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China on track to operate African Tazara railway as powers vie for control of mineral trade routes


South China Morning Post
Sun, November 12, 2023 

China has chosen China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) to negotiate a concession to operate the Tanzania-Zambia Railway line, as geopolitical tensions rise over control of trading routes for critical minerals in Africa.

CCECC, a subsidiary of the China Railway Construction Corporation, is expected to negotiate a public-private partnership concession in the form of a build-operate-transfer model with Tanzania and Zambia to operate Tazara.

It is also expected to upgrade the railway - which Chinese President Xi Jinping has called "a symbol of China-Africa friendship" - at an estimated cost of US$1 billion.

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The concession is expected to give a much-needed lifeline to the almost 50-year-old line, also known as Tazara, which was originally funded by Mao Zedong's government as a foreign aid project.

Last month, the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority announced the news, saying Chinese investors and CCECC were poised to play a significant role, hence the company's proposal was "expected imminently".

Observers have said the funding for the railway pointed to Beijing's keen interest in using Tazara for mining exports from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

But China is not alone - competition in the area with both the European Union and the United States is intensifying as the race for critical minerals used in the production of electric vehicle batteries heats up.

Tim Zajontz, a lecturer in global political economy at the University of Freiburg, said while the Chinese consortium would commit to invest in Tazara's ailing infrastructure and insufficient rolling stock, it was not an aid mission.

"The Chinese investors have made it unmistakably clear in previous negotiations that Tazara is no longer considered an aid project but that it must be a commercially viable venture," said Zajontz, who is also a research fellow in the Centre for International and Comparative Politics at Stellenbosch University.

Aly-Khan Satchu, a sub-­Saharan Africa geoeconomic ­an­­­­­­­­­­a­­­­­­­­­lyst, said the Tanzanian and Zambian governments seemed to be looking for a major revamp of the railway and were happy to concede the running of this line to the private sector.

"So I expect this to be a revamp, to operate as the concessionaire for a meaningful period of time," Satchu said.

He also noted Xi's keen interest in upgrading Tazara.

"This railway is a symbol of the Sino-African story and President Xi understands the power of the narrative," Satchu said.

Xi had promised to overhaul the railway when Tanzanian counterpart Samia Suluhu Hassan visited China last year and during Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema's visit in September.

"China is willing to support the upgrading and transformation of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway in accordance with the principles of marketisation and commercialisation," Xi said when he met Hichilema.

Zajontz said Tazara was part of the DNA of Sino-African relations, and often used to emphasise that China's dealings with Africa were based on equality, solidarity and anti-imperialism.

"Notwithstanding the official rhetoric, Beijing has also keen geoeconomic interests in Tazara's rehabilitation which would improve the performance of the Dar es Salaam corridor, not least for mining exports from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo," said Zajontz, whose coming book, The Political Economy of China's Infrastructure Development in Africa, discusses Tazara's planned privatisation.

When China's involvement in the Tazara railway began in the 1970s, the country was facing its own financial difficulties.

Meanwhile, Zambia was desperate for a railway link to the Tanzanian coast for its main export, copper. Neighbouring white-controlled Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - had cut Zambia's only route to the sea in response to its transfer of power to the black majority.

The US and Russia both refused to fund a new railway, so China stepped in, building Tazara for about a billion yuan, or billions of US dollars at today's rates.

The Tazara Memorial Park in Zambia's Lusaka province commemorates Chinese nationals who died during the construction of the railway line in the 1970s. Photo: Xinhua alt=The Tazara Memorial Park in Zambia's Lusaka province commemorates Chinese nationals who died during the construction of the railway line in the 1970s. Photo: Xinhua>

From 1970 to 1975, as many as 50,000 Chinese workers were deployed to build the 1,860km (1,155 miles) of track stretching from Zambia's copper belt to the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean.

It remains China's biggest overseas project to date, and managed to boost Beijing's political capital during the Cold War.

However, the American embassy in Zambia said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that although China had funded Tazara's construction, it was the US that kept it running, with over US$45 million in help for "new locomotives and rolling stock" as well as "substantial technical assistance".

"Tazara has never reached its full potential," the embassy wrote on Thursday. "By the end of 1978, only two trains were operating daily."

"In the 1980s, the United States joined international partners in responding to Zambia and Tanzania's request to rehabilitate Tazara, with the US government providing over US$27 million through USAID," it added.

Zajontz said the embassy's post was a great example of how the "great powers" competed for public opinion across Africa.

"Everyone who knows a little bit about Tazara knows that eventually it will be privatised and that the Chinese would not allow a non-Chinese firm to run it - for obvious historical reasons," Zajontz said.

He added that the tweet showed how "desperate" both China and the West were in stressing how much they had invested in African infrastructure initiatives.

Tazara's upgrade follows EU and US announcements that they will fund the building of a railway from the Zambian copper belt to an existing line to the Angolan port of Lobito. They will also develop the Lobito transport corridor, which will connect inland southern DRC and northwest Zambia to regional and global trade markets via the Angolan port city.

The interest in the central African countries all circles back to minerals that are vital to the manufacture of electric batteries, including cobalt which is mined in the DRC and Zambia. Chinese companies have made vast investments in both countries.

"The US wants to chalk up something on the board and this Lobito corridor is a relatively bite-sized investment - but the US is a Johnny-come-lately and woefully behind the curve," Satchu said.

Zajontz said the West was keen to control its own transport routes in the region.

"Both the US and the EU want to prevent a situation in which Chinese transport or logistics firms could interrupt critical value chains if prompted as part of geopolitical escalations," Zajontz said.

"For Beijing, the recent announcement of Western investments along the Lobito corridor has certainly increased the geopolitical incentive to invest in and operate Tazara."

Emmanuel Matambo, research director at the University of Johannesburg's Centre for Africa-China Studies, said China understood the ideological and intangible value of Tazara, and so "the concession will not place high demands, if at all, on Zambia and Tanzania".

As a landlocked country, Zambia in particular had struggled to make efficient use of its neighbours' seaports and China was alive to that, he said. "The Tazara is more than a railway; it embodies China's long-standing solidarity with the developing world."

