ABOLISH PRISON
DOJ says over a quarter of Lousiana's state inmates held beyond their release date

Theara Coleman, Staff writer
Thu, January 26, 2023 

Louisiana State Penitentiary bus Giles Clarke / Contributor/Getty Images

The Justice Department released an investigative report Wednesday revealing that the Louisiana Department of Corrections is keeping over a quarter of its inmates in jail beyond their scheduled release dates, CNN reports. The department alleges that the LDOC has been "deliberately indifferent to the systemic overdetention of people in its custody" since at least 2012.

During its yearlong investigation, the Justice Department found that between Jan. and Apr. 2022, the LDOC held nearly 27 percent of the people scheduled for release beyond their scheduled departure. 24 percent of the nearly 4,100 people affected were held for a minimum of 90 extra days.

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, the head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, said, "Our investigation uncovered evidence of systemic violations by the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections that have resulted in the routine confinement of people far beyond the dates when they are legally entitled to be released," per CNN.

In a letter to Louisiana's governor attached to the report, the DOJ blames the violations on "systemic deficiencies in LDOC's policies and procedures related to the receipt of sentencing documents, computation of an incarcerated individuals' release dates, and employee training," The department warned that it could sue the state if the LDOC didn't fix the violations within 49 days. However, the DOJ would prefer to "resolve this matter through a more cooperative approach."

In a statement to CNN, Mercedes Montagnes, executive director of prisoner advocacy nonprofit Promise of Justice Initiative in New Orleans, called the finding "egregious" and "frankly worse than we imagined."

"This is what the Justice Department is here for," Montagnes said. "We've been shouting, we've been screaming, we've been crying from every rooftop … for advocates like us this is validating. It's energizing to know that the full power of the federal government is going to come down here and hold people responsible."

Hundreds of child asylum seekers have gone missing, UK government admits

Theara Coleman, Staff writer
Wed, January 25, 2023 

Britain's Minister of State for Immigration Robert Jenrick 

DANIEL LEAL / Contributor/ Getty Images

British Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick admitted to parliament on Tuesday that hundreds of children seeking asylum have gone missing from government-run hotels, as opposing lawmakers and refugee advocates called for an investigation, CNN reports.

"Out of the 4,600 unaccompanied children that have been accommodated in hotels since July 2021, there have been 440 missing occurrences and 200 children still remain missing," Jenrick told officials. About 13 of the 200 missing minors are under 16 years old, and only one is female, per government data. The majority of the missing children are teenage boys from Albania, per CNN.

Jenrick said an uptick in migrants crossing in the United Kingdom through the English Channel left the government with "no alternative" to using "specialist hotels" to house minor asylum seekers as of July 2021. Jenrick claimed security guards, nurses, and social workers were all stationed at the hotels to ensure the children's safety while acknowledging that "we've no power to detain unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in these settings and we know some do go missing," per The Associated Press.

According to AP, the British newspaper The Observer first reported the missing children, citing sources from child protection agencies and an anonymous whistleblower working for a government contractor. Their sources claim dozens of children were abducted by "gangs" outside a Brighton hotel run by the U.K. Home Office. The Home Office has denied those allegations. "The wellbeing of children in our care is an absolute priority," a spokesperson told CNN.

In her response to parliament, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper pointed to human traffickers as the source of the issue, saying, "children are literally being picked up from outside the building, disappearing and not being found. They are being taken from the street by traffickers."

Rights group: leaked El Salvador data confirm abuses


 Men and boys who were detained under a state of emergency arrive at a detention center, transported there by National Police in a cargo truck, in Soyapango, El Salvador, Oct. 7, 2022. The international organization Human Rights Watch says it has official data on violations of due process, extreme overcrowding in prisons and deaths of people in the custody of the authorities during the country's state of emergency. 

(AP Photo/Moises Castillo, File) 

MARCOS ALEMÁN
Fri, January 27, 2023 

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — Human Rights Watch says it has obtained a database leaked from El Salvador's government that corroborates massive due process violations, severe prison overcrowding and deaths in custody under the emergency powers put in place last March to confront a surge in gang violence.

The global human rights organization said Friday that the database from the Ministry of Public Safety lists details about some 50,000 people arrested between the implementation of the state of exception in late March through late August.

A spokesperson for the president said they had not seen the report early Friday and had no comment.

El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly approved the suspension of some fundamental rights following an outburst of violence from the country’s powerful street gangs. People no longer have to be told why they are being arrested or what rights they have or given access to a lawyer. The government also suspended the right of association.

Many of the abuses have been previously reported by Human Rights Watch and local civil society organization Cristosal, but the government data added some detail. It included the names of those arrested, their ages and gender, the charges they face, the prisons they were sent to and where they were arrested.

