ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY

Missouri 

Supreme Court, governor refuse prosecutors' request to halt man's execution

New DNA testing does not link Williams to crime, prosecutor's say.

   

1 of 3 | The Missouri Supreme Court on Monday weighed whether to halt the execution of Marcellus Williams, who was convicted in the death of a local journalist, as prosecutors argued there was a lack of evidence against him and he received an unfair trial. Photo courtesy Marcelus Williams' legal team/Innocence Project

Sept. 23 (UPI) -- The Missouri Supreme Court on Monday denied a request to halt Tuesday's pending execution of Marcellus Williams as prosecutors filed to vacate his conviction for the 1998 murder of a local news reporter.

Monday's denial by Missouri's high court and the governor's refusal to act all but ensures Williams execution by lethal injection will proceed despite the last-ditch effort to get a death sentence reversed to a life sentence with no parole as clemency.

In six years so far as the state's chief executive, Gov. Mike Parson has not granted clemency to someone facing execution. Eleven people have been executed in Missouri during that time.

"Mr. Williams has exhausted due process and every judicial avenue, including over 15 hearings attempting to argue his innocence and overturn his conviction," Parson, a Republican, said Monday afternoon in a release obtained by KOMU in Missouri.

"No jury nor court, including at the trial, appellate and Supreme Court levels, have ever found merit in Mr. Williams' innocence claims. At the end of the day, his guilty verdict and sentence of capital punishment were upheld. Nothing from the real facts of this case have led me to believe in Mr. Williams' innocence."

Tricia Rojo Bushnell, an attorney for Williams, described Missouri in a statement Monday as being poised to execute an innocent man, "an outcome that calls into question the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system."

"Given everything we know about Marcellus Williams' case -- including the new revelations that the trial prosecutor removed at least one Black juror because of his race, and opposition to this execution from the victim's family and the sitting prosecuting attorney, the courts must step in to prevent this irreparable injustice," Bushnell said.

The court took up the case Monday morning ahead of Williams' scheduled execution on Tuesday night

Williams, 55, was convicted of killing St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia "Lisha" Gayle, 42, who was stabbed to death 42 times with a butcher's knife from her kitchen during an attempted burglary in her University City gated community.

However, St. Louis County's top prosecutor filed a motion to have his conviction vacated in January, citing a lack of forensics linking him to the crime and "overwhelming evidence" of an unfair trial.

The January motion to vacate was initially approved by a county trial judge but was reversed on Sept. 12 after Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey contested it.

The case came before Missouri's Supreme Court after prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell and attorneys representing Williams' filed a joint brief asking the court to send the case back to a lower court for a "more comprehensive hearing."

No forensic evidence had been able to tie Williams to the alleged crime nearly 30 years ago.

Yet despite this, Williams, a Black man, was convicted by an almost all-White jury in 2001 of Gayle's 1998 killing, according to Amnesty International, which is among the organizations that has called for Williams to receive leniency by Parson.

In the January motion, the Prosecuting Attorney's Office, which handled the 2001 trial against Williams, said DNA testing from the murder weapon could potentially exclude Williams as a suspect in Gayle's killing but it was later revealed the weapon had been mishandled, throwing a wrench in that case.

The effort to reverse the fortunes of Williams has pitted the local prosecutor against Missouri's Republican state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is up for re-election.

Bailey last month rejected a deal with prosecutors and Gayle's family to reverse Williams' sentence to first-degree murder and a resentencing to life in prison, instead appealing to the conservative Missouri Supreme Court comprised of five Republicans and two Democrats.

Other organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Council on American-Islamic Relations, joined Amnesty in calls for Parson to stop Williams' planned Tuesday execution.

The NAACP said executing Williams would "violate international law."

"Furthermore, a U.S. District Court in 2010 ordered that Marcellus Williams receive a new sentencing hearing, having found that his trial lawyer had failed to present any mitigating evidence of Marcellus Williams's violently abusive childhood," Amnesty wrote in a letter to Parson.

Gayle was in the shower on the morning of Aug. 11, 1998, when Williams allegedly broke into the gated community. Court documents said Gayle left her second-floor bathroom and was walking downstairs when she encountered her alleged killer on the landing. Her husband, Daniel Picus, found her body and called 911.

Among the evidence were bloody shoeprints and fingerprints, a knife sheath and hair from the suspected murderer that was collected from Gayle's shirt, hands and on the floor.

