Biden Names MAGA Movement As ‘the Most Extreme Political Organization’ In Recent U.S. History


Murjani Rawls
Wed, May 4, 2022

US President Joe Biden speaks about the economy in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on May 4, 2022.

In a press conference earlier today, President Biden went on the offense and spoke about the GOP’s Trump-shaped agenda, which he characterized as ‘extreme’ in an effort to set his administration with momentum heading into the midterm elections, Politico reports.

“Let me tell you about this ultra MAGA agenda. It’s extreme, as most MAGA things are,” Biden said in remarks at the White House, seeking to tie the plan to former President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” tagline.

Biden also spoke about Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) “11 Point Plan to Rescue America”– something Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t even support. Scott’s plan would raise taxes on millions of American families, reduce the government workforce, outlaw asking about “gender identity” on government forms, and propose a sunset on all federal legislation every five years that would force Congress to reauthorize essential programs like Social Security and Medicare.

“Senator Rick Scott of Florida … released what he calls the ultra-MAGA agenda. It’s a MAGA agenda all right,” Biden said. “Let me tell you about this ultra-MAGA agenda. It’s extreme, as most MAGA things are.”

“I think it is truly outrageous,” Biden said. “I’ve offered a different plan, a plan rooted in American values of fairness and decency.”

Biden set out proposals to pay for his domestic climate and social spending package by raising taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations and imposing a minimum tax on billionaires. He also reiterated his comments about the leaked Supreme Court opinion and wondered what other rights would be on the chopping block.

“What happens if you have states change the law saying that children who are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children?” Biden said. “Is that legit under the way the decision is written? What are the next things that are going to be attacked?”

The World’s Most ‘Pro-Life’ Nations Offer a Grim Preview of America's Future

Jill Filipovic
Tue, May 3, 2022

Supporters of Honduras' ruling National Party hold signs and flags reading "Honduras yes, abortion no" during a march

Supporters of Honduras' ruling National Party hold signs and flags reading "Honduras yes, abortion no" during a march against abortion at a rally attended by Nasry Asfura, the party's candidate for president in elections this month, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras November 7, 2021. Credit - Fredy Rodriguez—Reuters

A few years ago, in a small home off an uneven road in Honduras, I got a little peek into what life is like when abortion is illegal.

There, I met a woman in her early 20s, who for privacy I’ll call Alma. She lived with her family and a smattering of extremely cute animals – there were a few little dogs, a kitten or two, a hen and her chicks. Months earlier, Alma had had stillbirth – she hadn’t even known she was pregnant, she told me. Doctors, though, suspected that she had taken medication to induce an abortion. They called the police. When I met Alma, she was awaiting trial.

In Honduras, abortion is outlawed, along with emergency contraception. Sexual violence is commonplace, and women are barred from a basic tool to prevent pregnancy after rape, and then potentially jailed if they end an unwanted one. Through both abortion restrictions and endemic violence, women hear one message: Your body isn’t yours.

Read More: Inside Mississippi’s Last Abortion Clinic—and the Biggest Fight for Abortion Rights in a Generation

Alma was far from the only woman I’ve met whose body has borne the weight of abortion bans. There was a girl I called Sofia when I wrote about her, also in Honduras, forced to have a child as a 12-year-old rape victim. There was Anita, the pseudonym for a woman who fled war in South Sudan and was forced into sex by her husband even after a doctor told them another pregnancy too soon could kill her; she self-induced an abortion and nearly paid with her life. There was Silvana, raped as a child during Colombia’s civil war, who starved herself into a miscarriage. There was a woman whose name I don’t know, but whose story I heard again and again in a Bangladeshi camp full of Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar – to end an unwanted pregnancy, she put a red-hot brick on her stomach, searing off her flesh.

A leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion suggests that the Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that legalized abortion for American women. Those of us who have followed the long arc of reproductive-rights law in the U.S. aren’t surprised, although many of us are devastated and angry. Those of us who have reported on abortion rights and access, and women’s rights more broadly, know just how high the stakes are.

The reality is that abortion access, and the procedure itself, has changed quite a bit since the bad old days of pre-Roe America. Now, a combination of misoprostol and mifepristone, taken orally, can effectively and safely induce an abortion without the potentially fertility- or even life-ending complications of older methods that required something be inserted into the cervix. Activists have worked hard to make these medications are available to women in places where abortion is illegal or hard to get, including in the United States. If Roe goes, these activist networks will undoubtedly expand. Abortion won’t end, and activists will try to make sure that as many women as possible can access safe abortion-inducing medications. Again, the pro-choice movement will save women’s lives.

