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09 August 21
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ALSO SEE: Major Climate Changes Inevitable and Irreversible
– IPCC’s Starkest Warning Yet
wedish climate activist Greta Thunberg says the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should serve as a “wake-up call” for governments to do more to lower emissions. In its first major report in nearly a decade, the IPCC says the Earth could face runaway global warming unless drastic efforts are made to eliminate greenhouse gases and that humans are “unequivocally to blame for the climate crisis,” which is already causing widespread and rapid changes. “The climate crisis is not going away,” Thunberg said. “It’s only escalating, and it’s only growing more intense by the hour.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to Greta Thunberg, who has just responded to the new IPCC report.
GRETA THUNBERG: We have not once been treating this crisis like an actual crisis. And, of course, media is reporting now about extreme weather events and consequences of the climate crisis, but, then again, we also have to remember that these are all just symptoms of the climate crisis. We are not talking about the root cause itself, the things that is actually fueling these events. We are not holding people in power accountable. We are not talking about the current, best-available science, what it says, and how the situation looks like now. And we are especially not talking about the gap between what politicians are saying and what they are actually doing. …
This report doesn’t tell us what to do. It doesn’t say you have to do this, and then you have to do this. It doesn’t provide us with such solutions or tell us that you need to do this. That’s up for us. We are the ones who need to take the decisions, and we are the ones who need to be brave and ask the difficult questions to ourselves, like: What do we value? Are we ready to take action to ensure future and present living conditions?
So, I hope that this can be a wake-up call and that it really gives perspective and that it, once again, can be a reminder that the climate crisis has not gone away, it’s only escalating, and it’s only growing more intense by the hour.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Greta Thunberg responding to the new IPCC report. She was responding from Stockholm, Sweden.
Mitch McConnell. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/NYT)
re we entering a new era of bipartisanship? On the surface, the news from Washington seems remarkably encouraging. The Senate is close to passing a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, with $550 billion in new spending on everything from transit to highways to broadband to climate change mitigation. Political insiders are hailing the bill as a breakthrough, with the Senate poised, at last, to overcome the partisan gridlock that has ground its legislative machinery to a halt. Many thought that President Biden’s belief that he could get Republican votes was naïve, but he delivered. In a surprise, even the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, voted to move the compromise to a vote.
Of course, this is the same Mitch McConnell who said of Mr. Biden, “100 percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.” The same Mr. McConnell who made sure Donald Trump’s impeachment did not result in conviction, who filibustered the bipartisan plan for a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 violent insurrection until it died, who kept all of his Republican senators in line against the American Rescue Plan early in the Biden presidency. And the same Mr. McConnell who said that he would not confirm a Biden nominee to the Supreme Court if Republicans recaptured the Senate in 2022.
So why the reversal on infrastructure? Why dare the brickbats of Donald Trump after the former president bashed the effort and tried to kill it? Mr. McConnell has one overriding goal: regaining a majority in the Senate in 2022. Republicans must defend 20 of the 34 Senate seats up for grabs next year; there are open seats in Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina; and Senator Ron Johnson, if he runs again, could easily lose his seat in Wisconsin. Attempting to block a popular infrastructure bill that later gets enacted by Democrats alone would give them all the credit. Republicans would be left with the lame defense of crowing about projects they had voted against and tried to block, something that did not work at all with the popular American Rescue Plan.
Jeffrey Rosen. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
hat happened on Jan. 6 was horrifying: an attempted coup, inflamed by social media, incited by the defeated president and televised in real time. What happened before Jan. 6, we are coming to learn, was equally horrifying: a slow-motion attempted coup, plotted in secret at the pinnacle of government and foiled by the resistance of a few officials who would not accede to Donald Trump’s deluded view of the election outcome.
That is the unnerving picture that is only beginning to fully emerge of what was happening behind the scenes as Trump, enraged by his loss, schemed to overturn clear election results with the connivance of not only top White House aides but also senior officials at the Justice Department who were maneuvering around their chain of command to bolster Trump’s efforts.
