Sunday, October 01, 2023

AP PHOTOS: As Alpine glaciers slowly disappear, new landscapes are appearing in their place

MATTHIAS SCHRADER
Fri, September 29, 2023
















APTOPIX Climate Alps Glaciers Photo Gallery
The Tiefenbachferner Glacier, part of glacier ski resort Soelden, with Wildspitze mountain is visible near Innsbruck, Austria, Monday, Sept. 25, 2023. 
(AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)

In pockets of Europe's Alpine mountains, glaciers are abundant enough that ski resorts operate above the snow and ice.

Ski lifts, resorts, cabins and huts dot the landscape — and have done so for decades. But glaciers are also one of the most obvious and early victims of human-caused climate change, and as they shrink year by year, the future of the mountain ecosystems and the people who enjoy them will look starkly different.

Glaciers — centuries of compacted snow and ice — are disappearing at an alarming rate. Swiss glaciers have lost 10% of their volume since 2021, and some glaciers are predicted to disappear entirely in the next few years.

At the Freigerferner glacier in Austria, melting means the glacier has split into two and hollowed out as warm air streamed through the glacier base, exacerbating the thaw.

Gaisskarferner, another glacier that forms part of a ski resort, is only connected to the rest of the snow and ice by sections of glacier that were saved over the summer with protective sheets to shield them from the sun.

But the losses go beyond a shorter ski season and glacier mass.

Andrea Fischer, a glaciologist with the Austrian Academy of Sciences, said the rate of glacier loss can tell the world more about the state of the climate globally, and how urgent curbing human-caused warming is.

“The loss of glaciers is not the most dangerous thing about climate change," said Fischer. “The most dangerous thing about climate change is the effect on ecosystems, on natural hazards, and those processes are much harder to see. The glaciers just teach us how to see climate change.”

From a vantage point above the mountains in a light aircraft, the changing landscape is obvious. The glaciers are noticeably smaller and fewer, and bare rock lies in their place.

Much of the thawing is already locked in, so that even immediate and drastic cuts to planet-warming emissions can’t save the glaciers from disappearing or shrinking in the short term.

While the extent of glacier melt can create awareness and concern for the climate, “being only concerned does not change anything,” Fischer said.

She urged instead that concern should be channeled into "a positive attitude toward designing a new future," where warming can successfully be curbed to stop the most detrimental effects of climate change.

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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.

The epic European trek that is being transformed by climate change

Jasper Rees
Fri, September 29, 2023 

A party of skiers pitch their tents on the Mer de Glace glacier in 1965 – Switzerland’s glaciers have lost 10 per cent of their volume in the summers of 2022-23 - Paul Popper/Popperfoto


The Col du Grand Ferret rises to just over 2,500 metres. It requires a couple of hot, sweaty hours to lug a rucksack up from the valley floor but the reward, as you stand on the shoulder between two countries, is to have your breath taken away. To our left, falling away into a deep long valley, is Italy. To our right, in a jostling recession of crags, is Switzerland. And straight ahead, sliding down from the summit of Mont Dolent, is a magnificent glacier.

The Glacier de Pré de Bar is a wide prairie of corrugated ice tapering to a narrow point. With only slightly longer arms, I felt as if I could reach out and touch it. But every year those imaginary arms would have to stretch a little further. Since 1990, the glacier has been losing an average of 18 metres a year. To stand here is to look at a snapshot of a changing landscape.


Jasper Rees embarking on the Tour du Mont Blanc

It was announced that Switzerland’s glaciers had lost 10 per cent of their volume just in the summers of 2022-23 – the same volume as was lost between 1960 and 1990. Throughout the Alps, glaciers are retreating at pace: the chance to view them at all may soon be gone forever.

My partner Emily and I were there this summer to trek for 10 days and 170km around the route that circles the Mont Blanc range. The Tour du Mont Blanc is epic, and it is knackering. Every day we would gain around 1,000 metres before descending an equivalent amount to that night’s accommodation. On the most gruelling section there were three cols, each loftier than the last until we reached the TMB’s highest point at Col des Fours (2,665 metres). By the end we had climbed 10,000m. Everest is 8,849m. Hiking poles, about which we’d previously been snobby, are a sine qua non.

Hannibal is thought to have used one of these passes to invade Italy on elephants. But the full circuit was first completed in 1767 by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, a Swiss geologist who circumnavigated the range in search of a route up the Alps’ highest peak. There’s a statue of him in Chamonix.

In common with most hikers on the route, of all ages and from all continents, going it alone or in guided groups, we took the anticlockwise option. Thus the massif was always on our left: the big mother mountain herself, smoothly aproned in virgin-white snow, and her neighbours, snaggle-toothed Aiguilles and Jorasses as pointy as witches’ hats.

The TMB has everything: roaring rivers and thunderous waterfalls; stubbly boulder fields and dazzling wild-flower pastures; sky-wide panoramas and dense enclosing forest; clear skies and cleansing storms; intense heat then, at the Col des Montets (1,461 metres) between Switzerland and France, finger-numbing cold.

Above all – literally – there are those glaciers. I lost count of quite how many cling to the sides of the massif. They have intriguing names – Bionnassay, Frébouze, Triolet – and offer up endless variety. Some glisten white, others are muddily pockmarked. The Miage, a huge flat motorway flowing down the Italian side above Courmayeur, is entirely buried in rocky moraine. One evening, having walked down into Switzerland, we sat in our hotel’s beer garden and gazed for an hour at the dramatic Glacier du Dolent. And then on the penultimate day came the climax: the Glacier d’Argentière, a hoveringly high cliff of blue ice that resembled the flank of a calved berg.

I call it the climax, but it really shouldn’t have been. The frustration is that the Mer de Glace, the largest glacier in France, is nowadays barely visible from the route. For all its grandeur, by the time it rounds the foot of Montenvers into an opening above Chamonix, it has more or less dwindled to nothing.


'A huge flat motorway': the Miage glacier - Jean-Didier RISLER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty

This wasn’t always the case. In 1700 the Mer de Glace flowed so low it threatened to block the valley. In 1855 it was three kilometres further downstream further than it is today. Then-and-now photographs reveal how much it has shrunk over the past century. Tourists who take the train up to inspect it are confronted with markers that measure how fast it is creeping back up the mountain.