Four Missouri death row inmates in 40 years have been exonerated and since 1973, at least 200 American citizens have been spared from death row, a Missouri congresswoman cited the Death Penalty Information Center.

On Friday, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Miss., called on the governor to exonerate Williams "for a crime he didn't commit," she said.

Calling the death penalty "racist, flawed, inhumane," Bush, a co-sponsor of the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act, claimed Parson and the courts are allowing the execution to be carried out "despite credible evidence of Williams' innocence and mass scrutiny over the fairness of his trial."

U.S. executions in 2023 were largely concentrated in the South. Texas and Florida accounted for more than half of last year's more than executions across the United States.

The Death Penalty Information Center called 2022 "the year of the botched execution" in a year in which questions over human practice of the death penalty became a renewed national focus.

Records say that Williams had a troubled youth that involved death, sexual and physical abuse, drugs and stints in jail and was described by an attorney as "a caring and loving father" during the penalty phase of his murder trial.

His most recent stay of execution was ordered by then-Gov. Eric Greiten who had appointed a board of inquiry to look into the case until that decision was later reversed last year by Parson.

By doing so, Parson's actions "have violated Williams' constitutional rights and created an exceptionally urgent need for the Court's attention," Williams attorney had argued.

"St. Louis and I rise today to say that state-sanctioned violence has no place in a humane society," Bush added, "I am urging Governor Parson not to let another innocent man be murdered at the hands of the state. He must heed our call."

He originally had been sentenced to death for January 2015 and then August 2017. Both lethal injections were halted to conduct further DNA testing.

Williams had just started serving a 20-year prison sentence for robbing a downtown St. Louis donut shop at the time of his murder conviction.

A murder suspect was not immediately named by police and in May 1999 Gayle's family announced a $10,000 for information leading to an arrest. Williams became the main suspect after a girlfriend, Lara Asaro, and an inmate named Henry Cole claimed Williams was the culprit.

U.S. sends more troops to Middle East; EU warns Israel-Hezbollah conflict nears 'full-fledged war'

ISRAEL INVADES, LEBANON HAS THE RIGHT TO SELF DEFENSE

Smoke rises after an Israeli airstrike that targeted a Lebanese village, as seen from the Upper Galilee, northern Israel, on September 23, 2024. The Pentagon said Monday that it was sending additional troops to the region. The European Union warned Monday that the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah was nearing a full-fledged war. Photo by Atef Safadi/EPA-EFE

Sept. 24 (UPI) -- The Pentagon said Monday that additional troops will be sent to the Middle East as the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah rapidly escalates and as the European Union warns it was devolving into a "full-fledged war."

Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Department of Defense press secretary, announced to reporters during a press conference that "a small number of additional U.S. military personnel" are being sent to the Middle East "to augment our forces that are already in the region."
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He would not specify the number of troops being sent nor if additional equipment, such as ships or aircraft, would be accompanying them.

"For operation security reasons, I'm not going to comment on or provide specifics," he said.

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Ryder made the announcement amid a large escalation in the conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon.
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Israeli warplanes hit some 1,300 Hezbollah targets, including missiles that Israeli officials said were hidden in civilians' homes, throughout Lebanon on Monday, killing at least 492 people and injuring more than 1,640 others.

The two sides have been attacking one another over the southern Lebanese border since Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza began nearly a year ago, but Israel has recently escalated its bombardment of Hezbollah since last week when communication devices held by the militants detonated in a coordinated attack that killed 37 people. Israel has not commented on the attack but has been blamed for it.

At the same time, Israeli officials declared a new objective in the war: the return of tens of thousands of displaced Israelis to their northern Israel homes, near the Lebanese border.

About 60,000 Israelis have been evacuated from northern Israeli towns close to the Lebanese border because of the constant artillery and rocket strikes coming from across the border.

Israel has defended its massive Monday assault by stating Hezbollah had built up an arsenal over the last 20 years and had planned to conduct an assault on Israel like the one Hamas conducted on Oct. 7, which killed 1,200 Israelis and ignited the nearly one-year-old war.

The European Union's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, warned Monday in a press conference that the conflict was on the precipice of a full-fledged war.

"Escalation is extremely dangerous and worrying," he said. "I can say that we are almost in a full-fledged war. We're seeing more military strikes, more damage, more collateral damage, more victims."

He said the attacks in Lebanon have forced thousands to flee north, stressing the local transportation system. The detonation of Hezbollah communication devices -- pagers on Tuesday and Walkie-talkies on Wednesday -- have created a sense of "terror" among the Lebanese population, he added.

