26 January 22
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“They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young,” Neil Young wrote in a letter to his manager and label. “Not both”
“I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” he continued. “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both.” Young is referencing the steady stream of misinformation about vaccines that Joe Rogan has peddled on The Joe Rogan Experience. Last month, 270 doctors, physicians, and science educators signed an open letter asking Spotify to stop spreading Rogan’s baseless claims.
“With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE, which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence,” the letter reads. “Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy.”
Young removed most of his music from Spotify several years ago because he felt the sound quality on the service was too low, but he ultimately relented. “That’s where people get music,” he told Rolling Stone in 2019. “I want people to hear my music no matter what they have to get through to do it. I’m just trying to make it so they hear a lot more and enjoy it a lot more, but sell it for the same price because music is music.”
Young’s letter was addressed to his manager and a Warner executive. At press time, Spotify hadn’t responded to a request from Rolling Stone asking if they planned to remove Young’s music. It’s still available, but it might be smart to listen to Zuma and Rust Never Sleeps while you still can. They could disappear at any moment.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks at a news conference on the "Women's Health Protection Act" outside the US Capitol on September 24, 2021. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
The House of Representatives is looking to skip markup and hold a floor vote as soon as next week.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told members on a caucus call Tuesday that she’s looking to skip marking up the bill and move it straight to the House floor, setting up the possibility of a vote as soon as early next week, two congressional sources told The Intercept. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to talk to the press. Pelosi’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
“This is how the space for nonmilitary options gets slowly closed off in Washington, without any real debate,” one of the sources, a senior Democratic aide, told The Intercept.
The situation in Ukraine has escalated in recent days, with more than 100,000 Russian troops reportedly stationed along the Ukrainian border, while Western leaders seek to create a unified front to deter what they fear is a Russian invasion. British intelligence released an unusual report over the weekend on an alleged plot to install a leader friendly to Russia. On Sunday, the Biden administration advised Americans to leave the country because of “impending” reports that “Russia is planning significant military action against Ukraine,” escalating tensions in the eyes of local officials, and put troops on standby for deployment in Eastern Europe.
Last week, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., introduced the legislation, which has 13 co-sponsors, as a companion measure to the Senate’s Defending Ukraine Sovereignty Act proposed earlier this month. The Senate bill, introduced by Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Menendez, D-N.J., boasts 41 Democratic co-sponsors, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; and progressives Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.
The legislation would send $500 million from the Foreign Military Financing program to Ukraine for 2022. That amount would have made Ukraine the third-largest recipient of funding from the State Department’s FMF account in 2020, surpassed only by $3.3 billion to Israel and $1.3 billion to Egypt. (That year, the FMF program gave Ukraine $248 million.)
The legislation would also give Ukraine priority for excess defense equipment transfer and funds to counter Russian disinformation through programs like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. It would further aim to bolster Ukraine’s cyber defense and direct the president to consider imposing sanctions on Russia in the event of a cyber attack on Ukraine.
If the president determines that Russia has engaged in a “significant escalation in hostilities” to disrupt Ukrainian sovereignty, then the bill would direct the White House to issue a number of sanctions. Individuals and entities that would be targeted include the Russian president and other top government and military officials, Russian financial institutions, foreigners participating in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, and Russian energy producers. The legislation would prohibit Americans from trading Russian government bonds as well.
The Democrats’ effort to accelerate the bill comes days after a group of senators met with Ukrainian leaders in the country’s capital, Kyiv, to extend U.S. support for the country’s sovereignty. Despite the show of Democratic and Republican unity during the trip, no Republicans have co-sponsored Meeks’s or Menendez’s bills. Senate Democrats also have not publicly indicated the timeline on which they would like to vote on their legislation.
Republicans have offered their own measures. Earlier this month in the House, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the lead Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced the Guaranteeing Ukrainian Autonomy by Reinforcing its Defense Act, a companion bill to a measure sponsored by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch, R-Idaho. The bill would give Ukraine $450 million from the State Department’s FMF account and impose sanctions related to the Nord Stream 2 project immediately, without waiting for an escalation as in the Democrats’ bill.
McCaul’s office did not reply to a request for comment on whether he would support Meeks’s bill. The White House endorsed the legislation that Menendez released weeks ago.