But the length, I am told by Chamonix-based glaciologist Ludovic Ravanel, is not the main problem. “The length is related to many factors,” he says. “The thickness is much more relevant. Last year at Montenvers the loss in thickness was 16.50 metres. The current thickness is only 30 metres. In the western Alps the loss was 6.2 percent of the total volume of the glaciers.”

The theory with glaciers is that in winter the volume recuperates after the summer melt. But the summers are getting longer and hotter and the winters warmer and wetter. “It takes a lot of time in the autumn to get cold again,” says Pica Harry, a mountain guide who grew up in Chamonix. “I’ve seen the glaciers melting every year and it’s worse and worse the past ten years. I feel the mountains getting dry and a bit more rotten. People will come to see the dying glaciers maybe more in a climate change interest than really for the beauty of the mountains.”


The receding Mer de Glace - EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP via Getty

While last year was critical, this August a weather balloon 50 miles north of Chamonix measured the zero-degree line – the altitude at which the temperature falls below freezing – at 5,300 metres. That’s 500 metres higher than the summit of Mont Blanc, and a record since monitoring started in 1954.

The consequence of global warming in the Mont Blanc massif, says Ravanel, is to defreeze permafrost that for millennia has acted as cement to hold rocks in place. “Last year the piece of ice which I had dated to 6,250 years old totally disappeared. We are losing paleoclimatic archives in the Alps. We are losing very very old ice.”

Melting ice causes increasing rockfalls, some of them massive, and the debris now scars the flatter slopes of the glaciers. How bad can it get? “I have colleagues in Switzerland who have modelled the evolution of the glaciers,” says Ravanel. “At the end of the century we should have lost between 95 and 99 percent of the surface of the glaciers in the Alps. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports the situation is worse and worse, so it could be before the end of the century.”

They’re still there, and still spectacular, and you can see them in all their majesty on one of the world’s great walks. But hurry.

Jasper Rees in action

How to do the Tour de Mont Blanc


The Tour du Mont Blanc is most popularly done in high summer when there is more chance of sun, warmth and ski lifts to take you to and from Chamonix and Courmayeur. It is best booked well in advance, and through a company which knows the accommodation options. Guided treks are available, but we booked a self-guided trip through Mont Blanc Treks, which is owned and run by local guides, at a cost of £1,795 each. Also recommended as a helpful independent guide is Mags Nixon.

Most of the accommodation is in three-star half-board hotels, but for the more communally-minded there are cheaper refuges. (There is no hotel anywhere near the France-Italy border section, so on that night a refuge is the only option.) Some companies arrange baggage transfer but most hikers carry all they need in rucksacks. Even in summer, that should include warm clothing as the temperature can plummet. The Tour of Mont Blanc (Cicerone) has maps and routes in both directions, with variants in case of bad weather.

While the paths are clearly signed, and it’s very difficult to get lost, it essentially to have a base level of fitness. But it’s hazard-free hiking, not climbing. Those who wish to flirt embrace a more uncomfortable gradient can opt for the high variant route over the reportedly tricky Fenêtre d’Arpette in Switzerland.
















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Climate Alps Glaciers Photo Gallery

Number of migrants crossing Panama's Darien Gap surpasses 400,000 to record high

Thu, September 28, 2023 

UNICEF reports record number of children crossing Panama's Darien Gap


By Elida Moreno

PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - The number of people crossing the perilous Darien Gap linking Panama and Colombia has hit a record high of 400,000 in the year to September, official data showed, as migration to the United States intensified despite efforts to curb the flow.

More than half of those migrants were children and babies, Panama's security ministry said in a statement, adding that September alone saw the number of crossings increase by a fifth compared to the previous month.

The year-to-date figure of 402,300 migrants is almost double the number for the whole of 2022.

The United Nations had estimated in April that the number of migrants for the entire year would be 400,000.

Most of the migrants traversing the dangerous stretch of jungle are Venezuelans, with others from Ecuador, Haiti and other countries, Panama's security ministry has said.

Panama announced earlier this month measures to stop the increase in migration, including deporting more people with criminal records and a decrease in the number of days some tourists are allowed to stay in the country.

These measures follow a two-month program launched in April by the United States, Panama and Colombia to tackle undocumented immigration.

Costa Rica, another transit country for the migrants, declared a state of emergency earlier this week, and its President Rodrigo Chaves said he would visit the Darien Gap in early October in an effort to contain a migrant crisis.

The United States in May rolled out a new policy to deter illegal crossings, including deporting migrants and banning re-entry for five years, as the Biden administration grappled with migration at record highs.

The tougher measures drove the border-crossing rate down some 70% initially, but the number of migrants arriving at the U.S. border with Mexico has surged recently, suggesting the early deterrent effect is wearing off.

Some African and Cuban migrants and asylum seekers heading to the United States told Reuters they were flying into Nicaragua to bypass the perils of the Darien Gap.

(Reporting by Elida Moreno; Writing by Valentine Hilaire; editing by Miral Fahmy)

'New normal': High number of migrants crossing border not likely to slow

Terry Collins, USA TODAY
Sat, September 30, 2023

With migrants in need of housing, safety and economic opportunity continuing to enter the United States, the overall number of migrant encounters with U.S. authorities this year has already surpassed last year's total.

And that number is expected to keep climbing.

How many migrants crossed the border in 2023?

More than 2.8 million migrants have had encounters with authorities so far this fiscal year, compared to more than 2.7 million migrants in 2022, according to the latest Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics. The current migrant figure includes August, but not September, the last month of this fiscal year, which has yet to be announced.

About 2.2 million people were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border through August, compared to 2.38 million border encounters for all of last year.

"They've already exceeded last year's totals by now. There's no doubt. The encounters probably beat 2022 sometime during the middle of this month," said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight for Washington on Latin America (WOLA), a nonprofit advocacy organization. Isacson, who researches border security, said it's possible the overall migrant encounter number this year could reach 3 million or more. "It looks like it's on pace," he said.

The latest numbers come as some Americans are getting frustrated with migrants arriving in their neighborhoods with limited shelter and assistance options. Many said they want the federal government and local officials to do more to provide help to those in need and find a better solution for migrants hoping to enter the U.S.


