Deadline extended for tribes to seek broadband licenses

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — The Federal Communications Commission is giving tribes another month to apply for a band of wireless spectrum that would help them establish or expand internet access on their land.

Tribes pushed to be first in line to apply for licenses for the mid-band spectrum that is largely unassigned across the western United States and once was reserved for educational institutions. The tribal priority window opened in February and was set to close Monday. It’s now been extended to Sept. 2.

The extra time is far less than what tribes and tribal organizations had sought as they struggle to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

The FCC said the extension “strikes an appropriate balance” in giving tribes more time to apply but not delaying licenses to those that already applied.

“In light of the simplified application process as well as the extensive outreach done by commission staff, a lengthy extension of the deadline is unnecessary, as evidenced by the large number of applications we’ve already received,” said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

The FCC has estimated that about one-third of people living on tribal lands don’t have access to high-speed internet, but others say the figure is twice as high.

Nearly 230 tribes or tribal entities have submitted applications for the 2.5 GHz spectrum. Some have been granted temporary authority, including the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, the Navajo Nation in the Four Corners region and Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico.

In its request, the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe said it was preparing for students to do more remote learning in the fall and planned to use the temporary license to connect about 40 homes to the tribe’s network.

The National Congress of American Indians was among those asking the FCC to give tribes more time to apply because of the coronavirus pandemic, saying hundreds could miss out on the opportunity. Some urged the FCC on Friday to reconsider its decision.

“Even before COVID-19 and despite the commission’s efforts to simplify the application process and provide staff resources, even the six months provided for the tribal window would be a tight schedule for outreach and filing complete applications,” the group wrote in asking for an extension until February.

The spectrum remaining after the tribal window closes will be auctioned off for commercial use. Telecommunications company T-Mobile said it didn’t object to an extension of the tribal priority window for up to 90 days but wanted assurance that a public auction would happen next year.

Court overturns Boston Marathon bomber’s death sentence


FILE - This file photo released April 19, 2013, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation shows Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted and sentenced to death for carrying out the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing attack that killed three people and injured more than 260. On Friday, July 31, 2020, a federal appeals court overturned the Boston Marathon bomber's death sentence. (FBI via AP, File)

A federal appeals court Friday threw out Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, saying the judge who oversaw the case did not adequately screen jurors for potential biases.

A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new penalty-phase trial on whether the 27-year-old Tsarnaev should be executed for the attack that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.

“But make no mistake: Dzhokhar will spend his remaining days locked up in prison, with the only matter remaining being whether he will die by execution,” the judges said, more than six month after arguments were heard in the case.

Tsarnaev’s lawyers acknowledged at the beginning of his trial that he and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, set off the two bombs at the marathon finish line. But they argued that Dzhokar Tsarnaev is less culpable than his brother, who they said was the mastermind behind the attack.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a gunbattle with police a few days after the April 15, 2013, bombing. Dzhokar Tsarnaev is now behind bars at a high-security supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

Tsarnaev’s attorneys identified a slew of issues with his trial, but said in a brief filed with the court that the “first fundamental error” was the judge’s refusal to move the case out of Boston. They also pointed to social media posts from two jurors suggesting they harbored strong opinions even before the 2015 trial started.

The appeals judges, in a hearing on the case in early December, devoted a significant number of questions to the juror bias argument.

They asked why the two jurors had not been dismissed, or at least why the trial judge had not asked them follow-up questions after the posts came to light on the eve of the trial.

The judges noted that the Boston court has a longstanding rule obligating such an inquiry.

Tsarnaev’s lawyers say one of the jurors — who would go one to become the jury’s foreperson, or chief spokesperson — published two dozen tweets in the wake of the bombings. One post after Tsarnaev’s capture called him a “piece of garbage.”

Tsarnaev was convicted on 30 charges, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction. An email was sent to his lawyer seeking comment.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Bostonsaid they are currently reviewing the opinion and declined further comment at this time.

___

Durkin Richer reported from West Harwich, Massachusetts.

Highways raise alarm in Cairo’s historic City of the Dead

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A tomb from the early 20th Century stands partially demolished amid construction of a new highway through the Northern Cemetery in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, July 26, 2020. Dozens of graves have been partially or fully destroyed as the government builds two large expressways through the City of the Dead, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Authorities say no registered monuments have been harmed, but preservationists have raised alarm that graves of historical value are being lost and that the multilane highways tear apart the fabric of a historic necropolis that has remained intact for centuries.(AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)


CAIRO (AP) — For centuries, sultans and princes, saints and scholars, elites and commoners have been buried in two sprawling cemeteries in Egypt’s capital, creating a unique historic city of the dead. Now in its campaign to reshape Cairo, the government is driving highways through the cemeteries, raising alarm from preservationists.

In the Northern Cemetery last week, bulldozers demolished walls of graves, widening a road for a new expressway. The graves are from the early 20th Century, including elaborate mausoleums of well-known writers and politicians. The ornate, 500-year-old domed tomb of a sultan towers in the construction’s path and, though untouched, will likely be surrounded on either side by the multi-lane highway.

The 500-year-old domed tomb of a Mamluk sultan, Qansouh, which likely will be surrounded by freeway. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

In the older Southern Cemetery, several hundred graves have been wiped away and a giant flyover bridge swiftly built. In its shadow sits the mosque-shrine of one of Egypt’s earliest prominent Islamic clerics, Imam Leith, from the 700s.

As bulldozers worked, families rushed to move the bodies of their loved ones. Others faced losing their homes: though known as the City of the Dead, the cemeteries are also vibrant communities, with people living in the walled yards that surround each gravesite.

Cairo’s governorate and the Supreme Council of Antiquities underlined that no registered monuments were harmed in the construction.

“It is impossible that we would allow antiquities to be demolished,” the head of the council, Mostafa al-Waziri, said on Egyptian TV. He said the affected graves are from the 1920s and 1940s, belonging to individuals who will be compensated.

Construction workers knock down walls of family mausoleums in the Northern Cemetery. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

But antiquities experts said that’s too narrow a view. Among the wrecked graves are many that, though not on the limited list of registered monuments, have historical or architectural value. More importantly, the freeways wreck an urban fabric that has survived largely intact for centuries. The cemeteries are included in a historic zone recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

“It goes against the identity of the location itself. They (the cemeteries) have been an integral part of the history of Cairo since its inception,” said May al-Ibrashy, a conservation architect who chairs the Mugawara Built Environment Collective and has worked extensively in the Southern Cemetery.

The government has carried out a furious campaign of bridge and highway building in Cairo and around the country. Authorities say it is vital to ease traffic choking the city of some 20 million and better link regions, presenting the projects as part of a nationalist vision of a new Egypt.

That vision is solidly suburban. The bridges and highways mainly link up suburbs around Cairo, largely made up of upper-class gated communities, as well as a new capital being built farther out in the desert.

Critics say the construction at times has no regard for the neighborhoods of Cairo it passes through. In some cases, gardens and greenery have been torn down for bridges. One flyover was built almost the exact width of the street it runs down, and residents can literally step out of their upper-story windows onto the expressway.

The new flyover arches through a swath of the Southern Cemetery cleared of tombs and graves. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

The construction in the cemeteries, antiquities experts say, is a blow to efforts to preserve what is unique about historic Cairo: not just monuments spanning from Roman-era Christianity, through various Muslim dynasties to the early modern era, but also its cohesion through the centuries.

The two cemeteries extend north and south outside Cairo’s Old City, each at least 3 kilometers (2 miles) long. The Northern Cemetery first began to be used by nobles and rulers in Egypt’s Mamluk sultanate in the 1300s and 1400s. The southern, known as al-Qarafa, is even older, used since the 700s, not long after the Muslim conquest of Egypt.

