Blog: World Refugee Day – Right to Seek Safety

June 20, 2022
By Jordan Clark Marcichiw

Each year on June 20th countries from across the globe celebrate World Refugee Day, a day designated to honour the bravery, courage, and resilience of those who have been forced to flee their countries of origin to escape conflict or disaster. It is a day that creates public awareness and calls upon better support of people who are refugees in our communities.

The United Nations declared June 20th World Refugee Day in the year 2001, which marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. (1) This year’s theme is the Right to Seek Safety, declaring everyone has the right to seek safety – whoever they are, wherever they come from, and whenever they are forced to flee. (1)




Whoever

“Whoever they are, people forced to flee should be treated with dignity. Anyone can seek protection, regardless of who they are or what they believe. It is non-negotiable: seeking safety is a human right.” (1)

In Canada, we have welcomed over one million refugees, diversifying our communities and strengthening our workforce. Refugees are often depicted as being burdens on society, which is not the case (3). Statistics show over half of refugees are employed in high-skilled jobs, are younger and more likely to be of working age, and 14% of refugees are self-employed entrepreneurs (compared to the 12% of Canada-born entrepreneurs). (4) It is important to remember that regardless of work status, all people have a right to safety.

Wherever

“Wherever they come from, people forced to flee should be welcomed. Refugees come from all over the globe. To get out of harm’s way, they might take a plane, a boat, or travel on foot. What remains universal is the right to seek safety.” (1)

Refugees in Canada have come from a variety of countries, such as Syria, the Ukraine, Iraq, Thailand, Kosovo, and Poland. (5) The narrative which presents refugees as “good vs. bad” based on their country of origin remains persistent today. (3) For example, Afghan refugees are currently navigating stricter and more complex barriers to access refuge in Canada, compared to Ukrainian refugees. (6) Though many Ukrainian refugees do not meet the traditional United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) definition of refugee, the Canadian government has made several policy changes to offer refuge to Ukrainians who have been displaced. (6) While the support offered to Ukrainian refugees is commendable, this level of support should be available to all refugees, regardless of their country of origin.

Whenever

“Whenever people are forced to flee, they have a right to be protected. Whatever the threat – war, violence, persecution – everyone deserves protection. Everyone has a right to be safe.” (1)

Though Canada continues to admit high numbers of refugees, processing and wait times are highly criticized by refugee advocates. As of May 2022, Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) have been struggling to get through a backlog of 2.1 million immigration applications (7), delaying the ability of refugees to access safety. This has created considerable effects on the emotional and physical well-being of people who are refugees.

What Can I do? Listen and Learn – Seek the stories and lived experiences of the refugee community. Listen to their calls for action. Visit the UNHCR Canada webpage for virtual and in-person events to take part and learn. (8)

Support – Become aware of existing refugee assistance and advocacy groups and support them. In Edmonton, some refugee agencies include the Edmonton Immigrant Services Association, the Edmonton Mennonite Center for Newcomers, and the Refugee Health Coalition. Advocate – Consider what you can do to better advocate for refugees across the globe and in Edmonton. Like other populations in Canada, refugees are a diverse and complex group whose needs will vary. Consider the complexities of being a refugee, ask yourself questions such as: “Do refugee services appropriately support those who also identify as part of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community?”, “Are the needs of refugee seniors and children considered in program policies?,” or “Are disability services accessible for those in the refugee population?” If the answer to any of these questions is no, then advocacy work needs to be done.




References The Office of the Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2022). World refugee day. https://www.unhcr.ca/how-to-help/events/world-refugee-day/ 

 The Office of the Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2022). External toolkit: World refugee day 2022. [Slide 5]. 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RFbqL_nU_AHJtUl6M2jtPfXjOlqwXBpUiPqNR7sRG6w/edit#slide=id.g1234761c880_0_197

 Dossios, D. (2022, May). Canada’s asylum system is outdated, say authors of ‘Flight and Freedom’. New Canada Media. https://newcanadianmedia.ca/canadas-asylum-system-is-outdated-and-rigid/ 

 The Office of the Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (n.d.). Refugees in Canada. https://www.unhcr.ca/in-canada/refugees-in-canada/ 

 The Government of Canada. (n.d.). Canada: A History of refuge https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/refugees/history.html 

 Sachdeva, R. (2022, March). ‘Night and day’: Lawyers say Canada offers more support to Ukrainian refugees than Afghans. CTV News. https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/night-and-day-lawyers-say-canada-offers-more-support-to-ukrainian-refugees-than-afghans-1.5831685 

Singer, C. (2022, June). Canada crosses milestone of welcoming 15,000 Afghan Refugees. Immigration.ca. https://www.immigration.ca/canada-crosses-milestone-of-welcoming-15000-afghan-refugees 

 The Office of the Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2022). World refugee day events in Canada. https://www.unhcr.ca/how-to-help/events/world-refugee-day/world-refugee-day-events/

Jordan Clark Marcichiw (she/her) is a social worker who is passionate about spreading knowledge and advocating for systems change for the betterment of all individuals. Her personal interests include hiking, kayaking, skiing, playing slo-pitch, reading, and adventuring with her pup.

S'pore joins other places that have enacted or proposed laws to regulate online content

The new rules aim to minimise users' risk of exposure to damaging online content. 

Dominic Low and Rei Kurohi


SINGAPORE - Video "challenges" that ask viewers to film themselves performing dangerous acts can go viral rapidly through social media platform algorithms and user interest, and lead to injuries and deaths.

Terrorist acts captured on videos through live streaming can have their impact exacerbated when these clips are reshared online.

These were examples given by the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI) on Monday (June 20) of how harmful online content can be amplified on social media services, which are the focus of proposed rules to enhance online safety for users.


The new proposed rules include requiring designated social media platforms to implement community standards and content moderation processes, so as to minimise users' risk of exposure to damaging online content. Public consultations on these regulations will begin next month.

The ministry said Singapore is not immune to online harms such as religiously or racially offensive content that can incite religious intolerance and prejudice racial harmony here, as well as abusive online behaviour.

It cited an online survey by Sunlight Alliance for Action - a cross-sector alliance that tackles online dangers - which revealed that nearly half of more than 1,000 Singaporeans polled have had personal experiences with online harms.

And 61 per cent of them had encountered online dangers on popular social media services.



MCI said mandating upstream processes and measures will encourage social media services to take greater responsibility for user safety, and reduce harmful online content.

Noting that social media services have put in place community and content standards, the ministry said it will continue to work closely with them to develop regulations fit for Singapore's socio-cultural context.

