Pope meets Cuban president as small protest held away from Vatican


Pope Francis leads the Angelus prayer from his window at the Vatican


Tue, June 20, 2023
By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis held talks on Tuesday with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who is making a rare trip to the West, as police kept a small demonstration demanding respect for human rights on the communist-run island away from the Vatican.

A Vatican statement did not give any details on what was discussed during 40 minutes of talks but said that in Diaz-Canel´s subsequent talks with Holy See diplomats the topic was the current situation in Cuba, with particular attention to the Cuban Church's charity activities.

This appeared to be a reference to the country's dire financial situation.

Cuba is suffering a near unprecedented economic crisis, with widespread shortages of food, fuel and medicine that have prompted a record-breaking outflow of migrants to the United States in the last year.

A Cuban embassy statement said Diaz-Canel expressed support for the pope's efforts to achieve peace, protect the environment, promote nuclear disarmament and defend the poor.

Diaz-Canel, who was also due to meet Italian President Sergio Mattarella and officials of U.N. food agencies in Rome, rarely travels to Western nations. Last November, he travelled to China and Russia to meet with presidents in each country.

Pope Francis visited Cuba in 2015 and met with ailing revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, who died in 2016.

As the pope and Diaz-Canel met, about a dozen demonstrators opposed to the Cuban government held a protest near the Tiber River about six blocks away. They had planned to hold it outside St. Peter's Square but police did not allow them.

The protesters held up Cuban and Italian flags and demanded the release of those they say are political prisoners. They held up a large banner reading "Respect Human Rights in Cuba".

Communist-run Cuba has faced sharp criticism from rights groups, the United States and the European Union following the imprisonment of hundreds of protesters after the July 11, 2021, riots, the largest since Castro's 1959 revolution.

Some of those who took to the streets, angered by blackouts and shortages amid the coronavirus pandemic, cried "freedom" and demanded a change in government.

Authorities in Cuba have said those jailed following the 2021 demonstrations are guilty of crimes including public disorder, resisting arrest, robbery and vandalism. They have wavered little from those arguments despite growing international pressure.

But during an unusual visit to Cuba early this year, Cardinal Benjamin Stella, an envoy of the pope, said he had discussed a potential prisoner release with Diaz-Canel.

(This story has been refiled to add the dropped hyphenated last name of Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel)

(Additional reporting by David Sherwood in Havana; Editing by Christina Fincher)

'Slow water' could transform the Southwest, one little rock wall at a time

Erica Gies

 PopSci
Tue, June 20, 2023 

The different between nature-inspired rock dams and hard infrastructure like concrete dams? They leak.

WHEN VALER CLARK and Josiah Austin moved to El Coronado cattle ranch in southern Arizona in the 1980s, the seasonal rain didn’t soak into the soil but roared through arroyos and washes, cutting them deeper into the earth. The erosion was threatening a road, so they placed a few rocks across the adjacent wash. The tiny structure worked as intended, slowing water, catching soil, and fostering the return of long-gone plants. Clark and Austin had instinctually re-created an Indigenous technique for managing water in drylands.

Ultimately, the duo added around 20,000 small rock barriers across tributaries of the often-dry Turkey Creek, which ran through their 1,800-acre property in the Chiricahua Mountains. Within a few monsoon seasons, water seeped from the structures year-round, and the creek corridor turned green with plants. Downstream landowners were suspicious, claiming that Clark and Austin were holding on to “their” water. But when Laura Norman, a physical scientist from the US Geological Survey, measured the flow in 2013, she found that the barriers weren’t just slowing flash floods and extending supply into the dry season: They’d actually raised the stream’s flow by 28 percent.

Today, the Southwest is staggering through a “megadrought”—possibly the worst in 1,200 years. The Colorado River, which quenches the demands of more than 40 million people in seven US states and Mexico, is seeing average flows that are 19 percent lower than in the last century. Climate change is making the region’s water woes more severe, scientists say. But drought is partly determined by the gap between supply and human demand, and right now, demand is greater than the region’s supply. What’s more, our development choices—urban sprawl, industrial forestry and agriculture, intensive cattle grazing, and the concrete infrastructure we use to try to control water—are sapping the river’s natural systems and resilience.


Modern development tends to erase places where water slows down: wetlands, flood plains, mountain meadows, and forests. These ecosystems absorb high flows, prevent floods, and move water underground, which raises the water table. A healthy groundwater system supplies streams, wetlands, and rivers during the dry season and hydrates soil and plants, making them less likely to burn in wildfires and allowing them to release water into the atmosphere, contributing to rain. But humans have dramatically altered the water cycle by draining or filling as much as 87 percent of global wetlands over the past three centuries, interrupting the flow of two-thirds of rivers, and doubling the land area of paved cities since 1992. All told, we have transformed 75 percent of the world’s total land area for housing, agriculture, and industry.

Eight years ago, a nonprofit installed wire-wrapped rock structures called gabions in Babacomari Ranch in Arizona to detain precipitation and build up sediment.

Clark and Austin’s approach to land management has shown one way to reverse these negative trends, and the strategy is now spreading across the Southwest and northern Mexico. Their streambed structures, coupled with Norman’s in-depth studies on the benefits, led to the USGS co-founding the Sky Island Restoration Collaborative, a group of government agencies, nonprofits, private landowners, scientists, and restorationists in the US and Mexico who are building thousands of slow-water structures.

Called natural infrastructure in dryland streams, or NIDS, these structures include beaver dams, human versions of beaver dams, one-rock dams, check dams, log dams, leaky weirs, earthen berms, and gabions. The appropriate intervention depends on the specific site’s width and slope, nearby natural materials, and other factors. Despite the fact that several have “dam” in the name, these features do not block downstream flows like concrete hydropower dams; they just slow it down. They’re intentionally leaky to detain water, not retain it. “They’re a totally different beast,” says Norman.

She and her colleagues have documented NIDS’ effectiveness in storing carbon dioxide and mitigating flooding, water scarcity, pollution, heat, erosion, dust, wildlife loss, and food insecurity. These interventions—combined with levee setbacks to reconnect rivers with flood plains, forest and grassland restoration, and support for beavers’ comeback after they were hunted nearly to extinction—are part of the global “slow water movement” that could help boost water availability throughout the Colorado River basin.

USGS researcher Laura Norman checks on a post-assisted log structure used to elevate the streambed and mitigate erosion at Babacomari Ranch.

At the rim of the Grand Canyon, the all-powerful nature of water is explicit: The reflective squiggle a mile below carved the natural cathedral out of rock over millions of years. Yet Euro-American culture has interpreted that force as a challenge and tried to control it. Viewed solely in terms of human need, water is either considered a threat or a commodity—the new billion-dollar Colorado River deal involving the US government and three Western states is just one example. But that’s not the only way people relate to water. Other cultures, including many Indigenous groups in North America, perceive it as a friend or relative. With that perspective, the right to water comes with the responsibility to care for it, along with the many elements and organisms—soils, rocks, microbes, insects, and more—that also have relationships with it.