Until now, both have remained untouched by major road-building. Large Mamluk mortuary complexes create a skyline of domes and minarets over a landscape densely packed with graves and tombs from many eras.

“It’s a city of the dead, but it’s a living heritage. This continuity is very valuable,” said Dina Bakhoum, an art historian specializing in heritage conservation and management. “This urban fabric remained in place for a very long time,” as has its use and function — “you still have the hustle and bustle that you read about” in medieval texts.

Throughout history, people have lived in the cemeteries, and to this day people come regularly to sit at their loved ones’ graves. Sultans held sumptuous processions through the Northern Cemetery. During outbreaks of plague, Cairo’s population massed there for prayers pleading to God for relief.

Many of the damaged graves in the Northern Cemetery belong to notable figures from Egypt's early 20th Century history and show unique architectural style, experts say. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

In the 14th century, the ruler of the Malian empire Mansa Musa and his entourage lived in the Southern Cemetery during a stopover en route to Mecca, giving away such fabulous amounts of gold that Egypt’s currency plunged. Mamluk texts tell of nobles riding through the cemetery at night and having visions of holy men or poets who speak, then vanish. Medieval guidebooks describe itineraries for pilgrims to tour tombs of beloved Muslim clerics and saints.

It is a testament to the cemeteries’ integrity that — seven or eight centuries later — al-Ibrashy could reconstruct those guidebooks’ itineraries in her doctoral research. Graves have been rebuilt or replaced across the eras, but largely adhering to the same pathways, sometimes preserving the original names, sometimes losing them to time.

“The thing about the cemetery is there’s a lot of hidden gems that no one knows about,” al-Ibrashy said. “You find tombstones from the Ottoman period. You find a shrine that looks modern but is actually a site mentioned in the ancient guidebooks.”

In the Northern Cemetery, the new “Firdos,” or Paradise, Expressway, will cut across its northern edge.

“I’ve lived here for 41 years, I married my husband here,” said a woman in her 60s at the mausoleum of a prime minister from the early 20th Century.

The mausoleum was intact, but bulldozers leveled its compound’s wall and the rooms that were her home. Her late husband’s family were the tomb’s guardians, and he was born and raised there. He is buried alongside the site’s owners in the mausoleum’s garden, shaded by mango and olive trees.

“We have a long connection to this place. They don’t respect the living or the dead,” she said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Authorities say no registered monuments were harmed in the demolitions, but preservationists are mourning the damage to the necropolis' historic fabric. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

In the Southern Cemetery, known as al-Qarafa, the new flyover plows through a nearly 1-mile swath once dense with graves. Underneath the span, the shrine of Imam Leith, a religious scholar who died around 791 is undamaged but now virtually hidden.

Visible a few hundred yards away is the towering dome of the Mausoleum of Imam Shafii, one of Egypt’s most beloved religious figures, from the 9th century. Shafii is said to have paid tribute at Leith’s grave, and this part of the cemetery was named after the two holy men: the Qarafa of the Two Imams. Now the bridge, soon to be thundering with traffic, separates them.

Antiquity experts said even if registered monuments were not damaged, the area is within boundaries of Historic Cairo set by Egyptian law that provides protections.

Bakhoum said some antiquities authorities in recent years have started to come around to a more comprehensive view on preserving historic areas’ broader character, not just individual monuments. The problem is, multiple government agencies have an interest and say in what happens in Cairo, responsibility is dispersed and decisions made without discussion.

What’s needed, she said, is greater consultation among all the stakeholders to find alternatives that allow development while preserving history.

“I think the real problem we have here is really how do we define what is heritage, what is valuable, and for whom.”

The sprawling Southern Cemetery first came into use 1,300 years ago and has been the burial place of nobles, holy men, scholars, poets and commoners. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

Protesters vary as much as their arrests, AP analysis shows

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FILE - In this July 29, 2020, file photo, federal agents arrest a demonstrator during a Black Lives Matter protest at the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, Ore. An Associated Press analysis of more than 200 arrests shows that even those accused of breaking the law during the nightly rallies don’t neatly fit into President Donald Trump’s depiction of protesters as “anarchists and agitators.” (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)
Sheena McFerran was two rows behind a line of police at a protest in Portland, Oregon, when she saw officers pepper-spraying a Black man.

“I said, ‘Hell no,’ so I pulled his backpack back really hard and stepped into the space he was in,” said McFerran, a 34-year-old manager for the Sierra Club who’s white.

Edward Schinzing, 32, was just around the corner on another night. Prosecutors say he and 30 others broke into a building with a jail and courtrooms, destroyed an office and set it ablaze.

Both were arrested. Their disparate circumstances highlight what The Associated Press found in an analysis of more than 200 arrests: even those accused of breaking the law during the liberal city’s nightly rallies don’t neatly fit into President Donald Trump’s depiction of protesters as “anarchists and agitators.”

A review of court documents, social media posts and other public records from people arrested by federal and local authorities since mid-June reveals a group whose motives are as varied as the acts leading to their arrests.

They’re Black Lives Matter activists who have been in the streets since George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police in May, groups of self-proclaimed parents using leaf blowers to drive away tear gas and black-clad provocateurs taking advantage of the nightly chaos that’s gripped downtown Portland for over two months and led Trump to deploy federal agents in early July.

The AP found that 95% of those arrested by police and federal agents were local. The vast majority have no criminal record in Oregon. Many appear to be college students. Their average age was 28, court records show.

They’re mostly charged with misdemeanors like failing to comply with a lawful order, while some face felonies like arson and assault on an officer. Most people have been released, and some have been arrested more than once for similar offenses.
MORE FROM PORTLAND
– Portland prepares for US agents to step back from protests
– US attorney urges city to embrace surge in federal agents
– Federal court to review 'protest bans' in Portland arrests

The federal government agreed Wednesday to draw down the number of agents whose presence has swelled the ranks of the protests. Federal forces have drawn more black-clad people accused of setting fires or assaulting officers but also military veterans seeking to lower tensions and a self-titled “Wall of Moms.”



“They have acted as an occupying force & brought violence,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown tweeted of the U.S. officers.

Soon before the announcement, Trump insisted agents wouldn’t leave until local authorities “secured their city.” He’s spent weeks running Portland through the political playbook he used during the initial wave of nationwide demonstrations after Floyd’s death: painting those on the streets as anarchists and seeking to tie them to Democratic rival Joe Biden.

The U.S. Justice Department and Homeland Security officials have often highlighted destructive cases like Schinzing’s in their portrayal of protesters. The nightly unrest often follows a script: authorities declare a riot, sending hundreds of peaceful protesters home as smaller groups of demonstrators target the U.S. courthouse with bricks, laser pointers and fireworks. Federal agents respond with tear gas, stun grenades and arrests.

But AP’s analysis shows many of those arrested do not fit the caricature of an anarchist bent on destruction.

Moments before her arrest, police threw McFerran, the Sierra Club manager, to the ground, yanking off her mask and binding her wrists in zip ties. She was released after eight hours in jail and faces charges of disorderly conduct and interfering with police.

McFerran, who lives in Seattle, said she started protesting in her city and in Portland almost nightly after realizing she could do more in the fight for racial justice. Until Floyd’s killing, McFerran says she was a “tourist protester.”

“I realized I need to be participating in this legitimately every day,” she said. “I need to do this work.”

McFerran said she and her boyfriend, a former Army medic, provide security services and try to act as a “shield” between protesters of color and law enforcement.

Some of those charged with more serious offenses, such as assaulting officers and destroying property, have criminal histories. Most are white, according to court records.

Schinzing, who was photographed burning papers inside the county Justice Center, was ordered detained this week by a federal judge. He faces a felony arson charge, on top of unrelated harassment and assault charges from February, court records show. His court-appointed attorney declined to comment.

Acting Homeland Security Chief Chad Wolf said federal agents have made 94 arrests in Portland since July 4.