Where are the migrants coming from? Venezuela, Nicaragua and more

Isacson said the migrant arrivals, mostly asylum seekers, at the U.S.-Mexico border have now risen to about 8,000 migrants daily. It's a level last seen in April, before the termination of Title 42, a COVID-19 pandemic policy that allowed the U.S. to cite fears of spreading the virus as a reason to expel migrants.

"I think that's going to be the new normal, this current high level seems to be the baseline and it's changing quickly. It could go up to 10,000 migrants," said Isacson about the daily arrivals, adding that migrants from Venezuela, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador are trying to enter the country. "Parts of the world, especially Latin America, haven't recovered from the pandemic and their economies have worsened and some governments have been dictatorial as of late."

Isacson added that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said during a press conference last week that U.S. authorities encountered more than 142,000 migrants at the border during the first half of September, according to CBP figures. That's slightly more than half of the August total of 232,000.

Because of various upheavals in their homelands, many migrant arrivals today have "fewer social ties than in the past" to the U.S. as they "now need more of a safety net," said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst with the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute.
Why are so many migrants arriving in the US?

Many migrants are seeking to improve their lives, find jobs, and places to seek refuge, be it in shelters, hotels, community centers, airports, bus stops, and even sidewalks, experts said.

"The flow is continuous," said Laura Cruz-Acosta, a city spokeswoman in El Paso, Texas, a border town accustomed to welcoming migrants. The city receives more than 1,800 migrants a day but is now feeling somewhat strained as its shelters are over capacity, she said.

Mayor Oscar Leeser said at a news conference on Sept. 23 that the city had reached "a breaking point." The city's data dashboard showed Thursday that 7,600 migrants were in CPB custody, and more than 1,300 were being released into the city daily.
Why are Abbott, DeSantis sending migrants to NYC?

The migrants have sparked both local and federal debates among government officials.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has blamed a lack of federal aid and Republican Govs. Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida, who's also a GOP presidential candidate, for sending asylum-seekers to Northern states in recent months and causing a crisis.

During a speech in New York City Wednesday, Abbott said he sent 15,800 migrants to New York City, about 10% of the nearly 120,000 who have arrived there in the past year.

"What you're dealing with in New York, what you are seeing and witnessing in this state is a tiny fraction of what's happening every single day in the state of Texas," Abbott said. "This is unsustainable, and those are the words of your mayor. Those are the words of the mayors of Chicago and Los Angeles. Those are the words of the governor of Texas. What’s going on is unsustainable. It’s a crisis that’s chaotic and must stop."

Abbott's criticism didn't stop there. He also took aim at President Joe Biden.

"Joe Biden can flip that switch any day and stop New York from having to deal with the consequences of an open border," Abbott said. "They must prevail upon their president for more than just money. They need a change in policy."

In response, Adams' office said in a statement, "If he genuinely wanted to be part of the solution to this humanitarian crisis, Gov. Abbott would urge his Republican colleagues in Congress to collaborate with President Biden on desperately needed and long overdue immigration reform."

White House says Congress must pass immigration reform

A White House spokesperson said in a statement that Biden has called on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

"Without Congressional action, this Administration has been working to build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system and we’ve led the largest expansion of lawful pathways for immigration in decades," the statement said. "The federal government is working to provide information and services to ensure that those who are eligible submit their work permit applications immediately."

Most of those big U.S. cities weren't prepared for the arrival of migrants en masse ranging from single adults to large families with small children, said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst with the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute.

"It's not like migrants haven't been going to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.," Putzel-Kavanaugh said. "They are arriving in larger numbers and those larger numbers are exacerbating the situation."
How many migrants arrive at the US-Mexico border each month?

In August, there were 232,972 migrant encounters, either arrests or detainments, at the southern border (the most since December 2002), a spike from the 183,494 encountered in July and the 144,570 encountered in June, according to Customs and Border Protection. Last month's figure is also an increase from 204,087 encounters in August 2022.

Within the last five- to 10 years, the Border Patrol has been dealing with "different flows of migrants, changes in their nationalities and demographics, and the tools Border Patrol have at their disposal aren't fit for that," said Putzel-Kavanaugh, of the Migration Policy Institute.

Customs and Border Protection officials said migrants without any legal basis to stay will be processed for removal and face consequences that include a minimum five-year bar on re-entry, loss of eligibility to access lawful pathways, and prosecution for repeat offenders.

"We remain vigilant and expect to see fluctuations, knowing that smugglers continue to use misinformation to prey on vulnerable individuals. CBP is executing our operational plans and working to decompress areas along the southwest border," a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said in a statement to USA TODAY. "We are safely and efficiently vetting and processing migrants to place them in immigration enforcement proceedings consistent with our laws and operational planning efforts."
Illegal border crossings worth the risk for some

For many migrants who travel hundreds, if not thousands of miles, many with their families, to get to the U.S., they may think it's worth the risk, said Victor Manjarrez, a former Border Patrol chief in the El Paso sector and the director of the Center for Law and Human Behavior at the University of Texas at El Paso.

He said many migrants come to the U.S. to work. He pointed to a decision this month from the Department of Homeland Security that it would grant Temporary Protected Status to an estimated 472,000 Venezuelans in the U.S. as of July 31 to help ease a path to work authorization. The TPS is in addition to nearly 243,000 Venezuelans who already qualified for the temporary status.

Manjarrez said many migrants tend to believe what smugglers and others who are misinformed tell them, rather than government officials.

Isacson, the defense director of WOLA, said while there may be a lot of policies migrants have to contend with, many of them might assume it can't be as bad as what they've endured to get to the U.S.

"When you compare risking your life going through a jungle, a desert, or the Rio Grande to escape living in a dangerous slum in Caracas (Venezuela)," Isacson said. "Compared to that kind of life, they probably think there's no level of misery that these policies can impose that is worse than what they are fleeing from."

REAL CRISIS AT THE BORDER

Migrants are being raped at Mexico border as they await entry to US

By Laura Gottesdiener, Ted Hesson, Mica Rosenberg and Daina Beth Solomon

REYNOSA, Mexico (Reuters) - When Carolina's captors arrived at dawn to pull her out of the stash house in the Mexican border city of Reynosa in late May, she thought they were going to force her to call her family in Venezuela again to beg them to pay $2,000 ransom.