Choosing to return land to water might seem wasteful to some. But by restoring drylands to wetlands, or ciénegas in Spanish, Clark and Austin have shown how healthy slow-water systems can repair delicate desert landscapes that humans have destroyed.
A sick land

In early March, the morning after a fierce windstorm made saguaros sway and dropped snow on the low desert, I drove south from Tucson with Norman through the tiny hamlets of Elgin and Sonoita. We left behind the saguaros and paloverde trees of the Sonoran Desert and entered the Chihuahuan Desert, studded with big tuffets of sacaton grass and grazing pronghorns. At the roughly 28,000-acre Babacomari Ranch, we walked a channel of the San Pedro watershed. Norman, clad in a black cowboy hat, hiking boots, and a thick Wrangler work jacket, was meeting up with a fellow researcher to take soil samples. The channel has several gabions and log structures, installed eight years ago by Borderlands Restoration, a nonprofit that belongs to the Sky Island Restoration Collaborative.

Gabions are chicken wire containers filled with rocks. More engineered than other NIDS interventions, but still low profile, they are typically used in valley bottoms and anchored deep into the sides of the stream banks. The pieces of wood in the log structures are spaced 6 to 12 inches apart, pushed vertically into the streambed. They are meant to help water move underground and create “messiness” in the stream that slows water, captures sediment, and creates habitat. Both features have acted as intended: Parts of them are barely visible because trapped sediment has raised the riverbed and allowed new plants, including sacaton grass, to take root.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr28tSsvM1A

Borderlands Restoration founder Ron Pulliam served in the Clinton administration’s Department of the Interior and taught ecology at the University of Georgia. He says major results from NIDS, such as streams flowing year-round, can take 10 to 20 years—but small improvements in erosion and vegetation can happen in just a year of two. Seeing those quick results three decades ago encouraged Clark and Austin to stick with their unconventional efforts at Turkey Creek and beyond.

While the couple divorced several years back and sold El Coronado, Clark owns several other properties on both sides of the border. In consultation with ranchers and conservationists, she founded a nonprofit called Cuenca Los Ojos that builds NIDS and teaches these practices to other landowners and community members. Cuenca is also part of the Sky Islands group, and Clark’s daughter, Valerie Gordon, sits on the board.

This hard, dirty work is a long way from Clark’s early life in New York City. Then, in her 40s, she and Austin moved to El Coronado. The landscape “was so novel and so beautiful, it became the focus of my life,” she says. Curiosity about fire, water, plants, and lichen consumed her. “I’d never looked at ants before. I thought, There’s so much life going on here that I know nothing about.”

The Aridland Water Harvesting Study covers more than two dozen ranches, cities, and federally owned properties near the US-Mexico border.

That attention has served her well. “Valer has amazing powers of observation,” says Pulliam, a longtime friend and slow water ally. “She has a genius for understanding the movement of water and wildlife. She can’t explain it technically. But she has this intuitive feeling for how things work.”

Now 83, Clark recalls her first summer at El Coronado in the 1980s. “The monsoon season hit and I was terrified, because I saw how much damage the flooding was doing in the hills. It was a lot of erosion. The vegetation was being flattened. I remember asking, ‘What do the cows eat? Rocks?’” She felt something was wrong and began studying the history of the area. She discovered that local trees were cut down in the 1800s to fuel copper production. Without them, grass boomed, so settlers brought in vast herds of cattle and sheep, who made short work of the vegetation. Mining and cotton production took a toll as well. Then when rain struck the denuded land, the water cut deep channels into the earth.
What water wants

By placing rocks across a stream channel to slow water, Clark and Austin had intuitively re-created a technique that Indigenous peoples in the Southwest and northern Mexico had deployed for centuries to slow water, buffer against drought, and reverse desertification.

Soon after the couple added those first structures, a group of men came to El Coronado from Mexico, looking for work. Clark showed them the little rock dam. “I said, ‘It’s wetter here, and grasses are coming in. What if we do that in the hills because they’re quite bare?’ And they said, ‘We do that at home.’” For generations, they had used a similar practice to grow corn.

The men returned seasonally for 20 years and created some 20,000 rock structures throughout Turkey Creek’s side channels in the hills. As the low barriers caught sediment and deep-rooted grasses returned, “the mountains became sponges,” Clark recalls. “The wash became a stream, and scientists came and put fish in the stream.”

Gordon says the tenacity required to see this vision through is part of Clark’s personality. “My mother is very comfortable taking an unconventional path. She is not afraid of a challenge. And I think she also likes to do what other people don’t want to do.”

Indigenous rock structures similar to those at El Coronado can be found throughout the Southwest. Over the last decade, Pulliam saw several on land purchased by Borderlands Restoration in Arizona, and was struck by how different the watersheds looked from others in the region that were severely washed out. “All of the little side draws in this area have almost no erosion,” he says. “If you look carefully, there are ancient rock structures at least 1,200 years old still working.”

Indigenous peoples are still creating and using slow-water structures for various purposes today. Michael Kotutwa Johnson is a member of the Hopi Tribe and has a Ph.D. in natural resources. But his most important credential, according to his University of Arizona profile, is that “he continues to practice Hopi dry farming, a practice of his people for millennia.”

The Hopi, like most Indigenous cultures, are “place-based societies,” says Johnson. Their place receives just 6 to 10 inches of precipitation a year, so they have developed methods designed to conserve soil moisture. Johnson explains some of them.

Hopi read the landscape and natural water flows, then build rock dams at the bases of mesas to divert runoff into fields. They also use rock detention structures to capture nutrient-bearing sediment to hold moisture, allowing farmers to plant different varieties of crops without fertilizers or irrigation. “Crops always need new soil with nutrients,” Johnson says. Contour farming—planting across the slope of the land at a certain angle—also slows water and wind. Another strategy includes leaving the stalks, cobs, and leaves on the ground after a corn harvest to catch snow, allowing it to melt and be absorbed into the soil.



What if slow water interventions were deployed widely across the West? Could they heal the land-water relationship and reverse desertification? “Yes,” Norman says, without hesitation.

But there’s more to the Hopis’ resilience than a series of slow-water techniques, Johnson says. “It’s about having a relationship with the environment in a place that you’ve been living for a long, long time” and about the associated cultural belief system.

Rather than trying to maximize production, Hopi growers read the landscape to see what is possible for nature to provide that year. The timing and quantity of springtime vegetation serve as “biological indicators,” Johnson says. He notes that Hopi women select plants for certain traits and keep many varieties of seed for different annual conditions. “We’ve had 200-year droughts in our history. Our place is a testament to our resilience.”

