WHITE SLAVERY; AN OLD CANARD
Montana Attorney General Implies Planned Parenthood Is Trafficking Humans

Caitlin Cruz
Mon, August 14, 2023 

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen is sworn into office on Monday, Jan. 4, 2021, inside the Montana State Capitol in Helena, Mont.

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen accused Planned Parenthood of “intentionally” falsifying records and having “flagrantly violated” state laws to potentially further human trafficking, during a newly surfaced talk radio appearance on Aug. 1.

A woman identified as Marilyn called into Montana Talks, a conservative radio program broadcasted throughout the state, to ask Knudsen’s opinion on an abortion clinic in Montana to voice her concerns about its alleged connection to human trafficking. Knudsen took her accusations and ran with them.

It’s worth emphasizing—again—that while Knudsen, Montana’s top law enforcement officer, said the potential for human trafficking at (??) Planned Parenthood (???) is “something that definitely needs to be looked at by law enforcement,” he obviously doesn’t think it’s important enough for his own agency to do it. Perhaps if he believes this is such a real problem, he should turn his limited resources away from decimating abortion access and onto pursuing answers to that crisis. Let’s see what he turns up!

 Jezebel

Texas wants Planned Parenthood to repay millions of dollars

A Planned Parenthood sign is seen in Austin, Texas, Monday, Aug. 14, 2023. A federal judge who ordered restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone will consider Tuesday, Aug. 15, whether Planned Parenthood must pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to the state of Texas over fraud claims. 

PAUL J. WEBER
Mon, August 14, 2023 

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas wants Planned Parenthood to give back millions of dollars in Medicaid reimbursements — and pay far more in fines on top of that — in a lawsuit that appears to be the first of its kind brought by a state against the largest abortion provider in the U.S.

A hearing was set for Tuesday in front of U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who earlier this year put access to the most common method of abortion in the U.S. in limbo with a ruling that invalidated approval of the abortion pill mifepristone.

The case now before him in America's biggest red state does not surround abortion, which has been banned in Texas since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. But Planned Parenthood argues the attempt to recoup at least $17 million in Medicaid payments for health services, including cancer screenings, is a new effort to weaken the organization after years of Republican-led laws that stripped funding and imposed restrictions on how its clinics operate.

At issue is money Planned Parenthood received for health services before Texas removed the organization from the state's Medicaid program in 2021. Texas had begun trying to oust Planned Parenthood four years earlier and is seeking repayment for services billed during that time.

“This baseless case is an active effort to shut down Planned Parenthood health centers," said Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Texas brought the lawsuit under the federal False Claims Act, which allows fines for every alleged improper payment. Planned Parenthood says that could result in a judgement in excess of $1 billion.

It is not clear when Kacsmaryk will rule.

The lawsuit was announced last year by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is now temporarily suspended from office pending the outcome of his impeachment trial next month over accusations of bribery and abuse of office.

Spokespersons for the office did not return a message seeking comment Monday. Last year, Paxton said it was “unthinkable that Planned Parenthood would continue to take advantage of funding knowing they were not entitled to keep it.”

Jacob Elberg, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in health care fraud, described Texas' argument as weak.

He called the False Claims Act the government's most powerful tool against health fraud. Cases involving the law in recent years have included a health records company in Florida and a Montana health clinic that submitted false asbestos claims.

Elberg said it is “hard to understand” how Planned Parenthood was knowingly filing false claims at a time when it was in court fighting to stay in the program and Texas was still paying the reimbursements.

“This just isn’t what the False Claims Act is supposed to be about,” said Elberg, faculty director at Seton Hall Law School's Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law.

Planned Parenthood has roughly three dozen health clinics in Texas. One has closed since the Supreme Court ruling last year that allowed Texas to ban abortion.

A sign greets patients at a Planned Parenthood facility in Austin, Texas, Monday, Aug. 14, 2023. A federal judge who ordered restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone will consider Tuesday, Aug. 15, whether Planned Parenthood must pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to the state of Texas over fraud claims.

A "Love Is Love" sign greets patients at a Planned Parenthood facility in Austin, Texas, Monday, Aug. 14, 2023. A federal judge who ordered restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone will consider Tuesday, Aug. 15, whether Planned Parenthood must pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to the state of Texas over fraud claims. 

An exam room is seen at a Planned Parenthood facility in Austin, Texas, Monday, Aug. 14, 2023. A federal judge who ordered restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone will consider Tuesday, Aug. 15, whether Planned Parenthood must pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to the state of Texas over fraud claims. 

Signage is seen at a Planned Parenthood facility in Austin, Texas, Monday, Aug. 14, 2023. A federal judge who ordered restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone will consider Tuesday, Aug. 15, whether Planned Parenthood must pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to the state of Texas over fraud claims. 
An exam room is seen at a Planned Parenthood facility in Austin, Texas, Monday, Aug. 14, 2023. A federal judge who ordered restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone will consider Tuesday, Aug. 15, whether Planned Parenthood must pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to the state of Texas over fraud claims.

