Brazil deluge toll hits 44 as search continues for missing






Brazil Rains

A resident stands outside her house after flooding triggered deadly landslides near Juquehy beach in Sao Sebastiao, Brazil, Monday, Feb. 20, 2023.

 (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

TATIANA POLLASTRI and ELÉONORE HUGHES
Tue, February 21, 2023 
SAO SEBASTIAO, Brazil (AP) — The death toll from flooding and landslides in Brazil’s southern state of Sao Paulo reached 44 on Tuesday as searches continued for dozens still missing.

Most of the search was concentrated in the mountainous coastal municipality of Sao Sebastiao where 43 deaths have been recorded. Firefighters still hoped to find people alive in the rubble of houses slammed by landslides during a weekend deluge, said Sao Sebastiao city hall worker Pedro de Rosario.

“Hope is the last thing that dies, so we have a lot of hope," de Rosario said. “There are still people buried.”

Seven bodies have been identified and released for burial, while nearly 800 people are homeless and 1,730 people have been displaced, the Sao Paulo state government said in a statement.

Members of the armed forces joined the search and rescue efforts, and starting Thursday the Navy will build a hospital with up to 300 beds to help relief efforts, Gov. Tarcisio de Freitas said at a news conference in Sao Sebastiao on Tuesday.

Authorities are digging through the mud and clearing roads, but parts of the highway connecting Rio de Janeiro state with Sao Paulo’s port city of Santos are still blocked by landslides. Another road connecting the city of Bortiga to inland Sao Paulo remains completely blocked.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited the region on Monday. In remarks to reporters, he called for people living in the hillside areas to be relocated to safer regions.

Precipitation in Sao Sebastiao surpassed 600 millimeters (23.6 inches) during a 24-hour period over the weekend, among the largest such downpours ever in such a short period in Brazil.

Around 7.5 tons of aid items including food, water and hygiene kits have already been distributed to the victims, the state government of Sao Paulo said.

The affected area, on the northern coast of Sao Paulo state and famous for beach resorts flanked by mountains, is a frequent Carnival destination for wealthy tourists who prefer to stay away from massive street parties in big cities.

Installing solar-powered refrigerators in developing countries is an effective way to reduce hunger and slow climate change

Abay Yimere, Postdoctoral Scholar in International Environment and Resource Policy, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Mon, February 20, 2023 

People buy produce at a wholesale market in Nakuru, Kenya, on Dec. 24, 2022. James Wakibia/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Food loss and waste are major problems around the world. When food is tossed aside or allowed to spoil, it makes economies less productive and leaves people hungry.

It also harms Earth’s climate by generating methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Food loss and waste accounts for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter in the world, ahead of India and behind only China and the U.S.

Worldwide, 1.3 billion tons of food are lost or wasted every year. Earth’s population is projected to increase from 8 billion today to roughly 10 billion by 2050. Feeding that many people will require nations to increase agricultural production by more than 70% and reduce food loss and waste.

Expanding food cold chains to the world’s least-developed countries can have enormous impacts. But it also raises concerns if it’s not done in a way that avoids contributing to climate change.

Existing refrigeration systems release hydrochlorofluorocarbons, or HCFCs, and hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are extremely potent greenhouse gases. Producing electricity with fossil fuels to power these systems also worsens climate change. For these reasons, exporting traditional cold chains to developing countries is not environmentally and socially sustainable.

Instead, developing countries need cold chains that run on renewable energy and use alternative refrigerants with lower climate impacts. As a scholar focusing on sustainable development, green growth and climate change, I believe that expanding cold chains in the developing world – particularly sub-Saharan Africa – will not only benefit the environment but also provide important social benefits, such as empowering women.

Spoilage and contamination

To understand why cold chains are so important, think about how food travels from the farm to your table. First it is harvested and shipped to a wholesaler. Then it might go straight to retail stores, or to a food processing company to be cooked, frozen or canned. At each stage it may sit for periods lasting hours to days. If it is not held at a safe temperature, the food may spoil or become contaminated with bacteria that cause foodborne illnesses.

In 2021, over 700 million people were hungry around the world – 425 million in Asia, 278 million in Africa and 57 million in the Caribbean and Latin America. Many countries in these regions have minimal cold storage capacity to keep food from spoiling before it can be eaten.

Seafood, meat, milk and vegetables are highly reliant on cold food chains. Countries mainly in the developing world lose 23% of their perishable products before they reach markets.

Road work in Kashmir in the fall of 2022 halted thousands of trucks carrying apples on the main highway connecting the disputed region with the rest of India, causing extensive losses. Faisal Bashir/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Loss of cereal crops, which also benefit from cold storage, are equally staggering. For instance, Ethiopia loses about one-third of its stored corn after five weeks due to lack of proper storage. In 2019, India’s Ministry of Food Processing Industries estimated that the country had lost or wasted 56 million tons of food, worth about US billion, mainly due to lack of cold storage.

Inadequate postharvest management can lead to crop contamination and pest infestation. In Uganda, where most corn is grown by small farmers who lack proper facilities to dry and store it, contamination with fungi that produce dangerous substances called aflatoxin has been a significant human and animal health concern.
Social benefits from cold storage

Nearly 150 countries have adopted the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. This measure, negotiated in 2016, is driving changes in the cooling energy sector by requiring nations to phase down use of HFCs.

The global cold chain market is worth 0 billion today and is projected to reach 5 billion by 2026. Solar-powered cold storage is a niche market today, but is poised for growth.

In addition to minimizing food loss and waste, increasing incomes, curbing land degradation and reducing greenhouse emissions, sustainable cold storage offers great benefits for women, who produce 60% to 80% of crops and are responsible for postharvest activities in most developing countries.

Research in climate finance shows that women may be disproportionately burdened by poverty because they have less access than men to assets and financial resources in many countries. However, since women play key roles in farming and managing food supplies, they are positioned to participate in the food cold chain business in remote and rural areas if the international community provides financial and technical support, thus improving their economic status and livelihoods.

Pilot projects show promise

I see sub-Saharan Africa as an ideal candidate for the introduction of food cold chains, for several reasons. First, most of its food loss and waste occurs during harvest and postharvest stages. Installing sustainable cold chain systems at these stages can greatly reduce losses at an early point.

Second, much of the region lacks food cold chains. Investing here offers the opportunity to bypass conventional systems and leapfrog straight to sustainable designs.

In my view, a bottom-up approach starting at the farm level is the most viable strategy. Notably, dairy farmers in Uganda are organized into cooperatives, which have invested in cold chain storage. This made them much more resilient to commercial disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic than other sectors, such as fish and vegetables, which suffered heavy losses when producers could not get their products to markets.

