UNESCO designates Ukraine's Odesa a World Heritage in Danger site




Wed, January 25, 2023 

PARIS (Reuters) -The United Nations' cultural agency, UNESCO, said on Wednesday that it had designated the historic centre of Odesa, a strategic port city on Ukraine's Black Sea coast, a World Heritage in Danger site.

Russia, which invaded Ukraine 11 months ago, denounced the designation, saying the only threat to Odesa came from the "nationalist regime in Ukraine".

The status, awarded by a UNESCO panel meeting in Paris, is designed to help protect Odesa's cultural heritage, which has been under threat since Russia's invasion, and enable access to financial and technical international aid.

Odesa has been bombed several times by Russia since its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

In July 2022, part of the large glass roof and windows of Odesa's Museum of Fine Arts, inaugurated in 1899, were destroyed.

In a statement, UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay said that Odesa, "free city, world city, legendary port" had made its mark on cinema, literature and the arts.

"As the war continues, this inscription reflects our collective determination to protect this city from greater destruction," Azoulay said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the decision "will help us protect our Odesa ... Russia is incapable of defending anything other than terror and strikes."

Earlier on Wednesday, UNESCO inscribed the Landmarks of the Ancient Kingdom of Saba, Marib in Yemen and Rachid Karami International Fair-Tripoli in Lebanon to its list of World Heritage in Danger sites.

RUSSIA: UKRAINE THE SOLE THREAT TO ODESA

Russia's Foreign Ministry said it had no quarrel with the decision to celebrate and protect Odesa's legacy.

"But this requires a clarification that the sole threat to the city's rich history stems from Ukraine's nationalist regime which systematically destroys monuments to the founders and defenders of Odesa," it said in a statement.

It cited in particular a monument to Russian Empress Catherine the Great - widely reputed to be the city's founder - that was dismantled by an order of city authorities last year.

The UNESCO debate over Odesa took hours as Russia unsuccessfully tried to have the vote postponed.

Founded in the final years of the 18th century, near the site of a captured Ottoman fortress, Odesa's location on the shores of the Black Sea allowed it to become one of the most important ports in the Russian empire.

Its status as a trading hub brought significant wealth and made it one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Eastern Europe.

The city's most famous historic sites include its Opera House, which became a symbol of resilience when it reopened in June 2022, and the giant stairway to the harbour, immortalised in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin.

Although the city suffered significant damage in World War Two, its famed central grid square of low-rise 19th century buildings survived mostly intact.

Odesa was a key Ukrainian tourist hub before Russia's invasion. War changed all that, as the Black Sea became a battlezone. Sea mines still wash up near the city's shoreline.

(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon; Editing by Sharon Singleton and Himani Sarkar)


Ukraine's Odesa city put on UNESCO heritage in danger list


Sandbags block a street in front of the National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet building as a preparation for a possible Russian offensive, in Odesa, Ukraine, Thursday, March 24, 2022. The United Nations' cultural agency decided on Wednesday Jan.25, 2023 to add the historic center of Ukraine's Black Sea port city of Odesa to the list of World Heritage in danger. The decision was made at an extraordinary session of the World Heritage Committee in Paris. 

(AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris, File)

SYLVIE CORBET and ELAINE GANLEY
Wed, January 25, 2023

PARIS (AP) — The United Nations' cultural agency decided Wednesday to add the historic center of Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odesa to its list of endangered World Heritage sites, recognizing “the outstanding universal value of the site and the duty of all humanity to protect it.”

The decision was made at an extraordinary session of UNESCO's World Heritage Committee in Paris.

UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay praised the move, saying the “legendary port that has left its mark in cinema, literature and the arts” was “thus placed under the reinforced protection of the international community."

“While the war is going on, this inscription embodies our collective determination to ensure that this city ... is preserved from further destruction," Azoulay added in a statement.

Russian forces have launched multiple artillery attacks and airstrikes on Odesa since invading Ukraine 11 months ago.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on UNESCO in October to put Odesa on its World Heritage List, which recognizes places of “outstanding universal value.” The World Heritage Committee agreed Wednesday while also adding the city's historic center to its list of endangered sites.

Changes to the text proposed by Russia delayed the 21-member committee's vote. In the end, six delegates voted in favor, one voted no and 14 abstained.

Russian delegate Tatiana Dovgalenko lambasted the decision, asserting that local citizens had destroyed some Odesa monuments that were cited to justify the endangered designation.

“Today, we witnessed the funeral of the World Heritage Convention,” she said, adding that pressure prevailed and scientific objectivity “was shamefully violated.”

Ukrainian Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko welcomed the vote's outcome, saying it would protect Odesa’s multicultural history.

“It’s a great historic day," he told reporters. "Definitively, Odesa is under danger due to Russia's full- scale invasion. ... I have very much hope that the umbrella of UNESCO can protect at least Odesa skies and Odesa itself from this barbaric attack of Russians.”

Ukraine is not a member of the UNESCO committee.

Under the 1972 UNESCO convention, ratified by both Ukraine and Russia, signatories undertake to “assist in the protection of the listed sites” and are “obliged to refrain from taking any deliberate measures” which might damage World Heritage sites.

Inclusion on the List of World Heritage in Danger is meant to “open access to emergency international assistance mechanisms, both technical and financial, to strengthen the protection of the property and help its rehabilitation,” according to UNESCO.

Before Wednesday's vote, Ukraine was home to seven World Heritage sites, including the St. Sophia Cathedral and related monastic buildings in the capital, Kyiv. To date, none were damaged by the war, although UNESCO noted damage to more than 230 cultural buildings in Ukraine.

Azoulay told reporters that Odesa’s status was examined under an “emergency procedure” amid the ongoing fighting. She said “precise satellite surveillance” was being used for the first time to monitor Ukraine's World Heritage sites.

On its website, UNESCO describes Odesa as the only city in Ukraine that has entirely preserved the urban structure of a multinational southern port town typical of the late 18th and-19th centuries.

Two other sites were Wednesday to the List of World Heritage in Danger: the Ancient Yemenite Kingdom of Saba and the Rachid Karami International Fair in Tripoli, Lebanon.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

U.S. Coast Guard commander: There’s a plan in place for mass migration from Cuba, Haiti



Jacqueline Charles
Wed, January 25, 2023 

As hundreds of Cuban migrants washed ashore on New Year’s Day in the Florida Keys, local officials complained to the state that their law enforcement resources were being stretched and overwhelmed.

At the time, no one other than U.S. authorities knew that, out to sea, the crisis was building.

The U.S. Coast Guard, which monitors the vast waters between Florida’s shorelines, the Bahamas, Cuba and Haiti, had onboard its cutters more than 1,000 migrants — most of them Cuban, though there were some Haitians —, on the decks of its ships out at sea. Unlike those who’ve reached land over the course of this latest migrant surge, people stopped at sea have been sent back to their countries aboard Coast Guard cutters.

The Coast Guard had been making between 100 to 200 repatriations a day, but the Cuban government was marking the holidays, and the migrants aboard the cutters couldn’t be immediately taken back.

“That’s not a normal circumstance,” Rear Adm. Brendan C. McPherson, commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District and director of the Homeland Security Task Force-Southeast, said about the number of migrants aboard his cutters.

“There was an increase in flow. You had more people leaving from Cuba over the holidays than you had prior to the holidays,” he said. “We conclude the reason is the same reason we couldn’t do the repatriations: the Cuban government is on holiday like anybody else.”

