Climate crisis in the American west

‘We live in a desert. We have to act like it’: Las Vegas faces reality of drought

Urban sprawl spreads across the desert and, increasing water demands as drought continues to worsen in Henderson, Nevada, adjacent to Las Vegas. 

Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images


Water investigators track down wasteful homeowners and public turf torn up to conserve scarce water supplies

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Oliver Milman
@olliemilman
Fri 9 Jul 2021 

Investigator Perry Kaye jammed the brakes of his government-issued vehicle to survey the offense. “Uh oh this doesn’t look too good. Let’s take a peek,” he said, exiting the car to handle what has become one of the most existential violations in drought-stricken Las Vegas – a faulty sprinkler.

Kaye is one of nearly 50 water waste investigators deployed by the local water authority to crack down on even the smallest misuse of a liquid perilously scarce in the US west, desiccated by two decades of drought. The situation in Las Vegas, which went a record 240 consecutive days without rain last year, is increasingly severe.

Lake Mead, the vast reservoir that supplies Las Vegas with 90% of its water, has now plummeted to a historic low, meaning Nevada faces the first ever mandatory reduction in its water supply next year. This looming cutback is forcing restrictions upon the city that has somehow managed to thrive as a gaudy oasis in the baking Mojave desert.


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“The lake isn’t getting any fuller at this time so we need to conserve every single drop,” said Kaye, an energetic former US air force serviceman who wears a hi-vis vest and brandishes a badge as he does his rounds searching for violators. He starts his shift at 4am. “A lot of people think because we are government workers we are not out there at that time but we are out 24/7, every day of the year,” he said.

Kaye regularly hands out fines – they start at $80 and then double for each further offense – for the sort of rule-breaking he has spotted in Summerlin, a wealthy Las Vegas enclave where landscapers tend manicured grounds in the soaring heat. Water sprayed on to lawns and plants isn’t allowed to flow off the property, but that day a damaged sprinkler had caused water to cascade into the gutter, where the precious resource is lost.

“Look, we’ve got a little creek or stream here,” said Kaye, as he used his phone to video the water snaking on to the road. “If everyone did this, quite a bit of water would be wasted.”

It’s so hot in Vegas – this July day’s temperature will breach 40C (104F) – that the errant water will evaporate within five minutes. Kaye planted a yellow flag next to the leak as a warning to the homeowners but a few taps on the computer mounted in his cruiser shows this property has a previous warning, so an $80 fine will be on its way.

There’s a growing realization, however, that such rules – no watering between 11am and 7pm, none at all on Sundays – won’t be sufficient as Nevada is squeezed by a drought that has escalated dangerously in 2021. In June, the state passed a law to rip up “non-functional” public turf in Las Vegas, such as grass planted beside roads or on roundabouts, over the next five years to save around 10% of city water use.

Perry Kaye, a water waste investigator in Las Vegas, Nevada, issues a yellow warning flag because of a faulty sprinkler. Photograph: Oliver Milman/The Guardian

“That is just wasteful – the only person who walks on that is the person who cuts it,” said Kaye, jabbing a finger at a nearby grass verge median. “Some people just want to recreate home, where they grew up with grass.” The new law, along with a financial incentive given to homeowners to replace thirsty grass with more hardy desert plants and rocks, is an acknowledgment that climate change won’t easily allow the imposition of a verdant green oasis upon a bone-dry desert basin.
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A city that contains a huge replica of the Eiffel tower, sprawling golf courses and a simulacrum of Venetian canals complete with gondolas can never be said to fit in with its surroundings. But Las Vegas, called “The Meadows” in Spanish due to its natural springs that were pumped dry by the 1960s, is at least aware of its setting in a place so arid that only a few small creosote bushes and tumbleweeds can survive here naturally.

“We live in the desert. We are the driest city in the United States, in the driest state in the United States,” said Colby Pellegrino, deputy manager of resources for the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “We have to act like it.”

Pellegrino said the recent escalation of the drought has been “very scary” for some Vegas residents, although she insists the water authority has planned for this moment. Lake Mead’s level dropped under 1,075ft in June, barely a third full, triggering what will be the first ever cutbacks under a seven-state agreement on sharing the water from the Colorado River, which is harnessed by the Hoover dam to create the reservoir.

Different states get different water allocations and Nevada is a victim of its depopulated history, getting just 300,000 acre-feet of water a year (by comparison California gets 4.4m acre-feet) under an agreement struck before the Hoover dam was completed in the 1930s. “The joke is that Nevada’s representative was drunk,” said Pellegrino, who was born in 1983, when the state’s population was barely 900,000. It’s now more than 3m and receives tens of millions of tourists a year.

Houses, trees and swimming pools spring from the desert in Henderson, Nevada. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images

This small water allocation will shrink by 21,000 acre-feet with the new cuts, although Nevada has made impressive strides in keeping below its low cap, slashing its water use despite the population nearly doubling since the early 2000s. Pellegrino is confident that further savings can be made and scrutiny is being placed upon the water used in Vegas casinos’ ubiquitous cooling systems.

But global heating’s impact upon the west’s snowpack and rivers is unrelenting and the city’s water savings will only go so far. Las Vegas only has a supporting role in its own fate. Three-quarters of allocated Colorado River water is used to irrigate thirsty agriculture, and the overall water supply is more dependent upon the amount of snow melting hundreds of miles away in the Rocky Mountains than some extra marginal savings made in the suburbs.

“Vegas has done great things such as ripping out the grass, but we’ve lost 20% of the flow of the Colorado River since 2000 and another 10% loss by 2050 is completely possible,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University whose research has focused on the stresses facing the river.

