19 August 21
A Daily Struggle Against Fascism
Yes, a daily struggle is what our work at RSN has become. It’s real, it’s pervasive and most people would rather not look at it.
This is a pretty serious battle against some pretty serious people.
A budget would be a big help.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
The president gave them an adult portion in a speech on Afghanistan Monday afternoon.
guess we’re going to learn how much truth the American people can handle, because the president gave them an adult portion on Monday afternoon. It was time for the adventure in Afghanistan to end. It was time for the Afghan government and the Afghan military to defend their country without the United States holding their hands, and neither one was up to the job, nor did it appear as though they ever would be. And that was the basis of his decision, and he stands by it.
I’m now the fourth American president to preside over war in Afghanistan. Two Democrats and two Republicans. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president. I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference. Nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today and how we must move forward from here. I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.
I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. That's why we're still there, we were clear-eyed about the risks, we planned for every contingency. But I always promised the American people I would be straight with you. The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.
For decades, I’ve heard barroom sages wax nostalgic about Harry Truman, and how plainspoken he was, and how we needed that kind of man back in the White House. (It got so thick for a while that Chicago made a record about it, displacing Paul Simon’s Joe DiMaggio as the archetypal American hero.) Well, there it was, in the face of the terrible video from the airport in Kabul, and the carping of superannuated neocon geniuses who got us into this whole mishkadenze in the first place, and the ravings of the Madman of Mar-a-Lago, who cut the deal that set the chaotic endgame in train, and all the rest of the second-guessing world. He made the decision. He stands by it. And if America can’t take that, then America should grow up.
And by the way, Lord, do we need a new foreign-policy establishment. One more white guy in a suit talking to me about “credibility” and I very well may move to the Maldives.
Early returns are not promising. A quickie poll from Politico and Morning Consult reported that support for the military withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan had fallen from 69 percent in April to 49 percent this week, a true measure of how public opinion in this country is nothing more than a dandelion in a gale. And Senator Rick Scott of Florida, once America’s premier Medicare crook, decided to go whole hog. From Politico:
Scott, who is widely viewed as a potential 2024 presidential candidate tweeted: “We must confront a serious question: Is Joe Biden capable of discharging the duties of his office or has time come to exercise the provisions of the 25th Amendment?”
Oh, shut up. Please.
There are open questions about why the administration was caught so flat-footed by the speed with which our erstwhile allies folded. (We were there for 20 years. Somebody should have had an inkling.) But there is no question about why the president made the decision he did. He spoke as plainly about it on Monday as any president has on any event or policy in my lifetime. What I recalled halfway through his speech on Monday was an interview John F. Kennedy gave to Walter Cronkite one day on Cape Cod, talking about Vietnam.
"In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it.”
Two months later, Kennedy went to Dallas. Less than two years later, the first combat troops landed in South Vietnam—3,500 Marines, sent to “stabilize the situation” around the airfield at Da Nang, and we were off. On Monday, another American president said:
More importantly, I made a commitment to the brave men and women who serve this nation that I wasn’t going to ask them to continue to risk their lives in a military action that should’ve ended long ago. Our leaders did that in Vietnam when I got here as a young man. I will not do it in Afghanistan.
Now he has to stand the gaff of screaming recriminations from his political opponents, and the gaff of an elite political press corps that will be more than happy to amplify those screams into an apocalyptic howling. That’s the real test: will this president stand by his decision to stand by his decision?
Afghan people gather outside the French embassy in Kabul on August 17, 2021 waiting to leave Afghanistan. (photo: Zakeria Hashimi/AFP/Getty Images)
‘The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is ready to provide women with environment to work and study, and the presence of women in different (government) structures according to Islamic law and in accordance with our cultural values’
he Taliban declared an “amnesty” across Afghanistan and urged women to join their government Tuesday, seeking to convince a wary population that they have changed a day after deadly chaos gripped the main airport as desperate crowds tried to flee their rule.
Following a blitz across Afghanistan that saw many cities fall to the insurgents without a fight, the Taliban have sought to portray themselves as more moderate than when they imposed a brutal rule in the late 1990s. But many Afghans remain skeptical.