Signage is seen at a Planned Parenthood facility in Austin, Texas, Monday, Aug. 14, 2023. A federal judge who ordered restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone will consider Tuesday, Aug. 15, whether Planned Parenthood must pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to the state of Texas over fraud claims. 

AP Photos/Eric Gay

TEACHABLE MOMENT

8-year-old playing in school sandbox stumbles on 1,800-year-old treasure in Germany

Aspen Pflughoeft
Mon, August 14, 2023 at 11:19 AM MDT·1 min read

While playing in a sandbox in Germany, an 8-year-old boy spotted a small silver object. Intrigued, he kept it. Only later did archaeologists realize he’d stumbled on an ancient Roman treasure.

The boy, identified only as Bjarne, was playing at an elementary school sandbox in Bremen in August 2022 when he spotted the silver item, the Bremen Senator for Culture said in an Aug. 11 news release.

Not recognizing exactly what he’d found, Bjarne took the silver object home, the Austria Press Agency said in an Aug. 8 news release. Later, he brought the object to archaeologists — who identified it as a 1,800-year-old coin.

The coin was an ancient Roman denarius made in the 2nd century, Bremen state archaeologist Uta Halle told cultural authorities. It weighs less than an ounce because it was minted during a time of inflation when coins were made with significantly smaller amounts of silver.

Photos show the front and back of the small coin. It has a pattern around the edge and a central figure. The coin is worn, making it difficult to see the details of the design.

The ancient Roman coin found in Bremen.

Only two similar ancient Roman coins have been found in Bremen, Halle said in the release.

It’s unclear how the coin ended up in Bremen, an area that was not part of the ancient Roman Empire. The coin could have come through trade, been carried by the river or brought as a souvenir, cultural officials said.

Video from the German TV station Brisant shows now 9-year-old Bjarne holding the artifact during a news conference.

Bjarne holds the ancient Roman coin during a news conference.

Halle hopes the coin will soon be exhibited at the Focke Museum in Bremen, city officials said. Bremen is about 215 miles northwest of Berlin.

Google Translate was used to translate the news releases from the Bremen Senator for Culture and the Austria Press Agency as well as Brisant’s Facebook video.

A feud is heating up between Arizona workers and the world's leading chipmaker after the company said the US didn't have the skills to build its new factory

Jacob Zinkula
Mon, August 14, 2023

US President Joe Biden walks with the CEO of TSMC, C. C. Wei, and its chairman, Mark Liu, during a visit to TSMC's first Arizona Fab (semiconductor fabrication plant) in Phase 1A in December 2022.REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

• TSMC says the opening of its Arizona chip factory has been delayed due to a shortage of skilled workers.

• The company says it needs to bring Taiwanese workers to Arizona to get construction back on track.

• An Arizona union says US jobs are being threatened — and is urging lawmakers to deny the workers' visas.

Who knew that building a chip factory in Arizona could be the source of so much drama?

To get the construction of its Arizona chip factory back on track, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company says it needs more workers with the expertise and skillsets that Americans don't have. Since June, the company has been in discussions with the US government about receiving accelerated non-immigrant E-2 visas for as many as 500 Taiwanese workers.

Not everyone's happy about this potential development.

The Arizona Pipe Trades 469 Union, a labor union that says it represents over 4,000 pipefitters, plumbers, welders, and HVAC technicians, has started a petition to urge US lawmakers to deny these visas. The petition says that TSMC has deliberately misrepresented the skillset of Arizona's workforce. By approving TSMC's visa requests, a union website says lawmakers would be laying the groundwork for "cheap labor" to replace American workers.

The dispute marks the latest development in the US's race to build a presence in the semiconductor-chip industry — something that's become a major priority as the world gets more reliant than ever on the devices that need chips to run. That includes devices as varied as smartphones, televisions, refrigerators, and washing machines. And should the US ever enter into conflict with China — something that looks increasingly possible — it wants to be self-sufficient when it comes to making chips.

Last summer, President Joe Biden signed into law the CHIPS Act, which included over $52 billion in semiconductor subsidies to boost chip manufacturing in the US and create American jobs. The legislation was among the reasons TSMC, the world's leading chipmaker, announced plans last December to build a second factory in Arizona.

But construction of TSMC's first Arizona factory, which began in the Phoenix area in 2021, has run into some hiccups. Initial plans were for the factory to open by late 2024, but in a July earnings call, the company said this would likely be pushed back to 2025.

The reason: US workers weren't cutting it.

"We are now entering a critical phase of handling and installing the most advanced and dedicated equipment," said TSMC chairman Mark Liu. "However, we are encountering certain challenges as there is an insufficient amount of skilled workers with those specialized expertise required for equipment installation in a semiconductor-grade facility."