“I worry it could be even more than that, and that should frighten everyone.”

Back in Summerlin, Perry Kaye is also relentless. A house opposite the first offender has broken sprinklers splurging water into puddles on the grass and road. Kaye bangs on the ornate door to inform the homeowner, but no one is in.

“These sprinklers haven’t popped up properly, they are just oozing everywhere,” muttered Kaye. He has been policing water waste for the past 16 years, issuing countless fines in that time. “I had hoped I would’ve worked myself out of a job by now. But it looks like I will retire first.”

Wildlife in the frame: photography sale aims to raise $1m for Africa’s parks

Elephants play at a waterhole in Trunk Puppets, by Tami Walker. All photographs courtesy of Prints For Wildlife


Five photographers share the story behind their shot, as images go on sale to support conservation charity


Graeme Green
Mon 12 Jul 2021


More than 150 wildlife photographers are taking part in a sale of wildlife prints to raise money for African Parks, a South Africa-based conservation NGO. In 2020, the first Prints for Wildlife sale raised $660,200 (£479,000), with more than 6,500 prints sold within 30 days.

This year, the initiative, founded by two photographers, Pie Aerts from the Netherlands and Austrian Marion Payr, is aiming to raise $1m. The prints will be on sale through the online shop printsforwildlife.org until 11 August.

Alongside some of the most respected wildlife photographers in the world, such as Greg du Toit, Beverly Joubert, Suzi Eszterhas, David Lloyd and Steve Winter, the sale also features emerging talent from developing nations, with the aim of promoting greater diversity among wildlife photographers.

The money raised will support African Parks, which manages 19 parks, spanning 14.7m hectares (36.3m acres), in 11 countries on behalf of governments in Africa, for the benefit of local communities and wildlife.

“Conservation was in crisis before the pandemic and continues to be during these unprecedented times,” says Andrea Heydlauff, chief marketing officer of African Parks. “In protecting Africa’s parks, we are securing functioning ecosystems, providing safe refuge for some of the world’s most threatened species, and supporting hundreds of thousands of people through employment, improved livelihoods, food security, education and healthcare.”

Here, five photographers share the story behind their images.

Will Burrard-Lucas – ‘the cubs approached inquisitively’

Curious lion cubs are captured by the BeetleCam in this image from Will Burrard-Lucas

I spent the first lockdown of 2020 completely redesigning and rebuilding my remote-control camera buggy, known as BeetleCam, and at the end of last year I took it out to Kenya. My aim was to get started on a new long-term project photographing the lions of the Mara North Conservancy in Kenya.

I introduced the Serian pride to my BeetleCam over a period of several weeks. The lionesses learned to completely ignore the buggy but it was a different story with the cubs. They remained very playful and would often approach to snarl at the camera or attempt to sneak up behind it and knock it over. This image is from an early encounter, as the cubs approached inquisitively through the long grass of the wet season.

Since starting this project, I’ve learned how all lions in the Maasai Mara are threatened by human-wildlife conflict. This often occurs when lions kill livestock on the outskirts of wildlife areas and are then poisoned in retaliation. It’s estimated that there are only about 20,000 lions left in the wild and that these occupy less than 5% of the species’ former range.

Jono Allen – ‘this image was taken on a single breath’

A humpback whale and her calf taken by freediving photographer Jono Allen

My Prints For Wildlife photo is of a mother humpback and calf beginning their enormous journey south from the tropical waters of Tonga to the frozen waters of Antarctica. This image was taken on a single breath while freediving off the small island chain of Vava’u in Tonga, where the whales congregate each year to mate and give birth.
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It’s impossible to truly understand these incredible creatures until you’ve been in the water with them. My perception will never be the same. A good biologist friend of mine has studied humpbacks for more than 10 years. She has seen thousands of whales in her time. We swam with these two whales together and within minutes of being face-to-face with them she was moved to tears.

This image is an important one to me because the humpback is one of the greatest conservation stories of our time. During the whaling era, they were brought close to extinction, but through the grace of protection and conservation they’re now back to their original numbers.

Supporting the conservation efforts of organisations such as African Parks is vital. If it wasn’t for such organisations, we would be living in a world without these two beautiful humpback whales.

Tami Walker – ‘frolicking in the water’

Trunk Puppets, Tami Walker’s image of elephants at the waterhole

Here are two elephants frolicking in the water at a pan on the south-eastern side of Hwange national park in Zimbabwe. The elephants seemed to be enjoying every moment: playing, splashing, climbing up on each other and submerging themselves. Several other herds of elephant and other game came to drink at the pan but nothing distracted these two from their fun and games.

During my years of photographing wildlife, I’ve come to realise how much wild animals are in balance with the natural order of things, with their surroundings and the natural cycles in which they survive and proliferate, and how much humanity is having a negative effect on that balance. I’ve come to understand just how vital wildlife is for the welfare and continuance of our great African heritage. The impact of human advancement and pressure on these wilderness areas is a challenge for my generation and those to come.

OK MY FAVORITE 

Nili Gudhka – ‘basking in the sun’

A cheetah cub at sunrise on the Maasai Mara in Kenya taken by Nili Gudhka

Just before sunrise in Kenya’s Maasai Mara national reserve, we found a cheetah mother with two cubs who were about three months old. The cubs became very playful as the sun rose and it got warmer. While the mother was surveying the area for food, the two cubs found a small tree. One of the cubs climbed on top and sat comfortably, basking in the sun.