What unfolded on New Year’s Day, McPherson said, “was a confluence of events” that has continued to strain Coast Guard resources as the agency increases its vigilance on the ocean. Additional boats, aircraft and cutters, including the Coast Guard Cutter James, have recently been deployed to assist with patrols.

McPherson’s task force’s job is to coordinate the response of federal, local and state agencies. To drive home the point, Coast Guard officials say that between Dec. 30, 2022, and Jan. 2, the number of migrant interdictions, apprehensions and encounters made by the Task Force’s partners totaled 1,445.

“Some people may not realize that the state, the county and the local municipalities in the South Florida region have been a part of the task force from the beginning,” McPherson said. “They participate, they’re members of the task force, we coordinate, we synchronize our efforts.”

Earlier this month, as local agencies and the Border Patrol found themselves overwhelmed while responding to the influx of Cuban migrants, Gov. Ron DeSantis activated the Florida National Guard to help respond to the arrivals.

“We always have been and will continue to coordinate and synchronize with the state,” McPherson said. “The fact that the governor determined it was appropriate to declare an emergency and activate the National Guard, it’s his decision to make under their command and control, not ours. And as long as they’re working in the same space we are, we want to make sure that we’re de-conflicting and coordinating and synchronizing. That’s what we’re doing today.”

Since Oct. 1, the beginning of the federal fiscal year, the U.S. Coast Guard has intercepted 5,183 Cubans at sea attempting to get to the United States. Meanwhile Border Patrol agents have encountered more than 240 landings.

The increase in Cubans intercepted at sea is expected to surpass the 6,182 who were repatriated as of Sept. 30, 2022, the end of that fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, 2021.

Meanwhile, U.S. authorities are also keeping a close eye on Haitians, whose deadly sea voyages have been stymied by a shortage of fuel in that country amid an ongoing political crisis and gang violence.

The number of Haitians interdicted at sea is far lower than Cubans — 1,244 so far this fiscal year — but the low numbers may be explained by the lack of fuel and the Coast Guard’s beefed up patrols in Haiti’s territorial waters and off the country’s northwest coastline.

Last year, when the federal fiscal year ended on Sept. 30, the number of Haitian interdictions at sea had surpassed 7,100, the highest number in almost two decades.
Increased flows

McPherson said it was this time last year when he and his crews began seeing the increase in the number of migrants from Cuba and Haiti.

“It was an early indicator that something was different, something was new,” he said. “We’ve been doing these types of operations for a long time and something had changed.”

Both Cuba and Haiti have been in the throes of humanitarian and economic crises that continue to deteriorate. In Cuba, where anti-government protests in July 2021 led to imprisonments, people are running both from government crackdowns and a disastrous economy. In Haiti, people are dealing with the political vacuum created by the July 7, 2021, assassination of the country’s president, Jovenel Moïse, along with chronic fuel shortages, deepening hunger, rampant kidnappings and violent gangs.

Faced with such dire realities, nationals from both Caribbean nations have taken to the high seas.

“In August, it had continued to the level that we knew we were going to have to sustain this for a long period of time, or at least plan to,” McPherson said. “That’s when we elevated on August 21 to the next level of our planning under Operation Vigilant Sentry, our mass migration plan.”

Since then, Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection as well as local agencies in the Florida Keys have been seeing a continued, and steady increase in migration from Cuba, which culminated with at least 10 landings in one day on New Year’s Day. More than 100 Haitians also later arrived by boat, landing in Key Largo.

“For other reasons, Haiti too has been challenged,” McPherson said. “So we started to see what I call waves of departures of Haitian vessels and that we continue to see to this day. Similar consequences, but they look different.”

In the case of Cubans, it’s a perilous voyage in makeshift rafts sometimes made of tires or pieces of wood tied together. For Haitians, the journey is much longer, lasting usually days. Though landings are less frequent than for Cubans, Haitian migrants are usually traveling in overcrowded, leaking sailboats.

Another difference is how the trips unfold. While in both cases migrants are paying smugglers and have different ways to arrive safely, the Cuban voyages appear to be “better planned,” Coast Guard officials said. Cuban migrants and their handlers are now using cellphones and GPS technology to navigate. Some also wait things out on isolated Bahamian cays.

“That didn’t used to be the case. You would take to the sea, and you would see where the weather and the currents would take you,” McPherson said, referring to the increased use of technology. “They’re a little bit more equipped. They’re better informed by other people who have made these journeys. I think that’s the difference.”
Banned from parole program

Earlier this month, in an attempt to curb illegal migration at the United States’ borders, the Biden administration announced a two-year parole program for nationals from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua, similar to one already in place for Venezuelans. The new policy allows for 30,000 immigrants combined from the four countries to enter the United States each month as long as they have a U.S. sponsor, have passed background checks and have a valid passport.

Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that Cubans and Haitians who take to the sea will not be eligible to apply for the parole program. They also face a five-year ban from the United States.

McPherson said he hopes the new parole program will cut down the migration numbers. But for now they are focused on doing the job they have always done.

“Our goal and our objective is to interdict these vessels, whether it’s Cuban or Haitian, as close to their point of departure as possible,” he said. “And the principal reason for doing that is because every one of them is unsafe, and many times there are deadly consequences. So we want to prevent serious injury or loss of life.”

Doing so isn’t always easy. While a migrant boat may voluntarily decide to turn back after being stopped by the Coast Guard, many times those in charge of the boats resist when interdicted.

“Sometimes they’ll threaten our boarding teams; they may threaten others on board, you know, as an attempt to keep us from coming on board or they may just kind of ignore us and continue,” McPherson said.

Once a boat gets closer to shore, migrants become more determined and desperate. The Coast Guard then has to make a new calculus as to whether to let the boat go on or stop it before migrants can drop into the ocean, which has occurred in several Haitian landings.

“We see a level of determination, and, frankly, recklessness that puts them in danger and puts our officers in danger. So the first thing we try and do is try and stabilize and secure that situation as best we can,” McPherson said. “Again, more presence on the scene is often the best option. If we need to, we may take limited force to stop them. And then to bring them off in a safe and orderly manner.

“One of the first things we always do is... we want to provide them with enough life jackets [in case] something does happen, either as a result of their attempt to evade us, or just because the vessels are unstable, unsafe,” he said. “But in many cases, in some cases, they refuse to take them.”

By the Coast Guard’s estimates, some 30,000 migrants traveled through the Caribbean last year. Not all were interdicted, McPherson acknowledged.

“That’s the most we’ve seen since 1994,” he said, turning his focus to the Homeland Security Task Force’s mass migration plan. “The plan has been in place, it’s been exercised, it’s been in use. That’s why frankly, we were able to interdict 1,000 migrants and hold them.”

Nuclear Power? Have No Fear—Our Clean Energy Future Is Radioactive.


Jack Holmes
Wed, January 25, 2023


Nuclear Power? Have No Fear. Mike Kim

We’d all like to live in the world of fairytales and gumdrops where all our power comes from the wind and the sun. But when you talk to people who know what they’re talking about, one thing becomes clear: Wind and solar will be a big part of our energy future, but they won’t be everything. Those are renewable power sources, which fit under the larger umbrella of low-carbon energy, but the sun doesn’t shine all the time and the wind doesn’t always blow. A bunch of companies are working on new battery technologies to store energy from wind and solar for the downtimes, but we need other slices in our energy pie to crank out power 24/7. These are called “firm” or “baseload” power sources, and we’ve covered a couple—like hydro and geothermal—that will hopefully replace some of what we get from oil and gas.

