Safety illusion: Fortress schools won't solve America's tragic mass shootings

Alison Mau May 29 2022

"We Will Buy Them Back And We Will Destroy Them" - PM Jacinda Ardern On Gun Control In New Zealand

Jacinda Ardern discusses the Texas school shooting and gun control with Stephen Colbert.

Alison Mau is a senior journalist and editor of the #MeTooNZ project.

OPINION: By today's standards, I had a dangerous childhood. Roaming the neighbourhood until after dark, taking the tram to school from the age of five, getting into unsupervised trouble left, right and centre.

This was the way of the 1970s; we were told to "go and play", and expected to disappear without question while the adults got on with adult things. According to family legend, our beloved German Short-haired Pointer saved my life, twice, when I’d made "poor decisions" on family outings in the countryside (those are stories for another day).

At school, there was only concrete under the monkey bars we hung on every lunchtime; if you hadn't broken an arm by the time you graduated you were considered one of the very lucky ones. A knee-height bluestone fence was the only thing separating the grassed playgrounds and asphalt netball courts from the street. You could walk onto the school grounds from multiple entry points; this was not considered an issue, because the emphasis was on keeping schoolchildren in. Leave the school without permission and you risked being sent to the principal's office for "the strap".


JAE C. HONG/AP
Pastor Daniel Myers kneels in front of crosses bearing the names of Tuesday's shooting victims while praying for them at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Thursday, May 26, 2022.

No-one considered a need to keep unwanted, potentially dangerous people out.

I was bullied at school, by pretty much everyone, from the day I started until well into my high school years thanks to a run-of-the-mill but rather obvious physical deformity (I had my ears surgically pinned back when I turned 15). My most valuable safety asset was an older sister willing to defend me in the playground.

School was uncomfortable, often upsetting, but never did I feel unsafe. I certainly never feared for my life.

WILLIAM LUTHER
A state trooper walks past the Robb Elementary School sign in Uvalde, Texas, Tuesday, May 24, 2022, following a deadly shooting at the school.

As someone raised in that era, I've found one of the most poignant and frustrating parts of the reporting in the wake of the mass shooting of children in Uvalde, Texas this week, has been the discussion around the school's security measures - and how they must have failed.

According to news reporting, the Uvalde school district had doubled its security budget in recent years, to comply with state legislation brought in after eight students and two teachers died in a shooting at Santa Fe high School in Houston in 2018.

The result sounds like a fortress rather than a primary school.

Uvalde District had armed police officers, software to monitor social media, a threat reporting system and threat assessment teams, monitored entrances, and yes, fences to keep potentially dangerous people out. Teachers were required to lock classroom doors. Still, the 18-year-old shooter found an unlocked back door at Robb Elementary, and entered with a plan for deadly havoc.

No doubt the person who left that door unbarred will be found and questioned and blamed. And yet after Santa Fe, officials admitted none of these measures would have guaranteed safety from a person determined to carry out a deadly plan. They doubled down anyway. Texas Governor Greg Abbott​ put the focus on "hardening targets" - shorthand for making schools virtually impenetrable.

Santa Fe was one of the schools in the process of arming teachers and staff when the 2018 shooting took place. There were another 15 school shootings in the US that year, and according to a Washington Post database more than 300,000 American students have experienced gun violence in their schools since the Columbine shooting in 1999.

Abbott also promised action on tightening gun laws, and then did an apparent 180-degree turn, signing off on a permitless carry Bill in 2021. The result has been another generation of young kids, in yet another town, who can no longer feel safe at school as I did.

DARIO LOPEZ-MILLS/AP
Democrat Beto O'Rourke, who is running against Texas Governor Greg Abbott for governor this year, interrupts a news conference headed by Abbott in Uvalde, Texas.

There's been plenty of analysis this week on what has made the US such a stark outlier internationally when it comes to gun violence, and particularly mass shootings. This analysis has been going on for years; in 2017 a New York Times piece dove into the data, coming up with one answer - it's not mental health, it's not video games, it's not the overall level of violent crime - it's all the guns. Americans make up 4% of the world's population but own 42% of the guns, and studies have found that has a clear connection to the odds of it experiencing a mass shooting.

"American crime is simply more lethal", the piece concluded. "A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process."

This is - incredibly, unfortunately - a partisan issue. The New York Times this week asked all 50 Republican senators whether they would now support two Bills that passed in the House last year, that would allow stronger background checks for gun buyers. Most of them declined to answer, or said they would not. Many leaned on the need for more information - as if the research, and the litany of tragedies stretching back decades, does not exist.