For example, among those arrested during the period were more than 1,000 minors who were sent to pre-trial detention. In March, the country’s Legislative Assembly lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 12 from 16 for gang-related crimes.

The database also pointed to staggering levels of overcrowding in El Salvador’s prisons. The government is building a massive new facility, but in the meantime, more and more detainees are stuffed into existing prisons while awaiting trial.

As of August, the prison population had grown to more than 86,000, while according to government information in February 2021, they had a capacity of 30,000.

The government reported in November that 90 people had died in custody since March.

The most common charge those arrested face is “unlawful association,” accounting for some 39,000 of the new cases. More than 8,000 face a charge of belonging to a terrorist organization.

“The use of these broadly defined crimes opens the door to arbitrary arrests of people with no relevant connection to gangs, and does little to ensure justice for violent gang abuses, such as killings and rape,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro recently said that no international organization was going to tell El Salvador how to fix its problems and that the number of detentions shows that the strategy has been successful.

Violent crime has fallen dramatically across El Salvador and the public has expressed broad support for the harsh measures in polling.

For years, gangs controlled swaths of the country. They commonly controlled who came and went from neighborhoods, including whether government services had access. The gangs also mercilessly extorted local businesses and aggressively recruited for their ranks.

The government reported 495 homicides in 2022, the lowest figure in decades. The government did not include at least 120 killings committed by security forces against alleged gang members. Still, that total pales in comparison to the 6,656 homicides the country endured in 2015.

The Bloody Reign of Terror That Almost Destroyed the Amazon

Lewis Beale
Sat, January 28, 2023 

AFP via Getty Images

One landowner was known for chainsawing in half the peasants who refused to sell their land to him. Another had a jar in his office in which he kept the severed ears of the men he had ordered murdered. There were as many as 20 clandestine cemeteries used to dispose of the remains of murdered workers. And whole populations of Indigenous people had been wiped out by dynamite, machine guns, and sugar laced with arsenic.

This was, and in some ways still is, the Amazon rain forest, a lawless land of legal impunity and environmental degradation, where to be an activist or peasant fighting against land grabs and slave labor-like working conditions is courting death.

“In the Brazilian rain forest, grilagem, or land grabbing, is a central cause of deforestation, violence, and the array of crimes associated with illicit forest economies—fraud, money laundering, corruption,” says Heriberto Araujo, author of Masters of the Lost Land: The Untold Story of the Amazon and the Violent Fight for the World’s Last Frontier. “And in the 1970s,” he adds, “the reigning lawlessness prompted some criminals and psychopaths to take extreme actions in order to earn a name in the region. By becoming an evil myth, they perhaps could deter squatters from claiming their land-grabbed ranches and farms.”


Araujo’s book is centered on the Brazilian state of Para, the country’s second largest, which has accounted for the largest number of land control murders, and 80 percent of Brazil’s 18,000 slave labor complaints. In explaining what is happening there, and all over the Amazon, he focuses his story on several key players in the area: Dezinho, president of the rural workers union, who is eventually murdered for his advocacy; Maria Joel, his wife, who takes up the causes he fought for; Joselio, a landowner accused of torture, murder and enslavement; and Decio Nunes, a lumber baron twice convicted of murder who has yet to spend a day in prison.

More Than a Third of What’s Left of the Amazon Rainforest Is Dying

Araujo, who was interviewed by The Daily Beast via email from his home in Spain, believes that accountability is a central problem in this area, that “those who violate the law, either because they deforest an area or commit a violent crime, including murder, often manage to dodge prison. The fact that many crimes are committed through middlemen and hired killers represents a challenge for the police and the prosecution offices.”

The numbers seem to bear this out. From 1985-2018, of the 1,790 land and resource-related murders in Brazil, most of them in the Amazon, 92 percent resulted in no arrest or trial. But if this sounds all Wild West, Araujo cautions that there are significant differences between how the American West and Brazilian Amazon were opened up for development, and the land rushes that followed. In the latter, he says, “the federal government never really succeeded, if it ever really attempted, to put in place an effective and lawful system to distribute public lands among the population. The U.S. [government] did play a crucial role in systematically overviewing, if not controlling, the distribution of plots and the records of that process to prevent major fights for land. I don’t argue it was perfect, but it was done in a more professional way than in Brazil.”

The Amazon was essentially opened for major development in 1966 under Operation Amazonia, a campaign to develop and settle the jungle, which included construction of roads to, and into, the interior. But in 1969, when an Indigenous tribe slaughtered a peasant family, the country was forced to develop a policy that protected their lands against invasion. Still, according to the Jornal do Brasil as quoted in Araujo’s book, this didn’t stop planters and cattlemen with powerful ties in other states who had illegally “demarcated great areas, including in the Indian territory, and sold the land, without any deeds, to colonists.” Other pioneers, simply by clearing the land, became owners of it, the idea being that whoever cleared a plot became its owner, no matter the legislation. This became known in Brazil as “Land for people without land.” The harm to nature was seen as the price of progress, and, says Araujo in his book, “the world cared about the fate of the forest, but the immediate concern of many breadwinners was getting a job.”

