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Showing posts with label GRETA THUNBERG. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GRETA THUNBERG. Show all posts
Sunday, January 2, 2022
Top News: Yes, There Were 10 Good Things About 2021
Wednesday, December 29, 2021
RSN: FOCUS | Interview: Greta Thunberg on the State of the Climate Movement
29 December 21
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Thunberg’s school strike spread in Sweden and around the world, inspiring a youth-led global climate strike movement, Fridays for Future, which urged cuts in carbon emissions. Her speeches at major political gatherings, including the World Economic Forum, the British Parliament, the U.S. Congress and, most recently, the United Nations climate summit known as COP26, have castigated leaders for failing future generations with their “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.” Or, as she said in one speech, “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
Thunberg credits her Asperger’s syndrome, which is considered part of the autism spectrum, for her truth-telling and focus as a climate activist. She lives in Stockholm.
You called COP26 a “failure” and a “PR event.”
Well, in the final document, they succeeded in even watering down the blah, blah, blah. Which is very much an achievement, if you see it that way. Of course it’s a step forward that, instead of coming back every five years, they’re doing it every year now. But still, that doesn’t mean anything unless that actually leads to increased ambition and if they actually fulfill those ambitions.
What do you mean when you say, “watering down the blah, blah, blah”?
As we all know, or as we might know, the so-called “f-word” was included for the first time in this document: fossil fuel. Which makes you wonder what they have been doing these decades without even mentioning fossil fuels for a problem which, to a very, very large extent, is caused by fossil fuels. And instead of “phasing out” [coal, the document’s language became] “phasing down.” So, yeah, that is one very clear example.
And also, one question that was very up in the air was the question about finance for loss and damage and the Green Climate Fund, which they again failed to agree on. The money that has already been promised, the bare minimum that the so-called global north have promised that they will deliver, they failed to come to any conclusions, and it’s been postponed once again.
And what are positives that might have come out of COP26?
One of the positives is that it shows that, under the current circumstances, within current systems, we won’t be able to solve the climate crisis unless there is massive pressure from the outside. Nothing will come out of these conferences unless there is a huge increase in the level of awareness and unless people actually go out on the streets and demand change. And these global events are a big opportunity to mobilize people and to redirect the focus onto the big climate crisis again and highlight the fact that nowhere near enough is being done about it.
I read recently that at the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, we have 11 years until we get to 1.5 degrees Celsius change [the Paris agreement’s aspirational temperature threshold for heading off the worst impacts of climate change]. How do you get people to focus on that?
Well, there are many different numbers that include many different things. But it’s just the principle that we need to understand: that we have a very limited time, that we are using up the carbon dioxide budget right now — no matter which carbon dioxide budget you go for — and that cannot be undone in the future. Yes, we may be able to come up with new technologies and scale them up so that we can absorb carbon dioxide from the air, but you cannot undo the damage that has been done if we trigger feedback loops and irreversible tipping points.
But also, we need to understand that 1.5 is not a safe level. Already, as it is now — 1.1 or 1.2 — people are already suffering. Countless people are already bearing the brunts of the climate crisis and have been doing so for a long time. So this is not just a future problem. We need to understand that this is here and now. It’s already happening — it has been happening for a long time — and many people have been bearing witness to this and trying to tell this, but they have been ignored.
You’ve been very successful in getting energy and attention on this issue over the last few years. Can you talk about first becoming aware of the climate crisis yourself, and being galvanized to action?
There’s a big difference between the first time I heard about the climate crisis and when I actually understood its consequences. I heard about it in school maybe when I was 7, 8 or 9. They teach the ground principles: the greenhouse effect, and it’s being amplified by us since we humans emit CO2 and so on. But then I read up on it more and more because it didn’t seem real that they’d explain it as a very big problem — but it wasn’t treated like one. It was kind of a long process because there’s a lot to read and a lot to understand. And based on the things that I read, I drew the conclusion that this was very, very serious.
[My actions] started small at home, like turning off the lamps when I wasn’t in the room and cutting down meat consumption and so on. And then I did more: I stopped flying, and I stopped buying new things. I became a vegetarian and a vegan. I tried to join organizations and marches and sign petitions and the things that they recommend us to do. But that didn’t have an effect.
Was there a moment you moved from personal actions to a bigger scale?
I remember I was on a call with other young people who cared about the environment and were trying to figure out something to do, and we were going to plan a march. And then I thought, Okay, this could be something. And then I presented my idea of school striking, and they weren’t very keen on the idea. They didn’t think it was going to have an impact. They were like, “We can eat some cookies and drink coffee and tea and make it a pleasant event for young people to educate themselves about the climate crisis.” And I was like, “No, you clearly haven’t understood the climate crisis. This is an emergency. This is not only supposed to be nice, this actually has to be something important.” And I think we who have the privilege and the opportunity to actually do something should go put ourselves out there. So I hung up on the call. Well, it was a Zoom call, so I just pressed “Leave Meeting” — so it wasn’t as dramatic as it would have been otherwise. But I hung up, and I decided to go on and do it by myself.
And that’s when you were 15, right?