That feeling you had when you heard about the Uvalde killings? Sick to your stomach, and yet deeply unsurprised? The only truly surprising, breakthrough moment, will come if and when lawmakers agree that gun control is necessary, and urgent.

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ALISON MAU • SENIOR JOURNALIST AND #METOONZ EDITORalison.mau@stuff.co.nz

Nearly 40 percent of women in Turkey subjected to violence, says HRW senior Turkey researcher



By Turkish Minute
- May 28, 2022

Around four out of 10 women in Turkey have suffered physical and/or sexual violence during their lives, said Emma Sinclair Webb, Human Rights Watch (HRW) senior Turkey researcher with the Europe and Central Asia division, in an interview with her colleague Birgit Schwarz, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported.

In the interview, Sinclair introduced a new report prepared by HRW titled “Combatting Domestic Violence in Turkey: The Deadly Impact of Failure to Protect.” According to the report, the Turkish state failed to provide effective protection from domestic violence.

Webb said this was unacceptable as nearly 40 percent of women suffered from violence or stalking. Moreover, hundreds of femicide cases were recorded each year by women’s rights groups and independent media.

Webb explained that the Turkish government had a very conservative approach to combatting violence.

“Turkey’s president is on record opposing gender equality and it has been written out of government policy,” she said. “So while we are seeing government efforts to tackle violence against women, the government simultaneously undermines its own efforts by not seeing the fight against domestic violence as part of promoting women’s rights or ensuring gender equality.”

Emphasizing that although Turkey had laws protecting women against domestic violence, Webb said there was an enormous problem with enforcing these laws and prosecuting perpetrators of violence.

She explained that courts issue a fine or suspend sentences on the condition that the perpetrator does not reoffend within five years. “The authorities are failing to undertake effective risk assessments and don’t ensure the orders are observed. This leaves domestic violence survivors at risk even when they have reported abuse,” Webb added.

Webb said most femicides could possibly have been prevented had authorities paid attention to the women’s previous complaints.

In one case, Ayşe Tuba Arslan complained 23 times about her husband’s abusive behavior. Arslan was killed after divorcing him, but only three weeks before her death was her husband prosecuted for publicly threatening to “shoot and kill” her. However, the sentence was suspended on condition that he did not repeat the offense.

According to Webb, in order to better protect women authorities need to be more consistent in collecting data. “Police and courts need to get better at risk assessment and at spotting warning signs,” she said. “And breaches of restraining orders need to be penalized more resolutely.

Webb added that social media had become instrumental in raising public awareness against gender-based violence but said it was worrying that authorities needed such public pressure to take action.

Femicides and violence against women are serious problems in Turkey, where women are killed, raped or beaten every day.

According to the We Will Stop Femicide Platform (Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracağız Platformu), 280 women were murdered in Turkey in 2021.

Webb said the Istanbul Convention was very important for combatting gender-based violence and establishing equality.

The Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, better known as the Istanbul Convention, is an international accord designed to protect women’s rights and prevent domestic violence in societies and was opened to the signature of member countries of the Council of Europe in 2011.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sparked outrage in Turkey and the international community after he issued a decree in March 2021 that pulled the country out of the international treaty, which requires governments to adopt legislation prosecuting perpetrators of domestic violence and similar abuse as well as marital rape and female genital mutilation.

Since Turkey’s withdrawal from the treaty, Turkish authorities have been pressuring women’s rights organizations over their activist work.

Pakistan: Violence against women rampant regardless of rural-urban divide

ANI
28 May, 2022

Karachi [Pakistan], May 28 (ANI): Amid growing violence against women in Pakistan, another case of two Pakistani-origin Spanish sisters Arooj Abbas and Aneesa Abbas being allegedly tortured and shot dead has been registered as they failed to get their respective husbands’ visas to settle with them in Spain.

The incident took place in the Nathia village of Gujrat district in Pakistan’s Punjab province earlier this month.

Both the sisters, who are Spanish nationals, were married to their cousins in Pakistan more than a year ago, and were not happy with their marriages, reported Just Earth News, citing the police officials.

Cases of honour killing are frighteningly regular in Pakistan, especially in areas close to the tribal regions in the north and west.

More than 470 cases of “honour” killing were reported in Pakistan in 2021, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).

In 2016, the murder of Qandeel Baloch, known as “Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian”, by her brother Waseem Azeem sparked national outrage and demands for changes to the law. Azeem strangled her in her home in the Punjab province after she shared photos on Facebook of herself with a Muslim cleric.