Nigeria has the highest yearly food loss and waste rate in Africa – 415 pounds (190 kilograms) per capita. In northern Nigeria, a six-month pilot project that installed solar-powered cold storage for seven small fruit and vegetable markets preserved the quality of the goods and enabled the markets to charge higher prices.

These systems generated estimated net profits of roughly ,000 per year per market. Even at a 7% annual interest rate, such a system could recoup its ,000 capital cost within a decade.

Access to electricity is as low as 55% in some parts of Nigeria, and most of its electricity comes from gas and oil. Renewable-powered cold storage offers a cleaner alternative.

Other experiments have produced similar results in northwest Kenya and in Indonesia’s Wakatobi islands, where 78% of the population relies on fish as a staple food. Solar-powered cold storage facilities helped these communities save money and reduce waste.

To promote efficient and climate-friendly cooling, including air conditioning and refrigeration, the United Nations Environmental Program has organized a Global Cool Coalition that includes cities, countries, businesses and international organizations. I see this partnership as a way to make progress on both sustainable development and climate change. In my view, investing in renewable-powered cold chains in the world’s least-developed countries will help spur green growth, protect nature and feed the world’s hungry people.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. The Conversation is trustworthy news from experts.

It was written by: Abay Yimere, Tufts University.

Read more:

Cooling conundrum: HFCs were the ‘safer’ replacement for another damaging chemical in refrigerators and air conditioners – with a treaty now phasing them out, what’s next?

The cold supply chain can’t reach everywhere – that’s a big problem for equitable COVID-19 vaccination

Tanzania’s tomato harvest goes to waste: solar-powered cold storage could be a sustainable solution

U$A POSTMODERN MANICHEAISM 

What It Looks Like When the Far Right Takes Control of Local Government

David Siders
Tue, February 21, 202

LONG READ

WEST OLIVE, Mich. — The agenda for the Ottawa County governing board’s most recent meeting here last week listed, among other issues, a roof repair and resurfacing contract, a budget calendar that needed setting and, from IT, a request to hire one more employee.

They were terrestrial concerns. But over the course of a meeting that ran more than four hours, public speaker after speaker in three-minute increments were debating something else entirely, something far more spiritual — to what extent their government should, or should not, pursue Judeo-Christian values.

As snow dusted the streets outside the county building in this conservative, deeply religious swath of western Michigan, lots of people spoke in favor. They warned of the “tyranny” of mask mandates, the “sexualization of our children” and the “unhinged caterwauling fascists” of the left. One woman thanked the commissioners “for trying to bring our freedom back,” while a man read to them from Isaiah: “Be not dismayed, for I am your God … I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

It's been going like this in Ottawa County since last month, after an upstart band of far-right Republicans unseated seven more traditionalist Republican incumbents, seizing a majority on the 11-member board. The hardliners, members of a group called “Ottawa Impact,” had signed a “Contract with Ottawa” promising to “respect the values and faith of the people of Ottawa County” and to “secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and future generations.” They’d pledged to “recognize our nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage and celebrate America as an exceptional nation blessed by God.” At candidate forums inside a Baptist church not far from the county offices here, they’d talked about their faith.

Roger Bergman, the sole incumbent Republican commissioner the group failed to oust, had attended one of those forums last year, and as he sat in the audience, he grew concerned. But even Bergman, who at 76 has decades in local politics, wasn’t sure what it would all mean when it came time for a new, far-right majority to actually govern.

That is, until they took office last month, and havoc broke out.

In their first meeting, the new board members adopted a series of measures that changed things in Ottawa County. They fired the county administrator and replaced him with John Gibbs, a former Trump administration official, Christian missionary, failed congressional candidate and election denier who once suggested women should not have the right to vote. They ran out their corporate counsel. They closed the county’s office of diversity, equity and inclusion. They picked for their new public health officer — pending state approval — a safety manager at an HVAC service company who, during the Covid pandemic, suggested ivermectin and neti-pots instead of social distancing and masks. And they rewrote the county motto.

No longer was Ottawa County “Where You Belong,” but, rather, “Where Freedom Rings.”

“Oh, my God,” Bergman said when we met last week, after a commission meeting where a young man in a hoodie, Caden Hembrough, thanked the board majority for standing against “forces of darkness.”

Bergman said, “It’s becoming more and more evident that these people are Christian nationalists.”

Nationally, the most Trumpian, right wing of the Republican Party had been a disaster for the GOP in November, with hardliners losing in competitive states like Pennsylvania and Arizona and underperforming in House races elsewhere. Those candidates’ inability to attract moderate Republicans and independents was a big reason the midterms defied expectations, resulting in a less-than-red-wave year. In Michigan, a swing state, it was the same story. Democrats not only held onto the governorship but flipped the state Legislature, gaining full control of state government for the first time in 40 years.

But if the GOP paid a price elsewhere for its rightward drift, it didn’t here, in a county that Donald Trump carried by more than 20 percentage points in 2020. In this predominately white county of about 300,000 people, the entire election last year was functionally over after the primary. What remained was an object lesson in what happens when the far-right runs the enterprise.

It’s still government. But its meetings can look a lot more like a cross between MAGA rally warm-up acts and a Christian revival.

On the day I visited last week, Ken Schwallier, an apple grower, went to the microphone to thank the new board for “reversing” what he called “a long trend in our country falling away from our constitutional past.”

“We’re part of something new,” he told the commissioners. “It’s a grassroots effort that I’m glad to see here. We don’t see it very many places, but I hope it starts here and grows across the country.”

Bergman sat through the meeting, his gaze fixed on the lectern and his left hand on his chin. He considers himself plenty Christian. A former mayor of the county seat, Grand Haven, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, he’d helped to start a church himself. On his biography on the county website, he’d counted his own blessings from God.

This, he said, was different.

I asked him how, exactly. Earlier this month, the Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution had estimated, based on a recent survey, that more than half of Republicans nationally either sympathized with or adhered to views of Christian nationalism, a worldview shaped by the fusion of Christian messaging and American identity. It wasn’t exactly hiding in the corners of American public life.

When the words came to Bergman the next day, he texted me: “The phrase I was looking for yesterday,” he said, “was ‘They have chosen to weaponize Christianity.’”

For anyone who’s endured a county government meeting or flipped past one on public access TV, it may not strike you as the likeliest place for a spiritual crusade.

It wasn’t in Ottawa County, either, before Covid. When I met with Doug Tjapkes, a former newsperson who once owned a local radio station, at the church where he plays the organ every Sunday, he told me that for years he’d tried to hook his listeners on county government, and “no matter what I said or did or editorialized, I couldn’t get much interest.”