"Civilians in Lebanon are paying an intolerable, unacceptable price," he said.

"And it's against the Geneva Convention to make explosions at distance without taking into consideration for the environment where these explosives are exploding."

He described the attacks as targeted but random.

"I condemn. I continue condemning it," he said.

To prevent further escalation, he is calling for renewed diplomatic mediation efforts, pointing to this week's United Nations conference, titled Summit of the Future 2024, as "the moment to do that."

"Everybody has to put their capacity to stop this path to war," he said.

However, he warned that the worst case scenario of the conflict was "materializing."

During the U.N. conference in New York, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot announced that he has requested an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting to be held on Lebanon this week.

Congress is crying wolf again on the Pentagon budget

‘Emergency’ funding in the DOD spending bill is a dangerous gimmick

Gabe Murphy
Sep 24, 2024
RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT

As Congress zeroes in on a continuing resolution to keep the government funded beyond the end of the 2024 fiscal year on September 30, it’s effectively punting on a host of questions lawmakers would rather not weigh in on ahead of the November 5 election.

Chief among them is whether or not to advance the Senate Appropriations Committee’s plan to include some $34.5 billion in emergency spending in the final budget, including $21 billion for the Pentagon and $13.5 billion for domestic programs.

On the Pentagon side of this “emergency” cash infusion, which led to the domestic emergency spending in a nominal nod to parity, a cursory look at some of the emergency increases shows that many are not in fact responding to real emergencies. Rather, as the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee Susan Collins (R-Maine) readily admitted in her description of the funding, the $21 billion “will be emergency funding so it will not break the (spending) caps” agreed to last year. Those caps limit spending to one percent above FY2024 levels.

In a recently updated database of congressional Pentagon budget increases, Taxpayers for Common Sense revealed that Senate appropriators proposed 47 emergency program increases for procurement and 16 emergency increases for Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E), at a proposed cost to taxpayers of $9.1 billion and $2.9 billion, respectively.

On the procurement side, $3.3 million for “Industrial base facilitization,” $20 million for “Silicon carbide device manufacturing,” and $87.6 million for “Energy storage and batteries,” to name a few examples, hardly seem to respond to unforeseen emergencies. Neither does $650 million for “Miscellaneous equipment” in the National Guard and Reserve Equipment Account, a National Guard slush fund that Congress funds year after year even though the Pentagon omits the program from its request year after year.

Then there’s the nearly $3 billion for 16 RDT&E program increases labeled as emergency funding. Without even looking at the individual increases, we can safely say that none of this funding is responding to legitimate emergencies, because RDT&E accounts are about supporting the fielding of new equipment down the road, not deploying equipment into the field immediately (which is achieved through procurement). The most glaring illustration of this is the $500 million classified increase to the Navy’s Next Generation Fighter program, which won’t field planes until the 2030s at the earliest. In fact, with the Air Force rethinking plans for its next-generation fighter, it’s fair to ask whether the Navy’s next-generation fighter is facing a similar reckoning, and whether current plans for the fighter are likely to change, if they move forward at all.

An important backdrop to all of this emergency funding is the fact that military service leaders, in their annual submissions of congressionally required unfunded priority lists (UPLs), often insist that the Pentagon’s budget request is sufficient to meet our national security needs. For example, Army General Randy George wrote in his FY2025 UPL that “The Army’s FY25 budget request maintains our alignment with the National Defense Strategy and our ability to conduct our warfighting mission.”

So, when appropriators added eight emergency program increases for Army procurement at a proposed cost of $1.7 billion, they did so with the knowledge that the Army said it didn’t need that funding to conduct its warfighting mission.

Congress appropriating emergency funding for non-emergencies is nothing new, but it’s notable that this year they didn’t even bother to put it in a separate emergency supplemental spending bill. Instead, they just added it directly into the Pentagon’s base budget bill.

The fundamental problem with expanding this bad budgeting practice is well known to children across the nation: if you keep crying wolf, when a wolf actually shows up, it might be harder to effectively respond. And the wolves are coming. Interest payments on our national debt, driven in no small part by Pentagon spending that’s ballooned nearly 50 percent adjusted for inflation since the turn of the century, could surpass military spending this year, depending on whether the final bill adheres to budget caps or not. That’s $870,000,000,000 taxpayers will pay just in interest.

At the same time, military modernization plans that even Pentagon leadership has described as unsustainable mean that Congress will either have to cut back on those plans or incur even more debt, which will in turn create more budgetary constraints down the road. Budgeting for national security in this environment necessitates fiscal discipline and strategic prioritization, not unconstrained spending dressed up as an emergency.