Azeem was sentenced to life imprisonment but was acquitted in February this year after his parents sought his release. His lawyers used what is known as the Qisas and Diyat law to circumvent the new legislation.

According to Just Earth News, Pakistan is the sixth-most populated country in the world. But it’s one of the world’s worst performers when it comes to gender parity, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2020 gender gap report.

In a derogatory remark in 2021, Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said, “Men are not robots, ladies wearing small clothes impact them,” thereby subscribing to a view long refuted by a significant body of research that shows that sexual violence is a consequence of perpetrators dehumanising female bodies.

Other leaders and ministers have often defended jirga-ordered ‘honour killings’ in their provinces as ‘custom’.

In the name of honour killing, murder committed on the pretext of family honour, women in Pakistan continue to suffer in the hands of perpetrators legitimising their actions through a misplaced sense of justice.

According to a Supreme Court judgment in 2020, Pakistan has one of the highest per capita honour killings in the world. However, by using words like ‘honour’, the Pakistan society not only downplays the atrocity of the crime but legitimises it with a belief that ‘bad character’, particularly pertaining to a woman, needs to be punished or it will tarnish the community at large. (ANI)

This report is auto-generated from ANI news service. 

ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.

Victoria's Secret bankrolls largest-ever wage theft settlement for garment factory

by Ryan King, Breaking News Reporter
| May 28, 2022 

Over 1,000 Thai employees for a garment company connected to Victoria's Secret and other top fashion brands received an $8.3 million settlement this month, the largest-ever wage theft settlement for a single garment factory, a nonprofit group said.

The roughly 1,250 workers were laid off during the pandemic from supplier Brilliant Alliance Thai, which ultimately folded in March 2021 without offering severance pay. The factory agreed to dole out $8.3 million, a record-breaking settlement, according to the Solidarity Center, which advocates workers' rights.

“Low-wage garment workers left destitute by injustice meted out by global supply chains is nothing new,” David Welsh, the Thailand country director of the Solidarity Center, told the Associated Press.

 ”What’s new is they did not accept their fate — and won.”

Victoria’s Secret agreed to help finance the settlement by providing a loan to the defunct supplier's owner, according to a recent Reuters report.

"Over several months, we had been in active communication with the factory owners to facilitate a resolution," Victoria’s Secret said in a statement obtained by the Hindustan Times. "We regret they were not ultimately in a position to conclude this matter on their own so to ensure the workers received their full severance amounts owed, Victoria's Secret agreed to advance the severance funds to the factory owners."

The factory produced lingerie and other clothing products for multiple top U.S. brands, such as Lane Bryant and Torrid. When the company folded during the pandemic, the laid-off workers did not receive severance pay as required under Thai law, per multiple reports.

Victoria's Secret appears to be the only major brand that contributed to the settlement, though it is not clear how much it contributed. The Washington Examiner reached out to the company for comment.

Thailand ordered Clover Group, the factory's owner, to pay severance within 30 days of letting the workers go, but it declined, arguing it had insufficient funds to pay them and asked to have 10 years to pay them back. For over a year, the workers fought back with help from the Triumph International Union.

Advocates hope the victory will set a precedent for other workers.

"We want more brands to do the same because sadly this will not be the last of its kind — there will be many, many more cases," Welsh added.

Shanghai residents rebel against anti-COVID lockdown


Shanghai's chaotic and inconsistent lockdowns are being challenged by increasingly angry residents. 

The New Daily@TheNewDailyAU

May 28,2022

Six days ago, Shanghai residents in an upper-income apartment complex did what was until recently unthinkable by leaving their homes against orders and demanding an immediate end to a seven-week lockdown ordeal.

What happened next was also unthinkable: they were set free.

The story of a small triumph quickly spread on chat groups across the Chinese city this week, sparking one question in the minds of those who remain confined to their homes: Should we do the same?

By the end of the week, more residents had confronted management in their complexes, and some had won at least partial freedom from the consequences of Beijing’s aim to totally eliminate the coronavirus.

Other groups have not been so restrained, with Time magazine reporting workers at Apple’s Shanghai fabrication plant this week battled guards amid demands their seven-week ordeal locked inside the factory immediately end.

Reports of increasing unrest have also emerged involving Beijing students and in other cities

.

Before COVID, shoppers swamped Shanghai’s Apple store. 

Now Apple’s locked-down workers want out. 

While it is unclear how widespread they are, the incidents reflect the frustration that has built up after more than seven weeks of lockdown, even as the number of new daily cases has fallen to a few hundred in a city of 25 million people.