'It is rarely mentioned that she was never charged with terrorism.' Aafia Siddiqui after graduating from MIT in 1995. (photo: AP)
A British hostage-taker in a Texas synagogue demanded the release of a US-held woman whose true story remains a mystery
The woman is Aafia Siddiqui, a neuroscientist and mother of three who is serving an 86-year sentence in a Texas prison for attempting to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Earlier this month, a British citizen, Malik Faisal Akram, held four people hostage in a Texas synagogue and demanded Siddiqui’s release. Akram was killed in a shootout and the media were once again full of Siddiqui’s story – with her presented variously as victim and terrorist, genius and pawn. So much of her story is unknown or contested that it can be co-opted by all sides to suit their own ends.
In Pakistan, we trot her out when we need to remind ourselves of our failure as a nation. We bemoan the fact that a monster called the United States of America came stomping in, took away our daughter and locked her up for life. Occasionally, noises are made that she should be released in exchange for this prisoner or that hostage, then we forget her again.
According to Pakistan’s rulers, Siddiqui is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the west. A middle-class, very Muslim girl gets a PhD, raises her voice for oppressed Muslims everywhere and is punished. That narrative, of course, never includes the fact that, while the Americans have been accused of kidnapping her, so have our own intelligence agencies. Neither the Pakistani government nor US prosecutors have ever deigned to tell us how exactly she ended up being interrogated by two American soldiers in Afghanistan in 2008 in the first place, after disappearing, along with her three children, in Karachi five years earlier.
There is another picture of Siddiqui, this time often used by western media – her graduation picture, where she is bright-eyed, smiling, full of reckless optimism. Along with that photograph goes the narrative that she was a kind of terrorist genius, buying night-vision goggles, smuggling diamonds to raise funds for al-Qaida, and loitering around a government building in Afghanistan with bomb-making materials and a map of New York landmarks. In this narrative, it is rarely mentioned that, while she appeared on the FBI’s most-wanted list, she was never charged with terrorism.
Siddiqui is often held up as “ransom girl” by the Pakistani government and various jihadi groups. The former prime minister called her the “daughter of the nation”, while Imran Khan, the current premier, proposed that Pakistan might be willing to swap her for Shakil Afridi, who is imprisoned in Pakistan after being accused of helping the CIA track down Osama bin Laden. Aside from the fact that we apparently live in a world where the idea of justice has been reduced to a hostage swap, both prime ministers and many other rightwing parties that brandish Siddiqui’s pictures never seem to raise the question of how and why she left Pakistan, and where she was during those missing years. Is it perhaps because it might lead to another question: who is kidnapping and disappearing our citizens now that the US is not even paying us to do so?
When the US agreed to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan under the Doha agreement in February 2020, as a pre-condition to negotiations the Taliban got thousands of their brothers released from Afghan jails. Siddiqui was a high-profile female jihadist who faced a trial criticised by many international human rights organisations, yet did the Taliban negotiators say “no Siddiqui, no deal”? They forgot to even bring her up as a bargaining chip when they had their enemies on their knees.
What we know for sure is that, after years of disappearance, she turned up in a Ghazni police station in Afghanistan in July 2008 and was interrogated by Americans. She picked up a rifle and was injured in a scuffle. She was charged with assault and attempting to kill the American soldiers, and during her trial she was declared mentally unfit, and then fit again. Witnesses couldn’t agree how many people were in the room when the scuffle happened, and there were no fingerprints on the gun. So much of her story remains a mystery.
Based on the facts we can establish, Siddiqui is no emblem of jihad. Nor is she an emblem for hardworking girls wanting to go to MIT and do PhDs, and have children. Whatever the truth of her story, its murkiness is instead a symbol of everything that is wrong with our justice system and with the delusions of jihadists.
Central American asylum seekers wait as US Border Patrol agents take groups of them into custody on June 12, 2018, near McAllen, Texas. The families were then sent to a US Customs and Border Protection processing center for possible separation. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
The Justice Department is fighting to maintain Trump’s border restrictions and against compensation for separated families.
The Department of Justice is actively fighting in federal court for border restrictions that have barred most asylum seekers from entering the US. In separate federal cases, it has argued that the policy of separating migrant families under former President Donald Trump was lawful, and has fought against payouts for those families.