But there’s one source of clean, constant energy that already supplies 20% of the electricity in the United States: nuclear power. In the real world of the future, a big slice of the pie is radioactive.

“No one who's a real engineer could even imagine anything beyond about 80% wind and solar. I think it's far less than 80%,” says Paul Dabbar, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. He’s a former nuclear submarine officer who went on to become undersecretary for science and innovation at the Department of Energy. Somewhere between 20 and 50% of our energy pie needs to be constantly and reliably available, which wind and solar can’t supply without battery technologies we don’t currently have. Even then, there’s some skepticism among utilities and other folks whose job it is to keep the lights on. Geothermal and hydro are helping around the edges, but the issue is scale. “You're either going to run gas plants with carbon capture,” added Dabbar, referencing still-unproven tech for capturing the carbon emissions from natural gas plants before it floats up to the atmosphere, “or you're going to need nuclear.”

Once built, nuclear plants are clean, cheap, and produce big energy around the clock.

Alexandra Beier - Getty Images

Some in the environmental movement oppose nuclear, and Germany, for one, was on the path to shuttering its plants for a while. But that’s not realistic now, and it isn’t realistic when you consider our future electricity demands. “If we're really going to displace all this fossil power and electrify the transportation sector to some high degree, and maybe electrify other sectors, that's just going to increase the amount of electricity we use by quite a lot,” says Dr. Matt Bowen, a research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy. “All the scenarios that the Princeton Net Zero America folks looked at, I think our electricity generation always at least doubles after 2050. We're going to shut down all the nuclear power plants and still somehow double our generation in the next twenty-something years? It just seems highly implausible to me.”

There’s no low-carbon transition where power stays reliable and affordable without nuclear. Once they’re built, these plants are cheap: the fuel is cheaper than gas and coal, you’ve got some maintenance (which, by the way, you’ve also got on wind and solar), and a plant can operate for 80 years. And again, it's all based on mature technology that’s already powering our homes and businesses. The possibilities for fusion—the process of combining atoms to create energy that saw a breakthrough in December—are a whole ‘nother conversation.

For now, we’re talking fission: splitting atoms. We’ll probably need to build more of these power plants, which isn’t exactly easy. First of all, there’s public apprehension. We all have some image in our minds of nuclear disaster, whether that’s Cherynobyl or Fukushima or Three Mile Island here in the States. But in the scheme of things, deaths connected to nuclear power are very rare, particularly compared to oil and coal.

“The Chernobyl reactor was a horrible design that was literally illegal in the United States. It was unsafe,” Dabbar says. “As the temperature went up in the reactor, the power went up. That fundamental issue is very bad. Even the Russians themselves don't build it anymore. In Japan, it was a bad location. Don't put it in certain places that have potential problems, like a tsunami. If you look at Three Mile Island, no one died, nothing actually got out. The reactor got wiped out. It melted down inside, but it didn't hurt anybody. Obviously, that was not positive, and the things that allowed that to happen have been fixed. It was primarily about instrumentation and training.” That last one was in 1979 in Pennsylvania, which still gets 36% of its power from nuclear today. It sits behind seven states, including South Carolina (56%) and Illinois (54%). The kind of siting issues that Fukushima exposed will always be a problem, particularly as the same climate we’re trying to salvage is serving up more extreme weather events, but they’re a problem for any energy project. In Texas in 2021, it was the gas plants that froze.

Three Mile Island kicked off a serious downturn for the U.S. nuclear industry.

Karen Kasmauski - Getty Images

Another sticking point for the public is waste disposal. Dabbar ran the largest disposal program in the world while at the Department of Energy, and he’ll tell you it isn’t a technological problem. “There has been mostly a political block on the topic, not science, environmental, or engineering limitations. The ability to consolidate, concentrate and put the nuclear waste into a safe form, in a safe location, is completely doable. That's completely not a challenge.” The challenge is finding that safe location. There was agreement on a site at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, but waves of politicking have stalled that plan. Dabbar backs the idea of a central storage site, either “long-term geological storage that could last millennia” or “interim storage, which could be 100 or 200 years.” We already ship nuclear material around the U.S. by rail and truck and store it in a secure location. We know how to do this because we do it all the time when nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers need to refuel.

(Fun fact: Dabbar says newer designs for these reactors allow some Navy ships to go 40-plus years without refueling. Even with the older submarines, it was about 20 years.)

There’s a thornier political problem on the other side of the process: acquiring the fuel. Russia currently dominates key markets servicing the nuclear fuel supply chain. After uranium is mined, it goes through a number of different processing stages. Two of them are, individually, “conversion” and “enrichment.” Russia has big influence on these two markets, but the U.S. and the rest of the West has been working to disentangle their supply chains since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The United States should be able to largely get away from Russia this year,” says Bowen, who published a paper on the topic in May. We’ll always need to deal with the fact that we don’t actually mine much uranium domestically, but we can get more control over the nuclear equivalent of oil refining.

The plan was to store nuclear waste deep under Yucca Mountain, where there ain’t much around.

Dvaid Howells - Getty Images

OK, with all the (spent) fuel and (geo)politics talk out of the way, we come to the real obstacle to nuclear proliferation in the U.S.: It’s too damn expensive to build a nuclear power plant. The infamous recent example is the expansion of Plant Vogtle, a Georgia project in which two new reactors could come online this year after six years of delays and $20 billion in cost overruns. The $33 billion tab is more than double the original cost projections. Dr. Magdalena Klemun studied the economics of nuclear power at MIT before she joined the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She says American issues with delivering nuclear power plants on time and on budget are tied to increasingly stringent safety requirements—no bad thing—and declining construction productivity that’s hit across industries, but has hit nuclear particularly hard.

“Any onsite construction project is always prone to issues with the management of the construction team, issues with the supply chain, the on-time delivery of different materials and components,” Klemun says. But with nuclear, “every single screw that you place requires documents before that plan where exactly it is to be placed, and then documents after that confirm that everything has been done exactly right.” These projects suffer from ballooning “soft costs” on the worksite. More than that, because we essentially stopped building nuclear power plants for decades, we might have lost a step.

Dabbar’s view is slightly different. “‘On time, on budget’ is something that has not been a part of the culture of the nuclear industry,” he says. “To a reasonable degree, many people in the industry just assumed everything was going to be significantly over schedule and over budget. It's a little bit like you're building a home and your contractor gives you a price, but they just immediately think that it will never work and you're going to have to pay double. Well congratulations, it's almost certainly going to be double.”

Plant Vogtle

Photographer: Pallava Bagla - Getty Images

This has understandably freaked out local utilities and scared away the kind of capital investment that could get these projects off the ground more often. “If you're a power company CEO and you're looking at various types of power plants to go build, a lot of executives [who backed nuclear plants] have been fired, and companies go into bankruptcy,” Dabbar says. And it’s not new: “If you go back to all the other nuclear construction cycles in the U.S., there's one bankruptcy after another. This isn't just Georgia and South Carolina. There was Public Service in New Hampshire and El Paso Electric, and Long Island Lighting went into bankruptcy and disappeared.” Large nuclear projects often feature “very, very poor controls over the construction, budget, and schedule.”

At the Department of Energy’s National Reactor Innovation Center, director Ashley Finan says work is underway on construction technologies that will bring down costs. “We've built prototypes of steel bricks, which some people say is a Lego-type approach to concrete and steel for nuclear.” She adds they’re also looking at how a best practice from the tunneling industry, “vertical-shaft boring,” could bring down cost and time. But other large civil engineering projects have some of these same problems, Dabbar says, and he believes there's a solution that harkens back to his days on a nuclear submarine: build them smaller.

