THIRD WORLD U$A
One month later, Kentucky flood evacuees weigh cloudy future
By BRUCE SCHREINERtoday


1 of 3

Ivallean Smith, who awoke to rising floodwaters when her pet chihuahua Coco, left, licked her hand, is being sheltered with other evacuees at Jenny Wiley State Park in Prestonsburg, Ky., Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)

PRESTONSBURG, Ky. (AP) — Nearly a month after deadly flooding engulfed their houses, some eastern Kentuckians sheltering at state parks continue to wrestle with the same life-defining question — whether to rebuild at the place they call home or start over somewhere else.

Ivallean Smith, who awoke to rising floodwaters when her chihuahua licked her hand, hopes to return to the parcel of land she owns and loves. If she stays put, she says she’ll have to elevate her new home with blocks to try to protect against the kind of terror she lived through late last month, when the rain never seemed like it would stop.

Cynthia Greathouse has already made up her mind — she and her husband hope to leave soon for Florida. Greathouse was nearly swept away by surging floodwaters. Starting over elsewhere just seems easier.

John Bailey, meanwhile, still isn’t sure what comes next. His family’s home was ruined by the water, and his kids don’t want to go back.

For now, they’re all being lodged in hotel-style rooms at Jenny Wiley State Resort Park, a vacationer’s retreat tucked into the Appalachian mountains. Late last week, 455 people were still being housed in Kentucky state parks, churches, schools and community centers, Gov. Andy Beshear said.

For those displaced by the flood, decisions on whether to stay or leave will be crucial for the future of eastern Kentucky, where the coal industry’s decline has added to the region’s hardships.

Despite his indecision, Bailey sounded upbeat Tuesday, knowing things could have been worse. The catastrophic flooding caused at least 39 deaths in eastern Kentucky.

“We’re a lot better off than some people,” he said. “Some people lost their family.”

Flood victims said they’ve been treated with kindness at Jenny Wiley, known for towering pines, elk-viewing tours and fishing on Dewey Lake. The state parks, American Red Cross and communities have provided meals. But for displaced families, the focus is on the future.

Federal emergency management personnel have been on site. Other services included crisis counseling and help to replace lost driver’s licenses and seek disaster unemployment assistance.

Those at Jenny Wiley lauded the park’s staff for the hospitality extended to them. And they praised Beshear for taking up their cause. The Democratic governor has pushed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to accelerate its approval of requests for help

In his latest move, Beshear called Kentucky’s legislature into a special session starting Wednesday to take up a relief package for eastern Kentucky. In his video announcement, Beshear talked about efforts to provide intermediate lodging for people displaced by the flooding.

“We’re working to stabilize our people through a travel trailer program, where we already have nearly 100 travel trailers full and more on the way,” he said.

By Tuesday, Smith, 60, had spent four days at Jenny Wiley, making her and her adult son relative newcomers. Since her home collapsed, she spent time with relatives and one night in a car wash.

Her vehicle was destroyed by floodwaters. She was hoping a friend would take her to the courthouse to obtain documents requested by FEMA. Her decision isn’t final but she’d like to return to the land she owns — though she knows she won’t find much there.

“We lost everything,” Smith said.

For Bailey’s family, some normalcy returns Wednesday, when his three children start a new school year. A school bus will pick them up and drop them off at the park, he’s been told.

Asked if he’d like to rebuild on the place he owns, Bailey’s thoughts turned to his 16-year-old son.

“He won’t even go back right now to even look at it,” Bailey said.

He’s not sure where they might move, though he mentioned West Virginia as a possibility. But he won’t do anything without thinking about what the weather might do.

“I definitely want out of the flood zone,” he said.

Floodwaters wrecked Bailey’s home, shifting it at the foundation and leaving the floors looking like “a roller coaster.” When he checked around 4:30 a.m. on the fateful morning, the nearby creek was within its banks, he said. By 7:10 a.m., the water was up to his ankles. About 20 minutes later, it reached his stomach.

Bailey, his girlfriend, her sister and his children made a run for it. They’ve been living at the park ever since.

Bailey said he’s awaiting a decision from FEMA on his request for aid. His family has a “little bit” in savings to fall back on, he said, but “it’s going quick.” Bailey said he used to work in the oil and gas fields but is now disabled.

Greathouse, 54, has no intention of returning to live at her rental trailer. During the deluge, she said, she was rescued by men who attached a chain to her vehicle and pulled it out of the surging floodwaters with their truck.

Unable to get back home, she said she spent several nights sleeping in her car until a church pointed her to Jenny Wiley. She’s been there about three weeks.

Greathouse’s husband is getting out of the hospital Thursday after being treated for a hernia, she said. They’re awaiting approval for FEMA aid, but once that happens they’re planning to move to the Daytona, Florida, area. She has family there, she said.

“Start a new journey and get out of here,” said the lifelong Kentuckian. “There’s nothing really here to offer any of us.”

Reflecting further on the thought, she softened at the notion of cutting ties to her home state.

“I’ll always come home,” she said.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M; FESITVAL RIP OFF

How a lantern festival in Six Nations, Ont., billed as 'magical evening' in Toronto, turned into 'mayhem'

Tue, August 23, 2022 

An event in Six Nations of the Grand River, Ont., planned to have hundreds of people fly lanterns into the sky Saturday. Now, numerous people say they were turned away from the event, and are now demanding answers from organizers. (globetrotter.mitul.kathuria/Instagram - image credit)

As Hibba Asim and her friends were on their way Saturday evening to The Lights Festival — which was advertised by its U.S.-based organizer as taking place in the Toronto area — the 16-year-old said she was imagining a scene out of the Disney movie Tangled.

"All the lanterns go up, and it was really pretty in the sky and it's dark, and you see all these beautiful lanterns. I was really looking forward to seeing that," Asim, who's from Milton, Ont., told CBC Hamilton.

Instead, she found herself in an area that felt like "the middle of nowhere" without cellphone service before having to turn around and drive over an hour back to Mississauga with her friends.

Attendees had been given directions to a farm on Six Nations of the Grand River, the First Nations community over 100 kilometres from downtown Toronto. Some arrived to the spot and were able to participate, but local police turned others like Asim away.

"It was just disappointing and you felt devastated," she said, adding she and her two friends spent a total of roughly $190 on tickets.

Asim is among numerous people outraged by what happened on Saturday and are demanding answers from organizers. They include those who were unable to attend and local residents who say the event should have never taken place at all.

Six Nations Police said Tuesday morning it was investigating the "unsanctioned" event and charges are pending.

Lack of communication frustrated ticket holders

The event was advertised as a "magical evening" starting at 6 p.m. ET in the Toronto area. It was part of a series of events taking place in cities across the U.S. and Canada where people release rice-paper lanterns, lit by a flame in the middle, into the sky.