Read More: The Battle Over the Future of the Anti-Abortion Movement if the Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade

But activists working to deliver safe abortions in a hostile legal environment simply cannot reach every woman in need. Even now, with Roe still standing, a great number of American women cannot get the abortions they want. And the women who are best able to access safe abortions will be those with greater resources: Money, to be sure, but also the education, connections, and internet literacy to know where to find help, and how to tell charlatans and scammers from safe providers. Women who are already vulnerable – who are poor, who are young, who live in rural areas, who don’t speak English well or at all, who are the least able to take on a child they haven’t planned for – are the most likely to fall through the cracks.

U.S. Supreme Court police officers set up barricades during a protest outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, May 3, 2022.Al Drago—Bloomberg/Getty Images

The criminalization of abortion will in and of itself discourage some women from pursuing abortion procedures, and those women will carry pregnancies to term against their wishes, making them more likely to be stuck in poverty and tied to abusive men. Some of those women will die because of that lack of choice. One estimate suggests that maternal mortality might increase by as much as 21% if abortion is outlawed nationwide.

Other women, fearful of the law but desperate to not be pregnant and too scared or ashamed to ask for help, will take matters into their own hands. Others won’t know how to find help or where to look. Some will be fine. Some may not be.

Read More: If Roe v. Wade Is Overturned, Our Clinic Will Stop Providing Abortions Immediately. But We Won’t Shut Down

Overzealous prosecutors in the U.S. have already jailed women over suspected abortions. If abortion is outlawed, every indication is that more women, and certainly more doctors, will wind up behind bars.

The world’s most “pro-life” nations show us what could be in store. In countries with the strictest anti-abortion laws, women face pervasive violence from men. That isn’t to say that anti-abortion laws cause violence. It is to say that violence against women, like restrictions on what women can do with their reproductive lives, is a tool of misogynist dominance. It stems from the urge to force women to do your bidding, and the belief that women’s bodies and women’s lives should be under male control. It’s not a coincidence that the countries where women do the best – where they are the most economically prosperous, the safest, have the highest levels of education and employment, are the most supported in parenthood, and are the freest – are also countries where abortion is legal and contraception is easily accessible.

By curtailing abortion access, the U.S. is again making itself an outlier on women’s rights, and joining a small number of nations – Poland, Hungary, Brazil, Russia, China – that are moving ever rightward toward authoritarianism. While many countries have liberalized their abortion laws as they have become more democratic, just a handful have restricted reproductive rights – and those restrictions have gone hand-in-hand with shifts away from democratic traditions and toward autocracy.

According to the U.N., nearly 50,000 women’s lives could be saved each year simply by repealing anti-abortion laws. The U.S. has instead restricted abortion even further. Overturning Roe would be the biggest blow in nearly 50 years to abortion rights in the U.S., and just the first step in a broader conservative effort to make abortion totally illegal – and if anti-abortion activists get their way, a national abortion law would have no exceptions for rape, incest, health, or the pregnant woman’s life.

These are the stakes if this draft opinion becomes law: Some women’s lives, many women’s futures, and all of our freedoms.

Trump says 'a lot of people are very happy' the Supreme Court looks ready to overturn Roe v. Wade: 'Some people maybe say it's my fault'

Bryan Metzger,Oma Seddiq
Thu, May 5, 2022, 

Trump stands with now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett at the White House after she was sworn in on October 26, 2020.

Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images

Trump took some credit for the fact that SCOTUS appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.


"Some people maybe say it's my fault and some people say, 'Thank you very much,'" he said.


Trump cemented the high court's 6-3 conservative majority by appointing three new justices.

Days after the unprecedented leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion showing a majority of justices in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade, former President Donald Trump took some credit for the potential loss of constitutionally protected abortion rights.

Trump echoed other Republicans in condemning the fact that the opinion was leaked at all during an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network on Wednesday. Until then, Trump had stayed uncharacteristically quietsince Politico published the draft opinion on Monday night.

"I will say the leak was a terrible thing," Trump said. "You're just not used to that for the Supreme Court. It was very shocking. I think it was a very bad thing for the court."

The former president also said that the opinion is "something that they're working on I would imagine, I don't think anyone made it up." The court confirmed the validity of the document on Tuesday and Chief Justice John Roberts announced an investigation into the leak.

