Superman towers over the Kremlin: Reiner Riedler’s best photograph

‘This is from my Fake Holidays eries, taken at the Kremlin Palace hotel in Turkey. I found an entertainer dressed as Superman and asked him to pose by the pool. You’d end up in prison if you did this in the real Red Square’

Interview by Graeme Green

THEGUARDIAN

Wed 31 May 2023 

This photo is part of my Fake Holidays series. At the beginning of the project, more than 15 years ago, I went to Lara Beach in Antalya, Turkey, where there is one luxury five-star hotel after another, all along the coastline. On the other side of the road were the tents of the workers who had built the hotels. Luxury hotels are like little ghettoes. You take your plane and your taxi, then you are in the middle of an isolated luxury area.

The Kremlin Palace hotel, where this photo was taken, has an exact copy of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, Moscow. I have been to Moscow and seen the original church, which is a focal point – all tourists take a picture there. But here in Turkey, there is a swimming pool in front of the cathedral. I was fascinated. There were many Russian tourists.

I saw a weird guy, an astronaut, walking around the pool. “What’s happening here?” I asked. It turned out the hotel had a huge room with costumes for the entertainers who perform for the tourists. Superman was one of them. I found him by the pool and immediately asked to take his picture. I took about three shots. I chose the photo point, in front of the church with the pool between us, then asked Superman to jump. It was a very childish approach, perhaps, but he did it. The way he jumped was perfect. I felt in the moment: “That’s the picture.”
There is an entire industry manipulating us through our surroundings

It quite often happens that when I take a picture, I know it’s strong, but when I go home and look more closely, I understand its more complex meaning. This was one of those times. When I saw the image on my computer screen, I understood what it was about. There is the No 1 tourist site in Moscow, which stands for the entire history of the Russian empire, and then you have Superman on that famous square, jumping over Saint Basil’s Cathedral. It is Superman, representing American power, rising above what represents the Russian empire.

It would have been impossible to take a photo like this in the real Red Square and, now, I think you would end up in prison. In 2006, it was more simply a funny image: the collision of two worlds in one picture. The Crimean crisis happened much later, in 2014, and we were a long way away from the Ukraine conflict. If I look at the picture now it has a different meaning: I relate it to the political situation nowadays and it is getting more and more interesting. I loved the image before, but some images take their time to develop their whole impact.

My Fake Holidays project was inspired by seeing how many European cities were creating artificial beaches. I first came across one in Hamburg, Germany; they had put sand on the street and set up palm trees, and there was an inflatable swimming pool. I took off my shoes and put my feet into the sand. I felt immediately transported – just touching the sand reminded me of beach holidays when I was a child. I was fascinated by the idea that we can be so easily manipulated by our surroundings. There’s a whole industry doing it, like Disney – the mother of all leisure parks. I took photographs all over Europe, China, the United States, Japan … I was fascinated by the facades of happiness.


In my heart, I still feel like a documentary photographer. I am reflecting what I see with my photographs. The representation of reality with photography is a beautiful idea, but photography is changing a lot these days. We have artificial intelligence. Last month, an AI image was selected for the first time for a photo contest. But the most beautiful thing with photography is that reality is so strong. If you go out for a walk with a camera, you can’t imagine what you will find until you find it.

Reiner Riedler’s CV

Born: Gmunden, Austria, 1968.
Trained: Photography at Höhere Graphische Bundes-Lehr und Berufsanstalt, Vienna.
Influences: “Taryn Simon, Paul Graham, Wolfgang Tillmans.”
High point: “In the pandemic, I had a lot of time to think about my work. When I received a substantial grant for a film project, it was a very special moment because it marked the beginning of a new creative era for me: a step from photography to the moving image. I love these moments that give a new direction out of nowhere.”
Low point: “Being completely broke and hungry at the beginning of my studies.”
Top tip: “I believe in the importance of documenting. Photography doesn’t have to submit to trends.”

Reiner Riedler’s work is part of Civilization: The Way We Live Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, from 2 June to 17 September. For more of Reiner’s work, see www.photography.at and Instagram @riedlerreiner

Tulsa race massacre

Hundreds were killed in the Tulsa race massacre. Are we already forgetting them?

On the 102nd anniversary of the killings, efforts for justice in Greenwood are buried under hollow symbolism

After white rioters torched Black businesses in the Greenwood district, authorities detained thousands of Black people. 

Photograph: Science History Images/Alamy

Victor Luckerson

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 31 May 2023 

This year, on the 102nd anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, television crews won’t descend upon Greenwood, the neighborhood where as many as 300 Black people were murdered by a white mob in 1921. Thousands of protesters won’t march through the streets chanting “justice for Greenwood”, as they did following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Joe Biden won’t be on hand to declare Greenwood a symbol of the “American spirit”, as he did on the centennial of the race massacre in 2021.