Liu said the company planned to get construction back on track by "sending experienced technicians from Taiwan to train the local skilled workers for a short period of time" — these workers would join the undisclosed number of Taiwanese workers already in Arizona. But to do this, TSMC needs the US government to approve worker visas, something the Arizona union is trying to stop.

Given that TSMC is seeking billions of dollars in US subsidies via the CHIPS Act, the union says American jobs should be prioritized.

"Replacing Arizona's construction workers with foreign construction workers directly contradicts the very purpose for which the CHIPS Act was enacted — to create jobs for American workers," the petition read.

TSMC, however, has maintained that the incoming Taiwanese workers will not be a threat to any US jobs — and will only be there to support the construction process.

When reached for comment, TSMC said that any Taiwanese workers who come to Arizona will only be there for a limited timeframe and not impact the 12,000 workers currently on-site every day. It said its investment in Arizona is an opportunity to create thousands of high-paying jobs and drive innovation in the state and across the US.

"We have not replaced any of our local workers with foreign workers and continue to prioritize the hiring of local workers in Arizona," the company told Insider. "Our current focus is on recruiting local workers to fill electrical, process-related, sheet-metal, and welding positions."

The degree to which American workers can get the job done without additional assistance is up for debate. The union did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Other factors have contributed to the heightened tensions between TSMC and union workers. In June, The American Prospect spoke with workers who said injuries and safety violations were common on the construction site.

"It's easily the most unsafe site I've ever walked on," said Luke Kasper, a representative of the sheet metal workers union.

TMSC has denied these allegations.

When Biden announced in December that over 3,000 union workers would be helping to build the Arizona factory, TSMC founder Morris Chang reportedly said that this was "a little painful" to hear. In 2016, Chang said one of the key reasons companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook had been successful was that they didn't have unions.

The controversy in Arizona has even picked up steam back in Taiwan. On July 24, a Taiwanese Youtube channel with nearly three million subscribers posted a video accusing the Arizona workers of being lazy, a bilingual newsletter on tech, business, and US-Asia relations reported. Insider was unable to contact the administrator of the YouTube channel.

 

It's not clear when the US government will make a decision regarding the Taiwanese visas. In the meantime, construction on the factory continues.

Do you work in the semiconductor chip industry and have a story to tell? Reach out to this reporter at jzinkula@insider.com.

Update: August 14, 2023 — This story was updated after publication to include comment from TSMC.

SCHADENFREUDE

Hillary Clinton’s Reaction To Trump 2020 Election Case Indictments On ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ Goes Viral

Armando Tinoco
Mon, August 14, 2023 


Hillary Clinton was all laughs and giggles Monday during her appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show, which coincided with a Georgia grand jury returning 10 indictments in the Trump 2020 election interference case.

“I can’t believe this,” Clinton said while she laughed as Maddow introduced her on the show.

Clinton leaned back in her chair and laughed some more as the MSNBC host said, “This is not the circumstances in which I expected to be talking to you.”

“Nor me Rachel,” Clinton added. “It’s always good to talk to you. Honestly, I didn’t think that it would be under these circumstances. Yet another set of indictments.”

Clinton had been set to appear on Maddow’s show to talk about an opinion piece she wrote for The Atlantic in which she talks about the politicization of social issues. The former First Lady of the United States and Secretary of State wound up giving her take on the latest indictments surrounding Trump.

“I don’t know that anybody should be satisfied. This is a terrible moment for our country to have a former president accused of these terribly important crimes,” Clinton said. “The only satisfaction is that the system is working. That all of the efforts by Trump and his allies and enablers to try and silence the truth and undermine democracy have been brought into the light. And justice is being pursued.”

Trump was Clinton’s opponent in the 2016 presidential race which she ultimately lost. During his campaign, Trump incited his crowd of followers to chant “Lock her up,” in reference to Clinton using a personal e-mail system to handle classified information.

“I hope that we won’t have accountability just for Donald Trump and if there are others named in these indictments along with him for their behavior but we will also have accountability for a political party that has just thrown in with all the lies and the divisiveness and the lack of any conscience about what has been done to the country,” Clinton also said tonight

Hillary Clinton Promises She Gets No Satisfaction From Trump Indictment, Really

Igor Bobic
Mon, 14 August 2023 

Hillary Clinton said she took no pleasure from Donald Trump’s legal troubles as a grand jury investigating the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results returned an indictment Monday night in what could be his fourth set of criminal charges this year.

“I don’t know that anybody should be satisfied,” Clinton, who lost to Trump in the 2016 presidential election, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday after initially smiling and shaking her head at the news. “I just feel great profound sadness that we have a former president who has been indicted for so many charges.”

