Vyrtosa, a 67-year-old construction worker, shortly after stepping off the overnight route from the capital, Kyiv.

Ukrainian forces liberated Kherson from Russian occupation on Nov. 11 in what amounted to another major battlefield setback for Moscow. It had been the only regional capital captured by Russian forces since the Feb. 24 invasion.

Saturday's journey marked the first time Vyrtosa, a native of Kherson region with Moldovan roots, was able to return after escaping the Russian-occupied city of Skadovsk in April.

Upon arriving, a beaming Vyrtosa fulfilled his pledge to shout "Glory to Ukraine" upon arrival. He then tightly hugged his son, who he had not seen in eight months.

Hundreds of residents of the city, which is currently without electricity, running water or central heating, cheered as they welcomed the train.

"It's a symbol of freedom. It's happiness," said Maria Matsenko, 66, who was holding a Ukrainian flag while waiting on the platform with her friend.

The train, which was brightly painted by various Ukrainian artists and featured slogans such as "People of Steel", departed Kyiv late on Friday following a celebratory event at the main railway station.

The event included a performance by Ukrainian rock singer Oleh Skrypka, with passengers in the crowd, including Ukrainian soldiers, singing along.

Tickets to Kherson first went on sale weeks before its liberation as part of a "Train to Victory" initiative between Ukrainian Railways and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's United24 fundraising initiative.

The southeastern city of Mariupol, which was heavily damaged earlier this year and is still occupied by Russian forces, is among the other destinations.

(Reporting by Stefaniia Bern and Joseph Campbell; Writing by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Helen Popper)

'We survived': Kherson comes alive after Russian withdrawal
 

HANNA ARHIROVA
Sat, November 19, 2022 

KHERSON, Ukraine (AP) — A week since the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson was liberated, residents can't escape reminders of the terrifying eight months they spent under Russian occupation.

People are missing. There are mines everywhere, closed shops and restaurants, a scarcity of electricity and water, and explosions day and night as Russian and Ukrainian forces battle just across the Dnieper River.

Despite the hardships, residents are expressing a mix of relief, optimism, and even joy — not least because of their regained freedom to express themselves at all.

“Even breathing became easier. Everything is different now,” said Olena Smoliana, a pharmacist whose eyes shone with happiness as she recalled the day Ukrainian soldiers entered the city.

Kherson's population has dwindled to around 80,000 from its prewar level near 300,000, but the city is slowly coming alive. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy triumphantly walked the streets on Monday, hailing Russia’s withdrawal — a humiliating defeat for Russian President Vladimir Putin — as the “beginning of the end of the war.”

People are no longer afraid to leave home or worried that contact with Russian soldiers might lead to a prison or torture cell. They are gathering in city squares — adorned with blue-and-yellow ribbons on their bags and jackets — to recharge phones, collect water and to talk with neighbors and relatives.

“If we survived the occupation, we will survive this without any problems,” said Yulia Nenadyschuk, 53, who had hunkered down at home with her husband, Oleksandr, since the Russian invasion began but now comes downtown every day.

The worst deprivation was the lack of freedom to be yourself, which was like being in a “cage,” she said.

“You couldn’t say anything out loud, you couldn’t speak Ukrainian,” said Oleksandr Nenadyschuk, 57. “We were constantly being watched, you couldn’t even look around.”

Residents of Kherson talk about the "silent terror'' that defined their occupation, which was different than the devastating military sieges that turned other Ukrainian cities — such as Mariupol, Sievierodonetsk, and Lysychansk — to rubble.

Russian forces entered Kherson in the early days of the war from nearby Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014, and quickly took over the city. The city was the only regional capital Moscow captured after the invasion began on Feb. 24.

People mostly communicate in Russian in Kherson. Early on in the war, some residents were tolerant of neighbors who sympathized with Russia, but there was a palpable shift during the occupation, said Smoliana, the pharmacist.

“I'm even ashamed to speak Russian,” she said. “They oppressed us emotionally and physically.”

Many people fled the city, but some just disappeared.

Khrystyna Yuldasheva, 18, works in a shop across the street from a building the Russian police used as a detention center and where Ukrainian officials are investigating allegations of torture and abuse.

“There is no one here anymore,” she told a woman who recently came by looking for her son.

Other people sought to leave, but couldn’t. “We tried to leave three times, but they closed all possible exits from the city,” said Tetiana, 37, who didn’t want to be identified by her last name.

While people were euphoric immediately after the Russian retreat, Kherson remains a city on hold. The Russian soldiers left a city devoid of basic infrastructure — water, electricity, transportation and communications.