Despite the pop culture awareness delivered by HBO’s Watchmen and Lovecraft Country, Greenwood risks going it alone once again. All too often, that’s been the normal state of play in the neighborhood known across the United States as “Black Wall Street”.

A man raises a fist after a soil dedication ceremony on the centennial of the massacre. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

When I first arrived in Tulsa in 2018, on the 97th anniversary of the race massacre, Greenwood felt diminished. A lively Black district once filled with regal homes, raucous nightclubs and stately churches had been reduced to a block and half of humble storefronts and a community center in need of refurbishment. What’s worse, much of the land previously occupied by Black people had been replaced by white-controlled enterprises: high-rise apartments, a large college campus for Oklahoma State University, and even a sports stadium. On my first night in Greenwood, more people on the block were trying to catch the opening inning of a minor league baseball game than acknowledging the lives of people who had been slain on the land where that stadium now sits.


Greenwood is full of these kinds of chilling contradictions. Sidewalk plaques commemorating businesses burned down during the massacre now serve as welcome mats for glittering new office buildings. The highway that bisected the neighborhood in 1967, destroying dozens of homes and businesses, has been “beautified” with a mural, attracting Instagram likes rather than material gains for Greenwood’s progeny. The neighborhood’s historical fame has become a kind of albatross slung over Black Tulsans’ necks, as efforts at building concrete pathways toward justice are buried under hollow symbolism.


‘I work with the dead. But this can help the living’: the anthropologist investigating the Tulsa race massacre

It’s easy for visitors – and visiting journalists – to become distracted by the symbols, beautiful as some of them are. But after my first trip to the neighborhood, I realized the only way to really understand Greenwood was to become part of it. So I moved to Tulsa a few days after my 30th birthday and rented a house a half-mile walk from the neighborhood. I began excavating Greenwood’s past, analyzing land transactions and lawsuits filed in the aftermath of the race massacre and conducting oral history interviews with people whose families were devastated by the attack. I spoke to families who have called the place home for generations. I also sought to chronicle Greenwood’s present, covering protests, court hearings and debates on the floor of the Oklahoma state legislature, all mechanisms for restoring justice to a community that’s been deprived of it for so long.


01:09'Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around': reverend sings with Tulsa race massacre survivors – video

Three years after the murder of George Floyd, police violence remains one of the most urgent concerns for Black Tulsans. Tiffany Crutcher, a descendant of race massacre survivors, has been an ardent police reform activist ever since her twin brother, Terence, was killed while unarmed by a Tulsa police officer in 2016. Following Terence’s death, she moved back home to Tulsa to pursue activism, spending years trying to needle the Tulsa city council and the city’s Republican mayor, GT Bynum, into taking police oversight seriously.

The summer of 2020 seemed to offer a breakthrough; as the nation reeled from Floyd’s murder at the hands of police in Minneapolis, local protests in Tulsa brought thousands into the streets, blocking highway traffic and forcing a negotiation with the mayor. In those heady, turbulent days, Bynum promised to take on the police union, notorious for eschewing oversight and citizen intervention at all costs. But the season of change was short-lived in Tulsa, as elsewhere; Bynum ultimately walked back his plan to institute an independent monitor to oversee the police, instead supporting a “liaison” who would lack any disciplinary power.

Terence Crutcher, right, with his twin sister, Tiffany. Photograph: AP

Crutcher has watched this retrenchment with concern, but she remains undeterred. She now heads the Terence Crutcher Foundation, a local non-profit she launched a year after her brother was killed. Her work has shifted from trying to convince city leaders of the value of her agenda to taking it to the people themselves. “It looks like knocking on doors and listening to neighbors to understand what’s important to them,” she says of her advocacy. “I think it looks like bringing them along in this fight to advance policy, and giving them ownership for their own communities.” The foundation recently purchased a 65,000-square-foot shopping center just north of Greenwood, which it hopes to fill with small businesses and non-profits that can help transform Black Tulsa’s economic fortunes.

Another descendant of massacre survivors, Regina Goodwin, is determined to restore Greenwood’s physical landscape by removing the I-244 overpass from the neighborhood. As a child, Goodwin saw her family’s Greenwood Avenue office building destroyed to make room for the highway; a few years later, her home was bulldozed during urban renewal programs. Now Goodwin, a state legislator representing the Greenwood district, is calling for freeing up about 30 acres of land in and around the neighborhood for commercial and residential development benefiting the community’s historic residents.

Joe Biden silently prays during a moment of silence in Tulsa in 2021. 

Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

One idea being weighed is converting the property into a land trust owned by the community as a whole, so that previous patterns of gentrification aren’t repeated. “Everybody thinks it’s crazy,” Goodwin says. “This big piece of concrete, that’s all folks have known all their lives. But if you constructed it, you can deconstruct it.” Her plan gained a major boost in February, when the US Department of Transportation selected Greenwood as one of 49 communities that will receive federal grant funding to conduct a feasibility study on potentially removing the highway. On a personal level, Goodwin knows the pain Greenwood has endured, but she’s also become adept at using some of the tools that engineered Greenwood’s destruction to power its restoration.