Which raises the most disturbing question: What if? What if the senior Trump-installed officials at the Justice Department, notably acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, had been more willing to put loyalty to Trump over the rule of law? What happens, God forbid, next time, when the outcome may be further muddied thanks to changed state laws shifting power from election officials to partisan legislators?
I try not to be alarmist, but it is difficult to read the latest accounts and not be alarmed. The drip-drip-drip evolution of this story has served to mask how serious the threat was and how close it came to fruition.
We have known for months that Trump — heedless of constraints on hijacking Justice Department operations to his own political ends — had pressed Justice officials to intervene on his behalf. For example, he urged Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate unfounded claims of voter fraud.
We knew that when Rosen balked, Trump entertained a plan to oust Rosen and replace him with Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the civil division, who was more willing to push Trump’s fanciful assertions of fraud. We knew that Trump was deterred only after threats of mass resignations from other officials.
We knew that Clark had drafted a letter to Georgia state legislators asserting that the department was investigating claims of fraud in the state.
The cockamamie letter itself recently emerged. Dated Dec. 28, 2020, it stated that the department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.” This despite the conclusion by Attorney General William P. Barr, before he resigned that month, that the department’s investigation had not uncovered “fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
The Clark letter not only urged Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) to call the legislature into special session to consider “this important and urgent matter” but also advised the legislature of its “implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself into special session for the limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors.” It was to be signed by Rosen, acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue and Clark himself.
Clark had insisted that his dealings with the White House were “consistent with law” and that he had merely participated in “a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president.”
This is not how things are supposed to work. At a normal Justice Department, the head of the civil division, rungs down the organization chart, does not end-run the attorney general to have “candid discussions” with the president. At a normal Justice Department, there are guardrails in place to prevent this sort of improper interference by the president.
Now we are getting accounts of what happened in those frenzied final days from Rosen himself. Over the weekend, he hastened to testify to the Justice Department inspector general and the Senate Judiciary Committee before Trump could seek to interpose assertions of executive privilege. Rosen’s former deputy, Donoghue, also appeared before the Senate panel. The testimony was behind closed doors, but as we learn more of what was said, I suspect there will be even more reason to be concerned about what might have been.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told CNN on Sunday that he was “struck by how close the country came to total catastrophe.”
“What was going on in the Department of Justice was frightening,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said on CNN’s State of the Union. “I think it’s a good thing for America that we had a person like Rosen in that position, who … withstood the pressure.”
Will that always be the case? Will the country be able to dodge future bullets, from Trump or his successors? I would like to think so. But if there is anything the past five years have shown, it is the disappointing fecklessness of too many of those in power in the face of the Trumpist onslaught.
Venezuelan immigrants board a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle in Del Rio, Texas, on May 18, 2021. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
In addition, over 25 percent of migrants recently scheduled for some “expedited” deportation flights tested positive, says a document obtained by NBC News.
ore than 18 percent of migrant families and 20 percent of unaccompanied minors who recently crossed the U.S. border tested positive for Covid on leaving Border Patrol custody over the past two to three weeks, according to a document prepared this week for a Thursday briefing with President Joe Biden.
Some flights scheduled to deport migrants had more than 25 percent of passengers test positive before departure, leading Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove those migrants from the flights for quarantine in the U.S., according to the document.
The Department of Homeland Security document does not give precise dates or say how many migrants were tested.
Migrants are not tested for Covid in Border Patrol custody unless they show symptoms, but all are tested when they leave Border Patrol custody, according to DHS officials. Immigrants who are allowed to stay in the U.S. to claim asylum are given tests when they are transferred to ICE, Health and Human Services or non-governmental organizations. Deportees who are scheduled to be put on planes out of the U.S. are tested for Covid and other infectious diseases by ICE.
As of Wednesday, more than 15,000 migrants were in Border Patrol custody, according to Customs and Border Protection data obtained by NBC News.