Eventually the government began to prioritize massive farms, no longer supported the little guy, and by the early years of this century, soybeans had become a major crop, with iron or and gold mining also contributing to the despoliation of the land (The Guardian recently reported about a 75-mile long illegal road cut through an Indigenous reserve to reach an outlaw gold mine). But because of this, the country was also becoming an agricultural superpower, and under the presidency of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) exports tripled.

Still, there was progress in the early years of this century when, says Araujo, “illegal deforestation reached historic lows, and the reason for that progress was that the federal government had allocated resources to fight the networks of criminals behind the looting of the jungle.”

But that progress ground to a halt under the rule of President Jair Bolsonaro when, Araujo claims, “there was a real and purported attempt to destroy that capacity and knowledge, both because he removed key figures and underfunded the environmental agencies fighting the criminal networks operating deep in the forest. As a result, deforestation spiked and those reporting on these problems became a target.” Proof of this came last year, with the murders of Indigenous activist Bruno Pereira and journalist Dom Phillips, an incident that drew international attention to the ongoing lawlessness in the Amazon.

And yet there is hope going forward. Lula’s recent re-election signifies an end to Bolsonaro’s destructiveness, and just days into his new term in office, Lula has named an Amazon activist as minister of environment and an Indigenous woman as the country’s first minister of Indigenous peoples. He has also pledged that unlike his second term in the early 2000s, when he began catering to farmers, he is now embracing proposals for preservation.

Can he make a real difference? “Lula faces multiple challenges,” says Araujo, “from a sophisticated and violent criminality to a widespread mind-set that considers the Amazon a place to plunder. Ultimately, I think he has a chance to end illegal logging if the international community takes part in the process of setting the foundations to sustainable development. The Amazon requires a new model of development that puts at the center the whole system—the rainforest and its people, including Indigenous populations.”

The Daily Beast.

Clean Energy Saw as Much Investment as Fossil Fuels for the First Time in 2022

YALE E360
Fri, January 27, 2023 

Pexels

Solar, wind, electric vehicles, and other clean energy technologies saw a record-high $1.1 trillion in investment globally last year, matching investment in fossil fuels for the first time ever, according to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

“Our findings put to bed any debate about how the energy crisis will impact clean energy deployment,” Albert Cheung, head of global analysis at BNEF, said in statement. “Investment in clean energy technologies is on the brink of overtaking fossil fuel investments, and won’t look back.”

Nearly every sector covered in the report — from renewable power to batteries to heat pumps to carbon capture technology — hit new highs. Investment in renewables, such as wind and solar, grew 17 percent last year, reaching $495 billion, while investment in electric vehicles grew a staggering 54 percent, hitting $466 billion. Nuclear power was the lone sector where investment stayed flat.

China accounted for nearly half of global clean energy investment, attracting some $546 billion. The EU saw $180 billion, while the U.S. saw $141 billion. “China is investing by far the most in building out its clean energy supply chain, and it remains to be seen if other regions can capture significant market share,” said Antoine Vagneur-Jones, head of trade and supply chains research at BNEF.

Last year’s record numbers still fell short of what is needed to reach zero emissions by 2050. BNEF estimates the world must invest $4.55 trillion every year for the rest of this decade to get on track for net zero.

Three Myths About Renewable Energy and the Grid, Debunked

Norway's last Arctic miners struggle with coal mine's end

Coal miner Jonny Sandvoll poses for a portrait in the break room of the Gruve 7 coal mine in Adventdalen, Norway, Monday, Jan. 9, 2023. Gruve 7, the last Norwegian mine in one of the fastest warming places on earth, was scheduled to shut down this year and only got a reprieve through 2025 because of the energy crisis driven by the war in Ukraine. Sandvoll said he wished people understood more about coal and its uses before deciding to close the mine. 

(AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

GIOVANNA DELL'ORTO
Fri, January 27, 2023 

ADVENTDALEN, Norway (AP) — Kneeling by his crew as they drilled steel bolts into the low roof of a tunnel miles-deep into an Arctic mountain, Geir Strand reflected on the impact of their coal mine’s impending closure.

“It’s true coal is polluting, but … they should have a solution before they close us down,” Strand said inside Gruve 7, the last mine Norway is operating in the remote Svalbard archipelago.

It’s scheduled to be shut down in two years, cutting carbon dioxide emissions in this fragile, rapidly changing environment, but also erasing the identity of a century-old mining community that fills many with deep pride even as the primary activities shift to science and tourism.