With the new rules, the country joins a growing number of territories that have enacted or proposed laws to regulate online content.


Germany's Network Enforcement Act, which came into force in 2018, prohibits defined types of illegal content on social media networks with more than two million local users.

Among other things, the networks must set up robust processes to handle and act upon complaints by users on content, and publish biannual reports on their content moderation practices.

Firms that contravene their obligations under the Act can face severe penalties, such as a fine of up to €50 million (S$73 million).



Australia's Online Safety Act, which introduces basic safety expectations of online service providers, came into force in January this year.

Under this law, companies that fail to comply with the country's online safety regulator's order to take down illegal and restricted content can be fined up to A$555,000 (S$538,000) per offence.

High fines are also set out in the European Union's proposed Digital Services Act, which will set new standards of accountability for illegal and harmful online content. Aimed at providing better protection for Internet users, it is expected to be passed next year.

Companies that fall afoul of the law when it takes effect could be fined up to 6 per cent of their global turnover. In extreme cases, access to the platforms may also be restricted.

Other laws on online content include Britain's proposed Online Safety Bill, which is also expected to be passed next year

BLOGGING IS NOT A CRIME

Tajik Court Orders Two-Month Custody For Two Detained Bloggers

Abdullo Ghurbati and Daleri Imomali have denied the changes and pleaded not guilty. (combo photo)

DUSHANBE -- A Tajik court has ordered pretrial detention of two months for two popular bloggers known for their reports criticizing the authorities detained recently in the capital, Dushanbe.

Abdullo Ghurbati and Daleri Imomali were remanded in custody for two months after two separate hearings held in secret over the weekend.

Ghurbati's detention was previously reported.

The bloggers were detained on June 15 after being summoned by police for questioning.

The cases against the two bloggers have been condemned by international free-press campaigners.

Ghurbati is accused of beating a police officer at the Shohmansur police station, a charge that could carry a fine or a two-year prison sentence.

Imomali was charged with illegal entrepreneurship and premeditated false denunciation.

The two have denied the accusations and pleaded not guilty.

The bloggers' arrests last week came after an outcry by human rights advocates and media groups over an attack on journalists from RFE/RL's Tajik Service and Current Time last month.

Tajik authorities have launched a probe into the incident.

President Emomali Rahmon has been criticized by international human rights groups for years over his disregard for independent media, religious freedoms, civil society, and political pluralism in the tightly controlled former Soviet republic.

Climate change in Middle East

Iraqi gazelles die of hunger in a parched land

Gazelles at an Iraqi wildlife reserve are dropping dead from hunger, making them the latest victims in a country where climate change is compounding hardships after years of war 

In little over one month, the slender-horned gazelle population at the Sawa reserve in southern Iraq has plunged from 148 to 87. Lack of funding along with a shortage of rain has deprived them of food, as the country's drought dries up lakes and leads to declining crop yields.

 President Barham Saleh has warned that tackling climate change "must become a national priority for Iraq as it is an existential threat to the future of our generations to come".

The elegant animals, also known as rhim gazelles, are recognisable by their gently curved horns and sand-coloured coats. The International Union for Conservation of Nature classes the animals as endangered on its Red List. Outside Iraq's reserves, they are mostly found in the deserts of Libya, Egypt and Algeria but are unlikely to number "more than a few hundred" there, according to the Red List.

Turki al-Jayashi, director of the Sawa reserve, said gazelle numbers there plunged by around 40 percent in just one month to the end of May. "They no longer have a supply of food because we have not received the necessary funds" which had come from the government, Jayashi said.

Lack of public financing to blame?

Iraq's finances are under pressure after decades of war in a poverty-stricken country needing agricultural and other infrastructure upgrades. It is grappling with corruption, a financial crisis and political deadlock which has left Iraq without a new government months after October elections.

"The climate has also strongly affected the gazelles," which lack forage in the desert-like region, Jayashi added.

At three other Iraqi reserves further north, the number of rhim gazelles has fallen by 25 percent in the past three years to 224 animals, according to an agriculture ministry official who asked to remain anonymous. He blamed the drop at the reserves in Al-Madain near Baghdad, and in Diyala and Kirkuk on a "lack of public financing".

At the Sawa reserve, established in 2007 near the southern city of Samawah, the animals pant under the scorching sun. The brown and barren earth is dry beyond recovery, and meagre shrubs that offer slight nourishment are dry and tough.

Some gazelles, including youngsters still without horns, nibble hay spread out on the flat ground. Others take shelter under a metal roof, drinking water from a trough.

Summer hasn't even begun, but temperatures have already hit 50°C in parts of the country. The effects of drought have been compounded by dramatic falls in the level of some rivers due to dams upstream and on tributaries in Turkey and Iran.

Desertification affects 39 percent of Iraqi land, the country's president has warned. "Water scarcity negatively affects all our regions. It will lead to reduced fertility of our agricultural lands because of salination," Saleh said.

He has sent 100 million dinars in an effort to help save the Sawa reserve's rhim gazelles, Jayashi said. But the money came too late for some.

 Five more have just died, their carcasses lying together on the brown earth.    (AFP)

PAKISTAN

Drought emergency

Editorial Published June 20, 2022 -

EVEN now, when crop yields have declined, cattle are dying, agricultural lands are parched and millions do not have enough water for their basic needs, there is little sign that the authorities are as alarmed as they should be over the current drought emergency. For a long time now, international bodies have been warning that water resources in Pakistan will dry up by 2025. That the country’s per capita water availability has dropped from 5,060 cubic metres per annum in 1951 to a mere 908 cubic metres today, according to UNDP estimates, is a depressing measure of things to come. Despite the facts, warnings and signs, comprehensively tackling the water crisis issue does not appear to be on either the government’s or any political party’s agenda. Decades of short-sighted development and consumption practices have turned the rivers in the country into cesspools of toxic waste. Nearly 92pc of the Indus delta, once known for its immensely rich flora and fauna, has been destroyed while the river itself now resembles a nullah overflowing with plastic waste. Meanwhile, the Ravi is listed among the three most polluted rivers of the world, while freshwater lakes such as Manchhar and Keenjhar are also badly polluted and have contracted in size. All this is a searing indictment of the state’s policies and its mismanagement of the country’s water resources that are necessary to sustain life, business and growth.