Trump was then asked about Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer blaming Trump for the likely gutting of reproductive rights. In a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Schumer laid the responsibility for the revocation of abortion rights at the feet of both the former president and Senate Republicans, who had stacked conservative judges on the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court.

"The party of Lincoln and Eisenhower has now completely devolved into the party of Trump," said Schumer. "Every Republican senator who supported Senator McConnell and voted for Trump justices pretending that this day would never come will now have to explain themselves to the American people."

Trump was apparently unfazed by the comments.

"Well, a lot of people are very happy about that," Trump said of the court potentially overturning Roe. "So some people maybe say it's my fault and some people say, 'Thank you very much.'"

While anti-abortion rights activists would celebrate the reversal of Roe, a majority of Americans actually oppose overturning the 1973 landmark ruling that guaranteed the constitutional right to an abortion, according to public opinion polling.

Anti-abortion rights advocates have for decades pushed the high court to throw out Roe and have had some success in restricting access to abortion in red states across the country. Conservative legal groups, at the same time, have strategically promoted judges who've made their opposition to abortion known.

Trump, when running for president in 2016, pledged to put anti-abortion justices on the Supreme Court and that if elected, Roe would "automatically" be overturned.

All three of Trump's Supreme Court appointees — Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — voted in the majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, Politico reported. The court is expected to take a final vote and issue a final opinion by late June on the major abortion-rights case, Dobbs v. Jackson's Women Health Organization. The case concerns a Mississippi law that seeks to ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, challenging the 24-week standard set in Roe, commonly referred to as viability.

Before Trump entered the political scene, he supported abortion rights. During an NBC News interview in 1991, Trump described himself as "very pro-choice."

Trump Wanted to Launch Missiles Into Mexico to Destroy ‘Drug Labs,’ Former Defense Secretary Says

Ryan Bort
Thu, May 5, 2022, 


Former President Donald Trump suggested launching missiles into Mexico to “destroy the drug labs” ahead of the 2020 election, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper writes in his forthcoming book. The New York Times reported the revelation on Thursday afternoon.

Esper writes in his new memoir a A Sacred Oath that Trump suggested to him at least twice during the summer of 2020 that the United States could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” and that it could be done secretly. Trump even said the operation could be conducted “quietly” and that the U.S. could simply deny it had anything to do with it. “No one would know it was us,” Trump said, according to Esper.

Esper’s book describes an administration that was obsessed with Trump’s reelection campaign throughout 2020, according to the Times. The defense secretary, who was jettisoned for butting heads with the former president over using the military to quell Black Lives Matter protests, reportedly writes that he was also concerned Trump would use the military around Election Day, potentially to seize ballot boxes.

A Sacred Oath isn’t the first time Esper has talked about the Trump’s plans to take on the drug cartels. He told the Times last year that Trump had to be talked out of invading Mexico in a harebrained scheme to cut off the flow of drugs at the source. Trump has also suggested shooting migrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Axios reported earlier this week that Esper writes in his book that Trump suggested Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrating outside of the White House in the summer of 2020 should also be shot.

“Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump asked, according to Esper. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

‘Shattered’: How the Trump Family Won the D.C. Inauguration Case


Jose Pagliery
Thu, May 5, 2022

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

As the dust settles from the legal fight between the District of Columbia’s attorney general and the Trump family, it’s becoming clear to government watchdogs and the case’s star witness that the former president has once again gotten off easy.

On Tuesday, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine declared victory after the multibillion-dollar Trump Organization and the former president’s inauguration committee agreed to fork over $750,000 for their shady dealings in the run-up to Donald Trump’s 2017 celebrations in the nation’s capital. The deal ends his years-long investigation into the way Trump’s family and company misused nonprofit funds to honor the incoming president to instead enrich themselves.

But that’s less than the $1 million the AG had accused the Trump family of misspending in nonprofit funds by booking events at the Trump International Hotel Washington D.C.’s vastly overpriced rooms.


More importantly, the Trump Organization and the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee were allowed to maintain they did absolutely nothing wrong.

Judge Orders Deposition of Ex-Trump Org CFO Allen Weisselberg in Inauguration Lawsuit

“Defendants dispute these allegations on numerous grounds and deny having engaged in any wrongdoing or unlawful conduct,” the proposed settlement reads.

The announcement was severely disappointing news for Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who helped plan the event and became a key government witness against the Trumps after news stories appeared to pin the blame for mismanagement of funds on her.