But public health mandates related to the pandemic infuriated a group of parents who complained — and litigated, unsuccessfully — about “government overreach” in schools. They formed Ottawa Impact, recruiting a slate of candidates to run against the commission’s Republican incumbents. And they broadened their concerns from public health to a wholesale overhaul of how the county was being run. At one forum last year, at the Lighthouse Baptist Church in Holland, Sylvia Rhodea, a co-founder of Ottawa Impact and, now, vice chair of the county commission, described the election as one that “will decide whether we are going to save America, and that starts local.” America, she said, is a place of opportunity “built on the Constitution, Christianity and capitalism.” The office of diversity, equity and inclusion, she said, was promoting “woke ideology.”

Joe Moss, the group’s other co-founder and, now, chair of the commission, said, “There is a mighty force at our back, and everything that we do, we are doing for the glory of God.”

That’s not Christian nationalism, John DeBlaay, a member of the local Republican Party’s executive board, told me following the board meeting last week It’s just “everyday family people” who “value our faith, our family and our freedom.”

Still, he said, “For the first time in my life, I could honestly tell you it is like a good versus evil fight that’s going on in the world right now.”

The fallout has seemingly come from everywhere. In an email to the board, the county’s outgoing attorney warned that firings of multiple senior county officials would jeopardize the county’s bond rating, saying, “stable counties don’t fire their corporation counsel and administrator.” The county’s top health official, Adeline Hambley, is suing members of the board. And in a letter to the county last week, Dana Nessel, the state’s Democratic attorney general, said she had reviewed dozens of complaints about the board’s behavior at its first meeting, in January, in part related to whether board members had made personnel decisions before being seated, and behind closed doors. Though the state had not determined the board violated open meeting laws, she said, “the alleged conduct of certain commissioners is the antithesis of transparency and good governance.”

In The Holland Sentinel, it’s been headline after headline, like “Christian nationalism is gripping the nation – has it arrived in Ottawa County?” or “Ottawa County’s prospective health officer has no experience. Here’s why that could be a problem.”

And then there are the hourslong public comment sessions at the board’s regular meetings. There are supporters, and there are critics — people who call the board members “fascist,” or “troglodytic.”

“Right now, I’m looking at the face of a theocracy,” one man said to them last week. Karen Obits, a Democrat who said she has supported traditionalist Republicans in the past, told me she was struggling as a Christian to understand an approach to government that she said smacked of “Christo-fascism.”

Later that night, over pizza in Grand Haven, I asked Field Reichardt, a longtime observer of politics in the county, what he thought was going on.

“This is a microcosm of what is happening nationally — the changes that are threatening American democracy,” said Reichardt, a Grand Haven businessperson who worked on the presidential campaigns of George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, Pete McCloskey, George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford, a family friend. “This Christian nationalist movement truly frightens me.”

Reichardt, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a centrist Republican in 2010 before leaving the GOP and becoming an independent last year, said, “They think they are doing God’s work, and they truly believe it. They are beyond right-wing. They are Proud Boys-ian. Clearly, that’s what they are, when they refer to diversity, equity and inclusion as being ‘divisive.’”

We were sitting not far from Tjapkes, who was at the bar with his grandson. He’d been thinking about how big a story this was, and earlier had drawn a comparison to a lengthy strike at an industrial plant in Grand Haven in the 1960s.

But, he told me, “This is deeper.”

“There’s a spiritual dimension here that’s really concerning to me, because every time I hear all this stuff, I think my Lord’s taking a kick in the teeth again,” Tjapkes said. “This isn’t Christianity. I don’t know what this stuff is, but it isn’t the Christianity I know.”

He said, “I think it’s deeper than just political.”

The ascendance of the far-right in Ottawa County is not an isolated case. It happened in Shasta County, Calif., a red enclave in an otherwise blue state. Conservatives across the country have been making runs at school boards.

The problem for hard-liners is that, in general elections in more moderate districts and states, their brand of Republicanism has difficulty traveling.

On the morning after the meeting last week, I met with Steve Redmond, the president of the Ottawa County Patriots, over breakfast not far from the county board’s offices.

His group, which began as part of the tea party movement, had organized the forums at the church where Ottawa Impact candidates spoke last year. His group’s banner hung from the lectern.

The Ottawa Impact movement, said Redmond, who is 75 and has been involved in Republican politics for decades, was a “natural response” to Covid restrictions. It was a “parental rights movement,” he said, not a Christian nationalism.

“Most of them are conservative. They vote Republican. Many of them supported Donald Trump. Most of them are practicing Christians, and their faith is very important to them,” Redmond said of the Ottawa Impact board members. “Yes, in their meetings, they bring up scripture and other things. That’s kind of who they are. But I don’t think they’re trying to create a totalitarian Christian county. I think they’re simply trying to create good governance.”

The one Ottawa Impact-backed board member who agreed to speak with me, Jacob Bonnema, told me the same thing.

“I believe that this new board wants to promote family values and freedom for everyone in Ottawa County,” he said. “It is being mistaken and misreported to be only for some, rather than for everyone, and I resent that accusation.”

Bonnema told me he believed conservative government “is exportable.” However, he told me, “It needs to be done correctly.” He worried “proper processes” weren’t followed at the board’s first meeting, which he missed — an opinion that has put him at odds with some of Ottawa Impact’s most fervent supporters.

Redmond, meantime, had more of a political concern.


For the conservative movement, he said, Ottawa Impact’s takeover of the county board “could end up being counterproductive if they don’t find a way to govern well, dot the I’s, cross the T’s, follow the protocols and resolve some of the current critiques.”

He called it all “very resolvable.” But there is a risk, he said, if the board cannot cool things down.

“They risk having so much of a pushback that some of them would get primaried in two years,” Redmond said. “And even worse, if they didn't get primaried, it will set the stage for the Democrats to come in and take over, and that would be a real disaster.”

Ottawa County is so heavily Republican that’s probably a long way off. But the county is one of the state’s fastest-growing, and change isn’t inconceivable.

Paul Hillegonds, a former Republican speaker of the Michigan state House from Holland, told me that “when you look at the statewide election results, it’s clear there are a lot of disaffected Republicans, and more Republicans voting independently, and I think we’ll see more of that in Ottawa County, I’m guessing, if the party continues to move in the direction it’s going.”

And every indication is that the party is going to. In Lansing over the weekend, the state Republican Party selected Kristina Karamo, an election denier who lost her race for secretary of state last year, as the party’s new chair. And in Ottawa County, Republicans supportive of Ottawa Impact are already privately discussing primarying members the group backed last year but who have since questioned some of their actions, including Bonnema.

This came up during the board meeting last week, after Walter Davis, a retired college professor who had promised to speak at every commission meeting for two years as a form of protest, told the board he had to break that promise on the advice of his doctor. He couldn’t afford to get his blood pressure up.

“It turns out being around you is injurious to my health,” he said.

During a break in the meeting, in the lobby, I watched Bonnema approach Davis and put his hand on his arm.