The cheetah is Africa’s most endangered big cat. In the 19th century, there were 100,000 cheetahs living in the wild and today there are only about 7,000. This is due to human-wildlife conflict, habitat loss, climate change and, to me the most horrific issue, which is trafficking of cubs. Having spent countless hours with these beautiful cats, I’ve grown an emotional attachment to the species and hope that my work will be a means of advocating and conserving their existence.

Ketan Khambhatta – ‘leaving a cloud of dust’

Ketan Khambhatta captures the drama of a river crossing by zebra and wildebeest in the Mara Triangle in Kenya

I took this photograph at one of the river crossing points in the Mara Triangle, during the great migration of the wildebeest and zebras. I had been waiting in our vehicle for the wildebeest herds to cross the river and observed the zebras slowly moving forward to test the waters for crocodiles. But while the zebras were still checking, the wildebeest just started to run and jump into the river, leaving a cloud of dust and creating a dramatic moment that I thought would make for a great photo.

Being in the wild has increased my compassion towards wildlife. What became apparent during my photography trips is the threat that many animals face for various reasons, such as habitat loss, poaching and climate change.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

Biden’s clean energy plan would cut emissions and save 317,000 lives

A new report has found that a policy standard would be most effective to reach the goal of 80% renewable energy use by 2030

Climate activists march outside the White House to protest against fossil fuel use and to urge Joe Biden to prioritize clean energy climate policy.

 Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

Oliver Milman
@olliemilman
Mon 12 Jul 2021 

A Biden administration plan to force the rapid uptake of renewable energy would swiftly cut planet-heating emissions and save hundreds of thousands of lives from deadly air pollution, a new report has found amid growing pressure on the White House to deliver a major blow against the climate crisis.

Of various climate policy options available to the new administration, a clean energy standard would provide the largest net benefits to the US, according to the report, in terms of costs as well as lives saved.

A clean energy standard would require utilities to ratchet up the amount of clean energy, such as solar and wind, they use, through a system of incentives and penalties. The Biden administration hoped to include the measure in its major infrastructure bill but it was dropped after compromise negotiations with Republicans.


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But the new report, conducted by a consortium of researchers from Harvard University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Syracuse University, suggests it would be the most effective tool in reaching a White House goal of 80% renewable energy use by 2030. Joe Biden has said he wants all electricity to be renewable by 2035.
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A clean energy standard to reach the 80% goal by the end of the decade would save an estimated 317,500 lives in the US over the next 30 years, due to a sharp reduction in air pollution from the burning of coal, oil and gas. In 2030 alone, 9,200 premature deaths would be avoided once the emissions cut is achieved. The number of lives saved would be “immediate, widespread and substantial”, the report states.

A total of $1.13tn in health savings due to cleaner air would be achieved between now and 2050, with air quality improvements most acutely felt by black people who currently face disproportionate harm from living near highways and power plants.

Every state in the US would gain better air quality, the report found, although the greatest benefits would go to Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and Illinois, all states with substantial fossil fuel infrastructure.

The rapid switch to renewables would cost around $342bn until 2050, via capital and maintenance costs, although fuel costs would dwindle as renewables are cheaper to run than fossil fuels. The study added, however, that the financial benefits from addressing the climate crisis would dwarf this figure, at nearly $637bn.

“The cost are much lower than we expected and the deaths avoided are much higher; there really is a huge opportunity here to address climate change and air quality,” said Kathy Fallon Lambert, a study co-author and an air quality expert at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

“This would be a huge leap in ambition and we’d see that in the health impacts, there would be millions of fewer asthma attacks, for example. And this doesn’t even consider the health impacts from heat and other climate-related causes.”

Lambert said a clean energy standard would be “extremely effective” at slashing emissions, far more so than other proposals such as a carbon tax.

Biden is facing pressure from environmentalists, as well as major companies such as Apple and Google, to implement the new standard after it was dropped from the infrastructure bill. The president has said the measure will be included in a new reconciliation bill that can pass along party lines, although that will require every single Democratic senator to vote for it, which will prove a challenge.

The White House is determined this will happen however, with Gina McCarthy, Biden’s top climate adviser, saying the measure is a “non-negotiable” in the next infrastructure package.

“We need to make sure that we’re sending a signal that we want renewable energy and that it’s going to win,” McCarthy told Punchbowl News last week.

Goldfish dumped in lakes grow to monstrous size, threatening ecosystems

Minnesota pet owners warned not to release fish into wild, where they wreak havoc on native species

As many as 200m goldfish are bred for the pet trade every year; too many of them end up dumped in lakes where they grow to a monstrous size. Photograph: City of Burnsville

Edward Helmore
Mon 12 Jul 2021 

Authorities in Minnesota have appealed to aquarium owners to stop releasing pet fish into waterways, after several huge goldfish were pulled from a local lake.

Officials in Burnsville, about 15 miles south of Minneapolis, said released goldfish can grow to several times their normal size and wreak havoc on indigenous species.

“Please don’t release your pet goldfish into ponds and lakes!” the city tweeted on Friday. “They grow bigger than you think and contribute to poor water quality by mucking up the bottom sediments and uprooting plants.”

Last November, officials in nearby Carver county removed as many as 50,000 goldfish from local waters. The county water management manager, Paul Moline, said goldfish “are an understudied species” with “a high potential to negatively impact the water quality of lakes”.

Like carp, goldfish can easily reproduce and survive through low levels of oxygen during the Minnesota winter.

“A few goldfish might seem to some like a harmless addition to the local water body – but they’re not,” the Minnesota department of natural resources advised.