Because traditional ecological knowledge doesn’t conform to Western science’s norms, the latter has been slow to recognize it as legitimate. Johnson counters, “When you have 3,000 years of replication, that is a science.”
Making a convincing argument

Norman, whose expertise lies in forestry, watershed management, and remote sensing, agrees strongly with Johnson’s sentiment. But she realized that nature-inspired structures, whether built by Indigenous peoples or permaculture-minded land owners such as Clark and Austin, would not be recognized as a legitimate strategy by some unless their benefits were measured according to the Western scientific method. “My science is meant to address these misconceptions about the structures,” Norman says.

She has now dedicated a decade to leading the USGS Aridland Water Harvesting Study. Her work, with geomorphologists, biologists, botanists, and hydrologists, has proven that small stones and other natural materials placed across streams can restore and create permanent wetlands, regrow plants, store carbon dioxide, reconnect streams with flood plains, recharge groundwater, and increase stream flow.

Norman grew up in Rhode Island, then moved west to Oregon for college and on to Arizona for graduate school. She first encountered rock detention structures when researching her Ph.D. dissertation, which used satellite data and flood modeling to make sense of environmental justice impacts from poor land management in Nogales, Mexico, and its twin city in Arizona. Erosion was releasing fine particle dust into the air, resulting in human health problems; flooding was endangering people; and heavy sediment loads were causing sewers to overflow. While working with the International Boundary and Water Commission to identify locations where structures could help address these problems, she became fascinated by the way small changes to the terrain could alter water flow and ultimately the shape and character of the land.

A black bear enjoys a cool dip in a watering hole fed by a gabion in the Chiricahua Mountains. Camera traps have caught many species visiting these slow-water features.

Not long after, Norman heard rumors of an oasis in the Chiricahuas. Intrigued, she visited El Coronado Ranch after a rain. The rock structures detained huge pools of water, keeping the washes running. “Seeing that with my own eyes was mind-blowing,” she says.

To measure the effects, she compared a tributary of Turkey Creek with neighboring Rock Creek, which had no rock structures. Using modified stream gauges and precipitation measurements, she found that the subtle barriers reduced peak flows from summer monsoons by half and extended base flows into fall by three to four weeks. The check dams kept more water in the system, resulting in that incredible 28 percent increase of water flowing downstream. What’s more, they captured 200 tons of soil per year, cleaning the water of sediment and supporting verdant vegetation that attracted animals.

Norman explains why there was more water in the treated stream. In contrast to Turkey Creek’s series of wetland sponges, Rock Creek has bare bedrock. “When water runs over an impervious surface and is exposed to elements, it evaporates,” Norman says. Compacted and dry soils also repel water, or become hydrophobic—“scared of water.” But when barriers make the life-giving liquid linger, it can permeate the soil.

“A lot of practitioners and ranchers were of the opinion that they were able to create more water [with rock detention structures],” says Norman. “But to be able to document that was amazing. More water storage and more water availability for everything, to reverse that degradation cycle into a restoration cycle.”

Pulliam, who has collaborated with Norman on some of her papers, says her scientific rigor has led to wider acceptance of these practices. “Early on, even at USGS, people were skeptical. But as evidence accumulated, they began to see Laura as a really innovative scientist,” he says. “Like Valer, she persisted through a period where no one had much faith in [the structures’] efficacy.”

In 2021, the American Water Resources Association awarded Norman a medal of excellence, saying her “research is the foundation of a burgeoning community of practice and a shift in policy implementation in the arid Southwest.”
Desert oases

Studies from atmospheric scientists have found that, in the Colorado River basin, the warmer climate is creating a thirstier atmosphere, which could evaporate more water out of the soil and plants and sometimes turn snow directly to water vapor. They predict that Colorado River flows could be 20 to 30 percent lower by 2050, meaning state negotiators of the river’s sharing agreement should be planning for even less water than they have today.

But Norman and other experts studying water cycle restoration assert that it’s not just climate change making the West drier. People have also dried out the land over the last two centuries by killing beavers, cutting forests, overgrazing grasslands, and cutting off rivers from their flood plains and wetlands with levees, channels, and diversions. What if slow water interventions, including Natural Infrastructure in Dryland Streams, were deployed widely across the West? Could they heal the land-water relationship and reverse desertification?

“Yes,” Norman says, without hesitation.

In a paper published last fall, Norman and co-authors reviewed many studies that support the claim of region-wide restoration being able to counteract desertification. One reason is that NIDS create localized humidity and cooling. In a park in Phoenix, Norman found the air is up to 3 degrees Celsius cooler around structures for two days after a rainfall.

Another reason is that about 40 percent of rain over land, on average, is formed from evaporation from soil and transpiration from plants. With forests cut, grasslands overgrazed, soil compacted, and more wetlands and flood plains paved over, that moisture is missing from the Colorado River’s water cycle.

To undo part of the damage, slow-water projects need to be distributed throughout water basins, not centralized. The interventions are typically small, but their impact on flood protection, water storage, and localized cooling is cumulative, much as how solar panels on many roofs can generate a lot of electricity. “The whole Colorado River basin, plugged full of structures?” says Norman. “At that scale, you’d see a regional response that might impact the climate by sequestration of carbon and by cooling of temperatures from bringing moisture back into the atmosphere.”

These changes also support wildlife, providing critical refuges for animals native to the Sky Islands, one of the most biodiverse regions in North America. Supporting an array of animals—Gila monsters, black bears, mountain lions, ocelots, bobcats, coatis, javelinas, foxes, deer—is part of Cuenca Los Ojos’ mission and what drives Clark to heal land and water. “The horny toad [or horned lizard] squirts blood out of its eyes to scare you. There are just so many delightful creatures in the region.” The fact that she thinks blood-squirting eyes are delightful epitomizes her enthusiasm for everything she encounters on the land.

Scientists, including Pulliam, have been documenting the return of wildlife. They even recorded an endangered jaguar near the rock structures at Cienega Ranch, a site in the Aridland Water Harvesting Study. “Because there’s water, the animals come,’’ says Norman.

One critter they’re tracking is famous for building its own infrastructure in water. Beavers have returned to southern Arizona after trappers wiped them out 150 years ago. They’ve also been found on Clark’s ranches in northern Mexico. “Beavers won’t settle in desiccated areas,” Pulliam says, “but if you provide seed areas where they can get established, they can gradually improve adjacent areas.”
The upwelling of a movement

Nature-based solutions are gaining ground worldwide, including in the US—incentivized by the Biden administration’s Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts. But they are still often dismissed as insignificant in the challenge of buffering human communities from flood, drought, and climate change. That attitude reveals a misunderstanding of the scale of human disruption to the water cycle, and therefore, the scale needed for projects like NIDS to repair that damage.

Because the federal government influences the way so much land and water in the American West is managed, it could make a monumental difference by embracing slow-water practices, says Clark. But while some federal employees support them, so far, it’s not part of the official policy at the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, or Bureau of Land Management.