Yeah. I just thought that someone needs to do something. I need to do something more because this isn’t leading to anything. So I decided to school strike. And then many others did the same thing. And then we became a global movement.
But before that, when did the weight of the emergency hit you?
It was just the cognitive dissonance that I saw with everyone around me. My parents, my classmates, everyone I met. They were like, “Oh, what are your interests?” And I said, “I’m interested in the climate because it’s an emergency.” They’re like, “Oh, that’s fun.” And I was like, “You clearly don’t get this.” Because everyone said, “I care about climate change. I think it’s very important.” And then they don’t do anything. And that got to me because I’m autistic, and I don’t like when people say one thing and then do another thing. I have to live true to my values, so to speak. Like, I remember one time I was talking to my dad, and he said, “I want to buy a new car. This SUV looks really nice.” And I was like, “But you said you cared about the climate.” He was like, “I do, but you can still do both.” And I was like, “No, you cannot.” And I got really upset.
You’ve quipped that if more people had autism or Asperger’s maybe we would do better in focusing on the climate crisis and not continuing to justify the trade-offs in our own minds.
Of course not to romanticize autism or say that people should have autism. Because, under the wrong circumstances, autism can be something that holds you back. But I think that there are definitely many elements of what makes you autistic that more people should have. For example, us not having as much cognitive dissonance and being able to focus on facts, it’s a good thing. And being able to focus on an emergency and actually treat it as an emergency.
It feels like many today — neurotypical people, people in general — are so focused on following the stream, doing like everyone else, because they don’t want to stand out. They don’t want to be uncomfortable. They don’t want to cause any problems. They just want to be like everyone else. And I think that’s very harmful in an emergency where we are social animals. We’re herd animals. In an emergency, someone needs to say that we’re heading towards the cliff. And everyone is just following, saying like, “Well, no one else is turning around, so I won’t either.” That could be very dangerous.
Do you think one of the reasons you were so effective right away was because it was a shock to hear this small, young girl speaking uncomfortable truth to adults who were supposedly the experts?
Well, there have been many, many young people — many people — who have been speaking out on this. I’m not the only one who has gained attention on this. But, of course, many people have listened to me. And I’m very privileged to come from a part of the world where I have the opportunity to use my voice and to be listened to. But we just go straight to the point. We don’t care for the blah, blah, blah, so to speak. We say just what we want to be said. And we are not scared of being uncomfortable. We are not scared of being unpopular. We are ridiculed and mocked and hated on and sent threats — and that’s not something that should be romanticized in any way. But many are still going because we know that what we are doing is right. It’s just the idea of: We don’t care about our reputation; we care more about the planet.
There are clearly people interested in climate change who take a more diplomatic tack, aware that they have to compromise to get things done. Do you ever worry that the “blah, blah, blah,” or more combative rhetoric, makes their job harder when they’re trying to do the right thing, just from a more temperate position?
If you choose, as the media often do, like, 20 seconds from a 10-minute speech and just look at those 20 seconds, it may seem like we have undemocratic views and that we are very populist and so on. Which is not true. So I understand that some people might think that way and that they frame it that way.
Of course we need compromises. But we have to also understand that we cannot compromise with the laws of physics. If we are here [gestures], and we need to be there [gestures again] to have, say, safe living conditions, and they are talking about moving [just a tiny bit], then I would rather say no. Yes, it’s better than nothing, but we have to zoom out and understand that we’re not going to get there if we pretend that this is enough.
Strategically, do you ever feel the need to change your tack these days, to say, “Okay, this is what people might expect me to say now, and so here’s a new way to shock people out of their complacency”?
At the speech I gave in the U.N. General Assembly, I said, “How dare you!” Of course, I said many other things, but that was what people took out of it. And me being emotional and angry, yelling at world leaders. And then I thought that, Okay, now I have people’s attention, I will only speak facts. So in the speech [in Madrid] at COP25 after that, I basically only spoke about facts and numbers because so much attention was on that. And then people watched it, and it felt like no one understood a word I said. Because sometimes the news is just that I’m making a speech rather than what I have to say — very, very often. So that’s a way of trying to, I don’t know, surprise, if that’s the right word.
Are you inspired by any of the world leaders, by President Biden?
If you call him a leader — I mean, it’s strange that people think of Joe Biden as a leader for the climate when you see what his administration is doing. The U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. Why is the U.S. doing that? It should not fall on us activists and teenagers who just want to go to school to raise this awareness and to inform people that we are actually facing an emergency.
People ask us, “What do you want?” “What do you want politicians to do?” And we say, first of all, we have to actually understand what is the emergency. We are trying to find a solution of a crisis that we don’t understand. For example, in Sweden, we ignore — we don’t even count or include more than two-thirds of our actual emissions. How can we solve a crisis if we ignore more than two-thirds of it? So it’s all about the narrative. It’s all about, what are we actually trying to solve? Is it this emergency, or is it this emergency?
You have become a hero to young people, yet you were bullied as a kid and socially isolated. It must be sort of complicated now that young people who previously didn’t support you or give you the time of day are putting you on a pedestal.