Instead of a giant 1,200-megawatt reactor, you could have four 300-megawatt reactors on the same site. With Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) we have the advantage of building much of them in factories, with standardized processes that tamp down on the cost overruns and delays. “This is where all the ex-Navy people have come from for years,” he says. “The Navy takes Small Modular Reactors—better known as just a nuclear reactor for a submarine or an aircraft carrier—built at a central location, primarily in Virginia near Roanoke. Then they put them on a semi truck, and they ship them off to the shipyard and they weld it in. A very significant portion of the whole reactor is made at a factory someplace and shipped. Navy reactors are delivered on time and on budget into submarines and aircraft carriers all the time. It's actually a very well-honed machine.”

What if instead of a big, hulking, site-specific nuclear power plant design, we had a standardized design for a reactor that’s a quarter or a tenth the size that we could manufacture in a factory and ship to a site, where it could be installed in a process closer to what we have for nuclear subs and aircraft carriers? If we need more power than one reactor can provide, we could stack several on a single site. In one model, we could plug these things into former coal plant sites and use the transmission infrastructure already in place to connect them to the grid quickly. There are also plans for “microreactors” that are even smaller than the SMRs. They could power a single large facility, like a hospital, or a remote community on their own. This might freak you out, but keep in mind that many of these new advanced reactor designs have inherent safety features that allow them to power down and eliminate danger without even much human intervention.

Now just imagine we’re cranking these out in factories and shipping them wherever they’re needed around the country. In fact, you don’t need to imagine: on Tuesday, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved an SMR model from NuScale. An individual reactor will produce 50 megawatts on its own, but it can be stacked in groups of four, six, or twelve. The assembly line changed everything for a reason. We need one for nuclear power plants, because we need nuclear power.

NIMBY FOR GOOD REASON

US sweetens pot to study siting for spent nuke fuel storage


 An illustration depicts a planned interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in southeastern New Mexico as officials announce plans to pursue a project by Holtec International during a news conference in Albuquerque, N.M., on April 29, 2015. The U.S. government has long struggled to find a permanent solution for storing or disposing of spent nuclear fuel generated by the nation's commercial nuclear power plants, and opposition in the Southwestern U.S. is flaring up again as New Mexico lawmakers debated a bill that would ban construction of such a facility without state consent. 

(AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan, File)


SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN
Thu, January 26, 2023 

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — The U.S. government has long struggled to find a permanent solution for storing or disposing of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants, and opposition to such a site is flaring up again as New Mexico lawmakers debate banning a facility without state consent.

The state's prospective ban cleared its first legislative hurdle Tuesday with approval from a key committee. Supporters acknowledge that the bill has a long road ahead, but it does have the backing of Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.

State Sen. Jeff Steinborn, the bill's sponsor, said momentum against New Mexico becoming a permanent dumping ground for the nation's nuclear waste — including spent fuel from commercial power plants — is growing and he's cautiously optimistic this is the year that the state takes a legislative stand.

Steinborn said consent should be mandatory and that the federal government should provide states with a significant financial incentive reflecting the risks associated with managing radioactive materials.

New Mexico and neighboring Texas have sued in federal court over two proposed multibillion-dollar interim storage facilities — one in southeastern New Mexico and the other in Andrews County, Texas.

“New Mexico has not been offered anything with this deal,” Steinborn said. “And even if we had, I don’t think any amount of money would convince me that it’s the right thing.”

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a license for a facility in West Texas in 2021, and the agency plans to make a final decision as early as March on whether to grant a license for the planned storage complex in New Mexico. The two sites would be about 40 miles (64 kilometers) apart.

Environmental and nuclear watchdog groups have filed their own lawsuits, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Wednesday dismissed all objections opposing the Texas project.

Federal appellate courts elsewhere have yet to rule on the state of Texas' claims, which focus on whether federal nuclear regulators have authority to license such a facility, or on New Mexico's claims that regulators did not do enough to vet plans by Holtec International.

The New Jersey-based company is seeking a 40-year license to build what it has described as a state-of-the-art complex near Carlsbad, which already is home to the federal government’s only underground repository for Cold War-era waste generated by decades of nuclear research and bomb-making.

Ed Mayer, program director of the planned facility, told state lawmakers during a hearing earlier this week that Holtec has an unblemished safety record and the probability of a severe accident happening while the spent fuel is transported via train from sites around the U.S. would be 1 in 10 trillion. Even then, he said, no radiological material would be released because the casks holding the fuel are robust.

Southeastern New Mexico officials testified that building the complex would bring jobs and diversify the region's economy, which is fueled now by oil and gas development that spans the Permian Basin.

However, commissioners in New Mexico two most populous counties — Bernalillo and Dona Ana — adopted resolutions this week opposing the transportation of spent fuel across county lines and the construction of an interim storage facility in the state.

While not necessarily opposed to nuclear power, Bernalillo County Commissioner Walt Benson said "the level of risk is too high and there’s a lack of information in terms of containing that risk.”

From the decommissioned nuclear plant near the San Onofre Beach in Southern California to plants that have powered communities on East Coast, spent fuel has been piling up for decades and elected officials in those communities want it shipped elsewhere.

U.S. Rep. Mike Levin, a California Democrat, is among those who have sought federal funding to restart the U.S. Department of Energy's consent-based process for locating places where the fuel would be welcomed.

“One of my top priorities since my first day in office has been moving the nuclear waste at San Onofre away from the region as quickly and safely as possible,” Levin said in September.

The Biden administration sweetened the pot this month, putting up $26 million for communities interested in studying potential interim storage sites. The deadline to apply is Jan. 31.

Despite opposition from environmentalists, Biden and his top energy officials have pointed to nuclear power as essential to achieving their goals of producing carbon-free electricity over the next decade.

According to the DOE, nuclear reactors across the country produce more than 2,000 metric tons of radioactive waste a year, with most of it remaining on-site because there’s nowhere else to put it. The federal government is paying to house the fuel, and the cost is expected to stretch into the tens of billions over the next decade, according to a review by independent government auditors.

Steinborn said the state of New Mexico's willingness to entertain spent fuel storage will hinge on the federal government's ability to identify and fund a permanent solution.

“They just need to change their approach rather than just shove it down the state’s throat without any assurances,” he said.

Storing nuclear waste in Permian Basin threatens energy security, environment

Tommy Taylor
Thu, January 26, 2023 

If you live near the Permian Basin, you likely know the importance of the region to the economies and environments of New Mexico and Texas, and to the energy security of the United States, but it’s worth revisiting just how critical it is for our community and the country.

In short, the Permian Basin is responsible for delivering America’s energy independence. If it were a country, the Permian Basin would be the third largest oil producer in the world. The 5.3 million barrels of oil per day and approximately 20 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day that come from the Basin are essential to our nation’s economy and our energy security. The region holds an untapped potential of 92.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 299.7 trillion feet of recoverable natural gas. That’s enough natural gas to meet U.S. household demand for 60 years.

Despite all of this, there is an effort underway in Washington that threatens the future of the Permian Basin. From mostly behind closed doors, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved two private companies – Holtec and Interim Storage Partners – to take ownership of spent nuclear fuel at decommissioning reactors all over the nation and consolidate it at two above-ground storage facilities that are located in America’s most productive oil field – the Permian Basin.