Matambo added that, unlike Tanzania where the ruling party had a firm hold on the incumbency, Zambia was more politically open and China had wanted to retain Zambia's friendship through leadership changes. Helping in tangible ways such as reviving Tazara would boost China's image in the eyes of Zambians, he said.

Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Biden administration slow to act as millions are booted off Medicaid, advocates say

AMANDA SEITZ and KENYA HUNTER
Mon, November 13, 2023 

A Medicaid office employee works on reports at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Error-ridden state reviews have purged millions of the poorest Americans from the Medicaid program, and poverty experts across the country worry the Biden administration is not doing enough to stop them.

 (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File) 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Up to 30 million of the poorest Americans could be purged from the Medicaid program, many the result of error-ridden state reviews that poverty experts say the Biden administration is not doing enough to stop.

The projections from the health consulting firm Avalere come as states undertake a sweeping re-evaluation of the 94 million people enrolled in Medicaid, government’s health insurance for the neediest Americans. A host of problems have surfaced across the country, including hours-long phone wait times in Florida, confusing government forms in Arkansas, and children wrongly dropped from coverage in Texas.

“Those people were destined to fail,” said Trevor Hawkins, an attorney for Legal Aid of Arkansas.

Hawkins helped hundreds of people navigate their Medicaid eligibility in Arkansas, as state officials worked to “ swiftly disenroll ” about 420,000 people in six months’ time. He raised problems with Arkansas' process — like forms that wrongly told people they needed to reapply for Medicaid, instead of simply renew it — with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Nothing changed, he said.

“They ask questions but they don’t tell us what is going on,” Hawkins said of CMS. “Those should be major red flags. If there was a situation where CMS was to step in, it would have been Arkansas.”

Nearly a dozen advocates around the country detailed widespread problems they’ve encountered while helping some of the estimated 10 million people who've already been dropped from Medicaid. Some fear systemic problems are being ignored.

Congress ended a COVID-19 policy last year that barred states from kicking anyone off Medicaid during the pandemic, requiring them to undertake a review of every enrollee's eligibility over the next year. But the Democratic-led Congress also gave Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra the power to fine states or halt disenrollments if people were improperly being removed.

HHS has shared little about problems it has uncovered.

Earlier this year, the agency briefly paused disenrollments in 14 states, but did not disclose which states were paused or for what reasons.

In August, HHS announced thousands of children had been wrongly removed in 29 states that were automatically removing entire households, instead of individuals, from coverage. CMS required the states to reinstate coverage for those who had been terminated under that process, said Daniel Tsai, the director of the CMS Center for Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program Services.

“We are using every lever that we have to hold states accountable," Tsai said.

Florida tried twice to remove Lily Mezquita, a 31-year-old working mom in Miami, Florida, from Medicaid during her pregnancy this year. She pleaded her case in 17 phone calls — some with wait times stretching as long as two hours — before she was finally reinstated in August from her hospital bed while in preterm labor. Mezquita would explain the state's law, which says she's guaranteed coverage through her pregnancy and 12 months after giving birth.

“No matter how much I tried to explain, no one was willing to listen,” she said. “They’re making errors, and they’re very confident in their errors.”

Because her coverage didn’t immediately register in the state’s system, Mezquita paid out-of-pocket for pills doctors prescribed to prevent pre-term labor from arising again, and she missed follow-up appointments to check on her baby girl.

If trends continue, as many as 30 million people could end up being dropped from Medicaid once states finish reviewing their Medicaid rolls, according to Avalere's projections. The numbers dwarf the Biden administration’s initial projections that only 15 million people would lose coverage throughout the process.

“We have to say it’s going poorly,” Massey Whorley, a principal at Avalere, said of the Medicaid redeterminations. “This has been characterized by much higher-than-expected disenrollment.”

Most have been removed for procedural reasons, like failing to send back their renewal form or mail in proper paperwork. That points to bigger problems with how the states are determining Medicaid eligibility: their notices aren't reaching people, don't make sense or they're requiring unnecessary paperwork. Many of the people removed for those reasons may still qualify for Medicaid.

In Arkansas, which has finished its Medicaid redeterminations, public records shared with the AP show more than 70% of people were kicked off Medicaid because the state couldn’t reach them, they didn’t return their renewal form or provide requested paperwork.

“I can’t say how many calls I’ve gotten from people who just got out of the emergency room and found out they don’t have coverage,” Hawkins said.

The state's Department of Human Services says it tried to reach people with additional calls, emails and texts. It believes the high number of procedural disenrollments were the result of people who no longer qualified for Medicaid not mailing back their renewal forms, spokesman Gavin Lesnick told AP in an email. Lesnick said CMS has never asked Arkansas to pause disenrollments.

Long phone wait times and notices that don't include reasons why people are being kicked off Medicaid have plagued the process in Florida, said Lynn Hearn, an attorney at the Florida Health Justice Project. Hearn helped Mezquita appeal her case to the state. Earlier this year, the nonprofit sued the state over its handling of the process.

“We’ve seen CMS reluctant to step in on the issues that we’ve raised,” Hearn said. “We have seen errors in state processing that indicate more than anomalies — more like systemic issues."

The Florida Department of Children and Families has had an 87% response rate to its renewal forms and call wait times are under five minutes, spokeswoman Mallory McManus said in an email.

Medicaid enrollees in North Carolina, meanwhile, are also having trouble reaching their local office by phone or getting calls returned when they leave a message, said Cassidy Estes-Rogers, the director of family support and healthcare at the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy. State officials didn't immediately respond to questions about phone troubles.

Estes-Rogers said she meets regularly with local CMS officials about problems.

“They just don’t come back to us with any information on how that was resolved, and we don’t see any immediate effects from it,” she said.

Similar problems have arisen in Texas, where website and app outages have meant families don't even get the electronic notices stating their Medicaid coverage was up for renewal, said Graciela Camarena, the child health outreach program director for the Children's Defense Fund in Texas.

"They were visiting the doctor's office or the pediatricians' office — that's where they found out they were denied," Camarena said.