Yeah, I was scared of other young people when I first started school striking. So it was very weird to have other young people join me; it was a very strange feeling. Because I didn’t know how they would react and how they would think.
What can you tell other young people, both those experiencing bullying and maybe those doing the bullying, to help them move to a better place?
Just to those who are experiencing it that you are not alone. There are many, many others who are experiencing this same thing — many more than you think — beneath the surface. And it should not be like that. Children can be very, very mean. But being strange is a good thing. I think most people in the climate movement are a bit strange — very much including myself. And that is a good thing because, if you’re not different, you are not able to envision another future, another world. And we need people who are able to think outside the box. So being different is something that should be celebrated.
Do you draw a connection between empathy for each other on a small level and empathy as a global community with climate change and climate justice?
Of course. Since there are no binding agreements that safely put us towards a safe future for life on Earth as we know it, that means that we have to use morals, and we have to be able to feel empathy with one another. That is all we have right now. Some people say that we shouldn’t use guilt or this sense of morality. But that is, quite frankly, the only thing that we have to use. So, therefore, we have to use it. And we have to make sure that we don’t lose that connection. We have to realize that we’re in it for the long run and that we need to take care of each other.
As somebody who had been living in social isolation before speaking out, how did you handle both the positive adulation and the sometimes very personal negative criticism, even from world leaders, on Twitter and other places?
I don’t know. I didn’t think too much about it. I just thought: I’m doing what is right, and as long as I’m doing what’s right, what I think is right, it doesn’t matter what others think. But of course it was a huge shift from never talking to anyone whatsoever — in those days, I only spoke to my parents and my teacher and my sister. So to then be speaking, more or less, to the whole world, it was a very big shift. I don’t think anyone in the world could have expected anything like that, no matter who you are or what you do. It just blew up completely in a way that is very hard to understand if you haven’t experienced it yourself. But I think just the fact that I was so different before made it easier to stay grounded and not to listen too much to what other people were saying, both positively and negatively.
Can you get to the place in your mind where you say, Okay, it’s 30 years hence, and we were successful? What does that look like? And then what do you get to focus on in your life?
I have no idea. I try not to think about that too much. I try to rather do as much as I can in the now and change the future instead of overthinking the future. Hopefully we will take care of this, however that would look. But no matter what happens, if we continue to ignore it, the consequences are going to be much, much worse.
What do you do when you need a break?
I take occasional breaks. Like, this is my life all day, every day, but that doesn’t mean I cannot focus on other things. I can focus on several things. For example, school. Although now we’re actually talking about the climate. So I can’t get away there, either!
So does the teacher just turn it over to you: “Greta …”?
[Laughs.] We’re in climate role play. We’re going to represent different countries, and then we’re going to reenact a climate conference, make speeches and be delegates, try to come up with a resolution. And I’m going to be Saudi Arabia.
Perfect.
I’m going to block everything. Yeah, I’m going to make sure that they don’t come up with a resolution.
After the experience of the last few years, its roller-coaster up and down, do you find yourself more or less hopeful than when you first sat out in front of the Swedish parliament with your [“SKOLSTREJK FOR KLIMATET”] sign?
I don’t know. In one sense, we’re in a much worse place than we were then because the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are higher and the global emissions are still rising at almost record speed. And we have wasted several years of blah, blah, blah.
But then, on another note, we have seen what people can do when we actually come together. And I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things. That we can treat a crisis like a crisis. So I think I’m more hopeful now.
What can we learn from the pandemic about what can be accomplished when people do, in fact, treat a crisis like a crisis?
I think many people have realized how important science is. Because we saw how, when we really wanted to find a vaccine, we could do that in, like, no time. Which just shows that, if we actually focus on something, if we actually want something, we can accomplish almost anything.
Right now, what’s holding us back is that we lack that political will. We don’t prioritize the climate today. Our goal is not to lower emissions. Our goal is to find solutions that allow us to continue life [as it is] today. And, of course, you can ask, “Can’t we have both?” But the uncomfortable truth is that we have left it too late for that. Or the world leaders have left it too late for that. We need to fundamentally change our societies now. If we would have started 30 years ago, it would have been much smoother. But now it’s a different situation.
But also, it has just shown how fast social norms can change. And I think that can be something that we can learn from it. If I would have gone up to someone and shaken hands with them during the worst part of the pandemic, that would have been totally unacceptable. But just before the pandemic, everyone did that. It changed, basically overnight, people’s mindsets. And that just shows the possibilities.
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Tuesday, December 28, 2021
RSN: Marc Ash | Should Pramila Jayapal or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Lead House Progressives?
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28 December 21
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The perils of state run media are painfully self-effacing. When the state controls the media the state controls all aspects and affairs of the nation. The state is free to define the truth and its ramifications.
But what happens when the media controls the state? You get a corrupt message and result for sure but you can get far worse. Let’s assume hypothetically, an aspiring authoritarian sought the powers of the US presidency and let’s say that his dark theatrical style lent itself well to television ratings. Good television ratings obviously can generate enormous revenue. And let’s say that in pursuit of those high-value theatrics for-profit commercial media companies elected to award the aspiring authoritarian around-the-clock coverage of every word he spoke at every rally, literally propelling him to a major political party presidential nomination and the presidency itself. And with the powers of the US President now in hand the aspiring authoritarian sought to cancel free and fair elections. What would happen then? Historically control of the media and all news reporting would soon follow. And that leads us full-circle to state-run-media.