In addition to the massacre descendants, three people remain who lived through the horror themselves, and they too seek justice. Since 2020, three survivors of the Tulsa race massacre have been seeking restitution through a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa, other government agencies, and the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce (massacre descendants were dismissed from the case last summer). The eldest of the survivors, Viola Ford Fletcher, marked her 109th birthday this May in a Tulsa county courtroom, where her attorneys were fending off a motion filed by the city to dismiss the case.

Hughes Van Ellis, left, a Tulsa race massacre survivor, and Viola Ford Fletcher, the eldest living survivor, testify on Capitol Hill in May 2021.

 Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

During the hearing, the lead attorney, Damario Solomon-Simmons, listed iconic Greenwood landmarks that had been destroyed during the race massacre, including the Stratford Hotel and the Dreamland Theater, and argued that the survivors had suffered through the destruction of many vital community institutions. “We just want the opportunity – they just want the opportunity – to have their day in court,” Solomon-Simmons said. “There were over 10,000 people who suffered during the massacre. They’re the three that’s left.” A decision on whether to dismiss the case or let it proceed to

ANTIFASCISTS TREATED WORSE THAN NEO-NAZI'S

German leftists jailed for string of violent attacks on alleged neo-Nazis

Student ‘Lina E’, 28, and three male accomplices sentenced amid chaotic court scenes for attacks that injured 13

The defendant Lina E with her lawyers in the courtroom in Dresden. Photograph: Jens Schlueter/AFP/Getty Images

Philip Oltermann in Berlin
THE GUARDISN

Wed 31 May 2023

A 28-year-old female German student and three accomplices have been found guilty of carrying out a string of attacks on members of Germany’s neo-Nazi scene, in one of the most high-profile trials of a group of militant leftists since the days of the Baader-Meinhof group.

The woman, who in keeping with Germany’s strict privacy laws was referred to only as “Lina E”, was sentenced on Wednesday to five years and three months in prison amid chaotic scenes at a court in Dresden, eastern Germany.

Three co-accused men aged between 28 and 37 were given sentences ranging from two years and five months to three years and three months, over either membership of or support for a criminal organisation.

At least five more members of the anti-neo-Nazi network, including Lina E’s partner, are believed to be at large and continuing to operate underground, with a report by Germany’s criminal police office attesting the group displayed levels of professionalism last seen in the days of the Red Army Faction.

Colloquially known as the Baader-Meinhof group, the Red Army Faction, was a militant leftwing urban guerrilla network that carried out explosives attacks and assassinations in western Germany from 1970 to the early 90s. Many of its members have since vanished and never faced trial.

The charge sheet against Lina E and her accomplices listed six violent attacks in the eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony between August 2018 and the summer of 2020 that injured 13 people, two of them in a life-threatening manner.

The victims were mostly well-known rightwing extremists, or people the group perceived to be thus. Leon R, a barkeeper who was charged earlier this month with forming a rightwing extremist outfit, was attacked with hammers, clubs and pepper spray at his bar in the town of Eisenach in late 2019.

In at least one case the victim’s ideological affiliation seemed to have been less clear. Masked attackers beat up a 31-year-old in Leipzig’s Connewitz district in January 2019 because he wore a black hat by Greifvogel, a German clothing brand popular in rightwing extremist circles. In court, the man described the hat as a gift from a friend and insisted that he had long ago turned his back on a neo-Nazi scene he had belonged to as a teenager.

During the trial, which started in September 2021, Kassel-born Lina E became a modern icon in German leftwing and anarchist circles. The graffitied slogan “Free Lina” is a regular sighting on buildings in Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig.

Scenes at the Dresden court were raucous from the moment Lina E entered the room with about 100 supporters cheering her appearance from the galleries and the judge having to appeal for quiet to read his reasoning.

Some of the group’s supporters in the gallery heckled “Fascist friends!”, voicing the allegation that the German justice system has in the past been wilfully blind when considering rightwing militants’ crimes.

The judge himself appeared to acknowledge “deplorable” deficiencies in trials in which neo-Nazi supporters have been let off lightly. He described rightwing extremism as posing the greater threat to the country, but said even Nazis had inalienable rights, as reprehensible as their ideology may be.

His verdict against the main accused was more lenient than the eight years in prison called for by the prosecutor. Nonetheless, leftwing groups have called for protests against the ruling on Saturday, when rallies will be held in Dresden and Leipzig.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M; NATIONALIZE PG&E

California utility avoids trial for 2020 wildfire that killed four

Pacific Gas and Electric will pay over $50m for rebuilding and civic penalties and continue initiatives to reduce wildfire risks

The 2020 Zogg fire originated east of Redding, California, when a dead tree fell on power lines. Photograph: Ethan Swope/AP

Dani Anguiano in Los Angeles

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 31 May 2023 

One of the largest utilities in the US has avoided a trial for a deadly 2020 wildfire that sparked when a tree fell on one of its power lines in rural northern California.