Camarena said CMS has met with her organization to go over some of the issues. Some Texas lawmakers have asked CMS to investigate issues in the state, where nearly 1 million have lost Medicaid.

CMS has not asked the state to stop the process, Texas Health and Human Services spokeswoman Jennifer Ruffcorn said in an email. The agency “is continuously working to improve” its app and website, she added.

Local groups have also been funneling up problems to national groups that CMS meets with weekly, Tsai said. In some cases, issues raised to the agency don't violate federal regulations.

“However," Tsai said, “You look at what's happening and you say, ‘how is this a good, consumer friendly-process?’”

CMS has tried to play nice with states on Medicaid, hoping they can help improve the enrollment process for many years to come said Jennifer Wagner, the director of Medicaid eligibility and enrollment for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The organization has been working with local groups to notify CMS of problems.

“There is a question, in some states, if it’s time to shift toward enforcement," she said.

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Hunter reported from Atlanta.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Confederate military relics dumped during Union offensive unearthed in South Carolina river cleanup

JAMES POLLARD
Mon, November 13, 2023 

A Confederate sword blade is displayed at a press conference celebrating the early completion of the Congaree River cleanup on Monday, Nov. 13, 2023 in Columbia, S.C. Hundreds of Civil War relics were unearthed during the $20 million project.

 (AP Photo/James Pollard) 

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Hundreds of Civil War relics were unearthed during the cleanup of a South Carolina river where Union troops dumped Confederate military equipment to deliver a demoralizing blow for rebel forces in the birthplace of the secessionist movement.

The artifacts were discovered while crews removed tar-like material from the Congaree River and bring new tangible evidence of Union Gen. William T. Sherman's ruthless Southern campaign toward the end of the Civil War. The remains are expected to find a safer home at the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum in the state capital of Columbia.

Historical finds include cannonballs, a sword blade and a wheel experts believe belonged to a wagon that blew up during the two days of supply dumps. The odds of finding the wagon wheel “are crazy,” according to Sean Norris.

“It's an interesting story to tell,” said Norris, the archaeological program manager at an environmental consulting firm called TRC. “It's a good one — that we were able to take a real piece of it rather than just the written record showing this is what happened.”

One unexploded munition got “demilitarized” at Shaw Air Force Base. Norris said the remaining artifacts won't be displayed for a couple more years. Corroded metal relics must undergo an electrochemical process for their conservation, and they'll also need measurement and identification.

Dominion Energy crews have been working to rid the riverbed of toxic tar first discovered in 2010, at times even operating armor-plated excavators as a safeguard against potential explosives. State and local officials gathered Monday to celebrate early completion of the $20 million project.

South Carolina Republican Gov. Henry McMaster said this preservation is necessary for current generations to learn from history.

“All those things are lost on us today. They seem like just stories from the past," McMaster said. "But when we read about those, and when we see artifacts, and see things that touched people's hands, it brings us right back to how fortunate we are in this state and in this country to be where we are."

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Pollard is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.


Toxic gunk cleansed from Congaree River 13 years after first reported. What’s next?

Sammy Fretwell
Mon, November 13, 2023 at 12:10 PM MST·6 min read

Thirteen years after a kayaker reported stepping into a stinging patch of muck in the Congaree River, contractors have cleaned up the toxic mess that covered a stretch of the river bottom below the Gervais Street bridge in Columbia.

Work crews excavated and removed some 38,500 tons of coal tar from two sections of river bed between the Gervais and Blossom street bridges in what has been one of the largest environmental cleanup projects in Columbia’s recent history.

The $20 million Congaree cleanup effort was pronounced officially complete during a public event along the river Monday that featured Gov. Henry McMaster, Columbia Mayor Daniel Rickenmann and Keller Kissam, Dominion Energy’s South Carolina president.

Officials said the cleanup work, underway for more than a year, finished about a year ahead of schedule.

“There were many who doubted that it could be done, but I’m here today to say proudly that not only did our exceptionally talented and dedicated team do it, they did it in a manner that sets an example for others to follow,’’ Kissam said in a prepared statement.

McMaster, who took a personal interest in the cleanup effort, told the crowd gathered at the river that having to clean up the Congaree shows why it is important to protect the environment. The coal tar is believed to have drained into the river from an old manufactured gas plant, which operated on Huger Street from around the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s.

“There’s a lesson in here: That it’s easy to mess things up, but it’s hard to clean up,’’ McMaster said. ‘’Here we are cleaning up something that was done probably inadvertently without thinking. Everything went into the river back way back then.’’

“We have to be sure now that what we are doing is not messing something up so somebody has to clean it up later.’’

With the work completed, Rickenmann said plans to develop parts of the river can move more smoothly. Columbia leaders have long envisioned having a riverfront park near where the cleanup occurred.

The city also wants to expand the system of trails along the area’s rivers and plans are on the table to open Williams Street, which runs parallel to the Congaree between Gervais and Blossom streets.

“Opening up the river and the connectivity is something we have talked about for so long,’’ Rickenmann said. “This riverfront is really ..... the catalyst for Columbia.’’

Perhaps more importantly, the cleanup makes it safer for swimmers and kayakers below the Gervais Street bridge. The area near the end of Senate Street has historically been a popular spot to launch watercraft.

Dominion contractors dug up the material and hauled it away after building two temporary dams to hold back water in parts of the river. The dams, highly visible in Columbia during the cleanup, have now been removed and the state Department of Health and Environmental Control says the project was a success.

Gov. Henry McMaster speaks during a Nov. 13, 2023 public event to announce the completion of an environmental cleanup of the Congaree River in Columbia. Tons of toxic coal tar were removed from the river.

Work done in the river occurred on about three acres that contained the vast majority of the coal tar, which was located in two spots where the public might most be likely to have come in contact with it. A small amount of coal tar was left in other, less accessible parts of the river, according to Dominion. Overall, the coal tar was scattered over an 11-to-14-acre area.

Dominion’s Tom Effinger said the muck dug from the river bottom was hauled to a landfill on Screaming Eagle Road in Richland County for disposal.