“I’m just so shattered. It’s awful, it’s unjust, it’s absurd,” she told The Daily Beast. “I can’t believe this. They stole so much. The self-dealing. The perjury. They all know about it.”

Winston Wolkoff, who wrote a tell-all book about her time as first fady Melania Trump’s adviser, lamented that Donald Trump had slithered away again.

“He is above the law. There’s just no accountability whatsoever. For $750,000,” she said.

Elizabeth Hempowicz, director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight, described the settlement as “the kind of thing that helps fuel this public perception that there are two systems of justice: one for the everyman and another for the rich and powerful.”

“It's not about the money at the end of the day. What is a million dollars to the Trump family?” she said.

In reality, the money owed by the former president’s inaugural committee–some $350,000–was actually already paid by an insurance company. Lee Blalack, an attorney representing Trump’s Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC), said in a statement that an insurer had already delivered its half of the penalty and the nonprofit could officially wind down now that the litigation was over.

Trump Org Wins ‘Partial Victory’ as Judge Tosses Its Portion of D.C.’s Inauguration Lawsuit

“As the settlement states, the PIC continues to dispute all of the Attorney General’s claims and remains confident that had this case gone to trial, the PIC would have prevailed based on the evidence,” he said in a statement.

There was even some dancing on the grave, per se.

“It would have required the PIC’s insurer to spend double the amount of this insurance settlement just to try this case to verdict, and thus this modest settlement payment only makes common sense,” he added.

Presidential inaugurations are hastily put together celebrations that potentially fall prey to all the misgivings of a pay-for-play scheme: they’re organized by the incoming president’s associates and quickly funnel millions of dollars from donors who could see this as an opportunity to call in future favors from the administration. The concerns were heightened with Trump, who held extravagant parties for his children at the hotel with their name on it—one that soon became the go-to spot for lobbyists seeking to curry favor with his administration.

But the proposed settlement between the Trump entities and the D.C. attorney general shows that an incoming president’s family can use the opportunity to enrich itself with minimal consequences, Hempowicz told The Daily Beast.

“It certainly doesn't give us any bright-line rules that other inaugurations can operate under,” she said.

AG Karl Racine still declared victory, putting out a statement on Twitter that the district was “resolving our lawsuit and sending the message that if you violate DC nonprofit law—no matter how powerful you are—you'll pay.”

Trump Organization Honcho Allen Weisselberg Has One Defense: Gross Incompetence

But what the local attorney general gave up in the deal is the ability to pursue the matter any further, meaning prosecutors may ignore how the Trump Organization’s then-chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, held a shadow job auditing the committee’s finances. The Trump Organization maintained that it had nothing to do with the case—it was merely a shell company with zero employees and no relationship to the hotel—and that somehow its CFO managed to get looped in three months after the celebration to conduct an audit of the committee’s finances.

Investigators will also be ignoring how daughter of the twice-impeached former president, Ivanka Trump, testified under oath that she “really didn’t have an involvement” in the planning of the inauguration, even though emails surfaced at Mother Jones showing she closely scrutinized the event.

D.C. law enforcement is also forgoing further exploration into how a firm pertaining to long-time Trump buddy Mark Burnett, who created The Apprentice, walked away with nearly $25 million in nonprofit funds for helping broadcast the event, even though accounting records appear to show fudged numbers.

Accounting documents viewed by The Daily Beast show the committee’s planners drafted at least three versions of a television production budget with vastly varying costs for the same services that all curiously added up to almost exactly $25 million.

However, Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said any of the merited disappointment should be tempered with the grim reality that prosecutors face when targeting the rich and political powerhouse of the Trump family.

“Donald Trump and his associates have a strategy of aggressive litigation and particularly delay tactics. They will try to drag things out as long as possible. They will make it as difficult as possible. For the attorney general to get them to a place where they were willing to pay up is pretty remarkable,” he said.

“I wish it was more. And I wish it were all the money they got through self-dealing,” Bookbinder told The Daily Beast. “It is frustrating that Donald Trump always seems to escape without admitting anything.”

Donald Trump Jr. Deposed in D.C. AG Inauguration Probe

According to the pending deal, D.C. will receive the money and redirect it equally to two youth development nonprofits, the Mikva Challenge Grant Foundation and the DC Action for Children Today.

The settlement isn’t final yet, though. A local judge will still have to approve it and be convinced that the terms are fair and stand up to scrutiny.