The City of Toronto confirmed sky lanterns are banned in Toronto, "as they fall under the Open Air Burning section of the Ontario Fire Code," the city said in an email to CBC.

It's unclear how many people bought tickets or planned to attend the Ontario stop, but the event's latest Instagram post had over 800 comments as of Monday evening, with dozens of them saying they were there or had driven to the location.

Krista Chiaromonte, who drove to Six Nations from Woodbridge, Ont., said she paid $122 for two tickets.

She said she got stuck in traffic on the way to the event.

"On the other side of the road, we heard people rolling down their windows saying, 'Oh, it's cancelled,'" Chiaromonte said.

Asim said police were set up on a road outside the farm, asking people in cars to leave. She said police told them the event was cancelled.

Terri Monture, who lives beside the farm where the event was slated to take place, had different concerns about the event, saying it was problematic when it last was held at the same location in 2019.

"People were cutting through our fields and through our driveway, and damaging my cousin's crops." Monture told CBC Hamilton.

"Several of the lanterns landed close to the longhouses that are over on the next concession and almost caught the roof on fire."

This year, despite many people being turned around, Monture said she saw at least 300 lanterns floating through the air.

"I have no idea how many cars were coming in and out. It was crazy," she said, adding that police arrived shortly after 6 p.m. to turn people away, while the event's social media pages remained silent.

Hours later, "it was still mayhem," Monture said, with people trying to reach the site.

"It was literally an invasion of people who had no idea ... they were on a reserve," she said. "There were thousands of people who were frustrated, pissed off, only to be turned away ... It was completely disorganized ... People were urinating up and down the road."

Six Nations-elected council said lanterns weren't allowed

According to its website, the festival is run by Viive Events. The non-profit organization the Better Business Bureau (BBB) lists the company as based in the U.S., in Utah.

A letter sent Aug. 16 by Six Nations elected Chief Mark Hill to event contact Collin Maki said it was recently brought to the council's attention that the event was planned for Aug. 20 on a farm on the 4th Line.

The elected council "has not and will not authorize the release of lanterns from the Six Nations of the Grand River territory," the letter said, because "the threat of loss due to fire is far too great."

The largest Carolinian forest in southern Ontario is located on Six Nations.

The elected council takes the personal property and the health and safety of our community members very seriously. - Mark Hill, Six Nations elected chief, in a letter to event contact

"The elected council takes the personal property and the health and safety of our community members very seriously," the letter read.

"This could cause harm to our neighbours in the surrounding municipalities … adjust your festival activities accordingly."

Six Nations spokesperson Caitlin Court told CBC Hamilton the elected council heard from Maki and a representative of the property, called Johnson Farm, as early as Thursday — two days before the event. It is unclear who exactly owns the property.

"Mr. Maki and Johnson Farm have both assured the chief that there will be no lanterns released on the territory. The event will only include music and vendors," Court said in an email sent to CBC last week.

Six Nations Police said officers saw "an extremely large amount of vehicles waiting to enter the property" and had to conduct traffic control to turn away vehicles showing up after the "unsanctioned" event ended. It also said at least 30 lanterns flew into the air. The local fire department didn't respond to questions about the event.

Organizers say event was '100% approved'

Festival organizers responded to questions from CBC Hamilton ahead of the event and said lanterns were still planned to be released, adding it worked "closely" with the Ontario fire marshal to ensure the event was safe.

"Our lanterns' fuel cell has a burn time of less than one minute ... [They] will burn out before ever descending within a safe recovery area around our event," read the email, adding the lanterns are biodegradable and the team would ensure they would be cleaned up.

The festival didn't respond to more questions from CBC Hamilton on Monday, but posted an online statement Sunday evening.

"We want to apologize for any confusion and inconvenience you may have encountered at last night's [Saturday's] Toronto Lights Fest. Our event is one of unity and love, and it is disheartening when things get in the way of our purpose," read the statement.

The statement said they followed all procedures and had proper permits, adding the event was "not even close to being oversold" and people were enjoying entertainment as they waited to launch lanterns.

@canadakigalliyan/Instagram

The statement also said the festival has been held in the same location before "and it was a great time."

"We were understandably shocked to learn that at some point toward the end, the police had shown up and were turning people away," said the statement.

"They would not allow us to talk to those stranded participants and were not forthcoming with any information to help us understand why they were trying to shut us down … this event was 100 per cent approved. We are still trying to figure out why this happened."

Event organizers did not respond to questions from CBC about the letter sent to them by the elected council on Aug. 16.

"We will make this right. We have already started the search for a new location that will properly host The Lights .. and you will all be welcomed back to truly experience," the statement said.

Requests for refunds, apology

Asim and Chiaromonte said they want an apology and a full refund to everyone who attended, especially after hearing that Six Nations didn't approve the event.

The website's frequently asked questions section says tickets are non-refundable unless the customer opted for the Refund Protection Plan.

The other chance at getting a refund is if the event is cancelled and a new date isn't set within 90 days of the original event.

"It's really, really unprofessional, disorganized, frustrating," Chiaromonte said.

The company has 52 complaints registered with the BBB, with the pattern of complaint "alleging events that consumers register and pay for are not taking place ... The consumers reach out to the business for refunds and are unsuccessful in reaching them ... BBB urges consumers use caution when registering for these type of events."

Asim said the organizers should also apologize to Six Nations.

Chiaromonte added there shouldn't be any other Light Festivals in the future.

"If this is the way they operate, they shouldn't be allowed to," she said.

DIY

Hopi teens see need for skateboarding park, make it happen

By FELICIA FONSECA

1 of 8

Francisco Mata, left, Kira Nevayaktewa, Quintin Nahsonhoya and Felicia Mata help lay a concrete foundation for a skate ramp on Nov. 6, 2021, in the Village of Tewa on the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona. A handful of Hopi youth, including Nevayaktewa and Nahsonhoya, worked together to create the skate spot that opened this spring. (AP Photo/Felicia Fonseca)

VILLAGE OF TEWA, Ariz. (AP) — They skateboarded on basketball courts and in parking lots, through highway intersections and down roads that twist from the mesas that rise above the high desert.

They set up tricks with old railroad ties and lumber, sometimes using their own skateboards to move the materials in place. During a pandemic that led to lockdowns, curfews and mask mandates on the Hopi reservation, the solo nature of skateboarding was a comfort.

But the reservation that borders the northeast corner of Arizona lacked a designated skate spot. So a group of Hopi teenagers made it happen, seeing out a project they initially thought would take months and displaying the Hopi cultural value of sumi’nangwa — coming together for the greater good.

“I hope this will inspire other youth groups to try and do something like this to make the Hopi community a better place for the future generations of our people,” said Quintin “Q” Nahsonhoya, one of a handful of co-leads on the project.