During the cleanup, more than coal tar was removed. Work crews pulled out 2.5 tons of trash and debris, such as tires, Kissam said.

Contractors also found more than 100 Civil War era relics, including a wagon wheel, a Confederate saber, cannon balls and an anchor. Some of the Civil War era relics were believed to have wound up in the river during the time of Union General William Sherman’s assault on Columbia in 1865.

Hundreds of other artifacts were recovered from other eras, including from when Native Americans lived in the area.

Work crews found at least one unexploded bomb that was from an era after the Civil War. A special military bomb crew hauled it off. To protect workers, armor-plated heavy equipment was used to dig through the mud, Kissam said.

The cleanup work started in May 2022 after years of disagreements on whether to remove the tar or cover it up with rocks and leave the material in place.

SCE&G, later acquired by Dominion, had initially considered cleaning up the tar in the face of pressure from DHEC. But the company then changed its mind after saying cleaning up the tar would be a difficult, expensive process.

Leaving the tar in place and covering it up with stones and fabric would have saved the company $11 million at the time. SCE&G said it was having trouble getting environmental permits for the work, which is why it opted for leaving the material.

Critics said, however, that it was the company’s responsibility to get the tar out of the river since the pollution had drained from the manufactured gas plant site on Huger Street.

Then, after the Congaree Riverkeeper organization threatened a pair of lawsuits, Dominion restarted efforts to cleanse the river bottom of coal tar. The power company restarted the project and got the permits it needed.

The Congaree River is one of Columbia’s three major rivers. This photo is near the Gervais Street bridge.

Once the cleanup work finally began in May 2022, it went smoothly, officials said.

Coal tar is a goopy black substance generated from the 1800s to the 1950s at manufactured gas plants that produced energy. It is filled with toxins, including cancer causing benzene and substances that can cause tumors on fish.

Nationally, an estimated 5,000 coal tar sites exist across the country, including spots in other parts of South Carolina, besides the Congaree River.

In 2010, a kayaker notified DHEC that he had stepped in the substance, prompting the agency to post public warning signs along parts of the river. Other people, including riverkeeper Bill Stangler, also came in contact with the burning muck.

Stangler, the riverkeeper for the Congaree, Broad and lower Saluda rivers, said the coal tar cleanup took a lot of effort on the part of his organization, state regulators and local politicians. Had people not pushed the power company to restart the cleanup, it may never have been done, said Stangler, who said he was not invited to Monday’s public event along the river.

“We’ve been advocating on this for more than a decade, ever since a local river user stepped in that tar,’’ Stangler said. “It took a lot of work to get there. It was contentious at times, but we are happy to see this project get done.

“It sends a signal to our community and communities across the country that if you stand up and speak and fight for your rivers, great things can happen.’’


Confederate relics were discovered in the Congaree River during a cleanup of toxic coal tar. These relics were displayed Nov. 13, 2023 during a public event on the Congaree.

A former Fox News reporter who is refusingto divulge her sources could be held in contempt of court

ERIC TUCKER and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER
Mon, November 13, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a case with potentially far-reaching press freedom implications, a federal judge in Washington is weighing whether to hold in contempt a veteran journalist who has refused to identify her sources for stories about a Chinese American scientist who was investigated by the FBI but never charged.

The judge previously ordered former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge to be interviewed under oath about her sources for a series of stories about Yanping Chen, who was investigated for years on suspicions she may have lied on immigration forms related to work on a Chinese astronaut program. Chen has sued the government, saying details about the probe were leaked to damage her reputation.

But after Herridge refused to divulge to Chen’s lawyers how she acquired her information, the scientist’s attorneys are asking U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper to hold the reporter in contempt — a sanction that could result in steep monetary fines until she complies.

The long-running lawsuit, now nearing a crucial decision point, represents the collision of competing interests: a journalist’s professional obligation to protect sources and an individual’s right to pursue compensation over perceived privacy violations by the government. It’s being closely watched by media advocates, who say forcing journalists to betray a promise of confidentiality could make sources think twice before providing information to reporters that could expose government wrongdoing.

“Allowing confidential sources to be ordered revealed means that the public will have less information. The more significant the story, the more significant topic, the greater the loss to the public in not knowing the truth about what’s going on,” said longtime First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams. Abrams represented New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail after being held in contempt for refusing to divulge a source in an investigation of leaks about an undercover CIA agent.

The judge acknowledged the stakes in an August decision that forced Herridge to be interviewed, writing, “The Court recognizes both the vital importance of a free press and the critical role that confidential sources play in the work of investigative journalists like Herridge,” who now works at CBS.

But Cooper said that “Chen’s need for the requested evidence overcomes Herridge’s qualified First Amendment privilege in this case.”

The stories by Herridge were published and aired by Fox News in 2017, one year after the Justice Department told Chen she would not face any charges in its yearslong investigation into whether she may have concealed her former membership in the Chinese military on U.S. immigration forms.

The reports examined Chen's former alleged ties to the Chinese military and whether she had used a professional school she founded in Virginia to help the Chinese government get information about American servicemembers. They relied on what her lawyers contend was items leaked from the probe, including snippets of an FBI document summarizing an interview, personal photographs, and information taken from her immigration and naturalization forms and from an internal FBI PowerPoint presentation.

Herridge was interviewed under oath in September by a lawyer for Chen, but declined dozens of times to answer questions about her sources, saying at one point: “My understanding is that the courts have ruled that in order to seek further judicial review in this case, I must now decline the order, and respectfully I am invoking my First Amendment rights in declining to answer the question.”

Herridge’s attorney, Patrick Philbin, who served as deputy White House counsel during the Trump administration, said that forcing the journalist to turn over her source or sources would destroy her credibility and hurt her career.

“The First Amendment interest in protecting journalists’ sources is at its highest in cases, like this, involving reporting on national security,” Philbin wrote in court papers. “And confidentiality is critical for government sources who may face punishment for speaking to the press.”