“I’m sorry we won’t be hearing from you,” he told him. “I find you interesting, even if we disagree.”

It was an unusual, if basic, moment of collegiality in an otherwise disagreeable room, and I mentioned it to the man I was speaking with, a resident supportive of the new board. He wasn’t offended by Bonnema’s gesture of goodwill, but he wondered how long he would be around, anyway.


The far-right had taken over the board once. There was a good chance it could reshape it if its elected officials fell out of line.

As Bonnema walked back into the board room, the man standing beside me said, “He’ll be primaried.”

ARYAN ANTISEMITISM

India’s foreign minister blasts George Soros as ‘old, rich, opinionated, and dangerous’ after billionaire says Adani debacle would weaken PM Modi

Prarthana Prakash
Tue, February 21, 2023 

Gautam Adani, once the third-richest man in the world, shed $58 billion of his wealth less than a week after an American financial research firm published a report accusing his India-based energy conglomerate of pulling the “largest con in corporate history” and shorted the Adani Group’s stocks.

Since then, Adani’s close ties with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have come under scrutiny, putting Modi in a difficult position. Some of the sharpest criticism has come from hedge fund tycoon and billionaire investor George Soros, who alleged that the Adani debacle would weaken Modi’s grasp on India, paving the way for a “democratic revival.”

Now, a senior government minister has replied to push back on the criticism—and on Soros, as a foreign investor, in particular.

Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar slammed Soros’s remarks at an energy conference in Sydney on Saturday, dismissing his views on the country and the effects of Modi’s curious ties with Adani.

“He is old, rich, opinionated, and dangerous,” Jaishankar said of Soros. “What happens is, when such people and such views and such organizations—they actually invest resources in shaping narratives.”

Soros’s comments about Modi and Adani came at a security conference in Munich last week, where he accused Modi of not being a “democrat” even while being the leader of a democratic country like India. He also talked about how Modi has been tight-lipped about Adani’s meltdown, which could undermine his power at the government level and ultimately lead to “much-needed institutional reform.”

“Modi and business tycoon Adani are close allies; their fate is intertwined. Adani Enterprises tried to raise funds in the stock market, but he failed,” Soros said.

When asked about Soros’s prediction that Modi’s role would weaken in India, Jaishankar said that people like Soros believed that their definition and views are above everything else, reflecting a typical “Euro-Atlantic view” where Western countries are the dominant powers.

“People like him think an election is good if the person we want to see wins. If the election throws out a different outcome, we actually will say it’s a flawed democracy,” Jaishankar said.

Representatives from India’s Ministry of External Affairs did not immediately return Fortune’s request for comment. George Soros could not be immediately reached for comment.

Not the only one to push back

Jaishankar isn’t the only one who pushed back against Soros. The former finance minister of India tweeted that he did not agree with most of what Soros says, in the past and in the current instance of a so-called democratic revival.

Even members of the opposition party in India have rejected the connection between Modi, Adani, and the dawn of institutional reform in India. The general secretary of the Indian National Congress, Jairam Ramesh, tweeted: “Whether the PM-linked Adani scam sparks a democratic revival in India depends entirely on the Congress, Opposition parties & our electoral process. It has NOTHING to do with George Soros. Our Nehruvian legacy ensures people like Soros cannot determine our electoral outcomes.”



The Modi government has maintained its silence on Adani’s meltdown, despite cries at the parliamentary level to investigate Adani Group for its “brazen stock manipulation,” as the Hindenburg report alleged in January. Government ministers have maintained that Adani has “absolutely no connection” with them.

Modi and Adani are natives of the same state in the west of India, and Adani has supported Modi since his early days in power.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

How a grand attempt to improve airline travel backfired — and ended up turning flying into a total nightmare

Bartie Scott,Juliana Kaplan
Mon, February 20, 2023 

Shortsighted decisions that prioritized efficiency and price cuts over quality and comfort have made air travel and airline customer service a total mess.

Getty; Marianne Ayala/Insider

It all started with one dumb law

A plush hotel in New York's John F. Kennedy Airport seems to be haunted by the ghost of aviation's good times.

The TWA Hotel offers guests a luxurious stay, with 500 rooms, a rooftop pool, and a bar in an old retrofitted airplane. It also contains echoes of its past life as the TWA Flight Center, a hub for the now defunct Trans World Airlines. In TWA's heyday, airlines competed on experience, luring elite passengers with lavish meals and comfortable seats. Some of those golden-age amenities are present in the TWA Hotel, such as banks of pay phones and a luxe café built in the footprint of its dining predecessor.

But just across the tarmac, JFK's still working terminals stand as a stark contrast. This past year has been a nightmare for air travelers, featuring epic flight meltdowns, over a million mishandled bags, and a nationwide ground stop caused by outdated equipment at the Federal Aviation Administration. It's almost impossible to imagine a time when air travel was pleasant, much less enjoyable.

Aviation experts and industry groups say the story of air travel's service decline is one of priorities. Decades' worth of shortsighted decisions that prioritized efficiency and price cuts over quality and comfort came to a head during the pandemic, leaving millions of Americans trapped in a headache-inducing, feet-numbing flying purgatory with no signs of a long-term fix.

The trade-off

Johnny "Jet" DiScala, who visits more than 20 countries a year and runs a popular travel blog, could rattle off a dozen tips to make your next flight suck a little less. Unfortunately, he told Insider, there's not much to be done about one of his least favorite parts of flying: cramped legroom.

"When I started flying, legroom was, like, 39 inches," DiScala said, who started flying as a kid in the mid-1970s. "Now it's 28. That's criminal."

The Washington, DC, advocacy group Flyers Rights has estimated that seats in economy have lost roughly 8 inches of legroom since the early 2000s. And while butts still vary in size, airlines have taken away about 2 inches of seat width. When the FAA started accepting public comments in August as part of an effort to determine whether it should set a minimum seat size, it received more than 26,000 comments in 90 days, many from travelers complaining about shrinking legroom.

The shrinking seat is just one of many casualties of our modern flying experience. At the heart of these changes is a trade-off made some 50 years ago. Before the 1970s, flying was a rich person's game, and only a small set of Americans traveled by plane for leisure. But federal deregulation designed to open up competition among airlines and bring down prices to make flying more accessible changed that. A long-running survey by the industry group Airlines for America found that in 1971, only 21% of Americans said they'd taken a flight in the past year and just under 50% said they'd taken a flight in their lifetime. By 2019, just before the pandemic, 45% of Americans said they'd flown in the past year and almost 90% said they'd flown at least once in their lives.

DiScala says the mass access is well worth it.

"I think now is the golden age of travel," DiScala said. "Now, because of deregulation, there is more competition, and there's airlines like Spirit, there's low-fare carriers, which allow pretty much anyone to fly."