If a migrant who is about to be deported by ICE tests positive for Covid, the migrant is quarantined and deportation is delayed, according to DHS. The document refers specifically to those migrants chosen for "expedited removal," meaning they were deported soon after they crossed or attempted to cross the U.S. border.
"In the last 2-3 weeks, the percent positivity rates among all demographics has increased," the document says.
The document also recommends DHS provide more medical staffing at border processing facilities, citing one in the Rio Grande Valley where three EMTs were responsible for 3,000 migrants.
A second DHS document prepared this week for the White House says high positivity rates are "straining the capacity of the NGOs and local governments that DHS currently partners with to care for them."
That document attributes the rise of Covid among undocumented immigrants to "the highly transmissible Delta variant combined with lengthier stays in crowded [Customs and Border Protection] facilities."
The high rates have triggered emergency meetings between the White House, HHS and DHS this week, according to two sources with knowledge of the discussions.
The briefing materials make clear that the high number of Covid-positive migrants is slowing down the deportation of families, an effort the administration ramped up in late July.
In a statement, a White House spokesperson said, "DHS and CBP takes its responsibility to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and other diseases very seriously. CBP provides migrants who can't be expelled...or are awaiting processing with PPE from the moment they are taken into custody, and migrants are required to keep masks on at all times, including when they are transferred or in the process of being released. If anyone exhibits signs of illness in CBP custody, they are referred to local health systems for appropriate testing, diagnosis, isolation and treatment."
The Biden administration is considering testing all migrants in Border Patrol custody, according to the second document, but CBP, the Border Patrol's parent agency, does not currently have the testing capability.
Deputy Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, who will soon take over as chief, told NBC News on Wednesday that such testing would lead to further bottlenecks in the Border Patrol's facilities.
"As you can see, we're already overwhelmed," Ortiz said, standing next to a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, where hundreds of migrants have been held at a time, sleeping on the ground, as border processing facilities are stretched six times past their capacity
On Tuesday, CBP stopped 6,725 undocumented immigrants crossing into the U.S., according to internal data obtained by NBC News, keeping with the daily pace of July, which saw 210,000 total apprehensions, a 21-year high.
Of the more than 6,700 stopped, more than 900 were unaccompanied children, a demographic that continues to increase, according to the data.
A student enters Heliotrope Avenue Elementary in Maywood, California, on April 13, 2021. (photo: Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram/Getty Images)
But we can still make this pandemic school year better than the last.
ot too long ago, it seemed possible that the 2021-22 school year would be a “normal” one for American kids. Parents and experts alike hoped that vaccination rates among adults would drive down community spread of Covid-19 to manageable levels. There was talk that vaccines for younger kids would arrive, giving them the same protection as adults.
But now fall is upon us, and neither of these things has happened. A combination of lagging vaccination rates and the spread of the delta variant means that a majority of counties in America are considered to be at “substantial” or greater risk of Covid-19 transmission, according to the CDC. Vaccine approval for kids under 12 could still be months away. All of that poses big challenges for school districts that are planning to welcome students back in person, five days a week.
The challenges aren’t insurmountable, though. Perhaps the biggest feat is for lawmakers, school officials, employers, families — indeed, everyone involved — to accept that the pandemic is not over, and act accordingly.
Many public health experts say masking, virus testing, and other mitigation factors can make a return to in-person school safe and feasible, but the problem is many districts are not requiring masks this year — and some states are even forbidding mask mandates in schools. Add to that the fact that vaccinations lag far behind the rate experts say is necessary to curb spread, with rates especially low in some of the same places that won’t be requiring masks.
Then there is the concern for children’s health and the ongoing disruption to family life. While most children are not at high risk for severe Covid-19, and the availability of vaccines for adults — which dramatically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from the virus — may blunt the impact of school outbreaks, parents are still understandably concerned about their kids getting sick. The constant quarantines if caseloads are high in schools also place a big burden on working parents, many of whom lack paid sick leave and have spent much of the past 18 months trying to manage remote school while holding down a job.