Ecological destruction wrought by released aquarium pets is not new. Carnivorous lionfish, native to the Indo-Pacific but believed to have been released by Florida pet owners after Hurricane Andrew in 1982, have killed off dozens of Caribbean species, allowing seaweed to overtake the reefs.

Goldfish have received less attention than other invasive species, including Asian carp and zebra mussels, but warnings have been issued in Virginia and Washington state as well as Australia and Canada.

In 2013, Scientific American reported that researchers trawling Lake Tahoe netted a goldfish that was nearly 1.5ft long and weighed 4.2lb. The author of a report on California’s aquarium trade said: “Globally, the aquarium trade has contributed a third of the world’s worst aquatic and invasive species.”

Wildlife officials in Virginia warned recently that “pet owners should never release their aquatic organisms into the wild” after an angler caught a 16in goldfish.

The costs of rehabilitating waterways infested with goldfish is substantial. Carver county in Minnesota signed an $88,000 contract with a consulting firm to study how to eradicate shoals.

The Washington Post reported that in 2018 Washington state officials said they would spend $150,000 rehabilitating a lake near Spokane. In Alberta, Canada, an invasive-species expert called a goldfish problem “scary”.

It is estimated that as many as 200 million goldfish are bred each year, most ending up on domestic display.

Cuban president claims protests part of US plot to ‘fracture’ Communist party

Cuban officials blame the US for Sunday’s demonstrations as Biden calls on island’s leaders to hear citizens’ ‘clarion call for freedom’


02:04Thousands join rare anti-government protests in Cuba – video

Tom Phillips and Ed Augustin in Havana
Mon 12 Jul 2021 

The Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has attacked the “shameful delinquents” he claimed were trying to “fracture” his country’s communist revolution after the Caribbean island witnessed its largest anti-government protests in nearly three decades.

As Cuban officials blamed the US for Sunday’s demonstrations, Joe Biden called on the island’s leaders to hear its citizens’ “clarion call for freedom”.

“The Cuban people are bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights,” Biden said in a statement.

In a televised address on Monday morning Díaz-Canel, who recently succeeded Raúl Castro as the Communist party’s top figure, painted the protests as part of a United States-backed, social media-driven plot to stir up public discontent and overthrow the Cuban regime.

“The approach wasn’t peaceful yesterday,” the 61-year-old politician claimed, criticising the “completely vulgar” behaviour of some demonstrators who he accused of throwing rocks at police and destroying cars. Díaz-Canel conceded other protesters had legitimate concerns over food shortages and blackouts, although he blamed those problems on US sanctions. “It’s legitimate to feel dissatisfaction,” the party’s powerful first secretary said in the broadcast.


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Rogelio Polanco Fuentes, a top party official who runs its ideology department, denounced the protests as part of a well-funded US-sponsored effort to create “instability and chaos” in Cuba, which is currently experiencing its worst economic slump in decades as well as a worsening Covid crisis.

Polanco Fuentes compared Sunday’s protests to the failed US-backed uprising against Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, in 2019. “We are living through new chapters of the non-conventional war … in other places they have called these Colour Revolutions … or soft coups,” Polanco said.

Cuban dissidents rejected those claims about the protests which rippled across Cuba on Sunday, with thousands taking to the streets to denounce the lack of medicine and food and the lack of political freedoms.

By Sunday afternoon the demonstrations had reached one of Cuba’s most iconic locations: the seafront Malecón in the capital Havana where thousands of protesters were seen chanting “homeland and life” and “freedom”. The Malecón promenade was the setting of Cuba’s last significant street demonstrations, a sudden and short-lived explosion of dissent in 1994 known as the “Maleconazo Uprising”.

“What is happening is absolutely historical for us … I think this is a point of no return. Things will never be there same after this,” said Carolina Barrero, a 34-year-old Havana-based activist. “We are talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of people, all across the island. In every little town there was protest, [it was] completely spontaneous.

“They were shouting: ‘We don’t have fear any more!’ ‘We want freedom!’ and ‘Abajo la dictadura!’ (Down with the dictatorship!)’” added Barrero, an art historian who said she had recently been placed under house arrest after being detained reading a poem outside Cuba’s culture ministry.

Paul Hare, the former British ambassador in Havana, said Cuba’s leaders would be concerned by the highly unusual eruption of dissent, and particularly how it had been organized with the help of social media. Word of the protests spread rapidly on Sunday, as celebrities and influencers shared news of the marches using the hashtag #SOSCuba.

“What Cuba’s government has always dreaded is a coordinated movement, as opposed to sporadic protests … They see it as the possible genesis of an organized rival political movement,” Hare said.

“The hardliners will be saying: ‘Be careful – this could get out of hand’ … They will be worried [about the protests]. It is a sign that the Communist party is no longer able to vertically dictate what policy should be,” Hare added.

Cuban activists said they were unimpressed with Díaz-Canel’s initial response to their demands, and particularly his call on Sunday for “revolutionaries” to hit the streets to confront protesters’ provocations “with firmness and bravery”.

“What worries me the most is how they are trying to lay the ground for a wave of repression,” said Claudia Genlui Hidalgo, a 30-year-old dissident who saw several friends arrested on Sunday. “When he says ‘revolutionaries to the street’, he’s inciting violence.”

Barrero said she hoped the protests would lead to a peaceful transition away from one-party rule but was also troubled by the possibility of conflict and by Díaz-Canel’s description of the protests as “counter-revolutionary mercenaries”.