The shift did, however, have some unintended consequences. The effort to cut back on government rules opened up the airways to new companies, but it also set off a cost-cutting race to the bottom. The travel fiascos of the past year are just the latest results of this cost-cutting. Lost baggage, overbooked flights, outdated equipment, hidden fees, and disorganized staffing have fliers at their wits' end; consumer complaints about airline service have risen by 300% from pre-pandemic levels. And while these snafus cost passengers, they often have little recourse.

"US airline companies tend to be very, very focused on the bottom line," Janet Bednarek, a history professor at the University of Dayton who specializes in the airline industry, told Insider. "And if they compete, they want to compete on price, and that means they're not competing on service."

The law that changed it all

The idealized images of the "jet set" of the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s — dressed to impress, with a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other, enjoying impeccable service from the comfort of their cushy seat — were possible because the airlines were, as the industry blog Simple Flying put it, "guaranteed profits." The federal government dictated almost everything about air travel: how much airlines could charge for airfare, which routes they could fly, even their schedules. Many of these measures had been put in place to improve safety following some rattling accidents in the early days of commercial air travel.

But as planes got safer and airlines got the hang of moving millions of people through the air, some of the more stringent rules seemed less necessary. So in 1978, at the urging of the economist and "inflation czar" Alfred Kahn, President Jimmy Carter enacted the Airline Deregulation Act. The law was part of a suite of policies designed to fight decades-high inflation through deregulation. The thinking seemed simple: With fewer rules about who could operate and where, new businesses could spring up to take on sclerotic incumbents, forcing everyone to bring down prices and serve more people.

Before, only certain airlines could fly certain routes. And as Clifford Winston and Steven A. Morrison of Brookings noted, the regulators overseeing those routes and airlines often did not allow potential competitors in. With deregulation, a whole world of routes was opened to airlines. And as regulation eased, new airlines popped up, eager to service previously guarded routes and set competitive prices. Southwest Airlines, the villain of the latest travel season, was able to take advantage of this new lack of rules to expand from a local carrier to a nationwide juggernaut. Herb Kelleher, a cofounder of Southwest, once testified that the Airline Deregulation Act "literally made the Southwest Airlines of today and the other low fare carriers I speak for possible."

Some in the industry welcomed the idea of deregulation with open arms. In 1977, Richard J. Ferris, the president of United Airlines, said the soon-to-be-abolished regulations were "sowing the seeds of destruction" of quality airline service.

Daniel May, the president of Republic Airlines, said in testimony in 1983, as deregulation fully came into effect, that "because of deregulation, the domestic airlines are offering the public far more and better service than they could have expected under regulation."

But some airlines — including TWA — that had coasted on certainty and guaranteed profit margins were against deregulation, arguing that the competition would make fliers' lives worse and throw the industry into a bottom-line-focused fight for survival.

"The view of airline deregulation from the cockpit is that it is a cruel hoax on taxpayers, on vast numbers of air travelers, on the stockholders of airlines," Henry Duffy, the president of the Air Line Pilots Association, said in a 1983 Senate hearing on effects of the law. He said deregulation had "transformed a once profitable industry into one where bankruptcies, actual and threatened, dominate the news," adding that "quantity and quality of service have been drastically cut back."

As regulations eased, consumers felt relief. From 1976 to 1993, fares fell by a third — and deregulation accounted for 60% of that price drop, according to Winston and Morrison. From 2000 to 2004, they fell by 25%. The number of competitors in each market increased to 3.5 in 2005 from 2.2 in 1980, a report from the Government Accountability Office said. More people were flying.

As competition drove prices down, it was no longer feasible to hire live bands for in-flight entertainment or pay for other luxuries. The cost cutting didn't stop there: Squeezing seats closer together allowed companies to sell more tickets to help cover costs. Sometimes customers didn't show up for a flight, so airlines started to sell more tickets than available seats — if they overbooked, they could just pay off the unhappy customer they'd bumped and still come out ahead.

Many industry insiders eventually recognized the failed promises of deregulation."America's airline system has greatly deteriorated," Robert Crandall, a former American Airlines chairman, said in a 2008 speech. "Our airlines, once world leaders, are now laggards in every category, including fleet age, service quality, and international reputation." He added that "airline service, by any standard, has become unacceptable."

Ultimately, however, the next decades showed that safely flying an aluminum tube full of people 30,000 feet in the air is an expensive endeavor. And while more people were able to jump on a jet, the race to the bottom caused plenty of headaches for consumers and airlines alike. In 2001, American Airlines acquired TWA, which had filed for bankruptcy three times. Without those guaranteed profits from the pre-deregulation era, the groundwork was laid for today's woes.

A race to the bottom

Today, the promise of more competition has mostly fallen by the wayside. Just four companies — Delta, American, United, and Southwest — controlled 66% of the market in the US in 2021. And even as more Americans have started flying, the idea of dramatically cheaper flights seems to have faded: Airline-ticket prices are about 11 times what they were in 1969, while inflation has made overall prices about eight times what they were then. Jeffrey Price, a professor and aviation-security consultant, said that with few other options beyond air travel to get across the country, airlines essentially have a monopoly over long-distance transportation.

"We don't really have any other alternatives," such as a national high-speed rail system, Price said. "Leisure passengers are totally at the mercy of the airlines unless they really want to go get a recreational vehicle, and most people don't have that kind of time in their vacation days anymore to do that," he said.

At the same time, airlines are scrambling to hang on to any profits they can. Pay for pilots, airline workers, and airport employees has been slashed, contributing to a serious labor shortage. Plus, with an eye toward cost cutting, the industry has been slow to update its technology, as evidenced by the FAA systems outage on January 11 that affected more than 9,000 flights.

"The system is antiquated, doesn't have adequate backups, as we all saw, and needed to be upgraded 20 years ago, not six years from now," Price said.

That upgrading effort, known in the industry as Next Generation, has been in the works since 2003. Price said that while some of the delay is due to standard bureaucracy, the industry also doesn't have an incentive to pick up the pace if things are moving relatively smoothly.

"Shutting down the US airspace system has not been done since 9/11. Now we saw that it can be done because somebody put the wrong file in some folder or something," he said. "The system, it's way too fragile."

All this cost cutting is weighing on the customer experience. Those FAA comments from August? Well, they were predictably blunt.

"Well, where can I start? May I begin with an inner laugh? Take out all extra seats that the airline so greedily put in place," one commenter wrote. "The airlines are reacting like food vendors; they raise the price and cut down on the amount of food in the package and the quality."

Airlines have also cut down on how much food fliers get, offering measly bags of pretzels instead of the deluxe meals of 50 years ago. "Food and drink and all of that is weight, and weight equals more fuel needed to fly the plane," Bednarek, the history professor, said. "So anywhere that they can cut costs and make it less expensive for them to fly you so they can get more return off of the ticket price that you pay, that's what they're going to do."