Many shops, restaurants and hotels are still closed and many people are out of work. Residents were drawn downtown this past week by truckloads of food that arrived from Ukrainian supermarket chains or to take advantage of internet hotspots that were set up.

Russian products can still be found in small shops that survived through occupation. And the city is still adorned with banners touting Russian propaganda like “Ukrainians and Russians are a single nation,” or that encourage Ukrainians to get a Russian passport.

Some Ukrainians curse out loud when they walk past the remnants of war.

The humiliating Russian retreat did not end the sounds of war in Kherson. About 70% of the wider Kherson region is still in Russian hands. Explosions are heard regularly, although locals aren’t always sure whether they are from the mine-removal work or from clashing Russian and Ukrainian artillery.

On Saturday evening, two missiles struck an oil depot in Kherson — the first time a depot was hit in the city since the Russians withdrew, according to firefighters. Associated Press reporters saw a blazing fire and thick black smoke at the scene. Firefighters said the Russians stole firetrucks and ambulances as they retreated, leaving local authorities scrambling for resources to respond to attacks.

“There was a strong explosion,” said Valentyna Svyderska, who lives nearby. “We were scared, everyone was scared ... Because this is an army that is at war with the civilian population."

Earlier in the day, people excitedly waited for the first train to arrive in Kherson since the early days of the invasion. Mykola Desytniakov, 56, hasn’t seen his wife since she left for Kyiv, Ukraine's capital, with their two daughters in June.

Desytniakov stayed behind to take care of his ailing parents, he said, holding a single rose and peering anxiously over the platform.

“She will scold me, she doesn’t like flowers,” he said of his wife. “But I will give them to her anyway.”

Ludmila Olhouskaya didn’t have anyone to meet but went to the station anyway to show her support.

“This is the beginning of a new life,” the 74-year-old said, wiping off tears of joy. “Or rather, the revival of a former one.”

A major obstacle to bringing people back to Kherson, and to the rebuilding effort, will be clearing all the mines the Russians placed inside offices and around critical infrastructure, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs.

“Demining is needed here to bring life back,” Mary Akopian, the deputy internal affairs minister, said. Kherson has a bigger problem with mines than any of the other cities Ukraine reclaimed from the Russians because it had been under occupation for the longest period, she said.

Akopian estimated it would take years to completely clear mines from the city and the surrounding province. Already, 25 people have died clearing mines and other explosives left behind.

Before retreating, Russian soldiers looted from stores and businesses — and even museums. The Ukrainian government estimates that 15,000 artifacts have been stolen from museums in the Kherson region and taken to Crimea, which itself was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.

“There is, in fact, nothing there,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko, a senior official in Zelenskyy's office, wrote after a trip to the Kherson region. “The Russians killed and mined and robbed all cities and towns.”

Despite the ongoing fighting nearby, people in Kherson feel confident enough about their safety to ignore air-raid warning sirens and gather in large numbers on the streets — to greet each other and to thank Ukrainian soldiers.

Like many residents, the Nenadyschuks do not wince when they hear the explosions in the distance, and they are loathe to complain about any other difficulty they face.

“We are holding on. We are waiting for victory. We won’t whine,” said Yulia Nenadyschuk. “All of Ukraine," her husband added, "is in this state now.”

___

Sam Mednick contributed to this story.

___

Follow all AP stories on the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.

12 / 24
 Ammunition boxes lay outside a destroyed school on the outskirts of a recently liberated village outskirts of Kherson, in southern Ukraine, Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022. Ukraine liberated Kherson more than one week ago, and the city’s streets are revived for the first time in many months. People no longer sit in their homes in fear of meeting the Russians. Instead, they gather in the city’s squares to recharge their phones, collect water and catch a connection to talk to their relatives.

 (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue, file)

An ex-Facebook manager says she got Meta's layoff email at 5.35 a.m. while on maternity leave


Marielle Descalsota
Sun, November 20, 2022 


Facebook rebranded as Meta Platforms in October 2021 to reflect a shift in focus towards building its own metaverse.

Noah Berger/Getty Images

A Facebook manager of over two years said she was laid off while on maternity leave.


Anneka Patel, the ex-manager, was named one of the top PR pros by Insider in 2020.


Meta laid off 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce.

A Meta employee has said she was laid off while on maternity leave.

Anneka Patel, a communications manager at Facebook, wrote in a LinkedIn post on November 14 that she was one of the thousands of employees affected by Meta's mass layoffs.

Patel said she received Meta's layoff email at 5.35 a.m. after several of her coworkers sent her text messages saying they were laid off.

"This morning I found out I was one of the 11,000 employees impacted by the Meta #layoffs," Patel, who worked at Meta for two and a half years, said. "This hit me hard as I'm currently out on maternity leave."