The skateboarding destination opened late this spring in the Village of Tewa. It’s called Skate 264 for the highway that runs through the 2,500 square-mile (6,474-square-kilometer) Hopi reservation and connects the more than dozen villages. Kira Nevayaktewa came up with the logo that features a cat named “Skategod” that was part of the crew.

The youth group first wanted to ensure the community wanted a skate park, so they surveyed residents who overwhelmingly supported the idea. The group received a grant for branding, sold merchandise to raise money, secured a plot of land and got materials donated through partnerships.

Kira Nevayaktewa displays a logo she helped create for a skate spot in the Village of Tewa on the Hopi reservation in this photo taken Nov. 6, 2021. A handful of Hopi youth, including Nevayaktewa, worked together on the skate spot that opened this spring. 

(AP Photo/Felicia Fonseca)

Skate parks have popped up across Indian Country in recent years, many of them youth-led. Some host competitions like one on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota or the All Nations Skate Jam held during the Gathering of Nations powwow in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to much smaller spots like those on Hopi. Native Americans also have created their own brands of skateboards that feature traditional designs with modern twists. The sport that has Indigenous roots tied to surfing has gained even more acceptance since it debuted at the 2020 Olympics, said Betsy Gordon, who curated an exhibit on skateboarding in Native communities at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

“That gives it legitimacy in a lot of adult eyes, people who are making the rules or who fund (skate parks),” she said. “This sense of skateboarding being outsider and niche and oppositional and dangerous, I think it’s really disappearing.”

The creators of the Hopi skate spot — all teenagers when they started work in it in late 2020 — make it clear skateboarding is for everyone. Go at your own pace. Create your own style. No one is too good to fall, they say in an online Wipe Out Wednesday feature.

In one of their videos, someone picks up a skateboard for the first time, learns new tricks and is celebrated even when he doesn’t land them.

“For Hopi, a lot of things have to do from the heart and not willing to give up,” said Terrill Humeyestewa, one of the co-leads. “The skateboard is is kind of the same principle as that. Have a good mind, strong heart, think about what you’re doing it for and everything will work out OK.”

The co-leads, who also include Laela Nevayaktewa and Jacque Thorpe, have a mix of shy and outspoken characteristics. Each of them became comfortable talking with people outside their circle of family and friends. They got approval from the Village of Tewa for land to build the skate spot — no small feat on tribal land where development requires approval from clans, permit holders or the larger community.

The group raised money by selling beanies, stickers and shirts at roadside stands. Nahsonhoya’s father, Brandon, and stepmother, Valaura, served as fiscal sponsors and created partnerships with a Phoenix-area skateboard company that donated the ramp and props, and others who donated concrete for the foundation. Other family members and the broader community helped with the manual labor, feeding the crew or providing guidance.

Some of the co-leads have graduated high school since starting the project, others are finishing up. While safety was a priority, they said they also wanted to bring joy to others through skateboarding, stay active and avoid bad influences.

“It keeps you from doing nothing with your time, and that’s how I see Hopi and skateboarding coming together, filling your days and your time with something positive,” Thorpe said.

This undated photo provided by Paul Molina in August 2022 shows Terrill Humeyestewa performing a trick on a skateboard on the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona. Humeyestewa was among a handful of Hopi youth who worked together to create a skate spot that opened this spring in the Village of Tewa. (Paul Molina via AP)

Adult mentors lent their skills for video production, photography, graphic design and organizing to keep the group on track and encourage them.

“I didn’t know about skateboarding, but what I do know is community organizing and local fundraising, and I have a lot of connections in the community, so I can figure it out with you guys,” Samantha Honanie, a mentor, told the group.

“If they believed in themselves, we were going to walk them through this whole process,” said Paul Molina, another mentor.

The Village of Tewa now is overseeing the park and eventually will have security guards to patrol the area. Village leaders are hoping to add lights and a basketball court alongside the softball fields for the youth, said Deidra Honyumptewa, chair of the village’s board of directors.

“It’s a huge testament to us leaders, or older people, that these kids can get things done and they see a need for it,” she said.

This undated photo provided by Brandon Nahsonhoya in August 2022 shows a skateboarder trying out a new ramp in the Village of Tewa on the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona. A handful of Hopi youth worked together to create the skate spot that opened this spring. (Brandon Nahsonhoya via AP)

___

Fonseca covers Indigenous communities on AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/FonsecaAP

As inflation soars, access to Indigenous foods declines

By CLAIRE SAVAGE, HANNAH SCHOENBAUM and TRISHA AHMED

August 23, 2022

1 of 10

Janie Pochel, an advisor to the Chi-Nations Youth Council, is pictured at the First Nations Garden in Chicago, on Aug. 3, 2022. The garden was established in the spring of 2019 and is host to many traditional Indigenous crops including prairie sage, sweetgrass and strawberries. 

(Claire Savage/Report for America via AP)

CHICAGO (AP) — Blueberry bison tamales, harvest salad with mixed greens, creamy carrot and wild rice soup, roasted turkey with squash. This contemporary Native American meal, crafted from the traditional foods of tribes across the United States and prepared with “Ketapanen” – a Menominee expression of love – cost caterer Jessica Pamonicutt $976 to feed a group of 50 people last November.

Today it costs her nearly double.

Pamonicutt is the executive chef of Chicago-based Native American catering business Ketapanen Kitchen. She is a citizen of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin but was raised in the Windy City, home to one of the largest urban Native populations in the country, according to the American Indian Center of Chicago.

Her business aims to offer health-conscious meals featuring Indigenous ingredients to the Chicago Native community and educate people about Indigenous contributions to everyday American fare.

One day, she aims to purchase all ingredients from Native suppliers and provide her community with affordable access to healthy Indigenous foods, “but this whole inflation thing has slowed that down,” she said.

U.S. inflation surged to a new four-decade high in June, squeezing household budgets with painfully high prices for gas, food and rent.

Traditional Indigenous foods — like wild rice, bison, fresh vegetables and fruit in the Midwest — are often unavailable or too expensive for Native families in urban areas like Chicago, and the recent inflation spike has propelled these foods even further out of reach.

Risk of disease compounds the problem: healthy eating is key to battling diabetes, which afflicts Native Americans at the highest rate of any ethnic group in the United States.

“There are many benefits to eating traditional Native foods,” said Jessica Thurin, a dietician at Native American Community Clinic in Minneapolis. “The body knows exactly how to process and use that food. These foods are natural to the Earth.”

But many people the clinic serves are low-income and do not have the luxury of choosing where their food comes from. Food deserts – areas with limited access to a variety of healthy and affordable foods – are more likely to exist in places with higher rates of poverty and concentrations of minority populations.