“He set out to defraud the United States of America and the citizens of our nation,” Clinton, a former secretary of state, added of Trump. “He used tactics of harassment and intimidation. He made threats. He and his allies went after state officials... . We’ll wait to see what [Georgia prosecutors] say ... but I don’t know that anybody should be satisfied. This is a terrible moment for our country to have a former president accused of these terribly important crimes.”

Trump was indicted by the Department of Justice earlier this month over his attempts to ensure the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Democrat Joe Biden, was not certified as president. Georgia’s case deals explicitly with Trump trying to get that state’s electoral vote results overturned.

In 2016, Trump rode to the White House in part by accusing Clinton of being “crooked” amid an investigation into classified materials kept on a private email server during her time as secretary of state, prompting chants at his campaign rallies of “Lock her up.”

Now Trump is the one facing criminal charges, including in a separate federal probe stemming from his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office.

But if Clinton is feeling any schadenfreude at the fact that Trump is facing possible jail time, she didn’t show it during Monday’s interview.

“The only satisfaction may be that the system is working,” she said. “That all the efforts [to subvert the 2020 election] have been brought into the light and justice is being pursued.”

The former Democratic senator also referred to Trump as a “demagogue” and said he led a “deliberate effort to divide Americans [and] to lie to Americans.

“What happened on January 6 — ‘Don’t believe what you saw, believe what I tell you’ — those are all the hallmarks of authoritarian, dictatorial kinds of leaders,” she added.

ICYMI

A once-in-century solar storm could fry power grids and knock out satellites. Here's why scientists worry it could happen soon.

Marianne Guenot
Sun, August 13, 2023 

A long solar prominence erupting off the surface, taken by the Solar Dynamic Observatory on August 31, 2012.NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Most solar storms are pretty harmless, but every so often, the sun can send hugely powerful storms.


These are strong enough to cause widespread power blackouts and bring down satellites.


We are more likely than usual to be hit by a super-strong storm in the coming years, scientists say

The sun is always fizzing and popping and this constantly sends solar energy toward the Earth. But sometimes it's more serious.

On an average day, its vast solar energy is deflected without causing much damage. But every so often, the sun sends a storm so powerful it can tear open the Earth's magnetic fields.

If such a storm hit tomorrow, it would cause technological chaos that could "cripple economies and endanger the safety and livelihoods of people worldwide," per NASA.

Luckily, these storms are very rare. But our sun is getting restless ahead of a 20-year peak of activity, meaning there's more chance one could come to Earth in coming years, experts told Insider.

And we've never been more vulnerable.

A big storm is more likely in the coming years

Three different solar events can all send high-speed particles that mess with the Earth's magnetic fields: solar flares, coronal holes, or coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — huge explosions on the sun.

If these crash into the Earth with enough violence, they can peel back the Earth's ionized layer which protects us against the worst of space weather. This can open the door for more charged particles to pour through.

"We're talking a one-in-a-hundred-year event," Mathew Owens, a professor of space physics at the University of Reading, told Insider.

This type of strong geomagnetic storm can happen at any time. But it becomes more likely during a peak of solar activity, which happens about every 11 years when the sun's magnetic field lines get more tangled and twisted.

That tension increases the chance the sun will create more sunspots, more CMEs, more solar flares, and more coronal holes. All of this gives more opportunity for a once-a-century event to arise.

The coronal hole came into view as the sun rotated. These holes can spew incredibly fast solar winds, and these are likely to reach Earth.

NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory

"The much stronger events don't happen every cycle," Daniel Verscharen, an associate professor of space and climate physics at University College London, told Insider.

"But during a maximum of a strong cycle like the one that is coming, it's more likely to get some of those events that cause power outages here on Earth," he said.
We've never been more vulnerable to a powerful storm

The most powerful geomagnetic storms on record date back to before the internet and the massive satellite fleets that we see today. The more infrastructure we rely on, the more vulnerable we are to its failure.

The Carrington Event of 1859 is widely considered to be the most powerful solar storm ever recorded. But because there was very little infrastructure to mess up, it caused fairly little damage.

Still, it was dramatic: telegraph operators got electic shocks from their equipment, and fires broke out at telegraph stations as currents generated by the storm coursed through the wires.

A huge solar flare like this one anticipated the 1989 solar storm.

Solar & Heliospheric Observatory/NASA via Getty Images

Another notable storm happened in 1989. Though this storm was less powerful, it was more disruptive —by that point, we'd started relying more on power grids and global communications.

The surge of power caused a widespread blackout in Quebec that lasted 12 hours and knocked out short-wave radio. Canadians worried that the Soviet Union was jamming radio signals into Russia, a misunderstanding that could have been dangerous in the Cold War.

These events, thankfully, did not escalate further. But it could mean that we've been lulled into a false sense of security. Since the 90s, our reliance on communications, satellites, power grids, and other crucial infrastructure has increased exponentially.