According to her LinkedIn profile, Patel managed communications for Meta's community products groups, which included Facebook groups.

Patel's post garnered over 11,500 reactions and 560 comments in a week. Patel was included in Insider's May 2020 roundup of top professionals in the public relations industry.

Patel, former director of communications at Eventbrite, said she was scheduled to be on maternity leave until February next year.

"For those who know me, working at Facebook (now Meta) has been my dream ever since I moved from London to the Bay Area nine years ago," Patel said, adding that she plans to spend time with her three-month-old baby before looking for a new job.

On November 9 Meta announced it would be cutting more than 11,000 employees, or about 13% of its workforce.

"I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post. Zuckerberg added that he sees layoffs "as a last resort," but expects "cost-cutting changes" to continue in the coming months.

Patel was one of the hundreds of former employees taking to LinkedIn to write about their experiences of being laid off by Meta.

Insider previously reported that several Meta software engineers said they were laid off just two or three days after relocating from India to the company's Canada office.

Other Meta employees wrote "badge posts" — departure messages with a photo of their ID cards — upon receiving the dreaded layoff email from the company, according to a recent Insider report.

Meta and Patel did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment. When Insider contacted Patel via her Meta email, we received an automatic response saying the "mailbox is no longer active" and to "contact another person at the company."

Videos captured a fireball flashing across the Toronto skyline before it struck Earth near Niagara Falls

Kelsey Vlamis
Sun, November 20, 2022 


Toronto skyline  Pierre Ogeron/Getty Images

• A fireball lit up a neighborhood and passed over Toronto early Saturday morning.

• The object's impact on Earth was predicted, marking the sixth time in history that has occurred.

• The European Space Agency said such detection technology for small objects is improving.

A vibrant fireball that flashed across the night sky in the early hours of Saturday morning passed over the skyline of Toronto, Canada, before colliding with Earth near Niagara Falls.

The fireball was captured in several videos, including one that showed it appearing to pass by the city's CN Tower.

 

Another video, taken from a security camera at the front door of a home, showed the fireball light up the entire sky over the neighborhood before zooming past.

 

The European Space Agency said the event marked only the sixth time in history the impact of a space object with Earth was successfully predicted. The agency said while most asteroid collisions with Earth are only discovered after the fact from evidence like craters, the number of occasions in which a space rock is detected before it strikes is growing.

In fact, all six detections have taken place since 2008, according to ESA, which said continued improvement in sky scanning telescopes will likely make detection of smaller objects — which frequently strike Earth — more common.

Large asteroids, on the other hand, are much easier to spot.

Saturday's fireball was anticipated by amateur and professional astronomers in the hours before it struck. The Minor Planet Center, which monitors asteroids, said a fast-moving object was detected by the Mount Lemmon Survey near Tucson, Arizona, triggering a "warning of an imminent impact."

The MPC said seven observatories were able to spot the object before it entered the Earth's atmosphere at around 3:27 a.m. ET over Brantford, Ontario. The object was less than 1 meter in size, according to the ESA.

The term fireball is used to refer to exceptionally bright meteors, commonly called shooting stars, that can be seen over a wide area. "Objects causing fireballs are usually not large enough to survive passage through the Earth's atmosphere intact, although fragments, or meteorites, are sometimes recovered on the ground," according to NASA.

Mike Hankey of the American Meteor Society told The New York Times its possible meteorites — debris from a space object — from Saturday's event could be discovered near Niagara Falls.

Latest search for Tulsa Race Massacre victims comes to end


In this image provided by the city of Tulsa, Okla., crews work on an excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery searching for victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre on Oct. 26, 2022, in Tulsa. The latest search for remains of victims of the massacre ended Friday, Nov. 18, with 32 additional caskets discovered and eight sets of remains exhumed, according to the city. 

(City of Tulsa via AP, File) 


KEN MILLER
Sat, November 19, 2022
The latest search for remains of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre has ended with 32 additional caskets discovered and eight sets of remains exhumed, according to the city.

The excavation and exhumations at Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery that began Oct. 26 ended Friday and the remains were sent to a nearby lab for analysis and DNA collection.

Searchers sought unmarked graves of people who were probably male, in plain caskets with signs of gunshot trauma — criteria for further investigation that were based on newspaper reports at the time, said forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield.

Two sets of the 66 remains found in the past two years have been confirmed to have gunshot wounds, according to Stubblefield, though none have been identified or confirmed to be victims of the massacre.

DNA taken from 14 sets of the nearly three dozen remains found last year were sent to Intermountain Forensics in Salt Lake City for further study. DNA from teeth and thigh bones, known as femurs, will be extracted from the eight recently exhumed remains and also sent to Intermountain Forensics, Stubblefield said.

State archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck said 62 of the 66 burials found thus far were in unmarked graves.

Investigators are looking for a possible mass grave of victims of the 1921 massacre at the hands of a white mob that descended on the Black section of Tulsa — Greenwood. More than 1,000 homes were burned, hundreds more were looted and destroyed and a thriving business district known as Black Wall Street was destroyed.

Most historians who have studied the event estimate the death toll to be between 75 and 300. Historians say many of the victims were buried in unmarked graves, their locations never recorded and rumors have persisted for decades of mass graves in the area.

Stackelbeck said the remains meeting the criteria for possible massacre victims and exhumed thus far are not in a mass grave, but instead interspersed in the search area.

Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said he considers the entire cemetery to be a mass grave.

“Is there a mass grave where there are people lined up in a row like we thought might be? That is not the case,” Bynum said. “Is Oaklawn Cemetery still a mass grave? Yes.”

Investigators have recommended additional scanning of a nearby park and adjacent homeless camp, where oral histories have indicated massacre victims were buried.

Bynum said the city will decide the next step after reviewing the next report from researchers that is expected sometime next year.

All the exhumed remains will be reburied, at least temporarily, at Oaklawn, where the previous reburial was closed to the public, drawing protests from about two dozen people who said they are descendants of massacre victims and should have been allowed to attend.

The massacre wiped out generational wealth, and victims were never compensated, but a pending lawsuit seeks reparations for the three remaining known survivors. They are each now more than 100 years old.

Younger Chinese are spurning factory jobs that power the economy



Shenzhen's main factory recruitment hub in Longhua district

Sun, November 20, 2022
By David Kirton

SHENZHEN (Reuters) - Growing up in a Chinese village, Julian Zhu only saw his father a few times a year when he returned for holidays from his exhausting job in a textile mill in southern Guangdong province.

For his father's generation, factory work was a lifeline out of rural poverty. For Zhu, and millions of other younger Chinese, the low pay, long hours of drudgery and the risk of injuries are no longer sacrifices worth making.

"After a while that work makes your mind numb," said the 32-year-old, who quit the production lines some years ago and now makes a living selling milk formula and doing scooter deliveries for a supermarket in Shenzhen, China's southern tech hub. "I couldn't stand the repetition."

The rejection of grinding factory work by Zhu and other Chinese in their 20s and 30s is contributing to a deepening labour shortage that is frustrating manufacturers in China, which produces a third of the goods consumed globally.

Factory bosses say they would produce more, and faster, with younger blood replacing their ageing workforce. But offering the higher wages and better working conditions that younger Chinese want would risk eroding their competitive advantage.

And smaller manufacturers say large investments in automation technology are either unaffordable or imprudent when rising inflation and borrowing costs are curbing demand in China's key export markets.

More than 80% of Chinese manufacturers faced labour shortages ranging from hundreds to thousands of workers this year, equivalent to 10% to 30% of their workforce, a survey by CIIC Consulting showed. China's Ministry of Education forecasts a shortage of nearly 30 million manufacturing workers by 2025, larger than Australia's population.

On paper, labour is in no short supply: roughly 18% of Chinese aged 16-24 are unemployed. This year alone, a cohort of 10.8 million graduates entered a job market that, besides manufacturing, is very subdued. China's economy, pummelled by COVID-19 restrictions, a property market downturn and regulatory crackdowns on tech and other private industries, faces its slowest growth in decades.

Klaus Zenkel, who chairs the European Chamber of Commerce in South China, moved to the region about two decades ago, when university graduates were less than one-tenth this year's numbers and the economy as a whole was about 15 times smaller in current U.S. dollar terms. He runs a factory in Shenzhen with around 50 workers who make magnetically shielded rooms used by hospitals for MRI screenings and other procedures.

Zenkel said China’s breakneck economic growth in recent years had lifted the aspirations of younger generations, who now see his line of work as increasingly unattractive.

"If you are young it's much easier to do this job, climbing up the ladder, doing some machinery work, handle tools, and so on, but most of our installers are aged 50 to 60," he said. "Sooner or later we need to get more young people, but it's very difficult. Applicants will have a quick look and say 'no, thank you, that's not for me'."

The National Development and Reform Commission, China's macroeconomic management agency, and the education and human resources ministries did not reply to requests for comment.

MODERN TIMES

Manufacturers say they have three main options to tackle the labour-market mismatch: sacrifice profit margins to increase wages; invest more in automation; or hop on the decoupling wave set off by the heightened rivalry between China and the West and move to cheaper pastures such as Vietnam or India.

But all those choices are difficult to implement.