“We have to think what we’re going to do,” Strand, a 19-year mining veteran, told two Associated Press journalists as his headlamp spotlighted black dust and the miners’ breath in the just-below-freezing tunnel. “(Mining) is meaningful. You know the task you have is very precise. The goal is to get out coal, and get out yourself and all your crew, safe and healthy.”

After the main village of Longyearbyen, 16 kilometers (10 miles) away, announced it would switch its only energy plant from coal-fired to diesel this year, and later to greener alternatives, mining company Store Norske decided it would close its last mine in Svalbard. The date was then postponed to 2025 because of the energy crisis precipitated by the war in Ukraine.

Puzzlement over the future mingles with grief for the end of an era. It permeates the underground room where the last five dozen soot-covered miners take a break during their 10-hour shifts and the stylish café where their retired predecessors gather on weekday mornings to trade news.

“A long, long tradition is fading away,” said foreman Bent Jakobsen. “We’re the last miners. Makes me sad.”

The history of mining and its perils are etched on the mountainside in Longyearbyen. Below abandoned coal conveyor towers on a mid-January day, a trail of footprints in the snow led to a memorial monument, floodlit in the constant darkness of winter’s polar night, listing the 124 miners who have died on the job since 1916.

“I’ve been there, and families go there,” said Trond Johansen, who worked in mining for more than 40 years.

The half dozen other retired miners sipping their morning coffee were quick with more examples of the sacrifice that mining entailed, citing the exact ages and dates when colleagues were killed.

Among the last was Bent Jakobsen’s older brother, Geir, who was 24 when he was crushed to death inside Gruve 3 in 1991. Their eldest brother, Frank, who also worked at the mine, rushed to the scene only to be told by the doctor that it wasn’t survivable. Frank did most of the research for the memorial, erected in 2016.

“We have a place to go and put flowers on Christmas Eve,” Frank said. “It’s not only our brother, it’s other colleagues, too.”

Longyearbyen’s only pastor, the Rev. Siv Limstrand, whose Svalbard Kirke was founded by the mining company a century ago and still plays a critical role in the community, said it’s important to recognize the pain.

“People ask themselves the question, ‘Was it (worth) nothing?’ So there’s a kind of sorrow,” Limstrand said in the church’s cabin, a retreat built in the broad valley below where Gruve 7’s entrance lights shone in the polar night. “It should upset us in the community.”

In nearly two decades at Gruve 7, Bent Jakobsen rose to production manager and is now working on the clean-up processes needed for the closure.

His pride in the job is palpable, whether he’s driving down a 6-kilometer (3.7 mile) tunnel dug with “a lot of time, a lot of sweat, a lot of swearing,” or scraping off a piece of 40-million-year-old coal, or checking one of the steel bolts, each 1.2 meters long (4 feet), that hold up 400 meters (1,300 feet) of mountain above the workers.

“We’re a really tight-knit group in the mine, because you actually trust and lay your lives in the hands of others every day,” he said.

Jakobsen has seen how the landscape outside the mine is rapidly changing, too. Scientists say this slice of the Arctic warms up faster than most of the rest of the world.

From his childhood, the Svalbard native recalls the rhythmic clanking of the coal carts making their way across town, every day except Sunday. Today, herds of reindeer dig through the snow for moss and grass by the disused mining conveyances.

Jakobsen remembers when the archipelago’s fjords regularly froze over in winter, giving polar bears easy passage, while earlier this month it was all open water. He’s unconvinced, however, that closing the mine will make a significant difference.

Environmental scientists agree that Svalbard’s own emissions are minuscule – its coal reserves could keep the global economy running for about 8 hours, according to Kim Holmén, a special advisor at the Norwegian Polar Institute and professor of environment and climate. But they counter that every pollutant counts, and the archipelago can set an example.

“We’re all part of the problem and should become part of the solution ... every action has a symbolism, is a value, period,” Holmén said.

Most of all, Jakobsen and others in mining worry about the alternatives, especially since Gruve 7 exports coal for Europe’s metallurgic industry – like car engine construction in Germany – in addition to feeding the local energy plant.

“If you don’t take coal from us, you’ll take coal from someone else where it’s not that good – the world needs to take coal for your Tesla battery,” he said.

Even windmill components need coal, added Elias Hagebø, his face smeared with coal dust as he grabbed a quick lunch in the mine’s underground break room.

“If they just throw away coal, it’s stupid,” he said. At 18, he’s the youngest worker, and hopes he’ll be able to make a career in the mine just like his father.

Furthermore, Russia has operated mines in Svalbard for 93 years under an international treaty that gave Norway sovereignty on the archipelago while allowing all signatory nations equal rights to commercial enterprise.