Instead, one of the men shoved her onto a broken-down bus parked outside and raped her, she told Reuters. "It's the saddest, most horrible thing that can happen to a person," Carolina said.

A migrant advocate who assisted Carolina after the kidnapping, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity due to security concerns, confirmed all the details of her account.

The attack came amid an increase in sexual violence against migrants in the border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros, both major transit routes for immigrants seeking to enter the U.S., according to data from the Mexican government and humanitarian groups, as well as interviews with eight sexual assault survivors and more than a dozen local aid workers.

"The inhumane way smugglers abuse, extort, and perpetrate violence against migrants for profit is criminal and morally reprehensible," U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Luis Miranda said in response to questions about the rise in reported rapes.

Criminal investigations into the rape of foreign nationals, excluding Americans, were the highest on record in the two cities this year, according to state data from 2014 to 2023 obtained by Reuters through freedom of information requests.

The U.S. State Department considers Tamaulipas, where the two cities are located, to be the most dangerous state along the U.S.-Mexico border.

'TORTURE PROCESS'

Facing record illegal border crossings, U.S. President Joe Biden's administration in May moved to a new system that required migrants to secure an appointment - via an app known as CBP One - to present themselves at a legal border crossing to enter the United States.

Nine experts, including lawyers, medical professionals, and aid workers, told Reuters the new system has had unintended consequences in the two cities, contributing to a spike in violence.

The high risk of kidnapping and sexual assault in Reynosa and Matamoros is one of the factors pushing migrants to cross illegally, four advocates said. Crossings border-wide surged in September.

Biden officials say the new CBP policy is more humane because it reduces the need for migrants to pay smugglers and criminal groups to ferry them across the border illegally.

The experts said many asylum seekers are no longer paying smugglers to get them across the border - instead traveling towards the frontier on their own, hoping to make an appointment on the app.

But criminal groups are still demanding these migrants pay to enter their territory, the experts said.

"Rape is part of the torture process to get the money," said Bertha Bermúdez Tapia, a sociologist at New Mexico State University researching the impacts of Biden's policy on migrants in Tamaulipas.

The Gulf Cartel and the Northeast Cartel are both active in the region and kidnap migrants for ransom, particularly those who arrive without smugglers' protection, according to security analysts. Reuters was unable to contact the two groups.

Some migrants are also spending more time in the dangerous region, waiting to secure an appointment on the app. Tens of thousands of people a day are competing for 1,450 slots, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

A senior CBP official based in Washington said CBP was troubled by reports of migrants sexually assaulted in the two cities.

"It's absolutely something that we're concerned about," said the official, who requested anonymity as a condition of the interview.

U.S. authorities temporarily suspended CBP One appointments in June in another Tamaulipas border city, Nuevo Laredo, due to "extortion and kidnapping concerns," the official said.

However, Miranda, the DHS spokesperson, said the administration's policies made it unnecessary to wait at the border since migrants could book an appointment from other parts of Central and Northern Mexico.

More than 250,000 migrants have scheduled appointments on the CBP One app, and over 200,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans have entered the United States by air under a separate Biden humanitarian program, according to CBP statistics.

'TAKE HER'

Carolina said she arrived in Reynosa the night of May 26 on a commercial bus with her 13-year-old son. Men began trailing them as soon as they arrived at the bus station, she said.

"They said we couldn't be there without their permission," she said, speaking from Chicago.

The U.S. State Department warns that criminal groups in Tamaulipas target buses "often taking passengers and demanding ransom payments."

The men whisked Carolina away to a house where she said she and other migrants were raped.

She said she was freed after family members paid $3,100 in ransom. Reuters was unable to independently verify the payment. She did not report the attack to police, saying she saw no point.

An Ecuadoran woman said that while in captivity in Reynosa her kidnappers repeatedly allowed a drug dealer to rape her in exchange for his deliveries of a white powder, which she suspected was cocaine.

One night, she clutched her figurine of the Christ child, tiptoed past her sleeping captors, and escaped through the window. "I still have nightmares," she said, speaking from New Jersey in August.

Reuters is withholding the full names of the survivors at their request. To corroborate their accounts, Reuters reviewed medical and psychological reports; criminal complaints and legal declarations; financial records, photos and videos supplied by the survivors, attorneys and advocates.

The state attorney general's office has opened seven rape investigations of foreign women in the first half of 2023. Four were opened in June alone.

Only one of the eight survivors Reuters interviewed reported the attack to authorities: a Honduran woman who said she was raped inside a migrant camp in Matamoros in late May. No one has been arrested, authorities said.

Olivia Lemus, head of Tamaulipas' human rights commission, said official data represents a fraction of the cases. "Migrants are afraid to file reports," Lemus said. "The fact that there aren't more reports doesn't mean that this crime isn't occurring."

Mexico's national migration agency, Tamaulipas' security agency, and Mexico's foreign ministry did not answer questions about sexual violence against migrants.

Juan Rodriguez, head of the Tamaulipas migrant services agency, said the agency was "attentive" to the issue.

"Unfortunately, sometimes things happen. We can't deny it."

A Venezuelan migrant said he was kidnapped in May in Reynosa by a cartel while traveling to the border for his confirmed CBP One appointment. He couldn't raise the full $800 ransom, so he was forced to work for two months to pay off the remaining $200, he said.

Two other migrants who said they were held at the house during the same time period confirmed the man was forced to work against his will, and that they heard female migrants being raped.

On the nights the Venezuelan man was tasked with standing guard over the other migrants, he said he watched the cartel members ask the man in charge of the house for permission to rape the women of their choosing.

He said the answer was always the same: "Take her."

(This story has been refiled to remove a duplicate dateline)

(Reporting by Laura Gottesdiener in Reynosa and Matamoros, Ted Hesson in Washington, Mica Rosenberg in New York City and Daina Beth Solomon in Mexico City. Additional reporting by Jackie Botts in Mexico City, Daniel Becerril in Reynosa and Matamoros, and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco. Editing by Mary Milliken and Suzanne Goldenberg)


In Texas, water levels are so low a rarely-seen underwater cave and century-old ruins have appeared

Amanda Jackson and Zoe Sottile, CNN
Sat, September 30, 2023 

Water levels are so low at Canyon Lake in Texas that an underwater cave and remnants of communities that stood more than a century ago at the site are reappearing.