Liu, who runs a factory in the electric battery supply chain, has invested in more-advanced production equipment with better digital measurements. He said his older workers struggle to keep up with the faster gear, or read the data on the screens.

Liu, who like other factory chiefs declined to give his full name so he could speak freely about China's economic slowdown, said he tried luring younger workers with 5% higher wages but was given a cold shoulder.

"It's like with Charlie Chaplin," said Liu, describing his workers' performance, alluding to a scene in the 1936 movie "Modern Times", about the anxieties of U.S. industrial workers during the Great Depression. The main character, Little Tramp, played by Chaplin, fails to keep up with tightening bolts on a conveyer belt.

Chinese policymakers have emphasised automation and industrial upgrading as a solution to an ageing workforce.

The country of 1.4 billion people, on the brink of a demographic downturn, accounted for half of the robot installations in 2021, up 44% year-on-year, the International Federation of Robotics said.

But automation has its limits.

Dotty, a general manager at a stainless-steel treatment factory in the city of Foshan, has automated product packaging and work surface cleaning, but says a similar fix for other functions would be too costly. Yet young workers are vital to keep production moving.

"Our products are really heavy and we need people to transfer them from one processing procedure to the next. It's labour intensive in hot temperatures and we have difficulty hiring for these procedures," she said.

Brett, a manager at a factory making video game controllers and keyboards in Dongguan, said orders have halved in recent months, and that many of his peers were moving to Vietnam and Thailand.

He is "just thinking about how to survive this moment," he said, adding he expected to lay off 15% of his 200 workers even as he still wanted younger muscles on his assembly lines.

CONFLICTING ASPIRATIONS

The competitiveness of China's export-oriented manufacturing sector has been built over several decades on state-subsidised investment in production capacity and low labour costs.

The preservation of that status quo is now clashing with the aspirations of a generation of better-educated Chinese for a more comfortable life than the sleep-work-sleep daily grind for tomorrow's meal their parents endured.

Rather than settling for jobs below their education level, a record 4.6 million Chinese applied for postgraduate studies this year. There are 6,000 applications for each civil service job, state media reported this month.

Many young Chinese are also increasingly adopting a minimal lifestyle known as "lying flat", doing just enough to get by and rejecting the rat race of China Inc.

Economists say market forces may compel both young Chinese and manufacturers to curb their aspirations.

"The unemployment situation for young people may have to be much worse before the mismatch could be corrected," said Zhiwu Chen, professor of finance at the University of Hong Kong.

By 2025, he said, there may not be much of a worker shortfall "as the demand will for sure go down."

'YOU FEEL FREE'

Zhu's first job was to screw fake diamonds into wristwatches. After that he worked in another factory, moulding tin boxes for mooncakes, a traditional Chinese bakery product.

His colleagues shared gruesome stories about workplace injuries involving sharp metal sheets.

Realising he could avoid reliving his father's life, he quit.

Now doing sales and deliveries, he earns at least 10,000 yuan ($1,421.04) a month, depending on how many hours he puts in. That's almost double what he would earn in a factory, though some of the difference goes on accommodation, as many factories have their own dorms.

"It's hard work. It's dangerous on the busy roads, in the wind and rain, but for younger people, it's much better than factories," Zhu said. "You feel free."

Xiaojing, 27, now earns 5,000 to 6,000 yuan a month as a masseuse in an upscale area of Shenzhen after a three-year stint at a printer factory where she made 4,000 yuan a month.

"All my friends who are my age left the factory," she said, adding that it would be a tall order to get her to return.

"If they paid 8,000 before overtime, sure."

($1 = 7.0371 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Editing by Marius Zaharia and David Crawshaw)

NASA's Orion spacecraft on track to begin Moon flyby on November 21st



Igor Bonifacic
·Weekend Editor
Sat, November 19, 2022 

The Orion crew vehicle is exceeding expectations on its way to the Moon. NASA provided an update on Artemis 1 following the mission’s successful launch early Wednesday morning. "Orion has been performing great so far," Vehicle Integration Manager Jim Geffre said during a press briefing NASA held on Friday. “All of the systems are exceeding expectations from a performance standpoint.”

Artemis 1 seeks to confirm the crew vehicle can safely carry human astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite. The journey marks Orion's first trip beyond our planet's orbit. In 2014, the spacecraft completed a two-orbit test flight around Earth. A successful flight would pave the way for a manned mission to the Moon and eventually NASA’s first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The agency expects Artemis 1 to reach the Moon on November 21st. At that point, the spacecraft will perform the first of four main engine burns NASA has planned for the mission. At times, Orion will fly little more than 81 miles (130 kilometers) above the lunar surface. "We will be passing over some of the Apollo landing sites," Flight Director Jeff Radigan said. Four days later, NASA plans to conduct a second burn to put Orion in a distant orbit around the Moon before finally setting the spacecraft on a return trajectory toward the Earth. If all goes according to plan, Orion will land in the Pacific Ocean on December 11th.