In a statement, Fox News said that “sanctioning a journalist for protecting a confidential source is not only against the First Amendment but would have a chilling effect on journalism across the country as the ability to hold truth to power is essential in a democracy.”

The network said it fully supports Herridge’s position. CBS News said it does as well, asserting in its own statement that the motion for contempt “should be concerning to all Americans who value the role of the free press in our democracy and understand that reliance on confidential sources is critical to the mission of journalism.”

Legal fights over whether journalists should have to divulge a source are rare, though they’ve arisen several times in the last couple decades in Privacy Act cases like the one filed by Chen. Some lawsuits have ended with a hefty Justice Department settlement in place of a journalist being forced to reveal a source, an outcome that remains possible in Herridge’s case.

In 2008, for instance, the Justice Department agreed to pay $5.8 million to settle a lawsuit by Army scientist Steven Hatfill, who was falsely identified as a person of interest in the 2001 Anthrax attacks. That settlement resulted in a contempt order being vacated against a journalist who was being asked to name her sources.

In Herridge’s case, the scientist’s lawyers say they’re seeking a fine that would increase over time until she identifies her source. Unlike in Miller’s situation, it’s a private plaintiff demanding to know the identity of the source rather than representatives of the Justice Department.

Courts have recognized that journalists have a limited privilege to keep confidential their sources, allowing reporters to block subpoenas in the past. But judges in some cases, like Herridge’s, have found that privilege can be outweighed by the need for the information if the person seeking the source has failed to find it through other means.

Many states have reporter shields, which offer various protections from subpoenas and the forced disclosure of sources, but there is no such protection in federal law. Gabe Rottman, of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said Herridge’s case is a stark illustration of the need for a federal shield law.

“If sources can’t be given credible assurances of confidentiality, they won’t come forward,” said Rottman, director of the group's Technology and Press Freedom Project. “And that chills the free flow of information to the public and it limits journalists' ability to do their jobs.”

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Richer reported from Boston.

Who's getting evicted in America? The latest data shows a grim reality for millions of US adults — and kids — facing eviction as the housing crisis worsens for renters


Serah Louis
Mon, November 13, 2023

Propelled by rising rents and a shortage of affordable housing, eviction filings are skyrocketing across the country — leaving many Americans scrambling to cover costs, find a new place or face the risk of homelessness.

The rental crisis was already worrying before the pandemic: Roughly 7.6 million Americans faced eviction each year from 2007 to 2016, according to a recent report from The Eviction Lab and U.S. Census Bureau tallying for the first time the number of individuals, not just households, under threat.

Fast forward to today, and eviction filings are more than 50% higher than the pre-pandemic average in multiple cities.

Eviction Lab researchers are tracking eviction filings in 34 cities across 10 states, and the data provides a grim snapshot of the risks facing a growing number of American renters right now.

Here’s what is pushing the rental crisis to new heights — and the disturbing truth about who is most at risk.

The typical rent in the U.S. now sits at $2,011 — 3.2% higher compared to last year and up slightly from September — according to a November report from Zillow.

And the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) notes a full-time worker would need to earn $28.58 an hour on average to afford a modest, two-bedroom rental — far higher than the national minimum wage of $7.25.

This puts low-income Americans at major risk of losing out on housing — and facing homelessness.

While monthly rent growth is slowly cooling ahead of the winter months, more low-income workers are rent-burdened, as they struggle with wages that aren’t keeping pace with inflation and no more pandemic programs to help keep them afloat.

To compound this issue, the U.S. is facing a shortfall of 7.3 million rental homes that are affordable to renters with extremely low incomes (incomes at or below either the federal poverty guideline or 30% of their area median income), reports the NLIHC.

Read more: Thanks to Jeff Bezos, you can now use $100 to cash in on prime real estate — without the headache of being a landlord. Here's how

Who is at greatest risk of eviction?

Just over half of the 7.6 million individuals highlighted in the newest Eviction Lab report lived in a household that received an eviction judgment.

But aside from spotlighting how many people face eviction, the report points to a surprising group most at risk for removal from a rental property: Children.

Each year, 2.9 million children under 18 are threatened with eviction, while 1.5 million are evicted — representing 2 in 5 of the entire population that face eviction each year.

“When I started writing about these issues, I kind of thought kids would shield families from eviction,” said Matthew Desmond, principal investigator at The Eviction Lab, in an interview with The New York Times. “But they expose families to eviction.”

The eviction filing rate for adults living with a child was 10.4%, over double the risk for those without children. This increased risk could be due to additional financial costs — like higher grocery and child-care costs — reduced working hours or even discrimination from landlords who might not want to deal with potential noise and damage.

There are significant racial disparities as well. While less than one in five renters in the U.S. is Black, over half of all eviction notices are filed against Black renters and about one in 10 are evicted each year.

In comparison, only one in 24 white renters are threatened with eviction and one in 40 are evicted annually.

“The face of the eviction epidemic is moms and kids, especially poor moms from predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods,” Desmond told The Atlantic back in 2016, noting that about one in five African American women who rent report being evicted at some point in their lives.

Eviction risk generally decreases with age and income, although the study notes this is far from just a young person’s problem, with nearly 830,000 renters over 50 facing the threat of eviction each year.

What needs to change?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government introduced emergency rental assistance programs that prevented eviction filings from spiraling out of control as many Americans lost their jobs or faced reduced working hours, leaving them unable to afford their monthly rent.

In fact, The Eviction Lab reported earlier this year that COVID-era policies slashed eviction filings by more than half, compared to pre-pandemic times.

Diane Yentel, CEO and president of the NLIHC, says these protections need to come back.

“We absolutely should make this program permanent and permanently funded, keep this infrastructure that we built throughout the country, build off of these lessons that we learned, and continue to keep people stably housed into the future,” Yentel told PBS News in June.

She believes the housing crisis can be resolved with short-term emergency rental assistance programs and longer-term rental assistance. She also emphasizes the importance of preserving and building more apartments that are affordable to folks with extremely low incomes, as well as robust tenant protections.

“But it's going to require increased political will at all levels to be able to get the solutions at the scale needed to truly address this challenge,” she said.