Older generations remember the Taliban’s ultraconservative Islamic views, which included severe restrictions on women as well as public stonings and amputations before they were ousted by the U.S-led invasion following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
The capital of Kabul remained quiet for another day as the Taliban patrolled its streets and many residents stayed home, remain fearful after the insurgents’ takeover saw prisons emptied and armories looted. Many women have expressed dread that the two-decade Western experiment to expand their rights and remake Afghanistan would not survive the resurgent Taliban.
Germany, meanwhile, halted development aid to Afghanistan over the Taliban takeover. Such aid is a crucial source of funding for the country — and the Taliban’s efforts to project a milder version of themselves may be aimed at ensuring that money continues to flow.
The promises of amnesty from Enamullah Samangani, a member of the Taliban’s cultural commission, were the first comments on how the Taliban might govern on a national level. His remarks remained vague, however, as the Taliban are still negotiating with political leaders of the country’s fallen government and no formal handover deal has been announced.
“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan with full dignity and honesty has announced a complete amnesty for all Afghanistan, especially those who were with the opposition or supported the occupiers for years and recently,” he said.
Other Taliban leaders have said they won’t seek revenge on those who worked with the Afghan government or foreign countries.
But some in Kabul allege Taliban fighters have lists of people who cooperated with the government and are seeking them out. A broadcaster in Afghanistan said she was hiding at a relative’s house, too frightened to return home much less return to work following reports that the insurgents are also looking for journalists. She said she and other women didn’t believe the Taliban had changed their ways. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared for her safety.
Samangani addressed the concerns of women, saying they were “the main victims of the more than 40 years of crisis in Afghanistan.”
“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is ready to provide women with environment to work and study, and the presence of women in different (government) structures according to Islamic law and in accordance with our cultural values,” he said.
That would be a marked departure from the last time the Taliban were in power, when women were largely confined to their homes. Samangani didn’t describe exactly what he meant by Islamic law, implying people already knew the rules.
In another sign of the Taliban’s efforts to portray a new image, a female television anchor on the private broadcaster Tolo interviewed a Taliban official on camera Tuesday in a studio — an interaction that once would have been unthinkable. Meanwhile, women in hijabs demonstrated briefly in Kabul, holding signs demanding the Taliban not “eliminate women” from public life.
Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, noted both the Taliban’s vows and the fears of everyday Afghans.
“Such promises will need to be honored, and for the time being — again understandably, given past history — these declarations have been greeted with some skepticism,” he said in a statement. “There have been many hard-won advances in human rights over the past two decades. The rights of all Afghans must be defended.”
Germany suspended development aid to Afghanistan, estimated at $294 million for 2021. Other funding separately goes to security services and humanitarian aid. Sweden indicated it would slow aid to the country, but Britain committed to an increase.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said humanitarian aid could rise by 10%. He said the aid budget would be reconfigured for development and humanitarian purposes and that the Taliban would not get any money previously earmarked for security.
Meanwhile, Kabul’s international airport, the only way out for many, reopened to military evacuation flights under the watch of American troops.
All flights were suspended on Monday when thousands of people rushed the airport, desperate to leave the country. In shocking scenes captured on video, some clung to a plane as it took off and then fell to their deaths. At least seven people died in chaos at the airport, U.S. officials said.
Stefano Pontecorvo, NATO’s senior civilian representative to Afghanistan, posted video online Tuesday showing the runway empty with U.S. troops on the tarmac.
“I see airplanes landing and taking off,” he wrote on Twitter.
Overnight, flight-tracking data showed a U.S. military plane taking off for Qatar. A British military cargo plane, headed to Kabul, took off from Dubai.
Still, there were indications that the situation remained tenuous. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, now operating from the airport, urged Americans to register online for evacuations but not come to the airport before being contacted.
The German Foreign Ministry said a first German military transport plane landed in Kabul, but it took off with only seven people on board due to continued chaos. Another left later with 125 people.
By late Tuesday, the Taliban entered the civilian half of the airport, firing into the air to drive out around 500 people there, said an Afghan official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to brief journalists. That crowd ended up outside of the airport in a nearby roundabout.
Across Afghanistan, the International Committee of the Red Cross said thousands had been wounded in fighting as the Taliban swept across the country in recent days. However, in many places, security forces and politicians handed over their provinces and bases without a fight, likely fearing what would happen when the last American troops withdrew as planned at the end of the month.
As U.S. President Joe Biden did, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg blamed the swift collapse of the country on a failure of Afghan leadership. But he added that the alliance must also uncover flaws in its effort to train the Afghan military.