Orion’s early successes are a welcome development after the troubles NASA encountered with its Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket. The space agency was forced to delay the launch of Artemis 1 multiple times due to engine problems, hydrogen fuel leaks and hurricane-force winds. Early Wednesday morning, it appeared that the agency would be forced to delay the mission again after the SLS ground team discovered a leak in one of the fuel lines on the rocket’s launch tower. However, after NASA personnel tightened some bolts, the SLS lifted off, creating a dazzling nighttime display.

Trump's White House blocked government websites aimed at helping Americans vote, fighting human trafficking, easing homelessness, and stopping fraud, federal records show

Dave Levinthal
Sun, November 20, 2022 

Federal agencies asked the Trump White House to approve dozens of new ".gov" websites.

But Trump officials rejected many of them, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

In contrast, the Biden White House has approved almost all such website requests.

Donald Trump's White House blocked dozens of federal agencies from creating new government websites aimed at aiding homeless people, fighting human trafficking, and helping people vote, according to records obtained by Insider through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The requests for new websites came from agencies small and large at a time when Trump had grown openly hostile toward his own administration, often deriding the federal government's executive branch as an out-of-control "deep state" conspiring to undermine him.

The Department of Defense, Department of Labor, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Central Intelligence Agency, and Environmental Protection Agency are among the more than two-dozen agencies that Trump's Office of Management and Budget rebuffed.

Proposed websites that Trump's Office of Management and Budget rejected include HumanTrafficking.gov (Department of State); ReportFraud.gov (Federal Trade Commission); Telehealth.gov (Department of Health and Human Services), FindShelters.gov (Department of Housing and Urban Development), and FiscalData.gov (Department of the Treasury), according to federal records.

Such custom ".gov" website domains enhance government agencies' ability to effectively provide and market services to an American public that's all but universally connected to the internet.

Without them, agencies can still create new sections on their primary websites, but with long and unmemorable subdomain names replete with slashes and hyphens — not exactly prime fodder for a billboard or public service announcement.

The documents obtained by Insider listed no reasons for why the Office of Management and Budget rejected or accepted an agency's ".gov" website domain request.

Neither did the Office of Management and Budget, whose spokesperson, Isabel Aldunate, declined to answer Insider's questions.

Representatives for Trump, who this week officially launched his 2024 presidential campaign, did not reply to several messages.

President Joe Biden attends an event to support legislation that would encourage domestic manufacturing and strengthen supply chains for computer chips in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus, March 9, 2022, in Washington.

Patrick Semansky/AP

Major difference between Trump and Biden

The Trump White House's practice of regularly blocking and slow-walking federal agencies' website requests stands in stark contrast to that of President Joe Biden's White House, which has approved almost every request it's received, federal records indicate.

Of the 105 ".gov" websites requests Trump's Office of Management and Budget considered between July 2018 and the day Trump left office on January 20, 2021, it accepted 60, denied 44, and left one pending — a 41.9% rejection rate, according to the records obtained by Insider.

Of the 95 ".gov" website requests Biden's Office of Management and Budget considered between January 21, 2021, and September 9, 2022, it accepted 85, denied four, and recorded six requests voluntarily withdrawn — a 4.2% rejection rate.

Insider asked more than a dozen federal agencies that had their custom .gov website domain requests rejected by the Trump White House to explain what happened.

Some declined to comment, including officials at the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Labor. Others did not respond to inquiries, including the Department of Agriculture and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For those who did comment, they offered limited insight into why they sought new .gov websites or why the Trump White House denied their requests.

Housing and Urban Development, for one, told Insider in a statement that it asked to establish FindShelters.gov in late 2019 "for the creation of a new tool that would provide information about housing, shelter, healthcare and clothing resources in communities across the country."

After two months in limbo, the Trump White House denied the agency's request. It now provides such information on its main agency website, with resources concentrated at a URL of https://www.hud.gov/homelessness_resources.

President Donald Trump gestures to supporters after speaking during a campaign rally at MotorSports Management Company, Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2020, in West Salem, Wisconsin.

HUD's understanding of why its request was denied: "There has been a federal-wide ongoing effort to limit and reduce the number of federal public-facing websites. The effort was started to reduce cost and redundancy."

On December 23, 2019, the CIA asked Trump's White House to approve the website domain DataTransport.gov. A week later, the Office of Management and Budget rejected the request.