They are also a reminder of the power of China’s neighbourhood committees that the ruling Communist Party relies on to spread propaganda messages, enforce its decisions and even settle personal disputes.

Such committees and the residential organisations under them have become the target of complaints, especially after some in Shanghai and other cities refused to allow residents out even after official restrictions were relaxed.
Arbitrary rules

More than 21 million people in Shanghai are now in ‘precaution zones’, the least restrictive category.

In theory, they are free to go out. In practice, the decision is up to their residential committee, resulting in a kaleidoscope of arbitrary rules.

Some are allowed out, but only for a few hours with a specially issued pass for one day or certain days of the week. Some places permit only one person per household to leave. Others forbid people to leave at all.

“We have already been given at least three different dates when we are going to reopen, and none of them were real,” Weronika Truszczynska, a graduate student from Poland who posted vlogs about her experience, said.

‘No one believed it’

“The residential committee told us, ‘You can wait a week, we are going to reopen probably on June 1’,” she said. “No one believed it.”

More than a dozen residents of her complex, many under umbrellas on a rainy day, confronted their managers on Tuesday, two days after the Sunday night breakout at the upscale Huixianju compound.

The residents, who were mostly Chinese, demanded to be allowed to leave without time limits or restrictions. After the demands were not met, some returned to protest a second day. This time, four police officers stood watch.

On Thursday afternoon, community representatives knocked on the doors of each resident with a new policy: Write their name and apartment number on a list, take a temperature check, scan a barcode – and they were free to leave.

“We got the possibility of going out just because we were brave enough to protest,” Truszczynska said.

The party’s strict anti-virus campaign has been aided by an urban environment in which hundreds of millions of people in China live in gated apartment compounds or walled neighbourhoods that can be easily blocked off.

The front line for enforcement are the neighbourhood committees, responsible for keeping track of every resident in every urban household nationwide and enforcing public health and sanitation rules.
Incentive to over-enforce

Many tend to err on the side of over-enforcement, aware of the example made of public officials who are fired or criticised for failing in their pandemic prevention duties.

The importance of the committees dwindled in the 1990s as the Communist Party relaxed restrictions on the movement of citizens, but they have been undergoing a resurgence in an ongoing tightening of societal controls under President Xi Jinping.

The incident at Huixianju prompted others to speak out. In a series of videos that circulated this week, about two dozen people march toward the Western Nanjing Road Police Station, chanting “Respect the law, give me back my life”.

Residents of a compound in Jing’an district saw the gates of neighbouring compounds open over the past month – yet theirs remained locked.

On Wednesday, about two dozen gathered at the gate, calling out to speak with a representative.

“I want to understand what are the neighbourhood leaders planning?” one woman asks in a video of the incident.

Another resident points out they should be free by now, since the compound has been case-free for a while.

“Didn’t they say on television that things are opening up? We saw it on television,” an older man says.

The next day, the community issued one-day passes – residents were allowed out for two hours on Friday, with no word on what would happen after that.

Shanghai authorities have declared a June target for life to return to normal.

-with AAP

Is Corporate Criminal Law Heading for Extinction?

by Ralph Nader / May 27th, 2022

Crimes without criminals was not a subject for study when I was in law school. The two were seen as part of the same illegal package. That was before notorious corporate lawyers and a cash register Congress combined to separate economic, health and safety crimes from corporate accountability, incarceration and deterrence.

Lawlessness is now so rampant that a group of realistic law professors, led by Professor Mihailis E. Diamantis of the University of Iowa Law School, claim there is no corporate criminal law. I say “realistic” because their assertion that corporate criminal law, does not in fact, exist is not widely acknowledged by their peers.

Most Americans know that none of the executives on Wall Street who are responsible for the lies, deception, and phony investments they sold to millions of trusting investors were prosecuted and sent to jail. “They got away with it,” was the common refrain during the 2008-2009 meltdown of Wall Street that took our economy down and into a deep recession that resulted in massive job loss and the looting of savings of tens of millions of Americans.

Not only did the Wall Street Barons escape the Sheriff but they got an obedient Congress, White House and Federal Reserve to guarantee trillions of dollars to bail them out, implicitly warning that the big banks, brokerage firms and other giant financial corporations were simply “too big to fail.” They had the economy by the throat and taxpayer dollars in their pockets. Moreover, Wall Streeters made out like bandits while people on Main Street suffered.