“Our federal officers have faced assaults with Molotov cocktails, mortar-style, commercial-grade fireworks, accelerants, IEDs and other violent weapons,” Wolf said at a news conference about the withdrawal of federal agents.

Lisa Hay, Oregon’s federal public defender, said her office is representing “mothers, college students, lawyers” and others from across the state and country.

“It should concern everyone that there were arrests by unmarked police officers of Oregonians who were asking what’s going on and weren’t being given any answers,” Hay said.

The state sued over those allegations, which the Trump administration denies, but a judge found the state did not have standing to win an immediate court order restraining the federal agents.

Some Black activists say the political fight distracts from the focus on combating racist policing.

FILE - In this July 24, 2020, file photo, green lines cast by protesters' laser pointers cross the darkened lobby of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse as federal officers wait for a possible skirmish with demonstrators in Portland, Ore. An Associated Press analysis of more than 200 arrests shows that even those accused of breaking the law during the nightly rallies don’t neatly fit into President Donald Trump’s depiction of protesters as “anarchists and agitators.” (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

Mac Smiff, a 39-year-old father and analyst for a utility company, was arrested on June 6 and charged with interfering with a peace officer. He’s confident the charge will be dismissed, saying he got caught up as police swept through downtown after a protest.

A veteran activist, Smiff took to the streets after seeing a prominent politician talking about reducing funding for police on TV. He thought the wave of rallies following Floyd’s death seemed different, more focused, but said Trump deriding protesters as violent extremists is a familiar strategy.

“If you make the blame indiscriminate, then you can make the response indiscriminate. That’s just a tactic to justify using escalating force and chemical weapons against us,” Smiff said. “I own my house. I’m a professional human being. I’m out here fighting against corruption and police brutality. And the response is I’m a terrorist? That’s laughable at best.”

He welcomed the news that the federal presence in Portland would be winding down, saying the agents were a “distraction.”

“That was a side mission,” he said. “We came out here to defund the police.”

___

This version corrects the spelling of a protester’s last name to McFerran, not McFarren. It also corrects that a judge found that the state did not have the standing to win an immediate court order restricting operations of federal agents in the city, not that the judge dismissed the case.

Naishadham reported from Atlanta, and Bleiberg from Dallas. Associated Press reporters Gillian Flaccus in Portland, Oregon, Lisa Marie Pane in Boise, Idaho, and AP/Report for America Statehouse News corps member Sara Cline in Salem, Oregon, contributed to this report.

More seals means learning to live with sharks in New England

THANK THE SEAL HUNT BOYCOTT!
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A seal pokes his head out of the water in Casco Bay, Thursday, July 30, 2020, off Portland, Maine. Seals are thriving off the northeast coast thanks to decades of protections. Many scientists believe the increased seal population is leading to more human encounters with white sharks, who prey on seals. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)


PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Seals are thriving off the Northeast coast thanks to decades of protections, and that victory for wildlife has brought a consequence for humans — more encounters with sharks.

Seals are a favorite prey of large sharks such as the great white. The death this week of swimmer Julie Dimperio Holowach, who was killed by a great white off Harpswell, Maine, might have happened because the shark mistook her for a seal, authorities said.

Swimmers off the New England states have learned to be more mindful in recent years due to a spate of sightings of great whites, the apex predator made famous in the movie “Jaws.” A shark that killed a man off Cape Cod in 2018 was also believed to be a great white.

That was the first fatal shark attack in Massachusetts in more than eight decades, while the death of Holowach on Monday was the first documented fatal shark attack in Maine history.

A seal lounges on rocks in Casco Bay, Thursday, July 30, 2020, off Portland, Maine. Seals are thriving off the northeast coast thanks to decades of protections. Many scientists believe the increased seal population is leading to more human encounters with white sharks, who prey on seals. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

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“They’re not vindictive or mad or angry or preferring human flesh. They just occasionally make a mistake. And it’s tragic when they do,” said Greg Skomal, a shark specialist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. “As we restore top predators, the potential for these interactions could increase.”

Incidents of shark bites remain vanishingly rare, especially in Northeastern waters. The International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida lists only 10 unprovoked shark attacks off New England, according to records that go back to 1837.

The majority of documented shark attacks in the U.S. happen off Florida, and internationally, warm weather countries such as South Africa and Australia have higher totals than most. But shark bites are rare in those places, too. Australia has been the site of 652 unprovoked shark attacks according to records that go back to 1580, the International Shark Attack File reported.

FILE - In this Aug. 11, 2016, file photo, a great white shark tries to bite a fish head being trolled though the water as researchers chum the ocean looking for sharks off the coast of Gansbaai, South Africa. Seals are thriving off the Northeast United States coast thanks to decades of protections. That victory for wildlife has brought a consequence for humans: more encounters with sharks. The Monday, July 27, 2020, death of swimmer Julie Dimperio Holowach, who was killed by a great white off Harpswell, Maine, might have happened because the shark mistook her for a seal, authorities said. (AP Photo/Schalk van Zuydam, File)

Shark bites in colder northern waters are not unheard of. A handful have been recorded off Russia, Finland and Washington state. And researchers are seeing more of the great whites off New England, said James Sulikowski, a researcher of Northeastern sharks who is located at Arizona State University.

The greater number of sightings is “unequivocally” because of the resurgence of seals in New England, Sulikowski said. The seal comeback traces to the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, which afforded seals a chance to repopulate after generations of human exploitation.

Grey seals, once hunted with bounties and pushed close to the point of local extinction, are now common sights in coastal Cape Cod. Some people even feel the animals have come back to the point where they pose a nuisance, in part because they draw more sharks.

The sharks aren’t looking for people, but they’re a reason for swimmers to be cautious, Sulikowski said.

“They’re not looking for us. We’re not on the menu,” he said. “But as these predator prey relationships continue, and because they are so coastal, there’s potential for interaction with humans to increase.”

In Maine, marine patrol officers are conducting searches for the presence of sharks in the aftermath of Holowach’s death. The state is restricting swimming at some state parks. And it has sent a clear message to beachgoers — if you see seals, stay away.

US officials seek limits on “habitat” for imperiled species

TRUMP DEREGULATION

FILE - In this Sept. 27, 2011, file photo, is a gopher frog at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans. Federal wildlife officials are proposing limits on what can be declared as "habitat"" for imperiled plants and animals. The proposal to be announced Friday, July 31, 2020, and obtained in advance by The Associated Press would for the first time define "habitat" for purposes of enforcing the Endangered Species Act, the landmark law that has undergirded species protections efforts in the U.S. since 1973. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)


BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — The Trump administration is proposing to define what land and water can be declared as “habitat” for imperiled plants and animals — potentially excluding areas that species could use in the future.

The proposal to be announced Friday and obtained in advance by The Associated Press would for the first time define “habitat” for purposes of enforcing the Endangered Species Act, the landmark law that has undergirded species protections efforts in the U.S. since 1973.

It has broad implications for how lands are managed and how far the government has to go to protect plants and animals that could be sliding toward extinction.

Legal observers said the two-sentence definition, as well as an alternative definition that officials invited comment on, would limit what areas the government can designate as critical to a species’ survival.

“This is inevitably going to restrict the agency and force it to work where it can do the most good,” said Jonathan Woods with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which has fought against government habitat designations that the firm says infringe on private property rights.

Others warned that it would seriously hobble restoration efforts, by confining struggling species to small patches of pristine land and blocking restoration work that could expand their range.

The northern spotted owl of the Pacific Northwest, which depends on old growth forests, offers a prime example, said Noah Greenwald with the Center for Biological Diversity.

Much of the bird’s historic habitat was logged. “But it will become old growth forest again one day if we protect it. So does that not count as habitat?” Greenwald asked.

“If we want to recover species, we have to restore them to more larger portions of their historic range,” he said.