“There are no plans to decrease this operation,” Ildar Neverov, director general of Russia’s mining company Arcticugol, told AP in an email from Barentsburg, a village about 37 miles (60 kilometers) from Longyearbyen.

Given the race by global powers, including China, for increasingly profitable natural resources in Arctic, some in Longyearbyen worry that Norway might give up precious rights by closing the mine.

“It will be an unusual situation if the only nation doing mining is the Russians. This is a very geopolitical place,” Arnstein Martin Skaare, a businessman and former shareholder in Store Norske, said at the retired miners’ coffee hour in Longyearbyen’s café.

Back inside Gruve 7, crouched in a 1.3-meter-high (4.1 foot) tunnel, Jonny Sandvoll said he wished people understood more about coal and its uses before deciding to close the mine.

“It’s not the right way to do it,” said Sandvoll, a miner’s son with 20 years in mining. Then he refocused on the huge machine next to him that loudly burrowed into the shining black vein and extracted more coal.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Norwegian Arctic Coal Mine in Limbo

AP Photo/Daniel Cole

'Merry Christmas' is written in Norwegian on the wall at the bottom of the Gruve 7 coal mine in Adventdalen, Norway, Monday, Jan. 9, 2023. Gruve 7, the last Norwegian mine in one of the fastest warming places on earth, was scheduled to shut down this year and only got a reprieve through 2025 because of the energy crisis driven by the war in Ukraine. 

(AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

Harvard students stage walkout in front of professor accused of sexual harassment



Ryan General
Fri, January 27, 2023 at 3:11 PM MST·2 min read

Over 100 students marched out of a Harvard classroom on Tuesday to protest the first lecture of professor John L. Comaroff this year.

Comaroff, who teaches African and African American Studies at Harvard University, was found to have violated the school’s sexual harassment and professional conduct policies after two internal investigations last year.

In February 2022, three anthropology graduate students — Margaret G. Czerwienski, Lilia M. Kilburn and Amulya Mandava — sued the school for allegedly ignoring complaints filed by victims against Comaroff over the years.

One of the plaintiffs alleged that Comaroff kissed her multiple times without her consent and groped her in public.

More from NextShark: Fact check: US did not ‘bury’ data on anti-Asian hate crimes

The lawsuit, which remains ongoing, stated that the professor allegedly threatened the students’ academic careers if they reported 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,’” read the complaint.

It further alleged that the university “allowed its investigatory process to be used in service of Professor Comaroff’s campaign of professional blacklisting.”

The complaint noted that the professor and the school “destroyed the educational opportunities and careers of countless students.”

Protesting Comaroff’s first lecture of the year, students posted signs on the walls outside of the building where he teaches, reported The Harvard Crimson.

The signs included statements such as “Abusers have no place on campus” and “Stop protecting sexual predators.”

The protest, organized by members of the Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Auto Workers’ Feminist Working Group and Our Harvard Can Do Better, involved students flooding Comaroff’s classroom before his class.

As soon as Comaroff began his lecture, students rose up from their seats and started chanting, “Justice for survivors,” and “No more Comaroff, no more complicity,” while walking out.

Comaroff reportedly smiled and nodded at the protesters as the students made their way out of the classroom.

A video clip showing the students as they marched out of the classroom was posted on Twitter by student Rosie Couture.

Comaroff’s students conducted a similar protest when he first returned to teaching in the fall 2022 semester after he completed his unpaid administrative leave.

High-level U.S. diplomatic mission to Middle East overshadowed by violence

Tracy Wilkinson
Sat, January 28, 2023 

Palestinians holding a Hamas flag protest by the Dome of the Rock Mosque at the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem on Friday. The protest was a day after the deadliest Israeli raid in decades and raised the prospect of a major flare-up in fighting. (Mahmoud Illean / Associated Press)

America’s top diplomat headed out on a trip to Egypt, Israel and the West Bank on Saturday as a spiral of deadly violence gripped the Middle East, with any plans to focus on democracy now overshadowed as the region braces for the no-holds-barred retaliation to Palestinian attacks that the new extremist Israeli government has vowed.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will become the highest-level U.S. official to meet with Israel’s new government, led by perennial Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and populated with far-right nationalists and haredim.

After a month in office, the Netanyahu administration has announced numerous policies that many Israelis say will erode Israel’s democracy and civil rights, and that have alarmed U.S. officials.

The Blinken delegation had hoped to use two days of meetings in Jerusalem to press Netanyahu and other members of his Cabinet on a variety of issues including the normalization or recognition of Israel in the region, rights and freedoms for Palestinians as well as Israelis, and the importance of creating a Palestinian state.