 

 

\
Jessica Pamonicutt, executive chef of a Native American catering company in Chicago, displays the contemporary indigenous meal she cooked for Elders at the American Indian Center of Chicago, on Aug. 3, 2022. (Claire Savage/Report for America via AP)

“In these situations, there are limited healthy food options, not to mention limited traditional food options,” Thurin said.

Aside from health benefits, traditional foods hold important cultural and emotional value.

“It’s just comfort,” said Danielle Lucas, a 39-year-old descendant of the Sicangu Lakota people from the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota.

Lucas’ mother, Evelyn Red Lodge, said she hasn’t prepared traditional dishes of the Great Plains, like wojapi berry sauce or stew, since May because the prices of key ingredients – berries and meat – have soared.

Pamonicutt, too, is feeling the pinch. Between last winter and this spring, the price of bison jumped from $13.99 to $23.99 per pound.

Shipping costs are so high that the chef said it’s often cheaper to drive hundreds of miles to buy ingredients, even with spiking gas prices. She’s even had to create her own suppliers: the 45-year-old’s parents are now growing crops for her business on their Wisconsin property near the Illinois border.

Gina Roxas, program coordinator at Trickster Cultural Center in Schaumburg, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, has also agreed to grow Native foods to help the chef minimize costs.

When a bag of wild rice costs $20, “you end up going to a fast food place instead to feed your family,” Roxas said.

More than 70% of Native Americans reside in urban areas – the result of decades of federal policies pushing families to leave reservations and assimilate into American society.



Dorene Wiese, executive director of the Chicago-based American Indian Association of Illinois, said members of her community have to prioritize making rent payments over splurging on healthy, traditional foods.

Even though specialty chefs like Pamonicutt aim to feed their own communities, the cost of her premium catering service is out of the price range for many urban Natives. Her meals end up feeding majority non-Native audiences at museums or cultural events that can foot the bill, said Wiese, a citizen of the Minnesota White Earth Band of Ojibwe Indians.

“There really is a shortage of Native foods in the area,” she said, But the problem isn’t unique to Chicago.

Dana Thompson, co-owner of The Sioux Chef company and executive director of a Minneapolis Indigenous food nonprofit, is another Native businesswoman striving to expand her urban community’s access to traditional local foods like lake fish, wild rice and wild greens amid the food price surge.

Thompson, of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Mdewakanton Dakota people, said inflation is “really impacting the food systems we have here,” which include dozens of Indigenous, local and organic food producers.

At Owamni, an award-winning Indigenous restaurant under The Sioux Chef umbrella, ingredients like Labrador Tea – which grows wild in northern Minnesota – have been especially difficult to get this year, Thompson said.

When an ingredient is not consistently available or affordable, she changes the menu.

“Being fluid and resilient is what we’re used to,” Thompson said. “That’s like the history of indigeneity in North America.”

Inflation is similarly impeding the American Indian Center of Chicago’s efforts to improve food security. Executive Director Melodi Serna, of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, said the current prices of food boxes they distribute – with traditional Midwestern foods like fish, bison, venison, dairy products and produce – are “astronomical.”

“Where I could have been able to provide maybe 100 boxes, now we’re only able to provide 50,” Serna said.

For 57-year-old Emmie King, a Chicago resident and citizen of the Navajo Nation, getting the fresh ingredients she grew up with in New Mexico is much more difficult in the city, especially with inflation biting into her budget.

She finds ways to “stretch” the food she buys so it lasts longer, purchasing meat in bulk and freezing small portions to add to stews later on. “I get what I need, rather than what I want,” she said.

But King was able to enjoy a taste of home at an Aug. 3 luncheon at the American Indian Center of Chicago, where twenty elders gathered to enjoy turkey tamales with cranberry-infused masa, Spanish rice with quinoa, elote pasta salad with chickpea noodles and glasses of cold lemonade.

The mastermind behind the meal was Pamonicutt herself, sharing her spin on Southwestern and Northern Indigeneous food traditions. Through volunteering at senior lunches and developing a food education program, the chef is continuing to increase access to healthy Indigenous foods in her community.

“I want kids to learn where these foods come from,” the chef said. “That whole act of caring for your food … thanking it, understanding that it was grown to help us survive.”

___

Claire Savage, Hannah Schoenbaum and Trisha Ahmed are corps members for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Savage reported from Chicago, Illinois, Schoenbaum from Raleigh, North Carolina, and Ahmed from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Yelp to add more flags to anti-abortion pregnancy centers


 The Yelp website is shown on a computer screen in Los Angeles, March 17, 2010. The online reviews site Yelp said Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2022, that it is rolling out a new feature to protect users seeking abortions from being misled about anti-abortion centers listed on its platform.

 (AP Photo/Richard Vogel, File)


The online reviews site Yelp said Tuesday it is rolling out a new feature to protect users seeking abortions from being misled about anti-abortion pregnancy centers listed on its platform.

Such centers are typically religiously affiliated and deter clients from having an abortion. On Tuesday, Yelp said it will place a consumer notice on the listings informing users that the centers “typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.”

In 2018, moderators for the San Francisco-based company began recategorizing listings for such organizations as “crisis pregnancy centers” or “faith-based crisis pregnancy centers.” The organizations had previously categorized themselves as reproductive health services, medical centers and other health and medical categories.

“It’s well-reported that crisis pregnancy centers do not offer abortion services, and it’s been shown that many provide misleading information in an attempt to steer people seeking abortion care to other options,” the company said in a post on its website detailing the change.

Yelp’s move might put more pressure on Google to do something similar with listings on its site. Last week, hundreds of Google employees released a petition calling on the company to fix misleading search results for abortion services by removing “fake abortion providers” and halt its business with “publishers of disinformation related to abortion services.”

In June, Democratic lawmakers in Congress also urged the company to curb the appearance of the anti-abortion pregnancy centers for certain search results. But Republicans pushed back last month, warning the tech giant not to do so in a letter sent by 17 conservative attorney generals to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Google did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Tuesday.

In the past several months, Yelp said it has also been picking up on efforts to better match users searching for abortion clinics with those services and make it less likely those users will see anti-abortion pregnancy centers in search results. The company said it has evaluated roughly 33,500 listings this year and recategorized nearly 470 pages for the centers.

‘Pre-bunking’ shows promise in fight against misinformation

By DAVID KLEPPER

 The Google logo is seen at the Vivatech show in Paris, France, June 15, 2022. Google and a team of university researchers have hit on what they say could be an effective way to make people more impervious to the harmful impact of online misinformation. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

Soon after the Russian invasion, the hoaxes began. Ukrainian refugees were taking jobs, committing crimes and abusing handouts. The misinformation spread rapidly online throughout Eastern Europe, sometimes pushed by Moscow in an effort to destabilize its neighbors.

It’s the kind of swift spread of falsehoods that has been blamed in many countries for increased polarization and an erosion of trust in democratic institutions, journalism and science.