For the Biden administration, defending some of the Trump administration’s most controversial immigration policies could be an attempt to preserve tools to manage the border, said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law at Cornell Law School. Or, he said, they could mark an internal disagreement on righting the wrongs of the Trump era.
“Every administration wants to have as much flexibility and discretion as it can on immigration because you never know what conditions will arise in the future,” he said.
Still, it’s a legal strategy that comes as Republicans prepare to make Biden’s immigration record a key line of attack in the upcoming midterms, and amid complaints from immigrants’ rights advocates and progressive Democrats that the president’s not doing enough to dismantle his predecessor’s legacy.
There has been a steady stream of resignations among immigration officials in his administration, most recently those of two former advocates, Tyler Moran and Esther Olavarria. Meanwhile, Republicans regularly ridicule Biden’s policies, falsely claiming that he is an “open borders” Democrat. They hope that characterization will stick in the midterms, despite the fact that he has maintained Trump’s border restrictions, policies Republicans continue to praise.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department told a federal appeals court that the border restrictions known as the Title 42 policy, allowing the federal government to bar noncitizens entry into the US for health reasons, were necessary to protect public health. In just one year, the Biden administration has used the policy to carry out more than 1 million expulsions of migrants arriving on the southern border, either sending them back to potential danger in overwhelmed border cities in Mexico or to their home countries. Public health experts, however, have repeatedly argued that there is no scientific rationale for the policy and that it’s possible to safely process people at the border with the right precautions.
Earlier this month, the DOJ also urged two federal courts in California and Pennsylvania to dismiss cases brought by migrant families who had been separated by the Trump administration and are seeking compensation. Though Biden has previously said that those families deserved some form of compensation, settlement talks have since fallen apart. DOJ lawyers are now claiming that the Trump administration was within its legal right to separate families, meaning that those affected aren’t eligible for compensation.
The White House referred Vox to the Department of Justice, which declined to comment on the Title 42 and family separations cases.
The Biden administration’s defense of Title 42 and the legality of family separations in court may allow the president to truthfully say that he isn’t as “soft” on immigration as Republicans claim. But it also makes it hard to take Biden’s stated commitment to immigration reform seriously, and comes at an enormous cost: depriving hundreds of thousands of people of their legal right to seek asylum and magnifying the suffering of thousands of families broken by US policy.
Biden may have taken hundreds of administrative actions to undo Trump’s immigration policies during his first year in office. But his administration’s refusal to renounce Title 42 and fairly compensate separated families for their pain has cast a cloud over those accomplishments.
The Biden administration continues to invoke public health to keep out asylum seekers
Title 42 creates an easy way to reduce the number of people crossing the southern border; there’s no need to increase funding for processing, to ramp up immigration courts, or to invent policy that might reduce migration. Instead, the federal government can just expel people. And the Biden administration has continued to lean on this fact to manage the southern border, despite evidence that it has endangered asylum seekers in the name of what public health experts say is a dubious scientific rationale.
In March 2020, at the outset of the pandemic, Trump began using the special legal authority created by Title 42, a section of the Public Health Service Act that allows the US government to temporarily block noncitizens from entering the US in the interest of public health. Though Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientists initially opposed the policy, arguing that there was no legitimate public health rationale behind it, then-Vice President Mike Pence ordered them to implement it anyway.
Biden’s government has maintained that order. In court on Wednesday, DOJ lawyer Sharon Swingle said that Title 42 relies on “scientific expertise” and that lifting the policy would allow the coronavirus to spread in Border Patrol facilities among people detained there, staff, and the public. Those facilities are not designed to quarantine or isolate immigrants who test positive for Covid-19, and the emergence of the delta and omicron variants have led the CDC to conclude that Title 42 remains justified, she said. In August 2021, the CDC did indeed issue a memo renewing the policy.
“The government’s goal is to get back to a state of orderly immigration processing for everyone, but currently, in CDC’s view, the public health realities don’t permit that,” Swingle said.
Other public health experts say that migrants can be safely processed at the border and that the policy represents an attempt to “unethically and illegally exploit the Covid-19 pandemic to expel, block, and return to danger asylum seekers and individuals seeking protection.” Anthony Fauci, the United States’ top federal infectious disease expert and Biden’s chief medical adviser, has said that “expelling [migrants] ... is not the solution to an outbreak.”