“Normalization — advancing it and deepening it — will be on the agenda,” as will the Biden administration’s “unstinting commitment to a two-state negotiated solution,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf said in a briefing ahead of the trip.

But those issues now will take second chair to Blinken’s more pressing mission to urge de-escalation after violence over the last few days in Jerusalem and the West Bank, some of the deadliest in years.

Any serious criticism of the Israeli government’s more drastic proposals will probably be shelved, several analysts predicted.

The wave of violence began Thursday when a raid by Israeli troops on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank killed nine, most of whom Israel identified as militants planning a terrorist attack inside Israel. A woman in her 60s was among the dead, Palestinian authorities said.

A day later, as Israeli Jews observed Shabbat on Friday night, a suspected Palestinian gunman opened fire near a synagogue in East Jerusalem, killing seven and wounding several other people before police fatally shot the assailant. Palestinian militant groups praised the attack and celebrations were reported in several Palestinian towns.

In between those two deadly episodes, Palestinian militants fired rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel, and Israel launched several airstrikes on Palestinian positions. No casualties were reported.

On Saturday, Israeli police said a 13-year-old Palestinian boy shot and wounded an Israeli father and son near Jerusalem’s Old City. Police wounded and captured the assailant.

Given history and the explosive tensions of the moment, the cycle of killing could continue. U.S. officials said they have been on the phone constantly since the Jenin operation with Israeli and Palestinian officials to urge calm.

President Biden telephoned Netanyahu on Friday night to condemn the deadly shooting at the synagogue, which Biden called “an attack against the civilized world.”

In response to the Jenin deaths, the Palestinian Authority, the weakened body that governs the West Bank, announced that it was suspending what has been quietly successful security cooperation with Israel.

“Obviously, we don’t think this is the right step to take at this moment,” Leaf said of the move. “Far from stepping back on security coordination, we believe it’s quite important that the parties retain — and if anything, deepen — security coordination.”

But several members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet have threatened to take an increasingly hard line with Palestinians. Now, the tough rhetoric will be tested as the government faces a genuine security crisis.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, convicted in Israel years ago for inciting anti-Arab hate but now a Cabinet minister, has been put in charge of national security. Ben-Gvir once advocated deporting “all Arabs,” but softened his position more recently to say Palestinian “terrorists” should be expelled. He has also proposed changing rules of engagement to make it easier for soldiers and police to open fire on Palestinian demonstrators and more difficult to hold them accountable.

Ben-Gvir’s presence in the Cabinet with such a powerful security role is especially unnerving for Palestinians. U.S. officials have also criticized some of his actions: He attended a recent memorial for his hero Meir Kahane, the slain racist rabbi whose organization was branded a terrorist group by the U.S. Blinken refuses to meet with Ben-Gvir, aides said.

Late Friday, Netanyahu promised “immediate actions” in response to the synagogue shooting.

“We must act with determination and composure,” he said, while urging citizens not to take the law into their own hands.

At the site of the shooting, Ben-Gvir seemed to deliver the opposite message, promising to make it easier to arm civilians.

Netanyahu had not wanted to confront the Palestinian issue this early in his tenure because a fierce retaliation risks angering Arab nations that only recently recognized Israel, and who Netanyahu wants to keep on board in the quest for normalization, said Nimrod Goren, a fellow at the Mideast Institute in Washington and head of a think tank in Jerusalem that studies regional politics.

“The region will react to whatever happens with the Palestinians,” Goren said from his home in Israel. “So far they’ve been willing to play along, but if things go badly on the Palestinian tract, they won’t.

“The question is how quickly” they would turn on Israel and its government, he added.

Although the death toll in the region over the last couple of days is striking, the pace of violence — particularly in the West Bank — has been steadily rising for nearly a year.

Following a series of Palestinian attacks, Israel last spring launched a campaign raiding villages across the West Bank in what it said was an effort to eliminate militant cells. About 150 Palestinians were killed last year in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, along with about 30 Israelis, according to local human rights groups that keep track. Before Thursday’s Jenin attack, an average of one Palestinian a day had been killed this year.

Netanyahu’s new government is advocating numerous policies that contravene U.S. goals, including a plan to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which is claimed by Palestinians for a future independent state. The settlements, which many countries consider illegal under international law, have proliferated exponentially to the point that a contiguous Palestinian state may now be impossible.

Netanyahu and his partners are also trying to overhaul the Israeli judiciary so that courts would no longer be able to vet laws, taking away an important checks-and-balances mechanism. Netanyahu’s critics say his aim is to have a criminal corruption case against him voided.

Ultra-Orthodox members of the Cabinet want to inject more religion into education, make it harder for non-Orthodox foreign Jews to obtain Israeli citizenship and have condemned LGBTQ rights. Some Cabinet members, led by Ben-Gvir, want to upset the traditional status quo of religious sites in the Holy City, which are delicately divided among the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Days after taking office, Ben-Gvir made a provocative trip to the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, where, under rules in place for years, only Muslims may pray despite the site being sacred to both Muslims and Jews.