The lake, located in Comal County just northeast of San Antonio, is a man-made lake spanning 8,200 acres with 80 miles of shoreline. It was constructed in 1958 to help mitigate flooding and preserve water and was filled with water by 1968, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The area has experienced little rain over the summer. The drought combined with high heat to produce all-time low water levels. On Wednesday, the level fell to 890.89 feet, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers, which the agency said is about 18 feet lower than normal and the lowest recorded level in recent history.

JM Perez captured images on Tuesday showing the cave, which is usually underwater. He said the rare sighting was bittersweet.


“I work on the lake, so I’ve been watching it drop,” he told CNN. “We are a little over 18 feet low now. It is very sad to see it but on the other hand, it is very cool seeing some of the hidden caves. As well the history that is coming to the surface.”

A bridge and rubble from a previous house that was underwater at Canyon Lake in Texas reappeared due to historically low water levels. - JM Perez

The towns of Hancock and Crane’s Mill, founded by German immigrants in the 1850s, once occupied the space now filled by water, according to CNN affiliate KSAT. Some of Perez’ images show remnants of a house that laid on the lake’s flood as well as the Hancock bridge.

The water levels seemed to drop precipitously – in images captured by Porsche Devol on September 2, only a small portion of a cave was visible and now photos show a vast entrance with rock formations and stalactites hanging from the ceiling.

“I haven’t seen the water this low since I moved here,” Devol told CNN. “It’s actually kind of sad.”

The US Army Corps of Engineers told CNN they regularly monitor water levels at the lake and they close lakeside recreation facilities for safety reasons when the water is too low. In addition to the cave and remnants of the former communities, trash and other items have also appeared as the lake’s surface has dropped, according to the agency.

“It is common to find dumped items whenever the lake level drops,” Clay Church, a spokesperson for the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Fort Worth District, told CNN. “Old tires seem to be the most common items that we find.”

The US Army Corps of Engineers also urged people to use caution when visiting the lake. “As the lake level drops, there are more underwater hazards such as tree stumps and large rocks that are at or near the surface,” Church said. “These hazards present greater risks to boaters and swimmers.”
BOOK EXCERPT
How the British justice system allowed Nazi war criminals to live undetected

Jon Silverman
Fri, September 29, 2023 


In July 1995, 84-year-old Szymon Serafinowicz shuffled into the spotlight after 40 years of suburban anonymity in the Surrey commuter belt town of Banstead. To the astonishment of neighbours, who had taken him to be an unassuming pensioner, he was the first person to be prosecuted for murder under the 1991 War Crimes Act, accused of Holocaust atrocities more than half a century old.

But after two years of delay, Serafinowicz was found to be suffering from Alzheimer’s, and his trial, due to be held at the Old Bailey in 1997, was never held. His crimes were thus never fully revealed. And his victims, accordingly, were never granted a measure of posthumous justice.

Now, however, those wrongs can be righted, as research conducted with Robert Sherwood for our new book reveals definitively for the first time his wartime monstrosities, and how the failings of the British justice system over many decades allowed Serafinowicz and others like him to escape prosecution.

Serafinowicz, it turns out, was a man with a remarkable and unsavoury past, a murderer of Jews in his native Belarus and a henchman of the wartime puppet leader of the occupied territory, who spent a lifetime trying to overthrow Soviet rule.


Then and now: Serafinowicz – unassuming-looking in later life

During the war, he was the commander of auxiliary police, known by the Germans as schutzmannschaften, in the towns of Mir and Turets in what was then Belorussia. The original source of the allegations against him was an investigation conducted by a team from the Soviet secret police NKVD team in 1945. It was an audit of atrocity: “2,754 people from Mir district killed, tortured, or burnt alive listed – 1,750 in Mir, 450 in Turets. The main criminals in the area were: Serafimovitch Semion [the Russian spelling of his first name]...”

Serafinowicz seems to have been driven by revenge. In the winter of 1939-40, when Belorussia fell under Soviet rule as part of the Nazi-Soviet pact that divided up Poland, his wife’s parents were deported to central Russia and did not survive. As the manager of a flour mill, Serafinowicz himself is likely to have been regarded by the Soviets as ‘suspiciously bourgeois’. But after the Nazis turned on the USSR and began operation Barbarossa in 1941, Belarus fell under German control.

As a virulently anti-Communist Belorussian nationalist, Serafinowicz confessed to Scotland Yard officers in 1993 that in 1943 he was handpicked by Belorussia’s pro-Nazi quisling, Radoslav Ostrowski, to form a so-called Jagdzug. The purpose of these units was to track down Jews who had escaped organised massacres. Ultimately, about four in five of the pre-war Jewish population of Belorussia, over half a million people, were murdered by the Nazis and their local allies.

Despite such murderous anti-Semitism, Ostrowski was welcomed to Britain after the war. In 1950, for example, he travelled to Edinburgh for a conference of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. By this time, Serafinowicz too had landed on these shores.

By day he was a labourer on building sites in London; by night, a senior activist in various anti-Soviet nationalist organisations – which used to meet at Ostrowski’s home in Cathnor Road, Shepherd’s Bush.


Ostrowski was said to have recruited Serafinowicz to form a Jagdzug, to track down Jews who had escaped massacre

This despite the fact that, as early as 1947, M15 had passed on allegations to the Home Office that Serafinowicz was a war criminal. Serafinowicz had arrived in the UK, like many of his fellow Belorussian nationalists, the previous year, claiming to have fought with the Free Polish Forces, who were allies of Britain. But he was denounced as a killer by a fellow soldier and implicated in executions and the burning of villages.

What happened next is a scar on the reputation of Britain’s celebrated interrogator of captured Nazis, Colonel Alexander Paterson Scotland, who commanded the London Cage, which had become the home of the War Crimes Investigation Unit after the war.

It was he who was charged with carrying out an investigation into Serafinowicz. The quality of Scotland’s inquiry can be judged by his report: “Serafinowicz was brought to the London Cage on 30 April. Serafinowicz makes a good impression, he is a pleasant and easygoing type, has a somewhat sly character, possessing a slightly shifty eye, but could not be described as anything approaching a brutal type.”