Should such a storm happen today, the world could expect to see widespread power blackouts, satellites crashing out of orbit, and crucial communication networks being cut, per NASA.
Why scientists are concerned about the next solar peak

The sun's activity is currently growing, and scientists are particularly concerned about the ongoing solar cycle.

This cycle is expected to be relatively moderate — but it is already more active than the previous cycle. That means the sun could become more active than it has been in the past two decades.

Another factor, per Verscharen, the space professor, is that the sun's magnetic fields are also pointing southwards. This which means the charged particles the sun is sending are more likely to carry a magnetic charge that's opposed to the Earth's magnetic field, he said.

This can give the particles more chance to break through the Earth's defenses.

A photo montage shows the sun four years ago compared to now.

NOAA/Insider

It is still entirely possible that a once-a-century storm skips this solar cycle. But that doesn't mean we'd be safe from harm.

"Every solar cycle, we're more and more technologically reliant. What an average cycle would've caused in terms of space weather impacts 20 years ago is a lot less than what an average cycle might cause in terms of space weather impact now," said Owens, the other professor.

A storm wouldn't have to be a Carrington-level event to have widespread consequences, both the experts said.

The current solar cycle is already causing havoc. Powerful solar flares have caused radio blackouts that can be disruptive to long-haul flights going over the poles.

Elon Musk's SpaceX also lost 40 Starlink satellites as a solar storm caused the atmosphere to expand, increasing the drag for the satellites and causing them to burn up before they were even used.

All of these types of effects can have "major financial impacts," said Verscharen.
Scientists are racing against the clock

The current cycle is expected to peak around 2025. But won't be out of the woods by then, because geomagnetic storms are more likely to happen as solar is coming down from a peak, Verscharen said.

Till then, countries in higher latitudes like the US, Canada, Sweden, and the UK should be particularly wary — the higher the country's latitude, the more vulnerable it is to solar weather, said Verscharen.

Still, there are ways to mitigate the worst of the storms. With enough warning, operators can put in place measures to protect infrastructure from the worst effect of solar storms. They can switch off power grids strategically, re-route planes, or move satellites, for instance.

Scientists like Verscharen and Owens are now racing to understand what makes solar events more powerful, so that they can improve our advanced warning systems.

The European Space Agency is also looking to launch the Vigil satellite, which is due to go behind the sun to spot potentially dangerous sunspots and coronal holes days before they roll into view of Earth.

"With a combination of better prediction, better understanding of space weather, and paying more attention by especially the private sector that is now growing into the space, those things should be avoidable," said Verscharen.

First contact with aliens could end in colonization and genocide if we don't learn from history

David Delgado Shorter
Mon, August 14, 2023 

An array of radio telescopes pointing into the night sky with the milky way behind

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

We're only halfway through 2023, and it feels already like the year of alien contact.

In February, President Joe Biden gave orders to shoot down three unidentified aerial phenomena – NASA’s title for UFOs. Then, the alleged leaked footage from a Navy pilot of a UFO, and then news of a whistleblower's report on a possible U.S. government cover-up about UFO research. Most recently, an independent analysis published in June suggests that UFOs might have been collected by a clandestine agency of the U.S. government.

If any actual evidence of extraterrestrial life emerges, whether from whistleblower testimony or an admission of a cover-up, humans would face a historic paradigm shift.

As members of an Indigenous studies working group who were asked to lend our disciplinary expertise to a workshop affiliated with the Berkeley SETI Research Center, we have studied centuries of culture contacts and their outcomes from around the globe. Our collaborative preparations for the workshop drew from transdisciplinary research in Australia, New Zealand, Africa and across the Americas.

In its final form, our group statement illustrated the need for diverse perspectives on the ethics of listening for alien life and a broadening of what defines "intelligence" and"“life." Based on our findings, we consider first contact less as an event and more as a long process that has already begun.

Who's in charge of first contact

The question of who is "in charge" of preparing for contact with alien life immediately comes to mind. The communities – and their interpretive lenses – most likely to engage in any contact scenario would be military, corporate and scientific.

By giving Americans the legal right to profit from space tourism and planetary resource extraction, the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 could mean that corporations will be the first to find signs of extraterrestrial societies. Otherwise, while detecting unidentified aerial phenomena is usually a military matter, and NASA takes the lead on sending messages from Earth, most activities around extraterrestrial communications and evidence fall to a program called SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

SETI is a collection of scientists with a variety of research endeavors, including Breakthrough Listen, which listens for “technosignatures,” or markers, like pollutants, of a designed technology.

SETI investigators are virtually always STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – scholars. Few in the social science and humanities fields have been afforded opportunities to contribute to concepts of and preparations for contact.

In a promising act of disciplinary inclusion, the Berkeley SETI Research Center in 2018 invited working groups – including our Indigenous studies working group – from outside STEM fields to craft perspective papers for SETI scientists to consider.