All this and much more made up a rare symposium organized by Professor Diamantis last year at Georgetown Law School. (See here). He wrote that the “economic impact of corporate crime is at least twenty times greater than all other criminal offenses combined,” quoting conservative estimates by the FBI. It’s not just economic, he continued: “Scholars, prosecutors and courts increasingly recognize that brand name corporations also commit a broad range of ‘street crimes’: homicide, arson, drug trafficking, dumping and sex offenses.”

The litany of corporate wrongdoing ranges from polluting the air and drinking water, dumping microplastics that end up inside human beings, promoting lethal opioids that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, providing millions of accounts or products to customers under false pretenses or without consent, often by creating false records or misusing customers’ identities, (Wells Fargo), manufacturing defective motor vehicles, producing contaminated food, allowing software failures resulting in crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX’s with 346 deaths. (See, Why Not Jail? By Rena Steinzor).

People don’t need law professors to see what’s happening to them and their children. People laugh when they hear politicians solemnly declare that “no one is above the law,” extol “the rule of law” and “equal justice under the law.”

By far the greatest toll in preventable fatalities and serious injuries in the U.S. flows from either deliberate, negligent or corner-cutting corporate crime under the direct control and management of CEOs and company presidents, many of whom make over $10,000 an hour over a 40-hour week.

Five thousand people a week die in hospitals due to “preventable problems,” documents a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine study. The EPA estimates some 65,000 deaths a year from air pollution; OSHA has estimated about 60,000 work-related fatalities from diseases and traumas in the workplace. This carnage does not include the far greater numbers of people suffering from illnesses and injuries.

This range of corporate destruction was pointed out thirty-four years ago by Russell Mokhiber in his classic book, Corporate Crime and Violence: Big Business Power and the Abuse of the Public Trust (Sierra Club, 1988).

What are Congress and the White House saying and doing about this growing corporate crime wave? Saying little and doing almost nothing. Corporate criminal law enforcement budgets are ridiculously paltry. The Department of Health and Human Services recovers less than three percent of the estimated $100 billion a year stolen from Medicare and Medicaid.  There are too few cops on the corporate crime beat and the White House and Congress are unwilling to remedy this problem.

Congress doesn’t hold broad hearings on corporate crime, except when a dustup gets headlines like the recent contaminated baby formula from the unsanitary Abbott factory in Sturgis, Michigan.

This is remarkable because since January 2021, two of the rare outspoken lawmakers against corporate criminality, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), both are chairs of subcommittees in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There are large gaps to be filled and updated in the inadequate federal corporate criminal law. Some regulatory agencies, such as the FAA (aviation) and NHTSA (auto safety) have no criminal penalty whatsoever for willful and knowing violations that directly result in fatalities.

Then there is the patsy Department of Justice (DOJ). For years we’ve asked DOJ officials to ask Congress to fund a corporate crime database (like the street crime database). Attorney General Merrick Garland won’t even respond to letters about this issue. For years, specialists like Columbia Law professor John Coffee have been urging the DOJ to stop settling the few cases they bring against corporate crooks with weak “deferred prosecution agreements” or “non-prosecution agreements.” These deals involve modest fines, no jail time for the corporate bosses and a kind of temporary probation for the corporation.

Corporate attorneys play the DOJ like a harp knowing that the Department has a small budget for prosecuting corporate crime and that many DOJ attorneys are looking for lucrative jobs in these corporate law firms, after a few years of government service. Any one of many giant corporate law firms has more attorneys than all the lawyers working on corporate crime in the Department of Justice.

Professor Diamantis, W. Robert Thomas and their colleagues are prolific writers of law review articles. They argue for a range of effective penalties that will deter recidivism, which is rampant. They probe restructuring the corporate hierarchies of privileges and immunities from the law. They argue for updating the antiquated federal criminal code to match new technological/Internet/artificial intelligence (AI) violations.

Until, however, these scholars can make it into the mainstream media to reach enough citizens and get this “law and order” agenda adopted by candidates campaigning for elective office, the ideas they advance will circulate mostly among themselves indefinitely.Facebook

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Ralph Nader is a leading consumer advocate, the author of Unstoppable The Emerging Left Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State (2014), among many other books, and a four-time candidate for US President. Read other articles by Ralph, or visit Ralph's website.

This article was posted on Friday, May 27th, 2022 at 5:49pm and is filed under Corporations, Crime, Wall Street.