Still, the federal agencies are coming around, says Pulliam. One lightbulb moment came after wildfires roared through the Chiricahuas about a decade ago. “Watersheds with rock structures had much, much less damage, and the Forest Service started noticing,” Pulliam explains, adding that the department is now giving contracts to Cuenca Los Ojos and Borderlands Restoration to build structures on its land. Overall, however, he says the US government retains a bias for modern engineering in its funding. State agencies, on the other hand, are much more open to NIDS. “They all buy in. They see it. It’s in their backyard.”

Local Indigenous communities have shown what close attention to nature’s ways can yield. “Water is really life to us,” says Johnson, the Hopi farmer, contrasting that attitude with the dominant society’s view that water is a commodity. “People are so far removed from the relationship that we have with water that they just don’t understand the complexities, and they keep making the same mistakes over and over again.”

Maybe we can improve our relationship with water, as individuals like Johnson, Clark, and Austin demonstrate how to heal water systems, and scientists like Norman and Pulliam document the intricacies of how they work. In response to water scarcity in the Southwest, many people think the answer is to bring in more from elsewhere via dams, aqueducts, and desalination plants. But slow-water practitioners make the most of the water that’s already there. Norman recalls a local saying, half-jokingly, “Ah, that would be great if there were some magic water that just appeared!” When she started studying ecosystems benefiting from slow-water techniques, “I was like, I think we found some, you know?”

China Launches New EV Tax Break in Effort To Boost Lagging Demand

The latest extension of a series of tax breaks first introduced in 2014, totaling $27.8 billion so far

By 

MACK WILOWSKI

 

Published June 21, 2023

Drew Angerer / Staff / Getty Images

China on Wednesday unveiled a 520 billion yuan ($72.3 billion) tax break for buyers of electric vehicles (EVs)—its biggest yet for the EV market—in an effort to boost lagging auto sales and consumer spending.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The latest round of EV tax breaks in China will be the biggest yet, totaling an estimated $72.3 billion over four years.
• Since 2014, cumulative Chinese EV tax breaks have totaled 200 billion yuan ($27.8 billion).
• Extension of EV tax breaks is meant to spur lagging EV demand in China.
• China is the world's biggest electric car market, accounting for 60% of global EV sales as of last year.
  

How Does The China EV Tax Credit Work?

Under the package, buyers of new energy vehicles (NEVs) purchased in 2024 and 2025 will pay up to 30,000 yuan ($4,170) less in purchase tax per vehicle. The tax break will be halved after two years and kept at 15,000 yuan for 2026 and 2027.1

The package lasts for four years, extending previous tax breaks which were first introduced in 2014 and renewed multiple times, most recently last year. As of last year, cumulative tax breaks since 2014 exceeded 200 billion yuan ($27.8 billion), according to Vice Minister of Finance Xu Hongcai. This year’s exemption could eventually top 115 billion yuan ($16 billion), the biggest ever for the industry.1

Shares of some Chinese carmakers rose after the announcement. Nio (NIO) stock was up about 1.2%, while shares of Guangzhou Automobile Group (GNZUF) rose about 1.7% at 10:30 a.m. EDT.

Why Does China Need An EV Tax Credit

China is the world’s biggest electric car market, accounting for 60% of global EV sales last year, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).2 However, growth in the world’s second-largest economy has slowed, reflecting a broader economic slowdown in the country and prompting officials to offer more financial incentives to spur demand.

Passenger car sales in China rose to 2.05 million in May—the highest in five months—while EV sales at 717,000 were a little shy of the December 2022 peak, according to data from China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.3

China is not the only country turning to tax credits to boost EV demand. The U.S., despite being home to the world's largest EV-maker Tesla (TSLA), implemented its own version of an EV tax credit of up to $7,500 in order to make EV buying more appealing and encourage EV makers to reduce their reliance on Chinese materials for EV production. Given the eligibility criteria, only certain EVs qualify.

China unveils $72 billion tax break for EVs, other green cars to spur demand

Qiaoyi Li and Liz Lee
Tue, June 20, 2023 

A electric car charging station is pictured in a parking lot in Shanghai

By Qiaoyi Li and Liz Lee

BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) -China unveiled on Wednesday a 520 billion yuan ($72.3 billion) package of tax breaks over four years for electric vehicles (EVs) and other green cars, its biggest yet for the industry as it seeks to boost slower auto sales growth.

Weakening sales growth in the world's biggest auto market has raised concern over China's economic growth and while financial support was widely expected after an earlier government pledge to promote the industry, shares in major automakers jumped after the details were released.

"The extension by another four years beat market expectations," said Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the China Passenger Car Association.

New energy vehicles (NEVs) purchased in 2024 and 2025 will be exempted from purchase tax amounting to as much as 30,000 yuan ($4,170) per vehicle. The exemption will be halved and capped at 15,000 yuan for purchases made in 2026 and 2027, the Ministry of Finance said in a statement.

China had also previously offered a subsidy for EV purchases for more than a decade but the programme ended last year.

Chinese auto shares rallied after the announcement, with EV makers NIO and Xpeng rising 6.1% and 5.5% respectively, versus a 1.9% drop in Hong Kong's benchmark index. Li Auto also surged 3.5%.

The new package extends the current NEV purchase tax exemption which expires at the end of 2023. NEVs include all-battery EVs, plug-in petrol-electric hybrids and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.

Cumulative NEV tax breaks, which were first introduced in 2014 and extended three times as recently as in 2022, exceeded 200 billion yuan as of last year, Vice Minister of Finance Xu Hongcai said at a press conference.

Xu said this year's exemption would top 115 billion yuan, indicating the new package of 520 billion yuan would be the biggest ever amount of tax breaks for the industry.

The tax incentives put NEVs on the front burner of a broad-based push to rekindle growth in the world's second-largest economy.

The government heavily promoted NEVs in recent years through incentives that supported the rise of local players such as Li Auto, NIO and BYD.

BYD, backed by Warren Buffett's investment company Berkshire Hathaway, now outsells Volkswagen branded cars in China and became the country's biggest auto maker by sales this year.

Analysts said the cap on the purchase tax exemption would help drive growth of cheaper models that are mainly produced by domestic firms rather than premium vehicles from foreign makers.

NEV sales suffered a hit earlier this year after the government ended the EV purchase subsidy programme, but bounced back after automakers including Tesla cut prices to defend market share and after the previous extension of the purchase tax exemption.

"This will aid China's EV growth," said Susan Zou, vice president at researcher Rystad Energy, anticipating EVs sales would grow 30% in 2024, accelerating from 15% estimated this year.

NEV sales rose 10.5% in May from a month earlier, showed data from the China Passenger Car Association. They jumped 60.9% from a year earlier when COVID-19 curbs still roiled auto production and sales.

Many local governments also announced fresh stimulus measures, expanding various incentives that they began rolling out this year to prop up sales.