Expelling migrants has put them in danger unrelated to Covid-19, however. Under Biden, there have been 8,705 attacks, including kidnappings and sexual assaults, against migrants trapped in Mexico due to the policy and other US border restrictions, according to a recent report by Human Rights First. That’s nearly one violent incident for each hour of Biden’s presidency.
Ultimately, the Biden administration’s attempts to justify Title 42 as a public health tool obscure what it really is: a means of avoiding the politically damaging perception of a border crisis at the expense of migrants’ safety.
“It is shameful that an administration that ran on a belief in science and welcoming people with dignity continues to manipulate an obscure public health rule to violate the basic human rights of asylum seekers,” Karla Marisol Vargas, senior attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said in a statement. “Scapegoating Black, indigenous, and other migrants of color as vectors of disease just serves as an example of the ongoing racism entrenched in our immigration system.”
The Biden administration is arguing that family separation was legal
On the campaign trail, Biden vigorously condemned Trump’s use of family separations as a means of drawing a moral distinction between himself and his predecessor’s cruelty toward immigrants. While he has rejected the continued use of family separations and is working to ensure it never happens again, his DOJ has left families affected by it in the lurch, by abandoning settlement negotiations with them and dismissing their requests for compensation.
Some 5,600 families were intentionally separated in immigration detention under President Trump in 2017 and 2018 after they tried to cross the southern US border without authorization, and hundreds have yet to be reunited. Children taken from their parents were placed in foster care, the homes of relatives in the US, and federal detention centers, while their parents were detained separately.
The Biden administration has created a task force to reunite families that remain separated, successfully reuniting 61 children with their families as of November, and issued a callout to the public asking for recommendations on how to ensure that family separations never happen again. It’s also currently offering affected families counseling and permission to live and work in the US for three years.
But the administration withdrew from monthslong settlement talks with separated families in December after Biden dismissed the idea of delivering payouts as high as $450,000, an amount that the DOJ was reportedly considering at the time.
For those families, that $450,000 figure reflected the price of dealing with what could be lifelong psychological and health consequences of the trauma of separation and, in some cases of separated children, physical and sexual abuse they experienced while in foster care and in US custody. Republicans nevertheless seized on the issue, seeking to weaponize it against Biden and arguing that a settlement “would financially reward aliens who broke our laws” and “encourage more lawlessness” at the southern border.
The DOJ has since made a clear reversal. It has argued in court that, despite the fact that the US has condemned the policy, the separations were lawful. In further arguments, the DOJ said affected families aren’t entitled to payouts from the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows people who have suffered due to negligence or wrongdoing by the federal government to sue for financial damages.
“At issue in this case is whether adults who entered the country without authorization can challenge the federal government’s enforcement of federal immigration laws,” the Justice Department said in a January 7 brief in the Pennsylvania lawsuit. “They cannot.”
The DOJ is now on track to take the cases to trial, prolonging any possible resolution and potentially leaving families empty-handed.
“It’s very frustrating. This is going to take a really long time,” said Conchita Cruz, co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, which has brought two cases seeking compensation for separated families and will likely file more. “Had the government not represented that it intended to settle these cases initially, I think a lot of families would have been much farther along [in the court process], some might even have already won in court, and they would be in a different situation. Now, some families are in a worse position for having waited a year later with nothing to show for it.”
The administration has also requested to transfer the cases from California and Pennsylvania to courts in border states such as Texas, where Trump filled every existing federal judicial vacancy with conservative judges. That creates more hurdles for families who don’t live in those states to continue to pursue their cases, though Cruz says it probably won’t stop them.
“You’re basically putting people in a situation where, in order to fight this case, you’re going to have to take a week off work and go to another state in the middle of a pandemic for a trial,” Cruz said. “You’re going to have to fly to the place where your trauma began and have to recount the worst moments of your life and likely have to be separated from your family to do it. It’s going to be a major disruption in your life.”
Though Biden has promised to make amends for these families’ suffering, his administration continues to contribute to it.
Home building. (photo: Yahoo News)
Considering that we are in a never-ending extreme drought situation, how are they to provide water for these new residents?