That’s especially true for mothers, who have borne the brunt of child care and homeschool duties throughout the pandemic. “I’m hearing a lot of moms panicking,” Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at the University of Washington, told Vox.
There are solutions that could make schools safer and family life more livable this fall — from masks in schools to employer policies that allow flexibility to care for a child. As Kanecia Zimmerman, a professor of pediatrics at Duke University who has studied Covid-19 in schools, told Vox, “We can do this, and we can do this safely.” But these solutions will require a level of coordination, political will, and acceptance of the reality of the situation that, during the many months of this pandemic, haven’t always been in evidence.
Here’s what experts say schools need in the delta era
The delta variant has thrown a wrench into everyone’s plans for this school year. But the good news about delta, if there is good news, is that strategies developed for older variants of the virus should still be effective to fight it. The most effective, experts say, are vaccines.
For teachers, staff, parents, and children 12 and over, vaccines are important for Covid-19 safety in all settings. “Everyone, regardless of whether they’re in school or not, who is eligible for the vaccine, should just be getting the vaccine,” Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of global health and infectious diseases at Stanford University, told Vox. “This virus is not going to go anywhere until we have a highly, highly vaccinated community.”
For children under 12, though, vaccines may not be available until mid-winter, so for now, the best protection is masking. Schools that used masks well were still able to keep transmission low last year, Maldonado emphasized. And masks still work against delta, Zimmerman said, but with the variant more transmissible, it’s more critical than ever for schools to be meticulous about compliance. “It can’t be that there’s a slippage, or it’s hanging down at your chin for 10 minutes.”
Schools should practice distancing — the CDC recommends 3 feet, if possible — but not at the cost of keeping kids on hybrid or remote schedules, Zimmerman said. “It’s better to have people in the school building than not.” If schools can’t adhere to distancing, masking compliance becomes even more important.
Proper ventilation can be helpful too, though there’s not yet perfect data on exactly what that means, Zimmerman said. Experts do know that Covid-19 transmission is much less likely outdoors, so schools should do what they can to mimic an outdoor environment, such as opening windows. But even some urban schools in North Carolina with decades-old ventilation systems still managed to keep transmission low, she said. Their secret: “They were very adherent to masking.”
Overall, schools will need to be vigilant about face coverings until their surrounding communities achieve a combination of high vaccination rates and low rates of community spread, Zimmerman said. Before delta, “we were talking over 70 percent” as a vaccination threshold; now, she said, “we may be talking over 80 percent.” Measures of community spread are a little harder to pin down, but the CDC’s standard for “lower” transmission — less than 20 new cases per 100,000 people over the last 14 days — could be one benchmark. “The combination of those two things is likely a scenario where things would be safe enough to eliminate masking,” Zimmerman said.
Where we actually are as we head into fall
Unfortunately, the country isn’t where it needs to be when it comes to vaccines or masks. Vaccination rates have picked up across the country in recent days, likely in response to fears about delta, but many areas remain far off target. In Missouri, for example, just 41 percent of people are fully vaccinated. Rates like that coupled with the transmissibility of the delta variant have led to high levels of community spread across much of the US.
Schools can stay open even in areas of high community spread, experts say — if everyone wears masks. But mask policies in schools remain a mixed bag. Of the 100 school districts tracked by CRPE, about a third plan to require masks, a third will make them optional, and a third have yet to announce a policy, Lake said.
Many of the same areas with low rates of vaccination also lack mask mandates in schools — and eight states outright ban such mandates. In Arkansas, for example, just 37 percent of people are fully vaccinated, and cases are surging. But a state law passed earlier this year bans districts from requiring masks.
That leaves parents worried for their kids’ safety. “I just feel like they have taken away the only tool they have for the younger kids who can’t get vaccinated,” Arkansas mom Jennifer Carter told NBC News. (The ban has been challenged in court, and last Friday, a judge temporarily blocked it.)