"The domain was registered to support the IC's data services program," a source familiar with the matter said of the CIA's request, with "IC" standing for "intelligence community." The source offered no additional details.

In March 2019, the generally apolitical Peace Corps asked Trump's Office of Management and Budget to green-light PeaceCorpsCN.gov — a website referencing its operation in China. Office of Management and Budget officials rejected the request on an unspecified date.

"Per compliance with Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 18-01, the domain was requested at the time to enhance email and web security," Peace Corps spokesman Troy Blackwell wrote in an email.

By early 2020, the Peace Corps had begun the process of leaving China — one of Trump's favorite targets and topics. The Peace Corps has not re-upped its PeaceCorpsCN.gov website request since.

"After Peace Corps closed the China post, we no longer needed the domain," Blackwell said.

Patrice Quinn, 50, is pictured with her "I VOTED" sticker on her forehead after casting her ballot at a vote center in Pantages Theatre during the election day in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles, Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020.

Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP

Block and delay

In at least one case, Trump's White House denied a website request — the United States Agency for International Development-sponsored ProsperAfrica.gov — that Biden's White House later approved.

The ProsperAfrica.gov website now details efforts by the United States Agency for International Development to mobilize "services and resources from across the US government to empower businesses and investors with market insights, deal support, and financing opportunities" on the African continent.

And of the custom website domains Trump's Office of Management and Budget did OK, approval often took weeks or months instead of the days or hours typical for Biden's Office of Management and Budget.

One particularly testy delay came during the summer of 2020, when the Election Assistance Commission sought approval to create HelpAmericaVote.gov and use it to recruit and coordinate an army of new poll workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which by then had sidelined tens of thousands of older election volunteers unable or unwilling to staff in-person voting sites.

An unexpectedly long delay ensued. Finally, the Office of Management and Budget sunk the Election Assistance Commission's HelpAmericaVote.gov website, arguing in an email obtained by Insider that the election agency's request "did not justify the creation of a stand-alone site." The decision arrived as Trump's assertions that US elections were "rigged" and fraudulent had grown louder and evermore detached from reality.

Then-Election Assistance Commission Executive Director Mona Harrington frantically appealed for reconsideration.

"This is really negatively impacting our progress at this point," she wrote Justin Grimes, then an official in the Office of Management and Budget's Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer. "Please advise, we desperately need the domain."

Several days later, the Office of Management and Budget reversed its decision, and HelpAmericaVote.gov would go live in mid-August 2020, just in time for National Poll Worker Recruitment Day on September 1. About 100,000 people visited the site that day, the Election Assistance Commission said.

In a statement to Insider at the time, Trump's Office of Management and Budget said it rejected the Election Assistance Commission's request for HelpAmericaVote.gov "because the information provided did not justify the creation of a stand-alone site based on existing requirements. OMB worked with EAC given the importance of the topic to improve the justification which led to approval."

Trump's Office of Management and Budget did approve a few custom web domains quickly.

Among those granted the swiftest approval: TrumpLibrary.gov, TrumpWhiteHouse.gov, and FlyHealthy.gov.

Curiously, the General Services Administration on October 8, 2020, proposed creating BuildBackBetter.gov, which Trump's Office of Management and Budget approved the same day, according to federal records.

At that juncture, Biden has already made "build back better" a cornerstone plank of his 2020 presidential campaign platform. Trump's administration did not appear to use the BuildBackBetter.gov domain for any material purpose. But in mid-November 2020, then President-elect Biden began using it as part of his official presidential transition web presence, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

An opaque approval process

Trump in 2018 tapped the White House's Office of Management and Budget to serve as the national gatekeeper for new federal government websites — a role previously filled by the General Services Administration.

In a statement to Insider last year, the General Services Administration said the Office of Management and Budget decided in February 2018 to "perform the adjudication of all new federal executive branch .gov domain requests to limit the proliferation of executive branch stand-alone .gov websites/domains and infrastructure."

The office immediately took a hard line on agencies' website requests, denying as many as it accepted during the second half of 2018, according to federal records.

But the decisions were made out of public view.

In January 2021, Insider filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking the Office of Management and Budget for records related to .gov website domains that federal government agencies had petitioned to create. Insider also asked for records indicating whether the Office of Management and Budget approved or denied the agencies' requests to create .gov websites.

In March 2021, Office Management and Budget officials denied Insider's FOIA request, stating that "no responsive records were located."

Insider formally appealed that decision. In late October, about 19 months later, Office of Management and Budget officials acknowledged that records Insider requested did indeed exist.

Officials then agreed to release a summary of .gov website requests the Office of Management and Budget had approved and rejected, although it did not immediately provide other requested records, such as documents explaining why officials approved or denied a particular website.