Pakistan’s failure on this front will ensure an even more catastrophic impact of climate change, to which the current drought in the country is intrinsically connected. The ongoing heatwave, which has severely aggravated the prevailing water shortage, illustrates this. Consider Federal Water Resources Minister Khursheed Shah’s claims in the National Assembly on Friday that up to 6,000 cusecs of water “evaporated” while travelling a distance of 350km from Sukkur to Kotri barrages. Moreover, new research indicates that severe heatwaves, of the kind estimated to have taken about 90 lives in India and Pakistan this year, will now be the new normal as they are 30 times more likely to occur than before. Meanwhile, the dreaded rise of 2°C in global temperatures might translate into an exponential increase of up to 20°C in South Asia. If this does not call for steps to stop our wasteful ways, revive dying water bodies while protecting and conserving the limited water resources we have on a war footing, then what will?

Published in Dawn, June 20th, 2022

Criminal barristers vote to go on strike in row over legal aid

Walkouts in England and Wales from next week come amid ‘record backlog’ at crown courts

Barristers are expected to strike on picket lines outside various courts, including at the Old Bailey in London. Photograph: JoeDunckley/Getty Images


Caroline Davies

THE GUARDIAN

Mon 20 Jun 2022

Barristers specialising in criminal law have voted to go on strike in a row over legal aid funding, with several days of court walkouts expected from next week.

The Criminal Bar Association (CBA), which represents barristers in England and Wales, announced the industrial action after a ballot of members.

The planned action comes at a time of significant backlogs across crown courts, said to involve 58,271 cases.

The lawyers are the latest profession to go on strike as rail workers plan action this week and amid reports of unrest among teaching staff and NHS employers.
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The CBA said 81.5% of the more than 2,000 members to respond supported industrial action.

Jo Sidhu QC and Kirsty Brimelow QC from the CBA said: “This extraordinary commitment to the democratic process reflects a recognition among criminal barristers at all levels of call and across all circuits that what is at stake is the survival of a profession of specialist criminal advocates and of the criminal justice system which depends so critically upon their labour.

“Without immediate action to halt the exodus of criminal barristers from our ranks, the record backlog that has crippled our courts will continue to inflict misery upon victims and defendants alike, and the public will be betrayed.”

The strike action is intended to last for four weeks, beginning with walkouts on Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 June, increasing by one day each week until a five-day strike from Monday 18 July to Friday 22 July.

It means cases at which barristers are required will probably have to be postponed, including crown court trials.

Barristers are expected to strike on picket lines outside court, including at the Old Bailey in London and at crown courts in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds and Manchester.

In April, the CBA started to refuse to carry out “return work” – stepping in and picking up court hearings and other work for colleagues whose cases are overrunning – which is described as a gesture of goodwill to prop up the justice system.

The CBA said it also made “repeated efforts” to persuade the government to honour the recommendations of the criminal legal aid review to increase their fees by 15% immediately, but have been disappointed.

Lawyers have warned the criminal justice system is in crisis after a 43% fall in real terms in the legal aid budget since 2004-05.

While ministers have announced a proposed package of changes and pay increases after an independent review by the former judge Sir Christopher Bellamy, lawyers say there needs to be an immediate increase in their pay.

The CBA has claimed many of its members are being forced to leave the criminal bar after a fall in incomes of nearly 30% over the past two decades.

It says specialist criminal barristers make an average annual income after expenses of £12,200 in the first three years of practice.

Officials say Covid-19 absences have worsened the figures, but the lord chief justice, Lord Burnett of Maldon, said in evidence to the House of Lords constitution committee last month that the judicial system was struggling with falling numbers of criminal advocates.

Yellowstone National Park flooding: See before and after photos



Yellowstone National Park flooding: See before and after photos

Alicia Victoria Lozano and Jiachuan Wu
Fri, June 17, 2022,

Yellowstone National Park, a crown jewel of the American West that attracts more than 4 million visitors annually, is beginning its long road to recovery after unprecedented flooding inundated the area earlier this week, sweeping away homes, destroying roads and bridges, and altering the spectacular landscape for generations to come.

The full scale of the damage is still being assessed, but officials said the park’s south loop could reopen as early as next week with modifications likely in place. An “aggressive plan for recovery” is still being developed for the northern sections of the park.

“We have made tremendous progress in a very short amount of time but have a long way to go,” Cam Sholly, Yellowstone National Park superintendent, said in a statement.

The flooding started when up to 3 inches of rain and snowmelt combined to create catastrophic conditions in the 150-year-old national park, which spans three states and some 2.2 million acres.

According to the National Weather Service, the combination of up to 5 inches of rain and 2 to 5 inches of snowmelt that occurred between June 10 and 13 caused the severe flooding across the Absaroka and Beartooth mountain ranges, leading to conditions “rarely or never seen before across many area rivers and streams.”

“Yellowstone is a region shaped by our planet’s mighty natural forces,” National Park Service Director Chuck Sams said in a statement. “This is what makes it so spectacular and unmatched anywhere in the world. This week’s flooding reminds us that we humans are just one small part of this ecosystem.”

Several homes and structures were swept away and about 100 people were airlifted to safety. Businesses in gateway communities have been forced to close this week and reconsider operating through the summer season, which doesn’t officially kick off until June 21.

“It’s not unusual to shut down because of nature,” said Emily Jo Mahan, who runs an outfitting guide business on the park’s west entrance. “But this week, we woke up and a river had turned into a lake.”

TikTok moves all US traffic to Oracle servers, amid new claims user data was accessed from China



Manish Singh
Fri, June 17, 2022

TikTok said on Friday it is moving U.S. users’ data to Oracle servers stored in the United States. Overshadowing its migration announcement was a damning report that followed, claiming that TikTok staff in China had access to its U.S. users’ data as recently as this January.

The report from BuzzFeed News, which cites recordings from 80 TikTok internal meetings it obtained, claims that U.S. employees of TikTok repeatedly consulted with their colleagues in China to understand how U.S. user data flowed because they did not have the “permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own.”

“Everything is seen in China,” the report said, quoting an unnamed member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department as saying in a September 2021 meeting.

The report further casts doubt on the short video giant’s entanglement with Beijing, a long-running accusation amplified by former President Donald Trump, and the firm’s public comments about the independence of its U.S. unit.

U.S. officials have for years expressed concern that TikTok might let China’s authoritarian government have access to the data the firm collects from Americans and users from other nations. The matter escalated in September 2020, when the Trump administration said it would bar the Chinese-owned mobile apps WeChat and TikTok from U.S. app stores.

(India banned TikTok and several other Chinese-owned apps in 2020 citing national security concerns.)

TikTok -- as well as its parent firm ByteDance -- has publicly said it would never hand over U.S. users' data. The firm also engaged with Microsoft and Oracle to sell the U.S. unit and explored selling stakes to U.S. investors to comply with Trump's order.