Pramila Jayapal is a frequent guest on cable news, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rarely is. It tells you a great deal about how and why power flows on and off Capitol hill.
Pramila Jayapal is a good Progressive. She is passionate about Progressive positions and lends her lived experience to her vision for leadership admirably. She is also patient and non-confrontational in her approach to problem solving. Her leadership style is stateswoman like, with an air of gravitas badly needed in today’s highly polarized political atmosphere.
Pramila Jayapal also seems wholly unprepared for a knife fight. That’s inconvenient because capitol hill even in the best of times relates more like the Sharks and the Jets from West Side Story than rational adults trying to reach productive solutions.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the other hand sees through the game. She understood where men like Josh Gottheimer and Joe Manchin were going and what their intentions were. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was prepared for battle and she understood fighting that battle with a strategic advantage would have a far greater probability of success than ceding responsibility to fight for Progressive priorities to Joe Biden in the Oval Office.
House Progressives entered 2021 with a historic Congressional advantage. With a caucus estimated at more than 100 members they had tremendous strength in numbers. What they lacked was commitment and leadership. 100 members is great, but not if they cut and run at the first sign of trouble. 20 Progressives who are truly prepared to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and fight might have been quite a bit more effective.
Getting the Build Back Better Act or the For the People Act across the finish line was always going to be the hardest part Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez understood that Pramila Jayapal appears not to have. House Progressives should have been prepared for the knife fight they knew or should have known was coming. Instead they settled for promises. Now they have to fight the exact same battle without the leverage they gave away.
Pramila Jayapal is a frequent guest on cable news, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rarely is. It tells you a great deal about how and why power flows on and off Capitol hill. If the process plays out on commercial news broadcasts then commercial news broadcasters will broker the result and the result will likely be what best suits parent companies of commercial news broadcasts.
Progressives fight, it’s what we do. Pramila Jayapal and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are both good progressives. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may have a bit more fight in her. Time to rally truly committed House Progressives and prepare to get back into the good fight.
AOC for House Progressive Chair.
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A police officer. (photo: Adobe Stock)
Over the past two decades, Dr. Gary Vilke has established himself as a leading expert witness by repeatedly asserting that police techniques such as facedown restraints, stun gun shocks and some neck holds did not kill people.
Officers in Fresno had handcuffed 41-year-old Joseph Perez and, holding him facedown on the ground, put a spinal board from an ambulance on his back as he cried out for help. One officer sat on the board as they strapped him to it. The county medical examiner ruled his death, in May 2017, a homicide by asphyxiation.
Vilke, who was hired by the ambulance provider, charged $500 an hour and provided a different determination. He wrote in a report filed with the court last July that Perez had died from methamphetamine use, heart disease and the exertion of his struggle against the restraints.
Vilke, an emergency medicine doctor in San Diego, is an integral part of a small but influential cadre of scientists, lawyers, physicians and other police experts whose research and testimony is almost always used to absolve officers of blame for deaths, according to a review of hundreds of research papers and more than 25,000 pages of court documents, as well as interviews with nearly three dozen people with knowledge of the deaths or the research.
Their views infuriate many prosecutors, plaintiff lawyers, medical experts and relatives of the dead, who accuse them of slanting science, ignoring inconvenient facts and dangerously emboldening police officers to act aggressively.
The experts also intersect with law-enforcement-friendly companies that train police officers, write police policies and lend authority to studies rebutting concerns about police use of force.
Together they form what often amounts to a cottage industry of exoneration. The dozen or so individuals and companies have collected millions of dollars over the past decade, much of it in fees that are largely underwritten by taxpayers.
Many of the experts also have ties to Axon, maker of the Taser: A lawyer for the company, for example, was an early sponsor of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, a commercial undertaking that is among the police-friendly entities.
The New York Times identified over 100 instances of in-custody deaths or life-threatening injuries from the past 15 years in which experts in the network were hired to defend the police. The cases were nearly all lawsuits. About two-thirds of the cases were settled out of court; of the 28 decided by judges or juries, 16 had outcomes favoring the police. (Some cases are pending.)
Beyond the courtroom, the individuals and businesses have offered instruction to thousands of police officers and medical examiners, whose cause-of-death rulings often help determine legal culpability. Lexipol, a Texas-based business whose webinars and publications have included experts from the network, boasts that it helped write policy manuals for 6,300 police departments, sometimes suggesting standards for officers’ conduct that reduce legal liability. A company spokesperson said it did not rely on the researchers in making its policies.
Some researchers and doctors in this ecosystem who responded to questions from the Times said they did not assist law enforcement but provided unbiased results of scientific research and opinions based on the facts of each case. Several pointed to research demonstrating that police struggles overall have an exceedingly low risk of death. They also highlighted health issues that could cause deaths in such circumstances, including drug use, obesity, psychological disturbances and genetic mutations that may predispose people to heart problems.