The local government in Zhengzhou, capital of central Henan province, said on Wednesday it was handing out car purchase coupons totalling 50 million yuan between June and August, allocating 60% of the amount to NEV purchases.

($1 = 7.1936 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Qiaoyi Li and Liz Lee; Additional reporting by Siyi Liu in Beijing and Donny Kwok in Hong Kong; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Miyoung Kim, Elaine Hardcastle)

FISH & CHIPS FRIDAY
Catholic Church could consider resurrecting past practice amid successful study: ‘Pope Francis has already highlighted [it]’



Wes Stenzel
Wed, June 21, 2023 

British members of the Catholic Church have returned to the tradition of abstaining from meat on Fridays — and the positive environmental impact is substantial.

A new study by the University of Cambridge and collaborators indicates that, by cutting or reducing meat from their diet one time per week, practicing Catholics in the United Kingdom, about 10% of the total population, saved the equivalent of more than 55,000 tons of pollution each year, according to Phys.org. That’s roughly the pollution produced by 82,000 people flying from London to New York, according to the same source.

In September 2011, bishops in England and Wales announced that they would call Catholic churchgoers to revive the centuries-old tradition of fasting from meat on Fridays.

Research shows that although only about 28% of the country’s Catholic population shifted their dietary habits based on the bishops’ statement, 55% of those who changed their diet attempted to eat less meat on Fridays, substituting meat for other proteins like fish or cheese, while 41% cut meat out altogether on Fridays, according to Phys.org.


“The Catholic Church is very well placed to help mitigate climate change, with more than one billion followers around the world,” said professor Shaun Larcom, the lead author of the study. “Pope Francis has already highlighted the moral imperative for action on the climate emergency, and the important role of civil society in achieving sustainability through lifestyle change.”

The researchers also said that if American Catholics upheld the same meatless Friday tradition, we’d see more than 20 times the environmental impact in the United States as shown in the U.K. study.

“Meat agriculture is one of the major drivers of greenhouse gas emissions,” Larcom told Phys.org. “If the Pope was to reinstate the obligation for meatless Fridays to all Catholics globally, it could be a major source of low-cost emissions reductions, even if only a minority of Catholics choose to comply, as we find in our case study.”

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In Europe's empty churches, prayer and confessions make way for drinking and dancing


1 / 14
Belgium Repurposed Churches

Confessional booths are stacked into a corner at the Sacred Heart church in Mechelen, Beligum, Monday, June 19, 2023. Across Europe, the continent that nurtured Christianity for most of two millennia, many churches, convents, beguinages and chapels stand empty as faith and church attendance have dwindled over the past half century. Many are now been repurposed to preserve their historical and architectural relevance, while others have opened up to non-religious activities to expand their use. 

(AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

RAF CASERT
Thu, June 22, 2023 

MECHELEN, Belgium (AP) — The confessionals where generations of Belgians admitted their sins stood stacked in a corner of what was once Sacred Heart Church, proof the stalls — as well as the Roman Catholic house of worship — had outlived their purpose.

The building is to close down for two years while a cafe and concert stage are added, with plans to turn the church into “a new cultural hot spot in the heart of Mechelen,” almost within earshot of where Belgium's archbishop lives. Around the corner, a former Franciscan church is now a luxury hotel where music star Stromae spent his wedding night amid the stained-glass windows.

Across Europe, the continent that nurtured Christianity for most of two millennia, churches, convents and chapels stand empty and increasingly derelict as faith and church attendance shriveled over the past half century.

“That is painful. I will not hide it. On the other hand, there is no return to the past possible,” Mgr. Johan Bonny, bishop of Antwerp, told the Associated Press. Something needs to be done and now, ever more of the once sacred structures are repurposed for anything from clothes shops and climbing walls to night clubs.

It is a phenomenon seen over much of Europe’s Christian heartland from Germany to Italy and many nations in between. It really stands out in Flanders, in northern Belgium, which has some of the greatest cathedrals on the continent and the finest art to fill them. If only it had enough faithful. A 2018 study from the PEW research group showed, in Belgium, that of the 83% that say they were raised Christian, only 55% still consider themselves so. Only 10% of Belgians still attended church regularly.

Nowadays, visiting international choirs may find that their singers outnumber the congregation.

On average, every one of the 300 towns in Flanders has about six churches and often not enough faithful to fill a single one. Some become eyesores in city centers, their maintenance a constant drain on finances.

Mechelen, a town of 85,000 just north of Brussels is the Roman Catholic center of Belgium. It has two dozen churches, several huddled close to St. Rumbold’s cathedral with its UNESCO World Heritage belfry tower. Mayor Bart Somers has been working for years to give many of the buildings a different purpose.

“In my city we have a brewery in a church, we have a hotel in a church, we have a cultural center in a church, we have a library in a church. So we have a lot of new destinations for the churches,” said Somers, who as Flemish regional minister is also involved in repurposing some 350 churches spread across the densely populated region of 6.7 million.

A landmark repurposing project in Belgium was Martin’s Patershof hotel in Mechelen, where the interior of the church was gutted to create rooms where the beds have headboards resembling organ pipes and a breakfast room next to the altar where wafers of gold leaf hover overhead. “We often hear that people come here to relax and enjoy the silence of its former identity,” said hotel manager Emilie De Preter.

With its understated luxury, it offers contemplation, and more.

“In the hotel, people sleep in a church, maybe have sex in a church. So you could say: ethically, is it a good idea to have a hotel in a church? I don’t have so many hesitations,” said Somers. “I am more concerned about the actual architectural value.”

In nearby Brussels, the Spirito night club has taken over a deconsecrated Anglican church and has a drawing of a priest kissing a nun as its logo.

It is not exactly what Bishop Bonny had in mind.

Even if Roman Catholic religion is on the wane, a sense of the sacral or a need for reflection is also still present in society, whether one is religious, agnostic or atheist. And the aura of tranquility emanating from a church is hard to match. So for Bonny, there is no reason to turn churches into supermarkets or discos.

“Those are places for contemplation. And is that not exactly that the care of the church should be about?” he said. Bonny thinks the most successful and gratifying repurposing has been the handing over to other Christian communities, be they Coptic or Eastern European.

At his office, though, he can get weary just looking at the procession of suitors for empty Roman Catholic buildings. His heart is heavy when a real estate agent shows up. “They see possibilities. And you cannot believe, suddenly, how pious they can become when a financial opportunity presents itself. Suddenly they are more devout than a nun.”

Knowing the winding history of Christianity over centuries, Bonny takes the long view, since the near future does not look bright. “Every 300 years we nearly had to start again,” he said. “Something new, I’m sure, will happen. But it takes time.”

At the Martin’s Patershof, there is even is a condition that the church can reclaim the building if it is needed again, said De Preter. The hotel elements were built on steel beams and could be totally disassembled and taken out again. “If the church, at a certain point, wants the building back — which holds a very small chance, probably — it is possible.”