Friday’s proposal from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service comes in response to a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling involving a highly endangered Southern frog — the dusky gopher frog.

Trump administration officials said the proposal would provide “more consistency” and “more transparency” for private landowners, companies and states, but would not say how much or what type of habitat could be excluded under the new definition.

In the gopher frog case, a unanimous court said the government had to decide what constitutes suitable habitat for the 3 ½-inch-long frogs before it could designate some of those areas as “critical habitat” for the species, which survives in just a few ponds in Mississippi.

The dispute arose after the Fish and Wildlife Service designated 1,500-acres (607-hectares) of land and ponds in neighboring Louisiana as critical habitat for the frog even though none lived there.

Attorneys for the landowner, timber company Weyerhaeuser Co., called it an unjust land grab, but environmentalists said designating the land as critical was necessary to keeping the frog from disappearing.
The proposed definition says habitat includes “places that a species depend upon to carry out one or more life processes,” such as breeding or eating. If that had been in place prior to the dispute over the gopher frog, the government might have been forced to limit its critical habitat designation to the ponds only, and not the surrounding land, said Wood.

“It gives a standard which we’ve been lacking for the past 45 years to guide critical habitat designations,” he said. “You won’t have the free-roaming critical habitat designations like you would have in the Weyerhaeuser case.”

In that case, the administration ended up withdrawing the critical habitat designation in Louisiana under a legal settlement.

The Case For Facial Feminization Surgery

To make something like FFS truly accessible — and to give trans people true agency over it — requires completely reimagining the capitalist medical system.

Alex V Green BuzzFeed News Contributor
Writer and critic based in Toronto.
Posted on July 28, 2020,

In an essay for Esquire, writer Harron Walker describes an unexpected impact of COVID-19 on her transition. At the beginning of March, her facial feminization surgery was deemed necessary by three separate medical providers. But less than a week before her appointment, the hospital suddenly designated it an “elective” procedure — along with many other transgender surgeries that were postponed, some of them indefinitely, due to the pandemic.

Facial feminization surgery, or FFS, describes a set of complex procedures designed to “feminize” the face. The concept and treatments were developed with transfeminine patients in mind in the 1980s, led by a San Francisco–based surgeon who devised measurements for a “normal” female appearance by surveying anthropological skeletal records. Despite its origins, FFS as it’s performed today is very similar to other facial procedures adopted by cisgender women. The surgery changes the size of bones and the distribution of fat to bring a patient’s appearance more in line with conventional ideas of beauty, femininity, and “normalcy.”

FFS has changed substantially since its initial development. Different practitioners, aesthetic preferences, and ideas about what it means to be beautiful, feminine, and normal have all impacted the field, making it increasingly popular and desirable for transfeminine people with varied transition goals. Among many of them, it is considered a matter of life or death, or, at least, a gateway to a much better quality of life. The procedure makes the difference between someone passing and someone being targeted for anti-trans harassment, and it helps alleviate the dysphoric discomfort associated with being scrutinized and misgendered.

“It is absolutely lifesaving,” said Vivian, a 26-year-old white trans woman in Illinois, who had her FFS in 2019. When we spoke on the phone in March, she told me about childhood memories of crying while looking at herself in the mirror; though she didn't think she was ugly, she knew the face she saw was just not hers. In her words, the dysphoria she experienced was so severe that it became a daily struggle to go about her day. Since her surgery, however, she’s been thriving. “The psychological benefits are immense,” she said. “My dating life is better. I am better at my job. I’m safer on the street. I’m gendered correctly every day.”

C.J. Burton for BuzzFeed News

But FFS is expensive. Like, really expensive. Typically, it costs between $30,000 and $50,000, which is far out of reach for the average transgender person. That’s not including the cost of recovery, which can be substantial, time-consuming, and incompatible with a regular work schedule. And since it’s rarely considered “medically necessary,” FFS isn’t covered by most employer insurance plans or public medical programs.

Only part of Vivian’s FFS was covered by her insurer. The rest she had to come up with herself, which she managed through crowdfunding. For her, there were no other options. She was in immense psychological distress, and this surgery was the answer, even though — unlike other transition-related treatments, including gender confirmation surgery — her insurers insisted it was “cosmetic” and therefore not “medically necessary.”


“It is absolutely lifesaving."


In our newly adapted coronavirus vocabulary, categories like “essential” or “elective” (whether as work, services, procedures, or excursions) are political and fraught. In many cases, the designation “essential” is a marker of being undervalued and underprotected, as in the case of food workers. The label is both a blessing and a curse, given at the will of the capitalist state. A similar logic undergirds other arbitrations of what qualifies as essential versus elective — what is necessary and lifesaving, or what is cosmetic and ephemeral. These labels are political and variable, and they’re often applied based only on the interests of capital.

As Drs. Alex Dubov and Liana Fraenkel wrote in their 2018 article “Facial Feminization Surgery: The Ethics of Gatekeeping in Transgender Health,” there is no stable, objective definition of a “medical necessity.” Often, what gets called a “medical necessity” in the US is less a set of stringent criteria so much as “a means to control healthcare costs.” There is no federal definition of a “medical necessity,” and the term is generally unclear in state regulations, leaving it up to individual insurers to determine its application.

The idea of a transition being “cosmetic” or “unnecessary” is echoed in historical misrepresentations of transgender surgeries as unsafe, experimental, radical, and mutilating, which in turn inform political efforts to block access to transition-related care and undermine existing protections and opportunities. Facial feminization surgery is especially vulnerable to this false image; it is easy to frame as an act of indulgence, waste, or vanity — cosmetic, unworthy of support.

Panic about transition resembles the sort of conservative moralism surrounding abortion. In both cases, reactionaries raise hell over what they see as a cadre of selfish, indecent women profiteering from public coffers, through government assistance, insurance coverage, or even just the appearance of media sympathy. Narratives of excess and waste — like the horribly racist and sexist “welfare queen” trope — are often used to morally justify austerity in ways that disproportionately harm already vulnerable groups seeking healthcare and social services. These narratives are austerity devices: They convince us of artificial scarcity, telling us that the system can only afford to give us scraps, that not everyone should get “whatever they want.”

But trans people have no lack of want. According to a 2015 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 25% of trans people in the US reported experiencing issues with their insurance providers in the previous year. More than half (55%) of respondents who sought coverage for transgender surgeries, and 25% of those who sought coverage for hormones, were denied. One-third of respondents (33%) reported that they did not see a doctor when they needed to because they couldn’t afford it. Among respondents who were Black, Latinx, Indigenous, or had a disability, costs posed an even greater barrier to accessing care, along with a fear of being refused or mistreated by medical professionals. The survey also found that uninsured trans people were significantly less likely to get surgery than their insured counterparts. Only 7% of trans women and 1% of transfeminine nonbinary people reported having had FFS, though 43% and 21%, respectively, said they wanted it.

Walking this line between cosmetic and necessary, FFS exemplifies one of the biggest contradictions defining contemporary transgender life: the demand for authenticity and abundance, and the suffocating heteronomy of gatekeeping and austerity. We have no choice but the illusion of choice.

To make something like FFS truly accessible, and to give trans people true agency over it, requires completely reimagining the capitalist medical system and replacing it with something entirely new. In this way, FFS offers an opportunity for revolutionary rethinking. Why shouldn’t we get whatever we want?

Reflecting on the unpredictable loss of what was, until then, a sure thing, Walker’s essay about the delay of her surgery becomes a commentary on what the destabilization wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic might mean for transgender identity and the medical system more broadly. “If the system we have in place has failed to serve even me—a white, feminine trans woman who’s extremely into men, the very individual these institutions were built for—then who is it even serving?” Walker writes, adding: “Why shouldn’t it be replaced with something new and better?”