Hare predicted there would now be a political crackdown on those identified as protest ringleaders as Communist party security chiefs fought to prevent a repeat.

World leaders reacted to Cuba’s unexpected convulsion on Monday with Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, saying he hoped a peaceful resolution could be reached “without the use of force, without confrontation and without violence”. “The Cubans must decide [the solution] because Cuba is a free, independent and sovereign nation – there must be no interventionism,” López Obrador added.

A spokesperson for Russia’s foreign ministry also cautioned against “outside interference” that sought to “encourage the destabilization” of the communist-run island.

‘It’s a hotbed’: Miami’s role in Haiti murder plot fits decades-long pattern

Exile communities, ready supply of military veterans, history of corrupt local politics and drugs money make city a nexus for mayhem

A man sits next to a mural in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami.

 Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Julian Borger
Tue 13 Jul 2021 

One of the less surprising developments in the unfolding mystery of the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse is the central role of Miami in the whole story.

For decades, Miami has been the launching pad and a byword for half-baked plots and coups – from the Bay of Pigs, the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961, to last year’s harebrained raid on Venezuela, and now, allegedly, last week’s murder of the Haitian president. Most of the supposed participants were killed or arrested in the 24 hours after the murder.

The main suspect, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, is a Haitian with strong ties to the Miami area, as does another Haitian-American detained by the Haiti authorities, and the security firm alleged to have recruited the Colombian mercenaries accused of involvement in the attack has an office in Doral, just by Miami International Airport and Donald Trump’s golf resort.

The security firm reportedly named by some of the plotters, calls itself the Counter Terrorist Unit Federal Academy (CTU) and is run by a Venezuelan exile. When Miami Herald reporters went to knock on the door of its modest offices, no one opened the door.


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It is all reminiscent of the ill-fated Operation Gideon, a brazen abortive raid on Venezuela in May last year, hatched in Miami by exiles and mercenaries run by a gung-ho former Green Beret, Jordan Goudreau. That plot left eight people dead and 100 arrested. As in Haiti, the raiders were paraded in front of the cameras by the government they were supposed to overthrow, to rub in the humiliation.

Miami has all the ingredients required for an nexus of mayhem: several exile communities, dreaming and scheming about a return to power in their home countries, a ready supply of military veterans with Latin American and Caribbean experience from US Southern Command, headquartered in Doral, and a long history of corrupt, ethnically-driven local politics to provide a permissive environment.

Narco-dollars from the cocaine trade have historically served as the connective tissue and lubricant between these three pillars.

In her book on Miami, author Joan Didion wrote that its exiles were under “a collective spell, an occult enchantment from that febrile complex of resentments and revenges and idealizations and taboos which renders exile so potent an organizing principle”.

The urban sprawl that runs up the coast from Miami to Fort Lauderdale to West Palm Beach is home to the diaspora of most Latin American states, but the three most significant and active communities today are Cuban, Venezuelan and Haitian.

The Cubans have traditionally been based in Little Havana, just west of downtown Miami. A few miles to the north is the densely packed neighbourhood of Little Haiti. The Miami Venezuelans are more dispersed but the biggest concentration is in Doral.

“It’s the exile headquarters of the world,” said Anne Louise Bardach, who reported extensively on the city for her book Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana. “It’s because Florida is a peninsula that is basically a dagger cutting into the Caribbean and aimed at Latin America.”

The exile communities, Bardach said, operate almost like autonomous countries, with their own internal governance, their political machines, their own radio stations and newspapers.

“It’s a hotbed: people aching for their homeland,” she said. “They are all governments-in-waiting, and they all think they are about to take power next week.”

Each of the exile communities inevitably has its own relationship with US intelligence and their aspirations have played a role in US foreign policy.


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Cuban exile militias trained in the Everglades ever since the 1959 revolution, coming under the control of Jorge Mas Canosa, an exile who became a major force in Florida politics and in Washington. The Cuban and Venezuelan diaspora vote played a major part in swinging Florida to Trump in 2016 and 2020.

The city’s Haitian community has historically had less clout, but it has been a major force in Haitian affairs, while helping drive the demand for the security companies that have sprouted up across South Florida.

“The longstanding precarious nature of Haiti’s security environment is such that Haitian elites have long relied upon private security firms to ensure their own personal security,” said Jenna Ben-Yehuda, a former Haiti analyst at the US state department, and now president of the Truman National Security Project.

“The presence of private security has been pervasive throughout Haiti for decades, probably exceeding the number of Haitian national police officers.”

There are plenty of firms run by former US special forces soldiers seeking a comfortable retirement, like Goudreau. The firm named by the Haitian police as recruiting the Colombians in the attack on Moïse, CTU, did not have quite the same pedigree. Its owner, Tony Intriago, boasted of police experience in Latin America, and special forces connections, according to a Miami Herald profile, but none of it was confirmed. The Haitian police have so far not presented evidence of CTU’s involvement, and Intriago has been unavailable for comment since the assassination.

The initial signs suggest that the Haiti operation was aimed at something far more ambitious than mere murder, up to and including regime change. The fact that it fell well short, and simply added to the misery and chaos of its target country, is in many ways, just another Miami hallmark.

History shows us that outsiders can never bring peace to Afghanistan


The US and British withdrawal has set off panic, but the truth is they were exacerbating the problem they were trying to solve
‘

What Afghans really need help with is getting everyone else to leave them alone.’ 

A British army flag-lowering ceremony. 