But Airlines for America and the International Air Transport Association, which represent the major US airlines, have said they want to make sure the government remains focused on safety "and not comfort or convenience." So what's a squeezed passenger to do?

"People could stop flying," Bednarek said. And some people are: Business travel, which provides airlines their greatest profit margin, has especially struggled to recover from the pandemic. Congress has also taken steps to try and improve the flying experience and give customers more power, like mandating an aviation consumer advocate at the Department of Transportation, but they largely rely on individual travelers to change their behavior.

Perhaps it's time for travelers to reconsider whether the trade-off the government made on their behalf is working. Yes, more people are flying — but sometimes you're paying to get booted off a plane, get stuck in an airport, or scour the globe for your luggage. It might be worth it to pay a little more than to pay for nothing at all. Just take a stroll through the halls of the TWA Hotel, where there's ample legroom at the bar in a vintage plane, and you might get a little nostalgic for flights —and regulations — gone by.

Bartie Scott is a senior economy editor at Insider.

Juliana Kaplan is a senior labor and inequality reporter on Insider's economy team.

FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE
The pandemic has irreversibly changed America’s health care system. Here’s why we will all be feeling the consequences of delayed care for years to come



Elazer R. Edelman, Mike Mussallem
Tue, February 21, 2023 

The consequences of the latest wave of flu and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) cases coupled with the ongoing spread of COVID-19 variants are starting to play out for those with long-standing medical conditions who are waiting even longer for nonemergency procedures and doctors’ visits or deferring care altogether to avoid overcrowded facilities.

This is not just an issue in the United States. In the U.K., more than 7 million people are currently on elective surgery waitlists after years of pandemic-related disruptions.

It’s an all-too-familiar tale for those of us in health care who witnessed firsthand the devastating toll of postponed checkups and procedures as hospitals conserved resources for the pressing pandemic response. A procedure’s urgency was often left to interpretation—and indefinite cancellations proved catastrophic for many.

The backlog of deferred treatment and resulting long-term health consequences, including a significant decline in overall life expectancy, will continue to impact public health for years, if not decades, much like the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which attacked a fifth of the world's population and continued to affect public health for years.

Now is the time to thoughtfully and strategically reevaluate our policy approach to nonemergent medical care and surgical procedures amid health crises. We know that there are consequences to making profound policy decisions—especially in health care—and therefore we must learn and directly confront them, to better serve the ongoing needs of our patients.

The downstream effects of deprioritizing “elective” care

It is important to understand that elective is not the same as optional. More than 90% of surgeries are considered elective, which means these are nonemergency procedures that can be scheduled in advance. Though sometimes labeled “nonessential,” these measures that range from organ transplants to cancer operations are often vital to people’s health and well-being.

We didn’t need the pandemic to tell us that delaying care can lead to dire consequences for patients. Elective surgery delays can be detrimental in both preventive and curative care, allowing disease progression or leading to premature death. In 2020, Mayo Clinic warned that halting colon cancer procedures for more than four months would result in over 30,000 fatalities, while a study from The BMJ found that an eight-week delay in breast cancer treatment increased the risk of death by 17%. After a 12-week delay, mortality rates jumped to 26%.

Research on treatment disruption for patients with aortic stenosis, a narrowing of the heart valve opening that can be deadly if not treated quickly, also showed dire outcomes. One study published in JAMA found that nearly three months after elective procedures were halted amid COVID, more than 30% of aortic stenosis patients who deferred care required emergency transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) or died.

A compounding workforce crisis

As demand for medical care amid the pandemic increased exponentially, supply simply could not keep up. Hospitals were triaging extreme patient volumes while navigating unprecedented staffing and resource shortages, adding to the cyclical set of issues straining a less-than-robust system.

A lack of funding and resources, along with rising anxiety, depression, and burnout, contributed to a mass exodus of frontline workers. More than half-a-million health care and social service employees left the industry each month in 2022 and more than a third of nurses say they’re planning to quit soon. The American Hospital Association penned a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee and declared the shortages “a national emergency.” Staffing needs are as urgent as ever, with 16 million working-age Americans still struggling with long COVID-19, resulting in around $170 billion in lost wages annually. These staggering shortages and rising backlogs continue to limit the number of nonemergent procedures that can be performed.

Rethinking pandemic preparedness

Pandemics are disruptive, not only because of their direct assault on individual health but also due to the ripple effects of the policy decisions they necessitate. As we navigate the aftermath and substantial costs of COVID-19 along with this new onslaught of respiratory illnesses, it is more important than ever to reflect on the unintended consequences of restrictions imposed on health care operations. These include recalibrating to clear backlogs as quickly as possible and ensuring access to crucial, often lifesaving procedures.

As part of the health care ecosystem, we have a responsibility to patients, medical workers, and ourselves to rethink how we prioritize resources and evaluate the holistic impacts of policy on public health in response to a crisis.

Innovation is driven by evidence and the same should be true for our health care policies. It is incumbent upon us to identify timely real-world evidence to elucidate the effects of policy changes so they can be adaptive and agile enough to provide access to critical interventions and procedures. Only then can we ensure continuous care for all patients throughout the next wave—and pandemics yet to come.

Elazer R. Edelman, M.D., Ph.D., is professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of medical engineering and science at MIT. Mike Mussallem is the chairman and CEO of Edwards Lifesciences.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Democratic governors form alliance on abortion rights

- New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham speaks during a conference, Jan. 25, 2023, at the State Capitol in Santa Fe, N.M. Democratic governors in 20 states are launching a network intended to strengthen abortion access in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court nixing a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy.

 (Javier Gallegos/Santa Fe New Mexican via AP, File)

BILL BARROW and GEOFF MULVIHILL
Tue, February 21, 2023 at 5:50 AM MST·4 min read

Democratic governors in 20 states are launching a network intended to strengthen abortion access in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision nixing a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy and instead shifting regulatory powers over the procedure to state governments.

Organizers, led by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, described the Reproductive Freedom Alliance as a way for governors and their staffs to share best practices and affirm abortion rights for the approximately 170 million Americans who live in the consortium’s footprint — and even ensuring services for the remainder of U.S. residents who live in states with more restrictive laws.

“We can all coalesce,” New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in an interview ahead of a Tuesday announcement. She added that the court’s Dobbs decision that ended a national right to abortion “horrified” and put pressure on governors to act. “This is leveraging our strengths ... to have more of a national voice.”

That includes, organizers said, sharing model statutory language and executive orders protecting abortion access, ways to protect abortion providers from prosecution, strategies to maximize federal financing for reproductive health care such as birth control, and support for manufacturers of abortion medication and contraceptives that face potential new restrictions from conservatives.