I’m writing this at a moment of heightened contradiction over the place of body modification in progressive politics. While gender-affirming care is politicized and circumscribed, and biological conceptions of womanhood fiercely policed, aesthetic medicine has reached a zenith of unprecedented popularity, accessibility, and market diversity. It constitutes a kind of bad object for contemporary feminist critics, something many of us simultaneously desire and seek distance from. It is an ugly thing to want to be beautiful, and yet we all do it anyway.

Critics have long worried about the wide appeal of aesthetic medicine, attributed to the usual suspects of social media and the Kardashian/Jenner industrial complex. Whatever the equation, this is the result: looking shopped is in. With innovations in injectables, virtually everyone has had something done. And if they haven’t, they can fake it (and do) through angles, makeup, filters, and image manipulation tools like Facetune. Photoshop, once framed as the villain of gender equality and good self-image, has given way to a much more affordable and accessible array of editing and imaging practices — a hydra of hard- and software that lives in our pockets and in our minds, whether we are consciously aware of it or not, blowing up the very notion of “natural” beauty. You can see this in the booming popularity of a distinctive contoured and leonine style of hyperfeminine makeup mastered by Black American fem queens, sex workers, and showgirls — what Yves de Shon recently explained as "the trans aesthetic" on Twitter. In this way, we can imagine feminization as a collective experience that cis women actively take part in.

To be clear, I am not interested in creating new goalposts with which to adjudicate the women who have work done. Instead, I want to understand why the distinction between “cosmetic” and “necessary” is so persuasive, and why plastic surgery seems to always be the “slippery slope” at which point someone no longer qualifies as a politically deserving subject. Put simply, why does anyone need to “deserve” anything? Why is it so ugly to want to be beautiful?

It is an ugly thing to want to be beautiful, and yet we all do it anyway.


In her 2009 play The Silicone Diaries, transsexual performance artist Nina Arsenault recounts her inner monologue while applying makeup: “People say, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t do that. You won’t look like a real woman if you do that. You’ll look like a drag queen.’”

In a moment of startling realization, Arsenault resolves to stop holding herself back and allow herself to be exceptional, unnatural, unreal. “Nina, give yourself permission to be fabulous instead of reasonable,” she says. She embraces the fear of being trashy, over-the-top, beautifully exaggerated, a Barbie doll. “If you cannot look like a normal woman, sacrifice being normal.”

I’ve read the play a few times and am always taken aback by how bluntly Arsenault states her desires. She is white and her presentation is hyperfeminine, and thus she is more likely to be exempt from anti-trans violence than her Black and brown counterparts. Still, because Arsenault was openly trans before the “Transgender Tipping Point,” the footage I’ve found of her public appearances is hard to watch. She’s buoyant and funny, but even in spite of her impossibly idealized femininity, cis people called her a man right to her face.

There isn’t necessarily anything “empowering” about buying into the beauty industry. But beauty is still, undoubtedly, powerful; it translates to better treatment from coworkers, lovers, and even strangers. One woman I spoke to for this story, Grace, 33, from Toronto, told me her life has changed completely since she got FFS, largely because, as she sees it, she’s become more conventionally attractive. “Since I’ve had FFS, my quality of life has improved,” she told me. “It’s not even that I’m passing more. People still clock me as a trans woman, I still get ‘sir’d and all that. But they’re much nicer to me. Because they clock me as a pretty trans woman, or maybe they think I’m trying harder, people are kinder.”

(I talked to a number of people for this story, all of whom were either in the process of securing coverage for FFS or had already completed their surgery. Some names have been changed throughout to protect their privacy.)

It would be easy, albeit inaccurate, to dismiss FFS as an extension of the popular fixation on impossible standards of feminine beauty borne by all women, cis or trans. But just because something can be dismissed as frivolous, wasteful, or politically inconvenient does not make it so. Designating some forms of care as cosmetic effectively marks it for gendered privatization and legitimizes the distribution of resources in the interests of capital and the state. These narratives are not inconsequential. In the case of FFS, they decide if and how we get coverage from insurance companies and determine whether we can afford gender-affirming care. This kind of gatekeeping, even for ostensibly cosmetic procedures, operate primarily as austerity devices: mechanisms of regulating unruly bodies and communities, and ensuring that capital and capacity is denied to those deemed undeserving.

Elissa, a New York–based UX designer and white trans woman, recounted a yearlong process of booking appointments, securing paperwork, and making her case to specialists to fit the eligibility criteria for coverage.

“For the first three to five years, transition is like a part-time job that you're doing on top of your job."


“For the first three to five years, transition is like a part-time job that you're doing on top of your job,” Elissa explained on the phone. “I called this office in February to set up an appointment in October, and at that appointment I have to make sure that I have three letters. One is a letter testifying that I’ve been on hormones with my primary care physician. One is a mental health letter from a psychiatrist. So I have to contact my provider and have them arrange for a psychiatrist appointment, where I answer all these questions about how” — here, her voice turned sarcastic — “I have experienced gender dysphoria from a young age and it causes me great distress, and sometimes I don’t want to go outside because my face is jacked.” She laughed. “And then I do that again with another person, who’s a psychotherapist or a psychologist.”

“It’s a project,” said Charlotte, a 34-year-old trans woman of color in California. She has jumped through the hoops and collected all the paperwork but still will only get partial coverage for her facial surgery. Her plan with Blue Shield does not cover FFS, but it does cover corrective jaw surgery, which Charlotte also needs, and which her surgeon believes can be achieved through a similar procedure — two birds with one stone. Even if Blue Shield accepts it, though, she’ll still have to pay a big chunk out of pocket. “It’s going under a different insurance code, and that’s considered more medically necessary. But I don’t know what’s going to happen. I just want to get it done, and then we’ll see if I bankrupt myself or not.”

The process is unforgiving and sometimes at odds with someone’s actual identity and experience. Diegui, a 21-year-old Latinx nonbinary person living in California, is attempting to secure coverage for FFS through their school’s transgender health center. In their view, the entire process of consulting psychiatrists and parroting well-worn stories about their gender and self-perception felt like they were being forced to contradict their experiences as a nonbinary person of color. “I’m not going in as somebody who’s like, I was born in the wrong body; let medicine fix my body for me so that I can feel correct,” said Diegui over the phone. “It’s more of the fact that Western colonial notions of gender have fucked me up. If I’m going to have to subscribe to these things, I might as well take the resources from you to do it.” For Diegui, these assessments effectively end up measuring their compliance to Eurocentric ideas about identity and embodiment. If they don’t check off the right boxes, then their FFS claim would be considered “cosmetic” and “nonessential,” and thus ineligible for coverage.

Mayira, 24, is getting her FFS through Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid. (California, New York, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, and Washington are the only states whose public Medicaid programs cover FFS.) She started working as a Starbucks barista with the goal of getting insurance — but after two years, she is still uninsured, citing “unrealistic” and unforgiving scheduling requirements that made it impossible to stay insured for longer than a few weeks at a time.

“I’m not going in as somebody who’s like, I was born in the wrong body; let medicine fix my body for me so that I can feel correct. It’s more of the fact that Western colonial notions of gender have fucked me up."


Her Medi-Cal claim was handled by a trans-focused clinic, which also provides her primary medical care. Although the clinic helped fast-track what would otherwise be a protracted assessment process, the quality of care she’s received has been “cartoonishly frustrating,” she said. Mayira has been misgendered, deadnamed, condescended to, and neglected by the cisgender providers there numerous times. They also took the liberty of selecting her surgeon for her, without her consent. As well, a dearth of surgeons willing to work for Medi-Cal meant that Mayira was booking appointments for five years down the line.

The lack of wider coverage for transition-related surgery is a severe issue. According to a study by the National LGBTQ Task Force, trans people are unemployed at twice the national average (based on pre–COVID-19 statistics), and 44% of those who are employed are underemployed, meaning they work insufficient hours for insufficient wages.