Talks continued Tuesday between the Taliban and several Afghan government officials, including former President Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, who once headed the country’s negotiating council.
Discussions focused on how a Taliban-dominated government would operate given the changes in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, rather than just dividing up who controlled what ministries, officials with knowledge of the negotiations said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential details of the talks.
A top Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, arrived in Kandahar on Tuesday night from Qatar. His arrival may signal a deal is close at hand.
Medical personnel move a deceased patient to a refrigerated truck serving as make shift morgues at Brooklyn Hospital Center on April 09, 2020 in New York City. (photo: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Image)
exas officials requested five additional mortuary trucks to hold deceased COVID-19 victims, according to a recent NBC News report.
Chris Van Deusen, the spokesperson for the Department of State Health Services, told NBC News that the request for more refrigerated vehicles did not come from a specific town or hospital and was purely precautionary as cases rise in the state.
The report noted that the trucks will be sent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to San Antonio, where the vehicles can be distributed to areas in need.
Approximately 14,453 people are becoming infected with COVID-19 in Texas every day according to a 7-day average from New York Times' Coronavirus tracker. The COVID-19 caseload is not the only rising statistic in Texas: approximately 160 people died of the virus on Wednesday, a 325% increase in the 14 days prior.
Medical facilities in the state are increasingly jammed and debilitated as more and more coronavirus cases overload the system. Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said in a video that hospitals in his area are already lacking enough pediatric ICU beds.
"Your child will wait for another child to die" before getting one, Jenkins said.
Despite hospitals around the state clamoring for help and resources, Gov. Greg Abbott continues to vociferously fight against implementing vaccine mandates or re-implementing face mask mandates. Abbott signed an executive order in July that bans cities and government entities from requiring mask and vaccine mandates.
Several judges, including Jenkins, have fought against Abbott's executive order and issued mask mandates in defiance. The Texas Supreme Court sided with Abbott in a Sunday ruling that blocks masks and vaccine mandates. Still, Jenkins said he and Dallas county will act in defiance and keep its mask mandate with some slight alterations.
"We won't stop working with parents, doctors, schools, business + others to protect you," Jenkins tweeted Sunday night.
Comedian John Oliver hosts the HBO series 'Last Week Tonight.' (photo: Justin Stephens)
n Sunday's Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver addressed the rapidly spreading Delta variant of COVID-19, particularly among the unvaccinated, with the U.S. averaging around 100,000 new infections a day.
Oliver specifically focused on children, who represent 15 percent of the new cases, and just how hard people are fighting against basic measures to help curb the spread, like having mask mandates in schools.
He pointed to a scene that was caught on video outside a Tennessee school board meeting as an example. In the clip, parents can be seen verbally assaulting a school board member after the meeting with threats like “we know who you are” and “we will find you.”
Currently in states like Iowa, Texas and Florida, the governors have banned schools from implementing mask mandates. Leaving it up to the parents to fend for themselves when it comes to keeping their kids safe.
While vaccination numbers are slowly starting to climb again around the country, Oliver argues that it’s simply not enough. He also believes that the lack of adults getting vaccinated is pretty much the main reason why mask mandates in school is even still a debate.
“We are only fighting about masks in schools because there are a bunch of foolish adults that have decided not to get the vaccine,” Oliver said. “And to all of them, I can only say — to quote a bunch of upsettingly loud idiots — ‘We know who you are,’ and you’re the f***ing problem.”
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on HBO.
Dr. Peter Grinspoon was a practicing physician when he became addicted to opioids. When he got caught, Grinspoon wasn't allowed access to what's now the standard treatment for addiction - buprenorphine or methadone (in addition to counseling) - precisely because he was a doctor. (photo: Tony Luong/NPR)
e’re in the midst of an opioid epidemic. In the U.S., deaths spiked from 10,000 in 2002 to more than 49,000 in 2017. Canada’s steady uptick in opioid-linked deaths is highest for ages 30-39.
Treatments vary, and most of them use faith-based initiatives to attempt to stem addiction in the bud, and rely on an abstinence-only method.
The problem, say a growing number of scientists, is that these faith-based options don’t work—especially given new knowledge about how addiction affects our bodies through our brains.
The movement to redefine and understand opioid use disorder, or OUD, is welcomed by Peter Grinspoon.