“We oppose any unilateral actions that undercut the historic status quo,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said at the time. “They are unacceptable.”

Blinken’s trip to Israel, with a stop in Cairo, follows a visit earlier in the month by national security advisor Jake Sullivan and, reportedly, by CIA Director William Burns at about the same time.

The full-court press reflects concern over the new Israeli government, which some fear could destabilize the region.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

SAME OLD SAME OLD

Taliban warn women can't take entry exams at universities


This photo provided by Taliban Higher Education Ministry, UN officials meet with Taliban Higher Education Minister in Kabul, Afghanistan on Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023. The U.N. envoy met with the Taliban-led Afghan government’s higher education minister to discuss the ban on women attending universities.

(Taliban Higher Education Ministry via AP) 

RIAZAT BUTT
Sat, January 28, 2023 

ISLAMABAD (AP) — The Taliban on Saturday doubled down on their ban on women's education, reinforcing in a message to private universities that Afghan women are barred from taking university entry exams, according to a spokesman.

The note comes despite weeks of condemnation and lobbying by the international community for a reversal on measures restricting women's freedoms, including two back-to-back visits this month by several senior U.N. officials. It also bodes ill for hopes that the Taliban could take steps to reverse their edicts anytime soon.

The Taliban barred women from private and public universities last month. The higher education minister in the Taliban-run government, Nida Mohammed Nadim, has maintained that the ban is necessary to prevent the mixing of genders in universities — and because he believes some subjects being taught violate Islamic principles.

Work was underway to fix these issues and universities would reopen for women once they were resolved, he had said in a TV interview.

The Taliban have made similar promises about middle school and high school access for girls, saying classes would resume for them once “technical issues” around uniforms and transport were sorted out. But girls remain shut out of classrooms beyond sixth grade.

Higher Education Ministry spokesman Ziaullah Hashmi said Saturday that a letter reminding private universities not to allow women to take entrance exams was sent out. He gave no further details.

A copy of the letter, shared with The Associated Press, warned that women could not take the “entry test for bachelor, master and doctorate levels" and that if any university disobeys the edict, “legal action will be taken against the violator.”

The letter was signed by Mohammad Salim Afghan, the government official overseeing student affairs at private universities.

Entrance exams start on Sunday in some provinces while elsewhere in Afghanistan, they begin Feb. 27. Universities across Afghanistan follow a different term timetable, due to seasonal differences.

Mohammed Karim Nasari, spokesman for the private universities union, said the institutions were worried and sad about this latest development.

“The one hope we had was that there might be some progress. But unfortunately, after the letter, there is no sign of progress,” he told the AP. “The entire sector is suffering.”

He expressed fears that if education did not restart for girls, then nobody would take entrance exams because student numbers would be so low.

Also, Nasari said private universities want the authorities to waive land taxes for universities built on government property, and waive taxes on universities in general, because they are suffering huge financial losses.

Afghanistan has 140 private universities across 24 provinces, with around 200,000 students. Out of those, some 60,000 to 70,000 are women. The universities employ about 25,000 people.

Earlier this week, U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths and leaders of two major international aid organizations visited Afghanistan, following last week’s visit by a delegation led by the U.N.’s highest-ranking woman, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed. The visits had the same aim — to try and reverse the Taliban’s crackdown on women and girls, including their ban on Afghan women working for national and global humanitarian organizations.

Oil leases in New Mexico could worsen climate change, should be canceled, lawsuit argues



Adrian Hedden, Carlsbad Current-Argus
Fri, January 27, 2023 

A lawsuit challenged thousands of acres of public land leased to the oil and gas industry in southeast New Mexico, amid pressure from environmental groups in the state to see the federal government tighten restrictions on fossil fuel pollution.

The leases in question were granted to oil and gas companies in May 2021 after an auction by the Bureau of Land Management, under approval by the administration of former-President Donald Trump, but after President Joe Biden took office in January of the that year, the suit read.

These leases were approved without adequate environmental oversight, the suit read, as they did not follow regulations later updated by the Biden administration to consider the climate change impacts of oil and gas operations on the lands.

More:Oil and gas companies moving into Permian Basin in $100M string of deals, as region expands

The auction offered 6,850 acres in 37 parcels – six in Eddy County on 720 acres and 26 parcels on 5,220 acres in Lea County, records show.

Another 500 acres in Wise County, Texas were offered in the sale, along with 320 acres in Decatur County, Kansas.

In Oklahoma, 88 acres were sold on three parcels in Coal, Kingfisher and Major counties.