For families who don’t feel confident in their school’s mitigation measures, it’s not clear if remote options will be available. Many districts, like New York City, have said they will not allow students to choose full-time remote learning in the fall, even though a large number of families, especially in communities of color, have said they prefer remote learning for now.
Quarantines and testing protocols are another big unknown. With community rates of Covid-19 high going into the fall, cases are bound to pop up in schools. In the past, that’s meant quarantines and closures of classes, grades, and even whole schools for up to 10 days — a move that aimed to reduce the spread of the virus but also caused disruption for parents and students alike. The CDC now says that as long as all students are masked and maintain 3 feet of distance, students do not need to quarantine from school if exposed to an infected student. However, some districts, such as Los Angeles, are still planning to require quarantines regardless of masking, Zimmerman said.
And in districts that don’t offer a remote option, it’s not clear how students will be able to learn if they’re sent home to quarantine. “There is no contingency plan in most places as far as I can tell,” Lake said.
Across the country, planning for the fall remains a patchwork, with guidance from state governments limited and issues like masks highly politicized. Advice from the CDC, too, “has been pretty slow in coming and fairly hands-off,” Lake said.
Despite more than a year of experience with pandemic learning, this summer looks a lot like last summer, she added, when many districts rushed toward normalcy without adequate plans for how to backtrack. “It is shocking to me that we’re in the situation that we’re in,” she said. “But on the other hand, it feels very, very familiar.”
Here’s what that means for families
It’s not yet clear whether the delta variant causes more severe disease in children than earlier versions of the virus, Zimmerman said. In general, delta’s impact on severity is still being studied. But since it’s more transmissible, more children are catching it, and some of them will become severely ill. “Kids get sick” from Covid-19, Zimmerman said. “That has never been a question.”
That’s not a reason to keep schools closed, Zimmerman said. Shutting school buildings again “should be the absolute last thing that people do.” But failing to use the tools we know work, like masks, puts kids — and adults — needlessly at risk. As Zimmerman put it, delta shouldn’t change the calculus around schools unless “people are not going to do the things that are necessary to protect children and protect staff.”
And while kids getting sick is a major worry on parents’ minds, it’s not the only one. They also have to contend with the uncertainty inherent in another year of pandemic schooling. For students, another year of subpar planning for quarantines and remote options could mean more instruction time lost, already a big concern among education experts. After two school years impacted by Covid-19, “the academic losses are really high,” Lake said.
For parents, meanwhile, another year of quarantines means another year when they may be unable to work for days or even weeks at a time because a child can’t go to school. Known Covid-19 exposures aren’t the only issue. The ordinary coughs and colds that are part of children’s lives have taken on a new seriousness, with parents often needing to pull kids out of school for multiple days until they can get a negative Covid-19 test.
And the burden of these pandemic-era school disruptions tends to fall disproportionately on moms. In one survey last October, 63 percent of mothers said they were primarily responsible for their children’s online schooling, compared with just 29 percent of dads. Over the last 16 months, “Who was figuring out the schooling situation? Moms. Who were the main communications going to? Moms,” Susannah Lago, a mother of two and founder of the group Working Moms of Milwaukee, said. “That’s really hard.”
Women have disproportionately dropped out of the workforce over the last year, with child care likely a factor. After all, mothers with kids under 12 spent an average of eight hours a day on child care last year, the equivalent of a full-time job. And many say that ongoing uncertainty over school in the fall is keeping them from going back to work. “I can’t ask in an interview: ‘Do you mind if I take off two weeks with no notice,’” Bee Thorp, a mother of two in Virginia, told the New York Times.
For those still working, meanwhile, the delta variant and schools’ inconsistent policies just mean even more of the juggling, stress, and confusion that some hoped they’d left behind when the vaccines arrived. Parents are saying, “I can’t do this again,” Lake said.
Making the coming school year safer starts with letting go of “normal”
The situation this fall isn’t what anybody hoped for. But there are still ways for district officials and other decision-makers to help students, staff, and families have the best school year possible. The first is, very simply, to follow the science.