If this project ultimately comes to fruition, the Permian Basin won’t just be home to most of America’s energy resources, but it will also become the largest storage area of spent nuclear fuel in the world. According to Holtec, more than 2,100 shipments of spent nuclear fuel have been made in the U.S. in the past 60 plus years. That’s certainly a large amount, but to put this into perspective, Holtec’s proposed storage site in New Mexico is expected to hold over 170,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel. The Interim Storage Partners’ site in Texas is already licensed and could ultimately hold 40,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel. It is estimated that it would require up to ten times the number of shipments that have already taken place to move this toxic material to Texas and New Mexico and just as many shipments will be required down the road if a permanent storage solution is ever developed.

That means these two sites would store at or near the surface over 450 million pounds of highly radioactive material at their proposed capacity. A 60 year history of shipments of spent nuclear fuel dwarfs in comparison to what these two private companies have planned. A project of this scale has never happened before and never in area as economically and strategically valuable to our nation.

That’s why it defies logic to store spent nuclear fuel in the Permian Basin. Significant data shows that the Permian Basin does not even qualify to host the waste. For instance, the proximity of the deadly waste to aquifers and to old, abandoned wellbores that are subject to collapse disqualifies the storage sites. Seismic activity is regularly reported in the region, including a 5.3 earthquake this past December. That, alone, disqualifies the siting of nuclear waste storage. Additionally, government reports show that terrorist groups primarily focus on economic disruption. A security analyst recently reported that putting deadly nuclear waste alongside oil and gas would create a major target.

It gets worse. Holtec, the company leading the proposed storage site in New Mexico, was recently fined by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for security and safety lapses at a nuclear power plant. Yet, this private company wants to be responsible for storing most of the nation’s high-level nuclear waste.

Mr. Taylor is the Director of Oil and Gas Development at Fasken Oil and Ranch, Ltd.

This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: Storing nuclear waste in Permian Basin threatens energy security, environment

Can Rahul Gandhi and his 2,175-mile march save democracy in India?


Parth M.N.
Thu, January 26, 2023 

On a cold, breezy afternoon in this city in the northern state of Punjab, a crush of people lined both sides of a the main road, pushing and shoving to get a better view.

Locals peered at the crowds from their balconies, cradling toddlers with one hand and positioning their phones for a photo with the other. Security forces, parked alongside the sidewalk, gripped a long rope to keep the public from spilling into the streets.

They were waiting for the arrival of Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Indian National Congress and heir to a once-dominant political dynasty, who is leading a march that traverses the length of his country to challenge Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party.

Women watch from their house as Rahul Gandhi marches with his supporters. A poster of his mother, Sonia Gandhi, the longest-serving president of the Indian National Congress, is seen on the right. (Altaf Qadri / Associated Press)

Gandhi and his followers insist their country is being divided along religious lines under Modi’s hardline right-wing government, favoring the Hindu majority over Muslims and other minorities. The march christened the Unite India Rally — is one of the most significant political campaigns leading up to the national election just a year away, when Modi will be seeking his third term.

The rally started on Sept. 7 in Kanyakumari, at the southern tip of India, and is supposed to conclude by the end of January in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Gandhi will have covered 2,175 miles, walking through 12 states. On many days close to 1,000 people are walking with him.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi addresses a gathering at the Punjab Lakhanpur border on Jan. 19. (Waseem Andrabi / Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

With its emphasis on spreading a message of love and unification and raising important issues like unemployment and inflation, the rally is a counterpoint to a longtime narrative that has suggested the 52-year-old Gandhi — whose father, grandmother and great-grandfather served as prime ministers of India — was a reluctant politician who excelled at partying and had little interest in the hard work of governing.

Over the last few months, the rally has received notice and support from institutions that are not associated with the government — nonprofits, universities, professional organizations and cultural groups — noted lawyers and economists, stand-up comics and Bollywood actors. Even in it last leg, the rally is still drawing large crowds.

But will it be enough to overcome the decline of the Indian National Congress, which has struggled for years with defeat and scandals, and the current government, which has a tight grip on civilian institutions, including the court and news media?

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi with supporters during the party's Bharat Jodo Yatra on Sunday in Jammu, India. He began his cross-country trek Sept. 7 and will end it Jan. 30. (Waseem Andrabi / Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Sheela Devi was among the residents watching the rally from their homes. Wrapped in a muffler and a monkey cap, she said she was there “to give [Gandhi] my blessings,” and added: “He is raising the right issues.”

A homemaker with a husband who works as a driver at a car rental company, Devi, 45, is worried about rising costs. “The fuel has gotten expensive. The gas cylinder [for home heating] has gotten expensive,” she said. “These issues are being ignored. … It takes courage to stand up with the message of peace in these troubled times.”

She paused when she heard people chanting: “Rahul Gandhi for the win.”

“Is he here?” Devi asked a bystander. “I think so,” he responded and whipped out his mobile phone out to make a video call to his wife.

Police are seen through a ripped banner as India's opposition Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi speaks to a crowd. (Channi Anand / Associated Press)

The chants grew louder as Gandhi approached. His supporters, wearing caps and T-shirts bearing his image, started waving the national flag. Their energy seemed contagious.

The only person wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt in a sea of jackets and shawls, Gandhi waved and smiled through his ruffled salt-and-pepper beard, which he hasn’t shaved since the rally began. His pace was brisk, but he stopped on occasion to greet people who wanted to shake his hand or hug him, politely engaging before moving on.

“We have met people from different states, different cultures and different backgrounds,” said Vaibhav Walia, 32, an official with the Indian National Congress who has been with the rally from the start. “Fishermen, factory workers, youth, farmers have all come up to us and shared their concerns.”

Rahul Gandhi, center in a white T-shirt, throws flower petals toward press photographers during a march in New Delhi. By journey's end, he will have covered 2,175 miles and walked through 12 states. (Altaf Qadri / Associated Press)

One encounter, Walia said, stands out. In southern India, a Muslim woman grabbed his hand and told him she feared for her two adult sons because of the atmosphere in the country. “Nobody should live in fear because they belong to a particular religion,” he said.

Each day, the march, funded by the Indian National Congress, covers 15 miles in two stretches. The first continues until 10 a.m., pausing for Gandhi and his supporters to have a tea break and lunch. The march rally resumes at 3 p.m., and about three hours later, the participants stop at a pre-arranged camp to eat and sleep.

Rahul Gandhi, second from left, visits the Golden Temple on Jan. 10 in Amritsar, Punjab state. (Narinder Nanu/ AFP via Getty Images)

Gandhi and his party colleagues sleep in containers that have been turned into living quarters — a business class of sorts — and everyone else sleeps on mattresses spread out on a floor. In the second week of January, temperatures dipped below 40 degrees — which prompted some complaints.

“It is particularly difficult during this biting cold,” said Shakeel Ahmed, 52, a Mumbai-based advocate and activist, who also started walking on Sept. 7. “The sanitation facilities for us are inferior. In one state, a cultural program was arranged. When I tried to enter, I was told it is only for Gandhi and his associates.”

But Ahmed said he’d decided to ignore the differential treatment for the larger cause. “I have managed to get a lot of hope from the rally,” he said. “A few days back, I met a 90-year-old man who had walked two miles just to see Rahul Gandhi. I met so many youngsters who turned up to express solidarity. There is a lot of hate being perpetuated through the media and the ruling party. It is reassuring to see so many people, especially youth, turn up and talk about love and unity.”