A Shasta county judge on Tuesday dismissed manslaughter and other criminal charges against Pacific Gas and Electric related to the Zogg fire, which killed four people as they tried to flee the fast-moving blaze that destroyed the towns of Igo and Ono.


Firefighting goats could be furloughed due to California employment law

The trial – a rare occurrence as PG&E has typically settled criminal cases – had been scheduled to start in Shasta county next week, and would have served as a public reckoning for a company that has already paid out billions in damages for wildfires started by its power equipment.

As part of a settlement to avoid a trial, PG&E has agreed to pay $45m to groups focused on rebuilding efforts and a $5m civil penalty, and to continue initiatives to reduce the risk of wildfires.

The district attorney, Stephanie Bridgett, said in an interview with the Guardian that she did not agree with the judge’s decision to drop the charges, but that her office fought for a resolution that would help the community.

“Our goal originally was to prosecute [PG&E] criminally – to get a criminal conviction and force change that way,” she said. “This resolution does bring a lot of needed things into our community to prevent future fires, to make changes that need to be made within PG&E but also to have the personnel and services to respond better in the future.”

The settlement will fund fuel mitigation efforts, a scholarship program to increase the number of local firefighters, a large animal evacuation center and memorials to honor those who killed in the fire, among other efforts.

PG&E must also move some of its infrastructure underground, install new weather monitoring stations and meet regularly with the district attorney’s office to ensure it is complying with the agreement.

“The agreement reflects our continuing commitment to making it right and making it safe. We stand behind our thousands of trained and experienced coworkers and contractors working every day to keep Californians safe,” Patti Poppe, the company’s CEO, said in a statement.

PG&E has been subject to intense scrutiny in recent years for its role in causing devastating and deadly wildfires in California. The company has been accused of repeatedly prioritizing shareholder profits over ensuring the safety of its infrastructure.

In recent years, PG&E equipment set off 31 wildfires that wiped away entire towns and killed 113 people. The company pleaded guilty in 2020 to more than 80 counts of manslaughter for its role in the 2018 Camp fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise.

In Shasta county, the 2020 disaster started during a windstorm when a gray pine with defects that led to it being marked for removal fell on power lines in the rugged mountainous terrain east of Redding. Fueled by fire-friendly conditions, the blaze raced through the tiny towns and scattered homes in the foothills, consuming more than 56,000 acres (23,000 hectares), taking out hundreds of homes and forcing people to immediately evacuate.

Four people died trying to escape the fire: Alaina Mcleod, 46, and her eight-year-old daughter, Feyla; Kenneth Vossen, who was badly burned as he sought refuge at a pond on his rural property; and Karin King, 79-year old animal advocate and retiree.

The case, Bridgett said, was about getting justice for the victims and forcing change in order to save lives and ensure that PG&E doesn’t “continue the practices that led to the fire in the first place”.

The judge who dropped the charges said in his ruling that the tree falling on company infrastructure did not necessarily mean PG&E had been negligent. “The fact that the tree fell does not itself equate to gross negligence or recklessness,” the judge stated. That ruling was in contrast with another local judge who determined earlier this year there was enough evidence that the utility should stand trial for manslaughter.

PG&E had previously settled with the California public utilities commission for $150m after the regulatory agency alleged that “the tree that caused the fire was not removed in time because of PG&E’s poor recordkeeping”.

SHUT IT DOWN

Canada's Marineland theme park charged over its handling of black bears

Protestors stand outside Marineland in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in May 2023. Photograph: Canadian Press/Shutterstock

Park has long been a target of activists who have sought to shut it down over the lack of care given to its captive animals

Leyland Cecco in Toronto

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 31 May 2023 

A theme park in Canada is facing charges for its handling of black bears in captivity, placing fresh scrutiny on a park that animal rights activists have long sought to shut down.

Ontario’s ministry of the solicitor general said on Wednesday it had laid the charges against Marineland, an amusement park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The province said the park had failed to comply with an order related to its captive American black bears.

The province did not provide additional information about the charges, laid under a section of the law allowing provincial inspectors to issue an order to help animals that may be in distress.

It is unclear how many bears remain at the facility. In 2016, the province’s animal welfare agency charged Marineland with five counts of cruelty, including failing to provide adequate and appropriate food and water for its 35 American black bears. The next year, it faced six more counts of cruelty.

Marineland, which has long been a target for activists who argue the park has a moral responsibility to release the animals it keeps in captivity, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new charges.

The charges are the latest in a string of high-profile incidents at the park.