For now, that means masks in schools, Maldonado said. In places where state or city officials haven’t mandated masks, districts may need to take the lead. “If they go beyond what the states or the counties are mandating, then so be it,” Maldonado added. “They may need to be the guardians of the safety of their children.”
That could be a challenge in places where mask mandates are banned. But at least four school districts in Florida have said they will require masks in the fall, in defiance of the state’s ban, according to the Washington Post. “Now is a good time for folks to kind of dig deep and really think about what are student interests and what do we have to do to protect those interests,” Lake said.
Promoting vaccines — not just in schools but around the country — is also crucial, public health experts say. So far, few districts are planning to mandate vaccines for students or staff, and some teachers’ unions have opposed mandates. But even without a mandate, parents can help protect themselves and their communities by making sure they and any eligible older children get the vaccine. “Get everyone in your family who can be vaccinated vaccinated so that you can, at least, protect your bubble as much as you possibly can,” Zimmerman said.
Beyond mitigation measures, districts need to communicate with parents clearly and with as much notice as possible about what they can expect for the fall, Lake said. “As the pandemic has shown us, they’ve got to be able to respond to changing conditions quickly and communicate to families how that’s going to work.”
Meanwhile, employers will need to be understanding of the fact that for working parents, this fall won’t be back to normal. They need plans in place to make sure workers can take time off if their kids are home from school, and they need to offer mental health support to parents who are dealing with the stresses of a pandemic for yet another year. More than anything, they need to demonstrate the same level of flexibility that families are being asked to show in dealing with the uncertainties of school in the Covid-19 era.
“That goes two ways,” Lago said. It’s “not just families being flexible for Covid; it’s employers being very flexible to support the people that make their company run.”
Indeed, everyone involved may need to acknowledge that, yet again, school isn’t going to look the way it did before the pandemic, and everyone needs to plan for that. “Let’s not pretend that things are back to normal,” Lake said. “We’re not out of this yet.”
Demonstrations in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood demand an end to Israeli settlement activity and displacement on July 30, 2021. (photo: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images)
The Israeli Supreme Court’s verdict on the Sheikh Jarrah evictions, which set off huge protests in Palestine earlier this year, was deferred this week. But the deal offered to Palestinians shows that Israel is still intent on dispossessing them.
n May this year, the Israeli Supreme Court threatened to uphold the eviction of six families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem in favor of Israeli settlers.
This injustice had a galvanizing effect among supporters of the families, giving rise to mounting protests in the local region, in pockets of the occupied Palestinian territories, and, later, around the world. The court postponed the hearing as a result.
When the anger intensified and the demonstrations increased, the Israeli security forces reacted with the language of aggression in which they have become proficient. Israeli forces stormed Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque — a sacred site in Islam — during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, firing tear gas and stun grenades at stone-throwing Palestinians.
When Hamas fired retaliatory rockets, Israel embarked on an eleven-day pounding of the isolated Gaza enclave. A Human Rights Watch investigation concluded that Israel’s violence amounted to war crimes. At least 248 Palestinians were killed and many more injured as homes and vital infrastructure in the impoverished territory were obliterated, compounding a paralyzing state of affairs for its residents, who have already spent fourteen years under Israel’s blockade.
Fast forward a few months and a court hearing regarding the small Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem is again at the center of spiking tensions.
On Monday, a final verdict on the expulsion of Palestinian families was deferred. However, Israel’s highest court proposed an offer whereby the Palestinian residents would be granted a form of protected tenancy and avoid being evicted on the condition that they relinquish any claims of ownership over the homes and land in the district. Simply put, Palestinian people living in Palestinian houses are being told by the Israeli court that to avoid being evicted they must effectively become paying tenants to Israeli settlers.
The Times of Israel newspaper referred to the court decision as a “compromise.” The reality is that the proposal corroborates the consensus of an increasing number of human rights organizations that Israel is an apartheid regime which seeks to monopolize control over the Palestinian demographic.