The Biden administration revoked the Trump-era executive order and replaced it with one that called for a broader review of a number of foreign-controlled apps that could pose a security threat to Americans and their data.

TikTok said in a blog post Friday that "100% of U.S. user traffic is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure" in the United States, with an asterisk. "We still use our U.S. and Singapore data centers for backup, but as we continue our work we expect to delete U.S. users' private data from our own data centers and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the U.S.”

A report in March said the two firms were said to be close to finalizing a deal.

TikTok said Friday it is also “making operational changes,” including establishing a U.S.-based leadership to “solely manage U.S. user data for TikTok.”

“These are critical steps, but there is more we can do. We know we are among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of US user data,” it added.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment on BuzzFeed News’ reporting.

TikTok’s forced sale to Oracle is put on hold

Leaked Audio From 80 Internal TikTok Meetings Shows That US User Data Has Been Repeatedly Accessed From China


Emily Baker-White

Fri, June 17, 2022

Erik Carter for BuzzFeed News

For years, TikTok has responded to data privacy concerns by promising that information gathered about users in the United States is stored in the United States, rather than China, where ByteDance, the video platform's parent company, is located. But according to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users — exactly the type of behavior that inspired former president Donald Trump to threaten to ban the app in the United States.

The recordings, which were reviewed by BuzzFeed News, contain 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least. Despite a TikTok executive’s sworn testimony in an October 2021 Senate hearing that a “world-renowned, US-based security team” decides who gets access to this data, nine statements by eight different employees describe situations where US employees had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how US user data was flowing. US staff did not have permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own, according to the tapes.

“Everything is seen in China,” said a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department in a September 2021 meeting. In another September meeting, a director referred to one Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything.” (While many employees introduced themselves by name and title in the recordings, BuzzFeed News is not naming anyone to protect their privacy.)

The recordings range from small-group meetings with company leaders and consultants to policy all-hands presentations and are corroborated by screenshots and other documents, providing a vast amount of evidence to corroborate prior reports of China-based employees accessing US user data. Their contents show that data was accessed far more frequently and recently than previously reported, painting a rich picture of the challenges the world’s most popular social media app has faced in attempting to disentangle its US operations from those of its parent company in Beijing. Ultimately, the tapes suggest that the company may have misled lawmakers, its users, and the public by downplaying that data stored in the US could still be accessed by employees in China.

In response to an exhaustive list of examples and questions about data access, TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan responded with a short statement: "We know we're among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of US user data. That's why we hire experts in their fields, continually work to validate our security standards, and bring in reputable, independent third parties to test our defenses." ByteDance did not provide additional comment.

"Everything is seen in China."

In 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States began investigating the national security implications of TikTok’s collection of American data. And in 2020, then-president Donald Trump threatened to ban the app entirely over concerns that the Chinese government could use ByteDance to amass dossiers of personal information about US TikTok users. TikTok’s “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information,” Trump wrote in his executive order. TikTok has said it has never shared user data with the Chinese government and would not do so if asked.

Most of the recorded meetings focus on TikTok’s response to these concerns. The company is currently attempting to redirect its pipes so that certain, “protected” data can no longer flow out of the United States and into China, an effort known internally as Project Texas. In the recordings, the vast majority of situations where China-based staff accessed US user data were in service of Project Texas's aim to halt this data access.

Project Texas is key to a contract that TikTok is currently negotiating with cloud services provider Oracle and CFIUS. Under the CFIUS agreement, TikTok would hold US users’ protected private information, like phone numbers and birthdays, exclusively at a data center managed by Oracle in Texas (hence the project name). This data would only be accessible by specific US-based TikTok employees. What data counts as “protected” is still being negotiated, but the recordings indicate that all public data, including users’ public profiles and everything they post, will not be included. (Disclosure: In a previous life, I held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.) Oracle did not respond to a request for comment. CFIUS declined to comment.

Shortly before publication of this story, TikTok published a blog post announcing that it has changed the “default storage location of US user data” and that today, “100% of US user traffic is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We still use our US and Singapore data centers for backup, but as we continue our work we expect to delete US users' private data from our own data centers and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the US.”

Lawmakers’ fear that the Chinese government will be able to get its hands on American data through ByteDance is rooted in the reality that Chinese companies are subject to the whims of the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party, which has been cracking down on its homegrown tech giants over the last year. The risk is that the government could force ByteDance to collect and turn over information as a form of “data espionage.”

There is, however, another concern: that the soft power of the Chinese government could impact how ByteDance executives direct their American counterparts to adjust the levers of TikTok’s powerful “For You” algorithm, which recommends videos to its more than 1 billion users. Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, has called TikTok “a Trojan horse the Chinese Communist Party can use to influence what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think.”

Project Texas’s narrow focus on the security of a specific slice of US user data, much of which the Chinese government could simply buy from data brokers if it so chose, does not address fears that China, through ByteDance, could use TikTok to influence Americans’ commercial, cultural, or political behavior.

TikTok has said in blog posts and public statements that it physically stores all data about its US users in the US, with backups in Singapore. This does mitigate some risks — the company says this data is not subject to Chinese law — but it does not address the fact that China-based employees can access the data, experts say.

“Physical location does not matter if the data can still be accessed from China,” Adam Segal, director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, told BuzzFeed News in an email. He said the “concern would be that data would still end up in the hands of Chinese intelligence if people in China were still accessing.”

TikTok itself acknowledged its access issue in a 2020 blog post. “Our goal is to minimize data access across regions so that, for example, employees in the APAC region, including China, would have very minimal access to user data from the EU and US,” TikTok’s Chief Information Security Officer Roland Cloutier wrote.

Project Texas, once completed, is supposed to close this loophole for a limited amount of data. But many of the audio recordings reveal the challenges employees have faced in finding and closing the channels allowing data to flow from the US to China.

"Physical location does not matter if the data can still be accessed from China."

Fourteen of the leaked recordings include conversations with or about a team of consultants from Booz Allen Hamilton. One of the consultants told TikTok employees that they were brought on in February 2021 to help manage the Project Texas data migration, and a TikTok director told other TikTok employees that the consultants reported to TikTok's chief of US data defense. In recordings, the consultants investigate how data flows through TikTok and ByteDance’s internal tools, including those used for data visualization, content moderation, and monetization.

In September 2021, one consultant said to colleagues, “I feel like with these tools, there’s some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them, which is exhausting.”

When asked for comment, Booz Allen Hamilton spokesperson Jessica Klenk said something about the above information was incorrect, but refused to specify what it was. “[A]t this point I’m not in a position to further discuss or even confirm/deny our relationship with any client. But I can tell you that what you’re asserting here is inaccurate.”