But countering or stopping misinformation has proven elusive.

New findings from university researchers and Google, however, reveal that one of the most promising responses to misinformation may also be one of the simplest.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, the researchers detail how short online videos that teach basic critical thinking skills can make people better able to resist misinformation.

The researchers created a series of videos similar to a public service announcement that focused on specific misinformation techniques — characteristics seen in many common false claims that include emotionally charged language, personal attacks or false comparisons between two unrelated items.

Researchers then gave people a series of claims and found that those who watched the videos were significantly better at distinguishing false information from accurate information.

It’s an approach called “pre-bunking” and it builds on years of research into an idea known as inoculation theory that suggests exposing people to how misinformation works, using harmless, fictional examples, can boost their defenses to false claims.

With the findings in hand, Google plans to roll out a series of pre-bunking videos soon in Eastern Europe focused on scapegoating, which can be seen in much of the misinformation about Ukrainian refugees. That focus was chosen by Jigsaw, a division of Google that works to find new ways to address misinformation and extremism.

“We have spent quite a bit of time and energy studying the problem,” said Beth Goldberg, Jigsaw’s head of research and one of the authors of the paper. “We started thinking: How can we make the users, the people online, more resilient to misinformation?”

The two-minute clips then demonstrate how these tactics can show up in headlines, or social media posts, to make a person believe something that isn’t true.

They’re surprisingly effective. Subjects who viewed the videos were found to be significantly better at distinguishing false claims from accurate information when tested by the researchers. The same positive results occurred when the experiment was replicated on YouTube, where nearly 1 million people viewed the videos.

Researchers are now investigating how long the effects last, and whether “booster” videos can help sustain the benefits.

Earlier findings have suggested that online games or tutorials that teach critical thinking skills can also improve resiliency to misinformation. But videos, which could be played alongside online advertisements, are likely to reach many more people, said Jon Roozenbeek, a Cambridge University professor and one of the authors of the study.

Other authors included researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and the University of Western Australia.

Google’s effort will be one of the largest real-world tests of pre-bunking so far. The videos will be released on YouTube, Facebook and TikTok, in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. All three countries have accepted large numbers of Ukrainian refugees and their citizens could be vulnerable to misinformation about refugees.

Jigsaw CEO Yasmin Green said the work on prebunking is intended to complement Google’s other efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation: “As the scourge of misinformation grows, there’s a lot more we can do to provide people with prompts and features that help them stay safe and informed online.”

While journalistic fact checks can be effective in debunking a particular piece of misinformation, they’re time and labor intensive. By focusing on characteristics of misinformation in general instead of specific claims, pre-bunking videos can help a person spot false claims on a wider variety of topics.

Another method, content moderation by social media companies, can often be inconsistent. While platforms like Facebook and Twitter often remove misinformation that violates their rules, they’re also criticized for failing to do more. Other platforms like Telegram or Gab boast a largely hands-off approach to misinformation.

Social media content moderation and journalistic fact checks can also run the risk of alienating those who believe the misinformation. They might also be ignored by people who already distrust legitimate news outlets.

“The word fact checking itself has become politicized,” Roozenbeek said.

Pre-bunking videos, however, don’t target specific claims, and they make no assertions about what is true or not. Instead, they teach the viewer how false claims work in general — whether it’s a claim about elections or NASA’s moon landings, or the latest outbreak of the avian flu.

That transferability makes pre-bunking a particularly effective way of confronting misinformation, according to John Cook, a research professor at Australia’s Monash University who has created online games that teach ways to spot misinformation.

“We’ve done enough research to know this can be effective,” Cook said. “What we need now is the resources to deploy this at scale.”

Amazon keeps growing, and so does its cache of data on you

By HALELUYA HADERO

The Amazon logo is seen in Douai, northern France, April 16, 2020. In August 2022, Amazon has said it will spend billions of dollars in two gigantic acquisitions that, if approved, will broaden its ever growing presence in the lives of consumers. This time, the company is targeting two areas: health care and the "smart home." (AP Photo/Michel Spingler, File)


From what you buy online, to how you remember tasks, to when you monitor your doorstep, Amazon is seemingly everywhere.

And it appears the company doesn’t want to halt its reach anytime soon. In recent weeks, Amazon has said it will spend billions of dollars in two gigantic acquisitions that, if approved, will broaden its ever growing presence in the lives of consumers.

This time, the company is targeting two areas: health care, through its $3.9 billion buyout of the primary care company One Medical, and the “smart home,” where it plans to expand its already mighty presence through a $1.7 billion merger with iRobot, the maker of the popular robotic Roomba vacuum.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a company known for its vast collection of consumer information, both mergers have heightened enduring privacy concerns about how Amazon gathers data and what it does with it. The latest line of Roombas, for example, employ sensors that map and remember a home’s floor plan.

“It’s acquiring this vast set of data that Roomba collects about people’s homes,” said Ron Knox, an Amazon critic who works for the anti-monopoly group Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Its obvious intent, through all the other products that it sells to consumers, is to be in your home. (And) along with the privacy issues come the antitrust issues, because it’s buying market share.”

Amazon’s reach goes well beyond that. Some estimates show the retail giant controls roughly 38% of the U.S. e-commerce market, allowing it to gather granular data about the shopping preferences of millions of Americans and more worldwide. Meanwhile, its Echo devices, which house the voice assistant Alexa, have dominated the U.S. smart speaker market, accounting for roughly 70% of sales, according to estimates by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Ring, which Amazon purchased in 2018 for $1 billion, monitors doorsteps and helps police track down crime — even when users might not be aware. And at select Amazon stores and Whole Foods, the company is testing a palm-scanning technology that allows customers to pay for items by storing biometric data in the cloud, sparking concerns about risks of a data breach, which Amazon has attempted to assuage.

“We treat your palm signature just like other highly sensitive personal data and keep it safe using best-in-class technical and physical security controls,” the company said on a website that provides information about the technology.

Even consumers who actively avoid Amazon are still likely to have little say about how their employers power their computer networks, which Amazon — along with Google — has long dominated through its cloud-computing service AWS.

“It’s hard to think of another organization that has as many touch points as Amazon does to an individual,” said Ian Greenblatt, who heads up tech research at the consumer research and data analytics firm J.D. Power. “It’s almost overwhelming, and it’s hard to put a finger on it.”

And Amazon — like any company — aims to grow. In the past few years, the company has purchased the Wi-Fi startup Eero and partnered with the construction company Lennar to offer tech-powered houses. With iRobot, it would gain one more building block for the ultimate smart home — and, of course, more data.

Customers can opt out of having iRobot devices store a layout of their homes, according to the vacuum maker. But data privacy advocates worry the merger is another way Amazon could suck up information to integrate into its other devices or use to target consumers with ads.