Death of ‘world’s loneliest orca’ sparks calls for change

Two months ago, a captive whale named Kiska, dubbed the “world’s loneliest orca” died from a bacterial infection after spending four decades at Marineland. In a video clip before her death, the 47-year old whale is seen drifting listlessly in her tank.

Marineland continues to advertise its beluga whales, some of which it has sold in recent months to aquariums in the United States for “research purposes”, according to the export permits.

In December 2022, Ontario prosecutors stayed animal cruelty charges against Marineland following allegations it was using dolphins and whales for entertainment, violating a federal law that bans cetacean captivity.

The previous year, Ontario’s Animal Welfare Services found all marine mammals at Marineland were in distress due to poor water quality, a claim the park disputes. The province says an inspection of the facility’s waters, which began in 2021 remains ongoing.

In 2019, the park came under scrutiny after Marineland said two deer were killed in a stampede allegedly caused by a father and son taunting the animals. Days after the stampede, the park announced that a heart attack was believed to be the cause of death for an 18-year-old walrus named Apollo. Apollo was the fourth walrus to die in the park over a two-year period. The last remaining walrus, a female called Smooshi, was recently moved to SeaWorld Abu Dhabi.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/05/zoos-are-prisons-death-of-emara-beloved.html

Outrage as Brazil law threatening Indigenous lands advances in congress

Critics denounced ‘lies, hatred and racism’ as legislation moves to senate after being overwhelmingly endorsed by lower house


Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 31 May 2023 

Indigenous leaders and environmentalists in Brazil have voiced horror and indignation after lawmakers approved controversial legislation which opponents fear will strike a devastating blow to Indigenous communities and isolated tribes.

Members of Brazil’s conservative-dominated lower house overwhelmingly endorsed bill number 490 on Tuesday night, by 283 votes to 155.


Outcry as Brazil congress moves to gut environment and Indigenous ministries

“You will have Indigenous blood on your hands,” the Indigenous congresswoman Célia Xakriabá told its rightwing backers as leftwingers took to the podium to protest by smothering their hands in the red dye of annatto seeds.

Critics say the legislation, which now moves to the senate, poses a series of profound threats to Indigenous communities and the environment:

It potentially opens the door to road-building, mining, dam construction, agricultural projects and the use of genetically modified crops on protected Indigenous lands, as well as authorizing contact with isolated Indigenous groups in certain circumstances.

It would allow the government to reclaim land from Indigenous communities whose “cultural traits” are deemed to have changed.

Perhaps most damagingly, the legislation would also invalidate Indigenous claims to lands such groups could not prove they physically occupied on the day Brazil’s constitution was enacted in October 1988. Activists say that “time limit trick” could scupper scores of legitimate claims for the delimitation of Indigenous lands, from groups who had already been evicted from their ancestral lands or whose presence had yet to be recognized at the cut-off date.

The Climate Observatory watchdog said Brazil’s parliament had witnessed “its most shameful day since the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff” – a “show of lies, hatred and racism” which signaled the environmental chaos caused by former president Jair Bolsonaro was far from over.

Lawmakers had sent “a clear message to the country and the world: Bolsonaro is gone but the extermination [of Indigenous communities and the environment] continues,” the Climate Observatory added.

Sarah Shenker, a campaigner at human rights group Survival International, said: “This catastrophic bill is the most serious attack on Indigenous rights in decades … Hundreds of Indigenous territories home to over a million Indigenous people could be destroyed.”

She added: “There are many examples of uncontacted tribes whose existence and location was not yet officially confirmed by government in October 1988 … so if [this] was approved it could be used by anti-Indigenous politicians who are desperate to steal [such territories].”

When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned to Brazil’s presidency in January there was optimism South America’s largest country was entering a new era of sustainable development, environmental protection and respect for Indigenous rights. Lula named the veteran environmentalist Marina Silva as his environment minister and created a ministry for Indigenous peoples run by the Indigenous activist Sônia Guajajara. “We are going to reverse all of the injustices committed against Indigenous peoples,” Lula vowed in his inaugural address, claiming Brazil had a “historic debt” to such groups.

But the rowdy congressional debate that preceded the approval of Bill 490 brought such hopes crashing back down to earth and revealed a starkly divided country.

A succession of white, mostly male lawmakers took the microphone to claim they were supporting the legislation because they considered themselves Indigenous defenders who wanted to help such groups integrate into mainstream society. Many were staunch supporters of Bolsonaro and members of the powerful ruralista bloc linked to agribusiness which boasts 302 of the 513 seats in the lower house and 42 of 81 senators.

Bibo Nunes, a congressman from Bolsonaro’s rightwing Liberal party (PL), voiced outrage that nearly 14% of Brazil’s territory was in the hands of Indigenous people who represented only 0.4% of the population. “What’s the logic? Explain it to me, you lefties!” Nunes bellowed.