Additionally, four of the recordings contain conversations in which employees responsible for certain internal tools could not figure out what parts of those tools did. In a November 2021 meeting, a data scientist explained that for many tools, “nobody has really documented, uh, like, a how-to. And there are items within the tools that nobody knows what they’re for.”

The complexity of the company’s internal systems and how they enable data to flow between the US and China underscores the challenges facing the United States Technical Services team, a new dedicated engineering team TikTok has begun hiring as part of Project Texas.

"Chinese nationals are not actually allowed to join."

To demonstrate the USTS team’s independence from Chinese-owned ByteDance, one team member told a colleague in January that “not everyone can join” the team. “Chinese nationals are not actually allowed to join,” he said. (A former employee who spoke to BuzzFeed News on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution corroborated this account.) When asked for comment on this practice, TikTok did not respond.

But while the mandate of this team is to control and manage access to sensitive US data, the USTS team reports to ByteDance leadership in China, as BuzzFeed News reported in March. In a recorded January 2022 meeting, a data scientist told a colleague: “I get my instructions from the main office in Beijing.”

TikTok’s goal for Project Texas is that any data stored on the Oracle server will be secure and not accessible from China or elsewhere globally. However, according to seven recordings between September 2021 and January 2022, the lawyer leading TikTok’s negotiations with CFIUS and others clarify that this only includes data that is not publicly available on the app, like content that is in draft form, set to private, or information like users’ phone numbers and birthdays that is collected but not visible on their profiles. A Booz Allen Hamilton consultant told colleagues in September 2021 that what exactly will count as “protected data” that will be stored in the Oracle server was “still being ironed out from a legal perspective.”

In a recorded January 2022 meeting, the company’s head of product and user operations announced with a laugh that unique IDs (UIDs) will not be considered protected information under the CFIUS agreement: “The conversation continues to evolve,” they said. “We recently found out that UIDs are things we can have access to, which changes the game a bit.”

What the product and user operations head meant by “UID” in this circumstance is not clear — it could refer to an identifier for a specific TikTok account, or for a device. Device UIDs are typically used by ad tech companies like Google and Facebook to link your behavior across apps, making them nearly as important an identifier as your name.

As TikTok continues to negotiate over what data will be considered protected, the recordings make clear that a lot of US user data — including public videos, bios, and comments — will not be exclusively stored in the Oracle server. Instead, this data will be stored in the company’s Virginia data center, which may remain accessible from ByteDance’s Beijing offices even once Project Texas is complete. That means ByteDance’s China-based employees could continue to have access to insights about what American TikTok users are interested in, from cat videos to political beliefs.

It also appears that Oracle is giving TikTok considerable flexibility in how its data center will be run. In a recorded conversation from late January, TikTok’s head of global cyber and data defense made clear that while Oracle would be providing the physical data storage space for Project Texas, TikTok would control the software layer: “It’s almost incorrect to call it Oracle Cloud, because they’re just giving us bare metal, and then we're building our VMs [virtual machines] on top of it.” Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, TikTok’s national security lawyer hopes the negotiation will have ripple effects in the tech industry and beyond. “There is going to be national security law that comes down from the Commerce Department,” they said, referencing the Biden administration’s development of regulations to govern apps that could be exploited “by foreign adversaries to steal or otherwise obtain data.”

"The question is whether the company will go far enough."

“The law will be promulgated and codified in probably the next 18 months, I would say — and that’s how every Chinese company is going to be able to operate in the US,” the lawyer said.

TikTok’s efforts with Project Texas may ultimately pay off for the company. According to Graham Webster, a research scholar at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, if TikTok commits to being “transparent and high-integrity, and China-based employees won’t be able to access user data,” then “from a data security perspective, it should be possible to convince good-faith skeptics they have done enough.

“The question is whether the company will go far enough and whether skeptical authorities are truly open to being convinced,” he told BuzzFeed News.

The details of the arrangement between CFIUS, TikTok, and Oracle were still under discussion as of January 2022, when the recordings end. But even though Project Texas’s goal is to cordon off access to the most sensitive details about Americans that exist on TikTok’s servers, one policy employee had doubts that will actually prevent ByteDance’s employees in China from accessing this data.

“It remains to be seen if at some point product and engineering can still figure out how to get access, because in the end of the day, it’s their tools,” they said in a September 2021 meeting. “They built them all in China.” ●

Possible cause of mystery hepatitis in kids identified in new study, but more research needed

Caroline Kee

Fri, June 17, 2022, 

A small, new study from Israel describes a potential link between liver injury in children and long COVID. But it also highlights how much we still don't know about the ongoing mystery hepatitis outbreak in kids.

The lead study author and experts agree that it's too soon to tell whether prior infection with COVID-19 is behind the recent rise in cases of hepatitis in kids with no known cause.

Mysterious Hepatitis Cases: What we know so far

Since April 2022, health officials around the world have been monitoring a mysterious outbreak of acute hepatitis among children. There are at least 290 cases under investigation in the U.S., according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Globally, at least 700 cases are under investigation in 34 countries, according to the World Health Organization.

What makes these pediatric hepatitis cases so mysterious is that there is no known cause. Hepatitis, or inflammation of the liver, is often caused by viral infections, and the most common causes are hepatitis viruses A, B, C, D and E. However, none of these are behind the recent outbreak of hepatitis among children worldwide, which has left scientists puzzled.

While cases of unexplained pediatric hepatitis pop up every year, the number of cases detected since fall 2021 has caused concern among health officials and parents alike. The CDC recently published an analysis that found, between October 2021 and March 2022, there was no increase in hepatitis or adenovirus versus pre-pandemic levels. But this was limited to data from the U.S., and WHO has previously said that other countries have seen higher-than-usual rates of pediatric hepatitis with an unknown cause.

Of the 700 pediatric hepatitis cases reported worldwide, at least 38 children have required liver transplants and 10 have died, according to the most recent data from WHO.

Researchers have studied possible links between the current hepatitis outbreak and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as adenovirus, a group of very common viruses that cause cold- and flu-like symptoms. Adenovirus has been identified in a number of these pediatric hepatitis cases, but it usually doesn't cause hepatitis in healthy children, according to the CDC.

Researchers in Israel published findings from a small study, which suggests that prior infection with COVID-19, and its impact on the immune system, could play a role in the outbreak. The study, titled “Long COVID-19 Liver Manifestation in Children,” was published in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition last week.

What did this new study find?