The data include eight recently requested websites that are listed as "pending." Seven come from the Department of Education and appear to pertain to student debt relief, a top Biden administration priority, and feature URLs such as StudentDebtRelief.gov and GetStudentLoanRelief.gov.

The websites were not yet functional as of mid-November.

Read the original article on Business Insider

REST IN POWER
Leader of Argentina's Mothers of the Plaza dies at 93




Argentina-Obit-De Bonafini

Leader of the human rights group Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Hebe de Bonafini, right, leads a protest outside a church where former police chaplain Christian Von Wernich offered a mass in Bragado, Argentina, Nov. 28, 1988. Hebe de Bonafini, who became a famed human rights campaigner after her two children were arrested and disappeared under Argentina's military dictatorship, died Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022, her family and authorities reported. She was 93. 

(AP Photo/Eduardo Di Baia)More

DEBORA REY
Sun, November 20, 2022 

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Hebe de Bonafini, who became a human rights campaigner when her two sons were arrested and disappeared under Argentina's military dictatorship, died Sunday, her family and authorities reported. She was 93.

The death was confirmed by her only surviving child, Alejandra, who expressed thanks for expressions of support her mother had received while hospitalized in the city of La Plata. Local officials said she had suffered from unspecified chronic illnesses.

Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — a former president who had close ties with de Bonafini — posted a tweet calling her “a global symbol of the fight for human rights, pride of Argentina.”

Hebe María Pastor de Bonafini was one of the founders of the Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in May 1977, two years after the military seized power and began a brutal crackdown on suspected leftists.

She became president two years later and led the more radical of two factions of the organization until her death.

The Mothers initially demanded the return, alive, of their children — and later punishment of the military figures responsible for seizing and killing them, with no public word of their fates.

Widely honored for her human rights campaigns, she also was a controversial figure in later years for a radical opposition to U.S. governments she blamed for backing right-wing dictatorships, her involvement in partisan politics and for a corruption scandal involving her group's foundation.

De Bonafini was born in 1928 in the town of Ensenada outside the Argentine capital and at 18, she married a youth from her neighborhood, Humberto Alfredo Bonafini, and they had three children: Jorge, Raúl and Alejandra. Known to friends as Kika Pastor, her schooling stopped soon after primary school.

In Februrary 1977, soldiers seized her oldest son. A few months later, a second, Raúl, also was captured. Both had been members of leftist militant groups, one of them armed, de Bonafini later said.

As she made the rounds of hospitals, courthouses, police stations and morgues in search of one son, and later both, she ran into other women on the same mission.

Faced with stonewalling from officials, 14 of them began holding demonstrations at the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential residence to demand the appearance of their children.

It was a daring move at a time when the government prohibited meetings of more than three people. But they began gathering every Thursday, walking counterclockwise around a clocktower in the center of the plaza.

During a religious pilgrimage later that year, they began wrapping cloth diapers — symbolizing those once used by their missing children — around their heads, and white scarves became a symbol of the group.

The military government broke up early demonstrations. And it kidnapped and killed the first leader of the Mothers, Azucena Villaflor. But the group persisted.

When police would arrest one member, others would gather at the police station and ask to be arrested as well. When police would ask one to show her documents, the others would produce theirs as well — effectively prolonging the demonstration.

Looking back 30 years after the founding of the group, de Bonafini recalled, “We could not imagine that the dictatorships was so murderous, perverse and criminal" and said she wanted to speak for "the children who were brilliant, cheerful, warriors, teachers, incredible, convinced revolutionaries,"

She said their spirits lived on;: “Nobody goes forever,” she said. “We are their voice, their gaze, their heart, their breath. We conquer death, dear children.”

The Mothers and other activist groups say that about 30,000 dissidents were disappeared during the dictatorship — a figure finally accepted by the current government. Earlier administrations had estimated up to 13,000.

Three years after the end of the dictatorship, the Mothers split into two factions in 1986, with de Bonafini leading the more radical organization seeking systematic political change while the others focused more on legal issues.

Her anger often caused controversy, as when — following the 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York — she said, “I felt happiness. I am not going to be a hypocrite. It didn't pain me at all."

She established close ties in 2003 with the leftist government of Néstor Kirchner, who later helped revoke the amnesty laws that had protected soldiers accused of crimes against humanity during the dictatorship.

Her defense of Kirchner and his wife and successor, Cristina Fernández, sometimes led to friction with other human rights groups who had criticized some of the leftist administration's policies.

De Bonafini herself fell into a scandal in 2011 when prosecutors accused her of irregularities involving public funds given to a foundation created by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to build low-cost housing. Other officials of the foundation were convicted and the case against her had not been fully settled.