Leftist politicians countered that the legislation would endanger Indigenous lives as well as the global struggle against climate change given the crucial role Indigenous communities have in protecting the Amazon rainforest.

“This is a bill of death, backwardness and regression … This is a crime against Indigenous people,” said Juliana Cardoso, a congresswoman from Lula’s Worker’s party (PT).

But such arguments were ignored and the bill passed easily.

Guajajara told activists to remain mobilized in the face of what she called “a serious attack on Indigenous people and the environment”. “We will remain steadfast and united, as we always have been,” Lula’s Indigenous minister said in a video message.

Brazilian lawmakers vote to limit recognition of Indigenous reserves
Agence France-Presse
May 31, 2023

An Indigenous man takes part in a demonstration against the so-called legal thesis Marco Temporal (Temporal Milestone), a bill that stops the demarcation of Indigenous territories, in Manaus, Amazonas State, Brazil, on May 30, 2023. 

© Michael Dantas, AFP

Brazil's lower house of Congress approved legislation Tuesday that would limit expanded demarcations of Indigenous lands, which are considered key to protecting the Amazon and its native peoples.

The text, passed by the Chamber of Deputies on a 283-155 vote, establishes that reserves can only be on land occupied by Indigenous people at the time of the promulgation of the current constitution, in 1988.

The bill, which has yet to move to the Senate, was promoted by representatives sympathetic to the agribusiness sector and other opposition groups, and represents a setback for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's environmental goals.

According to scientists, Indigenous lands create key buffer zones against deforestation in the Amazon, the largest tropical forest in the world.

Hours ahead of the vote, about 100 indigenous people temporarily blocked a highway on the outskirts of Brazil's largest city Sao Paulo, before the police dispersed them with tear gas, according to images broadcast by local TV.

Brazilian Indigenous communities reject the premise of the bill, arguing they have the right to their original territories, regardless of the status of their occupation in 1988.

Critics say many Indigenous peoples did not occupy certain areas that year because they had been expelled during the preceding military dictatorship, which ended in 1985.

'War against Indigenous peoples'

There are a total of 764 Indigenous territories in Brazil, but around a third of them have not yet been demarcated, according to figures from the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (FUNAI).

Lula recognized six new territories in April, the first in five years after Indigenous rights stalled under far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro.

The Chamber of Deputies vote sparked protests in Brazil including in Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon region. It also drew the attention of international NGOs and activists, including American actors Leonardo Di Caprio and Mark Ruffalo.

The government of Brazil "is being attacked by agribusiness," Ruffalo tweeted ahead of the debate. "There is a war against Indigenous peoples and forests. Our planet is at risk."

Brazil's Minister of Indigenous Peoples, Sonia Guajajara, said Tuesday that the bill "is a genocide against Indigenous peoples, but also an attack on the environment."


She added that she would keep fighting as the bill heads to the Senate.

(AFP)

Frilly dresses and white supremacy: welcome to the weird, frightening world of ‘trad wives’

No longer a far-right subculture, the movement’s anti-feminist tenets are now inserting themselves into mainstream western politics

Protesters at the Women’s March for abortion rights in Washington DC, 22 January 2023. Photograph: Bryan Olin Dozier/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock

Sian Norris

THE GUARDIAN

Opinion The far right

Wed 31 May 2023

“In some more traditional relationships (but not all) the man disciplines the woman either physically (like spanking) or with things like writing lines and standing in the corner,” one woman advises another on the Red Pill Women forum, an online community of rightwing, anti-feminist women.

Welcome to the weird and frightening world of trad wives, where women spurn modern, egalitarian values to dedicate their lives to the service of their husbands. My research into this far-right subculture began during the writing of my book on the far right and reproductive rights. I was curious to learn how the movement, determined to reduce women to reproductive vessels to aid white male supremacy, recruited women to its cause. The answer was a toxic combination of anti-feminism, white supremacy, normalised abuse and a desire to return to an imagined past.



Trad wives can be traced back to the Red Pill Women forum that was set up in 2013. According to research from Julia Ebner in 2020, 30,000 women identified as Red Pill Women or trad wives. As with most far-right trends, most of them appear to be in the US, but due to the networked nature of the modern far right, trends that start stateside don’t remain there. Interviews I conducted revealed that the British far right encourages its women to be trad, with women attending nationalist conferences such as the annual Patriotic Alternative conference, and making a name for themselves on the far-right infosphere.

The subculture shares aesthetics and values across the Atlantic. Long, floral dresses are the norm, idealising a mythic past of feminine modesty. Women should be covered up, as their bodies are just for their husbands. A woman’s role is to stay at home, serving her spouse domestically and sexually, while her partner goes to work to support her. Men should “discipline” women.

Unsurprisingly, they are anti-feminist, with the far right recruiting women to the trad lifestyle by claiming feminism has failed to make them happy. While not a trad wife herself, “alt-right” influencer Lauren Southern shot to fame by claiming feminism taught women “to work 9–5 and drink wine every night until their ovaries dry up”.