Difficulty securing coverage through work is not an exception; it’s the rule. And even when care is available or covered, it’s either incomplete or inaccessible, or both. Travel, accommodation, and recovery costs all come out of pocket. Amelia, a 27-year-old Indigenous trans woman in Florida, told me she had to crowdfund a cross-country trip for her FFS. In Canada, one clinic in Montreal handles all transition-related surgeries for the country. If patients go elsewhere, they lose coverage.

Mayira, who is Black, thinks the mistreatment she’s experienced is partly because of racism, but she also considers it representative of a general pattern of negligence toward trans patients. “They want to think that they’re being helpful and doing it right, but they’re just going through the motions,” she said. “It’s not comprehensive care.”

Her experiences resemble stories I’ve heard from several friends about other trans-focused clinics in the US. Trans-focused clinics play an essential role in providing gender-affirming care. In that respect, they are absolutely vital, and their work must be protected. But inversely, they represent the incapacity of the medical system to engage with trans people as unique agents with distinct goals, bodies, and experiences, deserving of comprehensive, individualized care.

These stories illustrate a gap between what’s “right” for trans patients on paper, as medical consumers, and their actual needs and wants as human beings. And even when gender-affirming care is not tied directly to employment, trans people are still generally left to contend with incompetent and inaccessible providers who deny them full agency. Even in the best circumstances, the healthcare system treats trans people as disposable.



It’s hard to talk about the many failures of trans healthcare without stumbling into an argument for socialized medicine. That is, of course, the obvious solution, and it is a necessary one. But while the hyperprivatized American medical system is a bit of a global exception, the same problems of inaccessibility and general incompetence are replicated in the ostensibly universal medical systems of Canada and the United Kingdom. On top of dealing with rampant, well-documented prejudice, trans people in the UK often languish on long waitlists and take on significant additional costs to continue their transitions. In Canada, FFS is excluded from government coverage, requiring trans people to pay the steep costs out of pocket. This is a best-case scenario; there are still many jurisdictions in both countries where providers simply do not exist or where outright refusal to treat trans patients is commonplace.

Jasmine is a 30-year-old white trans woman in Ontario on public assistance due to a disability. The assistance has an asset limit of $40,000, meaning if she has over that amount in her account at any time, she loses her welfare. But while $40,000 can pay for a decent amount of surgery, it can’t cover everything, especially not in addition to ordinary costs of living. “If I wanted to do more, I would have to do it in chunks because I’m not allowed to own more money than that,” she said. She plans to get a part-time job that lets her save within the asset limit — but even then, she’d be forced to undergo one procedure at a time, potentially inflating recovery time and jeopardizing results. “It’s just overwhelming,” she said. “There’s so many little factors to plan.”

Many trans people are instead seeking gender-affirming care overseas. Elijah, a 32-year-old Black nonbinary person from the US, is getting her FFS in South Korea. The Korean clinic website doesn’t specifically advertise to trans patients; nevertheless, Elijah told me it sees a lot of trans patients, particularly Black women, and therefore offers more specialized, higher-quality, and more respectful services than she encountered in the US. “It didn’t feel like I was having a template superimposed on top of my face,” she said. “Not everyone wants the Beverly Hills face. I have a very African face with very African features.” Elijah estimated her FFS would cost $80,000 in the US; in South Korea, it’s about $25,000. “We’re indoctrinated to think that the best are US doctors, but…no,” Elijah said, laughing.

One 21-year-old Canadian trans woman, Sammy, is visiting her birthplace of Colombia to get her facial surgery. She has already picked out her doctor — a surgeon who primarily works with cis women, but who she thinks has a gift for crafting the perfect nose. In Canada, Sammy said, a feminizing rhinoplasty would cost at least $10,000. In Colombia, she’ll pay around $5,000.


“I do have a few cis girlfriends who have had their nose done, but it didn’t give them that…that oomph, that special touch to make it their nose,” Sammy told me over the phone. She spoke energetically. “And I feel like here, there’s not too many ethnic noses that a lot of the [Canadian] doctors work with, so I feel like it’s easy for them to make it look like one thing. Colombia is very diverse. They see a lot of noses, and they just personalize it so well. They just know how to give you that touch.” I had a lot of fun talking to her.

To Katharine, 27, a white trans woman who had FFS in 2018, transgender people must be central in the fight for medical equality, even beyond the US’s 2020 election cycle. “People are willing to shove what they view as narrow or limited social concerns aside, because they don’t think it’s political,” she said. “But we know differently. We know that this is political. And we can joke among ourselves about how it’s about feeling sexy and isn’t that fun and trivial, and it is definitely about the aesthetic. But that’s very important to many people’s lives. And we can’t back down about that.”

The common narrative is that gender-affirming surgery is an outlandish drain on public coffers and public decency, one best illustrated in a 2014 story in Mirror, a British rag. The story quoted right-wing anti-taxation group TaxPayers’ Alliance to smear trans surgeries as “ridiculous vanity operations.” In recent years, a number of American cases in the US involving incarcerated trans women have framed medical transition as an affront to both public safety and funds.

Hand-wringing over whether pesky transsexuals constitute adequately progressive or feminist subjects is premised on the neoliberal fantasy that individual choices can offer us a gateway to liberation.


Variations on these right-wing talking points are popular even among ostensible progressives, where the issue of gender-affirming medical care is occasionally framed as a side issue, a distraction, or, even more erroneously, “neoliberal.” It is a subgenre of cisgender fascination with transsexuality, best exemplified in the work of folks like Jesse Singal, or in a recent article in n+1 magazine, which presents transition as a kind of political failure, a succumbing to capitalism, patriarchy, or normativity — as though there is anything “normative” about changing one’s sex.

This brand of hand-wringing over whether pesky transsexuals constitute adequately progressive or feminist subjects is premised on the neoliberal fantasy that individual choices can offer us a gateway to liberation.

But the truth is just the opposite. We live, famously, in a society. Systems like capitalism and patriarchy are irreducible to the bodily choices of individuals. Rather than fixating on whether our choices render us good or bad feminist subjects, valuable and revolutionary political work should pursue collective struggle against socioeconomic conditions of exploitation and deprivation that unequally distribute resources and power at the expense of women. This means fighting for an abundance of care, health, and protection, beyond the limits imposed by narratives of worth and waste.

Calls for gender-affirming care like FFS are therefore not mere recursions to individual choice. Instead, they represent a demand for an entirely new and better way of life, including a healthcare system premised on bodily autonomy and opposed to austerity.

There is nothing diversionary about this. In fact, it is exhilarating in its revolutionary breadth. And this, I believe, is why we must recognize that the overpoliticization of transition does not exist in a vacuum. Political and cultural attacks on our access to gender-affirming care in the name of women’s rights, public safety, and financial responsibility are occurring now alongside the militarization and privatization of public life, expanding regimes of tracking and surveillance, and the spiraling descent of feminist politics into electoral euphemism and commercial brand strategy. These events are not only coincident, but contingent — they enforce and entrench one another. They are all symptoms of fascism, liberalism’s twin sister, and must be fought as one.

“Exercising bodily autonomy, including over contingent and aesthetic aspects of our lives, is an element of a life worth living for everybody,” said Katharine. In this way, the fight for FFS and transgender healthcare more broadly is neither marginal nor incidental; it is absolutely central to any truly universal vision of freedom and resistance against capitalism. It is where our politics must live if we are to win. ●

CORRECTION
July 30, 2020,
The Medicaid programs in New York, California, the District of Columbia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Washington cover FFS. A previous version of this story misstated which states offer coverage.

A New Exhibition Captures The Stark Reality Of Climate Change

"Just like COVID, the climate crisis can almost feel invisible at times and is hard to understand unless you are directly affected — and even then there are people who don’t seem to grasp the reality of it."