“Sensationalism, without offering scientifically demonstrated better control techniques, adds no benefit, and merely exacerbates the existing tensions between law enforcement and the society at large,” said Mark Kroll, a biomedical engineer who has backed the idea of an “arrest-related death syndrome” as an explanation of the deaths.
Others in the network, including Vilke, said it was wrong to characterize their work as favoring the police, and suggested the Times’ analysis misrepresented it. “I would disagree,” Vilke said when the Times shared its findings with him. Another of the experts, Dr. Steven Karch, sent papers suggesting Black males and people exerting themselves were generally more likely to have sudden cardiac death.
Lawyers for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was ultimately convicted in last year’s murder of George Floyd, also drew upon the same network of researchers and experts. In particular, they turned to the defense of prone restraint, a technique in which officers subdue subjects facedown, as happened to Floyd. The work of Kroll, who has a doctorate in electrical engineering but no medical degree, was cited by the Chauvin defense as proof that putting body weight on someone facedown does not cause asphyxia.
According to court documents, Perez had recently taken methamphetamines when police saw him behaving erratically. They handcuffed and tried to calm him, at one point putting a towel under him to keep him from injuring his face.
After an ambulance arrived, they placed a backboard on top of him and an officer sat on it. In a deposition, the officer said he had been trained that doing so posed no danger of asphyxia. A captain from the department said in the case that the training had relied on an article by Kroll.
“The problem is that when officers get sued in these cases,” said Neil Gehlawat, the lawyer for Perez’s family, the cadre of researchers insist that “‘no one can die this way,’ and then officers start to believe it.”
Shaping the Science
The physicians, scientists and researchers who come to the defense of law enforcement officers often cite experiments conducted on volunteers. They shock them with Tasers, douse them with pepper-spray or restrain them facedown on the ground.
Their published findings are usually the same: that there is no evidence that the actions have enough of an effect to cause death.
A Times analysis of more than 230 scientific papers in the National Library of Medicine database published since the 1980s showed those conclusions to be significantly different from those published by others, including studies about restraints, body position and excited delirium.
Nearly three-quarters of the studies that included at least one author in the network supported the idea that restraint techniques were safe or that the deaths of people who had been restrained were caused by health problems. Only about a quarter of the studies that did not involve anyone from the network backed that conclusion. More commonly, the other studies said some restraint techniques increased the risk of death, if only by a small amount.
Vilke’s first report on police restraint was funded by a $33,900 grant from San Diego County during a lawsuit over the 1994 death of Daniel Price. A woman reported seeing odd behavior from Price, 37, who had taken methamphetamines; officers restrained him facedown, his hands and feet tied together.
As part of their research, Vilke and others hogtied healthy volunteers. They observed that measurements of their lung functions decreased by up to 23%, which they concluded was not clinically significant because similar levels of diminished lung capacity could still be considered normal. The judge in the Price case cited the research when he dismissed the lawsuit.
The study and others have been challenged by some scholars and physicians because they are based on controlled conditions that are unlike real life, said Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at Harvard University who studies patterns of deaths in law enforcement custody.
“There’s a fundamental problem in terms of study design,” he said. “They’re not using people with more severe mental and physical disabilities. They’re not doing it with people who have taken drugs. When they’re testing Tasers, they aren’t using them as many times as you might see in some deaths.”
When their studies appeared in peer-reviewed publications, the network of experts acknowledged that their work had limitations. But when discussing the research in court, or during trainings and elsewhere, some of them used more expansive language, did not mention conflicting work, or said they had fully refuted scholars who disagreed.
A Network Forms
Dr. Charles Wetli, a former Miami medical examiner who died last year, was among the first to publish research that launched what has become an industry of sorts defending police officers. He wrote in the 1980s about men who had taken cocaine and died, many while being subdued by the police. He attributed the deaths to a condition he called excited delirium, when someone becomes aggressive from a mental illness or psychoactive drugs.
Later, in 1994, two former law enforcement officers, Michael A. Brave and John G. Peters Jr., described in a paper what they called custody death syndrome. The condition, they wrote, had “no apparent detectable anatomical cause” but could be associated with excited delirium or other vague diagnoses.
In describing the death of a hypothetical suspect, they focused on potential liability: “You immediately cringe at the thought of the critical scrutiny you will soon be facing by the media, by council officials and by special interest groups,” they wrote.
The two men later became affiliated with both the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths and Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, another group that provides legal resources for officers. Brave also became a lawyer for Taser.
In an interview, Peters said he founded the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths in 2005 because so many deaths were being blamed on Tasers, which he characterized as one of many misguided criticisms of police conduct. The institute conducts research and training that often rebuts the criticism and is one of several commercial forums that draw like-minded researchers about law enforcement behavior.
Taser provided some early funding to the institute in exchange for training programs, Peters said, and one of its initial sponsors was Brave, who joined Taser’s legal department around the same time.
The business of supporting law enforcement can be lucrative. Not all of the researchers testify frequently in court, but when they do, experts associated with the network typically earn $500 to $1,000 an hour for testimony and depositions.