In fact, the Trump Organization would have got out of this entirely were it not for Judge Yvonne Williams, who inherited the case at the start of the year. Williams dragged the Trump Organization back into the lawsuit as a defendant after the previous judge had inexplicably let it go on the theory that the New York-based company was outside his jurisdiction.

The Trump loyalist who led the committee, billionaire Tom Barrack, is still dealing with his own legal problems. He was indicted last summer on charges that he abused his position in the president’s circle of trust by engaging in foreign lobbying and obstructing justice.

Meanwhile, the worst of Trump’s present legal nightmare seems to be merely inching forward. A years-long criminal investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office into his alleged business fraud seems to be falling apart, now that the new DA who inherited the case from his predecessor this year has thus far blocked investigators attempts at seeking a grand jury indictment, according to multiple inside sources and a leaked resignation letter.

A parallel investigation by the New York attorney general remains a civil matter that would not land him in prison. And what could be the most promising criminal investigation—the Fulton County district attorney’s probe of the infamous phone call where Trump pressured Georgia's top elections official into flipping the 2020 election results by materializing 11,780 MAGA votes out of thin air—is just getting started.

COVID led to 15 million deaths globally, not the 5 million reported - WHO

AMERIKA REACHED 1 MILLION DEATHS TODAY

Thu, May 5, 2022, 
By Jennifer Rigby

(Reuters) - Almost three times as many people have died as a result of COVID-19 as official data show, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report, the most comprehensive look at the true global toll of the pandemic so far.

There were 14.9 million excess deaths associated with COVID-19 by the end of 2021, the U.N. body said on Thursday.

The official count of deaths directly attributable to COVID-19 and reported to WHO in that period, from January 2020 to the end of December 2021, is slightly more than 5.4 million.

The WHO's excess mortality figures reflect people who died of COVID-19 as well as those who died as an indirect result of the outbreak, including people who could not access healthcare for other conditions when systems were overwhelmed during huge waves of infection.

It also accounts for deaths averted during the pandemic, for example because of the lower risk of traffic accidents during lockdowns.

But the numbers are also far higher than the official tally because of deaths that were missed in countries without adequate reporting. Even pre-pandemic, around six in 10 deaths around the world were not registered, WHO said.

The WHO report said that almost half of the deaths that until now had not been counted were in India. The report suggests that 4.7 million people died there as a result of the pandemic, mainly during a huge surge in May and June 2021.

The Indian government, however, puts its death toll for the January 2020-December 2021 period far lower: about 480,000.

WHO said it had not yet fully examined new data provided this week by India, which has pushed back against the WHO estimates and issued its own mortality figures for all causes of death in 2020 on Tuesday. WHO said it may add a disclaimer to the report highlighting the ongoing conversation with India.

In a statement issued after the numbers were published, the Indian government said WHO had released the report "without adequately addressing India's concerns" over what it called "questionable" methods.

The WHO panel, made up of international experts who have been working on the data for months, used a combination of national and local information, as well as statistical models, to estimate totals where the data is incomplete – a methodology that India has criticised.

However, other independent assessments have also put the death toll in India far higher than the official government tally, including a report published in Science which suggested 3 million people may have died of COVID in the country.

Other models have also reached similar conclusions about the global death toll being far higher than the recorded statistics. For comparison, around 50 million people are thought to have died in the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and 36 million have died of HIV since the epidemic began in the 1980s.

Samira Asma, WHO assistant director general for data, analytics and delivery for impact, who co-led the calculation process, said data was the "lifeblood of public health" needed to assess and learn from what happened during the pandemic.

She called for more support for countries to improve reporting.

"Too much is unknown," she told reporters in a press briefing.

SOURCE: https://bit.ly/38Tk83Q World Health Organisation, online May 5, 2022.

(Reporting by Jennifer Rigby; Additional reporting by Leroy Leo in Bengaluru; Editing by William Maclean and Hugh Lawson)

This Idaho river was named one of the most endangered waterways in the U.S. – again


Scott McIntosh/smcintosh@idahostatesman.com

Eric Barker
Wed, May 4, 2022

The threat that dams and climate change pose to wild salmon and steelhead landed the lower Snake River on a national environmental group’s list of the nation’s most endangered waterways.

American Rivers released its annual list of rivers the group deems to be critically endangered and placed the Snake in the second spot. That is down one spot from the 2021 list that had the Snake as the nation’s most imperiled.

The Snake was replaced in the top spot by the Colorado River, where drought and overappropriation threaten the drinking water of tens of millions of people and the intricate ecology of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.