 

Urban Grassroots

by Orion Kriegman / May 28th, 2022

Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher point to the need for profound systemic change if we are to ensure the integrity of our natural world and its ability to regenerate so that future generations may thrive. The ecological emergency is now; further delay only intensifies the crisis. The core question for all our efforts at protecting biodiversity is how to create a virtuous feedback loop that (1) supports nature’s regeneration and (2) generates stronger political will.

Clearly social transformation can take years of preparation, building solidarity among the constituency advocating for change. This work requires daily habit building as well as mobilizations and political strategies. Yet, when the dam bursts, mainstream adoption of new values and institutions can happen quickly, sometimes virtually overnight (see gay marriage or the fall of the Berlin Wall). The Great Transition framework asserts that human history is punctuated by collective action seizing the possible from the jaws of the probable; with pragmatic hope, we can catalyze collective action powerful enough to bend the arc of history toward a thriving planetary civilization. As with other aspects of the GT, the concept of “convivial conservation” begs the question: how?

Cities might not be the obvious place to begin if our goal is large-scale habitat conservation and transformation of industrial agriculture. However, as the urban habitat is where we encounter the most people in their daily routines, working in cities is critical for generating the politics for change. This work will look different in different parts of our world as there are different cultural and economic challenges.

Using my work as the example with which I am most familiar, the Boston Food Forest Coalition (BFFC) aims to endow healthy food forests as part of the renewable green infrastructure of Boston. In fifty years time, at a slow and steady rate of growth, this could mean more than a hundred food forests have taken root throughout the city (each with their own annual harvest festivals and cultural events). Every healthy food forest park is a garden of connectivity, renewing community leadership for adaptation and resilience, and signifies a cultural realignment of urban life with the natural world, creating nourishing relationships between neighbors, land, and food. Together, we are asking a vital question: How do we embody the ideal of the “beloved community” (in which all people are cherished and nurtured) as we engage gracefully with the work of realigning humanity with nature?

BFFC responds to the global crisis by inviting people to join together in the adventure of adapting our lives, urban infrastructure, economic relations, and mental models to create a thriving future for future generations in harmony with the web of life. BFFC makes this journey tangible and immediate, planting trees today that will bear fruit for decades. BFFC embodies a new culture (e.g., collective land ownership), teaches new practices, and grows a learning community. The food production aspect of food forests is not the only way to do urban agriculture, but it is a particularly innovative way to bring ecological agriculture principles into the city to grow more per square foot than conventional agriculture does in terms of food crops while creating space for nature to live side-by-side with humans.

The beauty of BFFC is that it is not just about food and urban agriculture; it is about exercising the “Democracy Muscle” through collective action. Growing the commons by planting new food forests is weaving a web of mutual aid among neighbors, city officials, and local leaders. As Boston transforms, so do other cities in a global effort to realign lifestyles and the infrastructure that supports new ways of living with the natural world. Nature’s capacity to regenerate the complex web of life is truly astonishing.

BFFC emerges from grassroots energy, and this energy is always deeply personal. In my case, I have two young daughters, 6 and 9 years old, and like all children, they are in love with their world and thrilled to be discovering its nuances and complexity. It is important to emphasize that they are also realizing that they are inheriting a world in crisis. I believe having tangible examples of the adults in their world coming together and trying to face that crisis head-on is critical. Yes, the climate is changing, and we don’t know what’s going to grow here in the future. The only way we’re going to figure that out is by getting out there and experimenting and doing the observations and the citizen science and rebuilding cities so that they are in balance with nature, and then lead the way in terms of how to get involved and do that work. That is what I want to see now and in the future. I want to see more connection to the next generation, more ability to bring them along and say, “Welcome to the world you’re inheriting, and we’re not just gifting you a crisis; we’re also gifting you our best efforts and ways to come up with continued sustainable solutions.” This, for me, is the locus of the needed work of systems change and cultural transformation.

Originally published as part of the forum “Conservation at the Crossroads.” Facebook

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Orion Kriegman is the founding executive director of the Boston Food Forest Coalition and played a major role in the conception of Egleston Community Orchard in Jamaica Plain. Read other articles by Orion.

This article was posted on Saturday, May 28th, 2022 at 8:54am and is filed under Environment, Solidarity.

Protest in Liverpool over plans to send refugees to Rwanda


Saturday 28 May 2022,

A protest has taken place in Liverpool over controversial plans to send refugees to Rwanda.

A hundred refugees and asylum seekers are currently being housed at Home Office accommodation for refugees or asylum seekers in Liverpool.

The refugee charity, Care4Calais believe they could be amongst the first to be deported under the government's 'Rwanda policy'.