A little more than a decade ago, Grinspoon had the veneer of success. He had a medical degree, a family, and was doing well in his practice. But, as he chronicled in his 2016 memoir, Free Refills: A Doctor Confronts His Addiction, he was hiding a secret: he was addicted to opioids.
Now Grinspoon, who is 11 years sober, is advocating for medication-assisted treatment, called MAT, which combines behavioral therapy with FDA-approved medications to help stem addiction.
Last month, Grinspoon published a post on Harvard Health Blog that questioned the very medical basis of addiction. Titled “Does Addiction Last a Lifetime?,” the post questions what mental health professionals understand about an “addictive personality,” a concept that he argues saddles people with lifelong vulnerability to relapse, or to re-addiction to new substances.
Grinspoon sees no scientific evidence that being diagnosed with addictive personality is effective in treatment.
For one thing, he supports the use of buprenorphine. Drugs like buprenorphine lessen withdrawal symptoms and the cravings that lead to relapse and overdose.
While in rehab, Grinspoon was told, ‘A drug is a drug is a drug.’ “This mentality does not allow for a difference between the powerful opiate fentanyl, which kills thousands of people every year, and buprenorphine, which is a widely-accepted treatment for OUD,” he posted.
Grinspoon also sees a problem with the abstinence-only approach many rehabilitation centers have adopted.
“I have come to believe that an uncompromising ‘abstinence-only’ model is a holdover from the very beginnings of the recovery movement, almost 100 years ago, and our understanding has greatly evolved since then,” Grinspoon said. “The concepts of addiction and recovery that made sense in 1935, when Alcoholics Anonymous was founded, and which have been carried on by tradition, might not still hold true in the modern age of neurochemistry and functional MRIs.”
Given the opioid-overdose death rate, “uncompromising” is the key word.
“It seems as if it’s just what we’ve been doing since 1935 because there was nothing else,” he told the Daily Beast. “Now we have multi-faceted approaches to treatment, including the use of drugs like buprenorphine, which fuels OUD recovery."
The problem, according to Grinspoon, is the very basis by which we think about and treat opioid addiction. “You treat opiate withdrawal differently than you treat alcohol withdrawal,” he said. “Yet the rehabs tend to treat every addiction the same. Most rehab centers are not using cutting-edge science.”
MAT could change that. It includes not only buprenorphine for opioid addiction, but also acamprosate for alcoholism, and naltrexone for opiates and/or alcohol. None of these drug treatments were discovered until recently, and definitely weren’t known in 1935.
But implementing change here is difficult, thanks to court-mandated NA and AA meeting attendance. Courts and probation officers, as well as police, prosecutors and local, state and federal agencies, often order OUD-related offenders to attend abstinence-only, faith-based NA or AA meetings, and have done so for decades. Yet people within the U.S. criminal justice system experience high rates of OUD and overdose, according to a recent Johns Hopkins University study.
That study, published last December in the journal Health Affairs, looked at 72,000 adults in an OUD treatment program, including 17,000 referred by criminal justice agencies.
The researchers found that less than 5 percent of OUD-related offenders ordered into treatment received MAT. In contrast, 40 percent of people referred by employers or healthcare providers received MAT.
That potentially set them up for failure. The study authors found that MAT’s behavioral therapy-fueled approach could decrease overdose risk within the court-ordered population, many of whom lack homes, jobs, medical care or other factors that contribute to OUD upon release from jail. Despite its promise, researchers found that courts were unlikely to refer misusers to MAT.
That doesn’t surprise Grinspoon.
“Judges are vastly under-educated about modern addiction, both the disease and the treatment,” Grinspoon said. “I was forced, by my professional medical society, into a pretty religious 12-step rehab program for 90 days and, as an atheist, I found it counterproductive at best. Judges need to enable people to access modern treatments, not the old-fashioned, non-evidence-based mush that is called ‘treatment’ at many rehab centers.”
Nora Volkow, the Director of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, agrees. “In general, studies show abstinence-only programs do not work with opioids,” Volkow told the Daily Beast. “There may be some misusers for whom it does work, but in the majority of cases it does not. People with OUD have a very high rate of relapse in abstinence-only programs, and the death rate during relapse can be as high as 90 percent.”