Ethics of listening

Neither Breakthough Listen nor SETI's site features a current statement of ethics beyond a commitment to transparency. Our working group was not the first to raise this issue. And while the SETI Institute and certain research centers have included ethics in their event programming, it seems relevant to ask who NASA and SETI answer to, and what ethical guidelines they're following for a potential first contact scenario.

SETI's Post-Detection Hub – another rare exception to SETI's STEM-centrism – seems the most likely to develop a range of contact scenarios. The possible circumstances imagined include finding ET artifacts, detecting signals from thousands of light years away, dealing with linguistic incompatibility, finding microbial organisms in space or on other planets, and biological contamination of either their or our species. Whether the U.S. government or heads of military would heed these scenarios is another matter.

SETI-affiliated scholars tend to reassure critics that the intentions of those listening for technosignatures are benevolent, since "what harm could come from simply listening?" The chair emeritus of SETI Research, Jill Tarter, defended listening because any ET civilization would perceive our listening techniques as immature or elementary.

But our working group drew upon the history of colonial contacts to show the dangers of thinking that whole civilizations are comparatively advanced or intelligent. For example, when Christopher Columbus and other European explorers came to the Americas, those relationships were shaped by the preconceived notion that the "Indians" were less advanced due to their lack of writing. This led to decades of Indigenous servitude in the Americas.

The working group statement also suggested that the act of listening is itself already within a "phase of contact." Like colonialism itself, contact might best be thought of as a series of events that starts with planning, rather than a singular event. Seen this way, isn’t listening potentially without permission just another form of surveillance? To listen intently but indiscriminately seemed to our working group like a type of eavesdropping.

It seems contradictory that we begin our relations with aliens by listening in without their permission while actively working to stop other countries from listening to certain U.S. communications. If humans are initially perceived as disrespectful or careless, ET contact could more likely lead to their colonization of us.

Histories of contact

Throughout histories of Western colonization, even in those few cases when contactees were intended to be protected, contact has led to brutal violence, pandemics, enslavement and genocide.

James Cook’s 1768 voyage on the HMS Endeavor was initiated by the Royal Society. This prestigious British academic society charged him with calculating the solar distance between the Earth and the sun by measuring the visible movement of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti. The society strictly forbade him from any colonial engagements.

Though he achieved his scientific goals, Cook also received orders from the Crown to map and claim as much territory as possible on the return voyage. Cook’s actions put into motion wide-scale colonization and Indigenous dispossession across Oceania, including the violent conquests of Australia and New Zealand.

The Royal Society gave Cook a "prime directive" of doing no harm and to only conduct research that would broadly benefit humanity. However, explorers are rarely independent from their funders, and their explorations reflect the political contexts of their time.

As scholars attuned to both research ethics and histories of colonialism, we wrote about Cook in our working group statement to showcase why SETI might want to explicitly disentangle their intentions from those of corporations, the military and the government.

Although separated by vast time and space, both Cook's voyage and SETI share key qualities, including their appeal to celestial science in the service of all humanity. They also share a mismatch between their ethical protocols and the likely long-term impacts of their success.

The initial domino of a public ET message, or recovered bodies or ships, could initiate cascading events, including military actions, corporate resource mining and perhaps even geopolitical reorganizing. The history of imperialism and colonialism on Earth illustrates that not everyone benefits from colonization. No one can know for sure how engagement with extraterrestrials would go, though it’s better to consider cautionary tales from Earth’s own history sooner rather than later.

This article was first published by The Conversation.

EXPLAINER: Why is a police raid on a newspaper in Kansas so unusual?

AMERIKA IS NOT RUSSIA

DAVID BAUDER and JIM SALTER
Mon, August 14, 2023 

This surveillance video shows Marion Police Department confiscating computers and cellphones from the publisher and staff of the Marion County Record on Friday, Aug. 11, 2023 in Marion, Kan. The small newspaper and the police department in Kansas are at the center of a dispute over freedom of speech that is being watched around the country after police raided the office of the local newspaper and the home of its owner and publisher. (Marion County Record via AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)More


NEW YORK (AP) — Tensions between public officials and the press are hardly unusual. To a large extent, it's baked into their respective roles.

What's rare in a democratic society is a police raid on a news organization's office or the home of its owner. So when that happened late last week, it attracted the sort of national attention that the town of Marion, Kansas, is hardly used to.

The Marion Police Department took computers and cellphones from the office of the Marion County Record newspaper on Friday, and also entered the home of Eric Meyer, publisher and editor. The weekly newspaper serves a town of 1,900 people that is about 150 miles (241 kilometers) southwest of Kansas City, Missouri.

Within two days, the raid drew the attention of some of the nation's largest media organizations, including The Associated Press, The New York Times, CNN, CBS News, the New Yorker and the Gannett newspaper chain.


WHAT PROMPTED THIS ACTION?

Police said they had probable cause to believe there were violations of Kansas law, including one pertaining to identity theft, involving a woman named Kari Newell, according to a search warrant signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar.