Paterson, who carried out an investigation into Serafinowicz, but deemed him ‘pleasant and easygoing’

Scotland’s casual exoneration of a man responsible for many hundreds of deaths could be said to be emblematic of Britain’s response to the presence of war criminals in its midst until the passage of the 1991 War Crimes Act. But, as our book reveals, even armed with criminal legislation, the legal authorities provided no more than a scant measure of justice for the victims.

Other suspects accused of even more egregious atrocities did not even suffer the indignity of prosecution. Take, for example, Harijs Svikeris, a long-time resident of Milton Keynes, who was presumed to be one of the three “strongest” cases when the war crimes inquiries began. Svikeris, a Latvian, had been a platoon captain in the infamous Arãjs Kommando, a unit established for the sole purpose of ridding their country of Jews and Communists and, with merciless savagery, proved remarkably successful in doing that.

Over the years, fellow members of the Kommando testified about Svikeris’s role in killings in both Latvia and Belorussia. When I spoke to the head of Scotland Yard’s War Crimes Unit, Chief Supt. Eddie Bathgate, shortly after he retired, he admitted: “Svikeris was a powerful case and I would cheerfully have put him on the charge sheet. The interviews with him were videotaped and you could see he was guilty. One of my last remarks to the CPS was ‘you are not going to be able NOT to prosecute Svikeris’.” But prosecutors refused to proceed without the testimony in open court of eyewitnesses to his crimes.

There was one case that garnered attention even before the War Crimes Act was passed. Anton Gecas, a former National Coal Board manager, living in Edinburgh, had previously gone by the name Antanas Gecevicius and had been a commander of the 12th Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalion, whose wanton cruelty in murdering the Jews of Slutsk in 1941 was cited at the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Gecas sued Scottish Television for defamation over a documentary detailing his participation in massacres in Belorussia. He lost the case at the Court of Session in 1992, the judge, Lord Milligan, declaring that he was ‘clearly satisfied’ that Gecas was a war criminal. He too was never tried, for the same reason as Svikeris.


War criminal Gecas lived in Edinburgh, having worked as a manager at the National Coal Board - PA

This is a story about a palpable lack of judicial transparency. Neither Scotland Yard nor the CPS published a final report on the war crimes inquiries. Had they done so, questions would undoubtedly have been raised about the delay in bringing Serafinowicz to full trial, ignoring a key recommendation that the age of witnesses and potential defendants would mean that justice delayed was bound to be justice denied.

It is time to admit that the due process of law denied by the Nazis to their victims has shielded many of the perpetrators to the bitter end. If there is any justice to be found, it may lie with the demise of Svikeris. In July 1995, shortly after the UK announced the prosecution of Serafinowicz, Svikeris suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in Milton Keynes. It was reported that he died clutching a newspaper open at a page that carried the headline: ‘First man to be charged with Nazi war crimes arrested in Surrey’.

Safe Haven: The United Kingdom’s Investigations into Nazi Collaborators and the Failure of Justice by Jon Silverman and Robert Sherwood is published by Oxford University Press on October 5, 2023. 

NATO NATION BUILDING

Four more officials held after Libya flood disaster

AFP
Fri, September 29, 2023 

People walk past the body of a victim from the flood which devastated Derna, eastern Libya

Libya's prosecutor general has ordered the arrest of four more officials, bringing to 12 the number held as part of an inquiry into this month's flood that killed thousands.

Flooding caused by hurricane-strength Storm Daniel tore through eastern Libya on September 10, leaving at least 3,893 people dead and thousands more missing.

The seaside city of Derna was the worst-hit in the flash flood, which witnesses likened to a tsunami. It burst through two dams and washed entire neighbourhoods into the Mediterranean.

The four additional suspects, including two members of the Derna municipal council, were arrested for suspected "bad management of the administrative and financial missions which were incumbent upon them", said a statement issued overnight Thursday-Friday by the prosecutor general's office in Tripoli, western Libya.

On Monday the office ordered the arrest of eight officials, including Derna's mayor who was sacked after the flood.

Libya's prosecutor general Al-Seddik al-Sour belongs to the internationally recognised government in the country's west. A rival administration in the flood-stricken east, is backed by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.

The eastern government has said it plans to host an international donors' conference in Benghazi on October 10 to focus on the reconstruction of flood-ravaged areas, but its failure to involve the Tripoli government has drawn mounting criticism from donors.

Libya has been wracked by division since a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011.

- 'Separate' reconstruction plans -

The United States called on Libyans to set aside their political differences and agree a framework to channel aid to eastern towns.

"We urge Libyan authorities now to form such unified structures –- rather than launching separate efforts –- that represent the Libyan people without delay," US special envoy Richard Norland said in a statement Friday.

"A proposal to hold a reconstruction conference in Benghazi on October 10 would be much more effective if it were conducted jointly and inclusively."

Norland echoed concerns already expressed by the United Nations that mechanisms need to be put in place to ensure that foreign aid is spent accountably.

"Libyans need to be assured public funds are used transparently, accountably, and that assistance goes to those in need," the US envoy said.

On Thursday during talks with the European Commission, UN envoy Abdoulaye Bathily said he had called for funds to be monitored.

"I... emphasised the need for a joint assessment of reconstruction needs of storm-affected areas to ensure the utmost accountability in the management of reconstruction resources," he said.

On Friday, the eastern authorities said they would begin paying compensation to people affected by the disaster, which a UN agency has said uprooted more than 43,000 people.

"Cheques have been handed over to the mayors" after a relief committee received records of damage caused by the flooding, the government based in Libya's east said in a statement.

People whose homes were destroyed would receive 100,000 dinars ($20,500) in compensation, Faraj Kaeem, the eastern administration's deputy interior minister, said separately.

Those with partially destroyed homes would get 50,000 dinars, while those who lost furniture or household appliances would be given 20,000 dinars, he said.

The eastern administration announced on Wednesday the creation of a fund for the reconstruction of Derna.

The authorities have yet to specify how the new fund will be financed, but the eastern-based parliament has already allocated 10 billion dinars to reconstruction projects.

bur-ila/dv/kir/ami
As extreme downpours trigger flooding around the world, scientists take a closer look at global warming's role

Mohammed Ombadi, 
Assistant Professor of Climate and Space Sciences Engineering, University of Michigan
THE CONVERSATION
Sat, September 30, 2023

Torrential downpours sent muddy water racing through streets in Libya, Greece, Spain and Hong Kong and flood parts of New York City in September 2023. Thousands of people died in the city of Derna, Libya. Zagora, Greece, saw a record 30 inches of rain, the equivalent of a year and a half of rain falling in 24 hours.