Photograph: Ministry of Defence/Getty Images

Tamim Ansary

Mon 12 Jul 2021

Friends keep asking me to sign petitions urging President Biden to change his mind about withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. They all agree that the US can’t stay in the country for ever but this, they say, is not the time to leave: the Taliban are surging, and the social gains of the past 20 years are in jeopardy.

I’ve not signed any of those petitions. Yes, the Taliban have committed horrific offences, and they won’t stop. And they must be stopped. Just the other day I saw a video of villagers in northern Afghanistan burying a dozen civilians killed by a bomb: an old woman wept because her whole family had been wiped out. Oh, but wait – that bomb was dropped by the government, delivered by drone.

Both sides in this war kill civilians. I’d sign any petition that would stop the fighting and bring peace. What’s more, when this war ends, I hope the government now in Kabul emerges victorious. I hope Afghans resume their social and material progress on every front. But I can’t forget a pattern of Afghan history so blatant that I’m amazed it’s not central to this conversation.

The government in Kabul has never been able to secure authority in Afghanistan as a whole when it is held in place by an outside power’s military.

In 1839, the British replaced the Afghan monarch Dost Mohammed with his rival Shah Shuja, who had just as legitimate a claim to the throne as he. But the British had put him in power, so the country went up in flames and two years later the whole British community in Kabul had to flee on foot, most of them dying on the way out.

In 1878 the British tried again: this time, they ousted Afghan ruler Sher Ali and tried to rule the country through his son, Yaqub. Sure enough, the British cantonment was sacked, their representative was killed, the country went up in flames. The British had to give up and leave the country to a strongman, Abdul Rahman, who knew what he needed to do to secure his position with Afghans: he made a deal with the British and Russia to keep them both out of Afghanistan.

Jump ahead to 1978: the Soviets helped Afghan communists topple the last of the Afghan ruling family and elevated their own man, Nur Muhammad Taraki, to power. What happened? The country went up in flames. The Soviets sent in 100,000 troops to keep the communists in power, but that only turned the fire into a bonfire. The war raged for 10 years until at last the Soviets simply left – with the country eviscerated.

Then came the Americans. They dropped a fully formed government on to Kabul, picked Hamid Karzai to run the country, and clothed him in all the markers of legitimacy recognised in western democracies: constitution, parliament, elections. Under Karzai, girls went back to school, women’s rights improved, infrastructure was restored, progress was made.

Sure enough, however, as with all the previous great power attempts to manage Afghans through Afghan proxies, Kabul proved unable to secure countrywide legitimacy. Resistance brewed in the villages and spread to the cities.


Taliban sweep through Herat province as Afghan advance continues

In its war with forces based in the countryside, the Kabul government was hobbled by one huge disadvantage – the outside military forces that were helping it hold power. Because of that, it had no narrative to counter the one the Taliban wielded, which said: the government in Kabul isn’t Afghan, it’s a bunch of puppets and proxies for Americans and Europeans whose main agenda is to undermine Islam. Drones and bombs could not defeat that narrative but only feed it.

The US and Nato can’t stay in Afghanistan for ever, but is this the time to leave? The answer has to be yes if, as I am arguing, the US and Nato military presence in Afghanistan is causing the very problem it is supposed to be solving.

Many people assume the Taliban are the face of what Afghanistan would be without US help. But the American military presence might be obscuring the single most crucial fact: the Taliban don’t represent Afghan culture. They too are, in a sense, an alien force.

Before the Soviet invasion 40 years ago, it’s fair to say most Afghans were deeply devoted Muslims. The underlying issue among Afghans was not Islam or not-Islam but which version of Islam: Kabul’s urban, progressive version or the conservative version of the villages. Afghans involved in that debate were the ones who rose up against the Soviet invaders.

But the Taliban are not those Afghans. The Taliban originated in the refugee camps of Pakistan. Their worldview was moulded in religious schools funded by elements of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency. They were armed by Islamists from the Arab world, some of whom are in the country now, calling themselves Taliban. If the western military presence were removed, the Afghan energy that refuses to accept outsiders telling them who to be might recognise the Taliban as the alien force.

The great irony of the western project to bring democracy and social progress to Afghanistan is this: Afghans have a powerful progressive current of their own. It’s Islamic, not secular, but it is progressive. In the six decades after the country gained independence from the British and before it was invaded by the Soviets, Afghanistan was governed by Afghans. During that time, what did that Afghan government achieve? It liberated Afghan women from the previously obligatory burqa. It promulgated a constitution. It created a parliament with real legislative power. It set up elections. It built schools for girls nationwide. It pushed for coeducation. It opened women’s access to a college education at Kabul University and it opened public employment opportunities for them in professions such as medicine and law. It is staggering to look back at that era.

As the US and British withdrawal proceeds, the country is surrounded by outside forces hungering to get in: Pakistan, Iran, Russia, India, China. Before any of them succeed, there ought to be a global conference at which international actors can work out a way to keep one another out of Afghanistan. For what Afghans really need help with is getting everyone else to leave them alone.


Tamim Ansary is the author of Games Without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

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An Australian soldier’s heroics under fire to save an Afghan interpreter put our ministers to shame

There is still a chance to save the hundreds of locally engaged staff who trusted us

‘If it appears that Australia has cut and run ... that is because it has. The global optics – and the reality for those left behind – are appalling.’ 

Photograph: Corporal Raymond Vance

Paul Daley

Tue 13 Jul 2021

The Australian Special Air Service trooper Mark Donaldson was awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry after his vehicle convoy came under enemy fire in Afghanistan’s battle of Khaz Oruzgan in September 2008.