Whenever lawmakers get around to finalizing the Pentagon budget, they should ensure it adheres to the budget caps agreed to last year and save the emergency funding for real emergencies.

Gabe Murphy
Gabe Murphy is a Policy Analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for transparency and calling out wasteful spending.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

Jill Biden: Pentagon to invest $500M annually into women's health research

THEY HAVE MORE MONEY THAN ANY OTHER DEPARTMENT


First lady Jill Biden announces that the Department of Defense has allocated $500 million for women's health annually. Screen capture courtesy of Clinton Global Initiative/YouTube

Sept. 24 (UPI) -- First lady Jill Biden has announced that the Pentagon is committing more than $500 million annually for research into women's health, as the Biden administration has prioritized improving the lives of women.

Biden announced the investment Monday during a Clinton Global Initiative talk alongside Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, in New York City.

"It's a big deal. And it's about time," Biden said as she announced the funding. "We're going to get moving on this."

She explained that the money will go toward studying arthritis, chronic fatigue and cardiovascular health.

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A statement from the Department of Defense says that the half-billion-dollar investment for women's health research will primarily come through the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs, a Department of Defense program that receives funding for specific biomedical research.

It said investing in women's health research is "critical" to meeting the healthcare needs of the more than 230,000 active-duty servicewomen and nearly 2 million women military retirees.

Biden said the research will improve the health of women in the military service, "which then transcends to all women."

"So, I'm so excited about that," she added.

In addition to the funding, the Pentagon announced it will adopt a new research policy to ensure that women's health is considered during every step of CDMRP research starting Oct. 1.

It also stated that the Department of Defense will standardize health research opportunities to encourage applicants to consider research on health areas that affect women, and will commit to increasing investments in innovators and small businesses that engage in research and development on women's health.

"Investing in women's health research and evidence-based care is critical to meeting the healthcare needs of the women served by DoD," the Pentagon said.

The move comes as the Biden administration has made improving women's health a part of its platform. In February, the first lady announced the launch of the first-ever "Spring for Women's Health Initiative," which included $100 million for research into women's health.

In March, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to advance women's health research, close health disparities and ensure advances made in laboratories translate real-world clinical benefits for women.

"Investing in women's health research and evidence-based care is critical to meeting the health care needs of the women served by DoD," Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in a statement on X on Monday.

"These new announcements build on recent work that DoD has already done to advance women's health research and take care of our people."

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

Sharks, rays leap out of water for feeding, courtship, communication, more

By A. Peter Klimley, University of California, Davis

Sept. 23, 2024 
THE CONVERSATION

Manta rays, basking sharks and other species of rays and sharks are known to breach, leaping fully or partly out of the water. Photo by Alice B/Pexels

Many sharks and rays are known to breach, leaping fully or partly out of the water. In a recent study, colleagues and I reviewed research on breaching and ranked the most commonly hypothesized functions for it.

We found that removal of external parasites was the most frequently proposed explanation, followed by predators chasing their prey; predators concentrating or stunning their prey; males chasing females during courtship; and animals fleeing predators, such as a ray escaping from a hammerhead shark in shallow water.

We found that the highest percentage of breaches, measured by the number of studies that described it, occurred in manta rays and devil rays, followed by basking sharks and then by eagle rays and cownose rays. However, many other species of sharks, as well as sawfishes and stingrays, also perform this behavior.

Why it matters

It takes a lot of energy for a shark or ray to leap out of the water -- especially a massive creature like a basking shark, which can grow up to 40 feet (12 meters) and weigh up to 5 tons (4.5 tonnes). Since the animal could use that energy for feeding or mating, breaching must serve some useful purpose.

Sharks that have been observed breaching include fast-swimming predatory species such as blacktip sharks and blue sharks. White sharks have been seen breaching while capturing seals in waters off South Africa and around the Farallon Islands off central California.

However, basking sharks -- enormous, slow-swimming sharks that feed by filtering tiny plankton from seawater -- also breach. So do many ray species, such as manta rays, which also are primarily filter feeders. This suggests that breaching likely serves different functions among different types of sharks and rays.

The most commonly proposed explanation for breaching in planktivores, like basking sharks and most rays, is that it helps dislodge parasites attached to their bodies. Basking sharks are known to host parasites, including common remoras and sea lampreys. The presence of fresh wounds on basking sharks that match the shape and size of a lamprey's mouth suggests that breaching has torn the lampreys off the sharks' bodies.