A few weeks earlier, monsoon rains triggered deadly landslides and flooding in the Himalayas that killed dozens of people in India.

After severe flooding on almost every continent this year, including mudslides and flooding in California in early 2023 and devastating floods in Vermont in July, it can seem like extreme rainfall is becoming more common.

So, what role does global warming play in this? And importantly, what can we do to adapt to this new reality?

A powerful storm system in 2023 flooded communities across Vermont and left large parts of the capital, Montpelier, underwater. 
John Tully for The Washington Post via Getty Images

As a climate scientist with a background in civil engineering, I am interested in exploring the links between the science of climate change and extreme weather events on one hand and the impacts those events have on our daily lives on the other. Understanding the connections is crucial in order to develop sound strategies to adapt to climate change.
Thirstier atmosphere, more extreme precipitation

As temperatures rise, the warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor. Evaporation of water from land and oceans also increases. That water has to eventually come back to land and oceans.

Simply, as the atmosphere absorbs more moisture, it dumps more precipitation during storms. Scientists expect about a 7% increase in precipitation intensity during extreme storms for every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming.

This increase in the amount of moisture that air can hold is what scientists call the Clausius Clapeyron relationship. But other factors, such as changes in wind patterns, storm tracks and how saturated the air is, also play a role in how intense the precipitation is.
Liquid vs. frozen: Rain matters most

One factor that determines the severity of floods is whether water falls as rain or snow. The almost instantaneous runoff from rain, as opposed to the slower release of water from melting snow, leads to more severe flooding, landslides and other hazards – particularly in mountain regions and areas downstream, where about a quarter of the global population lives.

A higher proportion of extreme rainfall rather than snow is believed to have been a key contributor to the devastating floods and landslides in the Himalayas in August 2023, though research is still underway to confirm that. Additionally, a 2019 examination of flood patterns across 410 watersheds in the Western U.S. found that the largest runoff peaks driven by rainfall were more than 2.5 times greater than those driven by snowmelt.

Rainfall intensity is projected to increase more in certain regions by the end of the 21st century, based on climate model data. Light colors show a twofold increase and dark colors indicate an eightfold increase in future rainfall extremes compared to the recent past. Mohammed Ombadi., CC BY-ND

In a 2023 study in the journal Nature, my colleagues and I demonstrated that the intensity of extreme precipitation is increasing at a faster rate than the Clausius Clapeyron relationship would suggest – up to 15% per 1 C (1.8 F) of warming – in high-latitude and mountain regions such as the Himalayas, Alps and Rockies.

The reason for this amplified increase is that rising temperatures are shifting precipitation toward more rain and less snow in these regions. A larger proportion of this extreme precipitation is falling as rain.

In our study, we looked at the heaviest rains in the Northern Hemisphere since the 1950s and found that the increase in the intensity of extreme rainfall varied with altitude. Mountains in the American West, parts of the Appalachian Mountains, the Alps in Europe and the Himalayas and Hindu Kush mountains in Asia also showed strong effects. Furthermore, climate models suggest that most of these regions are likely to see a sevenfold-to-eightfold increase in the occurrence of extreme rainfall events by the end of the 21st century.
Flooding isn’t just a short-term problem

Deaths and damage to homes and cities capture the lion’s share of attention in the aftermath of floods, but increased flooding also has long-term effects on water supplies in reservoirs that are crucial for communities and agriculture in many regions.

For example, in the Western U.S., reservoirs are often kept as close to full capacity as possible during the spring snowmelt to provide water for the dry summer months. The mountains act as natural reservoirs, storing winter snowfall and then releasing the melted snow at a slow pace.


A series of atmospheric rivers in California dumped so much water on the region that Tulare Lake, which had dried up years earlier, reemerged as water spread across miles of California farmland. 
Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

However, our recent findings suggest that with the world rapidly shifting toward a climate dominated by heavy downpours of rain – not snow – water resource managers will increasingly have to leave more room in their reservoirs to store large amounts of water in anticipation of disasters to minimize the risk of flooding downstream.
Preparing for a fiercer future

Global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing, but people still need to prepare for a fiercer climate. The destructive storms that hit the Mediterranean region in 2023 provide a cogent case for the importance of adaptation. They shattered records for extreme precipitation across many countries and caused extensive damage.

A main factor that contributed to the catastrophe in Libya was the bursting of aging dams that had managed water pouring down from mountainous terrain.

This underscores the importance of updating design codes so infrastructure and buildings are built to survive future downpours and flooding, and investing in new engineering solutions to improve resiliency and protect communities from extreme weather. It may also mean not building in regions with high future risks of flooding and landslides.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. 

It was written by: Mohammed Ombadi, University of Michigan.


Read more:

Summer 2023 was the hottest on record – yes, it’s climate change, but don’t call it ‘the new normal’

How climate change intensifies the water cycle, fueling extreme rainfall and flooding – the Northeast deluge was just the latest

Monsoons make deserts bloom in the US Southwest, but climate change is making these summer rainfalls more extreme and erratic

Mohammed Ombadi has received funding from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to conduct the Nature study discussed in this article.

Scientists Discover That Africa’s Namib Desert Has A Human Population After Believing It Disappeared 50 Years Ago

Tomas Kassahun
Fri, September 29, 2023


Scientists have found a population of people in Africa‘s Namib desert that were believed to have disappeared 50 years ago. Anthropologists initially believed that the community disappeared when the languages spoken in the region died out. However, experts are now realizing that this group kept its genetic identity when their native language disappeared.

The Kwepe, one of the groups in southern Africa’s Namib Desert, spoke the Kwadi language.

“Kwadi was a click-language that shared a common ancestor with the Khoe languages spoken by foragers and herders across Southern Africa,” said researcher Anne-Maria Fehn, according to SciTechDaily.

Through DNA research, experts found the descendants of the people who spoke Kwadi. The team also traced Bantu-speaking and other groups whose language was believed to be lost.

The team of researchers included scientists from the University of Bern in Switzerland, as well as the University of Porto in Portugal and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. According to the researchers, the Kwadi-speaking descendants share a common ancestry, which is only found in groups from the Namib desert.