When Palestinians are not forcibly displaced, their experiences are made deliberately punishing. Today, Sheikh Jarrah remains under blockade, with endless restrictions intended to suffocate the lives of the Palestinians who reside there. Armed settlers roam freely, often using their privilege to stoke violence. In June, Israeli settlers injured at least nine Palestinians, including four girls, sparking further disorder which then injured at least another twenty Palestinians. Local Israeli police joined in, using stun grenades and rubber-coated bullets and spraying skunk water.
Their experience is not an anomaly. The situation in Sheikh Jarrah is a microcosm of the experience of all the Palestinians living under Israel’s uncompromising settler-colonial project — and these events take place at the behest of the authorities, not despite them.
In fact, a common theme in areas with a big settler presence is the Israeli state working in tandem with the settlers to make the lives of Palestinians uncomfortable and humiliating. A new report has shown that Israel’s security forces are complicit in a “drastic surge” of violence committed by settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Meanwhile, Israel’s government regularly plays down any state involvement on matters pertaining to eviction, working to portray the matter as a real estate dispute between private parties. But the state’s colonial dispositions are entrenched within all such actions — so even if the state is technically out of the equation, laws exist which keep the status quo in check, and other institutions singing from the same discriminatory hymn sheet assume responsibility. The outcome is usually the same: injustice.
Israel’s Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 is a case in point. It regulates the treatment of property belonging to the 750,000 Palestinians who were forcibly displaced in 1948, meaning they have no legal avenue for reclaiming property left behind. Jews, on the other hand, are able to regain property they owned prior to 1948, especially in East Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah. Israeli authorities are then more than happy to facilitate the process by evicting Palestinian residents and paving the way for settlers. Sometimes living neighborhoods are demolished to clear space for other types of facilities: as Leila Sackur recently wrote in Tribune, residents of East Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood recently received demolition orders — which require them to destroy their own homes or face fines of around $6,000 — to make way for a biblical theme park.
In healthy democracies, judiciaries are supposed to be independent from the government and have a constitutional responsibility to provide fair and impartial justice. But Palestinian justice is anathema to the Israeli courts — and those courts’ institutional discrimination and expansionist laws, coupled with their state’s propensity for violence, has instead fertilized and sustained an ecosystem of colonial domination.
The fight to save the homes of the families in Sheikh Jarrah has not yet been lost. Even if it is, we must continue to push for justice — for them and for all the Palestinians who have endured this pain for far too long.
A newly-hatched green sea turtle heading out to the ocean. (photo: Manoj Shah)
he 8.7 million species that inhabit this Earth did not evolve in a world dominated by human activity, and this can cause problems when climate change or pollution transforms a previously advantageous environment into a perilous one.
This is the case for juvenile sea turtles, a study published in Frontiers in Marine Science this month has found. The animals' natural development strategy puts them at greater risk of swallowing some of the eight million tons of plastic that enter the world's oceans every year.
"Once hatchlings leave the nesting beach all but one species enter in ocean currents to develop[] in open ocean areas," study lead author Dr. Emily Duncan of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall explained in an email to EcoWatch. "In the past this strategy was beneficial due to lower predator numbers and an abundance of food items. However now these are areas of high plastic accumulation therefore exposing them to higher ingestion risk."
Evolutionary Trap
What happens to juvenile sea turtles is what the study authors call an "evolutionary trap." This, the study authors explained, is the word for situations in which large numbers of a species are attracted to a particular resource or habitat that ends up harming them.
"This phenomenon occurs when organisms rely on environmental cues to make life history decisions, however, due to modern anthropogenic disturbances the environment is being altered rapidly and former reliable cues may no longer be associated with conditions favouring adaptive outcomes," the study authors wrote. "Human-induced global environmental change is capable of rapidly creating a diverse array of ecologically novel conditions to which animals have not evolved. Therefore, organisms become 'trapped' by their evolutionary responses."
This can be especially damaging for species like sea turtles that take a long time to develop, because they lack the ability to adapt to new circumstances in the moment.