The Snake River has made the group’s list frequently over the years because of the poor condition of wild runs of sockeye, spring, summer and fall chinook, and steelhead that are listed as either threatened or endangered.

Looming decisions over what steps should be taken to save the fish and whether that should include breaching the four lower Snake River dams helped propel the Snake to the top end of the list. The group bases the list on three main criteria – pending major decisions that the public can weigh in on, the significance of the river to people and wildlife, and the magnitude of the threat to the river and the degree to which climate change plays a role.

The Snake River has some of each. For decades, the Nez Perce Tribe, environmental organizations and fishing groups have advocated for the four lower Snake River dams to be breaching. Doing so would restore the river to its free-flowing state and reduce dam-related fish mortality, including elevated summertime water temperatures made worse by climate change. The Snake produces a significant portion of the salmon and steelhead that return to the Columbia River basin, and high-elevation tributaries in Idaho and northeastern Oregon are seen as wild salmon strongholds.

“We can save salmon from extinction and revitalize the rivers that are the beating heart of this place we call home,” said Wendy McDermott, northwest region director of American Rivers. “We can honor commitment to tribes and invest in a future of abundant salmon, clean energy and thriving agriculture.”

But breaching the dams would eliminate tug-and-barge transportation used by inland wheat farmers to efficiently get their crops to market. The lower Snake River is also a small part of the Columbia River Federal Hydropower System and breaching the dams would reduce power generation. Advocates of the dams say breaching is not needed, would hurt farmers and would eliminate a source of carbon-free power that could be replaced sources that burn fossil fuels such as natural gas.

Federal agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. The Bureau of Reclamation and the Bonneville Power Administration have said breaching would help the fish but have rejected it as too costly.

But the momentum for breaching has been on the rise. Last year, the breaching debate reached Congress when Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, introduced his $33.5 billion concept that would breach the dams and mitigate affected communities and industries. This spring, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Sen. Patty Murray are expected to release the findings of a draft study looking at ways to replace the services provided by the dam and decide by July 31 whether to back the dams or breaching. That is the same day that a pause in a long-running lawsuit is scheduled to sunset. Plaintiffs that include the Nez Perce Tribe, Oregon and environmental and fishing groups are in talks with the federal government. Both sides have said they are seeking long-term solutions to the decades-long court battle.

Before last year, the lower Snake was last on the endangered waterways list in 2009, when it was named the third-most imperiled river. It landed at the top of the list in 1999 and 2000 and has appeared on the list a handful of other years, each time because of dams and the harm they cause salmon and steelhead.

México’s tortilla bakeries hit hard by high inflation

US CORN FEEDSTOCKS FOR METHANOL E15 WILL RESULT IN CORN SHORTAGES

Pedro Pablo Cortes
Wed, May 4, 2022,

México’s highest inflation rate in 21 years is exacting a particularly steep toll on tortillerias (tortilla bakeries) and their customers, who are facing a spike in corn prices triggered in part by the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Case in point is La Morena, which is based in northern México City’s Pensil Sur neighborhood and is a traditional seller of that thin flat bread made from unleavened cornmeal.

Carmen Hernández, an employee at that establishment, she hasn’t seen another similar rapid increase in prices since she started working there 12 years ago.

“(Customers) get angry, of course. In fact, people think that the (higher prices) are our doing, but it’s really not. It’s the increase in (the price of) corn that’s making us raise the (price per) kilo of tortilla,” said Hernández.

The prices of corn tortillas rose at an annual clip of 17.42 percent in the first half of April, or more than double México’s overall inflation rate of 7.72 percent (a 21-year high).

Isaac Sánchez, La Morena’s manager, said the price of tortillas had long remained unchanged but has risen between 20-25 percent over the past two years.

A kilo of tortillas cost 15 pesos (around $0.75) in 2020 but has since climbed to 20 pesos, meaning that a family now receives between 10 and 12 fewer tortillas for the same amount of money spent, he said.

The climate crisis has spurred droughts, lower crop yields and higher prices, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has roiled the global grain trade and made matters even worse, according to Sánchez, who said he expects additional price hikes going forward.

A worker packs corn dough that is used for making corn tortillas. Tortilla makers in México have been hit by inflation and a shortage of corn.

La Morena has not laid off any of its 16 employees despite the crisis and currently produces 1,800 kilos (4,000 pounds) of tortillas per day.

According to the Inegi national statistics office, that establishment is one of more than 110,000 bakeries in México that make tortillas either from traditional corn dough or nixtamal meal, which is prepared through a process known as nixtamalization in which corn kernels are cooked and steeped overnight in water mixed with limestone.