Campaigners of all ages gathered close to the Chinese Arch on Saturday 28 May for a small rally.

Campaigners of all ages gathered near the Chinese Arch

Credit: ITV news

The Home Office says the scheme will discourage dangerous and illegal journeys to the UK and stop the dangerous trade of people trafficking.

Demonstrators are disputing claims Rwanda is the ideal solution for those seeking to rebuild their lives and have described it as a 'vicious policy'.

Many are said to be 'terrified' of being put on a plane to a country, known for it's human rights abuses.

Rwanda would take responsibility for the people who make the more than 4,000 mile journey. If they are successful in the asylum process, they would have long-term accommodation in Rwanda.

Campaigners say Liverpool should be able to welcome all refugees and asylum seekers

Credit: ITV news

Crossing the Channel in small boats is to be made a crime and those who are allowed to stay in the UK will have to live in strictly-controlled camp-like environments while their cases are considered, the paper said.

The Home Secretary Priti Patel said the scheme was needed to "save countless lives" from human trafficking.

The scheme is part of new plans to tackle people-smuggling gangs and increase UK operations in the Channel.

The plans to offshore asylum seekers to Rwanda were announced on 14 April and are the subject of several legal challenges.

Many asylum seekers have reported being terrified of being sent to Rwanda.

Refugee charity prepares legal challenge to UK’s Rwanda asylum plan

May 23, 2022

Volunteer-led charity Care4Calais are preparing a legal challenge against the government over the Rwanda asylum plan, which will send asylum seekers arriving into the UK to Rwanda for processing and resettlement. 

A Home Office spokesperson said:

"Rwanda is a safe and stable country, which has been recognised globally for their record in welcoming and integrating migrants and asylum seekers. It will be able to offer a home, stability, and a future for those in need.

"We are fully committed to working with Rwanda to offer safety to those seeking asylum and ultimately save lives through this innovative, ambitious partnership."

“The world-leading Migration Partnership will overhaul our broken asylum system, which is currently costing the UK taxpayer £1.5bn a year – the highest amount in two decades."

Migrants to be warned of Rwanda plan this week despite legal challenges

Asylum seekers have just 7 days to prove status or be sent to Rwanda

Carine Kanimba & Michela Wrong, The Long Tentacles of Rwanda’s Dictatorship

May 26, 2022

 

War on a Burning Earth

by Andrew Glikson / May 28th, 2022

According to the Fermi Paradox, the failure to date to achieve radio communication between Earth and extraterrestrial civilizations can be attributed to their inevitable short-term self-destruction, a consequence of uncontrolled dispersion of toxic substances, contamination of air, water and land, and construction of deadly weapons. On Earth this includes saturation of the atmosphere by greenhouse gases and production of nuclear weapons. The most extensive mass extinction event in the history of Earth, represented by the Permian-Triassic boundary 251 million years-ago, involved warming, acidification and oxygen depletion of the oceans, with consequent emanations of toxic H₂S and CH₄, leading to a loss of some 57% of biological families, 83% of genera and 81% of marine species.

If the history of the 21st century is ever written it would report that, while large parts of the planet were becoming uninhabitable, the extreme rate and scale of global warming and the migration of climate zones (>100 km per decade), the extent of polar ice melting, ocean warming and acidification, microplastic pollution and methane release from permafrost, threatened to develop into one of the most extensive mass extinction events in the geological history of planet Earth.

As concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases exceed 500 ppm CO₂-equivalents, consistent with global temperatures to well above 4^oC and threatening to rise at a higher rate than those of the great mass extinctions. Climate scientists have been either silenced or replaced by an army of economists and politicians mostly ignorant of the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere, but quantifying the cost-benefit economies of mitigation like corner shop grocers. Proposed mitigation action were mostly focused on reduction of emissions, neglecting the amplifying feedbacks and tipping points projected by leading climate scientists such as James Hansen.

But climate change was not the only threat hanging over the head of humanity and nature. As nations kept proliferating atomic weapons, with time the probability of a nuclear war increased exponentially. At the root of the MAD (mutual assured destruction) policy, or omnicide, resides the deep tribalism and herd mentality of the species, hinging on race, religion, ideology, territorial claims and the concept of an “enemy” perpetrated by demagogues and warmongers, leading to an Orwellian 1984 world where “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia,” as in the current “forever wars.” Prior to World War I two social forces collided, fascism and socialism. While the former has changed appearances, the latter weakened. At the core of superpower conflict between the Anglo-Saxon world and the Slavic or Chinese worlds are claims of moral superiority, but in reality naked grabs for power.