Other species may breach to communicate. For example, white sharks propelling themselves out of the water near the Farallon Islands may do so to deter other sharks from feeding upon the carcass of a seal.

Researchers have seen large groups of mantas and devil rays jumping together among dense schools of plankton -- presumably to concentrate or stun the plankton so the rays can more easily scoop them up. Scientists have also suggested that planktivorous sharks and rays may breach to clear the prey-filtering structures in their gills.

Understanding more clearly when and how different types of sharks and rays breach can provide insights into these animals' life habits, and into their interactions with their own species and competitors.

How we did our work

I worked with marine scientists Tobey Curtis, Emmett Johnston, Alison Kock and Guy Stevens. Across our various projects, we have seen breaching in bull sharks in Florida, basking sharks in Ireland, white sharks in South Africa and central California, and manta rays in the Maldives. Each of us has proposed different explanations for why the animals did it.

We reviewed scientific studies and video footage to see what species had been observed to breach, under what conditions, and the functions that other researchers had proposed for them doing so. This included information gathered from data logging tags attached to sharks and rays, digital photography, and imagery from underwater and aerial drones.

Our review proposes further studies that could provide more information about breaching in different species. For example, attaching data loggers to individual animals would help scientists measure how quickly a shark or ray accelerates as it propels itself out of the water.

Experiments in aquarium tanks could provide more insight into why the animals breach. For example, scientists could add remoras to a tank containing bull sharks, which can live in an aquarium environment, and observe how the sharks respond when remoras attach themselves to the sharks' bodies.

In the field, researchers could play audio recordings of splashes from breaches to elicit withdrawal or attraction responses from sharks tagged with ultrasonic transmitters. There remains much to learn about why these animals spend precious energy jumping out of the water.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

A. Peter Klimley is an adjunct associate professor of wildlife, fish, & conservation biology at University of California, Davis.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Anti-war sentiment has Germany's ruling party on the run

Populist challenge to Ukraine policy certainly not quelled as SPD squeaks by in party stronghold of Brandenburg

Molly O'Neal
Sep 24, 2024
RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing Social Democrats barely squeaked by in its stronghold of Brandenburg this weekend, highlighting the increasing influence of the national populist Alternative for Germany on the left and the upstart populist Sahra Wagenknecht Union (BSW) on the left.

The closely watched state election on September 22 saw Scholz’s SPD win 30.9% to edge past AfD at 29.2%. As in the September 1 state elections in Saxony and Thuringia, BSW finished in double digits, in this case in third place with 13.5%, more than the Christian Democrats (CDU) at 12.1%.

These four parties — SPD, AfD, BSW, CDU — alone won seats in the legislature. Two of these four parties oppose German military aid for Ukraine. The SPD, BSW and AfD outperformed their results in the last elections (2019), while the CDU fell short, and Greens and the Left (Die Linke) suffered major collapse compared to the previous elections.

This was the third and last state election held this month in the former East Germany and the last state election till next spring. The SPD had much to lose: they have led governing coalitions in Brandenburg for the 34 years since reunification. The incumbent governor (Ministerpräsident) Dietmar Woidke (SPD) has served for 11 years. A defeat in this SPD stronghold would have shaken further the fragile national governing coalition headed by Chancellor Scholz.

The state of Brandenburg, surrounding but not including the capital Berlin, has a much higher profile nationally than Saxony and Thuringia, where elections on September 8 showed striking gains by AfD and BSW, which are both opposed to German military support for Ukraine. In the lead up to the Brandenburg election, the German press has speculated that Scholz might have been forced out by SPD leadership if the party failed to win the Brandenburg election.

In these scenarios, the Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, by far the most popular national SPD figure, would have replaced Scholz at the helm of the SPD, triggering early national elections, otherwise slated for October 2025.

Governor Dietmar Woidke enjoys broad popularity in Brandenburg, and cannily avoided involving Chancellor Olaf Scholz in his successful campaign. Over the last weeks of the contest, with polls showing AfD leading SPD by several points, Woidke mobilized voter support by pledging not to serve again as governor unless SPD finished first.

This high-risk gambit worked, and it also allowed Scholz to avoid a destabilizing impact on his leadership, even though his two coalition partners — Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats — did not win seats in Brandenburg. In an exit poll, 52% of those who said they had voted for SPD said they did so because of Woidke. The huge voter turnout — 72.9% — may also reflect the outpouring of support for Woidke to remain in office.