Volkow said that many treatment options don’t take into account the fact that OUD acts differently from that of other disorders from common addictive substances. “What opioids do is to kidnap the system that drives our motivation for survival,” she explained. “For example, if you have not eaten for days your brain will make getting food a priority, for survival. But when you are opioid-addicted your brain is not able to do any of the things we normally do to survive.”
Laura Schmidt is a University of California San Francisco School of Medicine professor who recently wrote a paper published in Drug and Alcohol Review on alternative methods of opioid addiction treatment. She says addiction remains surprisingly misunderstood.
“The addictive-personality concept has pretty much been debunked by research,” Schmidt told The Daily Beast. “The biggest problem now is capacity. We simply don’t have enough treatment slots for everyone who needs them.” Analyses have shown OUDs far exceed treatment need: in 2017, more than 450,000 people with OUD were unable to access treatment.
Schmidt, like Grinspoon, points out that addiction has been freighted by history, ever since the 19th century temperance movement that saw alcohol consumption as abhorrent. “With that framework in place, treatment providers strategically deploy what’s called a moral/medical model, depending upon the patient,” Schmidt explained. “When providers decide patients need to be held morally accountable, they get patients to stay sober by shaming them.
“In the very process of doing that, they continue to promulgate the idea that addiction is the addicts’ fault,” Schmidt added. “Providers think by shaming patients they can get them clean.”
That approach is problematic, and leads to a vicious circle of further stigmatization, which Schmidt said could also lead to the significant barrier to funding treatment patients face in dealing with insurance companies.
It’s something Schmidt has, in fact, seen in her own work.
“I worked on a study of a healthcare organization offering OUD treatment to their members,” Schmidt said. “There was a waiting list, and while people were waiting to enroll in our study, a few were able to receive MAT. They told others on the waiting list that MAT had helped them stay off opioids, and eventually through word-of-mouth, OUD misusers began asking us if they could get into MAT. So the word spread that it helped to quell craving and withdrawal sickness.
“This was really notable to me,” Schmidt continued. “The misusers themselves were more open-minded about treatment alternatives than NA suggestions. They wanted what works.”
Advances in MAT grew out of investigation into the science of brain imaging. Scientists were able to see inside the brain of an addicted person and pinpoint parts affected by drug abuse. The discovery of brain circuits underlying addiction has resulted in development of effective medications — including buprenorphine, naloxone, and acamprosate. One study actually mapped out what appear to be relapse pathways in the brains of opiate-dependent users.
New research has shown how those neural circuits are detectable via functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. fMRI can show whether oxygen levels and electricity flows inside a misuser’s brain are normal or abnormal. fMRIs have shown how craving contributes to cocaine relapse, for example. Cocaine users’ own feelings of craving matched their fMRI images, which showed activity in the craving area of their brains.
It’s a critical discovery in the science of addiction, one that Schmidt said was “hard to deny.”
Multi-pronged approaches that combine fMRI, recovery program meetings and MAT, along with other new techniques, are beginning to gain acceptance. They’re already in place in states from Washington to Vermont.
But will that actually stem the deaths resulting from the opioid crisis? “There is a pervasive bias in the rehab network against this kind of medicine-assisted treatment,” Grinspoon said—but he's optimistic that MAT and other medically based treatments might help reverse the upward spike of opioid deaths every year.
A demonstrator clashes with riot police during a protest against the government of Colombian President Ivan Duque in Medellin, Colombia on July 20. (photo: Joaquin Sarmiento/AFP)
Colombia’s Primera Linea protesters accuse authorities of using arrests, prosecutions to weaken the push for change.
lejandro Gaitan awoke to the sounds of strange voices and heavy boots outside his home in the Colombian city of Armenia, about 280km (173 miles) west of the capital Bogota. Moments later, five police officers burst through the front door.
After conducting a search, they proceeded to read out a warrant for the arrest of the 22-year-old philosophy student, who was wanted for “terrorism” and attempted homicide, along with six other criminal charges. He faced more than 40 years in prison.
“I have a calm head that has helped me carry out my work as a spokesperson [for the protesters],” Gaitan told Al Jazeera in a telephone interview from his home, weeks after his June 18 arrest. “But when I was in that cell, it took all my strength to try to not feel bad, to not feel trapped, because the situation I faced truly was very bleak.”
The arrest surprised Gaitan, who had led peaceful marches and cultural activities during Colombia’s recent national strike against entrenched inequality. He spent 10 days in jail before a judge ordered his release. The case remains under investigation.