At the centre of human conscience is its mythological nature, a mindset closely related to the mastery of fire where, for longer than one million years, Homo erectus, perched at campfire, watching the flickering flames, has grown its insights and imagination, developing a fear of death, dreaming of omniscience and omnipotence, aspiring for eternal life.

As civilization developed in the Neolithic these sentiments drove humans to construct pyramids to enshrine immortality, undertake human sacrifice, to perpetrate death to appease the gods, expressed in modern times through world wars.

For an intelligent species to be able to explore the solar system planets but fail to protect its own home planet defies explanation. For a species to magnify its entropic effect on nature by orders of magnitude, developing cerebral powers which allow it to become the intelligent eyes through which the Universe explores itself, hints at yet unknown natural laws which underlie life, consciousness and complexity.

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Dr Andrew Glikson is with the Research School of Earth Science & School of Archaeology & Anthropology at Australian National University in Canberra. He can be reached at: andrew.glikson@anu.edu.au. Read other articles by Andrew.

This article was posted on Saturday, May 28th, 2022 at 9:10am and is filed under Climate Change, Environment.

The 'extreme profession' that hunts the most powerful storms on Earth

By Allison Finch, AccuWeather, Accuweather.com

This undated U.S. Air force photo shows a WC-130J Hercules from the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron "Hurricane Hunters" as it flies the first mission of the 2008 hurricane season.

 File Photo by James B. Pritchett/U.S. Air Force | License Photo

Hard-core scientists aboard specially equipped National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration aircraft play an integral role in hurricane forecasting.

Data collected from these high-flying and high-tech meteorological stations in the midst of a storm help forecasters make more accurate predictions during a powerful hurricane while researchers gain a better understanding of how storms evolve, which improves forecast models.

But the job is not for the faint of heart.

In an interview with AccuWeather national reporter Jillian Angeline, NOAA Flight Director Quinn Kalen described how these "hurricane hunters" take on these daring missions flying into such fierce storms.

Once positioned correctly above a hurricane, at an altitude of about 45,000 feet, a scientist releases a dropsonde, a weather device specially designed to be dropped out of an aircraft. As the dropsonde is falling through the hurricane, it collects data from the surrounding atmosphere, such as temperature, humidity and wind direction and velocity, which is then sent back to the aircraft via radio transmission.

"We're getting an entire column of data," Kalen explained. "It takes about 15 to 20 minutes for that dropsonde to fall. So that's a lot of data. The [dropsonde] is getting data every quarter of a second."

One of many dropsondes that are released into a hurricane to gather data.

Research flights last 8.5 hours, and roughly 30 dropsondes are released during that time, gathering approximately 504,000 data points per flight, according to University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

All of these data points are collected and transmitted back to the mainland, where scientists import them to forecast models.

On top of the data collected by the dropsondes, the plane, which is named after the Muppet character Gonzo, is outfitted with weather radar that collects even more data.

"The shape of the nose radar is why we call this Gonzo," Kalen said. "It's kind of a weird nose. Gonzo has that weird nose."

The information collected around and above the hurricane from the radars on either end of the plane help scientists create a detailed picture of the atmosphere surrounding the hurricane. Specifically, the tail Doppler radar, located on the back of the plane, collects radar images of the convection within a hurricane as the plane flies.

Kalen noted that the view from the plane right above the hurricane resembles fog. Not much can be seen from the plane's window until it is away from the storm.

Quinn Kalen, NOAA flight director, talks about his role as a hurricane hunter.

"It's essentially like you're flying in fog," Kalen said. "We'll get a real good view of the hurricane, not when we're in it but when we're out of it."

National Hurricane Center Director Ken Graham told AccuWeather the extremely valuable information hurricane hunters gather has improved the accuracy of hurricane models by 10-15 and has improved the hurricane intensity forecast by 20.

"They're heroes going towards the storm and it's bumpy. But they give us the data that we need," Graham said about the scientists that fly into hurricanes.

The role does come with plenty of risks. Kalen said scientists must always have an exit plan in case it gets too dangerous.

"It's definitely an extreme profession. Definitely like, it's the intensity of it. The intensity of the storm, of course, but the dependency on your job to do well is high," Kalen said, adding that flight directors like himself serve as a "liaison" between the pilots and scientists.

The data collected from these flights will be important in the incoming months as AccuWeather meteorologists predict another busy hurricane season this year, with six to eight hurricanes -- three to five of which are forecast to reach major hurricane status.