Woidke could have led a majority coalition (without AfD) without a first-place finish. Furthermore, his come-from-behind victory has perhaps slowed the momentum of AfD and taken pressure off Scholz and the unpopular coalition he leads. However, the weak fourth place showing for the center-right Christian Democrats, which along with the Greens, had been in coalition with Woidke’s SPD in Brandenburg, is a setback for the CDU and its leader Friedrich Merz.

The Greens’ failure to win any seats and the strong third place finish for BSW do not auger well for national coalition building in next year’s federal elections. As has happened in Saxony and Thuringia, the participation of BSW in Brandenburg’s governing coalition seems difficult to avoid. (Together SPD and CDU fall one seat short of a majority.)

The national SPD and its leader Olaf Scholz have won a reprieve, but there is little to rejoice about in these results, given the still quite strong result for AfD. The challenge of forming a coalition in Brandenburg with Wagenknecht’s BSW lies ahead. On September 8, a week after the very weak showing of the SPD in Saxony and Thuringia, Scholz urged a renewed diplomatic effort to end the war in Ukraine.

This could be interpreted as a gesture to help Woidke defend SPD’s leadership in Brandenburg against the two antiwar parties, AfD and BSW. The BSW has made opposition to further military support for Ukraine and opposition to proposed US missile deployments in Germany a condition for their participation in governing coalitions.

Molly O'Neal
Molly O’Neal is a university lecturer and research scholar, with a long diplomatic career focused on Central Europe, Russia and Eurasia. A Fulbright professor in Warsaw and in Dresden, she has a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. O'Neal is also a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

THE RIGHT ALWAYS CLAIM TO BE 'NON PARTISAN'

THE LEFT CLAIMS TO BE !NO PARESAN!

UNGA

Meryl Streep says cats have more rights than women in Afghanistan


The Taliban’s ban on women’s voices in Afghanistan ‘is a suppression of the natural law’, says Streep

Arpan Rai
THE INDEPENDENT

A female cat has more freedom in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan today than a woman, Meryl Streep said at the United Nations on Monday, stating that the world has been upended.

"Today in Kabul a female cat has more freedom than a woman. A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face. She may chase a squirrel into the park. A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today, because the public parks have been closed to women and girls by the Taliban," the Hollywood actor said.


She joined several prominent Afghan women activists at the event “The Inclusion of Women in the Future of Afghanistan” on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.

"A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not and a woman may not in public. This is extraordinary. This is a suppression of the natural law. This is odd," she said, referring to the Taliban’s latest edict for Afghan women, banning their voices and presence from public spaces.

Meryl Streep arrives for an event on ‘The Inclusion of Women in the Future of Afghanistan’ (AFP via Getty Images)

Women in Afghanistan, nearly half the population, have been banned by the Taliban from attending high school, colleges and universities. It further restricts women from working in a horrific repeat of its 90s rule on the country.

Afghan women are not allowed to step outside their homes and need to be accompanied by a male guardian, father or husband (mehram) or face punishment by the local Taliban leaders. They are also prohibited from entering public parks, gymnasiums and salons, most of which have been shut down since August 2021 after the Taliban took control of power in Afghanistan.

"The way that ... this society has been upended is a cautionary tale for the rest of the world," Streep said, as she called on the international community to intervene on behalf of women to “stop the slow suffocation of entire half of the population”.

US actress Meryl Streep arrives for an event on ‘The Inclusion of Women in the Future of Afghanistan’ on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly at UN Headquarters in New York City (X/ United Nations)

“I feel that the Taliban, since they have issued over 100 edicts in Afghanistan, stripping women and girls of their education and employment, their freedom of expression and movement, they have effectively incarcerated half their population,” she said.

The multi-award winning actor also called on the Sunni community nations to intervene as the Taliban claim to be a Sunni Islamist movement.

Streep also pointed out women comprised most of Afghanistan’s civil servants in the 1970s, before the nation plunged into wars over the next five decades.

The Taliban have outright rejected the foreign criticism of its harsh edicts on Afghan women, calling it an internal matter of Afghanistan. However the group is denied recognition by the international community, which has asked the Taliban leaders to restore the basic human rights of women.

STREEP SPEACH ON TWITTER:

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Labour conference 2024: Unite accuses Labour of delaying winter fuel vote until ‘lights are out’ on Wednesday

Daniel Green    

23rd September, 2024

Photo: @Rachel_Reeves

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Unite has criticised Labour for postponing a vote on means testing the winter fuel allowance to the final day of conference.