But what caught him most off guard, Gaitan said, were accusations that he belonged to the Primera Linea, a loose protest collective that has come increasingly under attack from President Ivan Duque and his right-wing political party, Democratic Center.
“It seems that the Attorney General’s Office didn’t do a deep investigation,” said Gaitan, who denies all the allegations against him, “but that they captured whoever was most visible during protests like I was.”
The front line
In late April, as mass protests began in Colombia over a since-revoked tax reform, youth from working-class backgrounds armed themselves with stones and improvised shields to protect protesters from police. They became known as the Primera Linea, or the Front Line.
As the protests went on, they took on more prominent roles that divided public opinion, erecting roadblocks, clashing almost nightly with police, and negotiating demands with local officials.
In Cali, the country’s third-largest city, Primera Linea protesters set up blockades and seized control of several blocks that police were prohibited from entering. Art classes, political debates, and democratic assemblies became regular events at these “points of resistance”.
But as the demonstrations now dissipate, a mass crackdown on these demonstrators has followed, with at least 178 apprehended, according to authorities. Many face a variety of criminal charges, including “terrorism”, that could leave them behind bars for decades.
Authorities have attributed much of the vandalism and crime that has taken place during the protests on the Primera Linea, a claim that has been used to justify the wave of arrests.
But critics say investigators are scapegoating the movement in order to weaken its influence. While some believe innocent protesters could be swept up in operations targeting the group, others believe an outright campaign of persecution is under way.
“Our concerns are that youth who are exercising their right to protest are being arrested in large numbers, as part of a policy to criminalise social mobilisations,” said Ruben Acosta, a lawyer with the Primera Linea Juridica, a national network of attorneys representing protesters.
“The government is looking for an enemy that will allow them to act arbitrarily and they’ve found that enemy in the Primera Linea,” Acosta told Al Jazeera.
‘Low-intensity terrorism’
According to members of the loose collective, the Primera Linea came about in response to police violence. In June, Human Rights Watch said Colombian police committed “egregious” abuses during the largely peaceful demonstrations.
But Defence Minister Diego Molano has accused the Primera Linea of countless acts of violence and vandalism, including the incineration of transit buses and businesses, which he classified as “low-intensity terrorism”. Attorney General Francisco Barbosa, who is leading the investigations against Primera Linea, called them “a group of thugs who want to do harm to the country”.
Authorities have also said repeatedly that Primera Linea groups are financed by left-wing rebels such as the National Liberation Army and dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which demobilised under a 2016 peace deal with the government.
Molano has denied the allegations that police are making indiscriminate arrests of Primera Linea protesters. “In the case of the Primera Linea, it’s clear that there are some who protest and that there are others that commit crimes and criminal activities that can be classified as terrorist acts … It’s against them that we have started investigations, litigation, and arrests,” Molano said during an interview with a local radio station last month.
The largest wave of protester arrests occurred in the days after demonstrations were held on July 20, Colombia’s Independence Day, when Primera Linea protesters were slated to gather in Bogota. By July 26, a total of 134 protesters in 18 cities had been arrested, authorities said.
“Delinquents, bandits, not one will remain free,” Molano recently tweeted. “We face the vandalism of the ‘Primera Linea’ with the Constitution in hand and the weight of the law.”
Colombia’s national police declined a request for an interview, instead directing Al Jazeera to an August 5 news conference during which General Luis Vargas, the national police director, told reporters that 10 additional operations took place after July 20.
Those operations resulted in the arrests of 56 Primera Linea members, who were charged with the destruction of public property, torture, terrorism, among other offences, Vargas said.
Effort to ‘silence’
One of the most high-profile arrests involved the detention of five protesters, including the well-known Primera Linea spokesperson Sergio Andres Pastor, known as “19”, in Bogota on July 30.
Authorities accused the protesters of being linked to an alleged kidnapping and assault on two civilians that prosecutors said they had mistakenly identified as police. The charges – conspiracy to commit a crime and torture – were quickly rejected by the defendants, as well as family members and fellow protesters who went to the streets in support of Pastor.
Sebastian Sanabria, an activist and former Primera Linea member in Bogota, said Pastor was an advocate for dialogue and often appeared maskless in meetings with the local government. The arrests, he said, were intended to undermine his leadership.
“Since they are [Primera Linea] spokespeople who are capable of creating change, they’re blaming them for this to silence them,” he said.