Earlier this year, President Joe Biden proposed a new budget to lower housing costs, expand supply, improve access to affordable rental options and increase efforts to end homelessness and prevent housing discrimination.

But with the government narrowly avoiding a shutdown and Congress in disarray after Rep. Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker, the Biden Administration is facing an uphill battle to move forward with any legislation in the Republican-controlled House.

A Breakthrough Clue May Untangle the Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe

Michael Natale
Mon, November 13, 2023 

How Did Edgar Allan Poe Die?Bettmann - Getty Images

This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.

Edgar Allan Poe, the man who invented the detective story, saved his most unsolvable mystery for last: the cause of his own untimely death.

It’s been more than two centuries since Poe first entered this world, and despite dying only 40 years after doing so, he’s never truly left us. But Poe’s immortality is not through reincarnation, as it was for his “Morella” or “Ligeia.” Nor is it a resurrection, like in his famous “The Fall of the House of Usher” or his satirical “Some Words with a Mummy.”

If any Edgar Allan Poe work anticipated how the author would find life after his mysterious death, it is the fate of the young bride in “The Oval Portrait”: a body withered away in neglect, the visage preserved forever in a work of art, even if the creation of that very art led to the subject's death.

Arthur Rackham’s illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait,” wherein an artist is so absorbed in painting a portrait of his beautiful young bride that he fails to notice that she’s passed away while posing for him.

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After all, Poe himself is still very present in the popular culture. In 2023, Mike Flanagan’s Poe-meets-Succession miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher rose to the top of the Netflix charts, and Austria’s official submission to the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest—“Who the Hell Is Edgar?”—is about singers Teya and Salena feeling like they’re possessed by the ghost of Poe.

But though Edgar Allan Poe is often viewed as the pre-imminent horror author of American letters, he’s also vibrantly present in the DNA of two other popular sub-genres of literature. For it’s through his invention of detective C. Auguste Dupin and his crime-solving technique of “ratiocination” in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” that we get the groundwork for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and the entire thriving genre of detective fiction.

Likewise, it’s through the puzzling circumstances of Edgar Allan Poe’s mysterious death that we get an early taste of the “true crime” craze, as real-world amateur sleuths across two centuries have tried their hand at unravelling a mystery buried under layers of myth-making, medical quandaries, and possibly even political corruption.

Edgar Allan Poe’s grave marker, erected in 1875 in Baltimore.

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The latest would-be Dupin to take a swing at the mystery of what, and perhaps who, killed Edgar Allan Poe is author Mark Dawidziak. In his 2023 book, A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, Dawidziak posits a breakthrough new theory that incorporates a deadly illness that had previously claimed the life of both Poe’s mother and wife, and a fiendish and criminal act of the era called “cooping.”

But even Dawidziak acknowledges in his book that, though he has his theory, nobody knows anything for sure:

“Nobody can tell you with anything resembling certainty why, while traveling from Richmond to New York, he ended up in Baltimore. Nobody can tell you what happened to him during the missing days between his last sighting in Richmond on the evening of September 26 and his reappearance outside an Election Day polling place in Baltimore on the damp, chilly afternoon of October 3. Nobody has ever solved the identity of the person, Reynolds, for whom Poe supposedly called out for hours before he died at the Washington University Hospital of Baltimore. Nobody has ever produced conclusive evidence, or so much as a first cousin to it, regarding the cause of the delirium generally described as “congestion of the brain,” “cerebral inflammation,” or “brain fever.” Even the melodramatic and rather pat last words attributed to him—“Lord help my poor soul!”—have been called into question.”

But just how, exactly, could there be such a mystery around the death of Edgar Allan Poe, one of America’s most celebrated authors? Let’s take a look at the life and death of Edgar Allan Poe, as one simply can’t discuss one without the other. After all, as Poe himself put it in “The Premature Burial’: “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

Who Was Edgar Allan Poe?

A 19th century etching of Edgar Allan Poe.

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While virtually every major city along the U.S.’s East Coast now wishes to lay some sort of claim to the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe, only one can hold the title of his birthplace: Boston. Though, as The New England Grimpendium notes, neither the house in which he was born, nor even the street upon which the house could have been found, still exist in Boston today, wiped away by robust urban renewal efforts and perhaps a then-lack of public interest.

After all, while cities from Richmond, Virginia to New York City all now proudly boast a piece of Poe, it was not as though any of these cities, or anyone in them, had much interest in claiming the author in his early years. And that includes his own parents.

As Biography notes, “Edgar never really knew his biological parents: Elizabeth Arnold Poe, a British actor, and David Poe Jr., an actor who was born in Baltimore.” An alcoholic, reportedly frustrated with being seen as the lesser stage performer in his family when compared to his wife (as is suggested in Kenneth Silverman’s Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance), David “left the family early in Edgar’s life.”

Which, it should be noted, is only the second worst thing an alcoholic stage actor frustrated at being viewed as the lesser performer in their family did in the 19th century.

Hulton Archive - Getty Images

For her part, Elizabeth appears to have tried to tend to her children (Edgar had an older brother, William, and a younger sister, Rosalie), but died from tuberculosis when Edgar was only two years old.

“Separated from his brother, William, and sister, Rosalie,” Biography continues, “Poe went to live with his foster parents, John and Frances Allan, in Richmond, Virginia.” John Allan was in the tobacco business, and made no bones about wishing for Edgar to continue in his footsteps. Poe, however, had ambitions to become a poet, and at a young age began to write with feverish inspiration he attributed to his muse and fiancée, Sarah Elmira Royster.

But if John Allan was the first person of many in a position to help Poe achieve his ambitions, he was also the first person of many to decline to do so. His lack of support extended to the financial, and though Poe was reportedly an excellent student when he attended the University of Virginia, his academic life was cut short when John Allan refused to fund his studies. So, too, was his romance with Royster, who “had become engaged to someone else” in Poe’s absence.

And so, dejected and searching for a path forward, young Edgar Allan Poe returned to Boston.

The dilapidated cellar of Poe’s Philadelphia home, now maintained by the National Parks Service to appear as it did when the author resided there.