A motion proposed by the trade union, which calls for the government to reverse the decision to cut the payment to ten million pensioners, will only be debated on Wednesday at the party’s annual meeting in Liverpool, when many attendees and media outlets will have already left the conference.

However, Unite has accused Labour of attempting to “silence” their concerns.

Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, said: “Right now, it is fair to say that the Labour leaders have tried to silence the voice of pensioners, workers and communities at party conference in this blatant manoeuvre to block debate on winter fuel cuts and the departure towards austerity mark 2.

“When this becomes widely known there will be real anger among everyday people. Real anger.”

Kate Dove, co-chair of the left-wing group Momentum, said it was “embarrassing” that the party’s leadership were “running scared of trade-union backed motions challenging the reversal of austerity measures”.

But Luke Akehurst,  Labour MP for North Durham, Labour national executive committee member and secretary of self-described moderates’ group Labour First, said: “The overwhelming mood of conference delegates is to get behind Keir and the Government and focus on promoting all the great Labour policies we all agree on, rather than having a public battle over points of disagreement, or trying to undermine or back seat drive ministers.”

It comes after Chancellor Rachel Reeves defended the decision to means test the benefit in a speech to conference earlier this afternoon.

In her address, Reeves said: “I know that not everyone in this hall or in the country with every decision that I make. I will not duck those decisions, not for political expediency, not for personal advantage.”

Corporations and lobbyists at Labour conference shred its already floundering climate credentials

LIKE THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION

 by Hannah Sharland

THE CANARY
23 September 2024
in Analysis

Amidst a Labour Party conference awash with warm promises to tackle the climate crisis, a campaign group has exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of the new government’s climate strategy. In particular, it has articulated the folly of fourteen years of financing a fossil fuel industry-favoured so-called climate solution. Specifically, this is the repeated abject failure of carbon capture and storage projects (CCS).

Of course, despite over a decade of falling far short, it hasn’t stopped the new Labour government getting on board with the greenwashing technology.
Labour conference: greenwashing technology for big oil and gas

In a nutshell, CCS is the fossil fuel industry’s latest greenwashing con for continuing on its polluting business-as-usual. Companies capture carbon emissions from large-scale industrial installations, and then pump it underground – for instance, in depleted oil and gas wells.

However, the technology isn’t proven at scale. For example, investigative outlet Desmog previously conducted an analysis of twelve large-scale fossil fuel industry-run CCS plants. Notably, the outlet identified:

a litany of missed carbon capture targets; cost-overruns, and billions of dollars of costs to taxpayers in the form of subsidies

Unsurprisingly, it isn’t the only study to have shown the technology woefully falling short. For instance, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) also found that ten out of 13 CCS sites it analysed had:

failed or underperformed against their designed capacities, mostly by large margins.

Now, anti-fossil fuel campaign group Oil Change International has revealed the staggering waste of UK taxpayers’ money into this unproven technology.
A trail of broken promises

On Sunday 22 September, Oil Change International published its new report titled:

Funding Failure: The True Cost of Carbon Capture in the UK

It uncovers how the UK government is funneling public money into the most expensive and least effective emissions mitigation option. Moreover, it underscores how this is benefitting the fossil fuel industry, while delaying a just transition to renewable energy.

Crucially the report identified how since 2010, previous Tory-led governments have committed or spent almost £500m on CCS projects.

Yet, despite hundreds of millions in public investment, companies have failed to bring even a single commercial-scale CCS project online in the UK.

It noted how the Tories funnelled £168m of this to two scrapped projects: Peterhead and White Rose.

However, even in the context of these glaring failures, the Tories have continued to develop policies to prop up this bogus technology. Oil Change International found that since 2020, the government has opened the door to £25.26bn for CCS and hydrogen projects.
Industry con at Labour conference again

Oil Change International noted that it was publishing it on the eve of the Labour Party’s annual conference. Therefore, it said that:

This is the first time in 14 years Labour will convene while in power, offering a powerful opportunity to lead on a just transition that is not reliant on failed technology.

On top of this, it pointed out that the £25.6bn could fund pensioners winter fuel allowance twelve times over. As a result, it also argued that:

Prime Minister Keir Starmer cites worsening economic pressures for proposed austerity measures, yet public funds continue to be diverted to carbon capture – propping up a failed technology.

Unsurprisingly however, the fossil fuel-backed CCS industry is already in bed with Labour. In 2023, Desmog revealed how industry trade body the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) sponsored 15 events at the two major party’s conferences.