Federal judge strikes down Florida's ban on Medicaid funding for transgender treatment




Associated Press
Wed, June 21, 2023

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday struck down Florida rules championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis restricting Medicaid coverage for gender dysphoria treatments for potentially thousands of transgender people.

“Gender identity is real” and the state has admitted it, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle wrote in a 54-page ruling.

He said a Florida health code rule and a new state law violated federal laws on Medicaid, equal protection and the Affordable Care Act's prohibition of sex discrimination.

They are “invalid to the extent they categorically ban Medicaid payment for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the treatment of gender dysphoria,” Hinkle wrote.


The judge said Florida had chosen to block payment for some treatments “for political reasons” using a biased and unscientific process and that “pushing individuals away from their transgender identity is not a legitimate state interest.”

An email seeking comment from the DeSantis' office wasn't immediately returned.

Hinkle’s harsh language echoed that in his ruling two weeks ago over a law that bans transgender minors from receiving puberty blockers. Hinkle, who was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, issued a preliminary injunction so that three children could continue receiving treatment.

The DeSantis administration and the Republican-controlled Legislature had banned gender-affirming treatments for children and a law that DeSantis signed in May made it difficult — even impossible —for many transgender adults to get treatment.

The latest ruling involved a lawsuit filed last year on behalf of two adults and two minors, but advocacy groups estimate that some 9,000 transgender people in Florida use Medicaid to fund their treatments.

Hinkle also addressed the issue of whether gender-affirming treatments were medically necessary and noted that transgender people have higher rates of anxiety, depression and suicide than the general population.

Transgender medical care for minors is increasingly under attack — Florida is among 19 states that have enacted laws restricting or banning treatment. But it has been available in the United States for more than a decade and is endorsed by major medical associations.

Gender issues in general have increasingly become culture war flashpoints in the United States, ranging from brawls over the celebration of Pride Month to attempts to bar transgender youths from taking part in women's sports.

ABOLISH PRISON
Hondurans see little hope for nation's prisons as details of cold-blooded massacre emerge
 

MARLON GONZÁLEZ
Wed, June 21, 2023
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Authorities in Honduras began to hand over to relatives the hacked, burned corpses of 46 women killed in the worst riot at a women’s prison in recent memory.

Some of the bodies were so badly burned they need genetic testing or dental studies to identify, said Yuri Mora, the spokesman for Honduras’ national police investigation agency.

The picture that began to emerge of Tuesday's violence at the women's prison in Tamara, Honduras was one of a carefully planned massacre of supposed rival gang members by inmates belonging to the notorious Barrio 18 street gang.

The carnage has led to calls for change to the country's prison system and even talk of whether Honduras should emulate the drastic zero-tolerance, no-privileges prisons set up in neighboring El Salvador by President Nayib Bukele.

While El Salvador’s crackdown on gangs has given rise to rights violations, it has also proved immensely popular in a country long terrorized by street gangs.

“One of the gave dangers is the Bukele-ization of security problem in this country, with everything that would imply,” said Honduran human rights expert Joaquin Mejia.

Nobody debates that Honduras’ prisons are in a shameful state. In Tuesday’s riot, incarcerated members of the notorious Barrio 18 gang slaughtered 46 other women inmates by spraying them with gunfire, hacking them with machetes and then locking survivors in their cells and dousing them with flammable liquid.

Chillingly, the gang members were able to arm themselves with pistols and machetes, brush past guards and attack. They even carried locks to shut their victims inside, apparently to burn them to death.

Jessica Sánchez, an activist with the Civil Society Group, a human rights organization, said “we believe that this massacre was carried out on orders from a criminal network, and I am sure it was known beforehand, and nothing was done.”

Miguel Martínez, a security ministry spokesman, said the attack was taped by security cameras up to the moment the gang members destroyed them in what he called a planned attack.

“You can see the moment in which the women overcome the guards, leaving them helpless, and take their keys,” Martínez said.

President Xiomara Castro said the riot at the prison in Tamara northwest of Tegucigalpa was “planned by maras (street gangs) with the knowledge and acquiescence of security authorities.”

Castro fired Security Minister Ramón Sabillón, and replaced him with Gustavo Sánchez, who had been serving as head of the National Police.

She ordered that all of the country's 21 prisons be placed for one year under the control of the military police, who will be asked to train 2,000 new guards.

But she didn't announce any immediate plan to improve the conditions in prison, which are characterized by overcrowding, crumbling facilities and poorly trained guards. Security is so lax that inmates often run their own cellblocks, selling prohibited goods and extorting money from other inmates.

Many doubted the answer lies in adopting the kind of brutally regimented prisons that El Salvador has built.

“Building more prisons in Honduras isn’t necessary. Why? Why build more prisons that turn into slaughterhouses for people, when the government has no control over them?” said Roberto Cruz, 54, who runs a small retail outlet in the capital.

“What is needed are professional people to run the prisons,” Cruz said, acknowledging that “it is a big, complex problem that needs an urgent solution.”

Most don’t trust the government to get it right.

“We demand an international investigation that can really look at the issue of prisons and women” in prison, said Sánchez.

For now, the cold facts of Tuesday’s massacre are emerging: 18 pistols, an assault rifle, two machine pistols and two grenades were found in the prison after the riot. All were smuggled into the facility.

Then there was the shocking fact that — as in many Latin American jails — some of the inmates' children were living with their mothers in the prison at the time of the attack.

“Some of the women were living with their children in detention. These children are now left behind and highly vulnerable. I am deeply concerned about their well-being and safety," said Garry Conille, the regional director for UNICEF, the U.N. children's fund.

It was not known whether any children witnessed the attack.

The riot’s death toll surpassed that of a fire at a female detention center in Guatemala in 2017, when girls at a shelter for troubled youths set fire to mattresses to protest rapes and other mistreatment. The smoke and fire killed 41 girls.

The worst prison disaster in a century also occurred in Honduras, in 2012, at the Comayagua men’s penitentiary, where 361 male inmates died in a fire possibly caused by a match, cigarette or some other open flame.

Honduras Prison Riot Police guard the entrance to the women's prison in Tamara, on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Tuesday, June 20, 2023. A riot at the women's prison northwest of the Honduran capital has left at least 41 inmates dead, most of them burned to death, a Honduran police official said. 

(AP Photo/Elmer Martinez)

How Would Prison Abolition Actually Work?

As the idea of prison abolition increasingly enters the mainstream discourse, GQ interviews an organizer within the movement.

GQ
June 11, 2020

Marion Correctional Institution, April 27, 2020.Megan Jelinger / Getty Images

As protests continue to spread in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, one seemingly radical, decades-old idea has been thrust to the forefront of mainstream discourse: prison abolition.