Lujan Grisham noted the launch comes as a federal court in Texas considers a challenge to the nationwide availability of medication abortion, which now accounts for the majority of abortions in the U.S.

In a statement, Newsom called the effort, which he and his aides spent months organizing, “a moral obligation” and a “firewall” to protect “fundamental rights.”

The group includes executives of heavily Democratic states like California, where voters overwhelmingly approve of abortion rights, but also involves every presidential battleground state led by a Democrat, including Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Tony Evers of Wisconsin.

The alliance has secured its initial funding from the California Wellness Foundation and the Rosenberg Foundation, not-for-profits that often steer money to public health efforts focused on disadvantaged communities.

While the organization is billed as national and nonpartisan, the makeup underscores that abortion access since Dobbs has settled essentially into two Americas that broadly track the platforms of the nation’s two major parties. That means greater access in states controlled by Democrats, tighter restrictions or practically outright bans in those controlled by Republicans.

For example, 22 Democratic-run states have weighed in on the Texas challenge to medical abortions that was filed by many of the same litigant states that worked together to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. A similar contingent of Republican-led states has filed briefs in the Texas case urging a judge to reverse a decades-old approval by the Food and Drug Administration of medical abortions.

Still, Newsom aides said the group would welcome Republicans, though they declined to name any GOP executives that Newsom or other Democratic governors might be recruiting to the consortium. Indeed, a handful of Republican governors support abortion rights broadly.

Lujan Grisham mentioned New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who has sent mixed messages on the issue. Sununu signed a state budget in 2021 that included a ban on abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy but also said after the Dobbs decision that abortion would remain legal in his state. He endorsed candidates in the November elections who favored further restrictions but also supports adding exemptions to the current law for victims of rape and incest.

Lujan Grisham acknowledged that the alliance cannot make national policy or even impose policy across state lines. But she said there’s practical value in having executives and their staffs have a formal framework to communicate.

She noted that New Mexico lawmakers now are considering how to affirm abortion access with a statute, even though she and others believe the state’s constitution already establishes the right.

“The problem is everyone keeps challenging those constitutional interpretations,” she said. “We’re going to codify equality on abortion rights, reproductive rights and care in as narrow as possible way.” New Mexico’s process, she said, could become a model for other similarly situated states.

Governors’ offices in the alliance also have started working with advocacy groups that back abortion access.

Jeanné Lewis, the interim CEO of Faith in Public Life, a progressive multistate faith-based organization, said having states work together to ensure abortion access is essential as states and federal lawmakers continue to consider bans and deeper restrictions.

“It is important for governors to be in conversations now about shared solutions across state lines,” she said.

Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood Foundation of America, said states should be working together to protect abortion access, especially given the pending Texas case.

—-

Barrow reported from Atlanta. Mulvihill reported from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Associated Press reporter Holly Ramer contributed from Concord, New Hampshire.

Kyocera’s president says Biden’s chip controls will tank Chinese manufacturing: ‘Producing in China and exporting abroad is no longer viable’


Nicholas Gordon
Tue, February 21, 2023 

The president of a major producer in the chip supply chain thinks companies will soon stop relying on China to manufacture their products, thanks to new rules from the U.S.

“The business model of producing in China and exporting abroad is no longer viable,” Hideo Tanimoto, president of Kyocera, told the Financial Times, though he added that manufacturing for the Chinese domestic market would still be possible. He pointed to worsening relations between Washington and Beijing: “Obviously with all that’s happening between the U.S. and China, it’s difficult to export from China to some regions.”

Newly passed regulations are a problem for Japan-based Kyocera, which has 70% market share of the ceramic components in the tools used to make chips. Tanimoto blamed U.S. controls, at least in part, for the company’s decision to slash its forecasted full-year operating profit by 31%.

Last October, the Biden administration imposed tough export controls on China, limiting the sale of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to the country’s chip industry.

Earlier this year, Japan and the Netherlands—whose companies manufacture the equipment needed for the most advanced chips—are also moving to bar exports of this technology to Chinese companies.

Tanimoto noted to the Financial Times that Japanese companies are being “asked not to ship their non-cutting-edge tools,” implying that even lower-end technology are running afoul of geopolitical strife.

In its recent earnings reports, the company also blamed a drop in demand for smartphones and inflation for its downward revisions to income. Kyocera reported $846 million in operating profit in the most recent quarter, a 3.9% decrease from the year before.

Companies are considering moving manufacturing out of China, in part to diversify their supply chains after Beijing’s COVID-zero policies disrupted manufacturing. Costs are also increasing, with Tanimoto noting to the Financial Times that Chinese wages have gone up. Apple and Foxconn have recently expanded production of consumer electronics in both India and Vietnam.

Still, despite rhetoric around decoupling, trade between China and the U.S. hit a record high in 2022, with the U.S. importing $536.8 billion worth of Chinese products.
Controls on China

Biden’s new chip controls are dragging down China’s semiconductor industry. Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC), China’s largest manufacturer of memory chips, has cut its orders for some chipmaking equipment by up to 70%, according to the South China Morning Post.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China’s largest chip foundry, admitted earlier this month that one of its newest factories will start operations later than anticipated. The company cited the difficulty of getting advanced equipment.

Both SMIC and YMTC are on the U.S.’s Entity List. U.S. companies can’t sell certain advanced technologies to companies on the list without a license from the U.S. government.

Beijing, for now, has yet to impose retaliatory measures on the U.S. Officials are considering export controls on advanced technologies used to create advanced solar wafers. China produces 97% of these components.

Instead, Chinese officials are ramping up funding for advanced technologies, with Guangzhou on Monday announcing a new $29 billion fund toward investments in semiconductors, renewable energy, and other high-tech industries.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

THE ONION GOES TO COURT

The Supreme Court lets police officers avoid being sued after they arrested an Ohio man for making fun of cops on Facebook

Grace Eliza Goodwin,Ashley Collman
Tue, February 21, 2023 

Stock photo.SimonSkafar/Getty Images

An Ohio man sued his local police department after they arrested him for mocking cops online.

The Supreme Court declined to take up his case, effectively allowing the police officers to avoid the lawsuit.

The Onion submitted a briefing defending Anthony Novak, who had created a Facebook page parodying police.

The Supreme Court has declined to take up the case of an Ohio man who said police officers violated his constitutional rights after they arrested him for making fun of the police department on Facebook.

Back in 2016, police arrested Anthony Novak for a satirical Facebook page he had created posing as his local police department in Parma, Ohio — his page had the same name, profile picture, and cover photo as the police department's official page, according to SCOTUSblog.

The posts on Novak's page, which was only live for 12 hours, mocked the police department. In one post, he announced a new hiring initiative "strongly encouraging minorities not to apply," according to SCOTUSblog.

Another post warned local residents not to offer food, shelter, or money to homeless people, NBC News reported.