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski denied that’s what the company wants to do.

“We do not use home maps for targeted advertising and have no plans to do so,” Levandowski said.

Whether that will relieve concerns is another matter, especially in light of research about Amazon’s other devices. Earlier this year, a group of university researchers released a report that found voice data from Amazon’s Echo devices are used to target ads to consumers — something the company had denied in the past.

Umar Iqbal, a postdoc at the University of Washington who led the research, said he and his colleagues found Echo devices running third-party Skills, which are like apps for Alexa, that communicate with advertisers.

Levandowski said consumers can opt out of receiving “interest-based” ads by adjusting their preferences on Amazon’s advertising preferences page. She also said Amazon doesn’t share Alexa requests with advertising networks.

Skills that collect personal information are required to post their privacy policies on a detail page in Amazon’s store, according to the company. Researchers, however, found only 2% of Skills are clear about their data collection practices, and the vast majority don’t mention Alexa or Amazon at all.

For companies like Amazon, data collection is for more than just data’s sake, noted Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame.

“You can almost see them just trying to paint a broader picture of an individual,” Martin said. “It’s about the inferences that they’re able to draw about you specifically, and then you compared to other people.”

Amazon’s One Medical deal, for instance, has sparked questions about how the company would handle personal health data that would fall into its lap.

Should the deal close, Levandowski said customers’ health information will be handled separately from all other Amazon businesses. She also added Amazon wouldn’t share personal health information outside of One Medical for “advertising or marketing purposes of other Amazon products and services without clear permission from the customer.”

But Lucia Savage, a chief privacy officer at the chronic care provider Omada Health, said that doesn’t mean One Medical wouldn’t be able to get data from other arms of Amazon’s business that could help it better profile its patients. The information just has to flow one way, she said.

To be sure, privacy concerns are not limited to Amazon. In the aftermath of Roe v Wade being overturned, for instance, Google said it would automatically get rid of information about users who visit abortion clinics amid pressure from Democratic lawmakers. Meanwhile, Meta, which owns Facebook, settled a class action lawsuit in February over its use of “cookies” about a decade ago that tracked users after they logged off Facebook.

But unlike Meta and Google, whose focus is mainly on selling ads, Amazon might benefit more from collecting data because its primary goal is to sell products, said Alex Harman, director of competition policy at the anti-monopoly group Economic Security Project.

“For them, data is all about getting you to buy more and be locked into their stuff,” Harman said.

Amazon plans to shut Amazon Care service amid One Medical overlap

Spencer Soper, Bloomberg News

The Amazon.com Inc. logo is displayed on an Apple Inc. laptop computer in this arranged photograph taken in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., on Monday, April 23, 2019. Amazon.com Inc. is scheduled to release earnings figures on April 25. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

Amazon.com Inc. is closing its primary care and telehealth service, a sudden move that follows the company’s deal to buy the One Medical chain of clinics. 

Amazon Care, which was launched in 2019, will close by the end of the year, Senior Vice President Neil Lindsay said in an email to the company’s health care team. 

“This decision wasn’t made lightly and only became clear after many months of careful consideration,” Lindsay said in the email, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. “Although our enrolled members have loved many aspects of Amazon Care, it is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we have been targeting, and wasn’t going to work long-term.”

Lindsay said many displaced workers will have opportunities to join other teams within Amazon.

Kristen Helton, who ran Amazon Care, is on a break that began earlier this summer, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.

Amazon Care overlaps with services provided by One Medical, which Amazon said in July it would acquire in an all-cash deal valued at US$3.49 billion. One Medical, whose parent is called 1Life Healthcare Inc., operates 182 medical offices in 25 markets in the US. Customers pay a subscription fee for access to its physicians and round-the-clock digital health services. Amazon in February announced plans to expand Amazon Care to 20 additional cities, including New York, Chicago, Miami and San Francisco.

News of the closing came as a surprise to members of the team, according to a person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter.

“It just seems like there weren’t enough health care hires from the start,” the person said. “A lot of internal Amazon people were working in a space they didn’t know anything about.”

Amazon for years has been trying to break into the health care industry. It purchased mail-order pharmacy PillPack Inc. in 2018 and joined a much ballyhooed health care venture with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. that fizzled out after three years.

Danish adoptees call for S. Korea to probe adoption issues

By KIM TONG-HYUNG

1 of 6

Peter Møller, attorney and co-head of the Danish Korean Rights Group, speaks during a news conference in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2022. Dozens of South Korean adoptees who were sent to Danish parents as children in the 1970s and ‘80s have formally demanded Tuesday, Aug 23, 2022, the South Korean government investigate the circumstances surrounding their adoptions, which they say were corrupted by systemic practices that falsified or obscured children's origins. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Dozens of South Koreans adopted by Danish parents decades ago have formally demanded the South Korean government investigate their adoptions, which they say were marred by widespread practices that falsified or obscured children’s origins.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Seoul has up to four months to decide whether to accept the application collectively filed Tuesday by the 53 adoptees. If it does, that could possibly trigger the most far-reaching inquiry into foreign adoptions in the country, which has never fully reconciled the child export frenzy engineered by past military governments that ruled from the 1960s to ’80s.

The application cites a broad range of grievances emphasizing how scores of children were carelessly or unnecessarily removed from their families amid loose government monitoring and a lack of due diligence.

Perhaps more crucially, the country’s special laws aimed at promoting adoptions practically allowed profit-driven agencies to manipulate records and bypass proper child relinquishment.

Most of the South Korean adoptees sent abroad were registered by agencies as legal orphans found abandoned on the streets, although they frequently had relatives who could be easily identified and found. This made the children more easily adoptable as agencies raced to send more kids to the West at faster speeds.

“None of us are orphans,” said Peter Møller, attorney and co-head of the Danish Korean Rights Group, as he described the group’s members who filed the application.

“(In) a lot of papers, the Korean state at the time have stamped papers that say people were found on the streets. If you do a little bit of math, that would mean that from the 1970s and 1980s Seoul would be flooded with baskets with children lying around in the streets. … Basements will be filled with lost child reports at police stations.”

Møller, who was adopted to Denmark in 1974, said about 50 more of the group’s members are expected to join the application and that he plans to come back to South Korea with their files in September.

The complaints by adoptees who filed the application include inaccurate or falsified information in adoption papers that distort their biological origins, such as wrong birth names, dates or locations, or details about birth parents.

Some of the adoptees say they discovered that the agencies had switched their identities to replace other children who died or got too sick to travel to Danish parents, which made it highly difficult or often impossible to trace their roots.

The adoptees called for the commission to broadly investigate the alleged wrongdoings surrounding their adoptions, including how agencies potentially falsified records, manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins, and proceeded with adoptions without the proper consent of birth parents. They want the commission to establish whether the government should be held accountable for failing to monitor the agencies and confirm whether the uptick in adoptions was fueled by increasingly larger payments and donations from adoptive parents, which apparently motivated agencies to create their own supply.