More:Pro-oil candidates lost out in New Mexico's 2022 election, as environment took center stage

In total, the sale netted $4.1 million, according to BLM data and the leases were issued by the BLM’s New Mexico office on May 12, 2021.

The lawsuit, which challenged only the New Mexico leases issued by the BLM and was filed in New Mexico U.S. District Court, called on the court to vacate the leases and require the agency adopt stricter environmental regulations for future sales.
Permian Basin oil and gas blamed for dirty air in New Mexico

Kayley Shoup, organizer with Carlsbad-area group Citizens Caring for the Future, plaintiff in the suit, said air quality continued to decline in the Permian Basin region leading to health problems for the community.

More:Oil company goes to court with Intrepid Potash over freshwater sales in Permian Basin

This was caused directly by oil and gas production, Shoup said, allowed by the continued use of public land by oil companies.

“Those of us living in Carlsbad continue to be alarmed by our ever-degrading air quality and environment in the region,” Shoup said. “Any direction you look in southeast New Mexico your eyes will be met with rigs, flares and pollution at a mass scale.”

Shoup said expanding oil and gas development and its environmental impacts threatened other industries like agriculture in the region.

More:Eddy County oil and gas collections near $10 million despite drop in oil prices

“Unmitigated oil and gas production on public lands here in New Mexico has already taken away our health and has stifled our ability to nurture industries such as agriculture,” she said. “We see leasing out our public lands for years to come as a direct attack on our ability to build a viable economy in our region in the future.”

Penny Aucoin, whose home south of Carlsbad was showered with a leaking produced water line, contaminating soil and leading to the death of animals on the Aucoin property, wrote in public comments submitted Nov. 19, 2020 that oil and gas production in the area risked the health of residents.

“You cannot expect oil and gas to police themselves,” read Aucoin’s written comments. “They have proven time and time again with accidents that could be avoided, leaks and equipment failures that could have been prevented if they had the proper oversight.”

More:Federal oil and gas reforms debated by New Mexico environmental, industry groups

The suit also alleged the BLM unduly denied contentions filed by both national and statewide environmental groups, and local residents in New Mexico.
Feds deny New Mexicans' fossil fuel concerns

In letters date Jan. 14, 2021, records show the BLM argued it was able to use past standards like resource management plans (RMP) and environmental impacts statements (EIS) despite development, at the time, of new regulations and that its analysis of the leases in question was adequate to move forward with the sale.

This was allowed, the BLM contended, under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

More:Federal methane restrictions needed, New Mexicans say, amid growing oil and gas drilling

“Contrary to the Protesting Party’s assertions, the BLM may rely on an existing RMP-EIS to support the NEPA analysis for a new, proposed oil and gas action,” read a letter filed by the BLM to the Sierra Club’s Rio Grande Chapter.

Similar letters were sent to Santa Fe-based WildEarth Guardian and the National Wildlife Federation, records show.

“Contrary to the Protesting Party’s assertions, the BLM adequately considered potential impacts from the proposed leasing action and the impacts from development to the extent reasonably foreseeable,” read a BLM letter responding to WildEarth Guardians.

More:Oil money windfall pushes New Mexico spending proposals to $9.4B. Lawmakers warned of bust

The Biden administration approved more leases than Trump’s, despite commitments by the President to enact stronger regulations on oil and gas in the U.S. to address climate change, read a report from the Center for Biological Diversity.

Since Biden took office two years ago, the Department of the Interior issued 6,430 permits to drill on public lands, records show, compared to 6,172 permits under Trump in his first two years in office.

About 4,000 of those permits were issued by the BLM’s New Mexico Office, in the state that ranks second in the nation in oil and gas production, with more than half of that occurring on federal public land.

More:New Mexico congressmembers call for federal work to plug abandoned oil and gas wells

Taylor McKinnon with the Center was critical of the President and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland for “failure”, McKinnon said, to respond to warnings from the scientific community that continued oil and gas leasing was exacerbating climate change and extreme weather events like wildfires.

“Two years of runaway drilling approvals are a spectacular failure of climate leadership by President Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland,” McKinnon said. “Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires phasing out fossil fuel extraction, but instead we’re still racing in the opposite direction.”

To prevent global warming, new fossil fuel developments must be stopped, according to a report from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia.

Without any new projects, the study showed by 2030 existing developments worldwide will produce 35 percent more oil than is consistent with avoiding 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming – a standard devised by the international community believed to create disastrous weather events.

“The president and Interior secretary have the power to avoid a climate catastrophe, but they need to change course rapidly,” McKinnon said. “Strong executive action can meet the climate emergency with the urgency it demands, starting with phasing out fossil fuel production on public lands and waters.”

This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: Oil leases in New Mexico could worsen climate change, lawsuit argues