Gabriel H. SanchezSenior Photo Essay Editor
Posted on July 28, 2020





Katie Orlinsky
On a summer bird hunt, Kenyon Kassaiuli, Jonah Andy, Larry Charles, and Reese John cross a flooded walkway in Newtok, Alaska, May 27, 2019. The Yupik village of Newtok, Alaska, is sinking as the permafrost beneath it thaws and the land erodes. It is estimated that in three to five years it could be underwater. Newtok is the first community in Alaska to have already begun relocation as a direct result of climate change — pioneering a process that many other Alaskan villages may soon undergo.


The United Nations has described the looming threat of climate change as the "defining crisis of our time." Today, as much of the world grapples with the health and economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, the stark reality of a global catastrophe is perhaps more real than ever before.

A new online exhibition at the Bronx Documentary Center explores some of the immediate effects of climate change in the US by piecing together a web of information about how the current administration is failing to address this troubling reality. The show is part of an ongoing series of programming called Trump Revolution, which chronicles the impact of Trump's policies on global affairs. While the exhibition was originally scheduled to be staged at the center's Bronx galleries, the coronavirus pandemic has forced the show to be adapted for the web.

Here, exhibition coordinator Cynthia Rivera shares with BuzzFeed News the work of six photojournalists featured in the exhibition and her thoughts on how the current COVID-19 crisis can foreshadow the more severe effects of climate change.


Can you talk a bit about the concept behind the Trump Revolution exhibition series?

The idea began when Donald Trump first started campaigning. When he took office, things started to happen very quickly in terms of policy changes and I think a lot of us were still processing the election. To help take account of all of these things, we decided to develop exhibition programming that would use photography to figure out if there was some kind of through line or theme in terms of what we felt like the president was targeting.

Immigration was the topic of our first exhibition and was developed at a time when ICE raids were at the forefront of the news. Next we chose to focus on the climate crisis at time when Trump decided to pull out of the Paris agreement. As the news cycle shifts from week to week, we thought it would be important to bring these topics back in focus and show that these things are still happening, whether we see them in the news or not.


Stacy Kranitz
The massive Exxon chemical plant is next to the ExxonMobil refinery in the Standard Heights neighborhood of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in April 2017. ExxonMobil Chemical Company has been caught regularly releasing air pollution above what is lawfully allowed in its permit.


Who are some of the photographers you featured in Trump Revolution: Climate Crisis?

For this chapter, we wanted to focus our scope on how the climate crisis was specifically affecting the US. We approached the topic of sea level rising through the work of Bryan Thomas in Florida, as well as through the work of Katie Orlinsky on how Indigenous people in Alaska are being affected. We discuss the devastation caused by wildfires in California through the work of Marcus Yam and discuss pollution in both the air and water with the work of Stacy Kranitz. Lastly, projects by Yuri Kozyrev and Kadir van Lohuizen, partly in Alaska and partly in Russia, chronicle the overall effect of what was happening in the north and how it affects the rest of the world in terms of sea level rising and climate change.


These five key points visually cover in a beautiful and tragic way what’s actually happening. We so often discuss the climate crisis in an abstract manner that can be hard to understand. So we wanted to show the actual people that climate change is affecting and what it actually looks like.

How has the coronavirus pandemic affected this exhibition?

We were able to adapt the exhibition into a digital format fairly quickly. My goal was to develop a website that mirrored the way a visitor would move through our physical space.

At the top of our exhibition page is our timeline, which would have been displayed around the entire top of our gallery space, and from there you go to the individual artist pages that are sequenced in the way they would have been seen in the gallery. One unique challenge of adapting the exhibition for online is keeping the energy alive enough to ensure that visitors won’t want to leave the page. It’s so much information to digest, so my challenge was to approach this quickly, but not so quickly that you miss too many things.

Our last page is the environmental solution and action page. For us, we felt like the show needed a space to show what people can do about all of the terrible things they just digested. These are things that you can personally do so that you don’t feel frozen in these circumstances — this is hope.



Bryan Thomas
Construction begins on the Auberge Beach Residences and Spa in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida. The streets of nearby Fort Lauderdale regularly flood during “king tides.” According to Climate Central researcher Benjamin Strauss, “Even if we could just stop global emissions tomorrow on a dime, Fort Lauderdale, Miami Gardens, and Hoboken, New Jersey, will be under sea level.”

Stacy Kranitz
Louisiana, September 2017. Southern University offers beautiful views of the Mississippi River, but it is located next to the Devil’s Swamp Superfund site and surrounded by petrochemical plants and toxic waste sites. A slew of leaks, discharges, and accidents have impacted Southern University, including toxic leaking railroad tank cars, ruptured pipelines, chemical spills from tank trucks, and leaking barges on the river, making it the country's most adversely impacted institution of higher learning.


From your perspective, how does the current COVID-19 crisis reflect the reality of the climate crisis?

I feel like in both cases there are groups and types of people who pay attention to things like this, but there are also a lot of people who don’t. It’s pretty evident that this country is split in terms of people who actually understand what is happening, which is crazy.


Just like COVID, the climate crisis can almost feel invisible at times and is hard to understand unless you are directly affected — and even then there are people who don’t seem to grasp the reality of it.

What do you hope people will get from the exhibition?

I would hope that within all of the information that we gathered and connected, people will better understand the connection between the word and the idea of the climate crisis. It’s my hope that in highlighting the people being affected by the crisis today ... that they would see themselves within these pictures. That’s always my hope — to help people to empathize.


Katie Orlinsky
After a successful hunt, Josiah Olemaun, a young whaling crew member, takes a break from moving and stacking whale meat into his family’s ice cellar in Utqiagvik, Alaska, April 29, 2018. Ice cellars are generations-old massive underground freezers dug deep into the permafrost. As permafrost thaws, it is wreaking havoc, melting what used to be permanently frozen ground and destroying and flooding many ice cellars. Others have warmed up to a point that they are unusable, spoiling whale meat and other crucial hunted foods.


Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times

Smoke from the Maria fire billows above Santa Paula, California, Oct. 31, 2019. The state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., initiated multiple rounds of power shutoffs that plunged nearly 2.5 million people into darkness throughout Northern and Central California.



Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times
A 16-year-old resident of Island View Drive wipes her tears in Ventura, California, Dec. 5, 2017; her family's home was destroyed by the Thomas fire.


Yuri Kozyrev / NOOR for Fondation Carmignac
The copper factory in Norilsk, Russia, in August 2018. Three plants of Norilsk — the nickel factory, the copper factory, and the metallurgical complex — were built successively in 1942, 1949, and 1981. Fifty-six percent of the city's population works in these places.


Bryan Thomas
From left: Esmeralda Garcia, Kali Cedeno, and Anthony Cedeno stand in the ocean in Destin, Florida. Given the current trends in pollution, 50% of the city of Destin will be underwater by the year 2070.


Kadir Van Lohuizen / NOOR for Fondation Carmignac



Whale hunting in Point Hope, Alaska, May 2018. The Inuit community of Point Hope is allowed to catch 10 bowhead whales per year. Due to the early disappearance of the sea ice, it’s much harder for the community to catch whales.




TOPICS IN THIS ARTICLE
Climate Change


Gabriel H. Sanchez is the Senior Photo Essay Editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York City.

Police Say The "Umbrella Man" At The George Floyd Protests Was A White Supremacist Trying To Incite Violence

Minneapolis investigators said the man is a member of the Hells Angels biker gang who started violence at what had been a peaceful protest.

ANGELS ARE WHITE SUPREMACISTS DESPITE HAVING THEIR HQ IN THE LATINX DISTRICT OF OAKLAND A BLACK COMMUNITY

Olivia Niland BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on July 28, 2020

Stephen Maturen / Getty Image
A poster reading "We Can't Breathe" is pasted to the remains of an AutoZone store that was destroyed during May 27 protests in Minneapolis, June 9.