The Times found that, with rare exceptions, when members of this network weigh in on a case in court, they side with the police.
And assessing the effectiveness of the opinions exonerating the police is difficult because most cases settle or are decided without explanation.
But several cases reviewed by the Times suggest that the research has had far-reaching effects — influencing investigator decisions in death inquests and giving officers assurance that their methods are safe. Some of the experts’ legal statements and educational materials they have prepared for police called safety warnings by Taser and other law enforcement groups outdated or needlessly conservative.
In a deposition in April, the sheriff in Riverside County, California, cited studies backed by the law-enforcement-leaning experts to explain why his deputies held people facedown after handcuffing them. The sheriff, Chad Bianco, described the position as “the absolute safest place for any subject.”
Two years ago, deputies working for Bianco found Kevin Niedzialek, 34, bleeding from a head wound and behaving strangely after taking methamphetamines. They shocked him twice with a Taser, and held him facedown.
When they rolled him onto his back, Niedzialek was unresponsive. He died the next day.
Sarah Weddington. (photo: Bettmann Archive)
‘Remarkable woman’ Weddington hailed for role in 1973 case that established right to abortion
Susan Hays, a former student of Weddington’s and a Democratic candidate for Texas agriculture commissioner, announced on Twitter that Weddington died on Sunday morning “after a series of health issues”.
Alexis McGill Johnson, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood, the largest US provider of reproductive services including abortions, tweeted: “What a loss. What a tremendous legacy.
“Planned Parenthood will continue to honor Sarah Weddington’s work every day – by keeping up the fight to ensure that everyone has access to abortion.”
Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, from which Weddington graduated, wrote: “Sarah Weddington was 26 (!) when she first argued Roe before [the supreme court] in December 1971, just over three years after graduating.
“A remarkable woman, a remarkable career, and a remarkable life. May her memory be a blessing.”
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, of the National Council of Jewish Women, tweeted: “May her memory be a blessing that lights our way in our fight for abortion access and equity for all.”
Julián Castro, a Texas politician who was housing secretary under Barack Obama and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, wrote: “Sarah Weddington was a proud Texan who led the charge to protect reproductive rights under Roe v Wade.
“She leaves behind an incredible legacy – one we must defend now more than ever.”
He was referring to growing threats to Roe v Wade, including the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, heard at the supreme court earlier this month, which could weaken provisions of the landmark ruling.
Colin Allred, a civil rights attorney and Democratic congressman for Texas’s 32nd district, touched on the supreme court’s decision to uphold a Texas abortion law, the most extreme in the US to date, which bans abortions at six weeks and does not make exceptions for invest and rape.
“Texas was home to Sarah Weddington who argued Roe, which no longer exists here,” Allred wrote. “Our history provides hope for our future. We must keep fighting for a better Texas.”
Celia Israel, a Democratic member of the Texas state legislature, tweeted about studying under Weddington at the University of Texas, Austin.
“It was always hard to just call her ‘Sarah’,” Israel wrote. “She commanded respect … she taught a leadership class, held me to high standards and encouraged me to get involved and make my mark.
“As is the case with teachers and leaders we look up to, we are their legacy.”
In an interview with the Guardian in 2017, Weddington predicted: “Whatever else I do in my life, the headline on my obituary is always going to be ‘Roe v Wade attorney dies’.”
She was at peace with that, she said.
“I think most women of my generation can recall our feelings about the fight,” she said. “It’s like young love. You may not feel exactly the same, but you remember it.”
A student in classroom. (photo: Ina Fassbender/AFP)
Omicron threat stokes fears coast to coast but leading public health expert says ‘We know how to keep schools open and safe’
Over the past three weeks, as Omicron-related cases soared in New York City and elsewhere, the number of children hospitalised in New York with Covid-19 quadrupled, the state health department said.
The California state epidemiologist Dr Erica Pan wrote on Twitter: “Unfortunately New York is seeing an increase in pediatric hospitalisations (primarily amongst the unvaccinated), and they have similar [five- to 11-year-old] vaccination rates.”
Across New York state, about 16% of five- to 11-year-olds and 71% of 12- to 17-year-olds are fully vaccinated.
“Please give your children the gift of vaccine protection as soon as possible as our case [numbers] are increasing rapidly,” Pan wrote.
Rising numbers of pediatric cases have convinced officials in some states to order a return to remote learning after the winter break. Around 300 schools in Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York will remain closed.
In Mount Vernon, a New York suburb, virtual learning is scheduled until at least 18 January.
“I have been very reluctant to close schools but given the current trends in Covid cases it would be risky not to do so,” district superintendent Kenneth Hamilton wrote.
In Maryland, Prince George’s county public schools, one of the 20 largest districts in the US, transitioned more than 136,500 students to virtual learning last week.
The district chief executive, Monica Goldson, told families staff “must be able to deliver in-person instruction and other activities in conditions that prioritise their own health, as well as the wellbeing of the school community.
“The increased positivity rates have significantly challenged the ability to do so, causing anxiety among many school communities and disruption to the school day.”
In New Jersey, Paterson public schools will start 2022 with two weeks remote.