Newell is a local restaurant owner — and no big fan of the newspaper — who had Meyer and one of his reporters thrown out of an event being held there for a local congressman.

Newell said she believed the newspaper, acting on a tip, violated the law to get her personal information to check the status of her driver's license following a 2008 conviction for drunk driving. Meyer said the Record decided not to write about it, but when Newell revealed at a subsequent city council meeting that she had driven while her license was suspended, that was reported.

Meyer also believes the newspaper's aggressive coverage of local issues, including the background of Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody, played a part in the raid.

HOW UNUSUAL IS THIS?

It's very rare. In 2019, San Francisco police raided the home of Bryan Carmody, an independent journalist, seeking to find his source for a story about a police investigation into the sudden death of a local public official, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. San Francisco paid a settlement to Carmody as a result of the raid.

Police have confiscated material at newspapers, but usually because they are seeking evidence to help investigate someone else's crime, not a crime the journalists were allegedly involved in, said Clay Calvert, an expert on First Amendment law at the American Enterprise Institute. For example, when police raided the offices of James Madison University's student newspaper in 2010, they seized photos as part of a probe into a riot.

The Marion raid “appears to have violated federal law, the First Amendment, and basic human decency,” said Seth Stern, advocacy director for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.”

COULD THIS BE LEGAL?

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution asserts that Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

Things get murkier when you get into specifics.

Journalists gathering material for use in possible stories are protected by the federal Privacy Protection Act of 1980. For one thing, police need a subpoena — not just a search warrant — to conduct such a raid, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Cody acknowledged this, in an email to The Associated Press, but he said there is an exception “when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.”

Gabe Rottman, lawyer for the Reporters Committee, said he's not sure Cody's reason for believing the so-called suspect exception applies here. In general, it does not apply to material used in the course of reporting, like draft stories or public documents that are being used to check on a news tip.

The search warrant in this case was “significantly overbroad, improperly intrusive and possibly in violation of federal law,” the Reporters Committee said in a letter to Cody that was signed by dozens of news organizations.

WHY DOES THIS MATTER SO MUCH TO JOURNALISTS?

It's important to speak out in this case “because we're just seeing in way too many countries around the world that democracy is being eroded bit by bit,” said Kathy Kiely, Lee Hills chair of Free Press Studies at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Anger toward the press in the United States, often fueled by politicians, has grown in recent years, leading to concern about actions being taken to thwart news coverage.

In April, an Oklahoma sheriff was among several county officials caught on tape discussing killing journalists and lynching Black people. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond later said there was no legal grounds to remove McCurtain County Sheriff Kevin Clardy.

In June, two reporters for the Asheville Blade newspaper in North Carolina were found guilty of misdemeanor trespassing. The Freedom of Press Foundation said the reporters were arrested while covering a police sweep of a homeless encampment and arrested for being in the park after its 10 p.m. closing.

WHAT SUPPORT IS THERE FOR THE POLICE ACTION?

Not everyone in Kansas was quick to condemn the raid.

Jared Smith, a lifelong Marion resident, said the newspaper is too negative and drives away businesses, including a day spa run by his wife that recently closed. He cited repeated stories in the Record about his wife's past — she had once modeled nude for a magazine years ago.

“The newspaper is supposed to be something that, yes, reports the news, but it’s also a community newspaper,” Smith said. “It’s not, ‘How can I slam this community and drive people away?’ "

Meyer disputed Smith’s description of how the newspaper handled his wife’s past and said the newspaper did not target her.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation issued a statement Sunday stating that Director Tony Mattivi “believes very strongly that freedom of the press is a vanguard of American democracy.” But the statement added that search warrants are common at places like law enforcement offices and city, county and state offices.

“No one is above the law, whether a public official or a representative of the media,” the statement read.

Meyer said the agency has not contacted him or anyone at the newspaper.

“I don’t know what they’ve been told, but they haven’t talked to us,” he said. “They’ve heard one side of the story and haven’t heard the other one.”

—-

Associated Press writers John Hanna in Marion, Kansas, and Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

Political leader in Ecuador is killed less than a week after presidential candidate's assassination

REGINA GARCIA CANO
Mon, August 14, 2023 



 Luisa González,

GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (AP) — The unprecedented violence shaking Ecuador claimed the life of another political leader Monday, bringing the number of politics-related slayings within the last four weeks to three, including that of a presidential candidate.

The fatal shooting of Pedro Briones, a local leader of Revolución Ciudadana, the party of former President Rafael Correa, was confirmed by Luisa González, the frontrunner in Sunday's special presidential election and member of the same party.

The shooting happened in the northern province of Esmeraldas. Details were not immediately available.

“Ecuador is experiencing its bloodiest era," González tweeted. "A heartfelt hug to the family of colleague Pedro Briones, fallen by the hands of violence."