Minneapolis investigators say a masked, umbrella-carrying man who was filmed in a viral video smashing windows during protests in the city in late May against the police killing of George Floyd was a white supremacist intent on inciting violence.

In an affidavit filed in state court on Monday as part of an application for a search warrant and seen by BuzzFeed News, an arson investigator with the Minneapolis Police Department identified the man as a 32-year-old member of the Hells Angels biker gang who intended to incite violence at the peaceful demonstration.

The news of his identity and the search warrant affidavit was first reported by the Star Tribune on Tuesday.

The man's identity drew widespread speculation after he was filmed on May 27 slowly and methodically smashing the windows of an AutoZone in Minneapolis, where protests erupted following the May 25 death of Floyd in police custody.



Javier Morillo 🇵🇷🏳️‍🌈@javimorillo

This video was removed from YouTube. It shows exactly who broke windows at AutoZone. Please retweet and help identify the instigator. #JusticeForFloyd11:02 PM - 28 May 2020
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While named in the affidavit, the man has not yet been charged with any crime and so BuzzFeed News is not naming him. The man did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story.


MPD arson investigator Erika Christensen wrote in the affidavit that the man’s actions at what had previously been largely peaceful demonstrations helped trigger a rash of looting and fires, noting that the AutoZone was later burned to the ground. Prior to smashing the store’s windows, the man also spray-painted "free shit for everyone zone" on its doors, according to the affidavit.

“Until the actions of the person your affiant has been calling ‘Umbrella man,’ the protests had been relatively peaceful,” Christensen wrote. “The actions of this person created an atmosphere of hostility and tension. Your affiant believes that this individual’s sole aim was to incite violence.”

Christensen reviewed hours of footage from TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube in an attempt to identify the “umbrella man,” but was unsuccessful, she wrote. He was ultimately identified last week via a tip emailed to the Minneapolis Police Department.

The tipster identified the suspect as a 32-year-old biker and told Christensen that the man intended to “sow discord and racial unrest by breaking out the windows and writing what he did on the double red doors.”

The man is a member of Hells Angels, as well as an associate of the Aryan Cowboys, a white supremacist prison gang based out of Minnesota and Kentucky, Christensen wrote.

The same man was also photographed during a confrontation in Stillwater, Minnesota, last month, in which a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf was harassed by a group of Aryan Cowboys, according to the affidavit.

Photos of the suspect bear “a striking resemblance in the eye, nose bridge, and brow area” to the “umbrella man,” Christensen wrote.

Olivia Niland is a news reporter and curation editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in Los Angeles.

Videos Appear To Show Federal Officers Shooting And Macing Reporters And Legal Observers, Despite A Judge's Order
Reporters and legal observers provided videos of federal agents targeting them. Their lawyers are asking a judge to hold the federal government in contempt of court.

Zoe Tillman BuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From
Washington, DC
Posted on July 28, 2020

Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Federal officers face off with protesters in front of the Mark O. Hatfield US Courthouse in Portland, Oregon, July 27.

WASHINGTON — Journalists and legal observers covering protests in Portland, Oregon, say federal law enforcement officers have shot at them, maced them, and forced them to move, in violation of a federal judge's order.

US District Judge Michael Simon entered a temporary restraining order on July 23 that blocks federal officers from arresting or using physical force against clearly marked journalists and legal observers in Portland. In first-person declarations filed in court on Tuesday, legal observers and reporters described being shot at and maced, and in some instances they provided video footage of the incidents.

Lawyers for the journalists and legal observers are asking Simon to hold the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Marshals Service in contempt of court. They want Simon to prohibit any federal agent who violates the temporary restraining order (TRO) from being involved in "armed operations" in Oregon; to consider a "complete ban" on the use of lethal or "less lethal" weapons by federal officers; and to order senior Trump administration officials, including acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and senior DHS official Ken Cuccinelli, to appear in court and explain why they shouldn't face sanctions.

"Every day it has existed, federal agents have intentionally violated the Court’s TRO. As a result of the federal agents’ defiance of the Court’s order, the free press remains unsafe while trying to document and observe the cataclysmic violence that federal authorities are inflicting on Portland. The federal agents — and their commanders, whom the Court ordered to be notified of the TRO — are not above the law," lawyers representing the journalists and legal observers wrote.

The Trump administration has deployed more than 100 federal officers to respond to demonstrations in Portland, largely around the Mark O. Hatfield US Courthouse. Federal agents have been accused of using excessive force in their response to protests around the courthouse and of making unlawful arrests of protesters; one viral video appeared to show federal agents grabbing a person off the street and placing them into an unmarked van earlier this month.

Attorney General Bill Barr defended the administration's response in testimony on Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee, saying that at night, the peaceful daytime protests have devolved into violence. The Justice Department on Monday tweeted photos of items that federal officers confiscated from "violent agitators" outside the courthouse, including "gasoline, hockey sticks, defense shields, leaf blowers, paint sprayers, paint cans with paint," and a jar it sad was "prepped for a Molotov cocktail."

A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

The latest court filing from the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon and other lawyers includes nine declarations from journalists and legal observers who alleged they were targeted by federal officers in violation of Simon's order last week.

Haley Nicholson, who said in her declaration she was wearing a neon green legal observer hat while filming the demonstrations on July 24, included a link to a video that appears to show an officer pointing a gun through an opening in a fence and shooting into a group of people standing on the other side. Nicholson said the officer shot her from about 4 feet away in her chest with a 40mm rubber bullet, and included a photo of the bruise.


View this video on YouTubeyoutube.com / Via Haley Nicholson

Video provided to a federal judge by Haley Nicholson.

Kat Mahoney, a lawyer volunteering as a legal observer at the demonstrations, wrote in her declaration that she was wearing a blue American Civil Liberties Union vest that identified her as a legal observer. Mahoney wrote that while she was filming and observing federal agents at around 12:45 a.m. on July 24, standing 6 to 10 feet away from nonviolent protesters, a federal officers shot a pink paint bullet at her head "for no reason."

The following night, Mahoney wrote that federal officers sprayed mace at her and other legal observers at close range, even though they wearing blue vests and neon green hats that identified them as legal observers. She included a link to a video that shows a person pointing to a neon green hat they're wearing, and then a uniformed officer on the other side of the fence walks over and sprays mace, according to Mahoney.


View this video on YouTubeyoutube.com / Via Kat Mahoney
Video submitted to a federal judge by Kat Mahoney.

Rebecca Ellis, a staff reporter with Oregon Public Broadcasting, filed a declaration saying she was wearing a press pass when she was shot in the hand by federal officers while filming. She included a link to a tweet with the video she was filming when she was allegedly shot at. Ellis also wrote that federal officers forced her and other journalists to leave an area despite Simon's order, which said reporters and legal observers would not have to obey dispersal orders.



Rebecca Ellis@Rjaellis
Feds approaching and just got shot in hand trying to film. Don’t think that TRO worked08:27 AM - 24 Jul 2020
Reply Retweet Favorite@Rjaellis via Twitter / Via Twitter: @Rjaellis

Another OPB staff reporter, Jonathan Levinson, wrote in a declaration that he was wearing his press pass and a helmet with "PRESS" on the front and back when a federal officer shot a paint round at him early in the morning on July 24. Levinson said there were few protesters in the area around him, and he was taking pictures of officers behind a fence at the time.

Multiple lawsuits are pending in federal court challenging the actions by federal officers deployed to Portland. Last week, a judge in a case brought by Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum denied her office's request for a temporary restraining order that would place limits on when federal officers could arrest and detain protesters and would force officers to identify themselves when making arrests.



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Zoe Tillman is a senior legal reporter with BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.