And, of course, they’re white. One meme I encountered on Telegram during my research summed up a good trad wife as being “knowledgable about her European roots” and who “loves her family, race and culture”. Leading the tribe is far-right influencer Ayla Stewart, who shot to social media fame when her notorious “white baby challenge” went viral after she declared: “As a mother of six, I challenge families to have as many white babies as I have contributed.”

‘During his time in the White House, Donald Trump weakened protections for victims of sexual harassment and domestic abuse.’

 Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP


The motive behind the white baby challenge, and much of trad wife culture, is a fear of the so-called “great replacement” – a baseless conspiracy theory that believes white people are being “replaced” by migrant people from the global south, while feminists repress the white birthrate via abortion rights. To defeat this so-called “white genocide”, as one Stewart fan expressed it, far-right women need to “Make White Babies Great Again!” On far-right Telegram channels, I found posters following her lead. One far-right woman posted she planned to have six babies, as that was above the “optimum replacement rate”.

What Stewart and her acolytes’ examples show is how the trad lifestyle is fixed to two essential components of fascist ideology that govern the modern far right: white supremacy and patriarchy. What’s concerning is how these aims are becoming more and more influential as the global far right pushes to overturn laws protecting women from gender-based violence and reproductive rights, and their ideas gain traction among mainstream rightwing political parties.

During his time in the White House, Donald Trump weakened protections for victims of sexual harassment and domestic abuse, while Spain’s far-right Vox party is vocal about its desire to overturn laws protecting women from gender-based violence.

The reversal of Roe v Wade met the far-right demands that women be removed from the public sphere into the domestic, and be pinned to reproduction. Poland’s far-right government tightened its already draconian abortion ban. Far-right leaders in Hungary and Italy continue to contest the right to abortion, and in Slovakia the far-right L’SNS party has repeatedly tried to bring in a ban. At the recent National Conservatism conference in the UK, Conservative MPs joined writers and activists who combined anti-migrant speeches with those urging women to have more babies.

Far from trad wives being a niche subculture confined to internet chatrooms, the movement’s core tenets have gripped mainstream politics – and women and their allies should stop at nothing to defend their hard-won rights.



Sian Norris is a freelance investigative journalist and the author of Bodies Under Siege: How the Far-Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global

Across Europe, the far right is rising. That it seems normal is all the more terrifying

Austria, France, Germany, Sweden and now Spain – the firewall between the mainstream and the far right is crumbling

Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party: a snap general election has been called for July. Photograph: Rodrigo Jimenez/EPA

Owen Jones

THEGUARDIAN

Wed 31 May 2023 

Normalisation is the process by which something unusual or extreme becomes part of the everyday. What once provoked horror and outrage soon barely registers. The way the presence of Donald Trump became a mere fact of political life is perhaps the most familiar example. But the normalisation of the far right is happening across the democratic world.

Once Trump became “normal”, events that seemed even more extreme did too. A 2022 survey found that two in five Americans thought civil war was “at least somewhat likely” in the next decade. One political scientist speaks of the possibility of rightwing dictatorship in the US by 2030.

The same creep of normalisation is happening in European politics. At the turn of the millennium, when Austria’s far-right Freedom party (FPÖ) – led by Jörg Haider, who had made comments suggesting he was sympathetic to the Nazi regime – entered a coalition with the conservative People’s party, mass protests not only erupted in Vienna but across Europe and in the US. The EU even imposed diplomatic sanctions on Austria. It was understood that an important red line had been crossed; that given Europe’s blood-soaked history, the far right had to be kept firmly outside the tent.

No longer. When the FPÖ formed a new coalition in 2017, the protests were relatively small. Today, the party picks up victories in local elections and leads Austria’s opinion polls. Now the country’s main political force, it has every chance of leading the next government. Meanwhile, under pressure from its right flank, the People’s party has adopted ever harsher anti-migrant policies.

Then there’s Spain. For years after the financial crash, the country appeared to buck the trend of many European nations because of its lack of a rising far-right party. Leading lights in the leftwing Podemos party had an explanation: the mass indignados protests against austerity, which erupted in 2011, seemed to ensure that discontent was directed at powerful interests, rather than vulnerable groups such as migrants. But in the 2019 general election, the far-right Vox party – defined by its hostility to migrants and opposition to regional autonomy in Spain – came third, and in last weekend’s local elections exceeded expectations. A snap general election has been called for July, and Vox could soon be in government, the first time the Spanish far right would be in corridors of power since the fall of Franco.

The pattern is strikingly clear. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is surging: one recent poll forecast it would come second in a general election, ahead of the ruling Social Democrats. While other parties claim they will refuse to work with the AfD at the national level, such relationships already exist at the local level, leading Foreign Policy magazine to recently declare that “Germany’s far-right ‘firewall’ is starting to crack”.