The adoptees also called for the commission to push Holt Children’s Services and the Korea Social Service — the two agencies that sent kids to Denmark — into providing full access to the entirety of their adoption documents and background information. They also say all those records should be transferred to government authorities handling post-adoption services to prevent the information from being destroyed or manipulated.

South Korean adoptees for years have been criticizing agencies over what they see as a lack of transparency and an unwillingness to open records. Møller said some adoptees in Denmark remain reluctant to join the application out of fear that the agencies might destroy their records.

Holt didn’t answer repeated calls seeking comment. The KSS deferred all questions to Holt, the bigger agency.

Holt already has an ongoing legal battle with U.S. adoptee Adam Crapser, who in 2019 filed a 200 million won ($150,000) damage suit against the agency and the South Korean government for failing to follow through on his adoption and ensure that his American parents naturalized him. After being abused and abandoned by two different sets of American parents, Crapser was deported in 2016 following run-ins with the law 

The Danish adoptees initially considered filing a lawsuit against the agencies or South Korean government before dropping the idea because South Korean law puts the burden of proof entirely on the plaintiffs in civil cases. If the truth commission decides to investigate the adoptions, its findings could later be used by adoptees in possible damage suits against the agencies or government, said Philsik Shin, a Seoul-based scholar who helped the adoptees prepare the application.

About 200,000 South Koreans were adopted overseas during the past six decades, mainly to white parents in the United States and Europe. Denmark was one of the biggest destinations for South Korean children in Europe, receiving about 9,000 adoptees — most of them from the 1960s to late 1980s when South Korea was ruled by consecutive military governments.

During the height of the adoptions in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, agencies aggressively solicited newborns or young children from hospitals and orphanages, often in exchange for payments, and operated maternity homes where single mothers were pressured to give away their babies. Adoption workers toured factory areas and low-income neighborhoods in search of struggling families who could be persuaded to give away their children.

The agencies were run by board members close to military leaders, who saw adoptions as a tool to reduce the number of mouths to feed and the remove the socially undesirable, including children from unwed mothers. Adoptions were also aimed at deepening ties with the democratic West amid a fierce regime competition with rival North Korea, according to the military governments’ documents obtained by AP.

It wasn’t until 2013 when South Korea’s government required foreign adoptions to go through family courts, ending a decadeslong policy of allowing private agencies to dictate child relinquishments, transfer of custodies and emigration.

Past S. Korean gov’ts blamed for abuses, deaths at facility
By KIM TONG-HYUNG

1 of 5

Park Sun-yi, left, a victim of Brothers Home, weeps during a press conference at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission office in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2022. The commission has found the country's past military governments responsible for atrocities committed at Brothers Home, a state-funded vagrants' facility where thousands were enslaved and abused from the 1960s to 1980s. 

(AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has found the country’s past military governments responsible for atrocities committed at Brothers Home, a state-funded “vagrants’ facility” where thousands were enslaved and abused from the 1960s to 1980s.

The landmark report on Wednesday came 35 years after a prosecutor first exposed the horrors at the facility in the southern port city of Busan and details an attempted cover-up of incriminating evidence that would have confirmed a state-sponsored crime.

The commission’s chairperson, Jung Geun-sik, urged South Korea’s current government to issue a formal apology to survivors and explore ways to ease their suffering as he announced the initial results of its investigation into Brothers, including extreme cases of forced labor, violence and deaths.

The commission also called for the government to review the conditions at current welfare facilities around the country and swiftly ratify the United Nations convention against enforced disappearances.

The commission “confirmed that the direct and indirect exercise of government authority resulted in the forced confinement of people deemed as vagrants at Brothers Home and caused serious violations of human rights, including forced labor, physical assault, cruel treatment, deaths and disappearances,” Jeung said in a news conference at the commission’s office in Seoul.

“The state has ignored pleas (by inmates) to correct the human rights violations at Brothers Home, had knowledge of the problems but did not act to resolve them, and attempted to distort and minimize the scale of the abuses after the Brothers Home incident became known in 1987, preventing proper legal handling (of the abuses) based on facts,” he said.

Lee Jae-seung, a senior commission official who oversees the Brothers inquiry, said he wouldn’t hesitate to define Brothers as a state crime.

The commission’s report was based on an examination of a broad range of evidence, including documents from police, prosecutors and courts, and Brothers’ own files, such as intake documents and death certificates. It also found records that suggest the facility abusively administered psychiatric drugs to control inmates.

The commission said the violence and abuse at Brothers were even worse than previously known. It said its examination of records so far point to at least 657 deaths at Brothers, which was higher than the previously known tally of 513 between 1975 and 1986 documented in the facility’s records.

The commission also confirmed that Busan police randomly seized people off the streets to send them to Brothers, regardless of whether they had easily identifiable homes or families. They often allowed Brothers employees, who toured the city in trucks, to do the kidnapping themselves.

Brothers, run by late owner Park In-keun and his family, also embezzled the wages of thousands of inmates who were forced into slave labor, which involved construction work both offsite and at Brothers, as well as work in factories making clothing, ballpoint pens and fishing hooks.

So far, no one has been held accountable for hundreds of deaths, rapes and beatings at Brothers.

Jung acknowledged that the recommendations the commission makes to the government aren’t binding but said its findings could be used as evidence for survivors if they pursue lawsuits for damages against the government or any remaining Brothers stakeholders. The commission did not directly recommend the pursuit of criminal charges.

The commission’s report was based on its investigation into the cases of 191 individuals, who were among 544 Brothers survivors who have so far filed applications. The commission plans to produce more reports as it continues its investigations.

Jung said the commission also plans to look into the foreign adoptions of Brothers children, which The Associated Press first confirmed in 2019. Through documents obtained from officials, lawmakers or through freedom of information requests, the AP found direct evidence that 19 children were adopted out of Brothers between 1979 and 1986, and indirect evidence suggesting at least 51 more adoptions.

Some Brothers survivors wept from their seats as Jung and Lee announced the results of the investigation.

Choi Seung-woo, who landed in Brothers as a schoolchild in 1982 after being kidnapped by police and endured severe beatings and sexual abuse for years, said the report gives survivors “hope and courage.” He urged the government to actively support survivors who are grappling with financial and health problems and intense “trauma.”

“(The commission’s findings) give us another opportunity to redeem ourselves in court, but no one knows how long that’s going to take,” Choi said.

Lee Chae-sik, another former inmate, said the commission’s truth-finding efforts won’t mean much if survivors don’t receive immediate help.

“I am fine. I run three convenience stores, but what about this guy?” Lee said, showing his text messages with another former inmate stuck in a long-term care hospital. “Our country has been waiting for us to die.”