Mangilal Manju, 22, a carpenter from the western state of Rajasthan, joined the rally the first week of October, leaving work (and $300 a month in earnings) behind. “My parents were reluctant initially,” he said. “But this is an important initiative, and we have to back it as much as possible. This is for the future of India.”

Fifteen days into the rally, Manju concluded that mainstream media, frequently accused of favoring Modi, was not covering the rally. So, he started his own YouTube channel and began posting videos that he shot on his smartphone. The most recent has garnered over 1 million views.

For decades, the Indian National Congress was either in power or provided a strong opposition. But today it's at a low point, with 52 our of 543 seats in Parliament. Party workers were demoralized.

Gandhi, who has emphasized secular values and pluralism during the campaign, has been criticized for a lack of vision. Saba Naqvi, a senior political journalist based in Delhi, said the Congress party’s rhetoric doesn’t match its reality on the ground when it comes to electoral politics.

A banner of Sonia Gandhi, the mother or Rahul Gandi and the longest-serving head of the Indian National Congress. (Sakib Ali / Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

“I don’t have the confidence in the Congress’ ability to directly take on the [Bharatiya Janata Party] even today,” she said. “A lot depends on how the party workers follow up the impact of the rally on the ground.”

But Naqvi believes the rally has cast Gandhi in a better light. It’s a “success in rehabilitation of Rahul Gandhi’s image and in reminding us of our constitutional moorings. It’s a voice against all pervasive cronyism of our times and rampant inequality.”

Shivam Vij, a columnist based in Delhi, said the rally has helped the Indian National Congress consolidate its base. “But the real challenge is to recover the ground it has lost to Modi in the last eight years,” he added. “The Congress needs to keep this momentum for a year and half until the next elections. That will help them get swing voters that are on the fence.”

Political commentator turned political activist Yogendra Yadav who was a staunch critic of Gandhi and his party in the past, said he was unsure if the march would have an impact. “But the response has exceeded my expectation,” he said. “The rally has activated the demotivated cadre of INC. There is a certain positivity and proactiveness that you didn’t associate with the party in years. [Gandhi] was seen as someone who was pampered, ignorant and arrogant. It has all been smashed by the rally.”

Rahul Gandhi with supporters in Jammu, India. (Waseem Andrabi / Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

India's Attempts To Censor BBC Documentary Make More People Want To See It

Marita Vlachou
Thu, January 26, 2023 

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi waits for the arrival of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi at Hyderabad house, in New Delhi on Wednesday. Modi's government has moved to block a BBC documentary critical of him.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi waits for the arrival of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi at Hyderabad house, in New Delhi on Wednesday. Modi's government has moved to block a BBC documentary critical of him.

The Indian government’s efforts to block a BBC documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi appears to have backfired as more students across the country have continued planning screenings of the series.

The two-part series titled “India: The Modi Question,” which premiered last week on BBC Two in the U.K., details allegations about Modi’s role in the deadly anti-Muslim Gujarat riots in 2002, while he was chief minister of the state.


The government has taken action to limit its citizens’ access to the documentary.

Kanchan Gupta, a senior adviser in India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, said both Twitter and YouTube followed the government’s orders issued under the emergency powers granted by India’s information technology laws to block the series.

YouTube, however, claims the links were removed at the BBC’s request.

“The video in question has been blocked from appearing by the BBC due to a copyright claim,” a YouTube spokesperson told HuffPost.

The BBC said this is “standard practice.”

“We issue Takedown Notices to websites and other file sharing platforms where the content infringes the BBC’s copyright,” a BBC spokesperson told HuffPost.

Twitter’s decision to remove some tweets on the documentary appears to stand in direct contrast with CEO Elon Musk’s pledge to protect free speech on the platform. Musk has even called himself a “free speech absolutist.”

Gupta said the government directed Twitter to remove 50 tweets linking to YouTube videos of the documentary. Twitter did not immediately respond to a HuffPost request for comment.

In response to a user sharing a story from The Intercept detailing Twitter’s action, Musk said he was unaware of this happening.

“It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things,” he wrote Wednesday.

The BBC documentary even appears to be currently trending on Indian Twitter.

A screenshot showing a hashtag referencing the BBC documentary trending on Indian Twitter.

A screenshot showing a hashtag referencing the BBC documentary trending on Indian Twitter.

Actor John Cusack has shared tweets linking to the documentary — but some of those appear to be blocked in India. Users in other countries can still see the posts and access the links.

A screenshot of how John Cusack's tweet referencing an earlier post linking to the BBC documentary looks like for India users.

A screenshot of how John Cusack's tweet referencing an earlier post linking to the BBC documentary looks like for India users.

A screenshot of how John Cusack's tweet referencing an earlier post linking to the BBC documentary looks like for U.S. users.

A screenshot of how John Cusack's tweet referencing an earlier post linking to the BBC documentary looks like for U.S. users.

Opposition party members have also continued sharing the series, defying the government’s orders.

“What @BBC show proves or disproves is up to viewers to decide,” Mahua Moitra, a member of the All India Trinamool Congress party, wrote on Twitter, adding that the government’s “raging censorship actions are unacceptable.”

Moitra has said she will continue posting links of the second part of the series, which aired Tuesday.

While the series has not aired in India or on BBC World, the BBC’s international news channel, the country’s government has already moved to ban people from viewing it or sharing it online. That decision has sparked fury in universities around the country where students have organized viewings.

Power in New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University was cut off Tuesday shortly before the student union had planned to air the documentary, prompting students to share the link on platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram for people to watch on their own devices, according to The Associated Press.

At another university in the capital, Jamia Millia University, police arrested half a dozen students who were protesting Wednesday after forces gathered outside the campus in an effort to stop a student group from screening the series, AP reported.

A security personnel speaks to people from inside the main gate of Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi on Wednesday. Tensions escalated in the university after a student group said it planned to screen a banned documentary that examines Modi's role during 2002 anti-Muslim riots, prompting dozens of police equipped with tear gas and riot gear to gather outside campus gates.More

A security personnel speaks to people from inside the main gate of Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi on Wednesday. Tensions escalated in the university after a student group said it planned to screen a banned documentary that examines Modi's role during 2002 anti-Muslim riots, prompting dozens of police equipped with tear gas and riot gear to gather outside campus gates.

The Indian government has sought to discredit the findings of the BBC’s investigation as propaganda.

“This is a propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative,” said Arindam Bagchi, a spokesperson for India’s Foreign Ministry. “The bias, the lack of objectivity, and a continuing colonial mindset, is blatantly visible.”

The broadcaster has defended the documentary, saying its journalists conducted thorough research and offered the government a chance to weigh in.

“A wide range of voices, witnesses and experts were approached, and we have featured a range of opinions, including responses from people in the BJP,” the BBC said in a statement, referring to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

The 2002 riots were triggered by a train fire that killed over 50 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya. Muslims were accused of setting up the fire, triggering Hindus to respond by burning their houses and properties, according to CNN.

The documentary also touches on a previously unseen British Foreign Ministry report that directly implicates Modi with inspiring and creating a climate that enabled the violence that killed over 1,000 people, most of which were Muslim.

Jack Straw, who commissioned the report as the U.K.’s foreign secretary at the time, said its findings showed the purpose of the riots “was to purge Muslims from Hindu areas.”

“These were very serious claims that Mr. Modi had played a proactive part in pulling back police and in tacitly encouraging the Hindu extremists,” Straw said in the documentary.

Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that while Modi was exonerated by the country’s Supreme Court in the absence of evidence, his ruling party has not shown a real commitment to justice.

Ganguly explains that men who have been found guilty of rape in the riots are still being held in high regard by the party’s supporters.

“The BJP’s ideology of Hindu primacy has infiltrated the justice system and the media, empowering party supporters to threaten, harass, and attack religious minorities, particularly Muslims, with impunity,” Ganguly writes. “The Modi government has adopted discriminatory laws and policies against Muslims and attempted to curb independent institutions.”

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for HINDUISM IS FASCISM 

Elon Musk's Twitter hit with holocaust denial hate speech lawsuit in Germany



Natasha Lomas
Wed, January 25, 2023 

Twitter owner and self-proclaimed "free-speech absolutist" Elon Musk is facing a legal challenge in Germany over how the platform handles antisemitic hate speech.

The lawsuit, which was filed yesterday in the Berlin regional court by HateAid, a group that campaigns against hate speech, and the European Union of Jewish Students (EUJS), argues that Musk-owned Twitter is failing to enforce its own rules against antisemitic content, including holocaust denial.

Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany -- which has strict laws prohibiting antisemitic hate speech -- making the Berlin court a compelling arena to hear such a challenge.

"[A]lthough Twitter prohibits antisemitic hostilities in its Rules and Policies, the platform leaves a lot of such content online. Even if the platform is alerted about it by users," the litigants argue. "Current studies prove that 84% of posts containing antisemitic hate speech were not reviewed by social media platforms, as shown in a study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Which means that Twitter knows Jews are being publicly attacked on the platform every day and that antisemitism is becoming a normality in our society. And that the platform’s response is by no means adequate."

For his part, Musk has repeatedly claimed Twitter will respect all laws in the countries where it operates (including European speech laws). Although he has yet to make any public comment on this specific lawsuit.

Since the Tesla CEO took over Twitter at the end of October, he has drastically reduced Twitter's headcount, including in core safety functions like content moderation -- also slashing staff in regional offices around Europe, including in Germany. Plus he's entirely disbanded Twitter's Trust and Safety Council and reinstated scores of accounts that had previously been banned for breaking Twitter's rules -- creating conditions that look ideal for hate speech to flourish unchecked.

Musk’s impact on content moderation at Twitter faces early test in Germany

Over Musk's roughly three month run as Twitter CEO, there have been anecdotal reports -- and some studies -- suggesting an increase in hate on the platform. While many former users have blamed a rise in hate and abuse for abandoning the platform since he took over.

Notably the lawsuit is focused on examples of hate speech that have been posted to Twitter over the past three months since Musk was in charge, per Bloomberg, which reported on the litigation earlier.

So it looks like an interesting legal test for Musk as the lawsuit applies an external lens to how the platform is enforcing anti-hate speech policies in an era of erratic (and drastic) operational reconfiguration under the new owner's watch.

While the billionaire libertarian generally tries to deflect criticism that he's steering Twitter into toxic waters -- via a mix of denial, fishing for boosterism, targeted attacks on critics and ongoing self-aggrandizement (of what he couches as a quasi-neo-enlightenment effort to be a handmaiden to the future of human civilization, by 'freeing the bird', as he couches his Twitter speech 'reforms') -- he did admit to an early surge in hate on the platform back in November.

At the time, tweeting a chart to illustrate a claim that Twitter engineers had succeeded in reducing hate speech impressions to a third less than "pre-spike levels" (as he christened the sudden uptick in hate seen in the period directly after his takeover of Twitter). Although he also suggested that spike was only linked to a small number of accounts, rather than to any wider reduction in the efficacy of content moderation since he took over and set about ripping up the existing rulebook.



While Musk seems to enjoy cultivating an impression that he's a "free speech absolutist", the truth, as ever with the space cowboy, looks far less binary.

For example, at Twitter he has taken a series of apparently unilateral and arbitrary decisions on whether to censor (or not) certain posts and/or accounts -- including, initially, unbanning Kanye West (aka Ye) and then re-banning him for tweeting an image of a Swastika with a Star of David; the latter being a symbol of Judaism, the former a Nazi emblem.

Or unbanning former US president Donald Trump's account, which was suspended after the violent attack on the US capital by Trump supporters -- but steadfastly refusing to reinstate InfoWars' hate preacher, Alex Jones, as Musk appears to object to Jones' infamous conspiracy falsehood that children who died in the Sandy Hook school shooting were actors.

Other decisions taken by Musk around Twitter content moderation appear to be driven purely by self interest -- such as banning an account that tweeted the location of his private jet (which he dubbed "assassination coordinates"). Last year he also suspended a number of journalists who reported on the episode as he argued their reporting had the same implications for his personal safety -- before reversing course in the face of a storm of criticism that he was censoring the free press.

Yet when not banning journalists, Musk has literally invited a number of hand-picked hacks in to sift through internal documents -- and publish what he's dubbed the "Twitter files" -- in what looks like a naked (but very tedious) bid to shape the narrative about how the platform's former leadership handled content moderation and related issues, like inbound from state agencies making requests for tweet takedowns etc; and throw fuel on conservative conspiracy theories that claim systematic shadowbanning and/or downranking of their content vs liberal views.

(Whereas actual research conducted by Twitter, pre-Musk, looking at its algorithmic amplification of political tweets found, on the contrary, its AIs actually give more uplift to right wing views, concluding: "In 6 out of 7 countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left." But who cares about non-cherry-picked data right?)

On abuse and hate, Musk is also quite capable of dishing it out himself on Twitter -- using his tactic of megaphoning trolling and mockery of vulnerable groups (or "wokism") to toss red meat to his right wing base at the expense of people who are at a disproportionate risk of being abused, such as the trans and non-binary people whose pronouns he's deliberately mocked.

Musk has also stooped to tweeting and/or amplifying targeted attacks on individuals that have led to abusive pile-ons by his followers -- such as the one that forced Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to flee his own home. So hypocrisy about personal safety risks? Very much.

Even a casual observer of Musk-Twitter would surely conclude there's a lack of consistency to the Chief Twit's decision-making -- which, if this arbitrariness filters through into patchy and partial enforcement of platform policies, spells bad news for the trust and safety of Twitter users (and RIP for any concept of 'conversational health' on the platform).

Whether Musk's inconsistencies will also lead to a court order in Germany requiring Twitter to take down illegal hate speech, via this HateAid-EUJS lawsuit, remains to be seen.

“Twitter’s actions are based solely on its own, intransparent rules, relying on the fact that users have no chance to appeal -- for example, when it comes to the non-deletion of incitements to hatred," argues Josephine Ballon, head of legal for HateAid in a statement.

"There has been no single case where a social network was prosecuted for this by the authorities. This is why civil society has to get involved, looking for ways to demand the removal of such content. We as an NGO act as representative for the affected communities which are subject to hostility and incitements of hatred on a daily basis. Thus we can build pressure on the platforms in the long term."

Interestingly, the lawsuit does not appear to be being brought under Germany's long-standing hate speech takedown law -- aka NetzDG -- which, at least on paper, gives regulators the power to sanction platforms up to tens of millions of dollars if they fail to swiftly remove illegal content that's reported to them.

But, as Ballon notes, there have not been any NetzDG prosecutions related to content takedown breaches (although messaging app Telegram was recently fined a small amount for breaches related to not having proper reporting channels or legal representation in place).