Sánchez said the price situation is largely out of the tortilla bakers’ hands and that all they can do is try to reason with their frustrated customers.

“There’s no doubt whatsoever that we’re selling a little less because people also are consuming less. Perhaps we could offer them other alternatives, but at the end of the day nothing can replace the tortilla,” he added.

In response, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Wednesday announced that his administration will unveil an inflation control plan on May 4 that will offer “price guarantees” for 24 staple products, including corn and tortillas, and negotiated agreements with business leaders.

He also is urging small farmers to plant more corn and beans to reduce shortages and bring down inflation.

But Blanca Mejía, representative of the Traditional Mexican Tortilla Governing Council that comprises tortilla and tortilla dough makers, expressed skepticism about the plan.

“We’re very nervous in the industrial sector because we don’t know what measures they’re going to take. We’re very afraid of price controls,” she said, adding that producers need freely fluctuating tortilla prices to face the price-hike situation.

Mejía said the main challenge facing tortilla makers is the price-per-ton of corn, which has risen from 6,900 pesos ($345) in early January, prior to the war in Ukraine, to 8,900 pesos at present.

Higher prices of corn are a major bread-and-butter issue in a country where 98 percent of the population consumes tortillas and per-capita consumption of that flat bread stands at around 75 kg per year, according to the Institute of Ecology, a public strategic research institute.

But even if consumption falls in the short term, Sánchez said he is convinced Mexicans will remain loyal to corn tortillas, which accompany most Mexican dishes and are a basic ingredient for making a variety of traditional foods such as tacos, tostadas and enchiladas.

“We could say that without tortillas you practically can’t eat. The Mexican diet needs them,” he added.

EU citizens may sue countries for health-damaging dirty air, top court adviser says


The Eiffel Tower is surrounded by a small-particle haze which hangs above the skyline in Paris


Thu, May 5, 2022
By Kate Abnett

BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Citizens in European Union countries may be able to sue their governments for financial compensation if illegal levels of air pollution damage their health, an adviser to Europe's top court said on Thursday.

The adviser's opinion follows a string of rulings at the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the EU in recent years, with around 10 EU countries including France, Poland, Italy and Romania found guilty of illegal air pollution.

"An infringement of the limit values for the protection of air quality under EU law may give rise to entitlement to compensation from the State," the court said in a statement.

Advocate General Juliane Kokott noted that it is often poorer communities that live and work in highly polluted areas and particularly need judicial protection.

Individuals claiming compensation would need to prove that the damage to their health had been directly caused by the air pollution, she said. A government may also avoid liability if it could prove the pollution limits would still have been breached if it had a sufficient air quality plan in place.

"This legal confirmation that there are routes to hold those in power to account is a major breakthrough in the fight for clean and healthy air," said Irmina Kotiuk, lawyer at environmental law firm ClientEarth.

EU court opinions are non-binding, but the court typically agrees with them in the ruling that follows in the coming months.

The opinion concerns a case brought by a Paris resident seeking 21 million euros in compensation from the French government, on the grounds that air pollution damaged his health and the government failed to ensure compliance with EU limits.

A Versailles court hearing the Paris dispute asked the EU court to clarify whether individuals can claim such compensation.

Paris breached the EU's legal limits for nitrogen dioxide pollution between 2010 and 2020.

In a bid to reduce premature deaths associated with dirty air, the EU will propose an upgrade of its pollution limits this year to better align them with stricter World Health Organization rules.

(Reporting by Kate Abnett, editing by Marine Strauss and Tomasz Janowski)

Big Oil Sold the World on a Plastics Recycling Myth. It May be Too Late to Undo the Damage

Alejandro de la Garza
Thu, May 5, 2022, 

Post Storm Trash
Post storm debris made up mostly of plastics and vegetation is scattered across the high tide line in Long Beach on Monday, Dec. 2, 2019. 

Credit - Scott Varley/MediaNews Group/Torrance Daily Breeze—Getty Images

A few weeks ago, my friend Brett Pogostin showed me a photograph of his girlfriend, Angie, taken on Padre Island National Seashore on the Texas Gulf Coast. They had driven 200 miles from Houston to visit this 60-mile stretch of undeveloped barrier island, which reaches south from Corpus Christi, Texas, towards the Mexican border. But when they stopped and got out of their car, they found the shoreline littered with plastic—old diapers, water bottles, and plastic detergent jugs. Bathers had set up their blankets and umbrellas amid the trash, and children made sand castles between pieces of plastic junk. Brett and Angie got back in the car and drove close to 30 miles trying to find a stretch of unpolluted beach, and finally gave up. Brett took a photograph: Angie smiling beneath a gray sky, bits of plastic garbage mixed in the sand at her feet.