The police department charged Novak under Ohio state law with disrupting police operations, and jailed him for four days, though he was later acquitted at trial, according to NBC News.

Novak then sued the department and the officers who arrested him, arguing that they violated his constitutional rights to free speech and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, according to SCOTUSblog.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled that Novak couldn't sue the police because they had qualified immunity — a legal concept that protects police from facing civil lawsuits over their actions while in uniform.

Novak appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, even getting the satirical news site The Onion to write an amicus brief.

"The Sixth Circuit's ruling imperils an ancient form of discourse. The court's decision suggests that parodists are in the clear only if they pop the balloon in advance by warning their audience that their parody is not true," lawyers for The Onion wrote in the outlet's amicus brief. "But some forms of comedy don't work unless the comedian is able to tell the joke with a straight face. Parody is the quintessential example. Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it—and by doing so demonstrate the target's illogic or absurdity."

But the Supreme Court on Tuesday decided not to take up Novak's case. The Supreme Court regularly takes on less than 1% of the case petitions it receives every year, according to News 5 Cleveland.

"The Supreme Court's decision not to consider Mr. Novak's plight reinforces a trend effectively blessing local government officials' abuses of the Constitution," one of Novak's attorneys, Subodh Chandra, said in a statement to Insider on Tuesday. "Now, in our region of the country at least, we must all think twice before we mock government officials because they can use the excuse that a handful of people are complaining to seize our possessions, jail us, and prosecute us. Officials can then deploy qualified immunity as a defense to any accountability, and federal courts won't even send a message to officials to not abuse rights in the future."

"We must abolish qualified immunity before we have no enforceable rights at all," Chandra added

Representatives for the Parma Police officers Novak sued and The Onion did not immediately return Insider's request for comment on the Supreme Court's decision not to hear the case on Tuesday.
Suing police officers is nearly impossible

The case highlights just how hard it is to sue police officers who violate the Constitution in the line of duty.

In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled that people can sue police officers who violate their constitutional rights, a decision which set off concerns that no one would want to be a police officer anymore and that departments would be rendered useless.

In 1967, the Supreme Court came up with the idea of "qualified immunity," which protects officers from being sued for violating the Constitution if they were acting in "good faith." That decision was further strengthened by the Supreme Court in 1982, when the court ruled that "good faith" was too much of a burden for officers to prove and that they should be given immunity so long as they didn't violate "clearly established law."

In recent years there has been an effort in the US to end qualified immunity protections for police officers. The George Floyd Justice in Police Act was passed by the House in 2020 and included a section restricting qualified immunity for police officers. But the bill failed in the Senate.

U.S. Supreme Court spurns challenge to Arkansas law against contractors boycotting Israel

Andrew Chung
Tue, February 21, 2023 
By Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to revive a newspaper's challenge on free speech grounds to an Arkansas law requiring state government contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel, a policy the publication's lawyers called a threat to a constitutionally protected form of collective protest.

The justices turned away an appeal by the Arkansas Times, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, of a lower court's ruling dismissing its lawsuit that claimed that the measure punishes participation in political boycotts based on the viewpoint expressed in violation of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment guarantee of free speech.

The Arkansas law, passed in 2017, requires public contracts to include a certification that the contractor is not engaged in a "boycott" Israel, which includes "actions that are intended to limit commercial relations" with Israel or "Israeli-controlled territories." It applies to contracts worth at least $1,000.

More than half of U.S. states have similar laws barring contractors that refuse to do business with Israel, including as part of the international "boycott, divestment and sanctions" movement that seeks to pressure Israel economically over its treatment of the Palestinians including Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Israel has called such boycotts discriminatory and anti-Semitic.

The Arkansas Times sued in 2018 after it was informed that in order to run advertisements for the University of Arkansas Pulaski Technical College, an institution with which it had advertising contracts for years, it would have to sign the certification.

The paper had not participated in a boycott against Israel but refused to sign because it said the measure required taking a political position in return for advertising.

A full slate of 10 judges on the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year dismissed the challenge, upholding the law as one that does not violate the First Amendment because it affects only commercial conduct, not expression.

"It does not ban Arkansas Times from publicly criticizing Israel, or even protesting the statute itself. It only prohibits economic decisions that discriminate against Israel," the 8th Circuit concluded.

In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the ACLU argued that the state's actions were prohibited under an important 1982 Supreme Court free speech ruling called NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. In that decision, the court decided that nonviolent boycott activity is constitutionally protected in a case involving a lawsuit by white-owned businesses in Mississippi to recover losses stemming from a 1966 racial-justice boycott.

The ACLU said boycotts are an "enduring part of the fabric of American public discourse," citing as examples 18th century Revolutionary War era boycotts of British goods, the Montgomery bus boycott challenging racial segregation in the 1950s and more recently boycotts of companies that support abortion provider Planned Parenthood and boycotts of companies that support the National Rifle Association gun rights lobby.

Allowing the Arkansas law to stand would strike a serious blow to American freedoms of expression and assembly by "empowering policymakers to suppress political boycotts that express disfavored messages," the ACLU said.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)

U.S. Supreme Court snubs Wikipedia bid to challenge NSA surveillance


Tue, February 21, 2023 at 7:43 AM MST·2 min read
By Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a bid by the operator of the popular Wikipedia internet encyclopedia to resurrect its lawsuit against the National Security Agency challenging mass online surveillance.

Turning away the Wikimedia Foundation's appeal, the justices left in place a lower court's dismissal of the lawsuit based on the government's assertion of what is called the state secrets privilege, a legal doctrine that can shut down litigation if disclosure of certain information would damage U.S. national security.

Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, Wikimedia Foundation sued in 2015 challenging the legality of the NSA's "Upstream" surveillance of foreign targets through the "suspicionless" collection and searching of internet traffic on data transmission lines flowing into and out of the United States.

The NSA, part of the Defense Department, is the agency responsible for U.S. cryptographic and communications intelligence and security. The U.S. government has said the NSA's surveillance targeting is authorized by a 2008 amendment to a federal law called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Upstream's existence was revealed in 2013 leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who later fled to Russia and has been granted Russian citizenship by President Vladimir Putin.

The lawsuit cast the "surveillance dragnet" as an unlawful invasion of Americans' privacy that violates the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, and Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Wikimedia compared the interception by the NSA of its communications to the "seizing and searching the patron records of the largest library in the world."

The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021 upheld a federal judge's dismissal of the case, concluding that the NSA properly invoked the states secrets privilege - meaning the litigation cannot proceed - because disclosing details about the surveillance could harm U.S. intelligence operations.

The ACLU's lawyers had urged the justices to hear the case, stating: "Although this mass surveillance of Americans' private communications raises grave constitutional questions, its lawfulness has yet to be considered by any ordinary court, civil or criminal, in the more than 20 years of its operation."

(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)