The citation for Donaldson’s VC outlines how the enemy attacked his convoy with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, pinning it down and causing many casualties. Donaldson deliberately distracted the enemy, drawing fire on himself so that the wounded could be saved and brought to the vehicles.


‘A tragic and wasted opportunity’: Australia’s inglorious exit from Afghanistan

The convoy’s escape was slow and perilous. The vehicles were full of wounded; Donaldson and the uninjured had to run, exposed, beside them to escape fire.

“During the conduct of this vehicle manoeuvre to extract the convoy from the engagement area, a severely wounded coalition force interpreter was inadvertently left behind,” the citation reads. “Of his own volition and displaying complete disregard for his own safety ... Donaldson moved alone, on foot, across approximately 80 metres of exposed ground to recover the wounded interpreter.

“His movement, once identified by the enemy, drew intense and accurate machine gun fire from entrenched positions. Upon reaching the wounded coalition force interpreter ... Donaldson picked him up and carried him back to the relative safety of the vehicles then provided immediate first aid before returning to the fight.”

Donaldson moved quickly and decisively. It was, clearly, unthinkable for him to leave the wounded interpreter – to abandon him to a certain battlefield death.

Right now the federal government should take Donaldson as the exemplar when it comes to the treatment of locally engaged staff who worked with Australian military forces before they were ingloriously pulled out of Afghanistan in mid-June.

Instead, with the resurgent Taliban retaking Afghanistan and targeting those locally engaged staff, including interpreters, the federal government is dragging the chain – tying up the processing of the asylum claims of the locally engaged staff in unnecessary bureaucracy. While there is still a chance to save the hundreds of Afghans who trusted Australia and supported its military and aid enterprises, they should be immediately removed to another safe country for visa processing. The cost, danger and strategic difficulty of doing that in a country again falling to the Taliban should not be a consideration.

Ministers insist that security vetting for protection visas is happening as fast as possible in Afghanistan. Clearly it is not happening fast enough for those former interpreters and other staff facing death or who have already been killed for serving those the Taliban regard as the invading “infidel”. A major impediment in the visa processing is the permanent closure of the Australian embassy in Afghanistan in May – a move that also heavily compromises realistic chances of prosecuting Australian troops for alleged war crimes.

The last of the US forces will abandon Afghanistan in late August.

If it appears that Australia has cut and run, pre-emptively, diplomatically and militarily, before the American retreat ... that is because it has. The global optics – and the reality for those left behind – are appalling.

The former prime minister John Howard committed Australian troops to the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and, in so doing, to Australia’s longest war. He speaks of Australia’s “moral obligation” to the Afghan locally engaged staff. Notwithstanding the irony of being proselytised to about the morality of the tail-end of this century’s main Middle East wars by Howard (who diverted Australian military resources to the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the most spurious of pretexts, allowing terrorist cells and the Taliban to re-emerge in Afghanistan) he has a point about the interpreters.

The world, meanwhile, is watching how the US and its allies, not least Australia, meet their moral obligations on the back of their Afghanistan retreat.

Australia already had poor form in this space, having abandoned many locally engaged staff when it pulled out of South Vietnam in 1972.

Australia’s refusal to protect Afghan interpreters from the Taliban is a catastrophic moral failure


“I’ve got Afghan guys who I worked closely with who I’m now writing references for,” says former police officer and war crimes investigator David Savage, who was severely injured and almost killed by a suicide bomber while working on an Australian aid project in Afghanistan in 2012.

“I’ve written directly to the [federal] ministers responsible and I literally just get stock standard replies, you know there is a process and if they fit our criteria they’ll be eligible for visas. If they wanted to bring them here with the urgency required to save them, they could. This is an avoidable tragedy.

“And it’s just strategically dumb in the long term as well. Who would risk their lives for Australia after this? Sure, nothing might happen for a while. But Australia is going to end up going into another country – whether it’s a peacekeeping mission, war or aid delivery. And which locals would put their hands up to say, ‘Yeah, we will trust the Australians’?”

As Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon, defence minister when Donaldson risked his life to retrieve that wounded Afghan interpreter, says: “Donaldson’s VC citation should be reproduced on the mousepad of every Minister who sits on the National Security Committee.

“I’ve no doubt the issue is not a simple one and there will be those with questionable claims. I have first-hand experience. But only two key questions need be asked and answered: did this person assist, and are they now at risk as a result of the help they provided?”

Interview

Jackson Browne: ‘I think desire is the last domino to fall’

The singer-songwriter discusses his new album and how his age and the current political landscape has shifted his musical direction

Jackson Browne: ‘What’s more personal than your political belief?’ 

Photograph: Nels Israelson

Jim Farber
Tue 13 Jul 2021 06.36 BST

In the nearly seven years leading up to Jackson Browne’s new album, Downhill from Everywhere, he entered a new decade of life (his 70s), became a grandfather and saw fresh waves of activists, from the MeToo movement to Black Lives Matter, replace the ones that had inspired him in the 60s and 70s. At the same time, many of his new songs center on a theme most people associate with the bloom of youth: desire. “I think desire is the last domino to fall,” Browne said in a phone interview from his LA home. “Desire is eternal, like hope. It’s just your capacity to act on it that changes,” he added with a dark laugh.

It’s that capacity that Browne ponders and challenges throughout the album, from its restless opening track, Still Looking for Something, to its finale, Song for Barcelona, which presents that Spanish city’s vibrancy as its own avenue for renewal. With characteristic eloquence and reach, Browne addresses desire in all its forms, whether that be for a romantic connection, a sense of purpose, a political goal or simply to experience something new.