With over two million people locked up in prisons and jails, the United States’ incarceration rate is the highest in the world, to the point where the country constitutes about five percent of the world’s population and yet houses 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Black and brown people are disproportionately imprisoned, sexual abuse is rampant, labor is exploited, and prolonged solitary confinement—denounced as a form of torture by the United Nations—is commonplace. The brutality of these conditions becomes all the more salient when compared to other developed Western nations, where even life sentences for murder rarely involve being condemned to spend the remainder of one’s days behind bars.

Prison abolitionists argue that it is not enough to simply reform our current criminal justice system—that it must be completely dismantled and, in its place, society must invest in communities and address harm in other ways. The two foremost leaders of the contemporary prison-abolition movement are famed activist Angela Davis and the scholar and geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. In 1997, they cofounded the organization Critical Resistance with the mission to “build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.” (You may have encountered the organization’s graphic chart breaking down the effectiveness of reform vs. abolition circulating on social media as of late.)

With the concept of prison abolition gaining increased visibility and unprecedented momentum, GQ spoke to Woods Ervin, an organizer with Critical Resistance who has been involved in the movement for a decade, about its basic tenets, goals, and visions for a prison-free future.


GQ: Prison abolition is an idea, when first encountered, that can feel incredibly radical and infeasible. How did you first encounter it, and was there a particular moment where you felt like the switch had been flipped for you?

Woods Ervin: The theory clicked for me around 2008. I was working at the time with queer and trans young people of color in Chicago. Part of the daily work was trying to support, engage, and help develop young people who are being constantly targeted by the prison-industrial complex [PIC]. I had a firsthand understanding of how the PIC comes into people's lives and shrinks their life chances.

These were young people who were 13, 14, 15, getting kicked out of their homes for being queer and trans, and who, out of survival, were constantly coming into contact with the prison-industrial complex. For me, that put it in really stark relief. Because they couldn't figure out how to get out of the systemic nature of it, there was nothing for those young people. They were just falling through the cracks.

It clarified for me that the prison-industrial complex needed to be pulled apart. I think it was then that the politics crystallized, and it was in the practice of organizing with Critical Resistance that the work of how to do it crystallized.

As an organizer, when you're giving someone the elevator pitch for prison abolition, what do you tell them?

I say that abolition is a political vision with a goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment. That it's not just about getting rid of building cages, it's about actually undoing the society that continues to feed on and maintain the oppression of masses of people through punishment, violence, and control. Because the prison-industrial complex isn't an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. And so we have to be building models today that develop and represent how we want to live in the future. It's both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.

“The prison-industrial complex isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it's meant to do.”

Compared to other countries, the U.S. has a particularly cruel prison system. You can look to, say, some of the Scandinavian countries and see more humane prison systems and life sentences that only last 10 years. To prison abolitionists, why is criminal justice reform based on a system like that insufficient?

The prison-industrial complex isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it's meant to do. By calling for any of these reforms, you immediately re-entrench the logic that is underpinning its systemic nature. The prison-industrial complex—both prisons, policing, surveillance—they feed off of reform. With each iteration, they've gotten bigger, more deeply entrenched into our communities, and more powerful.

Can you give an example of a reform that ended up further entrenching the system?

First of all, prison itself is a reform. Before, there was a use of corporal punishment, and the developing of the prison system is itself a move from that practice into what was initially seen as something that was more humane and has escalated from there. I think the reform of more trainings specifically—I'm thinking about police, which I think is on a lot of people's minds right now—results in something like Urban Shield, which was the crown jewel of police trainings in the Bay Area. And it essentially was a war-games training that brought together police departments from around the Bay Area and some departments from around the world, some from countries with known human-rights abuses, to develop their practices of coordination.

I'm sure you get this question constantly, but I think that the immediate concern that comes to a lot of people’s minds is: "Well, what if there's a serial killer on the loose? Or what about the case of a violent rapist?" What is done in those situations if you’ve abolished the police and you abolish prison?

This is a question that we frequently get. There are multiple ways to answer this question. First of all, it's going to depend on each scenario, right? These extreme moments of violence and harm are often located in specific communities. When we're thinking about abolishing the prison-industrial complex, we're thinking about abolition as a presence, but what does it mean to build up infrastructures in communities that can help with a variety of interpersonal issues as prevention measures, but also practice accountability for community members who do harm in a way that actually not just addresses the specific harm, but transforms the community as well?

But in addition to thinking about what we do in communities, we have to think about the rate at which the prison-industrial complex is able to actually address rape and murder. We've spent astronomical amounts of our budgets at the municipal level, at the federal level, on policing and caging people. And yet I don't think that people feel any safer from the threat of sexual assault or the threat of murder. What is the prison-industrial complex doing to actually solve those problems in our society?

And then there are the ways in which the prison-industrial complex itself is a perpetuator of some things, whether the police officers who are allowed to sexually assault women and girls who are part of investigations, guards who physically and sexually assault people who are incarcerated, or the issue we're seeing now, where police are murdering people. I know that’s a question that rises to the top for people, because of the ways in which the prison-industrial complex tells us that that's the service that it provides.

In that vein, though, murder and rape have been around since the beginning of time. What does the restorative justice process look like for victims, or family members of victims, so that they feel as if justice has been served, but not in a way that goes on to perpetuate the violence?

There are people who, such as Mia Mingus, who works at the Bay Area Transformative Justice Center, or Mariame Kaba, who works at Survived and Punished, who have been doing lots of work around developing practices of transformative justice that can actually work to transform the harms of sexual assault. There’s a whole body of work, of tools, of practices that can help to engage the issue of sexual assault and to ideally transform and build more accountable communities, so that we're able to actually remove that harm from society more broadly.

Right now, we're actually not doing anything about it. We're not trying to change the systemic way in which sexual assault manifests in our society. At least with transformative justice practices and community accountability practices, there's an attempt to actually get to the root causes and transform society so that those things can't happen.

Can you quickly clarify the difference between restorative justice and transformative justice?

Restorative justice is to try and restore relationships to how they were prior to a harm being done. Transformative justice, the purpose is to try and transform communities so that the harm cannot happen again.

On a logistical level, how does the prison abolition movement work to get these aims accomplished? It’s hard to wrap your head around when you think about how big the prison system is, how vast the police forces are. Is it a matter of starting first by defunding the police, or does it start through additive community programs, or the two of those simultaneously?

It is simultaneous. One shorthand we use at Critical Resistance is “dismantle, change, build,” and it's not necessarily linear. They have to be happening simultaneously because they're happening in relationship with each other, and the processes inform each other so that what you are able to build is actually in direct relationship to the community that is building it.

In the case of George Floyd, it is unconscionable that someone can be killed for allegedly forging a $20 bill. If we were living in a society where prison had been abolished, where the Critical Resistance vision had been put in place, what would have happened from the time when he handed over the supposedly forged $20 bill?