Michael Natale

Thus would begin a lifetime of odd jobs, low finances, and moving from place to place. Poe was briefly in the Army, briefly a cadet at West Point, and briefly employed by the Southern Literary Messenger. He resided in Boston, Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.

As a writer, Edgar Allan Poe penned poetry, literary criticisms (his reviews were so scathing they earned him the nickname “Tomahawk Man” and the ire of none other than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), a novel (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket), an essay on cosmology (Eureka: A Prose Poem), treatises critiquing the contemporary style of home decor (“The Philosophy of Furniture”), articles debunking hoaxes (“Maelzel’s Chess Player”), and even created some hoaxes of his own (“The Balloon-Hoax”).

In 1836, a 27-year-old Poe married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. While we naturally cannot know what occurred behind closed doors, it’s been suggested by several Poe scholars that theirs was a chaste marriage, one that was more a legal matter than one of carnal intentions. When Poe wrote of Virginia, he employed the term “maiden.” While this could have been simple literary flourish, it also could be used to indicate the virginal status of Virginia throughout their marriage. Virginia would, however, provide emotional support for the struggling author.

Indeed, acclaim largely eluded Poe until the publication of his poem “The Raven” in 1845, just four years before his death. Easily his most enduring and iconic composition, “The Raven” has permeated the American cultural lexicon as few poems have, and unlike so much of Poe’s work, it was recognized as exceptional by his peers at the time.

An 1869 label for Raven brand tobacco, which depicts a scene from Poe’s story. Check out Biography for more on how Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” has permeated pop culture across the years.

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But the glow of literary recognition would only shine unencumbered for Edgar Allan Poe for two years after “The Raven” was published. As Biography notes, “In 1847, at the age of 24—the same age when Poe’s mother and brother also died—Virginia passed away from tuberculosis.” Poe was “overcome by grief following her death, and although he continued to work, he suffered from poor health and struggled financially until his death in 1849.”

How Did Edgar Allan Poe Die?

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Which brings us to those fateful few days in 1849.

As Biography frames it, “...things were looking up for Poe in October 1849.” But of course, that’s only what we can infer from the material aspects of his life at the time, as well as the posthumous stories relayed by people close to him, who weren’t always reliable. It is true that Poe was “...a star author who commanded great audiences for his readings, and he was about to marry his first love, Elmira Royster Shelton.”

However, one of the pitfalls of history, especially when it comes to the lives of artists, is the creation of a narrative. The earliest iteration of a “Poe narrative” came at the hands of a former rival-turned-executor of his literary estate, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who opted to portray Poe, in the first official biography of the late author, as “a mentally deranged drunkard and womanizer.”

We’ve come to view Poe as the typical “tortured genius,” but more accurate assessments of Poe, coming from those close to him, would attempt to correct the record, particularly when it came to the writer’s drinking. (He was reportedly not much for alcohol, and was a lightweight on the occasions he did imbibe.)

But these recollections also fed into another irresistible narrative: that of the artist whose life was “just starting to come together” when it was tragically snuffed out. Remember that, especially around this time, the literary world was enthralled by stories of young poets dying well before their time.

The early 1820s had seen the untimely deaths of the Romantics John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, both before the age of 30. By this time, the late Robert Burns (who died at 37 in 1796) was seeing a growing posthumous fanbase elevate him to such an echelon that, by 1880, he would have a statue erected in New York’s Central Park alongside Sir Walter Scott and William Shakespeare. And 11 years after that statue was erected, Arthur Rimbaud, author of the modernist prose poem A Season In Hell and agonized lover of fellow poet Paul Verlaine, would be snuffed out by cancer at age 37 and solidify the public’s idea of the tortured poet who died tragically young (for pop culture obsessives, think of this in much the same way we’ve sanctified the "27 Club"in rock music).

In the absence of facts, when it comes to the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe, it’s easy to be tempted to fill in the blanks with the narrative of your choice (tortured genius or tragic dreamer). But much like the witnesses probed in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” who mistake the shrieks of an orangutan for a foreign tongue because they’re manufacturing logic in the absence of fact, we also must avoid missing clues for the sake of forming a satisfying conclusion.

A lobby card for the 1932 Universal film Murders in the Rue Morgue starring Bela Lugosi. Though it shares its title with the Poe story, the film departs drastically from the original mystery tale to be near unrecognizable.LMPC - Getty Images

What Do We Actually Know About Edgar Allan Poe’s Death?

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Here’s what we know happened for certain: On September 27, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe set out from Richmond to Philadelphia, with the intention of then heading to his cottage in The Bronx, New York. Next, on October 3, a printer named Joseph Walker recognized Poe, in what was described as a “delirious state,” outside of a tavern called Gunner’s Hall in Baltimore. It should be noted that the tavern, also known as Ryan’s Tavern, was at the time host to vote collectors for the 1849 election. It was common at the time for taverns to serve as polling places, and for men to be provided a drink upon casting their vote.

When Walker asked the distressed Poe if there was anyone he could contact for him, Poe named an editor he knew, Joseph Snodgrass. Walker wrote to Snodgrass:

"Dear Sir,
There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance.
Yours, in haste,
JOS. W. WALKER
To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass."

Poe would be taken to Washington College Hospital, and what happened in his time there isn’t much clearer than what occurred before Walker discovered him outside the tavern—though in this case, the reason is a little more nefarious than poor record keeping. We know Poe was kept “alone in a windowless room with only one attendant physician, Dr. John Moran.” And we know that on October 7, without seemingly ever having explained the missing days, Poe died at the age of 40.

Edgar Allan Poe’s cause of death was recorded as “succumbing to phrenitis,” or congestion of the brain, which was also often employed to suggest a drug- or alcohol-related death. It isn’t clear how doctors made that determination. It has also been suggested that Poe uttered the final words, “Lord, help my poor soul,” but the reliability of this reporting has been called into question.

Poe was laid to rest in Baltimore. The author who had neither city nor family to permanently call home, spent his final days, and remains interred, in the very same city in which the father he never knew had been born.
What Are the Theories About Edgar Allan Poe’s Death?