This is, after all, what happened in Sweden, where other parties refused to work with the Sweden Democrats party, which has neo-Nazi roots. In 2016, Anna Kinberg Batra, the leader of the conservative Moderate party, denounced it as racist. But in the last election, it came second, and negotiated a deal to prop up a rightwing government.

In France, Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party scored their best ever results in presidential and parliamentary elections last year. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is of the far-right Brothers of Italy party. In eastern Europe, we have Hungary, ruled by a de facto far-right autocracy, with an even more extreme party – Our Homeland Movement – surging in the polls. Similarly, note Poland, ruled by a hard-right government which is now manipulating the Ukraine crisis to set up a commission to supposedly investigate Russian influence in the country: in practice, just a bogus excuse to harass the opposition.

How did we descend so far into the mire? There’s no question that growing economic insecurities and inequalities provided ample material for far-right parties that offered scapegoating as an answer. If leftwing movements had proved more successful at redirecting that anger at the right targets – like politicians slashing social provision, bosses offering low-paid jobs and a financial system that plunged the world into crisis – then perhaps the far right would have enjoyed less appeal.

But they also wouldn’t be where they are without the complicity of mainstream parties. Trump is clearly the monster created by the very US Republican establishment – with its anti-Obama crankery, Islamophobia and hallucinated anti-communism – that now seems to abhor him. Across the western world, mainstream parties tend not to vigorously oppose the far right and offer an alternative vision of the future, but imitate their rhetoric and policies. All they’ve achieved is legitimising the zealots and allowing them to set the terms of debate.

We thought we had learned from our darkest moments in history. But unless the far right is once again treated as beyond the political pale, new horrors await.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Missile debris narrowly misses cars in Kyiv – video

A missile fell on a busy street in Kyiv on Monday, the day Russia launched an intense daytime missile barrage at the Ukrainian capital. 

A camera mounted in a vehicle captured the moment parts of what appeared to be a missile fell on a busy street in Kyiv on Monday, the day Russia launched an intense daytime missile barrage at the Ukrainian capital. The falling missile parts appeared to hit a line carrying traffic lights, narrowly missing cars that were driving on the multilane road. The Ukrainian military said it had intercepted all 11 of the ballistic and cruise missiles fired at the city in the attack that began at 11am. A timestamp in the dashcam footage showed the debris hitting the road at 11:22am.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M; I SPY

Amazon’s Ring doorbell was used to spy on customers, FTC says in privacy case

In the agency’s latest effort to hold big tech accountable, the company agreed to settle the privacy violations for $5.8m

Reuters
Thu 1 Jun 2023

 
A former employee of Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera unit spied on female customers for months in 2017 with cameras placed in bedrooms and bathrooms, the Federal Trade Commission said in a court filing on Wednesday when it announced a $5.8m settlement with the company over privacy violations.

Amazon also agreed to pay $25m to settle allegations it violated children’s privacy rights when it failed to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents and kept them longer than necessary, according to a court filing in federal court in Seattle that outlined a separate settlement.



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The FTC settlements are the agency’s latest effort to hold big tech accountable for policies that critics say place profits ahead of privacy.

Amazon, which purchased Ring in April 2018, pledged to make some changes in its practices.

“While we disagree with the FTC’s claims regarding both Alexa and Ring, and deny violating the law, these settlements put these matters behind us,” Amazon said in a statement.

Alvaro Bedoya, the FTC Commissioner, told Reuters the settlements should send a message to tech companies that their need to collect data was not an excuse to break the law. “This is a very clear signal to them,” he said.

The fines, totaling $30.8m, represent a fraction of Amazon’s $3.2bn first-quarter profit.

In its complaint against Amazon filed in Washington state, the FTC said that it violated rules protecting children’s privacy and rules against deceiving consumers who used Alexa. For example, the FTC complaint says that Amazon told users it would delete voice transcripts and location information upon request, but then failed to do so.

Amazon’s Ring cameras were used to spy on customers for months in 2017, the Federal Trade Commission said. Photograph: Jessica Hill/AP

In one instance in 2017, employees of Ring viewed videos made by at least 81 female customers and Ring employees using Ring products. “Undetected by Ring, the employee continued spying for months,” the FTC said.

A colleague noticed the misconduct and the employee was eventually terminated.

The FTC also said Ring gave employees unrestricted access to customers’ sensitive video data said “as a result of this dangerously overbroad access and lax attitude toward privacy and security, employees and third-party contractors were able to view, download and transfer customers’ sensitive video data for their own purposes”.

As part of the FTC agreement with Ring, which spans 20 years, Ring is required to disclose to customers how much access to their data the company and its contractors have.

In February 2019, Ring changed its policies so that most Ring employees or contractors could only access a customer’s private video with that person’s consent.