The world is in the midst of a plastic waste crisis. Every year, the world produces about 400 million tons of plastic. In the U.S. barely 6% of that waste was recycled last year, down from around 9% in 2018, as nations like China stop taking U.S. plastic. The vast majority of the waste ends up in landfills, in the oceans, or spread across the land, an endless tide of chemically indestructible junk, polluting our coastlines, infiltrating ecosystems and, when it breaks down into microscopic fragments, entering our bodies, with unknown health repercussions.

For years, the fossil fuel industry has been turning oil and natural gas into plastics in massive, heavily-emitting “cracker” plants. In anticipation of shrinking fossil-fuel demand, it is currently investing $400 billion to expand plastic production—including a $10 billion ExxonMobil-Saudi Basic Industries Corp. facility being built a few dozen miles from Padre Island, across Corpus Christi Bay. The result, according to one 2020 study: 1.3 billion metric tons more plastic dumped into our environment by 2040.

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For years, the folks selling that plastic have avoided blame for the ecological mess their products have caused, mainly by promoting a largely false set of promises about our ability to recycle plastics, along with a narrative—advertised in countless anti-litter commercials—that dealing with plastic waste was the responsibility of consumers, not producers. But that may be changing. Last week, California’s Attorney General opened an investigation into fossil fuel and petrochemicals companies, accusing them of perpetuating a decades-long disinformation campaign.

Such an inquiry has never been attempted before. And it will likely add to mounting pressure the industry has been experiencing recently. The plastics industry has a “target on its back,” Tony Radoszewski, president of the Plastics Industry Association, told attendees at an event last summer. “Some people are trying to put us out of business.”

ExxonMobil Corp. and Saudi Basic Industries Corp. Gulf Coast Growth Ventures petrochemical complex under construction in Gregory, Texas, U.S., on Wednesday, July 28, 2021. The plastics plant will be the world's largest steam cracker.

Eddie Seal—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Around the world, 71% of people think single-use plastic products should be banned, according to a 2019 Ipsos survey. Many African nations have outlawed plastic bags in recent years, while the E.U. banned many single-use plastic items last summer. Last month, Los Angeles County blocked restaurants from selling food in plastic containers that can’t be composted or recycled.

I’m fascinated by the question of what causes a person, city, or country to change their view towards plastics, given how difficult it can be to accept that there is something monstrously wrong with the world you take for granted. Evidence accumulates, and we relegate it to that dusty section of our minds reserved for the terrible things about the world that are too overwhelming or omnipresent to really think about. Then, some new bit of information, a thought, a feeling, hits from a different angle, cracks the dam, and suddenly the sheer awfulness of the whole situation—of a world clogged, in every crevice, with plastic junk—spills out into the open.

For some, that moment came back in 2015, when a video of researchers yanking a plastic straw out of a sea turtle’s nose went viral. For others it was reading about the plastics industry’s deception campaign around recycling. For my editor Kyla Mandel, new research on how microplastics are turning up in human blood redoubled anxiety about what plastics were doing to us. For my friend Brett, it was the trip to Padre Island that did it. Upon returning, he purged all the disposable plastic that he could from his life. He ordered sheets of dissolvable laundry detergent, and bought toilet paper packaged in a cardboard box. “Hope you enjoy that meal,” he’d say, seeing a coworker sit down with a pile of plastic containers, “because the planet is going to be enjoying it forever.”

Brett’s right on that point. The plastic we put into the world will be with us for hundreds of years, floating up on shores and circulating through our bodies—and those of our children, and our children’s children. There’s hope of stemming the flow of new plastic pollution if we manage to hold off corporate plans to keep expanding plastic production until we choke on it. But the tragedy of an irrevocably-changed world is already here.

“There was more plastic on that beach than anyone could ever pick up,” Brett said. “And even if you did, there’s infinitely more out in the ocean, and more would just wash up.”

It was that grief for what we’ve lost that woke me up. Brett has always loved the world’s wild places, and he spoke of Padre Island with a tone of indignation. But there was pain beneath the anger, a hint of something like heartbreak. And when I heard it, something in me broke, too.