“A surge of new cases has occurred in north-eastern New Jersey and it is expected that the trend will continue through the holiday break,” said the superintendent, Eileen Shafer.
Some officials have expressed frustration. Dan Domenech, director of the School Superintendents Association, told Newsweek: “Just when we thought this past October – when we had about 98% of kids back in schools in person – that things were moving in the right direction, here we are right back where we were last year.”
On Sunday, a leading health expert questioned the need for any schools to close.
Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told Fox News Sunday: “We know how to keep schools open, we know how to keep them safe. This really shouldn’t even be on the table. I’m disappointed to see this happening.
“We know that for kids being in school is the right thing for them, for their mental health, for their education. And we have all sorts of tools to keep schools open so I don’t really understand why school districts are [closing schools].
“… There could be times when you have such severe short staffing shortages that it may be hard to keep schools going. That really should be the only context I think at this point.”
Concern about Omicron infections among children remains high, however. On Friday, Christmas Eve, the New York health department warned healthcare providers of rising numbers of child hospitalisations around New York City, where Omicron was first recorded on US soil.
The department warned that admissions rose four-fold from the week starting 5 December to the week starting 19 December. Approximately half the admissions were of children under five and thus not eligible for vaccines. For the week starting 19 December, none of the five- to 11-year-old patients were fully vaccinated.
“The risks of Covid-19 for children are real,” said acting state health commissioner Dr Mary Bassett. “We are alerting New Yorkers to this recent striking increase in pediatric Covid-19 admissions so that pediatricians, parents and guardians can take urgent action to protect our youngest New Yorkers.”
The health department advised parents to protect “children who are five years and older by getting them fully vaccinated and protect children under five by making sure all of those around them have protection through vaccination, boosters, mask-wearing, avoiding crowds and testing”.
The California public health director, Dr Tomás Aragón, warned to expect rising admissions there.
“Why? Omicron is so contagious that it finds unvaccinated/non-immune people who are most vulnerable for hospitalisations and deaths.”
Throughout the pandemic, experts have said children are less likely to develop serious illness. For the week from 9 to 16 December, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported 169,964 pediatric Covid-19 cases, representing 1.8% to 4.1% of hospitalised patients.
A healthcare worker and a patient. (photo: ABC News)
In what they describe as the most comprehensive analysis to date of the virus’s distribution and persistence in the body and brain, scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health said they found the pathogen is capable of replicating in human cells well beyond the respiratory tract.
The results, released online Saturday in a manuscript under review for publication in the journal Nature, point to delayed viral clearance as a potential contributor to the persistent symptoms wracking so-called long COVID sufferers. Understanding the mechanisms by which the virus persists, along with the body’s response to any viral reservoir, promises to help improve care for those afflicted, the authors said.
“This is remarkably important work,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the clinical epidemiology center at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri, who has led separate studies into the long-term effects of COVID-19. “For a long time now, we have been scratching our heads and asking why long COVID seems to affect so many organ systems. This paper sheds some light, and may help explain why long COVID can occur even in people who had mild or asymptomatic acute disease.”
The findings haven’t yet been reviewed by independent scientists, and are mostly based on data gathered from fatal COVID-19 cases, not patients with long COVID-19 or “post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2,” as it’s also called.
Contentious findings
The coronavirus’s propensity to infect cells outside the airways and lungs is contested, with numerous studies providing evidence for and against the possibility.
The research undertaken at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, is based on extensive sampling and analysis of tissues taken during autopsies on 44 patients who died after contracting the coronavirus during the first year of the pandemic in the U.S.
The burden of infection outside the respiratory tract and time to viral clearance isn’t well characterized, particularly in the brain, wrote Daniel Chertow, who runs the NIH’s emerging pathogens section, and his colleagues.
The group detected persistent SARS-CoV-2 RNA in multiple parts of the body, including regions throughout the brain, for as long as 230 days following symptom onset. This may represent infection with defective virus, which has been described in persistent infection with the measles virus, they said.
In contrast to other COVID-19 autopsy research, the NIH team’s post-mortem tissue collection was more comprehensive and typically occurred within about a day of the patient’s death.
Culturing coronavirus
The NIH researchers also used a variety of tissue preservation techniques to detect and quantify viral levels, as well as grow the virus collected from multiple tissues, including lung, heart, small intestine and adrenal gland from deceased Covid patients during their first week of illness.
“Our results collectively show that while the highest burden of SARS-CoV-2 is in the airways and lung, the virus can disseminate early during infection and infect cells throughout the entire body, including widely throughout the brain,” the authors said.
The researchers posit that infection of the pulmonary system may result in an early “viremic” phase, in which the virus is present in the bloodstream and is seeded throughout the body, including across the blood-brain barrier, even in patients experiencing mild or no symptoms. One patient in the autopsy study was a juvenile who likely died from unrelated seizure complications, suggesting infected children without severe COVID-19 can also experience systemic infection, they said.
Immune response
The less-efficient viral clearance in tissues outside the pulmonary system may be related to a weak immune response outside the respiratory tract, the authors said.
SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected in the brains of all six autopsy patients who died more than a month after developing symptoms, and across most locations evaluated in the brain in five, including one patient who died 230 days after symptom onset.
The focus on multiple brain areas is especially helpful, said Al-Aly at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System.
“It can help us understand the neurocognitive decline or ‘brain fog’ and other neuropsychiatric manifestations of long COVID,” he said. “We need to start thinking of SARS-CoV-2 as a systemic virus that may clear in some people, but in others may persist for weeks or months and produce long COVID – a multifaceted systemic disorder.”
Supporters hold placards saying "we will live forever" with Memorial's flame symbol above the Russian word "we." (photo: Reuters)
Russia's Supreme Court has ordered the closure of International Memorial, Russia's oldest human rights group.
Formally it has been "liquidated" for failing to mark a number of social media posts with its official status as a "foreign agent".
That designation was given in 2016 for receiving funding from abroad.
But in court the prosecutor labelled Memorial a "public threat", accusing the group of being in the pay of the West to focus attention on Soviet crimes instead of highlighting a "glorious past".
Founded in 1989, Memorial became a symbol of a country opening up to the world - and to itself - as Russia began examining the darkest chapters of its past. Its closure is a stark symbol of how the country has turned back in on itself under President Vladimir Putin, rejecting criticism - even of history - as a hostile act.
There were shouts of "shame!" from those in court as the decision was read out.
The ruling also shines a light on the rise in repression in modern-day Russia, where Memorial's own human rights wing now lists more than 400 political prisoners, and independent groups and media are increasingly blacklisted as "foreign agents".
In court, lawyers for Memorial argued that the group's work was beneficial for the "health of the nation". They declared Memorial a friend of Russia, not its enemy, and called the case for liquidation absurd and "Orwellian".
Among the sites the group failed to mark with its "foreign agent" status was the vast database of victims of political repression that it has assembled over three decades of work.
The team argued that any mistakes had been corrected and that shutting down a prominent and respected organisation over such technical errors was disproportionate.
The justice ministry argued that a group's social significance could be no excuse for breaking the law. But the prosecution's closing speech pointed to a deeper motivation for this case.
"International Memorial… is almost entirely focused on distorting historic memory, first and foremost about the Great Fatherland War [World War Two]," Alexei Zhafyarov told the court, accusing the group of creating a false image of the USSR as a "terrorist" state.
Vladimir Putin has placed great store on the Soviet victory over the Nazis in World War Two, part of his hankering for the old days of superpower status - a far more attractive focus for many Russians than the parallel history of secret courts, prison camps and firing squads.
"Why should we, descendants of the victors, be ashamed and repent, rather than take pride in our glorious past? Memorial is probably paid by someone for that," the prosecutor claimed in court.
"They chose us because we are strong and prominent, and because we irritate them," Memorial board member Oleg Orlov recently told the BBC about the move to shutter an organisation he has been with from the start.
"The authorities these days are politicising history, but we say things they don't like. We talk about the difficult pages of the past and that annoys them," he said.
The organisation has faced pressure for many years, but that pressure intensified as Russia was swept by a fiercely patriotic wave following the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
Memorial's walls were smeared with graffiti, its work smeared on state TV as subversive, and in 2016 it was listed as a "foreign agent" - a slur eerily reminiscent of Stalinist times when those marked as "enemies of the people" were persecuted and purged.
Just this October, when a crowd gathered at Memorial's Moscow headquarters to watch Mr Jones, a film about the Stalin-era famine that killed millions in Ukraine, a nationalist mob burst in and rushed on stage calling the audience "fascists" and yelling: "Hands off our history".
Sister organisation Memorial Human Rights Centre, which works to document modern-day political repression and rights violations, is also facing closure for alleged violations of the foreign agents law. A ruling in its own case is expected this week.
Memorial says it will challenge the decisions, including in the European Court of Human Rights.
Oleg Orlov believes the case against both is intended as a warning: "The attack on us is meant as a strong signal to all civil society in Russia. They're saying: 'Look! If we can do this with them, then it's no problem to liquidate all you lot too,'" he told the BBC.
"The time has come to purge the field for good."
Greta Thunberg. (photo: Getty Images)
What she's saying: "The U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure," Thunberg said. "Why is the U.S. doing that?"
- "It should not fall on us activists and teenagers who just want to go to school to raise this awareness and to inform people that we are actually facing an emergency," she added.
Flashback: Thunberg is no stranger to calling out climate actions she feels are ineffective or performative. Last month, she dismissed this year's COP26 as "a PR event" and she accused world leaders of "greenwashing."
Our thought bubble, via Axios' Andrew Freedman: The Biden administration set out ambitious goals for reducing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, including reaching 100% clean electricity by 2035 and net-zero emissions by 2050.
- However, Biden's main tool for meeting these goals is bogged down in Congress, putting them in doubt. He also has been combatting an increase in gas prices related to the economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and other factors.
- This has led Biden to call for a temporary increase in global oil production. The White House also has not followed through on a campaign promise to crack down on new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, instead aiming for reforming the process. Yet, it is also greatly expanding the areas open to renewables, such as offshore wind energy.
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