Despite the scope of his yearning, Browne kept his perspective tight by framing everything from a well-seasoned point of view. “I’m old, you know,” said the 72-year-old songwriter. “It’s one of the undeniable facts of this life that it doesn’t last forever. So, I think my questions now have more to do with, ‘what can be accomplished in the time I have left?’ And, ‘what are we here for in the first place?’”

Such philosophical questions have served as both a spur and a muse for Browne ever since he first garnered attention as a teenage poet prodigy in the late 60s, when he wrote such improbably heavy songs as These Days. Not that he finds the gravity of such songs unlikely. “Kids have a very intense emotional life,” he said. “They just don’t get credit for it.”

He believes some of his flair for capturing grave emotions comes from listening to a lot of older blues and folk musicians from a young age. “When you sing an old song, you take on that feeling,” he said. “Also, my mother had this great collection of blues lyrics that treated them like an anthology of poems. That stuff hit me like a thunderbolt. ‘Man, this is the stuff!’ I thought. It’s a distillation of the human spirit.”

The political side of older folk songs inspired him to become his own kind of musical activist. In that spirit, the new album continues Browne’s common pattern of balancing politically minded pieces with personal ones. Still, he pushes back against the assumption that there’s a clear separation between the two. “What’s more personal than your political belief?” he said. “It’s highly personal.”

At the same time, he’s well aware that many people find songs with a political message preachy and pedantic. For him, such criticisms go with the territory. “You try not to preach,” he said. “But the problem is, if you’re too oblique, no one knows what the hell you’re talking about.”

He believes the resistance by some listeners to political music comes from a kind of guilt. “They can feel like they’re being lectured to simply because they don’t know much about the subject,” he said. “And they get the feeling they should know more.”

He has experienced such awkwardness first-hand while performing political songs he has written like Lives in the Balance. “I could tell people were getting restless,” he said, “so, I said to the audience, ‘I can see that I’m making some of you uncomfortable, but I feel like maybe that’s what I should do.’”

Photograph: Library of Congress

For the new album, Browne wrote a song called Until Justice is Real, whose title echoes the rallying cry of the activist group Color of Change. Their stated mission is “to create a more human and less hostile world for Black people in America”. Another song on the album, The Dreamer, deals with the vexing issues surrounding Mexican immigration to the US. Such messages arrive at an opportune time. In the last few years, young people have become more politically involved than at any time since Browne was young. “For a long time, it didn’t seem like youth engaged in anything like this,” the songwriter said. “Maybe it’s that now the problems are so severe, they can’t be ignored.”

While the return to activism may stir Browne, the rise of Donald Trump, and what that has revealed, has shaken his deepest assumptions about both politics and human nature. “Like a lot of people, I fundamentally believed that we were on a gradual ascent towards solving the problems that we have had all along, having to do with inclusion and opportunity and justice,” he said. “I thought that things were getting better. Evidently, I was wrong. We can’t pretend any more than we don’t have the same divisions in this country that we’ve had since the civil war.”
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But if Browne’s world view has darkened, his own life seems to be on the upswing. He says he’s now more excited about making music than he has been in years, buoyed by his band, who contributed more to the songwriting process than usual for the new album. More, the lyrics to several new songs, including Human Touch and Minutes to Downtown, capture a man who, late in life, has found a new romantic involvement. In the latter song, he sings, “I didn’t think I would ever feel this way again/no, not with a story this long and close to the end.”

Along the way, the song’s narrator offers a key detail, referring to “the years I’ve seen that fell between my birth date and yours”, clearly speaking to a younger lover. When asked about the lines, Browne takes a long pause. “I hate to disclose stuff about the personal part of the song because songs are about the listener,” he said. But, “in this case, I’m telling the truth about my own situation.”

Jackson Browne and Kevin Smith at Groove Masters. Photograph: Photo by Lori Fletcher

He wouldn’t be more specific but he stressed that, to him, “the more telling part of the lyric is the line about ‘a river changing course’. I actually looked it up and that can happen. Rivers do change course, but it’s a long process. I think my life has changed course. I’ve taken on a commitment to personal growth. And it’s late,” he added.

Browne deals with such late-breaking quests in a humorous way in the album’s single, Cleveland Heart, which finds him travelling to the famous Cleveland Clinic to have an artificial heart transplant. In the song, he says of that miraculous device, “they’re made to take a bashing / and never lose their passion. They never break and they don’t ache,” he sings. “They just plug in and shine.”

“It’s the whole idea of eliminating human frailty,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be great? Automatic happiness!”

In the video for the song – which features songwriter Phoebe Bridges playing a nurse – Browne once again underscores his age by letting his hair go grey. “I’m as vain as the next person,” he said. “But what are you going to do? To me, when I see an old guy with a dye job it interferes with my enjoyment of the person’s work. If you’re talking about what’s really going on in a life, you can’t be wearing a disguise.”

Browne’s sustained quest to be frank led him to close the album with Song for Barcelona, which imagines a life for him beyond music, made possible by a city he has long loved. “The song is about coming to terms with mortality and life’s temporal changes,” he said. Barcelona “is a place I could imagine myself going to live at some point. I would be like one of those little old people you encounter on the street – another person in the crowd.”

Downhill from Everywhere is released on 23 July

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How a tax haven is leading the race to privatise space

Luxembourg has shown how far a tiny country can go by serving the needs of global capitalism. Now it has set its sights on outer space


Illustration: Ben the Illustrator

The long read

How a tax haven is leading the race to privatise space | Luxembourg | The Guardian

FROM 2017