The study describes five children in Israel who recovered from COVID-19 and later presented with liver injury. It was a retrospective case series, meaning it looked back at existing data from patients.

"Basically, this was an observation we made in the last year or two, describing a liver injury type that is likely caused by a post-COVID phenomenon," Dr. Orith Waisbourd-Zinman, pediatric gastroenterologist at Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel and lead investigator of the study, told TODAY. Post-COVID liver injury has been well-documented among adults, the scientists note in the study, but the data from children are sparse.

All five patients, who were between 3 months and 13 years old, presented with liver injury after recovering from a case of mild or asymptomatic COVID-19. Two patients, both infants, had liver failure. They all had elevated liver enzymes, suggesting inflammation or damage, and the most common symptoms were jaundice, abdominal pain, nausea and weakness.

All of the subjects were previously healthy and tested negative for the usual culprits of liver injury during extensive blood workups, said Waisbourd-Zinman, which is what prompted researchers to test for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 and look into long COVID.

The study describes a type of liver injury that was "not caused by the virus itself, but rather the immune response after the virus disappears ... which is similar to other long COVID phenomena," said Waisbourd-Zinman. These include prolonged fatigue, brain fog, gastrointestinal symptoms and more.

The scientists posited that after recovering from COVID-19, the immune system may be primed to react differently to infection, leading to liver injury.

Although adenovirus has been a leading theory, Waisbourd-Zinman said it’s a “weak link.” Only one of the patients in this study had a positive test for adenovirus. “But when we stained the liver for the presence of adenovirus, it was negative," she added. Adenovirus was not found in the livers of any other patients in the study, either.

Multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a condition in which organs and other parts of the body become inflamed, has also been reported in children with a previous COVID infection and can cause liver injury. But the patients in the study didn't meet the diagnostic criteria for MIS-C.

Three of the patients in the study recovered from hepatitis with treatment involving steroids, except for the two young infants with liver failure, who required transplants. Waisbourd-Zinman said that none of the patients had been vaccinated against COVID-19.

The scientists concluded that the likely causes of the acute hepatitis were "either a post-infectious immune reaction similar to MIS-C" or the immune system becoming dysregulated after a COVID-19 infection, "priming the immune system to other infectious agents like adenovirus."

Long-COVID may or may not be the answer

Overall, the jury is still out on whether long COVID can trigger an immune response that leads to acute severe hepatitis in kids.

Not all experts are convinced by the study, which had a number of limitations. First, the sample size was very small, and the study was observational. It did not investigate the mechanisms of liver injury on a molecular level, so it may be too soon to rule out other factors. Also, the cases occurred between December 2020 and September 2021, prior to the current outbreak.

"Any viral infection can prime your immune system to have an odd or aberrant reaction. ... This is not unique to COVID-19," Dr. Rima Fawaz, pediatric gastroenterologist at Yale Medicine, who wasn't involved in the study, told TODAY.

The liver is a very resilient organ, so when it comes to liver injury, especially in healthy children, “often there’s a predisposing factor,” Dr. Michael Wilsey, vice chair of the Division of Gastroenterology at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in Florida, who wasn't involved in the study, told TODAY. Is that factor prior COVID-19 infection, adenovirus, a genetic component or some combination of these? We simply do not know.

It's worth noting that one of the patients in the study was diagnosed with hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a systemic inflammatory syndrome, which Fawaz said can prime you to have a dysregulated immune reaction and cause a prolonged, even fatal inflammatory response.

Although the common thread among these patients was prior COVID infection, there could be another common cause that researchers are not yet able to identify through existing tests.

“These may be patients who are at risk for reasons we don’t fully understand to developing post-COVID liver injury," said Wilsey. "We test for everything we know to test for."

The experts and study authors agree that more data and research is needed to fully understand these mysterious pediatric hepatitis cases and the potential link to long COVID.

The bottom line: Do not panic

Another thing the experts agreed on was that there is no need to panic. Acute hepatitis is still relatively rare. "I would reassure parents that they shouldn’t be stressed,” Waisbourd-Zinman said.

If your child has had COVID-19, that does not mean they will develop hepatitis. Parents do not need proactively look for liver problems or ask the doctor for liver tests after their kid recovers, Waisbourd-Zinman said.

But it is important to know how to recognize the symptoms of hepatitis. These include jaundice or yellowing of the skin and eyes, abdominal pain, dark-colored urine, light-colored stools, nausea, joint pain, fever and fatigue.

While this study may leave us with more questions than answers, it is certainly a step in the right direction. "Basically this is what we were hoping for: to gather more information so we can further study the mechanisms and understand this disease," said Waisbourd-Zinman.

How the final journey of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira ended in tragedy


Tom Phillips in Atalaia do Norte
Fri, June 17, 2022

Photograph: João Laet/AFP/Getty Images

Dom Phillips loved the Amazon and he loved the Amazon’s fish. His favourite was the tucunaré, a speckled South American peacock bass whose Indigenous name means “friend of the trees”.

It was in a hotel room named after the tucunaré that the British journalist spent his last night before venturing into the jungle with the Brazilian activist Bruno Pereira on the afternoon of Thursday 2 June.

But before checking out of the hotel in the river town of Atalaia do Norte, Phillips had one final interview to do.

After discovering that his hosts ran an eco-tourism company for fishing enthusiasts, the veteran correspondent grabbed his Dictaphone, pulled up a white plastic chair and began peppering them with questions about the Amazon and their sustainable work.

Dom Phillips takes notes on a previous trip to a remote part of Brazil. 

Photograph: João Laet/AFP/Getty Images

“He sat down right there with a recorder just like this one,” said Rubeney de Castro Alves, one of the owners of Javari Expeditions, breaking down in tears as he remembered his brief encounter with Phillips and the smile-filled selfie they took before he left.

As he settled his 100-reais (£17) bill, the British journalist told Castro Alves he would return from the rainforest in three days. “RETORNO – DOMINGO,” the hotelier wrote on his check-in card next to Phillips’s squiggly handwriting. “BACK – SUNDAY.” He underlined the second word for emphasis.

Minutes later the journalist was gone, heading a few hundred metres down the road to the dilapidated river port where he and Pereira would begin their final voyage.

As their motorboat set forth into the murky brown waters under a cloud-filled sky, a friend standing on the dockside used his mobile phone to take two grainy photographs of the pair – perhaps the last existing images of the men, who by then had less than three days to live.

From Atalaia do Norte, the men headed south along the meandering River Itaquaí. They stopped at a riverside hamlet to collect some paddles Pereira had commissioned for the Indigenous people whose cause he had championed.