The killing of Briones, who was a political leader in a rural area of San Mateo de Esmeraldas, came less than a week after the South American country was rocked by the assassination in broad daylight of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, who had a famously tough stance on organized crime and corruption. Villavicencio was killed at the end of a political rally in Quito, the capital, despite having a security detail that included police and bodyguards.

Their slayings followed the July 26 fatal shooting of the mayor of Manta, Ecuador’s third largest city. Agustín Intriago, 38, had recently been re-elected to a term that began in May.

Thousands of people have been killed over the past three years in Ecuador as the country has transformed into a major drug trafficking hub and cartel-aided local gangs battle for control of the streets, prisons and drug routes. Crime and violence have dominated the discussions around Sunday's election.

In an interview with The Associated Press, González said she revamped her security detail following Villavicencio's killing but continued to refuse to wear a bulletproof vest, arguing that she is a Christian woman.

"I have faith in God; he is the one who takes care of us,” she said.

Should she become president, she said she plans to take a tough stance on crime, cleaning up police forces, increasing control along the country's borders, and investing in equipment for law enforcement.

González criticized the government of President Guillermo Lasso for lacking control inside detention facilities, which she said prisoners and organized crime have turned into their productive and recreational centers.

At least 400 inmates have died since 2021 during various riots.

On Saturday, authorities moved the leader of one of the country's most powerful gangs, Los Choneros, into a maximum-security prison. Villavicencio had accused the group and its leader, Adolfo Macías, alias “Fito,” whom he linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, of threatening him and his campaign team days before the assassination.

The gang boss was moved out of a jail with lighter security into a maximum-security prison in the same large complex of detention facilities in the port city of Guayaquil. The transfer occurred after about 4,000 soldiers and police officers raided the jail where Macías was being held and seized weapons, ammunition and explosives.

In response, jail inmates on Monday protested and hung signs demanding Macías be transferred back.

“We want peace return Fito,” read one of the signs visible from the road outside the complex, which dozens of police officers and members of the armed forces guarded after supporters of Macías arrived on motorcycles to protest his relocation.

Authorities have not disclosed a motive for Villavicencio's killing. An Ecuadorian judge on Friday ordered preventive detention for six Colombian men described by authorities as being suspected of involvement in the slaying. The FBI is assisting in the investigation.

Authorities did not immediately release details of Briones' slaying.

The country’s National Police tallied 3,568 violent deaths in the first six months of this year, far more than the 2,042 reported during the same period in 2022. That year ended with 4,600 violent deaths, the country’s highest in history and double the total in 2021.

___

Associated Press writer Gonzalo Solano contributed to this report from Quito, Ecuador.

LIBYA

Tripoli clashes widen overnight in worst fighting this year

Reuters
Tue, August 15, 2023

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - The Libyan capital's most powerful armed factions battled in several districts overnight and into Tuesday morning in the city's worst violence this year, raising fears of a wider escalation.

Dark smoke hung over parts of the city early on Tuesday and the sound of heavy weapons rattled through the streets, a Reuters journalist in Tripoli said. Residents and local media reported fighting in different parts of the capital.

The clashes between the 444 Brigade and the Special Deterrence Force, which both backed the interim Government of National Unity (GNU) during brief battles last year, shatter months of relative calm in Tripoli.

Libya has had little peace or security since a 2011 NATO-backed uprising and it split in 2014 between warring eastern and western factions.

An assault by eastern forces on Tripoli, in the west, collapsed in 2020 leading to a ceasefire that has halted most major warfare. Turkey, which backed the Tripoli government, maintained a military presence in Libya.

However, there has been little progress towards a lasting political solution to the conflict and on the ground armed factions that have gained official status and financing continue to wield power.

Last year factions backing a rival government declared by the eastern-based parliament launched a doomed attempt to oust Dbeibah, leading to a day of heavy clashes in Tripoli. Sporadic fighting has also this year rocked the city of Zawiya, west of the capital.

On Monday the Special Deterrence Force, which controls the capital's Mitiga airport, seized 444 Brigade commander Mahmoud Hamza as he attempted to travel, a source in the brigade said.

Flights to and from Mitiga have been diverted to Misrata, a city about 180 km (110 miles) east of Tripoli, airlines and airport sources said. Clashes erupted near Mitiga late on Monday and early Tuesday, a Reuters journalist said.

A resident of the Tarik Shok area of southern Tripoli said he could hear fighting when he went to bed at 1:30 am and more strongly when he woke up at 7:30 am.

"We can hear heavy gunfire since early morning. My family lives in the Khalat Furjan area about 7km (4 miles) away and they also hear clashes," he said.

Footage circulating on social media, which Reuters was unable immediately to authenticate, showed Tripoli residents blocking roads with burning tyres.

(Reporting by Reuters Libya newsroom, writing by Angus McDowall, editing by Angus MacSwan)