Some weeks into the national strike, Primera Linea groups in various Colombian cities entered into negotiations with local officials in an effort to reduce confrontations – even with the disapproval of the president, who told a local radio station that talks with “people who hide their identity” went against the country’s democratic values.
Some of the first demands the protesters sought in these talks were safety guarantees for Primera Linea members, including protection from prosecution and police violence. Before the wave of arrests started, some local officials made pledges to that effect.
But the arrest of Pastor and dozens of other Primera Linea protesters has sowed distrust, even as the government promises to differentiate between the group’s violent and peaceful members.
For Sanabria, the arrests have unravelled months of dialogue and progress. “People are asking themselves, ‘What’s going to happen to us? Will we be persecuted in the same way our friend was?'” he said. “There’s a lot of distrust and discouragement.”
Scorched vehicles destroyed by the Caldor fire rest on Evergreen Drive in Grizzly Flats, California. (photo: Ethan Swope/AP)
Extreme weather and oppressive heat have hit from the Pacific Northwest to parts of Europe and North Africa. Climate scientists expect more of it.
Sizzling temperatures in the United States and Canada and persistent heat in parts of Europe and northern Africa are creating dangerous health conditions, aggravating droughts and fueling wildfires around the world. And it's this troubling confluence of climate threats that researchers have been warning about for two decades.
"Climate scientists were predicting exactly these kinds of things, that there would be an enhanced threat of these types of extreme events brought on by increased warming," said Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "It's very distressing. These are not encouraging signs for our immediate future."
While August is typically one of the hottest months in the Northern Hemisphere, this week’s heat waves add to a growing list of recent extremes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Friday that July was the hottest month since record-keeping began 142 years ago. Catastrophic flooding killed more than 200 people in Europe last month, and wildfires are raging in Siberia, across the Mediterranean and along the western coasts of the U.S. and Canada.
But to many experts, these events offer just a glimpse of what lies ahead in future summers because of climate change.
This week, a United Nations panel released an alarming report on the state of climate change and the consequences of further global warming. The assessment highlighted the threat of extreme weather events, including how global warming will make heat waves both more frequent and more intense.
The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that severe heat waves that previously occurred once every 50 years will now likely happen once per decade. And in a study published last month in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists determined that record-shattering heat events are up to seven times more likely to occur between now and 2050, and more than 21 times more likely to occur from 2051 to 2080.
The oppressive heat that blanketed the Pacific Northwest early this summer demonstrated how dangerous heat extremes can be. Hundreds of deaths were linked to the June heat wave, and more than 35 cities across Washington state and Oregon tied or set new temperature records.
"The heat event that we had in the Pacific Northwest in June — it's not that we're suddenly going to see that every summer, but the recent extremes are certainly a preview of what we'll see more frequently in the future," said Karin Bumbaco, a research scientist at the University of Washington and Washington’s assistant state climatologist.
Heat waves occur when a ridge of high pressure parks over a region, suppressing cloud formation and causing air to compress and warm. The resulting heat domes have been associated with tropical cyclone activity, which can alter the circulation of air over the Northern Hemisphere and trigger unusual weather patterns.
Heat waves occur naturally in the summer, but climate change is exacerbating these events because emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are causing average temperatures to increase. These changes to baseline temperatures mean that when heat waves do occur, they are more likely to be severe, said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.
"If average temperatures are increasing everywhere, that increases the odds of more intense heat events," he said. "Even relatively small increases in average temperatures cause a much bigger shift in the extremes."
Extreme weather events, including heat waves, are driven by a complex mix of atmospheric processes and can vary from year to year, but climate change helps amplify the threats, said Philip Mote, a climate scientist at Oregon State University.
Global warming can also create feedback loops that then make other extreme events more likely to occur. Droughts, for instance, can intensify heat waves because the sun can more easily heat the ground when there is less moisture in the soil to evaporate.
"Right now, we have drought conditions over half the country, so that's also playing into why we're seeing so much heat this summer," Bumbaco said.
Yet even while climate scientists have spent the past few decades projecting the effects of global warming, Mote said the intensity and pace of changes to the planet have been surprising.
"I've been involved with climate research for 23 years, and I honestly didn't think it would get this bad this fast," he said. "This isn't really news to anyone who have been studying this for a while, but it's depressing to see it coming true."
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