Before leaving his hotel, Phillips told its owners they were heading down a different river, the Javari – seemingly a security measure adopted as a result of the threats Pereira had received because of his activism in a lawless border region rife with environmental crime and drug trafficking.

Phillips told Castro Alves they would visit the Curuçá Indigenous protection base which guards one of the entry points to the Javari Valley territory, an Austria-sized expanse of rainforest that is home to more than 20 Indigenous communities, the majority uncontacted.Interactive

“Perhaps it was a strategy to throw people off their scent. I think it must have been,” said Castro Alves, a close friend of Pereira.

In fact, Pereira and Phillips were travelling up the Itaquaí to the Lago do Jaburu, where Indigenous activists have created a riverside surveillance point to monitor the illegal fishing gangs pillaging fish stocks within the Javari territory.

Related: Javari valley: the lawless primal wilderness where Dom Phillips went missing

With their boat’s 40-horsepower outboard motor, it would have taken about two hours to arrive. The men spent their first night sleeping in hammocks as the jungle around them erupted in a bewitching symphony of bird and insect song.

Early the next day Phillips, who was writing a book called How to Save the Amazon, began his interviews with members of the 13-strong surveillance team tasked with keeping environmental criminals out of an Indigenous territory that is home to the greatest concentration of uncontacted peoples on Earth.

“I was with him on Thursday, Friday and Saturday,” said one of those Indigenous guards, Tumi Matis.

“Dom asked me what was happening in the Javari Valley. ‘Why are you patrolling it?’ I said it was because fishermen and invaders were coming into our territory to steal our wildlife – tracajá river turtles and pirarucu fish,” said Matis, who hails from a village called Bukuwak, which means Paradise in the Pano language spoken by his people.

“In the cities people are cutting the trees down. Not here. Here we are protecting the forests,” Matis told the reporter proudly.

Andrew Fishman, an American journalist who talked often with Phillips about the book while paddleboarding off Rio’s Copacabana beach, said his friend had made a succession of trips to the Amazon since the project was conceived three years ago, gathering hundreds of hours of interviews.

Having undertaken a punishing 17-day expedition with Pereira deep into the Javari Valley for the Guardian in 2018, Phillips was keen to return. “He was eager to go back and see how things had changed in the few years since he had been there,” Fishman said.

“He seemed really excited about the book and a little bit nervous about its ambitious scope, as any sane person would be.”

“He wanted to make it a mainstream book so that it alerted everybody to the problems with the deforestation and the destruction of the Amazon,” said the journalist’s sister, Sian Phillips. “He wanted to find people to talk to in the Amazon who could tell their story. He wanted to give their story.”

Those who met Phillips on the final reporting trip of a 15-year career in Brazil, say he seemed in his element as he toured the isolated jungle region seeking insights that would help explain the complexities of the battle to save the Amazon.

The Itaquai River snakes through the Javari Valley Indigenous territory. 

Photograph: Edmar Barros/AP

“He seemed cheerful – he said he loved his work,” said Orlando Possuelo, another leading member of the new generation of Brazilian Indigenistas and the son of the legendary Indigenous defender and explorer Sydney Possuelo.

Possuelo offered a word of warning to Phillips during their two-hour meeting in Atalaia do Norte at the headquarters of Univaja – the Indigenous rights group where Pereira worked after being sidelined from Brazil’s Indigenous protection agency during the government of the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.

In February, one of the men now in custody for the murders of Pereira and Phillips, a fisherman called Amarildo da Costa Oliveira, allegedly fired shots at Pereira and another colleague on the Itaquaí.

“I told him: ‘Take care in the region you’re going to. Did you know they’d shot at Bruno?” Possuelo remembered saying.

“Really?” Phillips replied, before returning to his hotel to pack.

Related: ‘War for survival’: Brazil’s Amazon tribes despair as land raids surge under Bolsonaro

Pereira’s friends say he refused to be intimidated by the threats and the increasingly violent atmosphere that has gripped Brazil since the 2018 election of a president who has overseen what activists call a historic assault on Indigenous rights and the environment.

“These fishermen aren’t capable of killing me,” Pereira recently told a friend, according to Rubens Valente, a Brazilian journalist who has written extensively on the Amazon.

“He thought they were empty threats,” Valente said.

They were not. At about 6am on Sunday 5 June, having concluded his reporting, Phillips and Pereira started heading back down the Itaquaí towards Atalaia do Norte en route to a cold beer and a hot shower.

They stopped briefly at a riverside village, São Rafael, to talk to a local fisherman but left after being told he was not home. Minutes after retaking the river they were dead, ambushed and dragged into a nearby patch of jungle where they were buried in the ground.

The search operation, spearheaded by Indigenous people, belatedly included resources deployed by the Brazilian military. 

Photograph: João Laet/AFP/Getty Images

Their belongings were stashed in a nearby patch of flooded forest where Indigenous search teams found items including Phillips’s backpack and a pair of trousers belonging to Pereira.

On Wednesday, after a 10-day search, their bodies were finally found.

“I feel anger and disgust,” said Valente, who is in Atalaia do Norte to report on the murder of his friend. “The truth is that this was a death foretold … it is an irreparable loss.”

Orlando Possuelo. 

Photograph: João Laet/AFP/Getty Images

As he sat outside the hotel room Pereira had occupied before journeying into the rainforest, named after the Mayuruna people of the Javari, Valente fell silent and shook his head in disbelief.

Night had fallen by the time Phillips and Pereira recommenced their river journey, from almost the same point at which it had been so brutally interrupted.

At around 6.40pm on Wednesday they set off down the Itaquaí towards Atalaia do Norte in a three-vessel cortege led by a white ambulance boat and escorted by army troops.

Minutes later Orlando Possuelo emerged from the jungle, where a crestfallen Amarildo da Costa Oliveira had led police to the burial site.

“I’ve destroyed my life. I’ve destroyed the lives of my family,” the alleged killer was heard muttering.

Possuelo headed downriver to the Indigenous search base he has been coordinating since the hunt for Pereira and Phillips started almost two weeks ago.

Related: In his own words: Dom Phillips’ reporting on Brazil and the Amazon

“It feels like mission accomplished,” said Possuelo, surrounded by Indigenous volunteers from the Marubo, Kanamari and Matis peoples, who played such a key role in bringing the men home.

“We always say when we go about our work that we will never leave anyone behind - and we stayed here and we fought for our colleague,” Possuelo said.

As the group dismantled their riverside encampment and prepared to cast off, Possuelo said his focus would now shift to another, equally crucial mission: securing justice for the families of both murdered men.