Both the IID and CVWD impose limits on how much water each current household can use through a tiered price system. We are constantly reminded to conserve where we can. We are told: “Remove your grass lawn, get water-efficient appliances, take shorter showers, use recycled water on our outdoor vegetation!”
When I called to ask the new home builder where they were going to get the water for their 200 new homes, they answered, “There’s no law saying we can’t build and no law saying people can’t buy new homes.”
So what part of “there ain’t enough water as there is” isn’t getting through to the people who are responsible for making wise decisions for the future good of this valley?
Justice for Lourdes Maldonado. (photo: CengNews)
"Journalists who end up murdered often fight against corrupt politicians who are linked to criminals," activist Alejandro Melendez lamented.
"These rallies are an urgent call to institutions and society to turn their eyes to these murders, most of which go unpunished," said photojournalist and protest organizer Felix Marquez.
Dressed in black and carrying candles and photographs of murdered journalists, protesters urged the Police to strengthen protection mechanisms for threatened professionals and prosecutors to expedite investigations into these assassinations.
"Journalists who end up murdered often fight against corrupt politicians who are linked to criminals," activist Alejandro Melendez lamented, recalling that criminal structures will not disappear as long as the State does not support crime reporters.
"Widespread fear generates an almost total silence regarding organized crime. In the state of Tamaulipas, for example, the media only reports on culture. Despite the high rates of violence in this territory, there are no news about shootings or dead bodies," he explained.
Protesters will request a hearing with Human Rights Under Secretary Alejandro Encinas to discuss possible policies that not only protect the lives of journalists in their professional practice but eliminate structural violence towards them.
"We expect something different from President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO). What is happening to us is terrible: we are being denied the right to life and access to information," Melendez stated.
Gas flaring at a facility in the Permian Basin. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
But now a new report from Carbon Mapper and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) reveals that oil and gas facilities in the area are emitting unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions in the form of half a million cars’ worth of methane.
“In this decisive decade for reducing greenhouse gas emissions every molecule matters, and the fact that some facilities are persistently leaking methane for years without detection or repair highlights the urgent need for comprehensive and transparent methane monitoring,” Riley Duren, chief executive officer for Carbon Mapper and research scientist at the University of Arizona, said in an EDF press release.
The report is based on three years of aerial surveys of oil and gas facilities in the Permian Basin, taken from 2019 to 2021. The surveys revealed that around 30 facilities had consistently leaked large amounts of methane over multiple years.
These facilities, which include pipelines, well pads, compressing stations and processing facilities, only account for less than 0.001 percent of the oil and gas infrastructure in the basin, yet stopping their flow of methane would keep 100,000 metric tons of methane out of the atmosphere every year and save $26 million a year in gas.
Methane is the second largest contributor to the climate crisis after carbon dioxide, Reuters reported. It lasts for a shorter time in the atmosphere, but while there it traps around 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide, according to Yale Environment 360. The methane emissions in the report are the result of natural gas leaks, so eliminating those leaks is a relatively simple way to make a big contribution to fighting climate change.
To that end, a group of more than 100 countries including the U.S. signed the Global Methane Pledge at COP26 in Glasgow last November to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent of 2020 levels by 2030, as Reuters reported at the time.
At the same time, the Biden administration’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new rules to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas wells, which it said would cut emissions of the potent gas by about 75 percent. The new rule is open for public comment until the end of January, and the agency will announce a related rule in the spring for flaring and smaller wells, Reuters reported.
Overall, the report bolsters the idea that acting to control methane can make an important difference.
“The magnitude of emissions coming from a handful of methane sources in one of the top oil- and gas-producing regions illustrates the opportunity to make significant near-term progress toward the stated methane reduction goals of the U.S., other countries, and companies around the world,” Duren said in the press release.
The surveys identified almost 1,100 super methane emitters that contributed around half of the Permian Basin’s total methane emissions. However, many of these leaks were large but not long lasting.
The report did not name the companies responsible for the top emitting facilities, but Reuters identified the coordinates of the largest emitters as corresponding to facilities owned by Occidental Petroleum Corp, ConocoPhillips, Energy Transfer Partners, Callon Petroleum Co. and Coterra Energy.
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