One local lawyer we spoke to, who is not directly involved in the HateAid-EUJS case, suggested there's been something of a tacit arrangement between federal authorities and social media firm that Germany won't enforce NetzDG on the content moderation issue -- also with an eye on incoming EU digital regulation as the Digital Services Act, which starts to apply later this year for larger platforms, harmonizes governance and content reporting rules across the bloc under a single, pan-EU framework that should replace the older German hate speech regulation regime.

For their part, the litigants in this hate speech case against Twitter say they want to get legal clarity on whether individuals (and advocacy groups) can sue in court for the removal of "punishable, antisemitic and inciting content" -- such as Holocaust denial -- even when they are not personally insulted or threatened by the content.

In an FAQ on a webpage detailing their arguments, they explain [emphasis theirs]:

Whether we can demand this is to be decided by the court. To date it is unclear to what extent Twitter users, on the basis of Twitter’s Rules and Policies, are entitled to demand the deletion of such content in cases where they are not themselves affected. We believe that Twitter has to abide by its own rules which it boasts about in its contract terms -- to remove antisemitic posts and make sure that Jews can feel safe on the platform.

With our action, we take Twitter up on its contractual promises. We believe that platforms must delete antisemitic content – obviously, the platform needs to be compelled into doing so.

If they are successful, they say their hope is it will become easier for users to assert their rights to the deletion of illegal content against other major platforms, too. So there could be wider implications if the suit prevails.

"With this fundamental process, we want to have the courts clearly establish that platforms like Twitter are already obliged to protect users from antisemitic digital violence based on their own user agreements," they add. "Such a judgment will make it easier for users to assert their rights against the major platform operators in the future. The principle behind it is simple: If the terms of the contract state that hate speech is prohibited, then Twitter owes the user to remove it. This could then be enforced, for example, by NGOs such as HateAid to make the Internet more secure."

Twitter was contacted for a response to the lawsuit -- but since Musk took over the platform has abandoned having a routine external comms function and has yet to respond to any of TechCrunch's requests for comment. (But we still asked.)

It's worth noting that, pre-Musk, Twitter wasn't earning overwhelming plaudits for success in tackling illegal hate speech either.

Back in November, the most recent EU report monitoring the bloc's anti-hate speech code -- a voluntary agreement which Twitter and a number of other social media platforms have been signed up to for years -- found that, prior to Musk's takeover, Twitter was performing relatively poorly vs other signatories when it came to quickly responding to reports of illegal hate speech, with the Commission reporting that it removed just 45.4% of such content within 24 hours (vs an aggregate removal rate of 63.6%). While, over the monitored period of March 28 to May 13, Twitter received the second largest number of reports of illegal hate speech (Facebook got the most) -- reporting just under 1,100 reports. So it appeared to be both hosting a relatively large amount of illegal hate speech (vs peer platforms) and trailing its rivals in how quickly it deleted toxic stuff.

So it will certainly be interesting to see the state of those metrics when (or if) Musk-owned Twitter reports a fresh batch of data to the Commission later this year.

Musk at Twitter has ‘huge work’ ahead to comply with EU rules, warns bloc

Elon Musk tells Europe Twitter will comply with bloc’s illegal speech rules

More than 100 Harvard students walk out of class of professor accused of sexual abuse



Lauren Sforza
Thu, January 26, 2023

More than 100 Harvard students walked out of professor John L. Comaroff’s class Tuesday afternoon to protest his teaching again after he was placed on leave last year for violating the school’s sexual harassment and professional conduct policies.

The Harvard Crimson, the school’s student newspaper, reported that the students protested Comaroff’s first lecture of the year by plastering the walls of the building where he teaches with signs reading “Abusers have no place on campus” and “Stop protecting sexual predators.” After Comaroff started his lecture, students stood up from their seats and walked out, chanting “Justice for survivors” and “No more Comaroff, no more complicity,” the student newspaper reported.

Harvard student Rosie Couture tweeted a video of students walking out of the classroom that showed students protesting seconds after Comaroff started his lecture. A similar walkout occurred in Comaroff’s first lecture of the fall 2022 semester, when he returned to teaching after being placed on unpaid administrative leave, the Harvard Crimson reported.

Comaroff, who teaches African and African American studies and anthropology, was placed on unpaid administrative leave for the spring 2022 semester for violating the school’s sexual harassment and professional conduct studies. This suspension came after three anthropology students filed a lawsuit against Harvard last spring accusing the university of ignoring serious allegations against Comaroff for years.

In the complaint, the students allege that Comaroff threatened their academic careers if they chose to report him.

“When students reported him to Harvard and sought to warn their peers about him, Harvard watched as he retaliated by foreclosing career paths and ensuring that those students would have ’trouble getting jobs,’ ” the complaint filed in February of 2022 stated.

“Harvard even allowed its investigatory process to be used in service of Professor Comaroff’s campaign of professional blacklisting,” the complaint continues. “The results have been devastating: Professor Comaroff and his enablers have destroyed the educational opportunities and careers of countless students.”

One of the students who filed the complaint accused Comaroff of kissing her multiple times without her consent and of groping her in public. The lawsuit remains ongoing in the District of Massachusetts federal court.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.

New museum in Mexico spotlights endangered axolotl salamander






Thu, January 26, 2023 at 10:21 AM MST·2 min read
By Alberto Fajardo

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A new museum and conservation center dedicated to Mexico's critically endangered axolotl salamander is highlighting the amphibian's remarkable story that has captured the attention of scientists and the public alike.

With an impressive ability to heal itself, the axolotl (pronounced ah-sho-LO-tul) salamanders were showcased in the exhibit, which opened on Saturday, at Mexico City's Chapultepec Zoo.

The center aims to raise awareness of the animal, native only to Mexico and which is dwindling in the wild due to dire threats to its natural habitat.

For decades, researchers have marveled at how the axolotl can regenerate amputated limbs and damaged body tissue, even its heart and brain. Scientists also documented its ability to breathe with lungs and gills, as well as absorb oxygen through its skin, making it particularly vulnerable to polluted water.

"They are one of the few animals that can regenerate their skin, muscles, bones, blood vessels, nerves, heart, brain," said Fernando Gual, head of wild fauna conservation at the zoo.

"A hugely important part of this space is environmental education," Gual said of the new museum's exhibits, workshops and labs.

In Aztec legend, the desperate rebel god Xolotl transformed himself into an axolotl to hide and avoid being sacrificed by his fellow gods. He was still discovered, captured and killed. They were also a mainstay on the banquet tables of Aztec kings.

While the axolotl native to Mexico City's southern Xochimilco district is especially well-known, Gual points to 16 other kinds of axolotls that also call Mexico home, each one "like a wetlands ambassador."

Axolotls once thrived in Xochimilco's muddy canals, the only remaining part of a once extensive system of Venice-like waterways dating back to Aztec times. But the urban sprawl, contaminated water and non-native fish with a taste for young axolotls have led to the salamander's near-total collapse, according to population surveys.

Even so, Xochimilco still holds nearly 11% of Mexico's biodiversity, according to Gual, with the country's 370 amphibian species ranking it No. 5 worldwide.

As the museum opened to its first visitors, the axolotl's celebrity status was easy to spot.

"The truth is I'm very, very, very, very excited to be able to see how they eat, how they live, just how they are," gushed visitor Fernando, declining to give his surname but showing off a small axolotl tattoo on his arm.

"I'm marked for life."

(Reporting by Alberto Fajardo; additional reporting by Nina Lopez; Editing by Vin Shahrestani)