The first theory proposed for what caused the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe came courtesy of Joseph Snodgrass, who blamed Poe’s demise on excessive alcohol consumption. It was a tidy explanation for Snodgrass; the doctor was an ardent advocate for temperance, and used every podium and paper he could find to blame Poe’s demise on alcohol consumption.

That Poe had opted to eschew alcohol altogether at the advice of his doctor, and had even joined the Sons of Temperance himself the year of his death, seemed to matter little to Snodgrass’s convenient conclusion.

Others have intimated everything from foul play and madness to rabies contracted from a pet cat. Poe did, indeed, love cats, and reportedly had expressed a reluctance to drink water in his final days, which Dr. R. Michael Benitez pointed to in 1996 to make the case for rabies as the author’s ultimate undoing. Had the man behind "The Gold-Bug" really gone the way of Old Yeller?

A piece of decor in the otherwise purposefully sparse home at Philadelphia’s Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site depicts an ever-present cat on the author’s writing desk.

Michael Natale

Mark Dawidziak suggests what is, at first blush, the simplest solution: tuberculosis. As Biography notes, there was “an explosion in tuberculosis cases in the United States at the time,” to say nothing of the fact that the disease had claimed Poe’s wife, Virginia, just two years prior, so Poe had surely been exposed to it. And his symptoms, “like fever and delusions,” fit the diagnosis.

But Dawidziak also points to a more sinister element to explain Poe’s disappearance: the practice of cooping.

In the run-up to the so-called Gilded Age, the U.S. was rife with political machines that would bribe, bargain, and sometimes outright bully their way into positions of power. A common practice of the time was the act of rounding up vagrants and other powerless and unassuming men, trapping them in a confined space (hence “cooping”) and sending them out to various polling places under false names in order to cast fraudulent votes. The theory goes that Edgar Allan Poe was swept up in a cooping, subjected to the various mental and at times physical abuses that came with that, which caused both his absence and his subsequent strange behavior upon his discovery by Walker.

After all, Poe was discovered outside a polling place. And even if the notably “lightweight” man had eschewed alcohol personally, being forced to accept a drink at every tavern where he cast a fraudulent vote could explain a state of intoxication.

Some might balk at the suggestion that a “celebrity” could go unrecognized during all of this, but it’s important to remember that Edgar Allan Poe was merely a literary celebrity, with his image at best appearing as an etching in some newspapers and literary publications. The men actually orchestrating the coopings were often only a few poor choices away from being cooped themselves, usually the poverty-stricken or immigrants willing to do what they had to to survive.

Since we will never know for sure, and no C. Auguste Dupin has yet arrived to offer a conclusive explanation, we’re forced to choose which “story” we want to believe. For those who choose to believe the cooping story, there’s an extra bit of bitter irony to it all.

Maryland Senator David StewartWikimedia Commons

We don’t have records of the down-ballot races a cooped Poe may have been forced to vote in to try and sway things, but we do know the two men that Maryland elected to the Senate during that 1849 election. One was James Alfred Pearce, who was the incumbent, and held the seat from 1843 all the way through to 1862, so it’s safe to safe that there needn’t have been much effort to corruptly sway the vote to save him. But the other was David Stewart, a Democrat running for a Senate seat that had previously been occupied by the Whig party member Reverdy Johnson, who had vacated the seat to serve in the cabinet of President Zachary Taylor. (Who had his own death under questionable circumstances, though that’s a story for another time.)

Stewart would indeed win his Senate race, striking a blow to the Whig dominance of Baltimore... for a single year. Just one year later, in 1850, Stewart would lose his Senate seat to the Whig party’s Thomas Pratt, who would occupy it for seven years thereafter. So if the cooping plot that may have captured Poe had been to sway the vote for the Democrat Stewart, then one of America’s most celebrated literary minds was snuffed out for a single year of a single Senate seat.
Why Do We Still Care About Edgar Allan Poe Today?

Michael Natale

As one of the most prominent authors of the American cultural lexicon, it’s not surprising that many of the cities Edgar Allan Poe occupied now not only lay claim to the author, but have also preserved or erected buildings devoted to the man. And as for whether the mystery of Poe’s death still transfixes the public, you need only see the patient exhaustion on the faces of the tour guides within the walls of any of these museums as yet another group of curious tourists press them for the “answer.” How much these institutions embrace the mystery can vary.

In Baltimore, whose NFL team takes its name from Poe’s most famous poem, you can board a “Bus Tour of Edgar Allan Poe’s Life and Death in Baltimore,” which will take you past the hospital where he died, and his two grave sites.

Pay a visit to the Poe Museum in Richmond and you can take part in a tribute to the author, which can include delivering a eulogy and searching for “Death Clues” to solve the mystery.

And at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, the National Parks Department opts to not harp on Poe’s death, but rather, the time Poe spent in the still-preserved and sparsely decorated home (save for a charming reading room in the visitor’s center), and the stories he wrote therein. Though you can press a Park Ranger for their take on Poe’s death if you’re so inclined.

Michael Natale

In New York City, Poe’s footprint is a fair bit smaller than elsewhere, his proverbial ghost given less ground to haunt. In Manhattan, West 84th Street is also named Edgar Allan Poe Street, and a plaque on the side of a building suggests on that spot is where Poe composed “The Raven” (though other sites have claimed the same). While up in The Bronx, in a small patch of green known as Poe Park, the modest cottage in which the author resided still stands, though you can only get inside through a privately arranged tour through the Bronx Historical Society. Until September 2023, the cottage reportedly held an exhibit on the tragic deaths of both Virginia and Edgar Allan Poe for those fortunate enough to get inside to see it.

Adjacent to the cottage within the park is the Poe Park Visitor’s Center, operated by the City of New York. This particular facility isn’t focused on the history, or the mystery, of the author. Rather, it exists as a venue to showcase the artwork of current members of the community. It exists to create a space to encourage local artists in a manner Poe himself never had in life.

Edgar Allan Poe’s cottage behind a gate in Poe Park in The BronxMichael Natale