Further down the river, the boat carrying Phillips and Pereira powered homewards through the darkness towards a perfect full moon.

Ford announced plans to open a plant near a Tenn. Black town. Then the state took over the town.


Claretta Bellamy
Sat, June 18, 2022

Photos Andrea Morales for NBC News

When Mason, Tennessee, faced losing its ability to govern its own finances in a fight with white state officials earlier this year, doing so brought a spotlight to the majority Black community of fewer than 1,600 people for a situation that town advocates called discriminatory.

For months, Mason battled for its own financial control after the town refused to give up its charter, prompting the state to formally take over its finances shortly after carmaker Ford announced a major project nearby. But in May, Mason officials dropped a lawsuit they brought to Tennessee’s Chancery Court against state officials, after agreeing to more favorable terms, signaling the lengthy feud between the town and the state over racial discrimination and autonomy is coming to an end.

The majority Black town, represented in court by the NAACP, announced during a press conference last month that it would regain its independence, while also reaping the benefits of the nearby economic development opportunity coming to the region.

A replica of the Statue of Liberty in Mason.

Older storefronts along Main Street in Mason.

The conflict started in February when Mason faced a stark choice: forfeit its right to self-governance in exchange for debt forgiveness, or retain control and have to immediately start paying off almost $600,000 in debt it couldn’t afford.


The decision, forced on the town by Jason Mumpower, the state’s comptroller, came soon after the announcement that the Ford plant would be built nearby, slated to open in 2025. The project is expected to bring $1.8 billion to the state and create 18,000 jobs. Mason, the town closest to the plant with a sewer and wastewater system that the plant would use, will be one of its biggest beneficiaries financially. This is one reason why, according to Mason Vice Mayor Virginia Rivers, the town chose to take on the debt in March.

As a result, Mason was subjected to pay almost $600,000 of debt through monthly payment plans of approximately $22,000, owed to its water, sewer and gas funds that had accrued since at least 2007, according to Mason’s financial fact sheet. In addition to paying off the debt, the town could not apply for grants or pay bills over $100 unless they were approved by Mumpower, who began financial oversight in March.

“We were being set up to fail,” Rivers told NBC News in March about the original repayment plan required by the comptroller.

The lawsuit the mayor and Board of Aldermen of Mason filed against Tennesee’s comptroller of the treasury accused Mumpower of racial discrimination and misuse of financial power. The lawsuit also stated that the comptroller’s financial oversight plan violated the Tennessee Constitution, according to the Tennessee Observer.

“This was a power grab, not a path to support the citizens,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said. “They were seeking to dissolve the town,” he said, as the result of Mason being put under the financial control of majority white Tipton County

Johnson said the comptroller’s actions had racist undertones, since majority-white municipalities that were in debt, like neighboring Jellico County, were not forced to face the same ultimatum, reflecting the state’s history of targeting Black leadership.

For Mason, prior to the lawsuit, Johnson said, “democracy was not working.”

Following the settlement, now the town is required to pay back approximately $5,000 per month, which Anthony Ashton, senior associate general counsel of the NAACP, said is a more manageable payment plan compared to the $22,000 the comptroller previously required. And instead of needing approval for every expense over $100 each time it takes place, the spending threshold increased to $1,000 and is approved monthly.

The town also managed to pay off a portion of its almost $600,000 debt, lowering it to approximately $248,000, which will be paid off over four years.

“The debt was incurred with a previous administration,” Ashton said. “This administration was actively paying it down and rapidly paying it down, and yet it was this administration that received a target from the comptroller of ‘give up your charter.” The corrective action plan was “so strict and overwhelming” that it would “ruin the town financially,” he added.

In a statement in March, Ford acknowledged the tensions but said that the situation was between the state and Mason and denied any involvement. Rivers said representatives from Ford met with her administration in April to hear Mason’s side of the story, but did not offer any assistance to help.

“We’ve had several conversations with Mason officials to ensure they are positioned to benefit from the economic growth we are bringing to the area, and we’ll continue to engage with Mason and other West Tennessee communities to help them prepare for potential jobs and investments for their residents,” Ford said in a statement shared with NBC News in June. “Ford is committed to being a good neighbor and providing equitable opportunities.”

During the conflict, many people on social media also called for action, including one Virginia resident, identified as KD, who started a series of hashtags, petitions and fundraisers on behalf of Mason.

“They need a lot of economic substance down there — where the money would directly benefit the residents of Mason because they’re the people that are suffering the most,” said KD, who requested to remain anonymous due to safety concerns. “So we were able to put that GoFundMe page together strictly for that purpose.”

Since then, KD’s efforts have garnered almost $18,000 in donations from more than 325 supporters around the nation. KD is currently in the process of withdrawing the funds and plans to give Mason the money in the form of a cashier’s check, they said.

While this new deal may seem like a win for the town, not everyone is rejoicing. Rivers said that if Mason Mayor Emmit Gooden had not signed off on dropping the lawsuit against the comptroller, the town’s repayment terms would have not changed. She also said that the comptroller’s financial oversight will cease if the town’s budget for 2023 is approved by August.

“I am not totally satisfied but it’s better than what we had,” she said.

Mumpower released an updated corrective action plan in May with terms of agreement, one requiring the town to maintain regular contact with the comptroller’s office or it will be considered in violation of the plan.

“Mason’s agreement to a new corrective action plan is a significant step in restoring the town’s financial health,” Mumpower said in a statement released in May. “By agreeing to change its practices and work with our Office, Mason will operate on a balanced budget, work toward correcting its audit findings, and eliminate improper borrowing. Most importantly, if Mason follows this plan, taxpayers can know their leaders are being good stewards of their money.”

A man walks along Finde Naifeh Drive in Mason. 

When asked about Mason’s accusations of discrimination from Mumpower, the comptroller’s office said that it “proceeded diligently and in good faith to improve the financial condition of the Town of Mason so that its citizens can benefit from the services they receive from the Town,” according to a statement given to NBC News in June. The statement also said that the comptroller’s office “has a responsibility to ensure that Tennessee local governments do not fail without regard to the local government’s demographics.”

Now that the lawsuit has been dropped, the town will work to meet its financial obligations and continue paying off the debt. Mason will also move forward with investing in its infrastructure and economic development to bring business into the town for “Mason to be a beautiful place,” Rivers said.

“Hopefully, it doesn’t happen again,” she said. Because of the state’s correction action plan, the comptroller can exercise his financial authority if Mason gets “out of line at all in any way,” she said.

“But hopefully we don’t have to get to that point,” she added.