Lots of things could have happened. One thing that could have happened was that if there was a policy within the store where people who have needs around access to food could get those needs met, either through some government-based or community-based program so that this is essentially a nonissue. The buck would literally stop there. And that's not impossible. We have things like food stamps. Why isn't that an immediate offering that could have been available? The expansion of policing and imprisonment is directly tied to the erosion of goods and services being provided by our government in order to support people in their everyday needs. Which I think is why it's so clear during this moment of increasing austerity, you see large swaths of people all across the world making the connection and mobilizing accordingly.

What is the most frustrating part of working in prison abolition work in the sense of, what does the general public seem to find the most inconceivable about all of this?

Abolition calls on you to really use your imagination in ways that have become counterintuitive for lots of people, because of what Mariame Kaba calls “the cop in our head and cop in our heart.” We've been indoctrinated by a society that's been [using] policing and prison to answer for every social and political problem that we have that we have very little practice with the muscle of imagining and solving systemic problems without prison sentences.

Related, a lot of people are used to calling 911 whenever they have a problem. So who would be called instead?

Depending on the scenario, if you have capacities within your neighborhood to solve a problem, you would call your neighbor. If there is an emergency that's beyond you or somebody who lives in proximity to you is not trained to be able to handle the emergency that you are experiencing, there are models from around the world of direct responders who are trained in a variety of kinds of response that are particular to the emergency that you are having. To be able to come and support you with the mental-health crisis that's happening.

What are your essential texts on prison abolition? The primary ones are, of course, Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis and Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, but is there anything else you would recommend that was transformative for you personally?

I think that Alex Vitale's The End of Policing is excellent. There’s another compilation, Policing the Planet, that’s fantastic. Invisible No More by Andrea Ritchie. Because the prison-industrial complex is so complex, depending on what aspect you want to learn about it, whether it be prison or policing, I think that the [books] that we just talked about really cover those really well. But if you want to know more about things like surveillance or you want to know about probation or parole or the ways in which pretrial interacts with prisons and policing, there's so much more reading to do.

Have you encountered any politicians who are sympathetic to the cause?

Our experience is that via our campaign, decision makers move accordingly and oftentimes move around the particular issue that we're working on. So, whether it be the fight against the San Francisco jail in the Bay Area or the fight against the jail in Los Angeles, that decision makers via the campaigns that Critical Resistance engages in move towards abolition around that particular fight. This is why we win.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

A Straightforward Explanation for Why Financial Giants Want to Issue a Spot Bitcoin ETF

George Kaloudis
Wed, June 21, 2023 


The institutions are taking a fresh look at crypto and they’re flooding in.

Last week, BlackRock (BLK) applied for a spot bitcoin exchange-trade fund (ETF). This week, another comically large asset manager in Invesco (IVZ) reapplied for approval to offer a spot bitcoin ETF. The less-comically large ETF-sponsor WisdomTree also refiled for a spot bitcoin asset yesterday (WisdomTree’s filing was initially rejected by the SEC in 2022).

Elsewhere in non-bitcoin crypto, a crypto exchange backed by Fidelity, Schwab and Citadel Securities launched in the United States and Deutsche Bank applied for a digital asset license in Germany.

Read more: George Kaloudis – BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF Would Be a Big Deal | Opinion

So yes, the institutions are back. But why did $10 trillion asset manager BlackRock and $1.5 trillion asset manager Invesco decide it was time for the spot bitcoin ETF again? Many have offered convoluted and tinfoil-hat theories (some which I quite like).

Theories like BlackRock is scrambling to backstop Coinbase for some reason or the big firms are acting on behalf of three letter agencies to keep self-custodied bitcoin away from everyday people or that Wall Street can’t let the crypto crowd get too far ahead of them.

There are more theories out there, but here’s a much simpler one: Financial institutions like making money and offering a spot bitcoin ETF is a way to make money.

Let’s focus on BlackRock for a second. If you operate under the assumption that BlackRock has clients (it does) and those clients have money they want to give to BlackRock (they do) and those clients are willing to pay BlackRock to take care of that money (they are) and that BlackRock listens to clients (it mostly does), then it doesn’t take a massive leap of faith to believe that there is some amount of client demand for “crypto exposure” that would make offering customers exposure to crypto worth it. In exchange, of course, for a fee.

The fact that BlackRock sees a spot bitcoin ETF as the path of least resistance in offering that exposure to its clients is a different story. BlackRock will only make money on this ETF if approved. So far about a dozen spot bitcoin ETF applications have been rejected by the SEC (though there are reasons to believe BlackRack’s latest application will satisfy the market surveillance and disclosure requirements demanded by the SEC).

Read more: George Kaloudis – 'Wall Street’ Doesn’t Need Bitcoin; Bitcoin Doesn’t Need ‘Wall Street’ | Opinion

To be sure, the path of least resistance for crypto exposure is that way since the SEC has committed to, as CoinDesk’s David Z. Morris puts it, “burning the earth and salting the fields of the cryptocurrency industry.” This while making it abundantly clear that it doesn’t really have an issue with bitcoin and that its issue lies with other alleged securities masquerading as cryptocurrencies.

Also, it’s not that BlackRock specifically likes bitcoin or crypto overall. In fact, BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink once called the Bitcoin protocol an “index of money laundering.” If the spot ETF is approved I’d expect other BlackRock-sponsored crypto products in the future.

I, for one, don’t think that BlackRock would apply for this spot bitcoin ETF if it didn’t think that it, arguably the most powerful company on Wall Street, could get it approved. If I had my tinfoil hat on, then maybe there is a secret plot to make bitcoin look completely unappetizing to the world since even BlackRock couldn’t get a spot ETF through. I don’t think this is the case.

Perhaps that’s a bit naïve and there is an insidious reason behind the recent influx of spot bitcoin ETFs, but in the end you can point to one simple explanation for it all.

Financial institutions want to make money and this is a way to make money.

Invesco and WisdomTree Follows BlackRock in Filing for a Bitcoin ETF

Hope C
Wed, June 21, 2023 

WisdomTree and Invesco Have Filed for Spot Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Funds in the US

WisdomTree and Invesco have filed applications for spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the US, following BlackRock's move on June 15.

New York-based asset management firm WisdomTree has applied for a third time, requesting that the SEC allows WisdomTree to list its “WisdomTree Bitcoin Trust” on the Cboe BZX Exchange under the ticker “BTCW.” The SEC previously rejected its application in December 2021, and again in October 2022, claiming concerns of fraud and market manipulation.

Meanwhile, Invesco has "reactivated" its application for its “Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF.” According to the filing, the spot Bitcoin ETF will make use of "professional custodians and other service providers."

One crucial distinction in the BlackRock filing is that it intends to enter into a “surveillance sharing agreement” with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange futures markets. Similarly, WisdomTree signaled it is open to signing a surveillance agreement with "an operator of a US-based spot trading platform for Bitcoin." Fidelity Investments is also rumored to be considering its own spot Bitcoin ETF.