Once again, the CCSA has forked over thousands of pounds to secure itself a stand outside the main hall at this year’s conference. Significantly, as Desmog has highlighted:

Nearly a fifth of the CCSA’s 100 members are oil and gas companies, including BP, Exxon, Shell and Equinor.

What’s more, two major CCS developers are hosting a fringe event. These are Evero – which is developing two CCS projects at Mersey and Ince, and Climeworks, a direct air capture developer. Direct air capture is similar to carbon capture and storage (CCS) in that it removes emissions to be stored underground. However, whereas CCS is tied to industrial plants, DAC captures emissions from the air in any location.

On Tuesday 24 September, the pair are delivering a panel on:

Net zero and beyond – the role of Greenhouse Gas Removals in reversing climate change

Its listing on Labour’s programme states that:

Greenhouse Gas Removals (GGRs) are essential for the UK to achieve net zero. 23 million tons a year of GGRs by 2035 are already baked into the UK’s carbon budgets. But the Committee on Climate Change has recently pointed to ‘significant risks’ with the pace of government action on GGRs to meet this target.

For the UK to become an international leader in this sector, we all need to be more positive about negative emissions – from political leaders to technology developers and corporate GGR purchasers.

Moreover, lobby firm Arden Strategies is hosting this – and it too has a panoply of connections with big oil and gas.

Labour lobbyist in bed with the fossil fuel industry

Former Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy set up the agency. It has a dedicated ‘Labour directorate’ and its specific remit is to help clients “interact with Labour politicians”.

Notably, on its website, it advertises its services helping corporations map to “political stakeholders that share your company’s interests”. In particular, it states how Arden supports:

UK and global corporate clients to navigate and engage with Labour’s policies and politics. We also combine our in-depth knowledge of corporate advisory work with our team’s detailed understanding of how the Labour government operates and thinks.

While Arden does not list its clients, according to Tribune Magazine, it has organised events with British Gas owner Centrica. The multinational energy company holds a stake in oil and gas corporation Spirit Energy, which boasts assets in the North Sea.

In February, Arden was the official partner of a secretive lobbying event Scottish Labour hosted alongside its main party conference. As openDemocracy reported, the national party banned press from the this. Despite this, the independent outlet identified that Centrica’s CEO Chris O’Shea, and Scottish Renewables chief executive Claire Mack appeared on a panel discussion at the event. The pair sat on this alongside UK Labour and Scottish Labour’s net zero chiefs Ed Miliband and Sarah Boyack.

Despite the fact Scottish Renewables focuses on climate green technologies, the company counts oil majors like Shell and Equinor on its board.

In addition, German firm RWE also attended the lobbying affair. While the company’s main focus is on renewables in the UK, in Europe, it operates climate-polluting coal-fired power plants. It also owns one of Scotland’s most polluting industrial sites – Markinch biomass plant. As well as this, it operates Pembrokeshire gas power plant – the UK’s second largest greenhouse gas polluter.

Many of these same companies are coalescing round the unproven CCS technology as a smokescreen to prolong the industry. As well as this, Arden’s Murphy is on the board for the Future Energy Skills Programme coordinated by Centrica and GMB and backed by a who’s who of polluting corporations – which is also promoting CCS.
Subsidising CCS while slashing the winter fuel payment

Ahead of the election, Labour signalled its support for the technology. Its manifesto committed an additional £1bn to it directly.

Oil Change International senior campaigner Rosemary Harris again underscored the galling hypocrisy of this in light of the winter fuel payment cuts. This is especially the case given the government’s justification of clawing back £1.4bn in savings. She said that:


Globally, carbon capture has already had billions of pounds and decades to prove itself and it has failed on every promise.

As Keir Starmer’s government cuts winter fuel payments for vulnerable pensioners with one hand, they are handing out billions in subsidies to the oil and gas industry with the other. It is unfathomable that this government is continuing to spend public money on so-called ‘carbon capture’, when £500 million has already produced nothing.

Instead of propping up Big Oil’s last ditch efforts to maintain their profits, Keir Starmer and the Labour Party should lead a full, fast, fair, and funded phaseout of fossil fuels. We need to see an end to subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, and a real, funded transition plan that works for people and the planet.

Ultimately, another Labour Party conference flush with big polluters shows exactly whose side Starmer’s government is on. It’ll readily extend subsidies and support for an unproven technology acting as a lifeline for climate-wrecking industries – while removing a vital lifeline for the majority of pensioners this winter.

Featured image via the Canary