From the 1960s to 1980s, South Korean military dictators ordered roundups to beautify the streets. Thousands — including homeless and disabled people, as well as children — were snatched off the streets and brought to facilities where they were detained and forced to work. The commission said such roundups were “illegal and unconstitutional” as they violated people’s fundamental rights and freedoms.

In interviews with dozens of former Brothers inmates, many said that as children, they were brought to the facility after police officers kidnapped them, and that their parents had no idea of their whereabouts.

Many inmates were enslaved, raped and, in hundreds of cases, beaten to death or left to die, their bodies dumped in the woods, according to dozens of interviews with survivors and a review of an extensive range of government and Brothers documents obtained by the AP.

The commission said the facility’s death records describe many of the victims as already dead upon arrival at hospitals, which it said either indicates dismal health conditions at the overcrowded facility or an attempt to conceal deaths caused by beatings and torture.

The commission said records show that Brothers, which had a designated ward for inmates with mental health problems, purchased abnormal volumes of psychiatric drugs. Such drugs were likely forced upon a broad range of inmates as the facility’s owners tried to maintain their grip over a sprawling compound they controlled with severe violence and military-style discipline.

“Brothers Home arbitrarily administered drugs to inmates who struggled to adjust or were rebellious, and the psychiatric ward was used as a so-called ‘disciplinary ward,”’ the commission said in its report.

The commission also highlighted an extreme case of a former Brothers inmate who reunited with his relatives nearly five decades after he landed at the facility.

The man, identified only by his surname Seol, was grabbed from a Busan train station and locked up at Brothers sometime around 1974 and 1975. He was transferred years later to an orphanage, which registered him as an orphan, soon after his family registered him as dead following years of futile searches. Seol reunited with his relatives in June last year, following the commission’s investigation into his family background.

The roundups intensified as South Korea began preparing to bid for and host the 1988 Summer Olympics. Brothers, a mountainside compound in Busan, was the largest of these facilities and had around 4,000 inmates when its horrors were exposed in 1987.

Kim Yong Won, the former prosecutor who exposed Brothers, told the AP that high-ranking officials blocked his investigation under direction from the office of military strongman Chun Doo-hwan, who feared an embarrassing international incident on the eve of the Olympics.

Following Kim’s watered-down investigation and narrow indictments, Park, the Brothers’ owner, was acquitted by the Supreme Court in 1989 of charges linked to illegal confinement of inmates. Park, who served a short prison term for embezzlement and other relatively minor charges, died in 2016.

The commission began investigating the Brothers abuse in May last year, following a yearslong struggle for redemption by Brothers survivors, many of whom are struggling with financial and health problems.

Crucial illegal road threatens Amazon rainforest
By FABIANO MAISONNAVE

1 of 4

This May 2, 2022, photo provided by Xingu + Network shows an illegal road inside a protected area called Terra do Meio (Middle Earth) Ecological Station in Para state, in the Brazilian Amazon. The dirt road is now just a few miles shy of connecting two of the worst areas of deforestation in the region. (Xingu + Network via AP)

An illegal dirt road ripping through protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon is now just a few miles shy of connecting two of the worst areas of deforestation in the region, according to satellite images and accounts from people familiar with the area. If the road is completed it will turn a large area of remaining forest into an island, under pressure from human activity on all sides.

Environmentalists have been warning about just this kind of development in the rainforest for decades. Roads are significant because most deforestation occurs alongside them, where access is easier and land value higher.

On the east side of the new road is a massively-deforested area where Brazil’s largest cattle herd, 2.4 million head, now grazes. This municipality of Sao Felix do Xingu is the country’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, thanks to deforestation, according to Climate Observatory, a network of environmental groups. It is roughly the size of Maine and has a population of 136,000.

To the west is an area where three years ago ranchers coordinated the burning of several swaths of virgin forest in an episode famously known as the Day of Fire. This municipality, larger than Maryland, is Brazil’s eighth-largest greenhouse gas emitter.

Wedged in between is the Xingu basin. The Xingu River that runs through it is one of the main tributaries of the Amazon River. It begins in the drier Cerrado biome, surrounded by tens of thousands of square miles of protected areas.

The Xingu River is home to several Indigenous peoples, who are now pressed on both sides by an onslaught of settlers who have built a large network of dirt roads and illegal airstrips. Experts said the stakes could not be higher.

The opportunities for new deforestation “in the center of the corridor of protected areas of the Xingu brings the risk of an irreversible breaking of the Amazon rainforest, dividing it into islands of degraded forest, which does not have the strength to resist climate change. We need to protect and maintain large forest corridors to sustain the resilience of the threatened biome,” Biviany Rojas, the program coordinator of Socio-Environmental Institute, a Brazilian non-profit, told the Associated Press.

Almost half of Brazil’s climate pollution comes from deforestation, according to Climate Observatory. The destruction is so vast now that the eastern Amazon, just east of Xingu basin, has ceased to be a carbon sink, or absorber, for the Earth and has converted into a carbon source, according to a study published in 2021 in the journal Nature.

“They come to deforest, to extract timber and to dig for gold,” Indigenous leader Mydjere Kayapo told the AP in a phone interview. His people, the Kayapo, have suffered invasions from loggers and gold miners, who contaminate rivers with mud and mercury, co-opt leaders and provoke internal division.

The new road was detected earlier this year. According to satellite images analyzed by a network of nonprofits called Xingu+ and reviewed by the AP, it is 27 miles (43 kilometers) long.

The road cuts through two ostensibly protected areas: Terra do Meio (Middle Earth) Ecological Station, a federal unit, and Iriri State Forest, managed by the state of Pará, famous for its deforestation rates.

From January to August, Terra do Meio alone lost 9 square miles (24 square kilometers) of forest, and Iriri lost 6 square kilometers (2 square miles) of rainforest along the illegal road. In July, Xingu+ reported the illegal road-building to Brazil’s attorney general.

The city of Novo Progresso is also west of the new road. In recent days, the city has been covered by thick smoke from wildfires, deliberately set. On Monday alone, satellite sensors picked up 331 outbreaks of fire in the municipality, according to monitoring from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. August, which falls in the dry season, is typically the second worst month for both deforestation and fire.

Brazil’s federal agency ICMBio, which manages protected areas, and Pará’s secretary of environment, didn’t respond to AP emails seeking comment about the illegal road. These are the agencies responsible for protecting the areas flanking the road.

Under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, the area deforested in Brazil’s Amazon has reached a 15-year high, according to official data. The space agency said its national monitoring systems showed the Brazilian Amazon lost more than 5,000 square miles (13,200 square kilometers) of rainforest in the 12 months from Aug. 2020 to July 2021. New data is expected out by the end of the year.

____

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.