“Previous studies revealed that foragers from the Kalahari desert descend from an ancestral population who was the first to split from all other extant humans. Our results consistently place the newly identified ancestry within the same ancestral lineage but suggest that the Namib-related ancestry diverged from all other southern African ancestries, followed by a split of northern and southern Kalahari ancestries,” said researcher Mark Stoneking.

The people who spoke Kwadi started speaking Bantu languages more recently, scientists said.

“A lot of our efforts were placed in understanding how much of this local variation and global eccentricity was caused by genetic drift — a random process that disproportionately affects small populations — and by admixtures from vanished populations,” said researcher Dr. Sandra Oliveira from the University of Bern.

Opinion

Joe Biden joined the picket line, but did Donald Trump help create the UAW strike?

Steve G. Parsons
Sun, October 1, 2023 
Springfield News-Leader



On Friday, Sept. 22, what began as a targeted stand-up strike by 13,000 UAW workers at three plants owned by Ford, GM and Stellantis was expanded to an additional 38 locations for GM and Stellantis. On Tuesday, President Biden joined the UAW picket line in Michigan, something no president has done before. I believe this is not an appropriate action for a U.S. president. One should be tempted to believe that Biden has done more to help the UAW strike than any other president — but you would be wrong.

Part of the reason the UAW is in a strong position to strike is because of the replacement of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the U.S. Mexico Canada Association (USMCA, in 2019/2020). The USMCA created greater business restrictions in the auto industry in three ways. First USMCA requires 75% of vehicles parts be made in North American (up from 45% in NAFTA A and up from 62.5% under later NAFTA requirements). Second, auto manufacturing and parts manufacturing must be performed by workers earning at least $16/hour. And third, North American car and truck manufacturers will also have to purchase 70% of their steel and aluminum in US, Mexico or Canada in order to avoid tariffs.

Every action or policy change has winners and losers. There are three categories of losers for the greater restrictions on the auto industry implemented under USMCA. First, there are the small Mexican auto manufacturers and auto parts manufacturers who can’t afford to pay $16/hour; some will, in the long run, go out of business or cease to export to the U.S. or Canada. The second group of losers are the employees who would have had a job, albeit at lower wages, who are now without that job in the auto industry, the auto parts industry, or other support industries in Mexico and the U.S. In the long run, this includes U.S. UAW workers (or potential employees who would have been UAW members) as manufacturers substitute away from union labor to greater levels of automation. Job losses also occur as more plant closures occur (as many as 17 plants by Stellantis alone if UAW demands must be met). Addition job “losses” occur since each year U.S. auto sales will be less than they otherwise would have been. One estimate was 1.3 million fewer vehicles per year due to higher auto prices — before the strike. Obviously, post-strike numbers will be even greater.

The third group of losers are consumers who pay higher prices for vehicles, as much as $2,200 per vehicle — before the effects of the strike.

The obvious winners are those who actually keep a job in the auto industry at higher wages both in the U.S. and in Mexico.

To many readers this description of USMCA may come as a surprise. President Trump touted the deal as good for trade and a win for — well — everybody. The final was clearly pro-union, endorsed by Nancy Pelosi and the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who said USMCA produced “considerable progress on workers’ rights.” Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, claimed that union leaders greatly “improved” USMCA in later iterations.

The free enterprise and free trade-oriented Cato Institute stated: “Regulation is a general problem in the USMCA, even more than it was in NAFTA.”

Would Donald Trump really have left us with a trade deal worse than NAFTA and with so many business restrictions? The short answer is — yes. Unlike most prior Republican leaders who favored free trade, Donald Trump is essentially a protectionist. This is the same man that said import tariffs are “beautiful.” His increased import tariffs (especially on Chinese goods and components imported by U.S. businesses) increased costs to American consumers by between $17 billion and $48 billion annually.

Let me identify one more winner from USCMA and the strike — Tesla. Business Insider states: “Ford and GM already spend $20 more an hour on factory workers than Tesla. The UAW's demands would more than double that gap.” The higher costs for the Big 3 and the higher resulting prices for Big 3 vehicles are great news for Tesla.

USMCA and higher import tariffs would not have come into existence without Donald Trump. His pro-union protectionist policy greatly strengthened the UAW and its ability to strike and/or negotiate higher UAW wages. This leads to higher prices for consumers. The higher prices caused by “protecting” some American jobs, while losing others behind the scenes is simply bad policy.

Steve G. Parsons, Ph.D,. is a retired consulting economist with former clients around the world. He was also an adjunct professor for more than 20 years at Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught the economics of technology to graduate students in the school of engineering.

Posts misquote Biden's remarks at UAW strike













Natalie WADE / AFP USA
Fri, September 29, 2023 

Joe Biden became the first sitting US president to visit a picket line, grabbing a bullhorn to address striking auto workers in the state of Michigan on September 26, 2023. But social media posts sharing a video of the visit misrepresented his statement to members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) to make it appear as a gaffe.

"Joe Biden minutes after slipping on steps of Air Force One: 'I marched a lot of UAW picket lines when I was a Senator since 1973. But I tell you what -- first time I've ever done it in person.'" says an X post from Benny Johnson, a conservative podcast host, who has been fact-checked by AFP several times.


Screenshot of an X post taken September 28, 2023

The same clip garnered thousands of views on X, here and here, as Biden appeared on the picket line outside a General Motors parts distribution center in Belleville, Michigan, to show his support for auto workers as they petition for a 40 percent pay raise.

Biden is often the target of posts that make him appear confused or asleep in public appearances -- playing to those who argue he is too old for the job. However, despite the online claims the president did not say that this is the first picket line he has attended "in person."

In the video, Biden clearly says: "I marched in a lot of UAW picket lines when I was a senator -- since 1973 -- but, I tell you what, it's the first time I've ever done it as president."

This is reflected in the official White House brief, documenting the president's remarks (archived here).

Screenshot of a White House press brief with elements highlights by AFP, taken September 29, 2023

This dialogue is also clear in other videos reviewed by AFP including C-SPAN footage (archived here) and news reports (archived here).

The president's trip came a day before Donald Trump spoke at a non-union car parts factory in Michigan, a visit he made in lieu of attending the second Republican presidential debate in California.

More of AFP's reporting on misinformation about US politics is available here.