That young sea turtles tend to frequent parts of the ocean where they are more likely to encounter plastic is not a new observation, Sea Turtle Conservancy Executive Director David Godfrey, who was not involved with the research, told EcoWatch. Conservationists have been aware of the problem for at least 30 years. However, much of this awareness is based on anecdotal evidence, such as when large numbers of young turtles wash up dead after a storm.
"It's a hard thing to study," Godfrey said.
A Systematic Approach
That difficulty is part of what makes the new research so important, according to Duncan. Her team was able "report the high incidence of plastic ingestion in this vulnerable and difficult to study life stage," she wrote.
They did this by examining 121 stranded and bycaught juvenile sea turtles from Queensland Australia, which borders the Pacific Ocean, and Western Australia, which borders the Indian. Their sample included members of five of the world's seven sea turtle species: green, loggerhead, hawksbill, olive ridley and flatback turtles. They then recorded what percentage of each species had plastic in their stomachs, and which ocean they were found in. The results are as follows.
Pacific Ocean
- Loggerheads: 86 percent
- Greens: 83 percent
- Flatbacks: 80 percent
- Olive ridleys: 29 percent
Indian Ocean
- Flatbacks: 28 percent
- Loggerheads: 21 percent
- Greens: nine percent
The only species that did not contain any plastics was the hawksbill turtle, but the researchers noted that they only had a sample size of seven individuals to work with.
In general, the Pacific Ocean turtles were more exposed to plastic and the type of plastic found inside the turtles varied by ocean, with the Pacific Ocean turtles ingesting more hard plastics and the Indian Ocean turtles ingesting more fibers.
"Some of the most populous developing countries in the world surround the Indopacific," Duncan wrote, explaining these differences. "Rapidly developing economies, coastal migration and poor waste management will all play their role. Therefore there will be differing inputs and levels of plastic waste entering the ocean. Current movement will also impact the distribution of these throughout."
Godfrey said the new study was "a bit more systematic" than what he and others have observed over decades of conservation work. But, while the new study focused on the Indian and Pacific Oceans, his experience does suggest that the problem is not limited to these bodies of water. He described one incident along the Florida coast in which nearly 100 young turtles washed up dead and all of them had plastic in their stomachs.
"I've been in the operating room with little hatchlings spread out and their guts opened up and seen the just voluminous amounts of colorful plastic that they're pulling out of these turtles," he said.
Assessing Harm
Does eating all this plastic harm the turtles? Duncan said that some of the turtles in her study had clearly been directly harmed by the plastic they consumed. In one case, a starving green turtle from the Indian Ocean that had eaten 343 pieces of plastic was found to have its stomach damaged by its meal. However, she said more research was needed to determine how plastics might indirectly harm the health of young turtles, by, for example, exposing them to toxic chemicals.
Godfrey noted that plastic is only one of the many threats facing sea turtles. The species is also especially vulnerable to the climate crisis for four main reasons:
- Higher beach temperatures can cook eggs in the nest or result in more female than male turtles being born.
- Marine heat waves can harm turtle habitat by bleaching coral reefs or killing off seagrass.
- Climate change can impact their food sources.
- Sea walls built to defend coasts from sea level rise can actually destroy the sandy beaches turtles need to nest.
Added to all this is the problem of artificial lights along the coast, which can confuse young turtles when they leave the nests, causing them to wander inland instead of out to sea. All of this can have a "cumulative impact" on growing turtles that plastic only compounds, Godfrey said.
"Far fewer turtles reach the water, and those that do are weaker, they've burned energy going the wrong direction on the land, and then they get out into the marine environment and now they need sustenance, and half of what they find and eat is plastic," he explained.
Duncan said the best way to protect young turtles when they do reach the open ocean is to work together to reduce the amount of plastic entering the ocean to begin with and to improve waste management.
This, Godfrey said, requires policies like plastic-bag bans, business initiatives like restaurant chains swapping out plastic takeaway containers for paper ones and individual choices to use less plastic.
"You want readers of an article like this to know that we all have to make changes," he said.
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